f8

FILTERING THE TEXT

Filters are used to eliminate things in order to achieve a desired result. When we use them in cooking, the unwanted elements are dredged, strained, and discarded. When used in our cars, they prevent particles from interfering with performance. When we use them in email, they weed out what (or whom) we don’t want to read. What’s left is what we use—what contributes to our meal, our engine, or our sanity.

Most of my education was conducted in this way—using filters. It was no sinister plot. It was just what it was. The content I learned was filtered through certain presumptions and traditions that ordered the material for me, that put it into a system that made sense to my modern mind. Verses that didn’t quite work with my tradition were “problem passages” that were either filtered out or consigned to the periphery of unimportance.

I understand that a lot of well-meaning Bible students, pastors, and professors don’t look at how they approach the Bible that way. I know I didn’t. But it’s what happens. We view the Bible through the lens of what we know and what’s familiar. Psalm 82 broke my filter. More importantly, it alerted me to the fact that I’d been using one. Our traditions, however honorable, are not intrinsic to the Bible. They are systems we invent to organize the Bible. They are artificial. They are filters .

Once I’d been awakened to this, it struck me as faithless to use a filter. But throwing away my filters cost me the systems with which I’d ordered Scripture and doctrine in my mind. I was left with lots of fragments. It didn’t feel like it at the time, but that was the best thing that could have happened.

THE MOSAIC

The facts of the Bible are just pieces—bits of scattered data. Our tendency is to impose order, and to do that we apply a filter. But we gain a perspective that is both broader and deeper if we allow ourselves to see the pieces in their own wider context. We need to see the mosaic created by the pieces.

The Bible is really a theological and literary mosaic. The pattern in a mosaic often isn’t clear up close. It may appear to be just a random assemblage of pieces. Only when you step back can you see the wondrous whole. Yes, the individual pieces are essential; without them there would be no mosaic. But the meaning of all the pieces is found in the completed mosaic. And a mosaic isn’t imposed on the pieces; it derives from them.

I now view Psalm 82 not as a passage that shredded my filter but rather as an important piece of a larger, mesmerizing mosaic. Psalm 82 has at its core the unseen realm and its interaction with the human world. And that psalm isn’t the only piece like that; there are lots of them. In fact, the intersection of our domain and the unseen world—which includes the triune God, but also a much more numerous cast—is at the heart of biblical theology.

My passion is to persuade you to remove your filter and begin to look at the pieces of Scripture as part of a mosaic so that this “big picture” can begin to take focus. If you do it, you’ll find, as I did, that this approach leads you to the answers to questions like, “Why is that in the Bible?” and “How can I make sense of all this?” If you’ve spent serious time in Scripture, you know that there are many odd passages, curious phrases, troubling paradoxes, echoes of one event in another, connections within and between the testaments that can’t be coincidental.

1.We’ve been trained to think that the history of Christianity is the true context of the Bible

We talk a lot about interpreting the Bible in context, but Christian history is not the context of the biblical writers. The proper context for interpreting the Bible is not Augustine or any other church father. It is not the Catholic Church. It is not the rabbinic movements of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. It is not the Reformation or the Puritans. It is not evangelicalism in any of its flavors. It is not the modern world at all, or any period of its history .

The proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context of the biblical writers—the context that produced the Bible. 1 Every other context is alien to the biblical writers and, therefore, to the Bible. Yet there is a pervasive tendency in the believing Church to filter the Bible through creeds, confessions, and denominational preferences .

I’m not arguing that we should ignore our Christian forefathers. I’m simply saying that we should give their words and their thought the proper perspective and priority. Creeds serve a useful purpose. They distill important, albeit carefully selected, theological ideas. But they are not inspired. They are no substitute for the biblical text.

The biblical text was produced by men who lived in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean between the second millennium BC and the first century AD . To understand how biblical writers thought, we need to tap into the intellectual output of that world. A vast amount of that material is available to us, thanks to modern technology. As our understanding of the worldview of the biblical writers grows, so does our understanding of what they intended to say—and the mosaic of their thinking takes shape in our minds.

2.We’ve been desensitized to the vitality and theological importance of the unseen world

Modern Christianity suffers from two serious shortcomings when it comes to the supernatural world.

First, many Christians claim to believe in the supernatural but think (and live) like skeptics. We find talk of the supernatural world uncomfortable. This is typical of denominations and evangelical congregations outside the charismatic movement—in other words, those from a background like the one I grew up in.

There are two basic reasons why noncharismatics tend to close the door on the supernatural world. One is their suspicion that charismatic practices are detached from sound exegesis of Scripture. As a biblical scholar, it’s easy for me to agree with that suspicion—but over time it has widely degenerated into a closed-minded overreaction that is itself detached from the worldview of the biblical writers.

The other reason is less self-congratulatory. The believing church is bending under the weight of its own rationalism, a modern worldview that would be foreign to the biblical writers. Traditional Christian teaching has for centuries kept the unseen world at arm’s length. We believe in the Godhead because there’s no point to Christianity without it. The rest of the unseen world is handled with a whisper or a chuckle.

The second serious shortcoming is evident within the charismatic movement: the elevation of experience over Scripture. While that movement is predisposed to embrace the idea of an animate spiritual world, its conception of that world is framed largely by experience and an idiosyncratic reading of the book of Acts.

Those two shortcomings, while seemingly quite different, are actually born of the same fundamental, underlying problem: Modern Christianity’s view of the unseen world isn’t framed by the ancient worldview of the biblical writers. One segment wrongly consigns the invisible realm to the periphery of theological discussion. The other is so busy seeking some interaction with it that it has become unconcerned with its biblical moorings, resulting in a caricature.

I’m concerned about both shortcomings, but since this book derives from my own story, the problem of the Christian skeptic hits closer to home and is my greater concern.

If your background, like mine, is in the evangelical, noncharismatic branch of Protestantism, perhaps you consider yourself an exception to the patterns I’ve identified, or think that I’ve overstated the situation. But what would you think if a Christian friend confided to you that he believed he had been helped by a guardian angel, or that he had audibly heard a disembodied voice warning him of some danger? What if your friend claimed to have witnessed demonic possession, or was convinced that God had directed her life through a dream that included an appearance of Jesus?

Most of us noncharismatics would have to admit that our initial impulse would be to doubt. But we actually have a less transparent reflex. We would nod our head and listen politely to our friend’s fervent story, but the whole time we would be seeking other possible explanations. That’s because our modern inclination is to insist on evidence. Since we live in a scientific age, we are prone to think these kinds of experiences are actually emotional misinterpretations of the events—or, worse, something treatable with the right medication. And in any individual case, that might be so—but the truth is that our modern evangelical subculture has trained us to think that our theology precludes any experience of the unseen world. Consequently, it isn’t an important part of our theology.

My contention is that, if our theology really derives from the biblical text, we must reconsider our selective supernaturalism and recover a biblical theology of the unseen world . This is not to suggest that the best interpretation of a passage is always the most supernatural one. But the biblical writers and those to whom they wrote were predisposed to supernaturalism. To ignore that outlook or marginalize it will produce Bible interpretation that reflects our mind-set more than that of the biblical writers.

3.We assume that a lot of things in the Bible are too odd or peripheral to matter

Sometime after we moved to Wisconsin for my doctoral work, my wife and I found a church that felt as if it might become our new church home. The pastor had a degree from a well-known seminary. His first two sermons from 1 Peter were filled with solid exposition. I was excited about the prospects. By our third visit, he had reached 1 Peter 3:14–22 in his sermon series, a very odd passage that’s also one of my favorites. What happened next is etched on my memory. The pastor took the pulpit and announced with complete sincerity, “We’re going to skip this section of 1 Peter since it’s just too strange.” We didn’t visit again.

I’ve seen this sort of evasion more than once. Usually it’s not as dramatic. Pastors don’t typically tell their people to skip part of the Bible. The more common strategy for “handling” strange passages is more subtle: Strip the bizarre passage of anything that makes it bizarre. The goal is to provide the most ordinary, comfortable interpretation possible.

This strategy is ironic to say the least. Why is it that Christians who would strenuously defend a belief in God or the virgin birth against charges that they are unscientific or irrational don’t hesitate to call out academic SWAT teams to explain away “weird” biblical passages? The core doctrines of the faith are themselves neither ordinary nor a comfortable fit with empirical rationalism.

The odds are very high that you’ve never heard that Psalm 82 plays a pivotal role in biblical theology (including New Testament theology). I’ve been a Christian for over thirty years and I’ve never heard a sermon on it. There are many other passages whose content is curious or “doesn’t make sense” and so are abandoned or glossed over. Here’s a sampling of them:

•Gen 1:26

•Gen 3:5, 22

•Gen 6:1–4

•Gen 10–11

•Gen 15:1

•Gen 48:15–16

•Exod 3:1–14

•Exod 23:20–23

•Num 13:32–33

•Deut 32:8–9 2

•Deut 32:17

•Judg 6

•1 Sam 3

•1 Sam 23:1–14

•1 Kgs 22:1–23

•2 Kgs 5:17–19

•Job 1–2

•Pss 82 , 68 , 89

•Isa 14:12–15

•Ezek 28:11–19

•Dan 7

•Matt 16:13–23

•John 1:1–14

•John 10:34–35

•Rom 8:18–24

•Rom 15:24, 28

•1 Cor 2:6–13

•1 Cor 5:4–5

•1 Cor 6:3

•1 Cor 10:18–22

•Gal 3:19

•Eph 6:10–12

•Heb 1–2

•1 Pet 3:18–22

•2 Pet 1:3–4

•2 Pet 2:4–5

•Jude 5–7

•Rev 2:26–28

•Rev 3:21

Don’t consider that a mere catalog. The list is deliberate, and all of those passages will be examined in this book. All are conceptually interconnected, and all help illuminate the more commonly studied passages—those that do “make sense.” Look them up for a glimpse of what we’ll be talking about.

How are we supposed to understand the identity of the “sons of God” in Genesis 6:1–4? Why did Jesus angrily rebuke Peter by saying “Get behind me, Satan”? Why does Paul tell the Corinthian church to stop arguing because they would someday “rule over angels”? There are lots of explanations offered by pastors and teachers of the Bible for these and other strange passages, but most are offered without consideration of how that explanation works with the rest of the Bible, with passages strange or not-so-strange.

In this book, I’ll be offering my take on many “strange passages.” Other scholars have done the same. But if mine are different, it’s because they grow out of the perspective of the mosaic. They don’t exist in isolation from other passages. They have explanatory power in more than one place.

My point is not to suggest that we can have absolute certainty in interpretation everywhere in the Bible. No one, including the present writer, is always right about what every passage means. I have a firm grasp of my own lack of omniscience. (So does my wife, for the record.) Rather, my contention in this book is that if it’s weird, it’s important. Every passage plays a coherent role in the mosaic whole.

I’ve said that the mosaic of biblical theology gives coherence to the pieces of the Bible. But the Bible is a long, detailed work. One of the hardest parts about writing this book was deciding what to reserve for another book—how to be comprehensive without being exhaustive. I decided to cheat.

The present book is the culmination of years of my time spent reading and studying the biblical text and exploring the insights of other scholars. I’ve accumulated thousands of books and scholarly journal articles that relate in some way to the ancient biblical worldview that produces the mosaic. I’ve read nearly all of them in part or whole. My bibliography is nearly as long as this book. I mention this to make it clear that the ideas you’ll read here are not contrived. All of them have survived what scholars call peer review. My main contribution is synthesis of the ideas and articulating a biblical theology not derived from tradition but rather framed exclusively in the context of the Bible’s own ancient worldview.

The present book is academic in tone, but it’s not necessarily a book for scholars. You don’t need to have gone to seminary or earned an advanced degree to follow along. I’ve tried to reserve technical discussion to a companion website to this book that will provide fuller discussion on certain topics, additional bibliography, and “nuts and bolts” data from the original languages for those who desire that. 3

For those for whom this book may feel too dense, I’ve written a less-detailed version entitled Supernatural . It covers the core concepts in this book with an orientation toward practical application of the supernatural worldview of the biblical writers—toward how the biblical mosaic presented here should change our spiritual lives and outlook.

The subtitle of this book (“Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible” ) captures the struggle of being a modern person with a believing heart trying to think like a premodern biblical writer. If you can feel even a little of that conflict, you’re where I’ve been for a very long time. And I’m still on that journey. Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that I didn’t need protection from my Bible. If you believe that too, you’re good to go.