W HEN WE BEGAN OUR JOURNEY, I SHARED WITH YOU MY OWN EXPERIENCE of venturing into the mind of ancient Israelites and the Jews and Christians of the first century and how that made it impossible to look at the Bible as I had before. It ruined me in an agreeable way. But I can only say that with hindsight. At the time of that experience, I had already taught on the college level and was in the midst of one of the nation’s most respected Hebrew Bible programs—and yet I hadn’t been thinking clearly about Scripture. I hadn’t seen much of what I’ve written in this book. I’d been blinded by tradition and my own predilection to keep certain things on the periphery when it came to the Bible. It was the worst possible time in my life to have everything put into upheaval, to have to rethink and reevaluate what I believed. It required that I be humbled, something that doesn’t come easily to an academic.
The realization that I needed to read the Bible like a premodern person who embraced the supernatural, unseen world has illumined its content more than anything else in my academic life. One question I’ve been asked over the years when sharing insights that are now part of this book was one that I asked myself: Why haven’t I heard these things before? It astonished me that I could sit under years of biblical preaching and teaching and never have anyone alert me to the important and exciting truths we’ve tracked here.
I’ve learned that the answer to that question is complex. Rather than dwell on it, God provoked me to do something about it. Most people aren’t going to learn Greek and Hebrew (and other dead languages) as part of studying Scripture. Most aren’t going to pursue a PhD in biblical studies, where they’ll encounter the high-level scholarship that will force them to think about what the biblical text really says and why it says it in its own ancient context, far removed from any modern tradition. But everyone ought to reap some benefit from those disciplines. And so it has become my ambition to parse that data and synthesize it so that more people can experience the thrill of rediscovering the supernatural worldview of the Bible—of reading the Bible again for the first time.
The Unseen Realm is the first step in that effort. If you’re like me, what you’ve read here will be fodder for thought for some time. And truth be told, it’s just a starting point. My hope is that the book has alerted you to some terribly important principles that I’ve listed below: strategies for pursuing the biblical-theological ideas that run through Scripture. They’re my short list of research principles that, even though they are self-evident, I need to be constantly reminded of.
1.Let the Bible be what it is, and be open to the notion that what it says about the unseen realm might just be real. The writers certainly thought it was. I would suggest that it’s a good hermeneutical strategy to firmly grasp that they—the biblical authors—aren’t us while we seek to understand their thoughts. That doesn’t seem terribly profound, but it’s critically important to reading Scripture as it was written.
2.The content of the Bible needs to make sense in its own context, whether or not it makes sense in ours . I can’t help but think of our discussions of Genesis 6:1–4 here. That passage says what it says because of what it addresses in the worldview of the writer . Assigning a more “rational” (i.e., nonsupernatural) meaning to it in order to make it more palatable in a different context amounts to erasing its intended target. Even if some passages of Scripture don’t make sense in our world, and we cringe at what they say, changing their context to remove our discomfort isn’t sound hermeneutical method.
3.How the biblical writers tie passages together for interpretation should guide our own interpretation of the Bible . In academic jargon, this is referred to as intertextuality. It’s important for understanding what a biblical writer was thinking and doing. It is how ideas are threaded through the canon. Most of our exegesis involves breaking up passages and verses into their constituent parts, whereas the biblical writers were creating connections between texts. Since the Bible is, unavoidably, something of an artifact to us, we have to pay careful attention to the parts. But too often we only gaze at the pieces in isolation and fail to observe how they are tethered to other pieces. Learning to pay attention to intertextuality is to follow an inspired breadcrumb trail where it leads.
4.How the New Testament writers repurpose the Old Testament is critical for biblical interpretation . In other words, the Septuagint is a big deal. It does little good to remind ourselves that the New Testament is an inspired commentary on the Old Testament when we fail to discern just what Bible they were using (more often than not).
5.Metaphorical meaning isn’t “less real” than literal meaning (however that’s defined) . Whether we like it or not, the biblical writers weren’t obsessed with literalism the way we seem to be. Frankly, I’ve come to believe that every seminary and graduate school program in biblical studies ought to require a course on the hermeneutical methods of the biblical writers and first-century Judaism. It would be a wake-up call. Biblical writers regularly employ conceptual metaphor in their writing and thinking. That’s because they were human. Conceptual metaphor refers to the way we use a concrete term or idea to communicate abstract ideas. If we marry ourselves to the concrete (“literal”) meaning of words, we’re going to miss the point the writer was angling for in many cases. If I use the word “Vegas” and all you think of is latitude and longitude, you’re not following my meaning. Biblical words can carry a lot of freight that transcends their concrete sense. Inspiration didn’t immunize language from doing what it does.
Finally, my prayer for readers is that God will use this book in your life the way he has used its content in my own spiritual journey: to marvel at the intricacy of the biblical narrative, to be blessed by the love of God for his human children, and to acknowledge the role of the unseen world in the inheritance of salvation (Heb 1:14).