There are days I’d love to be transferred into an android body like Commander Data in Star Trek, just so I could catch up on all my reading!
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I read it as primarily discussing a hermeneutic principle, which is something that is critical.
And this is why I think it’s also important to talk about hermeneutics as it relates to other topics like homosexuality and transgenderism. But as was clarified:
Did you see my comment which linked Rod Dreher’s article:
I’m going to go put on a limb here, but I think it is actually critical for a hermeneutic here, and say that the major theme of the Old Testament is faithfulness, and that all of the Torah has to be judged by that standard. In Israel’s ancient tribal and kingdom context, faithfulness to the people of God would have meant things different than what it did in the age of the prophets, and again something different in the days of the church. So my question about all relationships in terms of gender (and sexuality) would start with the question of faithfulness – and that means defining “sexual immorality” in terms primarily of promiscuity because promiscuity is inherently unfaithful to every single partner. I’d say that’s where Paul’s admonition that “it is better to marry than to burn” comes from; as a Methodist pastor when I was a teen put it, if you can’t keep your pants on, find one person and one only with whom you will take them off – addressed equally to both genders in a group where there was tittering and some red faces.
The flip side of that being that the Bible doesn’t endorse those things, either. It’s more of a “Since you’re going to do these things anyway, here’s the best way to do so”.
True – most people are allergic to real thinking.
The second sentence reminds me of a professor of ancient literature who began the first day of class by writing “audience” on the board and then gave the etymology, the word descending from Latin audire via participles audiens and audientum – audire “to hear” and the two participles “ones who hear”, which gave us the words audio “sound” and auditorium “a place for listening”, all to emphasize that in every case in ancient literature “audience” meant people who heard the material read vocally, not to anyone who just sat and read it. He provided examples all the way up through Augustine where reading something didn’t refer to making sense of the words on a page but to pronouncing the words out loud in order(and noted that a “reader” was someone who read aloud so others could listen). He then launched us into a discussion of why this was significant, which took a lot of prodding since most people in the class had almost never read anything out loud since grade school.
The ancient church actually believed “sola scriptura” as the Wittenburg Reformers, the original Protestants, meant it, not as the answer to “What is the single source of doctrine?” but as the answer to “What is the highest authority?”, the difference being that the former turns everyone into his or her own “pope” while the second includes the Fathers and councils as sources for theology so long as they did not teach contrary to scripture. This is why the Lutheran reformation was conservative, as they kept everything that was not contradicted in scripture, while pretty much the rest of the reformation was radical because they threw out anything they could not derive from scripture.
I don’t remember when it was, but I recall reading along and encountering Jesus’ promise that the Holy Spirit would lead the Apostles (and presumably their successors) into all truth, and realizing that given this promise then the radical application of sola scriptura wasn’t biblical, a point confirmed when I reached Paul’s declaration that the Holy Spirit gives teachers to the church.
By the way, I encountered the use of “inerrancy” in a couple of the early Fathers and found they didn’t mean what it’s used for today; they used it in the sense of an archery term, that the Word of the Lord always strikes its target; it wasn’t about ‘errors’ in the scriptures, it was about the power of the Word. It didn’t really take on its modern meaning until much, much later.
The Bible itself doesn’t support such a view, given how the prophets and then Jesus drew out principles and then overturned chunks of scripture. In this connection I always recall how through the prophets God told Israel that He hated what He had commanded.
Paul shows the way by how he treats the Old Testament: he rarely treats it literally; his approach was to draw out the principles behind everything. Of course in that he is following the example of the prophets, but he goes more directly into the text and says things like, “This is an allegory” – and contrary to the hermeneutical assertion of one OT professor, “just because Paul did it doesn’t mean you can”, given that Paul said that scripture is written for our instruction, then the ways he interpreted the scriptures is an example for us.
That’s actually affirmed by the ruling of the Council of Jerusalem as recorded in Acts 15 where the entire Mosaic covenant law was reduced to just four items: the Old Testament cannot be taken literally as applying to us, it can only be used for drawing lessons from. That’s very unsettling to a lot of Christians who would much rather have a list of rules to follow (and to pound other people over the head with) than to have to draw out principles.
Another way to sum it up was given by one of the minor prophets: it is all there to teach us to act justly, to be ever merciful, and to walk humbly. Any interpretation of the Old Testament especially which does not do that is in error.
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This off-topic, but when it comes to Genesis 1 and cosmology I am always reminded of the ancient scholars who examined that first Creation account closely and concluded that
- the universe started out smaller than a grain of mustard, which is an idiom meaning “so small there is nothing smaller”
- the universe, filled with fluid (“water”), expanded incredibly rapidly, thinning the fluid
- when God said, “Light – BE!”, the fluid thinned so that light shone freely
- the Earth is incredibly ancient, though not as ancient as the universe
They were using a principle common to ancient literature where the letters themselves had meaning, though I don’t recall the details of that, along with examining just the words themselves. But I found it rather humbling that scholars who grew up speaking Hebrew saw in Genesis a Creation that is eerily close to today’s cosmology . . . and in all my time reading the Old Testament in Hebrew I never saw a hint of that – well, except in the moniker “the Ancient of Days” used of God, from which I conclude that God had already experienced/observed the universe over a very, very long time before humans came along/
I’d say it only assumes that the writers of the items in this small library spoke with one voice, rather like a chorus in a Greek tragedy, and not in numerous discordant voices.
As to a “‘flat’ level of inspiration”, even rabbinic Judaism recognizes that there are different levels of inspiration in the scriptures, that some are the Word of the Lord directly, e.g. when a prophet declares “Thus says the Lord”, and others are lesser, such as in the Psalms which tend to express the views of the writers (David, Asaph, etc.), and still others are lesser, e.g. historical bits which address theology only very indirectly, and still others are even lesser, e.g. statements made by pharaoh and other non-Israelites, and so on.
We speak of the canon of scripture as though all the contents are equal, but the early church distinguished between books that had universal, unanimous affirmation (homologoumena) and those which were accepted but with opposition (antilegomena, “spoke against”), and applied the rule that the second group must be interpreted in light of the first group, which meant that the second group wasn’t to be used to establish doctrine but only to affirm doctrine which is founded in the first group. Ironically, it was the first evangelicals, the Lutherans, who tried to get the church to recognize this "layering’ of the scriptures, but even most Lutherans today have forgotten about it (which is tragic since a large number of rather deviant teachings haave arisen due to people drawing doctrine from the antilegomena).
But even there which sort of has a canon within the canon there is another “layer”, and that is that everything has to conform to the Gospels, making them a deeper canon within a canon, and finally there is what has been called the final canon, the message of the Gospel itself, the standard to which all all the canon has to conform.
And all of that indeed sort of affirms that there is no flat level of inspiration throughout because it takes the core principle, the Gospel, and requires that everything conform to it, and so on down the line.
Then given that the New Testament is in essence a canon that is above the Old Testament, then we come around to the question of just how much we can derive gender roles from Genesis by itself especially when there is another canon that the New Testament itself has to conform to, namely the Gospel.
That strikes me as an odd thing to say, and that pastor as someone Paul would command not to associate with.
To include the whole statement:
I don’t see anything odd about it, or anything objectionable to Paul; it’s an admonition against promiscuity that essentially paraphrases Paul’s admonition,
Ha! I read it as your youth pastor the first time. Still, I don’t think that’s how Paul would define sexual fidelity.
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