Reeves on Scripture

I would like to introduce to you part of an essay by a dear brother, Joe Reeves. I have known Joe and Donna for 35 or so years. First at Eastside in Colorado Springs then in Athens, Greece. Joe is a retired USAF officer. His interests include philosophy and the study of 1st century texts. We have spent hours discussing our faith and lack thereof. And, yes, we disagree sometimes, but I respect his knowledge and writing ability. His view of 1st century Christian documents is not a typical one, but one that I believe is "right on." I'll gladly forward any comments to Joe. Perhaps he will respond.

To understand the meaning of any piece of written or oral language adequately one must understand the culture and subcultures that the language is being used to expresses. If the particular writing was written in the distant past, then it is even more important to understand the culture and subcultures from which the author was writing. Failure to do so will certainly lead to a misconception of the writer’s original intent and specific points that he or she was making to their original audience.
This is a point that is often overlooked in modern biblical teaching but it is just as true of any biblical book as it is of any other writing. Almost all “biblical” writing was written to an audience contemporary with the author, and to an audience that the writer wished to transpose in their thinking. In fact, I do not know of any exception. Failure to understand the culture in which a biblical book was written will almost certainly ensure the failure of any later audience to understand the writer’s points. This fact then requires that the attentive Bible reader must find a way to proceed from the text to some identifiable culture that imparts meaning.
The question is, which culture do people use to understand biblical meaning? Usually, people try to “interpret” the Bible from their own contemporary cultural standpoint rather than the cultural standpoint of the original writer and his envisioned audience. But when they do so, they also “interpret” the Bible through a totally different system than they interpret other written language. No one that I know interprets the local newspaper in that way. I will argue that unless Bible readers go back and examine the writer’s original social system and the social system of his original envisioned audience, they can not hope to understand the writer’s original point. But I find that few modern readers wish to understand the original message.
People today need to recognize that the “Bible” was written from within a culture outside of even the time and culture in which these books were collected together into what has become known as a “canon.” There was over three hundred years between these events. The New Testament books were written by Jews (with one exception) and collected together by Romans over three hundred years after they were written. Even between these two periods and cultures, those people simply had different mind sets about “Christianity.”
But in our modern culture, understanding the Bible from the original cultural perspective does not seem to be a concern to most modern “Christians.” In today’s “Christian” culture, the writer’s original point is seldom discussed. Instead, the reader usually supplies his or her own meaning to the text based on the current culture. And in this atmosphere of the different religious subcultures, one assumed meaning seems to be as acceptable as almost any other. This alternative is not new. It has been the general practice since Bible readers began to remove the biblical texts from the original cultural context in which they were composed. In today’s culture, these texts are no longer studied as texts but as proof texts and interpreted as if they were written by and to, people in the same social system as the modern reader.
The result of this cultural substitution is that the real, intended textual meaning of the biblical writing from the writer’s standpoint is no longer understood and his intended message to his envisioned audience no longer makes sense to the modern reader. In the modern Bible readers’ way of understanding, the words in the documents no longer refer to the original reader’s/hearer’s world, but to the modern reader’s world. Even the things mentioned such as ideas, values, feelings, people, clothing, houses, roads, and plants take on a totally different meaning than the meaning these words had to the writer and to the original recipients. But, since in current cultures the major teaching of these later readers’ subculture is that the Bible documents are “sacred writings”, they also believe those writings must make sense. But since so many of today’s Bible reader, even the most trusted teachers’, knowledge of the original culture is only minimal, the modern reader can no longer understand these words in the context of their original social system. So these later readers came up with a new way of interpreting the words based on their own culture. People of each new culture still insist that the Bible is, or was, the inspired “word of God”, but each succeeding generation and succeeding culture where the Bible was used interprets it based upon their own social system rather than on the culture to which it was originally written.
It is extremely difficult to get this point across to most modern Bible readers. But understanding this point is absolutely essential for proper biblical understanding. Like almost everyone reared in an American church, I did not understand how differently Americans or Europeans deal with “Scripture” until I lived in Greece for a period of time. While living in Greece, I saw that the Greek form of Christianity was culturally very different from mine. At first this was very troubling, but with the help of two native Greek Christians, I began to see that all the world, including first century Judaism, was somehow very different from the social system of rural 20th Century Arkansas, where I grew up. Because of that, I set out to learn as much as possible about the cultures of the Bible times, and now understand that you simply can’t know what the Bible meant for the original audience if you try to see it through your 21st century social system.
When people began to interpret the Bible based on their own culture rather than the writer’s culture and his understanding of the audience’s original culture, it became necessary to come up with a new understanding of how it should be interpreted. So these later readers devised a new criterion. In order for people in each succeeding culture to be able to interpret the Bible to apply primarily to themselves and their new culture, new theories of interpretation had to be produced. For the new culture, words no longer meant what they had meant when originally written by the original authors to the original audiences. Instead, interpreters now began to make interpretations that had never been made before. They began to make unjustified distinctions between the literal and figurative, assigning new literal meanings to things that the author and his audience would have quickly grasped as figurative, and they assign figurative meanings to other things that were obviously literal to the people of the first century. The new interpreters insist that the new meanings came form the true author of the Bible, God. They even insist that the Holy Spirit, not their culture, is the cause of their interpretation. They seem to believe that regardless of what understanding the author intended for his original audience, his words mean something totally different to the 20th and 21st century people, again insisting that the Holy Spirit makes it so. In fact, it is not uncommon for today’s leaders to state that concept very explicitly. And if you doubt the truth of this statement, then just ask church folks this question; can a text of scripture, at a later time come to mean what it never meant before to an earlier cultural group? The overwhelming reply you will receive is yes it can and usually does.
The search for the new cultural meaning, with a loss of concern for the original, and the belief that the literal or figurative meaning was, and is, obvious and easily understood to refer to today’s culture, resulted in the fact that the biblical documents ceased to be treated as stand-alone texts, which originally, to the very first recipients, they had to be. When one critically examines both these texts and the time and situation in which each separate text was written, it is rather obvious that their initial recipients had no choice but to understand them to be stand-alone documents. But instead of being considered meaningful language intended to communicate a particular message to a particular audience living at a particular time contemporary with the writer, people of these later cultures now consider the Bible as something in which the sum total was greater than the sum of the parts and as revealed and inspired language puzzles which only the religious elite can solve. In fact, here is a quote from a “ministry” major at one of the leading “Christian” universities, “With the Bible, even just reading it in English, you have to search and delve into the Scriptures to find the hidden meanings or use of an analogy.” Modern religious leaders began to claim that they had been especially “anointed” to understand what “God’s words” mean to this new culture. The Bible began to be used to bolster some controller’s idea or some behavior he required of other people at a given time and place. Simply put, the Bible became a document of proof texts used to prove, for or against, any doctrinal position from the Pope, to the institutional church government, to the content and conduct of a worship service, to special prayer languages, to the end-time-prophesy. (I think that gets us all) For most people of each new generation, the Bible now began to mean what it had never meant. Think about that: in our society the Bible is believed to mean what it has never meant before, what it obviously did not mean to the original writer, and could not have meant to the original recipients. It is no wonder that so many people in today’s world think God has told them so many different and opposing things. But even more amazing is that many professed Christians seemingly believe that God is the author of a specific text that may have several legitimate meanings for different modern readers, none of which would have been understandable to the original audience.
Today, the term text no longer refers to the entire document as written, say by Paul to the Galatian Christians or Matthew to a group of Jewish Christians. Rather, modern teachers take a sentence or phrase from here and there and combine that snippet with another sentence or phrase taken from another document, perhaps from a different author written to a different audience at a different time and having a totally different subject, and with that method believe they have proven any sort of dogmatic doctrinal position. This methodology can be easily born out by visiting different churches’ worship services and listening to their preacher, or just taking a cursory look at the history of biblical interpretation. This spiritualized puzzle formula makes intelligent reading of the biblical texts near impossible. This is especially true when we get the kind of “help” we do from today’s “religious elite” and also from many of the modern translations. For the observant thinker, there is no easier place to see cultural bias than from different English Bible translations.
If one uses the Bible to get an overall view of God and how He has worked throughout history, the in-depth cultural and language studies of past societies, though helpful, may not be necessary. But the way that the Bible is most often used today, to beat one’s neighbor over the head with some “essential” doctrinal position, in-depth study becomes paramount. There are many things discussed in the Bible that simply can not be adequately dealt with, in the way in which we in the 21st century people insist on doing. To understand these things properly, we must first go back and do in-depth studies on the original culture, language, and philosophy. When we do that our study will point to the need for using the structured approach to Bible study.
Furthermore, I will insist that when one uses the Bible in a way different than the original author intended, or if any person uses the Bible to prove a point different than the author’s original point, that person is making a private interpretation—a practice that Peter stated should not be done. If someone makes a point that is not the point the writer originally intended, they certainly can’t say they are speaking where the Bible is speaking.
In order to understand the Bible, it is essential to realize that we are not those to whom it was originally written. We do not live in the same culture as those who wrote the documents of the Bible. We are not of the same culture as those to whom it was addressed. Nor do we routinely have the same problems and circumstances as those people in the cultures to which answers were supplied by the Bible authors. Yet many in our culture use these documents as if we, not people some two thousand years ago, were indeed the intended recipients and with the assumption that the writers fully understood our circumstances and wrote to us based on our culture with no message at all to the original addressees.
If you look at many of the most popular doctrines of today’s church culture, and if you understand anything about the first century culture, it is evident that the most popular doctrines of today’s church culture would have made absolutely no sense to people in the first century. For example, what sense would today’s popular interpretations of Revelation, Daniel, and Ezekiel have made to those books’ original recipients? Given today’s Premillennialist [or any other "futurist" position - Dan] interpretation of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation, advocates of this current thinking agree that these books had no message for those to whom they were first delivered. In fact, in numerous books written by modern premillinnealists the authors emphatically state that since these books were written when the time of fulfillment was centuries in the future, they could not have had any meaning to any generation before our own. Further, just tonight, I heard a preacher state that “God is revealing things to our generation about the end times that have never been revealed to any generation prior to ours.” Given the modern end time interpretation, if correct, these books certainly could have had nothing to communicate to the Christians between the end of the first century and the beginning of the 20th century. At best, those books had one meaning for the first recipients and a totally different meaning for people today. They would also have had to have intermediate meanings to those who lived in the interim between then and now, else they would have been valueless to those generations.