Babylon
One of my classes this semester is a Text and Interpretation class on Revelation. I haven’t really been that interested in the class, as there is nothing new or particularly shocking being lectured (for me, that is). At most, the thing that has piqued my interest is the literary component of Revelation – it’s various chiastic and repetitive structures that scream Hebrew Literature. I’d be more interested in the idea that Revelation is the summation of the entire OT (and NT) with its 640-odd references to the OT, but I just can’t invest the time to read interpretatively the entirety of the Bible to really understand Revelation at a deep level. Interesting stuff, but nothing that has really hit me in the head to change my mind.
Until today.
Until today, I’ve been what you could call a preterist. That is, I believed that Revelation was primarily written to be a polemic against Rome for the persecuted Church in Asia Minor. Everything that is in Revelation concerning Powers, Oppresion and Evil can fit well into Roman Empire. My professor has been trying to get across to the class that Revelation is timelessly written, with next to no temporal prophecy involved, framed within Rome as the ultimate evil to which we wage holy war with our weapons of praise, suffering, and witness. After class today, that has changed.
In Revelation 17, we learn of the woman, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots. Rome, right? Babylon is code for Rome, right? Wrong. Throughout all of the OT, and all of our salvation-historical narrative history, Babylon was code for something older: Babel, the first worldly power that tried to overthrow God. Babel/Babylon is then every world power that has been mentioned in the OT: Tyre, Sidon, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Babylon, Rome, Egypt, etc. On top of that, its crucial to see that Revelation’s Babylon is a mother of harlots – more Babylons. So here’s the thing, this isn’t the first Babylon, and it certainly isn’t the last. Rome is irrelevant.
This is far more polemical than before. Instead of acknowledging (though condemning and judging) the powers of Rome, Revelation casts aside Rome as just another temporary world power.
Revelation is about being a faithful witness through persecution by the powers of the World, which will lose in the end to the power of God.
Revelation just got interesting.
This entry was written by , posted on November 12, 2008 at 12:29 am, filed under Biblical Study and tagged Bible, Interpretation, Revelation, School. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Evangelicalism Then and Now: Biblicism
Quire 63, folio 1 recto of the Codex Sinaiticus, http://www.codex-sinaiticus.net
If you recall, the first point of Bebbington’s quadrilateral is biblicism: a particular regard for the Bible (e.g. all spiritual truth is to be found in its pages). But that was then, and this is now. My interpretation of the first point of the quadrilateral is biblicism, a particular regard for an ahistorical, context-free reading of the Bible. Here’s why I think so.
I see over and over (especially within the more ‘spirit-filled’ churches) a push for young evangelicals and new Christians to not exercise the brain in interpreting scripture, but to rely on ‘what the Spirit is telling you through the text.’ To answer the critics who will attack me (though not in the comments – that would be ok), I’m not trying to bash the Spirit – what I am bashing is the idea that individualism rules over biblical interpretation. Ours is a communal faith that requires us to learn from our elders and teachers; reader-centric, ‘Spirit-filled’ readings of the Bible strip us of the accountability we need as responsible Christians.
This individualist interpretation is rooted in the idea that the stories, letters, and songs found in the scriptures were written to us, right now, today, in Canada/U.S./England/Paraguay/Wherever you may be. This is wrong. Two of the best classes I have ever taken in any educational context were Survey of the Hebrew Scriptures with Dr. Stan Walters and Survey of the New Testament with Steve Thomson. I learned two things above all else from these men: that the Bible wasn’t written to us, but merely for us; and that the Scriptures are our holy texts, not the stories held within. Let me hash out these ideas:
The Bible wasn’t written to us, but merely for us. Many people hear that the Bible is ‘God’s love letter to Christians.’ That’s nice, but it’s tripe; the Bible is so much more than that. The Bible is an amalgamation of 2500-odd years of storytelling, meticulously written to be presented to very specific followers of the (now fully-revealed) Trinitarian God, whom we serve. To really understand what God was telling them, and from which we can derive what God is telling us, we need to know their contexts. I once read that text without context is pretext. How very true. This is not an easy thing to do, but I’ll get to solutions further down the page.
The Scriptures are our holy texts, not the stories held within. To go along with the above point, it is imperative that we remember that the texts we take as our Scriptures are more than the sum of the narratives held within: even the grammar of it all should be Holy to us. As I’ve studied 2 years of Greek and now into my 2nd year of Hebrew, I am finding that both languages are ridiculously complex, compared to lazy, boring English. Not only that, but the authors of both the OT and the NT are working in genres that are so much more complex than what we regularly deal with in our contemporary settings. Hebrew Parrallelism is pretty much mind-blowing, and don’t even get me started on the 14-odd translatory values of the Genitive case in Greek.
So why does this sound so new? Context? Grammar? Here’s what I think happened – I think that these were understood en masse by Christians in the early days of Christianity. These things were taught as tools for the interpretative process until the centralization of power by Rome’s new pet religion and the Dark Ages led into a knowledge choke-point for the people. Scholarship has been playing catch-up ever since, and really only gaining ground since archaelogy hit the ground running. Since then, it seems most pastors tend towards using the Bible as proof-text to help their congregations get through life, without really wrestling with the hard questions found within. In turn, they intuitively teach their congregations that reading the text emotionally (what they would call, ‘in the Spirit’) is how one finds the 3-point sermons of living life in Canada in the 21st Century.
Solution? It’ll be hard, but I think that those who are trained in this stuff (pastors, I’m looking at you) need to disseminate it in real, educationally-viable ways. We need to walk away from easy proof-texting to tell people how to live life and step into the dirty ground of teaching how to fully read a bible, with helps like commentaries and dictionaries and study bibles (NOT the Life Application Bible) – which will lead into some really hard questions, but I think will also lead into deeper, richer faiths for Evangelicals everywhere. For all those non-pastors out there, start by picking up a good commentary (e.g. Anchor Bible Series, NIV Commentary) and just using that as a help – a written mentor to help show you how to really read the Bible for all its worth, without having to rely on our fickle emotions of the time to influence how we think the Spirit is talking to us.
Next on the docket for Evangelicalism: the regard for Christ’s atoning work…as fire insurance.
WK
This entry was written by , posted on November 4, 2008 at 12:32 am, filed under Christianity, Church and tagged Bebbington, Bible, Evangelicalism, Interpretation, Teaching. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
A Biblical Hardliner
In an effort to prove to my housemate Pat that I keeping with blogging this time around, I am going to make a statement that I hope others will comment on.
Here Goes:
There are things in the Bible that are concrete and not open for ‘interpretation’.
Time to unpack that statement.
The reason that I say this is because I’ve heard so many Christians tell me that God’s word is living and active, and if I say that something can only be a certain way, then I must be the most arrogant man in the Universe.
In the Universe.
Well I’m not. (yes, I know that, in itself, is a hilariously ironic – and possibly even hypocritical – response) Having done biblical studies for two years now, I’ve decided that people need to start taking certain things seriously in their ‘interpretations’ of the good book. For those who aren’t in biblical studies, we need to delineate between two kinds of interpretation: exegesis and hermeneutics. Exegesis is the interpretation of what the text originally intended/meant. Hermeneutics is the subsequent study of how to apply the exegetical work.
Essentially, the main/big difference between exegesis and hermeneutics is that exegesis should have one answer (albeit one with possible other layers, like any good author should be) and hermeneutics is far more up for grabs. Sadly, most people skip exegesis and move to hermeneutics or, even worse, blend the two into some horrific mind monster. That’s wrong. And this is where people get miffed at me.
This post is about the need for a correct exegesis of the Bible, of what it meant to the people of the time, (at which point I can, if I so choose, apply that knowledge to my life [hermeneutics]) but most Christians tend to get all existential (feelings-oriented) and New-Agey about their interpretations of the Bible. Case in point: Revelation is not correctly interpreted as pre-tribulation, pre-millenialism rapture promises and warnings. I propose that this idea comes mostly from some guy getting a little loose and liberal with his theology, tradition and his scholarship and came up with what is now the 8-Bajillion-dollar industry we have today.
When it comes to application, go nuts. Do whatever floats your boat. But when it comes to what it says, there IS a right answer.
Deal with it.
WK
This entry was written by , posted on April 18, 2008 at 12:23 am, filed under Biblical Study and tagged Bible, Christianity, Interpretation. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.