IS THERE A HERMENEUTICS OF SILENCE?

(The following letter explains itself. H. A. (Buster) Dobbs is associate editor of the Firm Foundation. I share this letter with our readers in hopes that it might help us overcome a serious mistake we have long made: making acappella music a condition for Christian fellowship, and insisting that instrumental music is a sin based upon the silence of the New Testament. This journal believes that the use or non-use of instruments in corporate worship is a matter of opinion or congregational preference and not an essential of the faith, and therefore should not be made a test of fellowship, as the Firm Foundation holds. - the Editor)

Dear brother Dobbs:

Since I am presently writing a series in my own journal on Biblical hermeneutics, I was particularly interested to learn from your editorial in the Firm Foundation that you are to speak on "The Hermeneutic of Silence" at Forum Five at Cincinnati Bible Seminary next month. Since my readers may have some interest in what I would say about the silence of Scripture, I thought I would kill the proverbial bird with two stones and make this an essay for my paper as well as a letter to you. But it is first of all a letter to you, for I believe we editors should be in touch and exchange our wares in the marketplace of ideas.

First of all, I am at a loss to see how there can be a hermeneutics of silence, for there has to be something said before there can be an interpretation of what is said. One may as well speak of "The Geography of Nowhere" or "The Physics of Nothing" as to speak of the hermeneutics of silence. Hermeneutics has to do with meaning and nothing more, and how can one make meaning out of nothing?

Perhaps you are using the wrong word, for there would be some defense for such a topic as "The Importance of the Silence of Scripture," or "What Are We to Do When the Bible Is Silent?" But with the topic you now have you are dead in the water before you start, for the simple reason that there can be no such thing as an interpretation of what is not said. I am confident that you will find no rule of interpretation, whether of the Bible or of general literature, that has to do with silence, for all rules have to do with the sense of words.

But if we are to be literate in the Bible we are to know what it does not say as well as what it does say. I should know, for instance, that it says nothing about gambling, social drinking, or smoking. And it does not speak explicitly of weightier moral issues such as slavery, segregation, abortion, sterilization, or euthanasia. And it uses no such terminology as the trinity, transubstantiation, purgatory, or extreme unction. It gives no theory of inspiration, no rules of hermeneutics, and even the word "Bible" nowhere appears.

Whatever document we may be studying it may be important to know what it does not say as well as what it does say, such as the Constitution of the United States. Some insist that that grand old document has endured because its creators were careful not to be too specific. When I was writing my Ph.D. thesis on The New Jerusalem my professor instructed me to find out what the Dead Sea Scrolls said about my subject. After a careful search I told him that the Dead Sea Scrolls say nothing at all about the New Jerusalem. To which he replied, "Very well. You need to know that."

So with all Biblical study. It may be significant that of all the references Paul makes to Jesus he never mentions the virgin birth (or, more accurately, the miraculous conception). And the gay community does not let us forget that of all the sins that Jesus names he makes no reference to homosexuality. And while it may be less important we have to concede that the Bible does not tell us how to select elders, and nothing is said about trustees, owning property, or building edifices.

But once it is granted that the silence of Scripture has some significance there is still no basis for a hermeneutics of silence. The only conclusion we can draw from the fact that the Bible is silent on a given subject is that the Bible is silent on that subject. Silence itself implies no sin, for sin is a transgression of law and there is no law in silence. If something the Bible is silent about is sin, such as gambling, it is not the silence that makes it a sin but something the Bible does say, some principle it sets forth or some ideal it imposes. Is not this the nature of sin, that it violates the spirit of Christ as revealed in Scripture? So, we would all agree that the Bible does not have to specifically name something as sin for it to be a sin. It would also follow that something cannot be named a sin only because "it is not authorized in the Bible." Is having trustees and owning property authorized?

The same week you published your editorial about silence the Guardian of Truth published a debate between two of our brothers on whether a plurality of cups for Communion is scriptural. One of them says to the other, "We know by his own admission, that a plurality of cups is not taught by example, command, or necessary inference." He goes on throughout the article to argue very much as you do about the silence of the Bible, except that "the practice" that concerns him is different from the one that concerns you. He writes about the silence in regard to cups and you write about the silence in regard to instruments of music. Like yourself, he even names the year that the cups were first introduced into Churches of Christ, and he names the culprits who did it, except that he refers to one innovation and you to another. But both of you raise the same question, "Where does the Bible speak of it?" Your case is of course different from the anti-cups brother in that he can range throughout Scripture and ask for book, chapter, and verse, while you restrict yourself to the New Testament. The anti-instrumental music position has to explain the numerous instances of instruments being used in the praise of God in the Old Testament, and particularly in Psalms which are not necessarily tied to the ritual of the Mosaic law. The average person has difficulty comprehending how an instrument could be the great sin Churches of Christ make it when the Bible plainly declares in Ps. 150:1-2:

Praise Him for His mighty acts
Praise Him according to His excellent greatness!
Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet;
Praise Him with the lute and harp!
Praise Him with the timbrel and dance;
Praise Him with stringed instruments and flutes!

This makes the silence of the New Testament in reference to instruments a different kind of problem. Since the Old Testament so overwhelmingly exalts instruments (and in reference to praising God, not in terms of animal sacrifices and ceremonial laws), one could conclude that if in the New Testament God changed his mind all that much and thus viewed an instrument used in praising him as a sin that he would have said so. If there is a "law of silence," it has to work both ways.

Back to our brother who objects to a plurality of cups on the ground of silence (and because it plainly says, "Jesus took the cup"), don't we have to concede that he is right, that the Bible is silent about cups and that they are an innovation — introduced by no one less than C. E. Holt and G. C. Brewer?

Are we not left with but one conclusion: each of us must treat the silence of the Bible according to his own conviction, and not impose his scruple upon others. We all practice things and use things in our churches that are not mentioned in the Bible. When we make laws based on silence and impose them upon others as matters of faith we may be guilty of a far greater sin than using plastic cups or having a piano in our church. And yet those plastic cups are a sin to some of our people. I respect that and understand it, and I would not have them sin by violating their conscience. I would only ask that they not make a law of God out of their scruple.

So with instruments. It is proper for us to remain acappella in our singing, and it can be based upon how we conceive the silence of the New Testament, but we are wrong when we make a law of God for all others and make them sinners if they use an instrument.

The Church of Christ case against instruments is having a hard time of it if we still have to march out that old saw of Noah and the gopher wood, as you indicate you plan to do in Cincinnati. It is hard to believe that our editors today can be so shallow as to write what you did, as follows:

God instructed Noah to build the ark of gopher wood and was silent as to any other kind of wood. Therefore Noah was limited to the use of gopher wood in the construction of the ark. Had God told Noah to make the box-like boat out of wood, without specifying a particular kind of wood, then Noah could have acceptably used any kind of wood. But God required gopher wood and it would have been a denial of God, and his authority, to use any other kind of wood. Silence, in this connection, was prohibitive, because God had spoken.

The problem with this argument is that it proves more than you want it to prove, for everyone who seeks to make a law out of his opinion can use it. "Jesus took the cup." Is that not specific enough? Then why your plastic cups of a different kind and size? Did not God give us a hymnal in the Bible, the book of Psalms? Why then your man-made song book, songs written by Catholic bishops? And why all the Sunday School literature of a different kind? What's wrong in simply taking the Bible? And how about your Sunday School, an arrangement of a different kind than the "all present" assembly in I Cor. 14? And on and on it goes. Those who make the Noah and the gopher wood argument are very selective as to how they apply it.

Moreover, the Noah-gopher mentality misses the point. True, Noah followed God in building the ark insofar as God spoke. The question is, Was Noah free to act according to his own judgment where God was silent? Could he use an awl in making holes in the boards, a saw, a hammer? If available to him, could he not have used a table saw, a power saw, or even a computer in building the ark? With your "law of silence'"  mentality, I can hear you protesting to Noah, "Now wait a minute here, patriarch, did God tell you to use a table saw or a computer?

We all take liberties with the silence of the New Testament in our corporate worship. If Churches of Christ can use a tuning fork, round notes, shaped notes, hymnals, multi-part harmony, a song leader (with his hand signals), amplifiers, and sometimes even humming, none of which is "authorized," then we should be able to bear with our brethren who choose to add an instrument to that list.

But you indicate that you will repeat at Cincinnati the old argument that we should never have made in the first place: that God has specified a particular kind of music (singing) and this excludes any other kind of music (instrumental music). The reason the argument should never have been made is that it assumes what cannot be proved, that one kind of music (specified) excludes another kind of music (not specified). The truth is that one kind of music may aid or elevate another kind — and we all practice precisely that.

Have you never heard of sheet music and written music? You use two different kinds of music every Sunday at your church: vocal music and written music. Our dear, aged brother Tillet S. Teddlie has written lots of music, and when he composed "When We Meet In Sweet Communion" it was music, sheet music before it was ever sung, a "different kind" from vocal music. Why do you have sheet music, brother Dobbs, when the New Testament is silent about that kind of music? If you can have written music to aid your singing, why cannot your brother have instrumental music to aid his singing? Consult your dictionary as to the meaning of music.

According to your editorial, you are going to tell Forum Five that "Unity must be based on truth." But truth in this context is not limited to those things that are clearly stated in the Bible as essential, but it includes your "hermeneutic of silence." Your brothers in Cincinnati would all agree with you if you defined truth as "Thus saith the Lord," but you are making unity dependent on what the Bible says nothing about, and so you insist there can be no unity except on the basis of your anti-instrument position. This is what all sectarians do, as Thomas Campbell observed in his Declaration and Address, in that they predicate unity upon "what the kingdom of God does not consist," as he put it. This is why we have umpteen divisions among Churches of Christ, each arguing as you do that "Unity must be based on truth," and they pervert truth to mean everything from "wine only" Communion and "no sponsoring church" mission work to a particular theory of inspiration or of the millennium.

If by "Unity must be based on truth" you meant the general truths of the Christian faith as revealed in the Holy Scriptures, then you would stand in the grand tradition of those who have pled for the oneness of the church on the basis of "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, love," which includes the founders of the Stone-Campbell Movement. And that is the only plea for unity that has any meaning. If we have to wait until we see alike all these things that the Bible says nothing about to start with, then unity will always elude us. It only becomes a vain and insipid call for conformity.

I am confident that you will be received at Forum Five with forbearing love, and you are more likely to show that kind of spirit if you do not consider them your adversaries, as your use of 1 Cor. 16:9 implies. Paul was referring there to men who were enemies of Christ, while those in Cincinnati are your brothers in Christ and not your adversaries, and surely they are as faithful to Christ and you or I.

I hope you will change your mind about making your "hermeneutic of silence" a test of fellowship and a basis for unity, and that you will lay the Noah-gopher mentality to rest. If you insist in parading those old bromides once more, I think you should at least blush.

Sincerely,

Leroy Garrett