The Sense of Scripture: Studies in Interpretation . . .
BEYOND THE ORIGINAL MEANING
This quotation will mean more to you when you know that James Denney was not only "that prince among Scottish New Testament exegetes," as one of his colleagues described him, but also a great preacher. He was one of the few theologians in his day who was also an effective evangelist. In his case at least theology and evangelism did mix. He moved people's hearts when he described the suffering love of God as revealed in the crucifixion of Christ. He had a way of raising one arm aloft and pointing to it with the other as if pointed to the Cross, and crying out, That is how God loves!The study of criticism has apparently blinded the commentators to the fact that the books on which they are writing are bits of the Bible — that but for that fact they would in all probability never have reached us - and that the chief business of the commentator is to elucidate their significance as vehicles of revelation. —James Denney
In his efforts to make the Christian message relevant to our modern age, Denney was critical of those commentators who supposed their task was done when they had ascertained the original meaning of Scripture, as the quotation indicates. Denney believed in the findings of modern biblical criticism and the role it plays in ascertaining the correct text and determining the original meaning of the writer. But he was convinced that the study of criticism has blinded most interpreters in that it led them to suppose that their work was done when they had determined what the original writer had in mind.
And so he lays out what he sees as the task of the interpreter, which is the thesis of this essay: the chief business of the commentator is to elucidate their significance as vehicles of revelation. He is saying that it is not enough to determine what a given passage meant to the original writer and to those who read it in his day. It must be interpreted for our generation and applied to our situation. What does it mean to us? is the question Denney wants answered. An interpreter has not finished his task, he believed, until he relates the Bible to the here and now and causes it to live and have power in our lives today.
You don't need anyone else to register this complaint for you, for you have often heard some preacher say, after delving into the Greek and the customs of the ancient world, "This is what Jesus meant" or "This is what Paul had in mind," and yet you were left asking yourself what the passage should mean to you. It is one thing to determine what the Sermon on the Mount meant to a first-century Graeco-Roman-Jewish culture (and that is no mean task!) and another thing to interpret it for an executive on Madison Ave. in New York City in the 1980's. What Paul's Corinthian correspondence meant to a half-slave population of an ancient Greek city may be different from what it should mean to a congregation of West Texas ranchers. We agree with Denney that it is essential to apply the findings of biblical criticism and ascertain the original intention of the writer and what it meant in his day, but this is only the starting point. We must go on and show how those ancient documents have relevance to our day and to our problems. We can't leave people dangling in the first century.
In reference to what Paul meant in Corinthians, a brother said to me recently in reference to a piece I published in this journal on the role of women in the church, "There's no question as to what Paul wrote about the ministry of women in the first-century church, but how are we to deal with the ministry of women in the church today?" The brother raised the same issue that concerned Denney. That the Corinthians would conclude from what Paul wrote that women were to be silent in the assembly does not necessarily mean that the 20th century church would reach the same conclusion. Two thousand years of history and dramatic changes in culture might make a difference in how the Bible is to be interpreted.
Do you have a problem with Denney's use of "vehicles of revelation" in reference to the Scriptures? Or is the Bible a revelation as it stands and not just a vehicle of revelation? Denney would agree that there is a sense in which the Bible is a revelation even if one never opens it, for it does, potentially at least, disclose the mind of God. But revelation has no meaning except in terms of what it means to us in a practical and useful way. The Bible is a revelation of God to you only as it reaches your heart and mind. But if you always have it hung on you what it meant to someone else twenty centuries ago, it is not going to disclose God's will to you in the here and now. So, the Scriptures are a vehicle of revelation in that, when properly interpreted and applied, they bring the meaning of ancient documents into your life today. And it is the responsibility of the Bible teacher to do that rather than to confine himself to the first century.
The story of Jesus washing his disciples' feet is a case in point. Once we confront the stunning facts of what Jesus did in that instance and inform ourselves in reference to the custom of footwashing, we are ready for a meaningful interpretation. What does this story mean to us? It certainly does not mean that we are to go around washing feet in our modern world, which would be viewed as bizarre at best, even though Jesus said, "If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet." It means that he has called us to a life of service and that we are to "wash feet" by acts of love and kindness. We are to be humble, eager to serve others rather than to be served. It means that we are to show loving kindness in many humble and condescending ways.
Take this obscure story back in the Old Testament, which could easily remain hidden and meaningless as well as boring. In Jer. 34 the Israelites made a covenant with each other, probably in all sincerity, to free their fellow Jews who served them as slaves, which the law said was to be done every seventh year. They were led to do this since the Babylonian army was virtually at their door, threatening to capture them and take them into captivity, as Jeremiah was prophesying. After all, who needs a slave in time of crisis! The Babylonians withdrew from their environs for a time in order to deal with the troublesome Egyptians. Once the crisis passed, the people revoked their covenant and again enslaved the ones they had freed. This of course made Jeremiah fightin' mad and he laid God's judgment upon them, assuring them that the Babylonians would return and bring with them the sword, pestilence, and famine.
If we merely learn the facts of this story, there is nothing there for us. But it can become a "vehicle of revelation" when we realize that we should not be too critical of those Israelites for what they did, for we remember those times of crisis when we resolved to treat someone better or love someone more or be more faithful to God only to forget such resolutions when the crisis passed. Many a father has resolved to give his child more of his life when the child was sick unto death only to forget his good intentions once the child was well again.
If the Holy Spirit smites your conscience and stirs up your sincere mind in such a manner when you read that story, then Jer. 34 becomes the word of God to you. Otherwise it is only boring history, dead words upon a page. It is the interpreter's task to elucidate the meaning of Scripture for the modern mind.
These familiar lines from Ecc. 3 also serve to show that the task of the exegete is not a simple one:
For everything there is a season,
and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
It goes on like that, verse after verse, with a time for this and a time for that. One might suppose that this is saying that life is ordered for us and so there is an appropriate time for all these things. But the meaning would come near to being the opposite, that the tapestry of life is puzzling and unexplainable. It is more cynical than it is hopeful. "This happens and that happens, and that is life, and does it really make sense?" is sort of what the writer is saying. The key is verse 11: "God had made everything beautiful in its time; also he has put eternity into man's mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God had done from the beginning to the end."
The Hebrew word for "eternity" would best be translated enigma or mystery: "God has put a sense of mystery in man" and so he can only wonder what God is up to. The passage is assuring us that life is an enigma and may not make sense, for God has chosen not to tell us the great secret of the purpose of life. Our mission is to accept life as we find it, the evil as well as the good, and to live it abundantly, and not to suppose that we have to explain it.
One of the most comforting passages in all of Scripture, Rom. 8:37-39, has elements in it that are both strange and meaningless to modern ears, rooted as they are to the age in which the words were written:
In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who called us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The ancient world feared things that we do not even believe in, much less fear. Who today is worried about principalities or powers or heights or depths? To the ancients these referred to things that haunted their lives: the tyranny of the stars and angels that dominated their lives. In assuring them of protection against "height" and "depth" Paul is telling them that the stars in their rising and setting cannot hurt them or separate them from God's love. But what does that mean to us? We are to go beyond the original meaning and see in this passage that nuclear weapons, terrorists, old age, Alzheimer's, AIDS, drugs, cancer, and senility cannot separate us from God's love.
It is not enough for us to learn that in the Parable of the Prodigal Son the compassionate father to Jesus stood for God, the elder brother the Pharisees, and the prodigal the outcasts that Jesus befriended. For our time the younger son can stand for all those who are "fed up" with "the system" and are ready to chunk the whole sordid mess of trying to conform to the world and all its superficial standards. The elder son can stand for all "play it safe, take no chances" Christians who turn a cold, rejecting eye upon their adventurous and rebellious contemporaries.
So, I am suggesting a "then and now" rule of interpreting the Bible. We must go beyond what it meant then to what it means to us now. The difference may be crucial, such as in the myth that our task today is to restore the primitive church. We have no such task, for such is impossible. It is as impossible as it is to ignore two thousand years of history and culture. We would all be shocked at the idea of being exactly like the primitive church if we could be transported back over the centuries and see what those churches were really like.
Our mission is of a different sort. It is not to do precisely what they did in every detail (assuming this could be determined, which it cannot) but to do for our generation what they did for theirs, in the spirit of Christ. Surely the Scriptures serve as our norm in doing this, and there are principles and ideals that are timeless and always applicable, but we cannot suppose the New Testament to be a kind of blueprint in which every i is dotted and every t crossed in mandating the character of the church, thus making every congregation, both then and now, exactly alike. It is evident that even the New Testament congregations were not carbon copies of each other. —the Editor