OTHER AND LESS CRUCIAL THINGS 

Inasmuch as the above installment is shorter than usual this is an appropriate time to add a few footnotes on matters that are less serious abuses of Scripture but which nonetheless deserve some attention. These lesser hermeneutical sins may be something like tailgating on the highway in that while they may not be all that serious they are reflective of a careless handling of the Bible, and they may be dangerous.

Oddly enough, it is only in the Churches of Christ/Christian Churches that I hear about "the Hebrew writer." I myself picked it up along the way, and when I was at Harvard I made reference in an essay to this non-existent New Testament character. In the margin alongside my reference to "the Hebrew writer" my professor placed a question mark, which is all he needed to do. I no longer use such a reference because, of course, there is no Hebrew writer in the New Testament. They all wrote in Greek. There is the writer of the book of Hebrews, but he wrote in Greek, which makes him the Greek writer of the book of Hebrews. In all the commentaries you read by what we call "denominational" scholars on the book of Hebrews you will never find the first reference to "the Hebrew writer." So the next time you hear one of our preachers use this term, which he probably will if he refers to the book of Hebrews, you will do him a favor by asking him, "Do you mean the writer of the book of Hebrews?" Because there may be the likes of that Harvard professor in the audience that will think he is an ignoramus. I am at a loss to know how that idiotic reference ever originated among us.

Nor is there the book of Revelations in the Bible. In the history of the church the last book of the Bible has been known as "the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine" or simply "the Apocalypse." When that Greek term is translated it becomes the book of Revelation, which is of course a correct way of referring to it. But not Revelations! One might possibly use that term in referring to all the revelations in the Bible, but there is no one book so named.

Our prayers sometime reveal a misunderstanding of important Biblical truth, such as praying in the first person when called on to address the Father in behalf of the entire congregation. Believers share a glorious covenantal relationship with God. This is why our Lord taught us to pray "Our Father," and this is the way we should pray when we are leading our sisters and brothers in prayer. We are all praying and so we should all say the Amen. It is offensive to the nature of the church for one to lead a prayer saying I, my, and me. We are saying so much when we say "Our Father," and we should never miss an opportunity to do so, perhaps even in private prayer, though of course the first person is appropriate when we pray alone.

What we think of the church may reflect what we believe about God and Christ. To use "the church," whether in our prayers or ordinary conversation, to refer to anything less than the universal (catholic) Body of Christ is not only sectarian but shallow. Among our people it is common for "the Lord's church" to refer to that denomination or denominations known as "The Church of Christ" or "The Christian Church." We not only do ourselves a great disservice when we do this, since it reinforces our exclusivism, but it causes us to appear ridiculous to the Christian world at large. Hardly anything will "renew our minds" more than making it a point to refer to the church in its Biblical sense, in reference to "all who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours," as Paul puts it in 1 Cor. 1:2. In saying this I recognize that the church may also be referred to in a local sense, and so a single congregation may be called "the church." But when we are referring to the church at large we should think in terms of all those who are in Christ the world over, most of whom will differ with us on a lot of things.

Another oddity that I have found only among our people is a rule of interpretation that goes like this: the Bible teaches by direct command, approved example, and necessary inference. There are scores of books on hermeneutics in print today, but I dare say you will find no such rule in any of them, unless it be written by one of us. The intention of this rule is good, for it proposes to make clear what applies to us today and what does not. But it only muddies the water. It is in fact simply not true, for there are direct commands, such as foot washing and the holy kiss, and approved examples, such as communal living in the Jerusalem church, that none of our folk believes apply to the church today. And the necessary inference rule has no value, for what is "necessarily inferred" ends up being a matter of opinion, such as how many cups arc to be used for Communion or whether a church can have a Sunday School. There are some useful rules for interpretation, but this is not one of them. Nor is this a lesser hermeneutical fallacy, but we mention it here nonetheless.

We usually use the term evangelist inappropriately. In the Bible the evangelist is one who preaches the gospel to the world, a proclaimer of the good news to the lost. And he is sometimes found setting a church in order and caring for it until it has elders or pastors. But he is not a local minister or pastor, one whose work is to minister to the church on a permanent basis. Nor is an evangelist one who holds big meetings for churches, one after the other. An evangelist is a missionary, one who is planting the cause of Christ in new fields. If we were "honest to God" we would call our "local evangelist" the pastor, as other churches do, since that is what he is. Even "the minister" is not Biblical since we are all ministers or servants (they come from the same Greek term). Neither is this a small matter, especially for a people who claim to value Christian origins.  — the Editor