Sermon Tone Analysis

Sincerity and the Supernatural

In the previous article, I noted that the right context for interpreting the Bible accurately isn’t the history of Christianity in any of its creedal distillations or denominational forms.

But I went even further—I said that the biblical context isn’t any modern world context, period.

The right context for understanding the Bible is the context that produced the Bible.

That seems simple, but experience has taught me that commitment to this patently obvious truth isn’t easy.

The biblical context includes its supernaturalism.

The biblical writers believed in an active, animate spiritual world.

That world was home to a lot more than the triune God, angels, Satan, and demons.

It included other gods (i.e., the gods of the nations were not merely idols) and territorial spiritual beings that were not demons—and were, in fact, superior to demons.

It included what we think of as ghosts, who could appear visibly, and even physically, and communicate to the embodied living world of which they had once been a part ().

For the biblical writers, divine beings could eat, drink, fight, and produce offspring with humans (; ; ; ; ; ; ).

Facing Up to the Bible’s “Weird” Passages

In the biblical worldview, the supernatural unseen realm had its own pecking order.

Scripture never says that such intelligent beings always had the same agenda, either.

The members of the heavenly host were also created in God’s image (the plurality language of isn’t about the Trinity), so they possess free will, the ability to make decisions.

Their acts and attitudes are not programmed and predestined.

They believe they can defeat the plans of God, or at least forestall them indefinitely, at great pain to him and great cost to humanity (eternal and otherwise).

Let’s face it—we just don’t think like that.

The above isn’t the supernatural world of most Christian traditions.

That doesn’t matter if we’re sincere about reading Scripture through the cognitive framework of its writers and original intended audience.

But in many cases, especially in evangelical biblical scholarship, the supernatural thinking of the biblical writers has been something to explain away or avoid.

I’ve seen it hundreds of times over the course of twenty years of sustained focused study as a biblical scholar.

There are many creative ways to explain away what the text plainly says in various “weird” passages.

But understanding Scripture isn’t about making it palatable or comfortable to modern readers.

It’s about discerning what the biblical writer believed and was seeking to communicate to readers who thought the same way.

Are We Sincere about Biblical Authority?

To be blunt, most Christians think themselves believers in the supernatural because they believe in the Trinity, Satan, angels, and demons.

They profess Christ and believe in God—and that’s the extent of what they truly think is real in terms of the supernatural.

They affirm what they need to affirm to call themselves Christians.

The rest is too scary or weird or seems simply superstitious.

When it comes to the supernatural, the question for every Christian who says they believe in biblical inspiration and authority to ask themselves is simple: How much of what biblical characters and writers believed about the supernatural world do I believe?

Put negatively: How much of what biblical characters and writers believed about the supernatural world do I feel comfortable dismissing as a modern person?

The answer to these questions will tell you how serious you are about biblical authority on such matters.

4

Let the Bible Be What It Is

As a biblical scholar, I’m often asked for advice on how to interpret the Bible.

I could refer people to tools (like Logos Bible Software) and techniques for analyzing the original languages, even for people dependent on English.

But neither of those are my go-to answer.

My own journey has convinced me there’s one fundamental insight that, if faithfully observed, will help more than anything.

It’s the best piece of advice I can give you:

Let the Bible be what it is.

What do I mean?

I’m suggesting that the path to real biblical understanding requires that we don’t make the Bible conform to our traditions, our prejudices, our personal crises, or our culture’s intellectual battles.

Yes, you’ll find material in Scripture that will help you resolve personal difficulties and questions.

But you must remember that, while the Bible was written for us, it wasn’t written to us.

What they wrote is still vital for our lives today, but we can only accurately discern the message if we let them speak as they spoke.

This advice of course dovetails with my previous article about getting serious and being honest about the oft-repeated mantra “the Bible needs to be interpreted in context.”

That article was about recognizing all contexts—including the history of Christianity—that post-date the biblical world are foreign to the Bible.

The right contexts for interpreting the Bible are those in which the Bible was written.

You can’t let the Bible be what it is if you’re filtering it through a set of experiences and ideas (a “cognitive framework”) that would have been incomprehensible to the biblical writers.

A Firm Grasp of the Obvious

I know that, on the surface, what I’m saying amounts to having a firm grasp of the obvious.

But if it were easy to do—and if it was the norm—I’d be writing about something else.

It isn’t and it hasn’t been.

But it certainly needs to be, at least if we don’t want to be pretenders when it comes to respecting God’s decision to produce Scripture when he did and through whom he chose.

Many illustrations come to mind of the importance of letting the Bible be what it is.

The supernaturalist worldview I talked about before, which is the focus of my books The Unseen Realm and Supernatural, is one example.

I’ll return to that illustration later.

I want to offer two others.

What about the pre-scientific cosmology of the Bible?

I’ve written about the ancient Hebrew conception of the universe in the Faithlife Study Bible.

For the biblical writers, the earth was flat and round, supported by pillars () and surrounded by water (); the water was held in place by the edges of the solid dome (“expanse”; “firmament”) that covered the earth (; ).

The people God chose to write about the fact that he created everything were not writing science because they couldn’t—and God, of course, knew that.

Instead of pressing Genesis into a debate with Darwin or making it cryptically convey the truths of quantum physics, we should let it be what it is so it can accomplish the goals for which God inspired it—to assert the fact of a Creator and our accountability to him.

Rather than fight the critics on grounds they choose, we ought to insist that they explain why it makes any sense to criticize the Bible for not being what it wasn’t intended to be.

Following such absurd logic, perhaps we should expect them to criticize their dog for not being a cat or their son for not being a daughter.

Their attack is patently absurd.

But we endorse it when we make the Bible a modern science book instead of letting it be what it is—what God intended.

Truth That Transcends Culture

The same problem persists when we try to deny that the Old Testament is patriarchal, or that parts of the Mosaic Law are biased against women.

Some are because that was their culture.

God didn’t hand down a new culture for particular use in Scripture.

He didn’t demand that the writers he chose change their worldview before he’d use them.

The biblical material simply reflects the cultural attitudes of the people who wrote it.

Again, all this is obvious—but so many students of Scripture seem to approach such issues with the assumption that the Bible endorses a culture.

God wasn’t trying to endorse a culture from the first millennium bc or the first century ad for all time and in all places among all peoples.

The reason ought to be apparent: God knew that the truths he wanted to get across through the biblical writers would transcend all cultures.

Endorsing the prejudices the writers grew up with wasn’t what God had in mind.

Some parts of Scripture reveal culture simply as part of Israel’s history.

Others focus on behavior.

With respect to the latter, God let the writers be who they were (i.e., he knew what he was getting when he chose them for their task), knowing they were capable of communicating timeless principles of conduct by means of their culture.

The point is that letting the Bible be what it is not only helps us interpret Scripture accurately, but it has unexpected apologetic value.

Taking Scripture on its own terms helps our focus and fends off distractions.

When Scripture is rightly understood, its relevance will also be clear.

5

Bad Bible Interpretation Really Can Hurt People

Anyone who teaches the word of God wants people excited about exploring Scripture.

Ultimately, you want to turn listeners into competent students so that they can teach others.

Along the way you have to deal with a lot of mistaken methods and conclusions.

But so what?

Hey—having folks engaged in studying the Bible is more important than what they actually think they see in it.

It’s no concern that what most Christians think is “digging deep” is barely scratching the surface of a passage or a topic.

I’ll take one misguided Bible student over a hundred straight-laced, passive, ecclesiastically-correct “believers” who never open a Bible anywhere else but church.

At least those are the sorts of things I’ve told myself for a long time.

If I’m honest, though, I’ve had doubts about the wisdom of my position.

I still do.

I’ve run across a lot of bad Bible interpretation over the years.

The problem isn’t just the Internet.

Granted, most of what passes for Bible teaching online could be aggregated under the banner of the “P.T. Barnum School of the Bible.”

Unfortunately, a lot of poor thinking about Scripture has been published for popular consumption in the Church—and consumed it is.

But is it really harmful?

Most of it isn’t destructive.