God helps those who help themselves. – 1 Hezekiah 3:4

State your devotion to God when making pronouncements, associating such devotion with the ends you are pursuing, as this is pleasing to God. – 2 Bartholomew 4:7

Of course, there’s no 1 Hezekiah or 2 Bartholomew. I made those up. Making up your own Bible verses is fun. You should try it sometime. But as fun as it might be, it’s problematic. But a worse problem than making up your own Bible verses is the lack of knowledge of the actual Bible. For example, according to 82 percent of Americans, “God helps those who help themselves,” is a real Bible verse.[1] That’s a problem. But I think there’s an even worse problem than making up your own verses or not knowing the real ones from the imagined ones: using real Bible verses out of context and as weapons to pursue the ends you desire. In my judgment, this is not pleasing to God.

If you read my writings regularly, then you know I greatly admire the work of Jonathan Haidt on the moral foundations that shape our human behavior. Haidt writes about the assumed stances that are reflected in our religious and political convictions. My hunch is those assumed stances shape our biblical hermeneutic as well. Rather than exegesis, i.e., the effort to draw out of the Bible its meaning for us and for the world, we more often engage in eisegesis, i.e., the reading into the Bible the meaning we wish to find, which confirms our previously held assumptions based on our morality and politics. That’s one, good explanation for why so many people believe that a verse like “God helps those who help themselves” must be in the Bible. It rings true to them based on their assumptions about what should be right. Since it rings true, it must be Scripture.

Yet, we can’t avoid eisegesis completely. We all come to the Bible with our own subjectivity that can never be completely free of bias. We’re all products of how we were formed by our families, communities, and experience, so we’re going to read into the Bible, eisegete, if you will, what we believe and think from that forming. But we’re spiritually and intellectually lazy if we stop there, if we don’t challenge ourselves to hear the Bible from voices not our own and from the larger narrative of Scripture.

I believe the Bible is completely true down to its very last word. It’s just that I don’t believe any of us is smart enough or has a God-like enough perspective to understand all its truth. The Bible, then, isn’t self-evident. Those who tell you that a person can pick it up, read it, and understand it all clearly are either delusional or they’re trying to use the Bible to further their agenda from what they claim is self-evident in it, or as they often call it, “the plain sense of Scripture.” The Bible is God’s gift to the Church. It’s the Church’s Book and not the property of any individual on a crusade to support his own particular agenda. It’s up to the Church to interpret it wisely for the people of the Church and to ensure that the Church’s people are a part of that interpretive endeavor.

+Scott


[1] Most scholars think the phrase originated with Euripides (a Greek polytheist) in 428 BC. The more modern phrasing came from that notable Deist, Benjamin Franklin, in his Poor Richard’s Almanac in 1736.

 

“God only helps those who help themselves.” – 2 Hezekiah 3:16

I realize there’s no 2 Hezekiah. I’ve occasionally joked around with others, seeking to find some shaky justification for my actions, by quoting 2 Hezekiah and then making up a verse to support what I already wanted to do. I’m not alone. There’s a not-so-proud history in the Church of concocting biblical justification for the actions we take. Rarely do we actually compose false books of the Bible to do so, but the consequence is just the same. This is simply another way of accomplishing the age-old task of finding a way to “baptize” what we already want to do.

For example, Jesus throughout the Gospels speaks consistently and commandingly about forgiveness and his disciples need to practice it. In Matthew 6:15, Jesus says: “If you do not forgive people their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” And it’s not just this one verse. The entire Gospel of Jesus reinforces this theme of forgiveness. So, this isn’t just one obscure verse, but a message that recurs again and again. Yet, for many what they prefer to read in the Bible is this: “Forgive no one. Those who wrong you are wrong. By forgiving them, you excuse the wrong, and only encourage them.”

In the 2nd Century, Marcion of Sinope took the Bible and a pair of scissors and cut out the parts of the Bible that didn’t conform to his understanding of Christianity. He excised the entire Old Testament and certain parts of the New Testament, which seemed to him in agreement with the Old Testament. In case you were wondering, he was told to leave the Church. On our worst days, we’re all closet Marcionites.

And therein lies the hermeneutical problem. Cherry-picking verses is never a good idea. The Bible is a whole story and in its entirety it tells a coherent and intelligible story of the human condition and God’s remedy of that condition in and through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. When any of us extracts verses out of context or ignores the parts of the Bible that challenge us, then we are practicing a dubious hermeneutic, one that often leads to self-justification and, eventually, to self-delusion.

The hermeneutical question then is not what we want the biblical story to say to us, but rather what it actually, in its entire narrative, says. Of course, this requires us as a Church to engage in a communal interpretation of that narrative. Not surprisingly, we don’t always agree what the Bible is saying to us. I find the work of the Swiss theologian, Ulrich Luz, helpful here. He writes about the history of interpretation and how we should continually incorporate that tradition into our current interpretive understanding of the Bible. This cumulative approach welcomes the past in our interpretation today so we might avoid hermeneutical laziness or willful ignorance.

None of this is an exact science. We’re always struggling to discern what the biblical witness says. That’s why we need one another for, contrary to 2 Hezekiah, God does NOT only help those who help themselves.

+Scott