Exploring the biblical theology of Christian egalitarianism

Search
Close this search box.

Introduction

I started reading the Bible regularly when I was about ten years old. I mostly took it all very literally. For several years I also read the Bible naively. I imagined that the books and letters contained in the Bible had been originally written to people very much like myself, with similar values, morals, behaviours, and ways of thinking. I also assumed that the church life of the New Testament church was similar to the way I saw church life being modelled. But I was wrong.

Now that I have taken some time to explore the culture, language, and history of Bible lands and times, my understanding of God’s Word is improving, and the scriptures are becoming more meaningful and even more inspiring than before.

The Old Testament is steeped in the culture of the Ancient Near East and the New Testament is set in the first-century Greco-Roman world. And the scriptures were written in ancient languages with ancient literary devices and idioms. Some Bible passages and verses are not as plain and clear as they seem to be to modern readers. A few verses, in particular, continue to be downright baffling, defying clear comprehension.

The following article about the perspicuity (clarity) and comprehension of scripture is by my internet friend Kristen Rosser. I think she says so well what I have been meaning to write about. I especially like the paragraph she has quoted from the Westminster Confession (chapter 1, paragraph VII) which was written hundreds of years ago.


The Bible and “Plain Sense” Reading

By Kristen Rosser

Over the last few years, as I have written about Bible interpretation on the Internet, I have focused on the historical-cultural approach: that we can’t understand what the Bible means to us, until we understand what it meant to the original audience, as the message was intended by the original writer. And I frequently get this question, in one form or another: But shouldn’t the Bible be accessible to everyone? Shouldn’t everyone be able to read the “plain sense” of the words and get God’s message from them? How can the Bible, if it’s God’s word, be the sort of book that you need help to understand?

Part of the Protestant viewpoint is that the layperson can and should read the Bible for his or herself — but that is not really the same as saying teachers aren’t necessary. The original Protestant doctrine is called “the doctrine of the perspicuity of scripture.” “Perspicuity” is an old word meaning “able to be perceived and understood.”

Here’s the doctrine as conceived by the early Protestant reformers:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.
Westminster Confession of Faith 1.7 (1647)

The original doctrine states that the Bible is clear enough regarding matters of eternal salvation, that anyone can, by reading diligently, understand how to be saved. However, this understanding of perspicuity has changed in the last hundred years or so, such that nowadays people think there’s something wrong with the idea that we might need scholarly research to help us understand the Bible. This is particularly true in the individualistic cultures of the Western world. But Jesus and Paul and Peter taught from an understanding of individual and community in balance—individual faith lived out within the church community. I don’t think any of the New Testament authors would have agreed with, or even understood, a mentality that any individual should be able to read and understand everything in the Bible alone, through the eyes of only his or her own experience and knowledge. The New Testament talks a lot about sitting under teachers to gain from their education and scholarship.

In any event, the idea that the Bible is supposed to be so timeless that anyone in any age or culture can read what seems to them like the plain sense of it, without misunderstanding and without needing any teaching or explanation, goes against even what the Bible says about itself. Just about every book in the Bible emphasizes right at the beginning, that it is a message by a certain person, to a certain group of people, at a certain time in history. For instance: “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ. . . To all who are in Rome.” Romans 1:1–7. Or “The word of the Lord that came to Hosea, the son of Beeri, in the days of Uzziah. . . And in the days of Jeroboam, the son of Joash, king of Israel.” Hosea 1:1. I believe those “street signs” are there for a reason– to tell us that the message was never meant to be understood a-historically or a-culturally. And the further removed we are from the time of the actual writing, the more scholarship we need to help us understand.

Does it necessarily follow that for the Scriptures to be inspired by God, the words cannot have been messages to certain people in certain times and places, or that we shouldn’t need scholarship and research, shared through community, to understand their full sense? Or is it perhaps that God values human experience through all of history, and he doesn’t want each age to feel no need of the wisdom that came before it?

Traditional church interpretations, based on the writings of early church scholars, do help—but after the fall of Jerusalem, when the church lost contact with its Jewish roots—it increasingly interpreted the Scriptures through Greco-Roman viewpoints. These tended at times to obscure more than they illuminated. But today’s resources for understanding the original history and cultures of the Scriptures are shedding more light than ever on authorial intent. We need to make use of the resources given us today, just as the man in Jesus’ parable of the ten talents (Matt. 25:14–30) expected his servants to make use of the resources he gave them.

If we believe the Scriptures are inspired, then it makes the most sense to say that it is each book and letter as understood by the original audience that is inspired — not what it may seem to mean to us, thousands of years and half the globe away. Salvation is one matter: it has to do with the relationship of humans to the eternal God, and is therefore timeless and understandable in any age. But much of the Bible has to do with the way humans relate to one another, and this is inextricably bound up with human history and culture.

It’s important to find out what the inspired biblical messages meant to the original audiences in their settings before we try to apply the message to ourselves and our churches today.

Kristen’s blog Wordgazer’s Words is here.
Kristen’s original blog post on The Bible and “Plain Sense” Reading is here.


Postscript: April 10 2013

I love this quotation that I came across today.

In ancient literature we encounter people who are marching to the sound of a different drummer; the tempo of their life is vastly different from ours. Their language is shaped by a different mentality, their mentality shaped by different experience. Their world has a different ceiling and different horizons; their maps give expression to different beginnings and endings. As long as a student shies away from that alien world, so long does Bible study remain bland, superficial, and tepid. But each step of penetration will increase his excitement, though also his bewilderment, for at each step he encounters a collision between two languages, two mentalities, two modes of existing in the world, in fact, two worlds. Each collision threatens that world in which the student has heretofore found shelter.
Paul S. Minear, To Heal and to Reveal: The Prophetic Vocation according to Luke (Seabury, 1976)


Explore more

Which Bible Translation is Best?
The Authority and Authenticity of New Testament Scripture
Some Pitfalls of Using Greek-English Dictionaries
Interpretations and Applications of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35
Articles on 1 Timothy 2:12 are here.
Articles on “the difficult passages” about men and women are here.

You can support my work for as little as $3 USD a month at Patreon.
Become a Patron!

2 thoughts on “The Bible and “Plain Sense” Reading

  1. Amen

  2. […] Importantly, Paul chose not to use any of the many Greek words which can mean “exercise authority” or “govern.”[5] He chose to use authentein. What Paul meant by this word is difficult, if not impossible, for us to fully grasp. For this reason, caution must be taken when interpreting and applying 1 Timothy 2:12. Yet most churches interpret and apply 1 Timothy 2:12 as though its meaning, and Paul’s intention, are perfectly plain. […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Subscribe to Marg's Blog

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Loading

Join Marg's Patreon

Would you like to support my ministry of encouraging mutuality and equality between men and women in the church and in marriage?

Archives