In the post prior [Yes, Filters Again], I included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous quote:
“If you remove the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
I then made the case that filters and lenses, and what they deem impossible, and subsequently unreasonable, prevents the truth from being seen. I’d like to explore that a bit further.
First things first. The question must be posed: who decides what is interpretatively possible and, therefore, reasonable? The answer, it would seem, based on our current discourse, is whatever theological filtration system and lens is employed. That answer would be partially correct.
Systems have creators. That’s the way it works. They do not create themselves nor do simple systems naturally, when left alone, progress and become more complex. On the contrary, systems, unless they are maintained, regress. A system’s need for attention is constant. As such, they are in state of ongoing creation or recreation. This is due to the fact, as the second law of thermodynamics states, that, within any system, nothing ever remains the same. Change is constant. Obviously, if energy or matter is added or removed from a system, it changes. However, even if we leave a system completely alone, it changes; it deteriorates over time.
This law works for Theological/Belief systems as well. If left alone—or taken for granted—a Theological/Belief system, even one that employs filters and systems, will change. But what causes said changes? In natural systems, we can point to exterior and interior forces that cause matter to decay and degrade. However, the forces that deteriorate a Theological/Belief system are quite different.
I have heard many time that the scriptures are open to interpretation. The reason for that, it is surmised, is because interpretation itself is subjective. This, in turn, means there is no right answer. This logic is not only flawed but, frankly, completely wrong. And that is because translation, while an integral part of interpretation, is not synonymous with it. In other words, interpreting meaning is not the same as translating linguistic terms. They are linked but not indistinguishable. Furthermore, it is asinine to presume that the biblical authors, both human and divine, did not have definitive meaning—a correct interpretation—in mind.
In order to ascertain the correct interpretation, the most important elements are obviously content and context. Through these we have what the transmission or message says and what it means. The question that causes the array of interpretative variants is, “Why does it say what it says?” When that question is processed through filters and considered through lenses, neither the content nor the context really matter all that much because the filters and lenses have already determined the answer and the interpretation. In this way, even the contextual data is subject to filters and lenses.
Because of this, the original context changes or is replaced by that of the current interpreter and their preferred system. This can occur ad infinitum if the process is uninterrupted.
While it is true that much can be lost in translation, that is generally an effect of contextual ignorance on the part of the translator. A bold statement? Perhaps. However, in the case of Biblical theology, translating and teaching the scriptures are rarely disconnected.
That is, the Bible, once translated into a new language, is not dropped into the hands of the people of that particular language without explanation. The translators don’t simply translate and leave. In most cases—although, for the sake of statistical argument, I will say that there could be cases where the opposite is true—the translators are believers working and living either in and among or in close proximity to said people group. As such, the aim of such believers isn’t simply to translate the content of the scriptures but to transmit it’s message as well.
This begs another, more pressing, question: if what was stated above is the norm, how did the system deteriorate—the contextual data of the biblical authors get lost—in the first place? This requires a rather lengthy answer, one which I will attempt to summarize below. [If the reader is interested in a more thorough explanation, see the references given at the end of this post.]
The chief deteriorating factor of the theological “system” of the biblical authors was, is, and will continue to be, institutionalized religion, specifically Christianity. Wait, what? Yes, the Church is the main source of theological deterioration. And it started when the Church, with a capital “C”, was first established.
While Constantine is lauded for putting an end to the violent Imperial persecution of Christians, he also redefined Christianity by amalgamating it with Roman religion (see references mentioned below). The reason for the term “catholic” (universal) in the title Roman Catholic Church is because, as Christianity was being institutionalized, there remained remnants of the ekklesia that did not conform. Such remnants and their “practices” were eventually outlawed by the Emperor.
Furthermore, the Council of Nicea, headed by Constantine, decided, among other things, upon which books and writings were “inspired” and subsequently included in the canon of scripture. Thus, the Catholic Bible, or Apocrypha, was born. After this, the scriptures were taken from the hands of the masses (those who could read, that is) and entrusted only to the religious elite or Papacy. Which is one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, for the sweeping ignorance of the biblical author’s context and theological framework.
It was not until the Reformation that the scriptures were distributed once again to the people. Yet because the contextual ignorance remained, many of the theological systems that were birthed out of the Reformation are not, in fact, biblical—that is, they do not reflect the theology or worldview of the biblical authors—though they derive from the content of the Bible. There are still many misconceptions, errors, and incorrect doctrines that are taught to this day.
One of the mistakes that the Reformers made that contributed to the continuation of this problem was when they decided to remove certain books from the biblical canon. The one redeeming aspect that could be attributed to the Council of Nicea’s decision-making paradigm was that the books which they deemed canonical were labeled as such due to their popular and regular use by believers up to that point. A fact that the Reformers did not think legitimate—a thought to which the Protestant Church, in all its various expressions, has also held.
But who gave them, either the Council of Nicea or the Reformers, the authority to make those decisions and changes—decisions and changes that had neither historical nor theological context to back them? And no, appealing to the argument of providential fatalism does not hold water.
The notion that every decision ever made, no matter what it may have been, was predestined to happen is neither biblical nor logical. Otherwise, there is no such thing as a true choice. If that were the case, then God gives commands that cannot be obeyed. And if a person’s disobedience was predestined, then by so doing, they are actually obeying the will of their Creator, in that they are doing what they were created to do. Therefore, to punish a creature for breaking a command that the Creator created them to break is not only cruel but a capriciousness bordering on insanity.
That is not the picture we are given in the scriptures, especially when the greater context of it is brought to bear upon our own theological framework. The context that produced the scriptures will inform the content of the scriptures. The context and theological framework or system of the authors cannot be emphasized enough as it pertains to biblical interpretation.
This returns us to the original query of this post: who decides what is interpretatively reasonable and possible? If we maintain our mutated theological systems, along with their filters and lenses, then we do. But neither we, the Constantinian Roman Empire, nor the Reformers are the biblical authors.
Both the Old Testament and New Testament writers were not put into a trance, wrote automatically, and produced a text that had no real true substance. What they wrote had meaning and relevance to the world in which they lived—to their context. What’s more, what they wrote was not unaffected by their context—a temporal and eternal context. A context that helped shape the scriptures. If we ignore this fact, we run the risk of turning the Bible into something little better than a Christian version of Aesop’s Fables.
We cannot eisegetically apply our context onto the content of scripture. If we want to ascertain and understand the theological messaging it contains, we must—and I cannot stress this enough—endeavor to learn as much as we can about the context in which it was written. Otherwise, we will interpret the Bible and create doctrines, via artificial filters and lenses, that the biblical writers would have considered unreasonable and impossible.
Pagan Christianity? by Frank Viola & George Barna
7 Facts Why Jesus Didn’t Say He Would Build A Church by Tim Kurtz
The Unseen Realm by Dr. Michael Heiser
Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John by Steven J. Friesen