Strangers in an Ancient Land, Part 1

Getting used to the world’s most enigmatic literature—the Bible.

(Updated August 2, 2021)

I’ve noticed something: those who laud the Bible as universally beautiful tend to dismiss humanity as universally awful.

On the other hand, those who dismiss the Bible as universally awful tend to laud humanity as universally beautiful.

They forget that both are inspired and God-breathed.

We should probably be more open to complexity in our approach, for this is a topic where being too simple makes everyone in the conversation simpletons. The Bible is, after all, the collected tales of us, inspired by God. A beautiful and awful thing.

We know it’s not a picture book, yet it is “illustrated” by the Holy Spirit. It’s not Biblianity, it’s Christianity.

I once heard someone say, “There is as much Christianity in the Bible as there is food in a cookbook.” Think about what that means for our millions of would-be “chefs”.

What it doesn’t mean is we trash the book. It means the scriptures demand to be met with eyes wide open to its potential, to treasure. Just as you meeting another person, or looking in a mirror.

Many attempts have been made throughout history to prophesy the Bible’s obsolescence, to remove it from the human zeitgeist. Yet, against all odds, the Bible remains the best (and bestselling) literary achievement there has ever been.

Chaturvedi Badrinath, Hindu scholar and author of The Mahabharata: An Inquiry in the Human Condition agrees:

I can’t understand why you missionaries present the Bible to us in India as a book of religion. It is not a book of religion — and anyway we have plenty of books of religion in India. We don’t need any more! I find in your Bible a unique interpretation of universal history, the history of the whole creation and the history of the human race. And therefore a unique interpretation of the human person as a responsible actor in history. That is unique. There is nothing else in the whole religious literature of the world to put alongside it.

The parents of Ruth Graham, evangelist Billy Graham’s wife, were medical missionaries in China. A biographer once told the story of a man they met there who had no background in Christianity. In reading John 3:16

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

he proceeded to translate it into his own language.

God wanted to possess the land so much that he sent his only son, that whoever was fooled by him would not perish, but would become a wandering ghost forever.

As we can see, this man used his own cultural background to interpret the passage, a background that included:

• concern about land possession
• legends that told of the tricks and scams common among deities
• the belief that people who die become ghosts on the earth
• the belief that the ghosts of those who have died in an unfortunate manner wander the earth forever

Obviously, understanding the biblical text is not a trivial pursuit.

The Myth of Biblical Clarity

“The Bible clearly says” is one of the least intelligible theological trademarks on earth. Indeed, the collected works of Scripture contain enough words and phrases that anyone could theoretically say anything one wishes — for any purpose imaginable. And, as any observer of history knows, to a large extent, men and women have.

Author and patristic scholar Brad Jersak points out that those who appeal to the “obvious clarity” of Scripture are instantly disqualified as rational interpreters, being in serious denial or (more likely) ignorant of the biases the reader inevitably brings to the text. For many, zealousness in spiritual matters has had a side effect – reducing the greatest volume of literature the world has ever known to a kind of personalized arsenal. Here, passages are paraded — decontextualized and naked — into battles involving mustered ideologies. Scriptural proofs for and against modernism, literalism, Catholicism, Protestantism, evangelicalism, nationalism, capitalism, communism and more are conscripted and weaponized together with biases grounded in one’s education, or lack thereof, peer groups, personality traits, psychological woundedness, church history, family history, personal history, et cetera, et cetera.

Jersak suggests that readers make an honest confession: the moment we open our Bibles, we now have a subject (me) and an object (the Bible) in a dynamic relationship. “Where then is the plain meaning”, he asks, especially among all the pearls we clutch so tightly?

Perhaps here is where one sees Jesus, modelling contrition, getting down to ground level, drawing a line in the clay, and asking, “He who fully understands himself cast the first stone.”

Yet, some do drop such “sanctified” ammunition, only to wander into the aimless sea of post-modernist doubt and unbelief. The most successful, however, choose to cast aside these culturally appropriated stones and recognize the need for

• the Body (the church/ekklesia), and
• the Spirit

in addition to Scripture in order to discern what truths God is revealing.

The Error In Inerrancy

There is a habit in common conversation to personify the Bible more than is warranted anthropomorphically. As though the book itself were a monolithic, homologous entity having agenda and agency: “The Bible says…”

Alec Aristo, a writer on Christianity, points out that the Scriptures are a means to an end and not the final authority in itself:

The doctrines of inerrancy and of infallibility of Scripture are not wrong, per se. It is just that they are often expressed in a way that grossly oversimplifies the issue, and tends to wall off intelligent inquiry into how to properly process and apply biblical texts.

The basic problem with these teachings is their fundamental confusion about semiotics — understandable, since linguistics wasn’t where it is now at the time those theological ideas were conceived (in their present form, less than 200 years ago).

Semiotics has to do with studying the signs (e.g. texts), and the realities to which the signs point (e.g. God). Whereas signs can be constructed in a variety of ways, reality is, fundamentally, just what it is. In this way, signs don’t carry any intrinsic meaning. Their only value is in pointing to actual reality.

Any linguist will tell you that language is fundamentally ambiguous and is therefore fallible. Humans have simply become very good at reading the contextual and physical cues required to process it, and to extract meaning from it with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Which is to say, we combine language with experiential reality to form a modicum of knowledge.

When you read ancient texts, however, most of the context is lost, so right there you are left with a pretty significant gap in understanding. If you simply try to read your most intuitive meaning into the text, that would lead to a classic Bible interpretation error called “eisegesis” — making the text say what you want it to say, by reading your biases into it.

The most important point, Aristo contends, is that our current cultural conditioning forms an invisible lens through which we see everything. That it is the set of glasses through which we look at the Bible. Therefore, even if we didn’t have all of the other difficulties, this alone would cause us to see in the Bible only the kinds of things we are ready and able to see and the rest will be filtered out. We would emphasize some things, de-emphasize other things and, in the end, the Bible would “preternaturally” fit exactly where we currently are. And, as our understanding of the world around us evolves — surprise! The Bible “somehow” evolves right alongside us.

To sum up: the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture commit a logical fallacy, which in philosophy is referred to as “category error” — they mistake a sign for the reality. Moreover, these doctrines confuse the Bible with the perception of the Bible. All of which sends the rest of the argument down the garden path as it were.

For the record, we ought to believe in the inerrancy and infallibility of God. That’s our point of reference. But, I am not quite ready to put a document written in fallible human languages, which has undergone a process of translation, into the same category. Even a document as unique and accurate as the Bible.

If you are reading your Bible in several translations, you implicitly affirm that you trust every single one of those human translators as much as you trust God. You aren’t reading the original autograph, anyway. You are reading the reconstructed and subsequently re-translated text. To make the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility work out for English Bibles, we would need a doctrine of inspiration of every Bible translator there is. You see how it quickly becomes unwieldy.

A better way of looking at it is that the Bible is an accurate and meaningful pointer to external realities. It would not be a stretch to say the most meaningful, ever. The language, the culture and historical distance obscures at least some of the meaning of the texts for us but, fortunately, we have the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth. And together, in community, we have a much better chance at arriving at a complete picture of God-reality than we would alone.

The Peril of Ignoring History

Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously said, “When experience is not retained… infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Teacher Tammi Kauffman agrees:

We disrespect the Scriptures when we discard the historical contextual understanding in favor of a 21st century one. We lack honor when we disregard the original language because it’s “right there in plain English.” There is probably no other ancient text that we treat with such contempt.

The obstacles to approaching a “native” understanding of the Bible seem to be threefold:

1. Most of us are not fluent in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, the languages in which the Bible was originally written. We are largely unfamiliar with the Bible’s linguistic context.

2. We live in a time far removed from the biblical period, and most of us are not archaeologists, anthropologists or classicists. We are largely unfamiliar with the Bible’s historical context.

3. Most of us are not of Semitic or Middle Eastern stock. As scholar Dr. John Walton notes, “We’re well aware that people have to translate the language for us. We forget that people have to translate the culture for us too.” By and large, we are unfamiliar with the Bible’s cultural context.

When people face these obstacles, especially for the first time, one response has typically been despair. The Bible seems more opaque then ever, and the temptation is to simply give up reading it. And so, in the next installment, we will look at the question, What on earth should we do with the Bible?

Thank you for reading. Besides being a fellow “stranger,” I’m a graphic designer and Bible educator who believes in the power of fellowship in studying the written word.

N E X T → Strangers in an Ancient Land, Part 2

And the Oracles Fell Silent: A Brief Response to Critics ← P R E V I O U S

(Cover art from Stranger In a Strange Land, a 1961 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein that tells the story of a human who comes to Earth after being born and raised on another planet. The title is an allusion to Exodus 2:22, “And she bore him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.”)