WHAT SHOULD WE BELIEVE ABOUT CREATION? PART 4 Andrew Sampson

PART 4: INTERPRETATION

The experience that many people have when they open the pages of the Bible is akin to finding yourself dropped in a foreign land without so much as a Lonely Planet guide to depend on. It is a profoundly disorientating experience. It is not that the people themselves are so very different to the people you know back at home. Human nature is much the same whether you’re in a major industrial centre in the west or a quiet rural village in the east. It is the way that people see the world which changes, as well as the ways in which they make themselves understood.

The fact is that the texts making up the Bible were originally addressed to a people living in a very different cultural landscape to us. For most readers of the Bible today, the distance between us and the original audience is vast. The people for whom these texts were originally written lived in a different time to you and me. Unless you happen to be reading these articles in the middle east, they lived in a different place. They communicated using a different language. They lived before Magna Carta, before the enlightenment, before the advent of modern science, before the spread of democracy, before the industrial revolution, before western colonialisation, before the invention of the modern nation-state, before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, before the sexual revolution – before a whole host of things that influence our most fundamental assumptions about the world in ways that we barely recognise. 

Failure to recognise this issue lies at the heart of so many of the problems that we can get into when we try and apply the message of the Bible to our contemporary lives. A delightful example of this is given by the American pastor and writer, Eugene Peterson.[1] When he was seven years old, Eugene’s parents decided to put a stop to the tradition of having a Christmas tree in their home. This happened because his mother, a deeply devout Norwegian woman, had noticed a certain passage in Jeremiah chapter 10:

 ‘Do not learn the ways of the nations

    or be terrified by signs in the heavens,

    though the nations are terrified by them.

For the practices of the peoples are worthless;

    they cut a tree out of the forest,

    and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel.

They adorn it with silver and gold;

    they fasten it with hammer and nails

    so that it will not totter.’

That settled it. There was no way that having a Christmas tree was compatible with celebrating a ‘Christian Christmas’. The young Eugene was mortified:

And it was all because Jeremiah had preached his Christmas-tree sermon. Because Jeremiah had looked through his prophetic telescope, his Spirit-magnified vision reaching across 12,000 miles and 2,600 years, seeing in detailed focus what we did every December and denouncing it as idolatry.

Christmas Day came and the relatives arrived. Uncle Ernie was Eugene’s favourite uncle, a larger-than-life character, and he wasn’t going to let the absence of a tree pass without comment:

‘Evelyn,’ he roared at my mother, ‘where the hell is the Christmas tree? How the hell are we going to have a Norwegian Christmas without a tree?’ … My mother’s reply, a nice fusion of prayer and indignation, was a match to his raillery: ‘No tree this year, brother. Just Jesus. We are not celebrating a Norwegian Christmas this year; we are celebrating a Christian Christmas.’ Then she got out Jeremiah and read it to him. … Stunned by her impertinent piety, he muttered through a mouth full of lutefisk ‘damn, damn, damn’ all through dinner.

The Peterson celebration of a treeless Christmas lasted just one year. The following year the tree mysteriously returned.  Eugene never understood why. Like all childhood experiences that leave deep scars, the Christmas of 1939 was best forgotten.

‘The treeless Christmas of 1939’ is an example of failing to heed the distance (we might say failing to ‘mind the gap’) between the biblical text and our contemporary situation. Most of us would readily acknowledge that there’s no way that the prophet Jeremiah, writing six hundred years Before Christ, was saying anything about a twentieth century custom in the American west. Yet, other cases may not be so clear cut. It is important, then, to be clear on the criteria that we should use to interpret the Bible correctly.

Before we begin to look at what those criteria may be, let us address a major misconception which needs to be thrown aside. There are those who say, ‘We don’t need to interpret the Bible; we just need to read it’. Many Christians are suspicious of talk of ‘interpreting the Bible’. Is not the meaning of the Bible plain to anyone who reads it? Is not so much historical and theological scholarship just a ruse designed to undermine the clear meaning of Scripture?

The problem with this view is that the act of interpretation is inherent in any reading of the text. It’s impossible to glean any meaning from a text without interpreting it. For as soon as anyone says, ‘This is what this passage is saying’, they’re making a claim that’s coloured by a whole bunch of assumptions and presuppositions that come from their own experience and learning.

That does not mean that we can never discern what the text is actually saying. It means that there are good ways of reading the Bible and bad ways of reading the Bible. There is such a thing as good interpretation and bad interpretation. If we never come to any text ‘neutral’, if our reading of the text is always going to be influenced by the things that we bring to the text, then let us make sure that we bring some good ideas to the text. Let’s make sure that our understanding and outlook are suitably informed.

So, then, what are the criteria that we should use to help make sure that we’re understanding Scripture correctly? How should we interpret Genesis 1?

I think there are three crucial principles that we need to keep in mind: literary genre; historical context, and authorial intent.

Literary genre is the type or category of literature that we are dealing with. Historical context is the situation, so far as we can understand it, of the audience for whom the text was written. Authorial intent is concerned with what the author is trying to say.

These three principles are necessary, I think, for developing competence in understanding any literature which originates in a time and place distant from our own. Taken together, these are the things that enable us to recognise that ‘of course Jeremiah isn’t talking about Christmas trees.’ They are certainly necessary if we are going to make headway in making sense of any passage as contentious as Genesis 1. That is why, in the next three posts, I’ll be taking a look at each of these principles in turn.

[1] Eugene Peterson, The Treeless Christmas of 1939, in The Pastor: A Memoir (New York: HarperOne 2011), Chapter 6.