One of the questions that I was most often asked, being a part of the old ministry, was how I managed to get what I got out of Scripture. In response I put a great deal of effort into detailing exactly what I did, but the most important step by far was reading the text critically. I had been taught since high school that exegesis meant letting the text speak for itself, as opposed to eisegesis or reading into the text. I didn’t approach the text assuming it was wrong, in a broad sense (although I had been taught to distrust Christian translations and anything from the New Testament which didn’t take into account the likelihood that most or all of the New Testament was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic, which was almost an article of faith in our group), but I did assume that it wasn’t always easy to understand, and I tried to wrestle with the text whenever I could. So, I asked questions, and I found that I had a knack for asking hard questions (although they often flowed from faulty presuppositions, as we have talked about in the past).
You can do this with nearly any passage, and I still think it is a valuable tool, although there are better, more informed ways to approach exegesis systematically. I learned this partially from rabbinic commentaries. Here’s a short example; I just randomly paged forward in an electronic copy of NASB77 until I stopped on this:
So Abram went up from Egypt to the Negev, he and his wife and all that belonged to him; and Lot with him. Now Abram was very rich in livestock, in silver and in gold. And he went on his journeys from the Negev as far as Bethel, to the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Bethel and Ai, to the place of the altar, which he had made there formerly; and there Abram called on the name of the LORD. —Genesis 13:1-4
What questions can I pull from this passage? It depends on how deep I want to go:
- Why is Lot mentioned now, but not when Abram descended to Egypt earlier?
- Given the context, why are we told about Abram’s riches both in livestock, and in precious metals?
- Why the intermediate step mentioned? Do we need to know that Abram was in Negev after Egypt but before Bethel?
- Is there a reason that the text is so specific with regard to where Abram stopped? Why does it seem almost redundant?
- What does it mean, that Abram “called on the name of YHVH,” rather than simply “calling on YHVH”?
The good side of this approach is that it takes the text very seriously, and makes us aware that every word in here was given by God to Moses for our benefit in some way. The bad side is that it assumes that we might be able to find every answer in a reasonable amount of time, and almost encourages a shallow response, depending on how far you want to go and how broad and deep your own previous Bible knowledge is. To properly carry this out we need a sense of our own smallness and insignificance in relation to the text of the Word of God, and the humility to often sit back and recognize that there are themes that are spread throughout the entire Word that ultimately must answer some of these questions; this is the beginning of what is called “biblical theology,” and I will talk more about that in a few posts. But humility was in short supply in my life in those days, and when you live in a puddle, a pond seems immeasurably deep.
Around the same time that many were asking how they could mine the text of Scripture like I did, my parents asked for help in coming up with a Bible curriculum for homeschooling my sister. Tracey and I had been reading up on the methods used to train Jewish children; they learned to read the Torah very young, and proceeded from there. Synagogues also functioned on a yearly reading program for the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), which started Genesis at the end of the Feast of Booths and finished Deuteronomy at about the same time, and then started the cycle over. In the course of a year you would end up reading 2-4 chapters per week, and rabbis specialized in delivering timely commentaries on the week’s parsha or portion. It was hard to demand that people read the Bible in a year (I have much fewer qualms about that sort of thing now), but I could push for people to read five books from the Bible in a year, and read them carefully, too. We came up with a plan, and put it into action. We started planning in the middle of summer, to be ready to read the portions in time with the Jewish people throughout the year.
We started with a few basic lessons on the way Jews read Scripture, and what certain oft-used words and concepts mean. We encouraged people to buy the Artscroll Chumash, which is the Torah plus relevant commentaries, divided into the appropriate portions, or even better the Tanach, which is the whole Old Testament with much more limited footnotes. We came up with a schedule (the Torah reading schedule is not the same every year, because you have to take the leap-month into account among other things) and printed it out for everybody. We even did a test run on a short book that was roughly the size of a Torah portion (Titus).
The rules were simple. Everybody had to read both the portion for that week, and the portion for next week. We read this week’s portion to answer questions about it, and next week’s portion to come up with questions about it. Every week we all tried to answer the questions from last week, and be ready to share and defend those answers. In this way no one person and their ideas would dominate, except insofar as I would be facilitating the exchange of questions and answers. We had another rule which very few actually followed, which was that no commentaries or footnotes were to be used. I was starting to get the impression that the Spirit could inform us as to what the Word of God meant, and I was alarmed at how often people would double-check what I said with rabbis rather than with the Word itself. It was an alarm that I didn’t feel strongly enough, but someday it would become the dominant force in my thinking and teaching.
As soon as the rest of the local group heard what we were doing with my family, they wanted in on the action too. Then my brother and his wife thought it would be good. Next thing we knew, I was doing two hours of formal stand-up teaching a week, followed by 6-8 hours of this discussion class, in three groups spread out in a fifty-mile radius. That schedule was grueling; I couldn’t commit to anything on weekends, because Saturdays were formal teaching (and I needed all day to prepare for those), and Sundays were three rounds of what we affectionately called “Torah 101.” Between the classes and the driving and a little bit of fellowship on Sundays, we could leave the house at 9:30am on Sunday and not be back sometimes until 8-10pm at night sometimes. Getting back before 8pm was more typical. I felt bad for Aaron and Amber, who always got the short end of the stick; by the time we got to their class I was so tired that I was impatient, and I had covered the material so many times and in so many ways by then that I’m not sure anybody got much out of it. I blame myself; the fact is, law without meaningful grace is a killer of both body and soul.
If I had it to do over, I don’t think I’d start with the Torah this time. That’s funny to say, because the Bible itself starts with the Torah, and there are certain things that are fundamental to the gospel that come straight from the Pentateuch: the creation of the world, the fall of man, the covenantal structure of God’s relationship with man, and the Law itself, the schoolmaster that drives us to learning our need of a Savior. But it is good to know too that the gospel carries within itself enough to quickly grasp the basics, and the Pentateuch becomes part of the reinforcing foundation of that mighty edifice.
In practice people weren’t as diligent as I had hoped they would be. I was such an egalitarian in some respects that I really believed that everybody had it in them to be a teacher, if we just approached the subject matter the right way. People were excited about the idea, but only maybe half of the larger two groups really tried to come up with questions. Everybody worked to a greater or lesser extent on answering the questions, though, and I was pleased enough with that. I saw early on that I would have to take up the slack with regard to coming up with questions, so I always came to the meetings armed with enough questions for everybody. There were weeks when all the questions were mine, and weeks when none or only one of them was mine. After some initial resentment on my part things settled down, and I will say to this day that doing the Torah 101 classes was the most rewarding time in my days as a Bible teacher.
My approach to the Torah, however, was not something of which I should have been proud. I struggled a lot with the whole issue of the role of the Law in the life of the believer. We made a lot of hay out of “I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill [the Law]” (Matt. 5:17) in our group, but what did that mean? I coveted consistency. We could accept that a ceremonial law, and the kosher laws, had been fulfilled in Christ (the teacher taught that that is what Romans 8:2 meant by “the law of sin and death,” which in my mind now demonstrates just how poorly he grasped the argument of Romans at all, as if the preceding seven chapters said nothing about sin and death), but we maintained that a moral law remained. How was it to be determined, though? We never had clear, consistent teaching on that. I taught for a while that the Sermon on the Mount was reestablishing that (it was a sort of New Covenant Theology before I knew what that meant), but I couldn’t really get past the Ten Commandments. Various things seemed to indicate that the Decalogue might apply to us, but how do we take it as literally as we want to take it, when we don’t take the Sabbath seriously? And remember, for us in the “Old Testament church” as it were, the Sabbath was on Saturday, and we were sure that that would never change. Should we stop working? The teacher taught a very loose sabbath-keeping, implying (although never really insisting) that people should try to take a day off. This drove me mad sometimes. Is it law, or isn’t it? Is it a commandment or a suggestion? I had gotten to the point sometimes where I denied that the Decalogue applied to us, since I couldn’t make the Sabbath law apply to us in any way that made sense to me. I went full-on antinomian for a while, then swung back to a “two commandments” teaching, then I made each of the 613 commandments in the Torah (you have to work a bit to get the exact number, but there are various lists of the commandments that explain how the rabbis derive the number, which by the way is gematria (alphabetically-coded numbers) because the letters of Torah in Hebrew add up to 613) some part of the Ten, which were part of the two, but I allowed that different laws were fulfilled in different ways. Ultimately I (and most of the people in the ministry) went with an idea that suggested that the Sabbath was completely fulfilled in Christ, along with the feast days, kosher laws, and sacrifices. Our Decalogue was a Nonalogue (or whatever you call nine commandments instead of ten).
When the Torah was finished, we had a sort of graduation party. The main group went on to do the rest of the Old Testament, and we got all the way to the end of 2 Kings, covering the majority of the history of the Old Testament in the process. The other groups just sort of stopped. My sister was past the point where this was helpful, and in fact looking back I think that I was really promoting the idea that, having begun by the Spirit, she could be perfected by the flesh. After all, that was ultimately my hope, too. The only person asking the right questions was Dad, who occasionally tried to pull things back to grace. He knew what had saved him, even if I didn’t.
Loading ...
