I took a class in college called Leadership in Backcountry Travel. The idea of the course was to teach us how to be leaders of backpacking trips. Our instructor, Jerry, was just as you might imagine him: skinny as a distance runner, unkempt, scraggly, and he had a few screws loose in the old cranium. Jerry's favorite teaching technique was to allow our mistakes to be our most potent instructors. And he gave us plenty of chances to make mistakes. Never did a nun rap a ruler to knuckles as painfully as those fire ants, mosquitos, wasps, heat, dehydration, and fatigue. Later I learned that Jerry delighted in pushing people into delirium and temporary insanity.
One of Jerry's best moments came when he wanted to teach us how to find ourselves on a map, and consequently find our way to a specified location on that map. He got the group together, gave us a map and compass, and said, "I'm leaving now. You need to find out where you are on the map, then trek to Turkey Point, where I'll be waiting for you tomorrow. Good luck." Then he walked into the distance.
The group argued for at least an hour about where we actually were on the map. There were no roads, fence lines, or riverbeds with which to easily find ourselves. Jerry had chosen well the location of his abandonment of us. We never came to a unanimous decision, but we decided to follow the most persuasive member of the group, a young man who came to college after being an equipment tester the Marine Corps. And so we marched.
We trekked for two days and never found Jerry, who eventually found us. He led us in a discussion about what we had done and where we went wrong. It became obvious that Jerry had been watching us the whole time and had never been very far away from us. So I imagined the newspaper headline, "College Instructor Beaten to Death by Weary Students." No one made the fist move, so I kept my fantasy to myself.
It turns out the marine had been right, except for one thing: he had not considered magnetic declination in his route. Magnetic declination means that compasses don't point to true north; they point to something called "magnetic north," which is close to true north, but not quite. In Texas, the difference between the two, called the angle of declination, is about 10 degrees. For other places in North America, it can be more than 20 degrees. Now, ten degrees may not seem like much, but it was enough to cause us to walk right past Jerry and Turkey Point and to keep going for two days in the wrong direction.
It seems to me that there is an angle of declination when it comes to reading the Bible as well. How else can people read passages or even whole books of the Bible, such as Revelation, and walk away with such divergent interpretations?
Some people think that's okay. "You go your way, and I'll go mine," they say. To them, neither understanding is wrong; the right interpretation is what's right for you. I do NOT subscribe to this idea. God gave us the Bible so that we could understand him and follow his ways. "Train up a child in the way he should go," Proverbs 22:6 says, "and when he is old, he will not depart from it." This verse clearly indicates that there is a way that God intends for us to live, and that way is found in the Scriptures. It's not up to our own imaginations to decide how we should live. God tells us. So, there is one right interpretation for every verse of the Bible. We may not always know for sure what that is, but we should always do our best to get to what God intended.
Having said that, we need an approach to interpreting the Bible that will get us to those right understandings. Two basic paths present themselves. We can choose to take some portions of the Bible allegorically, such as the Revelation example above, or we can take the biblical text "normally," meaning we take it at face value. This is often called the "literal" way of translating the Bible, but that moniker is misleading because not everything is taken literally in a literal interpretation. A literal approach means taking things literally unless there is a good reason to take them otherwise. Literary devices are taken into account. A literal hermeneutic, as it's called, does not reject allegorical language, but it does reject an allegorical system of interpretation.
We could fill a library with the books that have been written arguing about which hermeneutic is the right one. The best way I've found for deciding this issue is to place myself in God's shoes. Say I write a letter containing a life-or-death message to my beloved daughter. I would not want her to allegorize what I say unless I use allegory as a literary device. Otherwise, I want her taking what I say at face value. I want her to take me literally. And it would frustrate me immensely if she said, "My dad says that there's a new virus spreading that is going to cause a zombie apocalypse and I need to pack and get to the mountains now, but he doesn't mean that literally. What he means is that there are nasty rumors going around my workplace that are going to ruin my company and that I need to start looking for another job." Do you see the danger to my daughter? Do you see my frustration over her use of an allegorical hermeneutic? So much more with God who has given the most important message in all of human history!
So let's be diligent to interpret the Bible normally. The slightest variance can be just like that angle of declination. It can cause us to miss our target, sometimes not by much, and walk right past the truth. We could sojourn a long time before we realize we're in error. Let's not do that!
One of Jerry's best moments came when he wanted to teach us how to find ourselves on a map, and consequently find our way to a specified location on that map. He got the group together, gave us a map and compass, and said, "I'm leaving now. You need to find out where you are on the map, then trek to Turkey Point, where I'll be waiting for you tomorrow. Good luck." Then he walked into the distance.
The group argued for at least an hour about where we actually were on the map. There were no roads, fence lines, or riverbeds with which to easily find ourselves. Jerry had chosen well the location of his abandonment of us. We never came to a unanimous decision, but we decided to follow the most persuasive member of the group, a young man who came to college after being an equipment tester the Marine Corps. And so we marched.
We trekked for two days and never found Jerry, who eventually found us. He led us in a discussion about what we had done and where we went wrong. It became obvious that Jerry had been watching us the whole time and had never been very far away from us. So I imagined the newspaper headline, "College Instructor Beaten to Death by Weary Students." No one made the fist move, so I kept my fantasy to myself.
It turns out the marine had been right, except for one thing: he had not considered magnetic declination in his route. Magnetic declination means that compasses don't point to true north; they point to something called "magnetic north," which is close to true north, but not quite. In Texas, the difference between the two, called the angle of declination, is about 10 degrees. For other places in North America, it can be more than 20 degrees. Now, ten degrees may not seem like much, but it was enough to cause us to walk right past Jerry and Turkey Point and to keep going for two days in the wrong direction.
It seems to me that there is an angle of declination when it comes to reading the Bible as well. How else can people read passages or even whole books of the Bible, such as Revelation, and walk away with such divergent interpretations?
Some people think that's okay. "You go your way, and I'll go mine," they say. To them, neither understanding is wrong; the right interpretation is what's right for you. I do NOT subscribe to this idea. God gave us the Bible so that we could understand him and follow his ways. "Train up a child in the way he should go," Proverbs 22:6 says, "and when he is old, he will not depart from it." This verse clearly indicates that there is a way that God intends for us to live, and that way is found in the Scriptures. It's not up to our own imaginations to decide how we should live. God tells us. So, there is one right interpretation for every verse of the Bible. We may not always know for sure what that is, but we should always do our best to get to what God intended.
Having said that, we need an approach to interpreting the Bible that will get us to those right understandings. Two basic paths present themselves. We can choose to take some portions of the Bible allegorically, such as the Revelation example above, or we can take the biblical text "normally," meaning we take it at face value. This is often called the "literal" way of translating the Bible, but that moniker is misleading because not everything is taken literally in a literal interpretation. A literal approach means taking things literally unless there is a good reason to take them otherwise. Literary devices are taken into account. A literal hermeneutic, as it's called, does not reject allegorical language, but it does reject an allegorical system of interpretation.
We could fill a library with the books that have been written arguing about which hermeneutic is the right one. The best way I've found for deciding this issue is to place myself in God's shoes. Say I write a letter containing a life-or-death message to my beloved daughter. I would not want her to allegorize what I say unless I use allegory as a literary device. Otherwise, I want her taking what I say at face value. I want her to take me literally. And it would frustrate me immensely if she said, "My dad says that there's a new virus spreading that is going to cause a zombie apocalypse and I need to pack and get to the mountains now, but he doesn't mean that literally. What he means is that there are nasty rumors going around my workplace that are going to ruin my company and that I need to start looking for another job." Do you see the danger to my daughter? Do you see my frustration over her use of an allegorical hermeneutic? So much more with God who has given the most important message in all of human history!
So let's be diligent to interpret the Bible normally. The slightest variance can be just like that angle of declination. It can cause us to miss our target, sometimes not by much, and walk right past the truth. We could sojourn a long time before we realize we're in error. Let's not do that!