E-Book, Englisch, 126 Seiten
Reihe: Little Books
E-Book, Englisch, 126 Seiten
Reihe: Little Books
ISBN: 978-0-8308-8305-9
Verlag: IVP Academic
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E. Randolph Richards (PhD, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) is provost and professor of biblical studies in the School of Ministry at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is a popular speaker and has authored and coauthored dozens of books and articles, including Paul Behaving Badly, A Little Book for New Bible Scholars, Rediscovering Jesus, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, The Story of Israel, and Paul and First-Century Letter Writing.
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1
FALL IN LOVE
I met her when I was in first grade. She walked into the cafeteria as I was sipping chocolate milk and munching tater tots. I was so compelled by her beauty, I pushed away my tray, stood on my chair, and shouted, “Who is that pretty girl?!” Although I’m not certain I believe in love at first sight, we’ve been together ever since. I pursued her throughout elementary school and declared my love in sixth grade by stealing a kiss (a romantic peck on the cheek). In junior high, I had not yet hit my growth spurt, so at the homecoming dance I was forced to put my head on her shoulder as we swayed the night away. In high school, we went on our first mission trip together, where we both surrendered to the ministry. As I fell in deeper love with her throughout the ensuing years, I wanted to know every detail I could about her. And the more I learned about her, the more I fell in love with her. Now, twenty years of marriage and five little Dodsons later, I am still tempted to stand up whenever she walks into the room. I also met Jesus Christ as my Savior when I was in first grade. I stood up from my pew, walked down the aisle and declared my commitment to God. The next Sunday, I made it official by following the Lord in baptism. To congratulate me, the church gave me a black, leather-bound, red-letter edition Bible with my name engraved on the front. The more I grew in my relationship with God, the more I wanted to tuck into that Bible. And the more I read that Bible, the more I grew in my relationship with God. My zeal for the Lord and his Word led me to a Christian liberal arts university where I began my education in biblical studies. Even after a handful of degrees and decades in a classroom, I continue to be amazed at how God constantly opens my eyes to wonderful things in his Word—insights that I have never seen before (Ps 119:18). My love for the Lord has motivated me to study the Bible all the more. Is Love All I Need? As much as I had love for the Lord, I needed something else. Against the popular sentiment that in the Christian life all you need is love, Scripture makes it clear that love is not all you need. Yes, love for God is paramount and essential (Deut 6:5). But in Philippians 1:9-11, Paul demonstrates the need for knowledge in addition to love. In the passage, Paul tells the church that he is constantly praying that their love will continue to increase more and more in all knowledge and insight. Elsewhere Paul warns of the dangers of having knowledge without love: knowledge puffs us up and leads to pride (1 Cor 8:1), and even a person smart enough to fathom every cosmic mystery is nothing without love (1 Cor 13:1-2). This does not mean that Paul wants his people to be ignorant. Just as we should avoid knowledge without love, we should also avoid love without knowledge. Paul prays that his church will have both. As Warren Wiersbe wrote, “Christian love is not blind! The heart and mind work together so that we have discerning love and loving discernment.”1 Similarly, Peter commands the church to make every effort to add knowledge to their faith, since knowledge is necessary for preventing believers from becoming spiritually blind (2 Pet 1:5-9). Furthermore, what I’ve realized throughout the years is that the knowledge I need goes beyond simply knowing what the Bible says—it’s the knowledge necessary to correctly handle the Bible and interpret what it says. Is the Bible All I Need? A popular Christian speaker asked the question “If I were on an island, and I only had the Bible—no one preaching to me, no theology books—what would I believe?” This is an interesting question, but it can imply that a person would not need anything but a Bible to understand the Bible. To be sure, studying about the Bible can never replace studying Scripture. Nevertheless, there is more to understanding Scripture than just reading the Bible. In fact, if all you had were the Bible, you would have something that looks like the figure on the next page.
Sample from a late second- or early third-century papyrus of Paul’s letters (P46). That is to say, the only reason we have an English Bible (or even a printed Greek text) is because of the hard work of biblical scholars who were not alone on an island. It took centuries of work by innumerable scholars to enable us to hold a modern Bible in our hand. Assuming someone has already translated Scripture into English, is my English Bible enough? Alone on an island, I would not have a community of believers around me nor the great cloud of witnesses who came before me to check, confirm, or complement my interpretations.2 I might discard the Bible as contradicting itself when I read, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly” and then see in the next verse, “Answer a fool according to his folly” (Prov 26:4-5). I’d be puzzled by how Moses could write about himself in Numbers 12:3, “Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.” Isn’t it haughty to call yourself humble? Moreover, I’d probably believe in baptism for the dead (1 Cor 15:29), snake handling (Mk 16:18), and polygamy (1 Sam 1:2). I might be against women wearing pearl jewelry (1 Tim 2:9), and think it is okay for someone to dress like a prostitute to seduce her father-in-law (Gen 38). I’d possibly conclude that pressing a child’s foreskin to his father’s heel turns away God’s wrath (Ex 4:24-26) or that I should pray for God to bash the heads of my enemies’ babies against a rock (Ps 137:9). As history has shown us, when a person just “reads their Bible,” the result can be bad theology the likes of which has been used to support slavery, bully women, and spread heresies about Christ.3 In the 1990s, among a cluster of islands in eastern Indonesia, a “new biblical insight” arose. Some pastors had been diligently studying their Bibles—a good thing to do. They noticed that at Jesus’ baptism God had announced, “This is my Son” (Mt 3:17). Then at Jesus’ crucifixion, Jesus exclaims, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46). Those Indonesian pastors “discovered” the idea that the human Jesus became the Son of God when God adopted him at his baptism and then un-adopted him at his crucifixion, so that only the human Jesus died on the cross. This idea spread like wildfire across a dozen islands and hundreds of churches. Then someone on the mission board said, “Hey, let’s dispatch that rookie, Randy, to address it.” At that point, I was glad I had read more than just my Bible. Having studied theology and church history, I recognized that this was just the old adoptionist heresy. I had both the biblical and historical training to help untangle the mess. I detailed how the church, with its apostolic, rule-of-faith-shaped way of reading Scripture, had already responded to and rejected this heresy, and why their decision still applies today.4 Being alone on an island with just my Bible could not only lead me—like those Indonesian pastors—to biblical errors and fallacies, but it would also hinder me from understanding Scripture more fully. For example, if I just “read my Bible,” I might miss how decisively Genesis 1 turns other ancient cosmologies on their heads. I might not get what is funny about Gideon threshing wheat in a valley. I’d probably not notice how Luke cleverly hints at the trial of Socrates when Paul stands before the philosophers on Mars Hill in Acts 17, and I’d certainly miss the significance of that allusion. These are all things that the original audience would have understood better than we do when we just “read the Bible.” Take 1 Corinthians 13:1-3, for instance, where Paul states that love is the key to ministry. If I only had an English Bible without the help of scholarly commentary, I would not know that the translators of my Bible had to decide whether Paul wrote, “If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing,” or whether he wrote “If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” The difference in the Greek text is a single letter in the middle of a word: ?????SO??? vs. ???T?SO???. Not much of a difference! I would also not know whether Paul meant that those without love are like “clanging metal or cymbals,” or if he meant that those without love are like “clanging metal rather than resonate cymbals.” You see, the single-letter word ? that separates metal from cymbals can be translated “or,” but it can also be translated as “rather than.” A number of translations go with the first interpretation so that they render the word chalkos, “brass” or “bronze,” as “gong.” But Paul never actually wrote “gong.”...
