There are many things in the Bible that are hard to understand. When men encounter such things and consider how to explain them, two modes of thinking are possible, to reinterpret them so they make sense or to admit a lack of understanding. Let’s look at the first of these, reinterpretation.
No stretch of imagination is necessary to concede that reinterpretation depends on man’s reasoning. Since the time of Moses, when God’s revelation to man was first written down, man has been using his reasoning ability to make sense of the principles contained in the Mosaic Law. Those who pondered the hard things, mainly teachers, produced their own writings to explain difficult passages. The Jews produced the Talmud to demonstrate their rationale to other teachers and students. In New Testament times, the Church Fathers did the same thing, and even today, we have books that are called collectively, study aids. Commentaries, parsers, dictionaries, lexicons, interlinears, and atlases fall under this category.
Worth noting is that all these extra-Biblical writings are intended to help ordinary people understand the difficult things in the Bible. But many times, the reasoning of man produces a menu of possible interpretations on specific passages and it is up to the reader to pick the most likely view. And there is nothing wrong with this unless the teacher describing the possibilities for a difficult passage decides to impress his personal judgment on the listener by demeaning the other views or not even mentioning them. When this happens, especially on a passage that the teacher deems important, intolerance of other views can result. And with intolerance comes the possibility of a division among the believers. In the Christian church today, when like-minded people begin meeting separately, we call their meetings ‘denominations’ from the Greek word, onomasia, meaning an identifier that distinguishes some believers from others. In extreme cases, some groups will suggest interpretations that others won’t consider even possible. When this happens, a hairesis occurs, the Greek word meaning a choice. We get the English word ‘heresy’ from it and in our culture a heretic group isn’t considered a member of the Christian church at large. In other words, one group accuses another of not believing all the core values of the Christian faith.
So, when man is allowed to interpret difficult passages in the Bible to satisfy his reasoning, divisions in the Christian church are a common result. Now we’ll consider the other approach, to accept difficult passages with a superficial understanding, even if that understanding doesn’t make sense to us.
Sometimes this approach is called ‘blind faith’ but it isn’t blind at all. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that we simply don’t understand what is written. This approach is best when dealing with idiomatic expressions. An idiom is a phrase that needs a cultural definition to properly interpret it. For example, in British culture the phrase, ‘He did a runner.’, means the person fled to avoid capture. We might guess this meaning correctly but other phrases are almost impossible to rightly interpret unless additional information is supplied. It has been said that the King James Bible, the standard English translation for centuries, has over one thousand idioms. That’s a lot of opportunities to be wrong!
It is also tempting with this approach to ignore a difficult passage when research could easily explain it. Consider the Gospel of John, Chapter 2, Verses 12 and 13 (John 2:12-13). In this passage, critics of the Bible point out that Jesus is in Capernaum, which is approximately 75 miles north of Jerusalem, yet the passage says he went ‘up’ to Jerusalem. We would have said ‘down’ because Jerusalem is south of Capernaum. But when we research it, the Bible isn’t wrong. Jerusalem is at a much higher elevation than Capernaum and a man on foot would be walking up most of the time to get there.
The point is, we should only admit defeat interpreting a difficult passage when we have tried and failed to understand it. Even then, on another day, we may yet see its meaning. Archaeologists continue to discover about the culture of the Bible and to validate the existence of people and places that were questioned by non-believers as little as a hundred years ago. Sometimes, their work makes a difficult passage become clear.
What about just taking a verse literally instead of trying to find its rational meaning? Is it appropriate to make this a principle of interpretation?
The answer to this question is sometimes ‘Yes’ and sometimes ‘No’. When Jesus says, ‘I am the door’ (John 10:9), he doesn’t mean he is a piece of wood, so applying a literal interpretation would be foolish. But in the Book of Revelation (20:7), the phrase ‘After the thousand years’ is best understood as a literal period of time, even though there is debate about when this time occurs.
These are the difficulties with admitting ignorance about a passage but there is one great advantage to leaving a verse unexplained, it keeps every believer humble and avoids controversy within the church. Admitting ignorance is a small price to pay for unity.
So what is my conclusion to reinterpretation versus declared ignorance? It is this: Let common sense be your guide when taking a phrase literally. Do your homework with extra-Biblical sources to understand the context of a passage. Watch out for nonsensical phases that could be idioms. And when you have done all these things without success, just admit that you don’t understand instead of trying to think of something which makes sense to you. After all, you live in ignorance, and if you ‘bend’ scripture, you are likely to foster another division in the Christian church.
