Just Another Poor Hermeneutical Principle

I love good preaching and teaching of the scriptures. I get off on people expounding about the truth. I can only imagine that the feeling is what enthusiasts of spectator sports experience when watching a good game. Likewise, I want to yell at the players during the game when they drop the ball or at the ref for making a bad call.

One such time is when poor hermeneutical principles are employed. They seem forgivable when the preacher/teacher manages to score despite playing badly, but I cringe realizing that it was a fluke. Poor hermeneutics do not typically generate tenable teaching.

One such bad hermeneutical principle I have heard could be stated as such that the more a topic is mentioned in the Bible, the more important it is. To be sure, I can’t seem to find a reference to this in formal hermeneutical teaching anywhere, but I hear otherwise good preachers appealing to this principle all the time. I won’t name names, but a classic one is “1/3 of the Bible is nothing but prophecy. Therefore, it must be important to God.” Now, prophecy might be important but it’s not because of how much of the Bible could be considered prophecy. An argument could be made that the whole Bible is prophetic. To be sure, if this principle is applied consistently, then we must conclude that the doctrine of the trinity is irrelevant and the virgin birth is relatively unimportant. And the gifts of the Spirit were mentioned only once, but there is a whole book dedicated to the Levitical law! Haw many times are all those sacrifices repeated? I lose track when I’m reading through.

Rather, my desire is for preachers and teachers to make arguments for significance based on the reasonable certainty of a doctrine and its place in supporting the focus of scripture on the overall message of the gospel.

Conceptualization Rather Than Contextualization

In preaching or teaching, it is important to understand that the lesson be taught with the goal not of simply contextualizing the information but for creating new conceptual categories for apprehending and internalizing the message. I'll give part of my testimony as an example:

The two years after I realized my salvation in Christ were tumultuous. I ended up in a church whose idea of discipleship was to teach kids the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer and the Apostle's Creed, ask if they believed it, give them a book of worship, and call them saved. I, for one, was not well equipped to spiritually survive and I floundered. I knew I needed a good framework for understanding the truth of the Bible so I took a few Bible classes to get an idea of the big picture of the Bible. Then I started studying to form an integrated theology. You see I knew the context of the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer and the Apostle's Creed, but I didn't have the proper conceptual categories for normalizing any theological truth one could glean from them.

John Piper wrote on this recently. Here are some excerpts:

As we think seriously about contextualizing the message of the Bible, let’s remember that we must also labor to bring about, in the minds of our listeners, conceptual categories that may be missing from their mental framework. If we only use the thought structures theyalready have, some crucial biblical truths will remain unintelligible, no matter how much contextualizing we do. This work of concept creation is harder than contextualization, but just as important.

Here are a few examples of biblical truths that most fallen minds have no conceptual categories for conceiving.

1. All persons are accountable for their choices, and all their choices are infallibly and decisively ordained by God.
2. It is not sin in God to will that there be sin
3. What God decrees will come to pass is not always the same as what he commands that we do, and may indeed be the opposite.
4. God’s ultimate goal is the exaltation and display of his own glory, and this is at the heart of what it means for him to love us.
5. Sin is not primarily what hurts man but what belittles God by expressing unbelief or indifference to his superior worth
6. God is perfectly just and orders the complete destruction of the inhabitants of Canaan.
7. The key to the Christian life is learning the secret of acting in such a way that our acts are done as the acts of Another.

Please read the entire article here.

It Was Only A Dream. However...

I don't remember many of my dreams anymore. The ones I do remember are often bizarre: crawling on a spider web stretched horizontally over a great glowing chasm, maze-like buildings filled with people I don't know, or the time I escaped the grim reaper by flying off the roof of a 3-story school building somewhere in the Midwest. I had a dream last night. I'm sick right now and my dream was made rather lucid by the combination of drugs and fever. You would think I'd have another bizarre dream.

It was actually a rather normal dream. I was younger, perhaps an adolescent, and so was my younger brother.

We were visiting a small town that had two churches. We had been to one church and found the congregation welcoming and the teaching sound. We liked it there, but my brother wanted to visit the other church.

It was an independent fundamentalist (indy fundy) church. My brother went in as people were seating and tried to find a seat. The building was small and there were only a few inches between the outside ends of the pews and the walls. (I don't know why the fire marshal ever approved that. But, hey, it's only a dream.) Therefore, the only way to get into the pews was from the center aisle which at the moment was congested with people making their way to their pews. As is typical, the coveted positions are right next to the pews so the first people to sit often sat right on the ends next to the aisle. As is also often typical in may churches, people had places that they preferred to sit.

As I walked into the back of the church I saw that my brother had tried to sit in a pew and was being forcibly removed by the owners of the pew. I came up and told him that we'll just find another pew. This became easier as people cleared out of the aisle and into the pews. However, all the ends of the pews were filled. There was space in some of the pews, but the owners of the pews were set against getting up and letting us in so we could sit down. There was even one man who blocked the way to an otherwise empty pew who refused to even make eye contact with me.

I told my brother we would just leave and go back to the other church. Then I called out and said, "We're leaving now! Bye!" The sad thing to me was that many people responded, "Ok. Bye!" Just as we got to the back of the church I heard a lady call out, "Wait! We have some room on our pew!" It had to be the fullest pew in the house. Her whole family was in it. They were scrunching together to make room for us.

It's a good thing it was only a dream. However, it's not implausible. My dream didn't really have to be about indy fundies. It could have been about anyone. I had a brief conversation recently about acquiring a taste for an indy fundy service. Add to that yesterday's post about false professors and you have the makings of an indy fundy dream.

I've had good and bad experiences with indy fundies. My dad's dad was a Southern Missionary Baptist preacher. I don't understand the association between the churches that he served, but it seems that he was always preaching in a different church. There was one church near his home that he ministered in regularly. So, each of the churches may have been associated somehow - would you call that "independent"? Even the Independent Baptist churches I know seem to be associated. So, I don't know. Nevertheless, he was as close to an indy fundy as any I've ever heard preach.

I sang the indy fundy circuit with a trio once. I had been adopted by a family of wild indy fundies a couple of years before I was married, and we used to sing together. This was a good experience. However, I was still a Lutheran at the time. The pastor of one church found this out afterward and said that he wouldn't have let me sing in his church if he had known I was a Lutheran. That was a bad experience.

Fundamentalism has a bad rep. Theoretically, fundamentalism holds a good foundational view to theology, which is good. However, many fundamentalists are not very foundational. Take the preacher in the next video for example. TomintheBox called his approach to exegesis "Sqirmeneutics" and I agree. For those who don't know, hermeneutics is the set of rules we use in order to properly understand the scriptures. Squirmeneutics, according to TomintheBox is "1. the science of misinterpretation, esp. of the Scriptures, to such a degree that it causes listeners with any common sense to squirm" or "2. misinterpretation of the Scriptures so absurd that it causes one to question whether or not it could possibly be for real."



This preacher has issues. First of all, unless he would call boys "men", he needs to consider that those who urinate against the wall include boys. "Males" is appropriate. Second, the males that are referred to here are not being referred to in a favorable light. They are marked for destruction. Thirdly, the expression "[urinate] against the wall" was an ancient Hebrew idiom for "males", not an admonition for men to stand up when they urinate. His conclusions are completely unfounded. Therefore his fundamentalism is nothing of the sort.

The point to this article is that Whether you're an indy fundy or some other breed of church member, we tend to become rooted more in our ecclesiological habits than in seeking to glorify God. We need to learn to recognize the difference.

There are so many expressions of worship, whether corporately or otherwise, and different styles of preaching that are legitimate to get stuck on a single routine. I love to see the exuberance of African worship or the intricate synchronization of Messianic circle dancing. I love to see the poignant dramas of Hispanic churches and hear the cries of prayer of a multitude of people calling on God at once. I love the sound of large choir and the singing of a lone soul in mourning. I loved the glottal punctuation of my papaw every time he breathed as he preached. I love the natural flow of words as a preacher speaks off-the-cuff from notes or the careful wording when he has written the sermon out ahead of time. I love a congregation that is involved in worship.

I hate sermons that are vapid and vacuous or simply untrue. I hate worship that is full of pretense and self-aggrandizement. May we all seek the better things.

Sermon Jams

Perhaps you've never heard preaching like this. I heard about this from the Founders Ministries Blog. Recordings of some of the best preaching set to musical tracks. As a musician, I'm impressed with how they've managed to match up speaking with Bachian tonality and American rhythms. The goal is to put solid theological teaching in the ears of young people.

Visit the web site of Relevant Revolution to listen to their offerings for free.

Should Church Be For The Saved Or The Unsaved?

There’s a little debate going on over at GodTube about the validity of having a site that is explicitly “Christian” as though to say that God approves of it.

Russ Seehafer kicked off with this video entitled “Why GodTube.com is Stupid”:

Doug Eaton retorted with this video entitled “Why GodTube.com May NOT Be So Stupid”:

The debate hinges on the balance between what it means for Christians to be “in” the world but not “of” the world. Seehafer’s argument essentially asserts that having a site like GodTube is separatist and draws a Christian witness away from sites like YouTube. Eaton replies that Christians need a safe place to go – not to withdraw from posting on YouTube, but to have a place to find Christian material without dealing with all the anti-Christian sentiment at YouTube.

The debate brings to mind a line of questioning I’ve pondered about the nature of the worship services of local congregations. It is quite obvious that different churches take a different line of reasoning on the balance between the edification of the body and the use of worship and preaching in the service for evangelism. On one end you may have the puritans who open teaching in the service up to anyone with the assumption that they are already Christian and are properly motivated by the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, you may find churches where worship has devolved into mere entertainment and teaching of cheap grace for the purpose of attracting “seekers”. A large high-profile church in a neighboring city has experienced an alarming shift in this regard. The founding pastor recently stepped down due to declining health. He had built the church on solid meaty teaching. The pastor that the congregation found to replace him has decidedly changed the focus of mass worship and preaching to a more “seeker-friendly” format. The message from the pulpit is noticeably milky rather than meaty and the worship has become increasingly entertainment-oriented.

There are finer factors that need to be considered. To begin with, children attend who yet need to be evangelized. One primary consideration here is that the parents should be doing this in the home. But the idea that the people sitting in the pews are at different levels of spiritual maturity. A word spoken, a concept given, will approach each differently. For some, it may be something they have never before heard or considered. For others, it will be a good reminder of something they need to maintain spiritually. The progression from spiritual immaturity to spiritual maturity is part of our sanctification. For each of the elect, one matures to the point where his eternal condition is manifest in a moment of salvation. Within the church, the means by which God accomplishes this is by providing an atmosphere of interaction with the Truth as revealed in the Bible that exceeds one’s current level of maturity. Therefore, the difference between a service oriented toward believers and a watered-down service oriented toward “seekers” is a false dichotomy.

This would seem to settle the debate. However, there is an element of needing to engage people from diverse backgrounds. (As for the kinist argument that everyone should just stay in their own group, we know that Paul himself planted cross-cultural churches. The most basin lesson from I Corinthians is that cross-cultural fellowship done right glorifies God.) The level at which we tailor worship and message for diverse people and yet seek to transcend differences and establish a unified vision of the Kingdom of God is yet a matter for clarity. Arguably, each congregation is called to a particular ministerial focus depending on the dynamics of membership and leadership that God has placed. So the levels may be different yet.

So the questions I have remaining are:

1)      What is the appropriate balance?

2)      What are the necessary considerations for determining that balance?