As Christians we believe in the power of words.
The Gospel isn't just a feeling. It is news, and news is communicated through words. "So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ." (Romans 10:17) That's why we need preachers. We come on Sunday, we sit under preaching, and we hear the Word explained and proclaimed through words. Missionaries go, and yes they live lives of service, but they also communicate God's love by speaking words of truth.
We are a people of the Book. We are asked to study God's Word. (2 Timothy 2:15). Our heroes in the faith - like David - loved God's word. (Psalm 119). God's Word is true - and what a mind-blowing thing that the God of the universe has written a book. We can build our lives on sand, or we can build our lives on the Rock.
A basic presupposition underneath all this is the idea that words have meaning. Because we have a speaking God, we know that words can have real meaning. We are rational, thinking creatures created in the image of a thinking and speaking God. We worship a God who is more than a feeling, more than a force, more than an idea. We serve a personal God - a God who thinks and feels and acts and speaks. Because he is a personal God, we can be in a relationship with him.
When God speaks, his words are true. They have a real meaning. He is the author and final authority on that meaning. Not us.
When we listen to God, we are searching for that meaning. A presupposition of our listening and of that search for meaning is that God has not left us in the dark. He wants to us to know him and know about him. The upshot is that when we read the Bible, God may require us to be patient. It may take us a while to understand because there is a lot there. And we are trying to enter into some cultures very different from our own. But the Holy Spirit will help us. Our Christian community will help us. Christians who have grappled with these texts in the past will help us. We will never have a perfect understanding of all that is there, this side of Heaven anyway. Though we may not understand all, we have faith that there remains a basic clarity to God's word. He is not speaking in puzzles. And when God says something is so, it is so.
Let me introduce two words that you may have heard before: exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis is an attempt to look at a text to pull out what is really in it. Good preachers aim to preach exegetically. Eisegesis is interpretation of a text by reading into it your own ideas. This is more like reading verses out of context, and placing yourself too quickly into the text.
Exegesis is based on the belief that God has placed a real fixed true meaning into the text, and it is our job to dig it out without distorting it by our own biases. In a Bible study setting, this looks like saying "this is what the text means," instead of saying "this is what the text means to me." If you only read the Bible the second way, you will find in it only a reflection of yourself. You will find a small god created in your own image, instead of the other way around. If you don't believe in an objective find-able meaning, then the Bible will never be allowed to say hard things to you, and your growth will be stunted. But Jesus said "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:32).
Our culture does not have this perspective. Our culture is in rebellion and is not actively looking to be challenged by the objective truth of God's word. How did we get to our present situation?
What is the effect of evolution or atheism or materialism on our understanding of the meaning of words? If atheism is true, then evolution is the best explanation of how we got here. And ultimately, on that account, we are a quirk product of a blind process of time and chance. We are random bags of atoms, and our words are little more than a curious oddity. On this account, we are an accident. So how could our words be more than an accident, fore-ordained by a blind material process to be what they are, but ultimately not more than a small ripple of wind, unconnected to any notion of truth. Bleak, I know. If God is real, we have a reason for having a brain capable of understanding language and truth. If God is not real, we have no real reason to trust our brains. [picture brain exploding]
Everything is connected. I think that atheistic evolution has been the spirit of the world for the last couple of centuries, the dominant meta-narrative opposed to Christianity. Flowing out of that has been deconstructionism from the likes of Jacques Derrida and others, which is the idea that words and texts never have any real fixed meaning. The search for the author's intent is in vain. This is one of the characteristic symptoms of postmodernism. For an example of where you end up as a Christian trying to live as a postmodernist, see Rob Bell or Brian McLaren or other emerging church types. Why do you get churches that don't think homosexuality is a sin, that Jesus isn't the only way, and that hell is an imaginary place? Part of it is that you no longer think words mean what they seem to clearly mean. If you don't think words have real meaning, and if you don't think you can get to the Author's real meaning, you are going to be especially demotivated to seriously deal with the Biblical text. And when you open it, you will be less likely to find the God who is there, and more likely to find your own reflection.
SAME THING WITH READING THE CONSTITUTION!!!!!
There is a raging debate among constitutional scholars and judges and the people of our nation about how to read our founding documents. This discussion affects what will actually become law. It affects how we run our country. It affects who we will be as a nation.
Now this will certainly be an oversimplification, but let me paint the two different sides of the debate.
Side #1 - The textualists and originalists. This is Justice Antonin Scalia especially and other conservatives on our Supreme Court - Thomas, Alito, usually Roberts (but not so in the Obamacare cases). This was the losing side in the Obergefell case. A textualist thinks that you ought to stick clearly to the letter of the particular text or statute. The legislature has picked these words - they could have picked other ones but didn't - and so we will act on these particular words. An originalist says that the constitution means now what it originally meant - that its meaning doesn't change just because some years have passed.
Side #2 - Purposivists. This is your liberal side of the Court generally. Justices Breyer, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Ginsburg. In the Obergefell case, Justice Kennedy, author of the majority opinion in the Obergefell case, would probably fall in this category. This side looks for the spirit, not the letter of the law. They would be more likely to ask, not what the text means, but what should it mean? It looks at a question of interpretation abstracted up a level. (But once you start abstracting, it's easier to find whatever you want to find.)
What is at stake among these positions? What is at stake is democratic legitimacy in the face of judicial activism.
The textualist/originalist will sometimes make some very unpopular decisions by sticking with the letter of the law, but what this will do, at least theoretically, is hold the legislature's feet to the fire. It will cause them to draft better statutes because it knows that the judges will be taking seriously the actual words that have been enacted. Furthermore, if society thinks something needs to change, it can do so. But it will be doing so through its democratically elected legislature, instead of through a unelected judge or panel of judges.
In terms of the Constitution, the idea is that the Constitution means what it means. It means now what it meant then. If you asked those who wrote it or those who voted for it in the late 18th century whether the Constitution guaranteed a right to same-sex marriage, they would have looked at you cross-eyed. No way would they have said yes. If the people came to want that right to be a constitutionally guaranteed right, well, by-golly, we have a process for that. We have amended the Constitution twenty seven times. It's not easy to get a constitutional amendment passed, but that's probably a good idea. But the point is, there is some flexibility.
What happened in Obergefell is that Justice Kennedy found in the Constitution a new meaning. He found what he thought it should mean. This, my friends, is eisegesis. He read his own politics into the text of the Constitution and decreed it to be the law of the land. Much to Scalia's disgust. And to the great sadness of Christians who care about traditional marriage. And in defiance of the political process in places like georgia where a democratically elected legislature duly enacted a perfectly legitimate law saying that marriage is between a man and a woman - common sense until very recently.
Here is how it should go. The judicial branch should not be political. Judges should not insert their policy preferences. They should not see it as their job to do what they think is good (because that notion differs with each judge), but their job is to apply the enacted law to the particular situation whether or not he likes it. And the decisions about what laws to have should be left to the legislatures. If there is a law we don't like - for instance, laws allowing abortion - we should be able to the voting booth and change it. But in Roe v. Wade, the Court found that the Constitution guaranteed the right to abort in finding a right to privacy... emanating penumbras. Go figure. In Obergefell, the Court has found a right to same-sex marriage. These are both issues that have been taken away from the states in the name of the Constitution. In a way that the authors of the Constitution would have been aghast at.
So how will we read? Will we place ourselves over a malleable text, or we will humbly receive a text that already has a real meaning. Of course, the Constitution can be amended whereas the Bible cannot be. But I think our attitudes should be similar when it comes to questions of interpretation. In both instances we give deference to the original authors or Author. That is not the way of our world today, but I think it is the way we must go.
Ultimately, what I am asking is that we have some humility in the face of words that actually mean something.
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