"CREATIVE" WAYS TO TWIST SCRIPTURE

One of my duties at work was as a creative coach for the technical staff. One technique that I taught was to take an idea and see how you could turn it around. Some of those same methods have, unfortunately, been applied to interpretation of the Bible.

CONSIDER FROM A DIFFERENT VIEW

There is an art installation called Cadillac Ranch located near Amarillo, Texas. It consists of a series of cars half buried in the earth to provide a literally different viewpoint, but it can also be seen as a means of making a point about American's conspicuous consumption. This type of Scripture twisting is especially dangerous in that it simultaneously adds and subtracts at the same time. It does it by downplaying the literal meaning in order to reveal the so-called hidden meaning.

This approach goes back at least to the 2^nd cent. AD, and reached its heyday in the Middle Ages.

    Medieval exegesis-- fourfold sense of Scripture. Example: Genesis 1:1 “Let there be light”

        Literal: teaches the events (the act of creation)

        Allegorical: what you are to believe (let Christ be love)

        Moral: what you are to do (may we be mentally illuminated by Christ)

        Anagogical or spiritual: where you are to aim (may we be led to glory by Christ)

And the feeling was that the least important sense to pin down was the literal meaning.

 

Then there has been a renewed interest in the ancient form of Jewish interpretation called the 

Kabbalah, especially among celebrities such as Madonna and New Age devotees. It is a form of 

numerology in which the letters of the Hebrew text are turned into their corresponding numbers, 

subjected to various mathematical manipulations and then turned back into different words that reveal 

a hidden meaning. A Christian variation on this method was co-invented and popularized by NBA 

basketball star Jerry Lucas in the 1986 book Theomatics.

And, of course, there was the best seller The Bible Code (1997) in which a computer was used to 

search for equally spaced letter sequences in the Hebrew text to find hidden prophecies. This method 

was used to demonstrate that, for example, the Bible predicted that Lee Harvey Oswald was going to 

assassinate JFK and that King Hussein would invade Kuwait. Of course, these events had already taken 

place. The Bible Code wasn't quite as good in predicting future events since it said that the world 

would end in in 2006. By the way, there are literally hundreds of places in the OT where we aren't sure 

of the exact wording. Just one letter being off will destroy the whole approach of the Bible Code.

But it isn't only fringe teachers like these who try to replace the literal meaning of a text with a hidden spiritual meaning. You can find this kind of scripture twisting in pulpits today every time a preacher tries to read into the Bible some “deeper” message that wasn't intended. One example taken off the internet claims that resurrection of the dead through Christ is the real meaning of the story of Gideon and the fleece.

REVERSE/REARRANGE

When the Volkswagen bugs first came out on the US market, they caused confusion for mechanics who 

looked for the engine where the trunk was. There is similar confusion in interpreting the Bible on 

occasion when someone actually derives the exact opposite meaning from a text than the one intended. 

Let's return to Gideon's fleece. Casting a fleece to determine God's will is a common practice among 

some charismatic Christians even though the context of the story shows that Gideon was exhibiting a 

great lack of faith in God's word when he did it. Gideon's practice wasn't by any means meant as a 

model for us to follow.

In Matthew 24, Jesus is trying to warn his apostles not to get excited when they see various important 

events happen around them and confuse them for signs that he is about to come again. But, 

unfortunately most prophecy experts do exactly that and take these events for signs of an imminent 

return instead of the non-signs they are intended to be. For example, one Christian source made a big 

deal over the supposed increase in earthquakes beginning in 2013 to demonstrate that the Second 

Coming was just around the corner. I'm not sure where they got their numbers from, but the official 

statistics from the U.S. Geological Survey show no upward trend at all in the recent number of 

earthquakes.

The final example of this particular type of scripture twisting comes from a closer source. When my 

daughter and son-in-law first moved to a new town, they were visiting churches. At one church the 

senior pastor was on vacation so the assistant pastor took over the preaching duties. She chose the 

Book of Job as her text and spent her whole sermon going through the events of the book. As she 

closed, she said, “What is the moral of the story. It is this: if things aren't going well in your life, don't 

blame God because He has nothing whatsoever to do with it.” That is the exact opposite of one of the 

major themes of Job, the sovereignty of God over everything in creation.

CONSIDER FOR A DIFFERENT APPLICATION

I Thessalonians 5:22 says “avoid every appearance of evil.” This verse has probably been misapplied more than any other in the Bible. What was constantly being beat into us at church while I was growing up was the line, “What will other people think when they see you...? (followed by a list of dubious practices that were not evil in themselves but might possibility be misinterpreted by outsiders who would think you were doing something evil). With Southern Baptists, I guess it was dancing at one time.

In my church it was usually rock and roll music. I still the remember the title of a pamphlet that one of our elders gave us in the high school class: “The Devil's Dance of Death and Damnation.” Card playing was also a no-no unless you played with a deck that had no face cards in it, at least according to our minister's wife. In my wife's church, going to the movies was taboo because people who saw you coming out of a theater might think you were going to a dirty movie, which at that time would have meant PG rather than G rated. The fact is, as any Bible translation made after the KJV will show, the emphasis is not at all on appearances and what others might think. It is on avoiding actual evil itself.

Here are some additional examples in which someone had to really reach to come up with what they felt was the intended application lesson from a passage in the Bible:

    a. Since Satan is the Lord of the air, then Satan is in charge of all telecommunication systems.

    b. Before Jesus' arrest, his followers produced two swords (Luke 22:38). This passage was interpreted by one of the popes to state that the Roman Catholic Church possessed all spiritual and political authority on earth, with disastrous historical consequences.

    c. And equally tragic, in more recent times the Dutch Reformed Church set out its biblical basis for the practice of apartheid in a 1976 report. For more details, see my post "Apartheid in the Bible?"

    d. Then there is the prosperity gospel which uses the binding and loosing text to say that individuals can be free of disease and rich if they just claim it. In its original context, the saying of Christ had to do with the assembled church and any decisions they made as a whole.

Now that I have offended several other church groups, I might as well offend my fellow evangelicals while I am at it. I apologize to those of you who may have loved The Prayer of Jabez and its teaching, based on I Chronicles 4:10. But at the very least, the importance of this short prayer was certainly blown up out of all proportion by Bruce Wilkinson. And in the second place, the teachings in the book may have been sound, but were not necessarily derived from the text the author quoted. As a prime example, was Jabez really asking for more responsibility so that he could serve God better? It is highly unlikely as any commentary will show. He just wanted more land.

Here is one final example of deriving an unintended application from a biblical text. This one comes from David Barton, who is popularly known as Pastor to the Tea Party, based on the Parable of the Laborers in the Field (Matthew 20:1-15) “Jesus was anti-union and against the minimum wage. The parable teaches that an employer has the right to make individual agreements with his workers without any outside interference.” Several comments are in order:

    1. The nature of parables is to use an earthly story to teach a spiritual lesson, not an economic one.

    2. This is demonstrated by Jesus' own explanation at end of parable

    3. Barton makes the mistake of trying to import today's economic and political systems into an entirely different culture of 2,000 years ago.

    4. If you applied this same reasoning to the parable of the unjust judge and the widow, it would teach that Jesus supported the courts totally ignoring the rights of the poor unless absolutely forced to do so, and that the parable of the dishonest steward shows that Jesus applauds those who defraud their employer as long as they can get away with it.

    5. Finally, since one denarius, the amount of money each worker got, was the bare minimum to support a man and his family for one day, this parable actually teaches that there should be a minimum wage. But even this would be importing into the text a teaching that wasn't intended.

BREAK INTO COMPONENT PARTS

Here is the final technique to consider. You may indeed get valid insights into the text by tearing it to 

pieces, but what are you left with? One type of so-called Higher Criticism practiced in the liberal 

branch of Christianity is called Source Criticism. The objective of Source Criticism is to study the 

sources used to compile a book of the Bible. Since we know that prior sources were utilized by at least 

some biblical authors, especially in the historical books, this seems like an noble enterprise.

In the case of the OT, it has given rise to The Documentary Hypothesis to explain the origin of the Pentateuch from four separate sources. The first problem to mention is that scholars are by no means in agreement on which verses come from one source and which to another one. The situation is a little simpler in the New Testament Gospels. A common theory explaining the origin of the Synoptic Gospels, for example, is to propose that each author relied on his own separate source as well as a document containing quotations from Jesus. In addition, Matthew and Luke took much of their gospels from Mark's account.

Source Criticism is not exactly a fool-proof method, as you can see from some of the sources proposed for 2 Corinthians.

    Anton Halmel: 3 letters divided into 9 segments

    Walter Schmitals: a collection of 9 letters

    J. S. Semler: 12:14-13:13 is a later addition and ch. 9 was addressed to Achaia.

    Adolf Hausrath: chapters 10-13 were written before chs. 1-9.

    Rudolf Bultmann: 6:14-7:1 is not by Paul at all.

But Source Criticism doesn't stop there. It tries to establish, through clues hidden in the text, when and where each source came into being. And from that detective work, they then go on to disparage the later sources as not containing reliable material.

Brevard Childs, a Bible scholar who has done his own share of Source Criticism, clearly recognized that this method has been taken way too far. Here are some quotes from his commentary on Exodus.

    “The emphasis on the prior history of the biblical text by means of source and form criticism has often resulted in unwillingness and even inability to read the text in its present form.” (p. 195)

    “The present biblical text has been atomized and hopelessly blurred by hypothetical projections of the traditions' growth.” (p. 338)

    “Yet to the extent to which the scholar now finds himself increasingly estranged from the very substance which he studies, one wonders how far the lack of content which he discovers stems from a condition in the text or in himself.” (p. 437)

It is really no surprise that a number of those who attend liberal seminaries end up abandoning their faith altogether.