Through­out the his­tory of the Chris­t­ian church we have seen many doc­trines devel­oped. One only needs to go to a Chris­t­ian book­store or a bible col­lege library to find the diver­sity of inter­pre­ta­tions on bib­li­cal pas­sages. What is the rea­son for such a diver­sity of inter­pre­ta­tions?
What is so dif­fi­cult in inter­pret­ing bib­li­cal pas­sages? Don’t all authors claim to have the Spirit of God, yet they pro­duce such a jun­gle? Where is God in such a the­o­log­i­cal con­fu­sion? And where is God from the result­ing church move­ments that con­demned or excom­mu­ni­cated, and in the past slaugh­tered each other. Some of history’s dark­est hours make Chris­tian­ity one of the cru­elest and blood­i­est reli­gion in his­tory. Chris­tians who strug­gle with guilt about past and present cru­elty declare that those Chri­as­tians were not really Chris­tians, for if they had been Chris­tians, they would not have com­mit­ted such crimes.

Per­haps you could look at the pic­tures in the fol­low­ing site:

http://www.nobeliefs.com/nazis.htm

Are you shocked? I was when I first saw them. How­ever, what changed? Chris­tians in the West are still as sup­port­ive of mil­i­tarism as ever before. Just look at who Bush’s great­est sup­port­ers are. The Chris­t­ian Church.

But I do not intend to get into pol­i­tics here. All I am ask­ing is that you seek answers to the “why”.

Do you see why cor­rect bib­li­cal inter­pre­ta­tion is vital? Calvin believed that the image of God, that was lost at the fall, was only restored in the believer, and thus, it was not sin to kill unbe­liev­ers. He, along the other “great reform­ers”, was directly or indi­re­cly respon­si­ble for the mur­der of many.

Enough of his­tory. Now I want to deal with a few pas­sages. The first is Proverbs 8. You look up com­men­taries and many claims that wis­dom in that pas­sage is Jesus Christ. It doesn’t mat­ter that wis­dom is a fem­i­nine word in the Hebrew and she builds a house and has chil­dren. This is a fine exam­ple when a wrong con­cept is applied. We come up with an idea, namely that we are to see Jesus in all the Scrip­tures, and force that mean­ing on the books of the Tanakh (i.e. OT). So what is the cor­rect inter­pre­ta­tion? Wis­dom is not a per­son, rather, it is per­son­i­fied; the Jew­ish authors often use such
lan­guage. We see it when read­ing about trees clap­ping with their hands. Such a lan­guage is also used regard­ing the oper­a­tions of the Spirit of God. This con­cept is so often ignored by theologians.

Another exam­ple is the ideas built around the term “word of God”. Don’t we call the bible by that name? This led to con­fu­sion at the bible col­lege I attended, for stu­dents asked how come both Jesus and the bible were the “word of God”. Then they were told Jesus was the liv­ing word while the bible was the writ­ten word. Sure. Except that in Hebrews the “word of God” is ref­ferred to as the “liv­ing” word, and it is cer­tainly not Jesus who is meant there:

Heb 4:12 For the word of God is liv­ing and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, pierc­ing to the divi­sion of soul and spirit, of joints and mar­row, and dis­cern­ing the thoughts and inten­tions of the heart.

Now let’s con­sider the fol­low­ing passage:

Rev 19:13 He is clad in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God.

Rather than deriv­ing lit­eral truth from lit­eral pas­sages and try to inter­pret sym­bol­i­cal pas­sages by the lit­eral truth, the­olo­gians look at sym­bolic pas­sages, derive lit­eral mean­ing and force that mean­ing on other sym­bolic pas­sages. Wow!

So they don’t seek the def­i­n­i­tion of the term used in the NT from the Tanakh where it also appears, but from a very late apoc­a­lyp­tic writ­ing called Rev­e­la­tion, and the nature of apoc­a­lyp­tic writ­ings is that they are writ­ten in a sym­bolic way, they describe visions of the end times with drag­ons and beasts fight­ing against the peo­ple of God. So the­olo­gians declare that Jesus Christ is “the word of God” and insert this def­i­n­i­tion into John 1.

If they sought the def­i­n­i­tion from the Tanakh, they would have realised that it is the law or com­mand­ments of God, and “the name” in Jew­ish think­ing is a title a per­son deserves, not a lit­eral name. There­fore, Jesus is referred to as “the word of God” because he was totally devoted to fully keep­ing the laws of God. If we derive the mean­ing of the term from the Tanakh, then John 1 gains its true Jew­ish meaning.

Does truth mat­ter? I know many Chris­tians who don’t think so. They rather talk about “per­sonal rela­tion­ship with Jesus”, and I chal­lenge you to find that idea on the pages of the NT.

So what is so dif­fi­cult in inter­pret­ing bib­li­cal pas­sages? One must first of all under­stand Jew­ish mind­set to under­stand the Jew­ish book. The knowl­edge of his­tory, cul­ture and lan­guage is also required, just as being aware of the dif­fer­ence between nat­ural and gram­mat­i­cal gen­ders. So it is a very dif­fi­cult task. The knowl­edge of the method of four lev­els of ancient Jew­ish inter­pre­ta­tion, PaRDeS, is also a must, for it is exten­sively used in the NT. But beyond these one gets nowhere unless he gets the con­cept right. Always inter­pret sym­bolic pas­sages in the light of lit­eral truth, not the other way around.

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