Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes

[Michelle]

Ha! "We've implied that people who speak English as their first language -- and even more so, those who ONLY speak English -- are clueless and self-centered, but we need to be sure not to poke holes in their pre-millennial dispensationalism because then they might really be offended."

[Paidion]

Whom are you quoting, Michelle?

[Michelle]

No one. It was an imaginary conversation.

[Michelle]

My friend, Nick Peters, hosts the Deeper Waters Podcast. He does really interesting interviews (Steve Gregg was on there once) and today he will be talking with Dr. Richards about Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. It's live at noon on the west coast and is quickly archived after the show. Click this link to find the show.

[Michelle]

Well...great. I messed up the time of the live podcast (although it is already archived for later listening.) That, for me, was fortuitous because Dr. Richards sign off was an assurance that he would be mortified if his book discouraged people from reading the bible. He, in fact, hopes most of all to encourage western (well, all) christians to read the bible, even if they don't understand everything perfectly. He says God will honor our attempt! Phew.

... but it is one of the best books I've found to help loosen the plaque in the brains of Baptists.

Doug

Being a Baptist (well, truthfully, now in the CMA; not much different, although possibly more culturally diverse) I assumed from the above quote I was supposed to be discouraged. Maybe you, Doug, also didn't mean to be negative?

[dwilkins]

I mentioned the Baptists because I have been attending Baptist churches since middle school and have taken classes from one of their chief institutions. I know them fairly well because of this. My experience is that they (and Calvary Chapel or similar doctrinal constructs) claim to interpret the scripture literally, but in actuality they're almost pure idealists. They look at scripture as a road map for how to go about life with no, zero, nada effort put into understanding the structure of NT civilization and how the original audience would have understood the same scriptures. They generally skip this step and move forward into deriving an application directly to themselves. Another way to say this is that they have almost no understanding at all of audience relevance in their hermeneutic. They, and all other Reformed churches I'm aware of, also have a bad habit of creating systematic theology out of passages for which they have no appreciation of NT era cosmology. So, terms like "forever", "all", "eternal", "world", "creation", etc. literally mean something to the modern readers that they couldn't have meant to the ancient ones.

So, I was being critical of Baptists. But, being critical is not the goal. My point is to jog their thinking to get them to start understanding that certain terminology (grace and faith) or social constructs (the patronage and client paradigm, or the honor and shame paradigm) forces the passages they are reading to mean something different than they assume. To work through all of this would require being very familiar with scripture, so I'm a unhesitating advocate of studying it. But, I think that there has to be some cultural training along with scriptural knowledge.

I'm looking forward to listening to the archive later tonight. Thanks for posting it.

Doug

[Michelle]

Hi Doug,

I, too, have attended many (and have been a member of several) Baptist churches for a very long time. I was dedicated as a baby in a Baptist church which, if you look carefully at my visage in the corner there, you can ascertain was a long time ago. (However, I was educated at a Church of Christ institution, so some distortion may apply, but without instrumental accompaniment.)

My sense is that because of the commitment to the autonomy of the local congregation and the resulting lack of a synod, presbytery, or magisterium, it is very hard to use the absolutes always or never, never, never about any facet of a Baptist church. Well, one exception: infant baptism; you're fine to use a triple, multi-lingual negative when it comes to that.

That being said, I appreciate your desire for deeper and more meaningful study of scripture. I hope that you are on the ground helping those around you to see what you do when you read a passage.

I appreciate Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes for the purpose it fulfills which you articulated well. I do desire to comprehend as much as I can, which most definitely includes awareness of the culture and audience the writers had in mind. What kind of unnerved me with the book (and to be honest, with your depiction of Baptists above) were the several times the authors' implied that if I am from the West, my thoughts can be predicted with accuracy. I kept wanting to feebly protest that I don't think that way. I wish they had said instead that the cultural milieu of the West might, and quite often does, lead to individualistic interpretations and gross misunderstandings. The impression I got was that unless you were born in an Eastern culture, it's almost amazing that you can even comprehend the gospel, let alone any other biblical passage.

Apparently I misread Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes with emotionally-over-sensitive-albeit-informed-anthropologically eyes.

Michelle

[dwilkins]

Michelle,

I don't think you are completely off base with your concern about the implications of the book. That concern turns pretty quickly into a conversation about the perspicuity of scripture, something that Evangelicals assume. I think there may be such a thing in regards to the simplicity of the minimum amount of faith it would take to accomplish salvation. But, I think it fades almost immediately, so that cultural education becomes necessary to derive any complex doctrine from scripture.

Unfortunately, the one thing the book didn't address, but which I think is very interesting, is some attempt to answer the question of which is better, our way or their way (I'm thinking primarily here about guilt vs. shame)? Or, even more interesting, where did our way come from if the only thing that existed at the time was their way?

Doug

[mattrose]

I liked the book quite a bit. I thought the chapters on language (3) and time (6) were excellent.

But I also share some of Michelle's concerns. To me, the authors are a little too confident that they understand what is going on in people's heads. This over-confidence leads them to be a bit too bold in their generalizations of 'western' people (and, quite possibly, 'eastern' people). In addition, I found that that sometimes they projected things into the minds of biblical characters without warrant.

These 2 symptoms of the same mistake come together quite illustratively on page 121. The authors want us to consider that David might not have been experiencing any inner-turmoil over his sin with Bathsheba. They state, "It is far more likely that David had not given the matter a moment's thought. Remember, we Westerners tend to be introspective, but biblical characters were generally not."

How in the world would the authors know if biblical characters were introspective? Just because external conviction (shame, pg 120) is more public (and therefore verifiable) than inner conviction (guilt, pg 120), doesn't mean that we can deduce from the lack of verification that introspection was generally not present! I thought their whole take on the David and Bathsheba story was highly disputable. To my mind, there is quite a leap from the statement "the text gives no indication that David felt any inner remorse" to "We misread when we think David had a guilty conscience" (pg 125). I do understand that to make a strong point you sometimes have to exaggerate or generalize a bit. Perhaps in follow up conversation they would agree that shame exists in the west and guilt exists in the east. People are people.

Overall, though, I don't want to read books that I don't find objectionable AT ALL. I want the authors to get me thinking about some things. Though I still disagreed on a number of points, I truly appreciated the book for opening my eyes up to some things!

[MMathis]

The title says it all.

If the book was "Miseading Scriptures with Eastern Eyes" people would come out of the woodwork to say they were offended.