The Bible- A Revelation, Not Necessarily an Explanation
CONTEXT
A Revelation, Not Necessarily an Explanation
“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.” —Deuteronomy 29:29
There’s an uncommon, entirely Biblical approach to studying Scripture that illuminates the Book in a radically different light. It also explains the rise of Gnosticism, denominationalism and just about every ‘non-essential’ doctrinal disagreement in the modern church.
Unlike modern church scholarship and hermeneutics, which puts the Bible under a glass to microscopically dissect it, the approach begins with the pre-70 AD (year of the Jerusalem Temple destruction) Hebrew understanding of how the Bible’s message was communicated. I’m not referring to ancient rabbinical spiritualizations of Scriptural minutia that gave us, among other things, the legalistic Pharisees, the naturalistic Sadducees, the aloof Essenes, the Mishna or the Talmud. I’m referring to a peasant’s understanding—what the average sodbusters and goat herders grasped when Bible was read to them—when Jesus spoke to them and taught them, and they understood every word. This view is everything.
There were three main lenses through which these ancient peasants—those who wrote and read the Book—saw the world. Now—stay with me on this…
The Greek mind: Analytical, rational, able to abstract and intensely curious—they had to analyze and deduce how everything worked—philosophically, mechanically, artistically and scientifically (think of Sherlock Holmes, detectives and scientists). This is the mindset of the Western world to this day—the way we in the West are educated and reason. I was the ingrained mindset of John Calvin, Arminius, Augustin, the bishops of all the great church councils and virtually every scholar who dissected the teachings of Scripture since the Gospel went to the Gentiles. Blended into the mix were the philosophical presumptions of people like Philo (20 BC-40AD), who taught that every Biblical account was an allegory for some hidden spiritual message. In other words, he opened the door to interpret Hebrew and New Testament Scripture through Hellenistic—Aristotelian—logic and philosophy. It contributed to a movement that started when evangelized Gentiles set aside the Hebrew mindset of the Scriptures—the very umbrella under which it was written and understood—and began to interpret the Scriptures through Greek logic. This became the foundation of the philosophical evolution of Christianity in the West. This is us today.
The Hellenized Hebrew mind: Jews who knew and embraced the Scriptures, but because of the influence of Greek thinking (Hellenization), they weren’t kosher and tended to look at the Scriptures like Philo. With few exceptions, this has been the mindset of Judaism since the fall of the temple, after which the Jews became absorbed into the Greco-Roman world and began to think like them in earnest. Since then rabbinical teachings in the Talmud and most everywhere else have reflected this mindset. This divided logic was first recorded in Acts 6, noting a conflict in the treatment of Hebrew vs. Grecian Jewish widows that threatened to split the early church and brought about the first deacons—all of whom were selected precisely because they were Hellenized Jews.
The non-Hellenized Hebrew mind: Concrete, poor at abstracting (except in mathematics), concerned with the function of a thing (what a thing told you about itself by what it did or what it was for; “God is as God does”, et al) as opposed to the form of a thing (what a thing told you about itself by what it looked like—think Hellenistic sculptures of gods and heroes). To the Hebrew mind, God revealed Himself in what He did and said—the Scriptures, the Messiah and through the Holy Spirit. In other words, God hid very little and revealed much, but—and this is vital—what He revealed about Himself is precisely what He intended to reveal and nothing more. In other words, in Hebrew thinking what God revealed about Himself is what He revealed about Himself—just believe it and don’t try to fill in what he left blank—if He didn’t tell us, then He didn’t intend for us to know it or figure it out.
Until Peter took the Gospel to the Gentiles ten years after Pentecost, the church consisted largely of non-analytical, concrete-thinking people. In fact, the whole of Hebrew history was made up of people who thought this way, including Jesus. Suddenly the Gospel, which was Hebraic, was embraced by people generationally embedded in the analytical, rational, abstract thinking Greco-Roman world.
At first the Greco-Romans had no idea what a messiah was, much less a sabbath or ten commandments; they were stunned by the idea of God becoming a man (“How did that happen?”), being crucified for mankind’s sins (“Crucified—a God?”), rising from the dead (“You’re joking, right?”), ascending to His Father (“Who?”) and returning someday to set the world to rights (“Huh?”). They had to figure all this out—so from the middle of the first-century onward they set their rational, analytical minds to work on Jesus, the Hebrew Scriptures, the Apostle’s teachings—and, lo and behold, Gnosticism was born. And it was downhill from there.
Most of the New Testament was written to counter the proto-Gnostic teachings—Jesus, the Gospel and the Scriptures were being examined through a Greek lens by Hellenized people who felt it their duty to fill in the blanks. HOW did God become a man? HOW could God die on a cross? and so forth. Later Gnostic teachings led to even greater aberrations like the second-century Gnostic gospels. The early church, however, held tightly to the apostle’s teachings and, though most believers living in the Roman world were Hellenized thinkers, the non-Hellenized Hebraic disciples guarded the simple, concrete truths of what became the accepted New Testament.
Let me put it another way: Western-Greek logic is non-contradictory. In other words, one thing cannot be another—or simpler still, since the Bible is God’s Word and perfect, it must contain no contradictions.—therefore, any apparent contradiction is treated like a mystery that must be solved or a physics problem requiring an equation to explain some subatomic dilemma. So, when an apparent contradiction (sovereignty vs. human responsibility, et al) arises in the Bible, Western thinkers feel compelled to quantify the dilemma by cleverly fusing the two conflicting points into one.
But the Bible was originally written and read by people who didn’t think that way. Yes, they believed in exclusivity, i.e., “Jesus in THE way, THE truth and THE life.” That declaration is absolutely exclusive and non-contradictory. If someone said, “There is an additional way to the Father,” it would be rejected out of hand. But their overall thought process was markedly non-Greek—they didn’t hold to a mandate of non-contradiction, especially when it involved revelations from God. Their manner of logic has been labeled ancient dialectical thought.
But conflicting issues like sovereignty vs. choice make Greek-thinkers say, “you can’t have both—and since there are no contradictions in the Bible, it must be one way or the other.” But the Hebrews thought differently, in an Eastern manner, where two apparent contradictory revelations from God could coexist peacefully on the same page. Both would be true because they were revealed by God (so they must be true) and therefore cannot contradict at all. The connection between the two is not missing, but unseen—it’s there, existing in God, but He hasn’t revealed it.
Western intellectual high-mindedness typically rejects this sort of simplistic thinking—it’s just how we are. But the Hebrew mind never concerned itself about such things—if God said things were a certain way, then they just were—God hasn’t tasked us or given us permission to tie up loose ends. His Word is a revelation, not necessarily an explanation, and certainly not a puzzle book to hide His mind.
Remember—the Bible was written simply for simple people to understand, not for the intellectual elite. Jewish peasants understood it, as did children, slaves and the illiterate—it was the theologians who expressed the greatest confusion about His message and the Scriptures.
Western analytical thinking about the Scriptures hasn’t deepened our understanding as much as it has complicated it. Submitting God to our logic makes Him the object of our investigations, but like the Hebrews, submitting our understanding to His revelation of Himself makes Him the subject of the whole universe. And that is tremendous.