What Should We Do When Bible Passages Bother Us? | Dr. Esau Mccaulley

good evening afternoon morning g3 program lisa's asked me to speak to you all about dealing with difficult passages in the bible and i thought that rather than simply just jump in and start talking about a difficult passage and then working through it i want to take a step back and say well why do we run into difficult passages in the bible more broadly what is it about the bible that makes it difficult to interpret and the first thing is like we have to think about what is the bible itself well the bible isn't simply one book with a single author that you can begin in chapter one and work your way through all the way to the end the bible is actually 66 books written by a multitude of authors over a period of thousands of years and those authors had radically different socioeconomic understanding they had different they had different um places in society they had different problems they were going through different things in history and so when you say i'm running into a difficulty in understanding a passage from the bible or understanding what's going on um in the bible as a whole prophet part of it is the difficulty of making sense of this book that has these different authors but for the christian or the person of faith although there is there are multiple authors of these um letters books narratives and poems we also believe that this text is inspired and so that alongside the human authors who composed these texts they was the superintendents of the holy spirit and so that we do believe that there is an overarching story or account of god that emerges as we read these texts as though there was providence and that's not always easy to discern and that's when you run into the sticky issue of biblical interpretation the other thing that i want to say is that one of the things that makes the bible tricky is that it's a part of a canon once again this may seem straightforward but it's at least important to put out um at the beginning once you put a letter or a story or a poem next to another story letter or poem that changes its meaning not in a sense that it becomes something different it just enters into a conversation so you just imagine if you and two of your friends are talking you may talk one way and then you bring that third person into the conversation that changes the whole dynamic and so what you have then is not simply books that are interpret that are um potentially tricky on their own it's about what happens when you put them in a conversation with one another so for example what does it mean that we start the new testament with the book of matthew and the old testament ends the malachi that creates a certain kind of conversation that means that you hear malachi differently because you know it's followed by what occurs in the new testament and so part of making sense of the bible is understanding that it is 66 books written over a long period of time with different authors and different issues that we believe ultimately was under the superintendence of the holy spirit in some form and so then you say well then okay then i understand all of that but i still have problems understanding what it means now we got to get to um another important issue or something we need to think about well like well what kind of problem with the bible could we have right one of them could be a problem that i am misunderstanding the genre and i'm applying something in a way that it was never meant to be applied so let me give you an example wisdom literature things like proverbs or things are things that are generally true about how the world works so the proverb may say if you get up early in the morning you work hard you'll succeed now that's generally true right it doesn't mean that every single time you do those things you're guaranteed a result and so if you have a passage like says if you train a child in the way of the lord when they grow up they remain you know faithful you're going to say i did that i did exactly what this proverb said and i didn't get the result that i wanted well that's a that's a genre problem right the other one another example of that is something like the psalms the psalms are ultimately songs or prayers to god and when you're singing or you're praying or you're talking to god part of the the point of it is you can be honest about what's going on in your life and so if you see a song that says you know i want to smash all of my enemies and toss them off the bridge it doesn't mean that you should actually go out and find your enemies smash them and toss him across the bridge this is what the psalmist is saying to god about his lived experience what matters so much in that context is not so much what the psalm says but how god answers and so you have all of these passages in the psalm it's about vengeance upon one's enemies but for the christian we understand how does god answer those prayers he answers those prayers by sending his son to die for the sins of the world so that ultimately the vengeance of the new testament that sometimes emerges in the psalter is answered by god's own love and so sometimes you have the problem of i'm taking a a genre and i'm missing i'm misapplying it another common problem is you take something that's related to israel and then you apply it to you or america or whatever so you have something like um if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray then i will heal the land well that was because god was making this statement about the covenant that he had made with israel and the idea in the old covenant was that if israel was obedient to god god would bless them if they israel was disobedient to god then they would be punished and so in the old testament if the people of israel humbled themselves and prayed god promised them crops food all of these things now does that same promise hold true in the new testament no what do you get when you're a christian you get jesus that is what you get in the new covenant so you can't take this if we humble ourselves and pray and then directly apply it to the united states or even have the idea that if we simply do these things god is going to bless us that's a similar kind of idea that was much more prominent in the old covenant than it is common in the new covenant in the new covenant the blessing that is promised to the christian is the spirit and the transformation of life and even someone like peter gets confused about this because peter goes you know god jesus is walking and he says you know um whoever whoever um wants to follow us take up his cross and he who saves his life will lose it and all these things and peter hears about this and peter goes well hold on we left all of this stuff to follow you why aren't we going to get these blessings peter's still thinking in the old covenant context and jesus is explaining to peter that this is not how things are going to go here and so another kind of interpretive problem is we we we applying old covenant ideas to a new covenant context so let's say that the problem isn't one of genre my genre isn't messed up but that um well actually can i give one more i get one more history one um here's another genre mistake that people often make they will take something that is descriptive and they'll make it prescriptive and so you see um throughout the old testament for example um you see all of the multiple lives of the patriarchs in something like the book of genesis we go oh well then the bible has abraham having multiple lives abraham was mad at the god's own heart or whatever they would have multiple wives therefore we should be able to do what we want here's the problem in every single case when you look at it look at every single time there are multiple wives in the old testament in almost every single case this goes poorly it is not the case that these women are sitting around going this is amazing i love sharing my husband and the husband is going this is amazing everybody gets along well actually what you see is in every case there's you see the competition division and suffering and so what you should learn from reading those historical narratives is god was gracious to people despite their sin not their sin is something they must be justified and for that reason you can say i don't need to find a way to justify abraham selling his wife off so they can get into egypt you could say that was utterly wicked but nonetheless god was merciful to him and so once again we have to be careful that we're not looking at a descriptive narrative of what occurred and take from that this is the way that we should behave now let's say then that you don't have a a genre problem that you actually have an interpretation problem well then you got to ask yourself the following things what have i actually done to understand this passage most of the time we will hear something and we'll read it in the bible and it will bother us and then we'll kind of move on we'll forget about it then a year later we come back to that same passage we read it and then it bothers us and then we kind of turn on the internet and we see a meme about it and that means talks about the same problem that you have you go yeah this part of the bible doesn't make sense what i would say to people is there are scholars who devote their lives to understanding the context the history the language and the world into which the older new testament was written and they've often written about these things and so if you have a problem is it simply i came across something i didn't understand i looked at a paragraph in my study bible and it didn't help me and therefore i thought there was no answer or have you actually studied the problem there are 2 000 years of christian reflection on these texts how much of it have you read and too often i hear people and i see it all of the time where like they have these radio interviews and like these kind of radio dj's think they have oh here's this problem with the bible that i've never really considered and they think they've they've undone christianity as if nobody's ever considered the problem of evil or no one's ever figured about suffering so what i would encourage you to do is to say i'm going to actually if i'm a christian and i'm going to wrestle with something that really bothers me i'm going to take the time to read the best minds throughout the church history about this topic and see if on the other side of that i come to some better understanding now let's say that the issue then so like so what i'm saying is there's a couple of things have i studied it or have i simply memed it have i actually opened up a biblical commentary and read what two or three scholars have said have i looked throughout the history of the church and figured out how they dealt with the issue have i read whole books devoted to the topic or did i just get my getting my feelings and then tossed the bible aside now sometimes the problem isn't a part of the interpretation of the passage that you understand clearly what the passage says and that's what bothers you and that's actually good news because that means you're doing theology and this is what i mean as we read through the the entirety of the biblical story and we spend time as christians we eventually begin to get some kind of at least vague understanding of who god is who jesus is what the church should be doing and then once we get that we we tend to order passages in keeping with what what our theology is and when we run across something that that seems to violate this understanding of god that we developed then what we're saying is this passage is in conflict with my theology which means you're doing systematic theology which is actually good now when you when you run across a theological problem these are the kinds of things that i would ask myself is this the kind of problem that god actually wants me to solve so one prime example here is something like the conquest narratives right the christian reads the stories of people coming in the the the slaughter of the canaanites and the question is is there an answer to that question that gets rid of this deep sense of unease that i feel with the biblical text i don't think there is i think that part of or even you say something like the sacrifice of isaac where you come to this this story and god's about to like kill abraham's about to kill isaac and then he stopped at the last minute is there like a a answer to that question that's going to make me feel good well no i don't think that there is in the sense that you can say i may understand this text enough to be able to continue to function as a christian but it does mean that this question is answered to my satisfaction and sometimes what it means to be a christian is to live in that tension and to into give god and yourself time to wrestle with these ideas and make sense of them you may get to the point of saying i may never understand this passage but that doesn't mean that god hasn't shown me enough information to trust him and this is where like the last part of what i want to say as it relates to understanding passages and then i'll give you a concrete example sometimes the healing sometimes the the important part then is do i understand enough about god to continue to trust him this is what i mean when i talk about canonical theology there's two kinds of ways i talk i like to talk about this one is like the lord of the rings theology that means the one verse to rule them all right i have this one verse and this is the verse that defines what it means for me to be a christian and because i don't understand this verse or honestly in this passage i can't function anymore that's possible but i feel like that's kind of in some ways a myopic interpretation because we're not understanding our limitations as human beings instead i like to ask myself is there enough evidence in my own life in the life of the church and in the scripture themselves for me to continue to trust god and even when i'm in the most difficult uh passages or i'm struggling to make sense of something it is rare that that that sense of dis-ease is greater than the confidence that i have that the tomb was empty on the third day and so the important part then is when you're running across a difficult passage in the bible is to keep the broader story in mind and sometimes you're in this place where you say you know what for right now or maybe even for the rest of my life i had to suspend judgment on this and god in his own providence will allow us to function as christians this way so if you think of our theology in the bible 66 books across time and across space with all these all of these differences these this is a puzzle that we're putting together because we're all theologically limited and flawed it's rare that all of the puzzle pieces fit there's always two or three that are kind of off to the side and you go oh i don't know what to make sense of this passage right so you might say i'm a strong calvinist oh man these verses here really seems like god's telling the people they need to choose what they're going to do or you can say i'm a strong armenian but man it seems here and here god seems to really be talking about his sovereignty or you may say i am a strong baptist and i believe i believe in a free choice polity but man these parts right here really give me pause and so all of us have to understand that like no one's construction of the data accounts for every single verse in a way that's completely emotionally satisfied and i say this as someone who is pretty confident in the views that he hold but i don't have it all together and i'm always willing to understand that i might be wrong and interp reinterpret things in light of that and of course sometimes you get to the place where there are too many pieces of the puzzle that are not on the board and when that comes when that begins to happen you need to rearrange you know then your theology is actually whack the problem could be that you are in you have real theological error and did you constructed an account of god that actually doesn't do justice to the scriptures so let me give you at least one concrete example of a biblical difficulty that i think could at least partially be resolved as it relates to thinking canonically this is the the perennial question of uh what do you do about women in ministry i'm not going to solve this i'm going to give you five minutes about it but at least i can show you a little bit about my method and how this might help you so one of the key passages we're not even going to talk about all of the passages we'll talk about one of them and how the canon might help us one of the passages that often is cited is first corinthians 14 34 and 35 where paul says he does not allow a woman to speak that she must remain silent and so you have your lord of the rings theology here it is this clear state first corinthians chapter 4 14 verse 34 and 35 paul says he wants women to be silent in church and sure that's fair paul does say that but then you gotta ask she said well what happens did i read the entirety of even the letter of first corinthians rather than just the whole can let's talk about this letter when first corinthians chapter 11 you have this conservation that breaks out about women praying or prophesying with their heads uncovered now we don't even need to get into um the meaning of what paul is talking about with their heads covered or uncovered but the idea is that in first corinthians chapter 11 the question isn't whether or not women are going to pray or prophesy it's what they're going to wear while they do it there's also a question what men are going to why they do it but the point is in first corinthians chapter 11 paul is articulating the means by which or the proper means by which women can speak and prophesy in the church that means that unless paul has lost his mind when he gets to first corinthians chapter 14 verses 34 to 35 he must have some particular circumstance in mind so then you say okay then what kind of circumstance could account for what you see in first corinthians chapter 14 well in first corinthians chapter 14 he's talking about um the the weighing of prophecies in the church and having multiple people prophesying and they should take turns so that there is order and understanding there's been a lot of ways of accounting for this and but one of the one of the things they could say is that one of the conservations could have arisen as a male stands up and prophesized in the church and then his wife stands up and is critiquing the prophecy she's a part of analyzing the prophecy and you can see how that might cause some controversy in the home so paul says if you have a question about his prophecy you should remain silent ask him at home so you don't put him on front street another interpretation of this is that um it could be that it wasn't actually her husband who she was critiquing but it was another husband and you can imagine once again the drama that could go out in church if one woman is standing up and critiquing the man who's preaching and then it becomes like well what it becomes kind of an interpersonal family problem between this family who's critiquing them versus the other family that's option two the third way of understanding this is that if you look at how prophecies work in the greco-roman world um something like the delphi oracles the way that it worked was you go to an article and you were asked to and this and women would go to the oracle sometimes you ask this question well like am i going to have a kid and then they would say children will be a part of your life and then part of the ways in which you can make sure you got your money's worth and when you went to the oracles is to ask a bunch of questions to continue to kind of trap the prophesied the prophecy and anyone who's ever been to one of these kind of even these modern kind of like uh diane warwick i don't know she's still walking the earth like what you try to do is they try to be vague and you try to get specific when i'm going to get my check is it going to be on tuesday and so that kind of um repeated questioning to narrow down the prophecy was what some of the women might have been bringing from outside of the church into the church and so paul is seeing this incessant prophesy what's happening in corinth and paul may say okay you need to stop doing that and if you have a question about the prophecy once again ask your husband at home now those are three different ways in which you can account for why paul might have said in that context with that scenario of judging prophecies to be silent while at the same time saying that women could prophesy and preach in chapter 11. that doesn't mean we're not taking the bible seriously as god's word to us for our good it's actually engaging in a a reading of the wider context in which it occurs now another thing to add to that because we will sometimes say well then prophesying and praying in chapter 11 isn't the same thing as preaching and teaching well then you got to ask yourself what does paul actually say about how prophecy and our prophets work in his communities he says in like ephesians chapter 2 verse 20 that the apostles and the prophets are the foundation of the church all right so if you have women who are prophesying consistently it could be that like that means they're engaging in a significant ministry he says in first corinthians chapter 14 verses verse 31 that um that the purpose of prophesying or hearing prophecy is so that people might learn and so if women were prophesying in the first century according to paul that was the means by which people in the congregation can learn and so when you take a step back and say well then what do we see as the actual phenomenon in pauline churches it seems to be clear that even though you have something like first corinthians chapter 14 34 35 you have examples of women who are prophesying or preaching or teaching in a way that leads to the edification in the building of the church and in a sense that the people who engage who are prophets were alongside the apostles playing foundational roles in the establishment of early christian churches now if we zoom back out a little bit further we will say that look acts 21 verse nine you have philip you have you have the i think it's phillips four daughters who were prophet who prophesied you had at pentecost the holy spirit comes down to pentecost and you have um the people who are gathered in the upper room women and men who then go out into the streets and they begin to do ministry now when they began to do ministry in the upper room and they asked the question what does this mean what does peter do peter actually quotes joel and he says in joel it says in the last days i'll pour my spirit upon all flesh your sons and who your daughters shall prophesy so as these men and women at the foundation of the church the first sermon that leads to the miraculous expansion of the church you have men and women out there declaring the voice of god and they asked peter what does it mean and peter says it means that god is beginning his process of fulfilling this prophecy so the ministry of the women in acts was directly related to what the way peter read the old testament if we had time we could talk about junior who's called well known among the apostles you could have people like aquila and priscilla um a husband and wife teen that also did ministry in the early church we could talk about um phoebe with whom paul gave the letter to the church of rome the the letter that we know is the book of romans was written in corn he gives it to a deacon named phoebe she takes that letter from khan to rome and in deliverance of the congregation and so it stands to reason that um if there was a question about how to interpret those passages phoebe would have possibly been the first person who could clarify paul's meaning and anyone who's actually read romans might be willing to say that there's probably parts of that where they said does anyone know what paul was talking about here so when i talk about then when you look at these things as the canon emerges and you say let's look at the phenomenon of women in the new testament even in the communities that were shaped by paul you can see how that can help us understand how to understand what's going on in first corinthians chapter 14 verses 34 35. the other option then is to take that passage first corinthians 13 34 and 35 and use that as the filter through which you explain away all of that data and part of what it means is when i talk about canonical theology part of what it means is to put these passages in conversation and say what best combination or interpretation of all of these passages accounts for all of the data so is in first corinthians chapter 14 verses 34 and 35 paul giving a rule that then um we have to explain all of these other passages is somehow falling within that even though there's significant tension women have to be silent or is there a particular scenario that paul is addressing here that then allows us to keep the data that we have now i could be wrong about a passage here in the passage there and i could be wrong about first corinthians 4 14 34 35 and if i read and i come across something that gives a better account of all of that data than not to be willing to revise my stance but part of what i did is i said well let me look and see and this is what you've heard in this in this time what are the different ways which this thing is reconstructed what are some historical scenarios that allows me to interpret the data how does this fit with my understanding of the wider context in the particular letter in which it was written first corinthians chapter 11 of first corinthians and then from 11 to 14. then i say well how does this fit within the wider understanding of the new testament and if we had time we go into the old testament so that doesn't mean that every single answer every single problem that we have in the bible is going to be answered if we got to go through these steps but i do think it will significantly reduce our confusion and gives us enough evidence to continue forward the last thing i'll say is that for me as a christian yes there are parts of the bible that puzzle me and there are parts of the bible that remain kind of things that i've not yet fully come to grips with but for me the real struggle for being a christian is not the things that i don't understand about the bible it's the things that i do and so i think that the bible is clear enough about what it means to be a christian what it means to love your neighbor to love god to serve him the holiness of life that is manifested through the power of the spirit and when you feel overwhelmed by the things in the bible that are difficult i want to encourage you to think about the things in the bible that you understand thank you g3 i'll talk to you later goodbye [Music]

Channel: Jude 3 Project

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Keywords: problematic passages, difficult verses in the bible, is the bible problematic, christianity, bible study, Christian education, esau mccaulley, why trust the bible, new testament, old testament

Id: 1MCztZNYDz8

Length: 26min 22sec (1582 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021