Every sound evangelical believes in the authority of God’s Word. The Bible claims to be God’s Word not human ingenuity. While God chose people to communicate His Word to other human beings, it is in fact God’s revelation to us. There are several texts we can draw on but here is a great text:
But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”— these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:9-14).
The Spirit of God had revealed to chosen men, the thoughts of God. They, in turn, were to communicate to others, the things God revealed to him. The Bible is first and foremost God’s special revelation to humanity so that we might know Him, His purposes, and His plans. Most important, it reveals the character of God.
One of the principles of interpretation is understanding the culture and the context to which a writer was writing his letter. Culture helps us understand what was meant when a writer wrote about things that are foreign to our own culture. Context helps in the same way, what did the author mean when he said what he did.
When you read commentaries or listen to podcasts, you will hear all the time the key question is what was the author’s intent. The authors of the Scriptures were ordinary men, just like us, but the Bible says that the Spirit of God gave them the thoughts and words to write. The writers were not always conscious of this, but the Spirit of God oversaw every word that was penned.
Present-day commentators often place heavy emphasis on the fact these people were limited because they wrote to specific issues in that culture. Being that our culture is different, many suggest that their assumptions about a topic, like marriage for example, assumed things that are not necessarily true today. Those writers described things that would have been true in that culture but, as the argument goes, they were not necessarily prescribing certain things for time and eternity. The result today is the question, were these writers prescribing heterosexual marriage for all time, or describing a standard they assumed was the only way marriage could work because that is all they knew. The result is some believe homosexual marriage is not explicitly condemned by these writers so it can be permitted.
My concern today is there is little affirmed anymore about the divine author, the Holy Spirit. We affirm the inspiration of the Scriptures amongst orthodox teachers. The fingerprint of the Spirit is assumed and therefore there is never anything said when commentators exegete a text. After all, we have the finished product in our hands so there is (almost) no reason to talk about his work in this. The reason for my concern is that there are plenty of critique about the limitation of the human author. Apparent discrepancies and gaps in the full narrative picture, along with our inability to explain why one author (e.g. the gospels) includes some information and others don’t include that same information. We feel led to “fill in the gaps” and extrapolate our own conclusions from their limitations. The confusion of any text is always attributed to the limitation of the human author.
Consequently, those limitations have opened the door to speculate what we continue to hold true and what we can do to “make adjustments”. Marriage is a sensitive issue but one that serves the purpose here.
The purpose of this article is not to dive into that issue. My concern is more how we treat the text. For me, biblical study is an ongoing adventure because we must constantly learn about the context and the culture the Scriptures were written. But I want to advocate for the divine author a little more stringently than most.
The Holy Spirit guided every word that is on the pages of Scripture. He directed, consciously or unconsciously, every idea, thought and word chosen by the writers to communicate God’s heart and will to the people they wrote to. I will also advocate that the Spirit of God knew exactly what he wanted as a finished product.
The Holy Spirit, as the divine author, dropped these truths, through the heart and mind of these human authors, so they impacted the sea of human existence like a stone tossed into a pond. That truth has created an impact, ripples and waves that have rolled over centuries of time so that we have exactly what we are to have now – timeless truths that are as relevant for us as when they were written.
I also believe in the unity of the Scriptures, the Old and New Testaments. The Old helps interpret the New and the New helps to further explain the Old. The final say of the meaning of any text in the New testament does not hinge on the limitation of the human author or the culture as much as it rests on how the Old Testament writings help us understand New Testament concepts. That is not quite the norm today as much as you might think.
I have heard time after time that we generally “pick and choose” from the Old Testament things that we want to use to support our argument, so it is not really helpful to us. So people are now doing that very thing, picking and choosing what simply supports their ideas of what the text says.
All that to say, when understanding the culture and context clarifies the meaning of a text I am thrilled. When the culture is used to, in my opinion, change or even eliminate the meaning of a text, then I have concerns. This is the huge tension of interpretation – what really clarifies a text and what eliminates the meaning of a text?
Brad Little
