If you guys would open your Bibles to Matthew chapter 5, and I want to look at a passage that is very important, a hinged passage, if you would, in the sermon on the mount, and Matthew's chapters 5 through 7, and also a passage that has been considered to be kind of at the center of Matthew's infacies in terms of his theology. And that is the passage in Matthew chapter 5, verses 17 through 20, which reads as follows. Matthew 5 verses 17 through 20. Do not think that I came to abolish the law or the prophets. I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the law, until all is accomplished. Whoever then annulls one of the least of these commandments and so teaches others shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you, that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. This is a very strong teaching. And it's especially strong for us in the Protestant tradition coming out of, you know, the Reformation and Luther, and the recognition that salvation is not based on our works, but it's based on God's grace received through our faith. And yet Jesus says, for I say to you, that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Now, there have been various ways of dealing with this in Protestant biblical scholarship. One way, the kind of older, dispensational way, some of you may know that there's a theology that's really centered in America and to a certain extent in the United Kingdom that is known as a dispensational theology. And it held to seven different dispensations of seven different ways that God interacted with his creation. And the crucial distinction is between law, which is the mosaic covenant, and grace, which comes with Jesus and Christ. And so there's a distinction there between law and grace. The old dispensational way, let me say too, that in contemporary teaching, there's what's known as progressive dispensational, and they wouldn't hold to this per se. But the old dispensational way of dealing with this and the sermon on the Mount is this is indeed legalistic works righteousness. In order to get to heaven, Jesus is telling the Jewish people in front of him, that your righteousness has to even exceed that of the Pharisees. Now, the problem with that, I mean, what they're saying effectively is, in a broader context, the whole sermon on the Mount is not given to Gentiles in the new dispensation, in the dispensation of grace. It's given to Jewish people at the end of the dispensation of law. So law is still here, and grace is something that's still waiting to come until after Jesus is death and resurrection. So therefore, the sermon on the Mount, just between you and I, does not apply to you, is what they would say, literally, because it's meant for Jewish people before Jesus is death and resurrection. Now, I have some problems with that personally. We looked at the Beatitudes last time, and I'd like to think that the Beatitudes pronounced blessing on God's people for all time. More to the point, there's whole areas in the sermon on the Mount that just intuitively, we know, they apply to the church. So for instance, therefore, do not be like them for your father knows what you need before you ask and pray, then in this way, Matthew chapter 6, verses 9, in case you're tracking, our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, that Lord's prayer is in the sermon on the Mount. Now, not only is this something that the church has treasured for years, for millennia, and not only is it a very headifying prayer, but it also announces a bit of a change in terms of the typical way that somebody would pray. In particular, God's people are now being invoked by Jesus to address God's father. Now, there is some continuity with aspects of the Old Testament in that regard, but there's also some break with that, which would imply that this is not, I mean, even if you were to hold that there are two dispensations and I don't, but this is a change. There's a more intimacy here in the sermon on the Mount. So I don't think it works to say that the sermon on the Mount applies to Jewish people and not to Gentiles in the New Dispensation. More broadly, I don't think that there were two different dispensations. God has always interacted graciously with his people and did so in the time of Noah, and of Abraham, and of Moses, and of Jesus. So we'll talk more about that in another time. Another way of dealing with this verse, especially verse 20 of chapter 5, for I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven, is to demean the scribes and the Pharisees. After all, is it not just a few chapters later in the book of Matthew itself, where Jesus says, woe to you scribes and Pharisees? What low do you Pharisees? Hypocrits. And he repeats that again and again. So these are hypocrites. These are people who did not know that on their outward appearance they were doing all right, but in the inside they were just completely rotten. And everybody else sitting around hearing Jesus is like, when he finally mentions the Pharisees, it's good. They've deserved their comeuppance for a long time. Now, I think there is some truth to that. But it's also based on a poor understanding of how Pharisees were perceived in the first century. Pharisees were generally understood as righteous people, the most righteous people, perhaps in all of Israel. And even if there was hypocrisy there because they were living a surface-based righteousness, the rest of the throngs weren't waiting for the Pharisees to get nailed by Jesus. In fact, probably when they heard this idea that your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and their Pharisees, they're thinking, all right, I can't do that. Which brings us to a third possible interpretation in a very common Protestant interpretation of this passage, which is that this is a statement of law. And it's a statement of law to drive home just how harsh the mosaic law is and how it is impossible for you to keep it. So that you are brought to a crisis where you fall on your knees and ask for God's grace. So this is intended to provoke the depth of the misery of being under the law and the realization that you cannot keep it. Now, that sounds like a very good way of dealing with this. Because then this is works righteousness but it's not works righteousness as a real way of getting to heaven. It's an artificial works righteousness. It's a hypothetical one. If you want a standard, your works are going to get you to heaven. Here's the standard. Take the best people in all of Israel and you've got to do better than them. Now, that sounds good and it sounds fairly comforting. However, if you ask my opinion and I recognize there's a diversity of opinion with increased Christianity and good scholars disagree on this, but my opinion is that doesn't work. At least not in full in terms of the context of the book of Matthew and especially the context and the sermon on the Mount. I'm going to know why I'm doing this homily today. It is to encourage you both in terms of your relationship to God and also methodologically to encourage you to always look at the context. So Matthew's 517 through 19. Do not think that I came to abolish the law and the prophets. This is an explicit statement by our Lord that he is not overthrowing the law and the prophets. He's not throwing the stuff out. That's another reason, by the way, that I don't see the dispensational line working. He's not abolishing the law. We're not moving into a different dispensation. The law is still intact. Instead, I did not come to a polish but to fulfill. One of the big issues we'll have to return to is what does fulfill mean in Matthew and Matthew. And we'll come back to that next time. But this is a statement that he's really seeing himself as fulfilling the law and not doing away with it. For truly I say to you until heaven and earth pass away not the smallest letter or the stroke shall pass away from the law until it is accomplished. Whoever then annulles one of the least of these commandments and so teaches others shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever keeps and teaches them he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. You go into verse 20 and you're set up to say, Jesus is not throwing over the law. Now this is very significant, of course, in the book of Matthew because what Jesus does repeatedly is heal on the Sabbath and get into trouble with the Pharisees because he does it. But he doesn't see that as a breaking of the law. He sees that perhaps as a fulfillment of the law. So we understand his concept there. So when he says, I did not come to abolish it, you have to ask who in the book of Matthew would claim that Jesus is trying to abolish the law? The Pharisees, the very people he says you have to surpass their righteousness from. More importantly, for understanding verse 20, if you look at the rest of Matthew chapter 5, it takes on this pattern. You have heard it said quotation of some legal precedent. But I say to you, it's worse than you think. Okay, so let's see how this works. Verse 21, you have heard that the ancients were told you shall not commit murder and whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court. Now it's fascinating that you started off with that. There's two things going on there. You shall not commit murder. You guys recognize where that's from, right? Ten commandments, the decalogue, right? So that's this explicit Old Testament quotation. Whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court. Now that's a hard one to find in your Bibles, okay? It's certainly how rabbinic tradition understood the Old Testament. And frankly, it's in keeping with the Old Testament tradition. That the crucial thing in rabbinic tradition is when does somebody come to the court? And when is it that if you kill somebody under what circumstances you do, bring them to the court and charge them. What do you charge them with and what is the punishment? So in other words, what Jesus is starting with is this idea of murder, not as if murder itself was bad. I mean, certainly they'd recognize that, but as if murder was a legal issue. And then Jesus says, but I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother, angry with his brother, shall be guilty before the court and whoever says to his brother, Raka, which means fuel, shall be guilty before the Supreme Court, which would be, I mean that's the Sanhedrin, Supreme Court, this sounds like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a few others, you know, it's not that. And whoever shall say, you fool, shall be guilty enough to go into the firey hell, et cetera. Jesus is saying you might think that murder and the Old Testament law is all about when do you bring somebody to court? He's saying no, it's about the heart. And murder is something that we do in our own souls when we're so angry with somebody that we wish they were dead. You guys know that, but I'm just reminding you that's what's going on in the rest of Matthew 5. Now let's go into the next one, 527. You have heard it that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. Again, Jewish legal precedents had a lot of teaching about what constituted adultery and what you do with the adulterer. And frankly, they were doing a good job of trying to understand legally how to apply the Old Testament. The rabbis were pretty sharp folks, and they were intending to be careful with enacting every bit of legislation that's found in the law. But Jesus says it's not just a legal issue. It's a matter of the heart that everyone who looks on a woman to lust for her has committed adultery with her already in his heart. So it's a heart matter. And if you're in verse 31, and it was said, whoever senses wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce. That is a quotation from Deuteronomy, the Old Testament law. But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife except for the cause of unchastity makes her commit adultery and whoever marries a divorce woman commits adultery. Now what's going on there? Well, there's a fascinating account in the rabbinic documents that indicates that there was a disagreement over this very passage right in this time period by this two main rabbinic schools. The School of Shemaay and the School of Haleil. And once, and the Deuteronomy passage is actually very fascinating. Now let me just turn to it for a second. Deuteronomy 241. When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out from his house. And she leaves his house and goes to become another man's wife. And if the latter husband turns against her and writes her a certificate of divorce, etc., etc., it goes on. Now this is a very legal text, and it's assuming that divorce is going to occur, and it's trying to limit some of the ramifications that could come out of divorce if it's done poorly. That's what's going on in Matthew chapter 24. So it's trying to safeguard those who are divorced from getting themselves into even more trouble. That's, I think, fundamentally what's going on in Matthew 24. But it's one of the few passages in all of the Old Testament that speaks about divorce. So if you are a jurist, if you're a rabbinic teacher of the law, there are all sorts of other questions that come up for you like, under what circumstances may you divorce. And so they exegy to this passage very carefully. When a man takes a wife and marry her, so they're married, they have to be married, I mean, that's a start. And it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her. Well, those are kind of two different things, right? No favor in his eyes and indecency. The question is, what constitutes indecency and what constitutes no favor? The schools of Halal and Shemaib debated over this, and I'm going to talk about this further in chapel and Friday, perhaps. I'm going to talk about marriage in the ancient world and the chapel and how that applies to our understandings of marriage and the New Testament. But one of the issues here was that the schools looked at this, and one of them said there needs to be, she needs to do something that is just horrible, basically. The other school said no favor in his eyes. What does that mean? Well, he becomes disgusted with her. So what could constitute disgust? Well, if she burns his meal twice, it would be unfair to divorce her if she does it once because that could be an accident. But the second time through, I mean, she knows better. So that could constitute sufficient grounded divorce. That's the context. Now, this is careful, rabbinic legal exegesis and with probably the best of motives, because they want to really determine when does the law say we can divorce? Jesus says, except for the cause of enchastity, and his position is, you know, what constitutes indecency? Adultery. So he has a much harsher view of what constitutes these kind of things, and that has to do with more of an internal state, doesn't it? She has broken the bond of unity in the marriage by cohabitating with another person. So the internal state of the marriage has changed, and that I suppose constitutes grounds for divorce. It doesn't say you have to divorce a person in that context, but that is really sufficient ground at that point. So what you see consistently in the teachings and the rest of Matthew chapter 5, just to summarize, is murder, adultery, divorce, these huge things. And what he's saying is, the Pharisees who were the ancestors of the rabbinic teachings that we have, when I mean surpass the righteousness of these people, I mean we're not just talking about what do I have to do in order to accomplish the law? I mean, what keeps me from being brought to the court? The law speaks to our internal state and our relatedness with God. And therefore you have to surpass what the Pharisees are teaching and bring it to an internal state, so that makes sense. And it's in that context that he's not wanting to abolish, but he wants to fulfill the law. Therefore the rest of what's going on in Matthew really tells us what the law is intending to say to us in terms of its internal state. Now I'm going to stop there, because next time we're going to talk a little bit more about fulfillment, and I want to return to this passage again, but just to signal to you, you see then how important this passage is for the rest of the sermon on the mount. Because it sets up the rest of the teaching in the whole of chapter 5, and probably some of the stuff that came afterwards. It also sets up Jesus' relationship to the Pharisees. And when Jesus calls them hypocrites, it's the Greek meaning of the phrase, hypercritos. It's this idea of a person who acts the part. So again, externally everything is going right, and they are really doing a good job of trying to make sure that they understand what the law means in terms of the courts. But you've got to look internally, okay? And that would have been a shock to people in his day, and it should still shock us because it should make us very uncomfortable. Because we can't no longer examine how am I doing externally, we have to ask how is my heart? May I pray for us, and then we'll get on with our activities for the day. Father, as we come to a passage such as this, we are thankful that Jesus our Savior, our Lord, clarified the purpose and intent of the law. We are challenged to look internally and to walk as your people, and we are very aware of how far we are from that. We are thankful that this isn't the only teaching on the law in the New Testament, and that in fact you, O Lord, have brought for us salvation so that indeed as we look at the law and see our sinful souls, yet grace abounds, and grace abounds through the death and resurrection of our Lord, and we would acknowledge this certainly. And yet, Lord, we would not wish to leave aside this passage and just assume and presume on your grace. So make us those who would follow you not just in externals, but those whose hearts seek purity before you. In the midst of our repentance and our confession, enable us to work as your people, and to live lives that are holy, and bring glory to you. And you wonderful name we pray. Amen. Okay, last time, you'll remember that last time we had a little snaffoo with the videotape, we actually fixed that last time. But what I would like to do for the sake of you guys, and for people who are watching the tape, but for the sake of you guys, is to remind us of where we've come so far, in our discussions of how to think about the New Testament. We started off with this idea of an author, a text, and a reader. And we engaged in the practice of reflecting on contemporary thought about interpretation, interpretation of any literature, but especially interpretation of the New Testament. And we said that it is unfair to completely divorce the author and his intention from his text, that the author self reveals himself in his text, and that a good author is able to communicate to his audience in ways that they understand and can comprehend what he or she is trying to convey. So the text is not absolutely away from the author, and because of that, when you look at the text, hypothetically, in practice there probably are gaps in the text, things that you have to fill in, because the author doesn't tell you absolutely everything you need to know. But the author, if they're working well, tells the audience enough, and then is able to presume on the audience's knowledge coming into the reading of the text. Here she again does that, assuming on probably cultural affinity, cultural knowledge, cultural commoners, and that area of cultural commoners allows those gaps in the text to be filled in, so that we can fully understand the intention of the author. And that means that the reader doesn't just get to read the text and make it mean whatever he or she wants it to mean, but that the ethics of approaching the text requires to understanding what the author intended to convey to his or her audience in their day. And then we can disagree with that if we want to, but the fair way of approaching a text is trying to understand what they were intending to communicate. That's true just in literary theory in general. Can I say obviously it's all the more true with an inspired and errant, holy text that is inspired by God himself, where the author is human indeed, but working under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to produce a text which is inspired. And that we need to understand that text in light of its intended communication. We can't just make it mean, will we know we whatever we want it to mean. And that, whereas with other texts we can just choose to disagree, we can't be so full of it when we approach the Bible. So that's where we are with that. The other diagram that came up towards the end of last time was the idea of our pre-understanding, approaching the text. And the question was, is there a hermeneutical circle? A circle such that, well, there's some people who use the term hermeneutical circle in a not so bad way, but there's some who use it to describe kind of a vicious circle. A circle in which, because we have a pre-understanding when we approach to the text, we can never abandon that. And therefore, we just end up reading our pre-understanding back into the text all the time. In other words, the text is a better reflection of us than it is in the author. Last time we talked about various ways in which that could be true, and there's dangers there, but there are aspects of this whole thing that give us grounds for some confidence. So for instance, you guys did a great job of coming up with ideas with that regard. Some of the ones that just occurred to me off the top of my head are that, as we approach a text, if we do so with a self-awareness and a humility to allow the text to speak to our pre-understanding, an awareness of our pre-understanding and of the possible ways that we are wrong, and a willingness to give that up, that we can become more open to the text. The text in the midst of our subjectivity still remains an object. It is out there for us to perceive, and we can ask, does our pre-understanding cohere to the actual words that are in the text, to any sense in your stomach at times? You're reading a text and you go, I know what this means, I know what this is. This isn't fitting with what I know what it means. It's very discouraging, but you should learn to listen to that little voice and say, maybe I don't understand what it means. Maybe I do, but I need to be able to articulate whether I'm right or wrong here and why. There's that. Another aspect of this is if it's just me approaching the text, then it's just my own pre-understanding with the text, and that's very dangerous. If I'm reading the text in a broader community, by which I mean not just in my church today, and among you guys today, listening to the points that you make in the text, as well as the points I would want to make, and we have interaction and dialogue about that, but also listening to the community of the church throughout all time, so church history then becomes very helpful in interpreting the text, because it can take us outside of our own pre-understanding, give us another way of looking at the text, and then we can ask, is that right or is that better? Or is it worse? So reading in community becomes very important there, and then one final point to make in all of that is the Holy Spirit. This assumes a Holy horizontal plane, but the Holy Spirit can speak into our lives in a way that unveils the Scriptures for us, and maybe you've seen that in the lives of others, or maybe you have some sense in your own life that that's happened. Now, can I say we would all agree that we have to be very careful with that. The television airwaves are currently full of people who are willing to tell you that they know exactly what God has intended from the His Scriptures for your life, and some of them need to spend a little bit more time studying their Bibles, and less time meditating on their own thoughts. In other words, people make mistakes, and they're confident that the Holy Spirit is doing all this, and we have to be careful there. But the fact that the Holy Spirit is working in our lives gives us some grounds for optimism here as well. So therefore, I prefer to speak of, instead of a harmonical circle, I'm borrowing from several, especially a book by Grant Osborne, which is entitled The Harmonutical Spiral, which is to say that as we engage in the process of critiquing our own self-understanding and all humility, reading the text in community, being very careful to pay attention to the objectively what the text says, the words that says, the facts and the text, and as we pray and ask for God's elimination through His Holy Spirit, I think we can have grounds for optimism that we spiral in and we get closer and closer to a right understanding of the text. Now, can we be sure that we've understood the whole of the New Testament 100% correctly? I don't think any of us is going to approximate that. But the other thing to say is that there's some big picture items in the New Testament that are so much in your face, repeatedly, again and again, Jesus died for our sins. If you miss that, you've missed something so big that you're obviously, you're clueless in terms of reading the New Testament. And that's so repeated and so ingrained in the New Testament that we would hold that to be a lot more confident in our understanding of the text than, for instance, the teachings in First Peter regarding Noah and somehow our Lord preaching to those who are in prison. That's a weird text in First Peter 3, one of the, you know, if you get to it, it's just really wacky. And there's about nine different interpretations that I know of in the major commentaries. And so there's some texts that are really hard and we can disagree over. But there are other texts that are so clear that they're so central that we can be confident that to say that Jesus did not die for sins is to abandon the faith. Whereas we can dispute about what the whole thing is with Noah and First Peter 3. So that's some thoughts there. Do you guys have any other thoughts as you've thought about this over the last four or five days since we were last together? I'll give you about two minutes. I've got anything you want to say.
Yes. The question in short is if why should people listen to deconstructionists if they're saying that primarily I'm just reading this text for myself. They are subjective and they're loving that subjectivity, but it's a very interesting intellectual endeavor. And it's fun. If you read Derrida, I mean, he literally, he'll use the word play. He plays with the text. He has fun with the text. And you get to the end of it, you think, wow, that guy is really smart. And he had a lot of fun there. And it was kind of fun doing that too. And then you sit back and you realize, but the author just got trampled in the process. But, you know, it's fun. It's engaging. And so that's one of the things there. And they would say that what they're trying to do is they're not trying to force you into their same area. The best deconstructionist, most consistent ones would say that. But what they're trying to do is to provoke and you a similar sentiment so that you too can play and have fun with the text. So that's what they're trying to do. But, you know, the age old critique of a subjective viewpoint is if you're wholly subjective, then why do you even bother saying anything to somebody else? Because they're going to make of it what they want. And so, you know, communications just to lost endeavor. Well, the best deconstructionist philosophers are aware of that critique. And instead of just throwing up their hands, oops, excuse me, like that, they just engage all that and enjoy that. We're subjective beings. And let's just plunge right in. So, they're not as they're not wholly inconsistent in the matter. It's just a very different way of thinking that you know, you might want to bring to the text. Any other questions or thoughts? Yes. Okay. The question is something along the lines of I said that there are things that are just so obvious that we dare not abandon those. Because they're so central to what's going on in the New Testament. And the question and further is, but we don't seem to agree on what's obvious. And so, how can we be sure that something is obvious? Well, I think there's a couple of tests. One, in terms of church history, you have been fed a steady diet of the diversity of Christianity in your historical training. Christians can't agree with one another. And so, we constantly are splitting. Aside from just a very few heretical sex, I don't think any Christian, any Christian nomination, even the most far out one that you can think of that still calls itself Christian, would disagree with the assertion Christ died for our sins. I think that's just so obvious in the New Testament. So, there are things that actually Christians have agreed on for centuries. And so, we're not going to just completely throw up our hands and say, because they're denominations, we can't come to truth. That's one point. Second point is, what is glaringly obvious? Well, it's the stuff that's repeated again and again and again. Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah. He is the Lord. If you refuse to bow your knee to Jesus, the Lord, the Christ, you missed it. So, it's things like that, stuff that is just so overtly repeated. The last thing, I would say, is that even with some of the things that have been disputed among different denominations and such, I still don't want to just throw up my hands. I want to say, again, let's understand what the author is trying to say to his intended audience and do our best job of using the best methods of interpretation. And when we do so, we can approach a very high level of confidence if it's a mean point that the author is trying to convey. It's those more minor points that he just throws out on the way to making a different point, like first Peter III with the Noah thing, that I'm more willing to say as in those areas of increasing doubt and stuff. So, I mean, it's a very complex question and involves a lot more pondering than what I just gave it there, but those are just a few quick points to consider. I've got to move on for the sake of time, in part because we're still in lecture two and today we eventually need to move into lecture three. I want to draw one more diagram for you guys. Actually, I think I will do this one on the chalkboard just so you can keep these other ones in mind. Let me take this off, actually, so I don't. One of the ways that I've framed this is in terms of just any communication. Our interpretive framework needs to work for the Bible, but it should probably also be fairly reliable in terms of interpreting Shakespeare or Chaucer. We need to have some idea of just how literature works before we start doing our interpretation of scripture and literature there. One of the diagrams that comes up in every one of my classes, in fact, some of you guys I know were in my New Testament world class, and we did this yesterday. We're going to do it again, but I really care about this diagram because I want us to think through how do authors communicate to audiences. There we go. An author and an audience. Author communicating to an audience. Now, if you're in conversation with somebody, then this arrow is bidirectional because both ways. But if you're writing a text, the main difference between writing a text and having a conversation is that the arrow goes one direction. There's an author writing to an audience, and just so that you know, when I'm talking about an author and an audience, I'm thinking somebody like Paul, and in terms of an audience, I'm thinking of someplace like Corinth, okay, the Corinthians, in terms of the New Testament. But this is true, I think we're broadly as well. Here's a phrase. I'm very disappointed because dear birds is out of eggnog since the eul-tide has passed. You guys understand most of that? Maybe eul-tide's not a typical word for you might have preferred like Christmas. And eggnog, you know, some of you might know what eggnog, what most of you probably know what eggnog is, but maybe not everyone. Everyone of you probably understands the idea of dear birds, right? Because you live in St. Louis. What is dear birds? It's a grocery store, that's right, the people in the tape may not know that, right? A dear bird is like a windixie, right? Or, you know, a crowgirls or, you know, wherever you're from, you know, you get a name like that and suddenly you know what a grocery store is. And you know what a grocery store is in America, right? It's not this little, the kind of grocery store I'm talking about. It's not something roughly the size of that closet right over there, you know? It's huge, it's gigantic. You walk in and there's these sliding glass doors and there's these gigantic shopping carts and you go in and you throw stuff in, you know, all that. You know what a grocery store is, right? So when I say that I'm disappointed that dear birds is out of eggnog because the ultide is past. You understand basically what I'm meaning. Now, let's just say hypothetically, Felix, if I went to Ghana and I'd stepped off the plane and I greeted somebody and I said to them, I'm very disappointed because dear birds is out of eggnog because the ultide is past. You think they have any clue? No, I wouldn't think so. Why? Because the culture is different, okay? So you don't, some of it has to do with specific words, the definition of eggnog, the definition of ultide. Some of it has to do with the word dear bird but that has a broader whole set of connotations that go with that. And all of that immediately come to you because you're in a particular cultural context. So this is, these are mountains, okay? This is why John Early, who is a great artist in this room, knows that I am not. This is mountains for me. Those are snow caps. I was taught that by a student a couple of years ago that my mountains would look more like mountains if I put snow on them. Okay, those are mountains. This is intended to be the background, the cultural commonness, the areas of culture that are shared by the author and the audience. And that makes communication possible because I knew that with maybe a few exceptions at this room as soon as I gave my sentence about dear bird, etc. and eggnog, that you guys would primarily understand it. Because I know enough about your knowledge of the culture that I could speak to that as an author speaking to an audience. And that act of communication worked, at least for most of the people in the room, maybe not for all. That's how authors work. And that's how Paul works. So when Paul talks about marriage to the people in Corinth, he's talking about it with regard to shared concepts of marriage in antiquity, right? So when he talks about tongues in Corinth, they know what he means. When he talks about prophecy, they know what he means, right? All of that kind of stuff. When he talks about divisions in the church, they know what it means because they're living it. Does that make sense? That's how communication works. Now the problem is, this context is not us. We're not living in Corinth in the first century. That's one of the real crisis points in terms of understanding and interpreting something. If I can step back for a second and add to this diagram a second, what specifically do I mean about the backgrounds between Paul and Corinth? Well, two areas in particular, the Greco-Roman context of the ancient world, how it is, and its consequences, and in the nature of the Roman Empire, and also Judaism, and in awareness of it even among some of the Gentiles. That's part of the shared cultural context that they have. That's what defines whether they understand the word Dearberg or we understand the word tongues or prophecy. When I draw this diagram, one of the things I don't want you to think is that that means that every act of communication is then wholly dependent on culture in the sense that where did Paul get his ideas from? Well, he got them from the culture of his day because there's a lot of people in New Testament scholarship now that that's basically the question. They will speak of what is the origin of Paul's thought, or what is the origin of Jesus' thought, and when they mean that, they very often mean what aspects in his culture made him come up with the concepts that he had. But I don't think that's how Paul thought. I think Paul explicitly was thinking in terms of the Old Testament, and in terms of Jesus and the teachings of Jesus in the life and ministry of Jesus. So when he's explicitly, what he's explicitly drawing on is the Old Testament because that was his canon. That was what he believed to be Scripture, and the teaching of Jesus because Jesus was his Lord. Now, I'll play that out later as we talk about ramifications of that, and understanding Paul and others in the New Testament, but this is what's going on. Now, also obviously, the audience knows the Old Testament, and the audience knows the teachings of Jesus, so that too is part of their common cultural understanding. But the reason I put it here is just to say that that's what Paul is explicitly drawing on, even though he's speaking in cultural terms. Does that make sense? Now, that would be true, actually, if we took out Paul and Corinth and we put any other author here and maybe took some of this out. That's just how communication works, but this is, I think, especially how maybe Paul was working. Now, I want to say there's more to it than that. That the Scriptures and what Paul produced, in the word of Peter himself, that in 2 Peter 3, 16, Paul's writing our graph A, they are Scripture. Even if they're hard to understand. He admits that. Even if they're hard to understand, but they're Scripture. So this is not just working on a human level, but in fact the Holy Spirit is super intending, is the word I like to use, this whole process, producing an inspired result. Now, what I have just done is stated an understanding of inspiration that some of you may have not interacted with before. We're common in our circles to speak of the inspiration of Scripture, the inerrency of Scripture, et cetera, that kind of thing. But we rarely talk about mechanism, and so therefore people are left to say, how was Scripture inspired? Well, God breathed it. He produced it. But how did he do it? Well, it happened. So probably a more default understanding is to say that, in the time that Paul sits down with his pen to paper, God kind of took over. It was maybe two hours, actually Paul was probably dictating, but in any case it was almost like for two hours Paul was so in communion with God that he just kind of was a channel. Now, I want to say that there are times when God seems to have worked that way in the Old Testament where he explicitly said things to like his prophets and said, say this, and so all he had to do was just say it, and they were done. But that does not seem to be the way that God inspires all of Scripture, and in fact Christian teaching on inspiration is much more sophisticated that generally. In fact, often God uses that normal human means to produce an inspired result. So the Corinthians have issues. They have issues revolving around things such as divisions in the church, such as the nature of the resurrection, such as marriage, celibacy, such as adultery, such as the issue of tongues and its role in the church. They write Paul about these issues. It seems to be in first Corinthians that Paul is responding to a letter that he has received. So he's got a letter. He has an agenda, but they've also set part of the agenda, and he's sitting down aware of his apostolic role, his apostolic mandate, the fact that he has the Holy Spirit, but still aware that he is a human being writing to a group of human beings. And he engages in this process of communication, and that all of his life experience up to that moment, all of his reading of the Old Testament, all of his understanding of the teachings of Jesus, all of his interaction with his fellow Christians, from whom he learned quite a lot, and to whom he taught quite a lot. He made it so that in that moment, when he's dictating for Corinthians, that all of that comes together to produce an inspired result. That means that as we approach scripture, we approach it as both human and divine. Someone analogous to the incarnation. In the sense that these are human beings, acting as human beings, under the inspiration of the Spirit, and therefore the result is inspired. In a way that no other literature in the rest of the world is inspired. So that's how I understand inspiration. By the way, we're still not in the picture yet, but I'm willing to take any questions at this stage. Well, the question is, her husband, who's an elder, uses the term verbal plenary inspiration. These are fancy theological terms. Verbal refers to the word and plenary refers to the whole of it. When we speak of inspiration, we mean that all of it is inspired, all of scripture is inspired, and that each and every word is inspired. That's what's meant by verbal and plenary inspiration. No, it doesn't mean that the person was a channel. It means that the result is that every word is inspired to say exactly to that audience what God would say and what God would then have his people for all time to read. And that every word of it is exactly what God would have. Now, where are we? Well, God's communication to us. What we have, do we not, our own set of cultural context, be it Ghana, be it Taiwan, be it the southern US? Wherever our particular cultural context is, that is our backdrop. And what we have to decide is, as we approach scripture, not only was what was Paul saying to the audience, but what would God have us say, have that say to us today? Now, frankly, we do not have some of the same problems that you find in say, first Corinthians. There is not the same issue with the resurrection, in most spheres of Christianity today. Not exactly the same. There is not the same issues with marriage exactly the same. There is ramifications of it and there is a lot of overlap. Probably one of the most difficult texts in all of the first Corinthians to apply to today is in first Corinthians 11 where it talks about head coverings. It says that women are to cover their head in worship and it gives a variety of reasons for that. What it also says, men are not to cover their head in worship. We still have a legacy of that in chapel. The proper thing in chapel is for men to take off the caps, otherwise it is disrespectful. But we do not ask generally for women to wear head coverings. So clearly, we are not doing exactly what is stated in first Corinthians 11. Well, is that right or wrong? There are some churches where they apply that exactly. Word for word. What I would argue is going on there is that you have to understand what that meant in Paul's day. So let's start with the easier one, which is the men. Seems like it is easier. Why does Paul say that men should not wear their head covered? Well, he would give some reasons there, but why is that even an issue? Well, I will try to remember to show you guys a picture, but if I forget pardon me, I have a great picture of Augustus as a priest. He is wearing the priestly garments and he has this thing over his head. And actually, if you look at most ancient statues of priests, their heads are all covered. Now, that is not to say that the whole worshiping community with that way is just the priest whose head is covered. So when Paul explicitly says men are not to cover their heads, there is probably cultural associations going on there that we just don't understand. Because we don't have priests in that same sense, doing conducting pagan religions to a whole variety of different deeds, none of them is truly God. That is different. So that might be one of the issues there. With regard to women's coverings, he repeatedly shows that this is a sign of submission and respect. Ladies, when you wear a hat today, are you thinking submission? Are you thinking respect? Some might, depending on your cultural context, but the vast majority of people who wear hats and, frankly, those women wear hats anymore, but they are not thinking of it as submission. So, it seems to me, perhaps what is going on is that in this context, there is a transcultural application of this, which is basically, I mean, to be very crude about it, it would be, not crude, but be very simple about it is the better word. It is simply to say that men are to submit to Christ and show that is their area of respect. Women are to submit to their husbands. That is what the pastor says. And that is the transcultural aspects. And then they are supposed to have some way of showing that that is the way that all of this goes. And in our society, no longer the wearing of a hat, shows that. So the outward display is not important, but perhaps the inward display is, if you are going to be consistent in understanding first Corinthians 11. The point then is you take what is transcultural and then you apply it to your culture today, and it may look different. Let me give you a better example. One that I don't think you will have any problems with, because I know that there are issues with women's roles in society and all of that in the meaning of first Corinthians 11. The reason I went there is I wanted to be consistent with talking about Paul and Corinth. Let me give you another example. Old Testament. Did you know that you were bound in the Old Testament to have parapets on your roof? How many in the Paul here have parapets on your roof? You don't even know what a parapet is. Oh my goodness. Well, maybe that is because culturally your culture is wholly different. So that is an initial signal. Probably you know what the better question is? Then what is a parapet? What is a roof? You assume that you know what a roof looks like. Something like this. It keeps the eyes and the rain and the snow comes off and it goes down right into the little gutter and then it goes down the gutter thing and off into some wash somewhere. That is a roof. That is what a good house roof looks like. That is not what they look like in Palestine. You know what they look like in Palestine? Right here. And you had ladders that went up to your roof because there were times when it was better for you to be out in the open inside in the house. This is too hot to be down in the house. You might sleep up on the roof. In fact, there was a group of us that we were just in a villa excavating in Jordan this past summer. Right? And we stayed in this school house. It was a nice concrete school house. Pretty nice place. No air conditioning. No fans. Lots of windows. You kept the windows open because your only hope for cool in that place down was the breeze that went through and there were sometimes in the middle of the summer when it was so hot. I mean it was still 90 degrees and it was the middle of the night that you couldn't bear to sleep on your mattress inside. So there were people who would go up to the roof because it was a lot cooler there because there was nothing to inhibit the breeze. Just move right across you. Right? So there are reasons that you would use your roof in Palestine and it was still done in parts of the Middle East. Well, if that's the case, then one of the things that you have to watch out for is you can fall off a roof and that's not happy. Right? So what you need is a parapet, basically a little structure that would go around the roof to keep somebody from falling off. Something like a little wall. Right? So the Old Testament legally obligated people to build these parapets so people wouldn't fall off the roof. Now why? Well, so people wouldn't be damaged because in constructing your house or in constructing your belongings, you had done something that would make it natural as somebody could get hurt. So there's something. Now we've just understood author to audience in the cultural framework. You needed to know something about the culture and understand what was going on there. Right? Question, does that have any relevance to us today? Well, some would say the Old Testament law has no relevance to us today. Ultimately, I'm going to say that the Old Testament law often speaks to the internal state that we as Christians are supposed to have. Okay? What transculturally was going on there? Was it just about roofs and parapets? It's about making sure that you don't put other people in danger. Okay? Transcultural application. Now how will we bring that into our context? What around your houses or your places of living might be equal? Well, example, a few weeks ago, there was all that snow, there was a lot of ice, very slick, very dangerous. It was wholly possible for people to be walking up our driveway and slip and fall. Wouldn't it have been much more responsible with me to put out a little bit of salt to make sure that nobody dangers themselves because I hadn't constructed my property in a correct way? Something like that. Okay? So what did we do there? We tried to understand what the author was saying to his audience in the midst of his culture. We tried to understand what the principle was that came out of that, which was transculturally applicable even to us today, and then we tried to re-enculturate it into our own cultural context. I would argue that this speaks to our whole process of interpretation. Our process starts with trying to understand what the author was trying to convey, paying attention to cultural context to how they're drawing on the Old Testament in Jesus, and looking at the very specifics of the audience, the very specifics of the author. We need to know a lot about Paul if we're going to understand what Paul's saying. We need to know as much as we can about Corinth and the Corinthians if we're going to understand what he's trying to say to them. And then we transculturally apply it to us in interpretation, if you would, application. Okay? Now, I'll take any questions. The question is, how do we evolve the pitfalls of kind of rendering it culturally irrelevant? I'm sorry, that should be what I meant to say. Culturally irrelevant. How do we avoid saying, at the example you said, that people argue that homosexuality or, say, let's broaden it out to teaching about adultery? People who are living together all the time in our society, is that bad? Is it wrong? Well, in the first century it was considered wrong, but a few things. One is, on both of those issues we probably haven't done enough work to understand in the first century. Actually homosexuality was why they accepted the first century. And so it was, to a different degree, cohabitation. If you were already married, that wasn't good. But if you weren't, the idea of fornicating, I mean, that was no problem in the Greco-Roman world. There were problems with both in the Jewish world, why? Because they held to the Old Testament. And so then we go back to the Old Testament and we see, what is the ground of the Old Testament teaching? And is it a desire simply to just, in fringe on your, is it a desire to speak culturally to a group of people, or is it a desire to pronounce something about the very nature of human relationships that is true for all people at all times? There's a lot of clues there for us, especially when you look at legislation such as, you shall not commit adultery. I mean, that stated absolutely. The Ten Commandments are given absolutely. There's no cultural context with them as set possibly with the Sabbath. And they seem to be a historical. So you look at, and you have to do, be very careful as an exegy to see, is this intended to make a broader theme in and of itself rather than is this a specific application of a thing? And so part of that has to do with what is the rationale that's used there. So when I look at 1 Corinthians 11, for instance, and I say that I don't have a problem with women not wearing hats and contemporary services, I have to be very careful to see that I'm not just reading my culture back in and just trying to put it off. So I'm really getting to the meat of what's going on in 1 Corinthians 11, exegying it well, and understanding really what is the trans-cultural import of this text, and not just trying to make myself feel comfortable. So it's a lot of work. It's more of work than probably you were assuming exegesis is when our interpretation is when you came into this class. Any other questions? I'm not sure if I understand the whole import of your question, but what I hear is some angst that if you agree with this. First of all, I would just ask, is this correct? And I think it fundamentally is correct in terms of how we have to approach any work of ancient literature, but especially the Bible. If it's correct, then there are problems. There are complications here, because the question wouldn't it be easy for us to just have to pick and choose when we come back here? And to pick and choose in a way that, gosh, I want people to wear hats in church, or gosh, I don't want people to wear hats in church, and since we start with that, let's change the text to make it mean whatever we want it to mean, something like that. And I understand that angst, and I feel it too, but I think we have to live there in some respects. Specifically, you mentioned what about those places where they do require women to wear. There was a wonderful church that I was in in Germany, just outside tubing, and it was a brethren church, and they still sat with men on one side of women on the other. And the women generally, except for the very youngest ones, wore hats. Now I'm tempted to come in and say, you guys got it all wrong. And frankly, I have some problems with the idea of men and women sitting separately, but I have to be careful too, not to impinge, just make a cultural application to them. So for instance, for them, for women to wear a hat in service, is a sign of respect and authority being under authority, be under the authority of their husbands. And since that is how they conceive of it, for me to just kind of abolish that might be to work against their consciences in such a way that they are doing a better job of enacting 1 Corinthians 11 in their cultural context, because it is a sign of the order. Just like Paul wanted it to be. In our culture, it isn't that sign of authority, so therefore I don't think it's relevant in our culture. But in their culture it might be relevant, and I'm going to be very careful there. And part of that calls me to be a missionary, because the other aspect of this is this assumes that our whole approach to understanding the New Testament is it's about us, ultimately, meaning me, ultimately. But as a Christian, I have to realize that part of my job is to express to people in different cultures scripture and bring them into contact with scripture and bring them into contact with the Lord Jesus Christ. So this isn't missionary, this isn't a missionary drawing, a more missionary drawing would have also the mission here and their set of cultural assumptions. And we might be tempted to bring our culture into their culture and make them like us, but that's not what the ultimate result should be. That shouldn't be what we're shooting for. What we're shooting for, I mean, I'm oversimplifying here, but what we're shooting for is for them to do this, and for us to just disappear from the picture, and the results for them in their culture might be different from the results for us in our culture. It's not a class of missions, but that's where we're at. I'm out of time, and I appreciate your interest. I saw that there were some hands. I'm happy to take questions after class.