ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #21 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Okay. That was helpful. In light of all of this, all that you've said about the liberal approach to the Bible and our conservative approach, can we defend the way that we read the Bible as the right way? How do we do that? >> Well, that's in the end the $64,000 question, isn't it, Nick? And the answer is probably not one that's going to satisfy you very much. The bottom line is that there is no objective criteria. There is no method that everyone will agree to. This is in the end the fallacy of modernism and the fallacy of the historical critical method. You remember that we said the historical critical method began because people were looking for a scientific method that would ensure that everybody could see the meaning of the text as the same thing. And therefore, we would be able to do away with denominations, do away with different claims about what the text meant because there would be one scientific method that would produce absolutely certain scientific results that everyone would agree to. And in the end, after this process that's gone on for, you know, 250 years now, that we've come to the conclusion that the truth is that there is no really objective scientific method that will solve all of the differences between all of the churches. You know, that will lead to a reading of the text that everybody will absolutely agree to. So when we talk about proving that our understanding of the Bible is correct and that our reading is the right one, we really need to understand what we mean when we use the word proof. If by proof we mean what is the logical argument that will make everybody agree with me, you know, that will lead to the kind of logical certainty that I get when I say one plus one equals two, then the answer is no. It's really not possible to prove in that sense that our reading of the Bible is the correct one. And in the end, even the Bible itself tells us that this is true. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament remind us that there will always be some who have eyes but do not see and who have ears but do not hear. To read the Bible rightly means to read it from the position of faith in Jesus Christ as God. As our Messiah. As the savior. As the one who fulfilled the promises that God has made beginning with the promise to Eve and then handed down through the generations to the patriarchs fulfilled in part in Israel and ultimately come to fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Apart from that position of faith, no one can really read the Bible rightly. And no amount of logical argumentation, no amount of debate about grammar or syntax or literary form can compel faith on the part of anyone who does not believe. So if by trying to prove that our position is the right one we're looking for something like that, then we're simply not going to find it. Now, that does not mean that we should abandon the task of arguing that there is a right way of reading the Bible. We should not give up and say, "Yeah, all ways of reading the text are the same. And it doesn't really matter which way you read the Bible because they are all the same." The approach that sort of came out of the Reformation that we call the historical grammatical method is still important. And its concerns are still valuable. It's rooted in the view that the meaning that the author intended when he wrote the text is the meaning that's most important. It's the real meaning, if you will, of the text. And that we get at that meaning through a recognition of grammar, of syntax of vocabulary, of the genre of literature, of the history and the cultural context of the day in which the author was expressing that message. It affirms the fact that it's necessary to understand a text in its historical context. And we might add in its literary context if we're going to understand that text correctly. And that means in part, you know, realizing that Old Testament texts are Old Testament texts. They are not New Testament texts. They view the world from before the coming of Jesus, the Messiah. And they don't know everything about God's plan that has been revealed to us in Christ. We need to recognize, too -- and I think I've said this already once in response to another question. But I want to repeat it here. That there's a difference in the way that we use the term historical and the way that historical criticism uses the term historical. For historical critics, a text is historical. To say that a text is historical is to say that it is a product of history, that it's a byproduct of a historical process. When we say that a text is historical, what we mean is to say that the text is a witness to history. That it bears witness to the truth of what God has done in, with and under history. And that conviction that the text is a reliable witness to history is also ultimately a faith proposition. It is based on our faith and confidence in God who would not lie. And if that faith proposition is false, if God has lied to us about history, then we can have no certainty of salvation. Because we can't know that God is not lying to us about other things, as well. And ultimately, all of our faith in God is in vain. But in the end we have to recognize that this is a matter of faith. That there is no way to prove that the Bible happened historically exactly the way that we say that it did. Now, we can study ancient near eastern history. And through the study of history we can see that the biblical witness fits in. That the time of the patriarchs, the description of the life of the patriarchs, fits remarkably well with the picture that we have from archeology of that period. And it doesn't fit very well with a later period. And that can give us confidence. And it can also be evidence that we can use to challenge -- to argue against those who challenge the biblical witness. But in the end, it won't prove that Abraham was a historical person who left Ur of the Chaldees and migrated with his family first to Heron and then to the land of Canaan. I think it's highly unlikely that we're ever going to turn up a scroll or a monument that says, "This altar was built by Abraham who left Ur of the Chaldees because Yahweh called him there." And he built it, you know, in such-and-such a year. And frankly, if we did find such -- you know, such an archeological artifact, most people wouldn't believe it anyway. And so it wouldn't prove to them that Abraham existed and that the things that the Bible says about him are true, even if we found one. But you know -- so even archeology can't prove that the Bible is true. It still comes back in the end to our faith in not just the Bible as the word of God but our faith in Christ as the one to whom the Bible bears witness. And so we must not only affirm our faith about history, but also our faith that the whole of the Bible is the word of God. Again, we began the discussion of the history of interpretation with these three basic positions, that the Bible is the -- that either the Bible is the word of God, it contains the word of God or it's merely a human word, it's not the word of God at all. We believe that the Bible is the word of God. But that's not something that you can prove. No matter how good your archeology is, no matter how good your knowledge of Hebrew is or your knowledge of ancient literature, you can't prove that the Bible is the word of God. This is a matter that one must accept on faith. And we accept it not because we believe in the Bible but because we trust in Christ as the God who has revealed himself in that word. So if we trust Christ, then we trust Christ's word. If we trust the God of the Bible, we believe that that God would not lie to us. If we don't believe that, then we can't believe that there's any salvation for us because we can't believe anything that God says. So can we prove that the Bible -- that our reading of the Bible is correct and that the Bible is the word of God? No, we can't. But that does not mean that we should concede that all readings of the Bible are equal. I think we can make a good argument that our reading of the Bible is the best reading of the Bible. That it is at least as good and probably better than all the other readings of the Bible that are out there. And our argument would go something like this: It would be the recognition that our reading of the Bible is the only way to read the Bible coherently. It is that it is to bring a sense of unity to the Bible as a whole. And that our way of reading the Bible is most consistent with the way that the Bible reads it itself and understands itself. So to wrap this up then, if post modernism has made any kind of positive contribution, it's the recognition that the quest for a universal method that will solve all the problems is doomed to failure. Post modernism asserts that in the end all hermeneutical keys, all sorts of starting points or perspectives from which to read the text are equal. I think we would reject that. We would reject the view that all hermeneutical keys are equally valid because each person's perspective on the text is equally valid. Because we would say there's one person whose perspective on the text is not equal to ours. And that's God's. If God -- God knows more about the text and how it should be interpreted than any of us do or any of us can. Therefore, we should defer our own readings of the text to the reading of the text that God himself has placed in the text. So conservatives in the end would end up arguing that not all hermeneutical keys are equal. That some ways of reading the Bible are better than others. And they are better because they are more consistent with the Bible itself. That the reading that we produce is more consistent with the internal message of the scripture. And the strength of the conservative position in the end is not that it can be proved but that it provides the only way of reading the Bible coherently. Without the presuppositions of the conservative reading of the Bible, there is no consistency in the biblical text. And there can be no authority in the biblical text. Our view is that both the consistency of the biblical witness and the authority of the biblical witness come from Christ to which the word of God, both Old Testament and New Testament, bears witness. So our hermeneutical key for reading the Old Testament and the New Testament is Christ. And I think we would argue that this is in the end the right way to read the text. Because it's the way that the text itself understands its message. So the New Testament reads the Old Testament from the perspective of Christ as the hermeneutical key. We saw that already in looking at how the early church read the text and how it -- how the biblical writers applied the Jewish principle of midraush or the technique of midraush I suppose we should say to the text. And in the end, we sort of come back to the same recognition that it's not a method that guarantees the result, but the focus on Christ as the center of the text that guarantees a proper reading of the text. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***