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January 11, 2015 |
| Twisting Scripture | ||
Perhaps the greatest danger that Christians face is people who claim to be Christians but who teach unusual understandings of scripture. Almost always these people make an excellent sales pitch for their understanding. They present themselves well and can make their teaching sound very reasonable. How is a Christian to know if the teaching is true or false and how is a Christian to defend the truth?
The Holy Spirit is our initial warning system for false teachings. If we are listening then we will know that something is wrong. Sometimes though our warning is coming from just the knowledge that the teaching is different from what have previously heard. We can easily fall into the trap of feeling that because it differs from what we have been taught then it is wrong. Both the Bible and history give us examples where that feeling would have been wrong.
In Jesus' time we see that the orthodox (conventional) understandings of the church had drifted far away from the truth. It was necessary for him to correct those but his teachings were not always accepted by the religious elite and the people. John the Baptist experienced the same suspicions before Jesus.
Much later, in the 1300s to 1500s, Luther and the Protestant Reformers battled orthodoxy as they tried to bring a wayward church back to the truth. They were met with persecution, prosecution, and attempts to kill them.
In our own time we need to be aware that the church may have fallen away again or may be falling away. We know this to be true in some cases with the "once save always saved" and the Prosperity Gospel teachings such as "name it and claim it". We also need to be aware that the Protestant reformers may not have cleaned out all the garbage the Roman Catholic Church inserted.
So, we need to be careful that the voice we are hearing is the Spirit and not the voice of orthodoxy or tradition.
Another warning is the fruit of the teacher. Is he growing stronger believers or is he serving himself? Is he living for the wealth of his followers? Is this an ego thing for him, such as he just likes to have control over people?
A related warning comes from what the teacher is offering you with his teaching. Is he appealing to your desires for money, love, sex, ego, or other things? Is he offering an easy path to salvation or the possibility of having both salvation and living in the world?
We also need to understand that the Bible isn't clear on some things and there just isn't a point to squabbling over them or especially building a whole new church based on them. Divisions such as these do not strengthen the church.
Another warning sign for a false teaching is what I call wrinkles. If you imagine a thin piece of cloth laid flat on a table and you pinch it in a spot and twist that pinch a little bit. The result is wrinkles that spread out from the pinch point. The Bible is much like that piece of cloth. It is all linked together and if you try to twist it, wrinkles show up that can be seen in other scriptures or in other ways. Sometimes the wrinkle is big enough to become a fold, where the truth goes completely upside down.
An example comes from a web-site that I was on at one time. It had a lot of good information and was well reasoned and generally orthodox. But there was one belief that the site owner was pushing that wasn't. When I questioned him about it and followed his reasoning through some examples I found just such a fold. History recalls Polycarp as being one of the great fathers and teachers of the early church, a man who had studied mainly under the apostle John but also other apostles. To support the site's unusual belief, this man needed to declare Polycarp an evil man and false teacher.
Of course the foundation for testing these teachings is the Word of God, the Bible. But these false teachers also use the Bible. So I think it serves us well to look at some of the techniques that people use to twist scripture.
Some words have many meanings and usually most of those meanings are closely related, but not always. English has many words and thus we can describe things quite clearly by choosing the best word, but Hebrew and Aramaic especially have few words but many meanings for the words, many of which can be quite different. Sometimes false teachers will try to go back to the original languages to find an unusual meaning that will support their view.
An example of unusual meanings comes from an analysis I found of the Biblical view on spanking children1 presented in Proverbs and elsewhere.
Whoever spares the rod hates their children,
but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them. (Proverbs 13:24)
Christian Orthodoxy says that the correct meaning of "rod" is the plain meaning, a stick to cause pain in misbehaving children with the goal of getting them to change their behavior. There is a group within Christianity who reject this interpretation. The driving force behind their interpretation is the standards of the world which currently reject spanking children. The teaching below shows unusual meanings.
"Proverbs is a book of poetry -- figurative language. Considering just that, I'd say that the rod mentioned in Proverbs is a figurative rod, not a literal one." |
Note the reasoning here. The author correctly states that Proverbs is a book poetry, but then tries to get us to accept that it has a lot of figurative language as poetry sometimes does, but Proverbs has very little of that. Then the author tries to get us to accept that "rod" is meant figuratively, not literally, and therefore it means a rod of correction. This particular form of using unusual meanings of words is called Allegorization, which means taking something literal and giving it a spiritual or symbolic meaning. The result to the verse being considered is that it becomes: "Whoever spares the rod of correction hates their children." The author says "rod of correction" mean verbal correction.
To support this allegorization the author tries to show that the Bible would contain an internal conflict if the literal meaning of "rod" was used. In doing this the author again uses an unusual meaning of a word, in this case the word "beatest." The chosen meaning is "to beat to death" and the internal conflict is said to come from the fact that some children have been beaten to death, therefore it is possible to beat a child to death and thus the Bible would be wrong.
With only the smallest thought we can see that "beatest" was never intended to mean a severe beating. No loving parent would ever do that. Also Israel had very severe penalties for murder.
The rule for interpreting the Bible is to assume that it is literal unless there is a reason in the text to believe it is an allegory. This person has given no reason for allegorizing and there is none.
Another common technique is to just insert personal beliefs or the beliefs of the world. This example is dealing with the same topic as above. Most interesting is that it comes from the pastor of a church.
"When you hear the word from this passage of 'rod,' what do you think of? Perhaps a stick for beating and brutalizing, right? But what happens - what happens when we understand the rod in this Proverb as the same kind of rod and staff that comfort in Psalm 23? 'Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.' The rod and staff are the shepherd's tools for comforting the sheep. It is for caring and protecting, never for beating them to death. A good shepherd delights in his flock. The shepherd will go to whatever lengths necessary to provide the finest grazing, the rich pastures and clean water. The shepherd will do whatever is necessary to provide shelter from the storms and protection from enemies and diseases that sheep are susceptible to."3
This author pulls an unusual meaning from elsewhere in the Bible and then goes through a bunch of hand waving and human reasoning to get you to accept that unusual point of view. This is different from using unusual meanings because no attempt is being made to apply that unusual meaning of 'rod' to the original scripture. If the author tried to do that the result for that verse would be "Whoever spares the comfort hates their children", which would be nuts.
Instead the author tries to use human reasoning, nice sounding words, and the listener's lack of knowledge about shepherds and sheep. Saying Psalms 23 shows us "the rod and staff are the shepherd's tools for comforting the sheep" is completely false. The staff was used as a walking stick and to guide sheep, the crook on the end of it was used to lift sheep, and the rod was used to defend the flock by beating on attackers and it was used to smack problem sheep.
The author's theme here is that the shepherd would never do anything bad to the sheep with that rod but that's false for shepherds and was false for the good shepherd with his flock Israel. They received their smacks as needed. So the author's ultimate point is that God would never do anything bad to his flock and so you shouldn't ever do anything bad to your children – a completely false teaching.
The previous example showed a little bit of this technique but it wasn't the main technique. Here the idea is to use such a high level (simplified) view that you lose sight of what the Bible really says – as though you were way above the Bible and couldn't quite make out all of what it said.
The best example I have for this comes from my pet topic, the days in the Genesis creation account. Many people, even elders and pastors within the church, reason that the days of creation could be much longer periods of time than a day. They say that the word "day" can be used to indicate much longer periods of time, and that is correct. A person might say "back in my day" or "those were the days". These teachers then say that "day" could mean billions of years and therefore the Genesis account and the Big Bang Theory and evolution are really describing the same thing.
If we only take it that far it seems quite reasonable but we've forgotten to plug that back into the full context of the Genesis account, part of which says:
And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. (Genesis 1:3-5)
If we accept that a day means many millions of years, then how long would an evening be, or a night, or a morning. Obviously the use of the words night, evening, and morning show that the Genesis account is using literal days.
People with this long time view are enamored (in love with) with science and scientists and are trying to harmonize the Genesis account with the scientist's account. But again if we read what the Bible actually says we can see that they cannot be harmonized. Major events in the two accounts do not line up, even if you stretch the time scales.
There are many other techniques that people will use. There isn't time or space to cover them all.
There is a saying that goes something like "A lie will go around the world before the truth gets out of the starting blocks." This tells us that a lot of work is required to expose a false teaching.
1 http://www.religioustolerance.org/spankin13.htm