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April 16, 2025 |
| The 40,000-Foot View | ||
This study is called The 40,000-foot View. That's an expression that is used to describe very high-level views, not just views of places but also views of texts or topics. That's how we'll use it in this study.
When you travel by air, the airplane usually reaches an altitude of 33,000 to 40,000 feet. There are smaller planes that can't fly that high because they aren't pressurized, but commercial airplanes usually travel that high.
At that altitude, if you have a window seat, the world looks very different. If you look up, the sky above you is dark blue, almost black. That's because the atmosphere gives the sky its blue color, and there isn't much atmosphere above the plane.
If you look straight out the window, you see nothing, or maybe you see some clouds.
If you look down, you can see vast areas of the Earth. The only way you would know you are flying over mountains is if someone told you. You can't tell from what you see because the mountains seem small. Their tall peaks are too small to be seen. Their pyramid shape is just a bump.
The picture you saw on the title page was of the Swiss Alps. Notice how the height of those majestic mountains is not seen.
But, honestly, I have to accept the photographer's claim that this picture is of the Swiss Alps. I have no way to know for sure. It could be some other mountains. Really, if I hadn't been told it is a picture of mountains, I couldn't even be sure of that.
Another thing you don't notice through your window is the cities. There are none. They are still there, of course, but you are too high up to see any details that you could identify as a city.
When you land, what can you say about the view to a person who has never flown on an airplane? Well, not much. You can tell him how different it is, but it would be hard for him to grasp it and relate to it. You certainly can't tell him anything that would be useful to him. Everything that he saw on the ground was unseeable in your view. You can't tell him about the golf course, the traffic congestion, or anything else that might be of benefit to him.
In Christianity, there are some 40,000-foot statements about the Bible or God. These statements suffer from the same problems as the airplane passenger's view. We'll look at some of those statements.
I saw the title of a video called "The Entire Bible is About Christ." That title was all I needed to know I could save myself the time I could have spent listening to it.
Reducing the entire Bible to 6 words is like the 40,000-foot view from an airplane. All the details are lost.
Those 6 words, like the description of what is seen from the airplane, are unrelatable to a person who doesn't already know this experience. There is no interpretive reference, so it isn't even clear what the 6 words mean. For example, when the Bible talks about Satan, how is that about Christ? Without a way to understand what "About Christ" means, you're lost.
Therefore, those 6 words are not useful to anyone who doesn't know how to interpret them. How is Daniel-in-the-lion's-den about Jesus? What is the connection that would make the statement bring new enlightenment to the hearer of that story? Or, what is the connection to the woman who was raped to death in Judges 19? How do you say the Bible is about Christ there? We have to fear the connection is no more than some lame idea like, "Jesus was working in the background". That is so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, and so universally true that it isn't worth saying in any particular context.
I've seen other pastors make this statement, and other videos convey that message. This proliferation occurs because many pastors say this statement was a revelation from God while they were in seminary. Given that the 6 words are useless, I'm more likely to think they come from a different source.
There is also a problem with the derivation of the idea. In order to make a blanket statement about the entire Bible, surely the person making the statement must understand the entire Bible correctly. If not, how is it possible to know that the statement is true? Perhaps with a deeper understanding, a word or two might be added to the statement to cover something that was missed. But when we look at other videos made by the person making this statement, we see that he does not understand the entire Bible. One of the people I saw making this statement was a Calvinist, which we know is wrong. Then, when we compare two people who make the statement, we find they disagree about their understanding of the Bible. We have no reason to trust these people's statements. They do not understand the entire Bible.
A summary like this is essentially a paraphrase of the Bible. Like all paraphrased translations of the Bible, the person doing the paraphrase is expected to correctly interpret the words of the Bible. But we all interpret the words we read through our existing understanding. This person may have a misunderstanding or two and, therefore, is making a false statement.
Really, this statement has more in common with a stoned hippie making a statement that seems profound. His stoned friend says, "Yeah, man. That's deep." But if they make the mistake of writing down the profound statement, the morning's light will show it to be foolish. I've heard from people who have done this.
This is not the only statement like this. This kind of statement comes in different scopes and forms. The common factor they have is excessive summation, reducing a text down to a much smaller text. For example, the statement, "This Bible Book is About … something." The "something" is often some big thing like salvation, truth, godliness, etc.. But, can any Bible book be reduced like that?
Instead of excessively summarizing the words in the Bible, you can also see cases where the time to read or hear the Bible is excessively compressed. That leads to titles like "The Entire Bible Explained in Less Than 60 Seconds"
So, these statements lack any details and lack an interpretive reference to show how to apply them to the Bible. This makes it useless. We have no reason to believe the person making the statement has sufficient understanding of the Bible to be trusted. Worse, the statement may be the result of a misunderstanding by the person. The statement could simply be wrong. Finally, the statement is so reduced that there is no way to check its validity. We don't know how the person got to this summary?
A theme is a message the author has that ties the book together. Themes have a similar problem to these statements.
The people who study the Bible professionally want to believe that every book of the Bible has an overarching theme that guides the book. I'm guessing, but I think they want this because that's how they write their own books. They start with a theme and break that into pieces that become chapters. Similarly, they break the chapters down into sections. This is how we are taught to write non-fiction books. That's a thematic book. As a reader of a thematic book, you should be able to recognize the theme once you've read the book.
But books can be written in other ways. They can be written chronologically. That is, in time order. The first event first, then the second event, then the third event. The creation account in the first chapter of Genesis is strictly chronological.
A book can also be written as a stream-of-consciousness. That is, in the order the thoughts came into the author's head. These other ways of writing do not make it possible to derive a useful theme. That's because the author didn't have that in mind. So, any theme that someone finds is made up.
We also recognize that the books of the Bible were not authored by men, but by God. The men were only working the pen. We can't assume that God thinks like a man.
Many of the epistles are plainly stream-of-consciousness writings. The author starts with a topic, then moves on to his next topic, then on to his next topic. The Bible's authors segue smoothly from topic to topic, so you don't see sudden shifts from topic to topic. The epistle to the Hebrews is this way. He is aware of the problems the Hebrews are having, and he addresses the problems one by one. If you were to try to come up with a theme for it, you would get something like, "the author addresses the problems in the Hebrews church." That isn't really a theme.
1st Corinthians is also a stream-of-consciousness writing. Paul works his way through the many problems with that church.
I knew there would be people who were certain there was a theme to the book, so I did a search and selected the first two themes I found. I found what I expected. The two themes contradict.
One says Christian life, but the other says church life. One refers to a relationship, but the other refers to an application. Though they don't say much, they are not the same.
But, notice how these themes say nothing useful to the listener. Really, they don't say anything. Think about that second theme, "application of the Gospel to all areas of church life." That could be the theme for all of the epistles. No one is helped by this theme.
The reason the themes for this book are so useless is that the book isn't a thematic work. Nonetheless, some people are determined to find a theme to it.
I've even seen this drive to have and use a theme cause a problem. Believing there is a theme can lead you astray. If you believe you have found the theme for a book and you try to understand that book according to the theme, you can miss parts of the book that do not fit into the theme.
There is another area where this problem occurs.
There are people who desire to understand God's plan for humanity, generally and specifically, how he works with his people. They look at what God has done in the past in order to understand his plan. They have come up with more than one idea. That's a problem. Names have been given to these ideas.
The first was Dispensationalism, which came about in the 1850s. There is no evidence before that of anyone trying to do this study. After that came Covenant Theology, and later came New Covenant Theology.
To give you an idea of what these people are discussing, I'll describe Dispensationalism. I won't describe the others because that would validate all of them.
Dispensationalism understands that "[Bible] history is divided into multiple ages called ‘dispensations' in which God interacts with his chosen people in different ways - Wikipedia". So, in each of these ages, God dispenses laws, writings, or whatever to the people and interacts with them in a particular way.
These are just the ideas of men. There is no biblical support for thinking at this level. No Biblical person discusses ideas like this.
The closest thing we see in the Bible is the apostles saying that they were then in the end-times, and the next event would be the return of Jesus. That is sort of dividing history into sections. Dispensationalists do not refer to this current time in the way that the apostles did. Instead, they refer to it as the Church Age or the Age of Grace, a phrase the apostles do not use. These different names show that, even among Dispensationalists, there is no agreement about how history should be broken into ages, with some breaking it into 3, 4, 7, or 8 ages.
Even if one of these ideas is correct, what good is that to anyone? Can we understand the Bible better because of it? No. Can we live holier lives by its guidance? No. Can we bring more unbelievers into the fold with it? Certainly not.
At this time, now, we are near the end of the end-times, when God's plan will be completed. How does knowing what he has done in the past help us now? It doesn't.
I don't mean to say that all summarizations are. Some can be very good.
We've seen that these very high-level, 40,000-foot views summarize too much into too little. They become useless because of that.
But, if you summarize less, you can produce something that is very useful. One of these is an outline.
Many parts of the Bible are long teachings. When read verse-by-verse, it's difficult to follow the line of the author's thinking. Breaking the text into groups of related verses and summarizing those verses can produce a useful aid to understanding the author's words.
This is different from what we have discussed so far because the individual summaries refer to the verses they summarize. A person can read those verses for more detail or to see if the summary is valid.
Earlier, we saw the excessive summary called "The Entire Bible is About Christ". If it listed the verses it covered, it would say Genesis 1:1 through Revelation 22:21. As discussed earlier, it isn't reasonable to read all those verses, the entire Bible, to validate the summary.
I'll summarize what I've said and conclude with a couple of points. It's funny to have a summary because we've been talking about excessive summarization. But with this summary, you can check with the original text to verify.
I've used some examples and talked a lot about how summarizing too much text produces something with no value because the summary loses its connection to the text. You couldn't take any part of the summary and say, "Here; this is where the Bible says that." With that connection broken, you either can't trust the summary or you have to trust the summary because you trust its author. But we've also shown that the authors of these summaries do not have a complete and correct understanding of the Bible.
If the problem is that they are summarizing excessively, how much text is too much text? There is no exact answer to that question. Each person needs to judge for himself. The questions to ask yourself are:
Does this summary help you (and other Christians) in any way, or are you just baffled about how to make use of that summary? It isn't so much about whether the summary is right or wrong, but whether it is useful. Another question to ask is whether another person can reasonably read the summarized verses and come to the same summary. We've seen that different authors have come to different summaries while using the same text.
The same problem of a summary having no value is true of summarizing different topics together - which these authors do. If one topic is called red and another is blue, the result may be a summary that is neither red nor blue but something very different from both.
The author may be a well-known person and may think he has done a wonderful thing, and tell others that he has. But the test is whether it edifies God's people.
Also, summarizing so much that it becomes disconnected from the original text presents a danger that too much of the author's own thinking is going into the summary. We talked about that.
Finally - summaries like these are academic exercises for the sake of academics. Maybe they impress other academics.
They don't achieve anything that Jesus called us to do. They don't spread the Gospel, and they don't strengthen believers.
Be careful. Watch for things like this. In Paul's letter to Titus, chapter 3, verse 9, he says:
But abstain from foolish debates, from contentions and from the contests of the Scribes, for there is no profit in them and such things are worthless. (Titus 3:9)
These 40,000-foot views are exactly that.