lessons and evangelistic meetings—is so ubiquitous among us that I suspect most Adventists believe that reading a text here and a text there, without context, is a perfectly proper way to study the Bible. We gravitate to texts about food, our remnant church identity, the Sabbath, and the second coming, which sometimes make it look as if there’s really not much else that God is concerned about! Add to this the 100,000 manuscript pages of Ellen White’s writings, and we have enough ingredients to cook up some very specific (and occasionally quite odd) theologies.
The Big Picture A hermeneutic is, to put it roughly, a philosophy for understanding the Bible. A friend once gave me a simple and useful starting place for a good hermeneutic: “Always remember,” he said, “that the Bible was written not by God, but about God.” Seen that way, we must look at the big story about God. While looking at the big picture—the whole story, not just a part of it—it becomes much harder to make (as some churchmen do) one text stand in for the whole. As a story about God, every text is a detail in God’s story of interaction with ancient people—but not ideas that let a church abstract rules to enforce on its members.
Instead of multiplying details, a good hermeneutic results in a
few quite large, quite basic principles. We can add a few beliefs and practices that we find useful, but none of them—no, not even the Sabbath—are on the same level as the big story, shown most clearly in the Christian New Testament, which is that God is good and we should be good, too. And, seen as God’s story, it becomes clear that God’s big principles can be adapted to many different cultures, which lets the body of Christ be diverse and beautiful.
What We Must Be Of all of the Old Testament prophets, I would argue that the most theologically sophisticated (and most applicable to the New Testament gospel message) is Isaiah, who ceaselessly pounded the drum for justice. In Isaiah 58, the most pious religious people are wondering
why God isn’t blessing them. “‘Why have we fasted,’ they say, ‘and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not noticed?’” (verse 3, NIV). God, who they believed had given them in the Torah their complex system of worship and rules for personal piety, surprises them by totally redefining
WWW .A T OD A Y . OR G 21
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48
