6/5/24

It isn’t easy to read the Bible with an open mind. We all bring to the Bible what we’ve heard or been taught, and it is difficult to lay that aside and let the Bible speak on its own.

I had a professor in seminary who used the example of a template. A template is a pattern made of metal, plastic, or paper, used for making many copies of a shape or to help cut material accurately. If you wanted to cut a toy car out of wood, you’d place the template over your block of wood and cut around the pattern. The result? A little wooden car in the exact (depending on the person doing the cutting) shape of the template. Here’s an example of a painting stencil template:
 

You can see the wall through it. Slap some paint over it, carefully move it out of the way and you have your fancy designs! 

But do you see how the template limits how you see and the amount of the wall you see behind it?

This is the way a lot of people read the Bible. They have their template they place over the text and read the Bible through that template. The template makes sure the Bible is read “accurately” (as defined by those who made the template). 

They see only what their teachers want them to see.

What are these templates? They can be anything from a historical church creed to “the way I’ve always heard it preached.” When we approach the Bible with our minds made up about something, that’s our template. When we turn to the scriptures just to prove what we already believe, we have our templates out, placing them over the page of scripture, looking only at what shows through. 

Here’s my favorite example: I heard a very famous preacher on the radio some years back, preaching from Romans, who said, “Now, it sounds as if Paul is saying [whatever, I don’t remember now because I was only half listening until he said the next part], but we know the Westminster Confession says. . .” and he went with the Westminster Confession instead of what “it sounds as if Paul is saying.” 

The Westminster Confession was his template. 

What Is the Westminster Confession? It is the 14,000 word uniform system of belief for the Calvinists who were tossing the Episcopalians out of the English government (there was no separation of church and state) adopted in 1647.  Officers in the Presbyterian Church in America take a vow to “sincerely receive and adopt” these confessional documents “as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures.”

The 200,000 word Book of Concord serves the same function for traditional and conservative Lutheran churches, which require their pastors and other rostered church workers to pledge themselves unconditionally to the Book of Concord (speaking of word count, the New Testament has roughly 180,000 words, depending on the translation). 

During the late 1800s, movements sprang up in our country that rejected these historical church creeds. The tradition I was raised in even sang about it: “The day of sects and creeds for us forever more is past; our brotherhood are all the saints upon the world so vast.” We had a writer, F.G. Smith, who attempted to formulate the doctrines of our church, entitling his book What the Bible Teaches. Not everyone agreed with Dr. Smith and where the early editions were titled What the Bible Teaches by F.G. Smith, the later publishers got their private dig in by removing the “by.” Now the cover reads, What the Bible Teaches F.G. Smith. Catty but effective. 

The systematic theologies and historical creeds of the church can take what should be simple and make it unnecessarily complex, making Biblical theology seem out of reach for most Christians. 

The more you spend time in the scripture, paying close attention to what is actually on the page you discover that most of it is easier to grasp than you might think. The biggest issues we have are that it was written some 2,000 years ago in languages and in cultures that are completely foreign to us! Part of that is due to the triumph of Christianity making inroads into the world and improving life for women, the poor, etc. 

So, there have to be bridges built between our time and that time to make it more understandable. 

But the bridges don’t have to be the Golden Gate Bridge. Just a simple stone bridge anyone can cross will do the trick. I remember in college laying articles aside, shaking my head, thinking I’d be better served by reading Romans rather than whatever complicated thing I was wading through.

That doesn’t mean that understanding the Bible doesn’t take work. It does! If you were at church Sunday, you saw how complex some of Paul’s sentences can get (“Because . . . because . . . because . . . because . . . BECAUSE!”). But if we just slow down, look for the connecting words like “for” and “if” and “then,” etc. and really pay attention to what’s on the page in front of us, then we’ll discover the Bible isn’t incomprehensible at all. 

Of course it isn’t. The Bible is the gift to us from a God who loves us and wants to be with us. 

One author of a massive systematic theology understood that. Karl Barth’s 6 million word, 9,000 page Church Dogmatics remained unfinished at his death. In 1962, while lecturing at the University of Chicago, a student asked Karl Barth during a Q&A time, if he could summarize his theology in a single sentence. Barth responded by saying, "In the words of a song I learned at my mother's knee: 'Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.'"

And there, whether it’s Romans or Revelation we’re reading, is where we always need to begin. 

Blessings,
Pastor Terry

PS - Don’t forget! Camp Meeting Days will begin on June 16. If there are songs you’d especially like to sing (old favorites, maybe songs we haven’t sung in awhile) please let us know and we’ll do our best to include them.