Twisting Bible Verses
A true follower of the Lord Jesus wants to understand what the Bible really says, they do not want to twist its meaning around.
My next blog (not this one) is going to deal with a few commonly twisted Bible verses. There are people who will tell me that I simply do not understand them correctly, that I obviously do not have a proper amount of education. This blog is written partly to them. If you do not have the time or inclination to deal with the abstract ideas in this blog, then I don't want to scare you off from the rest of my blogs; you may want to go on to the next one. I am going to try to write rubber meats the road stuff. If I am not, then I need some feedback. Anyhow, this blog may be dry reading.
Bible twisting – accidentally or on purpose. Some do it on purpose, others accidentally.
Twisting the Bible on purpose. It seems to me there are two groups of people who claim the Bible is ambiguous. One group is those who have never read the Bible carefully enough to realize it is not ambiguous. The other group has put the Bible in some type of genre or category which is not to be read literally, but rather to be read with the idea that the meaning is totally in the mind of the reader. People have done the same thing with modern poetry, to the extent that many poets do not expect people to try to figure out what they are really saying. They expect their words to be twisted to the readers needs, and then they write poetry based on that understanding. It seems to me that when an author writes with the understanding people don't respect them enough to care what they are really trying to say, that the author is to a some degree dysfunctional (or maybe has little to say).
Another way to look at this – If you write a letter to a friend about a topic you feel is important, and your friend twists your words so that your letter ends up saying something different than what you actually said, you would say your friend is twisted. If I did that to my biology book my biology teacher would say I was delusional, not just twisted. Why? Because what the author has to say is important.
God is absolutely not dysfunctional, and He expects us to care immensely about what He is trying to tell us in the Bible. Yes, the Bible was written by humans, but it was all written by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It was written over an extremely long period of time and written by many different human authors, and yet when we read it to understand what the original human authors were saying we find that they had one common message. The message of the human authors agrees with our understanding that the ultimate author of the Bible is the Holy Spirit. Since God is the ultimate authority we should read the Bible understanding He is not dysfunctional and we need to try very hard to get at what He is trying to tell us. If we really care what the Bible says we do not twist it to say whatever we want it to say. We do not twist the words of the creator of the universe unless we are delusional.
A comment on genre – the Bible is composed of different genres and different genres have some different rules of interpretation. This does not change however that we want to know what the original authors of the Bible – both God and humans – had to say. People who twist words are not neutral in their investigation and are not at all likely to find truth. If someone twists the meaning of what I write I tend to think of them as at least partially my enemy.
Twisting the Bible accidentally. There is another group of people . . .watch out now, I am probably talking about YOU and will probably step on your toes. When you feel the pain in the toes, please do not attack the messenger. Please continue to try real hard to understand the message.
There is another group of people who also twist scripture . . . the majority of evangelical theologians, and they follow a respected historic precedent. Evangelical theologians do not claim that the Bible is ambiguous, but they also do not read the Bible itself to understand what it actually says. They study theology to understand the Bible. This ends up with twisted Bible verses. You can tell that this is what they are about by the way they teach the Bible. They do not go to other Bible passages to explain scripture, they primarily go to theology to explain scripture. Take notes in church and you will find that much of the time the teacher says they will teach what the Bible says and then what they really do is teach what theology (or history or some other source) has to say. Then they conclude with, “and that is what the Bible says about that!” Take notes! If you look at one of the passages that they twist they will tell you your interpretation is based on a lack of understanding about the subject, and go on to teach theology. You can know it is theology because if they are correct, the Bible translators screwed up. I would prefer to trust the translators of a good respected Bible version rather than trust a chain of Bible teachers I don't know who are probably playing follow the leader.
I also don't buy into the idea that the translators did the best they could given the limits of the English language. If the original ideas are not expressed properly the translation still needs to be tweaked. I believe the translators finished the tweaking process.
The way to get a good idea of the source of different understandings of a particular verse is to combine common sense and context. Does the interpretation give clarity to the verse in light of both common sense and the verse's context? If not, then it is likely a place where theology disagrees with the Bible and the theologians have to twist it's meaning to hold on to their theology. Evangelical theologians have been working with the Bible for a long, long time. They indoctrinate future Bible readers into their theology before the future Bible reader has a chance to read the Bible for themselves. This indoctrination makes it very hard for them to see past the paradigms of their theology teachers. One Bible passage seen to not actually fit in with theology is not powerful enough to change their theology, and correctly so. We do not build our belief system on one single fact. We build it on the whole of facts. For them to do the kind of paradigm shift necessary to see what the Bible actually says would itself take a miracle. An indoctrinated believer takes one verse at a time, says that's weird – but it doesn't fit in with how they see scripture as a whole – resets it's meaning to agree with their former paradigm – and goes on to the next verse. They don't get to the truth that way.
We will not understand the Bible if we twist its meaning, either accidentally or on purpose. A true follower of the Lord Jesus wants to understand what the Bible really says. A Christian on the other hand wants more evidence to back up their theology. The two are likely to diverge with the subject of loving the things of the world, or rather, they diverge just upstream from there.
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