A hermeneutic is a lens that you use to support interpretation. If you’re aware of the lens, then you can adopt a given lens to do some interpretation. When you’re done you probably adopt another lens to do a different kind of interpretation. In biblical studies, examples include the tried-and-true standard historical-grammatical academic hermeneutic that aims to discover an author’s original meaning. An alternative might be the African-American hermeneutic that Esau McCaulley adopts in his book Reading While Black.
Evangelicals seem to suffer from what I’ll call the hermeneutic of obedience where they read the bible looking for commands to obey. I won’t say this is an invalid hermeneutic, but when it’s a preacher’s primary lens for how they read their bible, it’s harmful and downright dangerous. In my experience, every sermon, no matter which passages are used, becomes a lesson of “You’re not good enough.” This lens also robs a person of the opportunity to have a good conscience towards God. Instead, their behavior is an exercise of trying to obey in order to relieve the guilt.
If it’s not obvious, there are a number of strong qualitative reasons to choose a different hermeneutic as your primary lens on the bible. We’re not going to look at the qualitative reasons in this post. Instead we’re going to take a quantitative, data-driven, look at the hermeneutic of obedience, first, because it should be obvious just how bad it is after doing so, and second because the graphs just look cool.
When I hear preachers camp on obedience, the other thing I tend to hear is that the Old Testament isn’t that important. That shouldn’t surprise us because, as we’ll see, the Old Testament isn’t full of commands to obey. The fact that the bible of the early church, the bible of Acts 2, was the Jewish scripture (yes, that body of work we call the Old Testament) is completely lost on them. It shows just how little these people understand their bible. In my sphere of information, this hermeneutic seems endemic in evangelicalism, but I get a sense the tides are shifting given the tremendous access of good bible teaching at our fingertips. Hopefully it’s a short matter of time before we can bury this one.
I use Logos as my bible study tool. It’s not inexpensive. If you’re just a bible reader, don’t get it. But if you want to invest time and money to learn how to study your bible, then perhaps give it a spin. If you do want to try it, contact me as I get access to discounts from time to time.
If you take a look at the video, I walk through the Bible Books Explorer in Logos. The tremendous value of Logos is the work they do to tag EVERYTHING to so many different taxonomies. You can slice and dice biblical data in ways unimaginable a couple decades ago. The Bible Books Explorer adopts the taxonomy work of Robert Longacre to categorize the biblical text into
- Narrative – story telling
- Procedure – think Levitical laws
- Behavior – commands to obey
- Exposition – what things are like
At a glance in the video it’s obvious that those who subscribe to the hermeneutic of obedience have to deprioritize the Old Testament because there just aren’t a lot of commands to obey. What’s missed is that even the New Testament contains significantly little command language relative to the entire body of New Testament content. To adopt this approach essentially means ignoring more than half of the New Testament.
Sometimes Acts 2:42 is used to support deprioritizing the Old Testament because the disciples “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching . . .,” and you find the apostles’ teaching in the New Testament. The problem is that most of the apostles didn’t contribute to the New Testament, and all of the apostles taught from the Old Testament (sort of, but we’ll just say that to simplify things).
In the video you’ll see how literally dependent on the Old Testament that the early church is.1 For us today, without a deep understanding of the Old Testament you’re going to get your interpretation of the New Testament wrong. Or at best be woefully incomplete. You just are. And frankly, if you find yourself in a community where obedience is valued and the Old Testament is deprioritized, you wouldn’t be faulted for taking whatever is taught with a grain of salt.
- Without getting into the detail here, the early church is a sect of Judaism. There isn’t a conversion per se to Christianity. So it’s not so much that the early church was dependent on the OT as much as the OT is their scripture. To be blunt, even after ALL the New Testament is written, the Old Testament is still the church’s scripture. It doesn’t stop being the foundation of all they know and believe just because Paul and others explained the implications of Jesus in documents that were shared among the believers.