The Hermeneutic of Hair-Splitting

The house lights were down. The preacher stalked back and forth across the stage. He wore dark glasses. His voice was severe (as always). No notes.

“At the Lord’s Supper you come prepared with something to give! But at the Lord’s Table you come empty—you come to get!”

He carried on with a list of antitheses, but that’s the only one I remember. He was on the subject of about 1 Cor 10:21, which he would have quoted from memory in the old King James, “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table, and of the table of devils.” He was adamant that the Lord’s table referred to was something other than the ordinance of communion. It was the experience of being nourished by the Word, or something like that. It meant to fill your mind with God’s Word, not with “doctrines of devils,” which I suppose would have meant values of the world or theology he disagreed with or whatever.

I believed what the preacher said, and I remembered it. We always said “the Lord’s Supper.” There were others who came in with the habit of saying the Lord’s Table to mean the Lord’s Supper. I corrected one of them once, but later I decided it was probably a pretty minor point and started letting it slide. But we never called it Communion. Our understanding of the sacrament was unidirectional—an act of worship and remembrance, never a means of grace.

But we thrived on this kind of hairline distinction. Our whole system of interpretation depended on it.

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One more story. This time we’re on the front porch of a camp cabin, in the sunlight. A lazy afternoon. Teenagers were sitting or lounging in different directions, eyes and ears turned toward the teacher in their midst. He finished what he had to say, and they began to scatter. I moved forward and got his attention.

“Hey, could I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve been wondering about this for awhile, but how do we know from the Bible how the gospel fits together? There isn’t really one passage that explains it. In one place we are told to repent. In another we are told to believe. In yet another we are told to be baptized. And then it says in one place that we will be saved. In another we will enter the Kingdom. In another our sins are forgiven. But there is no common phrase that tells us they are all speaking of one reality. How do we know these aren’t each distinct experiences?”

“I think the reason there are so many different descriptions of the gospel is that the gospel is this huge thing, far too big to encompass in one turn of phrase. Each of those truths you mention (and many more) are like facets of the enormous diamond that is the gospel, and the New Testament writers are turning it around and looking at it from every angle.”

He didn’t offer me an argument but understanding, which was far better. Again I believed and I remember. And yet because I believed this I could not continue to believe what the other had said. I don’t think he intended his answer to be subversive. But years later I find that it has leavened the whole lump. In time it unmade and re-formed my understanding of so many things.

Whatever his actual words were, which I feel I have done a rather poor job of reconstructing above, he communicated a different way of looking at the Bible. The term I have settled on to describe this perspective is synthetic. It seeks to synthesize what the Bible says into a cohesive whole rather than chopping it up with myriad distinctions. A more proper term is harmonization. This shift was for me a kind of copernican revolution.

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Interlude:

And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.

(The prophet Joel predicting day of Pentacost, at least if St. Peter is to be believed)

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The shift from hair-splitting to synthesis was intuitive. It made sense in itself rather than being shored up by arguments. But as I have learned more about Hermeneutics proper I have come to understand different components of this shift.

One critical component is the realization that we cannot assume that the biblical writers are using words in a technical way. They might use multiple terms interchangeably to refer to the same reality. They might use a single word to mean different things in different contexts. They might even describe a concept in different ways without tagging it with a summary term at all. This is all just the normal functioning of language. It is possible to argue that a given writer uses a particular word in a technical way, but this has to be argued from evidence, and we cannot assume that the theological import that we attach to that word is exactly what the apostle meant. At best this will be an anachronism because every theological term has acquired post-apostolic baggage.

Implied in this first point is a second, bigger-picture one, which is attention to the intention of the human author. We believe that the Scriptures are God-breathed. And yet we believe that the divine intention in the words of Scripture accords with the human intention of the individual writers, even if they did not understand the full import of what they wrote. A basic level of attention paid to what the human author could have possibly meant precludes a number of spurious distinctions. If we take say the Pauline epistles, it is obvious that they were written with an intent to communicate clearly and practically. While I would not presume to say they are always easy to understand, a hermeneutic that turns them into intricate puzzles does not do justice to authorial intent.

There is also a sense in which this is just a restatement of Occam’s razor. A harmonious interpretation with fewer distinctions is to be preferred. I’m not sure how far you could press this as a principle, but it certainly appeals to me as a general guideline.

In one way or another the entire field of Hermeneutics has bearing on this question. It is hard to give just one explanation. Attention to textual context is yet another line of argumentation, because unjustified distinctions are frequently at odds with any sense of flow in a passage.

In coming to terms with all this I have been greatly helped by Vern Poythress’s book on dispensationalism. He works through all the subtlety of the hermeneutical issues. A sampling:

Critics should also appreciate the remarkable degree to which dispensationalism is a harmonious whole. Every part harmonizes with almost every other part. If critics attempt to reinterpret in their favor a single text, dispensationalist respondents can often cite two or more other texts which support their own interpretation. Critics soon find themselves called upon to reinterpret many, many texts simultaneously. 

One element of dispensationalism making this impressive harmony possible is a joint working of two complementary hermeneutical procedures. The first of these procedures is the multiplying of distinctions. Dispensationalists are willing to introduce some sharp, fine-grained distinctions where almost no one else has seen distinctions. For instance, the rapture is distinguished from the second coming of Christ, even though (as many dispensationalists acknowledge) there is no consistent terminological difference between the two in the NT. The kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven are distinguished from one another. And so on. (However, many modified dispensationalists no longer hold to as many sharp distinctions. One must be prepared for differences on this point.) 

Complementary to this procedure, there is the procedure of doubling the application of a single expression in a single text of the Bible. Many prophetic texts are thought of as having an earthly fulfillment in Israel and a “spiritual” application to the church (recall diagram 2.2). Whereas the first procedure splits apart texts that are verbally similar, this procedure joins a single text to two different levels of fulfillment. 

Now, in principle, it is altogether possible for us to discover in the Bible some distinctions that have not been recognized before (procedure 1 above). And it is possible for some texts to have more than one fulfillment or “application” (procedure 2 above). But one must also recognize that dangers accompany the application of these procedures. If we permit ourselves to invoke both procedures a lot of the time, we greatly multiply the number of options available for harmonizing different texts of the Bible. We increase enormously the flexibility that we have in interpreting any one text. Hence, it becomes relatively easy to harmonize everything even under the umbrella of an over-all system that is not correct. Dispensationalists rightly feel that the dispensationalist system is in large measure harmonious, stable, consistent. But this consistency may all too easily be the product of a hermeneutical scheme that is capable of artificially generating consistency by (1) the multiplication of distinctions and (2) the doubling of relationships. Thus, in the case of dispensationalism, consistency is not a guarantee of truth 

(Vern Poythress, Understanding Dispensationalists)

The Text Editors of Christianity

Weird shower thoughts. None of this is fair to anyone.

• The Roman Catholic Church: GNU Emacs
• Eastern Orthodoxy: XEmacs
• Anabaptists: ed
• Lutheranism: vi
• Calvinism: vim
• Anglicanism: Emacs + evil-mode (the best and/or worst of both worlds!)
• Evangelicalism: Sublime Text
• Mainline Protestantism: TextMate 1.5
• Emerging church: Textmate 2 alpha?
• Calvinists in the SBC: Sublime Text with vim keybindings
• Dispensationalism: Visual Studio 6.0

Better Off: Manual Labor

For a number of years I worked at RoleModel Software under Ken Auer. Ken had a little presentation he would do at a whiteboard to explain his vision for the business. I must have seen it dozens of times. He would begin by drawing a big box labeled Now, and inside it he would draw a bunch of rectangles inside the box with labels like Work, Family, Entertainment, Education, Fitness, and Spiritual. The relative sizes of these rectangles represented his estimation of how average Americans spend their time, so Entertainment and Work dominated the area, while Spiritual was shoved over into one corner with a little question mark next to it.

Then he drew another picture called Then and it had the same set of rectangles in different sizes, but now they were all overlapping with each other. He wanted RoleModel to look more like the Then box rather than the Now box. I bought into this vision then, and in a lot of ways I still do. The problem was that I never saw it come to fruition.

Reading Better Off has helped me understand more clearly why it didn’t work out. There are certain qualities to manual labor that make a more integrated life more possible. Brende ultimately argues that technology does not save time so much as it cuts time into pieces. A given job may take half as long with mechanization, but it also displaces other aspects of the activity that would have been possible if it was performed manually, such that the total effect on our free time is no improvement.

The most obvious example is the issue of fitness. Farm work provides a baseline of physical exercise as a built-in. If we opt for technologized desk work, we have to make substantial time outside of work for exercise, or else resign ourselves to the health effects of inactivity. The time required for exercise will often conflict with other demands on our time, such as family and community relationships, spiritual disciplines, etc.

But exercise isn’t even the real benefit of manual labor. Our bodies and minds seem to be designed for repetitive physical tasks. Once we get the hang of it, we can divert our attention to other matters. Brende finds that work becomes a social occasion. He converses with his wife while working in their garden. He gets to know the other men in the community while bartering labor. Even if one does not have a companion, manual work creates space to reflect, to plan, to pray. I always loved raking leaves for this reason.

(I should note that Ken did create opportunities for manual labor on the peripheries of the business and that I never participated in them. I wonder now how my experience there would have been different if I had.)

At the end of the book Brende talks about his life after leaving the Minimite community, and the decisions he and his wife have made about how much technology to have in their lives. One of the most interesting bits was his thoughts on using power tools. He doesn’t own any but he sometimes borrows them from his neighbors. One downside to power tools is that they are loud, which is unpleasant and will tend to get in the way of conversation. Another thing is that they are almost always more dangerous than equivalent hand tools, which makes it more of a problem to have people around you when you are working (especially young children). He does his lawn maintenance using a reel mower and hedge shears.

She said multitasking is a myth
You ain't doin' anything good just everything awful

(Propaganda, Be Present)

What all this makes me think is that there is a line between body and soul that is made for multi-tasking. The point is not that we can’t do two things at once, but that we need to make wise choices about what kinds of things can be done at the same time. If our lives do not include any kind of physical work then multi-tasking can only mean trying to do multiple things at once with our minds and senses. From checking Twitter while having a conversation, to texting while driving, this seems to almost always be a bad idea. (It also seems to mostly happen around screens.) But our physical bodies are just sitting there (literally sitting) like an underutilized resource. “Man found alive with two legs.” I wonder what we could use them for.

Catholic Social Teaching

As an older teen I read an awful lot of Chesterton. Eventually I read What’s Wrong With The World, and changed my Political Views on Facebook to “Distributist”. I thought I might have blanked it out sometime over the last 8 years, but no. I just checked and it’s still there.

But my understanding basically stopped there. I liked what Chesterton wrote and I think I also found something deliciously iconoclastic about using an obsolete (or at least anachronistic) label to describe my position.

As an aside, I recently read this older post from Scot McKnight about Evangelicals converting to Eastern Orthodoxy. He says, “these converts search for the original-est NT church by riding the American encouragement to be anti-traditional. Yet, their restoration spirit encounters the Great Tradition of the Orthodox church as the best form of restoring the NT church so they end up being anti-traditional by being unAmericanly traditional!” Anti-traditional by being traditional is kind of sums up my whole aesthetic viewpoint, which I’m sure I mostly acquired from reading all that Chesterton!

One thing I didn’t do, for better or worse, was search out who else was in favor Chesterton’s vision. I remember googling around for distributism and not finding much. Hilaire Belloc’s name came up frequently, but I never read anything by him. I regarded Chesterton as a singular genius (and I still do) so I think I just assumed that he came up with all of his ideas in a sort of vacuum, and that people since his time had just ignored him.

So it has been kind of a revelation to me to discover that Chesterton was mostly just doing a Lewis-type popular translation of a series of papal encyclicals. I gained respect and even sympathy for Roman Catholicism from reading Chesterton, but never went so far as to read what the church itself taught. (I did think about converting, briefly, but eventually found the theology of the Reformation to be both more convincing, and still closer to Catholicism in many ways relative to my congregationalist upbringing.)

As I’ve started to get this all sorted out in my mind, I’ve begun to notice other evangelicals appropriating Catholic social theory. I just read through this transcript of a talk Tim Keller gave in 2013. This bit from the Q&A:

It’s not just social thought. If you look at Alasdair McIntyre, we don’t have any — evangelicals don’t have anybody who has written anything like After Virtue or Whose Justice? Which Rationality? or nobody like Charles Taylor, who is a Catholic as well.

We just don’t — there is just no intellectual tradition, really, and I wouldn’t say it has changed that much. I just feel like I do see glimmers of hope, but it hasn’t changed that much. We have to borrow from other traditions.

At another point he briefly describes how Protestants can differ theologically from Catholics and yet hold a common view of social justice:

And actually I wrote a book called Generous Justice, and the subtitle was “How Grace Makes us Just.” Catholicism is a very complex phenomenon, but the Medieval church that the Protestants were reacting against basically said, “If you are just, if you live a just and righteous life, you’ll get God’s grace.” The Protestants were saying, “No. If you really, really grasp God’s grace, it will lead to a life of justice,” and that is my view and that’s how I argue in that book.

So I guess I need to read more Keller.

(Meta) Personal Problems

Reasons I often give up trying to write something I thought I would be able to write:

• I quite accidentally read an article related to the topic I wanted to write about and it demonstrates that I don’t know nearly enough to write about the topic. I begin to form a list of books and articles I feel I ought to read before approaching the topic. The list refuses to stop growing so I eventually give up. I wasn’t trying to write a dissertation.
• I deliberately do some research and discover that my experience with the topic has been extremely atypical and unfortunate. I would just be complaining about my own personal problems, which is not what I had set out to do.
• I try to figure out how to introduce the topic and my interest in it but I keep bumping into the fact that I possess no credentials of any kind.
• I write a first draft and realize that just don’t know what I’m trying to say.
• I write a first draft and realize that I am writing about six different things and I’m not skillful enough to tie them together.

(I’m the most pleased with what I write when I bounce around a few different topics and I feel like the relationships among them come across satisfactorily without having to be spelled out.)

My latest tactic for avoiding these pitfalls is to try to write shorter, less ambitious posts, and to publish them right away. I also have observed that I am more interested in reading shorter posts via RSS, so I would like to get in the habit, even though I estimate that approximately zero people are following this feed at the moment.

Another thing that I have noticed about short posts is that they tend to nevertheless be longer than I intended them to be. I keep thinking of things to tack on the end.

I do like long-form writing too, by the way, but it is sometimes uncomfortable in a feed reader. I usually toss such articles over to Instapaper, but that has its own problems. This is the point in the train of thought where I briefly consider subscribing to a printed magazine, but so far I have always recovered from this affliction without any lasting effects.

(Not buying a farm)

Her: “You’re not going to drag me off to live on a farm, are you?”

Me: “Of course not! But there are parts of our modern society that I am increasingly not okay with—social media, algorithmic advertising, cloud services. I find these Amish people stimulating by way of analogy. Maybe we need a New Amish movement. Maybe we need to reject all technologies invented after 2005!”

She smiled with relief and began to express her own misgivings about Facebook.

Better Off: Tools and Machines

One of the first things we learn about the Minimites is that their relationship with technology is much more positive than we might have expected. While they have shunned every kind of modern convenience, they are still (being humans) technological creatures. The author introduces a distinction between tools and machines, which is interesting to me. The line is admittedly fuzzy. The Minimites use all manner of ingenious tools, but they mostly do not use machines. (The author in particular seems to have a vendetta against button-pushing.) They have even made innovations of their own, such as adapting gas-powered farm equipment for operation by a team of horses.

I do wonder about things like the sawmill, the ram pumps, the Pioneer Maid cookstoves. Aren’t those kind of like machines? And I wonder how they feel about steam engines?

One benefit of a preference for tools is that even if there is a mechanism, it is transparent, and so with appropriate skill the user is able repair or service the tool himself. Another benefit is the requirement of skill. All of these tools, from a simple hoe to the sawmill itself, require physical skill to operate. “Unskilled labor” is an artifact of a society of machines. Yet another aspect is efficiency. Because they are unwilling to use the power sources of electricity and gasoline, they have become quite adept at getting the most value they can out of human labor, animal labor, gravity, and fire.

For my part, I think this is a worthwhile distinction to think about. It reminds me of conversations about libraries (tools) vs frameworks (machines) in software development. I wouldn’t come down on the side of tools against machines across the board. But despite the prevalence of machines in modern society, we still have the option to use simple tools in many situations, and thinking about the differences will help us make better decisions about which to use.