Hermeneutics

Thoughts on wineskins process with hermeneutics

We’ve only had ready personal access to scripture for a few hundred years, and that mostly in the West. The majority of the world that has come to trust God did so by someone – whether literate or not - telling them a story with the hearer allowing the Holy Spirit to do His work. Now we moderns, again, mostly in the West, all literate with ready access to both scripture and historical data have multiple layers on top of a simple call to faith in Jesus. Will we use it as a blessing or a curse?

I hear mixed covenant quotes as it suits. A common example isusing old covenant commands with an underlying yet unstatedbelief (charismatics say it boldly) that the law of blessings and curses works for Christians (‘health and wealth’ gospel). Thismoves us to works based salvation like Jews, Muslims, re-incarnationists, Atheists, and ‘nones’, while proclaiming we live by grace.

It seems to me contextless quotes from both old and new covenants are used to correct people we see as erring, notably in conservative branded churches. Liberal branded churches sometimes use ‘genre’, or the assertion that scripture originatesin humans rather than God, as permission to downplay any scriptures that offend modern secular sentiments. Yay! No negative press or persecution. No shortage of condescension in either camp. Sometimes, in my own carefully built fortress, I usegenre and context until the moment I don’t get to believe something I’ve long held as true. Do I double-down or change?Do I continue to build my own kingdom or let God crush it (like in ‘Godzilla meets Bambi’), and allow Him to replace it with the most fabulous kingdom ever conceived?  

I must remind myself regularly that God cannot be put in my debt by my virtues, good deeds, my self-proclaimed educated understanding, or perfect uninformed ‘plain reading’ of scripture.

The necessary shift, one we believe God has always wanted, from following rules to a relationship with Him, is not promoted in fierce wrangling about theology. To me, Jesus is telling us that we can’t understand the revelation of God’s eternal plan to bring us home and make everything right if we try to sew in bits of the new onto the old or place the new inside the old container (wineskins). Jesus notes catastrophic results from this. Do I give up faith completely if my container blows up? A complete overhaul - whether of Israel’s thought process, or Christianity’s often poor mixed use of covenants – is necessary. I’ve found Otis, “The God they never knew: the tragedy of religion without relationship” and Jethani, “With”, as good reads for this regularreset.

Thinking of new wineskins, it seems Jesus was asking His immediate audience to take a hard right turn that they did not expect they’d have to take. The ‘treasure’ and the ‘pearl’ weren’t where they expected them to be. Having 2000 years of crazy and often fractured Christianity under our belt, we moderns may also be bringing the wrong container to ‘the greatest story ever told’.

At my best, there are still things I won’t know, things that I can’t see because of my unknown and unnamed filters and or the depths of my unplumed sin and resistance to God’s will. Whether or not I camouflage this ‘pick and choose’ resistance in willy nilly plain reading with contextless quotations or the use of my education to downplay unpopular bits of God’s will, the result is the same. In the end, I can’t study hermeneutics to winanything. The consequence of that will end in the realization that both the contest, and the ‘win’, were meaningless. The only meaningful contest was already won by our creator, brother, friend, husband, and messiah, without my help or smarts.

My prayer is that our takeaway from a fresh look at scripture, the ancient scriptural edits and the circuitous route by which we have received a book without equal, will incite humility and gratitude in our church family, cause us to lock arms as we encourage each other in our shared journey toward knowing God better and walking with Him - rather than proving any one of us ‘right’. That learning useful hermeneutics would naturally move us to loving God with all our heart, mind, soul, strength, and our neighbor as our self.