James: Who’s
this guy?
Matt: A
suspect. I found him outside with a snuggle in his coat pocket.
Steven: What?
Man, all I had was a knife.
James: Hey!
Think of the kids, man.
Steven: I
was carrying the – snuggle – for someone else. I ain’t snuggled no one
never. I mean, sure, I think it’d be nice to curl up on the couch with a cup of
cocoa next to a warm fire, maybe snuggle for a little while, but … I’m sorry, I
got lost in the metaphor.
Studio C, ‘Protecting
the Innocent’ (2013)
A few weeks ago, I learned a new party
game called ‘hot seat’. This game involves taking it in turns to sit in a
specially designated chair and pick one of a number of questions out of a hat;
one reads the selected question to the room, and it’s the job of everyone else
present to make an educated guess as to how the person in the hot seat would
answer it. A point goes to the closest answer.
 |
| This chair would do. It looks well comfy. |
I took the last turn of the evening. The
slip of paper I retrieved read, If you had a time machine, where would you
go first? My housemate of two and a half years or so grinned at that. What
a perfect question that was for me; he was going to have some seriously good
answers to suggest on my behalf. If I recall rightly, he ended up trotting out
at least four possibilities: to late-antique Mesopotamia, to ask the Jewish
scribes there questions relevant to my PhD thesis; to the recent past, to
prevent Steven Moffat becoming head writer of my beloved Doctor Who and
ruining it; to first-century Judaea, to witness the events of the gospels; to
slightly later in the first century, to ask the apostle Paul about the meaning
of 1 Corinthians 11.
1 Corinthians 11 is the bit about head
coverings, in case you didn’t know off the top of your head – no pun intended –
and you’ll gather from the fact that my housemate suggested it as the one bit
of scripture I’d seek an explanation for first that I’ve spent a good
deal of time and frustration trying to understand it over the past, well, two
and a half years or so.1 The standard explanations I encountered
bothered me. They weren’t satisfying. They struck me as weak. Why so? Because
they relied on context. Because they cast the entire instruction that women
should cover their heads when praying or prophesying as contingent on Roman
practices of dress and the issue of temple prostitution at Corinth. Because
they ignored that the appeal Paul makes in the passage itself is not to local
context but to creation and the very nature of things – which is about as
non-context-specific as you can get, really. Because they said little about the
significance of the accompanying command, less strange and offensive to us
today but still requiring explanation, that men ought not to cover
their heads when praying or prophesying. Because they seemed as if what they
were really geared towards was reassuring me that there was no need to make any
change in practice from what I was used to, rather than actually accounting for
the words on the page.
What a handy little tool context is
for dodging ways in which the scriptures challenge us to change what we’re
doing! Well, yes, it does look as if it says that, but you have to understand
that in the original context, the intended readers would have construed
it quite differently. Well, yes, it does look as if it says that, but
you have to understand that this passage was written for a specific group of
people in a specific context, and the principles it contains aren’t applicable
to the whole Church. And we’ll hear it, won’t we? We’ll hear it, because reassurance
that some portion of scripture that looks as if it might pose a threat to our
nice, comfortable, familiar, current way of doing things, actually doesn’t at
all, is a very appealing thing for our complacent little ears to hear.
Context isn’t the only weapon that can be
used for this purpose. Metaphor, or picture-language, or ‘codes’, or
whatever your preferred synonym in any given instance is, represents another
effective and versatile option. Well, yes, it does look as if it says
that, but this is poetry, after all, and so that’s really just an exaggerated metaphor
for some far more generic truth. Well, yes, it does look as if it
says that, but it’s important when dealing with this kind of picture-language
not to get bogged down in trying to pin down exactly what every different
thing represents, and instead to focus on the big picture that God is in charge.
Well, yes, it does look as if it says that, but you should know that
terms like ‘Israel’ and ‘Judah’ can often, particularly in passages like this
that deal with future blessing, be codes for the Church. (Yes, really, I’ve
heard that one.)
The thing is, as a brother in Christ
recently pointed out to me when we were talking about the Church’s
overeagerness to deal with scripture as metaphor and I, in genuine bafflement,
raised the question as to where on earth said overeagerness springs from, treating
a passage as metaphor almost invariably results in a reading totally consistent
with things one already believes and practises. Metaphor, like context, takes
specific details and explains them away as insignificant under some more
generic overarching principle. Metaphor, like context, allow one to look at a
text that says one thing and claim persuasively that its real significance for
us now is something altogether different. Metaphor, like context, makes it
really easy to find ways to justify maintaining one’s current doctrine and practice
exactly the way it is.
But look here, if we’re all at various points
partway through the long, slow process of sanctification; if we’re all still in
need of being taught and admonished; if it isn’t the case that God immediately
plants complete knowledge of correct doctrine and practice straight into the
new convert’s mind (which you’ll have noticed he doesn’t) – then it follows,
surely, that we ought to be finding things in the scriptures that challenge
us to change what we believe and practise. And by that I don’t simply mean conviction
that we really ought to be more committed to doing something we kind of already
knew we were supposed to be doing anyway, like preaching the gospel or giving
generously to those in need. I mean real changes of course. I mean looking at
the text and going, wait, it doesn’t actually say what I thought it did. I mean
looking at the text and going, wait, this is different to how I’ve been doing
it. And then not explaining that away through context or metaphor, but allowing
oneself to be conformed to Christ’s image instead of the world’s. Have you read
the bit of Nehemiah where the Judaean exiles arrive back in the land and
realise that the Torah commands them to celebrate the festival of Sukkoth in
the early autumn every year?2 Nobody had celebrated it since the
days of Joshua – I repeat, since the days of Joshua, when the Israelites
were still in the process of occupying their inheritance, hardly any time at
all since the Law had been given, hundreds and hundreds of years ago now – but that
didn’t trouble the returners. They didn’t appeal to context or metaphor to
excuse themselves from having to change what they were doing. On the contrary,
they had the sort of zeal for the LORD that was ready and indeed eager to make such
changes for the sake of pursuing holiness and obedience.
I know a Christian who read what the Bible
said about swearing oaths, and so chose to switch from swearing an oath on the
Bible to giving an ‘affirmation’ when she was next called to testify in court.3
I know a Christian who read what the Bible said about public exercise of the
gift of tongues, and so went to her church leadership to challenge the way the
congregation had been encouraged to speak in tongues over one another in a
recent service. And yes, I know the occasional Christian woman who read 1
Corinthians 11, and so started covering her head when praying or prophesying.
Look, I know that the kind of thing I’m
saying could be pushed too far. I know that not everything in scripture is to
be directly applied to us in a literal fashion. I’m not planning, for instance,
on physically severing my hand from my body the next time I do something sinful
with it. Mind you, I don’t imagine anyone else is, either, and I think it fair
to suggest that we far more often err on the side of context and metaphor than
of content and literalism. If our doctrine and our practice never change,
because we blithely explain away everything in scripture that seems to threaten
our current position, that should set alarm bells ringing. You and I aren’t
perfect yet, Christian. And neither, I hasten to add, are our church
communities, filled as they are with people like us. We should be finding stuff
in the scriptures that challenge us to change our doctrine and practice collectively,
not just as individuals. Think, again, of the returners observing Sukkoth.
Appealing to context and metaphor to keep
everything as it is, is easy. Changing what you’re doing because you see that
scripture commands it, is hard. And the process is never finished. But still, our
Lord and Saviour charges us to undertake it; he has made us righteous by
shouldering the penalty for every ounce of our sinfulness in our stead, and now
he continues to make us righteous by the washing of water with the word, that
he might present us to himself in perfect splendour. If that’s where we’re
heading, every change is surely so much more than worth the trouble of making
it. We’ve been made clean: now let’s open the word and let it continue to
cleanse us of erroneous doctrine and practice.4 A little less
contextualisation, a little more action, please.
Footnotes
1 Do please have a go yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+11&version=ESVUK.
2 If not, I’d strongly encourage you to do so now: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Nehemiah+8&version=ESVUK.
3 It was actually for this reason that the option of the ‘affirmation’
was originally introduced, as the BBC will tell you in more detail with
reference to the swearing in of MPs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32809040.
4 Relevant Biblical references for the last part of this post
(because I couldn’t be bothered to footnote them all individually): Matthew
5:33-37, James 5:12, 1 Corinthians 14:26-28, Mark 9:43, Ephesians 5:25-27. And
before I go, just a quick note that if you happened to particularly enjoy this
one, I make similar points in ‘One Foot in the World 2: The Evangelical Ceiling’,
from January of this year, and ‘Actually, Yes, Your Eschatology Does Matter’,
from May of last year. I think I’ve found my hobby-horse, guys. Or at least one
of them. *Sigh.*
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