Edgework

Most Bible readers are not students of philosophy. However, every Bible reader views the biblical text through a particular philosophical lens that makes “common sense” to them. Most of us in the modern world find some form of Greek philosophy closest to our notion of “common sense” and thus prefer to view the meaning of the Bible through this viewfinder.

The problem is that, for the most part, biblical writers lived and wrote from within the context of a Hebraic worldview. As the Christian message spread beyond the Hebraic world evangelists like Paul the Apostle frequently found themselves in contexts where Greek philosophical thought was the norm. The challenge they faced was to communicate the biblical message, born in a Hebraic context, to people whose philosophical foundations didn’t match those found in the Hebraic tradition.

A good example of this problem came with the attempt to translate the Hebrew word Shalom into Greek. Usually it is translated as Eirene and both words appear in English as Peace. But the Hebrew and Greek words are not equivalent in meaning. While Eirene denotes “absence of conflict,” Shalom represents a much wider and fuller range of meaning. It implies “harmony, wholeness, well-being, prosperity, rest, contentment, rest and much more.” When Paul spoke about peace, he undoubtedly had Shalom in mind, but was forced to use the Greek word Eirene when speaking to Greek audiences. And as the concept of peace has come down to us through the channels of Greek philosophy we most often miss the original intended meaning inherent in Shalom.

In Biblical Criticism in the Life of the Church, Paul M. Zehr describes the challenge facing modern Bible readers as follows:

Our task is to study the Word until we have discovered the depths of its meaning and then speak its relevance. This means exegeting within the biblical framework and worldview, including Hebraic philosophy, and then communicating that message to a modern, technical, and scientific Western world affected much by Greek philosophy. A difference exists between imposing a foreign philosophy upon the Scripture and in communicating the truth of the Scriptures in a world with a different philosophy from the biblical world view. We exegete in a world of Hebrew philosophy and preach in a world of Greek and modern naturalistic philosophies (76-77).

To accept this challenge is to forfeit the notion that we can simply read the Bible and “automatically” understand its intended meaning for today. It means to give up the idea that the truths of the Bible are readily available to even a child, as some have been fond of saying. It implies that serious students of the Bible need to immerse themselves, at least in a cursory manner, in a study of the differences between Hebrew and Greek philosophies. If they don’t they will most likely be imposing a foreign philosophy upon the Scriptures, often missing the original meaning of the text – and by extension a legitimate meaning for our lives. This is a hard pill to swallow for many evangelicals immersed in a kind of simplistic, Biblicist fundamentalism. The Bible is much more than an interesting children’s story book that is good for adults as well.

There are basically two types of Greek philosophies that have influenced Christian thinking through the centuries, originating either with Plato or Aristotle. In Platonism, this world is seen as a shadow, or partial representation of the real world that exists elsewhere. Gnosticism which arose in early Christian centuries, said that spirit is good but matter is evil, basically in line with Platonism. The fourth century theologian, Augustine, leaned heavily on Platonism. For him the soul, which was pre-existent to the body, was of ultimate importance. Its presence in the body preconditioned one to have faith in God which then formed the foundation for right reasoning. Luther and Calvin followed hard on Augustinian thought, as did pietism and much of evangelical thinking following in their train.

But Aristotle left his mark on modern Christian thinking as well. He held that all people are born with a clean slate (tabula rasa) but also have a capacity to reason. Thus, he argued, that all knowledge comes from reasoning. While early Roman Catholicism leaned heavily on the platonic mindset of Augustine, by the 13th century Thomas Aquinas was using reason to establish the authority of the Catholic Church. And in much of post-reformation theology, reason was used to prove the authority of the Bible. Thus, according to Francis Turretin (1623-1687), the authority of the Bible must be established before faith can happen. “It is precisely here historically that the theory of inspiration as inerrancy in scientific and historical details arose. Inerrancy in this form was not the historical view of the Christian church…It is, in short, a theory built on Aristotelian philosophy” (Zehr, 70). This view came down to the present via Presbyterian thinkers like Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield.

Modern evangelicalism, in all its differing forms, is largely rooted in thinking that demonstrates various combinations of Platonic and Aristotelian thought.

The challenge that confronts modern Christians is to return to a biblicism based on Hebraic philosophy as the early Anabaptists attempted to do. Again I quote Zehr:

A Hebraic philosophy is not as much interested in logic and proofs as it is in salvation, righteousness, peace and obedience. The Hebrews were not deeply disturbed if God’s call in life did not fit logically into a scientific, technological worldview. Truth is more concerned with faithfulness and reliability than with correctness and consistency. The Hebraic approach recognizes the Bible was not written to tell us how the universe operates in all its intricate details, but how to live rightly (73).

Much more needs to be said about our philosophical moorings when reading the Bible. But a good place to begin is to seek to understand the biblical text in the Hebraic setting before making applications within our modern context.