Barriers To Understanding The Bible

from The Chrtistian Reader:

Barriers to Understanding


The following is an excerpt from D.P. Brooks' book, The Bible—How to Understand and Teach It.



The Bible is both the simplest and the most difficult of books. Some things in it can be either gloriously or terrifyingly clear. Try as we may, there is no escaping its import. But in other parts the message is more difficult. Readers at times may not even know what the writer is talking about.





Some readers of the Bible do not appear to read primarily for meaning. They approach the Bible almost as a book of magic. Reading the familiar language of the King James Version, they drift off into a sort of spiritual feeling and have very little understanding of what they have read. Could it be because as young children they were required to listen to Bible reading without having any concept of what it meant? Perhaps they got the idea that there is something good in reading the Bible just because it is a sacred book—regardless of whether they grasp the meaning.



While we recognize the legitimate role of devotional study of the Bible, we want to raise a serious question: Must we not seek to understand God's revelation? Paul spoke of those who read the Scriptures with a veil over their minds: "To this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their minds" (2 Cor. 3:15). Here were people who read the Bible diligently, but they read in vain. They were not open to God's living message to them. Readers in the twentieth century can fall into the same trap.



We have already noted that the biblical writers wrote to the people of their own time and culture. Writer and reader shared the same mental pictures of the words and phrases used. But we today are far removed from the times and places of the Bible. Therefore, we must make a real effort if we are to be sure of getting the picture the writers intended.



The first and most obvious roadblock to understanding the Bible is that it was written in ancient Hebrew and Greek. Those who do not read these languages are dependent upon biblical scholars for translation into our language. Fortunately for us, no other book has ever been studied so intensely or translated so widely and accurately.



But anyone who has learned more than one language knows that there are differences between the meaning of many English words and the Spanish, French, Hebrew, or Greek words they are supposed to translate. True, there are many words which have almost exactly the same meaning in English as the equivalent words in another language. Such words as tree, sun, moon, cloud, dog, and others would be much the same in any language. But when you begin to talk about values—things like "truth" or "love"—you find that there is no perfect match in one language for a word in another…



Responsible writers in our culture are expected to maintain a high degree of accuracy and precision in their words. Biblical writers do not hesitate to say that "all" the people did thus and so. Of course, such language is not intended to be scientifically exact. When Matthew says: "Then went out to him Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins" (3:5-6), he certainly was not implying that literally all the people came for baptism. When Luke writes: "Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven" (Acts 2:5), he is not implying that he has made a careful check to see that not one single nation was excluded. Both writers were using language the way common people use it, not with scholarly precision.



Today a writer is expected to validate everything he writes. If he wants to tell how many people engaged in a certain activity he must have a count. If he wants to say what percentage of the people support a certain candidate or view, he must have a poll. Then he will write: According to a poll conducted by such and such a firm, 57.3 percent of the American people approve of the policy or bill under consideration. We have the right to expect that writers in our society live up to such a standard in their reporting.



But highly trained scholars have often treated the Bible as if it had been written by men who used language in the exacting and precise way that modern scholars write. Such a misconception can only lead to bad theology and misinterpretation of the Bible…Whole theological systems have been founded on passages which were treated as accurate, systematic formulations, when the writer would have been horrified to see his words so used and abused.



Dana and Glaze, in Interpreting the New Testament, declare: "The Western mind calls for an accuracy of statement and strict accounting with objective fact which were not required by the Semitic mind. The Western mind deals in terms of the literal and abstract, while Semitic thought is figurative and concrete. The Semitic mind conceived truth in pictures and figures" (p. 44).



Certainly there are books and passages in the Bible in which the writer is deliberately setting forth a reasoned statement. Romans is Paul's attempt to set down in orderly fashion his concept of the gospel. Therefore, we can expect the language there to be more exact than in the letter to the Galatians where Paul is making an impassioned attack on a false gospel which threatens the very life of the churches. Ephesians and Colossians, likewise, are more clearly reasoned than the letters to the Corinthians or the Thessalonians.



What does all this add up to? It means that we should be aware of the kind of book we are studying, the type of person doing the writing, and the purpose of the book. We know that Luke was a painstaking historian—likely more so than other biblical writers. Also, we will need to be careful about building a doctrine on one passage of Scripture alone. Significant truths usually are presented in a number of different passages, often in different terminology.



(From D.P. Brooks, The Bible—How to Understand and Teach It [Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1969], 12-17.)