Tossing Out Bible Bombs

(versus The Hard Work of Hermeneutics)

By Keely Emerine Mix

Rarely has any field of study offered itself more to pendulating – the swing from one extreme to another – than hermeneutics, the art and science of  Biblical interpretation.  This is either fascinating, maddening, or else utterly irrelevant to those who, for whatever reason, are not convinced that the 66 books of the Christian Bible are God’s word and who therefore watch from the bleachers, so to speak, as the church ricochets from context-absent wooden literalism to an often flamboyant weaving from bits of Scriptural cloth whatever seems appropriate to the moment.  It’s ruefully entertaining, even for those of us who revere the Bible as God’s revealed word, to watch the rhetorical and logical gymnastics that occur when the unskilled or inexperienced student attempts to weave a theology that veers from God as a disembodied hand measuring the skies and the seas (Isaiah 40:12, from which a televangelist once attempted to calculate the height of the Almighty) to God as ever-shifting standard of convenient righteousness (Romans 8:1,2 – “there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus…” – which has been employed by many as license to do those things that a sober examination of Scripture would prohibit).  This knowing amusement is possible for the Christian because we’ve all been there, we grow up, and not a lot of harm is done in the meantime because we speak in earnest circles of our equally immature peers and not from the pulpit.  At least that’s the idea.  And while I find the subject fascinating, I realize that the study of hermeneutics is not a hot topic among my readers, until, that is, an example of hermeneutics-gone-bad rears its head in our community.  This week, it did. 

In early June, Christ Church Pastor Doug Wilson received a six-page, anonymously written letter imploring him to repent of what the author viewed as consistently and markedly unloving behavior.  The letter was full of loving concern for Wilson, his congregants, and the community, laced with Scripture references as a self-titled “labor of love” designed to provoke Wilson to more Christlike behavior.  It did provoke him, although not in the way the letter writer had hoped.  “Dismissive” would generously describe his response to the letter and its admonitions.  We can speculate on where Wilson might have disagreed – indeed, we have to, because he has decided it deserves to be ignored, shredded by machine only after he verbally fillets the author’s reputation while refusing to respond to the meat of the letter’s content. 

Veering to the other side of the spectrum, the side that makes rigid and unbending what the Bible allows to be fluid and yielding, he serves us another example.  Wilson’s “Blog and Mablog” is a curious name for a Christian pastor’s online ruminations on the cultural and theological goings-on of the day because of the obvious connection to “Gog and Magog,” the Old Testament archetypical king and kingdom opposed to God’s sovereign rule.  In one of his recent posts, he affirms that a young man’s dyeing his hair purple was a sin.  Case closed, declares Wilson , and not because of any reference to purple hair anywhere in Scripture.  No, he says, the bible student must decide what purple hair “means,” and in order to spare us the search, Wilson confidently declares that it means “rebellion.”  Which, of course, is always the same thing: an evil in God’s sight.