Deciding what to apply and what to discard might be the fundamental question when reading the biblical text. I think it is fair to say that whatever system, church, denomination, or exposure you have had to biblical material and other sacred texts in general, the guiding question always has been, “which things in this passage apply and what things don’t.”
To phrase it with a bit more sophistication; what truths in the scripture are eternal and therefore relevant and what in the text is cultural and therefore no longer applicable? This is the two bucket theory: there is an eternal and ever relevant bucket and a cultural and irrelevant to my life bucket. If I am correct this is and has been the guiding question in college and seminary hermeneutics classes for a long long time, probably the last two centuries. So the academy continues to come up with theories about how to more carefully discern what stuff goes in which bucket.
Sound academic? Well on that technical level it might be but it is profoundly practical and affects every single bible reader today. Should women be forbidden to wear gold, pearls and braid their hair, because that is what I Tim. 2 literally says. It’s easy to say that is in the cultural bucket and therefore irrelevant. But when did it get put in that bucket? Who decided? When did it stop being eternal and inspired truth?
Or is a an international policy of genocide really ok, even though it isn’t too politically correct, because Numbers 31 under the edict of God the text says kill everyone but keep the virgins for the troops? That is what the inspired word of God literally says. Sure we can relegate it to the cultural bucket or the Old irrelevant Testament but on what basis? How do you figure that out? We say Christians have to tithe because Malachi 3 says so, but really? Was that written to us today in 2010? How do you pick and choose?
Buckle in we are going to probe this for the next run of posts. So what is your answer? How do you know what applies and doesn’t? Why do we teach new Christians to memorize Joshua 1:6-9 as a key linchpin in their development (70% of all discipleship programs in the USA have this as a bible memory verse) but don’t invoke the last verse of Joshua 1, of killing anyone who doesn’t obey the words of the leader? Let’s dig in and start the conversation.
And at the same time sign up for the transformational trek tribe. Get the manifesto here if you haven’t already.
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Confronting this one head on ehh. I’m excited to hear what you have to say, awesome topic.
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