What Does It Mean to Be Presbyterian? 4. Sola Scriptura

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Mark 10:1-12
October 3, 2010

He left that place and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan. And crowds again gathered around him; and, as was his custom, he again taught them.
Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

Do you know what one of the toughest things for me was about going to seminary? It was learning to read the Bible properly. I had read the Bible twice from cover to cover before going to seminary, so I was at least familiar with what was in it. Of course, I did that because I had only rejoined the church eight months earlier after being away from the church for nine years. I felt biblically ignorant, so I read the Bible twice to become more familiar. I didn’t understand most of what I read, but I read it. Still, I was unprepared for what I faced in seminary.

Most pastors experience the same kind of struggles I did when they first go to seminary. Most of us have had head-spinning first years. The reason is that there are ways to read Scripture that really open it up in amazing ways, but it takes a while to learn them.

This way of reading Scripture, called the historical-critical method, involves discovering in Scripture more than just what you see at first on the page. It means reading it in depth. But more on that later. To prepare us for this kind of reading, we seminary students had to take two full years of biblical languages, meaning that we had to take a year of learning to read Greek, and then another year of learning to read Hebrew, which are the original languages of the New and Old Testaments, respectively. Then we had to take courses on the different books of the Bible, to the point at which our heads felt like exploding because of too much information.

So here’s a question for you to ponder. Why do you think it’s so important for seminary students to learn so much Bible? Almost a third of our courses were biblical courses. Why not cut back on the Bible and learn more about things like religious ideas, church administration, leadership, and things like that? Sure, the Bible is important, but shouldn’t we pastors be reading the Bible on our own anyway? Why not use our valuable time learning other things, and then devote ourselves to biblical learning either on our own or later?

The answer lies at the core of Presbyterian beliefs. Why spend so much time on scripture? The answer is because of sola scriptura. Do you know what sola scriptura means? It was one of the prominent protest phrases of the Protestant movement on the 16th century. It means, “by scripture alone.”

The leaders of the Protestant Reformation were absolutely adamant that our faith should be grounded in Scriptural guidance and nothing else. They were protesting a problem that existed in the Roman Catholic Church at the tine, the church of which they had all been raised and become members of. The Catholic Church, for almost 1000 years, had developed beliefs and traditions rooted in thinking that sometimes ran counter to Scripture. The Catholic Church had made papal and church authority equal to Scripture, and it had led to abuses that the Reformers, such as John Calvin and Martin Luther, saw as self-serving and against God.

Let me give you an example. Do you know what the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is? It’s a belief in the Roman Catholic Church that because Jesus was without sin, he could not have been conceived in a fallen and sinful womb. So the church came up with a doctrine that basically said that Mary was conceived without sin, so that she could bear Jesus without sin. This idea reflected the Catholic understanding of sex, which was that it was, by nature, sinful. So they had to come up with a way for Mary to have been conceived as humans normally are, without being subject to the sinfulness of sex. So they created the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, saying that Mary’s conception was free of flaws, mistakes, or sin. The problem is that at worst this is not a biblical idea, or at best it is an idea that stretches the Bible beyond what it actually says. This doctrine goes against Romans 3:23, which says that all people are sinful. Roman Catholics would say that it is biblical because when the angel appears to Mary and tells her that she is “full of grace,” that signifies that she was sinless. That’s a stretch. The Reformers looked at doctrines like this and said that they were human conventions, and that Christians needed to get back to a root in Scripture. Getting back to creating a church more like the original Church was a passion for the Reformers. The legacy for us is that we are called to base our beliefs on scripture alone—sola scriptura.

It’s not enough, though, just to put scripture at the center of our faith and life. There’s something else that the Reformers understood that was key. We not only have to read scripture, but we have to read it in a particular way, and if you don’t read scripture the right way, it can lead you down the wrong road. It can lead to the modern problems we have today when it comes to reading the Bible, which are the twin problems of biblical literalism and biblical anachronism.

Biblical literalism is a problem we all recognize today. It’s the tendency to read Scripture in a very literal way, in a way that treats it as though it was written 2000 years ago, placed in a time capsule, and opened today so that we can read what the ancient Christians wanted for us today. It treats the Bible as though there are no inconsistencies or difficulties in it. Biblical anachronism is the belief by some that nothing in the Bible is relevant to today. Biblical anachronists would simply say that it is an outdated, primitive book that has no bearing on today’s problems, so it should be ignored. Unfortunately, most biblical anachronists don’t know the Bible at all, so their belief is rooted in a basic ignorance of Scripture. The twin problems of literalism and anachronism comes from a deeper problem: the tendency of people to engage in eisogesis rather than exegesis.

I don’t’ mean to overload you with overly technical terms. These two terms are fairly easy to understand. Think “eisogesis” bad, “exegesis” good. What’s the difference. Eisogesis means reading into the Bible what you already believe or want to believe. You treat it as though it was written only to you, and to support what you already believe. Presbyterians stand against eisogesis, and this stand against it is the reason why Presbyterian pastors have to spend three years in seminary, with the equivalent of a full year devoted to studying the Bible, including reading it in its original Greek and Hebrew forms. We are taught to engage in exegesis.

What is exegesis? It is reading the Bible in context in order to understand what it is saying to us today. When you do exegesis, you read the Scripture in context, asking:
• Who’s the author?
• What’s the context?
• Why was it written?
• What was going on at the time?
• How does this relate to other parts of the Bible?
• How do we apply this to our situation today?

We ask deep questions of Scripture. We try to understand everything about why it was written, and what was going on at the time of its writing, so that we can understand its issues. Exegesis teaches us how to avoid misapplying and manipulating Scripture to fit our own preconceived notions. Learning to distinguish between eisogesis and exegesis is the purpose of sending all Presbyterian pastors to seminary.

This is a direct contrast to what you see among many in the nondenominational, evangelical movement. The fact is that many, many evangelical pastors (if not most) are ordained without going to seminary. They are not taught these deeper ways of reading Scripture. Since they are ordained by their own churches, rather than by a denomination with standards, many of these evangelical pastors lack biblical training, or at leat the kind we get. And of the ones who do go to seminary, many go to seminaries where they take one year of basic religious understanding, and another learning marketing, administration, and organizational skills. The result is that many of these church pastors abuse Scripture by reading into it their own agendas.

So far what I’ve talked to you about is fairly technical. Let me show you what I mean, starting with our passage today, which says, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

On the face of this passage it seems fairly clear what Jesus is saying: You can’t get divorced, and if you do so and get married you are committing the sin of adultery. And this would be a good interpretation,… if you are doing eisogesis. If you read it deeper, you’ll find that there’s more there that you need to know to understand the passage. And it all has to do with understanding who, what, where, when. First of all, to understand the passage you have to pay attention to why Jesus says what he does. It says in the beginning of the passage that “Some Pharisees came, and to test him… The key word in this is the word “test.” Jesus knows that he is being tested, and that the question is set up to get him in trouble. If he says it is permissible to divorce, then the orthodox Jews will make trouble against him. If he says it isn’t permissible, then King Herod’s people will hear about it and possibly arrest him. You see, Herod had been divorced several times. Either way, Jesus loses.

At the same time, Jesus’ answer is a rebuke of the Pharisees. He knows that among the Pharisees, divorce is easy for men, hard for women. What do I mean? A Pharisee man could divorce his wife for any reason, including adultery. He could divorce her because he no longer liked her cooking, or she got old, or she scolds him too much, or he doesn’t like her friends. To divorce her, all he had to do was to get a writ of divorce from a rabbi, which was very easy for the right price, and then face the east while reciting three times in her presence, “I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee.” Meanwhile, a woman could only divorce a man if he had committed adultery, which she had to prove through witnesses, or because he was engaged in a corrupt vocation such as pig farming or tanning skins, which would render the husband sinful and untouchable. So, under these conditions what Jesus said might not have been so much a barring of divorce as it was protecting women. You see, a divorced woman, if she was not taken back by her original family, would be plunged into poverty. Often she had no choice but to become a prostitute, a slave, or a beggar. Jesus is both chastising the Pharisees and protecting women.

In addition, marriage had a different foundation then than today. Back then people didn’t marry out of love. They married because of a contractual arrangement. Women were considered property of men. Marriage was a contractual agreement between families as one family gave title of their daughter to another man. These marriages were often arranged years in advance when the man and the woman were both children. Marriage was as much an economic relationship as it was anything else. This is not the case today. We marry out of love. This brings us to a question about this passage. If marriage is based on something different today, and women and men have an equal ability to live dignified lives after a divorce, does the passage still apply in the same way? I don’t know if I know the answer, but what it says is that there is more complexity to Scripture than many people think. Add into this the fact that Jesus tells us to look at the plank in our own eyes, and not the speck in others, and to not judge. How does this impact what we make of this passage?

Let me give you another passage to look at, and see if you reading it more deeply helps gain a better understanding. Look at Deuteronomy 21:18-21, where it says, “If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. They shall say to the elders of his town, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel will hear, and be afraid.” Would we apply this passage literally today? I’m sure some of you who are parents of teens would love to ☺. But what do we make of it today? We dismiss it because we compare it to Gospel messages of Jesus, which teach us to treat children with care and love, and we recognize that Gospel trumps Deuteronomy. So we ignore this passage today.

Let me show you one more passage, and see if reading it more deeply gives you a different understanding. Look at Genesis 2, where it says, “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”

Seems pretty much what we’ve learned all these years. Adam is created, and we know that later he will be put to sleep, his rib taken out, and Eve will be created. This understanding of the passage leads many Christians to say that women are inferior to men because they came out of men. The problem is that they lack a deeper understanding of the passage. Let me take you in deeper.

First of all, it should not be translated as “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground…” That’s a poor translation based on hundreds of years of eisogesis. It really should read that Adam was formed from adamah. Adamah is the dirt, and Adam comes from adamah. It would be better translated that the human was formed from the humus, or earth. The name Adam is related to adamah in the same way that human is related to humus. It is Genesis’ way of telling us that human beings are made of the earth. The reason we translate Adam as “man” is that Hebrew, much like French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin, is a gender-specific language in which all nouns are assigned a gender, even if it makes no sense to do so. Adam is a masculine noun, adamah is feminine. If we are going to translate Adam as “man,” then perhaps we should translate adamah as “mother earth,” although that wouldn’t make sense, either. The point is this first creation of God is not a man, but a human being with no gender—or better yet, both genders.

Then God breathes into the human the “breath of life.” That is a mistranslation. It should say that God breathed into the human ruach. Ruach is the Hebrew word, and it means more than just breath. It means “Spirit,” too. The passage is saying that the first human being is created from humus, but then God’s Spirit is breathed into it. It tells us that humans, unlike all other created creatures, has God’s Spirit in them, not just life.

When the whole rib incident happens, it doesn’t say that Adam goes to sleep, has the rib removed, and then Eve is created. Actually, it is that the human being is put to sleep, and two new creations are formed. Once the rib is removed, the being that was Adam becomes Ish, and the woman is named Ishah. Ish is the man, Ishah is the woman. They are connected, but they are different creatures from the original human being, Adam. The reason we call them Adam and Eve is that later, in Chapter 3, the man changes from Ish to Adam, and the woman is given the name Eve. It’s confusing, but it has to do with the fact that the Bible often puts together stories from different traditions, and then never tries to clean it all up. We try to clean it all up, but when we do we can make mistakes. This new understanding of Genesis has a huge impact. For instance, it is part of the foundation that allowed the Prebyterian Church to begin ordaining women as deacons, elders, and pastors. This understanding tells us that women and men are equals because we both come from Adam and from Adamah, and are animated by God’s Spirit. There is no distinction in God’s eyes.

How we read Scripture makes a difference. Do we read it in a deep way, or in a shallow way? I realize that in talking about all this, you may not have the tools that we pastors have been given, but there are tools out there. For one, start by reading the Bible using a study Bible. There are a lot of great study Bibles out there, and they give you this kind of information to help you. Start by reading the gospels first, and then move onto other parts of the Bible. Another thing to do is to use our church library, in our prayer room. It has great resources for you to use.

Remember that we Presbyterians are people of the Bible because we believe in the idea of sola scriptura. If you ground your life and thinking in Scripture, you will find God speaking to your mind, heart, and soul. And it can have an amazingly transforming effect on your life.

Amen.