Why Pentecostals Read their Bibles Poorly and Some Suggested Cures

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yjpe21

Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association

ISSN: 1812-4461 (Print) 2224-7963 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yjpe20

Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly – and Some Suggested cures

Gordon D. Fee

To cite this article: Gordon D. Fee (2004) Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly – and Some Suggested cures, Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, 24:1, 4-15, DOI: 10.1179/jep.2004.24.1.002

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1179/jep.2004.24.1.002

Published online: 24 Apr 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 1710

View related articles

Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly – and Some Suggested cures1

Gordon D. Fee

I begin this lecture with an apology for offering something a bit more popular in this session.' But I do not apologize for its content. Here I address a deep concern that has grown on me over many years; indeed, in some ways it sums up one of the passions of my life, and that is to help the people in the pew to become more literate biblically than has tended to be the case since the burgeoning of the technological age in the latter half of the twentieth century.

I begin with an anecdote. A few years ago, a popular columnist in the Vancouver Sun wrote a piece bemoaning the fact that her teenage son had to ask her the meaning of a simple biblical allusion. The allusion was to the River Jordan in a current popular song. Her complaint was that in giving up the Christian faith, as she and most of her acquaintances had, they had also lost something dear regarding their Canadian heritage: a language full of allusions to biblical people and events. A huge part of Western culture was in the process of simply disappearing, she bemoaned.

But this' complaint could also be echoed in the church as well. In the language of the prophet, there is a dearth of knowledge in the land, especially knowledge of Scripture. And while there are a lot of inter- related causes for this dearth, I will focus on just a few of them in this lecture. First, and briefly, I want to examine some of the reasons why Christians of all kinds read their Bibles poorly; second, I will point out some of the results of this reality, and third, point toward some remedies.

' Gordon Fee is Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada. This lecture was given at the 25th annual meeting of the European Pentecostal Theological Association held at Nantwich, England, July 26-29, 2004.

The substance of this lecture (with "Evangelicals" in the title) was first offered at Regent College in March, 2002, in conjunction with the appearing of How to Read the Bible Book by Book As it turned out, it was also a plea for the kind of concerns that went into How to Read the Bible For AN Its Worth. The lecture was reworked considerably for presentation at the EP,TA conference, whose theme was "The Use of the Bible among Pentecostals." I have deliberately kept the basically oral format of the lecture, and thus have chosen to avoid too many footnotes.

The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, Vol. xxnir, 2004

I. Some Reasons for Poor Reading 1. The first reason why most Christians read their Bibles poorly is endemic to our present culture. The fact is that even though the computer has increased the abundance of books by many-fold, we are in danger as a culture of losing altogether the fine art of sustained reading.

We live in a time when our senses are being bombarded with constant noise and entertainment. The stimulation from such an overload of our senses, especially sight and sound, is having the dual effect of creating a generation who are practically incapable of quiet in any form and who therefore feel the need for constant external stimulation. Reading is now accompanied by the blare of music, and the television has become something of the monster that many predicted for it years ago: where more sights and sounds bombard the senses in two minutes of commercials than would have happened in a full half hour just a few decades ago.

Such over-stimulation of the senses is already having its impact on the ability of people to engage in sustained reading even of a good novel – how much more so of these ancient religious texts, whose culture is so foreign to ours and whose narrative art was initially intended not for the reader at all, but for the hearer, who in hearing these texts read over and over again not only knew their content, but could repeat them often verbatim with all the nuances and catchwords intact.

2. But our problems also stem from our varied forms of Christian religious culture. On the one hand, those who were born and raised in more liturgical contexts have very often never been taught that they should actually read the Bible for themselves. So what they know comes from the reading of the Biblical lections Sunday after Sunday. The result often is that the Bible has a sense of "oldness" – like the stained glass windows and often the architecture and liturgy itself – so that the idea of reading, and understanding, such ancient texts in the contexts of one's own culturally modem home would never even occur to them.

Related to this is the very "ancient" feel there is to the way the Bible comes to us. When people are told they should read their Bibles, their instincts, correctly, are to begin with Genesis. But one does not get very far into the narrative, chapter 4 to be exact, when the reader is confronted by the very strange story about Cain and Abel. With absolutely no explanation we are told that God looked approvingly on Abel's sacrifice and not Cain's, and so Cain murdered him; and then, as if that were not enough, the episode concludes with another strange thing – a genealogy that focuses on the arrogance of an otherwise unknown man named

Gordon D Fee: Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly – and Some Suggested Cures

Lamech, and then returns to Adam and Eve having yet another son, since their first son has been rejected by God and the second son -is dead. And that is followed by another, much longer genealogy. This is not easy reading, in the sense of normal, everyday stuff; and in many such cases some help is needed for the modem person to navigate their way through this tricky terrain.

Take, for example, the Book of Exodus. I will not ask how many of you have sat down and read Exodus all the way through; but this absolutely marvelous book has a way of turning off the modem reader, who is used to something considerably different in a story line. One can usually get through the first nineteen chapters easily enough, and then the Ten Commandments; but after that you encounter the first considerable collection of laws – and these especially have an ancient ring to them, even more so when they are followed by seven chapters of detailed instruction on constructing a tent for worship and sacrifice, which after a brief respite of narrative (chs. 32-34), is followed by six final chapters in which the whole thing is gone over once more in detail as they create the tent and its hrnishings. I am prepared to argue with any Christian that this is absolutely must stuff, which the Christian must know like the back of hislher hand – but not for the reasons that are sometimes given, but precisely because of how crucial this book is to the story of the Bible as a whole. And with a little help one can learn how to read it well.

3. But the ancient feel of these texts is an obstacle for only some Christians. On the other side is the more non-liturgical evangelical culture, represented by such diverse groups as Pentecostals, Baptists, Holiness groups, and endless non-aligned Independents, all of whom actually put a great deal of emphasis on personal Bible reading. But this, too, commendable as it is, often unwittingly promotes a kind of reading that is absolutely foreign to the way people read almost anything else except the newspaper, and is mostly foreign to the way the Bible itself is given to us.

Two practices, wonderful and commendable practices, tend to militate against a truly knowledgeable reading of Scripture, so that most evangelical Christians, including especially Pentecostals, the very people who tend to read their Bibles the most, tend also to read them poorly. And by that I mean, that even though they read them often, at the same time Scripture is seldom read on its own terms, from the perspective of the divinely inspired authors themselves.

Unfortunately, most of our poor reading stems from what is also the Pentecostal's great strength – the conviction that Scripture is God's very

The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, Vol. XXIV, 2004

word, a word for the church for all times and climes, inspired by the Holy Spirit for the church's growth and life in the world. But our very habits based on this conviction often militate against our reading the Bible with minds renewed by the Holy Spirit so that we have a better sense of what the Bible is, how it "works," as it were, and how it should inform everythmg about us: our theology, our worship, and our lives in their totality – at home, in the world, at work and at leisure. Our habits, therefore, which again I emphasize are commendable and should not necessarily be abandoned by a more informed reading of Scripture, have led us to two kinds of reading that tend to work against our reading with understanding.

a. The first of these, what I call the non-contextual individualization of verses – is exemplified for me by a phenomenon that I grew up with known as the "promise box" – a collection of individual texts printed on small cards that dutihlly found its way on our kitchen tables. The point of the "promise box" was for us each to hear God speak a word to us for the day, as a kind of constant reminder through the day of God's constant presence by his "promises." This "promise box7' view of the Bible was greatly aided by the accidents of history, when a sixteenth century bishop decided to divide the text into chapters and verses for easy and ready access, and then in English the King James Version was actually published so that every verse became a paragraph on its own! It is hard to imagine anything more totally destructive to informed reading of Scripture than the beloved KJV, which by the very way it was printed helped us to memorize "verses" – as though God had given us the Bible that way – but at the same time caused us to have little or no feeling for the actual sense units with the biblical text itself.

Indeed, I remember well the difficulty I had even as a lad with picking out Joshua 1:9, which (not surprisingly) did not start at the beginning, "Have I not commanded thee?" but with what came next: "Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest." I remember when I later encountered that text in its context in Joshua how strange it seemed that these words to Israel's military commander on the eve of the conquest of the Promised Land should be applied personally and individually to my own life as a boy at school. True, I needed all the courage I could muster as a Pentecostal preacher's kid in a secular school; but how, I wondered, did these words in a very case specific point in history miraculously become a word for me as I trundled off to school.

Gordon D Fee: Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly – and Some Suggested Cures

Now don't get me wrong; it is not that I don't believe that God can take these words out of their original context and by the Holy Spirit cause us in our circumstances to hear them as words for us.' I do indeed believe that that happens constantly for those who look to God's Word to hear directly from Him. But this practice, as much good as it may have engendered, also fostered a view of Bible "reading," which was not true reading. That is, because we were reading the Bible for personal devotion, we read it in a very fragmented way – a paragraph or chapter at a time, often without connectedness, and therefore without trying to understand what is going on, because we were basically looking for our "verse for the day."

Thus our first problem was the failure to read the Bible wholistically, as the grand narrative of God's dealings with humankind, in order to recreate human beings back into the divine image that was so besmirched by the Fall.

b. And this leads to my second basic reason as to why, by and large, Pentecostals – and most evangelicals – read their Bibles poorly, which comes directly out of this first one. Because we tended to be looking for a "word for the day," we unwittingly did two things to the sacred text that stand rather directly in opposition to the way God chose to give us his word.

On the one hand, we fragmented it and atomized it, with hardly any sense at all of its wholistic grandeur as God's Story in which by grace he is including us. At the same time, on the other hand, we thus also tended to flatten everything. Because all Scripture is inspired of God, and because Scripture came to us not the way it came to God's people originally, as organic wholes, but rather in small doses called "verses," we tended to read it all the same way: narrative, prophecy, epistle, gospel, the Law, psalm, proverb, other poetry all functioned in basically the same way. And only a good dose of common sense ever saved us from making the whole Bible look foolish.

To put it bluntly, how odd of God to give us the Bible the way he did, when he could much more conveniently – for our way of reading it – have given it to us in the form of some 7000 propositions to be believed and 700 imperatives to be obeyed, with a few anecdotes brought in at the end so as to illustrate some of the propositions and imperatives. Why did

–

' It thus becomes for us a prophetic word, in which the Spirit uses the language of Scripture to speak directly into our lives. But the help and power in this case comes ffom the Spirit speaking prophetically, not from the meaning of Scripture itself.

The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, Vol. XXW, 2004

he not do it this way, if our way of reading it was the way the texts themselves were intended to be read?

Why not simply shorten the process and be done forever with all those genealogies, or sometimes puzzling stories, or prophetic oracles that are so hard to read under any circumstances? Why not give us the Bible the way we would prefer it, so that we can get on with reading it our way, and do so much more conveniently? Fortunately, our view of Scripture as sacred and divinely inspired kept us for the most part from actually repackaging it to suit our own habits and preferences – with one outstanding negative exception.

Unfortunately, several generations of Pentecostals grew up with one scheme that tried to help them read the Bible wholistically, but which in the end was an unmitigated disaster, namely Dispensationalism. The problem in this case was with the scheme itself, which was driven by an outside agenda that is not explicitly taught anywhere in the Bible itself. Indeed, it is fair to say that without the scheme in hand, not one reader in three million could ever possibly come to Dispensationalist conclusions.

The driving agenda, of course, was a (commendable) concern for the Jewish people. The scheme was to divide biblical revelation into seven dispensations – itself an unbiblical formula that no reader of the Bible could ever have seen for oneself! The fonts was ultimately eschatological – that is, that God would do at the end of time what failed to happen within history. The invention had two parts to it. First, Darby discounted New Testament revelation that made it clear that the promise to Abraham was now being fulfilled,' as Paul vehemently argues in Romans and Galatians, that Jew and Gentile together form the one eschatological people of ~ o d . '

That led, second, to the theory that God had two separate programs: one for the Jew and the other for the church. And one was taught "the gap theory," that is, to read "gaps" into texts that clearly suggested otherwise,

' All one has to do is to read the literature and see how much of it is devoted to "getting around" the plain meaning of NT texts that play the lie to the whole Dispensational scheme.

In fact the whole of Romans is not primarily about "justification by faith," but about how Jew and Gentile together form the one eschatological people of God – and justification by faith is way God chose to make this happen. After all, the whole argument of Romans concludes in 155-13, where the promise that Gentiles would be brought into the people of God has been fulfilled and thus with "one voice" Jew and Gentile glorify God together.

— — -. Gordon D Fee: Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly –

and Some Suggested Cures

because only by this strategem could the theory be maintained. And this in turn led to the invention of a "secret rapture" of the church, so that God could rehun to his first program of gathering national Israel. And since none of this is explicitly taught in Scripture itself, how could a reader come by it without the outside grid?

But the damage had been done; and now the only "wholistic" reading of the Bible that most Pentecostals ever did was on the basis of a scheme that is not found in the texts themselves; and in the end it was .not truly wholistic, since the texts were still read atomistically – taking texts out of contexts to prove the pretext.

11. The (Negative) Results That leads me, then, to say a few brief words about the negative results of

, these non-wholistic hnds of "reading" of the Bible, since I have already, and will do so again, affirmed the positive side of things. But the negative results are serious, so serious in fact that I have spent almost all my adult life trying to help Christians read and study their Bibles in a way that is much more in keeping with the way God gave these inspired texts in the first place.

a. The first, and most obvious, result of reading the Bible poorly is our tendency to have a tembly fragmented understanding of what it is all about. We know some texts very well, and even where some of our favorite passages can be found: Psalm 23, 1 Corinthians 13, for example. Moreover, if we have been in church much of our lives we also have a generally good sense that there are two parts, the first dealing with God's ancient people, Israel, and the second dealing with Christ and the church. And we also have a good sense that these two parts are connected in some very important way(s).

But if we were asked to tell how the basic story works out, or how any given book – Hosea or Philippians, say – fits into the whole, we might feel just a bit more intimidated. "Hosea? Let's see, that's a part of the Old Testament isn't it? Yeah, he's one of the prophets. But I tried reading it once, and I simply couldn't follow the story line! When I finished I didn't have a clue where I had been or how I got there. So why read it that way, since it simply turns out to be a waste of time?" And "Philippians? Oh that's all about 'joy,' and Paul's saying 'for me to live is Christ and to die is gain'." But "fit into the whole? What possibly do you mean by that?"

The result is that most Christians have some fairly good idea of the New Testament, but except for the Psalms, a few scattered proverbs, and some

, . .

The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, Vol. XXIV, 2004

of the more memorable stories, the Old Testament remains a singular mystery.

b. And this leads to the second unfortunate result: that we miss a great deal of the New Testament itself because we are so poorly informed about the Old. And the point to make here is that the first readers of these New Testament documents, those whose heirs we have become, had a much greater awareness of what was going on not simply because they were written to them, in their language and culture, but because they were biblically literate in ways that most contemporary Christians are not. The result is that not only do we often not hear God's word in the way they did, but we miss very many significant aspects of the New Testament as a result.

Most Christians have some sense that the New is related to the Old. How could one not see that, given how often the Old is cited in the New, and often in the language of "fulfillment." But the New Testament writers do far more than that. Just note the following realities:

(1). Most of the New Testament was written not to Jews who had followed Jesus, but to Gentile converts, in a culture that was basically illiterate, in the sense that only about seventeen or eighteen per cent of the people could read or write.

(2). The only Bible these early Christians had was the Old Testament, which of course was never called that, because they didn't have a New Testament. So what we have come to call the Old Testament was simply referred to as "the Scriptures."

(3). I remind you again that the culture did not have the same form of media and literary blitzing that has become so common in the Western world.

(4). The net result of these realities is that these people knew their Bibles infinitely better than most of us do. Because most of them didn't read, they were read to; and also because they couldn't read but were read to, they had far better, sharper retention than we tend to have. And that also means that they heard not only the Old Testament texts when they were cited, but also when they were referred to more indirectly, and sometimes when only the language was echoed.

Gordon D Fee: Why Pentecostals Read Their Bibles Poorly – and Some Suggested Cures

And it is precisely at this point where all the reasons for and the results of our poor reading of the Bible merge to make us far less knowledgeable about the Bible than these earliest Gentile Christians were. At this point, let me borrow an illustration from my former student and now Regent colleague and friend, Rikk Watts. When he was a student at Gordon-Conwell seminary, he was listening to a lecture in which the phrase "fourscore and seven years ago" was used. Since Rikk was from Australia, he hadn't a clue as to either the what or the why of that "ancient English" in a modem lecture in America. So he asked some classmates afterward, "What happened 87 years ago?" to which they all drew blanks, because they had not heard anything about 87 years ago. So when Rikk reminded them of the lecturer's actual language, "four score and seven years ago," the light dawned. "Oh," they said, "those are the opening words in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address; and the lecturer was not talking about something that happened 87 years ago, but was alluding to Lincoln's address and its significance for the point he wanted to make."

My point is that there is hardly an American of my generation who would not recognize those words and their source, and instinctively be able to fill in all kinds of blanks both as to the historical setting and many of the stirring words of the rest of that great speech as well; and one could do the same in England with some of the (many) memorable words from Winston Churchill's wartime speeches; and even though, just as with Scripture, such phrases can often have a life of their own, the fact remains that people "schooled" on such great oratory will both recognize the language and remember its original setting. And that, friends, is precisely how the early Christians heard the Old Testament as it was alluded to and echoed in hundreds of ways throughout the New Testament writings. So if we are going to be better readers of the New Testament, we simply must become better readers of the Old – and all of this because we believe that the Biblical story is the single most important reality in our modem world.

III. Some Illustrations Toward Remedy So let me conclude this lecture with some illustrations of this latter concern, which hopefully will inspire even you who teach Bible and theology in Pentecostal Bible colleges to set your own minds to the need to become still better readers of Scripture – and to have a passion to teach a newer generation, which tends to read both little and poorly, to read Scripture as the matter of first importance, and as the proper entry point to good study of Scripture and good preaching and teaching.

The first is taken from the well-known account in John 10, where Jesus, speaking to the Pharisees (a point often unfortunately missed because of a

– .

The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, Vol. XXIV, 2004

disastrous chapter break at this point), refers to himself as the good shepherd. Evidence that he is the true shepherd is found in three ways: that his sheep know him and listen to his voice; that he lays down his life for his sheep; and that he has other sheep to bring into the fold.

But this is not simply an illustration drawn from a pastoral analogy of a shepherd with his sheep. With these words Jesus is offering himself to Israel as the fulfillment of the promised great Davidic shepherd that is found in Ezekiel 34. So first let's take a brief look at Ezekiel, since this prophetic book is so poorly known by Christians.

Ezekiel belonged to a priestly family who were among the first large wave of exiles taken to Babylon by Nebachudnezzar in 598, some ten years before the final siege in 588 that led to the total destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC. Among that first wave were most of Jerusalem's prominent people, including King Jehoiachin and Ezekiel's family. Five years later and seven years before the actual fall of Jerusalem, when Ezekiel turned thirty, the year that he would have entered the priesthood in Jerusalem, Yahweh appears to him among the exiles in Babylon and commands him to prophesy words of warning and hope to the exiles regarding the future of Jerusalem and the greater final future of God's people. And this prophetic activity continued for a twenty-two year period both before and after the fall of Jerusalem.

His book stands in sharp contrast to Isaiah and Jeremiah, in two significant ways: (1) his oracles are all dated and all but one of them are in chronological order; (2) his oracles are full of images of a most unusual kind, that serve as the forerunner for later Jewish apocalyptic visions. The collection is thus presented in three clear parts. Part 1 (chs. 1-24) is a collection of the oracles that announce the coming destruction of Jerusalem, a word that the exiles would not believe because they had come to believe that Jerusalem was inviolable. Part 2 (chs. 25-32) presupposes the fall of Jerusalem, and announces God's judgments on the surrounding nations as well, as a word of comfort to Israel that their God is the sovereign God over the nations – despite the Fall of Jerusalem and the present exile. Part 3 is where our text fits in. After an oracle in chapter 33 about Ezekiel's own role in things, he receives a series of oracles which in turn promise the restoration of all that had come to an end with the fall of Jerusalem: the Davidic kingship (ch. 34), the land (35: 1-36: l5), Yahweh's honor by way of a new covenant (36:16-38), his people (ch. 37), his sovereignty over the nations (chs. 38-39), and hls renewed presence among the people through a restored.temple (chs. 40-48) – note especially how the book ends, regarding Jerusalem, "The Lord is there!"

L d L , , , – – .

Gordon D Fee: Why Penteco

Collepals.com Plagiarism Free Papers

Are you looking for custom essay writing service or even dissertation writing services? Just request for our write my paper service, and we'll match you with the best essay writer in your subject! With an exceptional team of professional academic experts in a wide range of subjects, we can guarantee you an unrivaled quality of custom-written papers.

Get ZERO PLAGIARISM, HUMAN WRITTEN ESSAYS

Why Hire Collepals.com writers to do your paper?

Quality- We are experienced and have access to ample research materials.

We write plagiarism Free Content

Confidential- We never share or sell your personal information to third parties.

Support-Chat with us today! We are always waiting to answer all your questions.