Christians cannot agree across the board about what the
Bible teaches. If we could, there would be no need for denominations, and there
would be a single, clear, accepted interpretation of every verse of scripture.
Wouldn’t that be nice? But it ain’t so, and we all
know it.
Differences of Interpretation
Some argue these differences of interpretation are evidence the
Bible is untrue. Even Christians occasionally find ourselves quietly wondering
whether God might just have made his word the tiniest bit more obscure than
necessary. The apostle Peter certainly recognized some bits of the New
Testament are harder
than others to understand, as those of us who have worked our way through the
Pauline epistles well know.
Did the Holy Spirit have a purpose in allowing the word of
God to be written in such a way as to be so very open to human interpretations …
even really stupid ones? I believe he did. He certainly did
not fail to foresee the divisions which differences of opinion about the
text would inevitably create. It’s not completely impossible some of these stumbling
blocks were placed in our way deliberately to trip up those
who refuse to approach God’s word in faith. After all, the parables of
Jesus were not without their intentional
difficulties designed to deter the unrepentant and faithless.
The fact is that when we come to the word of God, much of
the time we see what we want to see and what we expect to see. It is only by
faith, dependence on the Lord and the guidance of the Holy Spirit that we can
get past our presuppositions and biases to understand God’s word as he
intended. A mechanical, merely intellectual approach will not help us.
Wrestling with Resurrection
For example, the Pharisees and Sadducees of the first
century disagreed over the concept of resurrection.
Matthew,
Mark
and Luke all comment on the fact that the Sadducees vigorously rejected the belief in
life after death. The Pharisees did not. The apostle Paul, well
aware of the acrimony which attended this theological divide, used it to distract
the Jewish council when it proposed to try him for blasphemy. In the resulting
clamor he was escorted to safety by the Romans.
It has been argued that the Sadducees rejected resurrection
because they accepted a different Old Testament canon than that of the
Pharisees, but this does not appear to be the case. Don Stewart has
shown quite decisively that the Sadducees accepted the Psalms and Prophets
as well as the Pentateuch. They simply read them allegorically rather than in
the more literal fashion of the Pharisees, much as a significant number of
evangelicals today read all the Old Testament promises to the nation of Israel
as applying figuratively to the Church, rejecting the literal meaning of much of the Major and Minor Prophets.
And, in fact, there are plenty of apparent references to
resurrection in the Old Testament that could be read either literally or
figuratively, depending on the theological assumptions we bring to the text.
Psalm 71 is a fine example. Written in David’s old age, the psalm depicts
a senior citizen at
the end of his strength, appealing to the Lord to protect him from his
enemies and give him opportunity to testify to his faith. In verse 20, David
expresses the conviction that God, who had made him “see many troubles and
calamities”, would “revive me again; from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again”.
Pharisees and Sadducees
Just as the Christian does today, a Pharisee in Jesus’ day would
have had no problem taking this perfectly literally. David believed his God
would bring him back from the grave to lead his people in praises once more
someday in the future. After all, “revive me again” is not an isolated
statement: David also speaks of proclaiming God’s might to his present
generation, and then proclaiming his power to all
those to come, something that might be rather difficult at the tail end of a limited
lifespan and with no prospects beyond the moment of his own death. Reading this couplet as a claim to the reality of literal resurrection works for the
evangelical reader who has placed his own hope in the risen Christ, and it certainly would have worked for the first century
Pharisee.
However, the Sadducee reading the same psalm was having quite a
different experience. His systematic theology and rationalism limited his
ability to see what we do, and what the Pharisees, for all their hypocrisy and
corruption, saw as well. So he might argue that, far from contemplating eternal
life, David was merely looking for the equivalent of an “Indian Summer” in his
old age: another opportunity to visit God’s house and testify to his greatness
in front of God’s people; a few moments of strength to finish a few more psalms
to pass on to subsequent generations; relief for his arthritic fingers so that
he could praise God with his lyre once again. The “depths of the earth” from
which David appealed to be brought up might be a metaphor for despair or
depression, after all, and “revive me again” might mean no more than “revitalize
my spirit”.
And perhaps we could even accept that reading as a
possibility. After all, there is some kind of plausible figurative application
available for every statement in the psalm which we might ordinarily read
literally, which is a whole lot more than Reformed Theologians bother to
provide us when they interpret the later chapters of the book of Ezekiel. It
sounds like resurrection to me, and I’m willing to bet it sounded like
resurrection to Pharisees in the first century, but you could differ over the
meaning of these verses without breaking furniture.
A Different Story
The book of Daniel is a different story. There are certainly well-known figures of speech in use at the end of Daniel 12 (“sleep”, “awake”), but I’m not sure how
you interpret this verse as anything other than an explicit promise of coming resurrection and judgment:
“Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”
Or this
one, for that matter:
“But go your way till the end. And you shall rest and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of the days.”
In context, the “end of the days” is the “time of the end”, a
“time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that
time”, and to “rest” is to “sleep in the dust of the earth” … in other
words, to be dead. It is difficult to imagine how one might spiritualize such statements and be left with anything remotely intelligible.
And yet the Sadducees would have had to. I wonder what they
would have said. When you have already ruled out the plain sense of a passage
in favor of assigning it some meaning you prefer for reasons that have nothing
to do with the passage itself, at some point your clever application veers from “spiritualizing” the text into spiriting the text away; from a dissenting opinion into
denial and disbelief.
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