Over at Stand to
Reason, Alan Shlemon is back
on the subject of the importance of reading
in context. I too am convinced that context is probably the single
most crucial way to accurately determine the intended meaning of any verse in
scripture, so as you may imagine, I find myself agreeing with almost
everything Alan has to say.
In discussing the Lord’s much-misunderstood promise that
begins with the words “For where two or three come together in my name,” Shlemon
asserts that “Jesus begins and ends by talking about how to respond to a
sinning brother. Therefore, the meaning of verse 20 must be restricted to
that context, making it unlikely that it is about God being present among
believers.”
Trading One Mistake for Another
“The meaning ... must be restricted to
that context.” Strictly speaking, I agree with this statement too, both in
reference to Matthew 18:20 and as to the fact that meaning ought to be
restricted to context generally ... but only provided we truly understand the entire context, not just the immediate context.
As it happens, Alan’s post on Matthew 18 serves as a
perfect illustration of the danger of staring so hard at the trees that you
miss the forest. He goes on to say this:
“Instead, Jesus is explaining the conditions that are necessary to render a judgment against a sinful brother (thereby kicking him out of the church). Two or three believers must agree about his sin. When they do, their testimony is ratified by their Father in heaven (‘there am I with them.’) on the basis of the church’s judgment (the two or three believers).”
Shlemon’s attention to the immediate context of the passage
has saved him from making the mistake we so often make, which is to apply the
Lord’s words willy-nilly to every gathering of believers in which there is a
commitment to faithfully represent the interests of the Head of the Church. It
may indeed be true that the Lord is present when two or three brothers or
sisters in Christ come together to worship, study the Bible, pray or encourage
one another, but that is at best an application.
It is not the meaning of this verse.
Christ in Our Midst
If we want to talk about Jesus Christ in the midst of his assembly,
we are better to go to Corinthians, where the church is called God’s field
and building, or to the comparison later in the same passage of the
church to God’s temple in which his Spirit dwells, or to the even more
intimate imagery of Christ
as head and the church as his body, “the fullness of him who fills all in all”.
Is Christ in our midst when the church gathers? Of course he
is, both to enjoy the fellowship of his people and to act
in judgment on them when they fail to respect their connection to the Body
and the Head. But we do not need to introduce these issues into Matthew 18:20 —
which is indeed about how to respond to a sinning brother — thereby obscuring
its meaning. The truth of Christ in our midst is all over the New Testament if
we are prepared to go look for it. In fact, it is the ubiquity of the
teaching that Christ dwells among his people that makes Revelation 3:20 (“Behold,
I stand at the door and knock”) so appalling: here we see Christ outside the church, appealing to the
individual believer, where it is very evident from the rest of the New
Testament that he does not belong outside the church looking in, but inside
giving us our direction, nourishment, purpose, power and example.
So then, when Alan Shlemon takes Matthew 18:20 and puts
it at least halfway back into its actual context, he is doing us a favor. In
this respect, he is not robbing Christians of a precious promise; he is simply
allowing the passage to say what it says. But he only us gets halfway back to
the meaning of the text, and this is where the importance of greater context
comes in. Because Alan has now introduced the Christian church into the
passage, and I think he’s quite wrong in that.
Halfway Back
The Greek word ekklēsia
is often translated “church”, but not always. Its original meaning is simply “gathering”
or “assembly”. It occurs only twice in the gospels: first, in Matthew 16,
where Christ famously and prophetically declares, “I will build my ekklēsia”; secondly, in Matthew 18,
where it is far from certain that the “my church” of chapter 16 is the ekklēsia in view.
In fact, the church did not exist at the time the Lord Jesus
spoke these words, and he had said almost nothing about it to his disciples
that would have enabled them to understand the sort of future “gathering” he
was contemplating. The unfolding of the teaching about the Christian
church — its meaning, purpose, prescribed order and God-given destiny —
does not occur until we come to the epistles. In the context of the gospel of
Matthew, and in keeping with the entire body of teaching found in the Old
Testament, we see Christ not as the Head of the Church but as the Messiah and
prophesied King of Israel.
There are sound textual and theological reasons for
believing that the Lord’s use of ekklēsia
in Matthew 18 does not anticipate the Church Age at all, but ought to be
understood in its original, Jewish context. The greater context of the Lord’s
statement does not support the interpretation that this passage has to do with
church discipline. Rather, I believe it has to do with shaming the guilty
party in the first century Judean religious community. We may apply the principles we
find here in the church, provided we do it very carefully and consistently, but
they are not its meaning.
If you are interested in pursuing this idea further, I have
made this case at length here
and here,
and my fellow blogger Immanuel Can makes it here.
But suffice it to say that Alan Shlemon catches the immediate context of
Matthew 18:20, correcting one error in the process, but misses the
greater context. That leads to a different error.
We need the entire
context of the Lord’s words to reconstruct his intended meaning, not just part
of it.
Old Testament and New
This is especially necessary to understand when we test Alan’s
thesis against the way the New Testament writers use Old Testament prophetic quotations
to make their arguments. Should our understanding of meaning be restricted to
context on general principle? I believe it should, but as always, we must
understand the entire context, not
just the apparent context.
For example, Christian expositors who believe firmly in the
importance of original context in discovering intended meaning may initially find
themselves quite unsettled by the way the writers of the New Testament make use
of Old Testament passages.
How, for instance, can we justify Matthew’s many references
to the character and work of Christ as fulfilling Old Testament prophecies
when, on more careful inspection in their original setting, those prophecies often seem to foretell nothing of
the sort? If we compare Matthew’s “Out
of Egypt I called my son” with Hosea’s original, it is not
at all obvious that Hosea intended to speak of Messiah, but rather of the
nation of Israel. The original context is almost no help at all. Or when
Matthew applies Asaph’s “I will
open my mouth in a parable” to the
parables of Jesus, he is apparently (but of course not actually) overlooking
the fact that the word “parable” in the original refers rather obviously to
what Asaph has to say in the rest of his psalm. The original context would seem
to militate against a future Messianic “fulfillment”. Or again, to any
objective reader trying to put himself in the sandals of Zechariah, his king “humble
and mounted on a donkey” appears to rule
in a millennial context, not ride into Jerusalem to the acclaim of the masses only to die shortly thereafter, as
Matthew’s gospel would have it.
In each of these instances and many others, it is quite
unclear that the best way to discover what these verses really mean is to pay
careful attention to the original context.
The Whole Context
Once we acknowledge that this sort of thing is a trend in
prophetic scripture rather than a matter of a few outlying examples, we must
either abandon entirely the principle of authorial intent discoverable through context
as a guide to meaning, or else we must look at the Holy Spirit’s authorship of
the Old Testament through its human writers as part of the “greater context”
which must be understood in order to properly determine the meaning of a text.
And indeed, this is precisely
what Peter says occurred:
“Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories.”
In other words, it is really quite useless to ask ourselves
what Hosea, Asaph, Zechariah or any other prophet intended to say based on the
words that precede and follow these quotations in their Old Testament settings.
In most cases they were unsure. The words were not theirs, but given to them by
the Spirit of God and presented to their original audiences just as they received
them. Moreover, it is evident in each instance that understanding the
application of these verses to Christ is far more significant than discovering
their original “meaning”.
Unless we recognize the ultimate authorship of the Holy
Spirit of God and his overriding intent to prefigure Christ throughout
the entire Old Testament here, there and everywhere as part of the “greater
context” of each of these verses and many others, Alan Shlemon’s principle of
restricting meaning to the original context goes right out the window.
David Gooding comes to a similar conclusion in The Riches of Divine Wisdom:
“So God knew that when through Scripture he rehearsed for the benefit of the writer to the Hebrews what he originally prophesied to David through Nathan, the writer to the Hebrews would see more meaning in that prophecy than Nathan or even David did.”
Indeed, this is what we should probably learn to expect in a
scripture that is said to be “living and active”.
In Conclusion
What are we saying then? Am I really arguing that
context is meaningless and we can make the scripture say anything we like? Of
course not. The principle that meaning ought to be restricted to context is not
just a good one but an excellent one. Attending to the context of a verse will almost
inevitably give you the best possible interpretation of that verse. Better than
doing Greek word studies, better than Googling the opinions of the evangelical masses,
and definitely better than praying for guidance and then sticking your finger
between the pages of your Bible at random.
Just make sure you get the entire context, not just part of it.
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