A number of years ago, when I was just getting involved in simple church, I was asked by a traditional church to give a “house church demonstration.” I’d had a long friendship with this church which reached back about 20 years. About 15 people showed up for the “demonstration.” We divided into three groups. There were two groups of regular folks and two pastors and I who sat at another table. I did this to show that in house church there is no clergy. And that God is perfectly capable of leading a discussion. It was the end of my friendship with the Senior Pastor and eventually led to end of my long standing relationship with that church.

What sin did I commit? When asked by the Senior Pastor how I could assure that heresy didn’t break out among the un-seminary trained “laity” I quoted John 16:13: But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. The pastor became visibly angry with me. With a tremble in his voice he gave me a list of approved commentaries. From that point on he was my enemy and he did his level best to undermine my relationship with the church. By the way, the other two tables had a wonderful time digging into the Scriptures and being ministered to by the Spirit. I’m sure that only made matters worse.

Am I against commentaries? Am I against solid hermeneutical exegesis of Scripture? No, I think they are both wonderful. I think that digging into the Scriptures and finding out what the human author meant by what he said is valuable. After all, he and the Scriptures he wrote were inspired by the Spirit. So, to find out what the author meant by what he said is to discern the thoughts of the Spirit.

However, let me illustrate my point by telling another brief story. It was 1998. I was in a Commentary of Texts class at the University of Madrid Complutense in Spain. The teacher was showing us how to dig every last detail of meaning out of a Lope de Vega play. She was teaching the exact same skills I had learned in my seminary Hermeneutics class. The only difference between what I learned in seminary and what I learned about how to understand Lope de Vega was that one class was in English and one was given in Spanish. Oh, and that Carmen, my professor, was a smoking, drinking, partying colorful character who looked, dressed and acted like Morticia Addams on the Addams Family. Carmen was a much better teacher than my seminary professor.

Why are we fascinated by the human ability to tear apart a text?  I believe this comes as a holdover from our “Enlightened” culture. The main value of the Enlightenment is that humans are the highest form of existence. What they cook up in their minds and develop as “truth” is the highest truth humans can know. Really? We have succumbed to the foundational principles of our Western world. This behavior of Western Christians, by the way, has a dangerous down side. The down side is that we tacitly teach “laity” that they should only believe what the seminary trained experts tell them is approved. We are avidly listening to humans, but not necessarily listening to the Spirit.

I think there is another hermeneutic that is even more valuable. It is the hermeneutic of finding out what the Spirit means by what the Spirit says. This is truly living in the new covenant. This will use the Scriptures. This will gladly dig into the meaning of the text and be grateful for that tremendous gift of God that the Bible is. However, it will also pay close attention to discerning what the Spirit is doing in our hearts and minds. It will pay close attention to where the Spirit is directing us to Kingdom building action, godly living and God glorifying behavior. And we will pay close attention to the dangers of the enemies of our souls, the values of the world, the temptations of the flesh, and the dark spirits who would like to seduce us to something that seems good, but isn’t.

Have you been explicitly trained in those hermeneutical skills? I didn’t think so. Why? Again, I believe we have been seduced by the foundational principles of the world; in this case the values of the Enlightenment of our Western culture. I am going to ask the same question that Paul asked of the Galatians; how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable principles? (Gal. 4:9)

What amazes me is that most Western Christians nowadays don’t know the hermeneutical skills of the Spirit. Nor do they know the valuable hermeneutical skills of tearing apart a text. In their place they wait for some seminary trained expert to tell them what to believe. Doesn’t that strike you as dangerous?

For other post that discuss how we have been seduced by the dangerous values of the world read: Jesus Manifesto, Life to the Full: Three Options, Being Respectable and Relevant, Greek and Hebrew Evangelism, Authority: How Jesus Leads a Church.

  • Where can we find training in the hermeneutics of the Spirit?
  • How do we avoid heresy?
  • What should be included in the hermeneutics of the Spirit?
  • How do we know that we are right if we don’t have an expert to tell us so?
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