Hermeneutics and Replacement Theology
Romans 9:1-6
In light of the trip I was on a couple of weeks ago to
Israel I’m going to continue to show some videos. The sound quality on this one
is a little shaky in the first 15 or 20 seconds because there was some
machinery running in the background. Then that got shut off so that will pick
up. The other thing that may be a little difficult for some of you is that the
lady we’re listening to is an Ethiopian Jew, one of the so-called Falasha which
is actually a derogatory Ethiopian term meaning a foreigner or someone who’s
been in exile. I chose this particular one to show because it is an extremely
moving story of her life.
I heard about five or six stories very, very similar
to hers from the different Ethiopian Jews. This lady is a director at a Kibbutz
known as Yemen Orde named for Orde Wingate. If you don’t remember, Orde Wingate
was a British officer who was a little bit eccentric. Churchill and many others
thought he was just about crazy. He was really one of the fathers or
grandfathers of the whole concept of special warfare, special operations,
asymmetrical warfare, and that kind of thing. He was a little bit strange in
that he would do things to test himself to see what a human being could endure.
Instead of walking across the Sahara Desert at night he walked across it during
the heat of the noonday sun with no water to see how long he could last, to
test his own endurance. That way he could see what his men could actually
endure under the worst possible conditions. The British dispatched him during the time of what is
called the Arab Insurrection or the Arab Revolt, from about 1935 to 1938 in
what was then the British mandate of what was Palestine.
What the British didn’t understand was how much of a
Zionist he was. He was reared in a Plymouth Brethren home where he and his
sister were taught the Old Testament and the whole Bible from the time they
were infants. The value of the Jewish people and Israel to God’s plan was
drilled into them so he had a tremendous love for the Jewish people.
Unfortunately both he and his sister apostatized from the faith when they went
into their adult years. His sister became a full-blown atheist and he became
something of an agnostic. In fact he loved the Jewish people and he loved the
Old Testament God but he had questions about the Trinity and some other aspects,
which he never quite resolved.
After his time in Israel where he trained Moshe Dayan
and many other young men who later became the backbone of the IDF, the Israeli
Army, the British pulled him out because he was so pro-Israel and pro-Zionist.
During World War II he was responsible for running the Italians out of Ethiopia
and so there was a connection there to the Ethiopians in his background. He
came in from the west, which was not thought to be possible so basically he
snuck in through the back door with a small number of troops and surprised the
Italians and ran them out of Ethiopia.
Then he was sent by the British during World War II to
infiltrate India where he developed a group that went behind enemy lines,
behind Japanese lines in Burma called the Chindits.
He was killed when a bomber carrying him and several Americans flying over
Burma was shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft fire in 1944. After the war their
remains were discovered and since most of those who were in the plane were
Americans and because they had no way of determining whose body was which, they
brought all of them back to Arlington National Cemetery and buried them in a
mass grave there. Because of his devotion to Israel and because of his devotion
to the Zionist cause he was given the title hayedid, a Hebrew word meaning “the friend”.
Every year on the anniversary of his death the Israeli ambassador to the United
States goes to his grave and has a ceremony where they recount his great deeds
for Israel and put flowers on his tomb.
That’s a great story but there’s an additional story
related to this Kibbutz named for him. It’s a youth village for troubled youth.
They have a tremendous program and originally they started off with orphans
that had survived the Holocaust and had no family. Eventually it turned into a
place where other orphans and troubled youth could come and they do a
tremendous job turning then around. During the Israeli War for Independence
this kibbutz came under attack from the Arab forces and they were without food.
There’s an Israeli legend, according to the author of this biography on Orde
Wingate, “Fire in the Night”, by John Berman and Colin Smith. They identify
that as simply a legend that his widow, Lorna, flew over the kibbutz and
dropped Wingate’s personal Bible to the personal defenders. Instead they write,
“Contrary to the popular Israeli legend, she was refused permission to make the
flight for reasons of her own safety. Instead she handed the Bible to a group
of women who with their children had been evacuated from the settlement. She
inscribed it on July 5, 1948, “To the defenders of Yemin Orde. Since Orde
Wingate is with you in the spirit although he cannot lead you in the flesh I
send you the Bible he carried in all his campaigns and from which he drew the
inspiration of his victories. May it be a covenant between you and him in
triumph or defeat now and always.” That Bible is now preserved at another
kibbutz, Ein Harod, which is near Harod Springs where Gideon called out the
300. We went there on our last trip to Israel. You see you do all kinds of
things besides just look at Bible sites when you go over to Israel.
We went to the headquarters building at Ein Harod
where Wingate ran his operations in training the special night fighters, the
Haganah, the Israeli army at that time. So there’s a connection to there with
Ethiopia. There are a couple of big pictures of Wingate and his widow standing
with David Ben Gurion who was the prime minister of Israel in early 50’s. They
were coming to begin this school they started after the war for independence.
Now this story of the Ethiopian Jews is a fascinating
story. Lots of times you’ll hear that it’s just legend,
but we don’t really know how much is true and how much is not true. The legend
is that in Ethiopia, which is where the Queen of Sheba was from, the queen who
came to visit Solomon is that she was pregnant with Solomon’s child when she
went back to Ethiopia with an entourage of Jews. These Ethiopian Jews are said
to be the descendants of that entourage.
There’s also other historical truth in that there were
a group of Jews who went to Egypt after the destruction of the Temple in 586
and various other groups that went down to that area so we’re not really sure
what their heritage is. They were called the Beta Israel, the house of Israel.
Some think in their part of the legend that they descend from the lost tribe of
Dan, that after the destruction of the northern Kingdom in 722 many of the
tribe of Dan migrated down to Ethiopia.
Others believe that they are the descendants of
Menilep the First of Ethiopia who was the son of King Solomon and the Queen of
Sheba and that was the belief of the kings of Ethiopia, all the way down to
Haile Selassie who was deposed in the late 50s. He claimed direct descent from
the Queen of Sheba and Solomon. We don’t have historical verification of that
so it’s uncertain.
There’s also the view that they’re descendants of
Ethiopia Christians and pagans who converted to Judaism almost 1500 years ago
and also the view that they’re the descendants of Jews who fled from Israel
after the destruction of the Temple in 586 and went down that way. The view
among the Jews in determining whether they were authentic really has quite a
history. I was not aware of this because we just hear the story of the legend a
little bit but as early as the 1500s Egypt’s chief rabbi, David ben Solomon
Abuzimri known as Radbad, a nickname based on acronyms from his name, declared
that in halecha,
that is in Jewish legal sense, that the Beta Israel were indeed Jews. The
Jewish community as far back as the fourth or fifth century knew them.
By the 15th century they were accepted that
they are indeed Jewish. This position from Radbad was reaffirmed in the 19th
century. Almost all leading Jewish authorities accepted Beta Israel as true
Jews in 1864. In 1908 the chief rabbis of 45 countries also affirmed that Beta
Israel were true Jews and then after World War II and after the they deposed
Halle Selassie, they became increasingly persecuted by the socialist, Marxist
dictators that ruled Ethiopia so they were left impoverished. They were
prohibited form observing any of their Jewish rituals. They were prohibited
from teaching Hebrew which they had been teaching their children from
generation to generation. They observed all of the Mosaic Law. They had no idea
that the Jews had returned to Israel or to Jerusalem because they were so poor
and they were located near Lake Tana, a remote area in Ethiopia. They had no
news, no idea, and no awareness of anything going on in the outside world. So
this young woman, who is probably in her early 30s, is telling her story. I
thought it was much more compelling than most of the stories I heard. I
listened to the whole thing a couple of times today. I’m half deaf so if I can
understand it and you’ll work with the accent a little bit, then you’ll hear
this remarkable story. She’s one of the directors of the youth village there.
If you wish to view this part of the class, please
visit: https://vimeo.com/66875424
One of the reasons I’m showing these videos is to help
us understand a little bit more about modern Israel and the role of Israel in
the world because the assault on Israel today is coming not only from Islam and
their historic anti-Semitism but we’re seeing a resurrection of anti-Semitism
in the Christian community and the resurrection of some of the worst forms of
Replacement Theology. So let’s open our Bibles again to Romans 9 and just
review where we’ve been in our study.
Tonight we’re going to look at the issue of
hermeneutics and Replacement Theology, all part of our introduction to understanding
Paul’s focus on Israel and the Jewish people in Romans 9-11. One quote I had
here from the Baltimore Jewish Times of November 9, 1979 about the Falasha,
“Once they were kings a half a million strong. They matched their fervor with
faith and outmatched the Muslim and Christian tribesmen around them to rule the
mountain highlands around Lake Tana. They called themselves Beta Israel, the
house of Israel, and used the Torah to guide their prayers and memories of the
heights of Jerusalem as they lived in their thatched huts in Ethiopia. Their
neighbors called them Falasha, the alien ones, the invaders. Even after three
hundred years of rule, even the black-featured faces that matched those of all
those around them did not make the Jews of Ethiopia secure governors of their
secure destiny in Africa.” That article was also significant because when that
article came out in the late 70’s there were movements to begin the movement of
these Egyptian Jews, the Beta Israel, to Israel. The publication of that particular
article by the Washington Jewish Week caused something of an uproar. It was the
leaking of information about the first attempt by the U.S. and Israel to bring
them out of Ethiopia and into Israel. It delayed that for some time.
Okay. Romans 9:1. As we saw last time in the first
three verses the Apostle Paul emphasizes his emotional attachment, concern, and
love for the Jewish people. He went so far as to say if he could he would die,
be accursed eternally, he would be lost if they could all be saved. In verse 2
he says, “I wish myself that I were anathema from Christ for my countrymen
according to the flesh.” There’s nothing negative toward Paul toward the Jewish
people. He’s not blaming them to be Christ-killers. He’s not blaming them or
saying they’re under the judgment of God and Christians should be hostile to
them. He shows his great love for the Jewish people.
In verse 4 he describes them as Israelites to whom
pertain, and this is a tense which emphasizes their present possession of the
adoption from Exodus, where they’re adopted as God’s first-born child, from the
glory, the covenants [Abrahamic, Land, Davidic, and the New Covenant). He’s
saying these still pertain to Israel. They have not been abrogated. The giving
of the law belongs to Israel. That not only describes a specific giving of the
Law but the fact that God called out the descendants of Abraham to be the
custodians of revelation, the custodians of the Scripture, preserving and
passing it on. “The service to God” relates to their priesthood in the Temple
and “the promises” which means these promises still hold true. God has not set
them aside.
He says in verse 5, “Of whom are the fathers from whom
according to the flesh Christ came.” This means Jesus is fully Jewish in his
humanity “whose overall and eternally blessed God. Amen.” This is another
profound statement there identifying Jesus as being fully God.
We looked briefly last time at the foundation of the
Abrahamic Covenant, God’s call of Abraham in Genesis 12: 1-3 where He promised
that He would make Abraham a great nation and He would bless Abraham
personally. That’s not in the plural, it’s singular where God is saying He is
promising to bless Abraham and “make your name great”. Then He says, “that you
should be a blessing…” This is a command. I went over all the various things
where Israel has done numerous things in agriculture and technology and
medicine and numerous other things, advancing the field. One thing I didn’t
mention last time is something called IsraAid. This is a team which the Israeli
government has developed consisting of doctors and a range of other
specialists, such as EMTs and
nurses, and a whole array of emergency equipment which they fly into places
like Haiti when they had the big earthquake three of four years ago and in
Japan when they had their earthquake, and in Indonesia when they had the
tsunami. When the earthquake occurred in Haiti the IsraAid was in Haiti within
about 48 hours, a couple of days before the US was there. Notice that Haiti is just around the
corner for us but Israel’s on-site solving problems, setting up triage,
treating people, having surgery, rescuing people under the rubble, all of this
on the spot again and again and again. They’re fulfilling that responsibility
of being a blessing to the world.
Then the key promise here in verse 3, “I will bless
those who bless you and I will curse him who curses you.” We saw it was two
different Hebrew words used there. I keep emphasizing that the first word means
a harsh curse and the second has the idea of just treating the Jews with
disrespect. If you treat the Jews with disrespect, God is going to harshly
judge you. That is one of the strongest verses to understand the horrors and
the dangers for any people, any nation to get into when they get involved with
anti-Semitism.
That’s what I pointed out last time that there are two
ideas that have plagued Christianity. One is the idea of Replacement Theology
and the second is Christian anti-Semitism. As Christians we have this horrible
legacy from the middle of the 2nd Century where anti-Semitic ideas
began to develop within Christianity, leading to some of the most horrible
things being said about the Jewish people and being done to the Jewish people
and on down through the Middle Ages and to the present culminating in the worst
expression of anti-Semitism ever. This was the Holocaust that was carried out
by the Nazi government by Germany during World War II.
A lot of people don’t realize this because it hasn’t been
published but recently we learned about a study that came out from the UN. This study had been going on for two or three years
investigating concentration camps, death camps, and ghettos. There are hundreds
and hundreds of both cities and towns all throughout Eastern Europe that
created two or three block ghettos and forced hundreds of Jews into those
ghettos as a concentration camp. So the question was how many ghettos were
there under the Third Reich. This study that came out in January was seeing if
there were 5 or 8 or 10 thousand. It was actually 42,500. That blew everybody’s
mind. Nobody had realized that.
What these two common views have in common is that
they are built upon a fallacious view of interpretation that is not restricted
to Biblical studies. How you interpret something, whether it’s an e-mail from a
girlfriend or boyfriend, whether it’s a legal document, whether it’s the United
States Constitution, whether it’s British Law, whether it’s Shakespeare or a
modern dramatist, whatever it is, how you interpret literature is always the
same. It’s always based on a literal, plain view of the language. Once you cut
yourself off from that then an author can’t communicate to his subject.
It’s always interesting that in the modern or
post-modern world of today, where you have these philosophers write condemning
the historic view of any kind of a plain, literal view of interpretation, they
do it in a way that they expect you to interpret their words in a plain,
literal manner. That’s the only way you can understand what they’re saying and
yet, they condemn that. We recognize that there are differences between
different kinds of literature such as history, poetry, love sonnets, and drama.
They all have their nuances but ultimately the interpretive framework is always
based on a plain, literal interpretation. It doesn’t deny the use of figures of
speech, it doesn’t deny the use of similes and metaphors, it doesn’t deny the
use of symbols but those symbols and metaphors are used in a way that’s commonly
understood to have something of a literal, specific, firm meaning.
So we need to begin our study of Replacement Theology
and anti-Semitism as a backdrop for our study in Romans 9-11 by looking at the
principles of interpretation. David L. Cooper was a missionary to the Jewish
community. One of his young protégées was Arnold Fruchtenbaum and through
Arnold’s ministries and that of others, David Cooper managed to put together a
rather catchy definition of interpretation which is very clear. He called it the
Golden Rule of Interpretation and it states, “When the plain sense of Scripture
makes common sense, make no other sense. Therefore take every word at its
ordinary, usual meaning unless the facts of the immediate context studied in
the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths indicates
clearly otherwise.” Okay, that’s a great definition so let’s talk about it a
minute.
He starts off with “the plain sense of Scripture.”
This refers to the language, the words, and what they normally mean when
looking the words up in a dictionary. You understand that in a dictionary
sometimes a word may have five or six different meanings. They’ll list them in
order of the most common meaning and so on. Then when you look at a word you
determine by the context what the meaning is. The meaning isn’t based on what
Webster’s says. The same is true in Greek or Hebrew. The dictionary is simply
the work of a lexicographer who has studied all the uses of a word and has
categorized the major nuances that are found for the various meanings of that
word in various cases of literature. That’s why when you look at say, an
English dictionary from the 1800s or 1700s; words that are contained in that
dictionary may have a different meaning from that same word today. Why? Because
language changes with usage. Usage determines meaning, not the dictionary.
Words don’t have absolute meanings.
Meanings are determined by context so when I teach
word study to people who want to get into advanced study of the Scripture the
key thing I tell them is don’t go to your lexicons and ask what the various
ones say. Instead look at all the usages and categorize them. That takes a lot
of time. We shortcut a lot because of the fact that we don’t always have the
time to look at every single use of a word, especially if it’s a more common
word, like pistis for faith or amen for
faith in the Old Testament. This may be a word used hundreds of times. It takes
a lot of time to go through and analyze each usage and the context of each
usage in order to boil down your meanings.
Fortunately there are lots of lexical tools that have
done a lot of that work for us. The more you study the more you come to
understand those different nuances but you have to look at what that normal,
plain meaning is. That’s the word that if I tell you something, you’re going to
understand it. You’re going to read your instructions to fill out your income
tax form. You want to make sure that you understand it in light of what the
author said. That’s another aspect to interpretation. In order for one person
to communicate to another person then the person that’s being communicated to
needs to understand the intent and meaning of the one communicating. When you
sit down and fill out your income tax and you read your instructions, you need
to do it the way they say to do it, not the way you would like to do it. They
have a word for people who fill that out on the basis of how they would like it
to mean. They call them tax evaders and criminals.
The same thing happened when you were say 14, 15, or
16 years old and you got a love note passed to you or now a love tweet or
e-mail and your question is what did he or she mean? What did they intend to
say? You don’t care what you would like it to mean; you want to know what they said.
We know that to be true. But when we get to be a junior or senior in high
school, all of a sudden, the teacher starts trying to tell us that the way to
understand poetry is to ask what it means to you. Of course if you go to some
Sunday school classes, you’re exposed to that much earlier. The teacher who’s
lazy comes in and hasn’t ever studied anything and says, “Read this verse and
tell me what it means to you.”
We have a culture that’s been brought up on this idea
that the meaning of a text doesn’t reside in the text, in the words of the
text, or in the mind of the person who wrote the text but in your mind. We call
that a subjective meaning because you’re the subject and the meaning is
dependent upon you. There’s not an objective meaning that is verifiable from
the author. Plain sense is just taking it at its face value. Plain sense is
common sense. If you read a passage of Scripture and it says that Jesus wept,
the plain sense of that is that Jesus cried. So you don’t want to try to read
into it something else. It’s in the context of the death of Lazarus so it makes
perfectly good sense. There’s nothing contextually to make you think that this
is really talking about some other kind of activity. So what’s he’s saying is
that “when the plain sense makes common sense, don’t try to read something else
into it.” It’s simple.
When Paul says, “To the Israelites to whom pertain the
adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law,” don’t try to make
Israel there the Church. Don’t try to read in other passages the word “church”
and say, “Well that must mean Israel.” I have another book to show you. Tonight
is really
show-and-tell night. I’ve brought all kinds of things to show you tonight. This
new book I’m working through is a two-volume book by Menachem Sokolov, written
in 1920 on the history of Zionism. He’s one of the few Zionist historians that
I’ve read that actually starts with British Restorationism. His first chapter
is called “England and the Bible.” He writes about one of the primary principles
that Martin Luther resurrected was literal interpretation. Luther only applied
is as far as justification by faith. That was such a huge battle that he didn’t
have time to push it beyond that in his system. So he still had a lot of
non-literal interpretation in his theology but in his view of salvation much of
it was based on literal interpretation. That was around 1517 when the
Protestant Reformation began.
So now in Sokolov’s book we’re up to about 1600 and
over those 80 years or so there’s been a development of theology as theologians
have pushed out the application of literal interpretation to other areas of
theology besides just salvation. So Sokolov, a Jewish author, writing about
England says, “The education of a large number of Englishmen has consisted
mainly in the reading of the Scriptures. The growth and the gradual diffusion
of literal and moral thinking is due to the supreme influence of the Bible is
the fact that can be recognized throughout the whole of English history. As a
single instance we may take two writers who lived in different periods, one
from the 1600s, one from the 1800s. The first is the Reverend Paul Knell,
(1615–1654 – the height of the Puritan era) and Matthew Arnold
(1822 –1888). Knell compared England with Israel. What other culture
besides England has compared their experience with the Israelites? The answer
is the black community. They’ve identified their slavery in America with the
slavery of the Jews in Egypt. They made the same mistake because they idealized
it and they used too much allegory. It wasn’t literal.
That was a problem that Sokolov is pointing out that
preceded Paul Knell. He goes on to say, “Knell compared England with Israel.
The name of Israel was used by writers of his age with so much laxity that it
is impossible to define the sense with which it is generally intended to
convey. It often meant the religion of Israel but other times it was used as if
it were a synonym for the word church. But Knell used the word in its plain
meaning. For him Israel meant simply the people of Israel or the land of
Israel.” Literal interpretation. Israel means Israel. Israel doesn’t mean the
church. The church doesn’t mean Israel. The term Israel is not a symbol for
something. It’s not a code word for the church. The church is not the Israel of
the New Testament.
That’s what a lot of people were doing up to Knell,
and Knell is one of the few that began to shift with a literal interpretation.
Most denominations, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and some Presbyterians were not
literal. Those Presbyterians who were premillennial were more literal in these
passages that related to Israel. This idea of literal interpretation doesn’t
just apply to the Bible. It applies to any kind of literature. One of my
favorite quotes is from Chief Justice Clarence Thomas at a lecture to the
Manhattan Institute about seven years ago. He said, “Let me put it this way.
There are really only two ways to interpret the Constitution. Try to discern
the best we can what the Framers intended, or make it up.” You could insert the
Bible for Constitution and it would be just as true. See that’s how people are
with the Bible. They either try to determine what the plain sense of Scripture
is in light of what the author intended or they’re just making it up. The
trouble in a lot of churches and a lot of theologians is that they’re just
making it up. Once you get away from a literal interpretation, it can mean
anything and there’s no protection of truth any more. The truth, they say, is
what it means to you and it can be different to what it means to me. That’s the
same thing with the Constitution. You hear people talk about the Constitution
as a living document. They mean that it doesn’t have to be interpreted any more
in terms of the intent of the original author.
Well, tell me, when you get a love letter or a letter
from the IRS,
especially today, if you’re a conservative Christian, or if you get a tax
notice or a greeting card from someone, how do you understand it? You
understand it literally. You don’t understand it in a figurative, allegorical
manner. You don’t say, “Well, what do I want this to mean?” That means it may
have meant something different yesterday than it means today. We don’t do that
in anything.
Isn’t it interesting that we have an administration
today where the only amendment from the Bill of Rights that they think has any
value is the Fifth Amendment? They trampled the First Amendment. They want to
destroy the Second Amendment. They don’t care anything about the Fourth
Amendment or the Tenth Amendment but they always claim the fifth because they
trampled all over the other ones and that is not restricted to just Democrats.
Trust me. There have been a lot of people over the years that have trampled
over both ends of the spectrum because they don’t want to take it literally.
See, we elect people to defend the Constitution. They
think we elected them to change the Constitution. We don’t hire a pastor to
change the Bible but that’s what happened in the late 19th century
with the advent of 19th century liberal theology. It went back to
the same kind of non-literal interpretation and it produced a pseudo-utopianism
that gave birth to a bastard child of Nazism. There were a lot of other elements
that figured into that, but that’s where the anti-Semitism came from. It had a
long heritage in Western Europe and it was all built on a non-literal
interpretation of the Bible. It bore its poisonous fruit in the Third
Reich.
What does the word hermeneutics mean? It’s from the
Greek word hermenuo which
is based on the Greek deity, Hermes, who was the messenger or interpreter of
the gods. The word basically meant to bring someone to an understanding of
something, to explain something, to make it clear, to make it intelligibly. So
hermeneutics refers to the science and art of interpreting the Bible. It is
both a science because it follows certain precise principles that must always
be followed and an art, because it takes time and skill to develop it. This is
based on a quote from Milton Terry from an earlier generation of his classical
work, “Biblical Hermeneutics”.
Terry is good as far as he goes but he reached a point
where he quit being literal. A lot of covenant theologians, once they get to unfulfilled
prophecy interpret it in a non-literal manner although they interpret all of
the prophecy that’s been fulfilled in a literal manner. Jesus was going to be
born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). He was going to be born of the lineage of David.
They take all of that literally but as soon as it becomes unfulfilled prophecy
they no longer understand it in a literal fashion. Milton Terry wrote in his
classic textbook on hermeneutics: “hermeneutics is both a science and an art".
As a science it enunciates principles, investigates the laws of thought and
language and classifies its facts and results as an art. It teaches what
application these principles should have and establishes their soundness by
showing their practical value in the elucidation of the more difficult
Scriptures.”
This means that as you interpret the Scripture it’s
not in isolation. It’s got a surrounding context. That context has a
surrounding context and even that has a surrounding context. The passage we’re
looking at in Romans 9 has a context of Romans 9–11 and is in the context
of the epistle to Romans, which is part of the Pauline epistles, which is part
of the New Testament, which is part of the Bible. So you don’t interpret just
in light of a verse. You don’t just take out your scalpel and carve out two or
three verses and try to understand them in isolation. Not only do you have the
literary context of the Scripture but you also have its historical context, its
cultural context, and all of those different aspects that are important. It
concludes by saying “The hermeneutical art thus cultivates and establishes a
valid exegetical procedure.”
Okay, now this is all spelled out in a lot of
different Bible study methods. Peter Lange, a German, in his commentary on
Revelation writes about the different types of hermeneutics, literal or
figurative. He says, “The literalist (so called)”…” The reason they sort of
qualify this is because our opponents say we have just a wooden literalism:
that we don’t believe in figures of speech, we don’t believe in metaphors or
similes. We just have a very rigid literalism. But that isn’t true. In other
words if I tell you to go jump in the lake that doesn’t mean I’m telling you to
literally go jump into a body of water. I just want you to go away or leave or
quit bothering me, or something like that. It’s an idiom. It’s a figurative way
of speaking that has a literal meaning. We know what it means. If I tell you to
go jump in the lake, not one of you would go find a body of water and jump into
it. That would be literal interpretation but that’s not what we mean by literal
interpretation.
Lange says, “The literalist is not one who denies that
figurative language and symbols are used in prophecy. Nor does he deny the
great spiritual truths are set forth therein. His position, simply, is that the
prophecies are to be normally interpreted, that is, according to the received
laws of language, as any other utterances are interpreted, that which is
manifested so regarded. There are some passages of Scripture that utilize a
tremendous amount of figurative speech.”
Let me read one to you, which comes from the Song of
Solomon, one of my favorite little descriptions. Now think how you would
picture this. I one time had an artist draw this literally and I can’t find it
now. Picture this in a literal manner. This is Solomon speaking of the beauty
of the Shulamite woman. “Behold you are fair, my love. Behold you are fair. You
have dove’s eyes behind your veil.” Are we going to take that literally that
she has literal dove’s eyes? It’s a literal veil. See we understand that in our
language that this is a metaphor. He’s comparing her eyes to the beauty of a
dove’s eyes. “Your hair is like a flock of goats going down from Mount Gilead.”
So there’s a comparison there between her hair and a flock of goats. Is it
comparing smell? Is it comparing color? Or is it comparing something that is
flowing beautifully and gently down the slope? We know what it’s comparing. We
understand that. We’re interpreting it literally but not woodenly. “Your teeth
are like a flock of shorn sheep.” Just imagine what that would look like if you
took it literally.
Okay, see, this idea that we don’t believe in metaphor
or simile or idiom is just nonsense, it’s not what goes on. Gordon Clark who’s
a well-known philosopher theologian, who has gone to be with the Lord, so he’s
now a dispensationalist, does make a very intelligent comment here. He says,
“If God created man in His own rational image and endowed him with the power of
speech…” Notice he goes back to the creator concept, that God initiated
communication and language and then He creates that in man as a finite replica
of who God is. “…and endowed him with the power of speech then the purpose of
language, in fact the chief purpose of language, would naturally be the
revelation of truth to man and the prayers of man to God.” Language was
originally created so that God could communicate information to man and man
would communicate back to God. That’s the purpose of language primarily. It doesn’t
mean there aren’t other aspects to it but that’s the primary aspect.
He says, “In a theistic philosophy one not ought to
say that all language is devised in order to describe the finite objects of our
sense experiences.” In other words, language isn’t there so we can talk about
what we see in the created order. “On the contrary, language was devised by
God, that is God created man rational for the purpose of theological
expression.” Now I’ve always wondered why people, even pastors, seem to avoid
discussing theology. I always thought that if the primary or highest purpose
for language was for us to just talk about God, then if you’re with someone who
doesn’t ever like to talk about God or theology, then Houston, we’ve got a
problem.
Now Floyd Hamilton is a well-known antagonist to
dispensationalist. He’s an amillennial covenant theologian and he writes about
interpretation, just to show you the other side. He says, “Now we must frankly
admit that a literal interpretation of the Old Testament prophecies gives us
just such a picture of the earthly reign of the Messiah as the
pre-millennialist pictures.” My! If we use literal interpretation, of course
we’re going to end up with what they think but Hamilton goes on to say, “But
that’s wrong. That was the kind of Messianic Kingdom that the Jews at the time
of Christ were looking for on the basis of a literal kingdom interpretation of
the Old Testament prophecy.” His subtext is that they were wrong and that
literal interpretation about future things is wrong.
Another amillennialist, Verne Poythress, who wrote a
really slanderous book against dispensationalist back in the 90s, is a
well-known theologian who teaches up at Westminster Theological Seminary but he
needed a fact checker who would tear out every other paragraph because it is
just filled with all kinds of falsehoods about what dispensationalists believe.
He wrote, “I claim that there is a sound, solid grammatical full historical
reason for interpreting eschatological fulfillments of prophecy on a different
basis than pre-eschatological fulfillments”. Now where do we find that in the
Bible? Are we going to interpret unfulfilled prophecy in a different way than
we interpret fulfilled prophecy? He continues, “It’s therefore a move away from
grammatical historical interpretation to insist that the House of Israel and
the House of Judah (Jeremiah 31:31) must with dogmatic certainty be interpreted
in the most prosaic biological sense, a sense that an Israelite might be likely
to apply as a rule of thumb in a short term prediction.” In other words, what
he’s saying is that the House of Judah and the House of Israel just can’t mean
the House of Judah and House of Israel, That’s just too common. Common as pig
tracks, as some would say. But no! He’s shifting the rules of the game in
mid-game.
O.T. Alice, another well-known Westminster professor,
covenant theologian, wrote numerous commentaries and attacks and slanders
against dispensationalists in the early 20th century says, “One of
the most marked features of pre-millennialism in all its forms is the emphasis
on the literal interpretation of Scripture. It is the insistent claims of its
advocates that only when interpreted literally is the Bible interpreted truly.”
Well, he’s right. That’s what we say. He goes on to say, “They denounce us as
spiritualizers or allegorizers, those who do not interpret the Bible with the
same degree of literalness as they do. None have made this point more pointedly
than the dispensationalists. The Old Testament prophecies as literally
interpreted cannot be regarded as being yet fulfilled or as being capable of
being fulfilled in this present age.” He goes on to say that he doesn’t
interpret it literally because we’re in the kingdom now.
We’ll stop there and next time we’ll come back and see
how a shift away from non-literal interpretation impacts how the church
historically viewed Israel and that’s the foundation for understanding this
whole thing that’s now called Replacement theology and how Replacement Theology
is rearing its ugly head today in a new form called Christian Palestinianism.
This is a counter-point to Christian Zionism. When I was in Israel I heard two
advocates of Christian Palestinianism address us. It was interesting to listen
to them but as one of my colleagues said, “We were patient to the point of
where we were almost ready to commit murder.” So one pastor sitting there did
call them a liar to their face but we won’t mention any names.