Part 55. Guidance and control. Principles and rules. (3)

Do you consider the meaning of a passage of scripture without any preconceptions? Highly unlikely. We do not act and think in a vacuum: in the background or foreground there are influences at work as a consequence of our knowledge,  experience and  motivation. Family, economics, politics, social policy, educational attainment, employment, class, income, hobbies, faith, newspapers, television et al all conspire to shape our opinions, our thinking, our action.  Whether it is a judge deciding a case, a bishop commenting on a theological issue, or the man at the bar in the pub holding forth there is a complicated potpourri of factors shaping their thanking.  

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was a long- serving judge of the USA Supreme Court and a distinguished jurist. He coined the phrase inarticulate major premises as a description of how in deciding cases judges take into consideration factors outside the facts of a case and a logical application of the law to the facts, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unconsciously.  In other words, a cartload of baggage. What baggage do we bring to our interpretation of scripture? When reading opinions on the meaning of scripture we should ask what agenda the author is promoting.  Consider this statement by John Piper a USA Baptist minister and theologian. 

If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you don't get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. This is not evangelism  but deception.

In other words, if you don't accept Piper's interpretation of scripture you are deluded and deceived.   Piper bring his inarticulste premise to bear on biblical interpretation.

Holmes was a prolific writer. Below I have summarised three points he made concerning his understanding of the law, points which may be equally applicable to our understanding of scripture.

* The life of the law has not been logic  it has been experience.

* Law is a set of generalisations of what judges did in earlier cases.

* Words are the skin of living thought.

I proffer the thought that our understanding of scripture should be akin to that of Holmes in respect of the  common law. Postmodernism has drawn out the fluidity of words. Faith is not based on pure logic but on hope and experience. We should not interpret scripture as a set of static, rigid, fixed rules but as fluid and dynamic guides to faith.

To be continued......