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It’s music day at the ol’ blog, with three musical numbers to brighten your day. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is the good, the bad, and the just plain weird.

First, a little ditty from Quixote that would probably fall under my “Letter to a Christian Nation” heading.

Next, I’ll send you over to Dr. Winn for two Christmas tunes that are at the very least, out of the ordinary. One is a rather original rendition of “O Holy Night” that brought back memories of what used to be called “special music” in my hometown Lutheran church. The other tune is my family’s favorite rendition of “Blue Christmas.”

Enjoy! (or at least, experience…)

In keeping with prior posts on hermeneutics (that is, how to read and actually understand the Bible in some reasonable fashion), more hermeneutics, discovering the nature of God, and too many posts to link to directed at shaking a bit of sense into mindless pop Christian culture, check out Ben Witherington, once again, as he provides a great post on how we should read the Old Testament in light of the New Testament.

The “old dude” I’m referring to is “Saint” John Chrysostom, one of the gems of the Early (4th Century) Church. We don’t hear too much from Chrysostom, and some may never of heard of him. It seems as though many people assume that there were no brilliant theological minds between the Apostle Paul and Martin Luther (or Calvin, for you Reformed folks). Born in 349, Chrysostom was actually a contemporary of Augustine, who was 5 years younger. Chrysostom became the Archbishop of Constantinople, while Augustine joined the Church in Italy after being converted in Milan. Of course, at that time there was still only one church, although Rome always seemed to always claim a higher status. While both men are considered saints in both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, the West seemed to follow Augustine’s thinking, while Chrysostom seems to carry more clout in the East. But, enough history.

The point that Witherington & Chrysostom make concerning the reading of the Old Testament is that since the coming of the New Testament (basically, I think, the appearance of Jesus) the Old Testament must be read and interpreted in light of the New Testament. Here’s a quote that Mr. W quotes from Chrysostom:

Now when you see these things merely sketched out you neither know everything nor are you totally ignorant of everything, but you know that a man and a horse are drawn there, though they are indistinct. But you don’t accurately [or fully] know what sort of emperor or what sort of prisoner it is until the truth of the colors comes and makes the face distinct and clear. For just as you don’t ask everything of that image/portrait before the truth of the colors, but if you receive some indistinct knowledge of what is there, you consider the sketch to be sufficiently ready , in just that same way consider with me the Old and New Testaments , and don’t demand from me the whole fullness of the truth in the [OT] type…For as in the painting, until someone draws in colors it is a shadowy sketch.

Much weirdness comes from reading the Old Testament separate from the New, and as a consequence confusing how the testaments fit together. Witherington says:

Now what is so interesting about this whole hermeneutical approach is that it believes that one must do justice to the history if one is to do theology and ethics right. Christianity was a religion grounded and founded in history, and so theology proper was a reflection on God’s mighty acts in history which had a before and after to them. It was not an abstract science or philosophy where one took ideas and simply linked them together without them arising out of historical events and their substance. In the end, Chrysostom’s hermeneutic mirrors that of Paul and the author of Hebrews. It would be my view that we should go and do likewise.

Good stuff again from Mr. Witherington. Go read the whole article.

Dear Christian Nation,

One of the problems that we have, and why some atheists and other forms of non-believers find Christianity nuts, is that so many of us read the Bible in ways that allow us to make it say whatever we want. Thus, we have those committed to a life of poverty, and also those committed to material wealth; we have legalists and antinomians, liberal pacifists and fundamentalist war-mongers, and the list goes on. Many non-Christians don’t understand that when Pat Robertson proclaims a natural disaster as punishment from God, or when Oral Roberts sees a 900 foot Jesus, they aren’t speaking for the rest of us. This individualized, subjective (and dare I say postmodern?) reading of the Bible is, at the very least, setting a bad example for non-Christians who are trying to make sense out of what we believe (or are supposed to believe).

This is not to say that even with good hermeneutics (the art of interpreting ancient texts such as the Bible) we won’t have disagreements; however, I’m certain that we’d have significantly less disagreement over many important passages, with just a little dedication to truth. After all, aren’t we supposed to be dedicated to truth?

Ben Witherington has posted a brilliant piece called Hermeneutics– A Guide for Perplexed Bible Readers, that should be of interest to Christians and may also be of interest to non-Christians. It may also upset a number of Christians who insist on creating their own private reality.

Witherington first makes a good case (please pay attention to this) for why Christians should work a bit harder to try to understand the Bible correctly. The problem, however, is that many of us simply don’t want to hear this; actually treating truth as something worth working on interferes with our “making it up as we go” brand of reality. In other words, hermeneutics interferes with their heresy.

Witherington says:

But why would we need a guide to the perplexed in regard to the interpreting of the Bible? After all, don’t Christians have brains and the Holy Spirit to guide them? Well yes, but all modern brains are affected in the way they think by the modern cultural milieu in which they are immersed. They are affected as well by their whole educational progress (or regress) through school as well.

And frankly, ancient Biblical cultures, languages, and modes of conveying meaning are often so different from what modern ‘common sense’ may deduce that we do need some guidelines to help us interpret the Biblical texts which came out of very different cultures and circumstances from our own, ESPECIALLY if we are only trying to interpret the Bible on the basis of one or more English translations, none of which are perfect representations of the original language texts.

Witherington also gives three rudimentary rules of interpretation, with a brief explanation of each rule:

1. What it meant is what it means
2. Context is king
3. Genre matters

Some may feel that these rules are meant to explain away some things, or to discredit some “pet” interpretations; however, these are simply rules for actually understanding what the Word of God actually means. Doesn’t this seem important? However, as sad as it is, there will be many who simply reject this approach as being “liberal,” or based on reason rather than “spirit.” These people will go on with their own version of reality based on subjective, individualized, out-of-context readings of the Bible, in effect taking the position that their own understanding is more authoritative than the Bible itself.

Sounds terribly postmodern, doesn’t it? Again, I’m not against different opinions on what a text means, and certainly not when it comes down to the application of a text’s meaning. However, if you’re going to simply pull meaning out of the air, why use the Bible at all?

There will be verse-mining and rumors of proof-texting. It’s unfortunate and apparently inevitable, especially when Christians reject “the good sense that God gave you.”