Spiritual Forensics
But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good. 1 Thessalonians 5:21 NASB
Examine everything – It is more difficult to unlearn than to learn. The problem is that as we grow older we discover that a great deal of what we learned has to be unlearned before we can gain new insight. Paul’s audience was like us. They already “knew” many things, but what they knew stood in the way of what they needed to understand. Therefore, Paul tells them to examine everything (panta dokimazete). So must we. The only question is how to do that.
“The desire for explanations is a very understandable human need. We want to hear the truth, and we want to understand why and for what purpose a certain thing happened. However, we also have another, simultaneous wish: we expect this truth to be easily understood. These two wishes are, in most cases, mutually exclusive. Our assumptions about our ability to understand are often quite presumptuous. Often, when we do get an explanation, we are unable to understand it. . . . That does not mean, however, that we ought not to question.”[1]
So the first thing in our quest is the question. Our answers are useless if we do not know the question. Why did Paul say this? What did Paul mean by each term? How did Paul’s exhortation fit into his own cultural view? Who were the people he addressed? Questions, questions, questions – all needing to be answered before we can say anything certain about Paul’s message. This is the role of spiritual forensics (thank you Karen Chin for this wonderful phrase). That means, among other things, that we can’t pretend that Ruth is an Old Testament version of West Side Story. It isn’t even a version of East Side Story. If we want to understand God’s Word, we will have to dig through the words He used to communicate to us long before we can start applying the meaning to our lives.
Paul’s exhortation implies one other crucial assumption. There is a standard. Paul uses the Greek verb dokimazo. It means “to examine, to prove, to test.” But all examination, all testing, implies a standard by which something is tested. There has to be an answer key in order to score an exam. There has to be a measuring stick in order to calculate distance. And there has to be a system of government in order to live in a Kingdom. The biblical standard is Torah. There can be no doubt about this. Everything Yeshua does and everything his disciples do after Him is measured by the standard of Torah, the assumed guide of all orthodox Jewish behavior. If you pull Torah out of the mix, you cannot understand anything in the New Testament documents.
With that in mind, we can list the ten principles of spiritual forensics:
1. Revelation is spoken before it is written – it was manifested in the authors before it was communicated in written form.
2. The meaning of the manifested message must be understood according to the culture, time, place and circumstances of the original audience.
3. Grammar – the whole system of the language, Syntax – arrangement of words and phrases, Morphology – the form and inflection, Phonology – the sounds, Structure – consonants as integral components of meaning, and Idioms must all be considered.
4. Hebrew has layers of meaning and each layer must be understood in order to grasp the full manifestation – PaRDeS plus exegetical intricacies like letters + pictures.
5. If the meaning we supply to the text could not be understood by the original audience, then our interpretation of the text is probably wrong.
6. A contemporary application of the text can be supplied only after we have determined as best as possible what the original audience would have understood.
7. Understanding the author’s motivation is crucial to understanding the original meaning and the contemporary application, if any.
8. Ignoring the cultural and historical setting of the text allows the contemporary audience to read into the text what the cultural presupposition of the current reading audience assumes to be true.
9. Scripture is one. No interpretation of the text that either adds to or subtracts from the original meaning in contradiction of the whole text can be legitimate.
10. NO interpretation of the text is a matter of personal revelation alone. The interpretation of the text is always a function of the believing community, not of any particular individual.
And you thought that reading the Bible was easy? That’s another cultural myth. We all want easy answers, but God often gives us parables that are difficult to understand.
Topical Index: exegesis, spiritual forensics, 1 Thessalonians 5:21, examine, test, dokimazo
[1] Adin Steinsaltz, Simple Words, pp. 94-95
A great word! One question, though. . . since God is God and His word has a living, dynamic capacity, could He not also use it in ways that say something unique to people of different times and cultures that the original recipients would not have understood?
Sure, and sometimes I suppose that He does, but since we don’t have any “inside” information on exactly what those additional other-culture meanings are, we need to be very cautious when someone tells us “this is what God is saying to us.”
Why Calvary?
There’s only one Truth. The problem however is that everyone explains it in his own way (saying by Samuel Jacobs). Skip, we want to give credit to your wife!! Why? Because she is a woman of valour, she lets you sit and known in “the gates” so you can teach us !! Let her works praise her in the gates.
Skip: Relative to PaRDes, do you think the original authors, as they were writing the Scriptures, were typically aware of the different levels of meaning and understanding that would eventually be imparted to the specific texts?
I am not so sure about the ORIGINAL authors of the Tanakh, but I am quite sure that the NEW TESTAMENT authors were aware as well as Yeshua. It was commonly known in their day.
“I am not so sure about the ORIGINAL authors”
Hi Skip,
I wanted to start with this point last night but the point got very complicated very fast
I am not on “terra firma” here, but if we start we the concept that Moses wrote Exodus
Then he was writing about a long period in history, in which an oral tradition was passed down
From many authors who were working in different literary genres (types of literature)
For example Genesis 1, regarding God creating man and woman is a theological statement IMO
But Genesis 2, is a simple allegory in which the author had a moral in mind
For me, another way of thinking about this “academic” issue is that a text is a physical object
And authors write/speak texts in Time, one word at a time, and can’t think of too many things
At one time
The “levels” of interpretation happen in Space and are more or less subjective
We can focus on any given level for long periods of time
The two things go together like a “horse and carriage”
Last night in an episode of Breaking Bad the caption read
Two Mexican Desperados have the their “crosshairs” on Walt (the hero)
“crosshairs” on Walt
On a personal note, when I was very young (4) I lived for a time with my great grandmother
And her son, my mother’s father, grandpa Walt
Grandpa Walt was a “wino” who lived on skid row during the day
And would come home late at night howling at the moon in tall old house
I felt safe alone with my grandmother, but it was a strange experience
His wife had died when my mother was very young and it took him years to get over it
But by the time I was in high school he had sobered up, got a job, and married a blind woman
Her name was Margie and she had a “seeing eye dog” named Toddy
Toddy was a black lab who was too rough for little old Margie
And my mother would get mad at Margie for not getting rid of it
But Margie loved that dog more than anything