Seriously, what do you do with these verses:
1 Corinthians 7:12 "To the rest I say, not the Lord..." and
1 Corinthians 7:25 "Now concerning the unmarried, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord's mercy is trustworthy." (RSV)
What do you do with these? Do you run through some hermeneutical hoops to make it so that Paul is inspired? Do you basically re-read it to mean that he knows of no saying of Jesus addressing this? Or, do you take it at face value? Are they binding?
I'm being serious here. I honestly don't know (and never have) how to read these two texts. If you take them as binding, then what does that say about your hermeneutic of scripture? If you take them as Paul's opinion, what does that say about your view of inspiration? And, are you comfortable with these decisions?
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5 comments:
JS,
I always wonder what is inspired and what isn't. The better question is does Paul even know he is writing "scripture" and it is going to canonized and read for the next 2000+ years. For example Paul says in 1 Timothy 2 "I want you to lift up hands". Now this isn't taken literally by most commentators or preachers. However, if I go a few verses down, wars have been started over women and speaking.
But lets look at Paul's instruction to Timothy "drink a little wine for your stomach". Is this a command for us today?
To answer your question. I don't know. And because I don't I wont build a docrtine off of it. I can't because it is too unclear. See where I am going?
Lionel,
Yes, you caught what I am trying to get at. We seem to pick and choose which scriptures are normative and which aren't.
I personally doubt that Paul knew he was writing "scripture;" he was dealing with problems at hand and relying on the leading of the Holy Spirit in how to handle them—not a bad model, now that I think of it :)
James
Why do you have a problem with "he knows of no saying of Jesus addressing this?" This seems like the most plain meaning of the text. Paul almost always uses "Lord" to denote Jesus and it fits the Synoptic tradition of Jesus' teachings. The inspiration question is different from this, but why are you opposed to this reading?
For several years now, I've become more and more discontent with the idea of the collection of books and epistles that we call "The Holy Bible" being referred to in its entirety as "the inspired, infallible Word of God" - especially the writings of the New Testament. That's not to say it's not all inspired and infallible - but who says it is? Does God tell us it is? Or man? I'm not saying "I'm right" about my thoughts and feelings, but it's just where I'm at.
All that to say, I agree with what you said in your comments, James, that Paul was simply relying on the Holy Spirit as he dealt with various issues in the church. I think Paul relied heavily on revelations he received from Christ Himself, including revelations about what was spoken of Christ in the Old Testament scriptures, as well as what he heard from the other apostles who had known Jesus, and direct revelations from Him.
As we today work out various issues by the Spirit, we can most certainly look at what Paul wrote. I do see that God used Paul in a huge way to influence the church at the time, and to explain "the gospel" and to get the early church established. I think we can glean heavily from all this.
In the end, when we "teach the Bible," I think we're simply teaching what we know about what it says, and all the hermeneutics in the world will never cause everything to line up neatly. :) Don't get me wrong - I love hermeneutics - but up till now I personally have never been able to make it all add up, and I'm fine with that.
I think "biblical hermeneutics" has made the mistake of believing that things must line up in Scripture. Somewhere along the line, alot of Christian scholars/teachers/preachers developed the infallible belief that a "hermeneutic" was a system of interpretation. But until recently, philosophers like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Ludwig Wittgenstein were completely ignored. What they were trying to grapple with is the fact that what we see in the text is the result of myriad undefinable factors that compose who we are as human beings. Human beings are most fundamentally contextual, not Cartesian brains who can divorce themselves from what is around them. The "undefinability" of our position as interpreters is what most conservatives seem to miss, even today. They seem to think the task of hermeneutics is to understand what our "context" and "presuppositions" are and then to interpret accordingly. It's still a very Modern paradigm to try to "get at" exactly what the text meant to the original author/audience.
But Wittgenstein/Gadamer (and let's throw in Heidegger for good measure) were early 20th century. So, having missed out on the beginnings of the reactions against modernity, it's no wonder why conservatives are at a complete loss to understand the direction that people like Derrida and various poststructuralists went when they said things like, "there is nothing outside the text."
The seeming complete lack of ability by most conservatives to deal intelligently with 20th century hermeneutics just left be so discouraged when I was in seminary.
There are some who get it, of course. Anthony Thiselton, for one, has a good grasp on these developments. So, perhaps all hope is not lost.
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