Exegesis or Literary Reappropriation?

I received this question on another post and thought it may help others to understand an important distinction.

Regarding your point that we are not to rip passages out of context and string them together to provide a totally new context for each to suddenly we get what God meant by it all: What is your comment to the fact that Paul did this exact thing in such an egregious way in Romans 3:9-20 that a growing number of people condemn him as a liar. I don't now condemn him at all, but would just like to hear your comment on this.

The New Testament authors often don't have the purpose of exegeting Old Testament texts in order to get to their original meaning. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. Instead, what they are often doing is literary reappropriation. For example, when we quote the phrase from Hamlet, "To thine own self be true" in order to say one should be honest with himself, we are reappropriating the phrase that originally meant to keep a watch over one's finances. 

Now, it is possible for someone to not know the original meaning and mistakenly think that their use was the originally intended use, but it is also possible for those who know the original use to cleverly expand and apply the phrase to a new situation. The former is out of ignorance and the latter out of extensive knowledge and ingenuity. 

People often think the New Testament authors are speaking from the former, but I would reject this for a couple reasons. 

First, this is the hermeneutic of the day. One can see this in Qumran Pesharim, interpretive texts, where a literal meaning is understood but a further meaning is applied to a modern situation. Most of 2d Temple rabbinic interpretation centers not around knowing the original meaning, which was thought to be something that even a novice could understand, but an insightful application of the original statement to a new situation. This was not meant to contradict the literal meaning but instead to show that the text was living and that the rabbi had the Spirit of God with him for the purpose of application.

Hence, the famous Matthean use of "out of Egypt I called my son" is not a case where Matthew couldn't read Hosea and see that this was Israel. That is, in fact, Matthew's point. Jesus is Israel and so His parallel situation recalls this text to mind. Israel's story is Jesus' story and vice versa. This is also why He goes off to the wilderness to be tempted. He is the true Israel. Matthew isn't ignorant of what the original statement meant if exegeted properly in context. He is aware, and thus, can apply the statement to further the theology of Jesus. 

Second to this, when they do quote Scripture's literal meaning, they seem not only aware of the text they are quoting but the entire context, even expecting their readers to know it in order to get the point.

I would argue that both of those things are happening here in Romans 3. Paul has already argued that Gentiles are under sin and Jews are under sin, so he does not need these texts to make his case. Remember that he is likely speaking primarily to Jews here within the mixed church in Rome, since they are the ones who think they are not sinners like Gentiles. The rebuke in Chapter 2 should put that idea to rest, but then Paul does something interesting. He quotes a bunch of texts about the wicked in the OT that the Jews would not have applied to themselves. Based on his argument in Chapters 1-2, he wants to now say that these texts can be applied to both Jews and Gentiles, everyone everywhere. In other words, one would have to know both the original context in order to get the weight of the point and to understand that it is being applied now to all men, not just a particular group of men. This is Paul's "Thou art the man" moment. He is basically saying, "You see all of these horrible people and the things the Scripture says about them? Well, that's you too." It's a use of literary irony.

I have no problem with this use of Scripture. I think it is clever and all literature is used this way even in our modern day. My issue is more that people don't know the original context and so in ignorance are going to misinterpret the original statement as well as misapply/misappropriate it to further contexts because of that ignorance. Most today do not spend their lives studying the text so thoroughly that they are being clever to apply a saying to a new context, but instead are ignorant of the original and so misuse Scripture and come up with the wrong original meaning and therefore apply it in such a way that would often contradict the original meaning if it had been known. 
 

A Clarification on Secondary Matters

When I say I deny the evangelical paradigm of primary and secondary doctrines and practices, I don't mean that there are no ideas of a secondary nature, but that I do not see anything that the Scripture teaches as primary and secondary. That is not a paradigm that the Scripture places any theology or ethics within itself. Anything that is not important or of secondary importance should be viewed as having to do with things that are not theology and ethics (i.e., eschatological timelines, amoral created things like wine or meat or holidays, etc.). I heard the other day a homosexual activist who argues that Christianity allows for full participation in both the church and gay lifestyle, and that this should not be elevated to a primary or essential issue. Indeed, any disputed matter is relegated to the category of "secondary" these days.

What should be done in place of this practice is to make sure what the Bible teaches and what it does not. This includes any doctrines or ethics made off of supporting arguments made by a biblical author while he is making his case about a particular teaching, ideas assumed by a biblical author but not argued for or intrinsic to the theology or ethic for which he is arguing, etc.

Along these lines, a tolerance that does not come from the evangelical version of relativism and its adoption of a Satanic philosophy, but rather from love and patience should be adopted. We don't need to syncretize Christianity with Enlightenment ideas in order to stop religious wars. We simply need love and patience on the end of those who already know the truth and humility on the end of those who are still learning it. As I have always said, we all become Christians as heretics and we do not stop being heretics for quite some time. It is a slow process of sanctification in the truth that brings us out of our heresies, and any teacher of God should be tolerant and loving toward those who are teachable for such reasons.

Pride and Arrogance in an Age of (Evangelical) Relativism

It is a common byproduct of our cultural syncretism to redefine biblical words in an effort to accord with the ideas that come out of Enlightenment inclusivism. In the Enlightenment, a philosophy of inclusion was sought over what was viewed as rigid dogmatism due to the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rationalists like Kant sought a unifying religion founded on reason, and Romantics, like Schleiermacher, sought a unifying religion founded on intuition, which often developed into something like Kierkegaard's existentialism.  Either way, individual dogmas were out. They are exclusive by nature and exclusivism is the enemy of the Enlightenment.

Soon, any exclusive religious claim that was made was viewed as narrow-minded and anti-intellectual. One might be able to make such claims of things that can be empirically verified, but religious claims could not be substantiated, and so anyone making exclusive religious claims is merely advancing his personal opinion over others. That meant that more concrete or literal, rather than abstract and figurative, religious claims are opinions, subjective experiences that are not to be used to exclude other opinions as though they are facts.

The logical conclusion of this sort of thinking is that anyone making exclusive religious claims in the face of diverse religious opinion does so because he thinks he is smarter, of a better character, or more intuitive than others of differing opinions. In other words, to make an exclusive claim in the face of multiple claims that are viewed as equally valid, since none can be verified as true, is to exalt oneself over others making differing claims. To exalt oneself is arrogant. Hence, anyone doing so by this very process of thinking that is often assumed rather than explicitly manifest is arrogant.

Now, the problem with the Enlightenment is that it has no reliable revelation in its quest to discover religious truth. Devotion to the Bible and subsequent creeds drawn from it were seen as the problem that caused the religious wars. Since exclusivism was upheld by the Bible and these creeds it had to go. Hence, even though there is an ultimate truth to be discovered, it can only be discovered individually and through personal experience (whether through one's own reason or intuition), and it it will manifest itself differently depending upon a person or group's cultural-religious constructs. For instance, a Hindu may find that he has tapped into the divine existence that everyone else has but in his context he names this deity Vishnu as he is expressed through Krishna, etc. A Christian, on the other hand, is also tapping into an experience with the same divine existence, but he names it YHWH as He is manifest through Christ within his Christian tradition. Religions are just ways of expressing the same truth that no one can know very literally or in any factual way.

Evangelicalism, however, has the Bible and some of the creeds, but it retains the problem due to religious syncretism, where Enlightenment ideas have infiltrated Christian thinking. So instead of thinking that all religions are experiencing the same divine existence, Evangelicals will negate that idea with what they view as concretely taught by the Bible and some of their creeds, but then adopt the idea when it comes to theology and ethics found outside of what they view as concretely taught and not a part of their fundamental creeds.

In other words, they make a primary-secondary distinction between theology and ethics in Scripture, so that what ultimately happens is that the ambiguous religious truth of Enlightenment thinking is simply removed from the ethereal space of the heavens and located now in the Bible itself. There is an absolute truth when it comes to these "secondary doctrines" but since there is a diversity of opinion about them, no one should claim that he knows what they are. Instead, each person has his own take on them in the same way that each person in the Enlightenment has his own take on how their experience of divine truth should manifest itself into a dogma.

What this means is that the evangelical has syncretized two belief systems: that of Christianity and that of Enlightenment inclusivism.

He has not given himself to full-blown relativism, but neither did most of the Enlightenment thinkers. There always existed an absolute truth independently of the one who experiences it, but the form it takes is subjective and cannot be verified as true. Hence, the individual is left with what he personally believes as a mere opinion with no way to verify that belief.

Since he cannot verify that belief as being true, and others seem to disagree and hold to a contrary belief, it must mean that those other opinions are equally valid, or at least should be respected as possibly true. Hence, his belief must be held as a personal opinion that cannot speak against other personal opinions without inheriting the charge of arrogance.

Indeed, if there is no way to know whether something one thinks the Bible teaches is actually what the Bible teaches then anyone making the exclusive claim that he does know what the Bible teaches in that area is arrogant, as he has exalted his opinion over others when his opinion is merely based on his own experience, reason, etc., and cannot be known from the Bible itself.

The great irony, of course, is that the Bible itself does not teach this idea of primary and secondary doctrines and practices, and so it is the person who functions off of this paradigm and then dogmatically holds others to it that is arrogant, as his opinion on the matter has come from his cultural experience and philosophy and not a source that can verify the idea.

It also seems to me that the people who are most offended by anyone making exclusive claims on what they consider to be secondary matters have what the Bible labels, not as arrogance as we think of it in the age of Relativism, but pride.

These people are offended that one making claims of exclusivity did not pay their proper respects to their opinions. These people have a high regard for their own opinions that are rooted in their own personal experience and reason that they want acknowledged by others. When someone comes along and makes exclusive claims against their inclusive ideas concerning secondary issues, their pride is wounded and they immediately see the one making exclusive claims as their enemy rather than a brother in Christ. To be sure, one of the true ironies of an inclusive ideology of love and inclusion is that it ends up hating and excluding those who don't sign on to their paradigm of tolerance founded upon religious relativism.

But the biblical version of pride is not found in someone making exclusive claims at all. It is found in anyone making exclusive religious claims not rooted in God's revelation. The humble man trembles at God's Word (Isa 66:1-2) and his speaking the exclusive truth in love is a direct result of his considering others more important than himself. In Ephesians 4:2ff Paul argues that Christians ought to be humble in love and then goes on to relate that there is only one faith, one church, one baptism, etc. and that there is an exclusive truth about all of these things concerning Christian theology and practice that must be used to love one another into a mature relationship with Christ.

It is when people are prideful that they put their own cultural ideologies in the way of fellowship because others do not hold to their man-made religious views, their personal opinions or the opinions of their inclusive culture, that envy and slander take place, as envy and slander are the weapons of wounded pride. And this is all contrary to humility and love.

Philippians 2:3-4 states, "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others." Yet, Paul introduces this first by saying in v. 2 that all Christians need to be "like-minded," not only being one in the Spirit, but "one in mind." In other words, unity, true unity, is found in the truth, and in so far as we are outside of that truth, our unity is disunity, our unity rests on a false foundation. 

Contrary to the lies of Enlightenment Relativism, therefore, it is not exclusive claims to truth that seek to unify Christians in one mind that are prideful, but rather inclusive claims about God's revealed truth that downplay the clarity of what God has said in order to lift oneself and his opinions up in a false humility that our culture sees as virtuous. Truly, it is the wise sage of relativism who takes the inclusive position that no one knows this or that particular truth and we should all just love one another and get along but this sage of human wisdom is prideful and a destroyer of unity. He is instead a fool to the God who has successfully revealed Himself and His whole counsel in Scripture.

The greatest irony of all of this then is that the one who makes the charge of arrogance/pride toward another claiming to know a truth based on God's Word is often the one who is arrogant/prideful. Confident in himself that he and his religious culture have got it right, he excludes the exclusive claims that would contradict his relativism (secular or religious), and by doing so proves himself a hypocrite. 

Satan's Candy

We have a community forum here where every once and a while someone will ask about a good church in the area. A recent post on the forum gave the criteria their family was looking for in a church: a good children's program. Many people responded by letting them know that all of the seeker-sensitive churches in the area and many smaller churches with the same type of philosophy of ministry had great children programs and great music to boot.

We've actually had professed Reformed people come to our church and leave it because we have no conventional children's program. Our children's program philosophy is one of integration with the entire church, discipling through family worship and fathers and mothers who take what they've learned at church and talk about it with their kids in order to teach and bond with their children as they should. It's rooted in Titus 2 and the biblical understanding of federal headship and family (both immediate and eccleasiastical) as the means of discipleship. We don't segregate our children by providing surrogate parents for the day.

However, I am amazed by the amount of people on the forum who seemed to go to a particular church for the same reasons: programs and music style or quality. Yet, the Bible isn't unclear that the focal point should be whether the Word of God is faithfully preached and the worship is biblically-based (i.e., it edifies in the truth and is orderly rather than simply emotional, repetitiously superficial, and chaotic).

Now, I know what these churches mentioned teach. I know what kind of believers these churches grow, or should I say, stunt in growth. Their worship is geared toward pleasing the masses, not God. They are geared toward excitement and emotionalism. Their programs are meant to mimic discipleship when they are largely religiously-oriented community clubs that don't really equip the saints for the work of genuine ministry as they are sanctified by the Spirit in truth.

I don't view these churches as just stepping-stones that immature Christians use on their way to real church later on. I do think it is true that immature Christians sometimes find that as a part of their journey, but for the most part, these churches are just recreational centers one goes to in order to get pumped up by some life lesson spoken really eloquently by a lifecoach for the upcoming week. I don't think they are churches at all, and that means that those attending them aren't really going to church and have forsaken the real assembly of God for whatever period they have been attending these set walls that pretend to be churches.

These places function like bug lights that mimic the moonlight and draw in the foolish and untaught to their deaths.

And that means that programs and great music in these religious community centers are simply the candy that Satan offers children to get them into his van. Anyone enamored with such things is not likely to survive.

I encouraged the family to look for a church for the right reasons, i.e., to look for a church that actually is a church due to the faithful teaching of the Word of God and a biblical form of worship that makes God the audience and Christian brothers and sisters the beneficiaries of His Spirit by emphasizing the truth that exalts Christ,, and to ignore the candy. I hope they listen.

My Hermeneutic

This is typically my hermeneutic. Obviously, it adds historical-grammatical and historical-redemptive elements to it, but this is the core of it.

"Using discourse analysis, Joel Green describes cotext as "the string of
linguistic data within which a text is set, the relationship of, say, a sentence to a
paragraph or a pericope in Luke's Gospel to the larger Lukan narrative." As an
interpretive strategy, attention to cotext "invites a close reading of the text for its
structural elements and argumentative development." Following on the holistic
interest in final texts, cotextual analysis stresses the linear connectedness and
logical coherence of plot, characters and themes across the narrative. As a finaltext
focus resists plowing up narratives, cotextual concerns resist pulling them
apart into discrete units. Where form critics tend to treat the Gospels as a chain
of variable individual pearls randomly strung together by juvenile artists,
narrative critics appreciate the mature craftsmanship of the entire necklace. On a
more popular level, this proclivity toward atomization is evident in much Sunday
school curricula and congregational preaching, concentrating on "focal texts"
from one to several verses, often with little or no connection to the biblical book
from which they derive" (F. Scott Spencer, "The Literary/Postmodern View" in Stanley Porter [ed.], Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views, 51-52).

The Errors of Errancy, Part VIII: The Vacuous Argument from Textual Criticism

I must confess that when people argue for Errancy based on textual criticism, I find this to be a non-argument. Perhaps, it stems from my view of inerrancy that we will explore here.

The argument usually goes something like this. If God inspired the Bible, it would be without error, and if it is, He would preserve it in an inerrant manner. Yet, since the manuscripts differ, some of the readings are erroneous (i.e., not what God intended to say and therefore erroneously ascribed to Him in these particular manuscripts). Hence, not only is the Bible we have today errant, this indicates that the original Bible is as well.

Now, let me say first that this argument depends heavily upon a particular view of inerrancy that I’m not sure anyone outside of KJV Onlyists and Muslims have ever believed in. I’ve argued in this series that language by its very nature as the means, and not the content, of communication is not inerrant, and that variation in language does not negate the idea that the content of what is communicated is inerrant. Hence, the idea of Detailed Inerrancy or Errancy is fallacious.

This is important to understand because when textual critics argue this way, they are alluding to variation either in spelling, word-choice, or location of content in the Bible, not a variation of what the Bible teaches when received as a whole. 

In other words, most variation in manuscripts consist of spelling issues or mistakes made in copying. Some are variations of words that are synonymous or are a change in order (e.g., “Christ Jesus” or “Jesus Christ”). The fewer variations are made up of different words that would convey a different idea in that particular text (e.g., whether Jesus got angry or had compassion in Mark 1:41 or is the peace the believer has in Romans 5:1 possessed or something he still needs to take hold of?), and even fewer are made up of the location of a text or whether a text should be included in the canon at all (e.g., the Pericope Adulterae in John 7:53–8:11 appears after the Gospel of Luke rather in John in some manuscripts and not at all in the earliest manuscripts, or the longer ending in Mark that seems to be a later addition). 

The issue really surrounds one’s view of inerrancy. If inerrancy means that everything must be preserved in its spelling, word order, location in a text, or even its inclusion in the canon, then those who argue for errancy would have a good argument. However, if inerrancy has more to do with God communicating His whole counsel to His people by preserving the messages He sought to communicate through the Bible, then this objection falls flat.

It falls flat because no one argues that any teaching has been altered at all. They just argue that its location may be altered. Even Ehrman, whose favorite argument is to point out that Mark 1:41 may indicate that Jesus got angry instead of had compassion (an unlikely textual choice btw), admits that the Gospels present Jesus as both having compassion and getting angry, and so this does not alter our picture of Jesus at all. It just alters the textual place in which one of these attributes is located. The same goes for any other variant. When taken as a whole, nothing in the Bible, regardless of what textual variant one chooses teaches something that the Bible doesn’t teach elsewhere where the text is without variation. 

What this means is that if inerrancy has to do with what is taught by the Bible, and not with the means of communicating what is taught, i.e., language and its finite limitations of expression, then appealing to variation in the manuscript tradition is a non-objection to the doctrine of inerrancy.

What it also means is that the common claim made by Evangelicals that the Bible is only inerrant in its original autographs is also false. The Bible we have, not just the Bible they had, is inerrant. Any claim to the contrary is arguing about the inerrancy of the mode of communication, which itself is an erroneous idea. If inerrancy has to do with what the Bible teaches, then the Bible they had taught the same things that the Bible we have teaches. It may teach it in different places or with different words or by including this pericope and not that one, etc., but it teaches the same things nonetheless. And if those same things it teaches are inerrant, then what we have today is inerrant. The issue that would divorce inerrancy from a modern Bible would simply become a matter of translation, not textual emendation in the manuscript or manuscripts used. 

Hence, it does not really matter whether the Pericope Adulterae or the longer ending of Mark are original. The ideas in them are taught throughout the Bible. In fact, the longer ending of Mark is pretty much a summary of the experience of the apostles that either appears in the Book of Acts or is extrapolated from it. Yet, because these ideas appear elsewhere, one can take or leave the long ending without doing any harm to what is communicated God through the Bible. The issue would only be a matter of interpreting the text correctly as the experience of the apostles and not of a normative instruction for the whole of the church. 

What this all means is that the manuscript tradition could have changed entire texts in a much, much worse way than it did by using synonyms, changing word order, taking a pericope out here and adding one there, and as long as it did not teach something contrary to what God had originally communicated, it would still convey exactly what God intended to convey. That is the benefit of having the whole rather than a part. This is even true of entire books in the canon. One could lose Jude, but get the same message in 2 Peter, and one could lose 2 Peter and Jude and get the same message in Revelation. One could lose James and get the same message in Matthew. 

God has given us more than we need, not the bare minimum that would be lost if a single line were out of place. And that is idea is confirmed by the manuscript tradition. We have the original text. Nothing is lost. It is just that we have more than the original text. My point is merely that the more does not subtract or add to the teaching of the Bible, regardless of what readings are adopted. Thus, the argument from textual criticism that the Bible is errant confuses the means of communication with the content that is communicated, and is itself, therefore, erroneous.

What Does the Bible Mean by "Hospitality"?

I remember watching reruns of the Flinstones before school when I was a kid. We always laughed at the theme song which included a phrase in it "you'll have a gay old time." Of course, it was originally meant to mean "fun" time, but language changes over time, and so the old use of the word had long since passed away, only heard now in the songs of a bygone era.

I remember another time when someone was attempting to make the argument that the Bible thought children should suffer, vaguely alluding to the fact that Jesus said, "suffer the little children."

Such is the case with our word "hospitality." This word has come up in our church in recent weeks as we've been studying biblical passages and the effects of the religion of the Enlightenment (i.e., liberalism/inclusivism), and as I was looking at various books on the subject, it seems very clear that this concept is misunderstood.

Well-meaning books like Victoria Duerstock's Biblical Hospitality: Design, Organize, and Decorate Your Home for Gospel-Centered Community or Rosaria Butterfield's The Gospel Comes with a Housekey or Joshua Jipp and Christine Pohl's Saved by Faith and Hospitality are legion and seem to all communicate the same types of errors. We'll come back to the last one. 

Most of these popular books are written by laymen, and so one can hardly blame them for reading the English word "hospitality" and thinking along the lines of modern get-togethers and fellowship.

In each of these books, which are representative of a larger pool of books that all say similar things, "hospitality" is defined as inviting unbelievers or believers one knows over for dinner or a get-together. The modern definition has to do with inviting people over for a meal and fellowship, to host or entertain in the modern sense. It is seen as a means of evangelism and fellowship of the congregation.

Now, let me say that I think that having people over for these purposes is a good thing. Our church does this, and it is good to have fellowship in homes. The early church, of course, just met in homes, and had no buildings called "churches" otherwise, so it brings us back to that original familial setting and could possibly be a remedy to the business model of church, although our modern numbers are not always accommodated by the sizes of our houses.

However, this is not what the Bible means by "hospitality." The Greek word translated "hospitality" is a compound the word φιλοξενία made up of φιλος and ξενία "love for a stranger" or in the plural
φιλόξενοι "love for strangers." Whereas many books will note this, and make an application that one should love unbelievers in their homes, it actually refers to Christian travelers who are not known by the person practicing hospitality. 

In Romans 12:13, Paul writes, "Contribute to the needs of the saints, seek out a love for the stranger (i.e., Christian traveler with whom they are unacquainted)." 

Notice that this context is all about Christians treating one another in love. Yet, it is not the Christians they know within their congregation, but Christians who may come to them from other churches in need. Hence, φιλοξενία is used and not something like φιλαδελφίᾳ "brotherly love," as in 12:10, where he is giving a more generic command.

In Matthew 25:38, the false believers respond to Christ, "When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or naked and clothe you?" To which He responds, "I tell you the truth, just as you did it for one of the least of these brothers or sisters of mine, you did it for me" (v. 40).
  Notice that it is the believer who was the stranger (i.e., not known by these professed Christians) who was not taken in. 

In 3 John 5-8, John writes to commend Gaius for receiving the Christians he sent to the church.

Dear friend, you demonstrate faithfulness by whatever you do for the brothers (even though they are strangers). They have testified to your love before the church. You will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God. For they have gone forth on behalf of “The Name,” accepting nothing from the pagans. Therefore we ought to support such people, so that we become coworkers in cooperation with the truth. 

Christ sets up this ministry in Luke 10:4-12:

Do not carry a money bag, a traveler’s bag, or sandals, and greet no one on the road. Whenever you enter a house, first say, ‘May peace be on this house!’ And if a peace-loving person is there, your peace will remain on him, but if not, it will return to you. Stay in that same house, eating and drinking what they give you, for the worker deserves his pay. Do not move around from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and the people welcome you, eat what is set before you. Heal the sick in that town and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come upon you!’ But whenever you enter a town and the people do not welcome you, go into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet we wipe off against you. Nevertheless know this: The kingdom of God has come.’ I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town! 

Romans 16:23, 2 Corinthians 7:15, Philemon 22, Acts 16:15, etc. speak of welcoming Christian strangers into the homes of other Christians.

This is why some have taken care of angels without knowing it, as Hebrews 13:2 suggests. They were strangers who came in the name of the Lord. "Do not neglect hospitality, because through it some have entertained angels without knowing it." If they had known these people, they would have known whether they were angels or not. It is precisely because they did not know them that makes this scenario possible.

Hence, when 1 Peter 4:9 says to show "love for strangers" to "one another" it is a command to take in other believers who travelers and are not known by the Christian host. Hence, one of the things the widow does in 1 Timothy 5:10 is to practice this love for Christian travelers by receiving them into her home. In fact, the word used here is a different one, ξενοδοχέω, which is again a compound word that means "to receive strangers." Likewise, those qualified to be elders must have a character that would receive strangers into his home, and hence, are to be φιλόξενον "lovers of Christian strangers/travelers" in 1 Timothy 3:2.

The modern-day equivalent would be housing missionaries who were not friends or known by the people housing them at first. It is not letting friends stay with them, or other members of the congregation stay with them, but Christian travelers. Housing missionaries is something Allison and I have had the privilege of doing a few times in our lives, but admittedly, it isn't a common opportunity in the American context, although one could apply it to Christians traveling, not only for ministry, but in general.

A good scholarly book on this subject is by Andrew E. Arterbury entitled, Entertaining Angels: Christian Hospitality in Its Mediterranean Setting. He notes that hospitality is not inviting others over for dinner and whatnot. Unfortunately, he does not let the NT data specify what this means in an exclusive Christian context.

So where did the change take place in our language? After all, our "hospitals" are places that take care of strangers in general, and the modern church thinks hospitality means having people over for dinner or a party (all good things of course, but not what the Bible requires of Christians when it is talking about hospitality). I think it changed with the inclusive principles of the "Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man" of Enlightenment liberalism. The stranger became anyone in the same way that the neighbor became anyone. Hence, hospitality includes opening one's home to believer and unbeliever alike (again, all good things, but not to what the term refers). It is simply one more example of generalizing something that is specific not only to believers but to specific believers. This is why one sees books like Saved by Faith and Hospitality. Not only does this book evidence a misunderstanding of the term, it also assumes the Pelagianism of the Second Great Awakening, where one saves others by actions rather than by Spirit changing individuals through the teaching of the Word of God.

On the other hand, some of it comes from the Second Great Awakening where the country preachers would ride around and make housecalls. The modern country preacher who visits people in their homes during the week stems from this, and people giving him a meal and whatnot, or the modern practice of having people over to the house just became assumed as part of this vital activity of hospitality to which we are all called. Hence, it was applied to believers one knew.

A correction of this is important for some because many people who think they are doing this by inviting friends or congregants over actually never have housed missionaries, some are not willing to do it, nor do they even know they should be. In many respects, this may be a post more relevant to my international audience, since far more opportunities to become hospitable people land in their laps than in ours in America. Let me encourage you if you are in such a position to help missionaries by housing and providing protection and for their needs that you do so, as I have argued here that it is a fruit of love. However, other things that are not biblical hospitality like taking in Christians who we know and are in need, or serving others when in your home (the more modern definition of hospitality) are still fruits of love, and that should be the root of all of our different kinds of service regardless of which correct category it fits under. 

The Errors of Errancy, Part VII: A Final Note on Detailed Errancy from Epistemic Concerns

Two things are needed in order for humans to have a correct view of reality. First, an omniscient source must exist in order to know the nature of reality, and second to this, that omniscient source must reliably communicate it to us in a way that is external to our unreliable faculties of reason and feeling/intuition alone. 

Usually one will argue that just the existence of God is needed for knowledge, but God’s mere existence is insufficient to provide a reliable source of knowledge for humans if He does not communicate a sufficient (not exhaustive) knowledge of reality to us. He need only exist to hold the exhaustive knowledge so that He knows the nature of reality. It is sufficient for us to have a sufficient knowledge of His “conclusions” gained from His exhaustive, and certainly archetypal, knowledge. Without this sufficient knowledge obtained through what would then be revelatory, therefore, knowledge is impossible, since everything is a guess and subject to change, and therefore, self-admittedly unreliable and possibly completely wrong.

This is not some arrogant endeavor where sinful men just want to know for the sake of certainty and control, but rather it is a knowledge that humans need if they are to discover anything in the world around them as being true and live in a way that is good instead of evil. 

This means that even the disciplines that are often used to undermine biblical errancy are actually reliant upon an assumption of inerrancy that most advocates of those disciplines would categorically reject. In other words, one must know that an archaeologist’s conclusions are either inerrant, or more reliable than, that of the Bible’s claims in order to reject the Bible’s claims about a certain site or event. Yet, this presupposes that one has an inerrant, completely reliable source of information or ability to access that information that humans do not have apart from externally received special revelation. Hence, the archaeologist cannot say whether his conclusions are true or false, or whether they are more reliable than the Bible’s claims, simply because he has no measuring stick by which to measure any claims, his claims or the claims of anyone else. There is an assumption of the complete reliability of reason and the methods that flow from it in obtaining knowledge that requires a reliable standard by which he can measure whether his conclusions are true. He can remain agnostic, but this means he can say nothing about any other theory, including that of the Bible. He must, therefore, first assume through sheer belief and speculation that the Bible is not that reliable source, a priori concluding that it is unreliable, and then argue that even though his conclusions are not inerrant either, and therefore, cannot function as the measuring stick, they are more reliable than the Bible. This conclusion, however, is not an academic one, but a religious belief that stems from his worldview.

If he had believed the Bible to be inerrant, then he would judge his own conclusions as incorrect or needing at least to match that inerrant source. Judging an inerrant document with an errant standard is illogical. Hence, one must first believe the document to be errant in order to come to the conclusion that it is errant, and so it is a circular argument based on the faith of one’s own subjective reasoning or moral intuition, largely influenced by whatever philosophical or cultural ideas are trending at the time. One need only ask an archaeologist if his conclusions are inerrant, or a historian if his theories or conclusions are inerrant. All will answer in the negative, and this begs the question as to why one would judge an inerrant source of truth with one that is admittedly errant. When scholars judge the Bible’s claims with the latest archaeological dig, is it not being assumed that the conclusions of those archaeologists are errant and reliable sources of information that will not be contradicted by future digs, future analyses, or even future abandonment of, perhaps, faulty methodologies? Is science settled to where scientists themselves no longer believe in the probability that future scientific discoveries and analyses will one day correct their lack of understanding of the science? Are all ancient chronologies believed by historians now set in stone, or do they shift with the advent of new information, so as to prove that these are not inerrant sources of information?

Let’s say I need to measure the size of my bookshelf with an electronic measuring tape, but that measuring tape has been proven to be inaccurate time and again. How would I ever know when it is accurate and when it is not, and therefore, how would I ever know the size of my bookshelf? In fact, how would I ever know if the measuring tape was ever right, or if it was malfunctioning and wrong every time? If I had a reliable measuring tape, I could judge the inaccuracy of the other, if it was ever right, how many times it was right in relation to how many times it was wrong, etc. However, if I use the inaccurate measuring tape to judge the accuracy of the other, I will conclude wrongly that the other measuring tape is the one malfunctioning and in error. 

It also does no good to argue that one can accumulate errant standards. This would be like multiplying the amount of inaccurate measuring tapes that I have in order to judge the accuracy of the reliable one that I have. If there is no way to judge how often the inaccurate measuring tapes are, then there is no way to say that they are ever reliable, how often they are reliable, in their readings. This means that merely accumulating the conclusions of natural science, history, archaeology, etc., which we have all agreed are not inerrant in their conclusions, since they have in the past been wrong, and may be found to be false in the future, does not increase the reliability of their conclusions and create a more reliable measuring standard any more than a single one of them alone.

Hence, it is impossible to discover whether a document claiming scientific, historical, and archaeologically related data is reliable in its claims by using errant standards without assuming a reliable source of that information that would confirm or deny the consistency of the conclusions of each with the reality the reliable standard sets forth.

This does not mean that one must believe the Bible intends to communicate specific information concerning the natural sciences, history, or archaeologically-related data, but only that the conclusions gained from the study of these subjects are incapable of refuting the reliability of the Bible in the same way that errant measuring tape is incapable of becoming a standard of the reliable one. What the Bible actually intends to communicate cannot be obtained, therefore, by comparing it with these disciplines, but rather through literary and contextual analysis of the text itself. If it should be concluded that the Bible intends to communicate, for instance, a historical idea, a contrary errant source, Josephus for instance, cannot be used to judge the reliability of the biblical claim unless one wants to argue that Jospehus’ histories are inerrant (something no Josephus scholar would ever do).

What this means is that usual external sources used by Enlightenment critics to undermine the Bible as a reliable source of what it intends to convey is a fallacious methodology that does not actually yield the result they claim that it does.

I have argued this, not because I am a Detailed Inerrantist, as I have already said such a view is not what the Bible is doing, but that one cannot even argue against Detailed Inerrancy on the basis of these external disciplines. It must be argued on the basis upon which I have already laid out. The nature of language and observing what the Bible itself is doing in terms of what it purposes to communicate.

The truth of the matter is that many disciplines have been employed by scholars who are unwitting apologists for the Enlightenment that do not conflict with the inerrancy of Scripture, and yet, are argued that they do (source criticism, evolution, ANE influences, authorship issues, dates of writing, archaeological data, etc.). It is usually the conclusions of presuppositions interwoven with the presentation of this data that argues against the inerrancy of the Bible, not the data itself.