King or Kingdoms in Revelation 17? An Exegetical Inquiry into Peter Leithart's Interpretation

"Rev. 17:10 explains the seven heads as seven kings, but the word “king” can refer to a kingdom, as represented and embodied in the king, its head. In chapter 13, we concluded that the seven heads are the heads of Babylon, Persia, four-headed Greece, and the final terrible beast who tramples. The scarlet beast is the sea beast, and his seven heads represent the same empires." (Peter Leithart, Revelation 12-22, 193)

This interpretation is also held by Gentry in his work, After Jerusalem Fell. Of course, it is necessary to make this argument because if basileus means "king" and not "kingdom" then the overwhelming majority of scholars and teachers throughout history that take this text as referring to Domitian are correct to do so and the Preterist understanding of Revelation is incorrect. 

So is there any objective means by which we can judge between these two interpretations? A few things.

1. The word basileus doesn't ever refer to a "kingdom" but always means "king" in the New Testament. It appears 115 times and every single one of them refers to an individual or group of individuals that rule a kingdom. It never refers to kingdom either directly or via synecdoche. 

2. Although the word hepta "seven" that modifies the plural of basileus (basileis), which is masculine and is indeclinable because it is a cardinal number, the word ogdoos is an ordinal number and is declinable. It is a masculine singular adjective modifying the unwritten basileus which is a masculine and assumed from the plural. If basileia "kingdom" were assumed, the word would appear as ὄγδοη, which is feminine. That means an assumed basileus is its antecedent, and as said before, this always means “king” in the NT. 

3. The beast is said to be one who "was, is not, and is about to come up out of the abyss," a phrase made up of two components which refer to individuals in the book, not entire kingdoms. The term is a play on God the Father's eternality and Jesus' description of one who is and who was dead and is alive forever more. Instead, this individual is not and that is explained as his having been in the netherworld, the place of the dead. Kingdoms in the book are not spoken of this way, but individuals are. They simply are cryptic ways of saying that the beast was a physically dead human being, a king. This fits the fact that he is wounded with a fatal wound. 

4. Christians are dying for not worshiping the beast and his image. There is no worship of the Roman Empire imposed upon Christians nor is the image historically of Roma. Instead, Caesar worship of the individual king is required and that is expressed by worshiping his image. 

5. The fact that the beast "was and is not" means that the sixth king is not the beast, since a king now "is." This means that the king, or kingdoms if Leithart were right, would be one or more of the five, since he is dead and in the netherworld. He is said to be an eighth which assumes that he is not the seventh either. So these can't be referring generically to the Roman Empire and must therefore be referring to kingdoms that persecuted Christians (again, if Leithart is right). The problem with this is that, if the kingdom must be one of the five and is not the sixth or seventh, that means that the Roman Empire is the eighth but not any of the previous kingdoms/empires, since there is no other kingdom/empire that pops up and persecutes Christians in between the Roman Empire that Leithart concludes "almost died" (which is a horrible translation of οὐκ ἔστιν btw) and the later Roman Empire that persecutes Christians. If he concludes that these are completely different nations, the Roman Empire can only be the eighth, which doesn't work out in the schema he creates in his commentary (i.e., Babylon, Persia, and four-headed Greece, which Leithart must then see as four separate kingdoms rather than the one kingdom that Daniel describes it as and ignores that it follows the kingdom of Greece rather than existing as the kingdom of Greece in Daniel). If this is true, then Babylon, Persia, and only three of Greece's four heads would be the kingdoms that have fallen because the sixth kingdom "is," which would mean that John is writing during the fourth king of the Greek Empire, again, making no sense. Likewise, as Daniel rightly indicates, the Greek Empire only has one king and he dies very quickly, bringing the empire to an end and giving rise to the kingdoms of the diadochi and eventually the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires (the Seleucids being the sixth which, ironically, would be the only one that is not the beast even though Daniel's whole point is that it is the terrible beast. So the seven kings here are not these seven kingdoms. 

I agree with the critique of the purely symbolic interpretation and would level it at Leithart's view as well, but Leithart quotes it thinking that he is not guilty of it.

"Hitchcock’s critique hits the nail squarely: [T]he problem with the symbolic interpretation in this text is that the symbol hasno concrete, meaningful referent. If all the text means is that the Roman rule is complete, why is the vision so detailed and particular in noting that ‘five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; and when he comes, he must remain a little while. And the beast which was and is not, is himself also an eighth, and is one of the seven, and he goes to destruction.’ Also if seven is the number of completion, why add the reference to the beast as the eighth? The symbolic approach fails to do justice to the intricate details of the text. (473)

The solution that Preterists come up with is laid out by Leithart as follows:

"After reviewing several “preterist” solutions that identify the heads with a succession of Roman emperors, Hitchcock (2007) concludes that the best answer is to say that “king” means “kingdom.” This “is supported by the parallels between Rev. 17:9-12 and Dan. 7:17, 23, where references to kings and kingdoms are interchangeable, thus revealing that a king represents the kingdom he rules” (481). Besides, “the seven heads are seven mountains (vv. 9–10), and ‘mountains’ or ‘hills’ often symbolize kingdoms or empires in the OT and in Jewish writings” (482). He argues for this interpretation from more specific parallels with Daniel 7 . . ." (194)

The problem with this approach is that it notes that the kingdoms in Daniel are described by their kings, and this is true enough, however, it conflates the fact that a kingdom can be described by characteristics of its king with the idea that the word "king" can mean "kingdom." This, as I have noted, is completely false. If John meant "kingdom" he would have used the word for kingdom, as he does throughout the book and even in the very context of Chapter 17. He used the word "king" because he meant to refer to an individual king.

Hence, the king here is an individual and specific king who was one of Rome's first five emperors and has died and has a second manifestation in the eighth legitimate emperor of Rome, Domitian, not a kingdom in general and Leithart (and Gentry's) attempt to get around it fail to be exegetically probable and should therefore be rejected.

Protecting Sola Scriptura from Sophism, Part VI: Why the Doctrine Is Only Protected through the Employment of Exegesis

So many people today are looking to unify the church through any other means than good exegesis. Councils, popes, denominations, tradition on the one end and individual intuition or supernatural insight on the other, people think the answer to unity is outside of the Bible. Yet, this very thinking is a denial of sola Scriptura from the start. 

At the Diet of Worms, Luther boldly proclaimed, "I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted one another." 

The ability of a local church to identify a solution to a problem may increase with many eyes on the matter. It could be that the eldership of one church is extended when bringing in another church to look at an issue. It may also not be successful in increasing this ability due to mass cultural delusion, lack of qualifications or gifting,  etc. The number of the Arians outweighed those of the orthodox following the Council of Nicea. Their councils increased the number of elders an Nicean church had but that church would be led into the darkness of the devil through it. Likewise, the Council of Trent concluded that the core doctrines of the Reformation were wrong. The Reformers did not submit to the decision. Does this mean that the Reformers were wrong or the Roman Catholic Church was wrong? According to whom? Who decides? This council against this council? Which one is Christ's when both claim to be Christ's and both claim to be using the Bible to come to their conclusions? Is nihilism the answer? Should we all give up trying to understand the Bible because we believe that it is not possible to definitively do so?  

Councils have historically countered one another even in matters that one would not consider heretical. They overturn previous councils due to conscience, i.e., they do not believe that the previous councils made the godly and biblical decision they should have. At Nicea, it was concluded that the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, Rome, etc. would retain exclusive authority over their jurisdictions without further hierarchy from the outside interfering. The Council of Constantinople, however, lifted up Constantinople as second to Rome in primacy. Which one is correct? If we say the first one, then should we conclude that whoever can meet first wins? Many councils now viewed as heretical were held before the councils that are now considered orthodox. "Well, not those councils," someone who is committing the fallacy of special pleading or "no true Scotsman" might say.  

The truth of the matter is that councils and popes don't solve the problem of disunity. The Roman Catholic church has always been riddled with dissension and disagreement, as it is to this very day. The current pope is actually splintering it further rather than unifying it. Yet, this does not stop many a protestant who is fed up with not knowing what the Bible says from joining that church or one that has conciliar government (which is odd since very few Bible passages are interpreted with absolute authority by these groups anyway).

But what are we to do if we do not allow councils by their very nature as councils to decide matters of faith and practice that are in dispute? The answer of the Anabaptists and other radical reformers is to disregard these councils with the assumption that they were prone to err and interpret the Bible for themselves through intuition and what they claimed was the Spirit leading them, letting the Bible "alone" decide these matters. The problem with this thinking, of course, is that the individual who thinks he is interpreting the Bible alone by the Holy Spirit is usually interpreting the Bible with traditions, cultural concepts, limited knowledge, and flawed logic that he is unaware that he brings to the Bible. 

The Magisterial Reformers themselves, while not going as far as the Anabaptists, and although not assuming that all councils have erred in all things, sought to evaluate all things with Scripture, knowing that they approached it within the culture and tradition of the church, but leaving even their own presuppositions open to critique by the Scripture. Hence, they attempted to use exegesis, the logic of the languages used by Scripture, to interpret the text and seek unity through it. Although their methods and knowledge of grammar, syntax, genre, backgrounds, etc. were limited, they nonetheless gave us a legacy to aspire to in that they knew that the ground for unity was not in any external thing other than the Bible itself, and therefore, the ground of unity cannot be in anything other than exegesis. 

The Evangelical answer to division is far more sinister than anything that has come before. It is simply an adoption of relativism applied to Scripture. If you are unfamiliar with a more robust postmodern understanding of relativism, it looks a little something like this: There is an objective truth but humans are limited in their understanding and knowledge as well as their biases. Hence, although objective truth may exist, no one can know whether they have come to know it with any certainty. Every man is feeling the elephant but may be describing it from his or her perspective, which may contradict other perspectives. Interpretation of the objective truth, therefore, is relative to the person, their traditions, experiences, biases, etc., so that the existence of objective truth is affirmed but the knowledge of objective truth is denied. Interpretation, therefore, is a guess, and those who guess should not pretend that they know. To do so would be arrogant and ignorant of the truth that no one can really know the truth when any certainty (the self defeating nature of the claim should be clear).

Now, let's match that up to how Evangelicals view biblical interpretation. There is a Bible that speaks objective truth as the Word of God. The interpreters of this objective truth, however, are finite and lack knowledge and understanding, have personal biases, etc. Hence, although the Bible is objective truth, there is no way to know if someone has interpreted it correctly with any certainty. For someone to claim that he knows what the Bible says therefore is arrogant and ignorant of the truth that no one can really know it. Hence, interpretation of the Bible is a guess and no one should pretend that it is otherwise. 

Depending upon the group, this rear its head in various ways. Some will claim people can know but it is through answers described above (i.e., tradition, councils, popes, personal intuition, or the Spirit's leading or supernatural gifting). Others will say that some interpretations can be known to be untrue using some exegesis (but not too much of course) but others that are not so obvious cannot be excluded and therefore must be considered valid. In all of these, sola Scriptura is being denied because the Bible itself is not the answer to the problem of biblical interpretation and unity. In other words, the Bible is not the supreme authority in matters of interpretation. The supreme authority is outside of the Bible, and when that supreme authority cannot be found or fails to give us a clear result, the objective truths of the Bible cannot be known.

This is unacceptable to one who is seeking to line up his theory of interpretation with the doctrine of sola Scriptura. As I have argued in this series, the Bible supplies what we need to interpret it. It informs us what languages it uses, what cultures it references, that it uses the logic of language to communicate, etc. In other words, it informs us how we are to interpret it and the answer is exegesis which limits the possibilities of interpretation within the parameters offered by the text itself. 

The seemingly spiritual idea that the Spirit guides biblical interpretation through a majority has proven to be untrue. The authority of the majority in the ecclesiastical community isn't about biblical interpretation but about application of the Bible and matters not addressed by the Bible and are under dispute. God never promised that where two or three agree in my name about a Bible verse, Jesus is giving them the answer. If that were the case, the contradictions between Christian groups, councils, cults, etc. would make little sense. Instead, ecclesiastical authority is the majority deciding judicial matters by the majority, not interpretive ones. If this is not the case, and it is also the majority that decides interpretive issues, then the authority is not the Bible but the majority. If that is the case, the Bible isn't even needed to begin with, as the Bible does not give what is needed to be interpreted correctly and so the Spirit must give an interpretation to the majority that can only be known through external means. 

As Vanhoozer has argued:

"Is biblical interpretation a form of rational inquiry? This query takes on a certain urgency in our

present postmodern climate. Is it possible to recognize, and to reject, false interpretations (knowledge

falsely so called), or is meaning relative to the interpretive community? What is the alternative, on the

one hand, to cognitive anarchy (where everyone believes what he or she wants about a text), and

cognitive totalitarianism (where the individual’s belief is dictated by the powers that be, that is, the

institutions of Church or State), on the other? Our belief that there is indeed meaning in the biblical

text would be small comfort if we could not say, however tentatively, what that meaning is. Of course,

part of the problem in resolving interpretive disputes is that different interpreters work with different

definitions of meaning. It is impossible to answer the question “Can we determine determinate

meaning?” until we first determine whether readers are engaged in the same enterprise. I have already

presented my case for defining meaning in terms of communicative action. Even so, it is possible for

interpreters to agree with this definition and still talk past one another, for communicative action

itself can be described in many ways. In the final analysis, however, the conflict of interpretations

owes more to the complexity of communicative action than to the inherent indeterminacy of language

and textuality. It therefore follows that deconstructive despair about the possibility of correct

interpretation need not be the last word on the matter" (Is There Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge 258-59)

In conclusion, therefore, only a theory of interpretation that believes that the Bible provides what is needed to interpret itself and that its interpretation can be known through that means supports the doctrine of sola Scriptura. That methodology of interpretation, as stated before, is exegesis. Exegesis is the Word of God supplying its own interpretation. To deny it is to deny the Word of God itself and to abandon our only true hope for unity. 

Protecting Sola Scriptura from Sophism, Part V: The More Subtle Forms of Sophistry

 Sophistry can look very academic. In fact, it most often looks academic. Most commentaries, monographs, journal articles, lectures, and other forms of media use the same material that an exegete uses in order to interpret the Bible. Hebrew and Greek words are discussed. Backgrounds are used as referents of the text. Syntax and grammar may be discussed, along with genre and literary considerations. But none of this is exegesis. These are merely the materials one uses to build the house. They do not control the methodologies used to build it. 

For instance, with backgrounds, one can change the referents provided within a text, and in doing so, change the text itself and therefore its meaning. With word studies, one can dictate what a text can and cannot say because a word is defined separately outside of the context rather than letting the context dictate the use of the word. One can misunderstand the grammar by putting too much semantic weight to it (e.g., "the Greek verb means this is past, present, or future" when the Greek verb is not tense based). One can have a faulty or made-up understanding of syntax or paragraph structure that then changes what words refer to what in the text. All of these elements can and are abused by academics who are actually eisegeting rather than exegeting, but all of them seem very convincing to those who are merely looking at whether the interpreter uses these elements rather than being critical of the methodology he is using to piece them together. 

In the same way that sophistry elevates one's vocabulary in order to persuade an audience to believe the veracity of an opinion, academic Bible interpretation that is void of good exegesis seeks to convince by virtue of how properties of biblical language are used rather than with the logical methodology of proper exegesis that allows those properties to form one's interpretation of the text. 

Another type of faulty exegesis is when texts are used to interpret the event rather than the text. This happens when one attempts to recreate the event with the text or multiple texts that now reinterprets the e event that was already interpreted for the reader by the text. The Bible often uses events as teaching tools for theology and ethics, but often these are stripped of the text as though it is a literal description of the event that is merely attempting to put the reader into the event rather than to teach the reader theology and ethics or even history through the event. An author has a specific amount of information that he wants the reader to take from the event, but a reconstruction seeks to put in more details and recreate the event in a way that the author did not include in his text. This takes the audience's mind off of the text and onto the event, often, ironically, ignoring the true authorial intent and meaning of the text. Often, this can be spotted when lots of other biblical texts or details from outside the text are employed to add information to the text at hand. Topical teaching and intertextual teaching can tend toward this fallacy.

Another key issue in biblical interpretation is applying the right hermeneutic to a text, which is really what this entire series is about. The historical, grammatical hermeneutic is derived from the fact that God uses language to communicate and language assumes the legitimacy of this hermeneutic in order to understand it. In other words, the Bible teaches this hermeneutic because by using known, coherent languages that function in accordance with the rules of logic, the authors intend to be understood. Hence, with grammar, syntax, specific words with specific referents within the context of the text, the biblical authors teach to their audience not only the substance of what they are communicating but also the means by which that communication is to be understood.

One of the worst crimes committed, however, is the "bait and switch" fallacy when committing non sequiturs when applying a text. This is where the interpreter making the argument will make a solid argument of the biblical text, understand the meaning of the text, but then assign an application that is not logically consistent with the interpretation. This is because the logic of the language is not really connected to an application that the interpreter wants from the text. This is still teaching a different Bible even though the interpretation may have been correct since it introduces teaching that is not consistent with the biblical text but teaches a foreign idea as though it is.

The above statement proves true even when the authors are using non-literal hermeneutics that may be in play within their culture and context (e.g., 2d Temple hermeneutics) because we know their non-literal intent by employing the historical grammatical hermeneutic. In other words, I know that Paul is making an allegory of Sarah and Hagar in Galatians, not only because he says he is doing so, which I would understand by employing the historical grammatical hermeneutic, but also because he uses similes in the context that, in accordance with logic, convey that the author is symbolically interpreting the two women. This, therefore, does not give me, as an interpreter, the right to go into biblical texts and do the same thing that Paul has done in his typological interpretation, but rather to keep the historical grammatical hermeneutic that Paul is assuming his readers will use to interpret him in order to understand the allegory he is using. I, therefore, know what Paul is saying in Galatians, i.e., that God had an additional authorial intent with the Genesis text than the original author had, and what the human author of Genesis is saying when he contrasts the two women by using the historical grammatical hermeneutic. 

This does not mean that no outside of the apostles can use typology of texts that the apostles did not say were typological. It just means that there is no way to verify that our typology is also God's additional authorial intent to the original author's. This is why, historically, no doctrine should be established based upon typological or allegorical interpretation. It cannot be verified as intended by either author of the biblical text, human or divine. The historical grammatical hermeneutic, however, is inherent in the use of language and a hermeneutic derived from exegesis of the language, which is why it can establish the authorial intent of both authors as long as those authors have communicated that intent through the logic of language.

Hence, if one is arguing in a way that commits etymological fallacies with words, illegitimate referential transference between biblical texts or other background sources, misidentification of genre, is attempting to interpret the even rather than the text, or imposes hermeneutical theories external to the Bible, then one can be sure that these arguments are not in support of the position for which he is arguing. 

Protecting Sola Scriptura from Sophism, Part IV: Identifying Arguments That Are Not Logically Rooted in the Language of the Text

As a result of what we have talked about above, arguments of one who is exegeting and one who is not will look very different. Both may still look academic in that they will talk about Hebrew, Greek, backgrounds, genre, etc. but the methodologies that direct the use of that information will be displayed in the arguments themselves. In other words, one person's arguments, the one using exegetical methods, will be consistent with the logic of language and the other person's arguments, whether academic in nature or not, will be inconsistent with, or completely ignore altogether, the logic of the language. This will, of course, often lead to interpretations of the text that are completely different from one another. Yet, one will be rooted objectively in the text and the other will be rooted subjectively in the cultural opinions and ideas of a particular culture and linguistic logic foreign to the original text.

In other words, if one is not properly exegeting, it means that his interpretations of the Bible will be solely rooted in his own culture-bound opinion and he will be doing nothing more than making his best guess at what the right meaning of a text might be just like everyone else who doesn't know the language and is only reading an English Bible. 

This means that the arguments of the non-exegetical interpreter will take a different shape to bring him to his conclusions and in a debate, whether formal or informal, whether in dialogue or monologue, he will argue his case very differently than his exegetical interlocutor. His arguments will be rhetorical but not logical. They will be sophist but not realist.

As I discussed before, sophism is a philosophy where a position is adopted and then any and all arguments that are assessed to be persuasive are used to support that position, whether they are valid arguments or not. When it comes to arguments made from the biblical text, there is a way to argue from the text and a way to use the text to argue. In the former, logical arguments from the text will be used to interpret the text and support the argument being made. In the latter, all sorts of linguistic and logical fallacies will be adopted, including using the text out of context or in disregard of its language, in order to support the argument being made. 

The fact that this occurs should allow the careful audience of an argument to discern between valid and invalid interpretations of the text. The following are some of the tactics employed by sophism to support an argument that should be dismissed immediately as invalid.

Let's look at the easier logical fallacies to spot first. 

Ad hominem, circumstantial ad hominem, or argument from bias are types of argumentation that attack the person making the argument but completely leave the opposing position untouched. It is meant to persuade an audience that one's opponent in a debate should not be listened to because of some characteristic about them (e.g., he is a bad person, he is biased and wants what he is saying to be true, he is just influenced by someone or something he likes or has close relations with, etc.).

An example of this might be if you're discussing Reformed theology and someone says that Reformed people are mean-hearted, arrogant, know-it-alls who just like to show their superiority in putting other views down. Even if all of this might be true of the person, it hasn't refuted a single iota of any biblical or logical proof in Reformed theology's favor.

Tone policing is a type of ad hominem fallacy where the person, not the argument, is attacked for how their argument is presented. Again, people who have a bad tone might be accused of being arrogant or condescending, which are bad traits, and therefore, this argument implies that their arguments should be dismissed because they are unlikeable people. Their position, however, remains completely undefeated at this point.

Arguments from tradition and ad populum are arguments where one appeals to what a particular group of people have always believed or what a particular group of people believe now. It usually appeals to the majority opinion throughout history (tradition) or the contemporary majority opinion (ad populum). Neither one of these establish the truth or falsehood of a claim, and if we are talking about Christian circles that uphold the doctrine of sola Scriptura, these types of arguments set up external authorities to rival the Bible rather than support its teachings. Now, if these are simply arguments that supplement good exegesis, it becomes less of an argument from tradition or ad populum and more of a support that shows that others have also used good exegesis to come to the same opinion. The problem remains only in the use of these arguments absent of the logical support of the text itself. Unfortunately, most people appeal to the fact that lots of people have different opinions and therefore lots of people couldn't all be wrong. This, of course, assumes that truth is found by somehow appealing to the majority of a group. Nazis anyone? Weren't the Jews who thought Jesus was the Messiah a minority group?

Genetic fallacies are fallacies similar to above, where an argument is being accepted (the church fathers or reformers said X) or rejected (the heretics said Y) based upon who held it.

The middle ground fallacy assumes that whatever is in the middle is the right answer. Hence, in biblical interpretation, if someone interprets Jesus to be saying that divorce and remarriage are allowed for any reason and another interprets Him as saying that it is never allowed for any reason, the rational position that is likely true is the middle position that interprets Him as not being radically on one side or the other but holding to a moderate position like divorce and remarriage are allowed only in a few circumstances. Of course, taking a middle position between two opposite "extremes" assumes what the extremes are first by determining what is true. In a way, therefore, it begs the question and assumes a faulty Hegelian dialectic that synthesis is the key to truth when truths may, in fact, exist at the extremities of the spectrum.

Strawman arguments and fallacies of missing the point are arguments that distort the positions of one's opponents or completely ignore them altogether and address some other point that is not being argued for. So if I argue that the Bible teaches a creational ethic when it comes to the sexual act where one is obligated to use all copulation in a way that is open to God to create human life, but then someone presents my position as arguing that accidentally spilling seed or kissing someone without making a baby is sin, this is a complete distortion of my argument that leaves it completely untouched since what is being argued is a different argument that I never made. In other words, if Argument X is made and the person attacks Argument Y, then Argument X stands. Strawmen and arguments that miss the point are usually done from carelessness with an argument that stems from a desire to psychologically sooth oneself when an unpleasant conclusion could be drawn from the real argument.

Arguments from consequences and some slippery slope arguments are arguments that reject or accept a proposition as true based upon whether it will lead to good or bad consequences. Hence, one might argue that Calvinism will lead to lower rates of Christians evangelizing, and therefore, Calvinism cannot be a correct interpretation of biblical passages since God wants us to evangelize. The consequences, even if bad and genuinely resulting from something true, do not determine whether an interpretation is true or not because they do not determine whether something is true or not.

Anecdotal fallacy is when someone argues against a proposition, e.g., the Bible says homosexuals are evil, by arguing from the experience and opinion of the person, i.e., I know some homosexuals and they are good people. All this says is that the person has a different conclusion from their experience, assumes their experience is greater than the authority presented in the argument, and therefore declares that it is false. This, of course, doesn't counter the argument presented but instead makes another argument that is not substantiated without further arguments.

Appeal to emotion is when, as in the rest of these fallacies the argument goes untouched, but the audience is made to feel good or bad about adopting a position. "Those who accept trans people are on the right side of history." "Trans people commit suicide because people say they're doing something wrong." "Donald Trump is a racist and anyone who votes for him is a racist too." None of these are logical arguments but they are surprisingly effective to human beings who are guided much more by their emotions than they would like to admit.

The Texas sharpshooter fallacy might sum up sophism itself since it is the fallacy where one adopts a position and then looks for arguments that support it and ignores others that do not. Cherry Picking is also a version of this, where only those arguments or data that support a position are mentioned and the data or arguments that might cast doubt on it are ignored. It's like one having the idea that libertarian free will is necessary in order for us to love God and then that person goes into the Bible looking to support the idea with passages that talk about choice while ignoring the passages that seem to contradict libertarian free will. In many ways, systematic theology and topical preaching, if not done with care, can fall prey most often to these fallacies.

The etymological fallacy assumes that the true meaning of the word is rooted in its etymology or original meaning. This is a lexical fallacy that is committed quite a bit by earlier works of lexicography like those of Brown-Driver-Briggs, Kittel and Colin Brown. This fallacy is often repeated in debates and sermons as proof of one's position when in reality it gives no support within itself to establish the meaning of a word as it is used in the context of a particular text by a particular author.

The historian's fallacy is one that assumes that those who argued in the past had the same information and were dealing with the same arguments that those in the present are addressing. A lot of arguments from church fathers or reformers are often caught up in this fallacy. It looks something like, "No church father saw this biblical passage like this" or "no reformer saw this biblical passage this way." It assumes that those in the past had the same advanced grammatical, lexical, syntactical skills, knowledge of the ancient environment through texts and archaeology, knowledge of genre through ancient texts, etc. in order to make the same assessment of a text but come to a different or indifferent conclusion to one made in the present with all of those exegetical tools. Most of the church fathers did not know Hebrew and only read a Greek translation of the OT. Most of the Latin Fathers did not know either Hebrew or Greek and only had a Latin translation to go off of. The Reformers were just relearning Hebrew, and often learned a later rabbinic Hebrew rather than ancient Biblical Hebrew. Likewise, up until the nineteenth century, most people thought the Greek of the NT was Holy Ghost Greek because they only had Classical Greek to go off of and judged everything in relationship to it. Second Temple literature has been analyzed now far deeper than before, as it had been ignored by so many in the past, and ancient Near Eastern literature was buried in the sand and unknown until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This doesn't mean that the Holy Spirit did not guide the church in God's Word, but it does mean that any individual text should be reevaluated in light of the lack of information we now have.

The nirvana fallacy argues that because a solution, or interpretation, of an issue isn't the most ideal that it should be rejected. This is often a fallacy committed in application of a text. For instance, since women can't attain to the Proverbs 31 woman, teachers should suggest that they should. Since no one sings as well as a cathedral choir, we shouldn't sing at all. This fallacy encapsulates the saying, "The perfect is the enemy of the good." Biblical ideals should be striven toward even if they are never fully realized.

Proof by assertion is a fallacy that we might rename as the Facebook Fallacy. This is where someone merely asserts a position or says, "I don't agree" but offers no support of their own position or disagreement. It is a claim or implication that one's conclusion is equally or even more valid than one's opponent without backing up that claim or implication. This is similar to what is called the "I'm entitled to my own opinion fallacy," where the mere opinion is asserted with as much authority as a conclusion that was well argued for simply because someone has the right to hold a different opinion.

The fallacy of appealing to the stone is similar to the above but the assertion is simply that the opposing argument is absurd, stupid, not biblical, etc. without the supporting arguments that show it to be absurd, stupid, or unbiblical. This is merely an assertion and assertions don't bring us to any understanding or confirmation of the truth.

Often the person using assertion fallacies are arguing emotionally and are offended since they view truth as something that is subjectively known rather than something that can be supported by an objective source through objective means. In the Christian context, a Christian might say that they believe that God's Word is objective but then believe that it can't be known through objective means, and so since everyone is just guessing subjectively, assertion is all we have and no one should assert his opinions over others.

The fallacy of affirming a disjunct is like that of false dichotomy. It assumes that if one thing is true the other is not. So if the Bible says that any given sexual act, for instance, has more purposes than procreation then procreation doesn't need to be a part of it. However, a logical biblical stance would be that the sexual act has its purpose in procreation and has more purposes to it, so that any given sexual act should have that purpose and seek also the others as well. In other words, it's more than procreation but it isn't less than procreation.

The division fallacy is where one thinks that something true of the whole must also be true of the parts. So if, as in the example above, the purpose of the sexual act is procreation, every part of that act must accomplish the goal of procreation. Hence, kissing, fondling of breasts, etc. are parts of the sexual act as the Bible describes, and they are not procreative, then the claim that the purpose of the sexual act is procreative is false. This is fallacious because it assumes that because the purpose of the sexual act is procreative that every part of the sexual act must be procreative when it is just the consummation of the sexual act in copulation that is procreative and the rest have a secondary purpose in procreation by leading up to that point.

Personal incredulity is the assumption that if someone cannot see an argument or that it is too nuanced to understand that this must give credence to the fact that it isn't true. People might admit that not all truths are easy to understand but the fallacy exists more in a skeptical sense where the person thinks that things are probably not true if they are hard to understand. Of course, lots of true things are hard to understand for most people. This has no bearing on what is actually true. An example of this might be the Trinity or Incarnation of Christ. So many people reject these doctrines based upon this fallacy.

I could go on and on but these are some of the most common ones I see in debates and conversations concerning biblical interpretation, application, and theology. These are the easier ones to spot, however, and there are some that are more tricky and are usually only spot by the trained eye. We'll explore those in the next post. Suffice to say that anyone who claims to believe in sola Scriptura should be careful not to use any of the fallacies above since establishing positions with these fallacies implies a denial of Scripture as his supreme authority.

Protecting Sola Scriptura from Sophism, Excursus II: Why We Need to Understand the Ancient World and Its Texts in order to Help Us Understand Scripture

 One of the objections to what I have argued above is that the Bible should be self-sufficient and we should have no need to learn anything that is external to the Bible in order to understand it.

There are a couple things I want to say to this. The first is that I don’t think the Bible itself teaches this idea. I think it stems from a misunderstanding of sola Scriptura and confuses it with what Keith Mathison would refer to as solo Scriptura. 

But the second thing I would say is that I think the Bible can be understood by itself without using anything external to it. The problem is not the Bible's communication but our lack of understanding it due to our having inserted our own cultural and linguistic concepts into the Bible. In other words, we tend to read an English translation of the Bible and think we are reading the words inspired by the Holy Spirit and forget that the words inspired were Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek. We tend to read into it all sorts of cultural assumptions that stem from our worldview instead of from the author’s. 

The problem is that I do not know ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, or Koine Greek as a native language. I could spend years trained as a linguist and decipher the language on my own from the Bible itself without ever having to use a grammar, syntax, or lexicon external to the Bible. In many ways, I still do this when I study the Bible. However, it is not unfaithful to the Scripture to trust that others have done this already so that reliance upon these external sources to understand the ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, or Koine Greek text is perfectly in keeping with faithfulness to the text of Scripture as being self-sufficient. 

The further problem, however, is that I am not a native of the ancient cultures in which these texts were written and so must learn the worldviews, idioms, and literary devices and signals (including any genres not shared by our cultures) of those ancient cultures in order to understand a text written within them. 

Again, I can do this by using the Bible alone, since the Bible has so many books that give us a conceptual sampling of these things. The problem, however, is not the deficiency of the Bible, as stated before, but the deficiency in our own understanding due to our having already put so much of our modern cultural concepts that come from our worldview, idioms, literary devices and signals, genres, etc. into the text. We have eisegeted so much of our understanding into the text that we are simply not careful enough to notice that the Bible teaches within another world that is not always in continuity with our own. Because of this, the more we can immerse ourselves in the ancient world, the more we can dislodge what we have ignorantly assumed about the text and the more we can pay more careful attention to what the text is saying. 

To put it plainly, a study of external texts to the Scripture is not because the Scripture needs help in communicating its ideas. It is because we need help seeing our externally cultural ideas with which we have twisted the Scripture. The person who refuses to immerse himself in these cultural contexts will most often lack the ability to see how he has distorted the text with his own ideas. 

As I have argued earlier, the logic of language functions off of referents. When we change the referents of a text, we change the meaning of the text, and we end up with alternate interpretations of the text that were unintended by the author. When the modern interpreter reads a text and subconsciously adds his own cultural referents to it, he ends up changing the text he is reading into something else. In other words, the Bible he is reading is no longer the Bible that was written but a new text that has been rewritten in his head.

Examples:

1. A linguistic example would be the oft cited text of Proverbs 29:18, which in English reads: "Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he who keeps the law prospers." One might remember many a sermon on this text that supports a church building project or new civic programs for the church to follow. This is because our English word "vision" can refer to a plan that someone has as a future goal. The problem is that the Hebrew word here is חָזוֹן, which refers to a revelatory vision, i.e., revelation from God, not some human plan or goal. The adversive parallel to the clause is that which follows, "but he who keeps the Torah prospers." This is because the Torah is revelation from God that instructs God's people so that they do not perish. 

Without understanding the language, the text is misread and becomes a completely different statement, and therefore, a completely different idea that will now be believed by the modern reader to have divine authority as a part of what the Bible teaches. There are numerous examples such as these.

2. There are numerous verses about the "heart" throughout the Hebrew Bible. David is a man after God's own heart, the heart is sick above all things and who can understand it, the thoughts of the heart of man is evil from his youth, God will give His people a new heart, etc. 

We read this word and interpret all of these in light of our own cultural referents. To us, the heart is the seat of emotion and desire. Hence, we tend to interpret all of these passages as having something to do with desire or longing. For instance, a man after God's own heart means a man who wants to desire as God desires and to be like God in that way. The heart being sick above all things and incomprehensible to us has to do with our sinful desires. The thoughts of the heart of man being evil from his youth refers to his wants and desires being evil, and God replacing the heart of His people has to do with giving them new desires.

Now, none of these are necessarily untrue theologically speaking, but they are not the emphasis of the text, and therefore, not to what the text is referring. Instead, if we were to just look closely at all of the texts throughout the Hebrew Bible, we would see that the heart often refers to the mind of the person. The Scripture itself could teach us that "thoughts of the heart" or "he said in his heart" are obviously talking about the mind, not emotions. He said in his emotions? Thoughts of his emotions? We don't really need any external witness to tell us that we have been reading these texts wrong because the texts are unclearly communicated. Instead, what external witnesses, like reading ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian literature for instance, help us to do is to ask the question as to whether we are reading the texts of the Bible as closely as we should. If I go to Egyptian concepts of the heart and see that they see the heart as the seat of the mind rather than the seat of emotion, it causes me to ask the question whether the biblical concept is different or the same as that of the Egyptian culture. In fact, it causes me to realize that there even is a different concept of the heart that I did not even know about before I read that literature. When I go back to the Bible and read it more carefully, it seems clear that the concept is very similar. This is not correcting the Bible but my flawed assumptions that I have been placing into the texts that I have been reading and with which I have been unknowingly changing the Bible.

3. There are a lot of similarities between the genres the Bible uses to communicate its messages and the various genres that we use but there are a couple genres that we do not use, and with which we are just flat out unfamiliar. One of these is apocalyptic literature. We have literature that we refer to as apocalyptic in our culture but they are not the same as the types of apocalyptic literature found in the Bible and 2d Temple Judaism. Because of this, the modern mind naturally seeks to read texts like Daniel or Revelation with the next best genre with which it is aware, which is largely as a type of prophetic-narrative that describes the future (or within preterist circles, a type of prophetic-narrative that describes the past). This is because the mind is seeking understanding with the tools that it has. It reminds me of a computer that wants to open a file but doesn't quite have the right program so it defaults to some file that frankly just does not do the job well. 

Now, can I understand apocalyptic literature by just reading Daniel, Revelation, some of Zechariah, etc.? Sure. But since I am not familiar with the genre in my modern context, it would be immensely helpful to me to read all sorts of apocalyptic literature external to the Bible like 1 Enoch and the various forms of apocalyptic literature one sees in the Pseudepigrapha and Dead Sea Scrolls. The Bible even quotes from 1 Enoch, an external text to the Bible. Why wouldn't I read it and try to understand it in order to understand what the Bible might be doing? Again, this is a method of correcting myself and my misguided interpretations. It does not add or take away from the Bible. It adds or takes away from what I have been assuming about the Bible and possibly interpreting or misinterpreting it with. In other words, it adds or takes away from what I have already been adding and taking away from the Bible via my modern cultural assumptions.

I say all of this to argue that arguments that include the reading of ancient texts are not additions to exegesis or eisegetical when handled logically. They are a helpful part of deciphering the language used by an author, to figure out his cultural referents, and to correct the modern assumptions we have already sewn into the text. They can be the seam rippers that remove the thread that binds our cultural ideas to the text and allow us to see the text as the author intended. 

This means that a good argument that keeps in line with the logic of the language will seek to understand a text within its linguistic and cultural environment and any interpretation that merely assumes the meaning by using modern concepts through the method of soundslikegesis is to be dismissed as unsupported by the text.

Protecting Sola Scriptura from Sophism: Excursus concerning the Holy Spirit's Role in Biblical Interpretation

 Some might look at what I have written thus far and argue that it seems more mechanical and that the Holy Spirit is able to bring one to the truth in his reading of Scripture without following the logic of proper hermeneutics and exegesis. Of course, this is absolutely true, since God can do anything. In fact, the Holy Spirit is able to lead people into all truth through a sunset or a Harry Potter novel.

The real question, however, is what we can expect the Holy Spirit to do based upon the revelation He has given us in the Bible. Every person can claim to have the Holy Spirit, but how does anyone know whether this claim is true, especially in light of completely contradictory interpretations of the Bible that are so legion today? 

The point I want to make briefly here is this: the Holy Spirit is going to use the logic of language to interpret the text in accordance with the logic of the language He used to have the text written in the first place. 

He could have communicated His truth to the world in some other way. He could have made it intuitive to every man and left it there. He could have done it through feelings. But He didn't. He used languages, now foreign and ancient to us, from cultures, now foreign and ancient to us, and the logic of referential meaning to communicate truth to us. If that is what God used to communicate, and we have no other reliable revelation to argue otherwise, then we must conclude that is what God uses to communicate, and follow the interpretive methods that are supported by it while rejecting the interpretive methods that are not.

In other words, what I have argued thus far in this series IS what the Holy Spirit uses to help us interpret the Bible accurately. Anyone who claims to be interpreting the text by the Holy Spirit who ignores these and ends up with interpretations that contradict their conclusions should be dismissed as one who is mistaken.

Protecting Sola Scriptura from Sophism, Part III: Relying upon Multiplying Referents for Successful Interpretation

 I stated in the last post the following: "What this all ultimately means is that the key to understanding the text is authorial intent and the key to understanding the authorial intent is reference-filled context of the author’s literary work and the author’s world his words reference."

I want to now argue that this fact limits the modern interpreter to only those interpretations that argue from the context of the literary work as it is situated in the language of the original audience. What this ultimately means is that one is at a sever loss of any ground for a reliable interpretation of the Bible unless he knows the original language of the author and his intended audience. 

Now, one might agree that the original languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek must be learned in order to have grounding for a reliable argument that supports any given interpretation, and he would be right to do so. However, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, as is English or any other language, are dependent upon the author's use of them to point to his intended referents within his world. In other words, if I were to attempt to understand a document written to ancient Mayans during the fall of the Mayan Empire, I not only would need to learn the formal aspects of ancient Mayan language (i.e., grammar, syntax, and English glosses for Mayan words), I would have to also learn ancient Mayan culture during that time period and locale in order to understand the references to which the author was pointing his audience toward in order for what he intended to communicate to be understood. 

If I instead insisted that cultures are universal and so all I needed to learn was the formal language but not the cultural referents intended, I would be simply replacing the context with my own and completely misunderstand what was being communicated. In fact, I would argue that since the formal language includes lexicography that points to things within the conceptual world of the author, one has not learned the Greek language Paul is using, for instance, until he learns the referential concepts within Second Temple Judaism to which Paul is referring. One has not learned the Greek language that John is using until he learns the ancient Gnostic concepts and practices he is referencing or the genre of apocalyptic and its symbolic references to which he is pointing. 

In other words, language is more than its formal symbols. One must also know to what those symbols refer in the mind of the author, and because of this, the modern interpreter must learn not only the formal language but the author's referential use of that language. This is because without the larger argument of his literary work, the understanding of the genre he is using, and/or the ignorance of worldview concepts within his cognitive universe and the cognitive universe of his audience, the likelihood of the text being misunderstood when worldviews collide is astronomical.

Now, it needs to be understood that there are enough cultural similarities between most cultures that the Bible is not a completely foreign entity even to the interpreter who uses only an English Bible. So the overall message, the historical-redemptive message, once the Bible is translated by competent scholars, as it has been many times, can be understood by the average reader. This is what the Reformers referred to as the perspicuity of Scripture. However, this doctrine is obviously reliant upon teachers who have learned the language as noted above. This doctrine assumes that texts have been translated correctly and that the ambiguities of the receptor language, like English or German for instance, are not so great so as to obscure the overall message of the Bible. (And, of course, no who claims to understand the Bible on their own without the languages is able to just read a Hebrew and Greek Bible when it is handed to them. Everyone needs it to be interpreted and translated first, so theirs is an interpretation built upon an interpretation.)

Having said this, beyond the main message of Scripture, it is possible that many texts can be misunderstood due to a lack of cultural continuity between the cultures, languages, time periods of the original author and audience so that teachers who learn these discontinuities are able to bridge the gap between them and argue for the probable interpretation of a text within its literary and cultural context.

Going back to the main point of this series now, it becomes imperative that teachers learn the original languages of the Bible and that includes the larger arguments of the authors' literary works as well as the cultural concepts that the languages of these authors reference. 

It reminds me of someone who recently said that they don't need to know Hebrew and Greek because they can interpret the Bible for themselves. But this is an illusion. The Bible is written in Hebrew and Greek so what they really mean is that after scholars have learned the languages for them and told them what the Bible is saying, they can now interpret it. I would agree, that is, in so far as they have understood the intended meaning of the translators and not hooked their interpretations onto an ambiguity in the receptor language or a referent that they have inserted from their own culture due to a cultural discontinuity between the two civilizations.

Now, context is such that the more context given to a text, the more likely that text can be deciphered by anyone (that is, if he or she is paying attention to the context). This is simply because our brains are able to decipher the logic of a text the more referents are supplied by an author or the more texts with which the interpreter is familiar. In the case of the Bible, because it consists of 39 books that come from the ancient Israelite context and 27 that come from the Hellenistic Jewish context of first century Judean Greek, an interpreter may do just fine without having read any of the literature from the ancient Near East or extrabiblical texts that come out of 2d Temple Judaism. 

However, as said above, more referents provide a greater clarity toward the author's intended meaning, so the more one can read ancient Near Eastern and 2d Temple Jewish literature, the greater advantage he will have in interpreting a text accurately. 

Having said that, can one still interpret a text accurately without them? Of course. Due to what I also said above, so much context is given because the Bible provides so many pieces of literature from those time periods that, as long as one is paying attention to the flow of the author's argument and context, no further context outside of the Bible is needed. But it does add support and help substantiate what an interpreter may have already understood from the Bible itself.

My point of this post is simply to point out that an argument that is filled with the understanding of the language and all of its referents is made by an interpreter, it is to be favored as working within the author's communicative process rather than outside of it. Those arguments for interpretations that work outside of it must be rejected as establishing no support toward a legitimate interpretation and often may be seeking to establish support through an illogical and eisegetical means, often unbeknownst even to the unskilled interpreter who is attempting to do it.