R.C. Sproul (0:00)

Some have found fault with the biblical writers. When the biblical writers say all Capernaum came out to hear Jesus and they'll jump at that and they say, well, that's not true. We can't trust the Bible when it talks like that. Oh, Capernaum went out to Jesus. Does that mean that every man, woman and child in that city came out? That the shut ins were carried on beds out to hear Jesus? That every last human being that was a resident of Capernaum went out to hear it? I don't think the Bible means to convey that.

Renewing Your Mind Host (0:32)

The difference between a science textbook and a detective novel is easy to notice. And that's because each uses different literary conventions, clues that help us understand what genre we're reading, whether something is hyperbole, metaphor, or poetic. Because the Bible is made up of many different genres and uses various literary forms, we must interpret each differently if we're to take Scripture seriously. That's why we're featuring RC Sproul's Knowing Scripture series this week on Renewing youg Mind. And you can request lifetime access to all 12 messages and the study guide, plus receive a 12 month subscription to Table Talk magazine when you give a Year end gift before midnight tonight. As we are only hours away from this critical deadline, any support you show today is greatly appreciated and helps us continue this year's outreach momentum into the new year. Thank you. Well, today Dr. Sproul will teach us to recognize the different genres and literary forms so we can read the Bible as it was meant to be read. Here's Dr. Sproul.

R.C. Sproul (1:44)

We considered what it is meant by, by the term literal interpretation of Scripture. And if you will recall, at the end of that lecture, I talked a little bit about the importance of being able to recognize different types of literary forms that are found in the Bible, lest we make mistakes in translation and in interpretation by failing to understand that poetry has its own rules and prose has its rules and so on. And in this session we're going to consider further this whole question of literary forms, how we can recognize some of them, and what are some of the unique problems that they confront us with. Now, at the outset, I want to talk about one particular dimension of biblical language that causes an awful lot of problems for people and in fact has been at the center of the storm of controversy in church history. And that is that the Bible, when it tells narratives and recalls history and describes events and people and places, it uses a kind of language that we can call the language of appearances or descriptive language, or the more technical term for it is what we call phenomenological language. Phenomenological language just means language that describes things the way they appear to the naked eye. How many times have you been involved in discussions or seen debates in the newspaper or on television centering on the alleged conflict between science and the Bible? Now would be naive to assume that there never is conflict between science and the Bible, because science works with human suppositions and hypotheses and the like. And it's readily understandable that from time to time there would be conflicts between theology and science that not just a tempest and a teapot, you know, when some scientist stands up and says that life is simply a result of chance or of a cosmic accident, and that therefore you as an individual have no eternal significance whatsoever. You're just a cosmic mistake, a grown up germ or something like that. There you're on a collision course with biblical teaching of the nature and the function and the dignity of man. And so there are real areas of conflicts at certain points between certain scientists and biblical theology. But so often the controversies and the disputes that arise between science and the Bible have to do with a misunderstanding either of what science is saying or of what the Bible is saying. And the classical case in point, of course, is the black eye. The Church God in church history over the Galileo episode, when the Church and her bishops refused to even look through Galileo's telescope to see whether or not they could confirm the the that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, but rather that the sun is the center of the solar system. Because the church theologians had drawn inferences from some of the biblical statements about the nature of the relationship between this planet and the sun. And they had put them in concrete and made them matters of dogma on the basis, not of sound biblical exegesis, but on the basis of influence from earlier theories of science. And here pride and prejudice collided and the Church was very much embarrassed as a result of it. Had we realized that the Bible uses phenomenological language, the languages of appearance with respect to describing events and the world around us, we never would have had that problem with Galileo. What do I mean by that? Well, the Bible speaks, for example, about the sun moving across the heavens, about the sun rising and the sun setting. Now, if you go outside tomorrow morning, you will. If you use your naked eye to observe the motions of the sun against the backdrop of the heavens from the vantage point of the Earth, you too will see the sun come up and speak of a sunrise. And you can watch and watch the sun move across the sky during the day and then set in the west at evening time. And if you were to talk to one of your friends about it, you may Even as a 20th century, sophisticated, scientifically minded person, talk about a sunrise and a sunset. But you would be mistaken if you would draw the conclusion from what you observe with the naked eye that that because the sun seems to move across the sky, that therefore we are stationary and the sun is moving around us, and that the Earth is the fixed center point of the universe. That would be a scientific error, but it would not be incorrect for you to use languages of appearance to describe things as they appear to the naked eye. My favorite illustration of that has to do with the weather forecast. In fact, in this day and age we don't even talk about weather forecasts anymore. We're far more sophisticated than that. Now we talk about meteorological surveys and the meteorologist comes on after the 11 o' clock news at night and he baffles us with technical scientific language and jargon and he talks about high pressure centers this and barometric pressure that, and anticyclonic activity and so on that's going on and all these blips on the radar. And I know sometimes my mind is boggled trying to follow all, all of the technicalities of the weather forecast. I just want to know whether or not I should take an umbrella to work tomorrow morning. I don't need to know all of the details of the technicalia that is involved in the weather forecast. But even after all of this scientific data and instrumentation that's presented to us on television, the last part of the weather forecast, they'll tell you what the temperature's going to be and they'll talk about the probability quotient for rainfall, precipitation and all that. And then at the end they'll say sunrise Tomorrow morning at 6:15, sun up. Should I rush to my telephone and call the television studio and say what kind of cranks are you people down there at the television studio? Are you trying to reintroduce the ancient Ptolemaic view of the universe that sees the Earth as the center of the universe and that the sun moves around, that the sun actually rises and the sun. Haven't you heard of Galileo? Haven't you heard of Kepler? Haven't you heard all of the knowledge that has been brought forth through the Copernican revolution? Well, of course not. I would be completely irresponsible to accuse the weatherman of lying or of falsehood or of any such thing by using the simple day by day descriptive language of terms like sunup and sunset. Now we get into trouble when we want the Bible to be a precise scientific textbook to describe things in 20th century terminology. Wouldn't you be suspicious if tomorrow afternoon somebody dug up a manuscript or found a manuscript in a cave in the Middle east and they dusted it off and they said, oh, here is a lost book of the Old Testament that dates back to 2000 B.C. we began to unravel the scroll and we began to see that Solomon tells us that the barometric pressure tomorrow afternoon and the probability quotient for precipitation will be such and such. You'd know right away it was a forgery. Because people didn't talk like that when the Bible was written. They had a different frame of reference which cannot be called incorrect or any such thing. It's just a matter of using naked eye descriptions. We're not talking here about matters of fact as we are of matters of description. Now we cannot expect the Bible, as I said, to be a precise, detailed, technical, scientific. That does not mean that the Bible doesn't reveal things that have heavy bearing upon scientific questions. It does. The Bible tells us that this world was created by Almighty God, that this world is not eternal. And if a scientist comes down the road and says the world is eternal, it has no creation, we have conflict. I don't want to minimize that, but I do want to say let's not try to force the Bible into a mode that it was never intended to be. Some people are upset by the fact that the Bible is not written with the same kind of mathematical precision that we can expect from computers. The Bible is given to round numbers. When it describes crowds. You know, 5,000 people were there on the day that Jesus fed people from fishes and loaves. Does that mean that one of the disciples went around with a pocket calculator and carefully marked off every single person that was in attendance? And isn't it wonderful that it came to exactly 5,000 right on the number? Or was that a round number? Crowd estimate. And at the same time as we have the use of round numbers in the scripture, we also have a legitimate use of the literary form of hyperbole. What's a hyperbole? A hyperbole is an exaggeration of fact. It's an exaggeration of the truth. We could say a hyperbole is a distortion of the truth. Now we recognize that distortions of the truth are falsehoods. They're lies, they're errors. So how can we tolerate hyperbole? Well, hyperbole is more than an exaggeration of the truth. The key to the hyperbole is that it is an intentional exaggeration of the facts to make a point. I've said in lectures that here is a problem that I have encountered a jillion times. Now what have I communicated to you with that statement? Do you really take me seriously and say I have so wildly exaggerated that as that? I don't expect anybody seriously out there to think that I've actually encountered that problem precisely in exactly one gillion times. I don't even know if there is such a number as a jillion. But what am I communicating to you? I have had to deal with that problem so many times that I am completely exhausted by it. And it feels like a jillion times I've had to face it. Some have found fault with the biblical writers. When the biblical writers say all Capernaum came out to hear Jesus and they'll jump at that and they say, well that's not true. We can't trust the Bible when it talks like that. All Capernaum went out to Jesus, does that mean that every man, woman and child city came out? That the shut ins were carried on beds out to hear Jesus? That every last human being that was a resident of Capernaum went out to hear it? I don't think the Bible means to convey that any more than the Pittsburgh Press meant to convey the same idea. When the Pittsburgh Steelers won the super bowl for the first time and they came home in triumph from the super bowl and there was a festival scheduled for the center square of Pittsburgh to celebrate it, and I don't know how many people came. A couple hundred thousand people came to that. And the newspaper account said the whole city turned out to welcome the Steelers. The whole city didn't turn out. There were lots of people that stayed in bed. There were lots of people were confined to hospitals. There were lots of people that had something else they wanted to do that day and just didn't bother to attend. But the newspaper writer was trying to give us a picture of a thronging multitude and of an exciting event that captivated the imagination of the populace of a city. And so he used hyperbole. I know of scholars who quibble about the New Testament teachings and whether or not they're really to be trusted. Because Jesus Christ made the statement to his disciples when he was trying to illustrate that just a little bit of faith can make a lot of things happen. He said, if you have the faith of the grain of a mustard seed, you can Say to this mountain, move and it will move. And he talks then about the mustard seed being the smallest of the seeds. Now, you know, we can say that something's small. We can say that something is smaller, and we can say that something is smallest. We have the descriptive, the comparative, and the superlative. The superlative is the third degree. And Jesus used the superlative. Jesus said, the mustard seed is the smallest of the seeds. Now, did Jesus of Nazareth mean to communicate at that point that of all of the myriad of myriad number of seeds on this planet, that in fact the tiniest, smallest seed in the whole world is the mustard seed? I doubt it. What Jesus was saying is, from this tiny seed, this tiny, this extremely small seed, comes a great big tree. That was the point that Jesus was making. Jesus was using hyperbole. And so we need to be aware of the legitimate use of hyperbole and being able to recognize it when we see it. Otherwise, we reduce the Bible to nonsense syllables, not allowing the legitimate literary forms to function as they should. All right. In addition to descriptive language or language of appearances, we also have the use of hyperbole, the use of round numbers, and we also have the use of metaphor and other varieties of figurative language. And here's another place where sometimes we can get in trouble in terms of biblical interpretation. We know that the Bible uses metaphorical language. Jesus was fond of it. In fact, the Middle east, the near east, ancient people have a speaking style that is rich in the use of figurative language and of metaphor. How many times does Jesus use the metaphors drawn from nature to liken his role as the Redeemer? I, I am the vine, abide in me, and I in you. And he makes that illustration, that analogy between vines and their fruit and their branches and Christ and his people bearing fruit. I am the vine, you are the branches, he says, I am the good shepherd. He says, I am the door through which men must enter. Now, let's impose a crass literalism upon Jesus statement. I am the door. And this is really crass. That would mean, if we took it literally in the pejorative sense of literalism, it would mean that where you have skin, Jesus had veneer of some sort. Oak, walnut, mahogany. Where you have arms, he had hinges. Well, that's absurd. Jesus does not mean to suggest that he is a door. Literally, he is a door. Figuratively, he is a door. Metaphorically, he is using that image to convey something, that he is. He is the one through whom we must go. Just as a human being has to pass through a door. To go from one room to the next. So we must pass through him to go from this world into the kingdom of God. That's the point that Jesus is making. And it's simple, isn't it? We don't need to be PhDs in theology to be able to recognize a simple metaphor like that when Jesus uses it. Unfortunately, there are some cases in the Bible when the literary structure is not quite so clear as to whether or not it is metaphor or figurative language. I think for example, of Jesus statement in the institution of the Lord's Supper, where in the words of institution, Jesus took bread, and when he had broken that bread, he looked at his disciples and he said, this is my body. Now analyze that statement. This referring to the bread. We can fill it in this bread. Bread is the subject, is, is the predicate. And my body is in this case, the objective part of the statement. Now Jesus is using the verb to be. The linking verb is the verb that indicates at times an identity between the subject and the predicate. Jesus said, this is my body, and he says, I am the door. Again, we have subject, predicate, object. The verb to be, I am the door. In the one case, it's clearly figurative. Is it figurative or literal when Jesus said this is my body? Do you realize how much controversy has gone on in church history over the dispute of the interpretation of that? The whole Reformation suffered from a lack of unity over the interpretation of that single verse. Another dimension of biblical language that we need to be very much aware of, unless we fall into serious error, is that the Bible is uses what we call anthropomorphic language, anthropomorphic language when it describes God. Well, what is anthropomorphic language? We know what anthropology is. Anthropology is the study of man. It comes from the Greek word anthropos, which means man. And so anthropomorphic is just a combination of the Greek word anthropos, man, and the Greek word morphos form. Put it together and what have you got? Anthropomorphic, which means man form. That is, the Bible uses human forms to describe God. It talks about God's eyes, his head, his hands, his feet. It talks about his throne. He's seated on the throne, the earth is his footstool. The Bible from beginning to end speaks in human forms and in human descriptions to describe God. And yet at the same time, the Bible warns us that God is not a man. But we don't have any frame of reference to relate to something that's a pure spirit being. We don't know how to Describe pure spirituality. We've never seen it. We are bound by space and time. We are physical creatures. And the only terms in which we can communicate about anything are human terms, because we're human. And so we use analogies to describe God drawn from human experience. And sometimes we think that we are able to escape this by using fancy and abstract language. Like, we say that God is omnipotent, and we think that by that we've somehow captured the essence of what God is. But even an abstract word like omnipotence, all powerful, is just a more sophisticated and subtle form of anthropomorphic language. Because the only way we understand power is humanly. And when we talk about all power, all we're saying is, well, we know what partial power is and greater power. We've seen different levels of power. And so we just sort of project abstractly with our mind the idea of ultimate power. But our understanding of it mentally is still bound by our own human forms of speech. Does that mean that our language about God is meaningless, as some have suggested in the 20th century, since God is not man and yet we use human terms to describe Him? No. Even though God is not man and we are not God, the Bible tells us that we are made in the image of God and that there is some sense in which we are like God. That point of likeness makes it possible to speak in terms of analogy that God is like man. He's not exactly like man. There's not an equation between God and man, but there are points of contact. And not only that, God in His Word taking the initiative to address us. And the supreme form of address is in his own Son, who is the incarnate Word. God becomes a man. He takes upon himself a human nature, and he speaks to us in human terms. Because we don't have the mind of God. We don't have the perspective of God. We have human perspective. And the only way we're going to be able to talk to God at all is in our terms. And God in His mercy, condescends. He stoops down and addresses us in human terms. And it's because we are in his image and because he's become incarnate and because God has the ability to communicate to us. That language is meaningful. It's not exhaustive. And if you push it too far, you're going to get yourself in a peck of trouble, just like the Mormons have. You know, when they have to actually come to the conclusion that God has a body, a spatially temporally defined, geographically located body. You know, that he's not a spirit being, he's a physical being. And that kind of crass physicalism that you find in Mormonism is because of a fundamental error of hermeneutics, an error of dealing with the biblical language of anthropomorphic description. Well, there are other categories and other problems. So in our next session we'll continue this examination of the different types and forms of speech and literature that we find in the Bible.