Kristen

NN said:
“With regard to your dispute of the logic chain of (239) – your position falls within the scope of possibility 2 – you claim that the instruction was specific to the culture and not universally applicable.”
Well, sort of– but I don’t think you are entirely getting my point. I didn’t say the instruction, by being specific to the culture, was therefore not universally applicable. You seem to be thinking inside a kind of box where it has to be either one or the other. I think it’s both. The Bible by its very nature is both culturally specific and universally applicable. The trick is not to say, “Which one is this particular passage?” but to say, “What is the timeless truth being conveyed in this passage that was written from within a specific cultural understanding?”
NN continues: “However, I presume that you grant that some instructions are universal and transcend ANY cultural institution:
e.g. God exists, man is sinful, all men are instructed to repent from their wickedness and seek God through the atoning work of Christ, etc. Since you have sought to answer this, ask yourself this question: How can one tell the difference? Let us presume that Paul gave instructions which were specific to the culture and are no longer directly applicable to our culture and also that he gave instructions which were universal and transcend any specific culture. How can one biblically tell them apart. ”
You’re right that if you try to separate them out– “this one’s no longer directly applicable, but this one is”– you can end up with a very inconsistent hermeneutic. Some people take THIS passage as timeless and THAT passage as not applicable; and other people take the first passage as not applicable and the second passage as timeless; and there is often very little rhyme or reason as to why.
Scot McKnight, in his book The Blue Parakeet, offers an alternative: Read the entire Bible with a view to authorial intent and the cultural understandings of the original writer and the original audience, and then– rather than dismissing any of it as no longer applicable– use those understandings to try to find the timeless principle within every passage.
The thing is that pretty much every book of the Bible begins with some kind of statement along the lines of “this is the message that came to such and such a person during such and such a period of time, in such and such a place.” I submit that those are not there just for extraneous detail, but that God inspired them to be there just as much as the rest of the Scriptures– and He did it for a reason. That reason was to alert the reader that each message was first of all a message to a particular people, bound within a certain time and place– and that therefore we should pay attention to those specifics in trying to understand the passage.
Now, when it comes to those truths that are related to the eternal nature of God, or to humanity’s relationship with God– such as sin, repentence, atonement, obedience– because the topics themselves are eternal and God-related, there’s going to be far fewer humanity-related cultural assumptions that need to be taken into account. This is why it’s far easier to ascertain the timeless principle being conveyed. But when it comes to human relations (such as marriage), those historical/cultural understandings become much more important. In any event, if we always take into account the cultural/historical settings in which the various books of the Bible were written, our hermeneutic becomes much more logical and consistent– we needn’t worry about “when does this apply to me and when doesn’t it?” Instead we ask “What is the truth principle being conveyed by this passage?” And then we apply that principle to our own lives.
I can even give a Scriptural foundation for this type of Biblical interpretation, for Paul himself used it. He said that when the Law said “Do not muzzle the ox while it’s threshing the grain,” it was not the time-bound specifics of the ox and the grain that were important– it was the timeless principle being conveyed that “a laborer is worthy of his wages.” If the Scriptures themselves espouse this principle-approach hermeneutic, I think it can be considered a safe hermeneutic to use.