Interpreting the Bible: Learn from Your Opponents

Many years go, public television aired a biography of Socrates. I well remember an exchange between him and one of his opponents–

Opponent: Socrates, you have to stop teaching these lies! You’re destroying your reputation. People are laughing at you. Your friends are an evil influence on you!

Socrates: My friends are those who want to help me, and my enemies are those who want to hurt me, right?

Opponent: Um, right.

Socrates: The people you call my friends you say wish to hurt me. You, who consider yourself my enemy, want to help me. It seems that my friends are my enemies and my enemies are my friends!

Opponent: You make black white and white black! I can’t stand listening to you!!

Socrates’ point, I think, was that we can actually be benefited more from our enemies than our friends. For example, if we attend a church where everyone agrees with us, then we’ll never learn anything new. Pretty soon, we’ll consider ourselves virtually inspired, because everyone we know finds our thoughts and ideas perfectly sound and Godly.

If we are actually in error on some point or other, we’ll never learn it from our friends. Our opponents, however, will delight in correcting our mistakes. We should take advantage of that fact!

Remember: the first rule of hermeneutics is humility. We start our studies thinking we just might be wrong. We come the Bible to learn, not to be affirmed in our pre-existing beliefs.

Just so, the people in the best position to correct our thinking are those who disagree with us (obviously!) This means we need to adopt two very important disciplines if we are to be serious students of the Bible, especially if we intend to teach or lead a church:

First, we must make it a point to talk to people outside our faith-tradition about Biblical things. We should talk to Baptists and Methodists and Seventh Day Adventist–maybe even a few atheists. We should talk to people in other factions of the Churches of Christ. And we should especially talk to those who are smart and learned, who can truly challenge us.

Second, we should diligently study the writings of those who disagree with us.

Now, these disciplines will do two very good things. First, if we are ever to persuade those in error of their error, we need to talk to them. We need to understand their points of view. We need to know how they came to their belief. You can’t persuade someone of his error unless you’ve first listened to him so carefully that you understand his views as well as (or better than) he does.

Also, we might just learn something true. After all, there are reasons that millions of people have different viewpoints from ours. They have their verses just like we do. Their beliefs respond to some need they have.

Sometimes, we’ll learn a better way to explain what we believe. For example, a charismatic Christian may well be in error, but how do we respond to his heart-felt desire to feel God’s presence and to be assured of his salvation? We may have to learn how to explain our old position in new terms.

Or we just might be wrong. We’ll never know until we’ve heard the other arguments. And, as a rule, we in the Churches of Christ do not do this.

For example, a while back a read a book by one of our authors criticizing theistic evolution. The book was filled with quotations and footnotes–but the author didn’t once quote from or cite to an argument made by an actual theistic evolutionist! For all I could tell, the author had condemned these evolutionist to hell without once reading their arguments!

Maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s wrong. He doesn’t know, because he hasn’t bothered to find out what his opponents actually teach–and thus his book is utterly useless.

It’s easy to disprove the other side when you make up their arguments for them! Anyone can win that fight! But take on a smart, educated, flesh-and-blood opponent, and you just might learn something.

Finally, some of the best-written, most profound Christian writings come from outside the Churches of Christ. Can you imagine doing without the writings of C. S. Lewis (an Anglican) or Francis Schaeffer(Presbyterian)? There are many, many great works of Christian theology and comfort written outside the Churches of Christ. We should gladly learn from them and give them credit without embarrassment.