Obstacles to hearing God’s words from Scripture

These obstacles are related to the interpretation of Scripture. The cause of obstacles seem to be connected with the problems of the grapho-sphere (Cilliers 2008b:14) or print culture in the process of interpretation.

5.1.1.1 “Exclusively literary tools” of criticisms

The fact that preachers regard the reading of various professional criticisms as the only way to interpret Scripture can be an obstacle to hearing God’s words from the Bible. As Schalfer (1992:46-47) points out, various sophisticated criticisms – text, source, historical, form, redaction, sociological and literary criticisms – are “means to a fresh hearing, not ends in themselves.” According to Peterson (1997:94), for fresh hearing, we need an oral medium, other than the critical medium:

No biblical book has suffered such an extreme fate at the hands of its scholarly exegetes. The reason is now easy to see no biblical book has been so far removed in its origin from the literary medium. The vision was written; but it was read aloud and very

quickly put back into the oral medium. And the reason, of course, was that it was addressed to persons who, in the main, could not read. Sound was primary. The experience of hearing the Apocalypse, whatever else it might have been, was not a literary experience. The medium was the ear. If neither the cause nor effect of the message was determined by literacy, it can hardly bode well for the interpreter to assume exclusively literary tools in his hermeneutical work.

Thus, the experience of hearing is more important than a literary experience in terms of the interpretation of Scripture. Moreover, Ellul (1985:45) comments, “Writing changes hearing into sight, and transforms the understanding of a person, with his words’ halo of mystery and echoes into the understanding of a text.” The written word loses “its life and immediacy” (Ellul 1985:45). According to Ellul (1985:37), sight occupies a privileged position in Western philosophy as the following observation exemplifies:

Platonism establishes the philosophical sovereignty of sight and G. Hegel follows it closely. Plato defines the essence of things on the basis of their perception. True knowledge is knowledge of ideas and of form; but idea, eidos, comes from the verb eido, which means to see. Rene Descartes also places sight in an absolute and privileged position, as the model of intuition. Intueri also means to see. What a constant repetition of error!

In Western philosophy, the philosophical sovereignty of sight seems to accelerate exclusively literary tools of theology, which have ignored the question about the life and immediacy of the Word.

If preachers stick to exclusively literary tools to interpret biblical texts, they will lose some important elements of Scripture. Although the meaning of a biblical passage should be “presented entirely and exactly as it was intended by God” (MacArthur 1992:23), preachers might fail to proclaim the entire and exact Word of God, because of their exclusively literary tools.146 On the danger of using such a medium without an oral medium, Peterson (2006:92) comments as follows:

Print technology – a wonderful thing in itself – has put millions and millions of Bibles in our hands, but unless these Bibles are embedded in the context of a personally speaking God and a prayerfully listening community, we who handle these Bibles are at special risk. If we reduce the Bible to a tool to be used, the tool bulks up calluses on our hearts.

146 _{According to Brown (2012:121), we still need theories of text interpretation as literary tools, “… but the}

hermeneutical requirements of contemporary practical theology far exceed the limits of traditional text- interpretative hermeneutical theories. Practical theologians will continue to draw upon an array of disciplines and strategies of inquiry in their quest to discern and respond to the world-transforming work of God in the living texts of human action, both within the church and beyond.”

Moreover, Thomas (1986:369) points out the peril of the Reformed Church’s exclusively intellectual preaching:

One of the great perils that face preachers of the Reformed Faith is the problem of hyper-intellectualism, that is, the constant danger of lapsing into a purely cerebral form of proclamation, which falls exclusively upon the intellect. Men become obsessed with doctrine and end up as brain-oriented preachers. … Such pastors are men of books and not men of people; they know the doctrines, but they know nothing of the emotional side of religion.

Hyper-intellectualism, as an exclusively literature tool, can be one of the obstacles to hearing the words of God from Scripture.

5.1.1.2 Fixed conviction for a self-centred purpose

Our misguided belief is also an obstacle to hearing God’s voice. According to Peterson (2006:11), “The danger in all readings is that words be twisted into propaganda or reduced to information, mere tools and data.” Preachers silence “the living voice and reduce words to what we can use for convenience and profit” (Peterson 2006:11). As a result, there is no listening to God’s words, but our propaganda for a self-centred purpose. Such a problem has existed in the history of mainline churches.

In the context of South African mainline churches, Cilliers (2006:81) discusses the problem of reading Scripture as follows:

We often read the Word just to strengthen our convictions. This is our dilemma. The problem of the South African society during the apartheid era was indeed the fact that our great variety (ethnic, cultural, political, social) had degenerated into a sinful partitioning, also in church. A pattern of separation was established. Churches and groups read and proclaimed Scripture from their own experience and perception of the South African reality, often from directly opposite world views, with conflicting interpretative frameworks, perspectives, collective “stories” and myths.

In South Africa, the problem of reading “was aggravated by the fixed conviction of such churches and groups” (Cilliers 2006:18). We must differentiate between our convictions and God’s Word. Because of fixed convictions, we do not hear the Word of the living God through the Spirit, and read only the letter written in ink on paper for our self-centered purpose. Compare Peterson’s (2006:59) remark in this respect: “One of the most urgent tasks facing the Christian community today is to counter this self-sovereignty by reasserting what it means to live these Holy Scriptures from the inside out instead of using them for our sincere and devout but still self-centered purpose.” According to Søren

Kierkegaard (as cite in Ellul 1985:37), the privileged position of sight in Western philosophy needs to be broken in order to hear the Word:

The speculative individual wants to touch everything he sees … Why doesn’t he respect the distance imposed by Being? Why doesn’t he deal carefully with the difference between himself and the other person in order to understand who he is? In order to understand, he must give ear: hasten to listen. You must learn to listen.

In order to hear the Word, the self-centred individual, who wants to touch everything he/she sees, needs to be changed into an other-centred person who has an unplugged ear toward others.

5.1.1.3 A self-centred experience

Contemporary emerging churches are responding to the fixed conviction of mainline churches.147 According to Pagitt (2005:23, 163), experience and feeling are more important than text and knowledge. He accentuates the importance of self-centred experience as follows: “At bottom, our trust in the Bible does not depend on information that ‘proves’ the Bible to be credible. We believe the Bible because our hopes, ideas, experiences, and community of faith allow and require us to believe” (Pagitt 2005:168). According to Pagitt’s above remark, “the Emerging Church movement” (Carson 2005:36) seems to rely on self-centred experiences or feelings, rather than a scriptural message or information. Then, the self-centered experience of Pagitt can change to “Baalism” without the Bible and God (cf. Chapter 3.3.2). Whereas some mainline churches struggle to hear God’s voice because of their exclusively literary tools, the Emerging Church movement struggles because it focuses on self- centred experiences and cannot hear His words (cf. Snodgrass 2002:9).

According to Babin (1991:38), “Authority resides primarily in whoever has an intimate experience of truth and values.” However, a self-centred experience does not experience God’s words, but has a different experience from Scripture. According to McClure (2001:47), “the epistemological foundationalism of the Enlightenment” undergirds a self-centred experience, as well as the exclusively literary medium. Thus, both have the limitation of foundationalism and fail to hear the words of God (cf. Murphy 1996:85).

A self-centred experience and a belief in this experience must be overcome by moving away from a self-centred standpoint in order to hear God’s words. We need to consider not only “God for us,” but “God for the others” (Cilliers 2006:81-82; cf. Kang 2005:150-151; McClure 2001:133-135; Nissen 2010:190-192).

147_{According to Carson (2005:36), “The Emerging Church movement is characterized by a fair bit of protest}

5.1.1.4 The problem of theological education

Some of the obstacles mentioned above are virtually the problems of theological education. For example, we learned the literary tools of criticism in theological schools, as the following comment of Jacks (1996:6) illustrates:

We spend three years in seminary building ourselves a citadel of books that can too easily isolate us from the world we’re living in – the world we’re supposed to be preaching to. Each year the pile of books grows. Our love of the written text and the world of ratiocination grows.

Such a problem of theological education can isolate us, not only from the world to which we preach, but also from the listening community to which God speaks (cf. Peterson 2006:92).148 The separation between preachers and the listening community149 means that preachers face obstacles to hearing God’s words, because they are also a part of the listening community to which God speaks (cf. Bohren 1980:462, 552).

According to Martin (2008:18-19), theological schools turn students into mechanical interpreters without careful reflection. Parker (1992:39) furthermore points out the problem of contemporary theological education contrary to the excellence of Calvin’s preaching school as follows:

There was none of the pernicious concentration on literary problems which has so bedevilled theological training in our own century – so that a bewildered student might well have conceived that the Pentateuch and the Synoptic Gospels had been composed solely to provide entertainment for minds left idle by a too-quick solution of The Times crossword.

Thus, our theological education needs theological training with careful reflection to hear God’s words.