After decades of Bible study, I’m convinced that we tend to get lots of things wrong about the Bible for failure to fully decouple from our own ways of thinking and communicating so as to fully grasp the ways of the Bible writers and of those they were sometimes quoting. I want to make a brief argument here in favor of the decoupling skills we Bible students should learn, but first I hope you’ll indulge me while I set the stage with a short and necessary introduction to what we tend to be like as humans.
INTRODUCTION: SELF-FOCUSED, NOW-FOCUSED, AND OFTEN DISSATISFIED
By nature, it’s quite easy for humans to be self-focused and even self-absorbed—to concern ourselves only with our own interests and habits, and to guard ourselves against external considerations. Yet even so, we do well to notice that our lives have been set into a world in which there are billions of other people already here when we get here. Apparently, this world is not all about the individual—or, to put it more personally, it’s not all about me. Yes, there’s more to this world than just me—whether I’m the sort to appreciate that fact or not. Some people discover this fact and make more of it than do others.
It’s also not all about now. We may from time to time become fixated on the present day, but there have been some millions of days up until now, and the events of some of them are recorded in writing. And then there’s the question of the future, and of trends, and of prophecies and such. We were born onto a timeline. And again, some people discover this and make more if it than do others who seem content to ignore the past or the future or both, more or less.
And so we can observe that some tend to shut themselves off somewhat from what is not-oneself and from what is not-now. But when we read what someone else wrote—or when we listen to someone else talk—we are, at least a little bit, opening ourselves up to the possibility of being influenced by something beyond ourselves. We are, at least a little bit, exploring beyond the boundaries of our own internal thoughts, dispositions, attitudes, and beliefs. And similarly, if we read someone from the past, we are, at least a little bit, exploring beyond our own time into another era. But even so, when we dare to do this, most of us still seem to have at least a slight preference to stay somewhat near “home” in such explorations, and grow uncomfortable when venturing too far afield into subjects and ways of thinking with which we are unfamiliar. Perhaps it’s from fear, or from lack of care, or perhaps the motive is as mundane as the mere desire to avoid the mental work of processing unfamiliar things.
We also tend to stay near “home” when it comes to the sort of language we read or listen to. If it’s archaic or foreign, it becomes inconvenient for us, and we’re often not apt to assume that the value of understanding it is worth the trouble it takes to understand it (correctly). We can also do this with writings—and even modern writings— that are filled with metaphors, for this requires more mental exertion from us, so as to interpret the metaphors accurately. (And this may tend to explain why poetry is not more popular than it is.)
For all these considerations (and probably more), it’s simply easier for us to stay nearer to what we’re used to when it comes to what we listen to and what we read. But here’s an important observation: At the same time we’re consistently inclined to stay close to home in our cognitive lives, many of us find ourselves wishing for more from life—wishing for something more fulfilling or intriguing—more satisfying. Ironically, we may wish for a life different from our own in some way, yet our habit is to read and listen only to things that are pretty much like we are already. Think about that. We may well finding ourselves wishing for change without having to do much work to discover what that change should be, or how to bring it about.
Now, it doesn’t take much mental examination to see that there’s a problem with such a lazy notion, because in this real world into which our lives were set at birth, life takes work. You can call me crazy here if you must, but I say that if one is dissatisfied with one’s situation in life, that situation is more likely to improved by one’s own efforts than by the occurrence of some fortunate and unforeseen event in which someone else comes and changes our lives for us. Even if someone else gives us the right ideas about what changes we might make to our lives, it so often works out that it is we ourselves who must do the work of making those changes happen. And I’ll argue at length that we must often do the work required even to understand those ideas of others in the first place. Life takes work—and for as long as humans have existed, people have been looking for ways to cheat that fact. And what easier way to cheat it than avoiding mental work?
IN SEARCH OF IDEAS
Wouldn’t it be something, though, if the better life for which we long were actually attainable? What if we could actually find some life-changing ideas coming from other people—or even from people in the past? Suppose we could find a way to increase our understanding substantially and to have a more abundant life than what most are used to in our culture! Well, many believe, as I do, that God revealed things of this sort through special people in ages past—and that these things can generally be found in the Bible. Yet at the same time, in my judgment, many who are looking to the Bible for answers are not walking away with many life-changing ideas that lead to substantial improvements in their lives. They keep at it because it seems the faithful thing to do, but it’s not bearing the fruit they expect it to bear.
And while there may be several factors contributing to this, I want to present one ironic cause here for your consideration: Sometimes we fail to grasp good ideas we read—the ideas we need to improve our lives—not because we are entirely disinterested in improving our situation, but because we fail to decouple from our our own habitual thinking well enough to understand just how different those better ideas really are from our own mental routines. We may read the words, but we don’t process them well enough to realize the difference between what they mean and what we habitually think. Even though we’re reading, we’re not decoupling from our own internal view well enough to be able to think the thoughts of the one we’re reading. Yes, we’re reading someone else—and that’s good—but we’re not really listening; we’re not really letting their ideas into our own mind, where we can set them on the table and look them over really well.
There can be different reasons for this. One is that, even though we’re willing to read, we’re still not really open to changing our thoughts should better thoughts be revealed in the writing. Perhaps this comes from pride, or from fear, or merely from the strength of habit. Or perhaps it comes from some other cause that doesn’t come to my mind in this moment.
But there’s another consideration—a very practical one—that prompted this post. It’s that we sometimes fail to think the writer’s thoughts—or the thoughts of the one the writer is quoting— because we have failed to decouple from our own habits of communicating ideas in order to understand their habits of communicating. This is a practical concern, and yet it can cause as much trouble as would some deeper matter of having a bad attitude. In other words, while we might sometimes fail to understand because we don’t want to understand, on other occasions, we might fail to understand because we don’t know how. It could be that the writer or speaker is using a manner of speech unlike our own, and that we fail to understand how that manner of speech works.
We might have to learn about their times, where we really only know and habitually care about our own time. We might have to understand their metaphors and figures of speech first before we can manage to think the thoughts they were thinking. And the more of their writings that we want to understand, the further afield we must go in our own learning—the broader must be the scope of our pondering—the more we must imagine the possibilities of what they might have meant to convey. Indeed, if someone from a couple thousand years in the future were to read your social media posts, don’t you think you’d have to explain a lot of things to them so that they could know how to think like you’re thinking? Would you really expect them to know what you meant had you posted something like, “The Rock is such a star!” And so, we ourselves may well need help understanding communications from those from different cultures and in different eras.
THE TRAGIC MISTAKE
You can go to almost any church these days and hear the general idea that the Bible is a very important book. So you can venture to read the Bible faithfully, as many do—whether much or little. But just because you’re reading it, this doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily decoupling from your own way of thinking in order to grasp the thinking of the various Bible authors. You might just be insisting on understanding it by use of your own way of thinking, and not of theirs. And this is a tragic mistake—made by millions, it seems—for you can end up thinking your own habitual thoughts while thinking you’re getting them “from the Bible”. Or, perhaps even worse, you can end up misinterpreting what the writers/speakers meant, and believing something that is neither what you already believed, nor what the writers/speakers believed! And how ironic is that—that we would go to the Bible for understanding, and come away with a misunderstanding, all while thinking we are now properly informed because we “got it from the Bible”?
Since I’ve touched on the subject, let me take a moment here to mention what I call “Interpretation Neglect”. It’s is a cognitive bias that discounts our own responsibility for the way we interpret things. Here’s a meme that describes it briefly.
Reading without decoupling from our own view is risky business because we can often walk away having failed to understand that we’re simply reading our own view into the text we’re considering, rather than walking away with an understanding of the text that its author or speaker would have agreed with.
SOME PRACTICALS
In the interests of practicality, I’d like to mention two particular decoupling failures that we should all find familiar. The first is the error of assuming oneself to be the audience, where the writer (or the one being quoted) was addressing people of a different time and situation. The skilled reader can decouple from a Bible writer’s or speaker’s “you”, and can understand that they were addressing someone other than readers that would come along a couple thousand years later. The skilled decoupler can say, “Let’s see what this author said to his audience,” rather than saying, “Let’s see what this author says to me.” He or she can say, “What can I learn from what was said to those people in that situation?”, rather than saying, “This was said to me!”
And why would this be an important skill to have? Well, if you assume it was all written to you, then you’re going to have to build an ark and a tabernacle and a temple and you’re going to have to wait in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit comes upon you in power, and so forth. (These were all instructions given to various Bible characters throughout the story.) But if you can decouple from the self-centered view, you can realize that such things are not instructions to you personally, and you can avoid the consequences of such bad assumptions.
For the record, I am not suggesting that we should take the attitude that nothing in the Bible should be applicable for us, or should be understood to relate to our own lives. Rather, I’m suggesting that the Bible is not written directly to us and that we have to learn from it indirectly in many cases—which is mentally harder. We can read what they were told, but then we have to decide (however wisely or foolishly we may do it) what should be learned from that, and what we should do ourselves. And before I move on, let me point out that God knows this, and yet he delivered these Bible documents to our generation anyway. He knows it takes more mental work to learn indirectly like this, yet he apparently thinks we can handle the mental operations necessary to interpret these things wisely. Based on the nature of the scriptures that have been delivered to our generation, it would seem that God expects us to be the reflective sort who will pondering things at length and learn from them.
ONE MORE EXAMPLE
When I sat down to write this, I had in mind only a short piece, and not the new book that the world really could use on this subject (hermeneutics). So let me give just one more example of the need for decoupling as we consider the Bible texts. Consider the question: How many stars are there? Without stopping to research the matter, just take a stab and answering in your mind, based on the knowledge of the matter you already have. Are there millions? Billions? Trillions?
Many of us will field such a question assuming our modern scientific view of the universe, and when we hear “stars”, we automatically think about the things we see in the sky at night, and that our new telescopes are detailing for us more and more with each passing decade. Perhaps this is how you took this question yourself, assuming that “stars” was intended literally. And if this is how you took it, I want you to notice that I previously mentioned stars in this post, where almost certainly, you took it figuratively. The previous mention was this:
“The Rock is such a star!”
Here, you (probably) understood that “The Rock” is an actor, and that “star” is a metaphor for a brilliant or exceptional individual, particularly in the field of acting. And in our previous discussion, I was asking whether someone from a couple thousand years in the future would need help understanding such a sentence about a rock and a star. And if you’re like most, I’m betting you could easily see how they might need help to decouple from their habitual use of such words in order to grasp yours.
Suppose, however, that when I asked you “How many stars are there?”, I was talking not about literal stars, nor about movie stars, but about angels? In that case, I’d have been meaning, “How many angels are there?” And you might wonder, “Why would anybody talk that way, and say ‘stars’ when he means ‘angels’?” And that would be a fine question, the answer to which could simply be that it was their custom–not yours, but theirs—to do so. Do you see the need for decoupling here?
In the Bible documents, the writers and the people they were quoting would sometimes use “stars” to refer to angels. Here’s one obvious example of this:
Revelation 1:20 The mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden lampstands is this: The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.
I’ll assert here simply that there are other Bible passages that use “stars” to refer to angel. Assuming I’m right about that, then the really important question is this: Just how many of the 60 or 70 “star” passages in the Bible are talking about angels?
A great many Bible readers have never once asked that question, and they are apt to read a star passage assuming it’s about literal stars unless something forces them to consider the alternatives. But there’s a pretty big difference between an author meaning literal stars and one meaning angels, right? So it’s actually quite important that we ask that question when we read those passages, but most don’t.
For example, most will assume that the “star” that led the wise men to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus was a literal star—or if not a star exactly, perhaps something roughly similar, such as a comet. They will never stop and consider the possibility that the Ancient Near Eastern writer was telling his Ancient Near Eastern audience about an angel guiding the wise men on their journey. And for the record, there are angels involved otherwise in the stories of Jesus’ birth, so it’s certainly reasonable to wonder whether this “star” was an angel, or whether it was meant literally. But many will never ask that question; they’ll never try to play out the text in their heads to figure out how it might have worked in each possible scenario. Rather, they will simply assume a scenario and run with it while they read.
How often, then, have we missed the point because of failing to decouple from our own assumptions and habits?
Indeed, how many have just assumed that the ancient authors/speakers must have been speaking literally when using phrases like “four corners of the earth” or “circle of the earth” for “ends of the earth”, without ever doing the work to figure out what they actually meant? And how many of us, consequently, have decided that the authors were scientifically ignorant, since we ourselves know better than what we are assuming they meant—that the earth is neither in the shape of a disc, nor in a shape that has corners or ends? It’s easy to assume that they were just ignorant, but what if they weren’t even attempting to write about scientific facts of geology, and you’re assuming they were because you yourself are a scientifically-minded person living in a scientifically-minded culture that is not very good at decoupling in order to understand people who didn’t think or communicate like us?
I’ve seen several moderns assure others that the ancients believed that the stars in the sky are, in fact, angels. This is their interpretation of the ancient writings, but I have never found a passage that includes actual information that leaves us no other reasonable choice but to interpret it the same way. To me, it seems more a customary assumption (that they believed that the stars are angels) than a thing that can be clearly demonstrated from the texts. So it’s an interpretive assumption on our part, and not a necessary inference from the texts. (If someone knows of a passage in any ancient document—biblical or extrabiblical—that demonstrates this on its own, without requiring that such assumption be brought to the text, please cite it for me!)
I’ve been in many conversations where I try to convince people of these kinds of decoupling errors, and the success of the conversations varies wildly from few people who eventually say, “Oh, I get it!” to those who will decide in response that Jack is an idiot, or a heretic, or even Satan himself! (Yes, really, there are some who have said such things to me.)
This sort of decoupling is a skill that God expects us to have. Though Jesus didn’t use the decoupling word here, this is exactly what he’s calling for when he counsels the Pharisees thus:
John 7:24 Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.”
He’s telling them, in other words, to decouple from their initial view of a matter, and to look deeply enough at it to judge it correctly. Paul points out to the Corinthians that they were making a similar error in 2 Corinthians 10:7. And there are many other Bible examples in which what the people were already thinking was not sufficient, and needed correction.
In fact, one fairly major theme that can be tracked through the Bible story is that of the need for the individual to give up what is his own so that he can have what is God’s. Here’s one of the starkest declarations of this idea, and it startles many to find it in their Bibles:
Luke 14:33 In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.
What he’s calling for here seems to be an overall attitude of decoupling from self, and this would certainly decoupling from one’s own thinking from time to time. And my main point in all of this is that not many of us are very good at “giving up everything” when it comes to how we read the texts. What I mean is that we bring far too much of our own habits of understanding and of communication to the texts, and we insist on understanding them in ways most convenient to us, even if those are not the ways in which the authors or speakers intended them. Think about the irony of that!
Here’s Jesus again with yet another bold statement that horrifies many when they first see it:
John 12:25 Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
Statements like these must be wrestled with—or not, of course. That is, we can wrestle to understand exactly what he meant, or we can just make a sloppy decision about it, or alternately, just ignore it altogether. And we could certainly grapple with the question of what he means here by “hate”, and whether it seems morally proper to “hate” one’s own life. And if we were to do that mental work, we’d be doing the very thing I’m promoting in this post. We’d be struggling to understand the sayings of someone who is quite different from us in some ways, and whose philosophy and communication habits are quite unlike ours in some ways. Indeed, are we the sort to go around saying that it’s best to “hate” our lives? No, probably not.
And really, should we be terribly surprised if understanding the thoughts of God and of God-inspired prophets takes a little work for us? Here’s how God famously put it through Isaiah’s prophetic pen:
Isaiah 55:9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Some will make the tragic mistake of assuming that what God’s meaning to convey here is something like, “So stop trying to understand things, dummy.” Many will read this verse and never stop to consider that those heavens above the earth were indeed visible to Isaiah’s audience. They were not imperceptible. They were not beyond any understanding. Sure, the literal stars in the sky were beyond counting, but many other things about them could be learned, such as their relative location, their brightness, their habitual paths across the sky, and their color. In fact, the ancients also spent enough time observing to notice that some of those things in the sky didn’t keep to their course as did the rest, but “wandered”. (They were noticing planets, which, unlike stars, are orbiting the sun, and move differently across the sky.) Indeed, much could be learned from observation of the heavens, just as much can be learned from observation of those thoughts and ways of God that have been set in print and delivered to humankind.
A QUESTION AND A DANGER
A fundamental question, therefore, is whether we think it is worth the trouble to try to understand the texts as they were intended by the writers and by the God who inspired them. And a fundamental danger is that we will, figuratively speaking, neglect that work and fashion those texts into some manner of idol that carries a meaning that’s different from what was intended, but that suits us just fine. This, too, is ironic—to go to the texts for understanding, and to walk away from them understanding it in a twisted way with which the writers and speakers would disagree!
One thing we all should keep in mind is that the Bible does not jump up from the table and slap us when we have failed to decouple from ourselves so as to understand it properly. We can fail in this way for our whole lives and never have it actively pointed out to us by the book. Sure, if we were listening/processing as we read, we’d be more likely to figure out our errors, but the Bible has no magical feature by which it actively alarms the non-listener/non-processor to his or her errors in understanding. Similarly, Jesus and God don’t generally come down here to tell us what we have got wrong after our Bible study sessions. (Perhaps you’ve noticed this!)
Even so, many Christians understand, however, the idea of a delayed accountability for our choices. A passage about this has come to my mind, particularly because it’s also about their failure to decouple from their self-view in order to have an accurate view of God. Consider the erroneous assumption they were making:
Psalm 50:21 When you did these things and I kept silent, you thought I was exactly like you. But I now arraign you and set my accusations before you.
They were assuming that God would think they way they think. And is this not the very thing I’ve been getting at in this post regarding how we can err in assuming that the Bible writers and speakers would have communicated how we communicate, and how they would have been saying something that we ourselves would say? In cognitive science, they speak of a “consensus bias”, by which we overestimate how many others agree with us—or how much they agree with us. And that’s pretty much the same sort of thing that happens when we come to the Bible, failing to decouple from our own views of things, so as to accurately grasp how they saw things.
I think it’s far better to come to the Bible to get God’s view than to find some echo chamber for my own view. Indeed, that’s how I’d want people to read my writings, rather than to try to spin them into something I wouldn’t say or agree with. And I think that this Golden-Rule approach to studying scripture should serve us rather well.
There’s not enough decoupling going on, in my view of modern Christianity—-and there never has been. One major theme running throughout the Bible is that many never will listen—or will not listen for long. (I talk about that on my Bible podcast here.) Good listening requires decoupling from self long enough to consider what is being said, how it is being said, and what it meant. I do not think that the Christian world could be nearly so divided and trouble as it is today if we were all skilled and diligent at decoupling from self so as to embrace the Bible texts.
James Taylor has a lyric that comes to mind: “What good is this happy life when all you wanted from the start was to cry?” It’s about a person with a disposition that is not interested in what lies outside the person’s own habitual grief. Such a person is not open to becoming happy, but enjoys sadness more. And I think this serves nicely as a metaphor for what I’ve been talking about here—that it’s easy for us to go to the Bible for help, while really not being willing to go the full distance to getting that help. Sure, we can crack open the book, but that’s such a minimal effort, and can hardly compare to the full course of action that’s required to understand it as it was intended. And in this way, I think that a great many people deceive themselves that they have indeed considered God, when really, they’re just “going through the motions” without engaging their minds robustly. They find something surprising in the text, and they say, “Hmmm. That’s weird.” And then they walk away from it, never decoupling from themselves long enough to find out what the author/speaker meant and to learn how it should be understood. They may open the treasure chest, but never taken any of the treasures out of it. They may set the table, but never eat the meal. They may ask the question, but leave before it is answered. Or they may read the Bible for answers, but read their own erroneous ideas into it, and walk away thinking that their convictions are coming “from the Bible”.
Surely, God and Jesus are the most misunderstood people ever. Any many religious camps have been built on those misunderstandings. Meanwhile, few are they who see the value in decoupling from self so as to more fully understand God and Jesus—and who develop the skill to be good at it. Cognitive science tells us that people are quite prone to overestimate their knowledge, skills, and abilities—and I suppose we’re no different when it comes to surveying our own knowledge of God, and our ability to discern what he meant by the scriptures. My own big epiphany in 2011 or so was, “I am most likely wrong about many things”. And two convictions that followed were these:
- Self-correction is the rightful duty of all humans. And,
- I do not have a moral right to hold to a wrong opinion.
In time, all this would change my view of my own Bible study world from one of over-confidence to one in which my views became more provisional—where I became less apt to consider a matter closed, and instead, remained open long-term to new information and to better reasoning about the evidence. In other words, it shifted from “Here’s what I think” to “Here’s what I think at this point.” It also shifted somewhat from being one who, to use current vernacular, “identified” as one with some certain conviction on some matter, to one who was willing to decouple from the vanity of obsessing over my own “identity”, and who invested more on understanding the identity of God and Jesus and on mining the depths of scripture in search of a true understanding of what was said, done, taught, and believed in those ancient times. And while I’m still frustrated with what all I don’t know about the Bible, I’ve certainly seen some progress in these latter years that exceeds the progress I made before.
Really, it’s about learning to quit listening to ourselves long enough so as to be able to listen to someone else—in this case, God and Jesus and the apostles and prophets. And if we’re going to do that, we’re going to have to learn—to really learn—how the Bible told the story. If we were to sit down to write out the Bible story in our own words, we would not do it as they did, for we are a different sort of people, with different conventions in how to communicate such things. And we, stubborn as we are, have a very hard time letting their writings be what they are. We can barely manage not to interpret them the way we habitually interpret things, yet that’s exactly what we must learn to do all the time.
If God were to sit us down for a few weeks and explain the Bible to us from his point of view, I’m pretty sure we would be quickly overwhelmed with the number of our own interpretive errors that would become obvious in such sessions—and probably before we got to the end of Genesis 1! Indeed, we might not even make it through the first three verses before we had to stop and ask God, “Would you please repeat that?”
We live in a hearsay culture—a meme culture—where we pass around trite understandings and platitudes far more often than we look deeply into matters for ourselves. But God is the sort to pierce through that, and to bid people to “Give careful thought to your ways” and to “Stop judging by mere appearances and make a right judgment.” And if we were particularly keen about all this, and about our own tendency to be mentally lazy, we might complain back to God, “But what you’re saying requires us to be careful and to think and to stop ourselves from making bad judgments, and to make ourselves judge rightly—and all these things take work—and we don’t like work.” And he might say in reply, “Uh-huh.”
He has given most of us the standard human brain, and it’s capable of this sort of reflective work. It’s capable of decoupling and of problem solving, and of imagining the possibilities, and so forth. And we might just choose to turn the focus of our minds back on the one who created our species, and apply ourselves to understanding him—not as an expression of our own personality and identity, but for the value of understanding him.
