Toddlers and Elephants

Jolly Friar made a great comment about Fairsized's great post, regarding hermeneutics. This does seem to be one of the central issues in the debate between premillenniaism (especially the Dispensational variety) and the other main views (postmillennialism, amillennialism).

In short, different genres of literature require different reading strategies. If we don't employ reading strategies appropriate to particular genres, then we necessarily flatten those genres out and reduce all of them to the level of our (lack of) literary sophistication. Friar's point is exactly this - that a firmly held belief in the doctrine of sola scriptura includes a conviction that the scriptures are God's Word. If they are God's Word, then they need to be interpreted and understood as God intended when He inspired them. This includes the agency of the human authors who, under divine inspiration, penned the original texts.

The question is not - cannot - be, "What does it mean to me?" Or, "How do the principles of common sense determine the meaning of the text?" Interpretation cannot be primarily reader-centric. It must be governed by authorial intent. What did John intend for his readers to understand? What did God intend? How would those original, 1st Century Jews living in the Roman Empire understand the Apocalypse? Just like we 21st Century, post-Enlightenment, Western Americans understand it?

When you read Moby Dick for the first time, did you think of it as being primarily a great adventure story about a big whale? Maybe so - but if so, you missed much of what Melville intended to communicate to you. Maybe then you became better versed in literary symbolism, and were able to go back and re-read the story with an eye for all of the authorially intended messages below the shallow surface of the story itself.

God's Word is marvelously, beautifully, magnificently deep. Perspicuous, yes, as Dr. MacArthur is keen to remind us of, because he believes that a non-dispensational approach to interpreting books like Revelation and Zechariah are the result of denying the perspecuity of scripture. Not so. Perspecuity does not mean simplicity or shallowness. Look - just because when I look at a page full of Newtonian Physics, and all I see is a "muddle" (that's Dr. MacArthur's word to describe amillennial hermeneutics) of numbers and symbols, it doesn't mean that Newton has muddled the field of mathematics and physics. I mean, really. Someone standing back and saying that most interpreters of prophetic scripture - in the history of the church - including Calvin - until the 1800s - have simply muddled those passages, is a bit like a 5th Grader passing judgment on Einstein because he can't make sense of the whole General Relativity bit. As Leon Morris said of the Gospel of John, God's Word is a pool shallow enough for a toddler to wade in, but deep enough for an elephant to drown in.

Dr. MacArthur himself, in his lecture on the subject of Israel and Sovereign Election, acknowledged at least two distinct genres present in scripture - Historical Narrative and Poetry. His minor point was that we can't read the Historical Narrative passages as if they were Poetry. We can't read Genesis 1-3 in the same way we read the Psalms. His major point was that this is what amillennialism does to the book of Revelation, and to all of the OT promises made to Israel. But, see, he's assuming that those passages belong to the genre of Historical Narrative. Why? Because they're not Poetry? Are those the only two options? Are there no other literary styles employed by the writers of scripture?

The amillennialist says that there are, and that interpreters like Dr. MacArthur have been guilty of reading passages that belong to one genre as if they belonged to another. We all sort of sense that this is a bad idea, don't we? We don't read the newspaper in the same way that we read Chaucer. We don't read a love letter in the same way that we read a history book. Well, maybe some of us do, and that's the reason why so many wives are so frustrated with their husbands. The point is, there are lots of different flavors of literature, and exegesis is as much an art as a science.

One of the other genres employed in God's Word is the Apocalyptic, Prophetic genre. These would be passages like Zechariah's night visions, Daniel's dreams, Joseph's dreams, Ezekiel's magnificently indescribable visions, and major portions of the book of Revelation. Passages where God isn't just speaking to and through a prophet, but showing the prophet something through prophetic, apocalyptic vision. These visions normally carry a symbolic meaning beyond the surfacy appearance of them. They are normally intended to point us far beyond visual appearances - what something or someone looks like - to communicate on a very deep level what something or someone is like. And so, where the Dispensationalist says that scripture should be read according to the "literal wherever possible" hermeneutic, the Amillennialist simply says, "Amen. It's just not possible in apocalyptic passages where the intention of the author is to speak symbolically through visions." In other words, when we come to these portions of scripture, we need to read the author literally - that is, we need to literally understand that the author is writing symbolically.

For example. Revelation chapter 1 records John's vision of the glorified Christ. He has eyes aflame with fire, glowing white hair, legs which gleam like burnished bronze, a sword protruding from his mouth, surrounded by lampstands, etc... Here's what far too many people reduce a vision of such magnitude to:

Maybe it's a nice, artistic rendition and reflects a fair amount of skill and talent on the artist's part. But it falls far short of what God want's us to know about His resurrected, glorified Son through this vision given to John on Patmos. Is our understanding of Him really to be limited to His visible appearance? Are we really to think that He has this sword poking out of His mouth, and that it's swinging around as He turns His head from side to side? Or like Melville's whale and the Pequod's crew, does the vision signify something far more important? Like the glory of His holiness, and His omniscient gaze, and the character and power of His Word (which, Hebrews reminds us, is "Sharper than any double-edged sword.")

Are Zechariah's lampstand and olive trees (Zech. 4) simply that? Literal, physical lampstand and olive trees? If so, then really, so what? So there's a Mennorrah flanked by trees in the Temple. Big deal. But it is a big deal. Such a big deal that the meaning of that vision, as stated by God Himself, is, "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit says the LORD." (v.6) It's what they signify and symbolize that's important - not the things themselves. And that's the nature of Apocalyptic, prophetic literature. It employs imagery that points to something other - something greater - than itself.

Indeed, all of Scripture operates in this way. We must interpret the historicaly-narrative portions as history, as events that actually happened as revealed. But especially in the OT, those events themselves - those people and those things - were all significant of something far greater than themselves. Physical sacrifices that foreshadowed a greater sacrifice. A physical temple that anticiapted a greater reality (Christ's own body, John 2:19-21 - and His Body the Church, Ephesians 2:19-22). A priesthood that was but a glimmer of Christ's. On and on and on, God orchestrates His Word and history itself as a grand, spectacular revelation of His Son and His Kingdom. Not just what they look like. But what they are like in the beauty of holiness.