Aspects of the Authority Crisis

2. Interpretation

There are many valuable things that can be learned from Scripture, but not all of them are things that the Bible is trying to teach.

The first task of the interpreter is . . . the careful, systematic study of Scripture to discover the original intended meaning. It is the attempt to hear the Word as the original recipients were to have heard it, to find out what was the original intent of the words of the Bible.6

It is only the things that Scripture intends to teach that carry the authority of the text.7 For example, it is very possible to learn much about leadership from a study of Nehemiah. In the end. however, there is no indication that the author of Nehemiah was preserving and presenting his material so that readers could be instructed in leadership. That being the case, when leadership is taught from the book and life of Nehemiah, the authority of Scripture is not being tapped.

Leadership is an important quality, and one that is worth learning about, but one may just as well learn about it from the lives of Abraham Lincoln or John Calvin. There is no special merit in learning it from Nehemiah simply because his story is in the Bible while the others are not. What makes the Bible unique are the things that it teaches with the authority of God. In the case of Nehemiah, the teaching of the book would concern such things as God fulfilling His promises of restoring the city of 1erusalem, and His sovereignty in the way His plan was carried out through the yieldedness of Nehemiah.

If a curriculum is using the biblical narratives to achieve its own educational agenda and never getting down to what the Bible is actually teaching in its use of those stories, then it should not claim to be Bible-based, for there would be no authority in what the curriculum was teaching. For instance, if a curriculum's objective is to teach that we are happy to go to church and decides to use the story of Hannah taking Samuel to the temple, what has been achieved? The relationship between the Bible story and the objective is oblique at best, for the experience of Samuel going to the temple in that context has no correlation to the child's experience of going to church. Furthermore, the intent of the narrator of that section of Scripture has nothing whatever to do with teaching about going to church. As a result, the thing that is being taught is not Bible-based for it has no authority behind it. Worse than that, in teaching the lesson this way what has been conveyed to the students about the use of Scripture in their own lives? The model they observe has suggested they may be indiscriminate in their use of the text, twisting Scripture to support something that may be true, but is not taught in that particular passage. This sort of distortion is all too common among adults and curriculum is at least partially to blame, for this is what has been modeled.