The Muffin Method of Hermeneutics: Loving God and Liking Him, Too
I was raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools from 3rd
through 6th grade. Although committed to my faith, I had a tendency
even before college to shake my fist at heaven and demand, “Why?” Why do women
have to wear hats, veils, and scarves to church? Why can’t we go past the altar
rail? How can you judge people when you are so distant? I just wasn’t impressed
with the 200-year-old appearances of the Virgin Mary on a foreign hillside to
shepherd children. People need God here and now.
In High School, three of us gals would sit at lunch and discuss religion. One was a Unitarian, one a Mormon, and I was still a devout Catholic. We were all committed to the belief system in which we were raised, and we were all aware of that bias. When I had a question I couldn’t answer, I went to the priest, fetching that wisdom back to our philosophical coterie.
College is usually where it all falls apart, and that happened to me. It dawned on me that all I knew about God was what I learned in school and from this priest or that. Again, I shook the fist toward heaven and declared, “Everyone is looking for you, and no one knows how to find you. If you want me, you find me. Come out from behind that pink cloud. You need to be down here helping this messy world.”
One day in my dorm room, I cried out to St. Augustine, whose own experience I had read about in High School. After lying down on my bunk and falling asleep, I awoke with what I believe was a compelling but incomprehensible prophetic dream. St. Augustine was in it and invited me to get a top-tier education. This was deep in my agnostic era before I knew anything about the Bible. I absolutely had no academic ambitions at the time.
God answered my challenge by sending me a crazy Pentecostal woman who had prophetic gifts and an evangelistic heart. At work one day, she gave me a copy of David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade. He was an Assembly of God pastor who ministered comfortably in a rural mountain church in Pennsylvania. One day, the Holy Spirit gave him a new challenge. Instead of judging the evil deeds of a New York gang, which he read about in Life Magazine, he was to go to New York and witness to them. The result of his obedience to this very uncomfortable call was an organization called Teen Challenge. It not only converted entire New York gangs to Christ, it contributed to the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s.
I cried my way through the book. When I was done, I told the Lord, “If this book is real, and you can prove that these kinds of things can happen to me, you got me.”
Years of Evangelical church attendance followed, but questions kept coming. “Why did you make women be second-class citizens? Why do you call women to teach, write, go to the mission field, and be leaders when you said all those things about women and their required submission to men? Why did Jesus rebuke his disciples for being so spiritually dull in thinking that food can defile a person when Yahweh yells about it in Leviticus and threatens death if priests eat certain things? Why are there two different versions of how David met Saul? Etc.
All my training for decades demanded a belief that the Word is Holy, Unchanging, Inerrant, God-breathed―all of it, every idea, with no contradictions, no cultural screens. If you wanted to teach in an Evangelical Bible College or get a book published by a Christian publishing house, you had to dismiss all the science about the progression of the human genome from Australopithecus to Homo habilis to Homo sapiens. All the geologists who spend their careers studying the age of the Earth are wrong. The Bible says so.
So the questions kept rolling in like the eternal tides, and answers came, but they were difficult to grapple with. I had to admit the really crucial, uncomfortable gut-wrenching possibility that Paul and Moses could have expressed something that didn’t come straight from God. Something from their culture. Something from the peer pressure Paul was receiving from other church leaders who were being hounded by Roman rulers and Jewish persecutors.
Peace has come to me in resolving these biblical conundrums. The answers gelled throughout eighteen years of biblical education, ending in a Ph.D., allowing me to set aside my angst about the inerrant Bible. Here are some of the conclusions I came to believe:
The Law of Moses was based on former Mesopotamian law codes written by pagan kings to keep order among their own walled cities and communities. The laws made perfect sense in the second century BCE. There is a reason that Jesus sometimes quoted Moses with the introduction, “It is written,” and sometimes quoted him, saying, “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago…but I say unto you…”
The Bible doesn’t have to be inerrant to be genuinely inspired. There are contradictions in both testaments. Get over it.
Biblical authors did not float around in a constant bubble of revelation. I don’t dismiss the visions, dreams, divine revelations, miracles, spiritual gifts, and authority from heaven that they genuinely had, but they were men and women living on this side of the veil and subject to pressures and biases that we all succumb to. We don’t have to pretzel-stress the Scriptures to make them fit our expectations of perfection.
Deconstructors like to claim that Jesus didn’t come to establish a church but rather a body of believers. Nonsense! A body of believers needs a vehicle for worship, sacraments, giving, good works, guidance by trained leaders, etc., the same way a soul needs a body to function here on Earth. The institution of the church is the container. The Body of Christ within is what Jesus founded. One is the side dish. The other is the entrée. Both are important.
God never intended to micromanage the process of church government. He doesn’t care who owns the building, how many deacons or deaconesses, elders, presbyters, pastors, prophets, apostles the church allows. He doesn’t care if in baptism one is dunked or poured upon. These things are what Lutherans call adiaphora, practices that are neither commanded nor forbidden. From its very institution in the first century, the church has changed in doctrine and practice. What God really cares about is a change of heart.
Common sense! It’s the sweetener that makes Christianity appealing and productive throughout all the ages and in every culture. In my Lutheran church, I taught my students the Muffin Method of Hermeneutics. Would you rather have a plate with discreet piles of salt, baking powder, flour, and egg, a metaphor for cherry-picking which scriptural hill we’re willing to die on, or would you prefer to eat the blended product, properly processed in an oven? Or would a frozen dinner be your cup of tea?
We’re afraid of common sense because it’s the slippery slope, the sure path to losing our faith. In fact, a dollop of common sense has boosted my faith from shaking my fist at a confusing God to liking him as well as loving him.
We’re better witnesses for the goodness of God if we shake loose the bonds of inerrancy. It doesn’t have to be a slippery slope. How can we know what to dismiss when God’s shouts are so intimidating? Easy. We go to the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord’s Prayer, and to Matthew 25. Jesus revealed that the Father seeks those who will worship him in Spirit and in Truth. That means the right attitude is far more important than our material customs. He pointed out the most important command of all, which is in both testaments: to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. He gave us the golden rule: to treat others the way we would want to be treated. He would approve of the general morality of the Ten Commandments. All these passages are the Spirit of the Law.
Check out my website, www.janetksmithpersonal.com where you can read for free The Legacy: A Memoir of Personal Guidance and Korean War Sabotage.
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