by Zack Hunt
But I didn’t do it alone. I had two guides in my quest to become undragoned—two saints of the church who helped me recover the Bible from dispensationalism and the weaponization of Scripture I thought was the way of the righteous. These guides helped me better understand the Bible and, more specifically, Revelation and the end times, and to see them in a whole new light. Their names were Origen and Augustine, and they died long before Jack Van Impe arrived on the scene.
Help from a heretic
Origen was one of the earliest and most influential of the church fathers and mothers. The reason you may not be familiar with him is the sad fact that in the year 553 CE, long after his death in 253 CE, his teachings—or to be more precise, teachings espoused much later by a group who self-connected to Origen—were declared heretical. But before Origen was unjustly condemned as a heretic, he wrote one of the most important works in the history of the church: De Principiis, or On First Principles. It was a passage in that book that, along with the work of Origen’s theological heir Saint Augustine, forever changed how I read and understand the Bible, especially a mysterious book like Revelation.
Origen believed there are two senses in Scripture: the literal and the spiritual. The literal is, as it sounds, the words that are literally written on the page. This is how dispensationalists approach the book of Revelation. They read it as a literal rather than metaphorical or symbolic account of the future. This is why the Left Behind series found such a welcome embrace: it fleshes out a literal reading of Revelation in a way that readers said makes the Bible come alive.2
Unfortunately, a literal reading of the Bible is also what allows fundamentalism to turn the Bible into a weapon. A so-called plain reading of the Bible is used to transform countless context-free verses into weapons against any number of “sinners.” It can sound convincing on the surface, this idea that the righteous warrior isn’t being judgmental or cruel, they’re simply quoting what the Bible clearly says. But “a plain reading of the Bible” is anything but. The only thing plain about it is the literal way in which it reads every weaponized verse without any attempt to understand the context, both immediately within a particular chapter or book and in the wider context of the gospel. Even in a plain reading, interpretation is still going on. In using a verse out of context and saying “This is what is meant,” we are interpreting that verse’s meaning. Which is why a plain reading of the Bible is anything but plain.
While there are certainly moments in the Bible when the literal words on the page are what God wants us to hear, pretending as if every sentence in the Bible should be read without context and then followed literally has led to all sorts of atrocities committed in the name of God. From the Crusades and slavery to Jim Crow and the treatment of the LGBT community, proof-texting the Bible under the auspices of a plain or literal reading too often leads us to proclaiming the very opposite of good news.
We forget that the Bible didn’t drop from heaven. Inspired by God, the words of the Bible were written by human beings, human beings whose own biases, prejudices, cultural context, and historical ignorance sometimes got in the way of the good news. It’s something Paul himself acknowledged in his second letter to Timothy when he writes, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16 NIV). It’s a powerful passage confirming the authority of Scripture. But what exactly does “God-breathed” mean? A linguistic analysis of the original Greek isn’t a ton of help here; God-breathed is simply the English translation of the Greek work theópneustos. But as it always does, context can give us a clue about what it means for something to be God-breathed. To find that contextual clue, we have to zoom out from the immediate verse, out from Paul’s letter, and out from the New Testament entirely. There is only one other passage in the entire Bible in which something is described as being God-breathed.
It’s found in the very beginning of a book that would have been foundational to Paul’s theology: the book of Genesis. In the story of creation, it’s on the sixth day that God takes the dust of the earth and breathes into it the breath of life. In other words, humanity is God-breathed. And yet . . . we’re not perfect. If we were, we would simply be God or, at the very least, a bunch of little gods. But we’re not perfect; we’re God-breathed, not God-incarnated. God-breathed doesn’t mean perfection, because God doesn’t take over our lives and control us like puppets. God gives us free will so that we can have a real relationship with God; that free will means we can and do choose to do imperfect things.
Scripture is God-breathed, writes Paul. As part of the relationship God has invited us to participate in, we help in the work of reconciling all of creation back to its Creator. The Bible is part of that work. The Bible functions both as a guide toward reconciliation and as a testimony to how that work has already begun. That work of participating in reconciliation doesn’t require perfection on our part. It simply requires a willingness to try. It’s God’s perfecting grace that brings to completion the reconciliation of creation to its Creator. We’ll stumble and fall and get some things wrong along the way, but as long as we keep pointing people in the right direction by loving one another as God first loved us, the Holy Spirit will take care of the rest. That’s why it doesn’t matter if there are contradictions in Scripture. They don’t affect our ability to tell the core truths about God. They’re simply the natural result of the Bible being written by imperfect people.
Origen embraced the flaws of the biblical writers because in them, he saw God using human imperfection to draw us closer to God by challenging us to think harder about what it truly means to follow God. Origen had a name for such imperfections; he called them “stumbling blocks.” He said the Holy Spirit allowed them to be in Scripture not to mislead or trick us but to force us to wrestle with what is being said, much like the writers of Scripture themselves must have wrestled with how best to communicate the message God had placed on their hearts. In confronting the “stumbling blocks” of Scripture in this way, Origen argued, we are drawn deeper into the text—past the literal words on the page and toward what he called the “spiritual sense” of Scripture. This is where God wants us to be; this is where the truth of Scripture lies.
As Origen explains, this spiritual sense is
kept hidden and covered in the narratives of holy Scripture, because “the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hid in a field; which when a man findeth, he hideth it, and for joy thereof goeth away and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.” By which similitude, consider whether it be not pointed out that the very soil and surface, so to speak, of Scripture—that is, the literal meaning—is the field, filled with plants and flowers of all kinds; while that deeper and profounder “spiritual” meaning are the very hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge which the Holy Spirit by Isaiah calls the dark and invisible and hidden treasures, for the finding out of which the divine help is required.3
In other words, Origen would say it is impossible to simply open up our Bibles, turn to a random page, and perfectly understand the message God is trying to communicate to us. The mysteries of the faith can’t be unraveled on a whim, nor can the complexities of life be uncomplicated with a proof text. Reading and interpreting not only takes hard work; it also requires the work of the Holy Spirit, which is often more mundane than it is mystical.
One of the great gifts of the Holy Spirit is wisdom and understanding. But too often we smugly dismiss the work of biblical scholars as nothing more than esoteric ranting of cynics in the ivory tower who want to tear apart our faith. Too rarely do we stop to consider that perhaps biblical scholars are doing the work of the Spirit, that their wisdom and understanding of the Bible comes from the Holy Spirit who is working through them to help us better understand Scripture. Too often we miss the movement and inspiration of the Holy Spirit because we relegate the Spirit to the supernatural and don’t allow for God to work in the mundane. We want God to speak to us through a burning bush, when more of
ten than not God is revealing the truth of Scripture to us through a biblical commentary. If the Bible is full of hidden treasure, we need people proficient in biblical mining to help us know where and how to dig down deep to find those scriptural treasures. We need them to help us know when we’ve actually stumbled upon treasure and when we’ve just found fool’s gold.
There are few greater examples than the book of Revelation of Scripture that needs deep digging to find the hidden truth. It’s a book cloaked in the mystery of apocalyptic language and set in a time far removed from our own. As we’ve seen, to read that language literally not only misses the deeper spiritual truth that is being conveyed; it creates a whole host of earthly problems as well. A literal reading of Revelation allows Palestinians to be oppressed, violence to be condoned, and morality to be suspended in the pursuit of fulfilling what dispensationalism claims is the literal meaning of John’s apocalypse. Dispensationalism claims to have deciphered the deeper spiritual meaning of Scripture, but more often than not, it uses the literal words on the page to sanctify ways of being in the world that go against the name and character of Christ.
But this phenomenon is far more widespread than Revelation. The underlying problem with a dispensationalist approach to Scripture is the same as any approach that uses biblical proof texts to justify unloving things in the name of God. When taken literally and out of context, Scripture meant to liberate and redeem can instead be used to afflict, marginalize, and oppress our enemies. We desperately need a better way to read the Bible in general and Revelation in particular, especially now that a literal reading has become a driving force in the political life of the church.
So how do we do that? How do we know when to dig deeper into Scripture? How do we know when to search beyond the literal meaning to find the spiritual truth God wants us to hear? And when we search, how do we know what we should be looking for and what reading of the text is inspired by God? To begin to answer those questions, we need to turn to another church father, Saint Augustine.
Augustine and the greatest commandment
Born in the middle of the fourth century in what is now the African nation of Algeria to a pagan father and a Christian mother, Saint Augustine of Hippo has had more influence on Western theology than any other church father. He was a prolific writer and staunch defender of Christian orthodoxy, penning such influential works as Confessions, City of God, and On the Trinity.
Augustine wrote another text that sounds almost as if he had just finished reading Origen when he wrote it. In The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine—writing fifteen hundred years before Darwin’s theory of evolution lit the fires of modern Christian fundamentalism—argued that anyone who interprets the opening chapters of Genesis literally is foolish.4 God’s truth, he said, is to be found in the spiritual meaning of Genesis. But we’ll come back to that a bit later. It’s Augustine’s treatise On Christian Doctrine with which we will presently concern ourselves. It is in this work that Augustine also builds on the work of Origen, his predecessor, and attempts to offer interpretive tools for discerning between the literal and spiritual senses of Scripture.
The key for Augustine lies not in a new interpretive theory but in an old one—one that, even by his day, was already starting to become ancient: the greatest commandment. In Matthew 22—notably just before the so-called Little Apocalypse in which Jesus lays out what judgment day will be like—Jesus has a run-in with his old pals, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They were up to their old tricks again, trying to expose Jesus as the heretic they thought him to be. The Sadducees tried their hand first, attempting to trip Jesus up with a question about who would be married to whom if, according to the law of Moses, a man died, his brother married the widow, and they all went to heaven. When that didn’t work, the Pharisees stepped up to the plate to have a crack at embarrassing Jesus. Instead of trying to trip up Jesus on his interpretation of just one law, they threw the book at him, so to speak, by trying to prove that he didn’t understand or perhaps even care about the law of Moses.
One of them, an expert in the law of Moses, asked Jesus, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” (Matthew 22:36). What we see here, in this short question, is an often-overlooked miracle. Calling Jesus “teacher” was likely not a sign of respect, since the Pharisee was there to expose him as a fraud. Rather than admiration, the legal expert’s words dripped with sarcasm. That Jesus—God incarnate, who could call down lightning bolts on command—didn’t pay him any mind is nothing short of a miracle. What Jesus did say was this: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets’” (Matthew 22:37-40).
If you are familiar with this passage, you’ve probably always focused on the call to love God and neighbor. That’s not a bad thing. It’s definitely the point Jesus is making and wants us to catch. But we would be remiss if we skipped over that last part—about how all the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. For the people of God in Jesus’ day, the Law and the Prophets were their Scripture, and the very foundation of their faith. So Jesus is saying that if you want to understand what God is trying to teach you through Scripture, that understanding must be grounded in and guided by love for God and neighbor. In other words, the greatest commandment isn’t just a call to be nice to people. It’s a guiding principle for reading and interpreting the Bible. And that’s exactly the point Augustine makes in On Christian Doctrine when he writes,
Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought. If, on the other hand, a man draws a meaning from them that may be used for the building up of love, even though he does not happen upon the precise meaning which the author whom he reads intended to express in that place, his error is not pernicious, and he is wholly clear from the charge of deception.5
Augustine is essentially saying that no matter how simple, straightforward, unadulterated, “plain,” or rock-solid we think our biblical interpretation is, and no matter how great and meticulous our exegesis might be, if our conclusion doesn’t lead us to love God and neighbor as ourselves, then we’re wrong. Perhaps more to the point: if we’re using the Bible to cause harm to others, we’re wrong. Period.
If all Scripture hangs on the greatest commandment, then loving God and loving others should be the standard by which we judge our biblical interpretation. Some may dismiss this as a warm, fuzzy, and relativistic approach to interpreting Scripture. But that perspective would miss the radical implication of Augustine’s claim. If Augustine is right, this way of reading Scripture would mean a seismic calamity for much of American Christianity, which is so often driven and defined by condemning others in the name of God. If Augustine is right, then many, if not all, of those “biblical values” we cling to aren’t biblical values at all. They’re our values, cultural and personal values we’ve simply sanctified with Bible verses. Worse, those so-called biblical values are not just misinterpretations of Scripture; they’re blasphemy, because they portray the God of love as a God of hate and oppression.
Our proof-texted biblical values don’t leave us morally neutral, the way incorrectly conjugating a Greek verb might do. Those so-called biblical values lead us to do the opposite of what Jesus himself said must be the driving force and guide for our faith, the hook on which everything—everything—we believe must be hung. If there are things we believe that don’t fit on that hook—that don’t lead us to love God and neighbor—then no matter how biblical we think they are, our understanding of the biblical passages we are citing is simply wrong.
Period.
A hermeneutic of love
When we combine Origen’s and Augustine’s rules for interpre
ting Scripture, we find an approach to reading the Bible that liberates us from the shackles of literalist fundamentalism and its offspring, dispensationalism, while restoring the intellectual integrity lost from proof-texting. Most importantly, their interpretive approach to the Bible refocuses our engagement with Scripture on the way of Christ. In doing so, the guiding principles of Augustine and Origen enable us to approach the Bible not as a weapon with which to beat our opponents over the head but as a guide for loving God, neighbor, and enemy alike. It’s a hermeneutic of love.
This hermeneutic, or rule for reading and interpreting Scripture, is summed up well in something else Origen said—a simple but beautiful statement that captures how and why the greatest commandment should drive us beyond the literal words on the page and down deeper to the spiritual truth of Scripture. Origen wrote that we should try to discover “a meaning worthy of God in those Scriptures which we believe to be inspired by [God].”6 It’s such a simple statement on its face, but given how Scripture is often approached today, it’s a fairly radical claim when you give it some thought. Today, the Bible is chopped up into chapters and verses, which then get used to prove our theological agendas and as ammunition to take down our opponents. We may claim that we are “simply” repeating what the Bible says, but that’s never true. What we are really doing is discovering in the Scriptures a meaning worthy of supporting our theological preconceptions.
To be sure, Origen came to Scripture with his own preconceived ideas and biases, just like anybody else. That’s unavoidable. But Origen had something a lot of us today are missing: self-awareness. He didn’t try to pretend he was an unbiased messenger for God by simply quoting the Bible without interpretation. Instead, because he recognized that his own biases and preconceived ideas would play a role in his interpretation of the Bible, he sought to combat them by pursuing an interpretation of Scripture that was worthy of his Lord. Since Jesus is God’s full revelation, interpreting the Bible to find “a meaning worthy of God” means finding a meaning worthy of everything Jesus taught, preached, and stood for. Finding such a meaning in Scripture will drive us to love God with all our hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves, just as Jesus commanded us to do.
