Hermeneutics of Convenience (50

He answered and said to them, “Why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition?” Matthew 15.3

Scripture and tradition
It is a mistake to think that traditions of interpreting the Bible should not be considered when it comes to how we read and understand the Scriptures. As we have seen, and as Augustine noted, we need the best teachers of the Church from every age to help us in understanding the Word of God.

Every believer will affirm that we need the guard rails of reliable tradition to keep us on the right path of Scripture interpretation. This is why we have creeds and confessions, why we cling to the old hymns and forms of worship, why we venerate certain thinkers and expositors from previous generations, and follow the teaching of reliable contemporary interpreters. We recognize in all these that Magisterium of the Spirit which has preserved sound teaching in every age.

The history of the Christian movement has accumulated a venerable tradition of interpretation that is indispensable to right reading and understanding of Scripture. We reject or ignore that tradition to our peril.

At the same time, we must always be careful that the tradition we embrace does not lead us to interpret the Bible in a manner at odds with the plain teaching of the text. Any tradition of interpretation – or any teacher or expositor or preacher – which leads us to ignore, side-step, or disobey the plain teaching of the Bible is a tradition outside the true understanding of Scripture which the Church has maintained over the centuries. All such interpretations are usually some form of a hermeneutics of convenience, embracing a “new way” of understanding the Bible as the key to interpreting all of Scripture and, as typically happens, of endorsing something someone would like to do or believe for his own advantage.

Devoted to God
The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were masters at this. We might all agree that it’s a good idea to devote things to God. Everything that we have comes from the Lord, and therefore it makes sense that everything we have should be devoted to Him. We should devote ourselves daily to the Lord in every aspect of our lives (Rom. 12.1, 2).

As a general principle, that’s true enough. But when you take that general principle, then abstract it as the key to understanding the Bible, and you set your interpretive saw to cut Scripture along those lines, Scripture-twisting is not far away.

The religious leaders of Jesus’ day, as we have seen, were the keepers of a body of spiritual regulations designed to order Jewish religious practice and to keep the people from wandering toward the religious practices of paganism. As part of this system, they had determined that it was a good thing to encourage special offerings to God – “things devoted,” as the Law of God describes them – as a kind of sacrificial, extra gift for the temple and its services. Since the temple was always in some stage of construction or repair, and services there were constant, the need for such extra offerings might have been apparent. All the religious leaders had to do was dress their demands up in the garb of noble spiritual tradition, and it would be easy enough to entrap a trusting populace.

It was convenient that all such special offerings, such “acts of devotion” to God, also redounded to the advantage of the religious leaders in two ways. First, they made the leaders and their role in the community more central and significant, if only because now more authority and revenue were flowing their way; and, second, the practice of encouraging special gifts devoted to the Lord’s service provided a source of additional funds from which the leaders could draw for their own purposes. Because these funds were “devoted to the Lord,” all some priest had to do was come up with something in his own interests under that rubric, and his project would be funded from the Corban of the people (Matt. 15.5).

Meanwhile, funds that might have been available to help take care of one’s elderly parents were being siphoned off as Corban, things devoted to God. God is clear that people should care for their parents as for all those in their household. Paul regarded this as so important that, to ignore it, he insisted, would make one worse than unbeliever (1 Tim. 5.8). This regulation concerning things devoted to God created for the religious leaders of Jesus’ day a way of appearing to be very spiritual within the community of faith; but it weakened an important bond of love between parents and their children and introduced a further measure of corruption and injustice into Judean society.

The religious leaders had, for their own convenience and the as a way of controlling the resources of the believing community, established a tradition which sounded like it had a noble purpose, but distorted a Biblical idea and, in the process, introduced unnecessary tensions and want in the households of Judea. Doubtless trumpeting “service to God and His temple” as the motive for such a scheme, they established a tradition which trapped people in disobedience to God by encouraging them to neglect certain requirements of the fifth commandment.

The sacrifice of love
As with every practice of Scripture-twisting, something done in the name of love – in this case, love for God’s temple – actually ends up compromising and corrupting love as God defines it. People may have considered that their special gifts of devotion, entrusted to the religious leaders, were a kind of “sacrifice of love.” But what they were actually doing was sacrificing love as God defines and intends it on an altar of mere self-love, thus weakening both the authority of Scripture and the bonds of love within families and the community as a whole.

Is it any wonder that this community, following those leaders, would act out of mere self-love and self-interest in failing to recognize Jesus, and in condemning the Messiah of God when He came among them, pointing to the Scriptures to validate His message and His claims?

For reflection
1.  Why is tradition absolutely essential for sound Biblical interpretation?

2.  How can we know when tradition is beginning to usurp the authority of the Bible in the way we interpret Scripture?

3.  What are some ways believers can become “trapped in tradition” in our day?

Next steps – Conversation: How can we tell when self-love is dominating the way we read Scripture? How can we check this tendency before it robs us of the ability to love God and our neighbors as we should? Talk with some Christian friends about these questions.

T. M. Moore

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Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.