Read Right (No ‘Rithmetic)

I recently won a much-coveted an earnestly-desired copy of the 3rd edition of How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart (thanks, Rob Bradshaw—your website rocks!). It’s a basic hermeneutics primer and I’d read good things about it since I first heard of it. So far, it has lived up to its promise.
I, like Professor Fee, grew up in a Pentecostal denomination. I’m still in a Pentecostal church; this one is in a fellowship rather than a denomination. The difference is that fellowships are affiliations; the local churches are entirely self-governing. There’s no hierarchy or governing authority over the local body. This has both advantages and disadvantages; but I digress. The main thing is that, being part of the Pentecostal flock all my life, I’ve heard downright strange stuff. Most of it hasn’t come from pastors but rather from independent teachers. . . or, really, from folks who’ve read something from some of those independent teachers.
I don’t intend to get into names here; there are plenty of websites where you can research the subject. But I have found that folks in the pews typically don’t read their Bibles the way Stuart and Fee say we should. In dealing with Old Testament narrative, for instance, Stuart (the OT scholar of the duo) points out that narratives have three levels. The top level is “metanarrative. . . the whole universal plan of God worked out through his creation.” The middle level is “the story of God’s redeeming a people for his name.” And the bottom level is “all the hundreds of individual narratives that make up the other two levels” (see Chapter 5 if you have the book).

But OT narratives are not, Stuart goes on to say, “allegories or stories filled with hidden meanings.” Nor are they “intended to teach moral lessons.” Yet they often “illustrate what is taught explicitly . . . elsewhere.” This isn’t quite the same as teaching a lesson or giving “the moral of the story.” A life is more than a moral lesson.
I’ve heard a lot of teaching that makes the Old Testament narrative into allegory. Maybe that’s just the Pentecostal way—looking for the hidden “deeper truth” while missing the plain hard-hitting “surface” truth. It’s refreshing to read this quote:  “You will get into all sorts of trouble if you try to find meanings in the text that you think God has ‘hidden’ in the narrative” (p. 102, paperback ed.). That alone is worth the price of the book.