Jamie sits down with Dr Rhyne Putman (associate professor of theology and culture here at NOBTS and Leavell College). They discuss how to navigate disagreements within the church. Dr Putman's new book, When Doctrine Divides the People of God, is available now: https://www.amazon.com/When-Doctrine-Divides-People-God/dp/1433567873/
Jamie Dew: Hey, everybody. It's Jamie Dew from Towel and Basin again. I'm flying solo without my good buddy Joe in this one. But I do have here with me today, Dr. Rhyne Putman, professor of theology here at NOBTS and Leavell College, and does a lot of great work in theological method and systematics and other things. First of all, welcome. Thanks for being here with me.
Rhyne Putman:Thank you for having me.
Jamie: And what else within sort of... I was just mentioning your repertoire of topics that you do, theological methods, systematics. Anything else you'd throw in there that you love to consider?
Rhyne: I am a big fan of Mississippi State athletics, and I will give you all my opinions about SEC football.
Jamie: I meant theology.
Rhyne: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jamie: I meant nerd stuff. Come on man.
Rhyne: Nerd stuff, nerd stuff. Yeah, I'm interested in cultural studies too.
Jamie: Okay.
Rhyne: Closely related to that. Hermeneutics in particular.
Jamie: Okay, cool. Good. Well, sometime today in some of these podcasts I certainly want to get into the hermeneutical issues. Let's start with something, I guess this is related to hermeneutics. So here we sit and you've just finished writing a book and have just completed this on theological disagreement, which is certainly relevant today because we have lots and lots and lots of theological disagreement. We have it broadly in the evangelical world there's theological disagreement. We have it in the Southern Baptist world where we disagree on all sorts of topics theologically.
And I think for some people, I would just say it this way, that that's a little surprising given what we have about the word of God that we have a word that's inspired, we have a word that's inerrant, and for a lot of people, they would think that, "Well, if all that's true, we should just be able to all pick up the Bible, read the Bible together, and we're going to land on the same page thinking the same thing and affirming the same thing." But that's not what happens. Why?
Rhyne: Yeah. That's exactly the topic of the book. I was drawn to this particular topic just sort of watching evangelical theological disagreements explode on the internet. We've always disagreed about things, but now we have a platform where everybody has an opinion.
Jamie: Everybody's got a microphone, yeah.
Rhyne: Everyone has a microphone, everyone has a platform, everyone has an opportunity to air their grievances. Theological Festivus. It's really sort of a scary place going through people's Twitter feeds and Facebook and various blogs and so on and so forth. I was really drawn to this topic. How does the broader non-Christian world see the way we disagree with each other? And of course our culture, we are so dramatically divided politically, culturally on so many different things and we're in the thick of an election year this year and watching political ads and watching the way that people respond to each other, the way that people talk about right or left, red or blue, there's so much hostility. And you would think, hey, we are followers of Jesus. We have the Holy Spirit. We should be different than the culture, but sometimes we're not right.
Jamie: One book, one Lord, that should--
Rhyne: That's right. But obviously that's not always the case. There's probably a concern on the one hand for a kind of ecumenical viewpoint that says that doctrine's insignificant or unimportant, that we're just going to do away with our differences, that we're not going to be focused in on the truth. That has been the downfall of a lot of ecumenical movements over the 20th century if you look at some of the significant ones that just ignored theological differences or minimized the importance of truth in theological discussions.
But on the flip side, there's a kind of tendency towards theological maximalism that says that every single doctrine is a hill on which to die.
Jamie: Sure.
Rhyne: A hill on which to die. Every single doctrine is an issue to fight over and you've got your tribe, I've got my tribe, but my tribe has the most significant access to truth, and if you really want to truly be faithful to Jesus, you need to come in and be part of my tribe.
Jamie: Right.
Rhyne: So that was really what drove my interest in this topic. And of course my previous work was in theological and my previous work was in hermeneutics, and I've always been convinced, since I've been studying theological method anyway, that if more people who took such extreme opinions in these debates would read theological method, it would soften the way that they address these things. Because there's this sort of naive mindset in theology among evangelicals that we just read the Bible and doctrine comes out of it. That the Bible just has systematic theological propositions from which we extract, and they forget that it really is an interpretive process, it's a hermeneutical process.
So I wanted to look into ways that theological method and really other disciplines as well would help us make sense of our theological disagreements and what we should do with them.
Jamie: Yeah. I used to always point out to my students and Lord willing I'll get an opportunity to do this again one day when I step back into the classroom, but it seemed like a basic point, but it was always met with a bit of surprise by my students that we have to make the distinction between revelation and doctrine or revelation and theology. And I know you'll sort of split those up as well, but revelation and theology, let's just say that. And I would say, revelation is a God product. God is the one who does that and therefore it does not err. Theology is man's response to that, and therefore it is prone to error. So I would illustrate it lots of different ways.
Take the debate between Calvinists and Arminians and such. One of them is wrong, maybe both of them is wrong, but one of them is wrong if they're saying mutually exclusive things. So we have to remember that theology is different because it's us responding, and as you've said there's an interpreted process. So walk us through that part from that point forward. So I pick up the Bible, I read it, you pick up the Bible and you read it, we land in fundamentally different places in different perspectives. Why? What are the factors that contribute to that?
Rhyne: Again, let me just say plainly, we believe in the inerrancy of scripture, we did not believe in the inerrancy of interpreters. I give five axioms to sort of guide why I think-
Jamie: In the book that just came out.
Rhyne: In the book, why we have theological disagreement. The first being we are imperfect readers of scripture. Number two, that we read the Bible differently. Number three, we reason about the Bible differently or we reason about theology differently. Number four, we have different feelings, we feel differently about scripture. We feel differently about different doctrinal topics. And five, we have different biases that are shaped by our traditions.
Jamie: All right. So to circle back on those and go through them one by one. When you say that we are imperfect readers of scripture, what do you mean by that? Illustrate that.
Rhyne: One of the things that I want to unpack for readers who might not be familiar with some of these concepts is there's a difference between what we call general hermeneutics and special hermeneutics. Typically in evangelical circles when people hear the word hermeneutics, the first thing that pops into their mind is biblical hermeneutics, thinking about the way you read through different genres of scripture.
Jamie: Sure.
Rhyne: But general hermeneutics when you go into a university setting is really talking about the nature of interpretation. So it's more like philosophy of interpretation.
Jamie: So general is more hermeneutics per se.
Rhyne: Right, right.
Jamie: Which would be present in science and history.
Rhyne: And literary departments.
Jamie: It would be relationships--
Rhyne: I mean we're always doing interpretations.
Jamie: That's right.
Rhyne: In any place where there's human communication, there's the attempt to communicate, there's always someone who is expressing meaning and someone who's trying to decode and interpret meaning and make sense of it and so on and so forth.
So general hermeneutics is about that. Now again as I mentioned earlier, there's two sort of ways that people go to extremes in hermeneutics. One of them is that sort of naive approach that what I read is the meaning of a text. It's simple, there's no real interpretive process, there's no way to make an error.
Jamie: People just assume that what I see is what is.
Rhyne: Yeah. It's sort of a fallacy of appearances. Whatever you see is the truth. And then on the flip side, you've got this sort of postmodern trajectory that kind of goes through literary departments and now science departments as well throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century that says that there is no real objective meaning in a text, there is no real objective truth, that we are sort of playing an endless game of deconstruction and various forms of reader response. Authors don't have meanings, readers have meanings. So we come to the text and every time we read a text, whether it's a religious text like scripture or whether it's a nonfiction book or work of fiction, we're always reading meaning back into the text. Neither one of these are helpful extremes.
What I want to do is make a case that the text can convey the meaning that an author has or the purpose that an author has, what we would call hermeneutical realism, that the text really does have a meaning, but one that can be also misinterpreted as well. So we want to say on the one hand texts have meaning, authors have meaning, but on the other hand we want to say that interpreters are fallible and they're fallible for a number of different reasons.
I mean, number one, the way God made us, we're not God, we don't have godlike minds. We have teeny tiny little human brains, our rational processes are limited, but also we're shaped by our time and place and culture. We're products of a particular place in time in history. I think those are things that we have to be aware of, especially when we're reading the Bible, that we're not trying to force 21st century Western ideas back onto the text, we're not really trying to see things through their own eyes or through their own lens in their original setting. But then I think there's just this other reality that we're sinners, and as sinners we have selfish, sinful inclinations that I think can distort our reading of text, and particularly biblical texts because we don't want the Bible to contradict some of our pet sins. We don't want the Bible to challenge us, to force us to do something different, to be holy. So when I say we're imperfect readers of scripture, I'm simply just trying to describe our hermeneutical situation.
Jamie: Yeah. So you're basically then avoiding the naivety of saying, "I just read it. It's straightforward. I automatically see it perfectly." That's one bad extreme. On the other hand, the postmodern extreme of saying there is no meaning in the text or anything else. It's only what I convey into the text. So in short then what you're saying is there is meaning in the text, but we can goof it up via reading in anachronistically 21st century back or our sin causing us to cloud the meaning of the text.
Rhyne: Right.
Jamie: Okay.
Rhyne: Now some people will raise the question at that point, in what sense then is scripture clear? The reformation, the perspicuity of scripture was a key doctrine, a key issue that Martin Luther advocated for, that others like he advocated for, but understand that the clarity of scripture doesn't mean that scripture is easy to understand. I think there's some misconceptions about what the doctrine of scriptural clarity really means, the perspicuity really means. It's not a statement that scripture is always easy to understand. It's a statement that scripture is intelligible. If you look at like the Westminster Confession, the statement made is that not all things alike are plain in scripture. There are some things that are very clear, like the Gospel, that are clear to understand at a basic level, even if there are layers or nuances that are more difficult or challenging.
And I think what you'll find across the board is that where we have disputed doctrines are where we have more difficult texts and what we find in common is what we find in clear texts that are clear to understand. Along the same lines, simply having the Holy Spirit's work in our life does not guarantee that we're going to have the same understanding, because I don't think that that's what the Holy Spirit's role in illuminating the scripture is. The Holy Spirit doesn't have a shortcut for doing the work of hermeneutics, for doing the work of interpretation. The Holy Spirit enables us to believe and to understand the biblical text.
I frequently tell people on this campus, we've had skeptical scholars for different debates and that sort of thing that we've had on campus over the years, and sitting down and talking to these men and these women, very, very intelligent people, probably people that know the Greek and the Hebrew better than I ever will in certain cases of biblical text, they can understand the propositions of the biblical texts, but they don't see the biblical text is true nor do they see themselves in the biblical text, what the biblical text says about them, about their need for the Gospel. And I think that's really what the illumination of the Holy Spirit does. The illumination of the Holy Spirit does not override the fact that we're imperfect interpreters of scripture.
Jamie: The second thing you said was that we read it differently. We read the scriptures differently. Illustrate what you mean by that.
Rhyne: So in this case, we're talking about what we call special hermeneutics or biblical hermeneutics. We put a great deal of emphasis in a seminary setting on proper exegesis of scripture, exegesis of scripture being reading from the text as opposed to a word that we kind of made up, isogesis, which is reading back into the text. So exegesis plays out in various ways. We can see that every level of the exegetical process can contribute to theological disagreement in some form or fashion. Like textual criticism, which is the process of weighing the different copies of biblical text and trying to assess what's the best reading of a biblical text. Those typically can make some small contributions to theological disagreement, but not all that significant, maybe like the ending to Mark 16 about whether or not we can drink poison and live, that sort of thing. I mean personally I'm not testing that one out myself.
Jamie: Me either, me either.
Rhyne: I mean, I think there's room for theological disagreement.
Jamie: I'll stick with coffee.
Rhyne: I'll just hang by the side. But the more serious things are like when we get into like how words are used in the text, one of the big debated points in evangelicalism is the role of women in the church. A lot of that hangs on how we interpret a word. That's part of it. In 1 Timothy 2:12 which is what we would call an example of hapax legomena, it's a word that only appears once in the New Testament. On both sides of that theological debate, there's a lot of attention given to that word and what that word means.
Then some of our debates are grammatical, meaning like we will debate on grammatical constructions. One of the big debates over the last couple of years was over the phrase pistis Christou, whether or not it's talking about faith in Christ or the faith that Christ had. That of course plays a significant role in how we understand some of the other debates related to Jesus, to justification, new perspective on Paul. So a lot of that hangs on grammatical phrasing.
Beyond the exegetical level, the bigger level where most of our disagreement happens is what I would call the hermeneutical level. And the hermeneutical level is things like historical context. How do we understand the historical context of a book? How do we understand the historical context of, for instance, Judaism? Because how we understand Judaism in the first century will have a huge impact on how we understand Paul's response to Judaism in books like Galatians or books like Romans. So historical background in how we sort of reconfigure the past, and that itself is an interpretive act. We are trying to piece together history from what's left behind that will play a significant role in how we understand Paul's theological framework and what he's saying in those respective books.
And then literary context. How do you understand genre? The go-to example of that in the New Testament is apocalyptic literature. I mean, how do we understand the book of Revelation in large part hinges on how we make sense of that genre. If we disagree at the exegetical level, if we disagree at the hermeneutical level, if we disagree in the background of the book, or if we disagree on how a particular genre of text functions, then we're going to yield different theological conclusions.
Jamie: So then what about reasoning differently? That was your third thing that you said, we reason differently about the scriptures as well, or from the scriptures. What do you mean by that?
Rhyne: Well, I mean basically there's three different types of logic or reasoning that people use. I'm relying pretty heavily on Charles Sanders Peirce, who helps us think through this. Of course, deductive reasoning, which we all know is sort of the way that we do view the arguments based on validity, whether or not an argument can be proven in a valid argument.
Jamie: And there's not a lot of that in scripture.
Rhyne: No. There's not. There's maybe a few instances of syllogisms, like I think in 1 Corinthians 15, but most of the time we don't move from the Bible to doctrine using those sorts of syllogisms. Now, what I will say is we can use syllogisms to prove a doctrine. I will frequently use a syllogism in class to talk about inerrancy, that God is truthful and trustworthy in everything that He does. God inspired scripture, therefore scripture is trustworthy and true. That's a sort of syllogism. But you don't typically draw that out of the biblical text that way.
Jamie: Right.
Rhyne: Inductive reasoning, at least as the way Peirce defines it, is basically the way by which we try to move from specific to general conclusions, but doing so in such a way where we demonstrate the probability of a hypothesis.
Jamie: Right. If I may, maybe you have a different example in mind, but in John's gospel for example, he starts off in the first 18 verses, "Here is Christ the God man, basically. The word, God, who becomes flesh." I mean that's really sort of what he's saying. And now everything else is marshaling the evidence to support those conclusions.
Rhyne: Yeah.
Jamie: So that's a good example of an inductive argument.
Rhyne: We do some of that theologically as well. Again, we start with the hypothesis. We start with an assumption and we use biblical texts, basically proof texts. That's an inductive sort of theological process for supporting a biblical claim. But where I think my contribution here is unique is I'm talking about the way that we use creative reasoning to come to hypotheses.
Jamie: Okay.
Rhyne: Peirce uses this category that he calls abduction.
Jamie: Which is not kidnapping.
Rhyne: Not to be confused with kidnapping. It goes by a few different names. In fact, contemporary philosophers call it inference to the best explanation. But basically what it's saying is that we have a creative process by which we form hypotheses. What I'm saying in biblical interpretation is because the Bible isn't a systematic theology textbook, we have to go to a biblical text and we have to sort of invent a hypothesis so to speak in our doctrine. This is what Paul's saying about justification by faith. This is what Paul's saying about election. This is what Paul's saying about ecclesiology. Paul's the easy one to go to because of his didactic letters.
But there's a sort of creative process that our mind uses to draw these conclusions. Again, it's an imperfect process because, for instance, when you deal with things like the church or ecclesiology, the Bible doesn't lay out, in anywhere it doesn't lay out here's a set of instructions for how you should organize the church government. When you read 1 Timothy 3, you're not getting instructions about this is how you should model church government, you're getting descriptions about the character of the offices. So what we're trying to do, basically reading other people's mail, is try to figure out how they did church government and how we can reconstruct that. It's sort of like trying to put the puzzle together without the picture on top of the box and knowing that we might be missing some of the pieces. So the creative process of abduction is guessing how all the pieces fit together.
Jamie: Yeah, so basically then interpretation moving from the simple facts that we've got, which are in many cases incomplete because we see... To your point, we have descriptions about these offices, but we don't have a manual for church politics.
Rhyne: Church planning, yeah.
Jamie: Yeah. So then to get to that manual, we have to step in and interpretively-
Rhyne: Be creative, and where we're creative there's differences.
Jamie: Yeah. These last two real quickly that we feel differently. We have different biases. Unpack those just for a minute or so.
Rhyne: Basically what I'm doing when I say we feel differently is I'm saying that more often than we realize our feelings or our intuitions drive our theological positions. We see this in political positions, we see this in a number of different other areas. Though we want to say, "Hey, I'm not bringing my feelings to the biblical text."
Jamie: Right. We all want to say that.
Rhyne: We do.
Jamie: We absolutely do.
Rhyne: We sometimes have an either really positive response to a theological position or a really negative response based to a theological position, and what we try to do is we try to justify our position by how we feel. People do this in politics. I think we do it in interpretation of scripture as well. So I try to, number one, acknowledge this reality, but also push people to say, "Hey, our emotions should be under the Lordship of Jesus." The lordship of Jesus is expressed in the biblical text. So if there's something that I feel in the Bible is difficult or it's unsettling to me, I want to ultimately conform my feelings. I want to conform my doctrine to what the text says.
And in terms of biases, the biases we have, we come from traditions. We all do theology inside from within a tradition. Sometimes what happens in interpretation is we tend to stick with the first compelling case that we hear. You might have heard a doctrine preached a certain way growing up and never really paid any attention to it, but in college you hear something, a pastor at a conference or you hear a theologian, you read a theological book and you're like, "Oh, that sounds compelling," so we tend to gravitate towards that and stick to it. The problem with that is when we come to the biblical text, we're doing everything that we can to justify the position we already have.
Jamie: Right.
Rhyne: Confirmation bias leads to a lot of problems in science, it leads to a lot of problems in courtrooms, in different real world applications.
Jamie: Relationships.
Rhyne: Relationships, everything. So what I try to do in this chapter is I try to talk about ways that, say, legal scholars say we should alleviate confirmation bias, we should hear different arguments, different positions, the best arguments, the best positions from other sides of a dispute and I say those things are relevant to good interpretation in theology as well. I mean, I would encourage my students to read different positions, the best versions or the best representations of different positions, and to make judgments for themselves.
Then one of the other things I really challenge readers to do is if you have a position that you disagree with, why don't you try to make a compelling case for it? Then I would also say, try to write a really good case against your own position. Those sort of things help alleviate our biases.
Jamie: Yeah. In the classroom, I've always when taking up almost any particular issue, I've tried, the older I've gotten especially, tried to make it the case that I'll state the positions of what they are and then I will probably offer a lot of the arguments against my own position from that point forward, simply as a way of trying to encourage folks to do the same for their own. At the end of the day, I hope that we're much more interested in getting it right than we are in just simply trying to defend our own views.
Rhyne: Right.
Jamie: This is super helpful against those folks or against the perspectives that theology is easy. And that it's, man, just read the text and it becomes clear. There is a bit of naivety in that, and I think that this is super helpful to help folks see the complication and the difficulty of doing theology. We are finite creatures trying to wrap our heads around an infinite being and that's tough business.
Rhyne: Sure.
Jamie: Appreciate your work. Title of the book that was just released?
Rhyne: The title of the book is When Doctrine Divides the People of God, An Evangelical Approach to Theological Diversity.
Jamie: Very good. Thanks for taking the time to talk about it.
Rhyne: My pleasure.
Jamie: Hey everybody. This is Jamie and Joe again.
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