Correctly Handling the Word of Truth: An interview with Craig S. Keener

An interview with Craig S. Keener by John P. Lathrop.

I noticed that of the eleven books that you have had published that you have written three about the Holy Spirit. Is the Holy Spirit a subject of particular interest to you?

Craig Keener: When I was a 15-year-old atheist, I argued with those who first brought me the gospel—then walked home so convicted by the Holy Spirit that I fell to my knees and surrendered to Christ. Two days later, I walked into a Pentecostal church and was so overwhelmed by God’s Spirit that when I began to pray it came out in tongues, though I’d never heard of that experience before. Two years later, at 17, I began to learn God’s voice in prayer and His deep love and yearning for us. Yes, the Holy Spirit is indeed a subject of great interest to me—and not only academically.

One of your more well-known books is the IVP Bible Background Commentary-New Testament. In this volume you give historical background information on the text of the New Testament. How crucial is historical background to understanding the Bible?

Craig Keener: The most important tool for Bible study, next to the Spirit’s guidance, is context—something we have available in the Bible itself. But after that comes background. There are some things that the biblical writers could assume that their first readers understood, which they didn’t need to explain to them. These include the Greek or Hebrew language in which they were writing; we have translations to help us with that barrier.

But what about cultural issues writers could simply assume, which are foreign to us? For example, we might be able to apply Paul’s passages on head coverings better if we recognized that those coverings were a sign of sexual modesty in his culture, and failing to wear them signified an attempt at seduction. Christians might not cover their heads in all cultures today, but we should avoid dressing or acting seductively. Sometimes missing the background can make a life-and-death difference. Nineteenth-century slaveholders abused Paul’s exhortations to slaves because they took verses out of context but also because they wrongly assumed that the kind of urban household servanthood he addressed was the same thing as the kind of systematic race slavery they advocated.

Because background is the least accessible tool for Bible study, I have focused much of my research over the years in making this available to the church. The Background Commentary, which provides background on almost every passage in the New Testament, has sold over 200,000 copies since it came out (over 30,000 of them in Korean, with other translations now becoming available).

Being a professor of New Testament you obviously are concerned with Biblical literacy. Do you find that most Christians are biblically literate?

Craig Keener: Lack of biblical literacy is my greatest concern. Background study will be of little value to Christians who rarely even read the Bible. Many Christians think they are biblically literate because they are familiar with many Bible verses; but the Bible does not consist of 100 Bible verses with a great deal of blank space in between. God gave us the Bible not a verse here and a verse there, but book by book, and we need to read each book in its context. I really got hold of that as a young Christian, reading 40 chapters of the Bible a day. I am not suggesting that everybody needs to read 40 chapters a day, and I don’t do that nowadays myself; but it helped me to catch the contours of Scripture, the flow of thought through each book of the Bible. Whether we read one chapter or forty, we need to think of each verse in the context of its surrounding paragraphs, and those paragraphs as part of the particular book of the Bible in which they occur.

What are some of the reasons for this?

Craig Keener: A major reason is that in our fast-paced culture we have gotten used to having everything instant—instant mashed potatoes, instant microwave cooking, and the like. That’s not how God wants us to approach the Bible; Proverbs insists that we be diligent in seeking wisdom and knowledge. Instead of studying Scripture carefully, following themes through a book of the Bible, we settle for proof-texts, so we can prove what we already knew anyway. But you never learn anything new in the Bible by just making it teach what you already know. You never get convicted by the Holy Spirit if you just find what you expect to find there.

Most of us know the story of Jim Bakker and the PTL Club. In his book, I Was Wrong, he offers a heartbroken confession of where he went wrong in Bible study. He was so busy in ministry, that he had little time to do his own study of the Bible, so he believed what his friends were teaching, assuming that they had invested the time to study what they were teaching. Once in prison, he read the Gospels carefully and realized to his horror that he had been teaching the exact opposite of what Jesus taught. If we are settling for recycling the way we’ve heard Bible verses used, instead of immersing ourselves in Scripture, we run the same risk.

Can you give a couple of specific examples of common errors that Christians make in Biblical interpretation?

Craig Keener: Wherever I teach in the world, and whether at a Sunday School or seminary level, I start my Bible interpretation classes by listing some verses that we regularly quote today, for example, “The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy” (John 10:10). Most students have heard (and some have preached) that the thief in the passage is the devil. Then I give them a few minutes to read the context, and ask them again who the thief is. Amazed, they virtually unanimously announce that the passage is referring to false teachers who come to lead us away from Jesus (in the particular setting in John 9—10, the Pharisees). Of course, it is true that the devil comes to lead us away from Jesus and that the principle may apply to him. But by focusing only on how we’ve always heard the verse quoted, instead of reading the passage carefully, we miss all the other “thieves” that we need to be watching out for. We do this with a rather large percentage of our Bible memory verses. Sometimes well-meaning Bible teachers can do this with word-studies, too—which in the worst cases come down to preaching from a dictionary or taking not just a verse but a word out of context. That’s just as bad when you do it from a Greek dictionary as when you do it from an English one. We dare not miss the forest—the big picture of the message—for the trees (compare e.g., Matthew 23:23).

As a charismatic are there particular concerns that you have about the Charismatic/Pentecostal church in this respect?

Craig Keener: I mentioned above that Bible readers today often take shortcuts by not paying attention to context. Charismatics are not the only Christians to take Scripture out of context, but when we do so we are unfortunately the ones most prone to blame it on the Holy Spirit. Please understand that I fully embrace the gift of prophecy and the importance of hearing God’s voice in prayer. I even accept that God can speak to us personally through a verse out of context—as He can speak to us through a poem or a song. But that personal message is not God’s canonical word for His church for all time. His purpose in giving us the Bible is to ground us in the message that apostles and prophets heard through the centuries, a message tested through its fulfillment through time.

One time I was praying hard about figuring out the meaning of the tabernacle in Exodus. What I felt was the Spirit’s direction where to go find the information that would help me understand it. I went and did research on ancient temples until I could see clearly how the tabernacle differed from these other temples, and the lessons that taught me about God’s ways. God’s Spirit can lead us to do research just as He can speak to us directly about some things.

Not all biblical scholarship today is God-honoring—some scholars do not even have the basic wisdom that starts with the fear of the Lord. But God does raise up teachers and scholars, and we should not be afraid of finding out the best tools available to help us understand the Greek, Hebrew, and background when we need them. Many evangelical groups tend to be ahead of Pentecostals and charismatics in this regard, but many Pentecostals and charismatics today are learning from their evangelical siblings where to locate the best in biblical research tools.

Do you find that there are certain blind spots that Western Christians have when they read the Bible?

Craig Keener: I could have spent the entire interview on this one question. After the industrial revolution western society became distant from many cultural assumptions shared by most cultures in history, including in biblical times. My experiences in Africa have taught me things about how babies are born, goats are herded, soil is ploughed with old-fashioned hoes, and so forth, that brought me closer to the world of the Bible.

But being in other cultures also brings us face to face with the limited ways we understand the Bible. Too often we just assume that a text cannot mean something because “nobody we know” (i.e., in our culture) takes it that way. In different parts of the world, the church has different blind spots, and we need each other’s eyes to see them. When Jesus told His disciples to forsake everything and care for the poor (Luke 12:33; 14:33), I suspect that He meant something more radical than just giving ten percent to the church on Sunday and thinking our job is done. Really hearing Scripture means being willing to press beyond our comfort zones; to genuinely pursue wisdom, we have to genuinely fear God enough to go where He leads us.

I lived and taught for four months in an area of northern Nigeria where Islamic jihadists targeted and slaughtered pastors, and as many people died over the course of that year as in our Twin Towers on Sept. 11, though Western media apart from Christianity Today mostly ignored it. When Christians there read passages about dying for Christ, they have to take them seriously and count the cost of being Jesus’ disciples. “Taking up the cross” to follow Jesus is no longer just putting up with ingrown toenails.

My wife spent 18 months as a war refugee in a forest in Central Africa a few years ago. After the Rwandan genocide of 1994 the entire region was destabilized, though media in the United States largely ignored it until recently. It’s estimated that 3.5 million people have died; millions of born-again, Spirit-filled Christians there are suffering because of war and everything that comes with it (like famine, cholera, and malaria). We have much we could learn from our brothers and sisters who have suffered deeply, and there are many ways we could serve them. Suffering churches resemble the churches of Smyrna and Philadelphia in the Book of Revelation, whereas churches more tempted with compromise with the world’s values resemble more closely Sardis and Laodicea. Each church had different tests, but all were called to overcome. My prayer is that we and our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world will listen to and learn from each other as one body of Christ. We each have blind spots, which is why we all need one another’s eyes. Then, together, we can approach Scripture with fresh eyes and ears and “hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”

PR