I hope to make this a long series on at least a dozen examples of the hermeneutical brilliance of this book by Randolph Richards and Brandon O’Brian. “Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes” is essentially a book that wishes to correct a major error in modern evangelical hermeneutics. That being, Christians today believe that the Bible was written to us and that we should read it as if it was written in 21st century American society. In reality the culture the Bible was written in had a completely different perspective than we do today, and when we read scripture, we must do so while keeping this perspective in mind. We do the same with language, we don’t read a verse in isolation, nor do we pretend the Bible was written in english. It is actually a really curious thing why so many scholars and theologians put such a heavy emphasis on linguistic analysis of the text today, I may even write a book on it one day.
That aside, I would like to give an example from the book that demonstrates how important an in depth study of ancient cultures is to reading the Bible.
“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm — neither hot nor cold — I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” (Rev. 3:15-16)
This was spoken by Christ to the church at Laodicea and those who are even somewhat familiar with the Bible will know how it has been interpreted. In our western eyes we see this “either/or” statement as a dichotomy between hot, or positive, and cold, or negative. Thus to be hot is to be “on fire” for Christ and to be cold is to clearly reject Christ. Lukewarm, on the other hand, is sitting on the fence. Its interesting to note also how our society seems to condemn indecision as well. This, however, is significantly different from how Laodiceans would have interpreted this passage.
As Dr. Richards points out, two cities near Laodicea, Hierapolis and Colossae were famous for there fresh water springs. Hierapolis had astonishing geological formations produced by hot water springs. Such springs, have formed white calcium deposits which appear to flow down the mountains on which the springs reside. You can see pictures of these springs here; http://www.marmaris.org/things-to-do/pamukkale/. Colossae, by contrast, had cold water springs, which were equally remarkable. Laodicea, however, had no springs, and had to import water from these two cities. But, by the time the water got there, it had lost its remarkable qualities, leaving the citizens of Laodicea with all the lukewarm water they could drink. With this in mind, Christ’s exhortation of the Laodiceans becomes clear. Their discipleship was unremarkable, it was neither hot nor cold, just lukewarm. Thus the lessons which should be taught about this passage, it seems to me, is that we need to be careful not to just be average run of the mill Christians but outstanding in our discipleship. We should not be teaching that this passage means to tell us that God would rather us reject Him, than be a lukewarm Christian. That’s not what the text is saying.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that the Bible elsewhere doesn’t teach what modern interpreters generally think Revelations 3:15-16 teaches, which leads me to ask the question; do you the reader believe that being an undevoted Christian is worse than not being Christian at all? Why or why not?
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