Hurricanes and the Goodness of God

For my American readers, this hurricane season will be one that many people remember for decades after the unprecedented flooding that Hurricane Harvey brought to the Houston area. Hopefully, it will also be remembered how people came together to help each other in the midst of a tense period in our national mood, when scenes of cooperation, relief, and unselfish neighbor-love are like balm to a frenzied social soul.

Now with Irma shredding through Caribbean islands and barreling down on Florida, we seem poised to be dealt another heavy blow from weather conditions not under our control. Only time will tell the scale of the damage there. Almost certainly there will be many billions of dollars of damage, countless lives disrupted, and a few ended. For Christians, not only in America but in all the world, we do believe there is One who has power over the weather, a God without whose permission nothing can occur, blessings or tragedies alike. So why does He allow these things to occur?

No Humansplaining

It is always ill-advised and futile to attempt to give narrowly specific reasons that large-scale natural disasters occur. Was Houston being judged for its sins like many claimed or implied New Orleans was in Katrina? Were the 16,000+ killed in the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami disaster more sinful than the rest of Japan or the rest of East Asia? Were the people whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices or who were crushed by a falling tower in Siloam more guilty than the rest of Jerusalem? (Luke 13:1-5, Hint: Jesus says "No!")

In the whatever'th-wave of the feminist movement we're in now, "man-splaining" is criticized as men offering unnecessary or patronizing explanations to which they expect women to listen respectfully. Or something like that. These things tend to be flexibly defined by those who wish to claim victim status, whether they have a legitimate cause for complaint or not. (They might as well lock up all the INTPs now, we love to explain things to anyone willing to listen to that much excited detail.)

But there is another kind of mansplaining, or humansplaining, which I would love to see end, and that is when people with positions of spiritual authority start trying to explain things they don't understand because they feel people expect them to have an explanation. Like the occasional situation in Chinese culture where courtesy demands a response to tourist inquiries of how to get to a place even if the local being asked has no idea, it's not so much about knowing, as feeling that you are in a position where giving an answer is expected and so you come up with a good-sounding one.

As a missionary with a seminary degree, I am sometimes put in this position. While I am not a very worthy example, at least I do try to always say when I don't know something off the top of my head but will go research it and have a better answer later, or else that the Bible doesn't actually give us an answer, so I neither have one nor should you trust anyone who says they do. It may be less satisfying than a pithy response you can copy and paste onto a picture and pass around social media, but I don't dare put words in the Bible's mouth. (If you feel I have done so with this post, feel free to let me know)

When a pastor or prominent Christian or anyone else stands up and says that a disaster happened for positive or negative reasons--as judgment for sin, or to bring everyone together--they are choosing from various possibilities, hopefully biblical-based ones, but they have no possible way of knowing the real reason or combinations. We are not privy to an explanation from God, and be very cautious about anyone claiming that they are.

But if we can't known the specific reason, then on a more basic level, why would a good God allow disasters like Katrina, like the Tohoku Quake, like the flooding in Houston, like the crises which you didn't even know were claiming lives every day in less-reported areas of the world, to happen? And can we answer that question without "humansplaining" or adding purely speculative ideas to scripture?
I think we can, and this is my attempt to do so.

A hurricane season that will be long remembered...

Why God Lets Hurricanes Strike Major Cities

I. Because when ocean water reaches a certain temperature, and seasonal wind patterns...

We know this reason, or at least learned it in high school or saw it on the weather channel at some point. This is what people call the scientific reason, and what atheists tiresomely pretend makes God unnecessary until you bring up that this is not the Why at all, but the How. Personally I find it fascinating, how the unbelievable amount of energy representing in a raging hurricane is all the result of a positive feedback loop that can emerge from the tranquil, sun-warmed ocean when conditions are right. But that's wandering from the thrust of our topic.

As I have blogged previously, the ancient Greeks spent some time thinking about why things happen, and came up with the brilliant idea that every event had multiple causes, as seen from different perspectives.

For a simple example, a crystal goblet dropped on a stone floor shatters into scintillating shards. Why? Well, 1) because someone dropped it. But also 2) because it's crystal. If it was rubber or wood, it mostly likely would have survived the fall. Also 3) because the floor is stone. If it had been thick shag carpet, the goblet probably also would have been fine, though my allergies might not. Also 4) because in some humanly incomprehensible way, the shattered goblet fits into the vast and mysterious unfolding of all things, under God's authority and obeying His will. When we ask "why did this happen" we are usually speaking more to the that last category. What was the ultimate purpose?

I am not here suggesting the Greek causal categories are comprehensive or even correct. But their reminder to us that there is not merely one reason for things to occur is important.

So for our damaging hurricane, we could come up with a similar set of explanations. "Why did a massive hurricane strike a populated area with lethal results?":

1) Because of a set of natural phenomenon which to some extent can be traced back in chains of cause and effect to the beginning of the universe. Energy was transferred and the earth went around the sun and the ocean sloshed around for millennia and the hurricane was always going to happen at that time, unless you want to go really deep into arguments about human free will and chaos theory, and suggest the sinking of some Carthaginian trireme during the Punic Wars was just enough energy disruption to butterfly effect the hurricane into being thousands of years later. Perhaps so, but even that can be described precisely by physics, if we had access to the data.

2) Because people decided to build a city there. Actually there are lots of big coastal cities, and hurricanes have a very wide track. Sooner or later every city near the coast will be hit, it's just a matter of time. If we didn't build any major cities within 50 miles of the coast, hurricanes would rarely ever threaten them seriously.

3) Because people build communities out of materials which can be affected by storms. I live in Taiwan, where cities are dense and built mostly out of concrete and steel. Here in the capital metro area, even supertyphoons are mostly just a day of missed work or school, while eating instant noodles you bought at 7-11 before the storm got too intense to carry an umbrella, and listening to the wind howling past the windows. People who live in the mountains are at greater risk of mudslides and flash flooding, however, because of the nature of their environment. Our choice of living space and way of life does render us more or less vulnerable to nature's occasional fury, and like New Orleans, deciding to live in low-lying coastal areas is simply accepting the risk that sooner or later there will be tragedy.

4) Because God did not prevent it. I say it in this way, because when people ask the question in other way (If God is good, why does He send hurricanes) they are implying that a hurricane wasn't going to happen, and God "incited" it. But it was, as we explained above. Given scientific superpowers, we could trace the unbroken chain of cause and effect and energy transfer and weather patterns all the way back to the Creation event. This is important. God's creation is real. It is broken by sin, but it still functions according to knowable and consistent physical laws. Now the Bible certainly does speak of God causing disasters specifically as punishment for sin, but it also certainly does not say that every natural phenomenon which humans are caught up in and suffer is a punishment from God.

So we live in the kind of world where hurricanes happen, we have built cities in their path, and we haven't built those cities to be hurricane-resistant. Yet knowing all this, God doesn't stop them. Why? This brings us to the second part of what we mean when we ask why a disaster occurred:

II. Because God did not interfere in the Natural Order on this occasion

We spoke of the unbroken chain of cause and effect which proceeds forth from the creation event: God can and does interfere with this when He decides to, but this is a specific and special event, what we call a miracle. Even in the Bible, which being concerned with God's salvation plan for humanity and interactions with us mentions miracles and direct acts of God very frequently, we still read of a natural world that is God's creation and functions more or less as it was designed to, a world where the sun is a light-emitting object that God placed in the high heavens for the benefit of earth (a different kind of geocentrism -- the sun doesn't revolve around us, but it's there for us and not we for it), yet not a world where the sun is a little god in a chariot that rides around the sky every day but might choose not to do so tomorrow, or might be caught by a hungry sky wolf instead. The very existence and persistence of creation is itself a miracle, to be sure, but to speak as though every single thing that happens each moment is an arbitrary supernatural intervention risks ignoring a default reality the Bible itself assumes, the blessing of being able to take reality for granted, a core component of a scriptural worldview that all modern science is based on and to which it testifies.

So science is true and godly in the sense that it measures this physical world God established to function according to the laws of physics, neither arbitrary nor pantheistic. Yet if we believed only in this, we would be deists and not followers of Christ. As Christians we understand additionally that the One who set those parameters is present and active, and can always make the call to intervene directly, and does so both unprompted for His own reasons and in answer to our prayers.

So then under what conditions does God intervene? The Bible gives us some general categories:

1) Salvation history - God's interactions with the Patriarchs, miracles on behalf of Israel, through His prophets, in the person of Jesus Christ, etc. The Bible is mostly about this--God's special interactions with individuals and nations in His eternal plan for our redemption, and what happened in history as a result.

2) Judgment for Sin - Both the Old and New Testaments mention specific occasions not directly related to the progression of salvation history, which show God specifically acting to punish special sin. In the Old Testament we famously have Sodom and Gomorrah, but in the New Testament we also have Herod, receiving the crowds' adulation in a blasphemous way (Knowing who the LORD was, he still welcomed the crowds' praising him as divine) and being struck down for it. This is mentioned almost parenthetically as a direct punishment by God, and not as the Spirit-empowered act of any apostle, like the blindness of Elymas. We can assume if God punished both individuals and cities/nations directly, in both Old and New Testaments, for sins other than causing harm to Israel (as in the case of Egypt), then He may still do so today.

3)  As an Answer to Prayer - Whether it is the healings and exorcisms performed by the disciples, or the miraculous answers to prayer the Church has seen from its inception until today, Christians know that God is sometimes willing to intervene dramatically. Testimonies to medical "mystery" cases where tumors vanish and doctors are confused by inexplicable recoveries are so common (even discounting the made-up, "share this post for a blessing" ones) that if modern scientists were as inquisitive as their forebearers we'd have whole fields of research trying to figure out by what means these things are occurring. (expect some kind of quantum energy/power of positive thinking explanations to crop up eventually as a way to get around a Biblical explanation if they haven't already, East Asia is way ahead of the West on that front)
Another specific example pertinent to our topic today: After a particularly severe typhoon here in Taiwan a few years ago, cleanup had just begun and rescue crews were still trying to get to people trapped in the mountains, when another typhoon headed for the island. Many people prayed earnestly, and the typhoon made an abrupt u-turn and headed straight back into the Pacific Ocean where it dissipated. I've heard similar stories in other places, and can't speak to their veracity, but at least I've witnessed it happen once myself in this case.

All this has prepared us to answer the central question: If a hurricane was going to hit a city through natural processes, yet God could directly intervene if He so desired, why didn't He do so?

Let's check our categories of Divine intervention mentioned above:

1) Is the hurricane part of salvation history? By definition, no.

2) Is the hurricane judgment for sin? Possibly. As I said above, it's foolish for us humans to pronounce this without knowing the mind of God (let alone start listing out which sins we guess God is punishing or why it was these people and not other people), but with Biblical precedent we also can't rule it out. I personally don't like this explanation because a hurricane is not really a "black swan" event; they happen every year, some are always more powerful than others, and it's only a matter of time before a large city is affected.

3) Did people earnestly pray in faith for God to send the hurricane somewhere else but He answered no? That's complicated, isn't it? Who would you pray for the storm to hit instead of you? As a Christian I fully believe that if many churches gathered together and prayed for God to make the storm do a 180 degree turn and head back out into the Atlantic, He could and might do that. I've seen a similar thing happen once, as I noted above. Obviously I have no way of knowing if those prayers occurred, though I think people tend to not pray with that kind of real urgency unless there's a special emergency. Sometimes we blame God for things we never really petitioned Him to change, but both scripture and the church's experience of great acts of God suggest that there is power in many people humbly petitioning God that a single person's earnest request does not have. To investigate how that works would both take a longer blog than this, but it can be said that prayer is never a means to manipulate God; we can never discover a formula by which to get consistent affirmative answers to our various requests, the Bible only touches on the topic of which prayers are pleasing to God, while telling us that there are some requests to which we will get consistent affirmative answers (Like James 1:5). (Note: This isn't a question of sovereignty--if God has ordained a thing, He has ordained the means, for example the prayers of many, by which it shall occur.)

III. Because Suffering and Pain is the Default of our World, not the Exception

Perhaps I was the only person who hadn't figured that out, but growing up this was not clear. Life wasn't perfect, but it was alright, and events like serious sickness or car accidents or job loss or natural disasters were tragic intrusions in how life ought to be. Much of the developed world seeks to make this perspective as much a reality as possible--that through use of resources and wise decision making, the suffering of this life may be minimized for as many people as possible. This is not a biblical perspective, but it's a natural human one, that leads to evils as well as good. (Trying to minimize suffering leads to acts of mercy and the alleviation of need, but also to abortion and euthanasia)
Scripture does not describe the world exactly in this way. Rather, a peaceful life free from tragic incidents or societal chaos is a blessing from God, a manifestation of Shalom, something to be sought after not because it is "normal" but because it's what people want and how the world was initially supposed to be. We are all longing after Eden, but sin has turned our quest for it into the welfare state, or even communist regimes.

When man fell, he dragged creation down with him. we have no idea if the world had hurricanes before the fall; although people do like to take one verse and run with it, on this question at least there is biblical evidence to suggest that before Noah's flood the climate didn't allow for that kind of thing. By the time of Noah's flood, not only had the fall taken place, but mankind was so wicked that God initiated a pan-disaster that dwarfs the most furious hurricane the world has ever known. To run the risk of the "humansplaining" I mentioned above, my understanding ("I, not the Lord") is that hurricanes and many other potentially lethal weather events began in the post-flood world as an inevitable result of changed climatic factors. (There is also some biblical evidence to suggest "climate change" in terms not of global warming, which an increasingly small number of people cling to in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, but of the increasing instability of the climate is also an inevitable result of the fall, and will only get worse until the end.)

I have mentioned in a previous blog how, just as you cannot get the tin out of a bronze-alloy sword without destroying it, our post-fall world is alloyed with sin. God will remove it one day, but in doing so "the heavens will perish with fire" and the "earth shall melt like wax." He delays so that more will know Him, more will fill His tables at the feast and enter His dwellings, before the end comes and the door is closed.

Hurricanes are an inevitable phenomenon in our sin-alloyed world. God does not, except in special cases, intervene to prevent the natural consequences of sin. That is the reality of the messed-up world we inhabit. Yet through common grace, by wisdom and understanding the nature of creation (effective city planning and disaster preparation, science that understands the weather and also stronger building materials, etc), we are free to develop ways to mitigate the destructive power of natural phenomenon, and indeed we have done so to a large degree.

So pray for recovery in Houston, pray for mercy in Florida and the Caribbean, and indeed for western wildfires, violence in Syria and Yemen and Nigeria and Sudan and American inner cities and elsewhere, tensions on the Korean peninsula, and a whole host of situations. But if you are simply praying that God will make all the bad things and the hurting stop, that prayer may arise out of the heart's distress, but it does not correspond to biblical reality. The consequences of human sin will wreak havoc as they do, until the final judgment.

Then, what should we do?

God has entrusted the task of letting the world hear the gospel to us. While movements of the Spirit are bringing millions to His kingdom, they are doing so alongside and through the faithful service of brothers and sisters around the world. We are His witnesses, and that is our constant and joyful responsibility whether or not we see God specifically intervening to do miracles on His own. "He's not a tame lion," but we are no longer languishing in the endless winter of frozen Narnia--Christmas has come, and Aslan has died, defeated death, and opened the way.

Now should we sit and question God for letting nature take its course, a course we chose ourselves in Eden by deciding we had better options than trusting obedience? Not as believers. We are on this earth to proclaim Christ to a world that desperately needs hope beyond this world. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. When confronted with disaster, we have two necessary options:

1. Pray, but don't do it alone. God does listen to our requests made in faith. If He chooses to let nature take its course, that is not being mean or unjust, that is in fact exactly justice. He may rather choose to show special mercy in a specific situation, even in a miraculous way, but my experience at least is that He rarely does so when we are casual about asking. And I don't mean prayer memes on FB, but roomfuls of people on their knees.

2. Go. Help. If you are burdened by a disaster, demanding the government or somebody do something on your behalf earns you zero points. (maybe even negative points, by encouraging a culture of shifting Christian responsibility up the secular ladder) Also you can earnestly request, but are unable to demand God do anything. But you are quite capable of being the body of Christ and bringing love and joy to a broken world. If people need help, you go help them.

And some people already are, as we watched in Houston. But what if, like Paul and his race, the Church was excited and even competitive about this? What if the government complained that so many Christians were already responding that they couldn't get state and federal aid in there? (I'm not talking about interfering with professionals doing their jobs, I'm saying a) that's an excuse when there's so much that can be done, and b) Christians can get access to that training too, yeah?) What if we decided no one would outdo us in showing charitable love and being first on the scene to bring mercy and relief in times of disaster and hurting?

I guess, in that situation, the Church might even look like salt and light to a hungry and darkened world. Pray for Florida, pray for Houston, pray for God's mercy on those involved in these and other disasters nationally and globally. Then recognize that God might be prompting you to be one of those expressions of His mercy that you were praying for, and go help someone.

Eisegesis - Bad for Science, Wrong for Scripture

A concise definition

 

1. We Assume, Rightly and Wrongly

Every human enterprise involves working from already-held assumptions and making judgment calls.

Something as simple as acknowledging that 1 + 1 = 2 is a correct equivalence requires one to have confidence in one's ability to understand what + and = mean, to be sufficiently convinced that there's no way one can reinterpret the statement to mean something else, etc.

For example: If I wrote instead that 一 + 一 = 八, you might be "pretty sure" it's the same statement, but if I asked whether you'd bet $1000 dollars on it, you'd probably not be willing to (you'd be smart not to, as 一 is indeed 1 but 八 is not 2, it's 8).

And if I wrote 一加一是二, unless you are familiar with Chinese, you might be willing to guess what it means, but not venture anything more than a guess. (Turns out it's the same statement, one plus one is two)

So even basic things we take for granted involve making judgement calls. We make decisions based on how much we assume we know, and if it's something we feel familiar with, we might not even realize we're doing it.

But sometimes our assumptions are wrong, especially when moving into territory that seems familiar, but isn't. There are cultures where a nod means no. There are cultures where laughter means someone is uneasy or embarrassed (sometimes true in Taiwan). Sometimes in different contexts, what looks familiar has an unfamiliar meaning, and assuming we know it, we misinterpret it.

In history, many wars were fought that could probably have been prevented if the leaders involved knew (or cared) that the other party was not so much hostile toward them specifically as working from different assumptions and wanting different things. I'm reading Diplomacy by Kissinger right now (a New Year's present to myself), and it's interesting to see how many times the Axis and Allied powers saw negotiations fail not necessarily because they didn't want a settlement (Hitler only did early on, to stall while he prepared for war, but Stalin pushed for advantageous ones with both Hitler and the Allies), but because they wrongfully assumed the other party was thinking in ways opposed but equivalent to them. Stalin couldn't figure out why America put so much importance on autonomy for Eastern European states because he assumed, like himself, that the US was thinking pragmatically in terms of balance between the great powers' spheres of influence, against which the smaller nations that lay between the Western powers and the Soviet Union were inconsequential except as bargaining chips. On the other hand, the US tried hard to convince Stalin to see the importance of those states' sovereignty and self-determination from an idealistic/moral standpoint, a mindset the man intentionally responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people might have found laughable at best.

So in the end the various parties often gained nothing but false understandings from their negotiations, because their assumptions about how the world worked and what the other side wanted were too different to reconcile. It seems as though they never even recognized this problem or tried to address it.

These days the concept of a "worldview" is fairly well known: the framework of ideas and beliefs through which we view and interpret the world. So the problems experienced by those leaders at the negotiating table we can now recognize as at least partly a clash of conflicting worldviews, and regret that steps were not taken to understand what their allies and opponents were truly seeking from the negotiations. (Though even now, I notice US foreign policy often has a blind spot with regards to non-western worldviews, like in the confusion over the motives of ISIS)

2. Eisegesis: Tinted shades are bad for making color charts

In seminary, a professor explained to us in our introduction to theology class that worldview also plays an important role in how we approach Scripture. We all bring assumptions with us that we sometimes read into the text, thinking that we're getting truth from God's word when we're actually unconsciously or consciously borrowing the authority of scripture to reaffirm existing biases, or imputing very modern ways of thinking to ancient authors who would have viewed the world quite differently.

Even the simple belief that through consistent and careful study we can distill theological truths from investigation of the scriptures is itself a product of our worldview. That is not to say it is a wrong view! It just means that we believe this about scripture because we first believe it about reality in general, then apply that belief to scripture. (I recall that one student could not wrap his mind around that concept. He protested that sufficiently careful study and proper methodology could eliminate our preconceptions and worldview from our study of the scriptures, not realizing that this conviction on his part was coming out of his worldview as well.) So one can't get "outside of" or "beyond" one's worldview, but that's ok, as explained below.

Now what I am saying is not that we cannot hope to find "untainted" truth in scripture, that we comprehensively distort everything we observe, but merely that we all bring our own assumptions to scripture, like anything else, and being aware of that can help us avoid problems of eisegesis. (Eisegesis means reading our own understanding into scripture, the opposite of exegesis which is deriving our own understanding from scripture. The Eisegesis wikipedia article, though poorly written in places, does a fairly good job of explaining the basic idea)

Granted, there is some level of "reading into" the scriptures that we cannot possibly avoid; we have all been born into the 20th/21st centuries, not the 1st century with Paul, let alone the time of the Patriarchs. We will bring our 21st century understandings with us to scripture, even if we've studied some about the cultural backgrounds and contexts of the human authors. But unlike the leaders of the World War 2 powers, we can recognize that our assumptions are there, that our worldviews are vastly different from the authors of scripture, and try let our worldview and ways of thinking be informed and transformed by scriptural truth. Many assumptions are so deep that they're invisible to us and thus we can't set them aside (although I've found living in another culture has helped bring many of mine to light), but guess what- God knows this, and He planned for us to be born now and not thousands of years ago, so it's ok.

Scripture has spoken to ancient Jewish kings, to Oxford dons, and to cannibalistic tribes; the Word of God is living and active, and not confined by your culture. The question is whether you may be confining yourself by not freeing your study of scripture from your limiting cultural assumptions. (Like those people who feel shaken to discover the events of Jesus' life are not all written in chronological order in the gospels, not realizing that thinking a linear time sequence is the most important way to arrange something is definitely a fairly modern and western concept! Even much of the 21st century world does not view time as linear.)

Therefore, since everyone approaches scripture from the place and time in which God has located them, our goal is not to be "contextless," which would be impossible, but to glorify God from the context in which He's placed us and move towards an ever-increasing understanding of the scriptures, and we have the Holy Spirit to help us in this process.

So our worldview is not like colored glasses we can take off; it's like the lenses and rod and cone cells inside our own eyes. Many of our assumptions, however, can be like those glasses, and we can take at least some of them off; to not do so increases the risk of unintentional eisegesis.

Take your eisegesis too far and you'll have Santa slapping you next...

3.1 Secular "Eisegesis" - Ex: Global Warming

With these things in mind, we can see why elevating "science" to a position of infallible authority is not only wrong given the existence of divine revelation, but also misguided even from a secular standpoint, because it implies the impersonal, self-correcting nature of the system can sufficiently overcome the human fallibility and mixed motives of those using it, and that the impartiality of the scientific method means a given conscious human being employing it in a non-theoretical world would also be impartial and not bringing their own assumptions to the process, which is itself really a pretty silly assumption.(Though less so if one believes humans are inherently good or at least neutral. The doctrine of human sin nature deeply affects the Christian worldview on a wide range of topics, often putting us at odds with the secular world where it is considered morally good to maintain a faith in the inherent goodness of humanity)

One can see this with the ever-convoluted issue of Global Warming. Bringing up the topic in the presence of True Believers tends to immediately provoke angry responses of disqualification- "are you a scientist?" (As if all historians and only historians could have valid input regarding Southern culture during the Civil War, regardless of whether their specialty is something like Ancient Egypt and you are actually from an old family in the South) Being "a scientist" does not magically give one qualifications beyond one's specific field of expertise, and not one scientist, or even team of scientists, can study a significant chunk of the global climate metasystem (systems of systems) in all its complexity, let alone the whole thing. One has to focus on or specialize in certain narrow aspects of it.

So when I question Global Warming I'm not suggesting that Climatologist A doesn't know lots of information about how the monsoon cycle over East Asia changed over the past decade, nor that Atmospheric aerosol modeller B is using the wrong equations to calculate the level of carbon dioxide in a certain context. The problem for me is not so much whether a bit of data here or there is accurate, but the vast, vast amounts of it, and that deciding what it's all suggesting involves a lot of judgment calls. Judgment calls that are not made by an impartial system, that is not conscious and so can't evaluate anything, but by actual humans who at best have their own biases and assumptions, and all too often ulterior motives, prioritized career goals, or a belief that any means are justified by their ideological end.

That can lead to a feedback problem. Once a scientist has been convinced that global warming is happening, and that demonstrating this is something like a moral necessity (for the good of mankind and future generations, etc), their research will reflect that belief. Note that in this case I am neither accusing them of illicit motives or of dishonesty. I think many do it because as members of the scientific establishment they have faith in the ability of the system in which they all participate to filter out human error or bias and thus accept "the weight of scientific opinion" as an extension of the rigidity of their own scientific endeavor. Then, feeling it important to do their part to contribute, they can publish their research which demonstrates conclusions which provide more evidence that global warming is occurring, and dismiss findings which demonstrate otherwise as random flukes or data that needs further research to explain why it doesn't fit the global warming model. This is where the eisegesis-like behavior comes in: they are no longer building a theory based on observed data, but analyzing observed data based on a theory they have already accepted as a given. Like eisegetes, they come to the table with assumptions, and it's all too easy for the data to seem to be fitting patterns it's supposed to, even without any fudging or special selecting.

Humorously, "Science defenders" will sometimes respond to this kind of assertion of systematic problems with links to scientific papers (or worse, scientific journalism articles) which argue that this problem does not exist, exactly like Christians who respond to accusations regarding Biblical inerrancy by quoting verses from it regarding its truth. (I certainly believe in Biblical inerrancy too, but responding in that way is like trying to refute the claim that all rulers are the wrong length by measuring one with your own ruler to show they're the same. An argument that assumes the authority/reliability of a source won't work for someone questioning the authority/reliability of that source.)

Note that this is business as usual for scientific research; of course one builds on accepted theories to develop new ones, that is how a field progresses, and one can't constantly question the underlying theory or little progress can be made. We all do the same thing in our daily lives. Unfortunately, that is also the way systematic bias creeps in. Choosing this or that accepted theory to begin a new chain of hypotheses leads to differing "schools of thought" in a particular field, very much like what one sees in theology, and then what should have been settled with rigorous scientific investigation (or rigorous scriptural investigation, respectively) starts becoming a matter of politics, as "schools of thought" gain or lose influence by means we are all more familiar with: depending on the name-recognition of its proponents, who has better PR, etc. Some people get prickly when you point this out, but it's the case in any realm of academia.

3.2 Scriptural Eisegesis - Ex: Prohibition

I have noted above the parallels between the scientific community and the theological community. It's important to recognize that just as the scientific community comprises those who practice science and is distinct from the reliable body of data science has helped gather about our universe, the theological community comprises those who study theology and is distinct from orthodox Christian theology that the careful study of scripture and the teachings of Christ and the apostles and the early Church councils helped assemble. So when I say "theologians do this too," I don't mean that basic doctrine is also suspect, but that at any given time there are droves of theologians saying all kinds of things about the Bible, and just because what they do is called theology we are not obliged to believe it any more than we must believe all the things said by all scientists just because they have that title.

So in that spirit, let's look at how eisegesis can creep into what we believe about scripture and how we can work to avoid it. I don't want to pick on anyone in particular, but I think the concept of alcohol as inherently sinful provides a good example of how this occurs.

Note: I have many brothers and sisters in Christ who choose to abstain from alcohol, and I believe they are right to follow their conscience in this matter and glorify God by doing so, and I do not and would never criticize their decision. In various times and situations I abstain from drinking alcohol as well, and did so for my years at seminary because of a pledge we signed. So I am not suggesting for any believer to drink or not to drink, but to follow their own conscience regarding this matter, as Paul is very clear about. I must take issue, however, with anyone who takes personal convictions and proceeds to preach them as scripture, as sadly often still happens in the US with regards to this particular issue.

For starters, we can easily establish that drunkenness is clearly and repeatedly described as foolish and sinful in Scripture both as an activity and a lifestyle. It follows that those who feel that to avoid drunkenness, or to avoid causing those close to them to stumble, it is better to abstain from alcohol altogether therefore have a scriptural basis for doing so. On the other hand, given the verses which portray drinking alcohol as a neutral (uncondemned) activity, sanction it (Deuteronomy 14, The Wedding in Cana. Amos 9:14), or even recommend it in specific cases (Ecclesiastes 9:7, 1 Timothy 5:23), it seems equally impossible to construct an argument from scripture that the consumption of alcohol is itself a sin.*

Yet in many American churches, this is indeed preached. One argument I have heard regarding Jesus changing water into wine is that the Greek word used for wine is the same as that for grape juice. "So," the argument went, "since we already know alcohol is sinful, we know Jesus must have turned the water into grape juice and not wine; the Lord would never provide an occasion to sin." I can join in with an amen for that last part, as scripture testifies clearly that God never tempts us to sin. But notice that the interpretation of the scriptural passage and even the chosen definition of the Greek word rides on an assumption which is not itself based on scripture- that the consumption of alcohol is sinful.

From where has this assumption come? Personal conviction, family tragedy, inherited from older believers held in respect by the one preaching or teaching... there are many ways people can become convinced that something is right or wrong besides direct attestation of scripture. That in itself is not a problem, of course- smoking is not found in the Bible, but one does not need an "anti-smoking verse" in order to see that it is at best a risky and inadvisable habit, anymore than one needs a "don't play in traffic" verse. The temptation comes when one is so passionate about endorsing or condemning something that one seeks to add the weight of scriptural authority to the endorsement or condemnation, knowing that this might convince those who otherwise wouldn't feel obliged to care or alter their behavior accordingly.

In an earlier post I wrote about folk theology and how it can creep in when we consider the origins of the symbolism surrounding holidays like Christmas. Sometimes similar can happen in a church or even a denomination over time, where something held as a strong conviction can slowly (or quickly, in churches where doctrinal issues are subordinated to popular social ones) assume a place alongside Biblical truth without being subjected to its authority.

Sometimes when this practice or teaching is found to be contrary to scripture, an eisegetical type process can be used to try to justify it, trying to "find" the practice or teaching in scripture to eliminate the perceived conflict. This often leads to "proof-texting," where verses which appear to favor the desired interpretation are selected and gathered out of context to provide the illusion of scriptural justification for the practice.

Now, did you notice anything about the little argument I ended with a * above? My methodology there was dangerously similar to proof-texting! I gathered a list of verses which demonstrate that the assertion that scripture considers drinking alcohol inherently sinful is not true. But what would be a better way? I can say for myself that my position on drinking alcohol for Christians was not determined merely by a list of verses but from finding that, after reading through the whole Bible from beginning to end multiple times, I could not come away believing that scripture taught the inherent sinfulness of alcohol based on anything in scripture itself. Rather, after reading verses about all the vineyards in Israel (and how this seemed to be a good thing) and various references to rejoicing with wine, and all the rest, I concluded the scriptural treatment of alcohol was as an earthly pleasure, and therefore a blessing from God as are all pleasures not misused or idolized, common in Israel, easily abused and thus the subject of many warnings, both abstained from and employed for religious ceremonial purposes (notably abstained from for a Nazirite vow, but used by Christ in establishing the ordinance of communion). I believe the look at specific verses should only come within an understanding of the entire Biblical perspective on an issue. (This is also useful for specific topics the Bible does not mention, like abortion, which makes proof-texting impossible anyway, but to which one can clearly still apply Biblical principles)

Of course that doesn't mean going back to check scripture regarding a practice or teaching is wrong; Paul praises the Bereans for searching the scriptures to confirm what he preached to them. But there is a difference between weighing an interpretation of scripture against the whole of scripture, and trying to find a verse here and a verse there out of context, or push for a creatively acrobatic interpretation of scripture, in order to justify something originally coming from outside scripture.

3.3 Conclusion

It's easy to bring out the charge of eisegesis against people with whom we disagree. For example, in the process of finding that batman picture I came across more than one graphic accusing anyone who said "Yom" in the Genesis account could be more than a 24-hour day as knowingly practicing eisegesis. I'm definitely not going off into arguments about what are and aren't valid interpretations of Genesis here, but remember what I said about the prioritizing of chronological-order, linear time descriptions being a relatively recent Western phenomenon? At very least, those making that accusation should be careful they're not ascribing their own modern, western sensibilities regarding time to ancient authors to whom the idea would sound foreign, which would be unintentional eisegesis on their own part.

It's clear that we should always be careful in our treatment of scripture, spending sufficient time in it ourselves to know it well, and not merely trusting the interpretations we receive from others (especially not developing the habit of mindlessly trusting the interpretations of one or two people), but weighing what we are taught against the whole of scripture as the Bereans did. We must also be careful to avoid injecting (active) or reading (passive) our own ideas into scripture, but seeking to understand what the Spirit is communicating from scripture through each author to us. If our attitude in approaching the Bible is to shape our thinking by God's word, we are already on the right track and will be less likely to unconsciously or consciously seek to confirm our own assumptions and biases that we bring to it.