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Yes, I have often thought, at least post faith crisis, that the message is probably more important than the means. I think the message is love one another. I’m not at all consistent with scripture reading and I don’t believe there is any power in the reading itself, so it’s hard to be motivated to reread something I have already read 8-15 times. I don’t get much out of it when I read out of habit. I tend to zone out and scan the page while my mind wanders. I’ve tried a lot of different approaches and none of them lead to interesting insights on a consistent basis. The novelty is long gone.
Beefster wrote:
I’m not at all consistent with scripture reading and I don’t believe there is any power in the reading itself, so it’s hard to be motivated to reread something I have already read 8-15 times. I don’t get much out of it when I read out of habit. I tend to zone out and scan the page while my mind wanders.I’ve tried a lot of different approaches and none of them lead to interesting insights on a consistent basis. The novelty is long gone.
Yep.
SamBee wrote:
Not a shock at all.
It was a shock to me because I was expecting something a long the lines of “here is how this passage is interpreted by Jews, and here is how it is also interpreted by Christians” etc. The gist of it was “these passages are interpreted as describing Jesus Christ by Christians”, but have no bearing based on the translations of the Jewish writing available.”
SamBee wrote:
Firstly, a lot of the influence upon the study of Isaiah these days is Jewish, and so is totally hostile to such a concept as Jews are inured to the idea of Jesus as Messiah before they can even walk. It’s very tough for Jews to become Christians and it is even seen as an act of betrayal in some quarters of Jewry. There are some Jews who appreciate Jesus’ teachings, but many of them reject them partly on the basis of persecution by Christians.Secondly, academia rejects prophecy and supernatural matters completely. It is guaranteed that you will NEVER EVER find an academic suggesting that the future is accurately predicted in any scripture. If it does seem accurate, they’ll say it must be because it was written after the events or is an interpolation. They will never accept a lucky strike.
So on two major scores there is a bias against any such interpretation in academia.
Your 2 main points I will happily consider – thank you!
I can also see how it shouldn’t necessarily have been a shock, but it was for me.
DarkJedi wrote:
AmyJ wrote:
One of the biggest shocks I got from the OT Yale lectures was that some of the Isaiah passages prophesying Jesus Christ weren’t about Jesus Christ originally – but were about Isaiah’s unborn son or someone else entirely. Still processing that one….
This is exactly the kind of stuff I was talking about. As far as I can tell from my own study, which includes using other resources, Isaiah was indeed not talking about the Messiah at all. That’s actually pretty clear reading the whole thing in context. The questions in my mind are:
1) Was Isaiah purposely talking about a future son as symbolic of the Messiah, essentially giving the scripture multiple meanings?
2) Was Isaiah only talking about his son but God wanted the multiple interpretations? That is, Isaiah was talking about his son and God was talking about his own son through Isaiah?
3) Are modern humans (Christians mostly) completely wrong about any of it being about the Messiah? IOW, was what Isaiah was writing about just that and nothing more?
4) Did Isaiah believe he was prophesying about anything more than just a few years in the future? Was he doing so and didn’t know he was doing so? Or was it just what it looks like and he was only prophesying a few years into the future?
And it’s not just the Messiah stuff that has a different Christian interpretation. All the war stuff in the beginning seems to have been about an upcoming invasion everyone knew was going to happen and Isaiah was blaming the Israelites for unrighteousness (“calling them to repentance”).
In the church, and I think other churches do it as well, we only tend to look at the parts of Isaiah that fit the narrative and can be made some sense of from out of an Isaiah-loving point of view. In SS school we skip most of it, and some other interesting parts of the OT that don’t fit the narrative. And we seem to love taking small passages out of context and never address what they are actually about or any other possible points of view (again that’s not just us).
This
Much food for thought…
Somewhere between Critical historical and Average Orthodox, leaning to critical.
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