"The Heresy of Explanation"

Pastors, preachers and Bible teachers, we need to stop "dumbing down" the biblical texts, because we believe modern audiences are incapable of wrestling with the texts and thus need our "expert explanations." I think such a practice is demeaning to both the biblical texts and to our audiences. When we do this, we are not even feeding our congregations on "milk" (let alone "solid food") but rather we are feeding them pre-digested, pre-packaged bits of our own making. A major part of the mystery, the challenge, and even the power of the biblical texts is found, not in their clarity but in their ambiguity, not in their harmony but in their diversity, not in their unity but in their plurality.

When I was much younger (by about 55 years), I didn't like steak. I wanted hamburger. Why? Because eating steak was too much effort. You had to cut it with a knife and chew it longer and I just wanted to get the meal over quickly and get on with my life of play. So much preaching and teaching today, if it has anything really to do with the biblical texts, is not even hamburger but rather is beef juice or a little beef tablet. People want and need substance. We continue to infantilize the church members (and their guests) by not allowing them to wrestle, struggle and persevere through the challenges of the biblical texts, and thus come to their own place of faith. As Robert Alter says (in the following quote), "...in the most egregious instances this amounts to explaining away the Bible." IMO, we need to pose questions, identify the texts' ambiguities, variations and pluralities, and simply provide some basic tools by which our fellow Christians can, both individually and collectively, wrestle and thus grow.

"The unacknowledged heresy underlying most modern English versions of the Bible is the use of translation as a vehicle for explaining the Bible instead of representing it in another language, and in the most egregious instances this amounts to explaining away the Bible. This impulse may be attributed...to a feeling that the Bible, because of its canonical status, has to be made accessible—indeed, transparent—to all...Modern translators, in their zeal to uncover the meanings of the biblical text for the instruction of a modern readership, frequently lose sight of how the text intimates its meanings—the distinctive, artfully deployed features of ancient Hebrew prose and poetry that are the instruments for the articulation of all meaning, message, insight, and vision...A suitable English version should avoid at all costs the modern abomination of elegant synonymous variation, for the literary prose of the Bible turns everywhere on significant repetition, not variation...Finally, the mesmerizing effect of these ancient stories will scarcely be conveyed if they are not rendered in cadenced English prose that at least in some ways corresponds to the powerful cadences of the Hebrew."

Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.