Remind them of these things, and solemnly charge them in the presence of God not to wrangle about words, which is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearers. (Second Timothy 2:14)
Many of us pastors have trouble staying out of the ditches and onto the road.
A scholar friend says, “Truth is a ridge on either side of which are vast chasms to be avoided at all cost.” One side is called liberalism, the other legalism. Rigid fundamentalism on the right, worldly compromise on the left. In between is the road. The way. It’s narrow.
Truth always is.
It’s one thing to love word-study and to delight in finding a particular word in Scripture that yields a well-spring of insights and applications, but a far different thing to fight over the meaning of some obscure Greek word.
First Timothy 6:4 warns God’s leaders about “word-battles” or “word-wrangling.” The idea is “constant striving” and “chronic disagreement.” The Greek word is disparatribai, a double compound word which means “constant contention, incessant wrangling or strife.”
Then, in Second Timothy 2:14 Paul uses a different word, logomachia, which we are told means “fighting with words.” The NASB translators made it “word-wrangling,” which I like.
The image of wrangling suggests a cowboy roping a dogie, jumping off his horse, and wrestling the animal to the ground.
Some of us do that with words. We capture them, hogtie them, and put our own brand on them. The result may be to make the word mean something entirely different from the writer’s original intention.
Those who love word wrangling, the sport of delving into the murky meanings of biblical words to find hidden, hitherto unknown insights and applications can have a lot of fun with this one.
A member of the American denomination known officially as Primitive Baptists and unofficially as hard-shell Baptists descended on my office for a little session in word-wrangling. His wife was a Southern Baptist and to keep peace in the family, he often attended with her, but reluctantly. In no way did he worship. The man resented the organ and piano, grimaced every time we mentioned Sunday School, and found fault with half the stuff in my sermons. (See note at the end).
”You talk about soul-winning,” he said. “We can’t win a soul to God! That’s the work of the Holy Spirit. You’re teaching error.”
I said, “He that winneth souls is wise.”
He said, “What are you saying? I don’t understand.”
I said, “I was quoting Proverbs 11:30.”
He said, “Does the Bible say that?”
“It does in mine.” I showed him.
It said the same thing in his.
“That’s not what it means,” he insisted.
I said, “Have you talked to Solomon lately? How do you know what he meant by it?”
He sat there for a moment and said, “I can see there’s no point in discussing Scripture with you. You’re so close-minded.”
Eventually, he and his wife divorced. Someone was close-minded all right, but I don’t think it was the preacher. (Other issues divided that couple as well, including his being a wealthy skinflint who required his wife to pay one-half of their living expenses out of her little income. He was a miserable human being.)
About fighting over words, here are a few quick thoughts worth remembering…
1) “Words do not have meanings; they have usages.”
Dr. Ray Frank Robbins, now in Heaven, taught New Testament and Greek at several of our SBC institutions over a long career. He possessed two doctorates, including one from Oxford in England. He taught at Samford University when it was Howard College, at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary when I was a student, and later at Mississippi College. He was as good as they come, as sharp as any knife in the drawer, and yet a sweet and gentle brother in Christ.
The quote above is from Dr. Robbins. Remember it; it’ll come in handy.
Pastors who have taken a few semesters of Greek (or less!) or who have taken none at all but have in their possession a book or two claiming to understand all there is to know along those lines often go to great lengths to tell their hearers “what the Greek means here.”
Be careful here, friend.
Words do not have meanings; they have usages.
Anyone who has lived in America as long as forty years has seen the meanings of quite a number of words change drastically. Case in point….
–“My, you’re looking gay today.” Hmmm. Are you saying your friend has a pleasant appearance this morning or that he is behaving in a sexually questionable manner?
–“I’m pro-choice.” That’s good, if you are scanning the menu of your favorite restaurant. You have the freedom to choose anything you can afford. However, if you mean you retain the right to carry a baby to term and give birth to it or to put it to death without any consequences whatsoever, that is another thing altogether.
–“I’m a liberal and proud of it.” President Harry Truman would say that and have no qualms about it. In those days—the 1940s–‘liberal’ was an honorable word and if anyone went ballistic over it, I don’t recall. These days, only the left-fringe seems to brag about being liberal.
It’s important, I’m confident, to get at the root of a word and see what it “means” in the original Greek or Latin or whatever. But when we get that, we don’t necessarily have a whole lot. We need to know how the word was used and what it meant to the speaker or writer.
2) Always back off and look at the bigger picture.
It’s possible to find single words in the Bible that suggest new applications of Scripture and exotic avenues of doctrine. Many a heretic has built a career in just that way, by “going to seed” on one word or phrase in some biblical text while forgetting everything else the Bible has to say on that subject.
This is why Scripture itself cautions us that no Scripture is of private interpretation. (II Peter 1:20)
Not everyone agrees on what this verse means (bet that is a surprise to you–lol). Was the Apostle saying that no one should get off by himself and find his own way of understanding the Word of God, but to stay within the context of the larger congregation of believers in order to have their counsel and balance? That seems to be a correct thing to do. That is, unless you lived in the Middle Ages when the larger church was often corrupt and more worldly than the world.
Or does that verse mean something else? The NIV has II Peter 1:20 read, No prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. This would make the caution apply not so much to the reception of a text on our end as the giving of the text on the prophet’s end. The next verse in the NIV reads, For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
At any case, it’s a good idea to stay within the congregation, within the larger body of faithful believers, and not to allow ourselves to drink too deeply of the heady elixir of finding-a-verse-that-has-eluded-the-scholars.
A friend quoted his seminary professor: “Anytime you come up with an interpretation of scripture no one has thought of in the 2,000 years of Christianity, chances are it’s wrong.” A good reminder.
3) Notice that in Second Timothy 2:14 Paul tells Pastor Timothy that fighting over words “is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearers.” Isn’t that interesting? It’s the hearers who are injured.
The “hearers” would be the spectators, the audience, for this rodeo. They watch respected spiritual leaders battle back and forth over the meaning of words and eventually, they leave the grandstand. They have had quite enough. Instead of learning spiritual truth, they became disgusted by the whole business and retreated into a passive attitude about scripture truths.
When you encounter some new doctrine or interpretation of Scripture–whether you found it all by your lonesome or someone else pointed it out-–do this:
1) Ask yourself what that does to the major affirmations of the Christian faith: the inspiration of Scripture, the deity of Jesus, the purity of the Gospel, salvation by grace through faith, that sort of thing.
2) Ask yourself what the saints of old as well as saints of the present–those teachers and expositors of the Word you esteem highly–would say about this. Then, go ask them.
Then, pull up a chair and get ready for a history lesson.
You might be surprised how many of them have trod this same narrow, questioning/discovering lane you now find yourself on and in what detail they recall the hubris now flooding your soul from the doctrinal discoveries you have made. They laugh at what naive greenhorns they were (and by implication, you “are”).
Then, pay attention as they speak of how the Pelagians or the Gnostics or the Arians or another off-shoot of the Christian faith made the same discoveries as you and played that hand out to its full extension, only to find it barren and lifeless.
As a young believer who sometimes struggled with doubts on the Bible and its record of Jesus, it gave me a comforting assurance to observe that many of the people I admired most for their brains and common sense were devout disciples of the Galilean.
I sat in the home of a young husband who had been taken in by the “elders” who had knocked at his door one evening when his wife had been at work. He was bored and had nothing else to do that night, so he let them in and then soaked up all their false doctrine and accusations. By the time his wife came to me–I was not their pastor, but the husband had sat in our congregation often as a teenager and she felt he had confidence in me–he was well locked into that false religion.
I asked him, “When they began telling you things so different from what you’d been taught in your own church, did it ever occur to you to ask someone about that? Did you think of calling your pastor or some other Bible teacher?”
His answer was revealing. “I didn’t think there were any answers to what they were saying.”
Doubt and conceit have this in common: they are confident no one has more truth than they.
Keep the bigger picture, friend. Ask other believers. But do not wrangle over words and sound all the alarms when the preacher or the visitor in your living room begins to do so. He may be on solid ground, but he’s also playing around quicksand where one must tread softly.
Let’s leave wrangling to the rodeos.
(Note: The couple referred to in that story are long in Heaven. I’m confident it’s all right to share their saga at this distance.)