“That Was Then, This Is Now”

“That Was Then, This Is Now” was a song recorded by The Monkees for their 20th Anniversary comeback tour in 1986. It was also their last US Top 20 hit. Someone on YouTube said it was “Just '80s enough to go over well in that era, but just '60s enough to qualify as a song The Monkees would record.”

Less well known is that I delivered a UK theology conference paper with that title back in 2013 (reprised at a US conference in 2014). It’s available on my Academia page (https://kcl.academia.edu/SteveBurnhope).     

I can’t say for sure what The Monkees had in mind—it was probably something to do with their reunion after an absence of two decades—but I can easily remember what I had in mind. It’s a phrase we hear often enough in academic circles when it comes to interpreting and applying the Bible in the present day.

Now the difficulty of the starting point to many evangelical ears—evangelicals are always on “heresy watch” to a greater or lesser degree—is that this phrase can appear to suggest that we can “pick and choose” which things the Bible says apply to us, today, and which things don’t (because they only applied to “them, then”). This sits uneasily with the idea that the whole of the Bible is authoritative for life and faith throughout all time. In other words, that we can’t arbitrarily ignore some things (or even, perhaps, many things) on the basis that they are somehow “out of date.”

I suspect one or two will be nodding at this point—though hopefully tentatively, anticipating some nuance will shortly be coming round the corner.

Let’s start by affirming those evangelical fears—or at least, acknowledging them. All else being equal, we ought not to be “picking and choosing.” But that is not really what we’re talking about; or certainly, what we ought not to be talking about. I think the legitimate evangelical fear is picking and choosing arbitrarily—for example, based on whether something in the Bible suits us or not. The question isn’t whether we distinguish between what applies to us now and what applied to them then. We always do. The question is whether we have good, consistent bases for how we go about it.  

It’s easy to agree that we should be interpreting a Bible verse—even something that Jesus said—within its context at the time and concluding that it is not a timeless truth which all Christians everywhere should obey, when it’s something like, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” Matthew 19:21. Many of us might read that and think, “Actually, I’m OK with not being perfect…” or “Ah, that’s just something which Jesus said to that one person, one time, so it’s not timelessly binding on us.” But there are many other instances where Christians also, generally, do not treat things Jesus said as applicable to us today. Already we haven’t had to look very far.

And there are many others available to us. Perhaps the easiest examples are found in Torah: the 613 commandments (called “commandments” for a reason) in the Old Testament that form the covenant charter for Jewish faith. As soon as we hear “Old Testament” or “Jewish faith,” evangelical ears tend to immediately assume “not applicable.” That it’s from “bad old Judaism” and therefore not relevant to “good new Christianity.” But that doesn’t stop conservative evangelicals pointing to Genesis 19:1–29, Judges 19:1–30, and Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 as biblical evidence for opposition to modern same-sex unions. Those four Old Testament passages have all played a significant part in the traditional Christian case against same-sex relationships (and are commonly included among the so-called “clobber texts”). Whatever your view on the subject is not my point, it’s how we’ve got from then to now in a single bound. For example, why those two commands in Leviticus, and not all the rest of the 613?

Now I appreciate that conservatives will respond, “OK, but we still have Romans 1:18–27, 1 Corinthians 6:9, and 1 Timothy 1:10 to prove that our position is biblical,” but it does point to a certain inconsistency and—perhaps more importantly, it reduces the number of available verses to three. Again, I am aware that conservatives have recently stressed indirect biblical evidence to bolster the case—such as Adam and Eve being a timeless paradigm for all human relationships, and something called “biblical marriage” that Adam and Eve epitomise. We don’t have time to go into all of that here and it would distract from the central point, which is the basis on which—using what criteria—we determine what in Scripture (Old and New Testaments) is timelessly applicable: as true now for us as it was true then for them.   

Let me suggest what the criteria should be. The following are a combination of established interpretive principles—the kind taught in evangelical colleges and found in hermeneutics textbooks—and some conclusions I’ve reached through studying, teaching and writing about the subject over many years.  

Words like “timeless,” “inerrant,” “authoritative,” and even just “biblical” may not be as helpful in practice as people tend to think.

London Underground station announcements are not wrong when they say, “Mind the gap!” because there is indeed a gap—in this case, between “then” and “now.” We ought not to try to close the gap by reaching too quickly for “timeless.” It is not good interpretation to start from the assumption that everything is timeless (especially if we’re expecting the text itself to tell us whether that’s so—trust me, it won’t). The same is true of assuming everything that we possibly can is to be taken as literal. We take as literal what was intended to be literal.

We have to start with what something meant—what it was “saying”—in its original historical and literary context: what its writer was communicating to their original audience.

Too often modern readers read the text as if it was written yesterday and written to them. Again, the ingrained idea that Scripture is “timeless truth” fuels that error, compounded by us calling the Bible “the Word of God.” Evangelicals will generally believe that God is timeless (outside of time) so we therefore bequeath the same thinking to “his Word.” It’s not illogical, but it’s misapplying a divine characteristic to Scripture in a way that Scripture itself never does. It is the Word of God (I’m happy with the phrase) but that is not synonymous with being “the words of God.” It’s not always easy to know what was in their minds, but that’s where good, contemporary commentaries come in.     

Although most of us as English Bible readers have to read it in English, we cannot rely on that for understanding and applying the original text (which was written in Hebrew, Greek, and a little Aramaic).

My point here is not that everyone has to read their daily Bible devotional passage in the original language. That would be silly. My point is that, as English readers—and this is especially true of those who purport to “teach” the Bible or preach from it—we may well be missing what the writers had in mind (what they were “talking about”) if we work solely from the English. Bible translation is, itself, an exercise in interpretation, and translators inevitably bring interpretive traditions and theological assumptions to their work. I heard a talk recently where the speaker took a word in a New Testament verse as his subject. The whole talk was then about that. The English word does indeed mean what he talked about … but it wasn’t what the Greek word had in mind!  

What something in the Bible meant—what it was “saying” from the perspective of the writer and their original audience—is only part of it. We need to be just as interested in why it was saying it.  

Another way of putting that is to say that what the writer said to that audience at that place and time in their circumstances may or may not be something they would say to a subsequent audience in different circumstances. For example, some New Testament letters were clearly part of an ongoing correspondence of which we have only part. We are hearing only one voice in a conversation. Only when we know—or can plausibly reconstruct—the circumstances of the letter can we take a view on how it applies to us today. The Bible was written in a context (many different contexts, in fact). Its meaning derives from its context.  

Not everything in the Bible applies to us today.

Alarm bells time again, perhaps! Surely everything applies? Not quite. Everything in the Bible is for us, but not everything is to us. God has given us the Bible—in the form we have it—as uniquely inspired literature. But the Bible itself offers nothing resembling a modern evangelical doctrine of Scripture, with all the modern language that gets assembled to make such a claim. Strictly speaking, when that word “inspired” was first used of Scripture, the writer was talking about the Old Testament (though we can extend the principle). And that same verse (2 Timothy 3:16) (modestly) describes inspired Scripture as “useful”—going on to explain the things for which it is useful. What it does not do is reach for any of the words evangelicals subsequently came to regard as virtually synonymous with “inspired,” such as “inerrant.” Keep in mind: nothing in the Bible was written to us, here and now; all of it was first written to different audiences in very different contexts and cultures.

So what are the options determining how we apply “That Was Then, This Is Now?”

In brief: (a) Make sure you have fully taken account of paragraphs 1 through 5 above. (b) Pay attention to the genre of what you’re reading (i.e., the type of literature)—each has its own set of interpretive principles that apply to it. (c) Remember that a very substantial part of the literature in the Bible is “narrative”—stories. Stories only rarely “teach” by giving commands or propositional truths. They do what they do narratively—which means that simply extracting a moral principle or rule from a story and calling it “what the Bible teaches” is likely to be on very shaky ground, because it’s highly dependent on interpretation.

Our goal is to be sufficiently well-informed to be able to determine:

(i) Is this for us today—in its exact original form (the word exact is important)?

(ii) Or is there some underlying value or principle which is?

(iii) Or was it only applicable for them then, in that place and time (a time-bound truth rather than a timeless truth)?   

None of that is “picking and choosing.” It’s straightforward interpretation.

In fact, the person who insists that they simply believe “what the Bible says” is interpreting every bit as much as anyone else—they just may not realise where interpretation is coming into it. The gap between then and now is unavoidable. Faithful Bible reading doesn't pretend that there is no gap—it just navigates it well.

For further reading on all these points (and more besides), these two books may be helpful: https://tinyurl.com/2jdxs28d https://tinyurl.com/4whhya5p.