On Bible Interpretation, Evidence, and Music
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2 Timothy 3:16 reveals that all of Scripture is God-inspired and instructive. Taken with Romans 15:4, similar verses, and examples of NT use of OT passages, some have concluded that even incidental narrative details are potential sources of doctrine.
Since OT narrative details reference everything from clothing to cooking, tools, weapons, vehicles (carts, chariots), and so much more, there are, of course, references to music. There are even references to specific instruments, moods, and uses of music.
I want to offer a few thoughts here for two audiences. The first is those who claim the hermeneutic (interpretive approach) that takes every narrative detail as a potential source of doctrine. The second audience is those who have participated in conversations, debates, or quarrels on the topic of “what the Bible teaches about music” and sensed that there was some kind of disconnect regarding how to use Scripture to address features of present-day culture.
Maybe something here can help a few understand each other a little bit better on these topics and more accurately identify points of agreement and disagreement.
Narrative and Evidence
I’ve written about proper use of narrative before, with a focus on why we should avoid “spiritualizing” elements of narrative—whether OT or NT. Many of the same problems afflict efforts to extract doctrine from narrative details.
Here, we’ll focus on the role of evidence in Bible interpretation, especially narrative.
It should be a given that since we’re talking about God’s Word, and teaching we are going to claim is “biblical,” any interpretation we take of any passage of Scripture—narrative or not—needs to be justified by evidence and reasoning. Saying “God meant this when He said that” is a weighty claim! It needs to be justified.
In other words, whenever we claim, “This information in this text has this meaning for us,” we should be expected to prove it. The “proof” may be informal, as it usually is in preaching. Still, we should expect listeners to want reasons. Our beliefs and assertions should be warranted, and we should help others see why they are warranted.
Narrative is no exception to this duty—any more than poetry, prophecy, or epistles.
Classifying Evidence
Some years ago, I wrote about casting lots as a thought experiment on handling biblical evidence. A lot of readers wanted to debate the validity of casting lots—but my intent was to stir curiosity: Why don’t churches or individual believers generally make decisions that way today?
There’s a reason we don’t. It has to do with evidence.
I’m going to talk about three qualities of evidence, two types of evidence, then five sub-types.
First, three qualities:
- Consistent with
- Supportive
- Conclusive
Say a building burned down, and we discover that Wolfgang was at the location when the fire started. His presence there is consistent with the claim that he started the fire, but it doesn’t support that conclusion at all. This is more obvious if lots of other people were there, too.
But suppose we also learn that Wolfgang had publicly said he wished that building would burn. He also bought lots of flammable liquids earlier that day. That still doesn’t prove he did it, but it is supportive. Though inconclusive, it is evidential for the claim that Wolfgang started the fire.
Now suppose Wolfgang was the only person there at the right time to have started the fire. Suppose the building was recently inspected and found to have no faulty wiring. There were no electrical storms that day, either.
We are now probably “beyond reasonable doubt” about Wolfgang’s guilt. The evidence is conclusive in the sense that it warrants a high-confidence conclusion.
On to the two types:
- Internal evidence
- External evidence
In reference to the Bible, internal evidence is anything within the 66 books of the Bible. External evidence is everything from human experience, human nature, and the whole created world outside the Bible.
Simple enough. On to the five sub-types. These are types of internal evidence. We could choose almost any topic, then classify every (or nearly every) biblical reference to it as one of these types. I’ll use music for this example:
- Direct teaching on the nature and purpose of music in all contexts.
- Direct teaching on the nature and purpose of music in a particular setting.
- Examples of people using music, with contextual indications of quality, and evidence of exemplary intent.
- Examples of people using music, with contextual indications of quality but no evidence of exemplary intent.
- Examples of people using music, but no contextual indications of quality or exemplary intent.
What do I mean by “exemplary intent”? Sometimes we read that person A did B, and the context encourages us to believe we’re seeing an example of good or bad conduct. For example, we read that Daniel prayed “as he had done previously” (Dan 6:10). The context encourages us to see Daniel’s choices as both good (“contextual indications of quality”) and something to imitate in an appropriate way (“exemplary intent”).
Evidence and Certainty
Why bother to classify evidence? Because classifying the information (evidence/potential evidence) guides us in evaluating how well it works as justification for a claim. In turn, that shapes how certain we can be that our understanding is correct and how certain we can encourage others to be.
Looking at the five types of internal evidence above, the evidential weight and certainty decrease as we get further down the list. By the time we get to type 5, we may not have evidence at all—in reference to our topic or claim. Depending on the size of the claim, there might be information that is consistent with a claim, but not really anything supportive, much less conclusive.
As we move up the list of types, relevance to the topic becomes far more direct, and interpretive possibilities are greatly reduced. Certainty increases because there are fewer options.
There is no Bible verse that tells us this. It’s a function of what is there in the text vs. what is not there. We know there is a difference between an apostle saying, “Do this for this reason” and an individual in an OT history doing something, with no explanation of why it’s in the text. The relationship of these realities to appropriate levels of certainty follows out of necessity.
How Narrative Is Special
Speaking of differences between one genre of writing and another in Scripture, let’s pause to briefly note a few things about narrative.
- Humans pretty much universally recognize narrative. They may not be able to explain what sets it apart from other kinds of writing, but they know it when they read or hear it.
- The characteristics of narrative that enable us to recognize it are not revealed in Scripture. There is no verse that says “this is the definition of narrative.” We just know.
- Those characteristics include the fact that many details in narratives are only there to support the story. They are not intended to convey anything to us outside of that context.
- There is no Bible verse that tells us narrative works this way. We just know. It’s built into the definition.
What does this mean when it comes to evidence and justifying our claim that a passage reveals a truth or helps build a doctrine?
It means that narrative detail has a different burden-of-proof level by default. Because the story-supportive role of narrative detail is inherent in the nature of narrative, our starting assumption with these details is normally that they are there to give us information about the events and characters, not to provide other kinds of information.
Can a narrative detail have a secondary purpose of revealing to us the nature of, say, hats and other clothing, carts and other vehicles, stew and other dishes, axes and other tools, lyres and other musical instruments? Probably sometimes. As with any other interpretive claim, the burden of proof lies on the interpreter to justify it. In the case of narrative, though, the interpreter has a lower-certainty starting point, and a longer journey to arrive at a warranted belief.
The Profitability of All Scripture
2 Timothy 3:16 and Romans 15:4 do indeed assure us that all of Scripture is important. “Verbal, plenary inspiration” describes our conviction that every original word of the Bible is fully and equally from God. So we don’t look at any words and dismiss them as unimportant. What we do is ask how do these words work together in their context to provide us with “teaching… reproof.. correction… and training in righteousness.”
Narrative details are important. They’re so important that we’re obligated to stay out of the way and let them do their job.
Aaron Blumer 2016 Bio
Aaron Blumer is a Michigan native and graduate of Bob Jones University and Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). He and his family live in small-town western Wisconsin, not far from where he pastored for thirteen years. In his full time job, he is content manager for a law-enforcement digital library service. (Views expressed are the author's own and not his employer's, church's, etc.)
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I tend not to use that verse much because other verses are stronger
Rajesh, it's obvious you understood Aaron's "best text" principle and were just obfuscating.
This is a false accusation. If you actually carefully read the things that I said about that matter, you might understand what I was saying. Then again, based on the nature of your previous comments on my threads, in both this thread and others, perhaps you will not because you yourself may actually be the one who has an agenda of obfuscating my discussions.
Rajesh, you're trying to make it look like this is complex, and it's really the basics of exegesis and hermeneutics, using really one of the first laws of linguistics; usage determines meaning. You start with the immediate context and then go to the broader context.
And in this case, it is my view that Scripture nowhere tells us that any instrument or genre is off limits due to its associations with paganism. This is to be expected, since guilt by association is a basic logical fallacy, and God doesn't use bad logic.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Predictably, once it was realized that the claims about Eph. 5:11 and its context were entirely baseless, classic evasion technique was employed to avoid further detailed discussion of Eph. 5:11 in its actual, true context of the whole book of Ephesians.
Ok, so what are the “best” passages that teach that the instrumental music that was played in any biblical account of music was itself always amoral or neutral or inherently good so that the instrumental music that was played in any biblical account was itself always pleasing to God and acceptable to Him?
There is no need to prove a generalization about things being amoral, or whatever, etc.
The burden of proof lies on the interpreter to show that the passage in question means what we’re saying it means.
Where supportive arguments go wrong
I’m not going to be able to keep up with the back and forth, I think because in exchanges between Rajesh and Burt, I usually see problems with the case being made on both sides of that.
So, for what it’s worth, there are two main ways that we go astray when trying to trying to make a case for a claim:
- Errors of evidence
- Errors of reasoning
The two can overlap.
Errors of evidence are when we’ve gotten something wrong in relation to the facts. We’ve imagined something that isn’t there or have misread/mistranslated, etc.
Errors of reasoning take a huge variety of forms, but in my experience, one of the most common is mistaken relevance. Some quick examples:
- Ad hominem: The “find a flaw in the speaker” argument is usually invalid because it usually has nothing to do with whether his claim is true or false. There are exceptions. But almost anybody can be correct and almost anybody can be incorrect, so… it’s low- or no-relevance to the claim.
- Straw man: If we replace a person’s view with something of our own making that only slightly resembles it, we have a relevance problem. The straw man is not the man and so arguments that defeat the straw man are not relevant to the real thing.
- Various species of category collapsing: If we lump a bunch of stuff into category A, then argue against category A, we might have a strong case against A, but we have said nothing at all about not-A. (This is kind of an error of reasoning layered on an error of evidence, since our evidence has lumped dissimilar things together.)
I should throw in one more, because it’s so common—well, it would be, because it’s a catch-all. Non sequitur. This is just your basic “this does not really follow from that” mistake. So we have passionately made a claim that A is true, then moved to a “therefore…” but the “therefore…” does not really follow.
- Argument: The guy down the road ran over a squirrel!! He obviously hates all animals and wants to make them all extinct!
- Counter argument: No, you can’t reason like that. People who run over squirrels are never animal haters!!!
Both of sides have indulged in non-sequiturs, of the overgeneralization variety.
It seems like on cultural topics like music styles, there’s a ton of overgeneralizing all the way around.
I know that’s a generalization, but I think the evidence supports it. 😀
On any controversial topic, we should focus on solid evidence and sound reasoning. The rest is just theater.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
On any controversial topic, we should focus on solid evidence and sound reasoning.
No evidence is solider or sounder than God's own words. Ephesians 5:11 states,
Ephesians 5:11 And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.
This is an explicit apostolic epistolary prohibition to all believers. Every believer has an obligation to God to heed fully what it prohibits.
Correctly establishing what this divine revelation prohibits is therefore essential.
Any claim that this verse has no application to human musical activity and its products is a claim that has to be proven biblically because neither the passage nor its context speaks of any such exclusions from its scope of application. To those who espouse such a view, what is your biblical proof that this prohibition has no relevance to human musical activity and its products?
Ok, so what are the “best” passages that teach that the instrumental music that was played in any biblical account of music was itself always amoral or neutral or inherently good so that the instrumental music that was played in any biblical account was itself always pleasing to God and acceptable to Him?
There is no need to prove a generalization about things being amoral, or whatever, etc.
So, is this an admission on your part that there are no "best" passages to prove a view about instrumental music that is very widely held by Christians in our day?
Alternatively, are you asserting that this generalization about things being amoral is self-evidently true and does not need any proof?
On Wednesday evening, I had an extended conversation with a friend who is a missionary in a country in South America. He testified to me how prevalent and dangerous the occult is in his part of the world.
He spoke of a yearly festival in which occult music was a central element and of how depraved are the activities in that festival. He testified to the distinctively, highly percussive nature of that music and how people practiced that music for months prior to the festival.
I believe that many Christians in America lack a biblical appreciation for how dangerous and widespread the occult is in the world. In particular, many believers need to change their minds and thinking concerning the dangers and corruption of music of the occult.
With topics like these, there is always so much noise vs. signal.
When it comes to answering a question like this biblically, there are some core issues, and the rest is noise.
Ephesians 5:11 And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.
This is a point of agreement. All are agreed that believers should not fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness.
There is no point in vehemently insisting on that. Nobody disagrees.
But application is always more complex. Questions/potential points of disagreement:
- What is an unfruitful work of darkness?
- What is fellowship?
Is use of a musical style or instrument “fellowship”? Is use of a thing that is also used by groups that engage in “unfruitful darkness” fellowship with unfruitful works of darkness?
It’s easy to test the reasoning there:
- Atheism is an unfruitful work of darkness
- Atheists wear socks
- Therefore, wearing socks is fellowship with unfruitful works of darkness
That clearly doesn’t work as valid reasoning.
Here’s where something like a “style” (weather clothing, music, architecture, hair, or any number of other things) is nuanced and Bert seems to also be overgeneralizing.
Styles carry meaning in cultural contexts. We don’t wear clown suits to funerals—generally. Most of us.
Musical styles carry meaning in a cultural context also.
I end up landing in place closer to Bert on this, though, in the end, because “cultural meaning” is highly ambiguous. It varies with time, location, and individual experience. Cultures are fluid things, constantly changing.
I remember well when, to many, having a beard and/or hair over the top of your ears identified you with the Hippie movement. In our culture, guys wearing earrings carried a lot of meaning for a while there, and it’s still got connotations that make a whole lot of us frown on the idea.
So Bert, though “guilt by association” is usually fallacious, meaning by association is not in the example above. So if we have a ‘style feature’ of a culture that conveys a meaning/message incompatible with Christian faith, we have an obligation to steer clear of it. It’s a bit difficult to fit Eph 5.11 to that, but it does contribute.
Along with the context, this is pretty close the point of 1 Cor 8:10
10 For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, will he not be encouraged, if his conscience is weak, to eat food offered to idols? 11 And so by your knowledge this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died. (1 Co 8:10–11)
He says 1 Co 8:4 that an idol is really “nothing in the world.” It doesn’t really have any meaning in itself. But in a context, people can become confused, because personal and cultural background strongly shapes how we experience things and the meaning we attach to them. Meaning by association is a real thing.
Conclusions…
- association matters a lot in matters of style
- association in matters of style and culture is full of ambiguity; it’s very context-dependent, including time, place, and other factors.
- applying 1 Co 8, Eph 5.11 and other passages to these kinds of questions is complex; we should calibrate our levels of certainty appropriately
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Psalm 150:5. Percussive instruments were commanded to be used in Temple worship, Rajesh. What you're doing, again, is the tired old game of guilt by association. "Oh, look, here are some pagans doing pagan things, and drums are involved! Let's ban drums and percussion for everybody!".
Or, put more bluntly, "Let's use bad logic to tell God's people to disobey the Bible." Please, Rajesh, stop leading God's people astray with your mishandling of the Word of God.
And Aaron, I think you need to speak more specifically on guilt by association. It is always a fallacy, and to use your example of long hair and earrings, even in the 1960s, the connection between these and the far out counterculture was weak, and fundamentalists turned a lot of people off from faith because they assumed, wrongly, that these features meant they were "maggot infested, dope smoking, FM types", as Rush would have said.
In reality, they were more generally saying "I feel that the establishment rules of the 1950s and 1960s go way beyond what is reasonable, and didn't Jesus wear a beard and have longer hair than was typical in the 1960s?".
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
What you're doing, again, is the tired old game of guilt by association. "Oh, look, here are some pagans doing pagan things, and drums are involved! Let's ban drums and percussion for everybody!".
This is total falsehood. I have never said anything about banning drums and percussion for everybody.
....would be the point of pointing out percussive rhythms in the objectionable music, then, Rajesh?
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Questions/potential points of disagreement:
- What is an unfruitful work of darkness?
- What is fellowship?
Is use of a musical style or instrument “fellowship”? Is use of a thing that is also used by groups that engage in “unfruitful darkness” fellowship with unfruitful works of darkness?
These questions must be answered through detailed attention to the teaching in both Ephesians and elsewhere in Scripture. When what Ephesians says is properly considered, it is clear that darkness as Paul speaks of it in Eph. 5:11 has everything to do with the work of Satan and his demons in the lives of human beings:
Satan energizes all unbelievers in their disobedience (Eph. 2:2);
Unbelievers have their understanding darkened (Eph. 4:18; cognate Greek verb to the Greek noun for darkness in Eph. 5:11)
Unbelievers are themselves darkness; it is not just something that they do (Eph. 5:8);
There are demonic rulers over the darkness of this world (Eph. 6:12), etc.
Works of darkness, therefore, are things done by evil humans who are energized by the devil to do what they do that is displeasing to God. Works of darkness are also things that demons do invisibly in the world in the lives of both unbelievers and believers (cf. Eph. 6:12 that says that we wrestle against demonic beings of various ranks/stations).
By comparing and contrasting many passages throughout Scripture, we learn that the Bible plainly teaches that the occult and its practitioners are preeminently aspects of what Eph. 5:11 prohibits believers to have fellowship with. What such fellowship entails has to be established through detailed examination of what Scripture reveals about the occult and its practitioners.
There’s a lot of interpreting going on there, with several points open to debate.
For example, what is “the occult”? This is not a Bible phrase. Scripture is far more interested in idolatry, though there are passages that connect idolatry and demons in some way.
Anyway, I don’t think anyone here is disputing that the worship of idols and/or demons is disobedient.
But, as I’ve pointed out previously, the presence of some feature in what we today call “the occult” or even in idolatrous worship doesn’t in itself make that feature evil.
Idolators wear socks. Witches wear socks. Well, maybe they don’t… I’m not sure. 😀 But they usually wear clothes. So, is wearing clothes bad because idolators and witches wear them?
“Well, a certain style…”? But is there even a style of clothing that is unique to idolators and occultists? I doubt it.
But let’s say there is: how would we determine when we’re seeing that style and when we aren’t? (Let’s say, for sake of argument, this hypothetical clothing style is itself an ‘unfruitful work of darkness’), what exactly would constitute ‘fellowship’ with it?
These would be matters of application, and more difficult.
(And the process would be the same for a music style.)
Which leads to a point I want to make:
We often want to leap to applications. By ‘we’ I mean all of us. Application is where we live and, so, what we find most interesting and useful.
But if we take shortcuts going to application, we end up with a destination we want people to follow us to, but we have not shown them the road there: observation, interpretation.
If we want folks to come along, our journey needs to be clear and followable. So, there are ultimately no shortcuts if we want to be effective.
I might look at a verse and immediately think “That means I should do this.” There is nothing wrong with that kind of leap to application, but the moment we involve other people as students or congregations or readers, we have persuasion to do. They need to see the whole road, and some will definitely notice if the road is impassable or just missing in places.
I’m using an extended metaphor, so I hope not confusing, but the point is, what’s good enough for me, leaping to application, is not good enough for teaching others.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
For example, what is “the occult”? This is not a Bible phrase. Scripture is far more interested in idolatry, though there are passages that connect idolatry and demons in some way.
Anyway, I don’t think anyone here is disputing that the worship of idols and/or demons is disobedient.
I appreciate the ongoing interaction. Here are some initial responses; I will provide more in-depth responses later.
Neither "style" nor "genre" is a Bible term. Yet, you or others use one or the other or both regularly in nearly every discussion of music.
The Bible has much to say about people who engage in demonic practices, such as witchcraft, sorcery, etc. In biblical usage, none of those practices involve worshiping demons (there may be only 9 verses in the Bible that speak directly about the worship of demons).
Yes, idolatry is an important subject in Scripture. Scripture, however, has much to say that is important about people who are involved in demonic practices that are not spoken of in Scripture as being idolatry.
In fact, Scripture distinguishes the two explicitly in more than one passage.
I use the term "occult" to refer to all those practices. By my count, there are at least 80 verses throughout the Bible that explicitly speak about the occult.
Does Ephesians 5:11 pertain to whether atheists, idolaters, witches, etc. wear socks or not?
An examination of Eph. 5:11-12 makes clear the answer to this question.
Ephesians 5:11 And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them. 12 For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret.
Ephesians 5:11 καὶ μὴ συγκοινωνεῖτε τοῖς ἔργοις τοῖς ἀκάρποις τοῦ σκότους, μᾶλλον δὲ καὶ ἐλέγχετε· 12 τὰ γὰρ κρυφῆ γινόμενα ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν αἰσχρόν ἐστι καὶ λέγειν.
Looking closely at the direct connection between 5:11 and 5:12 (based on the γὰρ in verse 12), we see that what Paul had especially in mind in the prohibition in 5:11 has to do with shameful things that evil people do in secret.
To my knowledge, there is no credible information that atheists, idolaters, witches, etc. secretly wear some kinds of distinctively occultic socks such that even talking about their wearing those socks would be a shame.
It seems clear that the prohibition in Ephesians 5:11 is not talking about things such as socks on atheists, etc. that do not have any known distinctively demonic or otherwise shameful significance to them. In addition, I do not know of any information from former atheists, idolaters, witches, etc. who have solemnly testified to the secretive, shameful character of their wearing such distinctively occultic socks.
In sharp contrast, we do have fully credible information from unbelievers and former unbelievers (who were previously directly involved in the occult themselves) that tells us of the demonic nature of certain occultic musical practices that occultists engage in.
Discussion