Unfortunate Words of the Bible

A Biblical Theology of Misunderstandings

G. P. Wagenfuhr

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532660733
  9781532660740
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532660757
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

What do unicorns, law, love, and hell all have in common? They are all unfortunate words of the Bible. Through mistranslation, cultural shifts, anachronisms, and misguided intentions, this book traces several key words whose meaning is commonly misunderstood in our world today. If the blatant mistranslation of unicorns could survive in the Bible for thousands of years, securing their place in our cultural imagination to this day, what would happen if important words, like salvation, were misunderstood? How might our cultural imaginations hide the meaning of the Bible rather than revealing it? By tearing down misunderstandings, Wagenfuhr builds up a broad overview of the story of the Bible that illustrates a more mature and more exciting vision for Christian faith(fulness) than is commonly assumed.

Part I

The Beginning

Words contain a whole world within them. Don’t believe me? Well, let’s start with creation. That seems like such an innocuous word. It just means the universe, doesn’t it? Hold on for a moment. Universe is not the same as creation. Those two words contain two entirely different realities. Creation is something that is created, and created things require creators. Now, if we use the word creation to refer to everything, we imply that there is a creator who made all of it. The creation has a relationship to the creator, either a good one or a broken one. Universe means everything taken as a whole. It doesn’t have to talk about how things came to be, or whether there is a God or not. There is no relationship in this word. It may be used purposefully to mean that there is nothing else, because God is not part of the universe and the universe contains everything.

We often use the word cosmos now to also refer to the universe, but that word has a much more storied history. You see, nearly all myths,1 from the ancient to our modern scientific ones, talk about how cosmos (ordered reality) has come from chaos (unordered reality). Order arises from disorder. Ancient myths have all sorts of weird and wonderful ways this order comes about, usually through violence, sexual reproduction, and creating divisions or boundaries. Our modern scientific cosmology (account of how everything came to be) talks about the Big Bang, how all matter was compacted into a singularity that exploded into the whole cosmos. Once there was nothing but potential, and then through an instant of incalculable violence, matter of various kinds came into existence, all governed by physical laws.

So, it shouldn’t surprise us that people oppose science and religion. The science of cosmology is trying to do what religions of the past did through stories about gods, without reference to any gods. The Big Bang is a story about how everything came to be without needing to talk about any creator. As I write this paragraph, the news of the death of Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) is just coming through. Stephen Hawking was a brilliant astrophysicist who thought that gods were for fairy tales. For him, there could be no creation because there was no creator. That means there is no intentional relationship governing anything, just laws of physics. Now, maybe the Big Bang happened—I don’t know, and it can only ever be a theory because it cannot be reproduced in a controlled laboratory environment—but if it did happen, there is nothing to say that God was not behind it. The important thing about myth is not how things came to be, but how we believe things came to be and how we make our lives meaningful based on that.

I always like to say to both sides of this science vs. religion debate: science is not capable of giving you meaning. The meaning of everything isn’t contained in things themselves. A tree doesn’t mean anything. It has no significance by itself. Only through stories are people able to get the meaning of things, and they do that through relationships. A tree could be lumber, a canoe, a log in a house, firewood, the home to a spirit, or a beautiful creature that proclaims the glory of God. Only by our relationship to that tree, our values, our intentions, our stories, does the tree have significance to us. You see, even scientific cosmology is telling a story. It has to go beyond science into myth, into storytelling, to get meaning. And it has to do that by telling a story of relationships, usually about how small and unimportant the earth is.

Even though there are Christians who are astrophysicists, our culture has been captivated by a story that is contained for us in just two words: cosmos and universe. Within these two words lies a story about the meaning of life, about the importance of humans, about how chance and probability can be substituted for God. Our very choice of vocabulary says a lot about what we believe. So, perhaps the words creation and universe are unfortunate words, depending on whom you ask. As we begin the story of the Bible before creation, we need to look at the main character of the whole thing: God. Unfortunately, the main character of the Bible has a bit of a name problem.

1. This word is used by scholars without reference to whether they are true stories or not. Myth simply refers to stories that give meaning to life.

1

God

Mask or Sign?

Word: Jehovah, God, Lord

Classification: Multiple language misunderstandings, pre-existing words used for other purposes

Original Hebrew Old Testament Words:

יְהוָֹה <YHWH>: The personal name of the God of Israel. Traditionally not pronounced.

אֱלֹהִים <Elohim>: God or gods. This is the plural form of El. Pronounced “el-oh-heem.”

אֲדֹנָי <Adonay>: Lord, master, ruler, king, husband: an authority figure. Pronounced “ad-oh-nigh.”

New Testament Greek Words:

θεὸς <theos>: God/god. Pronounced “theh-OS.”

κύριος <kurios>: Lord, master, supreme authority figure, sir (term of respect for a superior). Pronounced “COO-ri-os.”

English Words:

God: from Old English and related to other Germanic languages, meaning a supreme or powerful being. It is not related to “good.”

Lord: from Old English hlaford meaning the owner of property, husband, master of a household, or God. Originally this word meant “bread-keeper,” as opposed to “lady,” which meant “bread-kneader!”

Introduction

At the risk of offending some of you, let’s look at two names, Andrea and Dorcas. When I was growing up in the 1990s, we used “Dorcas” as a joke name. We thought it was a name so hideous that only mean parents could ever consider using it. Of course, there is a Dorcas in the Bible, in Acts chapter 9. Her name means “gazelle” or “deer,” which is a graceful and beautiful animal and was probably considered that way in her time. But I didn’t know what it meant, only that it sounded like dork, a word only invented in the 1960s. That’s what we call an anachronism, assuming things from our time were the same as they were in former times.

Andrea, I’m sorry to say, is traditionally only a man’s name. Andrea is the way that many European languages spell our Andrew, and it’s much closer to its Greek origin. You may know that one of Jesus’ twelve disciples was called Andrew, though his real name in Greek was Andrea. Andrea actually means “manly,” because it’s related to andros, which is the Greek word for “man.”

These two names reveal a major change in our culture. People used to give meaningful names to people in their own language. I imagine Dorcas was tall, thin, and lithe. I imagine the fisherman Andrea/Andrew was big, strong, and brave. Parents in the ancient world gave their children names that corresponded to their characters, and in many cultures, people would get new names when they came of age and their character was developed. Not so in our day. We name people with foreign or made-up words whose meaning we rarely know, because we think first about how a name sounds. We would think it strange if someone named their child a simple English word like Mighty. The exception seems to be a few flowers, seasons, and biblical virtues like Patience, Hope, Joy, or Charity.

The word God is similar. God may be an obvious place to start, but why would we say that God is an unfortunate word of the Bible? Well, as we will see, words are never simple, and for a word representing the most high being, finding the right word is very difficult. After all, if God created everything out of nothing, what word could we use to represent him? All of our words begin with things we encounter, and until only recently people chose names that had real meaning, instead of just sounding nice or seeming unique. For us today, names are used as a mask. We choose names that we think sound pretty or good, but they don’t tell us anything about the person. Like a painted mask, we want names to be unique, to portray an image under our control to the world. And now with the anonymity of the internet we take this a lot further by coming up with “avatars”2 and names that mask names.

In the ancient and medieval world, names weren’t masks, they were symbols. Names tried to represent the whole character wrapped up entirely into one or a few words. For example, Jesus (actually Yeshua) means “Yahweh saves.” It’s the perfect name for the savior who is God himself. Nathaniel means “God given” like Theodore or Dorothy, which are its Greek equivalents. Likewise, God in the Old Testament was meant to function as a symbol of the whole character, not a mask that is important in itself. Yahweh, as we’ll see in a moment, means something vitally important.

But although a name works like a symbol, representing the whole, it cannot substitute for the whole character. In order to know who Go...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: The Beginning
• Part II: Rebellion and Rescue
• Part III: The Mission of the Rescued People of God
• Part IV: The End
• Conclusion
• Bibliography