WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT ALIENS?
An exploration about exegesis, theology, and topical sermons
If your immediate reaction to this title is something like, “Hmm, what DOES the Bible say about aliens?” then this may not be for you. However, if your reaction is more, “What the heck are you even talking about?” then you may want to stick around.
Instead of asking the question, “does the bible speak about aliens?” we have assumed that it does and then we go looking for certain chapters and verses to prove it. This is backwards. Such an approach has sidestepped the basic questions of good exegesis (what did it mean to them in their time and culture and language) and forces our twenty and twenty first century concerns straight into the text in order to spit out an answer from the bible.
I am purposely using an obvious and ridiculous example here, aliens, but what about the less obvious? Whenever we ask the question, “what does the bible say about a specific subject?”, we open ourselves up to the possibility of dragging our own issues into the text. Asking what the bible says about a subject isn’t automatically a bad thing to do, it just needs to be based on good exegesis first.
This approach also demands something about the authority of the bible that is subtly misguided. Because Christians take the bible as the authority of our lives, we want to know what it says about all kinds of things, so we point to single sentences in the bible that speak to our chosen subject, but in doing so we remove these chosen sentences from the other sentences and paragraphs in which the authors of the bible intended to be heard inside of. For example, if we ask the question, “what does the bible say about God’s plan for my life?” some automatically run to Jeremiah 29:11. We haven’t even read the surrounding sentences and paragraphs, if we did we would know that Jeremiah is writing about a Babylonian exile that will soon take place for the people of Judah. Jeremiah 29:11 wasn’t intended to be a promise for us to hold on to which brings us comfort, but it is a reminder of God’s faithfulness and love to those happen to be under his judgment then and there in that time and space. Here we tend to place our American dream of prosperity into it as well. I can’t imagine Stephen as he is being stoned to death crying out, “but I thought you had plans to prosper me and not to harm me?” Jesus plainly said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
This is a plea for us to place the actual text of the bible, as priority, in front of our preconceived and often dogmatic agendas. I have in my pocket on my smartphone, three English bibles and one Greek New Testament, which I purchased for about $20. Gutenberg’s press has indeed been fruitful. I mention this because the bible has become readily accessible to us like no other point in human history. It used to be that Christians learned catechism and creeds, and the reason seems to be that not everyone had their own bible to access during those time periods. Today we can revive Erasmus’ motto of “ad fontes” (to the source) and we can do this at great ease and it will cost us next to nothing to do so. In doing so, we place the words of the bible first and then build our ideas about God from there instead of doing it the other way around with someone else’s or our own theological categories.
Sometimes when we approach the bible topically we assume that God’s whole intent in giving us the bible is to get us to believe certain categorical things about himself and to get us to obey certain commands, so we arrange verses into categories to our liking which will make it easier for us to find out what God wants us to believe and do. But, the bible was not given to us as a topical arrangement of subjects. Bible scholar Gordon Fee writes, “God did not choose to give us a series of timeless, non-culture-bound theological propositions to be believed and imperatives to be obeyed”, yet we treat the bible like this. This is the basis for so many of the topical sermons we preach and hear every Sunday across America, but the bible’s harder than that, and to force that framework into it is to assume that the bible’s easy and that there's no wrestling to be done and no hard thinking involved. We want convenient, quick and simple answers to all of life’s toughest problems, but instead the bible gives us Job, Habakkuk, and the account of Joseph instead.
This is also reflects our unwillingness to simply let mystery remain mystery and to confess we don’t know, and then to trust anyway. Sometimes when something doesn’t fit our categories we force it in just to make it fit, or ignore it altogether so that we won’t have to ask the harder questions. We need to think less in categories and more in contexts, otherwise a single author will seem to contradict himself. For example, if we asked, “What does Paul say about marriage?” We come to 1 Corinthians 7:8 “To the unmarried and to widows I say that it is good for them to remain unmarried as I am” but then we see him recommend to the Ephesian congregation in his letter to Timothy, “...I would have younger widows marry…” If we flatly ignore the contexts of both of these passages it looks like they are in conflict. This confusion results from not asking the exegetical questions first, namely what is going on in one congregation that might lead Paul to recommend one course of action and then another course for a different congregation? Paul addresses specific issues in the congregations that he writes to and some of these issues are not clear to us because we only have one side of the correspondence between Paul and his congregations.
The problem here is also that we have allowed the two men who chopped up our bible into chapter and verse divisions to do our thinking for us. Stephen Langton and Robert Stephens have taught us to read our bibles as if every sentence stands on its own weight quite apart from all the other sentences and paragraphs which surround it and in which the authors intended them to be read.
The topical approach is also the root of Systematic Theology, which leads to someone like Wayne Grudem to try and tell us who to vote for with the unspoken question in the background, “what does the bible say about voting” like there is anything in the bible about voting, as though the people in the bible had participation in government like they way we do? Such questions and a priori stand above the congregation with an air of authority and do not allow the congregation itself to wrestle with the text and wrestle we must. We must do the wrestling with the bible until God himself changes our who we are and then causes us walk away in a different manner, (yes this is an allusion to Jacob).
