Generalizations are a Valid Strategy for Representational Thinkers
By Jeannie Pace
The Bible invites us to join an ancient and sacred quest to know God, to know the world we live in, and our place in it. However, for many the Bible can be confusing and ambiguous. There are many strange and complex narratives in the Bible. There are many events that are non-repeatable and statistically improbable.
Why would I scaffold my faith on writings like this?
The Bible often blocks us from seeking clear answers but herds us toward a more interesting quest. The Bible presents us with an invitation to explore. What if, during my quest to know God, I had a strategy to deduct from these one-time, non-repeatable events? What if I could extrapolate a general conclusion from any particular passage, event or example of faith? What if I could derive a general principle from particulars?
There is such a skill. It is called “generalizing” or “making a generalization.” This is an important life skill, as well as a skill for helping us decode the Bible. Generalizations provide language for our ideas by creating metaphors and concepts that allow us to perceive the world and our realities.
Research by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By emphasizes this point.
“Concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They govern our everyday functioning – down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.”
Generalizations provide concrete concepts that help us interpret our reality – the seen and the unseen reality. Generalizations provide a framework for organizing Scripture into general principles for quick recall, enabling Christians to live wisely and represent God’s promises quickly and accurately.
The purpose of God’s Word to us – the Bible – is to make us wise and grow us to maturity. Becoming mature disciples who wander along an unscripted pilgrimage of faith will be a lifelong process.
But like a wise parent equips their children with a skill set for navigating their own ups and downs of life, God provides His Word to guide His children.
How exactly do we extract the wisdom provided by our heavenly Father? Biblical writers living in different times and various places wrote for different reasons and under different circumstances modeled a strategy for us. Ancient authors respected their past and their history and transposed it to the present. This allowed the past to continue speaking. We should learn to utilize this same process to work the past to guide the needs of the present.
A remarkable passage in Deuteronomy 5:1-5 models this process for us. In this text Moses relays the Ten Commandments to a new generation of Israelites living forty years after the commandments were first given on Mt. Sinai.
“And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them, “Hear, O Israel, the statutes and the rules that I speak in your hearing today, and you shall learn them and be careful to do them. The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. Not with our fathers did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today. The Lord spoke with you face to face at the mountain, out of the midst of the fire, while I stood between the Lord and you at that time, to declare to you the word of the Lord. For you were afraid because of the fire, and you did not go up into the mountain. ” (Emphasis added.)
With us…with you…to you. How can this be? The whole point of the forty years wilderness wandering was for the disobedient original generation to die in the wilderness so God could start over again with a new batch of Israelites. So why is the Deuteronomy author treating this new generation as if they were present forty years ago when they were not?
The second generation was to see themselves as the “exodus generation” to whom God is present and accessible – not a deity from days of old. Deuteronomy reimagines God for a new time and place so that the past would have spiritual vitality in the present.
This passage shows us how the Bible models the process of generalization that reveals what God keeps speaking. As responsible people of faith we are to strike out in bold faith to discern what it means to live God’s way for our time – not by scripting that for us but by modeling for us a process that we have to own ourselves.
In his book, How the Bible Actually Works, author Peter Enns points out that ancient writers recorded the past, but also how they perceived God in the present. That’s why we cannot leave the past in the past. It must be transposed to the present. Ancient authors did this not just because the stories held power, but because of what these stories said about God. They were the means by which the people connected with the God of old and brought this God into the present. This helped the Israelite nation force a link with God at crisis moments like the fall of the kingdoms, followed by being ruled by a succession of foreigners for centuries afterwards.
The Bible models for us the normalcy of seeing the presence of God for ourselves in our here and now. In his book Peter Enns repeatedly points out, “Our sacred responsibility is to engage faithfully and seriously enough the stories of the past in order to faithfully and seriously imagine God in our present moment.”
God in His wisdom saw to it that we would not know Him through human wisdom. For those who are being saved we know the means of accessing the power of God is through the Holy Spirit, revelations (promises, covenants) and faith (I Corinthians 1:18ff.) These revelations correctly represent the past, analyze the present circumstances and predict the future.
The question every generation must resolve and pass on is “What is God like?” Generalizing a principle from a particular narrative, promise, parable or revelation is a valid strategy for representational thinkers because it allows us to transpose the faithful God of the past into our current roles and life decisions.
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