2 Peter 1:19-21 (New King James Version)
19 And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts; 20 knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, 21 for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.
Verse 20, above, is rendered in the NIV this way:
20Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation.
As I meditated on this, I was thinking about the problems of interpretation down through history and to the present day. Our own -- or our "private" -- interpretations often become dogma.
Here is the dictionary.com explanation of dogma:
1. a system of principles or tenets, as of a church.
2. a specific tenet or doctrine authoritatively laid down, as by a church: the dogma of the Assumption.
3. prescribed doctrine: political dogma.
4. a settled or established opinion, belief, or principle.
Above, the NIV translation makes the most sense, that Peter is trying to say that the Word of God is not man-made. But I also like the King James rendering because it suggests that prophecy and biblical mystery is enigmatic and not subject to human interpretation -- that is, it does not or should not yield intractable dogmas.
The history of the church is one of trying to establish reliable dogma:
There were the early arguments over the identity and deity of Christ that led to the establishment of the Trinity doctrine; there was the huge split between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox; there was the later Protestant Reformation that led to schisms of all kinds and establishment of new dogmas; the ideas that became dogmas like Arminius' and Calvin's teachings; and the rise of dogmatic movements within Pentecostalism, Fundamentalism, and even Evangelicalism -- including the prophecy dialogs that rose from John Nelson Darby. The list of the establishment of competing dogmas is enormous.
In the Wiki article, it says of dogma: The term derives from Greek δόγμα "that which seems to one, opinion or belief" and that from δοκέω (dokeo), "to think, to suppose, to imagine"
Basically, dogma is our suppositions raised to absolutes. These become organization-foundations that are more immovable than God Himself.
But the church is moving into a new milieu ahead: a world of disintegration and reintegration.
I thought of this illustration: If you take a blender and put in various ingredients, then turn it on slowly, the pieces begin to disintegrate before they reintegrate into something else. At the close of the Modern Age, the blender was beginning to be ratcheted up and absolutes began disintegrating. The future -- what we now call post-Modern because we don't know what it will be -- looks to be a reintegrating into a new concoction.
With regard to church dogmas, this pressure places them under intense examination and a resulting disintegration into something else. These dogmata may have institutions behind them, but the dogmas themselves are breaking down. What will emerge is not a new dogma, but an integration of what the faith is, what it really means. It doesn't mean the dissolution of what was past, but a reconstitution that points to what it really is.
We have interpreted scripture until we are blue in the face, so to speak. We have strained it through various grids, tweaking as we went, and even going to war over it. In fact, often, our goal was to establish the complete credibility of our suppositions about the message of Jesus Christ. That would make us secure, and security is not actually faith. What we need more now is the ability to adapt.
The Modern Age was about nationalism and nation-states: the post-Modern world is about globalism. The mindset of the Modern Age was redux and "we-they" thinking: but the new world is "both-and". The blender is a-stirrin'.
