We have lost a sense of nuance in our society today.  This is the cause of most of our problems in nearly every area of life.  I realize that the two previous sentences don’t seem very…well, nuanced with their strong declarative declarations which don’t invite any further thought or reflection.  But if there is one thing that need not be qualified by nuance it is the fact that we just plain don’t like it…nuance, I mean.  

In the great movie Diner, about college buddies in 1959 Baltimore, Paul Reiser’s character, Modell, says: 

“I don’t like the word nuance. It’s not a real word. Not like gesture. With gesture at least you know where you stand…but nuance?”

I’m not sure if that line was written into the script by Paul Reiser or if he was improvising and Barry Levinson decided to keep it in the movie.  I tend to think that the line was Paul Reiser’s.  Many years later when he starred in the great sitcom Mad About You, his production company was called Nuance Productions.  In any event, it is so true.  Nuance seems like sort of a slippery word. The word suggests the idea that often there can be very fine, subtle shades of difference which can and should affect our understanding of something.  A more proper dictionary definition is “a subtle difference in shade of meaning, expression, or sound.”  We might talk about the nuances of facial expression or body language which, though seemingly just small things, can change our perception of a person or a situation.  A failure to recognize that such nuances do exist can lead to some pretty off kilter conclusions, convictions, and conflagrations. 

Whereas the possibility for this exists in many areas of life and thought, I am most concerned by how the lack of nuanced understanding has affected language, and particularly the language of scripture.  This has sometimes led to faulty interpretations of key scriptures.  This, in turn, has contributed to confusion and misunderstanding within our churches, our political landscape, our national life, and our world.  Often this misunderstanding involves the relationship between church and state and our place as Christians therein.  One would think that after a couple thousand years and several wars we would have this pretty much hammered out.  But not so much.  This stems from a misreading of scripture caused by disregard for the nuances of ancient languages, customs, and contexts.  

My thinking along these lines is, obviously, my opinion and understanding. Yet, I feel qualified to speak to issues that involve the interpretation of the Bible and how it intersects with and speaks to many of the issues of our day.  I have been a pastor preaching and teaching for 35 years. I have a couple of degrees which reflect 8 years of training. I continue to read widely from many different perspectives including and especially those with which I disagree.  I am certainly not claiming that my knowledge or understanding is perfect.  And one thing that is essential for the church today is to sometimes agree to disagree.   There are a few things that as Christians we must agree on—the bodily resurrection of Jesus, creation ex nihilo by God, the inspiration and sufficiency of the Bible, to name a couple.  But on some things, there can be disagreement between Christians without casting aspersions on the faith of those with whom we disagree. 

So, I’ll be writing about some things which seem to tend to get mixed up because of a failure to grasp the subtlety and nuance of the biblical languages and cultures.  And we can understand this if we just think about the English language and how much of the meaning of what we say is nuanced by our body language, inflection, tone, as well as the words we use.  I have great respect for people who learn to speak other languages.  When I was in seminary we had several students from other nations.  It was amazing to me how well they could speak English.  But they frequently told me that English was hard to learn.  It wasn’t so much the actual words that were difficult.  But it was the syntax, the grammar, often the spelling of a word, the pronunciation, and the nuances of the language which can only be learned after being immersed in it.   

I have had three years of New Testament Greek, one ill-fated year of Old Testament Hebrew, and three years of German in high school.  German isn’t the most difficult language to learn, but there are some things that don’t make sense unless you know the subtleties of the language.  My favorite was the day we were reading the phrase “Du hast einen vogel.”  This phrase literally means “you have a bird” but it’s used to call someone crazy.  Perhaps this is where we get the idea of a bird brain. 

In the Bible I think one of the most misinterpreted and misapplied passages is Matthew 24.  Soon I’ll be writing about that and giving my understanding of what Jesus is talking about and, more, importantly not talking about.  Will it be my own understanding of it and can we agree to disagree about my conclusions?  Yes, on both counts.  However, I believe careful consideration of the Greek text and the subtle nuance of the words and grammar used by Jesus in Matthew’s account lend themselves quite naturally to my conclusions. And I will just say for now that they are much different than what I have read and heard for years.  There is one thing that continues to bother me which I hear all the time from Christians.  Okay, there are many things, but particularly irksome is when someone says “Well, I just take the Bible literally” in their defense of a particular viewpoint or interpretation.   What they are saying, usually, is they are reading an English translation or version of the Bible most of which are very good and certainly consider the original languages, contexts, genres, and other factors.  But what I have found is that even the best English translations betray, often in key passages, the biases and viewpoint of the translators, editors, and even publisher.  Does this mean that they are bad? No, it just means that maybe there are more things going on in the original languages, context, and culture than even the most “literal” versions can convey. I’ll be talking more about this in future posts. 

It takes effort and humility to really understand the subtle shadings of many things in The Bible and in life.  This is certainly true of our nation currently in which political opinions and positions are more extreme than ever before.  Yes, that’s a pretty extreme statement.  Maybe I should limit it my lifetime.  Yet, I’ve read and studied a lot of history, and I believe it’s true.  There’s an unwillingness to put forth the effort required to really understand the issues of the day and acknowledge that they can be very complicated. In between total black and total white there are various shades of gray which need to be understood and assimilated into an informed and careful approach.  Simplistic, wooden approaches to address complex things won’t do.  I love what H.L. Mencken once said:  

“For every complex problem there is an answer which is clear, simple and wrong.”  

We often talk about George Orwell as an oracle of future reality.  But Walker Percy wrote a book back in 1971 which is just so prescient it’s bizarre.  I read it in 1985 at Indiana University at which time it seemed like so much science fiction.  I was reminded of this book in this excellent piece by Russell Moore.  To summarize, Percy’s 1971 novel, Love in Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World, describes a time very much like we are experiencing today.  He writes of a time when the country is divided into two factions, what we would call the Left and the Right.  The Right is driven by resentment toward minorities and rage at elites while the left is motivated by ideologies of sexual liberation and secularism. Religion and politics become intertwined.  The main character, Tom More, observes that there are left states and right states, left towns and right towns, even left movies and right movies.  The center is gone.  He says, “They want either total dogmatic freedom or total dogmatic unfreedom, and the one thing that makes them unhappy is something in between.” 

In between the extremes are the nuances and subtle shadings which lead to greater understanding, solutions, and truth.  Too often, when nuance is lost so is the truth—whether it’s in understanding the Bible or parsing the time we live in.