Words'nTone

Recently a friend and former student ran a thread through email on verses and texts that are often abused and misused and wrongly interpreted.  The list went on and on…I didn’t mention Mark 1:17 (cf. Matthew 4:19), but this is certainly an abused text…but harder to reveal as such.  In the years I have been a Christian, I’d say, aside from the reference to John 3:16 and Revelation 3:20 (“Behold I stand at the door and knock”), Mark 1:17 and Matthew 4:19 have been some of the most quoted and referred to verses I have heard from the lips of Christian leaders.  Ranking right up there with Galatians 2:20 (“I have been crucified with Christ”—a Rough Cut exegetical essay forthcoming someday, I promise), Jesus’ words about becoming “fishers of men” is a staple reference to refer to the way one is to be a Christian, especially in regard to “witnessing.” I, in some measure agree, but not for the same reasons given by most (e.g., fishers of men = witnessing, catching people for Christ).  In fact all the popular verses mentioned above will deserve Rough Cut time on this site!  But this one was well worth the study time.  In preparing this Rough Cut I was struck by the fact that the interpretation I was positing made it difficult for this popular verse to be applied.  My interpretation didn’t seem practical.  I have always struggled with the fixation with application.  I wrote in the fishers of men Rough Cut:

It can be too easy to resort to popular interpretations because they are, however misleading (away from the text), often easier to grasp.  We shouldn’t exclude difficult to understand allusions just because they are harder to relate to, or are more difficult to apply personally.  I pause to point out that we, in the contemporary American Church, are fixated on application.  There is a tendency to skip and even to eschew the vital step of interpretation (by which I mean exegesis).  Somewhere along the way, we abandoned the discipline of exegesis and biblical interpretation in exchange for American pragmatism.  The Bible often becomes, with each individual part (i.e., each text, each verse, and even sometimes just a word here and there in a verse), a utilitarian tool to give detail instructions and application—specific do’s and don’ts.  Every text has to be practical.  This makes it all the harder to offer interpretations that—on the surface—do not seem practical, or easily applied.

This fixation on application and practicality makes it especially difficult to offer interpretations of popular verses that are hard to understand and difficult to apply.  Such fixation on texts having to always be practical can lead us away from what God is actually saying through a text (like “I will make you become fishers of men” or “I have been crucified with Christ”).  As my essay on fishers of men points out, we should seek to understand the significance of a text first, then—and only then—can we apply what God has said.

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For the full essay…“Fishers of men” reconsidered: first significance, then application (Mark 1:17)