Review: Hugh Wetmore, ‘Why Christians Disagree When They Interpret the Bible: Finding Unity in our Loyalty to the Scriptures’, Cape Town (South Africa): Struik Christian Books, 2001.

This is a book by an Evangelical (Wetmore served as national coordinator of the Evangelical Alliance of South Africa) for Evangelicals. If you roughly divide Christian theology (from right to left) into Sectarian, Fundamentalist, Conservative Evangelical, Progressive Evangelical and Liberal/Radical, this book is somewhere between the two broad Evangelical camps: a bit more progressive than, say, pre-Lausanne Evangelicalism, but it wouldn’t have a complete affinity with Sojourners! (Sort of like the A (+)

my University English teacher sometimes gave my assignments.)

Sectarians/Fundamentalists wouldn’t like the suggestion in the last chapter: ‘We [should] seek to find consensus by… studying the Scriptures together with other believers from different backgrounds’ . Nor would they like the main reason for Wetmore’s (later) habit of carrying the whole Bible around with him rather than just the New Testament – so that he can imbibe the social justice emphases of the prophets. And some of them would rankle at his critique of Dispensationalism, and his general sympathy for a Pentecostal hermeneutic as one of the legitimate ways of reading the Bible.

But Liberals would sigh at his ‘too much Paul too little Jesus’ emphases, his occasional sexist language, and his preference for the NIV.

But I think it’s a good book – particularly for Fundamentalists and Evangelicals. I can’t remember him mentioning the inerrancy issue – interesting, in an Evangelical book of 229 pages about the Bible! He wants us to combine ‘grace’ _and_ ‘truth’. He is passionate about Christianity unity – what divides us is much less important than what unites us. He tackles courageously, and sensibly, some key issues about which Christians differ – like relating to the State (the book of course has a South African pre-and-post-Apartheid flavour), Divorce and Remarriage, the role of women in Church leadership etc.

However, I’d have liked an understanding of ‘the Gospel’ rooted in the life and ministry of Jesus rather than almost solely based on Paul’s ‘sin and salvation’ theology. There’s little attention giving to wrestling with the basic question ‘What do we mean by “God’s Word’?”‘. Wetmore has a post-Gutenberg inclination to align that concept solely with a written Bible.

His main message: we interpret the Bible differently because _we_ are different. This diversity has two main dimensions – pre-understanding, and personality. So we have rational vs intuitive interpreters, left-brainers and right-brainers. We have those who read the Bible from a position of social privilege vs. those who are on the margins of society. Important principles, those…

The ‘Earth Mother’ explanation of the apparent Pauline prohibition against women teaching men (pages 139-141) is worth the price of the book.

And the reminder that there is no fixed hermeneutic, but rather that we bring many mind-sets to the biblical text, is a truism which apparently needs constant iteration.

Buy it to give to your dogmatic Christian friends. The invitation to read the Scriptures with humility, an open mind and a teachable spirit is something which could change their thinking about the Word of God, for the better.

Rowland Croucher