From the Pastor's Study
From the Pastor’s Study Recognizing and Confronting Bias March 29, 2023
A few years ago, a colleague was asked to evaluate the work of a youth pastor in the area. My colleague had significant experience in the area of youth work, and when he interviewed and observed the youth pastor, he concluded that the youth pastor was not doing a good job and, indeed, really didn’t have the gifts for working with youth. My colleague didn’t want to sound harsh in his evaluation, so he wrote it with gentle and kind words. He tried to be clear, however, in saying that the youth pastor probably should find work where he could use his gifts. Unfortunately my colleague was unable to attend the meeting where his evaluation was read, and the council of that church heard him saying that the youth pastor was qualified and gifted for youth ministry. My colleague asked me to read the letter and because I had had a conversation with him regarding the youth pastor, I had no problem understanding what he had written. It was clear to me, but, apparently, the council had misread the evaluation. I later discovered that there were key people on the council that supported the youth pastor completely and were biased toward him and therefore misinterpreted the evaluation. The predisposition of those key council members led to a faulty interpretation of the evaluation.
A few weeks ago, I was talking with a friend about his pastor, and he told me that he thought his pastor was completely in error on a fairly controversial subject, the Human Sexuality Report that was adopted by our denomination at Synod 2022. His pastor, my friend told me, disagreed with the report, particularly the part that addressed homosexual tendencies and practices. I told him that I disagreed with his pastor, and I said that I agreed with the report which says that homosexual practice goes against the teachings of Scripture and should be included in what is sometimes called unchastity. My friend asked me, “How is it that two pastors of the same denomination, reading the same Bible, having gone to the same seminary, can disagree so strongly on what the Bible says?” I told him it was because his pastor was wrong, and I am right, but that was a quick and unhelpful answer.
The reason that we disagree is most likely we are reading the Bible with preconceived perspectives. Before he had thought about things carefully, this other pastor had come to the conclusion that the current psychological and medical stance on homosexuality is right, and he approached Scripture with that predisposition. I like to think that I come to Scripture with no predispositions, but that would be self-deceptive. I happen to believe that the recent changes in psychological and medical teachings regarding homosexuality have occurred because of extreme pressure by the LGTBQ+ community, and thus their conclusions are biased and possibly incorrect. I read Scripture from that perspective. I too have a bias, and I must recognize that.
So, who is right? If we all come to Scripture with preconceived ideas, how can we really know what Scripture says? The answer to this question is not hard, but to arrive at a good understanding of Scripture does take some hard work. I told my friend that what I needed to do was hours of research, checking the original use of words in both the Greek and Hebrew, studying both the grammatical and historical context. I plan on doing some of that, but that won’t happen this week. In addition, I want to try to understand the other pastor’s interpretation so that I can see if there is any validity to it. If I don’t understand how he arrived at his conclusions, I will not be able to answer him with my own. And, of course I also need to ensure that my own understanding is not tainted by my predisposition toward the controversy.
This sounds like a lot of work, and it is. Most of those reading this don’t have the tools or time to do the hard work necessary to dig into the original text and understand the culture and events that gave rise to it. We must rely on the conclusions of others. When we do that, however, we must recognize that all of us have a bias and we have preconceived notions of what is right and correct. When reading the conclusions of someone else, we must seek to understand their bias, but, even more importantly, we must understand our own biases. If we do that, we can be more certain that we are understanding the message of the Bible as the original authors intended it to be understood. Thankfully, we have access to many good scholars who do their best to recognize their own biases and who work hard at understanding what the text originally meant. While they also are influenced by their culture and time, they strive to minimize that influence. With regard to the Human Sexuality Report, I am quite confident that its authors dug deeply into the Bible and sought to understand it as it was meant to be understood. Is their understanding perfect? Probably not, but they are working hard at understanding what Scripture is saying and not making Scripture say what they want to hear. I know some of the authors, have studied under them, and I believe that they are people of integrity when it comes to reading and interpreting the Bible. I trust their work, although I do want to do my own so that I can speak with some authority to the controversy.
My colleague was quite disappointed that the council of the church who oversaw the work of the youth pastor misread his evaluation. He thought he had been clear, but the bias of some created the possibility of a misinterpretation. The biblical authors wrote clearly, and they would not want to be misinterpreted. They would be disappointed if we didn’t do the hard work (or at least rely on the hard work of others) to understand what they wrote. The Bible is infallible, we believe, for the Holy Spirit guided the authors to write what they did. Our interpretation and understanding is open to fallacy, so we have to be careful when we read it, not making it say what we want it to say but seeking to understand it as it was meant to be understood.
Pastor Gary
