There's a type of Bible "teaching" that, although it's thousands of years old, we see it rear its ugly head repetitively in church after church at 11 AM Sunday after Sunday. This type of teaching started with the ancient Greeks in regard to their precious Iliad and The Odyssey.
From there, the Jews adopted it because there were parts of the Old Testament they decided were embarrassing. Still alive, the church fathers, going against the teaching method of Christ and the Apostles, brought it into the church.
There's a name for the method; it's called the allegorical. Its adherents are able to find hidden meanings in the words of the Scriptures, and, in so doing, twist the clear and present meaning of the literal words into something completely different than what the author has written. The peddlers of this method find a meaning below the surface. For example, the preacher deliteralizes Second Coming of Christ and finds the hidden meaning: the Second Coming becomes Christ's coming into the heart of the believer at his conversion. The fire on an Old Testament altar becomes the Holy Spirit.
The congregation, hearing this, oohs and ahhs over the brilliance of the pastor who is coming up with these hidden meanings out of thin air, little realizing that the Bible has now become putty in his hands.
Augustine, often referred to as a brilliant theologian, was an allegorizer on steroids as we see in his treatment of the story of the Good Samaritan. I have reproduced what he did to the story word for word.
Read it and weep:
"A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho; Adam himself is meant; Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace, from whose blessedness Adam fell; Jericho means the moon, and signifies our mortality, because it is born, waxes, wanes, an dies. Thieves are the devil and his angels. Who stripped him, namely; of his immortality; and beat him, by persuading him to sin; and left him half-dead, because in so far as man can understand and know God, he lives, but in so far as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead; he is therefore called half-dead. The priest and the Levite who saw him and passed by, signify the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament which could profit nothing for salvation. Samaritan means Guardian, and therefore the Lord Himself is signified by this name. The binding of the wounds is the restraint of sin. Oil is the comfort of good hope; wine the exhortation to work with fervent spirit. The beast is the flesh in which He deigned to come to us. The being set upon the beast is belief in the incarnation of Christ. The inn is the Church, where travelers returning to their heavenly country are refreshed after pilgrimage. The morrow is after the resurrection of the Lord. The two pence are either the two precepts of love, or the promise of this life and of that which is to come. The innkeeper is the Apostle (Paul). The supererogatory payment is either his counsel of celibacy, or the fact that he worked with his own hands lest he should be a burden to any of the weaker brethren when the Gospel was new, though it was lawful for him 'to live by the gospel.'"
The method didn't cease to exist with Augustine. You've heard pastors use it time and time again: Christ calming the storm becomes Christ solving the storms of our problems; David's slaying of the giant Goliath becomes how to deal with our "giant problems." Christ's resurrection becomes His "comeback" and "you can have a comeback too."
If this is what you're hearing at church, go out and find a Bible teacher who uses the method of Christ and the Apostles: the literal, grammatical, and historical method. Start this Sunday and don't quit until you do.
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