Reading a Letter

Twenty-one of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament are letters. Every one of them was written to answer something, by someone who knew what, to people who knew it too. You have the answers. You have to work out the questions, and until you do, a line from a letter is a sentence overheard through a wall.

Lesson 9 of 12 · Reading a letter

A letter answers a situation, and the situation is not in the letter; it has to be reconstructed from what the letter says back. Its commands were to a church before they are to you, and its most quoted lines mean what the sentences around them mean, not what they mean alone. A letter was written to be read aloud, whole, in one sitting, to the people it was for, and that is still the first way to read one. Read it that way and its sentences settle into an argument. Take a line out and it will say almost anything.

Half a conversation

Paul’s first letter to Corinth answers, in turn, a report he had received and a letter they had sent him. He says so.

“For it has been reported to me concerning you, my brothers, by those who are from Chloe’s household, that there are contentions among you.” 1 Corinthians 1:11 · WEB
Answering a report: Chloe’s people have told him about the quarrels.
“Now concerning the things about which you wrote to me: it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” 1 Corinthians 7:1 · WEB
Answering their letter: now concerning the things you wrote about.
“I marvel that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ to a different “good news”,” Galatians 1:6 · WEB
Answering a crisis, with no thanksgiving at all, which every other letter of his has.

Their letter is lost. So is Chloe’s report. What survives is Paul’s side, and a reader has to infer what Corinth asked from what Paul answered, the way you can reconstruct one end of a telephone call. Seven chapters in, the phrase now concerning recurs like a man working down a list of questions, and every time it appears the question is missing. That is not a defect in the letter. It is what a letter is. The missing half is the situation, and the situation is what the letter means.

The shape of a letter

Paul’s letters follow a pattern their first readers would have recognized from every letter they had ever received: the sender, the recipients, a greeting, a thanksgiving, then the business, then greetings and a blessing. Inside the business there is a second pattern, and it is the one that matters for reading. First what God has done. Then, and only then, what you are to do. The hinge between the two is usually one word.

Therefore I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service. — Romans 12:1 · WEB

Read the comment on A Living Sacrifice

Therefore. Eleven chapters of what God has done in Christ, and then therefore, and then five chapters of what a church should do about it. The order is the theology. A command in a letter is never the beginning of the argument; it is the consequence of something the letter has already said, and a command read without its therefore is an instruction with the reason cut off.

ἐπιστολή epistolḗ G1992

from ἐπιστέλλω; a written message:--"epistle," letter.

The word simply means a message sent, a letter. It is the same word for the letter the Jerusalem council sent to Antioch (Acts 15:30) and for the letters of introduction traveling teachers carried (2 Corinthians 3:1). Nothing about the word says scripture. These were letters, written and carried and opened, and they became scripture by being kept and read, which is the way a letter should still be read.

A line out of a letter

The most quoted sentence in Philippians is a promise of strength for anything, and it is printed on a great many things.

“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Philippians 4:13 · WEB
The line, as it is printed on things.
“I know how to be humbled, and I also know how to abound. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret both to be filled and to be hungry, both to abound and to be in need.” Philippians 4:12 · WEB
The sentence before it, which is about being hungry.

Read together, the two say something narrower and better than the first says alone. Paul has learned to be content with a full stomach and an empty one, and the strength he speaks of is the strength to go without. Lifted out, the line is about achievement. In place, it is about hunger. Nothing has been mistranslated. A sentence has been cut off from its therefore.

Here a genuine question should be marked. Some of what Paul commands was addressed to one church in one city, about a matter of that city, and some was addressed to every church. The letters do not label which is which, and readers have argued for centuries over cases like the covering of women’s heads at Corinth, which Paul grounds in creation and also in what was shameful there. This lesson does not settle those arguments. It only says how they have to be conducted: by reading the whole letter for what it was answering, not by quoting the line.

Read it whole

The first hearing of any New Testament letter was aloud, in a gathered church, from beginning to end, once. Paul expected it and said so.

When this letter has been read among you, cause it to be read also in the assembly of the Laodiceans, and that you also read the letter from Laodicea. — Colossians 4:16 · WEB

Read the comment on The Letter from Laodicea

When this letter has been read among you, have it read in Laodicea too, and read theirs. Nobody in Colossae heard chapter three on its own. They heard a letter, as one thing, with its greeting and its argument and its therefore in order, and the parts made sense because the whole was in the room. That is still the first way to read one, and it takes about the time of a sermon. Even so it may be hard, and the New Testament admits it.

as also in all of his letters, speaking in them of these things. In those, there are some things that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unsettled twist, as they also do to the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. — 2 Peter 3:16 · WEB

Read the comment on Our Beloved Brother Paul

Some things in them hard to understand. Peter says that of Paul, in scripture, and adds that people were already twisting the hard parts. Reading a letter whole will not make Paul easy. It will make him say what he said.

How to read a letter

Read it through in one sitting, aloud if you can, before you read any part of it. Work out what it was answering from what it says back, and write the situation down in a sentence. Find its therefore, and read every command as coming after it. Of any line you already know, read the sentence before and the sentence after, and let them correct what you thought it meant. Then ask what it says to a church now, which is the question it was written to answer for a church then.