One of my favorite scriptures starts off “Test everything, hold fast what is good.” 1 Thes 5:21. If feels like like a license to explore, to find true limits vs. false, to not take everything at face value. Work to keep what is good, and reject evil, seems a license to fail fast and often, in order to succeed. Great practical advice, it seems, with a few guidelines. The first guideline is that “good” is consistent with the God’s revelation in scripture, not just “it works” in a short term sense. The second detecting evil is harder than it may first appear, since it is often cloaked in deception. Tests must be defined carefully, results measured with a true yardstick.
I was surprised to see the NASB had changed the meaning of this scripture! I was recommended the NASB about a year ago as more accurate and less political. So far we’ve gotten along fine, the NASB and me. Until 1 Thessalonians 5:21, that is. The NASB says “examine everything” instead of “test everything”. You have to read the footnote to find they admit Paul meant every teaching must be tested. Hmmm.
What is the difference? Examination carries a notion of knowing the right answer as you query a student to see if the student knows the right answer. Only God could examine us perfectly. Examination from the student’s perspective carries a notion of preparation and then regurgitation, a rather passive uncritical thinking sort of activity, the exact sort of thing we complain schools are making students do way too much of these days.
Testing, on the other hand, doesn’t care how good it sounds/looks on paper, we are going to try it out. We won’t just examine the wires, we’ll speak into the mike. We won’t just measure the kite, we’ll go see how high we can fly it. We won’t just review theory, we’ll look at the practical fruit. We even mimic the acceleration of time by creating or observing especially concentrated versions of the teaching, called a stress test. We disable primary systems to try out the back-ups peri0dically so that when we need them they operate. It is active testing that makes me believe a system works, not mere examination.
I suspect the author Paul meant “test”. Roger Williams’ forte was his courage to test an implementation of church and state separation, and to tweak it until the model could operate in stability. The difference matters. If we use NASB’s “examine” we might never try out ideas that are inconsistent with prior interpretations of scripture, and as a result we might never learn newer truer ways to implement scripture. Many of the best ideas initially appear impossible or controversial. That said, the arc of history is long, and some ideas that bore much initial fruit cannot sustain fruit-bearing over 10–14 generations. The test cycle is a very long one. Test carefully.
Originally published on Medium in We are all Overcomers.
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