As Long as We’re Talking About Homosexuality…

May 11, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 6 Comments

As I’m sure many of you already know, a group of LGBTQ Wheaton College students and alum have launched a page called One Wheaton.

In response, Wheaton President Phil Ryken issued this message.

For the past couple of decades, those of us in evangelical settings have been able to watch the homosexuality conversation from afar, as though “out there” in the world of the “faltering mainline churches” were the only place that Christians had to talk about these things. Recent conversations in several different settings, as well as this move by Wheaton alum, are underscoring that it is no longer possible for more evangelical types to avoid the conversation.

And hopefully we’ll realize that this inability to avoid the matter is a good thing. Most of us have waited far too long to engage and to thoughtfully process what we say, how we say it, and what it means to look like Jesus while holding to positions that others in our community find not merely offensive, but often deeply hurtful and even damaging.

Can we do it? Can we have a productive conversation that will move us more toward Christ-like love?

We’ll see…

Sex Ed

May 11, 2011 in Humor, Media with 0 Comments

I never liked The Wonder Years. I the problem had to do with the pain of self-realization. I was right about the age of the characters and didn’t like my life being shown up for the total uncoolness it really was.

However, there was one scene that I have always loved, and I share it with you now. It pertains to the wonder of sex ed, and the resolution of the great mystery of gym coach’s unmarried status. Enjoy.

Homosexuality in the News

May 11, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 23 Comments

Yesterday my Twitter and Facebook feeds were keeping me abreast of two rather different developments in the world-wide attempt to figure out where homosexual practice fits into life and law, culture and church.

On the one hand, there was the passage of 10A in the PCUSA, a change to the ordination standards that was crafted in order to allow persons in same-gender relationships to pursue ordination. Of course, they still have to be found ordainable on other grounds as well.

From the other side of the world, and pushing in much the opposite direction, it seemed as though the Ugandan Parliament was set to resume debate on its anti-homosexuality bill.

Click here to download the PDF file.

No doubt, the framers of the legislation in Uganda would see the juxtaposition as an affirmation of their contention that forces in favor of homosexuality are largely external, and forces of “activists” that would undermine “the people of Uganda.”

I find myself in a strange place in responding to these two events.

Although I am opposed to homosexual practice on religious grounds, it is precisely because I oppose it on religious grounds that I think the PCUSA is right to wrestle with the issue and take a stand one way or the other and that the people of Uganda are wrong to criminalize homosexual behavior.

One thing that traditionalists too often forget is that in the place where Paul seems to come down hardest on sexual immorality he confines his sphere of judgment to the church (1 Cor 5). It is the place of the Christian community to establish and enforce a godly morality among its own.

“But what have I to do with judging outsiders? Those who are outside God judges.”

This does not mean, of course, that we have no responsibilities for outsiders. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves; we are called to do to our neighbors as we would have done unto us.

And that is why in cases where religious or cultural convictions are leading to the punishment of behavior I disagree with on religious grounds, I feel convicted to oppose that law on precisely religious grounds.

What would I want done unto me? Would I want Muslim law and cultural requirements for dress, marriage, and schooling imposed on me and my family? If I would not want this done unto me as the “other,” then I am forbidden, by the gospel itself, of imposing Christian law on another.

The intent of the law in Uganda is, among other things, “to prohibit and penalize homosexual behavior and related practices” (3.b).

Several months ago, I petitioned all my good-natured readers for a reprieve from the word “homophobia.” Reading through the Uganda legislation, I know of no better word for what it embodies.

The legislation is striving to protect people from any number of important things. It protects victims who are forced to have sex by people who are in authority over them, who are minors, who have disabilities, who are drugged in order to become a sex object.

But protecting people from those who are using sex as power is not the same as protecting the country from homosexuality. The Bill embodies baseless stereotypes and rank fear that a gay person will force someone to have gay sex against his or her will (and perhaps transmit HIV thereby).

Sexual crimes are heinous. And this bill confuses the idea of sexual assault with homosexuality. While strong legislation against sexual assault should be applauded, at the bottom of the list of the sexual assaults (such as the ones mentioned above), the bill includes “repeat offenders.”

To be repeatedly convicted of same-sex intimacy is tantamount to raping a child or invalid according to this legislation.

And this is why I oppose such bans on homosexuality. It confuses sex between consenting adults whom one thinks ought not to consent with sex between someone who is wielding coercive power and a true victim. The former may be immoral or a bad idea, but this is categorically different from sexual assault.

Word on the street is that Uganda has taken the bill off the agenda. I’m glad of that. For one more day I can feel like my gay Ugandan neighbor has been loved like my straight American self.

The Church’s Jesus: On Not Overdoing It

May 10, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

Over the next few days I will likely be saying a bit more about the church’s Jesus, as I began doing yesterday.

But before I get deeper into this, I want to speak a word of balance. Yesterday I made some claims about the church’s Jesus being a Jesus that in some ways the academy could never affirm. The church must always stand in the place of rehearsing Jesus not merely as a historical figure but as one who demands that we follow.

And so, in this sense, what the church does with and says about Jesus will always bear a similarity to the Gospels’ original purpose that the “purely academic” study of the Bible cannot, and does not with to, incur.

But…

Where the church’s readings can start to lose their moorings is precisely the place where academic study not only camps out, but even excels and thereby often surpassed the church’s readings.

In a couple of the proposals for theological interpretation I have read, the church’s ideal stance of “obedience” has been held forth as something that places the church closer to the posture of an “ideal reader” of the text than the historical academic readings. But to my mind this concedes too much to the potential response and too little to the historical context.

The first readers of the Bible were not merely worshipers of YHWH or followers of Jesus. They were not merely people who, ideally, would respond to the exhortations or shape their lives in accordance with the narratives.

They were all these things of course.

But they were also Jews living in exile under Babylonian rule. They were also Jews restored to their land in the Persian period and attempting to eke out a living there. They were also caught up in the currents of Roman rule of the Mediterranean world.

To reconstruct the hearing and response of an ideal reader of the text, taking into consideration that such a reader wishes to faithfully respond to God is a necessary component. But it is insufficient. The ideal reader of the text is also situated in a particular historical and cultural context within which the cues, clues, and commands means certain things, carry particular connotations, and aim for faithful response in that historical and cultural context.

The church needs an academy because the academy is always asking what we too often take for granted: “What was this text really trying to say, what response was it truly attempting to elicit?”

For this, we need more than faith. We need history. And for history, we often discover that those without the constraints of prior answers (i.e., an academy that, as such, has no constraint based on an agreed upon a priori right answer) often provide greater illumination than than those for whom history is not the main thing.

So for all that I said, and meant, yesterday about the church needing to say what the academy (as such) cannot, I will not say that people who do not share the church’s faith cannot read the Bible aright. Often, the academy does better with one of the necessary components (a historically viable reading of the text), even while the church’s posture of obedience allows it to affirm another necessary component.

While we in the church say, “God was at work in this history,” we often have to listen to those outside the church to learn better what “this history” is.

The Church’s Jesus and Israel’s God

May 9, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 19 Comments

Last week I had a couple of confessional moments about theological interpretation and the biblical studies academy. My soul, lifted from the experience, now wants to explore a bit more who this Jesus is that I think is worth following–not the academy’s Jesus, but the church’s Jesus.

And it begins with the inseparability of Jesus from Israel’s God.

There are a few things that this could mean. And some of them are (or at least should be) acknowledged by the academy at all times as well. For instance, the connection between Jesus and Israel means that Jesus was a Jew and must be understood (and understandable) as a first century Jew who spoke and acted among other first century Jews. (Though both church and academy have lost sight of this from time to time.)

But the church’s Jesus is not merely a historical religious phenomenon.

The church’s Jesus is the one in whom and through whom Israel’s God is bringing about the fulfillment of God’s promises to that people. And so, when we go to study the church’s Jesus we find that each of the four Gospels demands of us that we interpret the Jesus story as the culmination of the Israel story.

Matthew invites us to consider what we are about to see in Jesus as the end of the era marked by Babylonian captivity, the fulfillment of the covenant promises to Abraham, and the realization of God’s promise to David. The whole story of Israel as such is telescoped into a genealogy marked by these three: Abraham, David, Exile… Christ.

The point of the generations is not merely that time has passed or that history is being observed. In Israel’s story these moments are marked by the dramatically intervening hand of God–for deliverance, yes, but even more so for promise of a better future. The claim of the genealogy is that the God of Israel is at work again, and that this Jesus can only be rightly understood as the one in whom this story culminates (or, perhaps, the one who embodies the story within himself).

Analogously, Mark begins his Gospel with a declaration that all we are about to see is in answer to Isaiah’s Second Exodus. The way of the Lord is being prepared by John the Baptist–and that means that when we see Jesus we see the work of the God of Israel, the deliverance and restoration promised through the prophets is coming about.

Do you see how the Gospels take us into an interpretive field that can never be entered by the academy?

We’re talking here about Jesus in relation to God. We’re not merely talking about how to read the books well–though here, perhaps, we could agree even as an academic guild. But we are talking about who Jesus was and what the proper framework is for interpreting his ministry correctly. While “religious studies” must, as an academic discipline, seek to understand Jesus as like unto other turn-of-the-era religious phenomena, the stories of Jesus themselves demand a different starting point.

Jesus, claim the Gospels, is the one thing that the scriptures had prepared us for; he is the one event we were told to expect. Jesus is the fulfillment of Israel’s story, the great and saving act of Israel’s God.

And so when Luke begins with a declaration that the things he writes are things that “have been fulfilled among us,” when his story begins with an old barren couple conceiving a child and moves on to songs of promises fulfilled–the point in all is that we only know this Jesus rightly when we recognize that in his advent the God of Israel is at work again.

And when John begins his Gospel with the words that start all of scripture (in the beginning), we are being told that to understand this theos who is on the scene, we must first understand the theos who created the world and all things in it, according to the biblical narrative.

So when the church whose stories these are begins its creed with an affirmation of the God who created heaven and earth, they are giving a necessary (if insufficient) indicator of the identity of the Jesus from whom we derive our unique identity as a people. The church’s Jesus is the messiah sent and empowered by Israel’s God, by the creator God.

What the academy can never say is what the church must say first and foremost and most clearly, as Peter does in Acts 2: This Jesus was a man attested to by God.

By the One God.

By the God of Israel.

“Israel” is not merely a context within which Jesus makes sense, but also a narrative within which God was at work prior to Jesus and consummately at work through Jesus. This is the church’s Jesus. In part…

Blogsphere Confessional: I Don’t Worship the Academy’s Jesus

May 7, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts with 10 Comments

When I pontificate here on the blog, I am at times hard on the church and celebratory of the academy. Sometimes this is tied to how the church’s theology influences biblical interpretation or how the academy impacts our understanding of what the Bible is and says.

On Thursday, I entered my private confessional booth to acknowledge that I am a theological reader of scripture. In other words, when I grumble about ways that I see theology impacting biblical interpretation I am concerned about how that’s being done, not that people are reading theologically in general.

Today, here in the privacy of my living room, just between you and me (and please don’t tell anyone, this is all very personal), I feel like I’ve just got to confess something about the other side of things. You see, I don’t worship the academy’s Jesus (or the Biblical Studies Academy itself, for that matter).

“The Academy” has all sorts of problems. For one thing, at places like the Society of Biblical Literature you can talk about how the Bible oppresses your people, how it needs to be reread in creative ways if you’re from a certain part of the world or from a particular minority demographic, how its themes impact modern movies, how ancient texts that have nothing to do with the Bible talk about things having nothing to do with the Bible. But reading the Bible as a more or less traditional Christian arouses fierce denunciations–this is not the work of the academic guild!

Now, I must say that despite such challenges, the SBL is a much happier place for people who want to do some sort of theological work with the text. There was a Pauline Theology group for a number of years around the early 90s. There is a Pauline Soteriology group that regularly puts together some of the best sections in the program.

More importantly, however, the Jesus I serve isn’t the Jesus of academic reconstruction. One of the greatest weaknesses of scholarly work with respect to the church is that it too often sees the Bible as something to be gotten behind. What’s “really” important in much of scholarship is the world that inspired the text, what it points to outside of itself.

Modernist definitions of “history” have often too narrowly scripted the scholar’s task. During my time at Duke E. P. Sanders made a passing comment once about how he couldn’t understand scholars talking about the things the Gospels tell us Jesus was thinking or feeling at a given moment. To his way of thinking, that is not the stuff of history and is therefore off limits.

Even reading and understanding the ancient text as an ancient text with its own story to tell? Apparently, that’s not historical work. The job of the gospels is, in this way of thinking, to give us a window on the Jesus who lies behind.

But the historical Jesus is not the Jesus who shows us the way to God.

This is not to say that historical Jesus studies are without value. Often they are of great value (as Sanders’ own work often is) in helping us to be better readers of the texts that make up the canon of Christian teaching. But we never bow the knee to the historical Jesus of anyone’s reconstruction. That would be a bowing of the knee to the academic, and the academy, itself.

Indeed, so long our Jesus is circumscribed by the academy we will not be able to say the most important things there are to say about Jesus: (1) that God was at work in this man, testifying to him by signs and wonders (Acts 2); (2) that this crucified claimant to Israel’s throne is, in fact, resurrected and bodily standing in the presence of God the Father; and (3) that this crucified one is now the Lord over all things.

That Jesus–one in whom God is at work, one who rules the world, can never be the academy’s Jesus. The Jesus who is worth studying can never be the object of academic affirmation as such.

For all my celebration of the ways that academic study of the Bible has made us better readers of scripture and shed light on the text that reading and responding in faith on its own could never do, it is in fact the reading and responding in faith that makes one a faithful reader of the texts that we actually have.

A Flawed Gospel?

May 6, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews, Quotes with 3 Comments

What does a flawed gospel look like? Dunn reads Paul like this:

What is so agonizing for Paul is that if Israel does not finally embrace the Christ, then his own gospel is flawed at its heart–the gospel of God’s righteousness, his free grace and faithfulness to the undeserving and ungodly; if it does not continue to Israel despite Israel’s unfaithfulness then it is not the gospel which he proclaims to all. (Romans 9-16, 532)

God is Free–For Us

May 6, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 7 Comments

What does it mean for God to be free? For that matter, what does it mean for us to be free? What does it mean for God to speak? What does it mean for God to reveal? And how do we know?

For Barth, to answer any of these questions we have before us two possible roads. Either we can start with our own understanding of the world, and find ourselves in the insoluble dilemma of the impossibility of God’s revealing Godself to us. Or, we can begin with the actuality of God’s revelation of Godself to us in Christ.

And Barth, of course, begins with the event of God’s self-revelation in Christ. This event tells us not only that God can be free for us, reveal Godself to us, but how this revelation is possible.

Here we have an extensive exposition of the fidelity of Barth’s project. God can be for us–and we know because God has been for us. God can reveal–and we know because God has revealed. There is a way for God to stand before humans, who cannot behold the face of God and live, such that we might behold God’s glory and live.

That way is incarnation. The word has become flesh and dwelt among us. God has become human.

The first 44 pages of my ยง1.2 are replete with “Yes!” in the margins. Barth’s insistence that we do not first have abstract qualities such as “righteousness” or even “revelation of God” into which God’s own must fit resonates deeply with me. The righteousness we have is the righteousness of Christ; the revelation is in the Christ event. If we could only learn this, then we would take a huge step together in reading Paul better, in reading the Gospels better. What saves is not an abstract quality called righteousness that God demands, but God’s righteous action on our behalf in the person of Jesus the Messiah.

But…

Within this, I found myself repeatedly disappointed with Barth’s reading of the New Testament’s Christology.

In coming to the text with the central conviction that Jesus is revelation of God as God-man, Barth speaks as though this divinity of the man is, itself, the most basic thing the NT has to tell us about Jesus: “knowledge of the divinity of Jesus Christ was the beginning of the way” (21).

Again, I am not against the divinity of Jesus, but Barth missteps as he makes a facile equation between “Jesus is Lord” and “Jesus is God”; as well as between “Jesus is the Messiah” and “Jesus is divine.”

The foundational Christian confession is, “Jesus is Lord”–but this is a bestowal upon the man Jesus of what was not his before, the name above all names (Phil 2). To say Jesus is Lord is to say that he is Son of God–which is a title born also by the kings of Israel (and others) in the Old Testament.

Why does it matter?

In the end, Barth has a very thin and negative account of humanity in this chapter. What it means for Jesus to be human is summed up principally in the word “flesh”–with a series of negative connotations attached.

Much better would have been to say that for Jesus to be human means he is, fully, “son of man,” and to explore how this Human One is granted incomparable authority by God.

Indeed, when Barth gets to the end of the chapter and claims that here he has given the (only possible) answer to the question, Cur Deus Homo? (Why the God-Man?) I can only respond: you have not even begun to address that question.

There is a necessity in the story, a role for humanity in the world, that is confirmed by Jesus enacting the Adamic/ Israelite/ Davidic imperative to faithfully rule the world on God’s behalf. To be human is not merely to be perishable or to live in the realm where sin and death hold sway. These things are true.

But to be human is fundamentally to be destined to the glory of God’s world-ruling children. This is what it means for Jesus to be human–not merely to reveal God, but to reveal what it is to be human. Not mere “likeness of sinful flesh,” but faithful reign over the earth.

Comment Tracking

May 5, 2011 in blogging with 0 Comments

I have had issues with my comment tracker, and changed the plug-in I’m using. If you want to track comments to an old post let me know and I’ll set you up. Thanks to all of you who have informed me of my other plug-in running amok!

Blogsphere Confessional: I Do Theological Interpretation

May 5, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 40 Comments

Confession is good for the soul.

I confess, here just between you and me, that I am a theological interpreter of the Bible.

This is why I named my blog “Storied Theology,” in fact–because I believe deeply that theology is important (there’s the “theology” part).

But also because I am convinced that there are better ways to conceive of the theological task than traditional systematic, confessional, and dogmatic theology. There is a theology that trades in the diachronic and polyvalent nature of scripture itself, and that continues to embrace such inevitable change and diversity as the church itself continues to speak over time.

I am, at times, critical of things that are going on in the “Theological Interpretation” circles of the biblical studies academy. Why? What are those criticisms?

Two issues stand out:

First, there is a tendency among some of the theologians involved in the movement, especially, to use theological readings of scripture as a way to bypass critical issues. I am all for theological interpretation being post-critical (where historical criticism in its modernistic forms does not get the last word), but it cannot go back to being pre-critical.

Thus, for example, we cannot simply say, “God is the author of scripture, so Isa 7 was speaking of a coming, virgin-born Messiah all along,” without also acknowledging that for Isaiah and any audience before the first century that this coming virgin-born Messiah was manifestly not in view.

There is a critical issue that can’t be gotten around, even if we then go on to give a second reading that embraces the Christological telos of the biblical narrative.

Second, I am at times grumpy about “the Rule of Faith.”

From the above, you can see that this does not mean that I am against Christian readings of scripture; and I am not even against a Christian hermeneutic for reading pre-Christ material (in fact, I think that this is necessary).

What makes me nervous, and where I think Christian reading of the Bible has not been helpful in its pre-critical manifestations, is where the Rule of Faith, embodied in the Creeds and Confessions of the church, become the hermeneutic by which our Christian readings are done.

Thus, a Rule of Faith “hermeneutic” might always be approaching Jesus in the New Testament as fully God and fully human, wrestling with how this God-man helps us make sense of the story of Mark. Jesus as God-man might become a way to understand how Jesus can forgive sins, walk on water, or feed 5,000 in the desert.

The idea that we use the rule as a hermeneutical lens has a rich history. But in a post-critical, post-modern environment it cannot be the whole story and often, we must acknowledge now, keeps us from recognizing a better one.

A first reading of Mark should recognize that its Christology is not John’s logos Christology. It may very well be that Jesus here is not depicted as pre-existent at all. We have to wrestle with the fact that neither “Christ” nor “Lord” means “divine” in an early Jewish context, whatever their subsequent connotations in Christian theology.

But such a claim that Mark develops a theology of a human messiah also does not contradict the faith of the church, which always maintains against Gnostic tendencies that Jesus is truly human. It falls within the trajectories set by the church’s Faith without using that Faith as a hermeneutic to transform the meaning of the story or Jesus’ identity within it.

The theology I am for is a theology that takes the Bible seriously–and that Bible as we know it is, in part, the Bible as critical scholarship has opened our eyes to it. And what it means for me to be a Christian is to continue to build theology for the church trusting that this Bible we actually have is, in fact, the Bible that God wants us to have.

While resisting the pre-critical moves that I do not think we can make anymore because we are more aware of issues of theological diversity and the like, I continue to affirm that the God who created the world is the God who has acted in the death and resurrection of Jesus and through the Spirit in the church. I continue to affirm that we know all this only through the Bible which is the record of and witness to, the revelation of God to humanity.

Because the story keeps pointing in these directions, I can continue to say with the church of all times, “I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ his only son…”

I do theological interpretation because I am convinced that the Bible, a theological construct in its own right, continues to tell us what the church’s story is.

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