Tag Archive - inerrancy

On Not Harmonizing

October 31, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 28 Comments

I’ve just wrapped up teaching the Synoptic Gospels part of my Gospels and Acts course. Going through the individual books, looking over proposed solutions to the Synoptic Problem, and seeing how the seemingly harmonious stories portray Jesus’ ministry in quite different lights, we are left with a few conclusion that are surprising to many of us. Here are a couple:

  • The Gospel writers have different ideas about how Jesus’ death works, which means they have different ideas about how God brings salvation through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
  • The Gospels we have used sources, including, probably, Mark as a source for Matthew and Luke, and yet they felt free to change this source for various reasons, including: style, making a somewhat different point, causing the story to more clearly echo an OT antecedent, eliminating theological claims that they did not want to make, or including new theological claims that are somewhat at odds with the theological claims of the original story.

This means that there is not only a plurality of voices in the NT, there is an irreducible theological diversity.

But more importantly, this theological diversity is no accident of history but, on the human level, has been intentionally introduced into the texts we have in front of us. Luke intentionally modifies Mark (and Matthew?) to increase the continuity between the OT narrative and the work of Jesus, and to eliminate the idea of Jesus’ death procuring salvation for people as such.

Two questions came up that I think are important for us to keep working through, especially as evangelicals for whom such conclusions seem to push against our prior conception of what it means to call the Bible the word of God.

First, what does this mean for “scripture interpreting scripture”? This rule became quite popular at the time of the Reformation, or at least, if you Google “scripture interprets scripture” the people who are the most fierce advocates for the view are likely to be appealing to the Reformation traditions in their defense.

But what do we do when Luke says, “Blessed are the poor,” and Matthew says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”? Is Matthew clear here where Luke is ambiguous, thereby telling us what Jesus really meant? Or are we to hear in Luke’s version his special concern for the socially marginalized?

What are we to do when Mark says that you don’t put new wine in old wineskins, but Luke feels compelled to add, “No one wants new wine, old is better!”? Do we let Mark’s apparent meaning stand, where Jesus is the new wine that cannot be contained by the older Jewish practices? Or do we allow the “more clear” Lucan conclusion to change our reading?

Image: WikiBooks, Gospel of Mark ch. 8

My response: (1) allow the scripture one author wrote help interpret that author’s other passages; and (2) allow the NT’s example of rereading the OT in light of Christ to train us to reread the OT as a witness to the saving life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus.

If we insist on giving the one meaning made clear by the other texts, we start to force the Bible into our preconception of what kind of Bible would be good for us, what kind of Bible would qualify as “word of God,” and in so doing we spurn the actual Bible that God did give us, and that God thought was adequate for conveying God’s word.

Question two is what do we do with this stuff as pastors?

My answer here: it is your pastoral responsibility to help people recognize that the Bible we actually have, rather than the Bible of our imaginations, is the word of God.

If you don’t give your people a category for this kind of diverse Bible being the word of God, then you will create a false sense of connection between a supposedly uniform, univocal Bible and the Christian faith as such. So what happens when they go off to college and take a Bible class at State University? What happens when they get bored one Saturday and map out (or try, anyway) the last week of Jesus’ life in each of the four Gospels?

Uh oh.

That’s when they discover that the Bible isn’t what you led them to believe. And if that imagined Bible is necessary for believing what God has to say about Jesus and the Christian faith in general, then the latter are apt to crumble as well.

Make no mistake, there are tremendous pastoral issues at stake in affirming correctly what the Bible is. But one of the worst mistakes we can make, especially in a day and age where media will tell people the truth if we don’t, is to affirm a vision of a single-voiced scripture that fails to correspond to the text we have actually been given.

Bible Made Impossible: Final Reflections

October 14, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 8 Comments

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been offering my engagements with Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.

You can find the first four installments here (pt 1), here (pt 2), here (pt 3), and here (pt 4).

My enthusiasm for Smith’s assessment and proposal continues in this final installment. He has put his finger on the problematic treatment of the Bible in evangelical circles, calling out the ways in which its understanding of scripture is insufficiently biblical, and insufficiently defined by the gospel.

Chapter 6, “Accepting Complexity and Ambiguity,” is bookended by two fantastic paragraphs that clearly articulate the problems with “evangelical biblicism”:

Ironcially, while biblicists claim to take the Bible with utmost seriousness for what it obviously teaches, their theory about the Bible drives them to try to make it something that it evidently is not. (127)

And then this:

The Anglican divine Richard Hooker put this well when he said about the Bible, “We must… take great heed, lest, in attributing unto scripture more than it can have, the incredibility of that do cause even those things which indeed it hath most abundantly, to be less reverently esteemed.” In other words, the more we try to make the Bible say allegedly important things that are in fact subsidiary, nonbinding, or perhaps not even clearly taught, the more we risk detracting form the crucial, central message of the Bible about God reconciling the world to himself in Jesus Christ. (148)

Biblicism, by insisting on the equality of every chapter and verse, creates a world in which everything we believe takes on equal significance. Deny the necessity of homeschooling and you’ve rejected the gospel. The importance of the Christological hermeneutic is that it allows back seat issues to stay in the back seat.

A final chapter from Smith works hard to articulate a third way between the conservative posture of biblicism and the strategies of liberalism or full-blown postmodernism. It is important for readers to appreciate that critical realism is, in fact, a true third way. No doubt it will be described as opening the back door for liberalism by many who hold to the position Smith wishes to advance. But that is plain wrong.

This final contribution is an accessible crash-course in hermeneutics and has the power to destabalize how we think about the Bible as an authoritative text. How do we, in fact, condemn slavery as morally reprehensible when the biblical writers seem so accepting of it? There are good reasons for our difference–and these are instructive for us when we think about what the Bible is and what we should be doing with it.

Smith’s book comes on the scene at an opportune time. As the evangelical right tightens its grip on evangelicalism more broadly, an tremendous number of believers are slipping through their fingers. Whether the conservative resurgence shows itself to be less-than-biblical because of a particular issue (e.g., the earth’s being 6,000 years old) or because of a holistic and yet inconsistent way of attempting to apply the Bible as an equally authoritative voice to all of life, those who leave biblicist worlds behind are reconfiguring what it means to confess that the Bible is the word of God.

So even though Smith will not doubt become another point at which the biblicist world points to encroaching liberalism and thereby solidifies anew its identity over against “them,” it also provides an invaluable tool to those who know that the biblicist Bible is, in fact, impossible–but who continue to believe that the Bible we have is, in fact, the word of God given to bear witness to the Word of God.

Interpretation and Scripture (review pt. 3)

October 10, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 23 Comments

Here’s where Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible is heading as it rounds off the first part of its discussion (the problems with biblicism): interpretive problems point to the reality that the Bible is not what biblicists think it is.

In other words, we cannot separate interpretive outcomes from our doctrine of scripture. When things that “shouldn’t be there” come up repeatedly in our interpretive endeavors, this points out to us that our doctrine of scripture needs to be reconfigured to match the reality of what the Bible is.

In the theological tradition in which I cut my teeth, this sort of relationship was acknowledged, at least in theory. The Westminster Seminary faculty put together a series of essays entitled Inerrancy and Hermeneutic that sought to articulate inerrancy in a way that did not prejudice interpretive outcomes.

Later, Peter Enns would elaborate on this tradition with his extended suggestion in Inspriation and Incarnation that the Bible we actually have should be shaping our understanding of what the Bible is.

Of course, this was the beginning of the end for Enns at WTS, as the theological and financial pull of biblicism was simply too strong to allow scripture to transform our understanding of what the Bible is. Indeed, it might have been expected: the commitment to inerrancy, for example, in American evangelical circles is often far too strong to allow the errors we discover in the Bible to override it.

This diversion into the world from which I came is to say that Smith is exactly correct in what he perceives to be an irreconcilable tension: there is the Bible that biblicists preach, and then there is the Bible that we hold in our hands. And they are not the same.

The Reformation tradition has nicely placed the Bible in everyone’s hands. This is a good thing. But with it has come the notion that anyone reading the Bible will be able to know what it says.

So why then is there pervasive interpretive pluralism if the Bible is so easy to read?

The point that Smith will come around to is that we need to rethink what the Bible is so that we read it differently, more in keeping with the Bible we actually have and its own stated purposes.

Protestant doctrines of scripture have told us, from way back, that what we need to know can be clearly read in scripture or deduced by good and necessary consequence. They have told us that the meaning of any passage is one. They have told us that there are inerrant autographs somewhere that contain the exact words God wanted us to have.

And each of these is either irrelevant and useless (inerrant docs we don’t have) or proven false (we don’t actually clearly see what must be known–we disagree).

Smith rounds off his discussion with some reflections on how a clearly false and impossible Bible manages to imbed itself in evangelicalism as though it is the Bible we actually have. He rightly points to both historical and sociological factors as creating both the perceived necessity of such a Bible and the plausibility structures within which such a Bible can be believed to exist.

In other words: when you hang around a bunch of people, be it in church or in seminary or in your denomination or at an Evangelical Theological Society meeting who not only believe the Bible is this thing, but who define themselves as holding to such a Bible over against the Bible-denying, God-hating liberals, it becomes quite easy to believe in the glorious garments of this particular, naked emperor.

This brings us to something Smith mentions only briefly but that, to me, is the most important reason we have to get beyond evangelical biblicism: it is pastorally disastrous.

Students who believe in this kind of Bible but then leave the world that makes it plausible by going to, say, a public university or a differently oriented seminary or, worst of all a PhD program and there encounter the real Bible for the first time–well, they lose their faith. Or, they have to go through so much intellectual reconfiguring of their faith that its persistence stands in question.

We have to start reading, thinking about, and talking about the Bible that we actually have. We have to recognize that there is no “one meaning” to be found in each passage, there is not “one theological system” to be gleaned from the whole, there is no “inerrant autograph” that is going to show us the truth that will eventually set us free.

We have to take responsibility for how we read, we must read in the right direction, for scripture to fulfill its purpose–which is a different purpose from that articulated by evangelical biblicism.

That purpose? Stay tuned…

Stop with Your Impossible Bible, Already (pt. 1)

October 6, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 21 Comments

A devoted Presbyterian (I think taht was me, once upon a time) moves from his confession of faith to the Bible. He had read about “the true and full sense of any scripture (which is not manifold, but one),” and embraced the parenthetical warning against multiple meanings. Then he looked up the OT passage from which a NT citation was drawn. One meaning? Uh oh…

Rachel Held Evans attempts a year of living biblically. As her year winds down, what does she have to say? That adjective “biblical” is really hard to pin down. Does biblical womanhood mean camping out in the back yard during your period?

We all think we know what biblical means. In our North American Christian context the word is thrown around as a way of demanding that all of life be lived in accordance with the Bible as the Word of God.

And Christian Smith is here to tell us that the two experiences summarized above are exactly what we should expect when we come to the Bible with the impossible demands of the biblicism of current evangelicalism.

His book is, The Bible Made Impossible, a book for which I shelled out my own money, so I am under no obligation by the Fed to make any disclosures to you about having my eyes blinded through having received it for free.

Smith affirms that the Bible is inspired by God. He recognizes its importance in the continuing story of the church.

But he also calls us to recognize that a “biblicist” view of scripture creates expectations that cannot be met, and that in the end it is an impossible theory to maintain in practice. And, in fact, nobody does.

So what is this impossible biblicism? Smith sees it delineated by these 10 claims / assumptions (pp. 4-5):

  1. scripture contains the very words of God (divine writing)
  2. the Bible is God’s exclusive means of communication with people
  3. everything God needs to tell us about belief and life is in the Bible
  4. anyone can read, understand and thus rightly interpret the Bible
  5. the Bible can be understood in its plain, literal sense
  6. we can build theology from scratch without creeds or confessions
  7. all the passages touching on the same topic can be brought together into a harmonious whole
  8. the Bible is universally applicable to people in all times and places
  9. inductive method leads to right hearing of the text
  10. the Bible, read this way, provides a handbook for living

Of course, no one person or group will necessarily hold to, or put on display, all ten.

These sorts of claims ring true to many of us: the big idea behind much of it is that if we sit down and read the text we can actually know what it says. God speaks in the Bible and we need simply to listen.

But there is one major problem: “pervasive interpretive pluralism.”

If the Bible is so easy to read and understand, why is it that Christians who hold to similar convictions about what scripture is nonetheless cannot agree on what scripture actually says.

This, claims Smith, is more than simply a phenomenon of people’s practice not reflecting the theory as well as it should. It is a determinative indication that the theory itself is flawed.

We do not simply read “what is there.” People interpret differently. People read preexisting theologies into and out of texts. Pluralism will not go away. And it does not simply touch on incidental matters such as whether or not we pass a holy smooch, this plurality extends even to such central ideas as what happens for our good on the cross.

And so, Smith will contend, the Bible is not what is so often claimed.

The Miracle of Scripture

August 24, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 9 Comments

What is so special about the Bible? Why do we keep talking about it? Why must Christians continually point to it as the way we know what is true about God?

Is there something miraculous about scripture? If so, what?

The answer that many of us encounter, and many of us cling to, is that the miracle is the perfection of scripture itself. Some might express this in terms of “inerrancy”: we believe the Bible, at least in part, because God has kept it perfectly free from error for us. Others might more generally refer to the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, majesty of style, and consent of all the parts.

No really. Some people do. I swear.

Such lofty exaltation of scripture can come at a price, however. For example, if someone holds scripture in high esteem based on a valuation of its inerrancy and then discovers that there are historical mistakes (e.g., Luke 2), unfulfilled prophecies (Haggai, Revelation), theological disagreements (Gen 1 & 2; Mark & John), or scientific problems (all the animals in the whole world on that Ark?), this can come with a loss of confidence in God, Christianity, the church, and one’s personal faith.

Might there be another way forward?

Karl Barth argues quite strongly that, yes, there is another way forward (Dogmatics §19).

The miracle of scripture does not consist in the fact that God kept the Bible free from taint of humanness, and especially of human limitation or sin.

Instead, the miracle of scripture consists, as in the salvation of humanity more generally, in the fact that God makes himself known through what is all too human, all too limited, all too often mistaken.

… the prophets and apostles as such, even in their function as witnesses, even in the act of writing down their witness, were real, historical men as we are, and therefore sinful in their action, and capable and actually guilty of error in their spoken and written word.

To the bold postulate, that if their word is to be the Word of God they must be inerrant in every word, we oppose the even bolder assertion, that according to the scriptural witness about man, which applies to them too, they can be at fault in any word, and have been at fault in every word, and yet according to the same scriptural witness, being justified and sanctified by grace alone, they have still spoken the Word of God in their fallible and erring human word.

And finally, this, which probably ends up going further than I’m entirely comfortable with, but by and large sums up some things I’ve been dancing around for years:

If God was not ashamed of the fallibility of all the human words of the Bible, of their historical and scientific inaccuracies, their theological contradictions, the uncertainty of their tradition… but adopted and made use of these expressions in all their fallibility, we do not need to be ashamed when He wills to renew it to us in all its fallibility as witness, and it is mere self-will and disobedience to try to find some infallible elements in the Bible.

In other words, this is the Bible we actually have. To demand another, an inerrant one for example, is to demand of God what God has not seen fit to give. It is to spurn the gift given and demand something better.

If God is not ashamed of an all-too-human Bible, we should not be either. This human collection of documents is the actual Bible that is the Word of God.

Calvinism as “The Big Tent”?

October 30, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 31 Comments

Over the past few weeks I have had a thing or two to say about the kind of evangelicalism that I could see myself being part of. It’s the kind of place where folks can hold onto biblical authority with one hand while holding scholarly and historical criticism in the other. It’s the kind of place where what we do is as much a measure of who we are as what we believe. It’s the kind of place where women are equal. It’s the kind of place where getting our story straight is of tremendous importance, but where asserting the absoluteness of our particular version of Christianity is not.

One reason I want to keep having the conversation about the nature of evangelicalism is that other people are doing their own work to lay hold of the label and put it over very different content.

Today’s conversation starter is a recent video on the Gospel Coalition blog, featuring Ligon Duncan, Al Mohler, and Kevin DeYoung.

The video is a round-table discussion of “the New Calvinism.” Based on comments made in the video, the basic tenants of this movement include: (1) a Calvinist/Reformed understanding of predestination of some people to life and other people to eternal death–what they refer to as “sovereignty;” (2) closely tied to point one is adherence to 4 or 5 points of Total depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the saints–what they refer to as “the doctrines of grace;” (3) authority (= inerrancy) of scripture, as something that (4) requires Calvinism and complementarianism (i.e., subordination of women to men at home and at church).

First, there are a lot of very good things going on with Gospel Coalition.

They talk about the importance of being united on these essentials, even while they continue to disagree about theological points such as ecclesiology and baptism. While I might not agree on the importance of continuing to be separate on those points of difference, it is genuinely a good thing that Christians seek out as many venues as possible for expressing the oneness we have in Christ. That has far too often been at the bottom of the Protestant agenda (if there), so this unifying impulse is a good thing.

Also, I believe they have rightly assessed that a huge swath of Christians is done with vapid, theology-free Christianity. They are meeting this need with a robust theological system and tying it back to scripture. That is a good impulse.

Finally, their hope is that this vibrancy will result in the same sort of missionary fruit that other Calvinist resurgences have produced. They want to see God glorified where God is not, and the mission agencies of the Southern Baptists and the PCA are backing up that desire better than many other churches’.

There are also places where their assessment of themselves and of others is problematic.

First, based simply on this video and its emphases, this is not a group that is together for the gospel, it is a group that is together for Calvinism. Untold numbers of Christians have believed in “the priority of God’s grace” being exercised in the cross of Christ on our behalf without also insisting that we had, for example, no free will to accept that offering extended to us. Put differently, Arminians believe the gospel.

Next, they are not a group gathered around the authority of scripture. They are a group gathered around a commitment to a particular set of readings of scripture. Again, myriad Christians (one might think of Wesleyans, specifically Methodists) read Paul with submission and yet do not become Calvinists. And hundreds of thousands find that the biblical narratives of women’s equality is binding on their consciences when it comes to gender roles in home and church.

The rhetoric functions as a means to wrap up their own interpretation of various passages and positions with believing the Bible itself. This is very, very dangerous. To believe in the Bible is not to believe in what Al Mohler or Lig Duncan or Daniel Kirk or Tom Wright says about the Bible. It is to believe that God has spoken there not that I have apprehended its correct meaning.

I do find it significant that few of the most important Paul scholars in our day and age are Calvinists in the sense outlined in the video. Richard Hays and Mike Gorman are Methodists. N. T. Wright is an Anglican with Reformed roots but with quite a different modern-day expression. John Barclay, Lou Martyn, Bruce Longenecker, Douglas Campbell… there’s not much serious Calvinism coming out of careful reading of Paul–and not much complementarianism, either.

Another point where they seem to be missing the mark is Mohler’s contention that Calvinism is resurging because of the secularism of society, and people want to know about their salvation, “Why me?” and so they turn to Calvin’s answer. But when they outline the points they stand for, they are consistently positioning themselves against other Christians. People are coming to Calvinism not because they’re confronting secular society, but because it gives robust (I daresay, at times, easy) answers to complicated questions about being a Christian. It offers the security of a theological fortress at a time when other Christians are telling them that the world is more complicated.

People are not fleeing to complementarianism because the world is secular.
People are not fleeing to a 6,000 year old earth because they want to know why they are believers when their neighbors aren’t.

This is an in-house reconfiguration of loyalties that is being paralleled in the political sphere. While a bunch of people are taking their disillusionment with the status quo and reinventing a mixed-middle, a huge number of people are listing right both theologically and politically, while a mirror reaction is sending some people further to the left. The disenchantment with what we came of age with is causing a number of reactions at once: some people rediscovering the past to which they long to return, some reconstructing using materials that used to be kept secret, some trying to run even faster to a future they hope will one day come to pass.

Together for the Gospel isn’t about retrenching as Christians in the face of secularism. It’s about one kind of Christianity appealing to Christians who can’t hold onto an authoritative Bible while embracing some of the middle-to-left developments in church and theology of the past 15-50 years.

So yes, being together is good. And being together for the gospel is even better. The latter is a laudable goal, but it will never be reached until it includes being together with Arminians and others. And much of the rhetoric of this group that speaks as though it represents “Christianity,” really only represents one (relatively small) way of making sense of biblical Christianity known as “Calvinism.”

So while I celebrate their willingness to have a big Calvinist tent, it is important that we not confuse that with representing anything like a truly big tent Christianity.

(NB: I was corrected twice about including someone as Reformed who would not so identify. I hereby repent in sackcloth & ashes, and have corrected the post.)

Genesis 1 & Biblical Authority

October 6, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 21 Comments

Yesterday someone tagged me on Facebook, asking what I made of the following quote:

If we can set aside the six-day creation doctrine, we have asserted our supremacy over Scripture. Our mind and our convenience now have a higher authority than the Bible, so that we have denied its authority totally and asserted our authority instead. If we claim the right at any point to set aside Scripture, we have established ourselves as the higher authority at every point. Clearly, therefore, the question of authority is at stake in Genesis 1: God or man? Whose word is authoritative and final? -R. J. Rushdoony, “The Necessity of Creationism”

There are a few reasons why I do not find this argument compelling.

First, I am uncomfortable with the way the issue of interpreting one passage of scripture is tied to the entire question of biblical authority. This problem is made repeatedly in conservative Christian circles: it is claimed that failure to adopt one particular interpretation is a denial of the authority of the text itself. A more recent example is the Al Mohler article in Christianity Today, in which he states his belief that one must be a complementarian with respect to gender roles in order to affirm the inerrancy of the Bible. No, that just means you are choosing to weigh certain biblical evidence more heavily than other evidence.

It is crucial when discussing the authority of the Bible to distinguish between biblical authority / theological positions (inerrancy, infallibility, inspiration) and our interpretation of that authoritative text. Or, to allude to the title of that book that only people from Westminster Seminary know about, we have to keep discussions of inerrancy and hermeneutics distinct. I will never find it persuasive that you have to hold to any particular interpretation of any particular passage in order to believe in the authority of the Bible. Because Bible-believing Christians have disagreed over just about everything.

Also, if conservative and/or Evangelical Christians are ever going to start demonstrating the kind of John 17 unity that would impress the world with our Christ-promoting oneness, we have to stop making such ultimatums of one another.

The second reason I don’t find the quote compelling is that both your average lay person reading the Bible and biblical scholars with access to more historical resources have a tremendous number of reasons for reading Genesis 1 differently than literal six-day creation as a historical account of how the earth started.

Read through Genesis 1-2 and make a list of what happens when. Even a casual observer notes that there are two accounts of the creation of humanity. Things are created in different orders.

Go back and reread Genesis 1 asking what all this might mean. Make a list of when things were created. Huh–the story is telling me that there was no sun, but that there was light. Fascinating.

The very fact that there are two different creation stories, and that the facts they tell are in different sequences and not indicative of how the universe actually operates, are all pieces pointing a faithful reader of the Bible, who is listening to the text itself for clues about how to interpret it, that Genesis 1 is not a text that should be read literally.

Yes, you can make the opposite argument. But the point here is that the Bible itself invites other ways of interpreting it. These are the kinds of clues we always look for when reading a text–we seek to understand its genre, and treat its contents accordingly. It is quite possible to submit to this text as an authoritative text whose genre one takes to be other than literal history. This is not an act of hubris, it is an act of humble listening.

These clues that the texts are not meant to be taken literally are confirmed from other directions once they are placed in their Ancient Near Eastern setting, something that even conservative biblical scholars attempt to do through their “grammatical historical exegesis.” The “historical” part is a confession that we have to understand the context within which the text was written to understand how God was intending to speak through it. ANE parallel texts help fill out the genre category of creation story that affirms the layperson’s instinct that these texts are not to be read as history.

A third significant problem I have with the quote is that it does not wrestle with the fact that Christians have read Genesis 1-3 as non-literal since at least the second century. It is quite possible to honor the Bible-honoring Christian tradition and not require that the earth was created in 6 24-hour days 6,000 years ago. Lack of such sensitivity in a quote like this has the, perhaps unintended effect, of creating the impression that what is actually only one Christian voice among many holds the lone key to faithful participation in the Christian narrative. And that is simply not the case.

So while I find the commitment to scriptural authority admirable, I do not find its way of linking it to this issue to be exegetically sound, pastorally wise, or ultimately honoring to Christ. I think we need to start taking much more seriously the theologically problematic assertion that people have to agree with any one of a list of particular, usually socially conservative interpretations of scripture in order to really believe the Bible or to “protect the gospel.”

The theologically and missionally imperative summons to Christian unity around Christ himself needs to take precedent over such amendments to the Christian constitution as we see in the Rushdoony quote.

Evangelical Manifesto

October 3, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 43 Comments

I don’t know why, but for now I’ve decided to care about the word “evangelical.” “Evangelical” can be a slippery word. Lots of people want to claim it. Lots of people want to disclaim it. I wouldn’t mind leaving it, really, except that right now those to my right are insisting that you have to agree with them about a whole host of things in order to claim that label for yourself.

I posted recently about Al Mohler, who insists that you have to be a complementarian on the gender issue so as to believe in inerrancy so as to be a good evangelical. Recently the Reformed world has distanced itself from the service of Pete Enns, Tremper Longman, and Bruce Waltke because they opened the door to a reading of Genesis 1-3 that was something other than literal. Most recently, a rumor has reached my ears that a certain evangelical college (I won’t mention its name because it’s only a rumor), under the lead of its complementarian president is beginning to institute a commitment to complementarianism by only allowing, for example, men to speak in chapel. May be true, may not, but the verisimilitude is enough to make my sectarian radar go up.

I am concerned about these developments. In particular, I’m concerned because those of us who aren’t interested in helping veer the ship to the right haven’t been as interested in carving out a broad definition of evangelicalism. (Though there are some exceptions.) In our silence, the ship is listing right, and I think that many of the developments, because of that, are or will be tragic for evangelicalism in America.

In pointed (and point-by-point) response to this listing right, I offer an alternative articulation of evangelical theology in some attempt to hold onto a word whose value seems to decline with each passing headline.

Evangelicalism for the 21st Century

Evangelical is an adjective that can describe Christians of various denominations and other substantives. There are evangelical Protestants, evangelical Catholics, and evangelical orthodox. There are evangelical Pentecostals, evangelical Anabaptists, and evangelical mainliners.

To be an evangelical is to be committed to the notion that the message of Jesus is good news about a God who desires all of humanity, each group within humanity, and every individual to be in relationship with God as the God of all.

To be an evangelical is to be committed to scripture as the word of God, a word that always has the power to prophetically confront and challenge what we take for granted–both within the church and as people in diverse cultures.

To be an evangelical is to be committed to telling the gospel story such that it will sound as good news in the ears of those who hear it, even as it summons us to repentance and faith.

In light of these three commitments: that the gospel be genuinely good news, that it comes as an invitation to be received into the family of God, and that we know of the good news as we learn it from scripture, here is an evangelical affirmation for the twenty-first century:

1. You can be an evangelical and not believe in inerrancy.

We believe this because of our commitment to scripture itself. Investigation of scripture will often, to many of us, provide indications that an “inerrant” Bible is not the way that God has chosen to speak to humanity.

This is part of the good news because it means that we do not have to set aside the labors of critical scholarship to affirm that the Bible is the word of God in which the good news is articulated.

Evangelicals embrace many of those who do affirm inerrancy. Many who embrace inerrancy are able to separate issues of inerrancy from issues of hermeneutics. This enables them to free the doctrine of what the Bible is from what the Bible must teach on any given subject. Many who embrace inerrancy do so with a revisionist definition of inerrancy that only intends to signal that the Bible is our ultimate authority. This, too, is an indication that the faithfulness to scripture as the word of God can go in numerous directions of faithful handling.

To be an evangelical who does not embrace inerrancy is to be a Christian who sets aside inerrancy because of what we find in scripture itself. This is not an application of anti-supernatural bias. This is not a presupposition against miracles or historical accuracy. It is a response to the Bible that has shown itself to be something other than inerrant–with a faithful confession that God has chosen just this sort of book through which to reveal himself.

2. Evangelicals can affirm the full inclusion of women in the life of the church.

To be an evangelical affirming women’s ordination is to be someone who is convinced that scripture itself leads the way toward their full inclusion in the body.

God the Father creates humanity male and female to rule the world on God’s behalf. To be an evangelical egalitarian is to confess that shared rule in the church is faithful telling of God’s purpose in creation.

Jesus the Son receives us all into himself, baptized as one into his name, where there is no longer male and female as a primary distinguishing marker. To be an evangelical egalitarian is to confess that shared ministry in the body is faithful living out of our common possession of the identity of the crucified Son.

The Holy Spirit fills all equally so that both sons and daughters will prophesy. To be an evangelical egalitarian is to confess that shared teaching in the church is a faithful expression of the egalitarian distribution of the Spirit.

I am an egalitarian because I believe what the Bible tells me about the Triune God in redemptive relationship to the humanity restored and renewed in Christ by the Spirit.

As an evangelical, I also acknowledge that others committed to scripture might demand a complementarian assessment of humanity’s standing before God. To be an evangelical complementarian is to acknowledge that this is an issue of hermeneutics, of finding primacy in some passages while relegating others to secondary positions. This differs from fundamentalist complementarianism which sees hierarchy in the church as essential to receiving the Bible as the word of God and to our confession of the good news of Jesus Christ.

Evangelical egalitarianism is good news to the world around us because it declares that the restored world into which God is inviting it does not demand subjugation of the weak to the strong, but upends the world’s hierarchical system.

3. Evangelicals can praise the God who created a 4.5 billion year old earth.

To be an evangelical old-earther, to be an evangelical who reads Genesis 1-3 as something other than literal history, is to be a student of scripture attentive to its own indications of genre.

To be an evangelical old-earther is not to reject the stories of Gen 1-3 as out-dated, but listen to them as the Ancient Near Eastern stories of ancient origins that they are. It is to listen to them and attend to the cues that they are not meant to stand as all-encompassing narratives about the beginning of all humanity.

They speak to us truly about the condition of the earth, about God’s intentions for humanity to stand one day over an ordered cosmos, and of a particular people as the means for that glorious future. We are old-earthers because we are attentive to scripture, not because we carry in presuppositions against it.

To be an evangelical is to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other Christians who, studying Genesis 1-3 and submitting to it as the word of God, cannot but confess that the world is 6,000 years old. To be an evangelical young earther, rather than a fundamentalist young earther, is to recognize that this is a hermeneutical decision that has an important voice in the church’s story, but one that has had a counter-voice to answer to since long before the days of Charles Darwin. It is to affirm that others may make a different hermeneutical decision about Genesis 1-3 without giving up their commitment to either scripture or the God of the Bible.

Evangelical old-earth creationism is good news because it means that students of the natural world do not have to abandon their scientific knowledge to participate in the story of God. It means that they might, in fact, have something to teach the church about what the book of nature is teaching us all about the way in which God created.

4. Evangelicals robustly affirm the social ramifications of the gospel.

To be an evangelical advocate of the social gospel is to affirm the biblical story that the disintegration of the cosmos extends beyond the relationship of God with humanity to encompass also the relationship of people with each other, the created order with systemic powers, and people with the sub-human creation.

To affirm such a robust set of problems is to demand an equally robust set of solutions. If the good news is to be genuinely good news, it must proclaim that God’s anointed king comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.

To be an evangelical advocate of the social gospel is to submit to the stories of the Gospels themselves, in which restored bodies, restored communities, subjection of demonic powers, and forgiveness of sins were all part of the ministry of Jesus.

To be an evangelical is to insist that to reject the social ramifications of the Gospel is to dishonor the extent of God’s care for God’s world, and the sweep of Jesus’ ministry on earth.

UPDATE:

5. Conviction without Sectarianism. (click link for a fifth point added the next day)

Conclusion

To be an evangelical, one does not need to follow the lead of so many in power who are retrenching this movement to the right. As those who are committed to scripture, to its invitation to enter into a rich, life-giving relationship with God, and to its proclamation of a message that is actually good news, we can stand together and proclaim a story that is, in fact, beautiful to those with eyes to see.

Why the History Stuff Matters

September 22, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Uncategorized with 15 Comments

A few threads of conversation from the history and the Bible posts from yesterday and Monday, along with an offline conversation with a friend, have me wanting to visit the spiritual ramifications of how we approach the Bible.

First, what does all of this talk about the creative theological hand of the Biblical writers have to say about our posture toward God? Is this a setting up of ourselves, of our autonomous human reason, above the God who gave the scriptures to us?

No.

In fact, my concern is that the position that is more closely aligned with inerrancy is in greater danger of this than my own. A few people have expressed concern that if the Bible is as messy, or free from the constraints of history as I suggest, that the God of the Bible himself is now suspect, or at least the Christian faith, because what we find there isn’t true.

But the only way that this argument works is if we presuppose that in order for God to speak God must give us a book that looks a certain way, conforms to certain preconceived standards, attains to our demands for historical precision.

I would like to put the shoe on the other foot. Why must God be accountable to our modern, rationalistic demands about how the Bible must fit together in order to be trustworthy? Why must the Bible be devoid of human labor, research, and even historical creativity, in order to be worthy of God’s voice to speak through it?

What I am saying is that we trust that the Bible we have is the Bible God wanted us to have, and that we investigate this Bible to learn how it is, in fact, that God has chosen to speak to us. I trust that this Bible we actually have is the Bible God wanted us to have. To respond to this by saying, “If this is what the Bible is then we shouldn’t listen to it” is to say that God must fit certain criteria, established by us, independent of the actual contents of the Bible [!] in order to be worthy of our ear.

It will never do to say that God must speak in x manner in order to be worthy of our ear. It will only do to say, This is actually how God has spoken, therefore if we would hear God’s voice we must accept this mode of divine speech. All this is to say that, as pious as it sounds to demand that “Bible as word of God” dictate our posture toward the text,  I will not allow that confession to tell me that the Bible must be something that the data demands be recognized as something else.

But secondly, the reason why it is important that pastors and theologians adopt this stance and not attempt to force the Bible into a preconceived mold is that it is disastrous for the faith of those who then go on to get an education in religious and/or biblical studies.

A professor friend of mine used to say, “A liberal is a fundamentalist who got an education.” What he meant by that is linked to what I said in my first point. Both fundamentalism and liberalism look at the world, and at the Bible, and make the same demands. This includes the demand for historical accuracy, the ability to be harmonized, and all the rest.

Once a thusly educated fundamentalist leaves the friendly confines and starts wrestling with the data in some other venue (such as an undergraduate or seminary New Testament Intro course), they discover that by those standards the Bible simply doesn’t measure up.

The problem is not that I’m saying that “the Bible doesn’t measure up to the historical standard,” the problem comes in when we affirm that in order to be truly apprehended as the word of God the Bible must live up to this preconceived historical standard. It’s that demand, made to my right and my left, that will cause people’s faith in the God of the Bible to be shaken when they wrestle with the tensions, not the reality of the data itself.

Allowing the data of the Bible to set our expectations about the kind of history we find there is essential–both for duly honoring the God who gave us this particular Bible and for speaking of scripture in such a way that followers of Jesus can maintain their faith even when they discover that the Bible does not live up to one set of preconceived expectations.

History & the Bible (Part 2 of 2)

September 21, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 47 Comments

What, then, is this Bible that many of us, on a broad spectrum of Christian belief, want to treat as the word of God, the rule for Christian faith and practice? In particular, what are we looking at when we read the historical narratives? How much should we expect them to resemble the “facts of history”?

The stakes are pretty high when we come to the Gospels, so let’s step back into some books that no one ever reads: the books of Chronicles. (Incidentally, Pete Enns has a three part series on Biologos dealing with this very issue that wrapped up today.)

There are a couple of things we need to keep in mind as we read Chronicles. One of the most important is that Chronicles uses Samuel/Kings; the writer might even be able to assume that some of his readers would know those old stories; and, he freely reconstructs the narratives to comport with his own theology.

One theological given in Chronicles is that sin is punished on earth while righteousness is rewarded. This can be a problem.

Manasseh Repented--And We Even Got This Picture of It!

For example: what if the guy with [one of] the longest reign (55 years) in the whole book, Manasseh,is the one who according to Kings is single-handedly responsible for Judah going into Babylonian exile? How do you explain the long reign for the most evil of kings? Easy: tell a story of repentance! Even better, make it a story that embodies Israel’s own story of exile in Babylon and restoration to the land. Manasseh becomes a model–for how Israel should turn faithfully to YHWH after the exile.

Such alterations happen regularly in Chronicles: the point is not to hand down the history but to preach the theology. We know that the Chronicler changed the story for his theological purposes, and it seems a lot of his early audience would have known it as well. Because of what he did with his source text, it would be a mistake to think that what we’re supposed to do with his text and Samuel/Kings is to attempt to lace together a coherent, non-contradictory narrative.

This is the kind of history that we have in the Bible–not one that is written for the purpose of preserving a given account of events, but one told for the purpose of proclamation.

We have evidence of the same sort of freedom being employed in the NT with the Synoptic Gospels. Luke tells us that he did his research; we can guess that he probably used Mark, and I think he probably used Matthew as well. But even if he only used Mark, we discover the exact same freedom at work as we saw in the case of Chronicles: he is not interested in telling us the accurate historical picture as we would define and look for historical factuality; he intentionally changes the story he has at his disposal such that his own theology is communicated and the history itself reads differently.

For me, the question of “inerrancy” versus not, or the question of how “historical” the Gospels are, or the question of whether or not we should harmonize different passages pushes in this direction: When we push for inerrancy, harmonizations, and historicity, we show that we have a fundamentally different desire for what these texts might give us than the biblical writers themselves had when they composed them.

Matthew: "See? Told you there were two!" Mark: "Bah. You used Photoshop."

If the purpose of the Gospels was to give us the historically identifiable account of the anointing of Jesus, then Luke would not have changed the location, host, time frame, and body part on which Jesus was anointed. If the purpose

of a Gospel is to give a full, historical account, then Matthew would not go around introducing second things such as a second Gerasene demoniac or second donkey that Jesus simultaneously rode into Jerusalem with the other.

The point is that at various points both Matthew and Luke have decided to tell versions of the story that are in ways major or minor different from the story of Mark–and that in trying to smash them all back together into a coherent unity we show that our own desire for the text is antithetical to the impulse that gave us the texts we actually have.

What the Gospel writers have separated, let no man put together.

And this begins to form my response to Adam’s comment on yesterday’s post about where my view ever moves from the messy details to the “high” acknowledgment that this is God’s word for the church, not just a human doing. My response to that is that it is precisely these humans doings that are God’s word to the church. God’s word to the church is Matthew’s post-Torah Jewish Christianity, and Mark’s apocalyptic and surprising messiah, and Luke’s seamless-salvation-history-Davidic-King, and even John’s pre-existent heavenly but now incarnate Son of God.

Honoring them as the word of God means receiving them not only as they are actually given to us, but trusting that God gave us the kind of books he wanted us to have in order to find the salvation that God has on offer in Christ. In other words, it’s precisely by not turning these into history books that I honor them as the word that God has given to guide us into the life that is only found in Jesus the Son.

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