Wright: Starting with Philemon

Looked about a week ago at the Preface to N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Now the book begins.

Chapter 1: Return of the Runaway?
1. A World of Difference
Summary
Wright begins our journey with the small letter to Philemon. To begin, he gives the classic background text, a letter from Pliny the Younger in which Pliny advocates for a slave who had come to him because his master was angry with him. Wright's goal is to show that, while there are some superficial similarities between the two letters, the worldview and way of life that informs Philemon is quite different from that which informs Pliny's letter.

A brief look at Pliny's letter gives way to a brief analysis of Philemon and its issues. Was Onesimus a runaway slave or just a slave with which Philemon was angry?  Wright favors a runaway slave.

Did Onesimus run into Paul by chance or did he seek him out? Wright thinks it more likely that he had sought him out, trying to be reconciled to his master. Wright also considers it now the majority opinion that Paul was imprisoned at Ephesus when he wrote Philemon and dates the letter to not long before Paul leaves and writes 2 Corinthians.

For what is Paul asking? Mere forgiveness for Onesimus? For Philemon to send him back to help Paul? For Philemon to set Onesimus free? Forgiveness, yes. To send him back, probably? Freedom? Wright does indeed think so. He brilliantly sees an ironic allusion to Exodus 21:2-6 where a slave could decide to be a slave forever. Philemon can receive Onesimus back forever in a quite different sense.

But Wright is Wright. He will not be satisfied with less than abstracting some exquisite and eternal truths from this interaction. Indeed, that is why he has started here. If only he could distinguish between his theological ponderings and exegesis of the text. Philemon and Onesimus are now members of the messianic family, and the central symbol of the Christian worldview for Paul is unity (11).

Philemon is about attempting a new way of life (6). The order things come in the letter (poetic sequence) is not as important as the implicit narrative (the referential sequence) (7). Faith generates and defines fellowship (17). Fellowship is an "energizing principle" that produces the reality of which it speaks.

And here it comes--Wright's signature--"Two thousand years of history, from the call of Abraham to the time of Jesus, are collected up like light in a prism and focused onto the royal representative in whom their meaning and purpose is fulfilled" (17). "Messiah" is something like a collective noun--"Messiah-and-his-people." This is what is in the bubble above the word Messiah, and when Paul prays that the fellowship of Philemon's faith might be active in the knowledge of every good among them "into Christ" (1:6).

Reflections
Insert the usual comments on Wright's pensive style and cute chapter titles. I deeply appreciate Wright's sense that "Sometimes it is better to get your hands dirty at once rather than approach a topic with lofty generalizations" (6). Of course we get to the lofty generalizations quickly enough.

I'm sympathetic to Ephesus as point of origin, but if it's late in Paul's stay, he doesn't do what he said and come visit. After Ephesus, Paul heads north toward Macedonia. I do wonder if Paul's quick departure from Ephesus in Acts 18:19 hides a quick, initial imprisonment after he first arrived there. He would then have gone on to visit Colossae. Obviously this is complete speculation.

It seems like there is often a point in Wright where the historical grasp on the balloon is let go and it floats away into dreamy abstraction. One wonders, in the end, whether Wright will ever be able to really get Paul because Paul was far too grounded in the end, and Wright can't help being contemplative. The referential world behind Paul, the one Wright seeks, was not an ideological system.

Was unity the center of Paul's worldview? If you mean the inclusion of the Gentiles, then the answer is probably yes. But notice the difference between "unity," which tends toward the abstract, and "the inclusion of the Gentiles," which is a concrete missiological problem. Did faith generate and define fellowship? Shared faith did provide common ground.

Did fellowship relate to a world in which both Philemon, Paul, and Onesimus were all "in Messiah"? I suppose so, theologically, but I suspect we would need to explain what we are saying to Paul. Wright is the king of theological overload. Paul is merely saying that Christian family fellowship entails some things, including the fact that Philemon needs to forgive Onesimus. These dynamics take place in the light of Christ. There are concrete truths here on how we should relate to one another, yes.

As for Christ incorporating Israel, I have yet to see any exegetical evidence that Paul thought in those terms. This is the spark of Wright's early brilliance and the pariah he has never been able to shake. It is brilliant theology, but most scholars remain unconvinced that any of the New Testament authors thought of Christ in this way.

Three Ways of Thinking...

This is just one dimension...

Platonic
First, there are those for whom the world is really an entry point to talk about ideas. There is this thing called worldview and presupposition, and that is when you're really talking about what's important and real. The things around us are really just pointers toward that world of truth.

The Bible is all about this world of absolute truth. Its purpose is to tell us about God's worldview and the right presuppositions to have about the world. The Bible is a world of ideas, a window into God's mind. Individual words hold all kinds of secrets, as do the biblical texts if you have spiritual understanding.

If you've studied church history or philosophy, this should sound familiar. For Plato, the world of ideas is the true world, and the things around us are only shadows of the real world. If you look at the world around you, the world of senses, you are bound to be mislead. Only if you look on the heavenly ideals, will you know for sure how to interpret the world around you.

Platonism was an antecedent of Gnosticism, where the initiated gain insight into secret truths. Today, the Calvinist tradition tends toward the presuppositional. It talks a lot about worldview and "warranted philosophical beliefs" that do not need to be substantiated by evidence. I believe in order to understand. Post-liberalism, I think, has some tendencies in this direction

Aristotilean
The second approach is more evidentiary in nature. It infers absolute truths from looking at the world around us. It looks for "evidence that demands a verdict." It expects (or makes) the evidence of science, archaeology, etc. to add up to the absolute truth that is also in the Bible. That truth, however, is not detached from evidence. It is supported and pointed to by the evidence. The real world thus embodies absolute truth, rather than us needing Platonic presuppositions to come up with the right answers.

Evangelicalism has often been more of this sort, more concrete, more inductive Bible study oriented. To be sure, there has often been some "steering" of the evidence in the desired direction. But what everyone says they are doing is letting the text say what it says inductively. This is a more Aristotelian approach to putting the details together. It believes that absolute truths are embodied in all the particulars. You get to the universals by seeing them in every particular.

So God embodies certain truths in his person. This approach tends to be more concrete, with less dreamy abstractions. You look for the universal principles that are embodied in each particular text of Scripture.

Modified nominalism
I hate to call this approach nominalism, because then attacks of medieval nominalism may distract from the concept. I do not wish to deny the existence of universal truth. I do wish to say that our finitude makes it quite presumptuous for us to think we can accurately think in those terms. The worldviews and absolute truths you hear so many Christians talking about are bound to be a source of much embarrassment and joke telling in the kingdom. "And you actually thought you had it figured out," and the angels slap you on the back and start laughing uproariously.

There are universal truths that are a matter of definition. "A person who is single is unmarried" is true by definition. However, when you are talking inductively, about the world, from the standpoint of our finite, human perspective, universal truths are aggregates of particular truths. That is to say, unless you are talking about something that is true by definition, universal truths are things that are true in all particular situations. In our current, fallen, finite situation, we are more or less forced to start with each particular and to connect them to each other in more limited ways.

To put it another way, you build up to universal truth by counting particulars and eventually coming to the conclusion that those particulars all point the same way. This is, by the way, what those are saying who say that context isn't everything. They are saying that all particular contexts all point in the same direction. But the underlying principle still stands.

In many cases, particulars probably will not build up to universals. Rather, one particular will be similar to another in some ways but not others. We will look for the ways in which different things resemble each other, looking for points of continuity and discontinuity but without any certainty that there will be some common core overlap. Some Schencks have big noses. Some have big ears, but there are no universal Schencky characteristics, only a collection of general family resemblances.

This approach gives full embodiment to each particular revelation, and requires us to map all those particular revelations to each other if we want then to speak of universal truths in Scripture. It is more complicated to be sure, but it is as far superior to the other approaches as the heaven is higher than the earth. This is the approach that gives the fullest sense to incarnation, for each individual truth is given its full significance.

I frankly can't see any possible way to argue for the other approaches. I can account for the other two, but the other two will inevitably end up trying to force some disparate data into a foreign mould. That is to say, there will be no "naughty data" in this modified nominalist approach, but there will always be disparate data with the others. That is to say, the aggregate of all particular discussions of ideology will suggest that this modified nominalist approach is a universal truth.

I get very frustrated with the prevalence of the other two approaches, for they seem sophomorish and kindergartenish. To me, they make Christians look stupid and inevitably undersell the profundity of God.

Advent Scriptures

I lead in a service that reads the lectionary each Sunday. I am always amazed at the way it weaves together Scripture from the Psalms, OT, Epistles, and Gospels each week in keeping with the Christian season. And it does so in a way that gets through most of Scripture every three years.

The Scriptures for the four Sundays before Christmas, Advent, are brilliant. They weave together readings that have to do with Christ's first coming with readings relating to his second.   Look at the sequences this year (Year A):

Week 1 (December 1)
1. Psalm 122 (going up to Jerusalem to the house of the Lord)
2. Isaiah 2:1-5 (flocking to the future holy mountain)
3. Romans 13:11-14 (Waking up from sleep)
4. Matthew 24:36-44 (not knowing the time of Christ's return)

Notice how the Scriptures begin to get us ready for Jesus' coming. We are going up to the temple. We are waking up from sleep. We are looking forward to the time when Christ will return to his holy mountain, although we do not know the day or the hour.

Week 2 (December 8, today)
1. Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19 (about the king taking care of the poor)
2. Isaiah 11:1-10 (the coming righteous Branch passage)
3. Romans 15:4-13 (about good news for the Gentiles)
4. Matthew 3:1-12 (John the Baptist preparing the way)

John the Baptist prepared the way of Jesus' ministry, a ministry in which the king of kings brought good news to the poor, just like the kings of old. Jesus was the righteous Branch that was promised, the one who eventually would bring light to the nations.

Week 3 (December 15)
1. Isaiah 35:1-10 (the return to Zion)
2. Luke 1:47-55 (the Magnificat)
3. James 5:7-10 (patience until the Lord's return)
4. Matthew 11:2-11 (signs that Jesus is the Messiah)

We are on the holy highway back to Zion. We are patiently waiting for him to come, looking for the signs of his kingdom. Meanwhile, we hear Mary's song as she celebrates what God is already doing within her.

Week 4 (December 22)
1. Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19 (restore us, O Lord)
2. Isaiah 7:10-16 (virgin birth passage)
3. Romans 1:1-7 (about Jesus the Son of David)
4. Matthew 1:18-25 (Joseph's dream about Jesus)

Joseph was promised that Mary would give birth to the Messiah. Isaiah 7 saw it long before though Spirit eyes. Paul tells of the accomplishment in Romans. Lord, please restore us.

A brilliant student once shared his philosophy with me...

... When we become a Christian, he said, God takes out our spirit and replaces it with his Spirit. So God literally lives inside of us. The Spirit inside us is not able to sin, like 1 John 3:9 says, because it is God's Spirit. But because we still have a human body and soul, though, we might still sin.

I can't remember if he said the sinful nature was in our human spirit, so that God takes our sinful nature out when we are saved. But you can see that a statement like, "What you do flows from what you are," becomes literal.  We have God inside as part of us, so it is only natural that we would act a certain way.

I remember thinking to myself, Wow, that is brilliant.  Brilliant and bizzare. Brilliant, bizzare, and probably not really what the biblical authors had in mind. (I also thought of Apollinarianism)

Man, I could start my own cult by going hog wild creative with this. So your body is why you can still sin after having your sin nature taken out. But because our resurrection bodies will be spiritual bodies, we will never sin in heaven. We will neither have the sin nature nor the body that is weak toward sin.

Then the soul is where our mind, emotions, and will are. This is the part of us that gets transplanted into our heavenly, resurrection body, along with God's Spirit that will still be inside us. So we'll still have our basic personality and memories.

This is what happens when you take things literally that are really more like metaphors and pictures... or is this actually the way it works?????

Who is smarter than who?

Before I die, I would love to write a little philosophy book on the nature of meaning and my sense of a critical realist view of the world. I'm not sure who would read or publish it, but alas, I digress... :-)

I was thinking the other day that the following phrase is a good illustration of how sloppily we often think: "She is smarter than him." This is doubly or triply sloppy. (Now mind you, it is perfectly legitimate to talk in this way because it is ridiculous to expect people to talk in philosophical propositions, although I would prefer just to say, "She's pretty smart.")

1. First, there is sloppiness in the words, "She is."  What we are really saying is that in specific instances where a person might demonstrate intelligence, she demonstrates it or would demonstrate it in some greater degree than he does or would. In other words, a great number of our "s/he is" statements are really "s/he does" statements. In those cases, we are what we do.

Is he a good boy or a good girl? What we are really saying is that he or she does good or bad things in certain circumstances (or better yet, that he or she intends to do good or bad in certain circumstances). A large number of ascriptive statements along the lines of "s/he is, it is" are really extensions of "s/he does" or "they did" observations.

Of course that's assuming there is any basis for such ascriptions. "She is such a good person" sometimes can really mean, "I love my daughter no matter what she does because she's my daughter."

2. Second, there is sloppiness in the universal nature of the statement. There are people who would demonstrate greater intelligence than someone else in almost any imaginable situation. But we are really making a statistical judgment when we say, "She is smarter than him." We are saying, "In the majority of instances where intelligence might be demonstrated, she will demonstrate greater intelligence." So, again, "she is" nothing. Rather, in most cases, "she does" something.

Even here, however, this is a potentially problematic statement. We really need to specify in what context she is generally smarter than him. Is she smarter than him when doing math problems? Is she smarter than him at finding things around the house? Is she smarter than him at fixing cars? There are different kinds of intelligence.

So I think I am pretty good at seeing the big picture. I am not good at all at remembering what specific cards have already been played in Euchre (warning if we ever find each other at a New Year's Eve party). There are people who are going to be smarter (=act smarter) than someone else in so many different contexts that we are justified in saying, "She is smarter than him."

But most of the time, it is only going to be in certain areas that a person is going to statistically do the smarter thing than another. And it may be that two people do two equally smart things that are smart in different ways. Basically, intelligence is a slippery notion sometimes.

3. Which, finally, brings us to the final question. What really is intelligence? You'll notice that I get really annoyed at all you Platonists out there (like Tom Wright and all the post-liberals at Princeton and Duke) who act as if the world is really just an opportunity to talk about beautiful ideological systems. (P.S. You Aristotelians are wrong too, although greatly preferable--you know who you are Roger Olson).

Intelligence is really about ability. It is not about access to God's ideas.  I have no problem using language about God's ideas as long as we know it is really only an analogy that helps us grasp a truth about God using our common language. Intelligence is about your ability to do things, thus the need to specify exactly what context we mean when we talk about intelligence.

That's enough for a cold morning, I suspect. The first sentence may have been enough for most... :-)

Some not too spiritual thoughts...

... about how people today often join a church and come to Christ (that order is intentional).

A couple things triggered these thoughts in my mind. The first was a conversation I had with a pastor about a high capacity individual who had recently started attending their church. The pastor was salivating to get this person into leadership. [Insert here all the usual warnings about exposing new people too soon to the dark side of the church.]

The second trigger was a meeting I was in this week where someone from another state was involved. They were from a secular organization interacting with Indiana Wesleyan University. I wondered how the experience was for them. Did they attend church back in their home location? Did we seem any different as an audience from any other place?

I pictured a scenario where a not-too religious person comes into contact with some people he or she likes. Maybe they're friendly. Maybe they're nice. Maybe they're honest. Maybe they're good. There's something attractive about them. The person thinks, "I'd like to hang out with people like this."

So they start attending their church. Is this person an exception to the environment there?  Or are there more people like them at the church? Are these positive people, people who really want to help the world in ways that most people would agree are helpful? Or are they a bunch of curmudgeons? Or is this a place to vent anger--that's attractive to some but more likely to be a shadow church. A shadow church is a church that pretends to be a church but really has very little to do with Christ.

Now comes another scary part for me. Once a person has become a part of this community, the ideas of the community will become a bigger and bigger part of the new person's life. Whatever the community--Mormon, Wesleyan, Baptist, Muslim--the person who has become a part of the community now becomes vulnerable to whatever the ideological system of the community is. That's how you turn a normal person into a suicide bomber or a fundamentalist.

My hope is that we will remember why they started coming in the first place and major on the major... it's not our ideas. Love God and love neighbor--that's the idea we should be teaching. Anything that distracts from that is infection.

Make them lovers.

Tom Wright Cometh...

I finished the Preface to N. T. Wright's long expected, 1500 page Paul and the Faithfulness of God. At 30 pages a week, that's at least a year of blog reviewing yet to come!!

Preface
Wright begins his 1500 page two book tome with an outline. He has arranged it in somewhat of a chiasm! A chiasm is a literary structure where the first element (A) corresponds to the last (A'), the second (B) to the second to last (B'), and so on until you reach the middle element. So chapter 1 correlates with chapter 16, chapter 2 with 15, and so on.

Wright does warn us, however, that it is not a perfect set up. While chapter 5 does correspond with chapter 12, the intervening chapters do not relate in that way. Part 2 (chaps. 6-8) gives us Paul's mindset within the worldview of his communities, but Part 3 (chaps. 9-11) gives us Paul's uniquely invented theology. "My proposal is that Paul actually invents something we may call 'Christian theology'" (xvi).

It seems hardly a coincidence that the heart of the book is chapters 9-11! Must not the Great Bishop mean us to think of Romans 9-11? Indeed, he mentions Romans 9-11 a little later in the preface as chapters Paul had in mind from the very beginning of Romans.

Wright also justifies taking a more synchronic approach to Paul rather than a diachronic one. A diachronic approach might have proceeded through Paul's letters and then synthesized them into a theology. Wright prefers a synchronic approach, one that looks at Paul's letters more or less as all teaching the same thing and thus, in a sense, Wright, treats them somewhat as a single text. He does not put it in this way, but he comes close when he says, "We should therefore expect to find that Paul says briefly and cryptically in one place what elsewhere he spells out in more detail" (xx).

Wright rejects charges that he first invented a picture, a "controlling story," and then superimposed it on the early Christian writers (xviii). Rather, he insists he has developed his understanding in constant dialogue with the primary texts.

The rest of the preface is filled with the sort of thing you might expect. He will presuppose his work in the earlier volumes--The New Testament and the People of God, Jesus and the Victory of God, The Resurrection and the Son of God. He thanks all of those who reviewed parts of the project. He gives some of the story of the writing. And, of course, he dedicates the book to Richard Hays of Duke Divinity School.

Reflection
So much of these brief pages are exactly the picture of Tom Wright that we have come to know, love, and occasionally poke fun at. He has designed this project in the form of a chiasm! Brilliant!

I regularly tell my students that anyone who sees a chiasm of this scope in a biblical text is just plain wrong, that there is a certain personality that loves to go chiasm-hunting and they are always wrong. The massively complex and extensive chiasms some interpreters see in great swaths of biblical text are a sign of the brilliance of the interpreter rather than of anything the text itself was likely to mean. What original reader or hearer would have caught such complexity? Such interpreters unknowingly reveal that they are not really interested in the text as real communication between one person and another but as a mirror of their own ingenuity and as a canvas on which they might paint timeless truths.

So any chiasm someone sees in a text that is more than a couple verses, or more complex than two or three steps, is almost certainly wrong... that is, unless they are Tom Wright and they tell you up front! His is a beautiful mind. I have often humorously remarked that Wright is sometimes more brilliant than Paul himself. :-)

I did not have to read anyone else's critique to think that Wright sometimes reads an overarching story into Paul that goes beyond any metanarrative Paul himself conceptualized. There is no question that Wright has spent a lifetime in dialog with the texts and that he knows them absolutely. It is nonetheless still possible that, like so many scholars, Wright has throughout his career played out the great spark about Jesus being Israel that he had back in his Oxford days.

If you had asked me whether Wright would pick a synchronic or a diachronic approach, I would have guessed correctly.  Of course Wright is more interested in a coherent, even if complex ideological system than in a more historically particular and variable Paul. Wright is both theologian and exegete, and perhaps history will eventually tell us which he is more. What we know is that he is brilliant.

But don't let this fun-poking come off as disparaging but rather as the kind of jabbing a friend might make to another whose idiosyncrasies are beloved. A group of friends are sitting at a coffee shop together with a famous friend who is the center of everyone's attention. You know at some point in the brilliant conversation the quirk will emerge. Wait for it; wait for it.

It comes. Smiles come across the faces. Knowing looks are exchanged. And everyone continues listening.

The Greatest Common Denominator of Scripture

Preface
Someone asked yesterday if I had written anything on a "big picture" view of scripture replacing the "atomization" which has been so common. The wording of the question indicated that they had read the piece Jeremy Summers and I wrote for the Missio Alliance blog. It also relates to something I wrote last week on how modern inerrancy in the 1800s shifted the center of biblical theology from the big picture to the details of individual passages, chiefly to oppose abolitionism. Individual verses on slaves obeying their masters came to trump the big principle that in Christ there is no slave.

I took the comment as a blog challenge. What would a hermeneutic look like today that tried to recapture the "inerrancy" of the pre-modern era? It's a difficult question because you can't undo historical consciousness. To the extent that someone understands reading in context, you can't undo it. This is in fact what current ETS inerrancy is--a partial understanding of context that can't be undone. It just gets more complex, as a D. A. Carson or Kevin Vanhoozer demonstrate.

For the record, my hermeneutic was born of this dilemma. I have found it impossible to deny inductive Bible study method as an evidentiary method. I don't see how anyone who truly understands it could. The only "successful" counter is presuppositional and thus turns to blind faith. Regardless of the evidence, we just won't follow the evidence. This is a recipe for eventual atheism--or at least eventual atheism for your children and students.

So since before I cranked out Who Decides What the Bible Means one week in the summer of 2005 (my first self-published book), I have argued for a two level hermeneutic, one of which involved the original meaning of the Bible and the other of which read the Bible in terms of common Christian understanding. The second is more or less the pre-modern way in which the fathers, Luther, Wesley read Scripture, before the modern inerrancy of Hodge and Warfield.

All of that is preface. My two level approach has not found general appeal, even though I think it is the only legitimate way to do what evangelicals want to do with Scripture. It is 1) both honest with history yet 2) allows us to read the text as the fathers read the text. What I am going to present below does not necessarily contradict what I've just written above, but it might be more palatable.

The Post
The problem with modern inerrancy is that it tends toward "the most difficult common denominator." I don't want to say "lowest common denominator" because every piece of the text is Scripture. But if you think of what a lowest common denominator is, you will get the picture.

Modern inerrancy functions such that, even if the vast majority of biblical texts seem to point in one way, a single difficult text can dislodge that trajectory. Before the modern, historical era, these "problem verses" were simply reinterpreted to mean something else. In modern evangelicalism, trump verses tend to undermine the big picture of Scripture.

I have the great benefit of being born an old soul into a old family in a hidden corner of the church. One of my grandfathers was born in 1883 and my mother grew up on Bible college/camp meeting grounds. My first hermeneutic was more or less the revivalist hermeneutic of the late 1800s/early 1900s.

I early recognized that I could not simply take a verse for what it seemed to say. Individual verses had to fit with what the rest of the Bible said. I distinctly and clearly remember thinking that as I read through my King James Bible. The meaning of an individual verse must be interpreted in the light of the whole.

Of course this is not the neo-evangelical or modernist way. An individual verse must be interpreted on its own terms. This is of course completely true from a historical perspective. It just isn't true from the way the pre-modern Christians of the centuries have read the Bible.

So what might a return to the "inerrancy" of the centuries look like?  It would be able to "set aside" problem verses until we know what to do with them. It would, in the words of the Reformers, be able to interpret the unclear verses in the light of the clear ones.

For example, we know that in Christ there is neither male nor female (Gal. 3:28). We know that one indication of the age of the Spirit is that sons and daughters will prophesy (Acts 2:17). We know that women did play spiritual roles and lead in the early church (Priscilla, Phoebe, the prophetess daughters of Philip, the prophesying women of 1 Cor. 11). Spiritual common sense says, especially in the Western world, that to prohibit women from ministry doesn't make any sense. The only argument you can make against it is that God just doesn't want it.

Now enters the modern inerrancy of Charles Hodge. Sorry, there is one verse in 1 Timothy that you cannot ignore, just like you cannot ignore the individual verses on slavery. Thus the majority of evangelicals are swayed. They flow to the most difficult common denominator. They take the most problematic Scriptures and make them central.

The problems here are massive. You may end up taking the most "that time" elements of the Bible and make them center stage. So instead of focusing on Jesus' love command, you may end up focusing on the annihilation of the Canaanites. You may end up using the Bible to promote things that are actually contrary to God's will because you have placed the center in the most difficult common denominator!

If we return to the sense of Scripture's truthfulness before the Princeton Calvinists, we look rather to the "greatest common denominator" of Scripture.  What is the central teaching of the Bible on this topic? If there are other passages that seem to pull in another direction, you set them aside as unclear. After all, we don't know all the history to interpret the original meaning of the Bible fully and certainly anyway.

Chalk it up to contextual uncertainty. Reinterpret it like a good premodern or just put an "unclear" tape on it. Invoke the notion of progressive revelation or situational particularity. However your tradition deals with unclear verses, do that. But don't let the problematic trump the central principles of Scripture.

This is something like what I have in mind when I speak of a big picture approach to the Bible driving the interpretation of the details, rather than an atomism. It is an approach that looks to the greatest common denominator and thus returns as best we can in the modern era to the hermeneutic of the fathers, Calvin, and Wesley.

Freedoms aren't absolute.

If there's one thing my holiness upbringing emphatically grilled into my head as a child, it's that it isn't about me. I grew up on a stable diet of "dying to self," which primarily meant that I was to surrender my will entirely to God. There was to be no part of me that resisted God's will or that pulled against God.

Of course that's easier said than done, and it's not what I have in mind today. This goal of selflessness spilled over into the way we are to treat each other.  We are to live "in honor, preferring one another," as my father used to say. You put others above yourself. This plays itself out down to the dinner table. Go ahead, you take the last piece of pie.

I remember a big aha moment in college when reading Romans 14--it's not about my rights. It's about what's best for everyone and the kingdom. It may be my right to do something, but that doesn't mean the right thing to do is to take advantage of my rights. Rather, let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus--who was God and not only became human for us, became a slave for us, but died for us a horrible death (Phil. 2).

I'm still not to what I had in mind for this post. The above is just about how Christians are supposed to behave in this world. There are legitimate situations, but let it be rare that you hear a Christian say, "I've got my rights." In fact, Paul advises the Corinthians that sometimes it's better to lose than to stand up for what is rightfully yours (1 Cor. 6:7).

With this background, you can imagine that it grates on my nerves to hear Americans talking about any number of rights they have, on both sides. I hate hearing "health care is a universal right" just as much as I hate hearing, "It's my right to take a gun anywhere I want." It's not that I don't believe it is important for us to speak up for the rights of Americans... and I do think Christians will do it that way--standing up not so much for their own individual rights but for the rights of others. My problem goes to another aha moment I had once upon a time.

None of the rights of the Constitution are absolute. That is to say, there are exceptions to almost all of our rights as Americans. To hear some Americans speak, there are no limits to my individual rights as an American. (And, yes, the current American climate has become dangerously egoist--my rights rather than our collective rights)  Because the rights of individuals sometimes pull against each other, rights have to be prioritized.

For example, my freedom to religion is not absolute. If I am a Jehovah's Witness who doesn't believe my child should have a blood transfusion, tough cookies if the life of my child is in danger. If my religion says I should kill abortion doctors or murder Christians, sorry Charlie. If my religion calls for ritual virgin sacrifices, I'm out of luck. The freedom of religion isn't absolute. There are exceptions.

My freedom of speech is not absolute. It's a fine line, but if my speech is urging people to violence beyond a certain point, I will be legally forced to shut up. No one is free to incite violence against the government or to speak toward the murder of government officials. At some point, a line is crossed and my rights end.

The same applies to other freedoms in the Bill of Rights. After due process, the government can take away my property to build a highway. A murderer does not have the right to carry a gun. Capital punishment, when legal, can deprive a person of his or her life. Our freedoms as Americans are not absolute. They are extensive, but they are not absolute. I personally think we need to be reminded of this fact.

And it makes sense because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. This is the primary principle of people living together. The greatness of the American experiment was the Bill of Rights, which set down certain boundaries for how far this overarching utilitarianism could go. We set up a framework that located individual freedom within the boundaries of a peaceful society.

The precise limits of those boundaries are constantly changing. I can understand a child having to wear a seat belt. I'm less comfortable with an adult being forced to wear one. I understand keeping public places free from smoke and with drinking limits for driving. I'm less comfortable when laws try to force me as an individual to eat healthily.

But it's a give and take. There aren't clear lines. You can't just say, "It's my right." We're in this thing together, not just as individuals.

It's worth reminding ourselves of the Preamble to the Constitution. We the people have established a more perfect union to establish justice, to ensure domestic tranquility, to provide for the common defense, and to promote the general welfare. And, yes, we established a Constitution to ensure the blessings of liberty too--primarily our corporate freedom but also our individual freedom.

Happy Thanksgivukkah

The last time was 1888, the next time will be 81,056 that Thanksgiving and Hanukkah will be on the same day. I doubt seriously that there will be a United States by then.

Hanukkah celebrates the re-dedication of the temple in Jerusalem after it was desecrated in 167BC by the Syrians. There is nothing intrinsically unchristian about it, although sometimes Christians think there is. In our world, we think of Hanukkah as a competing holiday with Christmas. But Jesus goes to this festival in John 10:22. If you think of how the book of Esther has the feast of Purim to celebrate God delivering the Jews of Persia from Haman, Hanukkah similarly celebrates God's victory over the Syrians.

You can read about the event in 1 Maccabees. Another reason why Protestants in particular might have a residual negative feeling toward Hanukkah is the fact that this book (along with 2 Maccabees), is in the Roman Catholic (and Orthodox) Bible. But just because we don't consider these books Scripture doesn't mean that God didn't deliver the Jews. Historically speaking, it is overwhelmingly likely that there is a core historicity to the story.

The Maccabean crisis is what Daniel 11 was originally about. The crisis played such a formative role on Judaism that it's likely Christianity would look drastically different if it hadn't had happened. Pharisees, Essenes, and Sadducees all arguably were formed as groups in this period. The period provided the lens through which Jews at the time of Christ arguably read the Old Testament.

The Scandal of Wesleyan Memory

Jeremy Summers and I have a brief post over on the Missio Alliance site giving a few areas where Wesleyan association with broader evangelicalism has at times threatened to undermine some of our core identity features as Wesleyans. This is part of a series including other traditions, like the Mennonites, the Brethren, etc--groups who are on the margins of evangelism. "Mainline" evangelicals struggle to accept us and we have a tendency to blur our traditions with elements from them.

Not all scholars are created equal...

All the same impressions as usual of SBL:

• Some scholars are incredibly educated incompetents. What I mean is that they know an awful lot of data but can't seem to put it all together. They know all the different plays and are brilliant at describing them, but they can't seem to cross the finish line. I heard a couple papers I would put in this category. 
• Some scholars are incredibly bright, but their presuppositions sometimes prevent it from showing. Sometimes I feel like I can outrun some of these, even though they are way smarter than I am, just because I can smell a cop out and want to be honest with the evidence.
• There are some scholars who are just world class masters. Most people have no idea what one of these looks like. I heard a paper by Greg Sterling today. What a master. Heard another by Jimmy Dunn--what clarity and lucidity.

If you've read me for long, you know my thinking here. God has never been limited to the original meanings in his speaking through Scripture. He certainly didn't make the NT authors stick to it. In the meantime, we can understand enough of the original meaning for life and salvation. 

But to get the nuances will often require expert knowledge of the biblical languages and the historical background. In some cases even those who know the most won't have enough information to be sure. This is the reason why it is more important for us to focus on the big picture of Scripture than on the details of individuals verses.

For example, our theology of women in ministry should not hang on the interpretation of individual verses like 1 Timothy 2:12 but should flow from the big principles of Scripture. 

Jim West, Chris Tilling, and Christian Brady

It is a strange feature of our current age that you can feel like you know people, maybe even are close friends with people you have never met. So I ran into the dubious trilogy above today in the book room: Jim West, Chris Tilling, and Christian Brady. I suppose the most surprising thing was to find out that Jim West actually seems rather normal in person.

But then again, I probably do to...

How Hebrews and Philo connected Scriptures

My thanks to the Intertextuality and the New Testament unit at SBL for letting me present a paper yesterday. My goal was to catalog some of the similarities between the way Hebrews and Philo connected Scriptures together. Here was my outline:

1. Similar Quote Splicing
In addition to the fact that both functioned out of the Greek rather than Hebrew Bible, they both share some specific word splices. For example, Hebrews 13:5 combines Joshua 1:5, Deuteronomy 31:8 and arguably Genesis 28:15 in the same exact way as Philo. They are the only two in all extant literature of the time. This must surely be more than coincidence, although we lack enough evidence to say what the lines of dependence were.

2. Use of Secondary Texts
Philo used secondary texts to explicate primary ones. Hebrews also does so perhaps more than most have noticed. The obvious example is how Hebrews uses Genesis 2:2 to clarify Psalm 95. But I also argued that Hebrews uses Genesis 14 to explicate Psalm 110:4 and various passages on the wilderness tabernacle to clarify Jeremiah 31.

3. Use of Exempla
Hebrews 11 is the most famous example list, a collection of biblical characters strung together to reinforce a certain theme. There are closer examples than Philo but Philo does this as well. Almost all my Philonic examples for this paper were taken from Allegorical Interpretation book 3. Strikingly, this little swath of Philo had numerous superficial parallels.

In the case of exempla, Philo's characters all come from Genesis and a little in Exodus, like the majority of Hebrews' examples. They overlap a little--Noah, Melchizedek, Abraham, Jacob. Philo spends significant time on Melchizedek and Bezalel, the artificer who made the tabernacle. However, Philo uses allegory to string them together.

4. Use of Gezera Shawa
Both Hebrews and Philo use catchwords to link from a primary passage to a secondary one. So the Philonic example I used was based on the word "cursing." Hebrews does this too. The author connects from Psalm 95 to Genesis 2 on the concept of God resting. The disobedience will not enter into "God's rest." So what is God's rest? Well, "God rested" on the seventh day. So someone who enters God's rest stops working in some way.

5. Use of Allegory
Philo of course is replete with allegorical connections. Hebrews is more grounded to a literal reading of the text (remembering that by "literal," we do not mean the original meaning but a surface reading that does not think it is taking the words in a figural way. The original meaning was culturally embedded in a way the paradigm of the biblical interpreters did not understand--or most contemporary biblical interpreters, including many scholars).

But Hebrews does allegory too, and uses allegory in its Scriptural connections. So Psalm 110:4 is a primary text that tells us that the Messiah will be a "priest after the order of Melchizedek." What is such a priest? This leads the author to the secondary text of Genesis 14.

The author's interpretation of Genesis 14 involves allegorical interpretation. What is a priest like Melchizedek? Using almost exactly the same etymological argument as Philo, it is a "king of peace" and a "king of righteousness." In the Genesis text, Melchizedek has no father, mother, priestly genealogy, time of taking or leaving office. Therefore, allegorically, this must be what a priest after the order of Melchizedek is like. Ironically, the historical Melchizedek himself didn't qualify! The author is not arguing about the historical Melch. but the allegorical one!

P.S. I have published many of these individual interpretations elsewhere if you are writing something and would like a reference to cite.

I also discussed the allegory of the tabernacle in Hebrews 9, which the author mixes with his understanding of Jeremiah 31 to give us a two part tabernacle that corresponds to the two covenants.

6. Connecting Shadows
The "shadows" from the old covenant do not match to Christ in a one-to-one way. Comparisons were made between Hebrews, Colossians 2:17, and Philo on the literal interpretation being a shadow of the deeper meaning of the Scriptural text. As usual, I dissed the prevalent translation of hypodeigma in Hebrews 8:5 as "copy."

For the paper's purpose, the key element here is that Hebrews connects all the sacrificial types of the Jewish Bible and amalgamates them into one shadow over and against the one sacrifice of Christ.

7. Final Thoughts
I made a little fun of the category of typology in the paper, a category invented by Protestant scholars so that books like Hebrews could be said to do something different from allegory--and thus medieval Catholic exegesis. But there is allegory in the NT, plain and simple. Hebrews is far more "grounded" to the literal than Philo, but it still does allegory.

Once again, I am struck by the number of superficial parallels. They are very superficial, but they are significant. It would be like reading a book you really disagreed with, but then taking half of the elements and redoing them. Or it would be like someone who grew up in Alexandria, heard Philo speak in the Great Synagogue, or perhaps was forced to go through Questions and Answers on Genesis as a child, but then went on to believe something different. But some of the forms stuck...

Basically, Apollos wrote Hebrews. :-)

A History of Inerrancy

A few quick thoughts on how I think the Bible's truthfulness has been conceived over time and has changed throughout church history.

Phase 1: Pre-Reformation
From the New Testament authors to the Reformation, there was an assumption that the Bible was the very words of God and that it was obviously truthful in everything it said. However, there was no restriction that would limit that truthfulness to the literal. If a passage seemed problematic from a literal standpoint, it could be interpreted allegorically.

Basically, the meaning of the Bible was tethered to the "rule of faith" rather than to history. Passages perceived to be difficult in relation to orthodoxy or their sense of the world were interpreted in a different way. We see this still in the church today in the pew, as church members who were not trained to read the Bible in context search for interpretations that fit with what they have already been taught to believe.

Phase 2: Reformation
The Reformation untethered the meaning of the Bible from orthodox tradition and forbid figural interpretation. Sola scriptura in effect retethered the meaning of the Bible to history rather than to the rule of faith. The moment this change of meaning orientation happened, Protestant liberalism and higher criticism immediately became one likely eventuality.

The orientation of meaning shifted from being a premodern mirror of common Christian understanding to an individual quest to "get back" to what it meant. The operating mode became one of pealing back, which would lead eventually to the quest for the historical Jesus and the pealing away of historical layers in the gospels.

It would take a few centuries for this to take its course. Luther, Calvin, Wesley continued to some extent to read the Bible in a premodern way, as a big picture mirror of their own theologies. They continued to read a single theology into the biblical texts taken as a whole. And of course they believed the Bible (meaning their own theologies which they saw in the Bible) was completely truthful.

Phase 3: The Princeton Calvinists
The modern doctrine of inerrancy was arguably born of Charles Hodges' support of slavery. (By the way, few people know that the Southern Baptist Church itself was also formed in defense of slavery.) Hodge's doctrine of inerrancy pushed the locus of meaning down to the verse level rather than the overall, big picture theological level as before. So since individual verses in Colossians, 1 Peter, etc. told slaves to obey their masters, Hodge argued that the abolitionist movement was going against the details of the Bible. Meanwhile, abolitionists such as my Wesleyan forebears argued from the big principles of Scripture.

We see this same hermeneutic in play today with the question of women in ministry. Rather than an overall theology informing the whole meaning of the Bible as before, individual, "inerrant" trump verses are brought to play in debates. This was a shift in the way the Bible's truthfulness is approached.

In the late 1800s, B. B. Warfield continued to push Hodge's approach to Scripture at Princeton. He argued literal interpretation of the Bible against my holiness, revivalist ancestors. It was during his time that historical criticism and evolution were coming into play, and he made some early responses. He did not completely rule out evolution (it's hard for us to "feel" that there was ever a time when emotions weren't as polarized as ours are now).  Warfield also accepted a kind of dual authorship of the biblical texts, with the personalities of the authors being involved.

My key take-away here is that modern inerrancy originated in direct opposition to the values of the Wesleyan tradition of which I am a part.

Phase 4: Fundamentalist Inerrancy
The form that inerrancy took in the mid-twentieth century was a defensive mechanism against developments in science and biblical studies. It set down assumptions that created a wall against these perceived threats. No matter what science says, you can't believe in evolution. No matter what Bible scholars say, you have to believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch.

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is the codification of these fences. The CSBI assumes an evidentiary, modernist approach but only within certain boundaries.  If the evidence seems to be pointing in a direction that crosses one of the boundary lines, the evidence must be reinterpreted. This is analogous to the way the patristic fathers reinterpreted biblical texts but now it is the historical and scientific evidence that is reinterpreted rather than the meaning of the biblical text.

Phase 5: Evangelical Inerrancy Today
As the new book, Five Views of Inerrancy, reflects, evangelical scholars today have resorted to more complex understandings of inerrancy in an attempt to be faithful to the biblical texts themselves. Kevin Vanhoozer reflects the complications of genre (the Bible does much more than affirm propositional truths). Michael Bird points to the cultural-embeddedness of the whole American debate and pushes us in some ways back toward the ways the truthfulness of the Bible was understood before Hodge. John Franke reminds us of the "plurivocity" of the biblical texts.

Some thoughts after walking through the book...

Inerrancy Review (Final)

I have been reviewing Zondervan's new Five Views of Inerrancy. I wasn't sure what I would think of the book but it has been very helpful. I have not been able to give as thorough a review (or read) as I would prefer but I'm sure Zondervan would like you to buy the book. :-)

The two previous posts were:

• Mohler's CSBI Inerrancy
• Vanhoozer's Speech-Act/Bird's Global Inerrancy

I only have time today to give a taste of the last two contributors: John Franke and Peter Enns.

John Franke
Franke is deep and nuanced, like Vanhoozer. His perspective, if I understand him, is quite fascinating, maybe even profound. Because we are finite and God is infinite, "God 'adjusts' and 'descends' to the limited capacities of human beings and 'lisps' to us, as adults do to infants, in order to be made known" (267).

God "pragmatically points us in the right direction without the necessity of being photographically precise or drawn exactly to scale" (268). "Inerrancy affirms that narratives, propositions, and assertions--in fact, all the genres of Scripture--are true but still relative to their context. Inerrancy should not be used to suggest, then, that the words of Scripture transcend their situatedness as a form of decontextualized, absolutist theological language" (270).

Let me see if I have understood him. The Bible reflects God on his mission to save humanity through Christ. The goal is Christ leading to the goal of humanity and the creation's restoration. Along the way, the infinite God has lisped to humanity in its varied contexts. These moments point the way forward. They point to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

They do not point precisely because of their situatedness. As a result, "Scripture itself authorizes multiple perspectives... circumscribed by the... canon" (276). "Scripture is inerrant in its witness to the plurality of perspectives that are indispensable to the practice of missional Christian community" (276).

Let me see if I can apply what I think he's saying (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). He's saying it's okay for some of us to believe in women in ministry and for some of us not to, because different situations in the canon at different times have called forth both directions. But I think he would also say that the missional trajectory of Christ and the kingdom make the egalitarian position superior to the other. I could have misunderstood him.

Pete Enns
Enns believes "that the term inerrancy has run its course and that evangelicals need to adopt other language with which to talk about the Bible" (115). If Mohler sees CSBI inerrancy as a matter of presupposition, no matter what the evidence seems to say, Enns largely favors an evidentiary approach.

One strength of Enns' chapter, I think, is his sense that the Bible reflects incarnated revelation. God speaks truth "through the idioms, attitudes, assumptions, and general worldviews of the ancient authors" (87). This seems obvious to me, because God wants to be understood. When you want to be understood, you speak the language of those with whom you want to communicate. "Scripture is a collection of a variety of writings that necessarily and unashamedly reflects the worlds in which those writings were produced" (115).

Interestingly, Enns does have a suggestion for how he could continue to affirm inerrancy. He suggests a "descriptive" rather than "prescriptive" approach. "A descriptive model of inerrancy would try to take its cues from biblical behavior and so draw inferences about what qualities to expect of Scripture" (114).  Rather than tell Scripture what it could say, you would listen for God in what seemed to be said.  Then, "no matter what is encountered, the reader is in the presence of the wisdom and mystery of our God."

Happy reading, if you get the book when it comes out on December 10!