95 Theses for the Church Today

Today is the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his famed 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, the spark of the Reformation. He had no thought of splitting the church, only of reforming it. He had no idea of the impact. Small events often have wildly disproportional consequences.

Here are 95 theses from me for the church today.
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1. Rightly did the Old Testament teach Israel that there was only one God.

2. Rightly did the early church come to understand that the one God exists in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

3. Rightly did the early church discern two testaments to go along with two covenants, the old and the new.

4. Rightly did the early church come to affirm the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene Creed.

5. Rightly did the early church come to discern the canon of the New Testament, consisting of 27 books.

6. Rightly did the church recognize with certainly the canonicity of 39 books of the Old Testament.

7. Seven more, along with additions to Daniel and Esther, are in a sort of middle status, a "deutero" canon.

8. Luther demoted them entirely out of the canon. In response, the Council of Trent (1545) promoted them to full status. Both moves changed their status.

9. The doctrine of purgatory, while logical, has no clear basis in Scripture, not even in 2 Maccabees.

10. The doctrine of hell is biblical, but Scripture uses figurative language to point to something we probably cannot understand.

11. The Old Testament does not engage the question of the afterlife much, chiefly in Daniel 12:2-3.

12. Paul never engages the question of hell, but clearly indicates a resurrected body on the Day of the Lord for those who are in Christ.

13. Revelation speaks of a lake of fire, originally prepared for the Devil and his angels.

14. Matthew speaks of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.

15. Scripture does not teach that ministers must be celibate.

16. Nor does Scripture teach that ministers must be male.

17. In Christ there is not "male and female," therefore, there is no function in life or the church in which a qualified woman or man cannot serve.

18. The laying on of hands is attested in Scripture as a means of grace whereby individuals are sent with ministry purpose.

19. Scripture also attests to the importance of study for the minister.

20. Therefore, it is appropriate for groups of believers to provide means of education and commissioning for the work of the ministry, known as ordination.

21. The doctrine of justification by faith is well attested in Romans and Galatians, and indicates that, when we first enter the people of God, a right status with God is only attained by putting our trust in him and in his king Jesus.

22. We put our "faith" in Jesus by confessing allegiance to him as our Lord.

23. The writings of Paul in Romans 2, 2 Corinthians 5, and James 2 also indicate that our works as a believer will be recognized on the Day of the Lord.

24. Works follow naturally as a result of having the Holy Spirit.

25. The Holy Spirit inside us empowers the image of God within us to love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.

26. We can be in Christ, have received the Holy Spirit, have left Egypt, and still not make it to the Promised Land. We can be disqualified for the prize despite having once been justified by faith.

27. Depravity in Paul is a thorough depravity rather than an absolute depravity. Every aspect of our selves is marred by the power of Sin over this world.

28. But the image of God is not destroyed. Thus while we do not have the power to be righteous for justification on our own, the goodness of God is present in us because we remain in the image of God.

29. All the world is under the power of Sin. Augustine called this dynamic a "sin nature."

30. For Paul, human flesh is under the power of Sin in this world unless the power of the Spirit takes over. Paul does not speak of this dynamic as a nature.

31. Temptation is not sin. It is when temptation has conceived by intention that it is sin.

32. There is such a thing as unintentional sin. Christ has atoned for all the unintentional sin of the believer.

33. Paul never says that we sinned "in Adam," as Augustine indicated. Rather, because of the power of Sin we sin like Adam.

34. Therefore, no individual is condemned because of the sin of Adam.

35. Original sin only has validity as a reference to Adam's original sin. I have no guilt because of Adam's sin, only its consequences.

36. The power of the Spirit makes it possible to love God and neighbor and thus to fulfill the righteous requirement of the Law.

37. Paul rejects any theology that considers sin the default life of the believer. We are not to let sin reign in our mortal bodies.

38. The basis of justification is the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.

39. The faithfulness of Jesus Christ is his obedience unto death.

40. Paul likens Christ's death to an atoning sacrifice that God offered or displayed.

41. The doctrine of penal substitution goes beyond the scope of what is claimed in Scripture.

42. We find in Scripture the sense that Jesus satisfied God's justice and that Christ died "for us."

43. But Scripture does not develop a doctrine whereby Christ mathematically satisfied a quantitative justice that was the sum of all sins past, present, and future.

44. "Sola fide," faith alone, thus must take into account the full biblical picture. Our act of faith is the trigger of justification.

45. Our faith is more than an intellectual assent but an act of allegiance that involves a life of faithfulness.

46. If our faith allegiance departs from Christ, then those acts can disqualify our justification. Any version of sola fide that does not take these truths into account is not biblical.

47. Being in Christ is a relationship. Relationships are seldom broken by a single moment or act, but they can be broken.

48. In the working out of Christian theology, both Calvin and Wesley suggested that God's grace empowers us to make the choice of faith. These are logical extensions of broader theology.

49. Wesley believed that this "prevenient grace" was a grace that empowered a free choice. This "theology of the iceberg under the surface" fits best with the appearance of a free choice in Scripture.

50. "Sola gratia," grace alone, needs to recognize that grace in the biblical texts derives from the world of patron-client relationships. In this world, grace could be solicited and could come with informal expectations.

51. Biblical grace thus can be solicited by our prayer of repentance, and our faith in God and his Christ can solicit forgiveness and justification.

52. Grace thus also comes with the expectation of commitment to Jesus as Lord. Such grace can be trampled on and insulted. One should not think such grace would then continue.

53. "Sola Christi," Christ alone is the effective basis for justification. God has chosen of his own free will the offering of Christ as the sole basis of justification.

54. Abraham was justified by faith in God when he was still uncircumcised, that is, a Gentile. He is thus the model of those who are justified by faith in God who are not Jews, as well as the model of faith for those Jews who are justified by faith.

55. He is at least possibly a model of those who have faith in God even though they have not yet heard of Christ. Such individuals would still be justified by faith on the basis of the offering of Christ.

56. When Augustine, Wycliffe, and Calvin read the predestination language of the New Testament in absolute terms, they did injustice to half of the biblical language.

57. Predestination is primarily about the plan of salvation rather than the individuals who are saved, and God's plan involves the participation of human wills.

58. When the Reformers invoked "sola scriptura," they had a pre-modern hermeneutic that was unaware of the extent to which their reading of Scripture was still guided by the rule of faith God developed in the church.

59. The Reformers only eliminated extraneous aspects of catholic tradition that were obvious to them but retained many appropriate core features of tradition, like the Trinity.

60. Because individual interpretation of Scripture uses the individual to provide the "glue" that joins the different teachings of the Bible together and serves as the basis for determining the continuity and discontinuity between that time and our time, the Protestant principle arises. The Protestant principle, set forth by Paul Tillich, is that Protestant churches will continue to split and re-split, to multiply without end, because there is no common basis to join scriptures together or determine the connection between that time and today.

61. Today there are over 30,000 Protestant churches who think they are just following scripture alone. In short, history has shown Luther the loser of his debate with Erasmus.

62. Interpretation and exegesis only tell us what it meant. They do not tell us how God wants us to appropriate it.

63. The Bible should thus be appropriated in communities of faith.

64. The appropriation of Scripture not only requires contextualization by communities of faith.

65. The appropriation of Scripture to individual situations requires improvisation. There is no Pharisaic list of application that can account for every possible situation.

66. Communion was originally a meal that remembered the Last Supper of Christ and looked forward to another meal with him in the eschaton.

67. God has used communion throughout the centuries as a means of grace, whereby the partaker with faith is spiritually empowered to love of God and neighbor.

68. Baptism was a Jewish rite that the early Christians used to signify the washing of sins and incorporation into the people of God.

69. As children were born to these first believers, it is at least possible they were baptized as well. Certainly this became the tradition of the church.

70. Infant baptism indicates that the child is in the people of God, a partaker of its faith, until the child reaches a point when he or she could make that faith his or her own.

71. The child receives a grace mediated through the community in which he or she is baptized. It is a protecting grace.

72. The adult in baptism receives a means of grace as well through the community. It is an including grace. The adult is now reckoned fully in the people of God.

73. The legalization of Christianity was not evil.

74. The organization of Christianity is not intrinsically evil.

75. Nevertheless, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When the church and state coincide, oppression eventually happens.

76. Therefore, the church should be very cautious about its involvement with the state.

77. In keeping with the way God governs the world, the church should not try to force the world to believe as it believes.

78. The church should not try to force the world to pass laws that fit with its particular theological understanding--especially the understanding of one specific Christian group.

79. The church should focus its involvement with the state on supporting laws of general morality--those which prevent harm to others.

80. In keeping with the prophets, its activism should focus on protecting those who cannot protect themselves and empowering all the members of society.

81. The social gospel was not wrong because of its focus on helping the needy and marginalized--this is what Jesus did on earth.

82. The social gospel was wrong because it left out other essential parts of Christian faith--Jesus as Lord, not least.

83. Fundamentalism is a reduction of the Christian faith to a visceral reaction against changes in modern culture.

84. All truth is God's truth, no matter where he reveals it or we discover it by his grace.

85. The New Testament says "Love God and love neighbor" is the fulfillment of the whole law. There is no commandment of God for our lives that is left out (Matt. 22:37-40; Rom. 13:8-10).

86. The love of neighbor includes the love of enemy. God himself loves Satan still and grieves at his perdition.

87. The love of neighbor and enemy never contradicts the love of God, for God never asks us to do or be anything for him that is unloving toward our neighbor.

88. God's justice fits within the context of his love. He is not a slave to justice.

89. God has the authority to forgive without payment. This would be no problem for him but less helpful for us.

90. Our love of God and Christ consists in our submission to his will as our Lord, and his will is that we love one another. God's will is that we love what he loves, and he loves not just the individual but the whole of humanity, groups within humanity, and indeed his creation.

91. There are many points on which Christians disagree. Paul gives guidelines for such situations.

92. On matters of personal conviction, each person should be fully convinced of what God expects of him or her.

93. Despite individual freedom, Christians should behave in a way that is loving toward others. Despite individual freedom, Christians should behave in a way that builds up the faith of others.

94. Paul affirms that no object is intrinsically unclean. It is a matter of personal understanding and conviction. Many actions are not intrinsically unclean. It is a matter of your intention as you act.

95. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again. Everything else is mostly ice cream on the cake.

Leadership Lessons from Wycliffe to Zwingli

I personally love the Wesley Seminary foundations side of the leadership course (the students may not be as excited). Here's a snapshot of today's discussions of leadership lessons from some of the key figures in the lead up to the Reformation:

Wycliffe

• Ideas rarely appear out of the blue but are usually a function of concrete contexts with concrete issues.
• It sure helps to have friends in positions of power. Be careful about biting the hand that feeds you. "Prophets" who just shoot their mouths off aren't as effective as those who are aware of their surroundings.
• It's best to be burned at the stake posthumously.

Pope Urban VI

• Don't tell your enemies what you're going to do before you do it. Don't shoot yourself in the foot.
• You can be right and completely fail because you're stupid.
• Small changes can have big consequences. (Butterfly Effect)
• You don't have to say everything you know.

John Huss

• There is a kairos moment for reform and for a movement--and there's a time and place where you get burned at the stake.
• Trust but verify.

Erasmus

• What you can get away with today, you might not get away with tomorrow, when the situation has changed.
• The perfect is the enemy of the good.
• Accessibility, affordability, early to the game tends to win over quality, complexity and bureaucracy (within certain limits).
• Sometimes if you try to stay in the middle, you tick everyone off.

Luther

• You can never completely tell what the consequences of events will be.
• Don't confuse tradition with the truth.

William Tyndale

• Those who seem important now may not be those remembered by history.
• Fighting against a movement can empower it.
• Sometimes you win in the long term by losing in the short term.

Council of Trent

• Leaders often give their opponents the long term victory by refusing to admit faults and make adjustments in the short term. Leaders tend to get stubborn when confronted and become self-defeating.

Zwingli

• Practice what you preach.
• My way or the highway is usually a losing strategy.
• Demonstrated that sola scriptura doesn't work practically

There's almost always something good in every side.

Notes on Luther 1

Some day I would like either to blog or write through church history. This was my last week doing the Bible-theology-church history for a leadership class and we ended with a recap of Luther.  I haven't done nearly enough research on Luther for it to count fully, but I thought I would put down some notes from today that I could pick up at some point in the future.

1. In hindsight, we tend to see the factors leading up to a major event out of proportion to their significance at the time. If we are involved in an event, we may get some hindsight. If we are outsiders, we will tend to see the lead up to an event in a skewed way. For example, was there truly any failing in not catching the Boston Marathon bombers beforehand? There may be room for improvement, but was the process of vigilance at the time normal and appropriate? After all, we have to balance the free life we all enjoy as Americans with threats like these.

So it surely could not even have occurred to Luther that he might start a new church or a movement of withdrawal from the Roman Catholic Church. It simply wasn't even conceivable, surely. Luther thought a number of things were wrong with his church--his church, the church, the only church. He hoped they could be corrected. He was not trying to leave. That simply wasn't on anyone's radar.

2. Luther was a medieval person.  He was a decidedly pre-modern individual.  When there was a thunderstorm, he didn't think of barometric pressure, electric charges, or condensation. He thought of spirits and demons. The line that we may draw so solidly with Luther is hindsight.  He was not born in the modern age.

He committed to become a monk in a bad thunderstorm, calling on St. Anne for protection.

3. I imagine Luther's brief encounter with Rome in 1510, before that fateful day in 1517, had a major effect on him. What he saw in Rome was a world that seemed to have little to do with the kingdom of God. He saw the resources of peasants being spent on opulence. He saw a materialistic world that was not focused on spiritual things. Perhaps he saw immorality.

Basically, he saw a building project (St. Peter's) supported by the doctrine of purgatory and indulgences.  You pay money, the Pope gives you time out of purgatory. Our ideas rarely exist in some Platonic vacuum. This experience no doubt had a major impact on Luther's drive to find a way theologically to do away with indulgences. We shouldn't think that his ideas of "faith alone" and "Scripture alone" came out of nowhere. They followed naturally from his concrete hatred of the injustice he saw in papal indulgences.

3. In Luther's own words, he hated the idea of the idea of "righteousness of God" in Romans 1:17 because he heard in it the "justice of God" (iustitia dei).  Perhaps his hatred here also related to his hatred of the idea of purgatory, the place where God's justice was allegedly satisfied. He kept his monastic vows.

It was perhaps somewhere around the year 1516 that he had his breakthrough.  What if Romans 1:17 isn't talking about the justice of God being revealed in the gospel but a righteousness that God gives us, a righteousness from God.  What if the gospel is about God declaring us righteous even though we are sinners?

This was the ideological breakthrough that would allow him to undo purgatory. God is not looking for moral perfection but for repentance, and nothing but individual repentance is required, not some penance administered by a priest. Rather, God justifies us by faith alone.

We should not think his theology was fully cooked at this time.  It is really in his commentary on Galatians in 1531 that his theology here reaches something like its mature form. And of course most Paul scholars would say Luther was wrong on Romans even if mostly right on Christian theology.  The righteousness of God in Romans 1:17 is God's propensity to save his people. And the gospel is the fact that God has enthroned Jesus as king by raising him from the dead, along with all that entails.

4. If you read the 95 Theses he nailed on October 31, 1517, they overwhelmingly address the question of indulgences.  They are not the grand "five solas" of the Reformation. While Scripture played a major role in Luther's argument, we also find an acceptance of the Pope's authority in general. Sola scriptura would evolve later in the fullness of his defense. Again, most of our arguments follow our intuitions, to justify them. Most people do not move from ideas to reality but the other way around.

We can see Luther's hatred of the doctrine of purgatory standing behind his explusion of the "deuterocanonical books" from the Bible. What Protestants now call the Apocrypha had been quoted and used extensively from the very beginning of Christianity. Jerome in the 400s called them a "second canon," not quite as authoritative as the "protocanonical" books but still with some authority.

Luther would demote them, then the RC Council of Trent in 1545 would upgrade them to protocanonical status. Why did Luther not like them? Because 2 Maccabees had the proof-text used to justify purgatory. It may seem nonchalant for Luther to take these books out of the mix, because as Protestants we are used to them being out.  In Luther's day, it reflected that 1) he did not view the canon as strongly as we think he did and 2) it was in the spirit of the same striking freedom he felt not to include James initially in his translation of the Bible into German.

5. October 31, 1517 was the tipping point.  Contrary to Brad Gregory, Luther was not the primary cause of secularism.  Luther could only happen because the church had undermined its own spiritual authority for years and its political power had been waning for years.  Luther represents a critical mass of protests that had gone on for centuries and the Protestant Reformation is part of the Renaissance, which had been going on for a couple centuries as well.

The Reformation is part of the Renaissance.

Paul the Jew 1

I am very grateful to Wesleyan Publishing House for publishing soon to be three books on Paul's letters.  Although there is a wealth of books out there on Paul, I was convinced that a lot of the great insights on Paul these last thirty years have not made it to the pew, including the Wesleyan pew.  What started out as a single book project, "Life Reflections on Paul's Life and Letters," has now become three books!  The first reflects on Paul's Earlier Letters.  The second ended up just being reflections on Romans.

Now the third one is being proofed, Paul: Prisoner of Hope.  It will cover the later letters of the Pauline corpus.  As often happens, I got long winded and these chapters, which were originally meant to be part of the second volume, became a third volume in their own right...

... which means I quickly need to write a new "first chapter" for the third volume that catches a reader up to speed with the other two books, just in case someone starts with this one.  I've decided to do so in three sections: Paul the Jew, Paul the Christ-follower, and Paul the apostle.  Today is Paul the Jew.
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Chapter 1: Introducing Paul
This is the last in a series of three volumes reflecting on Paul's life and letters.  Accordingly, this book starts near the end of a discussion that has already extensively covered Paul's known ministry.  The first volume, Paul: Messenger of Grace, reflected on Paul's early life, as well as on some of his early letters: 1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Philippians, since I wonder if it was written while Paul was at Ephesus.  The second volume, Paul: Soldier of Peace, reflected extensively on his letter to the Romans.

In this book, we finish reflecting on the remaining letters of the Pauline collection: Ephesians, Colossians, the Pastoral letters, and we will cover 2 Thessalonians and Philemon here as well. However, since you may not have read the two previous books on Paul, I want to take a few pages to summarize some of the key dimensions of Paul's life and ministry up to this point.  Most of the letters in this volume differ in some interesting ways from Paul's earlier ones, and it is helpful to have an idea of the starting point before  looking at the variations!

1. Paul the Jew
Paul was a Jew, just as Jesus was a Jew.  Christians throughout the centuries have often seen this fact as irrelevant, as if when Paul became a Christian, he abandoned his Jewishness entirely.  He is thought to have changed religions and perhaps even become a model for anger or hatred against Jews today.  It is unfortunate, but evil hearts throughout the centuries have often used such ideas as an excuse to persecute or even slaughter Jews. [1]

In part as a result of the Holocaust, the last few decades have seen a careful re-examination of some of these assumptions.  What we have found is some glaring holes in this way of looking at Paul.  For example, Paul identifies himself as an Israelite and a "Hebrew" in more than one place long after after he believed in Jesus (e.g., 2 Cor. 11:22; Phil. 3:5; Rom. 11:1).  In fact, Acts 23:6 has Paul identifying himself as a Pharisee in the present tense over twenty years after he became a Christ follower! [2]

It is only because Christianity and Judaism are two distinct religions today that we tend to see Paul as changing religions or converting from one religion to another.  Paul would not have seen it that way.  For him, the Jews remained the natural branches of the tree, with Gentiles being grafted in (Rom. 11:17-21).  One of the most obvious mistakes is to think of "Paul" as his Christian name, as if Paul threw away his Jewish name Saul when he "converted."  Acts continues to call him "Saul" well over ten years after he believed on Jesus.

If the prevalent picture drawn of Paul's Jewishness has often been skewed, even more so has the picture of Judaism. [3]  The old story was that Judaism was a legalistic religion that believed you had to earn your salvation by good works.  Our hero Paul then comes along and realizes that works play no role at all in getting right with God.  We are made right with God by faith alone, purely as a matter of God's grace.

This interpretation of Paul has of course everything to do with the argument between Martin Luther and the Roman Catholic Church in the 1500's.  But it seriously skews Paul's argument with other Christians in the first century.  The people Paul spars with in Galatians were other Christian Jews--including Peter and James--and, even then, he was arguing on the proper understanding of Jewish faith rather than in terms of Christianity versus Judaism as a separate religion.  He was arguing over the proper interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures, the only Scriptures that existed at the time.

It is also important to recognize that these arguments are not the central topic of Paul's letters as a whole. They come up primarily in Romans and Galatians, where the question of how Gentiles can be incorporated into the people of God is at issue.  Even there, the topic is not "Can a person earn their salvation?" but "Does a Gentile need to convert fully to Judaism to be saved?"  The works under discussion are not primarily good works, but "works of law"--especially the ones like circumcision that separated Jew from Gentile ethnically.

A thorough look through all the Jewish literature of Paul's day reveals both that there was a wide spectrum of Jewish beliefs at the time and that all or nearly all of them saw God's grace as the ultimate basis for right standing before him. [4] Further, as the Wesleyan and other traditions have always argued, how one lives remains an element in final salvation for Paul, not in terms of how good a person is but in terms of walking in faithful relationship with God.  The older Lutheran version of Paul was thus wrong on both ends--wrong about how grace-less Judaism was and wrong about how works-less Paul was. [5]

[1] An early reflection on this dynamic, written by a Jew in part while on the run from the Nazis in France, was Jules Isaac's Jesus and Israel (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971 [1948]).

[2] Of course, we have to interpret this fact carefully.  Paul was a master at rhetoric, and Acts tends to give a "conservative" portrait of Paul.  It is doubtful that Paul would have normally identified himself as a Pharisee at this point in his ministry.

[3] The work that broke the dam on this issue was E. P. Sanders' Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977).

[4] 4 Ezra, from about AD100 is sometimes mentioned as an exception.

[5] Like any tradition, present day Lutheran interpreters of Paul do not simply repeat the interpretations of Luther.  They have assimilated the discussions of the last thirty years into their interpretations.

Martin Luther vs. Communism

I tried to think of an interesting title to go with our side trips on the way home from Berlin to Wittenberg and Leipzig yesterday.  Wittenberg is the city where Luther taught and in 1537 nailed 95 arguments on the door of the cathedral, setting into motion what would become the birth of Protestantism.

As is often the case, he could not have imagined the effect that invitation to debate would have on history. When my children asked, "What's Protestantism?" I scarcely knew what to say.  It's a massive amount of reality right now.  It's all the churches everywhere in Marion except for one.  It's a massive amount of history.

Another piece of history is in Wittenberg too.  That's the fact that from 1945 to 1990 this town was in East Germany.  From 1961 to 1989 this place was divided from the rest of the world by a fence. You pass buildings that look like no one has done anything with them since WW2.  You pass a massive chemical plant.

We only drove partially into Leipzig.  I wanted to see this formerly east German city where Heisenburg (physics, early 1900s) and Lessing (theology and literature, 1700s) taught.  This is the city where Goethe (1700s, poet, writer), and philosophers Leibniz (1700s) and Nietzsche (1800s) studied.  A lot of it now looks like driving down mid-city Adams street in Marion, with abandoned factories.

What does it do to a person to grow up under that kind of communism.  You can take the person out of the wall, but can you truly take the wall out of the person?  And even if your children grow up without the wall, it will affect the way you raise them, your attitudes toward how to behave.

My guess would be that most east Germans are probably not bubbling over with friendliness and a drive to help you when you are in need.  One lady in Wittenberg was perfectly helpful with directions when asked.  Another at their version of Sams Club in Leipzig was not.

I thought of the legalism that pervaded the Wesleyan Church in the mid-1900s.  Even after we stopped dressing like that, it arguably has an effect.  Maybe you put that legalism into how you dress as a professional now or maybe you go anti-legalism and become a rebel.  Maybe you just transfer your legalism to the next issue--so now you're legalistic about drinking or apply it to a rigid sense of justice in your politics or in your grading.

I wondered whether I would find more leniency with the speed limit in east Germany or west?

Again, Paul the Arminian...

Romans 8:13, addressed to Roman believers:

"If you are living according to flesh, you are about to die."

I guess this "works righteousness" aspect of Judaism that Luther and Calvin decried--and that Arminians are now criticized for--turns out be what Paul himself taught.  Oops.

So let's keep a list: Paul the Jew, Paul the Arminian, Paul the nominalist...

Martin Luther on Copernicus

"There is talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that is how things are nowadays: when a man wishes to be clever he must . . . invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best!

The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth" (1539).

The "Pre-Modern" Coherence of Scripture

I and several others at IWU are on a deadine to write chapters for a book on a "Wesleyan hermeneutic." Since we are of diverse perspectives and there has been no organizing definition of what a Wesleyan hermeneutic is, I doubt seriously that this volume will actually answer the question very well. I suspect it will turn out to be a loose collection of somewhat disparate chapters by individuals in the Wesleyan tradition.

I could of course be way off here. Perhaps we will find unexpected covergences that we did not expect or plan.

My chapter is "Scripture is Coherent." An unintended--but not surprising--organizing principle has emerged to my chapter in its first draft. I thought I would share the first section, not least because some of you out there have far more expertise in Reformation hermeneutics than I do. Here it is.
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1. "Pre-Modern" Coherence
One of the most crucial issues for Christians who consider the Bible to be God’s authoritative word—perhaps in fact the most crucial—is the matter of biblical theology. How do we get from the particular teachings of individual books and passages within the Bible to be able to say what the “Bible” as a collective whole has to say? According to one recent count, over 38,000 distinct Christian denominations exist.[i] No doubt the overwhelming majority of these are groups that consider the Bible the primary, perhaps even sole source of their beliefs and practices. While such diversity is primarily a function of social groups, it is enabled by vast ignorance of biblical context. Further, it is a direct reflection of the diversity of the Bible itself and the myriad ways in which one might integrate that diversity into a coherent whole, a biblical theology.

“Pre-modern” interpreters, for lack of a better term, are interpreters who largely without realizing it read the words of the Bible against their own use of language, against their own symbolic universes and contexts.[ii] They come to the words of the Bible with their default mechanisms of understanding and read the biblical books accordingly. Yet as recent studies in the cultural anthropology of the biblical worlds have illustrated, the mere translation of words from ancient Hebrew or Greek into contemporary English is vastly inadequate to the task of translating the ancient meanings of those words.[iii] The words of the Bible took on their meanings—as all words do—within the symbolic universes of ancient cultures, cultural networks of meaning resulting from interrelated customs, ideologies, religious expressions, and social relationships.[iv]

The meanings of words are a function of the way people are using them at any given time.[v] Words are not fixed pointers toward a pool of specific word-meanings that all times and all places hold in common. An English translation of the Bible made today will inevitably become dated over time, perhaps even within a generation, because the words will inevitably take on new uses and old ones will fall into disuse. The diversity of Christian denominations is thus an understandable function of readers from thousands of distinguishable social contexts reading the biblical words from the standpoint of their own, several symbolic universes.

To varying degrees, the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, just as their Roman Catholic counterparts, were “pre-modern.” John Wesley was not equipped in his time to be able to read the words of the Bible in context to the degree that we are today. To make such a statement implies no lack of intelligence on his part—or on the part of Martin Luther, John Calvin, or other Christian thinkers of that period. It is simply to point out that their symbolic universes differed even from ours, and that we are privileged to inherit a set of glasses that they did not.[vi]

Wesley’s mechanism for organizing diverse biblical material was the “analogy of faith.” His Explanatory Notes on Romans 12:6 give a good sense of how it worked for him:

"Let us prophesy according to the analogy of faith — St. Peter expresses it, 'as the oracles of God'; according to the general tenor of them; according to that grand scheme of doctrine which is delivered therein, touching original sin, justification by faith, and present, inward salvation. There is a wonderful analogy between all these; and a close and intimate connexion between the chief heads of that faith 'which was once delivered to the saints.' Every article therefore concerning which there is any question should be determined by this rule; every doubtful scripture interpreted according to the grand truths which run through the whole."[vii]

The analogy of faith is the coherence of the several parts of Scripture with the “grand scheme of doctrine,” the “grand truths which run through the whole.” It is a reflection of “a close and intimate connexion between the chief heads of that faith ‘which was once delivered to the saints.’”

What Wesley is doing here is talking about an overarching biblical theology. The grand scheme of doctrine for him is his signature ordo salutis, the path to salvation. It includes such teachings as that “on original sin, justification by faith, and present, inward salvation.” Wesley was by no means the first to speak of a “rule of faith” as an organizing principle for the various materials of the Bible. We find this idea as early as Irenaeus in the late second century.[viii] From one perspective, it is the idea that certain core Christian beliefs provide a general rule that governs how the meaning of Scripture is understood and applied.

One of the distinguishing marks of the Reformation was Luther’s claim that Scripture itself must provide this rule, that the rule cannot derive from Christian tradition or ecclesiastical bodies.[ix] Rather “Scripture interprets Scripture” and “unclear” passages in the Bible are to be interpreted by the “clear” ones. In Luther's case, however, the clear passages turned out to be his interpretations of John and the Pauline letters, by which he clarified “unclear” passages in Matthew, James, Hebrews, and Revelation. From our current standpoint, we can provide no clear rationale from Scripture alone for this way of establishing unity within the biblical diversity. Luther was simply establishing a new rule of faith based on his own symbolic universe, which drank heavily from his own experiences and personality.[x]

Indeed, contemporary interpreters in the Calvinist tradition prefer to speak of an “analogy of scripture” rather than an “analogy of faith.” The distinction they thereby make is a coherency between meanings of the biblical books read in context rather than the coherency of biblical material with some overarching “faith,” as seems particularly obvious in Wesley's interpretation yet also in Luther's. They reflect the fact that, of all the Reformers, perhaps John Calvin was the most in tune to original context. Calvin thus provides us with a bridge to the bulk of twentieth century evangelical interpretation, which was more “modernist” in approach than “pre-modern.”

[i] Barrett, David B. and Johnson, Todd M., International Bulletin of Missionary Research (January 2008).
[ii] Hans Frei
[iii] Just two examples of this sort of work are Mary Douglas’ work on taboos and purity laws in the Old Testament (Purity and Danger) and Bruce Malina’s on the New Testament (The New Testament World). Whether we accept the specific reconstructions of scholars such as these, their basic point seems established.
[iv] Tate
[v] Wittgenstein
[vi] Calvin better than the others.
[vii] ref
[viii] ref.
[ix] ref.
[x] Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.