One of the hermeneutical problems of our day, I increasingly believe, is that American Christianity has gravitated toward focusing so much on individual verses that bigger principles can be undermined (cf. Matt. 23:23). I've explored this topic a little here.
It is on the level of an individual verse that a truth is most likely to be 1) ambiguous and 2) most contextual. We understand the broader principles of Scripture more clearly because they appear over and over. And individual verses are much more likely to be "that time" rather than "all time" or "one time" even, for the specific moment in history of the biblical writing in question.
Rather than rehash the overall idea and rehash my criticism of American fundamentalism, let me present two examples that have recently come home to me.
1. How do we decide what in Revelation is hyper-symbolic and what we should take as a symbolism that corresponds more closely to specific events or characters? One possibility is to use the "one time" rule. If a concept in Revelation is relatively unique in the whole Bible, then it should probably be taken as hyper-symbolic.
The millennium comes to mind. As far as I can think, there is nowhere else in the Bible that divides a period with the Messiah ruling with resurrected martyrs from a more general resurrection and judgment that happens when Christ returns. The "one time" nature of the millennium might suggest that it is a hyper-symbol of the reign of Christ rather than a literal 1000 year period.
2. If 1 Timothy 2:12 refers to women teaching men (which I don't actually think it is. I think it is another husband-wife passage), then it is the only passage in the Bible that says anything like this. 1 Corinthians 14 has to be about disruptive speech (because women pray and prophesy in worship in 1 Corinthians 11). There are other headship passages, but they don't say anything about women not teaching other men.
Given that Priscilla does teach Apollos in Acts 18 and Acts 2:17 predicts that women will prophesy in the new age, 1 Timothy 2:12 is a highly odd verse, the only verse of its kind in the whole Bible. If it even refers to women teaching men in general (which I don't think it is), it is entirely unique in the Bible.
So as we try to peal back the fundamentalist era of the twentieth century, here is a crucial element in that equation. This individual verse impulse was used in the 1800s to argue for slavery, where individual verses were used to trump more important kingdom principles. Like the Pharisees, its tendency is to undermine bigger principles with "clobber verses." It's not the Jesus or Paul approach to Scripture.
Showing posts with label greatest common denominator hermeneutic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label greatest common denominator hermeneutic. Show all posts
Thursday, November 05, 2015
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Trump Verse Hermeneutics
I wish I had it all crystallized, but I've been pondering for some time how to present in a convincing way to the church that they are reading the Bible wrongly in a way that does ultimate harm to the kingdom and its causes. It fits with my "greatest common denominator" theme. I thought I would try to collect some more thoughts and blogging is the most effective way for me to do that.
I put it like this to a class--before the 1800s, people interpreted individual verses in the light of their overall theology. Now, individual trump verses, often unclear verses, create a miscellaneous collection of atomized beliefs and practices. American Christianity has become Pharisaical--we have a list of things to believe and do, without underlying reasons for believing or doing them.
Let me see if I can unpack that a little. In their support of slavery, the Princeton Calvinists used a "trump verse hermeneutic." Forget the big principles of Scripture, Colossians 3:22 tells slaves to obey their masters. A context developed in which people focus on individual verses rather than on the big principles of Scripture.
The problem with trump verse hermeneutics is:
You think of the fact that Jews don't eat meat and dairy in the same meal because "you will not boil the kid in its mother's milk." The reason for this rule is lost to history, but today it is observed blindly in a context that makes the rule seem silly. In the same way, fundamentalists today insist the husband must be the head of the home not because it fits the big picture of Scripture applied today but because there are some trump verses, like the verses used in support of slavery in the 1800s.
We have created a culture in American Christianity where we urge and drive the person in the pew to pour over the Bible and linger on every word, but we have set the individual Christian up for failure. First, they have no hope to understand the words in context, at least not on their own. The first meaning of the Bible was a meaning of the times when it was written. Period. No debate. To disagree is not to understand the situation.
This has never been the end of the story, however. The Spirit can speak to anyone through the Bible, whether they know what the Bible really meant or not. Nevertheless, the problem I am addressing is that in our enthusiasm to get Christians into Scripture, we have inadvertently made them into Pharisees.
History has taken away from the American Bible reader the key to success when reading the individual verses of the Bible without contextual training. We have not given them an overall theological compass into which they might fit those individual verses. We have not taught them to see in the individual verses of the Bible the great truths of Scripture. We have not given them the "clear" by which to approach the "unclear" individual verse.
Instead, we have programmed them to come up with a thousand individual truths from a thousand individual verses, ripped from their contexts. We have not given them a dictionary by which to read the individual verses but have programmed them to see each individual verse as an individual truth. Their theologies are a loose collection of direct mandates and atoms to believe.
American Christianity has become a grand company of Pharisees and theological lawyers, and the mechanism for propagating this system has only become more and more sophisticated. We have trained our pastors to train our people to read the Bible this way. The pro-slavery interpreters of the early 1800s have won.
I put it like this to a class--before the 1800s, people interpreted individual verses in the light of their overall theology. Now, individual trump verses, often unclear verses, create a miscellaneous collection of atomized beliefs and practices. American Christianity has become Pharisaical--we have a list of things to believe and do, without underlying reasons for believing or doing them.
Let me see if I can unpack that a little. In their support of slavery, the Princeton Calvinists used a "trump verse hermeneutic." Forget the big principles of Scripture, Colossians 3:22 tells slaves to obey their masters. A context developed in which people focus on individual verses rather than on the big principles of Scripture.
The problem with trump verse hermeneutics is:
- These words weren't written to you originally. It is on the most localized level that verses are most likely to be context-bound to the worlds and situations they first addressed.
- It is on this micro-verse level that meaning is most ambiguous and susceptible to multiple interpretations.
You think of the fact that Jews don't eat meat and dairy in the same meal because "you will not boil the kid in its mother's milk." The reason for this rule is lost to history, but today it is observed blindly in a context that makes the rule seem silly. In the same way, fundamentalists today insist the husband must be the head of the home not because it fits the big picture of Scripture applied today but because there are some trump verses, like the verses used in support of slavery in the 1800s.
We have created a culture in American Christianity where we urge and drive the person in the pew to pour over the Bible and linger on every word, but we have set the individual Christian up for failure. First, they have no hope to understand the words in context, at least not on their own. The first meaning of the Bible was a meaning of the times when it was written. Period. No debate. To disagree is not to understand the situation.
This has never been the end of the story, however. The Spirit can speak to anyone through the Bible, whether they know what the Bible really meant or not. Nevertheless, the problem I am addressing is that in our enthusiasm to get Christians into Scripture, we have inadvertently made them into Pharisees.
History has taken away from the American Bible reader the key to success when reading the individual verses of the Bible without contextual training. We have not given them an overall theological compass into which they might fit those individual verses. We have not taught them to see in the individual verses of the Bible the great truths of Scripture. We have not given them the "clear" by which to approach the "unclear" individual verse.
Instead, we have programmed them to come up with a thousand individual truths from a thousand individual verses, ripped from their contexts. We have not given them a dictionary by which to read the individual verses but have programmed them to see each individual verse as an individual truth. Their theologies are a loose collection of direct mandates and atoms to believe.
American Christianity has become a grand company of Pharisees and theological lawyers, and the mechanism for propagating this system has only become more and more sophisticated. We have trained our pastors to train our people to read the Bible this way. The pro-slavery interpreters of the early 1800s have won.
Sunday, February 02, 2014
Greatest Common Denominator: God's People
Now continuing some notes on the "greatest common denominators" of Scripture in terms of theology. Previous posts were:
God
Creation
The fallen world
Atonement
Today, I want to think a little about the people of God in Scripture, the church.
1. In the OT, Israel was God's people by election. It would have been easy for them to get the impression that they were the only ones God had chosen, as if God's election is arbitrary and without any human element in the equation. But it is exactly this attitude that Paul undermines in Romans: "Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too" (3:29).
So in at least one strand of the OT, there was an openness to outsiders, to strangers who were willing to join Israel. We think of Rahab. We think of Ruth. We think of God's willingness to spare even Nineveh, the city God knew would eventually destroy the northern kingdom.
Job provides a special case. The setting of Job seems to be outside of Israel and is often pictured as patriarchal. Job holds out hope that those who do not know the God of Israel precisely may yet serve him according to what little light they may have.
2. The NT significantly complicates the question of who belongs to the people of God. Parts of the NT sounds like it is a matter of God's arbitrary whim (e.g., Rom. 9) but such an approach makes a mockery not only of the NT's sense that anyone can be saved (e.g., John 3:16) and, indeed, the rest of this part of Romans seems to imply that human choice is involved in our eternal destiny (Rom. 11). The invitation is open to anyone who calls on the name of the Lord (e.g., Rom. 10:9-13).
The best take away from the predestination language of the NT is thus the great mystery of who chooses Christ and who does not, as well as the fact that God is ultimately in control of the universe.
3. It is possible that we should distinguish between those who will be saved in the end and those who are in the people of God. This is a difficult distinction for us. Are babies in the people of God? They have made no confession of faith yet most believe they will be saved.
What of the "Job" of our age, who perhaps do not know of Christ or who live in a context where their understanding of Jesus is bound to be perverted by their culture? Is there no hope that God in love will judge them by the light they have?
Parts of the NT do not seem concerned with Paul's theology of inclusion. Matthew merely passes on that following Jesus, including a compassion toward others as he had compassion, is key to salvation. James similarly looks to the works that come from faith as essential to justification before God (cf. 2:24).
4. In Paul's debates, however, a more refined theology of who is "in" the people of God emerged. The key element in the equation is the Holy Spirit. Acts, Paul, and Hebrews all see having the Spirit, receiving the Spirit, tasting of the Spirit, being filled with the Spirit, being baptized with the Holy Spirit as the key element, the "that without which" of being in the people of God.
The Spirit cleanses sins, "cleanses the conscience." This cleansing corresponds with outward baptism in Acts. This cleansing is the "inward" reality that corresponds to the legal justification of a person. A person is declared "not guilty" before God in justification and the cleansing of the Holy Spirit from sins is the actual mechanism that makes such a verdict possible.
Sonship follows. The individuals is "adopted" into the family of God, although the whole human race is God's offspring. The Spirit "regenerates" us, gives us new life. This is a "sanctification" of our past sins with us now set apart to God as his.
5. The NT often speaks of repentance and faith as the precursors to receiving the Spirit and crossing from death to life. Repentance is a turning from a life moving away from God to one that is moving in God's direction. Faith is a commitment to God and his Christ. But it is the Spirit that marks the actual crossing. Repentance and faith are mere precursors to God's work through the Spirit.
6. The NT does not treat being in the people of God as irreversible. God has no desire for anyone to leave but he does not stop any one from leaving. Yet Paul has images of the need to press on like an athlete (1 Cor. 9) and to press on for the prize of the upward call (Phil. 3). Hebrews 3 warns its audience that just because you have left Egypt doesn't automatically mean you will make it to the Promised Land if one does not persist in faith.
7. The church or "assembly" of those "in Christ" is both visible and invisible. It is visible insofar as the "assembly" is a local body of believers who meet together regularly to encourage each other in faithfulness to the end (Heb. 10:25). It is invisible in that it is the collection of all those who have the Holy Spirit, and this group does not exactly correspond to those who visibly meet together. It is a group that crosses all times and places.
God
Creation
The fallen world
Atonement
Today, I want to think a little about the people of God in Scripture, the church.
1. In the OT, Israel was God's people by election. It would have been easy for them to get the impression that they were the only ones God had chosen, as if God's election is arbitrary and without any human element in the equation. But it is exactly this attitude that Paul undermines in Romans: "Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too" (3:29).
So in at least one strand of the OT, there was an openness to outsiders, to strangers who were willing to join Israel. We think of Rahab. We think of Ruth. We think of God's willingness to spare even Nineveh, the city God knew would eventually destroy the northern kingdom.
Job provides a special case. The setting of Job seems to be outside of Israel and is often pictured as patriarchal. Job holds out hope that those who do not know the God of Israel precisely may yet serve him according to what little light they may have.
2. The NT significantly complicates the question of who belongs to the people of God. Parts of the NT sounds like it is a matter of God's arbitrary whim (e.g., Rom. 9) but such an approach makes a mockery not only of the NT's sense that anyone can be saved (e.g., John 3:16) and, indeed, the rest of this part of Romans seems to imply that human choice is involved in our eternal destiny (Rom. 11). The invitation is open to anyone who calls on the name of the Lord (e.g., Rom. 10:9-13).
The best take away from the predestination language of the NT is thus the great mystery of who chooses Christ and who does not, as well as the fact that God is ultimately in control of the universe.
3. It is possible that we should distinguish between those who will be saved in the end and those who are in the people of God. This is a difficult distinction for us. Are babies in the people of God? They have made no confession of faith yet most believe they will be saved.
What of the "Job" of our age, who perhaps do not know of Christ or who live in a context where their understanding of Jesus is bound to be perverted by their culture? Is there no hope that God in love will judge them by the light they have?
Parts of the NT do not seem concerned with Paul's theology of inclusion. Matthew merely passes on that following Jesus, including a compassion toward others as he had compassion, is key to salvation. James similarly looks to the works that come from faith as essential to justification before God (cf. 2:24).
4. In Paul's debates, however, a more refined theology of who is "in" the people of God emerged. The key element in the equation is the Holy Spirit. Acts, Paul, and Hebrews all see having the Spirit, receiving the Spirit, tasting of the Spirit, being filled with the Spirit, being baptized with the Holy Spirit as the key element, the "that without which" of being in the people of God.
The Spirit cleanses sins, "cleanses the conscience." This cleansing corresponds with outward baptism in Acts. This cleansing is the "inward" reality that corresponds to the legal justification of a person. A person is declared "not guilty" before God in justification and the cleansing of the Holy Spirit from sins is the actual mechanism that makes such a verdict possible.
Sonship follows. The individuals is "adopted" into the family of God, although the whole human race is God's offspring. The Spirit "regenerates" us, gives us new life. This is a "sanctification" of our past sins with us now set apart to God as his.
5. The NT often speaks of repentance and faith as the precursors to receiving the Spirit and crossing from death to life. Repentance is a turning from a life moving away from God to one that is moving in God's direction. Faith is a commitment to God and his Christ. But it is the Spirit that marks the actual crossing. Repentance and faith are mere precursors to God's work through the Spirit.
6. The NT does not treat being in the people of God as irreversible. God has no desire for anyone to leave but he does not stop any one from leaving. Yet Paul has images of the need to press on like an athlete (1 Cor. 9) and to press on for the prize of the upward call (Phil. 3). Hebrews 3 warns its audience that just because you have left Egypt doesn't automatically mean you will make it to the Promised Land if one does not persist in faith.
7. The church or "assembly" of those "in Christ" is both visible and invisible. It is visible insofar as the "assembly" is a local body of believers who meet together regularly to encourage each other in faithfulness to the end (Heb. 10:25). It is invisible in that it is the collection of all those who have the Holy Spirit, and this group does not exactly correspond to those who visibly meet together. It is a group that crosses all times and places.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
An evil spirit from the Lord (1 Sam. 19:9)
David is playing the lyre, when the LORD sends an evil spirit on Saul. Saul picks up a spear and chucks it at David, trying to pin him to the wall. (1 Samuel 19:9)
I don't know about you, but this verse used to puzzle me. Doesn't God like David? Hasn't God already chosen David as king? Hasn't God already rejected Saul? And probably most crucial--I didn't think God sent evil spirits on people! Doesn't James 1:13 say that God doesn't tempt people to do evil?
A similar instance is 2 Samuel 24:1, where God incites David to take a census that he later judges Israel severely for. You might be shocked to know that when 1 Chronicles 21 tells this story, it says that it was Satan who did it!!! "Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel."
I call these difficult verses, "naughty verses." They mess with our paradigms. We might wisely set them aside as "unclear verses" and stick to the big picture of Scripture.
But there is a better explanation, even if it should require us to modify our understanding of how Scripture works a little. It notes that 1 Chronicles was written perhaps a couple centuries after 2 Samuel, after the exile, after the idea of the Satan entered into the worldview of Israel.
You'll notice, for example, that Genesis does not yet know that the serpent is Satan. This was an insight that would not come until as late as the century before Christ! No Jewish literature we have makes this connection until a book called The Life of Adam and Eve in the first century BC.
So if Chronicles had told this story of Saul and David, it would have certainly said, "Satan sent an evil spirit on Saul... and Saul tried to pin David with a spear." Indeed, the book of Jubilees, written about 150BC, says that it was Satan who told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.
Naughty verses of this sort take our hermeneutic, our way of reading the Bible to the next level. This particular one drives us away from a pre-modern reading of difficult verses like these (one that has no historical sense of the words but reads them as timeless truths ripped from the times and places when they were written). It drives us to a better sense of these verses in history.
So we have to be very, very careful not to read Exodus 4:11 on its own: "Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord?" The New Testament suggests that there are other spiritual forces in play in the universe. Again, this is why we need a whole Bible theology and not base our theology on individual verses. Individual verses come at moments in time, moments whose context we may not fully know or understand.
The Bible has within its pages a flow of revelation. The New Testament has a more complete and more precise understanding on many issues than the Old. This requires a bit of a paradigm shift. Rather than see every verse of the Bible saying the same thing from God to me, the words of the Bible ripped from their contexts and put in a timeless bubble, I have to get a better sense of the big picture. I am pushed away from a fundamentalist, verse level hermeneutic, to a whole Bible hermeneutic, like most Christians had before the 1800s.
I don't know about you, but this verse used to puzzle me. Doesn't God like David? Hasn't God already chosen David as king? Hasn't God already rejected Saul? And probably most crucial--I didn't think God sent evil spirits on people! Doesn't James 1:13 say that God doesn't tempt people to do evil?
A similar instance is 2 Samuel 24:1, where God incites David to take a census that he later judges Israel severely for. You might be shocked to know that when 1 Chronicles 21 tells this story, it says that it was Satan who did it!!! "Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel."
I call these difficult verses, "naughty verses." They mess with our paradigms. We might wisely set them aside as "unclear verses" and stick to the big picture of Scripture.
But there is a better explanation, even if it should require us to modify our understanding of how Scripture works a little. It notes that 1 Chronicles was written perhaps a couple centuries after 2 Samuel, after the exile, after the idea of the Satan entered into the worldview of Israel.
You'll notice, for example, that Genesis does not yet know that the serpent is Satan. This was an insight that would not come until as late as the century before Christ! No Jewish literature we have makes this connection until a book called The Life of Adam and Eve in the first century BC.
So if Chronicles had told this story of Saul and David, it would have certainly said, "Satan sent an evil spirit on Saul... and Saul tried to pin David with a spear." Indeed, the book of Jubilees, written about 150BC, says that it was Satan who told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.
Naughty verses of this sort take our hermeneutic, our way of reading the Bible to the next level. This particular one drives us away from a pre-modern reading of difficult verses like these (one that has no historical sense of the words but reads them as timeless truths ripped from the times and places when they were written). It drives us to a better sense of these verses in history.
So we have to be very, very careful not to read Exodus 4:11 on its own: "Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord?" The New Testament suggests that there are other spiritual forces in play in the universe. Again, this is why we need a whole Bible theology and not base our theology on individual verses. Individual verses come at moments in time, moments whose context we may not fully know or understand.
The Bible has within its pages a flow of revelation. The New Testament has a more complete and more precise understanding on many issues than the Old. This requires a bit of a paradigm shift. Rather than see every verse of the Bible saying the same thing from God to me, the words of the Bible ripped from their contexts and put in a timeless bubble, I have to get a better sense of the big picture. I am pushed away from a fundamentalist, verse level hermeneutic, to a whole Bible hermeneutic, like most Christians had before the 1800s.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Greatest Common Denominator: Atonement
This series is sketching out what the "greatest common denominators" of Scripture might be on topics of theology. Previous posts were:
God
Creation
The fallen world
What is the greatest common denominator of Scripture on the subject of atonement? Here are some thoughts.
1. God's love
The ultimate basis for all reconciliation between God and humanity is God's love. It is God's love that put atonement into action. In God's sovereignty, we must consider the manner of atonement God's choice. There can be no rules on God saying, "He had to do it this way." God freely chose to offer Jesus/himself as a sacrifice as the instrument. He could have done it by divine fiat because he is God and can create something out of nothing. That's just not what his choice was.
"God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). See also John 3:16.
2. The cross
The New Testament and the earliest preaching of the church saw the cross as the means of our reconciliation to God. "May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Gal. 6:14). "I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Cor. 2:2).
What did the cross do?
a. It absorbed the curse we had because of our sinfulness. "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole" (Gal. 3:13). Jesus absorbed our curse in that we were cursed. "God made him who had no sin to be sin[b] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21).
You can see where someone would think this is substitution, Christ taking our place. But in church history, substitution wandered way beyond anything the NT pictured. If we think of us being defiled and Jesus absorbing our defilement, we will be closer to what the NT was thinking.
b. It satisfied the order of the universe. "the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45). See also Romans 3:25.
I doubt seriously that any of us really understand how sacrifice worked in the minds of the biblical authors. It's roots in human history stretched back long before any book of the Bible was written. The biblical authors might have come closer to explaining that we do with our rationalizations. To use the words of C. S. Lewis, there was a "deep magic" to sacrifice.
We can talk about satisfying the wrath of God (Rom. 1:18), but this is just a picture, an anthropomorphism. God doesn't throw tantrums literally. We've come to talk in terms of justice, and that probably starts to get at it. But it's really something much deeper, something to do with the order of the universe. Sacrifice somehow satisfies the intrinsic order of things and performs a deep magic.
c. Jesus defeated death. If you look at Heb. 2:14, Jesus defeated Satan, who held the power of death. 1 Corinthians 15 also talks about Jesus defeating death. Again, the Bible doesn't really explain how this works.
3. It is worth noting that most of the references above come from Paul. Matthew, Mark, and Luke really don't have a lot to say about the meaning of Jesus' death, nor does Acts. John has a few more images. This general silence is worth noting, because it suggests that it is legitimate for some Christian traditions to emphasize atonement theory more than others. If some churches emphasize the cross, it is legitimate for other churches to emphasize the moral example of Jesus' life (like Luke) or resurrection power (like Acts).
The OT itself has strands that emphasize sacrifices (Leviticus) and strands that proclaim social justice far more important to God than sacrifice (Isaiah 1, Micah 6, Jeremiah 7). In the same way, "crucicentrism" must be balanced with concerns like social justice and the imitation of Christ.
God
Creation
The fallen world
What is the greatest common denominator of Scripture on the subject of atonement? Here are some thoughts.
1. God's love
The ultimate basis for all reconciliation between God and humanity is God's love. It is God's love that put atonement into action. In God's sovereignty, we must consider the manner of atonement God's choice. There can be no rules on God saying, "He had to do it this way." God freely chose to offer Jesus/himself as a sacrifice as the instrument. He could have done it by divine fiat because he is God and can create something out of nothing. That's just not what his choice was.
"God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). See also John 3:16.
2. The cross
The New Testament and the earliest preaching of the church saw the cross as the means of our reconciliation to God. "May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Gal. 6:14). "I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Cor. 2:2).
What did the cross do?
a. It absorbed the curse we had because of our sinfulness. "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole" (Gal. 3:13). Jesus absorbed our curse in that we were cursed. "God made him who had no sin to be sin[b] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21).
You can see where someone would think this is substitution, Christ taking our place. But in church history, substitution wandered way beyond anything the NT pictured. If we think of us being defiled and Jesus absorbing our defilement, we will be closer to what the NT was thinking.
b. It satisfied the order of the universe. "the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45). See also Romans 3:25.
I doubt seriously that any of us really understand how sacrifice worked in the minds of the biblical authors. It's roots in human history stretched back long before any book of the Bible was written. The biblical authors might have come closer to explaining that we do with our rationalizations. To use the words of C. S. Lewis, there was a "deep magic" to sacrifice.
We can talk about satisfying the wrath of God (Rom. 1:18), but this is just a picture, an anthropomorphism. God doesn't throw tantrums literally. We've come to talk in terms of justice, and that probably starts to get at it. But it's really something much deeper, something to do with the order of the universe. Sacrifice somehow satisfies the intrinsic order of things and performs a deep magic.
c. Jesus defeated death. If you look at Heb. 2:14, Jesus defeated Satan, who held the power of death. 1 Corinthians 15 also talks about Jesus defeating death. Again, the Bible doesn't really explain how this works.
3. It is worth noting that most of the references above come from Paul. Matthew, Mark, and Luke really don't have a lot to say about the meaning of Jesus' death, nor does Acts. John has a few more images. This general silence is worth noting, because it suggests that it is legitimate for some Christian traditions to emphasize atonement theory more than others. If some churches emphasize the cross, it is legitimate for other churches to emphasize the moral example of Jesus' life (like Luke) or resurrection power (like Acts).
The OT itself has strands that emphasize sacrifices (Leviticus) and strands that proclaim social justice far more important to God than sacrifice (Isaiah 1, Micah 6, Jeremiah 7). In the same way, "crucicentrism" must be balanced with concerns like social justice and the imitation of Christ.
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Greatest Common Denominator: The Fallen World
Previous posts were:
God
Creation
Now, the fallen world.
1. I have never really thought this question through in its potential complexity. I know the Augustine/Wesley schtick, of course, the one we read in all the theology textbooks and Wesleyans used to preach. God created the world perfect. Adam sinned. Sin came on all the world, both the creation and humans. We now have a sin nature that makes us sin. Christ's death atones for the sin acts we do, the Spirit removes our sin nature so that we do not have to sin any more.
This is a mixture of Paul, Augustine, and Wesleyans. What Paul taught, I believe, is that the creation has been under the power of Sin since Adam. With regard to the world, it became subject to corruption and decay. With regard to humanity, the weakness of our flesh makes us susceptible to the power of Sin. The Spirit empowers us to live righteously and fulfill the law of love.
But is this the greatest common denominator of Scripture? It is the model that won out in the Western church, the Catholic side. It is the model that has dominated Protestantism because Luther's base camp was in Paul. But Paul is only one voice in Scripture and the West is not the whole church.
2. Adam plays no significant role in the theology of the OT itself. That is to say, Genesis 4 through Malachi do not use Adam to make any argument at all. He is generally absent from those pages. Here you have to remember that most of us do not read the Bible for what it actually says. The question of Adam's significance for the OT is not debatable--he simply is not given a thought from Genesis 4 on. But we might read him into the pages because of the glasses we wear when we read the OT.
Similarly, Adam plays no clear role in the NT outside of Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 15, and possibly Hebrews 2. Again, most people--including pastors--don't read the Bible. They read into the Bible. We have no evidence that Adam featured at all in the theology of Matthew or Mark or John or James. Our default reading of the Bible is through theological glasses, and we see things that weren't originally there.
Did Jude believe in Adam's Fall? We don't know. He quotes 1 Enoch, and the Fall in 1 Enoch came not with Adam but when angels sleep with human women in Genesis 6, had giant offspring, from whose dead bodies the spirits of demons originated.
I'm digressing simply to point out the extent to which our organization of Scripture is dependent, not on Scripture itself, but on the traditions of organization we have inherited growing up in the church.
3. What most Scripture does assume is that we are separated from God and in need of atonement and redemption. Even here, however, the assumptions of Leviticus are one strand within the OT and one that stands in some tension with the prophetic strand. Jeremiah 7, Micah 6, Isaiah 1 all deny the importance of sacrifice over and against a more fundamental obedience to God in relation to how you treat other people. In the NT, Hebrews makes explicit the end of the sacrificial system.
The proximity to God in Scripture still varies. In the OT, Israel stands closer to a right standing with God than the pagans do. The NT sets us on a trajectory in which all people stand equally close to such a right standing. It is not that humanity has come closer to God but God has come closer to humanity in Christ.
So we can at least say that the common denominator of Scripture is that the default state of humanity is one of separation from God. It is a state of sinfulness in need of reconciliation and redemption.
4. But what is this sinfulness? In the OT Law, the need for sacrifice primarily has to do with "ceremonial impurity." Theoretically, "high handed" sins resulted in death, and since most of the OT does not have a conception of an afterlife, death was the ultimate purging.
I don't think there is any evidence that the standard of sin was absolute perfection. This perspective comes from a couple obscure verses in Paul, lifted to inappropriate centrality. The standard of sin, in the NT, becomes motive in relation to love. Jesus points in this direction in the Sermon on the Mount. John's writings support this perspective. Paul's writings support this perspective.
The Greatest Common Denominator of Scripture might thus view the understanding of the Law so prevalent in Christianity today as an immature one that has not fully grown into the NT. Sin has always been, for God, any act of will that wrongs another, including God. One can wrong another person both intentionally and unintentionally, but it is the intentional ones that most concern God.
God
Creation
Now, the fallen world.
1. I have never really thought this question through in its potential complexity. I know the Augustine/Wesley schtick, of course, the one we read in all the theology textbooks and Wesleyans used to preach. God created the world perfect. Adam sinned. Sin came on all the world, both the creation and humans. We now have a sin nature that makes us sin. Christ's death atones for the sin acts we do, the Spirit removes our sin nature so that we do not have to sin any more.
This is a mixture of Paul, Augustine, and Wesleyans. What Paul taught, I believe, is that the creation has been under the power of Sin since Adam. With regard to the world, it became subject to corruption and decay. With regard to humanity, the weakness of our flesh makes us susceptible to the power of Sin. The Spirit empowers us to live righteously and fulfill the law of love.
But is this the greatest common denominator of Scripture? It is the model that won out in the Western church, the Catholic side. It is the model that has dominated Protestantism because Luther's base camp was in Paul. But Paul is only one voice in Scripture and the West is not the whole church.
2. Adam plays no significant role in the theology of the OT itself. That is to say, Genesis 4 through Malachi do not use Adam to make any argument at all. He is generally absent from those pages. Here you have to remember that most of us do not read the Bible for what it actually says. The question of Adam's significance for the OT is not debatable--he simply is not given a thought from Genesis 4 on. But we might read him into the pages because of the glasses we wear when we read the OT.
Similarly, Adam plays no clear role in the NT outside of Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 15, and possibly Hebrews 2. Again, most people--including pastors--don't read the Bible. They read into the Bible. We have no evidence that Adam featured at all in the theology of Matthew or Mark or John or James. Our default reading of the Bible is through theological glasses, and we see things that weren't originally there.
Did Jude believe in Adam's Fall? We don't know. He quotes 1 Enoch, and the Fall in 1 Enoch came not with Adam but when angels sleep with human women in Genesis 6, had giant offspring, from whose dead bodies the spirits of demons originated.
I'm digressing simply to point out the extent to which our organization of Scripture is dependent, not on Scripture itself, but on the traditions of organization we have inherited growing up in the church.
3. What most Scripture does assume is that we are separated from God and in need of atonement and redemption. Even here, however, the assumptions of Leviticus are one strand within the OT and one that stands in some tension with the prophetic strand. Jeremiah 7, Micah 6, Isaiah 1 all deny the importance of sacrifice over and against a more fundamental obedience to God in relation to how you treat other people. In the NT, Hebrews makes explicit the end of the sacrificial system.
The proximity to God in Scripture still varies. In the OT, Israel stands closer to a right standing with God than the pagans do. The NT sets us on a trajectory in which all people stand equally close to such a right standing. It is not that humanity has come closer to God but God has come closer to humanity in Christ.
So we can at least say that the common denominator of Scripture is that the default state of humanity is one of separation from God. It is a state of sinfulness in need of reconciliation and redemption.
4. But what is this sinfulness? In the OT Law, the need for sacrifice primarily has to do with "ceremonial impurity." Theoretically, "high handed" sins resulted in death, and since most of the OT does not have a conception of an afterlife, death was the ultimate purging.
I don't think there is any evidence that the standard of sin was absolute perfection. This perspective comes from a couple obscure verses in Paul, lifted to inappropriate centrality. The standard of sin, in the NT, becomes motive in relation to love. Jesus points in this direction in the Sermon on the Mount. John's writings support this perspective. Paul's writings support this perspective.
The Greatest Common Denominator of Scripture might thus view the understanding of the Law so prevalent in Christianity today as an immature one that has not fully grown into the NT. Sin has always been, for God, any act of will that wrongs another, including God. One can wrong another person both intentionally and unintentionally, but it is the intentional ones that most concern God.
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Greatest Common Denominator: Creation
I'm putting down some notes in case I ever want to write a book something like, "The Common Denominators of Scripture." A few days ago I sketched out what a chapter on God might look like. Here are some thoughts on what a chapter on Creation might look like.
1. First, if we take creation out of nothing by faith, certain things follow. I will assume that it is appropriate for a Christian to read Scripture with the assumption of ex nihilo creation, even though Scripture does not seem to teach it explicitly, as far as I can tell. We might argue that it is the trajectory of Scripture (e.g., Heb. 11:3).
If God created the world out of nothing, then he presumably has all power in relation to it. He will also know every truth about it and its working. Simply as creator he will know every possible eventuality about it and, as we said in the previous chapter, we believe he knows every actuality about it as well.
2. Sovereignty and providence
The Bible teaches that God has ultimate authority over the creation. Nothing happens without his permission, good or evil. There is a strand of biblical language that sounds like God not only has authority over the creation but that he also determines everything that will happen. This is not, however, the only strand, and it fits better with the common denominator of Scripture to consider this language the unclear rather than the language of God's love and the freedom he gives the creation.
Nevertheless, God does work for good in the creation and he works good for us before we even know it. Indeed, he works good for us even while we are his enemies and even on those who are evil. He has been at work to reclaim us long before we existed.
3. Freedom of the creation
The greatest common denominator of Scripture will privilege those Scriptures in which God wants everyone to be saved and in which he gives substantial freedom to humans and the creation. This is more in keeping with his nature as love than to privilege the opposite. We can extend this basic principle to the way God has made the creation to follow the laws that he has planted within it. Some of the suffering and pain in the world could be simply the playing out of natural laws.
Christians disagree on whether this freedom might include the power to generate new life and indeed, a creative indeterminism on the quantum level, a kind of creational free will.
1. First, if we take creation out of nothing by faith, certain things follow. I will assume that it is appropriate for a Christian to read Scripture with the assumption of ex nihilo creation, even though Scripture does not seem to teach it explicitly, as far as I can tell. We might argue that it is the trajectory of Scripture (e.g., Heb. 11:3).
If God created the world out of nothing, then he presumably has all power in relation to it. He will also know every truth about it and its working. Simply as creator he will know every possible eventuality about it and, as we said in the previous chapter, we believe he knows every actuality about it as well.
2. Sovereignty and providence
The Bible teaches that God has ultimate authority over the creation. Nothing happens without his permission, good or evil. There is a strand of biblical language that sounds like God not only has authority over the creation but that he also determines everything that will happen. This is not, however, the only strand, and it fits better with the common denominator of Scripture to consider this language the unclear rather than the language of God's love and the freedom he gives the creation.
Nevertheless, God does work for good in the creation and he works good for us before we even know it. Indeed, he works good for us even while we are his enemies and even on those who are evil. He has been at work to reclaim us long before we existed.
3. Freedom of the creation
The greatest common denominator of Scripture will privilege those Scriptures in which God wants everyone to be saved and in which he gives substantial freedom to humans and the creation. This is more in keeping with his nature as love than to privilege the opposite. We can extend this basic principle to the way God has made the creation to follow the laws that he has planted within it. Some of the suffering and pain in the world could be simply the playing out of natural laws.
Christians disagree on whether this freedom might include the power to generate new life and indeed, a creative indeterminism on the quantum level, a kind of creational free will.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
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.
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.
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