One Wesleyan view of Chicago Inerrancy Statement 4

I'm glad this is almost over, trying to contrast a broad Wesleyan understanding of inerrancy in contrast to a narrower, more Calvinist Chicago Statement of inerrancy. There are some Wesleyans who are happy with the Chicago Statement, and they are legitimately Wesleyan. There are others for whom the word inerrancy should not be specified too much, because there are many specifics we can disagree on while still affirming the authority and truthfulness of Scripture.

Here we are so far:

1. Preface and Summary Statements
2. Articles 1-10
3. Articles 11-13

Getting very close now...

Article 18: Grammatico-historical exegesis is the bomb... no treatment or quest for sources that leads to relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching or rejecting its claims to authorship.
I've decided to go slightly out of order today. Article 18 is, in my opinion, is another potential example where Chicagoans say one thing and seem to do another. There is lip service given to "grammatico-historical exegesis," which at least aims at the original meaning. But whenever the pursuit of the original meaning hits a bump, the normal rules of exegesis are suspended and a clean up crew is called in.

What is grammatico-historical exegesis? It's a name I frankly didn't hear at Asbury or at Southern Wesleyan. I must have read it somewhere during my Wesleyan education, although I couldn't tell you where. I first really heard it used as a polemical term in a blog debate I had with a Reformed pastor from Michigan who called himself, "Once a Wesleyan." In other words, as a lifelong Wesleyan who went to a Wesleyan college and seminary, got a PhD in New Testament, and taught for about 8 years at a Wesleyan college--then I first really heard this Calvinist term.

I can use the term if you want me too. In my mind the phrase means interpreting passages using a knowledge of grammar and historical backgound. It is a phrase, again, with a fundamentalist Calvinist ethos surrounding it. Those who use it, as we might expect, mean more than what I just said, just as they mean more when they use the word inerrant.

In my mind, it should differ not at all from the "historical critical method," which is often blasted as filled with heinous "higher criticism." OK, fine, I'll call the method "historical-cultural method" then. In the end, those who use these phrases all claim to mean the same thing--trying to read biblical texts in their literary and historical contexts.

The phrase reminds me of a quote from Melanchthon, which says that exegesis is nothing more than the application of grammar to the biblical text. And of course Melanchthon is absolutely wrong! Exegesis does involve grammatical analysis, but words only have meanings in contexts. "Context is everything." Take away the "historical" part and you inevitably are substituting yourself and your traditions.

And thus so many of those who use this method, John Piper or Wayne Grudem, for example, are really practicing grammatico-fundamentalist-tradition exegesis. Piper makes this clear in his critique of Tom Wright's view of justification. It is not historical background but Reformation tradition that he uses as the context of his exegesis.

You can tell from Article 18, that "grammatico-historical" is meant to distance exegesis from "source criticism." Source criticism is the investigation of sources behind certain biblical documents. The word "criticism" is unfortunate, for all it means as far as I'm concerned is that you are making decisions (kritikos) about things.

Source criticism of the gospels does not seem to be too controversial a thing, where the dominant hypothesis is that Mark was written first and then Matthew and Luke used it as a skeleton, along with some other source of Jesus' sayings. For the Chicagoan, source analysis of the gospel cannot be used to "dehistorize" anything. This seems to me a straight jacket for a gospel scholar, and I don't think I am smart enough to pull it off if I were at a Wheaton or Moody.

Let me just give a small example. Mark 6:1-6 tells of Jesus' rejection at Nazareth. It has the key line, "What is this wisdom... Is not this ... the son of Mary, brother of..." In Mark, the incidence is narrated after the healing of Jairus' daughter and the woman with a hemorrhage and before the sending of the 12 and the telling of John the Baptist's death.

In Matthew 13, the setting is slightly different, although the same elements are all nearby. We have similar key words, "Where did this man get wisdom... Isn't this the son of the carpenter? Isn't Mary his mother...," which tells us we are looking at the same story. As in Mark, the telling of John the Baptist's death follows.

But in Matthew it comes right after Jesus talks about parables (which in Mark is chapter 4) and material on the mission has come further back in Matthew 10 (instead of just after in Mark). The healing of the daughter and the woman with a hemorrhage are back in Matthew 9.

It boggles the mind to suggest that these are different events where the chronology is not quite the same as Mark. I'm sure there have been extreme Chicagoans who have suggested such, but we have the inescapable conclusion for anyone interested in truth that Matthew and Mark simply do not narrate Jesus events in quite the same order--which means at least one of them is less historical at certain points than the other.

I doubt most of us care. Most Wesleyans don't. I doubt most Chicagoans do in terms of this story, although the Calvinist Lindsell might have back in the day.

The real questions come then when we get to Luke. In Luke, Jesus begins his ministry in Nazareth. It's the "inauguration" scene where he picks of the scroll and reads, "The Spirit of the Lord is on me." If I remember correctly, my NIV Study Bible doesn't list Luke 4 as a parallel to Mark 6. Why? Because it is significantly different from Matthew and Mark in its historical setting.

Let me play this out a little so you can see that "higher criticism" was not just a bunch of anti-supernaturalist, evil kooks ripping up the Bible. Luke 4 has very similar key lines to Matthew and Mark. They are amazed at his gracious words (i.e., his wisdom) and say, "Isn't this Joseph's son?" So we have in Luke 4, as in Matthew 11 and Mark 6, an initial contact of Jesus with Nazareth and an initial reaction to Jesus of amazement because he grew up there and a rejection of him.

Source criticism would say that these are three versions of the same event, especially since the general conclusion is that Mark was written first and that Matthew and Luke used it. But there are a number of potential "dehistorizations" in pursuing this line of thought. Luke has a rather expanded scene that he uses to set the tone for Jesus' entire ministry. Did Matthew and Mark not know this? Or was Luke novelizing the story a bit to bring out the essential nature of Jesus' ministry, putting it as the first event as a kind of keynote message?

All that is to explain the "dehistorizing" potential of looking at sources and supposed oral traditions behind the gospels. The Chicagoan says you just can't go there, even if normal reasoning makes a bee line for a certain conclusion. The Chicagoan insists on this because truthfulness to this person is connected to historicity. I believe this is a faulty standard. Who said that truth equals historicity? I don't know the answer to the Luke 4 question for sure, but the story stands true as one summary of Jesus' good news either way, even if Luke novelized what in his sources was a very bare bones event.

Source analysis of the gospels has generally been more allowed than source analysis of the Pentateuch. I can only think of two reasons: 1) the fact that Jesus refers to Moses material and thus raises the question of Mosaic authorship and 2) because Pentateuchal criticism hit the fan first. This gets us to Article 16 where we indeed will argue that fundamentalism and the inerrancy movement of the mid-twentieth century was a reactionary response to negative higher criticism.

So the suggestion that there are strands of sources behind the Pentateuch, wielded by German hands not experienced as faith-full, was experienced as a challenge to Christianity in the 1800s. Today it wouldn't have to be. I see the negative reaction to it largely a product of the circumstances in which it was introduced, including the shock of Christian thinkers who were caught completely off guard.

But again, when you place the Abraham stories that use Yahweh in one column and the Abraham stories that use Elohim next to each other, it's awefully easy to wonder if these are different versions of the same story. I was more than happy to go into New Testament--and to spend my time in Paul and Hebrews--so I didn't have to worry about these sorts of things.

Maybe there are reasonable answers to such questions from the Chicagoan side. I used to insist that there had to be. But I wasn't smart enough to figure them out. And though many smarter than I have suggested ingenious walk arounds these sorts of things, their suggestions often seem more in the category of possible rather than probable.

What I'm about here is openness. I'm not insisting anyone change their conclusions on the specifics above. But I wonder if the Chicago statement shuts down legitimate discussions and potentially negates any claims we have to being people of truth. The stories of Genesis, in my opinion, can be poetic and true, and God can speak through them no matter how poetic they are. Parables are not historical and they are true. As I've said before, error is a question of standard and target. What was God aiming at? Certainly He hits the target every time.

Article 15: Jesus' teaching of Scripture cannot be dismissed...
Absolutely. But what did the Chicagoans mean by this statement? Did not Jesus speak in the language and categories of his audience? If not, how would they have understood him?

I read recently of the Wesleyan expectation of righteous living. In a brilliant analysis, someone said that we 1) have a lower sense of what God's standard is but 2) have a higher sense of His expectation that we keep it. This plays itself out in relation to Jesus. We as Wesleyans believe that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can be "tempted in every way, and yet be without sin" (Heb. 4:15), just as Jesus.

These words, of course, are used in Hebrews of Jesus. But because we believe Jesus was truly and fully human, we do not believe that the life he lived, also under the power of the Holy Spirit, is a life that we cannot live also, by the power of the Holy Spirit. The implication with regard to Jesus is as I have just shared: 1) we potentially have a lower sense of Jesus' earthly perfection and yet 2) have a higher sense of the potential for us to keep it.

This dynamic might consistently play itself in our understanding of Jesus' knowledge on earth. Clearly he was not omniscient on earth, for he did not know the day or the hour of his return (Mark 13). Presumably Jesus did not know he was the second person of the Trinity at the age of 12, perhaps not even that he was the Messiah until his baptism. In order to be fully human, he had to submerge his omniscience somewhere that his conscious mind would not choose to access it. It is hard at least for me to imagine that Jesus in his human understanding did not come to knowledge of such things as he walked through life in communion with the Father.

The purpose of this small thought on Wesleyan Christology is to argue that we would not need to suggest that Jesus' knowledge of the world was absolute in order for him to be completely sinless. Indeed, it is hard for us to believe that Jesus was fully human if he was not capable of forgetting where he left his car keys from time to time. These are thought experiments and I do not put them forth as anything but thoughts--they may be wrong and I welcome being shown that they are. But as the Calvinist has an incorrect standard for sin--anything short of absolute perfection (cf. the faulty NLT translation of Rom. 3:23)--so I would argue the Calvinist Chicagoan might have an incorrect standard for Jesus' earthly knowing.

Article 16: Inerrancy has been integral to the Church's faith forever, not invented by scholastic Protestantism or a reactionary position in response to negative higher criticism.
Here we get at an incredibly crucial point and a sore spot for the Chicagoan. I have heard strong reactions to the idea that fundamentalism was a historical reaction to late 1800s higher criticism and early 20th century modernism. The Chicagoan sees himself preserving what the Church has always taught.

And they can make a superficial case because Christians over the centuries have indeed tended to assume that the details of the text were historical. But here's where I wonder these thoughts involve a faulty understanding of how meaning and language work. Let's call it the picture theory of language.

In the picture theory of language, words tend to correspond to things, like a picture in a bubble above your head when you hear the word. In that sense, words are tied down to specific meanings in a rather simple way. Translation becomes correlating sounds to the bubbles above your head. You think that Greek or Hebrew simply give you different words for the same bubbles.

In my opinion, this is Newtonian semantics and it underlies a lot of the Chicago statement. We basically then expect that the New Testament reads the Old Testament with the same bubbles over their heads, that the Christians of the ages did, and that we today do.

The quantum revolution for me here came from Wittgenstein. His basic understanding of meaning is far too obvious to question. Meaning is a function of the way words and sequences of words are used. In other words, they take on meanings in specific concrete contexts, cultures, and symbolic universes. These meanings aren't keyed to some Platonic bubble, and words rarely translate from one language to another with the same precise connotations.

The Chicagoan sense of meaning thus seems flat, two-dimensional. This is true no less of its sense of 1) what the words meant in contrast to what they mean to us, 2) what words in one part of the Bible mean in contrast to what words in another part mean, and 3) in what the word inerrancy means to them in contrast to what similar words throughout church history might have meant. More on #2 in the next article.

What I am saying is that it doesn't matter whether you can find words in Wesley where he talks about errors in the Bible or if you can find places in Christian writers where they assume the historicity of various details. The real question is whether these statements "did" the same things in those contexts that the word "inerrancy" did in the mid-twentieth century.

Certainly the flavor of the Chicagoan seems colored by the fundamentalist modernist controversy. I raised this question at the symposium. Clearly the late nineteenth century holiness authors operated with a different hermeneutic from Stephen Paine. I'm not qualified at this point to say exactly what all the differences are. But I raised the question to point to at least one conclusion we will certainly draw from the comparison--whatever sense of error they might have had, it wasn't the same.

I thus find myself shaking my head at the Calvinist Harold Lindsell when he protests that Christians have always believed in inerrancy, even though the word comes from nineteenth century Reformed thinkers who themselves arguably used the word differently than Lindsell himself. I shake my head like a modern physicist reacting to someone insisting that Democritus knew about the atom in the 400s BC because he used the word atomos in relation to a fundamental building block of the world.

Article 14: Affirmation of the unity and internal consistency of Scripture.
Here is another point of contradiction, I believe, within the Chicagoan hermeneutic, enabled by a faulty view of language. It says it wants to read individual passages in historical context. Yet it wants to read individual passages in a canonical context.

Kevin Vanhoozer has been on a pilgrimage from a focus on the original meaning of the Bible toward seeing the Christian meaning of Scripture as a matter of the whole of the Bible as a divine speech-act. I think I know where this line of thought will end, although I wonder if Vanhoozer will ever take the final step.

I as a child of the nineteenth century holiness movement was easily able to take the final step long before Vanhoozer as a Reformed evangelical. The final step is to recognize that there is necessarily a discontinuity between the meaning of the words of the Bible when read canonically--in the light of the whole--and the meaning of the individual books read in their historical-cultural context. This follows naturally from the fact that meaning is a function of context, and a canonical context is simply a different context from the varied original ones.

But the long and short of it is that the Christian reading of Scripture is really the canonical one and it seems to me light years away from the Chicago Statement and its priorities. Reading the Bible as a whole with Christian glasses is such a fundamentally different way of reading it than the Chicagoan preoccupation with precise authorship, correlation to specific scientific positions, and questions of authorship. It seems such a monumental step backwards to focus on these things at this point. A canonical reading of the Bible allows us truly to read the Bible the way Christians really have throughout the centuries and yet without ignoring genuine issues raised by historical criticism. Read canonically, those issues don't go away. They just become largely irrelevant.

Article 17: The Holy Spirit does not operate in isolation from or against Scriptures.
I've already pointed out that the Wesleyan tradition is more open to pneumatic exegesis than the Calvinist Chigagoan would ever be. There's a great quote in Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text that well fits this article of the Statement--the Spirit can blow when He wills but He cannot blow wherever He wills. In other words, the Spirit can't make the text mean something it didn't mean before.

Poppycock. The Spirit can do whatever He wants, including making the biblical text mean things it never did before. The word "against" is pretty strong and I would not use it of such new meanings. But certainly contexts can differ enough to where Holy Spirit inspirations can appear to go against biblical teaching.

In general, the Spirit is first a matter for the Church at large and only secondarily for the individual. In that sense, drastically novel leadings I would expect to be confirmed on a massive scale. I think the Spirit did that with slavery where, although not exactly in contradiction to Scripture, but going beyond it, the Spirit led not only Christendom but the world to abolish it. The same movement is underway in relation to the empowerment of women. Such things do not go against Scripture although they go beyond where it ended (I would argue they are still on its kingdom trajectory nonetheless).

Article 19: Signing is not necessary for salvation but it is vital to a sound understanding of the whole of Christian faith.
Not necessary for salvation, absolutely. Vital to a sound understanding? Some Wesleyans will say yes. Some Wesleyans like myself will say that it focuses on issues that, at best, are tangential to what is important (which is hearing God speak through His word) and at worst skew the very nature of the Bible, set up our children for faith crisis, and (possibly) reflect poorly on God as a God of truth.

One Wesleyan view of Chicago Inerrancy Statement 3

Previous posts looked at:

1. The Preface and Summary Statements
2. The first ten articles

This morning I want to look at 3 more articles of the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. My purpose is mostly "in house" for my church, The Wesleyan Church, although I am glad to dialog with others. My claim has been that some Wesleyans legitimately understand our affirmation of inerrancy to be defined in relation to the kinds of things the Chicago Statement affirms and denies.

At the same time, I argue that many Wesleyans, including most of our Bible scholars and denominational leaders, legitimately have a more general sense of inerrancy, not limited to the specifics of the Chicago Statement. My argument has been

1) that the very term "inerrancy" entered into our tradition from the outside as somewhat of a foreign (Reformed) body in our tradition, a cultural artifact of the mid-twentieth century largely at the urging of a single individual. Of course Wesley was only a "hair's breadth" from Calvin, so there can be such a thing as a Calvino-Wesleyan. I'm just not one of them :-)

2) that The Wesleyan Church has never connected its use of the word to the Chicago Statement, a statement that, again, is primarily a product of Calvinist circles (who have emphasized it, who signed it, where its original is kept, etc...) and that the vast majority of Wesleyans have never heard of it, and

3) that from my perspective it is a good thing we aren't limited to it, because the statement itself functions on the basis of a number of oversimplifications that at least seem debatable.

Wesleyans affirm that the Bible is inerrant, but there are those for whom this is a technical term and there is the vast majority where this is a general affirmation of the authority and truthfulness of God's word. I am not an "errantist," nor am I a "pick and choose-ist," nor am I a "only becomes the word-ist."

But I am a hermeneutist. Error is a function of intent and purpose, not of measurement against some supposed absolute, timeless, and universal framework of truth, not least that of a collection of mid-twentieth century white males in defensive mode against encroaching cultural threats. And every part of the Bible--including its statements on faith and practice, on things pertaining to salvation--was revealed within the categories of its original audiences at a particular point in the flow of history. And we cannot be fully evangelical in our beliefs unless we allow for the continued outworking of the significance of Christ in the church beyond the pages of the New Testament.

Articles 11-12
The 11th reiterates the truthfulness of Scripture and has nothing really objectionable in what it explicitly says. It is in what it specifically implied for these individuals, as I've said. Similarly, #12 distinguishes infallible and inerrant but does not consider them incompatible. OK, fine.

Here let me do a rare thing and compliment Kevin Vanhoozer for his distinction between what the terms inerrant and infallible might mean. "Infallible" for him means that divine speech acts in the Bible accomplish what they set to do. "Inerrant" then is restricted to those instances where the purpose of the divine speech act is to communicate truth, in which case such claims are true.

I think these are fine definitions that Wesleyans can adopt. They are sufficiently broad that they allow for us to have a discussion about what exactly the function of various Scriptures are as divine speech-acts, as well as of what communicative speech-acts are meant to affirm. These definitions thus allow for the sophistication of a quantum discussion, while also accommodating the Newtonians among us.

The problem in my opinion is that such breadth of possible meaning undermines the very purposes of raising these terms by the "Chicagoan." The Chicagoan wanted nothing of this sort left open for vagueness or discussion. Indeed, the very purpose of these 19 articles was to nail down the boundaries of what is allowed so that we can tell clearly who is in and who is out, what is true and what is not.

And so no doubt among Wesleyans there are those who think we already know the answers to all the key questions and that allowing for discussion of those questions will only bring harm. And there are Wesleyans who wonder if the answers are more profound than previous generations anticipated and, in any case, see closing off our minds to the questions--especially in our current context--to be a grave mistake for the faith of our children and for our witness to the world around us.

Article 13
This article affirms the "complete truthfulness" of Scripture and then says what it is not worried about in this regard. I don't find anything to object to in this statement except what these authors were thinking when they said "complete truthfulness." The lawyer like mentality of the article's writers shows up here:

"Complete truthfulness" for them is not negated by 1) lack of modern technical precision, 2) grammatical or spelling irregularities, 3) observational descriptions like sun rise, 4) reporting about falsehoods, 5) hyperbole and round numbers, 6) arranging material in a topical fashion, 7) varying selections of material in parallel accounts and 8) free citations.

See what fascinating attention to detail these scholars had! But you can also read between the lines to what they did not think would be "completely" truthful. Here are the issues they had in mind:

1. historicity
#7 above allows that the gospels have "selected" different material from the life of Jesus. But it would be very clear from the Calvinist Harold Lindsell's Battle for the Bible that it was important for these signatories that you be able to harmonize the four gospels on the level of historical detail. By the way, Paul Rees--son of one of the founders of the Pilgrim Holiness Church--wrote the Preface to the evangelical Jack Rogers' response to Lindsell's fundamentalist approach.

You've heard no doubt the old story of four people on different street corners describing an accident and conflicting a little on the details. I haven't found that analogy very helpful for a long time now, not least because only one of the gospels claims that it comes more or less directly from an eyewitness (John; Luke claims indirectly). Even if we go with traditional authorships (the first three gospels are anonymous and John never tells us who the Beloved Disciple was), only Matthew and John would be eyewitnesses.

But more to the point, it is not clear to me, from comparing the gospels themselves, that their primary function was to relate history, although certainly in my mind this was one of their purposes. Their primary functions were to proclaim and teach Christian faith (Matthew, Mark), to defend Christianity in relation to despisers and doubters (Luke-Acts), and to bolster the faith of a particular Christian community (John 20:31). They engage with history to do these things, but they are not written primarily to document history.

Here is where the Chicago Statement says something very profound that I do not believe it carries out. It says, "We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose." Ironic--that's exactly what I would say. The problem is that, when it comes to specifics, we differ on what that "usage and purpose" was in some cases. I would say the standards of truth and error they largely brought to bear on the Bible were modern standards.

I do not think that precise historicity, to where we need to worry about harmonizing the details of material relating to history, is an appropriate standard. Indeed, such harmonizations almost always create "fifth" accounts that differ from the actual accounts more than they differ from each other. This is typically (that is, in the hands of a Chicagoan) an ironic practice that ends up disregarding what the individual accounts say in deference to someone's idea of what they should say.

Here is the bottom line for me and most: I have found it impossible in my pea brain mind to accommodate the historical standard of the Chicagoan and to listen to each gospel, to Acts and Paul, to Kings and Chronicles, etc. So I have chosen to listen to the Bible rather than to this cultural artifact of the mid-twentieth century. I listen to the Gospel of John when it seems to say Jesus was crucified the morning before Passover. And I listen to Matthew, Mark, and Luke when they seem to say Jesus was crucified the morning after. The Chicago Statement, ironically, would require me to ignore one or the other and find some ingenious and far fetched, usually hilarious scenario that, in the end, would do violence to all the gospel accounts.

Thus, in my opinion, far from respecting Scripture, in practice the Chicago Statement will consistently require me to do violence to Scripture, to rip it, to rape it, to cut things out--all ironically in the name of a high idea of the Bible. The approach deconstructs itself because it requires me 1) to ignore Scripture to sustain it and 2) it makes a mockery of our claims to be interested in truth. You tell me which approach truly loves the Bible more! Is it the one that is willing to listen to its most likely interpretation or the one that frequently forbids you to let it say what it seems to say in the name of some "high idea" of it?

2. scientific matters
The topic of evolution seems to have been a driving force in the origins of fundamentalism. As I've mentioned before, the problem for many at that time was not so much the question of Genesis as 1) the outworking of social Darwinism in society and 2) the fact that evolution was a tool used against Christianity. Nevertheless, I don't want to pretend that I do not find it hard to fit evolution with my faith. There are real issues here, I think.

The problem for me on the other side is that the overwhelming majority of those who know the evidence and the history of the scientific discussion are united on the topic from a scientific standpoint. And as far as bias is concerned, it seems overwhelmingly clear to me that it is we Christians who have a clear presupposition influencing our conclusion far more than that of the evolutionists themselves. Evolutionists come from incredibly diverse contexts and thus can't be lumped together into some monolithic conspiracy theory or anti-supernaturalist framework. They operate in a conflictual world and thus might actually be motivated to disprove each other on this issue if they could to make a name for themselves. And evolutionists include among their number a good many Christians who have a vibrant faith.

I'm simply not qualified to pass judgment on such issues scientifically. But I find it deeply problematic to tell a Christian scientist that he or she simply cannot go there because of a particular reading of Genesis 1--and one that seems to divorce it from its near eastern context at that. I've said before that the real biblical problem with evolution is not Genesis 1 but Genesis 2 and 3, as Romans understands them. I've heard some ingenious suggestions by theistic evolutionists here. But my basic point is that, if we are really interested in truth like we say we are, we had better be very careful about what discussions we close off here out of hand. How many grad students in biology, genetics, paleontology, geology, etc. do we consign to potentially irresolvable faith crises in the process--especially when you and I are not qualified to judge the evidence scientifically?

I wonder if the view of Genesis 1 that arose in the 1970s by Calvinists like Henry Morris and Duane Gish (yes, they signed this statement) would have looked familiar to generations of Christians before them, let alone to ancient Israel. Yes, I went to their debates in the 70s and 80s. Yes, I was cheering them on. I was somewhat disappointed--even though I was rooting them on. Even as a high school student longing for them to go in for the kill (against Kenneth Miller), I found them surprisingly unconvincing (kept quoting philosophical statements of evolutionist rather than getting down to the evidence). I wanted to get up and take over for them because I thought they were messing it up.

My grandfather--who was almost certainly more conservative than anyone reading this blog--was sympathetic to the gap theory, which the Calvinist group of Chicago signers would find abhorrent in their literalness. The gap theory is the idea that Satan fell between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 and that then God started all over again in 1:3. He might have put the dinosaurs in between the first two verses. My point is that Morris' approach is not the only conservative Christian or Wesleyan one. It is one, just not the only one.

A literal reading of Genesis 1 has God separating the waters above from the waters beneath and then putting the sun, moon, and stars in between. Is that what we must believe? You go straight up past the sun and stars before finally getting to primordial waters at the top of the creation? It certainly isn't the pretty picture on the cover of Henry Morris' Scientific Creationism! At the very least, we must surely consider Genesis 1 to be somewhat poetic.

My point is not to argue for evolution, not at all. My point is to leave this question open for scientists of faith and theologians of faith to continue to explore. Are we really so sure we know what God thinks on these issues and intended to say in these biblical texts? If so, on what basis? On the basis of an interpretation that doesn't even try to read what these texts would have likely meant at the time they were written but blindly reads them as if they were written today in the context of an evolution debate?

3. genre matters
A key issue for the Chicagoans was that when Jesus referred to the books of Moses, or said "Isaiah says," or when 2 Peter says "Peter to x, y, z," that we must take these as literal attributions in order for the Bible to be truthful. In other words, we must conclude that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, that Isaiah wrote chapters 40-66, and that Peter literally wrote 2 Peter.

In my opinion, the first two issues are more significant than the third, although probably more people get bent out of shape over the third. In class I privilege literal authorship, but I have a hard time understanding why it would contradict inerrancy to say that, for example, Ephesians is an inspired encapsulation of Paul's thinking on the unity of the church directed at the churches of Asia a couple decades after his death. What if everyone knew this at the time? How would that be lying or untruthful? It would be a genre thing.

But them's fighting words. Fair enough. I don't understand. Inerrancy is not a matter of how something looks to us but of how it looked to them when it was inspired. Anyway, not something I'm interested in fighting for.

I understand the Moses and Isaiah issue better, because of how Jesus refers to them. The question is whether this was just the way people referenced these books and Jesus was following suit. Or is it necessary for us to assume that Jesus would not have spoken in the categories of the audience in a way that was not actually the way it happened?

In terms of the books themselves, however, we can understand why the issue came up. The Pentateuch itself does not say Moses wrote it. Genesis doesn't mention him, and Exodus through Deuteronomy refer to him in the third person, not as if he was writing it. It even narrates his death. In terms of listening to the Pentateuch itself, it is not telling us that Moses was its author any more than Jesus is the author of the gospels because he is the main person they are about.

In Isaiah, the prophet is not mentioned after chapter 35. Chapters 36-39 are almost word for word identical to four chapters in 2 Kings. The last 26 chapters picture a time several centuries after Isaiah. These chapters themselves--which would have been on a different scroll from the first chapters--are not worded as prophecies of the distant future. They do not present themselves as prophecies from Isaiah about two centuries later. The issue is the packaging (that the book as we find it in our Bibles has the heading, the vision of Isaiah) and the fact that Jews at the time of Christ referred to Isaiah as the author, including Jesus.

I consider this a very serious question, because it has to do with Jesus. So do we ignore the very rules the Chicago Statement itself endorses--the "grammatico-historical method"--when it comes to situations where one part of Scripture refers to another part in a certain way? From the standpoint of inductive Bible study, we would not conclude that Moses authored the Pentateuch. But the Chicagoan assumes that if Jesus referred to this material as from Moses or Isaiah, they must have been the author.

The difference between them and me is that I'm not sure I want to assume Jesus would not have used the conventions of his day in referring to these books. It is a question of whether we, in the name of truth and the Bible, are willing to allow for a broader range of intent by God rather than restricting it to a more narrow literality. Again, the Chicagoan wishes to end the discussion. In my opinion, the broader inerrantist is more interested in what is true. He or she does not preclude the position of the Chicagoan on a particular issue--indeed, because we are interested in the truth we must be open to them. But I personally think it does little to say we are about the truth if we aren't open to the evidence at hand.

Well, that's too much already so I'll have to do one more post. Sorry. I don't really enjoy the topic. I just thought this was an appropriate time to clarify yet another thing I appreciate about my church and its wisdom in not closing down discussions like this one. We don't specify how to baptize or what end time view you have to have. We insist you live a righteous life by the power of the Holy Spirit, that you truly love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself, that you do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with your God, that you fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the all of humanity.

Nope, nothing in there about the 5 points or the Westminster Confession or the 39 articles.

One Wesleyan view of Chicago Inerrancy Statement 2

In the previous post I mentioned the Preface and Summary parts of the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. I think all Wesleyans can wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of the Preface and most of the summary statements. The point of debate has more to do with the concrete playing out of the summary statements into concrete specifics. Some Wesleyans will agree with the specifics. Others such as myself think they have too superficial an understanding of meaning, culture, and genre. Both can be venerable Wesleyan perspectives.

The third part of the Statement is where it gets into specifics. 19 affirmations and denials. Today I want to start looking at them.

1. The first is an affirmation that the Scriptures are the authoritative Word of God and a denial that they receive their authority from the Church, tradition, or any human source.

I agree. I do pick up the subtle assumption that the text has had a relatively constant meaning from its origins till now. From my perspective, that is a Newtonian assumption in a quantum world. The question of whether the Bible is authoritative really pales before the really hard question, namely, what meaning of these texts is authoritative.

2. Scriptures are supreme. The authority of the Church is subordinate. Creeds, councils, declarations are of lesser authority.

Given the assumptions of the authors, I agree. I think the "Church" here is understood in a political sense--the political bodies of church history, not least the "Catholic church." I certainly do not think any political church holds such authority, and the creeds and councils are still political statements. In my opinion, however, when these authors say "Scriptures," they really mean the Bible read Christianly, the Bible read as Christian Scripture. They would disagree that they meant this, but in my opinion they cannot see their own glasses and how those glasses color their perspective.

From my point of view, these sorts of statements involve subtle but significant misunderstandings of language. It poses as contradictory options things that, on deeper examination, I believe are virtually the same. I'll agree to it in the same way I agree when my son says something like, "So it's better to score a touchdown than strike out, right Dad?" What I'm thinking, though, is that he's a little confused.

In my opinion, so many of the meanings these signatories themselves found so authoritative in the text of Scripture were themselves products of their own Christian tradition. The signatories would deny that this is the case, but they do not properly see themselves, in my opinion.

The NIV is a wonderful example of the "say one thing, do another" dynamic I see necessary for this hermeneutic to sustain itself.

Say: We are listening to the Bible. Our interpretations come from the plain sense of the text. We are under the authority of the text and not letting the Church have a higher authority.

Do: Let's translate "form of God" as "very nature God" so the full divinity of Christ is not in question (Phil. 2:6)--is "shape" really the same as "very nature"?! Let's translate "firstborn of creation" with "firstborn over creation" (Col. 1:15) so there is no question of whether Jesus is created or not. Let's add a word out of nowhere to "did not give" so it reads "did not just give" (Jer. 7:22), even though there is no such word in the Hebrew--we don't want to leave any question about whether Leviticus was written at the time of the exodus. Let's add another word out of the blue so that "to the dead" reads "to those now dead" so there is no room for the dead being saved (1 Pet. 4:6)--Protestants don't believe such Catholic ideas. Again, let's take the word "entirely" out so that we give no room for a completely allegorical interpretation in 1 Cor 9:9-10.

Most of these moves have no clear basis in the text and seems in each case to be motivated overwhelmingly to maintain the perspective of the neo-evangelical tradition, thus deconstructing the fundamental claims of this hermeneutic. When push comes to shove, those of the Chicago Statement approach consistently trump the most obvious meaning of the Bible with evangelical tradition, in my opinion.

The Church is something more profound and Spiritual than any of the specific creeds or councils... and the Church led by the Spirit is already assumed in much of what the crafters of this Statement call the "Scriptures."

3. ... is directed against those who only consider the Bible a "witness" to revelation or who are Barthian saying it only "becomes" revelation or that it depends on human response for its validity.

I don't maintain any of these things in the form attacked. I believe each book was a moment of inspiration to its original audiences. I believe that the Bible was the word of God, even though the Holy Spirit does make it "become" the word of God regularly beyond the original meaning (they were attacking Barth in this one). So I won't spend any time on this one.

4. God uses language for revelation. Our creatureliness/fallenness does not "thwart" it or make it inadequate.

I agree. However, I see no way that our creatureliness and enculturatedness does not make revelation relative to a particular framework. The authors of the Chicago Statement might have denied this. I see no way around it. All language is cultural, even though some elements might appear in every culture.

5. We affirm progressive revelation... but later revelation does not correct or contradict it... and no normative revelation since the Bible.

But what about the "eye for an eye" rule that Jesus rejects or the allowance for divorce that Jesus says was a concession to Israel's sinfulness and not God's plan. What about Jesus' sacrifice as the end of the sacrificial system--I personally can't see that Leviticus was expecting this at all. Look at what Paul does with the Sabbath Law. And I think Arius had a pretty good bibilical case for a view of Christ a little less than Athanasius was looking for. The debate was not settled on the basis of the Bible alone.

I just don't think things are as nice and neat as the Statement makes them out and I'm really worried about a paradigm that, rather than trying to follow the most likely interpretation, expends its energies and ingenuity trying to explain away difficulties.

6. Total inspiration. OK, but let's see what they meant.
7. Not just human insight. Indeed!
8. God used their personalities, didn't override them. Yep.

9. Inspiration did not confer omniscience on the authors, but enabled them to speak trustworthy. Their finitude or falleness did not introduce distortion or falsehood.

Yes, trustworthy to the target of what God was trying to say to their particular audiences at a particular time and place. But such revelation at a time and place will rarely apply to many other times and places with equal directness or poignancy.

10. inspiration a matter of autographs, but it has been transmitted faithfully.

Yep. Not an issue... although, I would not preclude the possibility that God at some times and places has spoken through texts that were not the original text. The Chicago paradigm finds this idea problematic. The Wesleyan, because of our affirmation of the Spirit, should be quite comfortable with this possibility.

The Chicago paradigm would find this lying on God's part. Surely He could not be a truthful God and speak as if a particular verse or wording were in the original. But this is such a misguided understanding of truth. When we humans always believe many things about the world that are not correct, God could hardly speak to us at all if He did not start with our understandings, even though He knows they often aren't quite right.

This distinction gets at the heart of the difference between the two understandings of inerrancy I am discussing here.

One Wesleyan view of Chicago Inerrancy Statement 1

The recent symposium on a Wesleyan hermeneutic at our church headquarters confirmed what I have said here before. The Wesleyan use of the word inerrancy is not limited to the way that word is used in other circles, like the Evangelical Theological Society, which is tied to a statement made in the late seventies called the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy.

I suspect most Wesleyans have never heard of it and would be pretty unaware of those discussions that were a really big deal for a few Wesleyans at Houghton and Asbury from the 1950s to the late 70s. Bob Black argued at the recent symposium that the term itself is somewhat of a foreign body of Reformed influence in our polity (see symposium site above and where I easily found the Chicago Statement online :-). But it was vigorously and successfully pursued politically by one key individual of the day, Stephen Paine of Houghton. And of course everyone voted with him each time he brought it up. After all, whether you had a clue about what he was wrestling with in his world, who in their right mind would vote for the idea that the Bible has errors?!!

But the Wesleyan Church has mostly been focused on church growth, health, and multiplication these last 30 years rather than on ideological matters. This of course is true of broader evangelicalism as well, as Webber tracks in The Young Evangelicals. There are of course a few Wesleyan scholars who still track this debate and for whom the more narrow definitions are important. Their understanding of inerrancy is clearly one venerable Wesleyan option. But I suspect that the Calvinist Greg Beale, formerly of Calvinist Wheaton and now of Calvinist Westminster Theological Seminary, is way too late in his attempt to turn twenty-first century evangelicalism back to mid-twentieth century evangelicalism.

I thought I might take a couple posts to look at the Chicago Statement from another venerable Wesleyan perspective, one that I would argue fits better with the spirit of the Wesleyan tradition historically. I think all Wesleyans will pretty much agree with the summary points of the statement in general. The Devil is in the details and in the specifics of how this particular group of first generation neo-evangelicals understood them. In other words, we may disagree some on the way they unpacked their basic points.

As far as I can tell, there was only one Wesleyan out of the some 360 who signed the statement in 1979 (the original is kept at Dallas Theological Seminary, again, a Calvinist institution :-). That was Wilbur Dayton, who taught at Asbury at the time, I believe. By that time the Wesleyan Theological Society had already taken the term inerrancy out of its bylaws because of the kinds of details it was usually taken to imply.

Those Wesleyan Methodists in 1950 and Pilgrims in 1968 who agreed to the term "inerrant," I would argue, would have affirmed the basic sentiments as I do. But they did not get into the weeds of the concrete issues that these signatories were concerned with. Our denomination has never had those debates because they are off focus from what is central to our tradition, and our denomination has never connected its use of the term inerrancy to the Chicago Statement.

Preface
There were several comments I think are great in the Preface:

1. "We acknowledge the limitations of a document prepared in a brief, intensive conference and do not propose that this Statement be given creedal weight"

2. "We offer this Statement in a spirit, not of contention, but of humility and love"

3. "We invite response to this statement from any who see reason to amend its affirmations about Scripture by the light of Scripture itself"

I appreciate the deep spiritual motivation of this preface and the kind spirit with which it was offered. Take this comment: "We gladly acknowledge that many who deny the inerrancy of Scripture do not display the consequences of this denial in the rest of their belief and behavior, and we are conscious that we who confess this doctrine often deny it in life by failing to bring our thoughts and deeds, our traditions and habits, into true subjection to the divine Word."

I think this comment gives some good insight into the thinking of this group. They were concerned about the slippery slope to faithlessness that they thought would happen if they did not take a strong stance on these particular issues. Of course the practicalities of slippery slopes are a different issue than what is actually true.

Short Statements
Here are my thoughts on the five short summary statements:

1. God inspired Holy Scripture... Holy Scripture is God's witness to Himself.

Yes, certainly. The complication is that it was God's witness to Himself so that the Thessalonians could know Him in their categories, to various settings of ancient Israel so that they could know Him in their categories, etc. I believe that the second and third generation of evangelicals have matured over time in understanding the implications of context in a way that the first generation did not fully appreciate. The greater sophistication of the TNIV over the NIV is a nice embodiment of this maturation.

In a theme I will no doubt express throughout this series, the problem with the Chicago Statement is neither its spirit nor its basic affirmations. It is that it underestimates the profundity and complexity of God's Truth. God is smarter than it accounts for, in my opinion. It is a statement of arithmetic in a glorious God-created world of calculus. It was a group of faithful white men (I spotted maybe 5 women in the 360 signatories and of course Edwin Yamauchi represented non-North Americans ;-) doing their best to keep faith in a world where things which at one time had been assumed, were being seriously undermined by the scholars of various fields.

2. The second summary says something very similar to what Asbury's statement of faith currently says. The Bible is to be believed in all that it affirms, obeyed in all that it requires, and embraced in all that it promises.

Absolutely. The point of potential disagreement is in what the Bible affirms, commands, and promises. The Chicago Statement goes on to define these things rather narrowly. In my opinion, it still has a rather simplistic understanding of meaning and context and thus continues to assume more or less that instructions to one time and place might easily transfer to all other times and places with an equal relevancy and poignancy.

Asbury decided in the 80s that it was not going to fight over the finer points of inerrancy and adopted a broad statement that, in my opinion, fits the ethos of the Wesleyan Church on this issue. In other words, Asbury's understanding of inerrancy is not tied to the Chicago Statement either. And since Asbury was the primary Wesleyan seminary up until the founding of a new seminary at IWU, its position clearly fits within the Wesleyan umbrella.

3. The Holy Spirit authenticates Scripture by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

Absolutely! Indeed, this statement sounds characteristically Wesleyan in terms of our holiness tradition. The problem of course is that the Chicago statement does not understand this statement in a characteristically Wesleyan way. The nineteenth century holiness interpreters understood the Spirit's speaking potentially to be a "more than literal," spiritual meaning the text could take on. Similarly, Wesley understood the Spirit to inspire understandings of the text for us in a way similar to how He did the original inspiration.

The Chicago Statement means nothing of this sort. In fact, all the signatories would have soundly rejected this characteristically Wesleyan hermeneutic. Here we must insist that the Pilgrims were a product of the holiness revivals where this hermeneutic dominated. And the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist Church returned to Methodism after the Civil War. The Wesleyan Methodist Church would have ceased to exist in the late 1800s if it had not reformulated its identity around the holiness revivals of the late 1800s, using its hermeneutic.

We have not John Wesley for our father, but Phoebe Palmer for our mother! I do have a fundamentalist/old school evangelical older brother that I love, but my personality is closer to my parents than his is (and I use the word his intentionally).

John Calvin's illumination of the reader of Scripture is not quite the same as John Wesley's inspiration of the reader of Scripture. The Chicago Statement is built on Calvin's model and does not allow for as much as Wesley's or that of the nineteenth century holiness revivalists. In the same way, the Wesleyan view of inerrancy has more room in it than the fundamentalist or old school evangelical approach does.

This is a crucial point. Clearly any spiritual interpretation God breathes through the text of Scripture is inerrant. But that's hardly what Stephen Paine was talking about or would have affirmed at Houghton in the mid-twentieth century. He was thinking historical meaning of the texts in their original contexts

4. The basic sentiment of the fourth summary statement is to affirm Scripture to be without error in its statements about God's acts in creation, the events of world history, and its own literary origins--in addition to its statements about God's saving grace.

Here we get to the crux of the matter. What exactly was God doing when He revealed the books of the Bible? Did God speak in absolute disclosure in the manner of a work of philosophy or science? Or did God sometimes speak poetically or poignantly to its original audiences? If God spoke poignantly to the original audiences, He would no doubt have spoken in the light of their assumptions, many of which would not be our assumptions today about reality.

This is the heart of the debate. Nobody would accuse the Parable of the Prodigal Son of error because it is a fictional story. Are there other places where the "genre" of biblical literature, taken broadly in a somewhat metaphorical sense, has left us with texts that surely should not be said to be in error (for they hit God's intended mark) but that work on the basis of assumptions that we would not affirm today (like the sun going round the earth or the dead being under the earth).

5. ... is basically the same as #4. "The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded."

The word "total" as they meant it is is highly problematic, for it assumes that there is such a thing as statements in human language that can be removed from human categories, can still be understood by humans who only can think in human categories, and can still be relevant and poignant to day to day life. In that sense, the Chicago Statement is just as modernist as the modernism it sought to cope with... and is ill equipped to speak to the Bible's authority in a twenty-first century context.

Next post--the specifics the 1979 signatories understood by these general statements.

Seminary (6-10-09): Cultural Contexts of Ministry

Trying to finalize the textbooks for the second intensive class of the seminary, onsite in Marion Aug. 3-7: Cultural Contexts of Ministry. We try to keep textbook costs for any 3 hour class down to $150 or less.

And if you're in the class, don't worry, we only read/skim lighter books in their entirety. The thick and deep ones should be savored selectively, and the reference tools are for sampling :-) Remember, this is not your father's seminary where a bunch of books are dumped in your lap to read from cover to cover, then the professor lectures through the same material in his or her own way in class all over again.

Here they are ($101.73 if you bought them all new):

For cross-cultural theory ($19.80):
Charles Kraft: Christianity in Culture (be sure and get the revised edition, not sure if the link below is it--the picture is the older edition)



For our postmodern context in dialog with evangelicalism ($17.16):
Robert Webber, The Younger Evangelicals



For our current global context ($10.17):
Peter Jenkins, The Next Christendom



For the city, poverty, and race ($23.10):
Harvey Conn et al, Urban Ministry.



For sampling American church context ($31.50):
Robert Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada

3.2 Cathedrals and Homes

The earliest Christians may have worshipped in multiple settings, chiefly in people's homes, but perhaps also in buildings, "synagogues," outdoors, and of course at the Jerusalem temple. Over time, of course, Christianity became a legal religion (AD313) and then subsequently the official religion of the Roman Empire (AD380). [1] It is no surprise, then, that Christians began to build structures in which to meet.

Some strong voices today find this shift the bane of Christianity, a movement away from Spirit-led communal settings in the home to a more sterile, "institutionalized" setting where people participated less in worship and more watched it take place in front of them by a priestly class. Frank Viola, for example, says that the story of Constantine "fills a dark page in the history of Christianity. Church buildings began with him." [2] Clearly in his mind, the church went seriously off track when it started meeting in buildings.

We can understand this sentiment, and there is no doubt some truth to what they claimed happened back then accompanied by a move to worship in basilicas, the large church buildings of the day. But their analysis, particularly that of Viola, is not entirely accurate historically, nor does it relate directly to the question of buildings today. The "institutionalization" of Christianity had begun centuries before Constantine. [3] Indeed, it was already taking place in the later books of the New Testament, as we will see in later chapters. There are benefits and drawbacks to structure and organization. The key across the board would seem to be balance, not "rigid" spontaneity or rigid structure.

In the end, it seems quite wrongheaded to blame buildings for the demise of true spirituality in any time or place. It seems quite possible to be authentically Christian in any church, no matter what kind of building you primarily meet in. In this section we want to explore the main types of places where Christians meet today and try to look honestly at some of their strengths and weaknesses. The main options today would seem to be 1) large cathedral like buildings intended to accommodate thousands, 2) the average church building in the world, which accommodate hundreds at most, sometimes dozens, 3) the house church, which is best suited to numbers of fifty or less.

It is probably true that it takes greater intentionality on the part of church leaders for there to be significant spiritual growth on an individual level when the primary venue in which worship takes place is a large service that you mostly watch rather than participate in. This is particularly true of large, low church Protestant churches where the service mainly consists of listening to someone else preach. You might sing a couple hymns, but the special music is done by someone else on stage. Someone else gets up to give the main prayers. You do get to put money in the offering plate as it passes by the place where you sit.

We can understand the protests of the Frank Violas of the world against the backdrop of this dominant American form of worship. And most Americans who go to such churches only engage in what worship there is for about an hour a week. They are of course encouraged to pray and read their Bibles at home, but this is not corporate worship as a community of faith.

Interestingly, the participation element is at least potentially a little better in mainline Protestant churches, and especially in Catholic and Orthodox churches, where the congregation participates in most of the service. There are no special songs but all songs are sung by the entire congregation. The Apostle's or Nicene creeds are confessed by the entire church, as are confessions proper. The whole congregation says prayers together, including the Lord's Prayer, and they usually come together forward to take communion.

The usual low church Protestant claim that these prayers are "empty ritual" has of course often been the case in reality. But it is not necessarily the case at all, as we will argue in later chapters. It is more than possible to worship authentically and spiritually by way of set prayers and creeds, just as it is possible for a sermon to be inspired even if the pastor has prepared it ahead of time. A person can worship in a low church Baptist congregation where the people in front do everything for you and you observe. And a person can worship in a high church Roman Catholic mass where all the words are decided ahead of time.

A house church brings a number of potential strengths, not least of which is individual accountability to one another. In a large church setting, it is easy to hide without needing to submit to the broader body of Christ. While the kind of structure a person meets in seems relatively unimportant, meeting together per se seems an essential element of Christian faith. The New Testament does not specify where to meet. It does assume and urge that believers do meet together regularly with other believers (cf. Heb. 10:25).

Clearly the kind of give and take we hear Paul write about in 1 Corinthians 12-14 assumes a small group fellowship where the Holy Spirit is active. Men and women are prophesying, and anyone in the assembly presumably can. The early assemblies broke bread and worshipped together (Acts 2:46-47). The idea of a lone Christian whose life with God takes place on their own in the woods somewhere is foreign to the New Testament when there was the opportunity to meet with other believers.

So while nothing demands that Christians meet in homes, it does seem that a Christian life would ideally involve Christian fellowship in smaller groups than the typical congregation. Such meetings are not limited in any way to Sunday School classes or during the week meetings, cell groups or Bible studies. They could be going out to dinner with other believers or the many kinds of social interactions that take place between people on a more intimate level. The house church has no claim to be the only proper way for Christians to meet, but it has clearly captured an essential dynamic of Christian life sorely missing in many if not most churches.

The cathedral and mega-church building are offensive to many today, because of the immense expense they require to construct. In addition there is the objection of the house church movement that such large meetings do not allow for the spiritual spontaneity and accountability of a smaller group. At the same time, clearly they wouldn't draw such large numbers of people if they were not actually meeting someone's needs and desires.

The legalization of Christianity in the 300s resulted in many people coming into the Christian faith. Were they all true believers? Did this influx result in some syncretization of previous Roman religion and earlier Christianity? No doubt. Will there be more people in the kingdom than there would have been otherwise? Almost certainly. In the same way, it is hard to imagine that these large churches do not bring in more people to the kingdom and influence more people for good than some equivalent collection of house churches in the same area put together.

It is a serious question whether the expense of building such large buildings weighs against them. In the words of Judas in John, "Why wasn't this... money given to the poor?" (John 12:5). Indeed, when we think of the extravagance of some church buildings surely our consciences should be pricked.

And yet surely there is some room for meeting in the middle. Surely buildings should be built with a view toward true ministry, how to further the mission of God to bring good news to the world at a particular location in a particular facility. And of course at some point there is a place for using money to bring glory to God. Jesus himself allows the woman to spend her perfume on him. And there is something about the magnificence of the medieval cathedrals, built over the course of a hundred years by the very people of the community, stone by stone, that surely embodies the glory of God in a way no house church ever could.

The long and short of all this discussion is that we cannot say that any one meeting place today is the most Christian kind of place to meet. From cathedral to mega-church building to house church, each has its contribution to make. The cathedral points to the glory of God, just as God has adorned the creation in splendor. The mega-church complex can be structured as an instrument of the good news, with its basketball courts to engage the community, its Christian school to integrate faith with learning, and its sanctuary where thousands get a small foretaste of the ten thousands worshipping God in festal assembly (Heb. 12:22-23). The house church gets at the heart of the church, the body of Christ, which generally met in small groups of less than fifty. Here the kind of individual manifestation of the Spirit and mutual accountability can take place as God intends it to.

[1] There is a certain strangeness to the trend to see Constantine as the enemy of Christianity for "institutionalizing" it. For one thing, it was Theodosius I in AD380 that made Christianity the only official religion of the Roman Empire, not Constantine. Constantine merely legalized it, which in itself hardly seems something to protest.

And perhaps the most significant "institutionalization" move Constantine made was toward reaching some sort of agreement on the divinity of Jesus by convening the Council of Nicaea (AD325). In that process, Constantine was less concerned about what position they ended up taking as that the Christians become unified. It was then Theodosius I who made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the empire, as opposed to Arian Christianity that saw Jesus as the first of God's creations.

We wonder if those who cry foul to Constantine are happy to open the door to those who do not believe Jesus to be fully divine, a belief that at one point in the 300s was perhaps the dominant view. The legalization of Christianity also catalysed agreement on issues like which books should be considered the New Testament and which text of those books Christians would use in worship. As far as we know, the current list of books was not even suggested until AD367 and was not ratified by any council until a regional council in AD398. The all too common rumor that the Council of Nicaea settled the New Testament canon is clearly pop ignorance and about 100 years off the mark.

[2] Frank Viola and George Barna, Pagan Christianity: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices, rev. ed. (Carol Stream, IL: BarnaBooks, 2008), 18.

[3] Some would make a somewhat artificial distinction between "institutionalization" and "organization," where the former refers only to organization that is sterile and empty. Certainly if that is the way you are defining institutionalization, then of course it is always bad. :-)

Wesleyan Hermeneutics (plural): My Take Away

The symposium was a great time to refect on things, to hear new ideas, to get a feel for where others are. Here is my take away from the weekend. First, it is clear that not everyone in the room operates with the same hermeneutic. For many, their system of interpretation is actually unknown to them. Others lean toward a fundamentalist/old school evangelical hermeneutic. Some have incorporated some postmodern elements. Some are in a "second naivete" and reclaming the "pre-modern" hermeneutic of the late nineteenth century holiness writers.

So it is no suprise that some wondered whether there really is such a thing as a Wesleyan hermeneutic, although Dr. Tom Armiger, one of our General Superintendents, did a superb job of capturing the dominant points of the weekend. I'm sure they will be posted online soon, probably here.

But I think I can map all this confusion and thus specify clearly a number of Wesleyan hermeneutics, plural, none of which we can properly reject.

A Tale of Two Hermeneutics
I am quite certain that you could approach this issue from another vantage point than the one I take here. But I can't think of any other approach that will bring greater categorizing power than the following.

Hermeneutical theory, in my mind, is a given. It is not Wesleyan. It is not Calvinist. It is not this or that. It just is. It is a science, and it is valid. It is the question of how one assigns meaning to a text.

There are only two ways to interpret a text, when we approach them from my categorizing approach. 1) You can try to read them in terms of their original contexts or 2) you can read them against some other context. There is no other option from this categorizing standpoint.

Now, there is, of course, a multiplicity of contexts other than the original ones against which you might read a text. This is where the notion of polyvalence, much invoked in the conference, come into play. These are almost impossible to categorize exhaustively.

It is also true that there is some degree of ambiguity about what it might mean to read a text in the light of its original contexts. An author might have a different understanding of a text than his or her audience, even though they partake of the same general context. Texts often have unintended potentialities, as anyone who has taken a true/false quiz will recognize. Texts leave gaps... and so forth.

But the general distinction seems unassailable. There is a kind of reading of a text that listens to it in the light of its original contexts and there are a multitude of other readings that loosen the text to one degree or another from those original contexts.

A Wesleyan Hermeneutic: Original Meaning
Clearly at the conference were those who find the locus of biblical authority in the original meaning. I consider this meaning valid as well. (I didn't like the way the term "historical-critical method" was painted as evil in contrast to "grammatio-historical method." At some point it would be fun to go through the history of biblical interpretation Terry Paige did and show the positive contribution of each figure rather than treating them all as the spiraling demise of the Enlightenment.)

Now there are right and wrong answers as to what the original meaning was. We cannot know them for sure, but there is surely nothing wrong with trying. My critique of those who operate with a more rigid understanding of inerrancy is that, in my opinion, they do not actually do what they say. They impose boundaries on what the text can and cannot say. If the text wanted to stay within those boundaries, it would not be a problem. I just personally think that the text doesn't want to stay within those boundaries.

What is a Wesleyan version of this hermeneutic?
Since we cannot change what the text meant, a Wesleyan version of the original context hermeneutic is distinctive in the sense of 1) the questions it approaches the text with from today, 2) the way it prioritizes biblical material, 3) the way it organizes the individual books of the Bible into a biblical theology, and 4) the contemporary context with which it is establishing points of continuity and discontinuity.

These are of course a matter of contemporary Wesleyan community and Wesleyan theology. The same elements apply to a Calvinist or Lutheran appropriation.

A Wesleyan Hermeneutic: Beyond the "Literal"
Once we have loosened the original contexts, a number of potential Wesleyan readings come into play, each with varying degrees of continuity with the original meanings.

1) There is a reading that dialogs between us and Wesleyan readings of the past. We read the Anglican, pre-modern Wesley reading Scripture and appropriate what we like. We read the nineteenth century pre-modern holiness writers reading Scripture and appropriate what we like. We read twentieth century fundamentalist/old school evangelical Wesleyans reading Scripture and appropriate what we like.

But we do the appropiation in the light of our sense of the Spirit's leading today, not as slaves to any particular way Wesleyans in the past have read Scripture. We are twenty-first century Wesleyans. If there is not some continuity we may as well change our name. But we have yet to define who will dominate our hermeneutical flavor this century.

2) There is an openness to pneumatic, spiritual readings in the Wesleyan holiness tradition that you do not find in evangelical Calvinism. John Drury pointed out that Calvin say the Spirit's role more in terms of illumination of what the text already meant, while Wesley was more open to unique inspiration of us as readers. We are clearly more closely related to Pentecostals than to the Reformed or Presbyterians, and we have a place for direct inspiration in reading the text--in ways never intended originally.

3) There was talk of the "rule of faith" and the "rule of love" as controls on non-contextual reading. There is a kind of Wesleyan "rule of faith" that goes beyond the core. I personally, however, would not recommend us validating Wesleyans reading the biblical text ideologically, however, unless it is the Spirit leading as in #2. However, we probably do want to affirm that in the past the Spirit has led us as a community to read the text pneumatically. But such a reading seems a combination of #1 and #2.

Conclusion
There is more than one valid hermeneutic. There is a valid original meaning hermeneutic and there are valid non-contextual hermeneutics. God has used both in the past. God will continue to use both in the future.

Wesleyans have in the past employed both hermeneutics differently. In the late twentieth century, some Wesleyans at Houghton and Asbury employed a fundamentalist/old school evangelical approach that is at least partially an original meaning approach, riding the wave of Reformed influence in the earlier part of the century. In the eighteenth century, our forebears were far more non-contextual and pneumatic in orientation. Wesley, although he did not know it, employed a theological hermeneutic not unlike most of the principle church "fathers."

So one thing that does make us somewhat unique among evangelicals is our openness to both hermeneutics. You will not get the Calvinists at Trinity or Gordon Conwell to condone the hermeneutic employed by Daniel Steele in the 1800s. But it is a part of our heritage that postmodern philosophy actually has justified. No one can say it is not properly Wesleyan.

In my opinion, I cannot say that the fundamentalist inerrantist approach is not properly Wesleyan either, for it has been practiced by a slice of the Wesleyan Church in the late twentieth century. I'm glad, however, that the Wesleyan understanding of inerrancy is bigger than it, as Dr. Armiger pointed out in his final summary.

Three potential blind spots from the symposium...

Steve DeNeff just gave a masterful presentation on preaching a Wesleyan hermeneutic. Very good stuff.

But let me just mention three potential blind spots as we walk away from the weekened:

1. To assume inadvertantly that unique Wesleyan identity is only a matter of theology and ideas.
I believe the center of Wesleyan identity is the heart and an optimism about life change, resulting in a changed life. It is why we can be more generous in the realm of ideas than some other traditions. We are heart people first, then head people.

2. John Wesley is not our father. The 19th century holiness movement was, and we have a fundamentalist brother.
Phoebe Palmer was our mother and Wesley is at best our grandfather. Accordingly, John Wesley is not the arbitrator of our decisions, including our hermeneutical decisions. This is especially the case because he could not possibly have anticipated the issues we currently must process. He set a very important tone for what followed, but the answer to the question of a Wesleyan hermeneutic does not rise or fall with him.

3. We have to stop thinking of "affirmation" as the only--or perhaps even the primary mode of Scripture.
Scripture does a lot of other things to. It expresses despair, anger, joy, for example. Stories affirm identity and values. Commands are even a different thing from affirmations of truths or propositions.

A couple lesser potential blind spots:
1. We didn't have hardly either women here, few pastors and even fewer laypeople, and most importantly there was no one here from the southern hemisphere or the third world, to make sure their voices were heard and questions raised.

2. We should at least note that standing against gay marriage is a different kind of activity than standing up for slaves or the unborn. There is a tendency today to lump all such issues into a prophetic model of standing against sin. There is at least a distinction in the kind of activity that should be taken into account.

Symposium: History of "Inerrancy" in Wesleyan Church

Another great paper by Bob Black Friday afternoon. In it, he argued that the word inerrancy entered into Wesleyan Methodist vocabulary primarily by way of Stephen Paine of Houghton but that it was really a Reformed beef. John Wesley did not trouble with, for example, varying numbers of soldiers in the biblical record. Similarly, even Reformed Princetonians like Hodge did not trouble over such things either, despite using the word inerrant.

Basically, inerrancy in its current form is largely a by-product of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies and was part of the Reformed reaction to modernism as it was then formulated. Notable Nazarenes and others of the time did not really participate in that debate, which was largely a Reformed phenomenon.

Black concluded that the term inerrancy and its twentieth century baggage are largely a foreign body in the Wesleyan Church's polity.

There was disagreement, of course, largely from Gary Cockerill of Wesley Biblical Seminary. He is of course the Wesleyan who is currently most involved in the Evangelical Theological Society. My sense is that he would probably not represent the majority of those present, although he is a strong voice.

Such arguments get into the historical weeds pretty quickly. Is it fair to say that Wesley believed in inerrancy when he lived more than a hundred years before the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy? Would not the Pilgrims and other holiness groups not have affirmed inerrancy just as wholeheartedly if they had had someone in their midst like Stephen Paine for whom the term was important, who had pushed it? They might have. After all, who would vote for errancy?

In my opinion, however, there is a crucial paradigm difference between assuming all the details of the Bible to be precise and orienting one's use of the Bible around defending them, to where they are the things you focus on. Secondly, as Steve Lennox's paper showed, the nineteenth century holiness authors were focused on spiritual meanings in the text. This approach obviously is not oriented at all around establishing the historical harmony of biblical parts and so forth.

Regardless of the historical weeds, it is simply the case that a body like the one gathered Friday has Wesleyans in good standing who run the gamut of interpretations of inerrancy. I doubt very seriously that anyone will mount a campaign to remove the word from our polity. But by the very existence of diversity of interpretation of it, it de facto must be interpreted in a broader way than the Chicago Statement for Wesleyans.

Regardless of what the word "inerrancy" has meant or meant to Stephen Paine, it is de facto the case that for Wesleyans today, the term is broad enough to allow 1) for those like Gary who have a strict and twentieth century understanding of the word and 2) for the more ambiguous position of Asbury Seminary that the Bible is "inerrant in all it affirms."

What does it affirm? That is a matter for debate and discussion and in fact could be as broad as what other denominations mean by "infallible in matters of faith and practice." "It" also might be taken to focus on the whole, rather than the minutia, thus allowing for some sense of progressive revelation and/or diversity of position on particular issues. In effect, the word "inerrancy" de facto does not have the specific content for Wesleyans it has for other groups, including ETS.

I might add in closing that to focus on "affirming" even misses the fact that much of the Bible may have meant to do other things than affirm truth. When the psalmist expresses hope that others would bash Babylonian babies against a rock (137), the function is surely something different than "affirming."

Magisterial Paper by Steve Lennox at Symposium

Steve is in the middle of a tremendous paper on the hermeneutic of 1800s holiness revivalists. It pulls the rug out from under the Hermeneutical Spiral and Vanhoozer's half-way reformation.

This quote from Daniel Steele (1894) is shocking and significant:

"It will not do to lean on the authority of a majority of experts; but on the practical question of the extent of gospel salvation from sin. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, the unlearned minority who have put the doctrine to experimental proof may be very much wiser than the learned majority of the magnates of the modern church, who have never subjected the question of the test of personal experience. Here the testimony of some Uncle Tom or Amanda Smith of the slave plantation may outweigh the opinion of a whole faculty of German theological professors. Experience outweighs theory; faith makes philosophy kick the beam" (Half-Hours with Saint Paul and Other Bible Readings, 239-40).

To read Lennox's paper, go here.

Wesleyan Educators: Today's Roundtable

Today educators from the religion departments of the five Wesleyan Church colleges are meeting: Indiana Wesleyan University, Houghton, Southern Wesleyan University, Oklahoma Wesleyan University, and Bethany Bible College. Today is the roundtable discussion. Tomorrow is a symposium on what a "Wesleyan hermeneutic" might be.

One of the discussions today is what is distinctive about Wesleyan theology. I've blogged on this before. But here is a summary again of what I think we should be saying:

1. Our base camp is in life change.
To frame the question in terms of distinct ideas is already to have altered what we are and have been. Our tradition is focused in becoming more Christ-like, far more than in a set of cognitive ideas. As a result, we are more interested in how our lives end up looking, our resultant behavior more than the fine points of your thinking. In other words, we are a holiness tradition.

2. We recognize a role for works in final justification.
Ok, ok, some might wince at wording it that way. We are justified by faith and cannot in any way earn our salvation. But if works do not result, final justification will not happen. This is of course thoroughly Pauline and biblical and a blind spot of the better known Protestant traditions. But it is clear from the New Testament that a person can begin on this path and not make it in the end, which of course implies a fundamental problem with the Augustinian/Calvinist understanding of predestination.

3. We have and will emphasize the importance of the social gospel.
Yes, "social gospel" is a dirty word/phrase. It is not the whole of the gospel. But it has been a major part of the Wesleyan tradition and will be again. We should not flinch from riding, even leading the wave of ministry to the poor and the oppressed in our world today. We strongly and unflinchingly affirm the full possibility of women in ministry, indeed in any role to which God might call a woman--and He calls them to every role!

That's enough for this morning.

Life Reflections: Paul, Sex, and Marriage

Finishing up a sample chapter for a book idea I mentioned a while back. This is the last part of one sample chapter, after going through the various things Paul has to say about sex and marriage, principally in 1 Corinthians 5-7.
________
It is hard to think of a force in our day to day life that is more powerful than our sexuality. What we believe about sex and marriage is far from some theoretical or idealistic matter. It is the very stuff of our day to day lives. Sex makes and breaks marriages and families. And marriages have not only to do with the two key individuals involved, but with children--humanity in its most vulnerable and damageable state. It is hard to think of another area of day to day life where a moment's self-gratification can have such long lasting consequences!

So the notion that marriage should be life-long and monogamous is not some legalistic idea foisted on society by dictatorial Christians or idealists. From the standpoint of contemporary values, it perhaps has most to do with giving our children a stable and nurturing setting in which to grow up. In terms of the values of earlier generations, it had much to do with who owned land and the prevention of wars and feuds. While it may sound outdated to say so, it makes sense to see a correlation between the stability of a society and the stability of the relationships between people. And surely the marriage relationship is one of the most important, if not the most important in society.

At the same time, it is all too easy to make these sorts of very important constants into unreasonable and oppressive rules without reasons, especially when it comes to exceptional situations. There are all sorts of landmines in making exceptions to rules. If a rule is valid, it is valid because it is the best case scenario. Refusing to allow for exceptions can unnecessarily destroy the lives of real people, but so can making too many exceptions to valid norms. By definition, exceptional situations are not the norm. They are not to be applied in the majority of cases. They are exceptions to valid rules, rules that apply in most cases.

Thus there is the landmine of using exceptions as an opportunity for self-gratification. Surely many of those who think they are the exception are not really. For example, it is hard to see where any divorce does not involve a moral failure of some sort on someone's part. It may not be a sexual moral failure, as in having an affair (physical or emotional). It may be a longstanding failure to be flexible or a chronic failure to value your spouse as much as you value yourself. It may be a cumulative failure to be willing to forgive the countless wrongs we all do unintentionally or intentionally to each other. Such failures build up over time and can break our relationships, just as they can break our relationship with God.

The fact that we know people will wrongly take advantage of the exception clause leads some people to close the door on exceptions altogether. This is understandable. But we have to remember that no one fools God. God is the one who is the ultimate policeman of the cheater. It is often a lack of trust in God that leads us to want to make sure the person who is hiding behind an exception clause doesn't get away with it. But ultimately, this is God's business.

Another landmine some will point out in this discussion is the landmine of crying "cultural" in a desire to get out of obeying what the Bible says. Is not the Bible the word of God for us as well as for them? Again, we don't want to give a loophole to those who would say the instructions of the Bible toward homosexual sex had to do with ancient cultural understandings of impurity to which we no longer subscribe. We don't want to give a loophole to those who would say that since the Bible seems so unexplicit on pre-marital sex we have to rethink the relationship between sex and marriage in the modern world.

But the distinction between the Bible as written for ancient audiences in ancient categories is something we can't get away from either. We have to deal with it the more we understand the Bible in context. The Bible was written first to them--it says so itself. The original audiences presumably understood the vast majority of what the biblical texts were saying. To suggest the contrary is incomprehensible, especially since those who have studied the ancient world find regular and thorough parallels in the non-biblical literature and artifacts of those days.

There is no question that the biblical books were in dialog with the categories of their own contexts. And yet our categories are often quite different from theirs. The amount of common human conceptuality of the world, and the degree to which an action in one culture means the same thing in another, is much smaller than many at first might imagine. This is especially the case for those who have not had a good deal of exposure to other cultures. The meanings of words and actions are more often different, rather than the same, when we compare the connotations today with the connotations then.

Again, most of these claims seem fundamentally beyond dispute. These basic factors all add up to the inescapable conclusion that the biblical teaching must be processed through some lens beyond the text, whether it be the lens of the ongoing Church, the lens of the Holy Spirit, or the rational lens of finding the points of continuity between that time and this time. Ideally, we would involve all three filters when appropriating the biblical text.

True, many will try to use "culture" and "exceptions" as an excuse to get away with something they should not. But it is our very desire to honor God by doing the right thing that leads us to take them into account. It is our desire to believe what is true, what God really thinks, that forces us to consider these elements in the equation. It is more comfortable simply to stick with a blanket rule or easy ideas we have never reflected on, especially when we are not the one having to deal with a potentially exceptional situation. It is more Christian to seek God's face prayerfully and corporately, with hearts to do whatever God requires.

The Church today is thus forced to "work out our salvation with fear and trembling" on such issues today (Phil. 2:12-13). We want it to be as easy as "God said it; I believe it; that settles it for me." But the reality is "God said it to them in a particular context; I believe it; that settled it for them." And we must with fear and trembling work together as the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to join those instructions to them with what God is saying to our world today.

Harold Smith of CT on campus

We were delighted to have Harold Smith, President and Editor in Chief of Christianity Today International on campus today. Many thanks to John Wilson and Jerry Pattengale for recommending and inviting him to campus!

We do have a remarkable campus and quite astounding things happening here. As I've said before, we're not better than everyone else. We're not more spiritual than everyone else. We're not smarter than everyone else. We don't take anything for granted...

But we are very grateful for the way God has astoundingly blessed this school these last years.

Seminary Vision (6-1-09)

In these posts, I'm not just giving updates on seminary development. I'm also trying to capture what I think is unique about what we are designing here. I think these sorts of things apply to educational theory in general, an area in which I am an experienced novice. They could really be written into a revolutionary book (and already have, at least in pieces).

Here's another one. We had a playful discussion about whether we should structure courses in terms of "ready, aim, fire" or "fire, aim, ready" or "fire, ready, aim." It seems obvious that you do the first...

BUT, that's exactly what the traditional seminary does in the extreme. You go off for three years to get ready. Then in theory you go to a local congregation, aim at it, and fire.

Here are some problems with this approach:

1. To a very large extent, teaching on getting ready won't stick with 80% of people unless they see what they are aiming at first. The vast majority of seminary stuff doesn't stick. It isn't that it all isn't relevant--at least I don't believe that. It's that most students can't see its relevance because they really have no real idea of what they are going to aim at.

In fact, to a very large extent, most people don't know how to ready themselves and aim at something until they have fired and missed a few times. People in seminary who have pastored a little before they came recognize to a much greater extent the usefulness of what they are learning because they have missed a few shots already.

A pastor will never misfire a certain way again if they shoot the wrong target once. On the other hand, they might misfire twenty times on a classroom test about taking that shot before it sinks in. This of course is the brilliance of our "in ministry" model. You are not in a practicum or a supervised ministry. You mess up; you're fired.

2. Most people will learn more, better if they have learned it a little wrong to begin with. This is especially the case with children. It's better to tell them: "An atom is the smallest thing there is" and then later correct it, "Well, actually there are these things called protons, electrons, and neutrons that are smaller." And then later, "Well, actually protons and neutrons are probably both made of quarks and gluons."

An approach that would try to teach all the exhaustive theory of firing before ever letting a person try a shot is bound for failure. They need to fire a little, even if not quite rightly, and then perfect later.

I leave you with two YouTube links that come to my mind often these days:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk7yqlTMvp8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t39EAeE8ehc

Say what you like about the NIV

I don't like the NIV as a translation. But trying to find things quickly in the standard RSV is very frustrating. Versions that have paragraph headings are a gift from God. May the rest be shelved forever. Good grief, even the Aland Greek text has headings.

3.3 Saturdays and Sundays

The worship of Christians on Sunday is one of the most common Christian practices you will find as you travel the great diversity of Christendom. From the 100s to the early 1900s, it would be hard to find a Christian group for whom Sunday was not the focus of the Christian week. Although we can think of a few notable exceptions today, Sunday remains the "Lord's Day" for the vast majority of Christians.

The best known exception that comes to mind is of course the Seventh Day Adventists, considered by some to be a cult, mostly because they have so many beliefs that are idiosyncratic when compared to most other Christians. The one that gives them their name, and that would be most apparent to someone driving by one of their buildings, is that they do not worship on Sundays but on Saturdays. For example, you might see a sign advertising "Sabbath School" instead of "Sunday School."

But even though they stand so far outside the mainstream on some beliefs and practices, all of them connect in one way or another to the Bible. And it is precisely because the Seventh Day Adventists are trying to follow out the Protestant principle of "Scripture only" that they have felt free to jettison such well established Christian traditions as worshipping on Sunday and belief in conscious existence between death and resurrection. They have done so because they have focused on verses in the Bible other traditions tend to ignore or reinterpret.

For example, it is quite common among grass roots Christianity to forget that the Sabbath in the Old Testament was from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. Every single reference to the Sabbath in the Old Testament refers to Saturday, including the fourth commandment to "Remember the Sabbath day, to make it holy" (Exod. 20:8*). [1] Many if not most American Christians equate this commandment directly with the practice of worshipping on Sunday, but they would be hard pressed to give you a biblical reason for the equation.

For example, every reference to the Sabbath in the New Testament also refers to Saturday. When Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath, he was healing a man on Saturday. When Colossians says not to let anyone pass judgment on you because of your observance of a Sabbath (Col. 2:16), it is referring to Saturday. Some have seen in the Greek wording of Matthew 28:1 a subtle indication that God shifted the Sabbath to Sunday at the point of the resurrection--"on the first of sabbaths." But all versions translate this idiom correctly as a reference to the first day of the week. Only by ripping the text from the way words were used at the time of Christ might one read it differently.

The New Testament thus does not equate the Old Testament Saturday Sabbath with Sunday. At least Paul's position on the issue of Jewish Sabbath observance is clear. Gentile believers are not obligated to keep the Jewish Sabbath. This is quite remarkable for some Christians to believe. Does not the Sabbath rule go back to creation, to the fact that God rested on the seventh day, Saturday (Gen. 2:2; Exod. 20:11)? Is not an Israelite stoned for picking up sticks on the Sabbath (Num. 15:32-36)? Did not Nehemiah stop the "evil" of buying and selling on the Sabbath around Jerusalem (Neh. 13:15-22)? Do we not find strong words in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel about keeping the Sabbath?

Indeed, all of these things are true. And it is just as true that Paul does not consider this teaching binding at least as it regards Gentile believers. "One person considers one day more important than another. Another considers all days the same. Let each be fully convinced in his [or her] own mind"* (Rom. 14:5). We have already mentioned Colossians 2:16: "Do not let anyone pass judgment on you because of food or drink or with regard to a festival, new moon, or sabbath."*

What Paul is arguing for here is generosity toward the practices of other believers. So "one person considers one day more important than another."* This is the Seventh Day Adventist and the person who believes Sunday is a Christian non-negotiable in one way or another. There is nothing in the New Testament that requires Christians to meet on Sunday. Paul would bid us not despise the Adventists for worshipping on Saturday, nor should we despise all the extra services various churches have devolved at other times and days of the week. If a church wants to have a second service on Saturday night, Paul says that is okay.

On the other hand, meeting on Sunday does seem to be an early practice, and where we might fault the Adventists is that they not only have decided to go with Old Testament practice. They have sometimes tried to argue that the rest of us should not meet on Sunday as we do. Some have tried to reinterpret what the "Lord's Day" is in Revelation 1:10, even though Christian writers like Ignatius clearly understand it to be Sunday, writing within fifteen years or so of Revelation.

Paul of course mentions setting aside contributions for the Jerusalem gift on the first day of the week (1 Cor. 16:2). Unfortunately, he does not tell us if the church met to worship on that day. Certainly in Acts Paul regularly visits synagogues until he is kicked out. But when it comes to the "Lord's Supper," he simply says "whenever you come together" (1 Cor. 11:17). We get the impression that they may have met more than once a week.

In any case, the practice of meeting together on Sunday is a well established Christian tradition that seems to have originated among the early Christians and clearly has continued throughout 2000 years of history. If God had a major problem with it, He has not bothered to tell us. It would seem to be a perfectly appropriate and acceptable way for Christians to remember Christ's resurrection. Sunday is the Lord's Day, the day most Christians have set aside to remember that Christ rose from the dead, to worship, pray, and often to eat the Lord's supper.

What is clearly not Christian is to despise other believers for their practice, unless they do not truly do what they do to honor the Lord (Rom. 14:6). The Adventists who worship on Saturday do as most Christian Jews of the first century surely must have, although many of them perhaps also met for at least a brief time on Sunday to remember the resurrection and look to Christ's return. The fundamentalists who have transferred the Sabbath laws to Sunday also do so as to the Lord. Many of them will not work on Sunday, nor will they buy and sell on the Lord's Day, which to them is the equivalent of the Sabbath. We should not despise them for these practices.

But they also must not despise those who have modeled themselves after perhaps most Gentile believers in the New Testament. Paul does not bind the Jewish Sabbath on them in any of its particulars. They meet together on the Lord's Day to remember the resurrection and look to Christ's return, but they work, buy, and sell on Sunday, as Paul probably did himself. If Paul refrained from these things, he would have done so on Saturday. They "consider all days the same" (Rom. 14:5), and they do it in honor to the Lord.

[1] This is the numbering of the commandments by Jews and the majority of Protestants. For Lutherans and Catholics, however, this would be the third commandment.