The final of the IWU Seminary videos is "leading edge." I've been providing further commentary along with the videos. Here are the links to the commentary, and each video on YouTube is further linked there:
Missional
Communal
Integrated
Spiritually Enriching
Personalized
Economical
The final video is on the Leading Edge aspect to our degree.
1. As I thought about what is leading edge about our seminary, really, all of the items on the above list fall into that category. A couple of them are now fairly common, although they weren't 10 years ago. For example, the fact that you don't have to move somewhere for three years--or even for one--is a new innovation that has saved the very existence of seminaries. You can do 2/3 of the degree online and the other third by coming to campus for 1 week intensives. Thanks to Asbury for pioneering much of this.
2. Asbury gives good training to its online profs. By the same token, Indiana Wesleyan has really perfected adult education both online and at satellite sites. We use the cohort model, where you take a sequence of courses in a particular order with the same group of fellow students. The model of course creation is usually three stage: 1) course content is generated by content experts, 2) the content is put into instructional form by pedagogical experts, which then is 3) taught by good facilitators.
This process in itself is a leading edge process. Most schools focus on getting content experts with name recognition. This makes a school look good, and it does privilege a group of students who are on the same wavelength with that professor.
But in practice, world renown content experts are rarely spectacular teachers. The majority of students thus do not benefit as much from having a world class professor as they would from a less brilliant scholar who is a more brilliant teacher. This is an interesting irony and self-defeating aspect of most educational institutions. That which is most valued--spectacular names--more often than not undermines the very reason for most educational institutions' existence: to teach.
A unique curricular process has evolved in the design of our seminary at IWU. Yes, our online courses with syllabus, grading process, and specific assignments are preset in a template in Blackboard, regardless of the particular professor. This is potentially discouraging to the maverick prof but is student oriented. It ensures the best pedagogy with the best content.
The content is generated collaboratively, not by a single content expert but by a half dozen brilliant minds. The pedagogy has also been generated collaboratively, by a group of people including several with significant online teaching. We have changed the standard format of Blackboard. I didn't use to like Blackboard, but I realized the reason was more than anything the way they generally package and promote its format. A small tweak--making each of the left hand buttons correspond to one week's assignments and discussion forums--and all is good. I'm left dumbfounded at who these Blackboard people that they have promoted such a counterintuitive format all these years in so many different institutions!
I have concluded that, really, big name scholars are best reserved most of the time for one week intensive formats. For the long haul, you want a good facilitator. Good education is not the transmission of information. The lecture in itself is the most inefficient form of teaching. Learning that is most retained and appropriate is learner generated, and thus the best teacher is one who designs a learning experience that leads a student to generate his or her own understanding. And it will hit multiple learning styles.
The teaching of individual courses will also include a collaborative element, where the course is led by a practitioner, but you receive some feedback from Bible and theology/church history professors, and other professors will feel free to drop in and comment too. We are thus trying to set up a true learning community, rather than a bunch of lone ranger superheroes like you get at other seminaries.
The seminary at IWU has also convinced IWU to add the Blackboard Community add on, making it possible for students across various cohorts to interact with one another. Asbury had this with its Cafe that so irked its board of trustees during the presidential crisis a few years back. But it was a great thing to create across the seminary cohesiveness and camaraderie. We will implement something like this as well, including alumni of IWU's MA program so they can keep in touch.
3. You can see from the process of course creation that integration has been a primary concern. It has been a challenge, but we have managed to meet in the middle on course design. There have been differences. One person wants a book that is just too long and too much for one element of a course. Some of the debates we've had as course designers have made their way into discussions for the course.
Is the missional movement wrong when it opposes thinking about attracting people to your church? Does your church community have to include the community immediately surrounding it or can your church be located in an area with which it has little interaction? We've debated and disagreed and finally made these discussions things for students themselves to make up their minds up in the course.
We've mentioned already how we bring Bible, theology, and church history to bear on topics. I'm excited for a couple weeks in the missional course where students will look at social justice in the prophets one week and study Rauschenbush and the early twentieth century social gospel in the next.
And as we've said, it is the leading edge of seminary education for training to be done in ministry, on the job. Students in our MDIV have to get in a church if they are not. We will be refining and retrofitting our MA degrees for those not in local church ministry. We haven't abandoned you in the parachurch or you lay leaders or you ministers wanting to beef up a particular skill set. But the MDIV is on the job training, "take your church to seminary."
4. The attention to spiritual formation is not unique to our program, but it is unusual. Tht we require it across the curriculm is fairly unique. And the robust way in which we address it is fairly unique. We look at the process of real change rather than the less productive--go and pray approach. And when you look at some other programs in spiritual formation, they usually myopically focus on the personal dimension, when in fact the corporate dimension must be present for the personal dimension to flourish. This is a blind spot of Western individualism that shows up even in the most noted spiritual formation programs in the US.
5. Finally, we have designed a program that is both faith-full and mature in its understanding. We are in the Wesleyan tradition, which means we are most interested in life change more than adding a set of mental widgets or skills. We are interested in you being able to do ministry more than in you knowing things. To be sure, knowing things is good and important, but we are getting the priorities of seminary education straight.
We are hermeneutically mature, especially for evangelicals. Most evangelical seminaries play a game here--if I learn Greek, diagram the sentences of the Bible, study a little historical background, then I will somehow mysteriously and almost automatically know God's will for today. We're seeing this paradigm unravelling before our very eyes. God has as often as not used the words of the Bible in ways other than their original sense and intent. This fact in itself undermines a curricular program at most seminaries that dedicates as much as a third of the curriculum to the pursuit of the original meanings of individual biblical books.
And of course, very little attention is spent in this typical curriculum to teaching what to do with that original meaning once you think you have it. How do I get from that time to this time. For that matter, how do I get from my class in Romans to my class in pastoral care and counseling, let alone to my class in preaching?
I have mentioned elsewhere that this is a great time for the Wesleyan tradition because of currents in the intellectual flow today. And as such, this is a great time to be starting a Wesleyan seminary!
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Seminary Vision (7-1-09): Economical
The public "opening" of the seminary is October 1-2, around the time of homecoming. The practical opening of the seminary is when students show up for classes August 3. But as a quiet note of celebration, today is the technical, legal opening of the seminary (woo-hoo!). Shh, don't tell anyone. Today it officially exists within the structure of the university. Pop, goes the non-alcoholic bottle of champagne.
The next of the IWU Seminary videos is "economical."
So far we've featured the Missional, Communal, Integrated, Spiritually Enriching, and Personalized vidcasts. Today we feature the Economical vidcast.
It's true. If you can get into Princeton or Duke, there's a fair chance their endowment machine will give you some hefty financial aid. That is, at least before the economic crisis.
But as far as evangelical seminaries go, it's going to be hard for anyone to justify going anywhere else but to IWU's new seminary--especially Wesleyans!
The per hour tuition rate for IWU's MDIV is 367 per credit hour. That's respectable. It shows we're affordable but not cheap. We have to put the number somewhere around there so that no one thinks we're the Dollar General of seminaries (P.S. aren't people stupid--that people would pass up real value because it is inexpensive!). Fine. We have a respectable number, 367 a credit hour.
BUT, then we give scholarships. For Wesleyan ministers, it's half off, which brings the number down to $183.50 a credit hour. That's pretty good... certainly beats anything a Wesleyan minister would get from the other institutions Wesleyans usually look at.
THEN, because we are now the only denominationally owned seminary of the Wesleyan Church, we have instantaneously, as of today, equal status in the eyes of the denomination to Asbury. That means all Wesleyan ministers who take our MDIV will get the same amount of denominational loan grant that only on campus Wesleyan students at Asbury get. I don't know the exact number, but it's about 80 dollars a credit hour, a fifth of which is "forgiven" by the denomination for every year served in ministry.
That brings us down to aroun $103.50 a credit hour for a Wesleyan minister.
BUT THAT'S NOT ALL! Many districts have funds for seminary education or matching funds. I believe two years ago one of the Michigan districts gave $85 dollars a credit hour for their ministers to go to seminary. That brings us down to about $20 bucks a credit hour.
So let's see, a Wesleyan minister from that district could do their whole first year, 20 credit hours, for about 500 bucks for the whole year!!!
To be sure, this equation couldn't support a thousand people. But in the meantime, from an economic perspective, you'd have to be crazy as a Wesleyan minister to go to one of the other places Wesleyans typically look at. You'd be like the Sprint commercial with the guy taking a bag of money out with the trash or the woman shoveling her quarters into a public fountain!
The next of the IWU Seminary videos is "economical."
So far we've featured the Missional, Communal, Integrated, Spiritually Enriching, and Personalized vidcasts. Today we feature the Economical vidcast.
It's true. If you can get into Princeton or Duke, there's a fair chance their endowment machine will give you some hefty financial aid. That is, at least before the economic crisis.
But as far as evangelical seminaries go, it's going to be hard for anyone to justify going anywhere else but to IWU's new seminary--especially Wesleyans!
The per hour tuition rate for IWU's MDIV is 367 per credit hour. That's respectable. It shows we're affordable but not cheap. We have to put the number somewhere around there so that no one thinks we're the Dollar General of seminaries (P.S. aren't people stupid--that people would pass up real value because it is inexpensive!). Fine. We have a respectable number, 367 a credit hour.
BUT, then we give scholarships. For Wesleyan ministers, it's half off, which brings the number down to $183.50 a credit hour. That's pretty good... certainly beats anything a Wesleyan minister would get from the other institutions Wesleyans usually look at.
THEN, because we are now the only denominationally owned seminary of the Wesleyan Church, we have instantaneously, as of today, equal status in the eyes of the denomination to Asbury. That means all Wesleyan ministers who take our MDIV will get the same amount of denominational loan grant that only on campus Wesleyan students at Asbury get. I don't know the exact number, but it's about 80 dollars a credit hour, a fifth of which is "forgiven" by the denomination for every year served in ministry.
That brings us down to aroun $103.50 a credit hour for a Wesleyan minister.
BUT THAT'S NOT ALL! Many districts have funds for seminary education or matching funds. I believe two years ago one of the Michigan districts gave $85 dollars a credit hour for their ministers to go to seminary. That brings us down to about $20 bucks a credit hour.
So let's see, a Wesleyan minister from that district could do their whole first year, 20 credit hours, for about 500 bucks for the whole year!!!
To be sure, this equation couldn't support a thousand people. But in the meantime, from an economic perspective, you'd have to be crazy as a Wesleyan minister to go to one of the other places Wesleyans typically look at. You'd be like the Sprint commercial with the guy taking a bag of money out with the trash or the woman shoveling her quarters into a public fountain!
Christianity and Original Sin
I have a writing assignment due today for a particular denomination's Sunday School literature. I thought I would draft it here.
___________
“Original sin” is not a topic we hear much discussed or even mentioned from the pulpit these days. Many Christians may never have even heard of it. It refers of course to the first sin of our human parents, Adam and Eve, the “original” sin. In terms of us today, the question of original sin has to do with how the sin of Adam and Eve has left its impact on us as human beings.
At least since the days of a Christian named Augustine (354-430), it has been conventional to think of our human nature as “fallen.” That is to say, our humanity is not what God intended it to be originally. God intended for us to do good and not to do evil. God intended us to be able to think more clearly and understand the world more accurately than we do.
Instead, Augustine—and then later Protestant leaders like Luther, Calvin, and John Wesley—believed that we have a sinful nature inside us, a “carnal” or “fleshly” nature that makes it impossible for us to do good or choose God without the power of the Holy Spirit inside us. Without the Holy Spirit, our plight is that of Romans 7:15: “what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Augustine believed this sinful nature was passed down “genetically” through sex, thus providing a partial explanation for why Jesus needed to be born of a virgin.
The default state of humanity is now “totally depraved,” incapable of doing any good in its own power. Although “total depravity” is more often associated with John Calvin, many of us in the Wesleyan tradition (as well as many Calvinists themselves) might be surprised to know that John Wesley affirmed this idea as well. Like Calvin, Wesley did not believe that we as human beings are able to choose God or do good on our own. Like Calvin, Wesley believed we could only choose God or do good if the Holy Spirit was empowering us to do it. The difference is that Wesley believed God offered this power to everyone, while Calvin believed that God only selected a few choice individuals to receive it. Such people were only God’s puppets, forced to do only what He made them do.
Another key difference between Calvin and Wesley is in how optimistic they were about God’s power to help us do good in this life. Luther did not believe we should even discuss such things, for the very discussion might tempt us to boast in our own righteousness. By contrast, Calvin did think the drive toward becoming more righteous in this life was important. But he believed the imprint of the original sin inevitably stayed with us our entire lives, with the result that we would never be able to stop sinning. The sinful nature inside us would be a part of us till we were glorified at the point of our deaths.
Wesley, on the other hand, was more optimistic. He believed that God wanted to overcome our sinful natures entirely, to “sanctify” us entirely and make us completely holy in this life. In the century that followed Wesley, various thinkers responded to these ideas. The Wesleyan tradition has historically affirmed that God wants to eradicate our sinful nature and destroy it. Others, like the Keswick tradition, have taught that our “carnal nature” will always be around, tempting us to sin, although they believe God can and wants to empower us to win over such temptation, even though it will always be a struggle on some level.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have the benefit of recent studies that help us look at Paul’s writings with fresh eyes. As a result, several aspects of the historical debate we have just mentioned seem a bit out of focus. For one, the phrase “sinful nature” is misleading at best, even though the New International Version and other translations use it consistently. But Paul nowhere uses the word nature in this way. The actual word he uses is flesh.
To begin to understand what Paul means by “flesh,” we only need take the word in its normal sense: skin. Paul understood our bodies to be enslaved to the power of Sin, along with the entire creation (cf. Rom. 8:19-21). This understanding is similar to what Augustine and later Christian thinkers have thought, but also significantly different.
In Paul’s thinking, the entire creation, including the skin of my body, has come under the power of Sin as a result of Adam’s sin. It is better to think of this power as a power over me rather than a power inside of me. To be sure, we have to take such images as metaphors. Paul was not thinking of the frontal lobes of our brains, but God was giving Paul’s audiences true pictures of the human condition in terms they could understand. We get into strange waters indeed when we try to mingle Paul’s ancient psychology with modern categories!
So Paul says things like, “I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin” (Rom. 7:14, NASB). A nice way to define flesh in this sense is my skin under the power of Sin. However, Paul does not see this state as the norm for the believer. Many readers of Romans 7 strangely stop without going on into Romans 8, where Paul indicates that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:8). In other words, Christians not only can get “out of” their sinful flesh—they cannot please God if they do not!
The confusion in debates over our “sinful natures” follows both from subtle misreadings of Paul we have inherited from Augustine and from taking various metaphors too literally. Basically, Paul teaches that the default state of humanity is one of moral disempowerment and alienation from God. Christ has made it possible, not only for us to be reconciled to God, but also for the Holy Spirit to empower us in relation to sin.
The powers of Sin in this world will be around until Christ returns. But we as Spirit-filled believers are not consigned to defeat in the face of temptation. “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to us all. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13, TNIV). This truth, consistently proclaimed by Paul, has largely been lost to contemporary Christianity to such an extent that it is scarcely believed even by those of us in the Wesleyan tradition.
But it is a truth we more than any other tradition are responsible to bring to this generation of believers. God has made it possible, through the power of the Holy Spirit, for us to live Christ-like lives in this world. What was impossible in our own power and in our own flesh, “God did: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and ... condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3-4, NASB).
___________
“Original sin” is not a topic we hear much discussed or even mentioned from the pulpit these days. Many Christians may never have even heard of it. It refers of course to the first sin of our human parents, Adam and Eve, the “original” sin. In terms of us today, the question of original sin has to do with how the sin of Adam and Eve has left its impact on us as human beings.
At least since the days of a Christian named Augustine (354-430), it has been conventional to think of our human nature as “fallen.” That is to say, our humanity is not what God intended it to be originally. God intended for us to do good and not to do evil. God intended us to be able to think more clearly and understand the world more accurately than we do.
Instead, Augustine—and then later Protestant leaders like Luther, Calvin, and John Wesley—believed that we have a sinful nature inside us, a “carnal” or “fleshly” nature that makes it impossible for us to do good or choose God without the power of the Holy Spirit inside us. Without the Holy Spirit, our plight is that of Romans 7:15: “what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Augustine believed this sinful nature was passed down “genetically” through sex, thus providing a partial explanation for why Jesus needed to be born of a virgin.
The default state of humanity is now “totally depraved,” incapable of doing any good in its own power. Although “total depravity” is more often associated with John Calvin, many of us in the Wesleyan tradition (as well as many Calvinists themselves) might be surprised to know that John Wesley affirmed this idea as well. Like Calvin, Wesley did not believe that we as human beings are able to choose God or do good on our own. Like Calvin, Wesley believed we could only choose God or do good if the Holy Spirit was empowering us to do it. The difference is that Wesley believed God offered this power to everyone, while Calvin believed that God only selected a few choice individuals to receive it. Such people were only God’s puppets, forced to do only what He made them do.
Another key difference between Calvin and Wesley is in how optimistic they were about God’s power to help us do good in this life. Luther did not believe we should even discuss such things, for the very discussion might tempt us to boast in our own righteousness. By contrast, Calvin did think the drive toward becoming more righteous in this life was important. But he believed the imprint of the original sin inevitably stayed with us our entire lives, with the result that we would never be able to stop sinning. The sinful nature inside us would be a part of us till we were glorified at the point of our deaths.
Wesley, on the other hand, was more optimistic. He believed that God wanted to overcome our sinful natures entirely, to “sanctify” us entirely and make us completely holy in this life. In the century that followed Wesley, various thinkers responded to these ideas. The Wesleyan tradition has historically affirmed that God wants to eradicate our sinful nature and destroy it. Others, like the Keswick tradition, have taught that our “carnal nature” will always be around, tempting us to sin, although they believe God can and wants to empower us to win over such temptation, even though it will always be a struggle on some level.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have the benefit of recent studies that help us look at Paul’s writings with fresh eyes. As a result, several aspects of the historical debate we have just mentioned seem a bit out of focus. For one, the phrase “sinful nature” is misleading at best, even though the New International Version and other translations use it consistently. But Paul nowhere uses the word nature in this way. The actual word he uses is flesh.
To begin to understand what Paul means by “flesh,” we only need take the word in its normal sense: skin. Paul understood our bodies to be enslaved to the power of Sin, along with the entire creation (cf. Rom. 8:19-21). This understanding is similar to what Augustine and later Christian thinkers have thought, but also significantly different.
In Paul’s thinking, the entire creation, including the skin of my body, has come under the power of Sin as a result of Adam’s sin. It is better to think of this power as a power over me rather than a power inside of me. To be sure, we have to take such images as metaphors. Paul was not thinking of the frontal lobes of our brains, but God was giving Paul’s audiences true pictures of the human condition in terms they could understand. We get into strange waters indeed when we try to mingle Paul’s ancient psychology with modern categories!
So Paul says things like, “I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin” (Rom. 7:14, NASB). A nice way to define flesh in this sense is my skin under the power of Sin. However, Paul does not see this state as the norm for the believer. Many readers of Romans 7 strangely stop without going on into Romans 8, where Paul indicates that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:8). In other words, Christians not only can get “out of” their sinful flesh—they cannot please God if they do not!
The confusion in debates over our “sinful natures” follows both from subtle misreadings of Paul we have inherited from Augustine and from taking various metaphors too literally. Basically, Paul teaches that the default state of humanity is one of moral disempowerment and alienation from God. Christ has made it possible, not only for us to be reconciled to God, but also for the Holy Spirit to empower us in relation to sin.
The powers of Sin in this world will be around until Christ returns. But we as Spirit-filled believers are not consigned to defeat in the face of temptation. “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to us all. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13, TNIV). This truth, consistently proclaimed by Paul, has largely been lost to contemporary Christianity to such an extent that it is scarcely believed even by those of us in the Wesleyan tradition.
But it is a truth we more than any other tradition are responsible to bring to this generation of believers. God has made it possible, through the power of the Holy Spirit, for us to live Christ-like lives in this world. What was impossible in our own power and in our own flesh, “God did: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and ... condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3-4, NASB).
3. Genres in the Pentateuch (Critical Issues Series)
Yesterday I started with 2. The Old Testament Canon. Today I move on to 3. Genres in the Pentateuch.
________
A genre is a type of literature. There are both macro-genres, like biography or history. But there are also micro-genres or sub-genres, like poetry and narrative.
The Pentateuch has several genres of the more basic sort: narrative, legal material, poetry, and genealogy. For example, the stories of Abraham are exactly that, stories, narratives. Obviously the various laws of Israel are legal material. Then we have the instances where the descendents from Adam to Noah or from Noah to Abram are listed.
Issues in Narrative
A number of tools have developed in the last thirty years for analyzing biblical stories. The branch of biblical studies that approaches the stories of the Bible in this way is called narrative criticism. As we mentioned in the Introduction, "criticism" in this context does not mean "cutting down" the biblical text or taking a negative stance toward it. This is an unfortunate development in the meaning of this word over time. "Critical" in this context has to do with making sound decisions, taking an analytical stance toward the text from a particular perspective while trying to be as objective as possible.
The tools of narrative criticism apply to any of the biblical stories in either the Old or New Testaments. They can also be applied regardless of historical issues. Both the person who thinks Jonah is a "little novel" and the person who thinks it is a fair presentation of actual historical events can use narrative criticism to analyze it.
Narrative criticism breaks down the basic elements of a story into events, characters, and settings. The settings are in time and space--when things happen and where they happen. The characters are the persons and other figures that participate in the story. The events are then the individual occurrences that make up the plot, the storyline.
Of course, events do not have to be narrated in the order they occurred. A story can begin in medias res, "in the middle of the thing." Nor does the amount of time a narrator spends on a particular part of the story need to be proportional to the actual amount of time it took in the overall plot. "Story time" is usually different from "narrative time," as in a gospel like Mark where a third of the narrative is spent on one week in Jesus' life.
Narrative criticism is basically a simplified and more practical version of an earlier and more technical approach to stories known as structuralism. Nevertheless, the structuralist model does provide some insights at how plots unfold. In general, structuralism suggested that every story has a beginning, where a driving problem behind the story sets it up. A story then has an end where that problem is either successfully addressed or, in tragedy, the goal is not met. The middle of the story is then the part where the problem works its way out and the stories hero's address it in one way or another.
Narrative criticism makes a distinction between the narrator of a story and its author. For example, an author can have a narrator tell a story from a particular point of view that is incorrect. We call such a narrator an "unreliable narrator." An author can write of course from several different points of view. The author can adopt a perspective of omniscience, for example. Or an author can have a narrator tell a story from his or her own limited, first person perspective.
From the standpoint of the biblical texts, the most important point of view to find in a text is its evaluative point of view. This is certainly the perspective of God or Jesus in a particular narrative (although hermeneutically, it is worth exploring whether the Bible as a whole might have a divine evaluative point of view that supercedes the particular point of view God as character might take in a particular biblical text). For example, in Job it is the point of view presented by God at the end of the story that gives the key by which we should evaluate not only the perspectives of Job's comforters but in fact Job's own slightly skewed perspective earlier in the book.
Narrative criticism both provides some helpful tools for inductive Bible study as well as raises some concerns for it. Inductive Bible study is of course an approach to biblical texts that aims to induce meaning from the texts themselves, rather than imposing meaning on them on the basis of extraneous preconceptions. One helpful construct narrative criticism provides is that of the implied author and reader.
Christian history has left us with strong traditions about the authorship of various texts, like that Moses authored the Pentateuch, Matthew the gospel with that name, John the gospel with that name, etc. Instead, narrative criticism operates with the notion of an "implied" author and an "implied" reader. This is the kind of author and reader the text seems to presuppose.
For example, Moses is not the implied author of the Pentateuch. Indeed, he is not even the narrator of the Pentateuch. Rather, he is a character in the story, someone the story is about. Similarly, the implied author of Matthew would seem to be a Greek-speaking Jew. By working with the construct of an implied author and reader, narrative criticism provides a tool that truly helps a person listen to the biblical text itself rather than imposing extraneous categories on it.
At the same time, narrative criticism poses potential hurdles to listening to the original meaning of biblical stories when those texts have edited source material. Narrative criticism, at least in its dominant form, insisted on looking at narratives as a whole, largely bracketing questions of sources and editing. The result is that occasionally the story in itself approach can lead an interpreter down rabbit trails.
In Luke's editing of Mark, for example, he has omitted the handing over of Jesus to the Roman soldiers. The educated Christian reader knows that this transference has taken place because we know the story from the other gospels. But in Luke as it stands, it seems as if the Jewish leaders themselves are the ones who go on to beat Jesus.
Issues in Legal Material
We will look at poetry when we get to the Poetic Books. For now we only want to mention a few aspects of the legal material in the Pentateuch. We might divide up this material into two general types: apodictic law and casuistic law. Apodictic law involves blanket commands such as we find in the Ten Commandments. Casuistic law is "case law." It comes in the form of "if this happens, then that happens."
Some have argued that the Ten Commandments or Decalogue, the "Ten Words," have a similar form to various Hittite suzereignty treaties. In such treaties, the sovereign promises certain things in return to the allegiance of his people. So in the Ten Commandments, God promises blessing to Israel if they will keep His commandments.
The numbering of the "ten words" differs somewhat from tradition to tradition. In the Jewish reckoning, the first word is the declaration: "I am the the God who brought you out from Egypt." Then what most Protestants consider to be the first and second commandments ("have no other gods" and "do not make graven images") are combined. The Lutheran and Catholic traditions also combine these two as the first commandment, but then split the tenth commandment ("do not covet") into two (neighbor's wife, neighbor's ox...).
It is perhaps worth noting here that the perspective of the commandments here is not strictly monotheistic but henotheistic or monolatrous. In other words, the existence of other divine beings is not denied. It is simply denied that they are legitimate to worship or serve. Israel must only worship Yahweh (monolatry) and there is only one legitimate god among the many (henotheism).
The bulk of the legal material in Exodus and Deuteronomy is case law. These two books provide interesting variations both in what the law is, in the consequences, and in the rationale for the law. In keeping with inductive Bible study method, each book should be interpreted in its own right, with a view to the whole book. A theological method that synthesizes or harmonizes the two is a different method, even if legitimate in its own right. Such a theological method, however, does not result in what these texts actually meant originally, and it imposes a new, extraneous meaning to them from the outside in rather than listening to them from the inside out.
The legal material of the Pentateuch was fully in dialog with its Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) context. The Code of Hammurabi, for example, pre-dates the time of Moses by over five centuries and already included a form of the lex talonis, the "law of retribution," an "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." Laws such as not to boil the kid in the mother goat's milk likely were in dialog with the practices of surrounding peoples, as were quite possibly practices such as the prohibition of eating pork. Meanwhile, they held other practices in common with their neighbors. Thus circumcision was not unique to the Jews but was also practiced by the Egyptians.
One question raised by ANE legal texts is the extent to which they were symbolic. Some have argued that these laws were not largely practiced by the peoples whose leaders created them. Rather, they would have more symbolic value. Following this line of thinking, we would wonder how common it was to stone adulterers in ancient Israel. Nor would we be surprised if we found that the legal traditions of the Pentateuch went largely unnoticed by Israel until the time of Josiah. These things are of course a matter for significant debate.
From the very beginning, Christians have faced the interesting question of how to apply the Old Testament laws to a new understanding of how God is moving in history. Of course Jews themselves have had to relate practices directly relating to the Ancient Near East to quite different contexts. Even in the time of Jesus they were facing such issues. Paul addressed the laws by saying the believer was not "under" them, but at the same time he represents them in a boiled down, less ethnocentric form.
In the second century AD, Christians began to develop lenses for filtering the Old Testament laws. These filters "work" for us, even though they are not the categories of the texts themselves. They are theological appropriations of the texts. For example, Christians tend to make a distinction between the "moral" law and the "ceremonial" law. The Pentateuch itself knows nothing of this distinction, but for us it serves to distinguish between Old Testament laws we continue to follow, such as the sexual prohibitions of Leviticus 18, and ones we discard, like the prohibitions on eating pork.
In addition, we believe the "cultic" or sacrificial laws to be fulfilled in Christ's death. Christian traditions tend to sit differently to the "civil" law of Israel. Some traditions have drawn strong support for civil legislation from Old Testament practices like capital punishment. And in general, some traditions are more oriented toward making the law of the land conform to Christian understandings, just as the law of the Pentateuch presents itself as somewhat of a "theocratic" law where the law of God is the law of the land.
________
A genre is a type of literature. There are both macro-genres, like biography or history. But there are also micro-genres or sub-genres, like poetry and narrative.
The Pentateuch has several genres of the more basic sort: narrative, legal material, poetry, and genealogy. For example, the stories of Abraham are exactly that, stories, narratives. Obviously the various laws of Israel are legal material. Then we have the instances where the descendents from Adam to Noah or from Noah to Abram are listed.
Issues in Narrative
A number of tools have developed in the last thirty years for analyzing biblical stories. The branch of biblical studies that approaches the stories of the Bible in this way is called narrative criticism. As we mentioned in the Introduction, "criticism" in this context does not mean "cutting down" the biblical text or taking a negative stance toward it. This is an unfortunate development in the meaning of this word over time. "Critical" in this context has to do with making sound decisions, taking an analytical stance toward the text from a particular perspective while trying to be as objective as possible.
The tools of narrative criticism apply to any of the biblical stories in either the Old or New Testaments. They can also be applied regardless of historical issues. Both the person who thinks Jonah is a "little novel" and the person who thinks it is a fair presentation of actual historical events can use narrative criticism to analyze it.
Narrative criticism breaks down the basic elements of a story into events, characters, and settings. The settings are in time and space--when things happen and where they happen. The characters are the persons and other figures that participate in the story. The events are then the individual occurrences that make up the plot, the storyline.
Of course, events do not have to be narrated in the order they occurred. A story can begin in medias res, "in the middle of the thing." Nor does the amount of time a narrator spends on a particular part of the story need to be proportional to the actual amount of time it took in the overall plot. "Story time" is usually different from "narrative time," as in a gospel like Mark where a third of the narrative is spent on one week in Jesus' life.
Narrative criticism is basically a simplified and more practical version of an earlier and more technical approach to stories known as structuralism. Nevertheless, the structuralist model does provide some insights at how plots unfold. In general, structuralism suggested that every story has a beginning, where a driving problem behind the story sets it up. A story then has an end where that problem is either successfully addressed or, in tragedy, the goal is not met. The middle of the story is then the part where the problem works its way out and the stories hero's address it in one way or another.
Narrative criticism makes a distinction between the narrator of a story and its author. For example, an author can have a narrator tell a story from a particular point of view that is incorrect. We call such a narrator an "unreliable narrator." An author can write of course from several different points of view. The author can adopt a perspective of omniscience, for example. Or an author can have a narrator tell a story from his or her own limited, first person perspective.
From the standpoint of the biblical texts, the most important point of view to find in a text is its evaluative point of view. This is certainly the perspective of God or Jesus in a particular narrative (although hermeneutically, it is worth exploring whether the Bible as a whole might have a divine evaluative point of view that supercedes the particular point of view God as character might take in a particular biblical text). For example, in Job it is the point of view presented by God at the end of the story that gives the key by which we should evaluate not only the perspectives of Job's comforters but in fact Job's own slightly skewed perspective earlier in the book.
Narrative criticism both provides some helpful tools for inductive Bible study as well as raises some concerns for it. Inductive Bible study is of course an approach to biblical texts that aims to induce meaning from the texts themselves, rather than imposing meaning on them on the basis of extraneous preconceptions. One helpful construct narrative criticism provides is that of the implied author and reader.
Christian history has left us with strong traditions about the authorship of various texts, like that Moses authored the Pentateuch, Matthew the gospel with that name, John the gospel with that name, etc. Instead, narrative criticism operates with the notion of an "implied" author and an "implied" reader. This is the kind of author and reader the text seems to presuppose.
For example, Moses is not the implied author of the Pentateuch. Indeed, he is not even the narrator of the Pentateuch. Rather, he is a character in the story, someone the story is about. Similarly, the implied author of Matthew would seem to be a Greek-speaking Jew. By working with the construct of an implied author and reader, narrative criticism provides a tool that truly helps a person listen to the biblical text itself rather than imposing extraneous categories on it.
At the same time, narrative criticism poses potential hurdles to listening to the original meaning of biblical stories when those texts have edited source material. Narrative criticism, at least in its dominant form, insisted on looking at narratives as a whole, largely bracketing questions of sources and editing. The result is that occasionally the story in itself approach can lead an interpreter down rabbit trails.
In Luke's editing of Mark, for example, he has omitted the handing over of Jesus to the Roman soldiers. The educated Christian reader knows that this transference has taken place because we know the story from the other gospels. But in Luke as it stands, it seems as if the Jewish leaders themselves are the ones who go on to beat Jesus.
Issues in Legal Material
We will look at poetry when we get to the Poetic Books. For now we only want to mention a few aspects of the legal material in the Pentateuch. We might divide up this material into two general types: apodictic law and casuistic law. Apodictic law involves blanket commands such as we find in the Ten Commandments. Casuistic law is "case law." It comes in the form of "if this happens, then that happens."
Some have argued that the Ten Commandments or Decalogue, the "Ten Words," have a similar form to various Hittite suzereignty treaties. In such treaties, the sovereign promises certain things in return to the allegiance of his people. So in the Ten Commandments, God promises blessing to Israel if they will keep His commandments.
The numbering of the "ten words" differs somewhat from tradition to tradition. In the Jewish reckoning, the first word is the declaration: "I am the the God who brought you out from Egypt." Then what most Protestants consider to be the first and second commandments ("have no other gods" and "do not make graven images") are combined. The Lutheran and Catholic traditions also combine these two as the first commandment, but then split the tenth commandment ("do not covet") into two (neighbor's wife, neighbor's ox...).
It is perhaps worth noting here that the perspective of the commandments here is not strictly monotheistic but henotheistic or monolatrous. In other words, the existence of other divine beings is not denied. It is simply denied that they are legitimate to worship or serve. Israel must only worship Yahweh (monolatry) and there is only one legitimate god among the many (henotheism).
The bulk of the legal material in Exodus and Deuteronomy is case law. These two books provide interesting variations both in what the law is, in the consequences, and in the rationale for the law. In keeping with inductive Bible study method, each book should be interpreted in its own right, with a view to the whole book. A theological method that synthesizes or harmonizes the two is a different method, even if legitimate in its own right. Such a theological method, however, does not result in what these texts actually meant originally, and it imposes a new, extraneous meaning to them from the outside in rather than listening to them from the inside out.
The legal material of the Pentateuch was fully in dialog with its Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) context. The Code of Hammurabi, for example, pre-dates the time of Moses by over five centuries and already included a form of the lex talonis, the "law of retribution," an "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." Laws such as not to boil the kid in the mother goat's milk likely were in dialog with the practices of surrounding peoples, as were quite possibly practices such as the prohibition of eating pork. Meanwhile, they held other practices in common with their neighbors. Thus circumcision was not unique to the Jews but was also practiced by the Egyptians.
One question raised by ANE legal texts is the extent to which they were symbolic. Some have argued that these laws were not largely practiced by the peoples whose leaders created them. Rather, they would have more symbolic value. Following this line of thinking, we would wonder how common it was to stone adulterers in ancient Israel. Nor would we be surprised if we found that the legal traditions of the Pentateuch went largely unnoticed by Israel until the time of Josiah. These things are of course a matter for significant debate.
From the very beginning, Christians have faced the interesting question of how to apply the Old Testament laws to a new understanding of how God is moving in history. Of course Jews themselves have had to relate practices directly relating to the Ancient Near East to quite different contexts. Even in the time of Jesus they were facing such issues. Paul addressed the laws by saying the believer was not "under" them, but at the same time he represents them in a boiled down, less ethnocentric form.
In the second century AD, Christians began to develop lenses for filtering the Old Testament laws. These filters "work" for us, even though they are not the categories of the texts themselves. They are theological appropriations of the texts. For example, Christians tend to make a distinction between the "moral" law and the "ceremonial" law. The Pentateuch itself knows nothing of this distinction, but for us it serves to distinguish between Old Testament laws we continue to follow, such as the sexual prohibitions of Leviticus 18, and ones we discard, like the prohibitions on eating pork.
In addition, we believe the "cultic" or sacrificial laws to be fulfilled in Christ's death. Christian traditions tend to sit differently to the "civil" law of Israel. Some traditions have drawn strong support for civil legislation from Old Testament practices like capital punishment. And in general, some traditions are more oriented toward making the law of the land conform to Christian understandings, just as the law of the Pentateuch presents itself as somewhat of a "theocratic" law where the law of God is the law of the land.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
2. The Old Testament Canon (Critical Issues Series)
I've written more than one booklet and paper here. It's just more motivating for me to write, at least thinking I might have people listening. I thought of a small project yesterday in relation to the Bible part of the seminary curriculum.
I personally think a seminary trained pastor should at least have heard of the standard critical issues of the Bible. They don't need to know too much about those issues as they are really tangential to what ministry is overwhelmingly about. Indeed, I would argue these issues are tangential to what the Bible is primarily about for Christians.
And I don't say that because I am in denial, as if anyone with a brain or with faith knows that these issues have no substance but are simply the faithless schemes of godless liberals. I say that because the Bible as God's word is the Bible as Christian canon, and on this level it matters precious little whether there were sources that the Pentateuch edited into its current form. In that sense I am irritated to think of how much time both liberals and evangelicals have spent focusing on such issues in the twentieth century.
But there's no reason for IWU's seminary students to be ignorant either, as if we're afraid to bring such things up. We shouldn't be afraid.
So I'm proposing a piece of the puzzle in a "brief guide." Don't know if it will go anywhere officially. But I can slap it on my web page if not.
Chapter 1 would be introduction and would give my sense of what "critical" issues are and how a person of faith might engage them faithfully.
____________
Chapter 2: The Old Testament Canon
In our modern Bibles, the Old Testament is arranged in a series of roughly four sections: the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), the so called "Historical Books" (Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther), what we might call the "Poetic Books" (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon), and the Prophets. The Prophets are then often subdivided into the "Major" Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel) and the "Minor" Prophets (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Zechariah, Haggai, Malachi).
However, this is not the way these books were grouped at the time of Christ. Indeed, if we are to get our minds into the way Jesus talked about these books, we first have to recognize that no book existed at the time of Christ that was big enough to accommodate so many different writings. And they were all different writings. You may have noticed that even the Psalms are divided into five books (1-41, 44-72, 73-89, 90-106, 107-50). This material is simply too long to fit on a single ancient scroll.
Nevertheless, the Jews did divide these writings into groups. The contents of two of these groupings seem fairly well established by the time of Christ, namely, the Law and the Prophets. When Matthew 5:17 says that Jesus did not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, it is speaking of the two central collections of writings in the Jewish Bible. The "Law" refers to the Pentateuch or "five scrolls": Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. This grouping is of course the same as we use today.
However, from that point on, Jesus' grouping of the Jewish Scriptures (which Christians conceptualize as the "Old" Testament) differed from ours. The Jews divide the Prophets section of their Bible into two parts, the "Former" Prophets and the "Latter" Prophets. The Former Prophets contain much of what we call the Historical Books: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Notice that Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther are not in this section of the Hebrew Bible.
To call these writings "prophets" perhaps reflects the fact that they were not understood as mere history. Indeed, from a historical standpoint, we would want to hear a good deal more than the 7 and 9 verses alloted to Omri and Jereboam II. These two northern kings ruled for decades and had incredibly successful reigns from a political standpoint. But they receive short shrift in Kings.
The Hebrew language is generally not written with vowels. Those Hebrew Bibles that have them follow the medieval practice of writing points underneath to signify them. What this means is that a Hebrew text tends to be significantly shorter than the equivalent text in another language. What were thus originally only one book, Samuel or Kings, thus became 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, when translated into Greek. Actually, in the Greek Old Testament, often called the Septuagint, these books are 1, 2, 3, and 4 Kings.
The Latter Prophets refers to the books we think of as the Prophets today. It did not include Lamentations or Daniel, however. On the other hand, The Twelve was the way in which the so called "Minor" Prophets were referenced. So when Paul says that God's righteousness has now been revealed apart from Law, although that righteousness was witnessed to by the Law and the Prophets, he means to say that the Jewish Scriptures had witnessed to the events that had recently taken place with Jesus (Rom. 3:21).
The third section of the Jewish canon is called The Writings, and it is basically a grab bag of smaller and perhaps in most cases, later books. Luke 24:44 may allude to this shape of the Jewish canon at the time of Christ when it says that Jesus had taught his disciples about the things to be fulfilled in him from "the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms." The Psalms here refers to the first and most prominent book of the Writings. As early as around 130BC, the prologue to the Greek translation of Sirach mentions the Law, the Prophets, and the "rest of the books," indicating that the three-fold division of Scripture was already in play then.
It is common to hear people say that the limits of the Jewish canon were set in the year AD90 at a place called Jamnia (Yavneh). The Romans had allowed the Jews to set up their religious headquarters at Jamnia after they had destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in AD70. The leadership of the Jews at this time would arguably have been overwhelmingly Pharisaic in nature. The result is perhaps that the rabbinic Judaism that gained power and flowed out of this period was far more a reflection of Pharisaism than a fair representation of the diversity of Judaism at the time of Jesus. We must be very careful, therefore, about presuming that the Jewish traditions we read about in later literature were actually the beliefs and practices of Jews across the board at the time of Jesus.
However, there really is no hard evidence of some "council" at Jamnia setting the limits of the Jewish canon. Indeed, the evidence would seem rather to suggest that the edges of Jewish Scripture remained somewhat fluid in the late first century AD. Jude 14-17, at this time, seems to quote the Book of Watchers as Scripture (1 Enoch 1:9). A good argument can be made that the Essenes considered 1 Enoch to be Scripture and, on the basis of Jude, that at least some early Christian Jews did too.
We have no reason to think the predominantly Gentile Christians of the earliest centuries would have used books like Wisdom, Sirach, and such as Scripture if they had not inherited this practice from at least some of the earliest Jewish Christians, probably Greek-speaking ones. The New Testament itself seems to draw in at least a few places on these sorts of books that did not make it into the canon of rabbinic Judaism.
And so it is that different Christian groups today have differing beliefs on the exact contents of the "Old Testament." Roman Catholics have seven additional books, the so called Apocrypha (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees), including expansions of Esther and additions to Daniel. The Orthodox also have 1 Esdras and other groups like the Ethiopian church have more still. Martin Luther generally set the majority of Protestantism (with the notable exception of Anglicans) on a course that limits the Old Testament to the rabbinic, Jewish canon.
Perhaps it is easiest to map this Catholic-Protestant polarization best by looking back to a man named Jerome in the early 400s. He was the one who standarized the Latin version of the Bible in the early 400s, translating all the books from the original languages with an eye to existing Latin translations. Jerome considered the books Protestants call the Apocrypha to be a kind of second level canon or, as we now say, to be deuterocanonical rather than "protocanonical." At the time of the Reformation, Luther thus downgraded these books from having any Scriptural status at all. In response, the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent (1545) then upgraded them to have protocanonical status. In that sense, the Anglican and Orthodox churches probably come closest to using these books in the way they were used throughout most of Christian history.
I personally think a seminary trained pastor should at least have heard of the standard critical issues of the Bible. They don't need to know too much about those issues as they are really tangential to what ministry is overwhelmingly about. Indeed, I would argue these issues are tangential to what the Bible is primarily about for Christians.
And I don't say that because I am in denial, as if anyone with a brain or with faith knows that these issues have no substance but are simply the faithless schemes of godless liberals. I say that because the Bible as God's word is the Bible as Christian canon, and on this level it matters precious little whether there were sources that the Pentateuch edited into its current form. In that sense I am irritated to think of how much time both liberals and evangelicals have spent focusing on such issues in the twentieth century.
But there's no reason for IWU's seminary students to be ignorant either, as if we're afraid to bring such things up. We shouldn't be afraid.
So I'm proposing a piece of the puzzle in a "brief guide." Don't know if it will go anywhere officially. But I can slap it on my web page if not.
Chapter 1 would be introduction and would give my sense of what "critical" issues are and how a person of faith might engage them faithfully.
____________
Chapter 2: The Old Testament Canon
In our modern Bibles, the Old Testament is arranged in a series of roughly four sections: the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), the so called "Historical Books" (Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther), what we might call the "Poetic Books" (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon), and the Prophets. The Prophets are then often subdivided into the "Major" Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel) and the "Minor" Prophets (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Zechariah, Haggai, Malachi).
However, this is not the way these books were grouped at the time of Christ. Indeed, if we are to get our minds into the way Jesus talked about these books, we first have to recognize that no book existed at the time of Christ that was big enough to accommodate so many different writings. And they were all different writings. You may have noticed that even the Psalms are divided into five books (1-41, 44-72, 73-89, 90-106, 107-50). This material is simply too long to fit on a single ancient scroll.
Nevertheless, the Jews did divide these writings into groups. The contents of two of these groupings seem fairly well established by the time of Christ, namely, the Law and the Prophets. When Matthew 5:17 says that Jesus did not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, it is speaking of the two central collections of writings in the Jewish Bible. The "Law" refers to the Pentateuch or "five scrolls": Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. This grouping is of course the same as we use today.
However, from that point on, Jesus' grouping of the Jewish Scriptures (which Christians conceptualize as the "Old" Testament) differed from ours. The Jews divide the Prophets section of their Bible into two parts, the "Former" Prophets and the "Latter" Prophets. The Former Prophets contain much of what we call the Historical Books: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Notice that Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther are not in this section of the Hebrew Bible.
To call these writings "prophets" perhaps reflects the fact that they were not understood as mere history. Indeed, from a historical standpoint, we would want to hear a good deal more than the 7 and 9 verses alloted to Omri and Jereboam II. These two northern kings ruled for decades and had incredibly successful reigns from a political standpoint. But they receive short shrift in Kings.
The Hebrew language is generally not written with vowels. Those Hebrew Bibles that have them follow the medieval practice of writing points underneath to signify them. What this means is that a Hebrew text tends to be significantly shorter than the equivalent text in another language. What were thus originally only one book, Samuel or Kings, thus became 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, when translated into Greek. Actually, in the Greek Old Testament, often called the Septuagint, these books are 1, 2, 3, and 4 Kings.
The Latter Prophets refers to the books we think of as the Prophets today. It did not include Lamentations or Daniel, however. On the other hand, The Twelve was the way in which the so called "Minor" Prophets were referenced. So when Paul says that God's righteousness has now been revealed apart from Law, although that righteousness was witnessed to by the Law and the Prophets, he means to say that the Jewish Scriptures had witnessed to the events that had recently taken place with Jesus (Rom. 3:21).
The third section of the Jewish canon is called The Writings, and it is basically a grab bag of smaller and perhaps in most cases, later books. Luke 24:44 may allude to this shape of the Jewish canon at the time of Christ when it says that Jesus had taught his disciples about the things to be fulfilled in him from "the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms." The Psalms here refers to the first and most prominent book of the Writings. As early as around 130BC, the prologue to the Greek translation of Sirach mentions the Law, the Prophets, and the "rest of the books," indicating that the three-fold division of Scripture was already in play then.
It is common to hear people say that the limits of the Jewish canon were set in the year AD90 at a place called Jamnia (Yavneh). The Romans had allowed the Jews to set up their religious headquarters at Jamnia after they had destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in AD70. The leadership of the Jews at this time would arguably have been overwhelmingly Pharisaic in nature. The result is perhaps that the rabbinic Judaism that gained power and flowed out of this period was far more a reflection of Pharisaism than a fair representation of the diversity of Judaism at the time of Jesus. We must be very careful, therefore, about presuming that the Jewish traditions we read about in later literature were actually the beliefs and practices of Jews across the board at the time of Jesus.
However, there really is no hard evidence of some "council" at Jamnia setting the limits of the Jewish canon. Indeed, the evidence would seem rather to suggest that the edges of Jewish Scripture remained somewhat fluid in the late first century AD. Jude 14-17, at this time, seems to quote the Book of Watchers as Scripture (1 Enoch 1:9). A good argument can be made that the Essenes considered 1 Enoch to be Scripture and, on the basis of Jude, that at least some early Christian Jews did too.
We have no reason to think the predominantly Gentile Christians of the earliest centuries would have used books like Wisdom, Sirach, and such as Scripture if they had not inherited this practice from at least some of the earliest Jewish Christians, probably Greek-speaking ones. The New Testament itself seems to draw in at least a few places on these sorts of books that did not make it into the canon of rabbinic Judaism.
And so it is that different Christian groups today have differing beliefs on the exact contents of the "Old Testament." Roman Catholics have seven additional books, the so called Apocrypha (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees), including expansions of Esther and additions to Daniel. The Orthodox also have 1 Esdras and other groups like the Ethiopian church have more still. Martin Luther generally set the majority of Protestantism (with the notable exception of Anglicans) on a course that limits the Old Testament to the rabbinic, Jewish canon.
Perhaps it is easiest to map this Catholic-Protestant polarization best by looking back to a man named Jerome in the early 400s. He was the one who standarized the Latin version of the Bible in the early 400s, translating all the books from the original languages with an eye to existing Latin translations. Jerome considered the books Protestants call the Apocrypha to be a kind of second level canon or, as we now say, to be deuterocanonical rather than "protocanonical." At the time of the Reformation, Luther thus downgraded these books from having any Scriptural status at all. In response, the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent (1545) then upgraded them to have protocanonical status. In that sense, the Anglican and Orthodox churches probably come closest to using these books in the way they were used throughout most of Christian history.
Seminary Vision (6-30-09):
The next of the IWU Seminary videos is "personalized."
So far we've featured the Missional, Communal, Integrated, and Spiritually Enriching vidcasts. Today we feature the Personalized one.
Three points immediately come to mind in how the program at IWU is personalized.
1. It requires you to do regular action research on your own congregation, youth group, small group, etc.
The research is thus not primarily hypothetical or case study-ish. It is sociological research you do with your congregation every week. The strategic plans you formulate are plans for a real church. And of course if you mess up, real people get upset with you. That's a personalized education.
2. You do not have to move from where you are.
You can do most of the program online, only coming to campus for two weeks out of the year to satisfy residency. That means you remain in your life space rather than uprooting to a vacuum.
3. You have 15 hours of electives that you can carve into your own specialty.
So far we've featured the Missional, Communal, Integrated, and Spiritually Enriching vidcasts. Today we feature the Personalized one.
Three points immediately come to mind in how the program at IWU is personalized.
1. It requires you to do regular action research on your own congregation, youth group, small group, etc.
The research is thus not primarily hypothetical or case study-ish. It is sociological research you do with your congregation every week. The strategic plans you formulate are plans for a real church. And of course if you mess up, real people get upset with you. That's a personalized education.
2. You do not have to move from where you are.
You can do most of the program online, only coming to campus for two weeks out of the year to satisfy residency. That means you remain in your life space rather than uprooting to a vacuum.
3. You have 15 hours of electives that you can carve into your own specialty.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Seminary Vision (6-29-09): Spiritually Enriching
The next of the IWU Seminary videos is "spiritually enriching."
So far we've featured the Missional, Communal, and Integrated vidcasts. Today's video is the Spiritually Enriching one.
There are two principle ways in which we are consciously attending to the spiritual dimension of the MDIV degree.
1. A one hour spiritual formation course that accompanies each of the six core courses of the curriculum. These are written to lead a person through the actual process of change rather than just sending you off to read the Bible and pray:
a. Change and Transformation--asks how change and transformation take place
b. Self-Awareness and Appraisal--leads you to assess where you are at in your pilgrimage
c. Goal Setting and Accountability--has to do with identifying where you need to move to
d. Mentoring and Spiritual Direction--deals with this important component in getting there
e. Personal and Corporate Disciplines--here we get to the component that so many spiritual formation programs focus exclusively on. Even here, they usually focus only on the personal disciplines. In good Wesleyan fashion, we will bring in the means of grace and corporate disciplines too.
f. Recovery and Deliverance--focuses on the arrival and embodies a tradition that is optimistic about God's power to transform for real.
What a robust approach! Without even realizing it, so much spiritual formation is anemic!
2. The second element of spiritual formation is a philosophy that will work its way through the whole curriculum. There are those who are anti-seminary because they perceive it to be harmful or distracting to faith. Some try to stop their ministers from going for fear it will make them liberal and corrupt them. Others think it gets them out of focus and gets their priorities out of whack.
Is this true or an urban legend? I suspect there is some truth to it. But the problem for me is not that seminaries teach false things. The accusation that they subtly change priorities may have more to it and the rise of home grown seminaries on site at megachurches (e.g., Mars Hill) helps because teaching is done in the ministry setting, as ours will be by requiring them to be in ministry. The potential danger of the onsite church seminary is becoming ingrown, of course... and no church has the infrastructure of a university like IWU that is some 14,000 strong (online, records, support services, etc.).
My sense is that the Bible and philosophy are the main culprits in faith challenge at seminary, and having some expertise in both areas, I can't say that the problem is that these challenges are false. The problem is that our paradigms are not equipped to incorporate the challenges into our faith.
So the approach to these topics we are taking in our MDIV is not to pretend that the issues aren't real (the fundamentalist dodge) but to appropriate some of the great possibilities of theological intepretation. We will not focus on the question issues but when we encounter them, we will be able to keep them in perspective. It is a great privilege to be born at a period when we are finally able to move beyond the dichotomies of the past!
So far we've featured the Missional, Communal, and Integrated vidcasts. Today's video is the Spiritually Enriching one.
There are two principle ways in which we are consciously attending to the spiritual dimension of the MDIV degree.
1. A one hour spiritual formation course that accompanies each of the six core courses of the curriculum. These are written to lead a person through the actual process of change rather than just sending you off to read the Bible and pray:
a. Change and Transformation--asks how change and transformation take place
b. Self-Awareness and Appraisal--leads you to assess where you are at in your pilgrimage
c. Goal Setting and Accountability--has to do with identifying where you need to move to
d. Mentoring and Spiritual Direction--deals with this important component in getting there
e. Personal and Corporate Disciplines--here we get to the component that so many spiritual formation programs focus exclusively on. Even here, they usually focus only on the personal disciplines. In good Wesleyan fashion, we will bring in the means of grace and corporate disciplines too.
f. Recovery and Deliverance--focuses on the arrival and embodies a tradition that is optimistic about God's power to transform for real.
What a robust approach! Without even realizing it, so much spiritual formation is anemic!
2. The second element of spiritual formation is a philosophy that will work its way through the whole curriculum. There are those who are anti-seminary because they perceive it to be harmful or distracting to faith. Some try to stop their ministers from going for fear it will make them liberal and corrupt them. Others think it gets them out of focus and gets their priorities out of whack.
Is this true or an urban legend? I suspect there is some truth to it. But the problem for me is not that seminaries teach false things. The accusation that they subtly change priorities may have more to it and the rise of home grown seminaries on site at megachurches (e.g., Mars Hill) helps because teaching is done in the ministry setting, as ours will be by requiring them to be in ministry. The potential danger of the onsite church seminary is becoming ingrown, of course... and no church has the infrastructure of a university like IWU that is some 14,000 strong (online, records, support services, etc.).
My sense is that the Bible and philosophy are the main culprits in faith challenge at seminary, and having some expertise in both areas, I can't say that the problem is that these challenges are false. The problem is that our paradigms are not equipped to incorporate the challenges into our faith.
So the approach to these topics we are taking in our MDIV is not to pretend that the issues aren't real (the fundamentalist dodge) but to appropriate some of the great possibilities of theological intepretation. We will not focus on the question issues but when we encounter them, we will be able to keep them in perspective. It is a great privilege to be born at a period when we are finally able to move beyond the dichotomies of the past!
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Seminary Vision (6-28-09): Integrated
I've been featuring the IWU Seminary videos. So far I've looked at the Missional and Communal emphases of our new MDIV.
Today I want to feature the Integrated vidcast.
Don't get me wrong, a "disciplinary" approach has its place. Indeed, there is a possible world in which we have OxBridge style MAs in Bible, theology, and Church history up and running in a year's time. In them, you would be able to plum the depths of the most obscure and minute topic... if you can find a professor willing to advise you :-)
But what pastors need most in ministry is not a depth of knowledge in particular subjects. What they need most is the skill to integrate knowledge and skills in specific, concrete ministry situations, guided by godly and effective dispositions. It's hard to teach this skill, because it needs to be used in such diverse situations that you can really only model and practice it in general in preparation. The variety of specific outworkings of integration in ministry come at you like a pitcher with a wicked curve ball you've never faced before.
So we are convinced that the "siloed" approach to seminary education--each discipline separate and in its own place--has the significant weakness of forcing you to do all the integration of things together on your own. And little attention is paid to developing this essential skill.
The Bible means nothing to anyone today--or it means the wrong thing to people today--if you have not developed the skill of appropriating it to practice with integrity. Similarly, so much of the pop banter you read about flows nicely from a shallow understanding of Church history. And what good is theology other than a hobby if you don't know how to apply it?
Of course a similar problem exists with some practical courses in seminary. It is one thing to study anatomy and physiology in a textbook. It is a significantly different thing to find these things in a corpse. And it is quite a different thing yet to know what to do with a living person on an operating table. Most seminaries these days at least have you do practicums--that's like dissecting the corpse. We'll study while you're in a ministry capacity at your church.
So there are two key features of our program that ensure that integration takes place:
1. It is an "in ministry" degree. You have to be working in a local church at least 20 hours a week to be in our program. You will do action research with members of your youth group or congregation every week. "When would you say you were 'converted'?" "What was it about this church that convinced you to try it out?" "If these are the stages of a church's life cycle, where would you say we are?" "If these are the four types of forces that cause change in a local church, which one or ones would you say are most in play right now?"
2. Bible, theology, and Church history are incorporated into every week of the course, and there is an iconic Integration Paper in which you run a specific church problem through biblical exegesis, theology and Church history.
For example, in the same week you are looking at institutionalization as a phase of a church's life cycle, you will read a piece by Bud Bence in defense of Constantine. In the same week as you are talking about strategizing for mobilization, you will read excerpts from John Calvin and John Wesley and then compare and contrast classical predestination with Wesley's prevenient grace--how if at all does it affect who can be reached?
In this way, the various disciplines of theory across the board are presented in the context of practice.
Today I want to feature the Integrated vidcast.
Don't get me wrong, a "disciplinary" approach has its place. Indeed, there is a possible world in which we have OxBridge style MAs in Bible, theology, and Church history up and running in a year's time. In them, you would be able to plum the depths of the most obscure and minute topic... if you can find a professor willing to advise you :-)
But what pastors need most in ministry is not a depth of knowledge in particular subjects. What they need most is the skill to integrate knowledge and skills in specific, concrete ministry situations, guided by godly and effective dispositions. It's hard to teach this skill, because it needs to be used in such diverse situations that you can really only model and practice it in general in preparation. The variety of specific outworkings of integration in ministry come at you like a pitcher with a wicked curve ball you've never faced before.
So we are convinced that the "siloed" approach to seminary education--each discipline separate and in its own place--has the significant weakness of forcing you to do all the integration of things together on your own. And little attention is paid to developing this essential skill.
The Bible means nothing to anyone today--or it means the wrong thing to people today--if you have not developed the skill of appropriating it to practice with integrity. Similarly, so much of the pop banter you read about flows nicely from a shallow understanding of Church history. And what good is theology other than a hobby if you don't know how to apply it?
Of course a similar problem exists with some practical courses in seminary. It is one thing to study anatomy and physiology in a textbook. It is a significantly different thing to find these things in a corpse. And it is quite a different thing yet to know what to do with a living person on an operating table. Most seminaries these days at least have you do practicums--that's like dissecting the corpse. We'll study while you're in a ministry capacity at your church.
So there are two key features of our program that ensure that integration takes place:
1. It is an "in ministry" degree. You have to be working in a local church at least 20 hours a week to be in our program. You will do action research with members of your youth group or congregation every week. "When would you say you were 'converted'?" "What was it about this church that convinced you to try it out?" "If these are the stages of a church's life cycle, where would you say we are?" "If these are the four types of forces that cause change in a local church, which one or ones would you say are most in play right now?"
2. Bible, theology, and Church history are incorporated into every week of the course, and there is an iconic Integration Paper in which you run a specific church problem through biblical exegesis, theology and Church history.
For example, in the same week you are looking at institutionalization as a phase of a church's life cycle, you will read a piece by Bud Bence in defense of Constantine. In the same week as you are talking about strategizing for mobilization, you will read excerpts from John Calvin and John Wesley and then compare and contrast classical predestination with Wesley's prevenient grace--how if at all does it affect who can be reached?
In this way, the various disciplines of theory across the board are presented in the context of practice.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Seminary Vision (6-27-09): Communal
I've been featuring the IWU Seminary videos. Yesterday I featured the short video on the Missional orientation of our new MDIV.
Today, I want to feature the Communal video. Some people are natural extraverts. They will make connections with the people around them without help. Others of us are quite as happy to stay in our own cacoons.
Building community is an important feature of any Christian group. This is particularly a concern if your learning group is primarily online. We've incorporated a number of features to our seminary to facilitate this element in the equation:
1. It is a cohort model.
... which means that you will take the bulk of your courses with the same group of 10-20 individuals. You will know each other well--and each other's churches--by the time you are finished.
2. Spiritual formation throughout.
Not only are you in a cohort with a small group throughout but you are in a sequence of spiritual formation classes together throughout. More on this later.
3. Yearly convocation
Every year in August, the entirety of the seminary faculty and student body will gather together to worship and fellowship together at the Marion campus. For some, this will eventually be the time of graduation.
4. Blackboard Community
The seminary has pushed for IWU to add the community function to its Blackboard platform and the university has agreed. We will therefore be facilitating interaction between students in different cohorts with each other in between convocations throughout the year.
Today, I want to feature the Communal video. Some people are natural extraverts. They will make connections with the people around them without help. Others of us are quite as happy to stay in our own cacoons.
Building community is an important feature of any Christian group. This is particularly a concern if your learning group is primarily online. We've incorporated a number of features to our seminary to facilitate this element in the equation:
1. It is a cohort model.
... which means that you will take the bulk of your courses with the same group of 10-20 individuals. You will know each other well--and each other's churches--by the time you are finished.
2. Spiritual formation throughout.
Not only are you in a cohort with a small group throughout but you are in a sequence of spiritual formation classes together throughout. More on this later.
3. Yearly convocation
Every year in August, the entirety of the seminary faculty and student body will gather together to worship and fellowship together at the Marion campus. For some, this will eventually be the time of graduation.
4. Blackboard Community
The seminary has pushed for IWU to add the community function to its Blackboard platform and the university has agreed. We will therefore be facilitating interaction between students in different cohorts with each other in between convocations throughout the year.
Table of Contents: Jewish Background Literature
Leaving out the "Apocrypha" and the Dead Sea Scrolls (which are nicely and cheaply packaged for purchase--bracketed below), what Jewish "pseudepigrapha" are significant for New Testament background?
Here's a shot from around 200BC to AD200:
Pre-Maccabean
1. [Tobit]
2. [Sirach]
3. Alexandria: Artapanus
4. Alexandria: Ezekiel the Tragedian
5. Alexandria: Aristeas
6. Alexandria: Aristobulus*
7. 1 Enoch: Book of Watchers
8. 1 Enoch: Astronomical Book
9. 1 Enoch: Apocalypse of Weeks
10. Historical Sources: 1 Maccabees*
11. Historical Sources: 2 Maccabees*
12. Historical Sources: Josephus*
*post-Maccabean
The Maccabean Crisis
1. [1 Maccabees]*
2. [Daniel]*
3. [2 Maccabees]*
4. 1 Enoch: Dream Visions
5. [Judith]
6. [Baruch]
*relevant to crisis, regardless of dating
Early Essene Writings
1. Historical Sources: Josephus*
2. Historical Sources: Philo*
3. Jubilees
4. [4QMMT]
5. [Temple Scroll]
6. [Covenant of Damascus]
Qumran Writings
1. Historical Sources: Pliny*
2. [Community Rule]
3. [Habakkuk and Nahum pesher commentaries]
4. [Hymns]
5. [Messianic Rule]
6. [War Scroll]
7. [Songs of Sabbath Sacrifice]
8. [Florilegium, Testimonia, Melchizedek]
The Roman Era
1. Historical Sources: Josephus*
2. Psalms of Solomon
3. [Wisdom]
4. Philonic Corpus
5. 4 Maccabees
Later Apocalyptic Writings
1. Testaments of Twelve Patriarchs
2. Epistle of Enoch
3. Similitudes of Enoch
4. Apocalypse of Abraham
5. Testament of Job
After Jerusalem's Destruction
1. Historical Sources: Josephus
2. 4 Ezra
3. 2 Baruch
4. 2 Enoch
5. The Mishnah
What's missing or misplaced?
Here's a shot from around 200BC to AD200:
Pre-Maccabean
1. [Tobit]
2. [Sirach]
3. Alexandria: Artapanus
4. Alexandria: Ezekiel the Tragedian
5. Alexandria: Aristeas
6. Alexandria: Aristobulus*
7. 1 Enoch: Book of Watchers
8. 1 Enoch: Astronomical Book
9. 1 Enoch: Apocalypse of Weeks
10. Historical Sources: 1 Maccabees*
11. Historical Sources: 2 Maccabees*
12. Historical Sources: Josephus*
*post-Maccabean
The Maccabean Crisis
1. [1 Maccabees]*
2. [Daniel]*
3. [2 Maccabees]*
4. 1 Enoch: Dream Visions
5. [Judith]
6. [Baruch]
*relevant to crisis, regardless of dating
Early Essene Writings
1. Historical Sources: Josephus*
2. Historical Sources: Philo*
3. Jubilees
4. [4QMMT]
5. [Temple Scroll]
6. [Covenant of Damascus]
Qumran Writings
1. Historical Sources: Pliny*
2. [Community Rule]
3. [Habakkuk and Nahum pesher commentaries]
4. [Hymns]
5. [Messianic Rule]
6. [War Scroll]
7. [Songs of Sabbath Sacrifice]
8. [Florilegium, Testimonia, Melchizedek]
The Roman Era
1. Historical Sources: Josephus*
2. Psalms of Solomon
3. [Wisdom]
4. Philonic Corpus
5. 4 Maccabees
Later Apocalyptic Writings
1. Testaments of Twelve Patriarchs
2. Epistle of Enoch
3. Similitudes of Enoch
4. Apocalypse of Abraham
5. Testament of Job
After Jerusalem's Destruction
1. Historical Sources: Josephus
2. 4 Ezra
3. 2 Baruch
4. 2 Enoch
5. The Mishnah
What's missing or misplaced?
Friday, June 26, 2009
Seminary Vision (6-26-09): Missional
For the next few days, I want to feature one of the IWU Seminary videos, in addition to any other posts I make here.
Today, I want to feature the short video on the Missional orientation of our new MDIV.
The first major 6hr course in our new curriculum is called the Missional Church (there are two shorter 3hr one week intensives prior to this first course: an orientation to the MDIV and to ministry called the Pastor, Church, and World and a second course focusing on the varied layers of Cultural Contexts of Ministry).
The Missional Church course has been designed, not only by Norm Wilson--a career missionary and long time leader among Wesleyan Global partners... not only by an instructional design team including key people like Keith Drury, Russ Gunsalus, Dave Smith, and myself... not only with input from Bible, theology, and church history experts like Steve Lennox, Chris Bounds, and Bud Bence... but it will be taught this Fall by church growth experts Chip Arn (online) and Bob Whitesel (onsite), who have also been heavily involved in the specific form the course has taken online.
Books for the course include such titles as Treasure in Clay Jars, Missional Church, The Missional Leader, and The Master's Plan for Making Disciples. It covers topics like social justice, evangelism, church growth-health-planting-multiplication, and traditional missions. Action research includes assignments assessing where your church is in its life cycle and enabling you to strategize on how to connect with your community and close the "back doors" of your church.
Bible widgets look at a missional hermeneutic, the prophets and social justice, the Great Commandment by way of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the Great Commission of Matthew 28, and the expansion of the gospel in the book of Acts. Theology widgets include readings in people like John Wesley and John Calvin. Church history widgets include a look at Constantine and St. Patrick.
Racing to get the online version fully in place by the time the first online course opens August 21!
Today, I want to feature the short video on the Missional orientation of our new MDIV.
The first major 6hr course in our new curriculum is called the Missional Church (there are two shorter 3hr one week intensives prior to this first course: an orientation to the MDIV and to ministry called the Pastor, Church, and World and a second course focusing on the varied layers of Cultural Contexts of Ministry).
The Missional Church course has been designed, not only by Norm Wilson--a career missionary and long time leader among Wesleyan Global partners... not only by an instructional design team including key people like Keith Drury, Russ Gunsalus, Dave Smith, and myself... not only with input from Bible, theology, and church history experts like Steve Lennox, Chris Bounds, and Bud Bence... but it will be taught this Fall by church growth experts Chip Arn (online) and Bob Whitesel (onsite), who have also been heavily involved in the specific form the course has taken online.
Books for the course include such titles as Treasure in Clay Jars, Missional Church, The Missional Leader, and The Master's Plan for Making Disciples. It covers topics like social justice, evangelism, church growth-health-planting-multiplication, and traditional missions. Action research includes assignments assessing where your church is in its life cycle and enabling you to strategize on how to connect with your community and close the "back doors" of your church.
Bible widgets look at a missional hermeneutic, the prophets and social justice, the Great Commandment by way of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the Great Commission of Matthew 28, and the expansion of the gospel in the book of Acts. Theology widgets include readings in people like John Wesley and John Calvin. Church history widgets include a look at Constantine and St. Patrick.
Racing to get the online version fully in place by the time the first online course opens August 21!
8.3 Philosophy of Science
Whether individuals could describe it or not, the scientific method is deeply ingrained in the consciousness of Western culture. Our teachers in middle school and high school at least tried to teach it to us. But we probably learn it more effectively from watching police and crime shows where they gather evidence and form hypotheses about "who done it." They test these hypotheses against the evidence, gather further evidence, test the hypothesis some more.
[textbox: scientific method, hypothesis, theory]
At some point they move beyond considering someone a "person of interest" and they will declare them a "suspect" in the case. Eventually they may arrest the person and put them on trial. Finally, a jury will, at least in theory, weigh the evidence again to decide whether guilt is the most logical conclusion given the evidence, at least "beyond a reasonable doubt." As we have argued previously, it would seem impossible to prove anything of this sort absolutely--the world of inductive thinking is a world of probabilities, not absolute certainties.
The process is so common sensical that it hardly seems something anyone would question. After all, isn't this the way we operate in our day to day activities? I hear a thumping on the roof. I go and investigate. Is it a burglar? Santa Claus? Too big for a squirrel. Not sure if it was heavy enough for a person. I go upstairs and look out the window. Oh, it's a raccoon.
On the other hand, most of us are scarcely consistent. Sometimes--perhaps more often than we might admit to ourselves--we form conclusions on the basis of almost no evidence at all. We "pre-judge" someone or something on some irrelevant basis. This is the stuff of prejudice. We see a person's color, race, or gender and presume that they must be a certain way. In chapter 2, we called this the informal fallacy of hasty generalization, with other fallacies often involved as well.
[textbox: prejudice]
Nevertheless, even if we are not good inductive thinkers, most Westerners would likely claim in theory that they consider this method of investigation legitimate and valuable. You'll remember from chapter 2 that inductive thinking is when you look at a collection of data and induce a general truth from it. We are so used to this way of thinking in science that it is hard for most of us to imagine a time when the best known thinkers were primarily talking about truth from a deductive standpoint, where you start with certain assumptions and then play them out in particular details.
To be sure, we are seeing a resurgence of this older deductive approach to truth today, especially since postmodernism raises questions about whether we can really induce truth from our observations of the world. We live in a climate where it is acceptable simply to start with large, unproved assumptions and talk about reality from there. Some Christians, such as the radical orthodoxy movement we mentioned in chapter 2, see this situation as a great climate for Christian faith.
Many of postmodernism's criticisms seem to be valid, as we will see later in this section. However, our hunch is that the usefulness of inductive thinking will continue to predominate in the days to come. Its usefulness in expressing accurately what happens in the world, as well as in enabling us to do things in the world is too great for it not to continue. If every group simply starts with their own untouchable assumptions and proceeds from there, then such groups can hardly even talk to each other.
Historians often trace the re-emergence of inductive reasoning and scientific method to Sir Francis Bacon in the 1500s (1561-1626). But others might suggest that Bacon himself was riding a wave that goes further back to the theologian Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s (ca. 1225-74), and then beyond him to Islamic philosophers like Ibn Sina (sometimes called Avicenna, ca.980-1037) and Ibn Rushd (sometimes called Averroes, 1126-98). These individuals did use deductive reasoning to a significant extent. But their reasoning often began with some observation of the world, such as the fact that for something to move, it has to be pushed. In that sense, Bacon more represents the culmination of a trajectory rather than a completely new beginning.
Francis Bacon secured his name as the "father of scientific method" primarily because of a book he wrote called the New Organon. In it, he suggested that when trying to arrive at a conclusion on some matter relating to the world, a person should create tables of data. You would put data relating to something you were studying, like heat, in one column. Then you would put data relating to the opposite, like coldness, in another. Then you would test hypotheses against the columns, to see if your understanding matched the way the data played out. This grounded the study of the world in observation rather than in making deductions from "axioms" you assume as a starting point.
[Organon quote]
A few features of Bacon's approach are significant. First, he assumes that a person can be more or less objective or unbiased as he or she looks at the data. Secondly, he assumes that you can come to a definite and final answer to the question you are posing to the data. Both of these assumptions came under serious question in the twentieth century.
[quote: "knowledge is power"]
One of the main figures to question these two assumptions was Karl Popper (1902-94). Popper rightly pointed out that the very questions with which we come to some set of data colors the answers we will draw from that data. No one comes to a set of data without certain presuppositions or expectations. No one can look at a set of data with a God's eye view. No one is perfectly objective.
Secondly, Popper seriously questioned whether we could ever come to a final answer and verify that a scientific theory was true. A claim like "all snow is white" cannot be finally verified. The very nature of inductive thinking is open-ended. So it was that after Europeans had thought for years that all swans were white, they came across black swans in Australia. So Popper suggested that science was based on the quest not to verify theories, but to falsify them. Good theories were theories that, thus far, had resisted falsification.
In this approach, he rejected another approach that enjoyed a brief moment of popularity in the early twentieth century, logical positivism. [1] Logical positivists held that only things a person could observe and verify had any real claim to being called "true." The fundamental problem with this theory, of course, is that it cannot be observed or verified. It is thus incoherent on a most basic level. Popper's suggested that the best theories are those that have not yet been falsified is at least an improvement on logical positivism, although it still assumes that with scientific theory we are basically dealing with theories that are either "true" or "false."
However, by far the most significant philosopher of science in the twentieth century was Thomas Kuhn (1922-96). In the first edition of Kuhn's, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that no scientific paradigm is ultimately better than another. You will remember that a paradigm is a way of looking at a particular subject, like the diversity of animal species. To Kuhn, what we think of as scientific development is a kind of organized wandering from one paradigm to another, following a predictable process. In the second edition, he tempered his thinking a little, particularly over protests at the thought that creation science might be equally valid in comparison to evolutionary science. [2]
[text box: paradigm, normal science]
Kuhn's basic idea was that science operates most of the time according to a dominant paradigm, the normal science. So in the early 1500s, the dominant astronomical paradigm was that the sun went around the earth. In the 1800s, the paradigm of physics was Newtonian. In the twentieth century, the dominant biological paradigm was evolutionary. These are the lenses through which a particular set of data are viewed and organized.
So you are at the Grand Canyon and you see a set of layers of earth and rock. In the typical creation science paradigm, you might assume that these layers were laid down over a relatively short period of time, perhaps in the aftermath of a world wide flood. [3] Alternatively, such a person might suggest that God created the earth to have "apparent age." In other words, the earth may look like it is billions of years old, but it only appears this way because God made the earth and universe to look old. The dominant geological paradigm in these matters, of course, is that these layers represent millions of years of slow, largely uniform conditions in which layer was gradually laid down over time. [4]
According to Kuhn, the reason paradigms change is not so much because we get smarter or that science gets better. Rather, all paradigms leave explained or seemingly contradictory data. I like to call it "naughty data." After a paradigm has shifted, most "normal scientists" expend their energy trying to fit anomalous data into the new, dominant paradigm. Such operations may go for a long time without changing the current paradigm too much.
For example, evolution has been the dominant scientific paradigm perhaps for over a century now. But it has not gone unchanged. For example, while Charles Darwin (1809-82) suggested that the more complex organisms we know today evolved from less complex ones, he could not really explain how such changes took place. His version of evolution simply saw organisms gradually changing bit by bit, with nature over time selecting the bits that best helped organisms adapt and survive.
But Darwin's version of evolution could not really explain how the new changes came about in the first place. This element of evolutionary theory did not enter the equation until after Darwin, when the idea of mutation entered the scene. So we have here an example of "normal science" persisting, in this case, the paradigm of evolution. But when encountering a problem with the theory, normal scientists did not abandon the overall idea of evolution. Rather, they modified the theory to account for some "naughty data" that did not fit.
Kuhn suggested that there will always be anomalous data in relation to a dominant paradigm. This data is the seed of a paradigm shift, which Kuhn predicted would always take place eventually. At some point, Kuhn argued, someone would suggest a completely different way of looking at the data--one that focused on the data that did not fit the current paradigm.
[text box: Thomas Kuhn]
Of course normal science resists such radical rethinking. Copernicus' (1473-1543) suggestion that the earth went round the sun was not met with open arms by either the Roman Catholic Church or the scientists of the day. [5] Indeed, one of Kuhn's points was that it was not scientifically obvious at the time that Copernicus was correct. For example, his mathematical explanations of the planets' movements did not work as well as the "Ptolemaic" scientists who defended the normal science of the day--that the heavenly bodies moved around the earth. [6]
[insert figure of Ptolemaic universe]
But the math of the Ptolemaic scientists was much more complex than Copernicus'. So while they might account for the motions of the heavenly bodies more accurately, Occam's Razor was against them--the idea that the simplest explanation is usually a better explanation. As Christians, we should take warning. We Christians have paradigms about Christianity as well. We have paradigms of interpretations, for example.
A Baptist will emphasize certain verses that fit with their way of thinking and tend to de-emphasize other verses, "naughty verses," that do not fit as well. The same is true of a Methodist or a Presbyterian or a Reformed thinker. At the same time, we often find that Christians in a particular tradition expend a good deal of intellectual energy trying to account for the passages that do not fit their paradigm as well. Often new churches and denominations are born off such naughty verses. [7]
A great example of applying great intellect to account for problem data is that of mid-twentieth century fundamentalism and its understanding of inerrancy. In a famous book called The Battle for the Bible, Harold Lindsell took a very rigid view of how minutely the gospels of the New Testament need to fit together historically in order to be truthful. [8] In a famous example, he tries to explain how all four gospel accounts of Peter denying Jesus can be historically accurate down to the smallest detail and still fit together. Ingeniously, he suggests that Peter might have denied Jesus six times--three before a first rooster crow and three more before a second crowing! [9]
Lindsell's reconstruction is a great illustration of a paradigm ripe for a shift. Yes, he managed to account for some naughty data. He applied his significant intellect to problem data and found a way to make it fit into his paradigm. But his thesis was so complex that it begged for a paradigm overhaul. His scenario created a "fifth" gospel that is more different from any of the individual gospels than they are from each other! It is no wonder that evangelicals of the late twentieth century generally came to take a looser view of how minutely accurate the gospels need to be historically in order to be considered truthful or even inerrant.
In the case of the planets, Copernicus' heliocentric solar system (sun at center) did not fit all the details as precisely as the geocentric one (earth as center) defended by the math of the Ptolemaic scientists, but it was simpler and not far off. Less than a century later, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) made the heliocentric math both simpler and more accurate by arguing that the planets moved around the sun in ellipses rather than circles. As Kuhn argued, however, what now seem to us as obvious steps forward in a progression of knowledge were not clear at all at the time.
According to Kuhn, paradigms shift in a political struggle between those who support the old paradigm and those who focus on data that does not fit. Since normal science operates by trying to fit anomalous data into the old paradigm, it usually resists strongly the advent of new paradigms that form around the problem data. The old paradigm establishment may keep new paradigm supporters from publishing or speaking at conferences or getting jobs. But if the new paradigm gets its foot in the door, if its supporters increase--usually among younger scientists--the older scientists will eventually die off.
So it was that Albert Einstein (1879-1955) never supported the radical version of quantum mechanics that developed in the 1920s and is now the normal paradigm of physics. "God does not throw dice," he once wrote in a letter to a fellow scientist. But Einstein has been dead for over fifty years now, and it would be hard to find a reputable nuclear physicist today who agrees with him on the issue in question.
Although Kuhn's theory applies to paradigm shifts in science, the basic principles clearly apply to paradigm shifts in any field of knowledge that involves the organization of data. For example, one important shift in the study of Paul's writings in the New Testament has flowed naturally from greater attention to passages in Jewish literature that view God's relationship with Israel as one of grace rather than as something Israel primarily earned or worked to achieve. When certain interpreters focused on the importance of God's grace in Judaism, the seeds of a paradigm shift came into play. And it is predictable that they have encountered angry resistance by the "normal scientists" of the old paradigm. [10]
In the years since the Protestant Reformation, Lutheran and Calvinist interpreters had interpreted certain passages in Paul to oppose human "works" as having any role at all in God's acceptance of us, in our "justification." Accordingly, not only did these interpreters accentuate any passages in which human action seemed to play a role in God's acceptance, they also read Paul and the New Testament in such a way as to deny any role of works in God's acceptance there. But of course, there are any number of New Testament passages that connect God's final acceptance of us to our actions in this life, both in Paul and elsewhere (e.g., Matt. 25:31-46; Rom. 2:5-6; 2 Cor. 5:10; Jas. 2:24-25). And so the "new perspective on Paul" in its various forms has both emphasized that Judaism was also a religion of grace and that Paul had a significant place for works in his understanding of God's acceptance of us.
There is therefore much in Kuhn's approach to science that is helpful in understanding the way in which scientific paradigms change. We can wonder, however, if he were not too pessimistic in his sense that such paradigms were not really headed anywhere. For example, quantum mechanics--even though it may very well be superceded at some point--certainly accounts for the workings of the world on a vastly different scale than Newtonian physics did. As we mentioned in the first section of this chapter, it may still only be an "expression" of what we observe in the world, a kind of scientific myth. But it is a myth that has served and continues to serve us very well. Quantum mechanics is a vastly more useful scientific approach to the world than Newtonian physics was. And in that respect, surely it deserves to be called a better, even a "truer" theory than Newton's.
[1] The best known logical positivist was A. J. Ayer (1910-89).
[2] "Creation science" here refers to those Christian scientists who argue for a relatively young earth with only a minimal amount of evolution around the level of individual species or orders.
[3] This paradigm is called catastrophism, the idea that the earth's geology is best explained on the basis of world wide catastrophies, particularly a world wide flood.
[4] A paradigm we might call uniformitarianism. Certainly mainstream geology also would allow for major earth catastrophies as well. A common theory for why the dinosaurs went extinct involves a rather large asteroid hitting the earth and changing its climate.
[5] We should point out that the Roman Catholic Church today actually has scientists on retainer and could not in any way be described accurately as being against science. For example, Roman Catholic thinkers would more likely engage themselves in how evolution might connect to Christian faith than with trying to disprove it.
[6] "Ptolemaic" here refers to the Greek astronomer Ptolemy (**), who argued that the planets, sun, and moon moved in perfect circles around the earth.
[7] The Seventh Day Adventist Church is a great example of a church formed around naughty verses. This church worships on Saturday because they emphasize the fact that the Sabbath in the Bible always refers to Saturday. They have noticed verses in 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4 where Paul speaks of death as sleep and so do not believe we are conscious in between death and resurrection.
[8] **
[9]**
[10] In my opinion, we are currently witnessing continued resistance by the old Pauline paradigm in such "Ptolemaic" works such as John Piper's The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright (Crossway, 2007), and the two volume work edited by D. A. Carson, Peter T. O'Brien, and Mark Siefrid, Justification and Variegated Nomism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001, 2004).
[textbox: scientific method, hypothesis, theory]
At some point they move beyond considering someone a "person of interest" and they will declare them a "suspect" in the case. Eventually they may arrest the person and put them on trial. Finally, a jury will, at least in theory, weigh the evidence again to decide whether guilt is the most logical conclusion given the evidence, at least "beyond a reasonable doubt." As we have argued previously, it would seem impossible to prove anything of this sort absolutely--the world of inductive thinking is a world of probabilities, not absolute certainties.
The process is so common sensical that it hardly seems something anyone would question. After all, isn't this the way we operate in our day to day activities? I hear a thumping on the roof. I go and investigate. Is it a burglar? Santa Claus? Too big for a squirrel. Not sure if it was heavy enough for a person. I go upstairs and look out the window. Oh, it's a raccoon.
On the other hand, most of us are scarcely consistent. Sometimes--perhaps more often than we might admit to ourselves--we form conclusions on the basis of almost no evidence at all. We "pre-judge" someone or something on some irrelevant basis. This is the stuff of prejudice. We see a person's color, race, or gender and presume that they must be a certain way. In chapter 2, we called this the informal fallacy of hasty generalization, with other fallacies often involved as well.
[textbox: prejudice]
Nevertheless, even if we are not good inductive thinkers, most Westerners would likely claim in theory that they consider this method of investigation legitimate and valuable. You'll remember from chapter 2 that inductive thinking is when you look at a collection of data and induce a general truth from it. We are so used to this way of thinking in science that it is hard for most of us to imagine a time when the best known thinkers were primarily talking about truth from a deductive standpoint, where you start with certain assumptions and then play them out in particular details.
To be sure, we are seeing a resurgence of this older deductive approach to truth today, especially since postmodernism raises questions about whether we can really induce truth from our observations of the world. We live in a climate where it is acceptable simply to start with large, unproved assumptions and talk about reality from there. Some Christians, such as the radical orthodoxy movement we mentioned in chapter 2, see this situation as a great climate for Christian faith.
Many of postmodernism's criticisms seem to be valid, as we will see later in this section. However, our hunch is that the usefulness of inductive thinking will continue to predominate in the days to come. Its usefulness in expressing accurately what happens in the world, as well as in enabling us to do things in the world is too great for it not to continue. If every group simply starts with their own untouchable assumptions and proceeds from there, then such groups can hardly even talk to each other.
Historians often trace the re-emergence of inductive reasoning and scientific method to Sir Francis Bacon in the 1500s (1561-1626). But others might suggest that Bacon himself was riding a wave that goes further back to the theologian Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s (ca. 1225-74), and then beyond him to Islamic philosophers like Ibn Sina (sometimes called Avicenna, ca.980-1037) and Ibn Rushd (sometimes called Averroes, 1126-98). These individuals did use deductive reasoning to a significant extent. But their reasoning often began with some observation of the world, such as the fact that for something to move, it has to be pushed. In that sense, Bacon more represents the culmination of a trajectory rather than a completely new beginning.
Francis Bacon secured his name as the "father of scientific method" primarily because of a book he wrote called the New Organon. In it, he suggested that when trying to arrive at a conclusion on some matter relating to the world, a person should create tables of data. You would put data relating to something you were studying, like heat, in one column. Then you would put data relating to the opposite, like coldness, in another. Then you would test hypotheses against the columns, to see if your understanding matched the way the data played out. This grounded the study of the world in observation rather than in making deductions from "axioms" you assume as a starting point.
[Organon quote]
A few features of Bacon's approach are significant. First, he assumes that a person can be more or less objective or unbiased as he or she looks at the data. Secondly, he assumes that you can come to a definite and final answer to the question you are posing to the data. Both of these assumptions came under serious question in the twentieth century.
[quote: "knowledge is power"]
One of the main figures to question these two assumptions was Karl Popper (1902-94). Popper rightly pointed out that the very questions with which we come to some set of data colors the answers we will draw from that data. No one comes to a set of data without certain presuppositions or expectations. No one can look at a set of data with a God's eye view. No one is perfectly objective.
Secondly, Popper seriously questioned whether we could ever come to a final answer and verify that a scientific theory was true. A claim like "all snow is white" cannot be finally verified. The very nature of inductive thinking is open-ended. So it was that after Europeans had thought for years that all swans were white, they came across black swans in Australia. So Popper suggested that science was based on the quest not to verify theories, but to falsify them. Good theories were theories that, thus far, had resisted falsification.
In this approach, he rejected another approach that enjoyed a brief moment of popularity in the early twentieth century, logical positivism. [1] Logical positivists held that only things a person could observe and verify had any real claim to being called "true." The fundamental problem with this theory, of course, is that it cannot be observed or verified. It is thus incoherent on a most basic level. Popper's suggested that the best theories are those that have not yet been falsified is at least an improvement on logical positivism, although it still assumes that with scientific theory we are basically dealing with theories that are either "true" or "false."
However, by far the most significant philosopher of science in the twentieth century was Thomas Kuhn (1922-96). In the first edition of Kuhn's, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that no scientific paradigm is ultimately better than another. You will remember that a paradigm is a way of looking at a particular subject, like the diversity of animal species. To Kuhn, what we think of as scientific development is a kind of organized wandering from one paradigm to another, following a predictable process. In the second edition, he tempered his thinking a little, particularly over protests at the thought that creation science might be equally valid in comparison to evolutionary science. [2]
[text box: paradigm, normal science]
Kuhn's basic idea was that science operates most of the time according to a dominant paradigm, the normal science. So in the early 1500s, the dominant astronomical paradigm was that the sun went around the earth. In the 1800s, the paradigm of physics was Newtonian. In the twentieth century, the dominant biological paradigm was evolutionary. These are the lenses through which a particular set of data are viewed and organized.
So you are at the Grand Canyon and you see a set of layers of earth and rock. In the typical creation science paradigm, you might assume that these layers were laid down over a relatively short period of time, perhaps in the aftermath of a world wide flood. [3] Alternatively, such a person might suggest that God created the earth to have "apparent age." In other words, the earth may look like it is billions of years old, but it only appears this way because God made the earth and universe to look old. The dominant geological paradigm in these matters, of course, is that these layers represent millions of years of slow, largely uniform conditions in which layer was gradually laid down over time. [4]
According to Kuhn, the reason paradigms change is not so much because we get smarter or that science gets better. Rather, all paradigms leave explained or seemingly contradictory data. I like to call it "naughty data." After a paradigm has shifted, most "normal scientists" expend their energy trying to fit anomalous data into the new, dominant paradigm. Such operations may go for a long time without changing the current paradigm too much.
For example, evolution has been the dominant scientific paradigm perhaps for over a century now. But it has not gone unchanged. For example, while Charles Darwin (1809-82) suggested that the more complex organisms we know today evolved from less complex ones, he could not really explain how such changes took place. His version of evolution simply saw organisms gradually changing bit by bit, with nature over time selecting the bits that best helped organisms adapt and survive.
But Darwin's version of evolution could not really explain how the new changes came about in the first place. This element of evolutionary theory did not enter the equation until after Darwin, when the idea of mutation entered the scene. So we have here an example of "normal science" persisting, in this case, the paradigm of evolution. But when encountering a problem with the theory, normal scientists did not abandon the overall idea of evolution. Rather, they modified the theory to account for some "naughty data" that did not fit.
Kuhn suggested that there will always be anomalous data in relation to a dominant paradigm. This data is the seed of a paradigm shift, which Kuhn predicted would always take place eventually. At some point, Kuhn argued, someone would suggest a completely different way of looking at the data--one that focused on the data that did not fit the current paradigm.
[text box: Thomas Kuhn]
Of course normal science resists such radical rethinking. Copernicus' (1473-1543) suggestion that the earth went round the sun was not met with open arms by either the Roman Catholic Church or the scientists of the day. [5] Indeed, one of Kuhn's points was that it was not scientifically obvious at the time that Copernicus was correct. For example, his mathematical explanations of the planets' movements did not work as well as the "Ptolemaic" scientists who defended the normal science of the day--that the heavenly bodies moved around the earth. [6]
[insert figure of Ptolemaic universe]
But the math of the Ptolemaic scientists was much more complex than Copernicus'. So while they might account for the motions of the heavenly bodies more accurately, Occam's Razor was against them--the idea that the simplest explanation is usually a better explanation. As Christians, we should take warning. We Christians have paradigms about Christianity as well. We have paradigms of interpretations, for example.
A Baptist will emphasize certain verses that fit with their way of thinking and tend to de-emphasize other verses, "naughty verses," that do not fit as well. The same is true of a Methodist or a Presbyterian or a Reformed thinker. At the same time, we often find that Christians in a particular tradition expend a good deal of intellectual energy trying to account for the passages that do not fit their paradigm as well. Often new churches and denominations are born off such naughty verses. [7]
A great example of applying great intellect to account for problem data is that of mid-twentieth century fundamentalism and its understanding of inerrancy. In a famous book called The Battle for the Bible, Harold Lindsell took a very rigid view of how minutely the gospels of the New Testament need to fit together historically in order to be truthful. [8] In a famous example, he tries to explain how all four gospel accounts of Peter denying Jesus can be historically accurate down to the smallest detail and still fit together. Ingeniously, he suggests that Peter might have denied Jesus six times--three before a first rooster crow and three more before a second crowing! [9]
Lindsell's reconstruction is a great illustration of a paradigm ripe for a shift. Yes, he managed to account for some naughty data. He applied his significant intellect to problem data and found a way to make it fit into his paradigm. But his thesis was so complex that it begged for a paradigm overhaul. His scenario created a "fifth" gospel that is more different from any of the individual gospels than they are from each other! It is no wonder that evangelicals of the late twentieth century generally came to take a looser view of how minutely accurate the gospels need to be historically in order to be considered truthful or even inerrant.
In the case of the planets, Copernicus' heliocentric solar system (sun at center) did not fit all the details as precisely as the geocentric one (earth as center) defended by the math of the Ptolemaic scientists, but it was simpler and not far off. Less than a century later, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) made the heliocentric math both simpler and more accurate by arguing that the planets moved around the sun in ellipses rather than circles. As Kuhn argued, however, what now seem to us as obvious steps forward in a progression of knowledge were not clear at all at the time.
According to Kuhn, paradigms shift in a political struggle between those who support the old paradigm and those who focus on data that does not fit. Since normal science operates by trying to fit anomalous data into the old paradigm, it usually resists strongly the advent of new paradigms that form around the problem data. The old paradigm establishment may keep new paradigm supporters from publishing or speaking at conferences or getting jobs. But if the new paradigm gets its foot in the door, if its supporters increase--usually among younger scientists--the older scientists will eventually die off.
So it was that Albert Einstein (1879-1955) never supported the radical version of quantum mechanics that developed in the 1920s and is now the normal paradigm of physics. "God does not throw dice," he once wrote in a letter to a fellow scientist. But Einstein has been dead for over fifty years now, and it would be hard to find a reputable nuclear physicist today who agrees with him on the issue in question.
Although Kuhn's theory applies to paradigm shifts in science, the basic principles clearly apply to paradigm shifts in any field of knowledge that involves the organization of data. For example, one important shift in the study of Paul's writings in the New Testament has flowed naturally from greater attention to passages in Jewish literature that view God's relationship with Israel as one of grace rather than as something Israel primarily earned or worked to achieve. When certain interpreters focused on the importance of God's grace in Judaism, the seeds of a paradigm shift came into play. And it is predictable that they have encountered angry resistance by the "normal scientists" of the old paradigm. [10]
In the years since the Protestant Reformation, Lutheran and Calvinist interpreters had interpreted certain passages in Paul to oppose human "works" as having any role at all in God's acceptance of us, in our "justification." Accordingly, not only did these interpreters accentuate any passages in which human action seemed to play a role in God's acceptance, they also read Paul and the New Testament in such a way as to deny any role of works in God's acceptance there. But of course, there are any number of New Testament passages that connect God's final acceptance of us to our actions in this life, both in Paul and elsewhere (e.g., Matt. 25:31-46; Rom. 2:5-6; 2 Cor. 5:10; Jas. 2:24-25). And so the "new perspective on Paul" in its various forms has both emphasized that Judaism was also a religion of grace and that Paul had a significant place for works in his understanding of God's acceptance of us.
There is therefore much in Kuhn's approach to science that is helpful in understanding the way in which scientific paradigms change. We can wonder, however, if he were not too pessimistic in his sense that such paradigms were not really headed anywhere. For example, quantum mechanics--even though it may very well be superceded at some point--certainly accounts for the workings of the world on a vastly different scale than Newtonian physics did. As we mentioned in the first section of this chapter, it may still only be an "expression" of what we observe in the world, a kind of scientific myth. But it is a myth that has served and continues to serve us very well. Quantum mechanics is a vastly more useful scientific approach to the world than Newtonian physics was. And in that respect, surely it deserves to be called a better, even a "truer" theory than Newton's.
[1] The best known logical positivist was A. J. Ayer (1910-89).
[2] "Creation science" here refers to those Christian scientists who argue for a relatively young earth with only a minimal amount of evolution around the level of individual species or orders.
[3] This paradigm is called catastrophism, the idea that the earth's geology is best explained on the basis of world wide catastrophies, particularly a world wide flood.
[4] A paradigm we might call uniformitarianism. Certainly mainstream geology also would allow for major earth catastrophies as well. A common theory for why the dinosaurs went extinct involves a rather large asteroid hitting the earth and changing its climate.
[5] We should point out that the Roman Catholic Church today actually has scientists on retainer and could not in any way be described accurately as being against science. For example, Roman Catholic thinkers would more likely engage themselves in how evolution might connect to Christian faith than with trying to disprove it.
[6] "Ptolemaic" here refers to the Greek astronomer Ptolemy (**), who argued that the planets, sun, and moon moved in perfect circles around the earth.
[7] The Seventh Day Adventist Church is a great example of a church formed around naughty verses. This church worships on Saturday because they emphasize the fact that the Sabbath in the Bible always refers to Saturday. They have noticed verses in 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4 where Paul speaks of death as sleep and so do not believe we are conscious in between death and resurrection.
[8] **
[9]**
[10] In my opinion, we are currently witnessing continued resistance by the old Pauline paradigm in such "Ptolemaic" works such as John Piper's The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright (Crossway, 2007), and the two volume work edited by D. A. Carson, Peter T. O'Brien, and Mark Siefrid, Justification and Variegated Nomism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001, 2004).
Thursday, June 25, 2009
IWU Seminary on Video!
Here are some great videos sharing the vision of the new seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University.
If you don't want to go through them all, here are the individual vids:
Introduction
Missional
Communal
Integrated
Spiritually Enriching
Personalized
Economical
Leading Edge
If you don't want to go through them all, here are the individual vids:
Introduction
Missional
Communal
Integrated
Spiritually Enriching
Personalized
Economical
Leading Edge
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Nice Post by President of OWU
Nice thought by Everett Piper, President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University. I would say that his thinking and mine are a little like Paul and James sometimes: we agree but are emphasizing different pieces of the puzzle.
For example, he says, "I have maintained for years that those who say that an objective defense of truth is obsolete are dead wrong. To abandon apologetics and, thereby, embrace the relational at the expense of the rational is simply a false dichotomy."
I agree. This is a false dichotomy. The relational is not anti-rational and any abandonment of there being better and worse answers to questions is foolhearty. There is such a thing as right and wrong, just and unjust, and as Christians who love our neighbors it is our responsibility to work for them in effective and fully Christian ways.
Again, "They don’t need nor will they accept some watered down 'generous orthodoxy' that really is nothing but a lie born of Man’s oxymoronic canonization of the relative."
I agree. Any watered down sense of generous orthodoxy that leaves us with nothing in our hands because it has all washed away is worthless. The phrase I use is "identity within diversity." We know who we are and what we believe with full awareness and love toward the myriad of other identities and beliefs, at the same time humble at the realization of the limitations of our own knowledge.
For example, he says, "I have maintained for years that those who say that an objective defense of truth is obsolete are dead wrong. To abandon apologetics and, thereby, embrace the relational at the expense of the rational is simply a false dichotomy."
I agree. This is a false dichotomy. The relational is not anti-rational and any abandonment of there being better and worse answers to questions is foolhearty. There is such a thing as right and wrong, just and unjust, and as Christians who love our neighbors it is our responsibility to work for them in effective and fully Christian ways.
Again, "They don’t need nor will they accept some watered down 'generous orthodoxy' that really is nothing but a lie born of Man’s oxymoronic canonization of the relative."
I agree. Any watered down sense of generous orthodoxy that leaves us with nothing in our hands because it has all washed away is worthless. The phrase I use is "identity within diversity." We know who we are and what we believe with full awareness and love toward the myriad of other identities and beliefs, at the same time humble at the realization of the limitations of our own knowledge.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Reading the Bible Canonically as Scripture
Well, I never intended to get into such controversial issues in those last posts, especially since I see so many of them as tangential to what we should be talking about when it comes to Scripture. I'm in Arizona and then California for a few days for a family wedding, and didn't want to leave my blog fixed in the mud. So here's a quick thought on what it might mean to read the Bible Christianly and canonically.
1. We read the Bible more as a single book than as individual books.
This is of course how Christians throughout the centuries have read the Bible. In my opinion, fundamentalism and early neo-evangelicalism have tried to continue to read the Bible in this way without making the necessary hermeneutical adjustments. To read the Bible as a single book, once one is more fully aware of their historical particularity, requires a person to loosen their meanings somewhat from their historical contexts.
This loosening of concrete historical meaning to read the Bible as a single book need not deny the historical particularity of the books themselves as individual moments of inspiration. We just need to be open to a slightly different meaning for them, including a different significance, when we read them as a whole.
2. The unifying principle of this canonical reading is a story, the story of creation and redemption.
The significance of Adam, Moses, Jesus, and the church is a significance they take on in a unified story. Historically, Adam and Moses did not have the same significance in their particular books historically as they have in the Christian story. And the nature of the church and the full significance of Jesus, have involved much outworking in the days since the final books of the New Testament were written. The Christian story is anticipated by the snippets of the individual books of the Bible, but the story as a whole is "extra" biblical.
3. The authoritative import of Scripture derives from a mysterious intersection between the text, the Holy Spirit, and the Church.
And all three are essential Christian ingredients. The text in itself is susceptible to multiple patterns of meaning. This is true of individual texts but the polyvalence of the text multiplies massively as we begin to ask how individual texts might be integrated with other biblical texts.
By the Church, we refer to that mysterious body of Christ and the communion of the saints that does not coincide exactly with any physical or political body. But all true believers today are in a body with all the true believers of the centuries, and the Spirit speaks through that collection to lead it to understand the Bible as God wills in any given time and place.
So it is not the Bible alone, nor any specific church or churches alone, but the mysterious intersection of these groups from which the Bible as Scripture derives, the book of Scripture as a whole read canonically, through the eyes of the Spirit speaking through the Church. The original inspiration was infallible and inerrant for given times and places and given circumstances in the flow of revelation. But the most authoritative, inspired, infallible, and inerrant word of God in human language is the canonical one, the meaning and import of the text inspired in the Church through the Spirit.
1. We read the Bible more as a single book than as individual books.
This is of course how Christians throughout the centuries have read the Bible. In my opinion, fundamentalism and early neo-evangelicalism have tried to continue to read the Bible in this way without making the necessary hermeneutical adjustments. To read the Bible as a single book, once one is more fully aware of their historical particularity, requires a person to loosen their meanings somewhat from their historical contexts.
This loosening of concrete historical meaning to read the Bible as a single book need not deny the historical particularity of the books themselves as individual moments of inspiration. We just need to be open to a slightly different meaning for them, including a different significance, when we read them as a whole.
2. The unifying principle of this canonical reading is a story, the story of creation and redemption.
The significance of Adam, Moses, Jesus, and the church is a significance they take on in a unified story. Historically, Adam and Moses did not have the same significance in their particular books historically as they have in the Christian story. And the nature of the church and the full significance of Jesus, have involved much outworking in the days since the final books of the New Testament were written. The Christian story is anticipated by the snippets of the individual books of the Bible, but the story as a whole is "extra" biblical.
3. The authoritative import of Scripture derives from a mysterious intersection between the text, the Holy Spirit, and the Church.
And all three are essential Christian ingredients. The text in itself is susceptible to multiple patterns of meaning. This is true of individual texts but the polyvalence of the text multiplies massively as we begin to ask how individual texts might be integrated with other biblical texts.
By the Church, we refer to that mysterious body of Christ and the communion of the saints that does not coincide exactly with any physical or political body. But all true believers today are in a body with all the true believers of the centuries, and the Spirit speaks through that collection to lead it to understand the Bible as God wills in any given time and place.
So it is not the Bible alone, nor any specific church or churches alone, but the mysterious intersection of these groups from which the Bible as Scripture derives, the book of Scripture as a whole read canonically, through the eyes of the Spirit speaking through the Church. The original inspiration was infallible and inerrant for given times and places and given circumstances in the flow of revelation. But the most authoritative, inspired, infallible, and inerrant word of God in human language is the canonical one, the meaning and import of the text inspired in the Church through the Spirit.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch and Inerrancy
Patty David had a good follow up question on the Facebook edition of the third Chicago Statement post (hope you don't mind me responding this way :-). I thought I would dedicate a whole entry to the question of Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the gospels, and the Chicago statement.
Here is her thought, "Is it too simplistic to hold that Genesis became 'inspired' at the time Moses put the Pentateuch together (presumably during the wilderness wanderings if you're not a JEPD advocate)? If Moses indeed met with God for 40 days on Mt. Sinai and in the tabernacle, isn't it at least plausible that God is the one who told him which accounts to include (maybe even 'tweaking' them so that what was written was actually true)? And wouldn't the Israelites have at that time, when God commanded them to keep the book of the Law, begun to view this material as inspired and authoritative?"
Here's what I am arguing for:
1. In my opinion, we don't even get into any really thorny issues if we consider the legal material of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy to go back generally to Moses. In other words, when Jesus says in Matthew 8, "Go offer the gift Moses commanded you," we believe that part of Leviticus does go back to Moses.
But here's my thought here. Believing this does not require us to conclude that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy in their current form was compiled by Moses. From a standpoint of inductive Bible study, none of these books want to be read as if they were written in their current form by Moses, since Exodus through Deuteronomy are about Moses. And Genesis doesn't mention or have anything to do with Moses.
I put it this way in my earlier post: Thinking that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, given the way it is written, is a little like thinking that Jesus must have written the gospels since they are about Jesus.
Another problem is that the earliest instances of the Hebrew language we know of date from about 1000BC. In other words, it is not at all clear that Hebrew existed in anything like the form it appears in our Pentateuch at the time of Moses.
So in answer to your question, I don't have a problem per se with the idea of God telling Moses which traditions to include in the Pentateuch. The question is whether all this material was assembled in this way at the time. Jeremiah doesn't even seem to be aware of Leviticus!! (Jer. 7:22). A good argument can be made that when Joshua and Kings refer to the book of the Law, they only mean Deuteronomy or part of Deuteronomy (cmp. Deut. 31:26 with Josh. 1:8). It is only from the time of Ezra that we find the phrase, "the Book of Moses," presumably including the books we now think of as the Law (Ezra 6:18).
As far as Israel is concerned, they seem to know almost nothing of the fine points of the Law from the times of the Judges to Josiah. Even Elijah violates the Law regularly by offering sacrifices outside of Jerusalem. I find it hard to believe he had a clue he was doing something wrong. The same with Gideon and a host of others who seem to offer sacrifices with no clue they should only be doing it at the tabernacle.
So my first point is that I don't think there is much to worry about in terms of inerrancy if we at least believe the legal material goes back to Moses but was put into its current form later. Of course it's not hard to see from the data of the last two paragraphs why some have suggested that some of the material does not actually go back to Moses, when it would seem that the vast majority of spiritual leaders of Israel were vastly aware of very key items (like only sacrificing in Jerusalem, the sacrificial rules of Leviticus) until the time of Ezra!! See my third point below.
2. I'm also convinced that we tend to bring a literary worldview to documents that were part and parcel of an oral world. Oral cultures tend to pass on tradition with core material that stays fairly constant, with a good deal of variety around the edges. So it is no surprise to me that, for example, we have some minor variations between Deuteronomy and Exodus when they treat exactly the same material.
And from a practical standpoint, the question of Scripture is, by its very nature, a question about us today at a given moment in time. I thought of the requirement of Greek in the curriculum. The standard way of thinking is, "They should be able to read the real biblical texts as they were actually written in their real original languages." But in terms of usefulness, you have to wonder about the fact that 1% of those forced to take it actually can use it 5 years later to any significant degree.
In the same way, something might be 100% inspired, inerrant, infallible, the greatest truth that holds the secret to everything... and if I am not capable of understanding that, it means nothing to me. The most important moment of inspiration, from the standpoint of any individual reading Scripture, is the moment of reading it. I hope you will hear what I'm saying when I say that the original inspiration of Scripture is completely pointless if we as readers are not inspired today to read it in the way God is speaking to us today.
The fact that we as Protestants--especially outside the holiness and Pentecostal traditions that are open to "more than literal" meanings--have spent so little time thinking about this part of the equation demands some fundamental hermeneutical rethinking!
3. I see no problem with #1 as far as inerrancy. In the name of truth, as I've written in post #3, I think we need to give our Old Testament scholars room to explore more canonical models of reading the Old Testament without necessarily forcing them to think a certain way about the precise historicity of the material. I want to allow this because 1) they're not stupid or faithless, 2) we want to listen to the texts more than to preconceptions about what they can and cannot tell us, and 3) because the original meaning really does turn out to be secondary to the canonical meaning, which is not located in the ancient near east, but a) in the New Testament use of the Old and b) in the Christian use of the whole.
Those are my thoughts today, open for critique, correction, and affirmation :-)
Here is her thought, "Is it too simplistic to hold that Genesis became 'inspired' at the time Moses put the Pentateuch together (presumably during the wilderness wanderings if you're not a JEPD advocate)? If Moses indeed met with God for 40 days on Mt. Sinai and in the tabernacle, isn't it at least plausible that God is the one who told him which accounts to include (maybe even 'tweaking' them so that what was written was actually true)? And wouldn't the Israelites have at that time, when God commanded them to keep the book of the Law, begun to view this material as inspired and authoritative?"
Here's what I am arguing for:
1. In my opinion, we don't even get into any really thorny issues if we consider the legal material of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy to go back generally to Moses. In other words, when Jesus says in Matthew 8, "Go offer the gift Moses commanded you," we believe that part of Leviticus does go back to Moses.
But here's my thought here. Believing this does not require us to conclude that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy in their current form was compiled by Moses. From a standpoint of inductive Bible study, none of these books want to be read as if they were written in their current form by Moses, since Exodus through Deuteronomy are about Moses. And Genesis doesn't mention or have anything to do with Moses.
I put it this way in my earlier post: Thinking that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, given the way it is written, is a little like thinking that Jesus must have written the gospels since they are about Jesus.
Another problem is that the earliest instances of the Hebrew language we know of date from about 1000BC. In other words, it is not at all clear that Hebrew existed in anything like the form it appears in our Pentateuch at the time of Moses.
So in answer to your question, I don't have a problem per se with the idea of God telling Moses which traditions to include in the Pentateuch. The question is whether all this material was assembled in this way at the time. Jeremiah doesn't even seem to be aware of Leviticus!! (Jer. 7:22). A good argument can be made that when Joshua and Kings refer to the book of the Law, they only mean Deuteronomy or part of Deuteronomy (cmp. Deut. 31:26 with Josh. 1:8). It is only from the time of Ezra that we find the phrase, "the Book of Moses," presumably including the books we now think of as the Law (Ezra 6:18).
As far as Israel is concerned, they seem to know almost nothing of the fine points of the Law from the times of the Judges to Josiah. Even Elijah violates the Law regularly by offering sacrifices outside of Jerusalem. I find it hard to believe he had a clue he was doing something wrong. The same with Gideon and a host of others who seem to offer sacrifices with no clue they should only be doing it at the tabernacle.
So my first point is that I don't think there is much to worry about in terms of inerrancy if we at least believe the legal material goes back to Moses but was put into its current form later. Of course it's not hard to see from the data of the last two paragraphs why some have suggested that some of the material does not actually go back to Moses, when it would seem that the vast majority of spiritual leaders of Israel were vastly aware of very key items (like only sacrificing in Jerusalem, the sacrificial rules of Leviticus) until the time of Ezra!! See my third point below.
2. I'm also convinced that we tend to bring a literary worldview to documents that were part and parcel of an oral world. Oral cultures tend to pass on tradition with core material that stays fairly constant, with a good deal of variety around the edges. So it is no surprise to me that, for example, we have some minor variations between Deuteronomy and Exodus when they treat exactly the same material.
And from a practical standpoint, the question of Scripture is, by its very nature, a question about us today at a given moment in time. I thought of the requirement of Greek in the curriculum. The standard way of thinking is, "They should be able to read the real biblical texts as they were actually written in their real original languages." But in terms of usefulness, you have to wonder about the fact that 1% of those forced to take it actually can use it 5 years later to any significant degree.
In the same way, something might be 100% inspired, inerrant, infallible, the greatest truth that holds the secret to everything... and if I am not capable of understanding that, it means nothing to me. The most important moment of inspiration, from the standpoint of any individual reading Scripture, is the moment of reading it. I hope you will hear what I'm saying when I say that the original inspiration of Scripture is completely pointless if we as readers are not inspired today to read it in the way God is speaking to us today.
The fact that we as Protestants--especially outside the holiness and Pentecostal traditions that are open to "more than literal" meanings--have spent so little time thinking about this part of the equation demands some fundamental hermeneutical rethinking!
3. I see no problem with #1 as far as inerrancy. In the name of truth, as I've written in post #3, I think we need to give our Old Testament scholars room to explore more canonical models of reading the Old Testament without necessarily forcing them to think a certain way about the precise historicity of the material. I want to allow this because 1) they're not stupid or faithless, 2) we want to listen to the texts more than to preconceptions about what they can and cannot tell us, and 3) because the original meaning really does turn out to be secondary to the canonical meaning, which is not located in the ancient near east, but a) in the New Testament use of the Old and b) in the Christian use of the whole.
Those are my thoughts today, open for critique, correction, and affirmation :-)
Monday, June 15, 2009
Conclusion: One Wesleyan View of the Chicago Statement
It occurred to me that the somewhat scattered nature of my run through the Chicago Statement didn't really leave you with any real positive sense of what inerrancy might mean if one is not defining it narrowly in the manner of the Chicago Statement.
Here are the previous entries running through the Statement from a broader Wesleyan, rather than Calvino-Wesleyan perspective. Both perspectives can legitimately claim to be Wesleyan, although I would argue that a more open ended sense of inerrancy is more in keeping with the Wesleyan tradition in general.
1. Preface and Summary Statements
2. Articles 1-10
3. Articles 11-13
4. Articles 14-19
Where does this leave us?
The more general approach to inerrancy admits of degrees. One might, for example, allow for a little more looseness on the precise historicity of biblical stories. Yet one might still pretty much accept the biblical narratives as historical. To allow more room does not mean one will allow much more. Frankly, although most Wesleyans do not pay much attention to harmonizing accounts. I suspect most Wesleyans pretty much take the biblical accounts as they are.
And I suspect most Wesleyans, even though they don't focus much on the Bible in relation to science, probably have serious questions about evolution. And there are very few Wesleyan scholars who would see some biblical writings as pseudonymous, written under the authority of a dead figure from the past like Paul, Peter, or Daniel.
I suppose the biggest difference is the emphasis or attention. The Chicagoan tends to focus on these sorts of issues. They become defining issues. Most Wesleyans, as Wesley, the nineteenth century holiness writers, and indeed Christians throughout the centuries, have assumed these things. But there is a significant difference between assuming them and orienting one's approach to the Bible around them.
But let me tell you where I am at as a tracker of things hermeneutic. The very issue of inerrancy to some extent leaves me a bit speechless, because I think the very issue is raised on the basis of some fundamental confusion over how meaning works, particularly in relation to the library we call the Bible. I can think of three distinct ways in which the meaning of the Bible is inerrant and infallible.
1. There were the individual, distinct meanings of each book of the Bible, written at a time and place, addressing particular contexts, taking on meaning in a socio-cultural matrix of the past, in a flow of revelation.
So Genesis was written at a time and place. It seems likely that it was not simply written from beginning to end, but that sources were used, were edited. Were those sources inspired? Who used Genesis initially? If the book of the Law lay dormant in the temple for years, then I find myself wondering when books like Genesis became inspired Scripture. Was it at a point centuries after the writing? Was it when God led Jews to use it? The meanings it would have had from its inception to the time when Jews began to consider it Scripture are bound to have changed.
So when did Genesis first take on an inspired meaning, inerrant for God's purposes for a particular audience? We can say it was when it was first edited, but if it wasn't used for a few centuries later, when it would have taken on slightly different meanings, that inspired, inerrant, "original" meaning would have been directed at virtually no one. So was the first inspired meaning when it started to be used as Scripture?
Or was it the meaning it took on as Genesis became part of the Law, the Pentateuch, if indeed it was at a different time? Or was it the significance Genesis took on in the late intertestamental period? Was the meaning Genesis had as interpreted in the book of Jubilees (ca. 160BC) inspired for the Essenes of that day?
Or is the inspired meaning of Genesis the meaning it had for the New Testament authors, which is quite different from its original meaning at some points. Paul's allegory of Hagar and Sarah would have been unrecognizable to any Jew from Genesis' writing to the time of Christ.
Can you see why the question, "Is the Bible inerrant?" leaves me with a puzzled look on my face. It presumes, Moses sat down one day and wrote Genesis and was thinking the same things that Paul was when he read Genesis, which is what my pastor preached this morning. The question of whether the Bible is inerrant must yield to the question of what meaning of the Bible is inerrant.
Certainly, in God's hands, Scripture always accomplishes what God wants it to do (it is infallible) and anything God wants to communicate through it is true (it is inerrant). But the question of the Chicagoan seems a question founded on such a vast misunderstanding of the situation that I hardly know what to say. "Yes," I answer, like if my son asked me whether a touchdown is better than striking out.
2. The Christian meaning
This is where we are in Christian hermeneutics, the recognition that there is a Christian way of reading the Bible as a whole. Many evangelicals are moving in this direction, although Protestant baggage makes it hard for many to go the whole way. As a child of the nineteenth century holiness movement, I'm already there knowing where it's headed.
The problem with the canonical approach of a person like Brevard Childs or Kevin Vanhoozer is that they have difficulty recognizing that the organizing principle of a canonical reading of the Bible as a whole cannot ultimately come from the texts themselves. The texts in themselves are diverse and thus are susceptible to multiple canonical readings. What this means is that we cannot read the Bible as a unified whole without some "control" outside the biblical texts themselves.
And for this, we must look to the Christian lenses that developed in reading Scripture in the centuries following the writing of the New Testament itself. This is the bridge evangelicals find so hard to cross. But it is a hermeneutical necessity. You can either acknowledge that you read the Bible in the light of Christian glasses, as I do, or you can pretend you do not--and of course read the Bible this way anyway. Those of us who read the Bible as a unified book have a "rule of faith" that we use to organize its material.
Evangelicals and Protestants do not get their theology from the Bible alone and never have. There are rules, as we saw in relation to the NIV translation. In short, there is a reading of the Bible that Christians have actualized on the basis of common Christian tradition throughout the centuries.
Have there been variations? Certainly. Does there seem to be a commonly agreed core including things like the Trinity, creation ex nihilo, the Fall of Satan, etc? Yes. There is a Christian way to read the Bible as a whole. It is different from the original meaning of any one passage, although hopefully there is a strong degree of continuity with various parts.
Is this Christian meaning infallible, insofar as God uses it in His Church? Absolutely! Is this Christian meaning inerrant, insofar as God communicates through it to His Church? Absolutely!
You can see how far removed this "more than literal" use of Scripture is from the minutia of the Chicagoan, who is worried about jots and tittles of the original meaning of verse x. In that sense, the Chicagoan focus is worried about moss at the base of some tree in a forest over which the canonicist is flying in a helicopter.
3. Personal and Group Inspiration
And the Holy Spirit can and does speak to us as individuals, groups, and even denominations. He quickens the text, makes it become the word of God to you and me personally. Whatever He does with the text, it will not fail to be done (infallible). And whatever He communicates to you and I, it will be true (inerrant).
In short, Scripture is a sacrament of revelation, a divinely appointed meeting place between God and us. God can speak through anything, including a street sign. But He has set these words of Scripture aside especially as a place to meet with us, to make the ordinary words--like the ordinary water of baptism or the ordinary bread and wine of communion--to become the word of God.
So Scripture was the unfailing word of God to the varied contexts to which God has spoken through it in the past, and it becomes the unfailing word of God as God speaks to us through it today.
Here are the previous entries running through the Statement from a broader Wesleyan, rather than Calvino-Wesleyan perspective. Both perspectives can legitimately claim to be Wesleyan, although I would argue that a more open ended sense of inerrancy is more in keeping with the Wesleyan tradition in general.
1. Preface and Summary Statements
2. Articles 1-10
3. Articles 11-13
4. Articles 14-19
Where does this leave us?
The more general approach to inerrancy admits of degrees. One might, for example, allow for a little more looseness on the precise historicity of biblical stories. Yet one might still pretty much accept the biblical narratives as historical. To allow more room does not mean one will allow much more. Frankly, although most Wesleyans do not pay much attention to harmonizing accounts. I suspect most Wesleyans pretty much take the biblical accounts as they are.
And I suspect most Wesleyans, even though they don't focus much on the Bible in relation to science, probably have serious questions about evolution. And there are very few Wesleyan scholars who would see some biblical writings as pseudonymous, written under the authority of a dead figure from the past like Paul, Peter, or Daniel.
I suppose the biggest difference is the emphasis or attention. The Chicagoan tends to focus on these sorts of issues. They become defining issues. Most Wesleyans, as Wesley, the nineteenth century holiness writers, and indeed Christians throughout the centuries, have assumed these things. But there is a significant difference between assuming them and orienting one's approach to the Bible around them.
But let me tell you where I am at as a tracker of things hermeneutic. The very issue of inerrancy to some extent leaves me a bit speechless, because I think the very issue is raised on the basis of some fundamental confusion over how meaning works, particularly in relation to the library we call the Bible. I can think of three distinct ways in which the meaning of the Bible is inerrant and infallible.
1. There were the individual, distinct meanings of each book of the Bible, written at a time and place, addressing particular contexts, taking on meaning in a socio-cultural matrix of the past, in a flow of revelation.
So Genesis was written at a time and place. It seems likely that it was not simply written from beginning to end, but that sources were used, were edited. Were those sources inspired? Who used Genesis initially? If the book of the Law lay dormant in the temple for years, then I find myself wondering when books like Genesis became inspired Scripture. Was it at a point centuries after the writing? Was it when God led Jews to use it? The meanings it would have had from its inception to the time when Jews began to consider it Scripture are bound to have changed.
So when did Genesis first take on an inspired meaning, inerrant for God's purposes for a particular audience? We can say it was when it was first edited, but if it wasn't used for a few centuries later, when it would have taken on slightly different meanings, that inspired, inerrant, "original" meaning would have been directed at virtually no one. So was the first inspired meaning when it started to be used as Scripture?
Or was it the meaning it took on as Genesis became part of the Law, the Pentateuch, if indeed it was at a different time? Or was it the significance Genesis took on in the late intertestamental period? Was the meaning Genesis had as interpreted in the book of Jubilees (ca. 160BC) inspired for the Essenes of that day?
Or is the inspired meaning of Genesis the meaning it had for the New Testament authors, which is quite different from its original meaning at some points. Paul's allegory of Hagar and Sarah would have been unrecognizable to any Jew from Genesis' writing to the time of Christ.
Can you see why the question, "Is the Bible inerrant?" leaves me with a puzzled look on my face. It presumes, Moses sat down one day and wrote Genesis and was thinking the same things that Paul was when he read Genesis, which is what my pastor preached this morning. The question of whether the Bible is inerrant must yield to the question of what meaning of the Bible is inerrant.
Certainly, in God's hands, Scripture always accomplishes what God wants it to do (it is infallible) and anything God wants to communicate through it is true (it is inerrant). But the question of the Chicagoan seems a question founded on such a vast misunderstanding of the situation that I hardly know what to say. "Yes," I answer, like if my son asked me whether a touchdown is better than striking out.
2. The Christian meaning
This is where we are in Christian hermeneutics, the recognition that there is a Christian way of reading the Bible as a whole. Many evangelicals are moving in this direction, although Protestant baggage makes it hard for many to go the whole way. As a child of the nineteenth century holiness movement, I'm already there knowing where it's headed.
The problem with the canonical approach of a person like Brevard Childs or Kevin Vanhoozer is that they have difficulty recognizing that the organizing principle of a canonical reading of the Bible as a whole cannot ultimately come from the texts themselves. The texts in themselves are diverse and thus are susceptible to multiple canonical readings. What this means is that we cannot read the Bible as a unified whole without some "control" outside the biblical texts themselves.
And for this, we must look to the Christian lenses that developed in reading Scripture in the centuries following the writing of the New Testament itself. This is the bridge evangelicals find so hard to cross. But it is a hermeneutical necessity. You can either acknowledge that you read the Bible in the light of Christian glasses, as I do, or you can pretend you do not--and of course read the Bible this way anyway. Those of us who read the Bible as a unified book have a "rule of faith" that we use to organize its material.
Evangelicals and Protestants do not get their theology from the Bible alone and never have. There are rules, as we saw in relation to the NIV translation. In short, there is a reading of the Bible that Christians have actualized on the basis of common Christian tradition throughout the centuries.
Have there been variations? Certainly. Does there seem to be a commonly agreed core including things like the Trinity, creation ex nihilo, the Fall of Satan, etc? Yes. There is a Christian way to read the Bible as a whole. It is different from the original meaning of any one passage, although hopefully there is a strong degree of continuity with various parts.
Is this Christian meaning infallible, insofar as God uses it in His Church? Absolutely! Is this Christian meaning inerrant, insofar as God communicates through it to His Church? Absolutely!
You can see how far removed this "more than literal" use of Scripture is from the minutia of the Chicagoan, who is worried about jots and tittles of the original meaning of verse x. In that sense, the Chicagoan focus is worried about moss at the base of some tree in a forest over which the canonicist is flying in a helicopter.
3. Personal and Group Inspiration
And the Holy Spirit can and does speak to us as individuals, groups, and even denominations. He quickens the text, makes it become the word of God to you and me personally. Whatever He does with the text, it will not fail to be done (infallible). And whatever He communicates to you and I, it will be true (inerrant).
In short, Scripture is a sacrament of revelation, a divinely appointed meeting place between God and us. God can speak through anything, including a street sign. But He has set these words of Scripture aside especially as a place to meet with us, to make the ordinary words--like the ordinary water of baptism or the ordinary bread and wine of communion--to become the word of God.
So Scripture was the unfailing word of God to the varied contexts to which God has spoken through it in the past, and it becomes the unfailing word of God as God speaks to us through it today.
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