_______________________
17. There was a professor when I came to Indiana Wesleyan University who taught history through the lens of a biblical worldview. By that time, I had gone through the fires of seminary and beyond and was in the final stages of developing what I might call a contextual understanding of the Bible. Biblical worldview language hadn't really been part of my holiness background, although I had certainly heard of it. It was a foundational concept though for the history department at IWU at that time.
Coming to IWU was a good thing for me. If I had taken a job at a research university, I would probably have continued on my merry way in a bubble where I didn't have to articulate my paradigm shifts to anyone. I could just teach the Bible the scholarly way. I wouldn't have had to engage a quite powerful machine of counter-argument.
But IWU students were me, ten years earlier. They hadn't gone through the fires I had, and they probably didn't need to. But how could I speak their language? How could I get back into their heads? How could I rewind my mind ten years?
18. In my third or fourth year at IWU, I talked the Religion Department into having a regular colloquium. We would make presentations to our students on one issue or another. The first one was in the old College Wesleyan Church, and it was on hermeneutics.
At that first one, I presented a paper titled, "The Bible as an Object of Knowledge." It was an early attempt for me to try to put into words the contextual paradigm shift that I had undergone during my formal studies of the Bible. The title presented a simple truth. The meaning of the Bible is something we have to input into our heads. In other words, we have to interpret it.
Many, many people act like the meaning of the Bible is obvious. It's an unexamined assumption. But in reality there is disagreement about every inch of the Bible. I have repeatedly pointed out that there are 10,000s of denominations each with different interpretations. Visit 10 churches preaching on the same text and you may get 10 different "truths" from the passage. "Now here's what's going on here" or "Here's what no one has noticed before." Grab a shelf full of commentaries on any passage and you will have multiple interpretations on the same passage by those who know the most about the passage!
And, as I've mentioned, some of what people say is the Bible doesn't actually come from the Bible. For example, our position on abortion doesn't really come from the Bible. The Bible doesn't say a word about abortion. That doesn't mean our position is wrong. It just means that we don't realize how much of what we say is the Bible really comes from our traditions, experiences, and assumptions.
When I say, "the Bible is an object of knowledge," I mean we have to interpret it. I chuckle when people pit reason and the Bible against each other -- trust the Bible, not your reason. I chuckle to myself. What the heck do you think you are using when you interpret the Bible??!! You use your reason when you are reading the Bible. Reason is what is taking place whenever you connect two thoughts together.
The magnitude of our lack of self-awareness is mind-boggling on such things.
19. So what is a biblical worldview as this phrase is normally used? It is a paradigm. It is a system of organizing the data of the Bible. In good Kantian fashion, there are two key components here. There is the data of the Bible and there is the organization our minds give to that data.
My paper back in 2000 talked about three main reasons why there are so many different interpretations of the Bible. The first is disagreement over the meaning of individual words, verses, and passages. The second is disagreement on how to integrate the various passages of Scripture together. And the third is the gap between the time of the Bible and our time. The result is a shocking multiplicity of possible biblical worldviews. I dare not say infinite. I won't say countless. But it is a much larger number than we probably can come to grips with. [32]
This correlates well with the elements of a biblical paradigm that I just mentioned. The "data" of the Bible is the interpretations of individual passages. These can be probably correct interpretations but they can also be false data, so to speak. Suffice it to say, 1) if there is one correct interpretation of the original meaning of a passage and 2) there are a lots of different interpretations of that passage, then 3) most of the interpretations of the passage are wrong. [33] This simple argument suggests that there is more false data about the Bible than true data. Remember, these are the "atoms" in a person's biblical worldview.
20. But then there is the organization of that data. If you think of the data of the Bible as a word cloud, some of the data is "bigger" than others. That is to say, some verses are going to be more central to the meaning of the Bible than others. A good biblical worldview would prioritize properly. Does Hebrews get a bigger say on the topic of sacrifice or Leviticus?
Martin Luther suggested that we use the "clear" verses to interpet the "unclear" ones. He is basically talking about organizing principles. Which verses do we select as most significant? (Which ones do we effectively ignore?) Which data do we make central? Which data do we consider strange and puzzling? The problem is that we disagree on which verses are clear and which are unclear!
There are a lot of different ways to prioritize and integrate the biblical materials. For example, 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4 both talk about death using the metaphor of sleep. Most Christian traditions consider this merely a metaphor and prioritize parts of Scripture that suggest we are conscious between our deaths and the resurrection.
But not the Seventh Day Adventists. One of the fascinating things about Seventh Day Adventists is that, from an orthodox perspective, they prioritize the wrong passages. They notice the "weird" passages and then choose them over the ones other Christians consider "clear." So most Christians recognize that the early Christians worshiped on the Lord's Day, Sunday. But the Seventh Day Adventists have noticed that the Old Testament Sabbath was on Saturday.
So in their organization of the data of Scripture, they have prioritized the Saturday Sabbath over Sunday as the Lord's Day. It is another organization of the biblical materials. It is actually quite staggering to think of how many possible permutations there could be.
For example, someone might say, "The New Testament reflects a perversion of the Old Testament" and prioritize the Old Testament as the authority over a biblical worldview. Frankly, this would be the orthodox Jewish way to organize the Christian Bible.
Along with different interpretations of indivdiual verses, the different organizations of biblical material into different biblical theologies have naturally resulted in a myriad of different denominational biblical theologies.
21. In order to construct a biblical worldview, there have to be organizing principles that you bring to the text. When I learned about Gödel's incompleteness theorem, it seemed to apply here. The basic gist is that a system is never grounded completely in itself. Similarly, the text of the Bible can't entirely interpret or organize itself. There have to be guiding principles, scaffolding, that comes alongside, a meaning-harvesting mechanism.
I'm messing with some Reformation pillars here, but as a holiness child I didn't grow up with them. They ultimately were unreflective anyway. The perspicuity of Scripture is unaware that the clarity actually comes from tradition. "Scripture only" has resulted in 20,000-30,000 different denominations. They were ultimately unreflective perspectives. In 2000, I would have said they were pre-modern conceptions.
The Wesleyan Quadrilateral in this regard is more profound than you might think. (And who cares whether Wesley ever used those words or if Outler coined the phrase -- it is hermeneutically profound.) You can't get rid of reason if you utter sentences. Tradition is what steers our biblical theologies. And the Holy Spirit speaks to us in experience, so I would think twice before rejecting him.
22. So all the principles we have explored earlier in the chapter apply to this case study of biblical worldivews. They are paradigms. They shift from time to time and group to group.
And power is involved in those shifts. Denominations police their biblical paradigms. Inerrancy is a paradigm that is guarded by powers that be. In my first decade at IWU, I read the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. I didn't find anything too difficult in it.
BUT, I also recognized that in the paradigm of those who drafted it, it likely meant a lot more than what it said. For example, once you allow for different genres to play by different rules, then inerrancy doesn't ensure any specific position on evolution or women in ministry or pseudonymity. It only requires that you consider the Bible to be truthful in what it affirms.
But that's not why the term is policed. The term exists in part to prevent interpreters from drawing certain conclusions from the biblical text. That is the real nature of the paradigm. And it is guarded by those with power. This is why a John Sanders can lose his job over Open Theism, even though he believed he was interpreting the Bible correctly.
So, there are many possible biblical worldviews. It seems reasonable to use Christian orthodoxy (that is, tradition) as its utlimate organizing principle. That can't change what it originally meant. As Gordon Fee once said, it can't come to mean something it never meant. [34] I wouldn't put it exactly that way. But I would agree that the original meaning is what it meant, and it can't change. [35]
But we can prioritize those parts of Scripture -- a chorus of voices -- that align with orthodoxy. We can make those the fulchrum points and map the rest of Scripture to them.
[32] In the early 2000s, I felt inspired to write up these insights for a contest with Westminster John Knox Press. I wrote Who Decides What the Bible Means? in a week. Unfortunately, they did not accept it, nor did Abingdon (I felt I was blocked by someone who got them to publish his version of the book instead). I finally self-published it.
[33] I want to be clear that I believe in the polyvalence of texts and that God uses the flexibility of potential meaning to speak many different messages to many different people. When I say there is one correct interpretation, I mean of the original meaning, which is only one possible valid meaning.
[34] Gordon Fee, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2014).
[35] I have another writing project, The Flow of Revelation, that is basically a biblical theology that integrates the Bible's original meaning in a flow that ends in Christian orthodoxy.
_______________________
Previously,
1.1 Unexamined Assumptions
1.2 "Unitary" Thinking
2.1 Binary Thinking in Ethics
2.2 Contextualization in Missions
2.3 Beyond Relativism and Absolutes
3.1 Setting the Stage for a Political Conversation
3.2 Binary Political Thinking
3.3 Assumptions about Christ and Culture
3.4 All our thinking and living is enculturated.
7.1 How Do We Know (part 1)
7.2 A Framework of Understanding (part 2)
7.3 The Ordering of Impressions (part 3)
7.4 Paradigm Shifts (part 4)
No comments:
Post a Comment