7.5 Biblical Paradigms as a Case Study

Happy Philosophy Thursday! Finishing up a chapter on epistemology.
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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 about the original meaning. [33] This simple argument suggests that there is more false data about the Bible than true data -- at least in relation to what the Bible first meant. 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. We can speak of an orthodox biblical worldview -- but it is only one of many, many possible interpretive organizations of the biblical material.

[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.

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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)

 

Biblical View of Economics 1

I'm speaking this morning in Michigan on "Biblical Foundations for Faith, Work, and Economics: Human Flourishing and the Kingdom of God."

I start off with the basics of a Biblical Worldview, using some material I developed to present to a graduate class of Orthopedic Therapists at IWU. Here is the basic worldview piece of my presentation:

1. God exists and is involved in the world.
2. All human beings have intrinsic worth.
3. The world is not as it should be.
4. God has fixed, is fixing, and will fix the world through Christ--history has a direction.
5. In Scripture, God has revealed two foundational ethical absolutes.

My second slide then emphasizes that we should not think of worldviews here as ideas in a weak sense. By "views" I mean perspectives that are expressions of deep seated values and drives, what Jesus calls the "heart" in Mark 7. James 2 indicates how "dead" mere ideas are, even ideas about God. "Faith without works is dead" or we might say, "Belief that doesn't come from the heart is dead."

Our behaviors and habits flow from our loves, which we often try to express in words and ideas. There are also other very significant components to our view of the world--the way we tell our stories and the stories of others, as well as the key symbols and "rituals" of our lives.

I'll post more later...

How to Build a Movement

There were some key elements to the civil religion I posted on yesterday. Why does the America cult have such staying power? Why does any movement have staying power?

In fact, the way I described civil religion fits with what N. T. Wright has called the elements of a worldview: story, ritual, symbol, and answers to basic questions. I don't want to go into all that. This post isn't about worldviews. It's about movements that have staying power and momentum.

Story
Organizations that have a founding story or key stories that express their identity and mission tend to draw people. It's not just about serving people in some obvious way. There's something about the human being that wants to belong to a group that has a destiny.

The Greeks and Romans understood this with their myths of the Trojan War and the founding of Rome. This is what we might call a founding myth. If you think a myth of this sort is just a fake story, you've missed something profound. We humans thrive on these sorts of identity-destiny-mission-giving stories.

I know of churches that people flock to because they have a founding story of this sort. Wesley Seminary has a story of its founding that makes people feel like they are joining something more than just an institution. These stories don't have to be false--in fact, the truer they are, the more powerful the sense of being part of something with a purpose.

Symbols
When we started the seminary, we thought it was important that it have a building--even though we knew it was destined primarily to be an online seminary. Sure, the faculty and administration needed offices. Sure, we needed to have a place for some classes. But it was more important for symbolic purposes. We wanted students to know that there was a place that was the seminary, that the seminary was a real seminary rather than an imaginary one.

This was one of the purposes that the temple served (in addition to that atonement thing ;-). God had an address on earth. It's not necessarily easy to make a symbol. Often the most powerful ones have to do with the founding stories. Take the cross, for example.

With that example, you can see that we're not just talking hokey here. Symbols are more powerful than words, if you have the right one.

Rituals
It is unfortunate that some Protestants so overreacted to medieval Catholicism that they tried to strip Christianity of its symbols and rituals. These are some of the most powerful elements of the human psyche.

Movements have rituals. Worshiping on Sundays is a ritual. "Sacred days" are symbols that also entail rituals. Every year at the seminary we come back together to start a new year in a service of worship. Churches can have unique rituals that are essential to who they are, in addition to the common rituals of Christianity.

Universities have rituals that can bind everyone together. IWU has its World Changer Convocation, its busts in the rotunda. Students at IWU long for the Friday Night Live comedy nights. Homecoming is a socially cohesive ritual event. Of course rituals have to have buy-in too. It has to be the right kind of ritual, one that resonates in some way.

Basic Perspectives
Surprising to some, the ideas we connect to these stories, symbols, and rituals are secondary to the power they have in themselves. Human beings are not "thinking things" at their core, but we use thought to conceptualize the significance of these more elemental forces of the human psyche.

So there will be words that go along with these more powerful elements. Slogans are more powerful than paragraphs--"We say yes."  "It's about the people." "If you don't look good, we don't look good."

These are really mission statements but packaged in their most effective human form. Again, if they don't resonate with people they become a joke or just fade away. But find the right one and you're moving.

It's not easy to manufacture these elements, although some people just have a knack for it. These are the people who lead movements. These are the politicians that move people. These are the pastors to whose churches people flock.

We like to spiritualize these things (which is part of the mythic quality) and I would never want to reduce movements to mere mechanics. But I suspect most people over-spiritualize them.

Some thoughts for a Tuesday morning...

A Biblical Worldview

I am not opposed to using worldview language. There are important cautions that need to go along with it, to be sure.

1. For example, the relation between people's thinking and action is far more complex than some consistent movement from thought to action. Our professed ideas often aren't the real reason for what we do. And most of what passes for a "worldview" is a gross oversimplification, like goo-goo ga-ga talk. It's embarrassing to think of a college class calling something "faith integration" that takes a doctoral level understanding of one field and tries to "integrate" it awkwardly with some kindergartenish worldview concept. In many, perhaps most cases, it would be better for the professor not even to try and just be a person with faith teaching a subject they are actually an expert on.

Still more problematic is language of "biblical" worldview. I will use this language below but most of those who use this language are pre-modern, unreflective interpreters. That is, they are Bible readers who define the words of the Bible by the definitions of their tradition. They read the Bible like a mirror and rip a selection of key mirror verses to express what their community already thinks.

It is somewhat difficult to speak of a biblical worldview if you know how to read the Bible in context. For example, the way the Israelites who wrote down the books of the OT viewed God among the gods was arguably not exactly the same as the way Jews viewed God by the time Paul came around. You will not find the best original meaning Bible scholars even speaking much of biblical theology in relation to the whole Bible, let alone the more simplistic biblical worldview construct.

But it is now potentially a "post" modern time. That is to say, I am open to speaking reflectively of a biblical worldview in a way that is aware that it is loosening the original meanings of the biblical texts and organizing them by an outside organizing principle.

I believe for Christendom, that organizing principle is best some form of common Christianity or orthodoxy. For me, that pattern also might involve the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition, which I believe is the best "constructive" version of Christian tradition in relation to the modern world. (We all at least partially construct our theologies in dialog with modern issues of thought. We just don't always admit it to ourselves.)

2. So what might such a "biblical worldview" look like?

• It believes in a loving, powerful, knowing God who exists apart from the world but is involved in the world. 
• But God does not determine everything that happens, even though nothing happens apart from his permission and will. We have a responsibility to choose the good and can choose the good.
• God speaks. He has spoken through Scripture and he continues to speak to people today, especially those among his people. The Spirit helps us arbitrate between what is his speaking and what isn't.
• But there is much truth we can know without a special word from the Lord.
• It believes that the world needs to be reconciled to God. The world is alienated from God. Although God is working everywhere--there is hope for goodness everywhere--humanity's default state is one of disempowerment and degradation everywhere. We need rescued.
• The key to the restoration of fallen humanity is Jesus. He is the means of restoration and reconciliation. He is also the Lord and master of all the earth.
• History is moving toward an ultimate restoration. We are eternally accountable to God for our lives, although his disposition is one of mercy toward those who trust in his mercy.
• There are two great ethical requirements of humanity by God. The first is to submit to his absolute rulership, a submission that is not onerous because he is a loving Sovereign. The second is for us to live lives of love toward one another.

3. A sound "biblical worldview" has implications for the specific issues of our world (e.g., abortion, poverty) but flies more at a "meta" level. For example, I do not believe that it makes sense to speak of a "biblical" perspective on abortion unless you are a pre-modern reader who is simply seeing the Bible as a mirror of what you already believe. There is rather a biblical perspective on murder, especially on the basis of the love ethic. Our position on abortion then tries to play out that worldview perspective in the specific case of an unborn child.

But the Bible read in context, either on the whole (which is where "biblical worldview" comes into play) or in some particular verse (which then is not usually flying on the level of worldview but more on the level of ancient situation), does not take a position on human identity in relation to human development. This is a question from our world, not theirs. What we do as communities of faith is apply the basic principles of our Christian worldview to specific situations like these in our contemporary world.

The freedom of speech and our democratic worldview enables those in America with means to speak our minds loudly and with great vigor in the public forum. I'm afraid that, much of the time, we more or less embarrass ourselves when we speak of a biblical or Christian worldview and turn off intelligent outsiders to faith. We are a people of easy answers where, in the name of our religious tradition but invoking the Bible, a person of mediocre thinking ability can speak with the authority of God.

Bart Ehrman's How Jesus Became God: Introduction

I do not know how widely Bart Ehrman's new book, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, will be read. There is a good evangelical response in a fine collection of chapters edited by Michael Bird, a book appropriately called, How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus' Divine Nature--A Response to Bart Ehrman. There has also been some fine blog engagement with these books.

I've decided to walk through Ehrman's book as well. I'm also working through Bird's response book, but I don't want to compare the two books. I want to read through Ehrman's book as if I were a "none" who is not particularly interested in religion or as if I were a Christian who has never encountered ideas like Ehrman's before. My goal is thus not to write an apologetics piece like Bird but more to play the role of a consultant of sorts, thinking through it with the person for whom these are pretty much new ideas.

Introduction
"I do not take a stand on the theological question of Jesus' divine status," Ehrman says (3). In that sense, Ehrman at least suggests that his study might allow for faith in Jesus' divinity. At the same time, he is quite clear that he is "no longer a believer" (2). His professed point of view is rather that of a "historian."

On the one hand, there is a significant thing to consider here. Ehrman fully accepts that Christians came to believe that Jesus was God and that Christians have believed it from the earliest centuries of Christianity. You can thus, at least in theory, be a believer whether you prefer Ehrman's or Bird's sense of how that belief unfolded. You can take the path of Bird and conclude that Christians had this understanding from Christianity's earliest days. Or you can take perhaps a slightly modified version of Ehrman and believe that God turned on the lights of understanding about Jesus over the course of several decades.

On the other hand, the idea that Ehrman is just a "historian" is probably slightly misleading. While I reject as naive and ideologically promiscuous the idea that worldviews are large, total packages, I do accept that there are key presuppositions and operating rules that any so called historian inevitably assumes. When Ehrman does history, he inevitably would reject any supernatural explanation for an event. In that sense, if there is a God who is involved in the world, Ehrman's reconstruction of events can never be correct, because he specifically forbids any interpretation of events in which God is a factor.

By contrast, a historical approach that does not eliminate the possibility of the supernatural out of hand might try to interpret events in terms of normal cause and effect explanations as a default but be open to supernatural explanations if cause-effect seems lacking in some regard and especially if supernatural explanations are already in play.

Next week: Chapter 1: Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome

Wright: Finishing chapter 1

Well, here's the rest of chapter 1 of N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God, finished reading it about three weeks ago. :-(

Preface

Chapter 1
1. The Basics of Philemon
2.i-iii. Philemon and Christian Worldview
iv. History, Exegesis, "Application"
v. Sources

vi.Worldview, Theology, History
Summary
In this section, Wright finishes setting up his analytical system. He has already reminded his reader of the components of worldview he uses: story, praxis, symbols, and basic questions. He has also set up a quasi-matrix for analyzing Paul: history, exegesis, theology, and "application." Now he tries to connect the two.

In a person or community, there are basic beliefs (theology) that flow out of a person's worldview. These basic beliefs provide a person or community's basic aims (history). As a natural consequence of such basic beliefs, there are consequent beliefs (theology) that are a natural by-product and play out in more detail. These are more negotiable and lead to our more specific intentions in life (history).

Then to complete the loop back to earlier in the chapter, basic beliefs/consequent beliefs/theology all relate to the worship dimension of a community. Aims/intentions/history then relate to the culture of a community.

Finally, Wright brings in the complication that no interpreter is objective. There is a gap between us and the text. We have our own worldviews, worship, and culture that get in the way of seeing the text. We tend to infect our reading of Paul with what we are looking for or from him.

Reflection
How complicated! The real world is complicated, but I can't imagine that this Rorschach has any staying power. Wright is brilliant. He has tried hard to upgrade his initial idealist software with numerous real world plug-ins, but the result is clunky.

Wright's fundamental personality and bias remains very rational, despite the way he has tried to take on board all the correctives and insights of philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists. His account of worldview is light years ahead of van Til but for all Wright's distancing from these arch-presuppositionalists and antihistorians, he is still their child. He still assumes that real life aims and intentions flow from underlying beliefs.

So he has all the elements, but he remains a structuralist in his thinking. He sees the underlying pattern as more primary than the world from which he abstracts it. Rather, human thought is epiphenomenon, a mechanism for living in the world. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs gives a more accurate picture of what stands behind human aims and intentions. Behind our lives are more fundamentally drives, not ideas.

Our ideas are collections and clumpings of family resemblances, not deductive masterpieces. Our identity-giving stories are more often short vignettes than large metanarratives. Human thought is much more atomistic and a front for more basic urges than anything like tidy systems.

vii. Philemon as Allegory
Wright ends the chapter with a fun allegory, which of course is not the meaning of Philemon but we are delighted at this intentional sensus plenior. Philemon represents theological orthodoxy. Onesimus is the Enlightenment project of historiography. Some historical approaches have left the Paul of faith behind. Meanwhile, some (John Piper) do not want the Paul of history to come back.

Paul himself knows that he must unite his whole self. He must send history back to theology. A unified Paul--both of faith and history--can be recovered. Such is Wright's aim.

The Flexibility of a Christian Worldview

I'm reading The Unintended Reformation with the Monday reading group and will probably post about it regularly for the next month or so.  I came across a good point today that I wanted to emphasize:

"Because the central claims of Christianity were not based or dependent on any philosophy but rather on God's putative actions in history, inherited assumptions and practices provided a framework for the testing, debate, and discriminating assimilation of philosophical ideas compatible with the faith" (39-40).

Brad Gregory is talking about the late Middle Ages here and about how Christian thinkers could appropriate elements from Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, even Epicureanism without also adopting their clearly non-Christian elements.  It is also true that "inherited assumptions and practices" at that time would have included a good deal of Roman Catholic ritual and tradition.  One of the reasons the Anglican church can house such a diversity of belief (from charismatic to evangelical to Anglo-Catholic to Sea of Faith non-literalists) is because they all share the liturgy in common.

All of that is introduction. What I want to jump on is the "because" part.  The central claims of Christianity are based in God's actions in history, not on a philosophical system.  This fact has historically made it possible--and I believe continues to make it possible--for there to be some flexibility in the philosophical framework within which Christian faith is housed.

Are there some basics to a Christian worldview?  Yes, I believe there are.  For example, a Christian worldview believes in a God that literally exists, created the world, and acts in the world.  But the basics are event-focused and a relatively short list.

What this means is that those who talk extensively in terms of biblical or Christian worldview are really doing what Augustine did with Platonism or Thomas did with Aristotelianism or Luther or Calvin or Van Til have done.  They are not presenting the biblical or Christian worldview but presenting a Christian worldview that places the core events into some philosophical framework that is not actually part of the core.