Grudem: The Inerrancy of Scripture

Continuing my series reviewing Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology: http://cafetutorials.blogspot.com/2012/07/christian-theology.html

Chapter 5 is entitled: "The Inerrancy of Scripture"
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Summary
Grudem begins by referring back to one of his arguments in chapter 4 (82, n. 13):

1. The Bible is God's words.
2. God never lies.
3. Therefore, the Bible never lies.

He extends this in chapter 6 on inerrancy.  "The inerrancy of Scripture means that Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact" (91).  What does he mean by this?  He does not say so but he implicitly is referring to the Bible taken in its plain sense (usually its literal sense, although sometimes the plain sense can be figurative). And he means "everything it talks about," every detail (93).  "The Bible itself does not make any restriction on the kinds of subjects to which it speaks truthfully" (93).  He is ultimately referring to things like historical details, scientific implications, attributions of authorship, etc...

He gives three further clarifications:
1. The Bible can be inerrant and still speak in the ordinary language of everyday speech.
2. Loose or free quotations are not errors.
3. Unusual or uncommon grammatical constructions aren't errors.

He also addresses some challenges to his (Chicago Statement) understanding of inerrancy:
1. Some say the Bible is only authoritative in areas of faith and practice.
Some groups from the late 1960s started to distinguish the word "infallible" from the word "inerrancy," where infallible meant that the authority of the Bible only extended to matters of faith and practice.  I suspect that he rightly describes the way the language evolved (93 n. 2).  He has a long paragraph on pages 93-94 where he argues that "the New Testament writers were willing to rely on the truthfulness of any part of the historical narratives of the Old Testament."

2. Some say the term inerrancy is a poor term.
His rejoinder is that "we often use nonbiblical terms to summarize a biblical teaching" (95).

3. Some say it's misleading to speak of inerrancy in the original manuscripts since we don't have them.
But their content is 99% assured.  Basically, "the current published scholarly texts of the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament are the same as the original manuscripts" (96).

4. Some say the biblical writers accommodated their messages in minor details to the false ideas current in their day or taught those ideas in an incidental way.
So, he says, doesn't that imply that God is a lying God?  What kind of a role model does that make God, a God who makes "white lies" (97).  Can't God use human language to communicate perfectly without having to affirm any false ideas.

5. Some say this overlooks the human side of Scripture, overemphasizing the divine aspect.

6. Some say there are clear errors in the Bible.
"There are many evangelical Bible scholars today who will say that they do not presently know of any problem texts for which there is no satisfactory solution" (99).

The chapter ends with some problems Grudem thinks follow from denying inerrancy:
1. It creates moral problems--should we imitate God and lie in small matters too?
2. If we deny inerrancy, can we really trust anything God says?
3. If we deny inerrancy, we make our own human minds a higher standard of truth that God's word itself.
4. If we think the Bible is wrong on some minor details, then we must also say it is wrong in some of its doctrines as well.

Evaluation
These are very unfortunate chapters to me.  They're unfortunate because we could have a much more helpful discussion of how God speaks through the Bible without all the misunderstandings that are "fundamental" to Grudem and his fundamentalism. We could have talked about the spiritual and sacramental quality of Scripture, whereby God mysteriously speaks to us and changes us. We could have talked about how God met the authors and audiences where they were at.

Instead, we're forced to get under the hood to see why his engine doesn't run so well sometimes.  He's not wired the thing correctly. It runs... it just doesn't run well.

Grudem's already acknowledged that his argument is circular--he assumes certain things and goes from there.  He also warns us about making our own human minds a higher standard of truth than the Bible. But since his argument is circular, he starts with the assumptions of his own mind as well, as I've already said repeatedly. In fact, because he doesn't dig into the probable assumptions of the texts themselves, his assumptions are far more his than those of the texts themselves.

This is a problem with his sort of inerrantist.  He thinks he has a high view of the text but isn't willing to let the texts themselves set their own agenda. So it turns out their high idea is what is important to them, not the texts themselves.  In practice, his method actually rapes and violates these texts repeatedly in the name of a so called "high idea."

What if the real situation, the one that actually listens to the biblical texts--rather than shoving preconceived definitions down their throat--goes like this:

1. God spoke to the people of the Bible mostly in their own categories, in their own thought categories.
2. God's speaking was more about changing their heart than giving them perfect understanding.
3. God has given us the Bible as a place to meet him and be changed by him, and his Spirit continues to walk with us today as we work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

We can still affirm that the Bible is inerrant in all that God affirms through it, infallible in all that God tries to do through it, authoritative in all that God commands through it. Grudem doesn't accept the incarnation principle fully.  He'll accept that a phrase like "the sun rises" is simply putting things in the perspective of the author. But he won't accept that "As David said" could be exactly the same thing. There are arbitrary boundaries to his own rules.

I'm also emphasizing in my wording that God is the authority behind the Bible. The words themselves, as all words, are capable of all sorts of meaning.  The meaning that is inerrant, infallible, and authoritative is the meaning God wanted and wants them to have. But it's all about God--the text is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Grudem arguably makes the Bible into a barrier between us and God and his god is the pop-up God he splices together from his out-of-context readings of the Bible rather than the immortal, invisible, real God-only-wise that stands behind it.

I said there are arbitrary boundaries to his rules.  So I'm with him that grammatical infelicities, loose quotations, and street Greek aren't errors. But why stop there.  What if some creative license was acceptable in ancient biography or history writing?  What if Genesis 1 is more poetic than literal? Why would those be errors if they were perfectly acceptable at the time of writing?

And why only inerrant in the original manuscripts?  Because your sense of God's speaking is so limited that you have to have a strong demarcation of what is in and what is out, of which text is the right one?  Funny, God doesn't seem to have been so concerned.  If God is really that concerned with the precise contents why didn't he reveal the list? Why didn't God reveal a list of the authoritative OT books in the gospels or Paul?  Why doesn't Revelation include a list of the NT books that are authoritative?  Why did God let the church debate such things for 400 years? Why didn't he preserve the original manuscripts? Why did he let the church, on your admission, overwhelmingly use the less original text for 1500 years?

The best answer is that God isn't nearly as concerned about these sorts of things as Grudem is. That God is primarily interested in a relationship with us, not having us memorize and regurgitate head knowledge. God meets us where we are at with our understanding and moves us along in our hearts and lives.

So let's quickly go through some of Grudem's claims. First, there is a difference between what might cause me doubt and what is true.  Let's say there was only one blind man that Jesus healed around Jericho, does that make it untrue that "in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"? Not at all. The truth in one part of Scripture is not contingent on the truthfulness of another part.  Truth is truth, no matter where it comes.

I actually agree with Grudem that the distinction made in the last part of the twentieth century between inerrant and infallible was somewhat of a false distinction, but not for the same reason.  Every word of the Bible was revealed in the language and categories of its audiences.  That means that even in matters of faith and practice we have to do some translation.

For example, the OT does not deny the existence of other gods like Dagon and Ba'al. It is henotheist rather than technically monotheist.  We call them demons in the New Testament.  The understanding of God's relationship to evil develops in the pages of the Bible as well. In Samuel, God sends evil spirits and tempts people. In Chronicles, Satan tempts and in James, God certainly doesn't tempt. So even in matters of faith and practice, we need to consider God's continuing relationship with his people to have a full picture of who he is. Matters of faith and practice in the Bible are also incarnated truths.

There is also something quite Victorian about Grudem's assumptions about lying. There is lying in a military context in the Bible (Rahab). If John 7:8-10 were not telling us about Jesus, I'm quite sure Grudem would consider it wrongful lying.  Grudem's preoccupations with precise history and such are part of his own sub-cultural assumptions. Think more in terms of teaching a child. It's more important to move them in the right direction than for them to understand everything.

So inerrancy is probably a poor term today, given the way it is used by fundamentalists like Grudem.  But it is usable, if we use it more generally and not as Grudem himself or the Chicago Statement does.  Obviously anything God taught or teaches through Scripture is without error if we understand it in context. Obviously anything God commanded or commands through Scripture is absolutely authoritative.  Obviously anything God intended and intends to do (e.g., to promise) through Scripture will not fail.

As Asbury Seminary puts it, "The Bible is without error in all it affirms." Then we get to work together to figure out what that is.

A key insight in all of this is to realize that the same words can be taken by different people to teach, command, or promise different things.  The God-breathed interpretation at any time is arguably a Spiritual one, and that is a key insight into understanding 2 Peter 1:20-21. Indeed, this has been a previous critique of mine in this series. Grudem assumes that the teaching, commanding, and promising of Scripture will always take place with the plain or literal sense of a text.

But this is not what the Bible itself actually does.  More complicated? Yes. More accurate? Yes. Grudem's wiring can work a good deal of the time, on the simple things. But his wiring will lead us to fight against God when things get more complicated.

Educational Microevolution

It occurred to me the other day that the current changes underway in education are a little like the peppered moth in England in the 17 and 1800s.  In the 1700s, before the Industrial Revolution, white peppered moths thrived because they blended into the trees. Black peppered moths, on the other hand, were easily seen by birds and so were much lower in population.

Enter the Industrial Revolution and the burning of coal all over England.  The trees became sooted and now, the population of black peppered moth began to thrive and the population of the white peppered moth took a nose dive.  In biology this is called natural selection--nature "selects" for survival the species that are most suited to adapt to a particular environment.

It occurred to me that we are seeing a similar shift in college education right now, especially in the online environment. The professor who nature will select tends to be more administratively gifted, one who gives relatively quick feedback and can manage more and more moving parts. This is especially true for online courses.

Relevance is another element. Somehow, a lot of colleges and universities have been able to get by with a frequent focus on truth for its own sake.  With the availability of online classes and the rise of community colleges, the stationery "come live here for 4 years" college won't be able to compete unless their greater value is somehow apparent, especially if they remain exorbitantly more expensive.

So the old professor who just lectures and talks about whatever research s/he's doing, of no interest or relevance to the student is a white peppered moth in an Educational Revolution. The ponderous, absent minded professor, the foreign grad student that no one can understand, they're not going to be selected.  The deep professor who leaves the student thinking, "It sure sounds like English but I haven't a clue what she's saying"... crow feed.

The college that specializes in the liberal arts, unless they're high end or have other programs to keep that sinking consumer ship afloat... bird prey.

A Robust Sense of Evangelism

Scot McKnight, in King Jesus Gospel has, along with N. T. Wright, refocused us on what the gospel actually is in the New Testament.  Despite the embarrassment of the Gospel Coalition, whose key players for some time have been trying their hardest to plug the leaks in their sinking ship.

Sorry, the truth doesn't care. The gospel is the good news that 1) our God reigns (Gospels) and that 2) Jesus is king (Paul), 3) along with all the good stuff that entails (Acts).  It's not about how to get saved and, although our salvation is part of the good news, it is a minor part.  It is more an implication of the gospel than the focus of the gospel. In Luke, the gospel is primarily good news to the poor and the disempowered (thus the GC conference this year where they will apply all their intellect to argue that the earth is flat).

Here's the next step.  Since the gospel is God and Jesus focused--not me focused, not my salvation focused--this has implications for what it means to "evangelize" and what "evangelism" is (since it is the verb, "to proclaim the good news") and what an "evangelist" is ("someone who proclaims the good news").

An evangelist is someone who proclaims the good news that our God reigns (Gospels) and that Jesus is king (Paul), along with all the good stuff that entails (Acts).  To evangelize is to proclaim to others the good news that our God reigns, that his kingdom made its Normandy landing in the ministry of Jesus (Gospels), that Jesus is God's king over the cosmos (Paul).  That proclamation is evangelism.

True, going would seem to be part of this evangelism and, yes, such preaching aims at a response.  What response?  Confession of the lordship of Jesus, of course, since he is king (Romans 10).  Repentance and submission to the rule of God, of course (Gospels).  Such a response of course means you will be saved, but that is a consequence.  The focus is on the reign of God and his Christ, not on me.

A final word on the Great Commission.  The Great Commission is about making disciples.  Nothing is mentioned about evangelism, although evangelism certainly fits with the Great Commission.  But evangelism is not mentioned.  You make disciples by 1) baptizing them and 2) teaching them.  Baptizing does get them in, but involved a confession of Jesus as Lord and thus submission to his kingship.  Becoming a follower was thus not a matter of praying a sinner's prayer or a moment of justification.

Once we have a more accurate understanding of the gospel, then we'll have to have a more robust sense of evangelism too.

1.5 Mark Part 2

continued from yesterday
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... It is easy for us to forget that Jesus participated fully in humanity. He suspended his knowledge of all things while he was on earth (e.g., Mark 13:32). Even though we believe he was God, on earth he had to learn who he was, and he had to learn God's will, just as we do.

Jesus taught, and he taught primarily in stories and riddles.  The primary example Mark gives us is Jesus' parable of the soils in Mark 4.  A farmer throws seed on four different kinds of soil: the path, rocky soil, soil where there were weeds, and good soil.  Birds snatch the first. The second has no root and so gets scorched by the sun. The third gets choked by weeds, and only the seed on the fourth soil thrives.

Jesus' point is that not everyone will respond appropriately to his news of the kingdom. Only the one who "has ears to hear" will hear and follow (4:9). Ironically, Jesus' own followers don't understand this riddle, a fact to which we will return in the next chapter.  Jesus' own disciples don't understand the parable whose point is that only those with faith will understand his riddles!

Inevitably, Jesus got into conflict.  He didn't go looking for it.  It inevitably came looking for him. When you are making as big an impact as Jesus was, some people are going to feel threatened. They're going to get jealous.  Some are just going to flat disagree with you. Jesus had his share of that, and eventually it grew so great that they put him to death.

Mark, Part 2
The turning point of Mark, as is often said, comes after Jesus acknowledges to Peter that he is the Christ, the expected anointed one of Israel (Mark 8:27-30).  The tone and direction of Mark changes from that point on.  Up to this point, everything has been, "go, go, go!"  Jesus has healed, he has cast out demons, crowds of immense proportions have followed him.

But now the tone changes.  Three times Jesus will tell his disciples that he is going to Jerusalem to die. There is a sense of foreboding and destiny. Although Jesus does still heal and the crowds still follows, he seems to spend more time privately with his key followers.

Mark 9 records the curious event of the Transfiguration, where Peter and James and John see Elijah and Moses appear with Jesus.  They will emerge as a core group of disciples within the larger group of the Twelve, even after the resurrection.  Unfortunately, James and John seemed to want such privileged roles. They got into conflict with the other disciples over their desire to have the highest roles in the coming kingdom (10:35-40).

Indeed, at another point the whole group of disciples were arguing over who would be the greatest when the kingdom would come (9:34).  They must have thought that they were going to Jerusalem for Jesus to become king, not to die.  We will return to the disciples' lack of understanding in the next chapter, a key theme of Mark...

The True Wesleyan ;-)

I decided to take some old blog posts from a while back and self-publish them.  The result is a short 48 page, $6.99 book called, The True Wesleyan.



I also Kindle-fied it ($2.99):



Here are the (very short) chapters:

1. The True Wesleyan
2. A Generous Tradition
3. A Heart-Oriented Tradition
4. God Is Love
5.  The Cross as Love
6.  Human Freedom
7.  Optimistic about Love
8.  Loving the Whole Person
9.  Loving into Social Structures
10.  The Importance of Faithfulness
11.  Scripture as Sacrament
12.  Looking Ahead

By the way, I can self-publish any of my blog series anyone likes ;-)  "The Antichrist," anyone?

1.4 More Mark

continued from here. I've had a writer's block on moving forward. Like a knot in a muscle, you just have to rub it out.
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The first 13 verses of Mark set the stage for Jesus' ministry.  We meet John the Baptist, and Jesus is baptized by John.  Jesus is driven to the desert where he is tempted in preparation for his mission.

Then 1:14-15 arguably give us the key verses of Mark. This begins the first half of the gospel in earnest (1:14-8:30).  What did Jesus preach?  He preached that the kingdom of God was arriving.  The climax of this section is arguably in 8:27-30 where Peter acknowledges for the first time that Jesus himself is the Christ, the earthly king of the kingdom. [1]

So we have the announcement of the kingdom at the beginning of this section, but the disciples do not yet fully know Jesus' role in that kingdom. He is simply its chief proponent, now that John the Baptist has been arrested.  But by the end of the section they acknowledge that he is in fact the Christ of that kingdom.

Jesus does several different kinds of things in the intervening verses. He recruits and trains followers. In Mark, recruiting Peter, Andrew, James, and John is the first thing he does after he starts preaching the kingdom (1:16-20). [2] Later he will call a tax collector named Levi (2:13-17). [3] Still later Jesus' followers will coalesce into 12 key individuals (3:13-19), probably symbolizing the restoration of the 12 tribes of Israel. Then Jesus sends them out to preach just as he has (6:6-13).

These 12 only scratch the surface of those who followed Jesus in Galilee. The story of Jesus feeding 5000 people one day alone points to a much larger group of Jesus-followers.  The early church understood these twelve to be unique in a way that none since have been or could be (e.g., Acts 1:25; 1 Cor. 15:5). And while Paul understood himself and others to be apostles as well, witnesses to the resurrection (1 Cor. 9:1), he also likely understood himself to be the last of this group (1 Cor. 15:8).

Nevertheless, the Great Commission tells us that making disciples of Jesus didn't stop here.  Jesus sends his disciples to go make other disciples. In Mark 6, Jesus sends out his disciples to assist in throwing demons out of power and in preparing people for the arrival of God's kingdom. In Matthew 28, his core followers are to teach his commandments to all the nations and to baptize them.

In recent times, we have tended to limit the Great Commission to convincing others to become Christians, but there is nothing so narrow in Matthew 28.  Becoming a follower of Jesus in Matthew is more than getting baptized.  It is even more than a process of learning Jesus' teachings. Becoming a follower of Jesus in Matthew means taking on Jesus' yoke (Matt. 11:28-30).  It involves being willing to be persecuted, even crucified because of following Jesus (Matt. 10:38).

A second thing that Jesus did was cast out demons. When Jesus did so, he was doing something much bigger than just helping one person out, although Jesus' exorcist ministry was a clear example of his compassion toward others. Rather, many Jews at the time believed that the earthly realm had come to be in the control of demonic forces since the earliest days of humanity. Therefore, when Jesus cast out demons, he was reclaiming the earth for God--the rule of God was returning to the land once more (cf. Luke 11:20). And he sent his own followers out to participate in this sign of God's approaching kingdom.

Certainly Jesus heals many people in the first half of Mark, perhaps the most obvious example of his compassion.  He heals Peter's mother-in-law (Mark 1:29-31). [4]  He heals a leper (1:40-45) and a paralytic (2:1-12).  He heals a man with a disabled hand (3:1-6) and someone who cannot speak or hear (7:32-37).  He heals a woman with a hemorrhage (5:35-43) and even raises a girl from the dead (5:25-34).

Some of the miracles he did transcended human healing.  On one occasion he multiples food to feed 5000 (6:33-44), on another 4000 (8:1-9).  He calms the sea (4:35-41) and walks on water (6:47-53). These events speak of a power from God that we would call supernatural today, transcending the laws of nature.

Jesus prayed.  Mark gives us only two verses on Jesus' temptation in the desert (1:12-13), but tells us elsewhere that Jesus sought on deserted places to pray (1:35). He would increasingly find it difficult to get alone for such things. If it wasn't the crowds seeking him out, then it was his followers seeking him out for the crowds. We can presume that this time alone with God not only recharged Jesus but also clarified for him his sense of God's will.

It is easy for us to forget that Jesus fully participated in humanity...

[1] In Mark's language, the kingdom of God is the kingdom of God, and thus God the Father remains the ultimate king of the kingdom.

[2]See chapter 5 of The Essential Jesus for more about the followers of Jesus.

[3] Our impulse to harmonize makes us want to equate Levi with the disciple Matthew. After all, in Matthew's version of this story, the name of this tax-collector is named Matthew. At the same time, there are some questions about this identification.  So a disciple Matthew is mentioned in Mark 3:18. If it was the same person as Levi, why wasn't he called Levi there as well.  Mark 2:14 says that Levi's father was Alphaeus, but Mark 3:18 identifies a James as the son of Alphaeus.  None of these observations preclude the possibility that Levi is another name for Matthew.

[4] It is important for some Christian traditions that the apostles not marry, but the most obvious reading of the New Testament is that almost all the apostles had wives. Cf. 1 Cor. 9:5.

The Turn of the Century WC: Black and Drury

For the last three weeks I've been reading through Black and Drury's, The Story of the Wesleyan Church So far:

Chaps 1-2  About Wesley and the origins of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in abolitionism
Chaps 3-4  About its activist early days that were low church, pro-women (and anti- some other things)
Chaps 5-6  The post-Civil War let down, when the best and brightest returned to the Methodists

Today, I'm looking at chapter 7, which brought the Wesleyan Methodists to the end of the 1800s and chapter 8, the birth of what would snowball into the Pilgrim Holiness Church.
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End of the Century Wesleyan Methodism
Three elements in this chapter seem to point to the most important events just before the turn of the century within the WM Church. The first is that they finally called it a "church" instead of a "connection" in 1891. The second was the founding of Houghton College, the first college venture that really stuck within the denomination. The third was the beginning of significant missions, in particular the sending of the Johnston's to Sierra Leone, West Africa in 1889. Father and son would die within five years.

Of great interest was also the founding of African-American conferences that were separate from the white conferences. This was not forced on these Wesleyans--they wanted to have their own districts--but it seems a defeat and that is how Black and Drury take it.  Surely there was another way to allow them to have their own connection while being full members of integrated districts.

Also of interest in this chapter is the move toward "pre-millennialism."  At the turn of the century, dispensationalism was becoming a strong force in America with its sense of a rapture, tribulation, and anti-Christ.  Up to that point, Black and Drury argue, Wesleyan Methodism had been "post-millennial," optimistic about the possibility of changing the world.  Enter the gloom of impending crisis, where things would get worse and worse until the second coming.

By the way, they were all wrong, weren't they? Over a hundred years ago the Left Behind types were preaching it was all going to happen ASAP and it didn't.  SO STOP IT!  Dispensationalism has only survived because of short term memory.  

Birth of the Pilgrim Holiness Church
Well, not exactly.  There were a number of holiness associations that rose in the late 1800s, several of which would later snowball into the Pilgrim Holiness Church. But the one later Pilgrims have always pointed to is the formation of the International Holiness Union and Prayer League that took place in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1897 in the home of Martin Wells Knapp.  That location would become God's Bible School.  Both the school and the paper he founded, The Revivalist, are still going strong. Knapp would die before he realized he had founded a church.

His co-founder was Seth C. Rees.  Rees was a Quaker, and I have occasionally mentioned elements of Quaker thought that I consider strengths of the Pilgrim heritage of the Wesleyan Church.  Holiness was the key basis for the new group.  This is the doctrine of a second experience that empowers a person not only to do the right thing but to do so gladly and easily. They were, in short, Pentecostals before tongues got mixed into the equation.

They were fiery preachers. They were entrepreneurial with a very loose organizational structure. "For decades, Pilgrims were more like a ragtag band than an orderly denomination" (104). Their motto was "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity."  Of course they saw a lot of non-essential things as essential, no doubt.

One thing they didn't know was the later wall fundamentalism created between social ministry and evangelism.  They preached getting saved, getting sanctified, the possibility of healing, and the soon return of Christ (the "fourfold gospel")... and they ministered in the slums, in prisons, started city missions, went to hospitals...  Like the Salvation Army, the Pilgrims were full blown "social" alongside their full blown "gospel."

Grudem: Authority of Scripture 2

... continued from yesterday
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So what is the authority of Scripture? It is, first of all, the authority of God.  Any authority the Bible has, it has because God stands behind it as the speaker/transformer.  When I read Grudem, I begin to fear that he has made the Bible into an idol, as if the Bible were now detached from God and could be worshiped as an end-in-itself.  But the Bible is a means to an end, to bring us to God and Christ. The Bible does not exhaust God and God can speak to us/change us in other ways too.

The Bible is thus the mediated authority of God, and it was mediated through people who lived in other times and places in "many and various ways," but chiefly through his Son (Heb. 1:1-2). One of the greatest ironies of Grudem's approach, a fundamentalist approach to Scripture, is that it has a hidden agenda for how Scripture can speak. It does not come to the Bible with a blank sheet of paper but with its own questions for the Bible to answer, not letting the Bible say what questions it wants to answer.  How you pose a question has everything to do with the answer you get.

So while Grudem quotes many verses, he has already decided what it means for the Bible to be truthful or what a "writing" is without realizing how deeply these sorts of categories lie in our cultural assumptions. For example, it is true that the word "scripture" means "writing," but Grudem just assumes that this means a writing in the ancient world had the basic functions and characteristics of writing for him today, a literate, post-printing press, educated individual.

But those who actually try to come to the ancient world would say that the ancient world was an oral culture such that even writings were read aloud and with an oral mindset.  This is probably why the early copyists of both the OT and NT documents seemed free to paraphrase the wording.  This is probably why the NT authors felt free to adjust the wording of OT texts. As a typical unreflective pre-modern, Grudem reads his own assumptions into the biblical text thinking and calls it the timeless meaning.

God can indeed speak directly to us through the words of Scripture, but the original revelations were written to people who have been dead for 2000 years and more.  That's what the texts actually say.  You and I are not the initial audience of the "thus saith LORD" of the prophets.  Not only are we not the audience but the genres are not uniform. Grudem acts like the primary purpose of a psalm or a narrative is to give us truth--thus a narrative's primary purpose would be to tell us what happened. This is an impoverished approach to such genres.

So apart from when the Spirit speaks to us directly through the words of the Bible, the books themselves want to be read as indirect revelation--words we can learn about God from by the way he spoke to and through others in various ways. God can certainly transform us through Scripture directly as well, but this is less of a matter of understanding as a matter of changing who we are. The more direct the change in understanding, the less we are reading the words for what they originally meant.

Third, the authority of Scripture is an incarnated authority.  This follows directly from the fact that it is a mediated authority. Once you have a deep understanding of how meaning works, you will recognize how wide the gulf is at times between us and the original audiences.  Our default sense of meaning (and Grudem's) is that words point to this timeless bank of meanings that all humans share in common. Not so.

Meaning is always local. The bank from which the meaning of words is drawn on any occasion is the local bank, and universal meaning only takes place when all locations have the same meaning in their banks. The deep sense of "sacrifice" in the ancient socio-cultural environment, for example, is not in the North American dictionary. We can read about what they did when they offered sacrifices but truly understanding how sacrifices worked in the psyche of an ancient, that's going to take a lot of doing for you and me.

In good pre-modern fashion, Grudem doesn't seem to realize how variable the meaning of words can be or, rather, he is overconfident that people with the Spirit will see the same meaning.  This is why I have described his understanding of the Bible as two-dimensional. It is superficial because he has no idea how differently he sees the world than the biblical writers did.

Because the authority of Scripture is mediated and incarnated, the authority of Scripture is the all-time of Scripture, and the "all time" of Scripture is the import of the whole of Scripture.  A "one-time" command of Scripture can teach me something, but it is not directly demanding something of me ("go and sell everything to the poor," spoken to one person). A "that time" command of Scripture ("cover your head because of the angels") is not directly demanding something of me. The ultimately authority of Scripture over me is the authority of the timeless take-away of the Bible, which is a function of the Bible taken as a whole, its varied pieces directed to different audiences integrated into a singular theology and ethic. This takes place more on the level of principle than of individual precept.

All of that is looking under the hood.  In practice, when it happens right, I love when Grudem says that, "the Holy Spirit speaks in and through the words of the Bible to our hearts and gives us an inner assurance that these are the words of our Creator speaking to us" (77).  When the Bible is functioning as Scripture, we don't need to know all the "below the surface" talk above.  God speaks to us.  God transforms us.

So why do I find fault with Grudem?  Because I do not believe he rightly hears the Spirit at many points.  So if his spiritual engine isn't working right, then it makes sense to get under the hood and get clarity on where his machine isn't working right. Ultimately, the fundamentalist approach to Scripture inadvertently makes the Bible into a barrier between us and God.  It results in a Bible that, rather than pointing beyond itself to the real God, creates a skewed picture of God, flattened by its false rules for what the Bible can and cannot say. It makes the Bible an end-in-itself rather than a sacrament of God's speaking and transformation.

Grudem: Authority of Scripture

Now continuing my review of Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology: http://cafetutorials.blogspot.com/2012/07/christian-theology.html
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It is fascinating to read Grudem's footnotes, because in them you can probably see the critiques of the years since this book first came out.  It is also important to realize that these critiques surely have not come from the faithless.  After all, this is not the sort of book a person without Christian faith would even read.  The critiques have almost certainly come from other Christians, people like me who see in Grudem's theology a well-intentioned disaster.

For example, there is a revealing section in this chapter where Grudem responds to the objection that his version of the authority of Scripture is a circular argument.  A circular argument is an argument that assumes its conclusion as it tries to make its conclusion.  For example, what if I were to say something like, "You can trust everything I say because I never lie."

Grudem's response: Of course it's circular, just like all appeals to an ultimate authority (78-79).  This at least seems very clever on the surface.  What he is saying, very badly, is that ultimate starting points are generally assumptions rather than premises that can be proven. And that is true. We use basic reason without really being able to prove it. We expect ideas to cohere with each other without being able to prove that coherence is an indicator of truth. Postmodernism has emphasized our uncertainty about such things and basically said that life "works" when we operate on these sorts of assumptions.

But then we make some observations. First, the Bible isn't really the same sort of "ultimate authority" as the ultimate assumptions he compares it to--things like reason, logical consistency, or empirical data (79).  He's not comparing "like" things. In fact, Grudem's very assumptions about what it means for the Bible to be true are based on the sort of ultimate assumptions he is contrasting the Bible with! The basic reasoning and coherency he implies are not the ultimate authorities for him--he uses them in every sentence.  In fact, they stand at the heart of his definition of the truthfulness of Scripture.

So what does he really mean when he says the Bible s an ultimate authority? Surely he means the set of specific truth claims he thinks he is getting from Scripture are assumptions without need for proof.  But this is something different from ultimate criteria for truth, which turn out to be the same as those he is trying to defend himself against. He still assumes that if the Bible is true, the world will correspond to it. And he still claims that for the Bible to be true, its parts will cohere with one another. And he claims that the truths he finds in Scripture will work in the real world.  He still operates with the same criteria of truth we learn about in philosophy: correspondence, coherence, pragmatism.

The Bible is thus not the same kind of "ultimate authority" as the tests for truth we have just mentioned. The Bible for Grudem rather provides the content of truth. But these truth claims are not "necessary truths."  They are assertions that could in theory be true or false.  Not so with basic reasoning. If we do not assume basic reasoning, we cannot talk meaningfully at all about anything. Communication of any kind disintegrates.

So Grudem is right to say (badly) that the ultimate foundations of truth will involve unprovable assumptions. However, the content of the Bible largely does not involve that kind of assumption. The claims Grudem thinks he gets from the Bible do not have the nature of unprovable assumptions.  You know the child's game.  I say something.  You say "Why?"  I give a more basic answer.  You say, "Why?"  We keep this game going until I say something like, "Just because" or "Because I said so."

When you get to a "Just because" answer, you've hit assumption (which, again, Grudem clumsily calls an ultimate "authority"). Certainly some of the assumptions of the Bible may fit into this category.  The philosopher Alvin Plantinga thinks that the existence of God is such a "warranted Christian belief."  But "Jesus healed a blind man on his way to Jericho" is hardly a claim of that sort. So what sounded very clever at first, a snappy come back, actually doesn't make sense in the way he has posed it.

Even more clever than Grudem's resort to "all ultimate authorities are circular" is his fail safe device.  Since everyone with the Holy Spirit recognizes his understanding of the Bible, anyone who disagrees with him obviously doesn't have the Holy Spirit.  It's incredibly convenient and fitting for a 5 point Calvinist to say something of this sort.  No doubt if I were predestined, I would immediately recognize that he's right.  So much pressure!

Of course I could use this same argument to claim that the world is run by little green men that only the enlightened see.  That's how cars run, you know.  There's one green man on the top of each piston and another one on the bottom. What looks like gas exploding is really these little green men farting back and forth. Don't believe me?  It's because you're evil and God hasn't revealed it to you.

I'm not discounting the need for faith--not at all. There are much more intelligent versions of "truth is revealed" than the one Grudem seems to assume here.  For example, Kierkegaard believed that the most important truths in life were subjective, a matter of blind faith. Karl Barth's Dogmatics and the movement for radical Christian orthodoxy see basic Christian faith as matters we should be "unapologetic" about, where "apologetics" is the attempt to prove Christian claims using "evidence that demands a verdict." Rather, they would say, they are things we believe by faith.

But, again, the Bible isn't really the same kind of literature as Barth's Dogmatics or the kinds of truths that Kierkegaard takes a leap of faith over. Barth writes in a somewhat poetic way as if to say, "The truth of God is beyond what can be captured in simple propositions.  We try to point to it in human language in analogical terms."  Kierkegaard's leaps of faith are not so much leaps about truth-claims but about deep existential truths.

In the end, Grudem's way of reading the Bible doesn't fit with the Bible itself. He reads certain words in the Bible in a certain way and concludes that the Bible teaches certain things about itself.  But when it turns out that the way he is reading it is untrue to its own nature, the entire foundation for his theological enterprise crumbles. That is not to say that there is not truth in his thinking. Truth is bigger than the method by which we arrive at it.

But Grudem's method and his way of using the Bible disintegrate. First, as we already showed above, he uses the very tools of correspondence and coherence he wants to trump with the Bible, Second, he uses all sorts of non-biblical tools like textual criticism and of course his chapter on canon must thoroughly rely on factors outside the Bible.  Third, he does not understand how genre impacts meaning--the Bible does not present itself as a set of truth claims. Fourth, he has a naive understanding of language, as if words have something like fixed meanings, which means, fifth, that he doesn't understand how context determines meaning, as I have said previously.  We see this in his "proof-texting," ripping words from the Bible and reading them in a way that makes sense in his context, rather than listening to their full meaning in their original context.

2 Timothy 3:16 is an excellent illustration of 1) the fact that his ultimate assumptions come from outside the Bible and 2) that he is not self-aware in his use of them. All Scripture is God-breathed and beneficial for teaching, correction, discipline, and moral training. Because of Grudem's assumptions, he assumes such functions will come from the literal meaning of the OT text. He would not have to, by the way, he could see the Spirit-illumined meaning of the text as something different from what it seems to mean literally to him.

But ultimately, the inspired meaning that NT authors often saw was a different meaning than the original one. Paul for example finds it hard to believe that God would be concerned with oxen (1 Cor. 9:9). No, wasn't Deuteronomy 25:4 "entirely" referring to the Christian mission, and how those who work for the sake of the gospel should be materially supported by those to whom they minister. In other words, the God-breathed meaning is an allegorical one, not a literal one.

You run the risk of losing your faith if you try to maintain Grudem's hermeneutic and are exposed to any true expert on the meaning of the Bible. For most people blind faith does not work well when reality pummels you, and if faith is not at least minimally reasonable, what would that say about God's desire for us to put our faith in him? It works fine, of course, if you think God has predestined certain people to see it. Indeed, irrationality becomes a badge of honor.

So what is the authority of Scripture...

Summary: Christian Political Philosophy

Wrote this summary today:
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Throughout history, people have lived under various forms of government. While many of us are privileged today to live in places where we can participate in our own governance, most throughout history have had little say in how they were governed or about the rules of society. We can argue that the representative democracies of today are perhaps the best form of governance for large numbers of people even though this form of government did not exist in biblical times. For this reason we can’t say it is a biblical form of government—indeed, almost all forms of government can be run in a Christian way. But the way a representative democracy tries to “love” every individual, give each person certain basic rights, and take everyone into consideration not only fits with the core principles of the Bible and Christianity in general. It probably fosters those values as strongly or more strongly than any other form of government.

The Enlightenment sense of a social contract seems not only a very helpful but a very Christian way to conceptualize how we live together with one another in a society today. Every individual is part of a society and everyone should be taken into consideration when formulating the rules of that society. God does not show favoritism to people because of their social status, gender, or race (Gal. 3:28), and so everyone needs to be afforded certain basic rights. This translates into the love command, since “love does no wrong to a neighbor” (Rom. 13:10).

Within this framework, a society that is structured in such a way as to bring about a maximum amount of true happiness is a better one than a society that only leads to the happiness and pleasure of a few. Your understanding of God can come into play here. If you believe as I do that God wants people to choose him freely, then you will resonate with an approach to society that allows its individuals extensive freedom—even to live life unwisely—except when it hurts or impinges on the rights of others. But the tension between individual and societal happiness will always be a matter of give-and-take, following the whims of a nation at a given time. While a Christian might favor individual freedom when it does not affect others, Christians will surely err more on the side of helping the many than defending the self-oriented freedom of a few.

The idea of bringing about maximal happiness for a society was a founding principle behind capitalism as an economic system when it began in the 1700s. This is why a Christian can potentially support such a system, because of the principle of loving one’s neighbor. But it is also easy to lose sight of the reason why we can support a capitalistic system. The New Testament sounds very strong warnings about how money can work against fundamental Christian values. Money brings a power that, given human nature, is more likely to oppress others than to work for their benefit. We can cautiously endorse capitalism if we believe it will bring about a greater good for a greater number. While its fundamental orientation around one’s individual self-interest is fundamentally unchristian, we as Christians can support it when it is working in everyone’s best interest.

Greek of Romans 3:21-31

Did this reading of the Greek with translation for a class:

Competencies of a Minister

1. A sense of calling and vocation
2. Good personal priorities
3. A personal and corporate spirituality/relationship with God
4. A sense of how people change, who you are, who you should become, how to get there
5. A sense of how culture affects ministry on every level
6. Knowledge of biblical content
7. Ability to apply Scripture with integrity
8. Knowledge of orthodox Christian theology and how to apply it
9. Knowledge of denominational/church theology and how to navigate it
10. Sense of both global and local Christian history to give perspective, wisdom to draw on
11. Ability to lead, manage, and administrate a local church
12. Knowledge and skills to relate properly to denominational/church political context
13. Ability to participate in God's local and global mission (serving, evangelizing, multiplying)
14. Ability to facilitate the worship of a local community
15. Ability to facilitate a congregation's experience of the Word of God
16. Ability of how to facilitate the corporate formation of everyone in a congregation (discipleship)
17. Ability to facilitate good relationships and individual wholeness in a congregation
18. The ability to assess every area of ministerial life and implement appropriate changes

Rhetorical Guide for the Political Season

Be looking for the following good and bad uses of speech and rhetoric.  Find Waldo in every speech and advertisement.  P.S. All the candidates are "he's" this time, thus the "he's" below.
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Straight talk: Words being used in their normal ways.  Candidate means what he says.

Figurative speech: Words being used in a less than literal way.  Comparisons are being made to say such and such is like something else.

Hyperbole/Overstatement: Making the point by over-making the point, exaggerating to make the point

Understatement: Making the point by stating things much more modestly than they actually are

Humor: Making a joke, often one that makes fun of an opponent, either in good fun or as an attack

Irony: When something said has a second meaning that in some way intersects curiously with the primary meaning, often unintended. One example is when you say the exact opposite of what you mean

Sarcasm: a jab or cutting remark, often through irony or understatement

Disagreement: Sometimes candidates just flat disagree.  They just have an honest difference of conclusion or interpretation.

Misplaced blame: Blaming the wrong party for something

Misrepresentation: When a candidate knows that what he's saying is misleading or skews the actual facts, often intentionally but can also happen unintentionally

Glaring omission: Some fact or information omitted that would significantly change the basic impression

Hypocrisy: When a candidate criticizes another candidate for something he actually believes or did himself

Flat-out Lie: When a candidate looks you straight in the eye and tells you something he knows isn't true.

Some Fallacies to look for:

Fallacy of Diversion: Where you change the subject or the issue

Circular Reasoning: Where your conclusion is part of your argument

Appeal to emotion: Where you get the audience's emotions stirred up and pretend that's an argument

Appeal to improper authority: When you treat someone as an expert who isn't

Attack the person: Where you don't actually attack a position but the person with the position

After this, because of this: When you assume that something that came before something else is the cause

False Alternative: When you present something as an either/or that isn't, when there's a third alternative

The Synoptic Question

Made this video to slip into the one assignment in the MDiv curriculum where it seems potentially relevant:

According to the light they have...

One of the concerns I have always had about my denomination, the Wesleyan Church, is that because we are not a very theologically reflective denomination, we have a tendency simply to absorb whatever is in the water of our bedfellows.  In the late twentieth century, we were church growthies, mainly interested in growing ever larger churches.  It was a time of what Webber called "pragmatic evangelicalism," multiplication without much on the brain other than multiplying numbers.

During that time, for those few Wesleyans who studied Bible or theology in any depth, it was a fairly innocuous time because no one really cared.  The church emphasized growing numbers, leaving those at the Wesleyan colleges to do their thing. A good trend in one respect is going on right now, namely, that Wesleyan colleges, large churches, and church leadership are in greater contact than ever. These are arguably the three main centers of leadership in the denomination right now.

It is also a time when we are in greater contact with the broader evangelical world than ever before, and this has potential consequences, where theological options can accidentally go away or be inadvertently modified. For example, in a move designed to count something deeper than mere prayers for conversion, Wesleyan districts have moved to counting baptisms instead. The idea is that we are looking for more substantial commitments to Christ than the mere assent of words.

Here's the danger.  The Wesleyan Church has in its history both Wesleyan Methodists who could baptize infants and Pilgrims who, like the Salvation Army and Quakers, did not baptize at all.  To me, these elements of our history should stay on the books as options.  Few Wesleyans today baptize infants. Few Wesleyans today will not be baptized at all.  But both reflect a fundamental theology that says, "Baptism itself does not save you.  It is an outward sign of an invisible grace, and the grace can exist without the sign."

I was thinking today about another idea that was previously quite acceptable at least in Pilgrim circles. I heard a story about a former Pilgrim general official who on his deathbed felt spiritually inadequate. The quote I heard was that "surely Seneca will get into the kingdom before me, given the light I've had." Seneca was a Roman moralist, a good man who tried to help Nero become a better person. Nero put him to death. As far as we know, Seneca never heard about Jesus, although there is an old tradition that he and Paul died at around the same time and met each other.

What this old Pilgrim was expressing was the Quaker idea that God judges us according to the light we have. Although Wesley didn't have this idea, it is an extension of his idea of prevenient grace, a grace that seeks us out long before we realize it. Chris Bounds once told me that although Wesley didn't have this idea, it was a natural implication of his theology. In short, it is more the Calvinist tradition that would consign those who have never had a chance to hear about Jesus to hell. It is in better keeping with the Wesleyan tradition to wonder if, on the basis of Christ, some will be saved because they have responded appropriately to the light they have, even though they have never heard of Jesus.

Flash forward to today. As Wesleyans make connections, we should be careful to recognize that while we have much in common with other evangelicals, we are not always exactly the same. For example, we may agree with the vast majority of, say, the Lausanne Conferences. But it would be regrettable if, not realizing our own history and the strengths of our tradition, we inadvertently lost some of its richness because we didn't know what we were doing.

Wesleyans, as long as they are Wesleyans, will always be somewhat uneasy partners with broader evangelicalism.  We have our own history, and there has always been debate over whether we belong or don't belong. I suspect that if we get too comfortable with the title, we've changed without realizing it.

Attention Deficit Generation...

I am cursed to have a short attention span. But I think it has made me a more interesting teacher/preacher/writer over the years. If I start to bore myself, I figure it's time to switch up what I'm saying in some way.  I admire the way Seedbeds has set up the 7 minute seminary--just about the current attention span.

Consider what text messaging and smart phones are doing to us--and the purpose is not to pretend we can change it.  If we can't deal with it, we're dead.  If education can't lasso Facebook type things, it's dead.  The "no lap tops in my class" approach is the sign of a loser teacher, someone time is going to run over like an avalanche.  The "switch-task" mentality is here for the long haul, and if you can't deal with it, you're not.

This is why things have to begin with the attention grabber.  The novel/movie starts best in the middle of the story, otherwise you've lost the audience a half hour before it gets good.  The curriculum needs to start with what is perceived to be immediately relevant--you can go deep later.  Give a problem that needs solved.  Don't hold a session on how to do PowerPoint. Come alongside me while I'm designing a PowerPoint for my next class.

We learn by doing.  We fall asleep in a lecture--and that goes for traditional preaching as well. Don't give me all the background in preparation for the juicy stuff and expect me to still be in the room when you get there.

Welcome to the new common sense.

"Surviving Success" (Black and Drury on the WC)

For the last three weeks I've been making my way through Bob Black and Keith Drury's magnificent new Story of the Wesleyan Church.

So far we've learned:
Chaps 1-2  About Wesley and the origins of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in abolitionism
Chaps 3-4  About its activist early days that were low church, pro-women (and anti- some other things)

I can think of no better title to capture chapters 5-6 than their own title for chapter 6: "Surviving Success."  The success in question is of course emancipation of the slaves. It called into question the very reason for the church's existence.  With the abolitionist cause over, why continue as a denomination?

10-15% of the church went back to the Methodist Episcopal Church.  In fact, almost all the "best and brightest" exited, including Luther Lee and pretty much all the founders of the connection.  It looks like a really bad decision was made by the grass roots (against the leadership) not to merge with the Methodist Protestant Church. Adam Crooks, the church planter who went to North Carolina before the Civil War, looks to be about the only great leader who stayed, and he wrestled strongly with it.

Black and Drury do a good job of these chapters. They don't have the pessimistic tone of my take-away, but these years were frankly depressing.  After founding Wheaton College and Adrian College, the WMs lost them both because of financial issues. We lost having Asa Mahon in our history because the grass roots refused to merge with the Methodist Protestants.  There was even a 12 year stint from 1879-91 where they backed off on the ordination of women. Laura Smith Haviland left for the Quakers.

The only bright light I see is that the WMs seem to have had the right positions on civil rights for the newly freed slaves.  They opposed President Andrew Johnson's support for Black Codes and veto of a federal Civil Rights bill.  They opposed the KKK when a lot of churches were giving them members.

But you wonder how different church history might have looked if the WMC had merged with the Methodist Protestants, a group twice as large.  Might not have the Free Methodists merged with such a church? Most of the MPs eventually merged back into the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1939.

P.S. Although the WMs were Republicans, they thought Lincoln too soft on slavery because he was a gradualist (wanted to abolish slavery slowly).  It all proved academic anyway.

2c Revelation cont (bib theo series)

This post continues my series on biblical theology.  Thus far:

1 Introduction to Biblical Theology
2a Revelation (From Text to Scripture)
2b Revelation (NT Understanding of Scripture)

With this post I want to finish the section "From Text to Scripture."
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Another key insight is to recognize that this entire way of talking about revelation focuses on the head, on understanding. One of the insights of modern times, no doubt known informally throughout history, is that there is much more to us than what is merely going on in our conscious minds and our uttered words.  Our words are only a shadowy reflection of what the Bible often calls our hearts.

The "heart" is a metaphor for the part of us that orients our actions.  It is our will and the longings that most direct it.  To expand the words of 1 Samuel 16:7, "God looks on the heart." In that passage, Samuel is implying that external appearance can be deceiving. But the words we say are part of our external appearance.  And as it has turned out, the mere words of our unspoken mind also turn out to be often superficial to our true motivations and desires.

Truly powerful revelation would not just tell us how to think.  It would change us.  It would change our desires and our will to act in certain ways.  To use an often repeated distinction, we would know God in a personal sense and not just in the manner of "head knowledge."

To think of the Bible only or even primarily in terms of telling us what to think is not only horribly myopic.  It is fundamentally skewed.  It is skewed first because it does not take into account the actual genres of the Bible itself.

A narrative does have implications for what we are to think but they are implicit in the story. More fundamentally, a story draws you in. You identify with one of the characters. The story can reveal who you really are and what you should be. This is a much more transformative and existential operation than merely collecting a set of beliefs.

The psalms largely do not tell us what to believe or even how to act.  They are catalysts for us to express our feeling of sorrow, anger, and hope.  This is an emotional, not primarily a cognitive function.

The bottom line is that the genres of the Bible do not translate most naturally into a set of propositional beliefs. They are much more matters of the heart and the will than the mind.  They involve the mind. They have implications for the mind, but it is the mind on a more fundamental level than some credo or set of beliefs.

A second skew is the fact that the vast majority of biblical texts were written to address audiences in the distant past.  Paul's letters addressed the situations of local churches in the ancient Mediterranean world. The books of the Old Testament were written for ancient Israel.  It's sacrificial law related to sanctuaries that have been gone for millennia.  Its civil law to a nation that has not existed for the same amount of time. Even the gospels implicitly addressed a different time and place.

We can certainly draw timeless truths from the Bible, but we do so with most integrity when we are fully aware of the distance between then and now, between their contexts and our contexts. If we are thus to use the traditional model of revelation, then, we must think of these books first as God's revelations to them.  We are not them.  These books were at least written to them.  In terms of truths, we must then determine how to translate those truths to our contexts.

On the other hand, if we see revelation more on personal and transformative terms, then we often take away the timeless without realizing that we are not reading the words with the same import they might originally have had.  Through the Spirit, we experience them as God wants us to. The danger is of course that we can be (and often are) mistaken in what God is saying or trying to do in us. This is why we best read Scripture together, in fellowship. This is why it is good for us to have scholars around who have done their homework on the likely original meanings...

Next weekend maybe: God's speakings

Listen to the Candidates Themselves

I don't know whether the Citizen's United case went the right way or not, but I do think it is unfortunate either way.  I just don't see the ability for those with massive financial resources to inundate the media with "partisan stuff" as a net positive in any way, shape, or form.  The decision has made things worse than ever, in my opinion, and that's a bi-partisan position (thus the McCain-Feingold Reform Act).

[By the way, this is why (as I've said before) the old, "vote for a Republican so that we can have anti-abortion judges" is a bait and switch, not nearly as slam-dunk as we often pretend.  There are far more consequences for the Clarence Thomas type judge than the reversal of Roe vs. Wade that has never come. Agree or disagree with the type of decisions this kind of judge makes, but don't pretend it's about abortion. So far it's not been about abortion at all but entirely about things like this Citizen's United decision.]

That is all preface and aside.  My point is that there is a lot of smoke and mirrors in the superpack commercials.  It should not be trusted on either side.  If we want to know what the candidates stand for, we should listen to what they themselves are saying and the advertisements that they themselves approve.

Are they themselves saying false things? Almost certainly.  But it seems to deteriorate even more the further you get from the individual candidate. I'm resolved not to hold Romney or Obama accountable for anything in the ads of their superpacks, only for what they themselves say in the ads they themselves endorse because, frankly, their own superpacks turn me off to them.

Did Citizens United go the right way?  I don't know.  But I refuse to be the dupe of these superpacks.  I'll enact campaign finance reform on my own--and intelligence--by ignoring them.

3.2 Grudem: NT Canon

... continued from yesterday
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Someone who sees the Bible as Scripture is going to agree with Grudem that the books of the New Testament are the right books and that no more books should be added to the Bible. But there is a dreamy quality to the way he unfolds it that again is more like a two-dimensional legend with flat characters than reality. And there's no reason for it other than a compulsion for certainty.

Ironically, there is a great deal of "common sense" to his argument that implies what he will not tell you--he cannot rely on the Bible itself for the answers to which books are in the canon. This is a massive hint of the inadequacy of his overall view of Scripture. When it comes to justifying the contents of Scripture he must resort to a common sense completely outside of the text.

So it is "not accidental" that Revelation comes last or that Genesis comes first in the Christian canon 63).  It "must" be that way. Why? Because it makes sense to him. Smile. Or is because there is a circularity to your argument, Wayne? Convinced that the Bible as it stands has to be the canon, you will find any argument that sounds like it makes sense to justify it?

What's the bottom line?  It is because we can have confidence in "the faithfulness of God" (65). I agree. But where was that faithfulness manifested?  Say it; say it.  In the church.  AD367. He acknowledges it. No writing prior to 367 has the same list of New Testament books that are now in our canon.  AD397 before any official recognition of these books as the New Testament canon anywhere that we know of. Looks like the church wrestled a little with the question--and that it wasn't the first order of business (which contradicts the all-importance these issues have for his theology).

His argument for the finality of the New Testament canon gives a glimmer of depth. If Christ is the final revelation, then it makes sense that the canon would not be far behind. This Christ-focused approach points us toward substance, revelation as something more than words, something deep and cosmic. But Grudem is so written word focused that this hint of depth comes only because he has no recourse in the biblical text itself. There's no text that says, "And with Revelation, the canon is closed." Grudem himself admits that the words about adding and subtracting were about the book of Revelation itself, not the Bible or the New Testament as a whole (65).

Ultimately, the collection of the canon--and the collection of doctrine and ethics--require mechanisms that are outside the biblical texts themselves. Some external organizing principle is required to determine the limits of the canon, as well as to systematize biblical teaching. Grudem is forced to engage such factors in this chapter, but he will return to pretending they are not at work in later chapters. His answer is actually quite good: we must rely on the faithfulness of God... in the church, through the Spirit to affirm the canon of Scripture.

Of course those who argue for the Majority Text (roughly that behind the KJV) use this argument as well--surely a faithful God would have preserved the precise text.  Of course the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches use this argument as well--surely a faithful God would have preserved the right interpretations and applications of these texts.

Again, Christians will agree with the destination.  These are the books that belong in the New Testament canon.  Historically, though, that conclusion was won with far more disagreement and real debate than Grudem imagines.  He imagines that it was almost obvious from the very beginning that Paul's writings were Scripture, that the gospels were Scripture. Galatians 2 points to much more conflict and disagreement in the early church. The real story was much more real, much more three-dimensional, like real history.