Undeception

Confession: I find less and less about science that thrills me the way it used to.

While I used to – and many people I associate with still do – greet the news of a scientific discovery or advancement with the geeky equivalent of a fist pump, a whoop, and a holler, for me nowadays it’s more like how I feel when a close friend’s child poops in the potty for the first time. Sure, I’m duly glad for the child and happy for her parents, and hopeful about the financial boon attending the chance for my friend to start spending less on diaper purchases. But apart from the notable lack of personal investment in their situation, we parents of older kids know that it’s actually rare indeed that a single deposit in the potty makes the child potty-trained–it may be months before she does it again. There’s satisfaction to be enjoyed at the milestone and what it might mean for the future, but it’s usually premature to declare victory.

This reaction of mine is probably just a phase, as I’m just increasingly unnerved by the triumphalistic fanfares of scientism. A pronounced pro-science movement has sadly been necessitated by resistance to science among Fundamentalist and conservative Evangelical Christians, but overcompensation has yielded an overweening, cultish reverence for science, with its most ardent devotees treating every scientific discovery as a nail in God’s coffin. It’s this that’s driving the growth of the New Atheism movement.

I’m always looking for ways to mitigate this overreaction and to integrate a healthy appreciation for science into a similarly cautious confidence in Christian theology. So when I read this recent (now two-month old) article by James K. A. (aka Jamie) Smith in Christianity Today, “What Galileo’s Telescope Can’t See,” I was happy it added some things to the discussion worth thinking about.

Our sensibility (following the late Robert Webber) should be an “ancient-future” one: The church will find gifts to help it think through postmodern challenges by retrieving the wisdom of ancient Christians. The goal is not to simply repeat ancient formulations while sticking our heads in the sand; rather, the contemporary church—and contemporary Christian scholars—can learn much from the habits of mind that characterized church fathers like Athanasius and Augustine.

The main thrust is that when believers encounter challenging scientific evidence, they shouldn’t close their eyes, cover their ears, and shout their existing theological constructs at the top of the lungs. Rather, we should look to the example of the historical church and learn to “foster the Christian imagination to underwrite more creative approaches.” Smith cites councils such as Chalcedon as having delivered cleverly and creatively derived theological resolutions to science/religion conflicts. The danger Smith is trying to put his finger on more or less amounts to what happens when you pit science and religion opposite one another in a fact fight, in a fashion typical of Western Christianity. He’s arguing that “creative” ways of retooling and upholding earlier agreed-upon beliefs to account for scientific revelations are needed to help heal the science/religion divide.

But I want to shift this a bit: the contentious science/religion divide is only superficially attributable to science offering answers that our theologies have yet to account for. Coming up with clever and henceforth authoritative rationalizations to make sure new data is consistent with what we already believe doesn’t seem all that different from “sticking our heads in the sand” while refusing to admit that this is what we’re doing. This is not a sufficient answer; we must dig a bit further down.

The deeper cause for the rift is trying to use either science or religion as a skeleton key to unlock the answers to both practical and more existential questions. Gould’s NOMA principle is rejected no less by Evangelical Christians than it is by atheists like Jerry Coyne with his fierce denunciation of “accomodationism”. Now, I’m not talking about the dubious apologetic claim about “different kinds of knowing”; I’m referring to “different kinds of questions” which we answer in the most practical ways we can considering the intractability of epistemological indeterminacy. Too many people talk about a “war between science and religion” and in so doing confuse the essentially incidental conflicts between specific scientific data and particular religious beliefs with the more fundamental question of whether science and religion can in theory coexist without falling all over each other trying to better answer the same questions. It’s not, “How do my truth claims need to make way for competing truth claims?” but, “Which kinds of observations are the most useful for which aspects of our lives?”

Science and Religion are portrayed to be in harmony in the Tiffany window “Education” (1890). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I view discovery of more accurate understandings of our physical universe as a (literal) godsend that should if anything highlight that our dependence cannot be on fallible, ever-changing intellectual assumptions, but can only rest on the basis of our faith, which is God Himself. I see the Church, the Bible, and other forms of tradition as candles that serve as guides that focus our life-efforts by teaching us to reject rationalist/positivist pat answers to encounter the meaning of our God-filled universe in the ways of our ancient forebears. Philosophically, scientific inquiry and religious belief stand much more often back-to-back than face-to-face; the latter stance is usually the result either of religion trying to answer (or dismiss) “how” or science trying to answer (or dismiss) “why”.

I’m not trying to draw too sharp a distinction between “how” and “why” questions: we’re not looking at two different objects, but merely describing the object differently. As Christians we cannot help believe that God is – somehow – a fundamental part of the “how”, and atheists must be forgiven for believing that a material-only universe must generate its own answers to “why”. What needs to be avoided are the turf wars that result from either side caustically belittling the answer the other side gives from within its own area of expertise. We need more theistic and atheistic representatives to agree to avoid flaunting the boundary line.

Unfortunately, the necessary commitment to letting science’s tentative answers to “how the universe works” questions override our forbears’ answers to those questions is dependent on a much less rigid system of doctrines and a much less hegemonic role of influence over our doctrines coming from the historical theological community than much of Western Christianity will tolerate. But Christianity has never been about giving definitive answers to “how the universe works”, nor even all that much about the “how God works in our universe” question. Christianity supplies us with meaning by instructing us “how to live in God.”

When we find scientific data that steps on our theology’s toes, we have to realize that our theology may well have been camped out on the wrong side of the boundary and withdraw gracefully. But we should also be on the lookout and be willing to hold the line when proponents of scientism make invalid claims to our inheritance. There is much work that can be done from within the demilitarized zone.

The New Testament, taking its cue from certain passages in the Old Testament, often makes the point that what God considers acceptable righteousness is not righteousness through rote obedience to the Law (e.g. Romans 3.21). This sets up two major answers to the question of what God does consider acceptable righteousness that have been championed by different theologies.

These thoughts are in my mind because I recently heard someone talking about Paul’s teaching that righteousness could not be achieved through the Law. Now, since the first few centuries we’ve tended to blur the distinction between the “Law” (a.k.a. the Jewish Torah) and works-based rituals, including even divinely mandated rules; there’s a good basis for this conceptually, so I’ll let that convention stand for now. Anyway, it occurred to me that there are two very different follow-ons to the statement, “Righteousness cannot be achieved through works of law (or Law)…”

1) “…therefore, God supplies a means to accomplish positional righteousness.”

The solution to the problem that has perhaps the most currency today is the idea of God’s intervention in Jesus, in whom perfect righteousness is fulfilled. For these Christians, righteousness is treated as something of a ticket good for admission into God’s Kingdom (not to say “heaven” alone). Since we cannot afford in our poverty of holiness to purchase this ticket, we must depend on a deep-pocketed donor who has sufficient wealth in righteousness.

That is, our “position” as “in Christ” makes us virtually righteous. In essence, He creates an ad hoc law that will allow Him to bring us into good standing with Him despite our remaining at odds with His standards in every other possibly realistic sense.

As I understand it, some Catholics who accept this solution (and not all necessarily do) nevertheless insist that we are responsible for “paying back” as much as we can afford and letting Christ teach us to acquire greater righteousness to show our faithfulness and love. Those Protestants who depend the most on the Reformers’ theology take great offense at this understanding, considering the suggestion that we can earn any righteousness by human effort, even in obedience to God, as a declaration of self-sufficiency that has the effect of repudiating Christ’s completed work. In fact, many in this camp actually define “gospel” in just such a manner as will specifically exclude those trying to accomplish righteousness in addition to Christ’s righteousness, excoriating the attempt to earn salvation as ****able hubris.

Here is an actual exposition of this view as we often encounter it in the wild:

‎Righteousness is a state of being. I stand before God righteous or right with Him, based on who I am, not what I have done or will do. It is a positional reality, not a performance reality. One is either righteous -in right standing with God- or unrighteous. There are only two categories of people on the planet—righteous or unrighteous. There are no gray areas concerning righteousness, no percentages of righteousness. You either are or you are not. You have either received the gift of righteousness or you have not!

Access to this God given and performed “state of being” called righteousness is based on our willingness to believe and receive the person and finished work of Christ on our behalf. It is a gift offered to us without “strings” attached! Believe the almost unbelievable good news that “right standing” with a holy God is offered as a gift and receive it by faith and the miracle of all miracles becomes a reality! I instantaneously become a son of God with all the privileges and standing that reality affords me. Wow! The Gospel really is good news.

~ Clark Whitten

But this isn’t the only way of finishing the statement, ”Righteousness cannot be achieved through works of law (or Law)…”

2) “…therefore, God supplies a means to accomplish true righteousness.”

The other major stream of thought holds that the solution to our insufficient righteousness cannot be, or at any rate has not been, shortcut through. God’s demand for righteousness will not be circumvented by a benefactor–even Himself: God insists upon true holiness. Jesus’ role is as the enabler and facilitator we need to become righteous. Righteousness isn’t something that can be simply conjured up by “declaring” its existence; we can’t hide behind someone else’s righteousness.

Jesus’ work on earth shattered death’s hold on us and unshackled us from our unrighteousness. His holiness is not imputed to us from without; it must be cultivated from within.

So to contrast them, in the first formulation righteousness is imputed on top of our unrighteousness; in popular Evangelical vernacular, when He looks at us, He doesn’t see our sinfulness, but His own righteous Son. By legal fiat, He has declared us righteous – on Jesus’ merit, not our own – and thus are we brought in as fully privileged sons and daughters, whose commitment to maturity in righteousness is irrelevant soteriologically. In the second formulation, He declares us righteous only in the sense of our candidacy for properly realized righteousness; in grace He adopts us and teaches us to be a part of His household as children, knowing that He will accomplish righteousness in us. But it will require our participation.

This is no trifling distinction. The “imputed righteousness” model treats righteousness as a legal construct which we can legally flout since God conveniently tacked a rider on the condemnation bill that made an exception for us. We are seen as truly righteous regardless of the state of our hearts and our deeds; although it’s never really stated this way, the logic of this means that sanctification is just something we can bother with when feel up to it.

The second model is the only one that could truly be said to uphold righteousness apart from the law, because God’s solution to our righteousness deficit is to do just what we are taught in the Bible: to replace rote righteousness as dictated by laws and regulations with a heart that organically learns to love and do what is right, good, and holy. If you believe that God has to impute a righteousness that is only positional in order to consider us righteous, you believe that our righteousness is not so much apart from the law as it is an end-run around law-keeping that is itself justified by a legal excuse. No: the righteousness from God is fully and wholly apart from the law; it problematizes the rationale behind the entire legal schema.

There is another, deeper distinction between these two theologies. In one, our problem is that God needs to destroy the unrighteous, and our hope is in God’s commitment to accepting us anyway because of our resting on Jesus’s merit; in the other, our problem is that God needs to destroy unrighteousness, and our hope is in God’s commitment to saving us from it by our continually submitting to Jesus’ lordship.

Whatever is meant when the NT authors referred in the past tense to our having been made holy through Christ, and they did say this occasionally, this holiness is clearly not enough. We know this because the authors of the New Testament were virtually unanimous that holy is as holy does, and even those who are “in” are subject to judgment (see e.g. Matthew 25.31-46; Philippians 2.12; Hebrews 10.36, James 2.14-26; 1 John 1.6-9, 2.6). Sanctification is justification. No shortcuts.

In a section recapping some Olympic news, the September 8 issue of World Magazine had a short piece about Ryan Hall, a record-setting runner who many considered to hold great promise as a contender in the 2012 Olympics. He received lots of attention due to his successes, and was the subject of a cover feature by Runner’s World Magazine in 2008 and appeared in an AT&T commercial this summer.

In London in 2007, running only the third marathon of his life, Hall posted the fastest time ever by a U.S.-born American citizen, 2:06:17.

So how did he do in the 2012 Olympics?

Five years later, in the same city and with Olympic glory at stake, Hall pulled out of the marathon after 10 miles due to a right hamstring strain. It was a disappointing follow-up to his 10th-place finish four years ago in Beijing.

What’s sad is the reason why he performed so badly.

Hall’s Olympic shortcomings have critics questioning his training practices. The 29-year-old left the prestigious Mammoth Track Club and coach Terence Mahon two years ago, moving to Redding, Calif., to join Bethel Church, a faith-healing ministry. Hall believes his Christian faith and self-awareness preclude his need for a coach. [my emphasis]

For those not familiar with the bubble of charismatic Christianity and its celebrity worship, Bethel Church is the famous headquarters of pastor Bill Johnson and associate pastor Kris Vallaton, whose prosperity gospel and healing “ministries” are extremely popular in the charismatic community these days. The Redding church has a famous “school” that teaches its students how to “move in the gifts of the Spirit”, and its leaders globetrot spreading their message and demonstrating their techniques. I know a local church (in Georgia!) that got turned inside outwards because many started devoutly following the Bethel movement; a core group from the church left it and began attending a Bethel-affiliated church two hours away, ostensibly to get closer to the “power source”. It’s a destructive theological system in more ways than one, and Ryan Hall is yet another victim of its message.

I hope others will learn from this. But unfortunately, the gatekeeping apologists for it will have explanations for his failure other than the obvious, and the acute leader-centrism of the charismatic movement will preclude much reevaluation by the people in the congregations. But here’s hoping anyway.

But it seems to me that it’s not just charismatics that have things to learn from the shortcomings of this deus ex machina theology that keep its adherents blissfully, sinfully inert while awaiting a divine quick-fix. Many aspects of more mainstream Evangelicalism treat God as a shortcut to things we should be working harder on ourselves. And often enough, the negative results dwarf Ryan Hall’s embarrassing Olympic performance.

Praying for those in need is one that comes to mind. It’s fine, good, and even important to pray for everyone undergoing hardship, but even if we believe intercessory prayer is going to solve the problem, our prayers should all the more focus on submitting to God to develop within us a greater empathy, to be more keenly attuned to the needs of those around us, and especially to be on the lookout for ways to help people firsthand instead of outsourcing it to someone else (or Someone else) to take care of. Jesus didn’t divide up the sheep and the goats based on whether they prayed for “the least of these”. Surely those who had a chance to do something and yet satisfied their deus ex machina theology (conveniently mollifying their conscience at the same time) by praying for them would be closer to the goats in that parable. Or in the words of James 2.15-16, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?”

Now, I’m not calling just any belief that God will step in to set things aright by the name of deus ex machina theology. It’s the thinking that we have some justification for kicking back and resting on our laurels in the name of “faith” or “monergism” that I’m criticizing. The faith that pleases God is faith in action, not blind, complacent trust in some ethereal solution to our problems.

Even if God is an interventionist God – indeed, even if He regularly intervenes in the dramatically supernatural ways expected by charismatics at their sufficiently faith-empowered whim – can there be any doubt that He’d rather be at the beck and call of His most obedient children who only ask for His empowerment after having sought to emulate His behavior to the best of their ability?

Joel Watts has a really good post up today about the relative values of mythology and history.

I tried to get [my children] to understand that stories are shared by people, and sometimes, we take stories from others to explain something important to us. I didn’t get to the point of the new creation story in Noah’s narrative, as I didn’t think they could handle the massive amount of information already.

But, why is it that we can so easily suggest Gilgamesh is a myth but take Noah as literal fact? Why? Because we have a fuzzy understanding of how stories work, and we are wholly anti-Semitic when it comes to reading the Jewish Scriptures. We insist these authors are modern day white male historians trained at Harvard, and not Jews in Babylon building the Jewish identity.

My kids and I ran into this discussion just last week when reading from an American folklore book. We were reading about John Henry, the steel-drivin’ man who died with a hammer in his hand…and apparently managed to do so despite the inconvenient paucity of his own historicity.

To my delight, my children understood intuitively that even though stories like this, Johnny Appleseed, or the Paul Bunyan tall tales might not have happened per se, they remain with us because they so capably express the mindsets of the people of the time. They tell us much about values that their heroes held, especially (in the case of American folklore) the values of hard work, dedication, and ambition to excel.

I didn’t bring this over into the area of biblical folklore/mythology at the time; I expect it’ll sink in when the time comes. But now I can at least imagine that my seven-year-old son, who offered concerned pushback against the notion that the Bible could contain stories that didn’t actually happen when it was first pitched to him several months back, will be able to see the high benefit of stories that convey values and meaning. This time he was able to identify the way people behave, the things they believe in and try to live up to, as the “important stuff”. Bingo.

These ahistorical stories, based as they often are in historical settings, have two great virtues that are often (if not usually) overlooked when reading “straight history” written to conform to our modern historiographical ideals.

1) They focus on the most essential facts about what made the characters tick. Whether Johnny Appleseed planted just so many trees and could talk to animals, we at least know that people thought of him as a kind man dedicated to caring for nature, plying his life’s mission selflessly and without regard for convention. We’re left examining the ways that people who knew the historical figure John Chapman thought of him, written up in terms larger than life to accentuate the aspects of character and temperament that he especially seemed to embody.

2) They communicate information about the values of those who created and adopted the stories. This is even bigger, because even when there is a historical figure behind the stories, the impressions of those figures reflected in their associated stories are not at all dependent on the accuracy of those impressions. The historical John Chapman might have been a kitten-kicking jerkface who simply got famous off of fooling everyone; in the case of Paul Bunyan, there was never such a person to begin with. But there is something more important we can still know: these stories were passed on in no small part because those who did so thought that the aspects of those characters depicted in the stories were valuable and worth passing on.

So there is something invaluable in reading legend/folklore/mythology as a history lesson–not about the events in the stories, but about the people generating and receiving the stories. We are then left to engage with those ideals, confronting them in reference to our best, retrospectively informed understanding of what is truly right and good. Just because we see that the Israelites believed God needed to wipe out all flesh because of sin doesn’t mean we need draw the identical conclusions about what God is like, but we can certainly take serious their belief that sin is intolerable.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying as an assertion that we should just discard everything believed by the authors of biblical folklore, judging them against what we happen to believe in our exalted modern state. No, as a rule I think we should seek out continuity between their ideals and ours and be willing to allow their contextually expressed values into our own value systems–mutatis mutandis, of course. In actuality, I find the trajectory of basic values of goodness, love, and ethically based righteousness from early Judaism through Christianity to be a consistent slope that continues far upward into humanity’s future. I want my children to view our faith neither as blindly traditionalistic nor as fundamentally iconoclastic, but as painstakingly cumulative.

When reading Scripture this way, as a history lesson about its authors and audiences, we are finally learning useful truth rather than trivial data from our forebears in the faith. Adam and Eve? The massacre of the Canaanites? Incidental but contextually understandable misunderstandings. We can, as Jesus did, focus on doing the “important stuff”: acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God.

One citation of choice for those insisting that Jesus affirmed the typically Fundamentalist and Evangelical view of Scripture as our “infallible rule of faith and practice” is John 10.34-36, in which Jesus’ part of an argument with the Jewish leaders is recorded thus:

Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are gods’? If he called them ‘gods’ to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken), what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’?’

Many read this as Jesus confirming the full authority of the Old Testament as supporting their contention that the Bible is the “Word of God”. But the unquestioned assumptions behind the use of this verse as a prooftext are a mile deep.

First, as I explained before, logically it is only post-canon that we can even conceivably view the Bible in its entirety as ”the word of God”. And as it happens, we have good evidence that such an interpretation would be particularly invalid here.

For one thing, referring to the Tanakh (the Jewish canon such as it was at the time) using the Greek word graphē (lit. ‘writing, text’) was done in the plural, hence “the Scriptures”.  But here graphē is used in the singular: this means that “the Scripture” that “cannot be broken,” here refers only to the specific passage or “word of God” in question, i.e. “you are gods” from Psalm 82.6. It does not refer to the entire Jewish or Christian canon. Once again, you can’t just read “word of God” and think “the Christian canon”: here as usual the passage being referred to is not just any old passage of the Old Testament, but what purports to be a direct quote from God (“I have said…”). Plus, “the word of God” is qualified by “to whom the word of God came”: in other words, the entire Bible did not come to the audience of Psalm 82, so we know that only that particular text is being referred to as the “word/message of God” on this occasion. The apologist will want to extend this to the whole Bible, but they are responsible for proving why that is legitimate.

The more important point, however, is that in this passage Jesus is shown giving an undoubtedly rhetorical argument, arguing from within his opponents’ viewpoint but not necessarily adopting it himself. Perhaps most obviously, apart from Mormons I doubt many people really think Jesus was calling everyone “gods” in the sense we think of it: elohim meant either “mighty ones” or “God”, and we certainly have no other evidence to suggest Jesus thought of everyone as deities. John is picturing Jesus dishing out a bit of witty repartee dripping with irony, not a solemn theological exegesis of Scripture.

It’s not really in dispute whether the Jews, and hence presumably Jesus himself, upheld their Scriptures as having a divine source and authority, but there’s reason to suppose that Jesus is laying it on a little thick here: in verse 34, John paints Jesus referring to the Jewish Scriptures as “your Law”–not “our Law”, “God’s Law”, or even just ”the Law”. Just like all throughout the rest of the Fourth Gospel, that places Jesus as an outsider to the Jewish religious system. In effect, he’s saying, “In your own Scripture it says ‘you are gods’, and that message of God can’t be broken (right?). So why are so inconsistent?”

From verse 1 of the Gospel, Jesus is pictured as the personification of God’s message to humanity that trumped everything the Jews previously thought was God’s message.

You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

John 5.39-40

Now, as unique and distinctive as the Gospel of John is, this understanding of Jesus as the superseding Word of God is quite consonant with the other books of the New Testament. And when truly grasped, this understanding is fairly devastating to the typical inerrantist approach to Christianity. Here’s what I mean.

One of the most consistent presentations of Jesus’ teaching, serving as the lifeblood of so much of the New Testament, is the idea that rote obedience to God is insufficient and that cultivating and living up to God’s ideals is paramount. This is behind the standard Reformation doctrine of sola fide, in which we are set free from the Law of Moses with all its rituals and reconciled to God through Jesus alone. In all four Gospels Jesus is shown making a point to unshackle valid religious observance from hollow, blind ritualism. This is commonly understood by inerrantists.

What’s not always recognized is that Jesus was not afraid to take Scriptures and declare them or their appropriation by the literalists of the day to be inadequate to please God; this happens most obviously in Matthew 5′s recurring “You have heard it said, but I say…” He is commonly shown taking up the mantle of the OT prophet and prying up the planks of literalistic adherence to Torah:

• When challenged about associating with yet-impenitent sinners: “Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (cf. Isaiah 1.13-23, Amos 5.21-25);
• After picking grain on the Sabbath: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
• Simply refraining from acting out in anger is not enough: “I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment…”
• Undermining the rationale behind Torah’s purity laws: “Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (see this discussion)

For Jesus, as F.F. Bruce put it, “The law is fulfilled ethically rather than ceremonially.”That ethic can be summed up as acting in love, as is borne out in his exaltation of two commandments as the “greatest”; anything the Law and the Prophets say that has value is a manifestation of loving the Lord with all your being and proving it by loving your neighbor as yourself. This is the law of love.

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

John 13.34-35

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.

Romans 13.8

Ritual is a legitimate and even valuable way to express devotion to God and love for one’s neighbor: slavish obedience to rituals resulting in breaking those two great commandments, whether because the laws and rituals don’t go far enough in helping us avoid breaking those commandments or because they entice us to act against them, is defective and counterproductive. This is, in fact, the meaning of Jesus’ statements that he came to “fulfill” rather than “abolish” the Law: Jesus wasn’t campaigning against the Law as a set of rituals meant to evince one’s disciplined love of God and neighbor, but was intent on getting his countrymen to do the more important job of fulfilling the purpose behind the Law, which frequently includes going above the letter of the Law rather than ignoring it.

My point: even if Jesus agreed with inerrantists that the Old Testament Scriptures are word-for-word from God above (and it is difficult to find evidence that he did), he certainly did make it a point to warn that using Scripture as an “infallible rule of faith and practice” is a hopelessly backwards way of trying to serve God faithfully.

This dissatisfaction with treating Scripture as an ideal standard continues throughout the New Testament. As Paul memorably put it, “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” In Galatians the Law is described as a schoolmaster that’s been replaced by Jesus. Peter in Acts is shown that following laws of ritual purity grieves God’s heart because it marginalizes people He has declared clean. For the author of Hebrews, the New Covenant Jesus established is “better” than the old one in that the law of God is written on our hearts instead of stone. Everywhere we look, we see early Christian testimony that says, “The Law was great, but it was insufficient to create righteousness.” I could go on and on. It’s the core of Christianity. The central insight energizing the Christian faith is that now, as then, the Scriptures are only useful inasmuch as they help us live out the first and second greatest commandments faithfully.

So when I read Jesus criticizing the practice of korban in Mark 7, I perceive that he was far more interested in the ethical truth behind the commandment to honor one’s parents, as given full weight by the prescribed penalty of execution for those who insulted their parents, than he was in affirming the Old Testament – still less the Christian canon – as the “standard of faith and practice” . Jesus taught us to observe the letter of the Law only insofar as it helps us fulfill the heart of God that we find represented in the two greatest commandments–the law of love.

Please note that this is a far, far cry from the prooftext-laced condemnations of behavior that we see coming out of many inerrantists. Where we see Jesus condemning behavior, it’s not for issues of personal holiness: it’s because he saw a system, built as it was around avoiding breaking Torah, that ran roughshod over those whom God demanded to be cared for as a primary act of devotion to Himself. For modern-day inerrantists, it’s different: instead of adding impossible regulations to fail-proof our adherence to the Bible’s demands for righteousness, we add the notion of non-negotiable doctrines that go far beyond Jesus’ New Command and end up violating the law of love just the same.

In summary, those who believe in a supremely authoritative Bible cite Jesus to support their view of inerrancy by assuming that Jesus somehow referred to the Bible as the Word of God, uniformly inspired by the Holy Spirit. Over the last few posts I think I have shown that a claim for Jesus’ acceptance of the modern Protestant’s God’s-Word-ism goes far outside of the scope of evidence. And regardless, I think it’s clear that at very least he would not draw the same sorts of conclusions from God’s-Word-ism that modern inerrantists so commonly do, especially regarding their bedrock, non-negotiable belief that the Bible is our sole “standard of faith and practice”. It is the law of love, internalized and painstakingly woven throughout our interactions, that should be our standard of faith and practice, and at times when our doctrines derived from the Bible lead us to violate that law that should be imprinted upon our hearts, we must respectfully release those doctrines and cling for dear life to the law of love.

So if you choose , against all the evidence, to maintain cognitive assent to the idea that the Bible is inerrant, that still shouldn’t be the foundation of your life in Christ. Even if true, it amounts to trivia. What matters is what you do when that inerrant Bible seems to be encouraging you to strain at doctrinal gnats while swallowing ethically rancid camels, treating the perceived shortcomings of others as grounds to violate Jesus’ highest commandment.

We’ve got to be careful when selecting the verses we’re going to allow as prooftexts that Jesus thought of the Bible (or the part of it that was available at the time) as “the Word of God” in the popular Protestant understanding of that term.

One passage frequently brought up to demonstrate Jesus’ biblicism is Mark 7.9-13:

Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban’ (that is, an offering to God)— then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.”

There you have it! Jesus castigated the Jewish religious leadership for not taking a couple of verses from the Old Testament, which he called “the word of God”, as seriously as their own traditions. By simple synecdoche, the whole Bible is thus the Word of God.

Not so fast. We can’t just blithely assume that every time we see the phrase “word of God”, “word of the Lord”, or another permutation of those words, it’s referring to the Bible as we think of it. (At least in one notable case, Jn 1.1, it refers to Jesus!)

To my knowledge, there is no evidence that the Christian canon was seen as the primary meaning of “word of God” until the Reformation–give or take a few centuries. The Jews (not to mention most non-Protestant Christians) took a different view of what “word of God” means than inerrantists have co-opted it to mean: for people in Jesus’ time, “the word of God” was “everything that proceeds out of the mouth of God,” which could of course in theory be either more or less than what’s written in what would eventually become the Jewish canon.

When Jesus pointed out a scripture like “Honor your father and your mother” (as above in Mk 7) and upheld it as the “word of God”, he did indeed seem to be affirming the authority and divine source of that teaching. But take a look at what part of the Old Testament he is referring to here: the Law, which clearly purports to have been handed down by Moses from God’s direct revelation. This isn’t a passage from Judges, 2 Samuel, or Job: it’s from a section of Scripture assumed by Jews to be the most authoritative, “thus saith the Lord” passage possible–straight from Mount Sinai. We simply have no evidence that the Jews or earliest Christians believed in some sort of divine dictation (which is what “word of God” implies) of the Old Testament generally, with the exception of the “thus saith the Lord” passages in Torah and the Prophets, and even then the Jews and Christians took quite a while in deciding which of the prophetic books carried divine authority. The “history” books of the Old Testament? Certainly not.

In short, what is referred to as the “word of God” is never talk about God: it’s talk assumed to be directly from God. And do you really believe that the whole Bible was directly, mechanically dictated by God? Not even the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy takes things that far.

The passages in question here in Mark 7 are part of decidedly prescriptive material intended to define acceptable behavior in religious practice, and it’s this context under which Jesus is addressing the Jewish leadership. If what God (ostensibly) told Moses can’t be said to be the “Word of God”, what can? So it’s not surprising that Jesus would cite chapter and verse to illustrate the Pharisees’ hypocrisy when their customs violated the spirit of the Law they claimed to be upholding.

But even granting that, can we then take the next step that some inerrantists do and say that by referring to a teaching from the cultic texts defining the Jewish religion (Torah) as a “word” from God, Jesus was affirming that every Jewish text that eventually got incorporated as the Old Testament was likewise “the Word of God”? Are we justified, or even given any reason at all, to extend that to everything in the Old Testament just because we know that eventually people would string all those scriptures together into a canon (which hadn’t been accomplished in Jesus’ time)? And may we then stretch this out to make it apply to everything that would eventually be called the canon?

The same tendency for conservative Bible readers to make too much hay of a biblical reference to a single part of Scripture frequently rears its head with Psalm 119. Almost every verse of this longest chapter in the Bible praises the Lord’s “word”, ”Law”, ”commands”, etc. Modern Christians are tempted to read each and every verse as referring to our Bible (especially when it says “Your word”), but this would be foolish: the subject of this Psalm is manifestly Torah, the set of prescriptive laws of behavior and ritual purity governing the Jews and regarded as defunct under Christianity. It’s exceedingly ironic that this huge Psalm is exulting in the one section of our Bible that Christians find to be inapplicable, despite v. 152: “Long ago I learned from your statutes that you established them to last forever.” Whoops!

So was Jesus at least saying that Torah was the inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of God?

Even an unqualified “yes” only buys us the Pentateuch and not much else within the Bible except by a stack of other assumptions not related to Jesus’ own recorded words. At most, we can try to recover the view of his contemporaries and accept as the “Word of God” only those passages explicitly stated to be presenting God’s…well, words.

But my answer is either “yes and no” or “no”.

As for “yes and no”, let me quickly say that passages like the above may indeed be implying that Jesus shared his peers’ apparent assumption of Torah’s divine origin and ultimate authority, with all necessary perfection implied, but again, we have no reason to apply the appellation “Word of God” to any specific body of scripture as a technical term as Protestants tend to do. And as I indicated in the prior post on this topic, I’d not be scandalized if Jesus did think of Torah this way.

Next time, however, I’d like to pursue the “no” answer by suggesting that Jesus may be using more rhetoric in his usage of Scripture than appears obvious on a first blush reading. That, or at least that he is occasionally presented as doing this by other Gospel writers.

Next up: Jesus the Tanakh-thumper?

People commonly appeal to Jesus’ words in the Gospels as authoritative evidence shoring up their beliefs about the inerrancy and authority of Scripture. If Jesus believed that the Bible was the Word of God, then he believed it was inerrant, and if he believed it was inerrant, it’s inerrant. Q.E.D.

You think I’m special? Get a load of this!

Right?

I’m going to explore this over the next few posts. But before getting to the main questions, in this post I want to make a couple of quick points.

I’m not sure that it matters all that much whether Jesus was an inerrantist. Jesus did not claim exhaustive knowledge. Apparently he thought that the mustard seed was the smallest of all seeds on earth–that, or he presented a truthful statement in a decidedly reckless and misleading way, which indicates an error in his judgment.

And aside from understandable ignorance about such mundane facts, Luke says he had to grow into wisdom; this is significant because it means that at one stage, he had incomplete wisdom, which for the Jews was anything but trivial. In fact, late into his ministry he’s even recorded to have admitted ignorance about an important aspect of his own mission (“the day or the hour” when he would return and bring the Kingdom). This shouldn’t be troubling to us, but inspiring: Jesus is our model of a man being instructed by God and putting all of his dependence on Him. He wasn’t just a puppet to God’s ventriloquism. We should, then, actually count it a felicity when he didn’t share the mindset and presuppositions of his peers.

The other point I wanted to raise was the obvious point that appealing to the Bible to say, “Jesus affirmed inerrancy,” is begging the question. The best you can hope to demonstrate is that there are passages in the Bible that claim that Jesus affirmed inerrancy–which would not prove inerrancy, since it depends on those passages’ inerrancy!

I don’t have have a problem with saying that anything that is truly a word from God within Scripture is sacred and inviolable. God would not lie. So if, as the bumper sticker says, “God said it,” then “He meant it,” and indeed, “that settles it.” But the point in question is whether God did say everything the biblical authors may have thought He said–or whether they even thought that everything they said was from God. It’s only from a premature and unwarranted assumption of inerrancy and a simplistic understanding of inspiration that we would just proceed as though everything attributed to God in Scripture is actually from God–isn’t that what the discussion is about?

But starting with the next post, we’ll lay those things aside for a little while. Let’s assume that it does matter whether Jesus signed off on the Chicago Statement, and that the circularity of using internal evidence to prove the Bible inerrant isn’t a problem.

Next up: The Bible’s “Word of God” isn’t the Protestant’s “Word of God”