Undeception

The following is the opening snippet of a guest post I contributed to Religion at the Margins.

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This week I listened to an excellent discussion between Sheikh Dr. Muhammad Al-Hussaini and Patrick Sookhdeo, a former Muslim. I came away with immense respect for both men.

The Sheikh made some great points about religious violence having a tribal, racial, and otherwise sociological basis rather than any sort of profound theological grounding in Islam’s scriptures. The former Muslim in the conversation, now a Christian, was in complete agreement: there are passages that seem to justify violence upon those outside the faith, and others that no more or less vaguely discourage it.

Dr. Al-Hussaini’s observation applies to so many aspects of how we live out our religion: we think we’re basing the way we live on the truth, when so often it’s the other way around. We often say we’re being “biblical” when we find what we’re already conditioned to believe somewhere in the pages of the Bible.

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Mark Goodacre’s latest NT Pod discusses the high concentration of “according to the Scriptures” tags in the Gospels’ Passion narratives and asks whether the Passion narratives are prophecies historicized (as argued by Crossan) or tradition scripturalized. The specific context of his discussion is the Passion narratives, but the principle that will explain it goes for all the Gospel material that cites details of Jesus’ life as prophetic fulfillments.

In the first view, the Scriptures were mined for information about what should have been true about the Messiah, prophecies the NT authors thought would yield some information to fill in their hazy knowledge of the historical details about Jesus. One of the problems with this sort of thinking is that it seems to lean heavily on the assumption that the passages now typically viewed by Christians as messianic had been conceived of as such before the Gospels were written. Easily the weakest evidence for Jesus’ importance presented by Lee Strobel in his Case for Christ material is the claim that Jesus bafflingly fulfilled four dozen OT prophecies, all centuries after the fact. What we can’t forget (and Strobel’s “experts” apparently have) is that we have very little evidence that many of those so-called “messianic prophecies” were considered messianic before the authors of the Gospels cited them as “fulfilled” in Jesus.

I have little doubt that there are instances of the historicization of prophecy in the Gospels, but the idea that all the details of the Passion narratives were extracted by poring over the OT is not particularly compelling. In the podcast, Goodacre points out some good reasons that the model falls short and ends up arguing for something that I agree is more likely: that early believers found in the details of the Passion, which they knew from their traditions, parallels to the Old Testament that were so striking that they sounded like they might have been prophecies. These early believers, particularly the Jewish ones, were so steeped both in Scripture and in their conviction of Jesus’ importance that they looked at Jesus and saw the OT made flesh and walking among them. They also needed an explanation as to how both their cherished Scriptures could be reconciled with this new figure, and so they essentially padded Jesus’ messianic credentials by revising a job description tailor-made around the details they knew of Jesus. They obviously already thought of him as messianic or otherwise eschatologically important (or else why bother?), so they looked to their Scriptures and, using the fluid interpretive methods of the day, found lots of material that buttressed their beliefs.

A very similar way of reading the Bible is amazingly popular even among modern Christians. It’s behind the christological, often called christocentric, readings of the OT, which in practice come off as the reverse process: we see Jesus in the OT more than we see the OT in Jesus because we’re not as steeped in the OT and do not feel the same need they did to justify their new beliefs at the expense of their Scripture’s sole authority. Nowadays we take New Testament theology as our authority and think we have to find reasons to justify keeping the OT around. So when we see a fourth person in the fire with the three Hebrew children, it’s Jesus; when we read of the ram in the thicket, it’s Jesus. And trying to prove a reading of one passage by citing another passage in a completely different biblical context is not at all unlike the NT authors’ attempts to show that their old authority, the Tanakh, affirmed their shift of allegiance toward a new authority by anticipating him through prophecy.

Preachers and inspirational/devotional writers make whole bales of hay out of this sort of typology and similarly anachronistic readings of the OT: our congregations are led to believe that there is christological, or at very least explicitly Christian, significance to be found in seemingly every nook and cranny of the OT. If the “tradition scripturalized” position is correct, this has a very good pedigree in Christian belief. But of course, a parallel’s existence doesn’t at all imply its divine intentionality. We should keep around the Old Testament not because of an erroneous assumption that it is crypto-Christian, but precisely because it’s a testimony of what faith in God looked like before Christ. Reading the Old Testament makes me glad I’m a Christian.

Andrew Perriman addresses this issue of audience relevance on his blog today. The post is a response to a passage from a book whose author cautions against the impression Christians have when studying historical criticism that “the ancient text does not address them, but only addresses the ancient community.” Says Billings,

On this issue, Christian interpreters need to be clear that we read as part of the one people of God; we are not reading “other people’s mail. When Christians analyze the text, its history, and background, we should not assume that the historical gap between our contemporary horizon and the ancient one is a great canyon to be bridged by clever analogies or parallels. In a very real sense, this gap is bridged by the Spirit—the same Spirit who unites together God’s people culture and time. The books of the Bible are not just “addressed to” ancient Israel or the early church. Through Scripture, the Spirit addresses all of God’s people, not just the original hearers.

Perriman acknowledges the potential for a feeling of disconnect between the original audience and modern readers when we insist on recovering historical context and authorial intent. I have certainly felt this myself at times and have also on these grounds experienced some pushback from other people for my contextual re-centering of various passages. But Perriman rightfully rejects that the misgivings Billings mentions are worth sacrificing historical contextualization for, particularly if this is done by way of relying on “the Spirit” as a “reliable hermeneutical principle”:

What checks, if any, do we have on interpretations inspired or guided by the Spirit? We might refer to interpretive tradition, and I suspect that Billings has this confidence in the power of the Spirit to speak directly to the church through the scripture because he trusts the Reformed-evangelical tradition of which he is part. But then ‘Spirit’ has just become another word for ‘interpretive tradition’. Otherwise, we are likely to resort to something like historical-criticism to check the subjective readings generated by the Spirit, in which case we are back at square one.

He also identifies what is tragically sacrificed when minimizing historical context in favor of personal application and diagnoses the source of this unfortunate desire:

This sort of reaction creates an unnecessary and unhealthy fear of historical distance – and indeed of history. We have a deep cultural need for contemporaneity and immediacy, and I suspect that this is reflected in our insistence on a contemporary and immediate and personally relevant text. I would suggest that in order to recover scripture as a resource for the future of the people of God, we need to gain a new respect for its historicality.

These concerns are at the heart of my rejection of that particular type of Christocentric reading which I have detailed on this blog. For more, read his whole post, “How does God speak to us through an ancient text?“

Will twenty-first century evangelicals be able to make their peace with a culture of Christianity characterized as “without inerrancy, with women, without young earth, with social justice”? Daniel Kirk hopes so.

I hope so, too! This would be a great development. But I have some misgivings about the prospect when I consider certain defining characteristics of mainstream evangelicals.

• Most who self-identify as “conservative” evangelicals, in the U.S. anyway, view the most essential aspect of our faith to be belief in God through Jesus — and not just any belief: right belief. Right belief is then defined as holding fast to the truths revealed in the Bible.
• Evangelicals are self-consciously “people of the Book”. Every passage of Scripture is affirmed a priori to be accurate and, if possible (and sometimes even when not), taken at face value. Every question, small or large, should be answered by reference to the Bible if at all possible. Faithful Christians are those who believe and do not allow themselves to doubt the truths of the Bible. The leading lights of the movement are those who are most successful and credible at carefully guarding the Bible from critical inquiry that potentially undermines its accuracy.
• Probably chief among the Church’s responsibilities is to be good stewards of true theology, where “how to interpret the Bible” and “what the Bible says” are defined more or less precisely by how their own tradition interprets it. It is possible to move from one tradition to another and be considered “still a Christian”, but only as long as both traditions affirm all these fundamental assumptions I’m describing, principal of which is “the gospel” defined in their particular way.
• Specifically, “the gospel” is defined as penal substitution, which is based upon the specific formulation that’s triumphed among Protestant systematic theologians since Calvin. “Being saved” means accepting this understanding of the gospel without question.

My point? These assumptions are all — all based in inerrancy. And that’s the first plank we want to take out!

Every inerrantist knows the stakes: take away inerrancy, and the whole beautiful structure comes crashing down. Structures like exaggerated patriarchal subordinationism, an historiographic reading of Genesis, and a view of justice that emphasizes wrathful punishment rather than extravagant mercy typically cannot stand serious scrutiny once one begins to question that the Bible is a pure chunk of divine revelation. Why, without inerrancy, we might end up with…all kinds of horrible things. Things like women in leadership, a rejection of creationism, and a de-emphasis on doctrine in favor of “social justice”. Bible believers would then have no protection from the compromise of all their carefully constructed beliefs. Rejecting inerrancy changes everything!

And you know what? There’s no sense trying to redefine key terms like “inerrancy”, “infallibility”, or “evangelicalism” just to avoid that assessment. Because inerrantists are right: in every practical sense, rejecting inerrancy changes everything.

Those who embrace inerrancy find non-inerrantist modifications of doctrine to be the primary problem. On the other hand, those who approach the Bible as sacred and thoroughly human literature (rather than as a perfectly accurate and harmonizable set of divine revelations) consider the inevitability of reevaluated doctrines to be a marked but essentially superficial difference between themselves and inerrantists: for them, the fundamental contrast lies in these groups’ views about acquiring and parsing truth. For mainstream evangelicals, most of whom at the very least take a “soft” view of inerrancy that affirms the passages of Scripture teaching doctrine as inerrant, the Bible is The Standard, and challenging the assertions made by any author of Scripture is tantamount to standing in for the serpent in the garden, hissing, “Yea, hath God said…?” For those who, like Dr. Kirk, accept even the more modest deviations from this form of inerrancy, acknowledging theological tensions, contradictions, limited authorial understanding, and outright erroneous assertions, no given passage of Scripture can ever be the absolute standard by which “good” or “bad” teachings are easily accepted or rejected. In certain areas, we must view the Church’s understanding of God’s ways to be a trajectory shaped by but not ending within Scripture.

See, for all practical purposes, rejecting inerrancy seems to yield an entirely different religion qua religion from that practiced by inerrantists. I know, that sounds outrageous on the face of it, but consider that they are separate systems with often dramatically divergent doctrinal focuses, widely variant understandings of their own mission, and, as the linchpin, highly contrastive epistemologies:

• At bottom, inerrantists believe because the Bible says so; some have an appreciation for church tradition, but usually only as long as it bolsters their own beliefs about what the Bible says. If the Bible’s shown to be wrong, they’d sooner evacuate the premises than pick through the rubble. As goes the Bible, so goes Christianity. Truth is defined as that which is Christian.
• Non-inerrantists believe because our understanding of God, as shaped (but not bound) by the historical community of faith whose testimonies of God comprise the Scriptures and have affirmed those testimonies in the centuries since, is consistent with and complementary to our broader understanding of history and the world we experience today. Christianity is defined as that which is true.

An analogy that comes to mind is that of older and newer versions of software. There’s a level of “backwards compatibility” for non-inerrantists such that we typically understand and can embrace conservative evangelicals as (misguided) brothers and sisters, but continuing the software analogy, I have to ask, will older versions of the software be able to process us? Sadly, I expect a negative response. Windows XP systems will simply not recognize programs written for Windows 7 as valid software!

I don’t like this schism at all. I want so badly to find a way to bring mainstream evangelicals along and find unity, but given differences this fundamental it’s so very difficult. I can’t wait for a more significant portion of the Church to adopt the culture of Christianity as conceived in Dr. Kirk’s “Evangelical Manifesto”. And I’m sure it will. But when it does, I daresay modern inerrantists won’t want to be considered a part.

I realize that his intent is speak up and say, “Hey wait, this is our religion, too — you can’t just paint us out of the picture!” But by trying to reclaim “evangelical”, we’d end up with two fundamentally different groups trying to lay claim to the same label. The hallmark of “evangelical” is a focus on the euangelion, the “gospel” — but an integral reason for the clash is that most of us can’t agree on the definition of that primary distinctive (nay, shibboleth), much less what living it out would look like. It would take a bloody, contentious coup for non-inerrantists to be able to co-opt the term “evangelical”, and I’m just not at all sure it’s worth the strife.

Unfortunately, knowing human nature, no viewpoint is able to gain any traction among the masses unless it has a catchy umbrella term or label. “We are ‘not-evangelicals’, who don’t believe this…do believe that…” will simply not fly. But our non-inerrantist culture does need a “handle” of some sort , other than the non-descriptive and baggaged “liberal” and the negative “post-evangelical” label that I am fond of using. I’m just not convinced that any attempts like Dr. Kirk’s laudable Manifesto will be enough to wrest this particular term from those currently defined by it!

Am I wrong? If not, what can be done?

One of the things you have to get used to when studying another language academically is the sometimes bewildering number of modifiers placed on nominal cases, which themselves may be overwhelming in their own right. Not only must you learn to distinguish the accusative from the dative, and the dative from the genitive (etc.), but then you have to grapple with things like a dative of means as opposed to a dative of manner. I think my all-time favorite is genitive of time within which.

Initially I questioned if some of these categories weren’t just being made up for the novelty of it or, since I was studying NT Greek at a conservative Christian college, because some exegetes with a mystical bibliology were going overboard trying to milk every last drop of meaning from a God-breathed text.

I was wrong, and moreover regarding the latter conjecture, I would that every person trying to milk every last drop of meaning from the Bible were so properly thorough in their linguistic analysis, rather than utilizing the type of “exegesis” that consists of throwing a verse against the wall and seeing what sticks.  By no means am I saying that overwrought dissection isn’t possible, but as I learned more about how language works, I began to appreciate its complexity and have consequently concluded that we do indeed usually need such categories to properly describe what’s being said.

But anyway, I was reminded of the usefulness of these categories recently as I came across this statement by Jesus in Mat 5.12:

χαίρετε καὶ ἀγαλλιᾶσθε, ὅτι ὁ μισθὸς ὑμῶν πολὺς ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς·

Rejoice and be glad, because your compensation will be ample among the heavens.

Now, it is true that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and there is a chance that one could make the argument that the following observation is an illustration of just that!

The thing I wanted to point out was that “compensation” is singular but “your” is plural. So it appears he’s talking about a single compensation for multiple people. Most translators would note the possibility that the possessive pronoun is distributive (there’s one of those fancy categories). In other words, is Jesus saying, “You guys are going to share in something great” (the literal reading) or ”You will each find your (individual) compensation to be ample” (a distributive relationship between the possessive pronoun and the object)? Without the very real category of distributive, someone taking a mechanically literalistic reading might conclude that there is one collective reward. But if the possessive is distributive, things make more sense according to our own way of understanding how wages are supposed to work. The distributive reading is indeed the conventional reading, and it makes sense; there do seem to be cases in which the object is clearly not shared as a collective heap but must rather be conceived of as parceled out among the possessors.

This might be one of those cases; surely each persecuted individual deserves his own share. Right? But wait: are we justified in choosing the reading that makes the most sense to us without verifying that we’re not reading our own cultural views back into the text? Scholars commonly remind us that the people of Palestine, as those in the East reportedly do even now, thought much more corporately than individualistically, the latter outlook being commonly claimed as an heirloom of Greek thought that only later influenced Christianity. When we blindly assume that, for instance, the OT prophets were making individualized promises to each of us (Jer 29.11 comes to mind), we run the great risk of personalizing more than we were ever intended to. Matthew was certainly the Gospel the least influenced by Hellenism and the most reflective of Hebraic modes of thought and expression. (And if Goodacre et al. are correct, Luke’s version in chapter 6 that has this exact phrase is borrowed directly from Matthew, not Q…)

Honestly, on this one, I’m not sure. For one thing, wages (a possible translation for μισθὸς) were, then as now, typically given to individuals. And there’s something to be said for the distributive sense when considering the adjective πολὺς ‘much, many, great, plentiful’ with the singular noun. But is it at least possible that Jesus wasn’t promising everyone “wages”, or that they would have their own personal pan pizza, but that he’d deliver a large sheet pizza for us to share? The Sheep and the Goats judgment later in Matthew 25 is certainly pictured as an en masse affair.

Oh, there’s certainly a sense in which this is an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin question (what’s it matter so long as we get what’s coming to us?), but I’d still like to know what you think. Would a “collective reward” picture have any interesting implications or advantages over the more typical “individual reward/wage” view?

Most of the hullaballoo surrounding Knapp-gate seems to have blown over for the time being, but its implications and the probability of similar future incidents continue to grow.

Undeniably, a crucial aspect of Christians’ discomfort with Jennifer Knapp’s stance is that she is “unrepentant” as a lesbian. That charge only works from outside, however, in that from her standpoint, homosexuality is not sin at all. This is considered to make her situation even worse — she’s living in denial! Surely she’s being selective in her use of Scripture, twisting it to make it mean what she thinks it should based upon her experience!

But is interpreting Scripture based upon prevailing sensibilities so unparalleled among her critics? Take, for example, the clear teaching in both the Old and the New Testaments, coming from the mouth of Jesus in fact, that charging interest on loans (called usury in Bible-ese) to fellow believers is a reprehensible, inexcusable practice. Lending money was considered a form of charity and as such undeniably played into Jesus’ fury at the “moneychangers” in the temple and in the social situation of the earliest believers in Acts who shared all possessions.

As I recall, the late Christian financial advisor Larry Burkett advised his evangelical audience not to charge interest among believers based upon this firmly biblical teaching. I can’t say that I’m surprised that Burkett’s once widely-broadcast counsel on this matter has not had much longevity; lending money is bifurcated, conveniently enough, into instances of necessity/charity vs. voluntary business transaction (as with banks), and usury now is taken to mean not “interest” but “excessive interest”.

I’m not saying that these categorizations and redefinitions are illegitimate; among other uses, charging interest actually makes a good deal of sense as a mechanism to allocate scarce capital. What I am saying is that the moment evangelicals (usually unconsciously) fly right past the clear teaching of the text to justify something they feel is common sense, right, and fair, they are in the same territory as those who creatively reinterpret/ignore Scripture for things which evangelicals steadfastly oppose, such as women in leadership or homosexuality. I, too, have found just about every justification for homosexuality based upon reinterpretation of Scripture to lack credibility. Yet evangelicals should not too quickly affirm their knee-jerk impression that those believers who “ignore” or reinterpret Scriptural condemnations of causes such as homosexuality or women in leadership are such unnatural aberrations, or rather, they should not harbor the illusion that they themselves are somehow exempt from unnatural or aberrant beliefs about Scripture despite their own unavoidable interpretive incompetence.

What evangelicalism needs most is a swift kick in the pride. Evangelicals must learn to recognize that even their beliefs are conditioned by things other than the text — are sometimes even directly at odds with the text; to acknowledge that no human may legitimately claim or imply the unimpeachability of his opinion merely by adorning it with the words, “The Bible says…” in place of the more accurate statement, “I interpret certain passages of Scripture to mean…”; to grant that even knowing what the Bible says is no guarantor that one knows the meaning or value of what it says. Humility needs to come home to the Church, that institution built in honor of, but too rarely in imitation of, our exemplar who “…humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death—even to death on a cross” (Php 2.8). Humility, in doctrine as much as anywhere, should be the very hallmark of our faith. Newsflash, American Christians: it’s not.

An amusing example of Christianese getting misappropriated in an inspirational context showed up in our office newsletter. One of these things is not like the other…

What Makes a Dad

Author Unknown

God took the strength of a mountain,
The majesty of a tree,
The warmth of a summer sun,
The calm of a quiet sea,
The generous soul of nature,
The comforting arm of night,
The wisdom of the ages,
The power of the eagle’s flight,
The joy of a morning in spring,
The faith of a mustard seed,
The patience of eternity,
The depth of a family need,
Then God combined these qualities,
When there was nothing more to add,
He knew His masterpiece was complete,
And so, He called it … Dad

Most of us glanced through it and passed on. But one co-worker without a Christian background sent out an email asking, ”What the heck does ‘faith of a mustard seed’ mean?”

Most of us who are familiar with the phrase missed this bad formulation — “of a mustard seed” here implies possession, not a comparison or other association. When we understand the original context (Mat 17.20), it becomes apparent how nonsensical this particular line is. Even understanding it not as a mustard seed’s faith but as a mustard seed’s worth of faith is problematic: who would include “has a bare minimum, but adequate, amount of faith” in a list of otherwise hyperbolic attributions of virtue?

This is a reminder of the human tendency to take the familiar for granted when it suits us. Mr. or Mrs. Unknown, being only vaguely familiar with the now cultural expression “faith of a mustard seed,” apparently reproduced the phrase in an almost stream-of-conscious way without parsing it. It also underscores, as my blog often does, the value of taking every chance we get to reexamine our assumptions and presuppositions from the outsider’s perspective. How many of our theological constructs need reexamination of context?

Last week I read an abysmally misleading article from Pastor Jim Wallis arguing for political involvement in social justice concerns thusly: “Amos instructs the courts (the government) to ‘Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts’ (Amos 5:15).” Only problem is, “courts” here refers to a gate or courtyards, manifestly not the courts of justice with judge, jury, etc. Whether this undermines Wallis’s point is immaterial: he’s clearly been misled by an ambiguous translation of the Hebrew sha`ar, represented as courts in the NIV, for instance.

Yet from what I read of the various bibliobloggers hailing this article’s progressive political agenda, which are the same group of people typically most critical of outright dumb biblical interpretations, I didn’t see any of them point this out. I have to wonder, though, would I have pointed this out if Wallis were arguing in favor of something I agreed with, for fear of undermining the larger point?

Would pointing out the small error, mentioned almost in passing, be a worthy endeavor? In this case, I think so, because if there’s anything that we should be wary of, particularly if we’re as allergic to using the Bible to motivate politics as progressives generally claim to be, it’s convenient but erroneous prooftexting.