Undeception

Allan R. Bevere’s blog today posted a quote from C.S. Lewis from Miracles on the general topic of the primacy of the apostolic witness. One part of the quote caught my eye.

The Resurrection, and its consequences, were the “gospel” or good news which the Christian brought: what we call the “gospels”, the narratives of Our Lord’s life and death were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already converted. The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it.

via The Quotable C.S. Lewis #31: The Apostolic Witness

Although I would caution against reducing the “good news” to “the Resurrection” as he appears to do (Jesus proclaimed it long before he was even crucified: the “good news” is the coming of the Kingdom of God), I think this is a cracking good observation by Lewis. The historicity of the Gospels is never more important than their subject. No matter how much we know about how well they mirror historical reality, the fact remains that there would be no Gospels at all if there were not a gospel that had already been believed. The New Testament itself should be viewed as secondary to the primary apostolic witnesses and should never be viewed as the unquestionable, authoritative witness itself.

I found this to be a stark reminder of the secondary nature of the written word: the Scriptures should never be elevated to the level of the reality to which they seek to testify. Unfortunately, the bibliolatry of the modern Protestant church does just that.

Although I was once critical of “Christocentric” readings of Scripture in general, I have recently considered that there is really only one brand of it that I have major problems with.

Specifically, I dislike a Christocentric bibliology that views the entirety of the Bible as sub-consciously or self-consciously about Jesus. Jesus’ foot was the one who would crush the serpent’s head; Jesus was (typologically at least) the ram in the thicket; Jesus stood with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace; Jesus was the one in view when David was promised that his line would endure forever; etc.

I disagree strongly. The authors of Scripture were entirely children of their own times alone, and while it certainly appears that they began to be hopeful for some of the right things (and missed others dramatically), viewing the NT’s deliberate attempts to reinterpret current events in the terms of OT themes as the decisive “actual meaning” of those OT passages is anachronistic. Inasmuch as they violently commandeer the ancient writings that comprise Scripture ex post facto and thereby prohibit us from seeing certain insights (such as a development of early believers’ understandings of God), these Christocentric interpolations really amount to the truly revisionist readings of the Bible.

Yet there is a way of viewing Scripture that I have an affinity for which I have lately decided qualifies as a “Christocentric” reading. It views the whole of Scripture not so much as “pointing to” Christ (which, again, implies a consciousness on the part of the authors, or at least a more direct divine editorial hand than the evidence suggests) but culminating in Christ. It is much more of an evolutionary approach that mirrors, or perhaps rather, is part of the warp and woof of the development of the universe. It results in an encouragement to judge the Scriptures by Christ instead of revising his theology to make it compatible with some of even the OT’s most disgusting portrayals of God. If Jesus was the definitive Word of God, putting him as he truly was into those wineskins should, occasionally at least, result in a bit of a mess.

Anyway, there have been a few posts on other blogs during this last week that have been complementary to the better aspects of Christocentric bibliology. First was a post by Jeff Dunn on Internet Monk that, while occasionally straying into some classic Christocentrism-of-the-wrong-sort language, did contain this gem:

A woman asked me if I knew of any DVD series that used New Testament characters to teach positive character traits. Another woman, a teacher in a Christian school, needed it for her middle school classes. I said, “No, I don’t know of any.” Then I continued, “And that would be the wrong use of Scripture.”

“What do you mean?”

“Scripture is given to us for one reason only,” I said. “And that is to reveal Jesus to us. If you want to teach positive character traits, try a book like Mickey Mantle’s The Quality Of Courage. That’s much better to use to teach that kind of thing.”

While I wince a little at the idea of the Bible being “given” to us in the direct manner implied here, I do think his main point is a good one. We can look at the saints in the Bible and see some good character traits — heck, Hebrews 11 is full of them — but if we insist that we want to take what they had to tell us seriously, we’ll not lose sight of the fact that the NT authors were firmly, thoroughly Christocentric. The Gospel writers (especially Mark) and certainly Paul were intent on showing even the Apostles to be fallible, while never once intimating the same for Jesus. We even have people go so far as to discern and prescribe “character traits” supposedly exhibited by any and every animal mentioned in the Bible (but only those in the Bible), because of course, “God mentioned the bat in His Word for as many good reasons as we can think of, and more.” There are good character traits in Scripture, and I wouldn’t go as far as Dunn does to say that highlighting those traits in order to teach them was “wrong”, at very least it bolsters Protestantism’s characteristic and problematic bibliocentrism. It also tends towards very silly, misguided, and often sidetracking emphases such as the Prayer of Jabez craze of yesteryear: Jabez prayed that prayer, so we should at least give it a go!

A post that describes bibliology in terms I quite like is Diglot’s ”My Take on the Bible“. It’s short, sweet, and to the well-stated point. His points coincide so closely with my own views that I will not even try to start quoting the post here. What I will do is quote a verse mentioned in the post that I think stands as a good summary of the NT writers’ own Christocentric bibliology.

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. (John 5.39-40)

As both Jeff Dunn and Diglot pointed out, as self-professed Christians we’ve got to be careful that we don’t major on the minors. Anything in Scripture worth fighting for will be found in Christ. Maybe we should spend less time systematizing or arguing the “fundamental” importance of certain teachings within the Bible (“recovered” by some sect or another), and spend more time listening to the actual Word of God, if that’s who we believe he is.

Take the great 16th century reformer Martin Luther, for instance.  Most would argue that Luther — who argued for “scripture alone” — had a high regard for the Bible.  Yet, he was quite critical of some of it.

For instance, Luther argued …

(1) God’s prophets in the Old Testament were sometimes in error,

(2) the book of Kings is more reliable than the book of Chronicles,

(3) the book of Esther should have probably been left out of the Bible,

(4) not all the Gospels are of equal value,

(5) the writer of Hebrews erred when he said that there is no possibility of a second repentance,

(6) the author of James “mangles scripture” and the whole book should be burned like worthless straw,

(7) the book of Revelation reveals nothing.

From an interesting post on Nazarene theologian Thomas Jay Oord’s blog For The Love of Wisdom and The Wisdom of Love.

At the suggestion of a certain rather busy diplomat, I decided to treat this trending ditty as a Theologically Interesting Lyric. It is indeed theologically interesting, because it dovetails into my recent discussions about contrasts in the OT writers’ conceptions of God and those of some of the NT writers.

First the song: “Pray for You” by Jaron and the Long Road to Love. In order to avert the potential spambot activity they would attract I have elected not to reproduce the lyrics here, but here they are in case you don’t want to watch the video:

[Hard link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atBg9zLI2bA]

Potential humor aside, when I first saw this my first thoughts were of just how anti-Christian in spirit such sentiments were. Jesus told us to forgive, turn the other cheek, walk the other mile, etc. My mind searched for a Scripture that would point out how invoking the Lord’s name to do what is evil is condemned and an affront to God.

There may be such verses, but before I got there, my mind rammed into a wall: I remembered the imprecatory Psalms.

Any student of Scripture knows of these psalms in which the psalmist begs God to take revenge on the psalmist’s enemies. These sometimes take the form of simple requests for salvation with the contextual implication that the desired manner of salvation would involve some form of retributive or preemptive violence.

Then there are more sadistic cases in which the psalmist expresses his hope for vengeance that seems to exceed the ill will in our song selection:

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,

Happy is he who repays you

For what you have done to us-

He who seizes your infants

And dashes them against the rocks.

Psalm 137.8-9

In his Reflections on the Psalms, C. S. Lewis famously referred to such “cursing Psalms” as expressing “contemptible”, “devilish” sentiments. Ironically, these judgments of Lewis are themselves deprecated similarly by many inerrantists.

Lewis’s point is that we can’t necessarily assume that every attitude expressed by even the godly men in Scripture is prescriptive for us or indicative of how we ourselves should respond or believe. We should not just uniformly accept every teaching of Scripture as equally authoritative, not treating the whole thing “as an encyclopedia or an encyclical” but rather “steeping ourselves in its tone and temper and so learning its overall message.”

Too often, evangelicals with “higher” views of Scripture disagree and try to redeem these statements as justifiable, if perhaps hyperbolic, appeals to God for justice rather than personal revenge. But the problem is the definition of “justice” underlying this: the psalmist believes that justice is served by retributive revenge, and apparently the more dramatic the better: if the simple downfall of a foreign nation is a sign of God’s intervening hand, surely the skulls of the infidels being crushed against the rocks is a sign that God’s people are especially vindicated! This is something the psalmist may have believed, but it’s certainly not something we should follow him in.

How can I say this?

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Matt. 5.43-48

Sometimes it is believed that we should hold our peace, turn the other cheek, etc. because “‘Vengeance is Mine,’ says the Lord. ‘I will repay.’” Just let ‘em be, I have heard countless times, because God’s got something nasty in store for those wicked folks that He might just spare them from if you dare usurp His privilege of enacting vengeance.

But notice the subtle twist in the last sentence of the above passage from the Sermon on the Mount that is seldom duly noted: loving one’s enemies is to be undertaken not in deference to God’s priority for wrath but in imitation of God’s perfection exemplified in self-sacrificial love of one’s enemies! It is when we forgive and show grace that we are acting as our Father in heaven.

Again we see that a faithful reading of Scripture does not automatically deify the thoughts of the authors and contort them so that they appear to be in full concord with one another. As people who self-identify as Christians, surely it is no scandal that we should insist upon reading all Scripture through Christ, judging all Scripture through Christ.

I foresee that many of my evangelical friends will not have a problem with recognizing the circumstantial angst of the psalmist and understand that his emotions may have gotten the better of him. To these I say, you and I are not as far apart as you might think. I simply extend consideration of the limitation of humans in their circumstances in more of the Bible than the imprecatory Psalms.

Michael Patton, a man I respect immensely, has just reminded his readers that, “The palatability of a doctrine does not determine its veracity.”

This is a principle based in logic, of course. As a case in point (which was probably also his post’s inspiration), he brings up many Christians’ emphasis on the love of God disproportionate to their acknowledgment of the wrath of God. He defends the Reformed view of God’s nature and character by his playfully caricatured example of an objection:

“God’s love? Oh yes, give me two helpings of that. God’s wrath? Pass. I don’t have enough room and it does not sound good. God’s grace will be great, but I will have to skip the atonement—too bloody and odd. Predestination? Sovereign election? No way!”

In the end, he admits that, “For the most part, I find Christianity very palatable. Grace, love, righteousness, our future hope, the restoration of all things, etc. are all doctrines that I would gladly take from a smörgåsbord. But,” and this is his main point,

when it comes to things that are not quite so palatable and lovely, I must take them too as my final authority is not that which is reasonable to my taste buds, but that which God has revealed in His word.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. That sentiment is fully consistent with a view of Christianity that views the Bible as the final, crystalized, and most importantly complete version of all truth, revealed personally by God. But if we are more consistent in the typical Evangelical belief in “progressive revelation”, which despite arguable limitations correctly acknowledges mankind’s understanding of God as a trajectory, jet-powered and steered by the example of His Word, Jesus of Nazareth, we find less justification to ignore the nuanced sense of God found in the New Testament even in the interests of bowing to the authority of texts that speak of God as a wrathful deity perpetually on the warpath against those who transgress His moral code.

There are certainly plenty of those texts. And let’s be clear: the Old Testament repeatedly describes God as merciful, overflowing with lovingkindness and tender mercies, and in the New Testament we do indeed hear much of a coming judgment said to be officiated by Jesus himself. But who can doubt that the understanding of God in the New Testament has developed more fully into a God for all humanity and not only Israel, a God who sends His shepherd out to seek and save the lost?

“Ah, but there is still judgment against sin, even in Jesus’ own teachings.” The point I am making does not erase the wrath of God, but it does focus it on things other than mere abstract moral transgressions or ritual violations, and instead seems to target particularly those things which are harmful. Can we miss the fact that the judgment described in the Olivet Discourse is characterized as a punishment of specifically those who, even despite their outstanding morality and fidelity to prescribed rituals, utterly fail to fulfill God’s primary mission for them, which is revealed to be ministering to God by working in the interest of compassion? An intolerable system that fleeced the poor and obstructed the worship of the needy seems to have been the source of Jesus’ sole example of “wrath” in the Temple. (Note also that those endlessly tortured in the lake of fire in Revelation are not disobedient humans, but otherworldly forces of evil who have offended God most grievously by leading humanity away from Him.)

In a guideline largely alien to the Old Testament, Christians are told that they must imitate God’s character as nearly as possible. Yet although we are sundry times called to do so specifically by loving and forgiving one another, we are never told to be wrathful, to hold people to standards too high to reach, or harbor unforgiveness of those who have actually committed grave sins. We are instructed to be holy as He is holy, but are never led to demand holiness from one another except for the purposes of restoration. Paul tells the Corinthians to judge within their congregation, to be sure, but remediation is stated as the goal for church discipline in 1 Cor 5.5. If we are to judge those “inside” our community (v.12) in the hopes of eventual reformation, is it unthinkable that God should exercise His judgment on those “outside” (vv. 13) for the same reason, and more successfully?

So even if Michael Patton agrees with many other theologians among the Reformed that there are Scriptures that depict God as intent on inflicting a singularly loveless, hateful pain upon those who offend His standards, shouldn’t any theologian trying to understand God’s heart use the whole tenor and testimony of Scripture in order to do so? Are we not justified in being loathe to characterize God as a tyrant, individual scriptural illustrations of God’s anger notwithstanding? Should we put God’s love on par with God’s wrath as though one arm were extended to embrace the wayward son and the other to pitilessly strike him down?

Here I am being influenced by, or perhaps rather I am finding my lifelong suspicions unexpectedly articulated in, the ideas of George MacDonald. This passage from his sermon Justice (already referenced on this blog) makes the point that God would prefer us to err, since err we must, on the side of the most loving view of God we can imagine:

The lord of life complains of men for not judging right. To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God. To uphold a lie for God’s sake is to be against God, not for him. God cannot be lied for. He is the truth. The truth alone is on his side. While his child could not see the rectitude of a thing, he would infinitely rather, even if the thing were right, have him say, God could not do that thing, than have him believe that he did it. If the man were sure God did it, the thing he ought to say would be, ‘Then there must be something about it I do not know, which if I did know, I should see the thing quite differently.’ But where an evil thing is invented to explain and account for a good thing, and a lover of God is called upon to believe the invention or be cast out, he needs not mind being cast out, for it is into the company of Jesus. Where there is no ground to believe that God does a thing except that men who would explain God have believed and taught it, he is not a true man who accepts men against his own conscience of God. I acknowledge no authority calling upon me to believe a thing of God, which I could not be a man and believe right in my fellow-man. I will accept no explanation of any way of God which explanation involves what I should scorn as false and unfair in a man. If you say, That may be right of God to do which it would not be right of man to do, I answer, Yes, because the relation of the maker to his creatures is very different from the relation of one of those creatures to another, and he has therefore duties toward his creatures requiring of him what no man would have the right to do to his fellow-man; but he can have no duty that is not both just and merciful. More is required of the maker, by his own act of creation, than can be required of men. More and higher justice and righteousness is required of him by himself, the Truth;–greater nobleness, more penetrating sympathy; and nothing but what, if an honest man understood it, he would say was right. [emphasis mine]

This reminds me of one observation highlighted by Rachel Held Evans in her delightful new book Evolving in Monkey Town. “His ways are higher than our ways” is an oft quoted justification for claims made about God’s inexplicable behavior. What Evans notes is that this verse actually showcases God’s desire to show mercy, once that verse’s context within Isaiah 55 is identified: “Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return to the Lord, and He will have compassion on him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon. ‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are you ways My ways,’ declares the Lord” (vv. 7-8). Evans explains:

Isaiah 55 provides an entirely different framework for thinking about God’s justice, because it suggests that we have it backward — the mystery lies not in God’s unfathomable wrath but in his unfathomable mercy. God’s ways are higher than our ways because his capacity to love is infinitely greater than our own. (p. 136)

And if this weren’t enough dynamic quotes for one post, I can’t resist recapitulating another that I posted as an entire entry a few days back, this time re-situated amongst the thoughts that prompted me to publish that entry in the first place. It’s from none other than the true father of the Reformed, St. Augustine, who nonetheless understood these points I have made and voiced them more succinctly and profoundly by far:

Whoever thinks he understands divine scripture or any part of it, but whose interpretation does not build up the twofold love of God and neighbor, has not really understood it. Whoever has drawn from scripture an interpretation that does fortify this love, but who is later proven not to have found the meaning intended by the author of the passage, is deceived to be sure, but not in a harmful way, and he is guilty of no untruth at all.

Without assuming, as the inerrantist must, that every Scripture speaks univocally, we may still recognize a clear emphasis upon love and forgiveness throughout the NT that we should not feel guilty about focusing on. In the Synoptics, Jesus is depicted identifying the greatest commandments as a love for God that is somehow codependent upon love for our neighbor; in John, the “new” commandment Jesus gives is to “love one another” as exemplified by his own love; in Paul, the greatest of all virtues – above faith itself – is “love” for one another after the model of God’s selfless love toward us; the author of 1 John feels comfortable defining God’s very nature in this way: “God is love”; another well known and perhaps only apparently contrastive description of God is found in Hebrews 12.28, where He is described as a “consuming fire” — but surely we must see in that metaphor the OT motif of a fire of refinement that eats away the impurities for the purposes of purification, not destruction.

If after all God’s wrath is a force of His nature dueling with His love, not subject to His love as MacDonald insisted, then surely we will be forgiven for upholding the noblest view of Him possible, that of a God who is, at bottom, Love personified — especially since such an understanding is securable by the deafening testimony of Scripture. Beyond our beliefs or our incredulity, our faithfulness or our failings, the greatest of these is still love.

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.

“Just think of the natural sciences as they increasingly develop into a comprehensive knowledge of the world. A short time ago no one could have conceived of this development. What then do you suppose the future holds, not only for our theology, but for our evangelical Christianity? … There are those who can hack away at science with a sword, fence themselves in with weapons at hand to withstand the assaults of sound research and behind this fence establish as binding a church doctrine that appears to everyone outside as an unreal ghost to which they must pay homage if they want to receive a proper burial. Those persons might not allow themselves to be disturbed by the developments in the realm of science. But we cannot do that and do not want that. Therefore, we must make do with history as it develops.”

—Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr Lücke [1829] (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1981), p. 60.

H/T to my friend Matt Raymer for the foregoing and for his observation that although here we are nearing two hundred years since the above quote, Christians like Matt and I have had to rediscover from scratch so many of the lessons Schleiermacher learned so long ago.