Undeception

This is a companion piece to another post of mine, “We might not like it, but it’s in the Bible, so…”

Occasionally I see people back away from their theological hunches, or at least decide to remain agnostic about them, because try as they might they just can’t see “where the Bible teaches it.” The starting point for them is this: The Bible is our necessary, inviolable source for ascertaining truth about God. What it says, goes. Thank heavens we know exactly what it says! They call this a biblical faith.

My good friend Drew Smith stumbled across a post by Angela Shier-Jones at The Kneeler speaking about her philosophical faith, which resonated with me, especially given some recent conversations on this blog. This is almost precisely what I’ve been noticing about my own faith lately, with its roots in the Bible but its trunk and branches reaching and spreading into the air above it.

As a Christian who, although rejecting inerrancy, still loves and feeds on the Bible, I realize that above all it offers important glimpses into the mind of men grappling with the things of God. I value Scripture as I value all church tradition, because the Bible is simply the earliest instance of church tradition available, codified by later church tradition, and hardly less fallible. But for bringing us to meet God, the Bible is uncommonly valuable, so much so that I find it tragic that so many believers could have been led into the company of Jesus by the Bible and then found it necessary to throw out some of the insights gained by the illumination of the fire that he started, just because it wasn’t strictly “scriptural”, i.e. it didn’t sound enough like the glimpses of men of old that are recorded in Scripture. Those men may have written something deemed by later men to deserve inclusion in the Bible, and a few of them may have even known Jesus when he was here, but in their time they could not have benefited from the stream of understanding that has developed through the ages from the seed of truth they planted.

Moreover, as eloquently pointed out by Thom Stark, they themselves set the precedent for this dynamic wrestling with the problematic theologies of their contemporaries and forbears that occasionally shows through in entire books of the Bible: in Thom’s words, the Bible is an argument with itself. How can we simply trust that the arguments ever got settled within the canon we have? Who settled it? Where is their consensus ratified for our use? The closest thing we have, in my understanding, is that “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all,” and even that isn’t “proved” by Scripture. But the hope is sparked there, and in hope we go on to shine that light wherever something our God-seeking conscience considers darkness is imputed to God or His ways, even when that darkness is something one or more of the authors of Scripture believed.

Rather than a definitive end to theological arguments or clearly ringing pronouncement of unquestionable truths, the Bible instead sets a trajectory of understanding about God that does not land within its pages. Shier-Jones in her blog post put it this way (in the form of a prayer):

How sad that religion so often decries the great gift you give to us of collective intelligence, of the progress of knowledge and the slow but inexorable maturing of the mind of humanity. How pathetic when priests, the appointed guardians of the mysteries, perjure their calling by insisting that they already know what the truth is, that we need look no further, seek no harder. We can stop asking and stop knocking at your door because you have already said all you intend to say. The Bible says it all, and what it says is all that we need to know.

Thank you God – that you taught me better than to believe that!

The Bible is your word – but it is not your final word…

There is much in the Bible that does not teach, and even much which disallows, human evolution, which is hands-down the best explanation for the similarities and diversities in the biological forms on this planet. The same thing goes for universalism: only a few passages can be found to support it in Scripture, and there are certainly passages that contradict it, but at least in this case the germ of understanding about God and His nature that blossoms into and nourishes universalism is easily found within Scripture, and in certain places our glimpses into the heart of the Bible’s authors suggest that it had already begun to sprout there.

When I viewed Francis Chan’s recent video, I was annoyed by his suggestion that we should not try to understand God outside of strictly biblical considerations, since we are only like clay to the Potter: “Our only hope,” says Chan, “is that He would reveal to us what He is like, and then we can just repeat those things.” He goes on to show that he thinks God has done so, within the pages of Scripture alone. Rather than literally “only hope”, I suppose he meant, “only hope for knowing with certainty,” but the distinction between those two things are lost on most inerrantists, it seems. If that was our only hope, quite simply, we’d be SOL.

I initially decided I’d let the Apostle George respond to Chan, but a friend reading that post was not convinced. What makes us think, he wondered, that we can impose our ideals upon God? Although it may perhaps be an imposition upon God to say that He must be a certain way because we would like this or that to be the case, this is not the same as applying more factors than proof-texts to our understanding of who He is and what He is like, and weighing other interpretations of Him against those factors. Everyone applies their own reasoning and presuppositions when reading the Bible, of course, but most don’t acknowledge it, and will even condemn it when they see it in others. MacDonald’s insight was that we owe it to the one we worship to self-consciously apply the best of our experience and reason to understand Him, and not simply parrot the prevailing doctrines, even when gleaned from Scripture.

It’s the conscious application of this variety of factors that makes this approach more satisfactory than pretending we’re not “imposing” anything on God when we string bunches of scriptural testimony together, shrug our shoulders, and say, “Well, I guess that settles it; I guess acting monstrously can be just, and showing vindictive spite can be the reflex of love.” We can’t just point to this or that Scripture that describes God doing manifestly evil things like ordering the violent deaths of men, women, and children or (ostensibly) torturing people for eternity and let those instances predominate over our beliefs about what “goodness” means as it applies to God. We must steadfastly avoid placing every insight from nature or from philosophy under the subjection of our even more fallible patchwork quilt of sola scriptura theology, especially when the resultant position makes God out to be essentially unworshippable.

If God has indeed used Scripture to birth something real within our hearts and minds, let’s trust Him to bring us where it leads rather than cutting it down and using it as mulch for some doctrine of our own, based as it usually is in the often underdeveloped and immature understanding of those who went before us! I’m not advocating a “chronological snobbery” (Lewis’s phrase) that assumes everything before us was wrong and everything modern is right, but neither should we commit the opposite error of supposing that “greater things than these” can never be done by those who meet God for themselves. Surely an all-out trust in God as a fundamentally good person, as best we understand “good” with all the available data weighed judiciously, is preferable to letting slavish adherence to orthodoxy stand in for a faith that could mature both our souls and our understanding of God.

What I must say is this: that, by the Word of God, I do not understand The Bible. The Bible is a Word of God, the chief of his written words, because it tells us of The Word, the Christ; but everything God has done and given man to know is a word of his, a will of his; and inasmuch as it is a will of his, it is a necessity to man, without which he cannot live: the reception of it is man’s life. For inasmuch as God’s utterances are a whole, every smallest is essential: he speaks no foolishness—there are with him no vain repetitions. But by the word of the God and not Maker only, who is God just because he speaks to men, I must understand, in the deepest sense, every revelation of Himself in the heart and consciousness of man, so that the man knows that God is there, nay, rather, that he is here. Even Christ himself is not The Word of God in the deepest sense to a man, until he is this Revelation of God to the man,—until the Spirit that is the meaning in the Word has come to him,—until the speech is not a sound as of thunder, but the voice of words; for a word is more than an utterance—it is a sound to be understood. No word, I say, is fully a Word of God until it is a Word to man, until the man therein recognizes God. This is that for which the word is spoken. The words of God are as the sands and the stars,—they cannot be numbered; but the end of all and each is this—to reveal God. Nor, moreover, can the man know that any one of them is the word of God, save as it comes thus to him, is a revelation of God in him. It is to him that it may be in him; but till it is in him he cannot know that it was to him. God must be God in man before man can know that he is God, or that he has received aright, and for that for which it was spoken, any one of his words.

George MacDonald

from Unspoken Sermons, vol. 1, “The Temptation in the Wilderness”

Do not suppose that I believe in Jesus because it is said so-and-so in a book. I believe in him because he is himself. The vision of him in that book, and, I trust, his own living power in me, have enabled me to understand him, to look him in the face, as it were, and accept him as my Master and Saviour, in following whom I shall come to the rest of the Father’s peace.

The Bible is to me the most precious thing in the world, because it tells me his story; and what good men thought about him who knew him and accepted him. But the common theory of the inspiration of the words, instead of the breathing of God’s truth into the hearts and souls of those who wrote it, and who then did their best with it, is degrading and evil; and they who hold it are in danger of worshipping the letter instead of living in the Spirit, of being idolaters of the Bible instead of disciples of Jesus.

It is Jesus who is the Revelation of God, not the Bible; that is but a means to a mighty eternal end. The book is indeed sent us by God, but it nowhere claims to be his very word. If it were — and it would be no irreverence to say it — it would have been a good deal better written. Yet even its errors and blunders do not touch the truth, and are the merest trifles — dear as the little spot of earth on the whiteness of the snowdrop. Jesus alone is The Word of God.

Personal letter, 1866.

Thom Stark’s The Human Faces of God is a book whose major arguments are developed through an essentially deconstructive methodology. Its purpose amounts to an undeception, stripping away unwarranted and harmful assumptions. As Yale’s esteemed OT critical scholar John J. Collins admits in the foreword, ”Many critics will want to portray Stark’s book as negative, as an attack on biblical values.” Collins counters this assessment, perhaps hyperbolically: “No modern critic comes close to being as critical of the biblical tradition as were Amos and Ezekiel, or, for that matter, Jesus” (p. viii). I am reminded of the (probably apocryphal) story of Michelangelo describing the process of creating a sculpture as chipping away at what does not belong to the statute within. Although the main program of the book is the chiseling away part of the process, Stark’s goal – and my hope – is that the book’s message will be visible in the form of the material left standing rather than entirely in the chunks of discarded stone strewn around on the floor.

That positive message is first articulated in the Collins’s foreword:

If we are to appropriate the Bible as Scripture . . . we cannot affirm the canon whole and in equal measure. Rather it behoves us to listen to the critical voices within the tradition and proceed in a similar spirit. This is not to say that we should excise anything from the canon, as Marcion did. Some texts teach by negative example, and function as scripture by exhibiting attitudes that we must now condemn. But our condemnations, too, are inspired by biblical values. There is much in the Bible to inspire us, so long as we do not lay on the ancient texts burdens of inerrancy and infallibility that no text can bear. (pp. viii-vix)

If this book is to be successful, these ideas will need to be explicitly noted and developed rather than merely having their converse defeated, however soundly.

In his preface, Stark sets the stage by calling attention to the book’s targeted ideas and the discussion’s expected participants. Regarding the former, he declares war on the understanding of the nature of Scripture formulated in the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy:

Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.

With the target in his sights, he proceeds to give a little background on the principal of this book’s conversation partners: himself. Stark identifies his tradition as the Restoration Movement. He sadly notes that although the Stone-Campbell tradition began by denying hyper-formulated interpretations of Scripture in favor of returning to the Scripture itself (“No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible…”), it has essentially been absorbed into today’s Evangelical movement, whose own criticisms of Fundamentalism have abated in deference to an orthodoxy imposed by interpretive templates such as the Chicago Statement. Stark sees his own journey and this project as something of a strike to rekindle the spark that ignited his tradition: treat the Bible honestly, on its own terms. We must chip away at the ex post facto harmonizations and obliterations of the unique testimonies of its human writers.

Stark expects Fundamentalists and Evangelicals – in a word, inerrantists –  disillusioned by the obvious problems with treating as codswallop all the recent historical, literary, and scientific discoveries contradicting the Chicago Statement’s prescriptions to find some comfort in embracing those difficulties rather than denying them through fanciful apologetics tactics. To be sure, disillusionment is best avoided by not perpetuating the illusions to begin with, but catching the resulting process of self-destruction early on and offering an alternative way of viewing what Scripture has to teach us is the next best thing.

He also declares his intent to speak to more progressive, post-evangelical Christians like myself who may still be nursing unrealistic expectations of Scripture, relics of our heritage as inerrantists that need to be done away with so that we can read the text honestly. I suspect he’s referring specifically to popular post-modern revisions of NT eschatology such as preterism, among other things; at least, that’s one area I know he will deal with (in chapter 8), and one in all honesty for which I expect some personal discomfort, given my own lingering (though critically revised) preteristic views!

Although he expects the negative assertions of his book to be ignored by hard-nosed fundamentalists and its positive assertions dismissed by doctrinaire materialists, Stark harbors somewhat more hope for that great mass in the middle. I agree that the harvest is likely to be slim among the outer edges of his field, but I have high anticipation for the chance to revise some of my own unexamined assumptions and for the possibility that this book may be something I can commend to friends struggling with the sustained suspension of disbelief required by inerrancy and with what appears to be the vacuum left in our faith by abandoning it.

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?

Keith Reich over at Know Thyself has put up a post along the lines of my recent one about why I reject Christocentric readings of the OT that view certain passages as consciously or unconsciously about Jesus. He gives several good examples and reasons why he does, too.

My hard and fast rule for reading any scripture is that it should be read in its own historical context.  Therefore, for Old Testament texts, that context is a historical Jewish context. What did these texts mean to the Jews at the time of writing?  What do they mean for the Jews now?  From a Jewish perspective today, these texts certainly weren’t referring to Christ.

A second problem arises in saying that these texts were specifically written about Jesus, whether or not the author knew what he was writing, and that is that these texts do not line up perfectly with what the New Testament says about Christ.  For example, if Jeremiah’s “New Covenant” was fulfilled in Christ, then why doesn’t everyone “know the Lord?” For Jeremiah states,

No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD (Jer 31:34).

Or again, if Jesus is the servant from Isaiah 49, how does Isaiah say this,

And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”

It seems clear that the servant in this passage is “Israel,” not Jesus.

Christocentrism in the OT.

There’s another example that he calls “the big one” plus some more discussion that you’ll just have to go to his blog to read.

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.