I grew up loving heaven. The best part of the entire Narnia series was when the children ended up in Aslan's country and never had to leave. Whenever I thought about angels and glorious spiritual realities beyond my ken I would have this sense in my physical body of buzzing and tingling that I only later associated with the presence of the Holy Spirit. Everything "heaven" was precious and wonderful. I could hardly wait to get there. I even seriously entertained thoughts of suicide on that basis, not that I would have ever carried them out. It was against the rules.
So what would cause me to question this? Try Surprised by Hope by NT Wright. If once you are aware that the primitive Christians were not at all about heaven, (If they had the response would have been "everyone knows about the after-life and everyone has a different version -- who cares about that new Jewish cult?") but rather the resurrection, you suddenly have a different end in view. We're all coming back! Heaven separated from Earth is not God's ultimate plan. We're coming back and heaven's coming with us.
So much of our theology revolves around heaven. But heaven is incomplete. Heaven is not our home. The gospel song, "I Can't Feel At Home In This World Anymore" -- I used to sing it to myself constantly -- is not actually telling us the truth. Otherwise why would the martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6 be so particular about what happens here on earth. No, the happy ending is so obviously "Now the dwelling place of God is with men!" And no, I'm not proposing some turn-of -the-last-century liberalism that says if we all work together in a non-miraculous way (who believes in miracles anymore, anyways, right?) we can bring peace on the earth and make it into heaven. But read the book of Acts and understand this statement: "With great power the apostles were testifying to the resurrection of Jesus." When was the last time when you heard someone doing that?
I think that the death that was warned of in the garden was the separation of heaven and earth. Certainly when redemption is complete, they will be one, indicating that it's a return to a possibly former, certainly intended state.
These thoughts are incomplete. I could try to rewrite the aforementioned book for you but maybe you'll want to read it yourself. There's so much here that I am constantly mulling over, just because I've never thought this way before...
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Friday, September 27, 2013
Doctrines and labels
My daughter called me the other day. She was in the throes of debate with a staunch Calvinist. (And what two words go together better than "staunch" and "Calvinist"?) As a result of their discussion she wanted to know what I thought of "total depravity," by which her friend meant a complete inability on the part of humanity to choose what is right. I replied that whether or not such a thing is true is actually moot so long as the Holy Spirit is in the world doing the work Jesus described, that is, convicting the world. It made me ponder once again what power a labeled doctrine has. Once there is such a label, be it transubstantiation, inerrancy or total depravity, it presents to the world an in or out, good or bad choice-- if you agree, you're in, and if you disagree you're out. That's power, that is. Now maybe we need some such labeled doctrines, but at risk of tritely quoting Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility. Let's try to have as few as possible.
Monday, September 16, 2013
Pardonable Subjectivism
Question for Christians: How do you treat the personal story of someone's conversion? I mean when someone recounts to you their conversion story, what to you do about it. Do you, on one hand, analyze the account to death and point out its theological faults, or derive a deep abiding doctrinal statement from it, blithely bending and twisting what you thought you knew to fit with your friend's account? Or would you generally take a middle road and allow the person his private perceptions of how and why God has worked in his life without giving it universal application?
Second question, more theological this time: In the context of the above, taking into account God's universal love for us, how would you respond if someone told you that God, counter to your intuitive understanding of that love, saved him, showed mercy to him, gave grace to him, loved him, etc. (and yes, I lump these together on purpose. I think that we split hairs far too glibly in these matters.) only because of some extenuating circumstance and that otherwise he would have been passed over? Would you try to explain to that person, that no, God has mercy on everyone, because that is his nature and it's not at all about us or would you pass it off as not that vitally important?
Third question: What if this person was the Apostle Paul? In 1 Timothy 1:13 he says precisely the kind of thing I refer to in question-- that he was shown mercy because of his ignorance. Now what do you do? You see, a couple of days ago I was reading this. It's written by a friend, whom I disagree with sharply on many occasions and issues, but whose erudition and Bible scholarship are several "pay-grades" above my own. I was appreciating his exposition about the various biblical words for ignorance, when suddenly I thought, "Wait a minute. Saying something that seems to abrogate God's universal mercy is not allowed or maybe taken seriously from anyone else, but if Paul does it we have to alter our theology?" It's a question of paradigm. If we look at the Bible as inerrant (I'm starting to call this the "the book done fell from the sky" theory) we are forced to make everything in it true in an absolute sense and it has to distort our theology. That's why my friend sees a necessity to categorize different kinds of ignorance.
There's really another way. Let's remember who we all are. Paul is not the uniquely anointed leader of a church filled with people otherwise disconnected from God who need him to disseminate all that is true. He is one of many sons of God (ideally!) equally filled by the Holy Spirit. He has a very significant voice among us, but by very definition of what it means to be the church, if we really want to look ourselves as all (including Paul) members of the body of Christ (Paul's own metaphor) then we cannot claim absolute error free communication will come from any one of us. We are all here to complete each other. Moses' prophetic prayer -- to which the church is the fulfilment-- says it all. "Oh that God would put his Spirit on all his people..."
And when it comes to Paul's take on why God showed him mercy or indeed his claim to be the chief of sinners, which I really have heard people take literally, ("You can't claim to be too bad to forgive; Paul has already declared himself to be the worst of sinners and God forgave him...") the question becomes "Why do we have crank up the doctrine mill for a subjective throw-away comment about something very personal -- Paul's conversion experience?" I say we allow him this subjectivism. We certainly allow it for each other. But let's not try to theologize around it.
Second question, more theological this time: In the context of the above, taking into account God's universal love for us, how would you respond if someone told you that God, counter to your intuitive understanding of that love, saved him, showed mercy to him, gave grace to him, loved him, etc. (and yes, I lump these together on purpose. I think that we split hairs far too glibly in these matters.) only because of some extenuating circumstance and that otherwise he would have been passed over? Would you try to explain to that person, that no, God has mercy on everyone, because that is his nature and it's not at all about us or would you pass it off as not that vitally important?
Third question: What if this person was the Apostle Paul? In 1 Timothy 1:13 he says precisely the kind of thing I refer to in question-- that he was shown mercy because of his ignorance. Now what do you do? You see, a couple of days ago I was reading this. It's written by a friend, whom I disagree with sharply on many occasions and issues, but whose erudition and Bible scholarship are several "pay-grades" above my own. I was appreciating his exposition about the various biblical words for ignorance, when suddenly I thought, "Wait a minute. Saying something that seems to abrogate God's universal mercy is not allowed or maybe taken seriously from anyone else, but if Paul does it we have to alter our theology?" It's a question of paradigm. If we look at the Bible as inerrant (I'm starting to call this the "the book done fell from the sky" theory) we are forced to make everything in it true in an absolute sense and it has to distort our theology. That's why my friend sees a necessity to categorize different kinds of ignorance.
There's really another way. Let's remember who we all are. Paul is not the uniquely anointed leader of a church filled with people otherwise disconnected from God who need him to disseminate all that is true. He is one of many sons of God (ideally!) equally filled by the Holy Spirit. He has a very significant voice among us, but by very definition of what it means to be the church, if we really want to look ourselves as all (including Paul) members of the body of Christ (Paul's own metaphor) then we cannot claim absolute error free communication will come from any one of us. We are all here to complete each other. Moses' prophetic prayer -- to which the church is the fulfilment-- says it all. "Oh that God would put his Spirit on all his people..."
And when it comes to Paul's take on why God showed him mercy or indeed his claim to be the chief of sinners, which I really have heard people take literally, ("You can't claim to be too bad to forgive; Paul has already declared himself to be the worst of sinners and God forgave him...") the question becomes "Why do we have crank up the doctrine mill for a subjective throw-away comment about something very personal -- Paul's conversion experience?" I say we allow him this subjectivism. We certainly allow it for each other. But let's not try to theologize around it.
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Why I Read the Bible the Way I Do.
I thought I would make the effort, since I find that so often I am a different animal than others when it comes to how I approach the Bible, that it would be fair of me to itemize how I got this way.
Once upon a time, long ago and far away, in Langley-Vineyard-That-Was, Gary Best embarked on a sermon series that would last about a year and a half. The question before us was, as close as I can summarize, "What does the Bible really teach about the status of women in relationship to men?" It was a paradigm changing experience for me. It wasn't so much his conclusion, although I turned a fairly definite corner there too, but the process which produced that conclusion, which led me to an irrevocable shift. Gary argued (successfully, in my opinion) that after the fall, women as represented in God's law and in the practise of his people were always treated slightly better than the way they were treated in the cultures around them. He saw a persistent and definite trend that, as the redemption of the Kingdom worked its way through the cultures of his people, should have progressed in a rising straight line back to the equality men and women shared in the Garden. Unfortunately for women, the church hasn't read the Bible that way, and for years, men have ensured that the line of has levelled off and women, contrary to God's plan represented in that trend, have been left at the last biblical data point instead of being allowed to complete the intended redemptive process.
But that's not what this post is about. I found the implications of his line of reasoning very impacting. The ideas that there could be a story that is larger than the text-- a story in this case of God leading his people through change, never changing more than they could handle culturally, lest they not be able to make the shift and the change be lost-- and that at any one slice of time, the message might be tailored to the people of that time and culture with no expectation that future cultures and times should take it as literally written to them were for me a door that slammed shut behind me that I realize now that I after that sermon series I could never treat the Bible as it is traditionally treated.
At another time I was exposed to the following, in the teaching of an acquaintance, Rod Graciano of Timothy Ministries. It's an easily understood and paradigm setting way of looking at all doctrine. He calls it the Temple of Truth. It's basically a list of criteria against which you must test any new teaching that comes along. As follows:
Another life changing experience was watching friends embrace Roman Catholicism and grappling with all the strange and new (to me) perspectives that they started to espouse. It was at my friends' house that I read a part of a volume by Peter Creeft which explained pretty convincingly that the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, the supremacy of the Bible, was pretty well nonsense, and not even taught by the bible itself. Again convincingly, the Bible, specifically the New Testament was chosen by the church on its own authority. This makes historical sense. What doesn't necessarily follow, however, is that we ought to follow the Catholics back to that authority, that sola ecclesia, that supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church. Such a move is historically very problematic. I just don't believe that a group with such towering errors in their past as the Crusades, the persecution of the Anabaptists (my spiritual forebears), and the construction of cathedrals on the backs of the poor of Europe (follow the money!) can claim to have ultimate spiritual authority. The fact that Pope Francis is now having to clean house on that ancient institution is very telling. Did the Vatican have that ultimate authority through all those years of corruption? If they had it once, that is, even if you accept 'On this rock I will build my church' to have founded the papal dynasty, they can't claim have kept their authority after abusing it so. They appear to be a very human institution, and therefore an option at best merely equal to any other church. So, sola scriptura is out, but I just can't accept what is offered in return. Thinking a bit further along these lines, I can't help feeling that sola scriptura was developed by the Protestants as a bulwark and an indictment against the practises of the Catholics to justify their exit. I don't think they needed such a indictment. The Roman Catholic Church had enough to indict itself without any help from sola scriptura.
This next one happened very quietly. I was listening to a friend of mine teaching a class on the principles of the simple church movement. Here's my slant on what he said: There are three levels of authority in the church. (I cringed when I heard this at first -- I was expecting some kind of charismatic hierarchy to come forth, but was intrigued when I heard the following)
But without saying much more this one just plain fit me like a glove. It makes absolute sense to me to place the teachings and commands of Jesus our Saviour and Lord above those of the apostles instead of taking the view that his teachings needed fleshing out or defining by his followers. And it's when I marry Rod Graciano's Temple of Truth step one with setting the commands and teaching of Jesus above all others, which comes to "There should be at least one explicit statement of Jesus..." that I am struck by this: there is no explicit statement from Jesus about the later assembled New Testament. An outsider to the church (the more Protestant side) judging from the importance we place on the Bible, would naturally expect that somewhere Jesus would have said "after me will come a book!" But he never did. So really the formation of the New Testament ranks far more with Rod's step four. It seems a matter of historical precedent-- God's people had Torah in the past therefore we need a new Torah. And I think we have been guilty of some serious imbalances in the use of our new Torah.
So take this post as a prequel to a previous post and understand why I need to pursue the line of reasoning taken there. I am a follower of Jesus, but not a Bible idolater. I love and try to read the Bible for what it is. But I hate to see it being used for what it's not.
Once upon a time, long ago and far away, in Langley-Vineyard-That-Was, Gary Best embarked on a sermon series that would last about a year and a half. The question before us was, as close as I can summarize, "What does the Bible really teach about the status of women in relationship to men?" It was a paradigm changing experience for me. It wasn't so much his conclusion, although I turned a fairly definite corner there too, but the process which produced that conclusion, which led me to an irrevocable shift. Gary argued (successfully, in my opinion) that after the fall, women as represented in God's law and in the practise of his people were always treated slightly better than the way they were treated in the cultures around them. He saw a persistent and definite trend that, as the redemption of the Kingdom worked its way through the cultures of his people, should have progressed in a rising straight line back to the equality men and women shared in the Garden. Unfortunately for women, the church hasn't read the Bible that way, and for years, men have ensured that the line of has levelled off and women, contrary to God's plan represented in that trend, have been left at the last biblical data point instead of being allowed to complete the intended redemptive process.
But that's not what this post is about. I found the implications of his line of reasoning very impacting. The ideas that there could be a story that is larger than the text-- a story in this case of God leading his people through change, never changing more than they could handle culturally, lest they not be able to make the shift and the change be lost-- and that at any one slice of time, the message might be tailored to the people of that time and culture with no expectation that future cultures and times should take it as literally written to them were for me a door that slammed shut behind me that I realize now that I after that sermon series I could never treat the Bible as it is traditionally treated.
At another time I was exposed to the following, in the teaching of an acquaintance, Rod Graciano of Timothy Ministries. It's an easily understood and paradigm setting way of looking at all doctrine. He calls it the Temple of Truth. It's basically a list of criteria against which you must test any new teaching that comes along. As follows:
- At least one explicit statement of Scripture. Without this support, the doctrine is uncertain and would be unbalanced if emphasized.
- Confirmation of additional statements of Scripture. Additional passages even if implicit can help support a doctrine and show its importance.
- Compatibility with established biblical truth. This is a necessary foundation, but does not in itself constitute a doctrinal edifice.
- Old Testament types and historical precedents. Types may deepen a teaching, but are not necessary and cannot support a doctrine by them selves. Historical precedents show that something may be done, but they do not prove that it must be done.
Another life changing experience was watching friends embrace Roman Catholicism and grappling with all the strange and new (to me) perspectives that they started to espouse. It was at my friends' house that I read a part of a volume by Peter Creeft which explained pretty convincingly that the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, the supremacy of the Bible, was pretty well nonsense, and not even taught by the bible itself. Again convincingly, the Bible, specifically the New Testament was chosen by the church on its own authority. This makes historical sense. What doesn't necessarily follow, however, is that we ought to follow the Catholics back to that authority, that sola ecclesia, that supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church. Such a move is historically very problematic. I just don't believe that a group with such towering errors in their past as the Crusades, the persecution of the Anabaptists (my spiritual forebears), and the construction of cathedrals on the backs of the poor of Europe (follow the money!) can claim to have ultimate spiritual authority. The fact that Pope Francis is now having to clean house on that ancient institution is very telling. Did the Vatican have that ultimate authority through all those years of corruption? If they had it once, that is, even if you accept 'On this rock I will build my church' to have founded the papal dynasty, they can't claim have kept their authority after abusing it so. They appear to be a very human institution, and therefore an option at best merely equal to any other church. So, sola scriptura is out, but I just can't accept what is offered in return. Thinking a bit further along these lines, I can't help feeling that sola scriptura was developed by the Protestants as a bulwark and an indictment against the practises of the Catholics to justify their exit. I don't think they needed such a indictment. The Roman Catholic Church had enough to indict itself without any help from sola scriptura.
This next one happened very quietly. I was listening to a friend of mine teaching a class on the principles of the simple church movement. Here's my slant on what he said: There are three levels of authority in the church. (I cringed when I heard this at first -- I was expecting some kind of charismatic hierarchy to come forth, but was intrigued when I heard the following)
- The commands of Christ: that which we must do.
- The practises of the apostles: that which we can do.
- Human tradition: that which we might or might not do, but which cannot be allowed to interfere with the commands of Christ.
But without saying much more this one just plain fit me like a glove. It makes absolute sense to me to place the teachings and commands of Jesus our Saviour and Lord above those of the apostles instead of taking the view that his teachings needed fleshing out or defining by his followers. And it's when I marry Rod Graciano's Temple of Truth step one with setting the commands and teaching of Jesus above all others, which comes to "There should be at least one explicit statement of Jesus..." that I am struck by this: there is no explicit statement from Jesus about the later assembled New Testament. An outsider to the church (the more Protestant side) judging from the importance we place on the Bible, would naturally expect that somewhere Jesus would have said "after me will come a book!" But he never did. So really the formation of the New Testament ranks far more with Rod's step four. It seems a matter of historical precedent-- God's people had Torah in the past therefore we need a new Torah. And I think we have been guilty of some serious imbalances in the use of our new Torah.
So take this post as a prequel to a previous post and understand why I need to pursue the line of reasoning taken there. I am a follower of Jesus, but not a Bible idolater. I love and try to read the Bible for what it is. But I hate to see it being used for what it's not.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
The Love Problem
It's popular these days to bolster the current conception of God's
all-inclusive love from the life and ministry of Jesus. We know that God
is perfectly revealed in Jesus and if we want to know what God is like,
we can look at Jesus' life and glimpse his Father's character. And what
Jesus reveals is Love pure and simple. He is loving, healing, never
judging, etc. etc. Love. Love. Love. Sounds so soothing. Yeah, it's been
bugging me. I seem to react to being soothed. So I looked for this
loving inclusive Jesus and I can't find him. Parable after parable,
teaching after teaching, Jesus emphasizes the haves and the have-nots,
the ones who obey and the ones who don't, the sheep and the goats. His
message is not the kind of thing I think of when I think of
all-inclusive mercy and love. He seems so often instead to be giving a
warning, if not of righteous judgement, then of a simple cause and
effect situation in which if you don't take God's hand offered you,
there is no other hope.
And I find it makes sense to me. You see, I'm very impressed with the problem of Sin. Mind you, it's a past tense problem. God has already dealt with it. But what a solution! If the only way to deal with sin was this all-in approach where the GOD OF THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE AND ALL POSSIBLE UNIVERSES has to become one of his creation and die, then sin itself must represent an unfathomable rift, something God can't fix merely with his loving merciful character, but through the means of the cross and all that comes with it, that is, the life, death, resurrection and return of his Son. And from everything Jesus and the other New Testament writers seem to say we have some part in appropriating that solution. It's not merely thrust upon us. We are called to repent and believe (act out?) the good news. Otherwise we are on the outside, whatever that looks like.
Two different "use the offered solution" scenarios come to mind. The first is my health. I would like to live healthy to a full age and still be running in my eighties. But I have no hope of getting there then without eating healthy and engaging in daily exercise now. The second is patching software on a computer. If a program has a specific vulnerability to attack and the developers of that software have published a fix for it, there is no hope that your copy of the software is safe from the specified attack unless you actually install their fix.
So the problem these days seems to be God's love measured against the fate of all those who won't "exercise," who won't "install the fix," who won't turn and follow him, who look at his absolutely gob-smacking-ly appalling sacrifice and find it just isn't to their taste. I think it's not actually fair. What do you call an act of spending everything he had to redeem us? Well, that's got to be Love, I'd say. Having accomplished this great salvation, what about those who reject the offered life ring? What is he supposed to do with them? It's simply unfair to make it his fault if they refuse to be helped. I'm not saying that some of the current rethinking of our ideas of hell and damnation isn't healthy. We need to rethink our stuff all the time. But I am saying that some of the current "God is all love" thinking, where he manages to save even those who don't want him anyways is a little like the nonsense about him making a stone that is too big for him to lift.
And generally speaking, barring nonsense poetry, which I admit I do enjoy, I'm opposed to nonsense.
And I find it makes sense to me. You see, I'm very impressed with the problem of Sin. Mind you, it's a past tense problem. God has already dealt with it. But what a solution! If the only way to deal with sin was this all-in approach where the GOD OF THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE AND ALL POSSIBLE UNIVERSES has to become one of his creation and die, then sin itself must represent an unfathomable rift, something God can't fix merely with his loving merciful character, but through the means of the cross and all that comes with it, that is, the life, death, resurrection and return of his Son. And from everything Jesus and the other New Testament writers seem to say we have some part in appropriating that solution. It's not merely thrust upon us. We are called to repent and believe (act out?) the good news. Otherwise we are on the outside, whatever that looks like.
Two different "use the offered solution" scenarios come to mind. The first is my health. I would like to live healthy to a full age and still be running in my eighties. But I have no hope of getting there then without eating healthy and engaging in daily exercise now. The second is patching software on a computer. If a program has a specific vulnerability to attack and the developers of that software have published a fix for it, there is no hope that your copy of the software is safe from the specified attack unless you actually install their fix.
So the problem these days seems to be God's love measured against the fate of all those who won't "exercise," who won't "install the fix," who won't turn and follow him, who look at his absolutely gob-smacking-ly appalling sacrifice and find it just isn't to their taste. I think it's not actually fair. What do you call an act of spending everything he had to redeem us? Well, that's got to be Love, I'd say. Having accomplished this great salvation, what about those who reject the offered life ring? What is he supposed to do with them? It's simply unfair to make it his fault if they refuse to be helped. I'm not saying that some of the current rethinking of our ideas of hell and damnation isn't healthy. We need to rethink our stuff all the time. But I am saying that some of the current "God is all love" thinking, where he manages to save even those who don't want him anyways is a little like the nonsense about him making a stone that is too big for him to lift.
And generally speaking, barring nonsense poetry, which I admit I do enjoy, I'm opposed to nonsense.
Friday, August 2, 2013
Ancientry
I'm noticing an uptick of a certain type of marketing of our faith, a new emphasis, ironically, a new emphasis on the word "ancient." Signage, websites, and whatnot proclaim an offering of "ancient" faith. People are exploring "ancient" faith in online blogs and communities. Interest is growing in old writings, old liturgy, etc. Older cultures in the Christian stream, the Orthodox and Catholics delight in this because of course to them belongs the largest aggregation of years, the greatest seniority, the most ancientry.
It's all tosh. We are bowing down before numbers. 'Many' years, 'many' lives of men are not long in comparison to, for instance the lifespan of an angel, or God himself. God is the Ancient of Days. All of man's past is as the grass... And is two thousand years ago really ancient times? Is this not the new age of the Spirit? Is this not the promised time of the kingdom of God? The time that all the (actually) ancient prophecies were pointing to? ..
What's at stake here? Three things. First is the equality of all believers, those long ago and those present. If God is the same God as revealed by Jesus, then our access to him is or ought to be the same as for all our past brothers and sisters. If we venerate the past, we can never attain or even surpass it.
Secondly it is not normal or right to treat the past church as the glorious time that we must get back to. That verse in Proverbs about the path of righteous growing brighter and brighter must surely be God's ideal for the church. That glow has to be on the future, not the past. Somehow we have to believe that the best is yet to be, that we "ain't seen nothing yet!" If not, we're doomed. And besides, any such attempt to return to the first church is doomed to failure. We are not of the same culture and never can be.
Thirdly, if we can divest ourselves of this idea of ancientry, if can see ourselves as being in the same moment, the same new day, as the first century church we might be free as necessary to undo prior mistakes or make new choices in the church without feeling any guilt. We might be able to rethink stuff. It might be as simple as turning around to get the (oops!) forgotten camera before a holiday trip. But if we cling to our ancientry we're locked into whatever came before. All the historic responses to bygone cultures are immutable decisions that handcuff us against actually dealing rightly with today.
It's all tosh. We are bowing down before numbers. 'Many' years, 'many' lives of men are not long in comparison to, for instance the lifespan of an angel, or God himself. God is the Ancient of Days. All of man's past is as the grass... And is two thousand years ago really ancient times? Is this not the new age of the Spirit? Is this not the promised time of the kingdom of God? The time that all the (actually) ancient prophecies were pointing to? ..
What's at stake here? Three things. First is the equality of all believers, those long ago and those present. If God is the same God as revealed by Jesus, then our access to him is or ought to be the same as for all our past brothers and sisters. If we venerate the past, we can never attain or even surpass it.
Secondly it is not normal or right to treat the past church as the glorious time that we must get back to. That verse in Proverbs about the path of righteous growing brighter and brighter must surely be God's ideal for the church. That glow has to be on the future, not the past. Somehow we have to believe that the best is yet to be, that we "ain't seen nothing yet!" If not, we're doomed. And besides, any such attempt to return to the first church is doomed to failure. We are not of the same culture and never can be.
Thirdly, if we can divest ourselves of this idea of ancientry, if can see ourselves as being in the same moment, the same new day, as the first century church we might be free as necessary to undo prior mistakes or make new choices in the church without feeling any guilt. We might be able to rethink stuff. It might be as simple as turning around to get the (oops!) forgotten camera before a holiday trip. But if we cling to our ancientry we're locked into whatever came before. All the historic responses to bygone cultures are immutable decisions that handcuff us against actually dealing rightly with today.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
A False Dichotomy
Ever heard this one? "We believe in the Spirit and the Word!"
It's a bit of a blast from the past, I'll admit, but it's still around, if not in slogan form, and people still think this way so I thought I'd have a go at it.
What is implied by a statement like this is that there is a need to strike a balance between the Holy Spirit and the Holy Scriptures. And it sounds nice, doesn't it. Such a pretty double alliteration -- H. S. and H. S. -- so it must be true. But let's rethink this. The Holy Spirit is God, yes? and the Holy Scriptures are what? the Bible. So what we have here is God balanced against a collection of writings. And yes, we try to cook the accounts a bit by claiming the perfection and inerrancy of the book, but still can we really ever claim that there is something lacking in God such that he needs a book to balance him?
And yet we do need a balance. We need a balance between one man's perception of what the Spirit is saying and another's. But that is not God vs. a book. That is the church reaching consensus as described by the phrase, "it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us." And the written record is part of that process, but not as the balancing agent...
Also just for fun (!) I did a quick search in my Bible study software to find out if we are really right in constantly applying the phrase "word of God" to the bible. Just wanted to find out how it's actually used by Bible writers. So I searched for "Word of God" or "Word of the Lord" and came up with 299 references and tried to identify how to define the phrase by close context.
233 times (mostly O.T.) it refers to a present prophetic message/commandment or the experience of receiving such a message by the prophet.
38 times (obviously N.T.) it refers to Jesus' teaching and/or the Gospel as taught by early church missionaries.
10 times it refers to Law or existing commandment. One of these usages is by Jesus himself.
14 times the definition is not obvious from near context. This is mostly in Psalms. The psalmist praises the word of God and you are expected to already know what he's talking about.
3 times it's used to describe the process of creation i.e. God created by the "Word of the Lord."
1 time it is Jesus himself.
At any rate, this, I think, is at odds with the current use of the "word of God" as synonymous with "the Bible," Which gives the false dichotomy implied by our opening catchphrase a final uppercut and leaves it down for the count. 1 2 3...
It's a bit of a blast from the past, I'll admit, but it's still around, if not in slogan form, and people still think this way so I thought I'd have a go at it.
What is implied by a statement like this is that there is a need to strike a balance between the Holy Spirit and the Holy Scriptures. And it sounds nice, doesn't it. Such a pretty double alliteration -- H. S. and H. S. -- so it must be true. But let's rethink this. The Holy Spirit is God, yes? and the Holy Scriptures are what? the Bible. So what we have here is God balanced against a collection of writings. And yes, we try to cook the accounts a bit by claiming the perfection and inerrancy of the book, but still can we really ever claim that there is something lacking in God such that he needs a book to balance him?
And yet we do need a balance. We need a balance between one man's perception of what the Spirit is saying and another's. But that is not God vs. a book. That is the church reaching consensus as described by the phrase, "it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us." And the written record is part of that process, but not as the balancing agent...
Also just for fun (!) I did a quick search in my Bible study software to find out if we are really right in constantly applying the phrase "word of God" to the bible. Just wanted to find out how it's actually used by Bible writers. So I searched for "Word of God" or "Word of the Lord" and came up with 299 references and tried to identify how to define the phrase by close context.
233 times (mostly O.T.) it refers to a present prophetic message/commandment or the experience of receiving such a message by the prophet.
38 times (obviously N.T.) it refers to Jesus' teaching and/or the Gospel as taught by early church missionaries.
10 times it refers to Law or existing commandment. One of these usages is by Jesus himself.
14 times the definition is not obvious from near context. This is mostly in Psalms. The psalmist praises the word of God and you are expected to already know what he's talking about.
3 times it's used to describe the process of creation i.e. God created by the "Word of the Lord."
1 time it is Jesus himself.
At any rate, this, I think, is at odds with the current use of the "word of God" as synonymous with "the Bible," Which gives the false dichotomy implied by our opening catchphrase a final uppercut and leaves it down for the count. 1 2 3...
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