A Spectrum of Scripture Skeptics

I had a really good theological education from high school to college to seminary.  But one thing that was not so good about it was a tendency of my theologically conservative teachers to paint all theological liberals with the same brush.  A notable example was that during my college days the Jesus Seminar had recently wrapped up and was still big news.  For those unfamiliar with this, the Jesus Seminar was a colloquium of highly skeptical scholars who met together to assess the five Gospels (yes, five—they included the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas) and give their collective opinion of what in the Gospels genuinely happened or Jesus said, what definitely didn't, and a couple gradations in between.  (Their published report can be found here.)  Unfortunately, I was left with the mistaken impression that all theological liberals—and by extension all clergy (though not necessarily scholars) trained by theological liberals, and by further extension all members of churches pastored by those clergy—took the same skeptical, anti-supernatural approach to the Bible as the Jesus Seminar.

Now my impression wasn't entirely without merit.  Once I went to a Mainline church that acquaintances of mine occasionally attended.  The semi-retired parson started his sermon by reading Romans 3:27-30 (we're justified by faith, not works) and James 2:24-26 (we're justified by works, not faith alone) and concluding from this, which any halfway-decent seminary student could explain, that the Bible is a useless mass of contradictions.  His conclusion was that the Bible doesn't matter as much as "the Bible you are writing."  I know—gag.  (By the way, I'll give you the halfway-decent seminarian's answer another time.)

Nevertheless, that experience doesn't reflect all Liberal Protestantism.  My opinion was corrected in a remarkable class I took during seminary at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University called Religion, Politics, and Public Policy in the U.S.  The student makeup of the class was very religiously diverse, and my bigotry against Liberal Protestants was thoroughly challenged (particularly by the Liberal professor).  I found that it's as unfair to assume that all Liberals disbelieve that Jesus rose bodily from the dead as for Liberals to assume that all Evangelicals hate gays.  It's never good to take the extreme edge of a movement as a reliable sample of the bulk of that movement.

I learned that just as there are different ways that believers under the conservative umbrella regard Scripture, there are different ways that people in the liberal camp do too.  There is a broad and diverse spectrum from the Jesus Seminar on the left to those who believe that God audibly dictated the Scriptures word-for-word (in the King James Version), every sentence of which is to be interpreted literally (including, "The trees of the field will clap their hands" [Isa. 55:12]?) on the right.

I'm currently leading my church's youth group through a curriculum developed by a publishing house of a liberal Mainline Protestant denomination.  So far it's great stuff (I hope to review it on the blog at the end of the school year), but sometimes I cut or reframe lessons because I don't agree.  A couple of these have to do with the Bible, and I want to quote from them here as examples of a Liberal take on Scripture that is a lot more respectful than the Jesus Seminar but still raises some concerns.

A lesson that examines how the Bible is true contrasts biblical stories that enjoy significant scholarly support on extrabiblical grounds with those that don't.  Then it concludes,

For the very first people who heard these Bible stories, the difference between a factual historical account and a really powerful story didn't really exist.  For them a Bible story could be very true indeed whether or not anybody could prove that it actually happened.  The important thing for them was the meaning behind the story, that it demonstrated the character of God, the God they knew was active in their everyday lives and throughout history.  You see, their faith was never in the story at all or in the storyteller or even in the pages of a book.  Their faith was in God.

The lesson raises a good point that we easily overlook about the difference between the ancient writers and readers and ourselves, because the differences are significant.  The ancients tended to be less precise in their accounts than we would be.  They often don't have a high regard for putting things in chronological order but rather tell, flash back, jump ahead, and retell in confusing ways if it gets a point across better than retaining the actual order of events.  (Think of the last time you recounted a conversation you had with someone else for an example of this.)  They never intend to report "objective" history—every story they tell is to prove a point and is intentionally shaped according to that bias, so fact and opinion (which may in fact be a true opinion) are always blended.  And for all we know, some biblical authors may have intentionally employed fiction to get points across like novelists do today, but back in those days their works weren't published with "NOVEL" stamped on the back cover, so it's harder for us to tell which in the canon is which.

But to say that ancient readers didn't distinguish between fact and fiction at all or care about the difference is a big stretch.  The ancient Israelites and early Christians couldn't have faith in God detached from faith in at least some (I would say nearly all) stories about him.  In fact, that's exactly what sets the religion of the ancient Israelites and Christianity apart from every other religion we know of.  You could totally discredit the existence of Buddha and still have Buddhism.  You can't eliminate Jesus and have Christianity.  Mohammed's revelation was witnessed by no one but Mohammed and was detached from any historical events.  Part of God's revelation to Moses was witnessed by the entire Israelite nation, and all of it rested on the claim that Yahweh historically brought Israel out of Egypt, the land of slavery.

In fact, it was this very feature of the ancient Israelite religion and Christianity that won new adherents.  Rahab of Jericho shifted her allegiance to Yahweh and the people of Yahweh not because of a powerful story that expressed truth detached from fact but because all of Jericho had heard the report of what he had actually done in Egypt and across the Jordan.  Likewise, time and again the apostles insisted that "we are witnesses of these things" (e.g., Acts 3:15)—factual events that led to the inescapable conclusion that Jesus is Lord and Christ.  And in these cases people did indeed believe the story because they believed the storytellers were credible.  (How else would one come to believe it?)  Even if one were to argue that these stories in Joshua and Acts are themselves fictional (I don't), at the very least they reveal the point of view of the ancient Israelites and early Christians that their claims about God rest on historical fact, which sounds more "modern" than many today would like to admit.  (In fact, one could argue that biblical religion is where the modern obsession with fact sprang from.)

Another lesson in this curriculum examines how on occasion the Bible contradicts itself.  It doesn't examine foolish, so-called contradictions like between Paul and James that I mentioned previously but rather blunt, literal, factual details that anyone who looks at them can see don't line up.  For example, the lesson points out that in his resurrection account Matthew (also Mark) says that there was one angel; Luke (also John) says there were two.  (If you add Mark and John in the mix you run into other problems, like whether the angels appeared inside or outside the tomb and whether they were present before or after the women showed up, plus other weird issues that I think can in fact be reconciled.)

The lesson does a good job of pointing out this fact about the Bible that conservatives prefer to avoid, and it rightly points out that God's inspired Word was written to direct people to him, not to itself, that God is God, not the Bible.  However, it concludes by saying, "It doesn't matter if there was an earthquake at Jesus' tomb or whether the tomb was open before or after they got there or if there were guards or if it was an angel or two men or a tree that told Mary and Mary that Jesus was risen.  What's important about the story is that Jesus had risen."

Really?  Those recorded details, even conflicting details, aren't important?  That's a strange claim to make in light of a previous lesson in the curriculum that did such a great job of explaining how the Bible and its authors were inspired by God.  It's a strange claim given Jesus' own opinion of Scripture (in his day the Old Testament) that it couldn't be broken (John 10:35) and that neither the tiniest letter ("jot") nor serif that distinguished one letter from another ("tittle") would disappear from it until everything had been accomplished (Matt. 5:18).  It does matter whether there was one angel or two—not in the sense that the resurrection of Jesus rests on it, but because no matter how many angels were actually there, God wanted Matthew and Mark to say that there was one and he wanted Luke and John to say that there were two.  I can't tell you why in this particular case, because I don't know.  But I believe that it's intentional, because every word of Scripture is inspired by God, and everything that God does is intentional, and everything that God does matters.

Liberals who are relatively close to the center of Christian thought about Scripture have some important things to teach Evangelicals, because they are willing to look squarely at some things that we would rather ignore.  We owe it to the God who inspired Scripture to grapple with the relationship between truth and fact in his Word from the perspective of original authors and readers.  And we don't love the Bible as fervently as we claim to if we refuse to get close enough to it to see and acknowledge its relatively few direct, factual self-contradictions.  But examining these things gives us no excuse to conclude that occurrences that we think are unlikely are therefore fictitious or that the only thing that matters is the big picture while the details are irrelevant.  God is still the God of all Scripture—even the incredible, even the details.

If Parkour Were a Central Tenet of Evangelicalism

You have to read this, because it's just plain silly.  Thank you, Ted Kluck.  (Note: Check out the comments on his post also, including the one by Yours Truly.)

Christlikeness and the End

According to the Bible, what has to happen before Jesus comes back?  World War III?  The rebuilding of the Jewish Temple where the Dome of the Rock now stands?  Jews flocking to faith in Jesus?  Global evangelization?  An earthquake big enough to detach California from the continental United States?  A one-world government?  Worldwide mass-imprisonment and -murder of Christians?

(Answers: Some yes, others no.)

How about the Church purified into mature Christlikeness?

Huh?


Read this great article by Francis Frangipane.  No view of the end times is complete without the concept he discusses there.

Back to the Future?

What would you do when you saw an e-mail in your inbox with the subject, "FW: LET'S PUT CHURCH FIRST AGAIN"?

Please check out this great post by Zach Bartels at Dispatches from the Heart of the 42 Months.  Zach found this e-mail forward unusually thought-provoking, and I agree with him.  Fortunately though, Zach's response is even more thought-provoking.  It's a great reminder to me to be a bit less critical of others than I might be, but it's even better as a meditation on the "GODS" that "the Good Old DayS" can become.  Check it out.

He Became King for Us

1 Chronicles 14:2 reads, "David realized that the LORD had established him as king over Israel and that he had elevated his kingdom for the sake of his people Israel."

Allow me to rephrase this verse in light of the person and work of the Son of David, Jesus the Messiah: Jesus realized that his Father had established him as king over new, true Israel—i.e., the people composed of those of all ethnicities and cultures who have received God's promise of salvation through faith in the Messiah (see Rom. 9:6-8 through ch. 11; Gal. 4:21-31)—and that he had elevated his kingdom for the sake of that people.

Have you considered that Jesus is exalted as King for our sake, not just for his own?  We think frequently that he became human without ceasing to be God for our sake and that he died on the cross for our sake.  We also might mention that he rose from the dead for our sake.  But he also ascended into heaven for our sake, is establishing his reign for our sake, and will come again for our sake.

It is for our sake that Jesus has all supremacy and authority and you and I don't.  It is for our sake that he is vastly important and that any importance we might have is derived from him.  It is for our sake that he is in a position to command and that we are in a position to do nothing but obey.  This is all for us.

The lavish love of Jesus and the supreme dominion of Jesus are not in conflict.  They aren't even two sides of the same coin.  The uncompromising authority of Jesus is how he loves us.  It is out of his intense compassion for us that he took the throne.

Jesus and 1st-Century Judaism

The Judaism of Jesus' day had three main components whose roots you can see in the Old Testament.

One component was the temple and the worship associated with it.  Its Scriptural roots are in the Levitical laws of Moses, after the exile it is expressed in the temple/priest-and-Levite focus in Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, and in Jesus' day it was championed by the Sadducees (i.e., the high priestly family and its partisans).

The second component was the law.  Its roots are in the bulk of Moses' legal corpus, after the exile it appears in the person of Ezra the scribe and in his and Nehemiah's reforms pertaining to intermarriage, the Sabbath, and so forth, and in Jesus' day it was championed by the Pharisees in local synagogues.

The third component was the coming reign of God.  Its roots are in "day of Yahweh" prophecies throughout the prophets, during and after the exile it takes on an increasingly apocalyptic tone and style in Daniel and in parts of Ezekiel and Zechariah, and in Jesus' day it was championed most forcefully by insurrectionist Zealots and by the kind of community that lived at Qumran and wrote/transcribed the Dead Sea Scrolls.

These three components are not discrete categories.  Most likely the mass of Jews were influenced by and held to all three of them.  Even the leaders of these components held to all three for the most part despite their emphasis on one in particular.

Jesus, in his person, life, and teaching, adopts all three and transforms all three.

Jesus maintains that temple-worship is crucial, but he maintains that his body itself is the temple.  Paul describes the church as Jesus' body and thus the temple of God so that anyone who is part of it can worship, as Jesus said, "in spirit and in truth."  The author of Hebrews points out that Jesus' sacrificial death gave access to the true temple in heaven to those who believe in him.

Jesus insists that the law will never go away but also that he is the living fulfillment of it, the one Paul calls "the goal [telos] of the law" (Rom. 10:4), the one the author of Hebrews says establishes a new covenant.  What distinguishes the new covenant and its law from the old one is not its content but its location—it applies inside a person's heart and mind, not outside on a person's body—and its permanence—Christ's sacrifice and the forgiveness that comes from it is once-and-for-all.  Anyone associated with Christ is by nature a lawkeeper because that person keeps the Living Law himself who transforms his or her nature into Jesus' own by his Spirit.

Jesus relentlessly asserts that the reign of God is close, but he insists the the reign of God is an invisible reality that exists wherever there is someone who submits to it and to Jesus, its king, even now despite the powers-that-be.  It's a reign that's not of this world but works invisibly through all of it like yeast through dough.  The reign of God will become visible when Jesus returns in glory but will be inherited only by those who receive it now while it's hidden by receiving Jesus himself.

In sum, Jesus takes the physical temple, law, and coming reign of Judaism and converts them into a spiritual temple, law, and coming reign all located in himself but which have physical results in the behavior of those who believe in him.

In the Jewish revolt against Rome in A.D. 66-73, the physical temple was destroyed.  In that war, the Kitos War of 115-117, and the Bar Kochba Revolt of 132-136, attempts to establish a physical reign by force were crushed.  The only options that remained to Judaism in the second century were the physical law on the one hand and the spiritualized versions of temple, law, and reign in Christianity on the other.  From that time on, almost all Jews chose the former.

It is interesting that with the founding of the state of Israel the physical reign of Judaism has at least partially been reestablished after a long hiatus (partially in that it is not a legal theocracy).  It is also interesting how many Christians are eager for Israel's physical law, physical reign, and (as they hope) physical temple to reappear and coalesce given that the church has confessed for 2,000 years that we already possess the true and eternal forms of all three in Christ.  (That's probably a post for another time.)

Oh Great—Not Another Blog Post about Rob Bell's "Love Wins"

This is a post I didn't expect to write on a book I didn't intend to read.  But sometimes, when enough people tell me or ask me about a book that I don't want to read, I feel pastorally obligated to buckle down and read it—see also The Da Vinci Code and The Shack.  (For the record, Love Wins is much better than The Shack.  It's also more nutritious than The Da Vinci Code but much less exciting.)

I'm not going to write a review of Love Wins.  Such a review would include a list of what I thought was good about the book, which is a fair amount.  In fact, a person could get saved reading Love Wins.  (I know a guy who got saved reading Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth, and Love Wins is better than that too.)  It would also include a point-by-point refutation of what I thought was wrong with it as well as a list of dangling questions I have about Bell's thought that arise from avenues he starts down but doesn't fully explore, Scripture texts he leaves unconsidered, and his own self-contradictions.  But I'm not going to write that review for three reasons:

• Why should I add to the bloated amount already written on the topic (and thereby, perversely, sell more copies of his book)?
• Why should I contest Bell on ground Bell has chosen?  (I'll contest him on my own ground at another time.)
• Why should I write a review that you don't want to read?

Because if you're like me, you don't really want to know what Rob Bell says in his book.  If you did, you'd read the book.  What you want to know is how what Bell says differs from what you say.  Unfortunately, since I don't know you, I can't answer that.  But I can tell you how what Bell says differs from what I say.  Contrary to what I believe, Rob Bell contends that:

• There is a judgment that entails punishment for some, but it isn't permanent (or, to be precise, it may not be permanent, which is a "better story" than otherwise), and therefore all will ultimately be reconciled to God.
• Repentance is necessary for salvation, but the opportunities to repent don't cease at death or judgment.
• Christ alone saves but not necessarily through faith in his name.

There's more that Bell says and more that I might say, but these are the differences that are fairly straightforward (or at least as straightforward as he gets).

These assertions by Bell make some people angry, including some who are preacher-types like Rob Bell and I are.  But after reading the book, I don't think that preacher-types who disagree with Bell get in a tizzy just because of Bell's content but because of a technique he employs in presenting it.

I am the kind of preacher who very often says things like this when I preach: "Now when this says [English translation of Bible verse], the original text comes across with a meaning more like [the meaning it's more like]."  I do this all the time.  Many other pastors do too.  When we say this kind of thing, here's what we're really saying: "Unlike you, I've studied [Hebrew/Greek] for many years.  I've studied this passage in that language.  I think the translation of this passage that you're used to is at worst misleading and at best inadequate.  So I'm going to tell you what you would see in this passage if you knew as much as I do.  Now, it's almost impossible for you to independently verify that what I'm saying is true.  I know this, but I'm asking you to trust me that I know what I'm talking about and that I'm not lying to you and that you'll benefit more from listening to me talk about this verse than from reading it out of the translation you have by the team of scholars that translated it."

When pastors like me say this, we actually think that people do in fact set aside the words in front of them in black and white (to a point) and trust what we're saying just because we want them to.  And not only that, but we believe that when we say, "The original Hebrew says . . . ," or, "It says in the Greek . . . ," that that's like playing the ace of trump—people just immediately bow down before the unassailable authority of what we're saying.  Chances are, people aren't nearly as impressed as we think they are (or as we are with what we're saying, or, at our best, as we are with God's Unvarnished Word itself).  But I think that to some limited extent people do believe us and do yield to what we teach when we play the Original Language Card.

What infuriates some preacher-types, I believe, is that Rob Bell plays the Original Language Card too.  He plays it often and he plays it well.  Some of the time he is right on; he says things we would say.  Other times he acts smarter than he is and he mangles the original text in ways that take doctrine in directions that perplex us.  This causes preachers' blood pressure to rise for two reasons.  (1) He stole our weapon and he's using it against us.  It's like patent infringement.  It's not fair.  (Obviously this is a petty, stupid, childish reason to get upset, but I think it's lurking in some preacher-types.)  (2) If Rob Bell plays the Original Language Card and I play it back to refute him, which of us will people believe?  I'm used to playing that card to trump other people's inaccuracies if I have to, but I can't trump trump.  If people really blindly follow anyone who plays the Original Language Card (as we assume they do), then Rob Bell will lead a whole lot of people in a bad direction.  But if they don't follow him, then maybe they don't really follow me when I play the Original Language Card either, and that's disconcerting in its own way.

One more thing about Rob Bell and Love Wins.  At one point in the book he gives a short list of giants of Christian history who supposedly agree that punishment isn't permanent and all individuals will eventually be reconciled to God, which Bell thinks is the best interpretation of Scripture.  It would have been nice of him to cite his sources.  But whether or not they actually agree with him, a question remains.

There is a line that separates two kinds of errors of faith and practice.  On the one side are errors that a person can hold and yet adhere to the faith.  For example, Paul thought that people who refused to eat meat that had been sacrificed to an idol because (as they thought) the meat had been tainted were wrong, but he didn't doubt their loyalty to the gospel so long as they didn't force that belief on the rest of the church.  On the other side of the line are errors that a person can't hold and believe the message of Jesus; to maintain such an error is effectively to be part of a different religion altogether.  For example, John insisted that people who denied that Jesus was the Christ, which John defined as being the preexistent Son of God come in human flesh, were alienated from the faith.  In fact, he calls them "antichrists."

So there is definitely a line that divides errors that disconnect from errors that don't, but it's a fine line, and sometimes it can be quite difficult to know which side of it a given faulty assertion is on.  Rob Bell asserts that even if people don't agree with him, they have to admit that he's on the Christian side of that line (though he recoils from talking about "lines"—one way he says it is, "[T]he historic, orthodox Christian faith [is] a deep, wide, diverse stream that's been flowing for thousands of years, carrying a staggering variety of voices, perspectives, and experiences," including his own [pp. x-xi]).

This is the only lingering question I have from reading his book that's really important.  Whether or not Bell is right in what he asserts, does he have the right to assert it and still be considered Christian?  If he's wrong, how wrong is he?

It may take generations of wrangling over Bell's assertions themselves (which, as he openly admits, aren't original to him) to come to a conclusion—matters this weighty aren't decided at the speed of tweets.  (Yes, I'm calling out @JohnPiper, though no doubt he is part of the Church's struggle to an answer.)  But it's a serious and urgent question that everyone who disagrees with Rob Bell should be thinking about.  As the years go on, more and more people will enter our churches who take Bell's position.  We need to start figuring out if we can have the same Church in common, if all of us can legitimately share the name "Christian."

How Narrow is "the Narrow Road"?

Here is a challenging, humbling, and stirring word from the incomparable K. P. Yohannan of Gospel for Asia.

What We Read the Bible For

If you've been a Christian for any length of time, you know (I sincerely hope) that you're supposed to read the Bible.  But you might not have realistic expectations as to what you're supposed to get out of it when you read it.  I think that there are three things that we read the Bible to get:

1. Information.  We read to learn stuff about God and his work in history (by which I mean the past, the present, and the future).
2. Insight.  We read for the "Aha!" moments, the times that we recognize a new truth about ourselves or about how to live life wisely and well in God's sight.
3. Intimacy.  We read to spend time with the Triune God, engaging in the deeply personal conversation with the human race initiated by the Father concerning the Son inscripturated through the Holy Spirit.

Now the fact is, you're not going to experience all three of these every time you read the Bible.  That's totally okay.  For one thing, not every passage of Scripture lends itself to each of these three things equally, and for another, God gives us what we need when we need it, which will vary from day to day.

But it's also worth noting that different approaches to reading the Bible tend to produce different results.  The biggest factor is how much we read or try to focus on at a time.  To oversimplify it for the sake of a rule of thumb, reading big chunks (like in a read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan) most readily yields information, reading medium-sized chunks (say, half a chapter in the epistles) produces insight, and repetitious meditation on very small portions (like a verse or two) is the most fertile for intimacy.

Of course, as I said, this oversimplifies matters greatly—the correlation is not neatly one-to-one as my rule suggests, and of course we can receive information and insight at the same time, for example.  We're also capable of reading a large section, narrowing to a smaller subsection within it, and narrowing still further to a tiny portion during a single time of reading.  But I mention this because keeping it in mind as you read the Bible may help you to get the balanced diet of information, insight, and intimacy that you need.

Crazy

Mark has a curious way of telling two stories at once that we tend to separate: Jesus' response to the teachers who accused him of throwing out demons by the power of Satan, and Jesus' mother and brothers trying to get face-time with him.  We separate them because Matthew puts them back to back but doesn't tell them as a single story, and also Luke does the same and obscures the connection further by putting the actual arrival of Jesus' family elsewhere in his book.  But as Mark tells the story, Jesus' family comes to take Jesus away forcibly, believing him insane; then Jesus responds to the scribes' accusation that he is possessed by Beelzebul; then the family arrives and Jesus asserts that his real mother and siblings are those who do what God wants.  (This suggests another reason that we probably separate the two stories: Mark's version portrays Jesus' family in an uncomfortably bad light.)

A few things stick out to me here.

The world is so unused to seeing evil defeated that they think that there must be evil behind it when it happens.  And they are so unused to seeing people do what God wants that even seriously religious people think that people who do must be crazy.  This shows how screwed up is the world we're living in and how badly we go against the grain when we even get started really displaying the reign of God.

And yet, Jesus never stopped going against the grain.  I don't know how I would persevere if people accused me of being pure evil or if my close family believed that I need to be involuntarily committed to a psychiatric unit.  But Jesus did.  He never stopped going against the grain because he was remaking the grain.  That's what the reign of God is all about.

Of those who opposed, misunderstood, and even slandered him that day, some remained in it stubbornly but others turned around.  The scribes, or at least most of them, stayed stuck in their opposition to Jesus.  But his mother and brothers became part of the backbone of the church.  Never count out those who think you're crazy because of your obsession for God's reign, especially those who, like Mary, have once heard the good news and humbly received it.