As I sit here, CSI is going in the other room; it’s an old episode, of course, but apparently someone was interested in watching it. I didn’t like the episode well enough the first time around to want to watch it again, so I’m in here tapping the keys. It did spark a thought, though: the preacher’s job in studying Scripture (and anyone’s, really) is much the same as that of a criminalist or forensic scientist: follow the evidence, wherever it leads. When we run into problems—as individuals, as churches, as denominations—is usually when we set the evidence aside in favor of what we want to believe, or start allowing our preferred conclusions to distort our interpretation of the evidence. As Christians, we need to let Scripture speak for itself, to seek to understand it on its own terms, to the best of our ability; we need to allow it to tell us things that we don’t want to hear, to challenge our comfortable assumptions and stretch our cozy faith. We need to allow God to speak through his Word to lead us to the truth, rather than insisting on leading ourselves to our own ideas.As Gil Grissom is wont to say, “people lie, but the evidence never does.” To be sure, we’re never guaranteed to interpret that evidence correctly—even when we’re trying our best to be faithful, we still make mistakes because we’re still limited; but we can trust the Spirit to work through the process to correct our errors, if we’re open to correction. It isn’t solely on our shoulders to get it right—that’s the work of the Spirit in and through us; ours is to learn to get our own agendas out of the way so that they don’t block the Spirit’s work.
Category Archives: Scripture
Pray without ceasing
In 1949, on the island of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland, the leaders of the local presbytery of the Free Kirk of Scotland grew so worried about the way things were going that they issued a proclamation to be read in all their congregations lamenting “the low state of vital religion . . . throughout the land,” declaring, “The Most High has a controversy with the nation,” and calling on everyone to pray that God would call the nation to repentance. In one parish on the island, the parish of Barvas, the message took root with a pair of sisters in their eighties. The sisters encouraged their pastor to pray together with the elders and deacons, and promised that they would pray twice a week from ten at night until three in the morning. So the minister and lay leaders prayed twice a week in a barn—no word on whether they stayed up until three AM—and the sisters prayed in their home; they did this faithfully for several months, in which nothing happened. During this time, a request was sent to an evangelist named Duncan Campbell, asking him to come to Lewis; he declined, because he was scheduled to speak elsewhere. God had other ideas, however, and his commitments were cancelled, freeing him up to go to Lewis. The result was a spiritual explosion, as revival swept the island, transforming it by the power of the Holy Spirit. Where once the jail was full and the churches nearly empty, the situation reversed itself—the churches were full to overflowing, while the jail was shut up for lack of use, because there was no crime. It was a remarkable time, and over the years, many have praised Campbell for it; but as he himself said more than once, it wasn’t his preaching that brought revival. Indeed, many who came to Christ during that time never heard him or anyone preach. No, this was no pre-planned preacher-driven event; rather, the roots of that revival were to be found in the faithful, persistent, believing prayer of those two sisters, and of those who prayed with them; they were certain God would answer them, and refused to stop until he did.That is stubborn prayer. It’s the approach to prayer which Jesus tried to develop in his disciples, and it’s part of what Paul talks about in his epistles. It’s the spirit we see in Jacob when he wrestled with God at Peniel—he was clearly out of his weight class, but he would not let go until God blessed him. He hung on for dear life, through his exhaustion, through the pain in his dislocated hip, through the screaming ache in his muscles . . . through it all, he hung on until he had nothing left but determination; and as the night was ending, God blessed him. We don’t often think of Jacob as a model for anything, but in this, he is; he’s a model for us in prayer.That may seem strange to us, because we aren’t taught that way; and some might be wondering, “Isn’t that selfish? If God tells us ‘no,’ are we allowed to just badger him until he gives in and gives us what we want?” Certainly, that could be true, if we’re praying selfishly; but if our prayer is truly focused on God and centered on his kingdom, that’s another matter. Such prayer leads us out of selfishness, not into it, in part because it draws us out of our small desires and teaches us to desire the presence of God, that we may live in the awareness of his presence.To understand the significance of that, stop and think about what it means to be in someone’s presence, and particularly to be in the presence of someone you love. It means that it doesn’t take any effort to talk to them; it means you hear them when they talk to you; it means you’re open to them, available to them, and they’re open and available to you. It means that even when you’re not talking to them or specifically thinking about them, you know they’re with you, and so they’re involved in some way in what you’re doing; their presence connects them to you. Even if you aren’t having a conversation, conversation is always possible, and comes naturally; and even your silence can be its own form of communion.That’s what our life with God is supposed to look like; that, I believe, is what it means to pray without ceasing, as Paul commands us in 1 Thessalonians 5. That’s what it means to pray at all times in the Spirit, as he says in Ephesians 6. It’s not a matter of talking all the time, by any means; the silence and the listening are as important for us as the times when we talk. The key, rather, is to be in what we might call a spirit of prayer, by the Spirit of God, such that we are aware of and attentive to God when he speaks, and that conversation with God flows naturally out of whatever we’re doing—that whenever we have something to say, whether something that’s bothering us or something that gives us joy or a question that’s puzzling us, it’s perfectly natural for us to turn and say it to God, just as we would to anyone else to whom we’re close.As you can probably guess from this, I don’t agree with those who say that it’s unspiritual to pray for your own wants and needs. In fact, I’m always kind of surprised to run into that attitude, though I shouldn’t be—it’s common enough. In my last church, I had an elder sit in my office and argue that position, angrily and at great length; he firmly believed that if you could do anything about a problem, you shouldn’t be praying about it, because it was your responsibility to get out there and fix it yourself. He then argued, further, that if you had created the problem, you had no right to ask God to help you fix it, because it was on your shoulders. I bit my tongue and didn’t point him to the numerous psalms in which David and other psalmists do exactly that. When he told me that God helps those who help themselves, though, I did remind him that that isn’t Bible, it’s Ben Franklin. (All I got in return was a blank look.)There are a lot of people who think this way, but their view isn’t rooted in Scripture; Paul takes us a very different direction. Look at Ephesians 6:18: “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.” Then in Philippians 4:6, Paul says, “Don’t be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” Notice: when? “on all occasions”; we might also say, “at all times.” About what? “Everything.” These are commands to ask God for things, to tell him what we need and want and ask him to provide for us; they insist to us that God wants us to do that, and indeed that he expects us to do so.Why isn’t that selfish? Well, in the first place, what’s the foundation for our requests? Our relationship with God. We don’t go to him just as someone who can give us stuff and demand that he do so; this is not just another consumer transaction. Rather, we talk to him as someone who loves us and whom we love in return, and we tell him what’s on our heart, including our needs and our desires, because he cares about us and he wants us to tell him. We don’t just ask in order to get what we want—we also ask in order to deepen our relationship with God. When we approach him in that way, it’s not a demand for services, it’s an expression of our dependence on him, and an act of trust. It’s an act of trust that he can in fact give us what we ask for, and that he does actually want to give us good things. That can be hard, because there are times when trusting him is hard, and times when we don’t want to admit we need him; but in all circumstances, whether good, bad, or whatever, we are called to do so, and asking God to meet our needs is an important discipline in learning to do so.In the second place, people who ask of God selfishly do so in a spirit of entitlement; they believe they deserve to get what they want, and regard it as nothing more than their due. By contrast, Paul tells us to pray in a spirit of thanksgiving. This doesn’t mean simply to thank God in advance for the things he will do for us, or even to thank him for the things he has already done, though both are important; rather, this is to be our basic attitude in prayer, and in all of life. This too is a recognition that we are completely dependent on God, that everything comes to us as his gift; this is the truth that James captured when he said, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” Because of this, because of God’s goodness and generosity to us—yes, Paul assures us, even in the midst of our suffering—gratitude should be our fundamental response to life.Whatever our circumstances, in a grateful spirit, we are to bring all our requests—our wants, our needs, our concerns, the deepest desires of our hearts––all the things which lie at the roots of our anxieties and fears, as well as those anxieties and fears themselves and everything to which they give rise—into the presence of God, trusting that he’ll take care of us. We don’t do this because he doesn’t know what we want, or need, or fear; we don’t pray for his sake, we pray for ours. We do this as a formal, deliberate acknowledgement of our dependence on him, and to give us the assurance that he knows what we want, what we need, because we have told him. Perhaps most importantly of all, we lay our requests at God’s feet because doing so draws us closer to him, and focuses our minds and our hearts on him; and so doing, it involves us in and connects us to the work he is doing in and around us.Third, if our prayer is truly kingdom-centered, then it keeps us aware of the bigger picture, which we see in Ephesians 6 ; we understand that we don’t just pray that God would bless us, or that he would bless others, so that we and they would be happy and fulfilled and healed and free from pain and could go on to enjoy our lives. Rather, we pray for our needs and the needs of others in part because each of us is involved, individually and as part of the church, in the great struggle which is the inbreaking of the kingdom of God into this world. The kingdom is resisted, both openly and subtly, by the forces of the prince of the powers of this present darkness, and so Paul tells us that we need to be armored up and armed to deal with that resistance; and the foundation of that is prayer. We pray for our needs and wants, and for the needs and wants of others, so that we might be strengthened, and so that opportunities for the enemy to undermine us or weaken us would be closed off. And because the enemy is always looking for ways to do that, and the spiritual struggle we face is continuous, so too we must pray continuously. Ultimately, as we do so, we find that it trains us to depend on God, and to use the gifts that he’s given us not on our own initiative, but on his; and it prepares us, as the Rev. Tim Keller put it, “to have our hard hearts melted,” to have the barriers in our lives torn down, “to have the glory of God break through,” so that we may see his glory in our lives.This isn’t something you can learn how to do by having someone tell you, or by reading a book; the most I can do, or anyone can do, is point you in that direction and invite you to do it. We can only really learn this by doing it—by asking God to teach us to live in the awareness of his presence, so that we learn to be in prayer throughout everything we do, and by setting aside time just to pray, for focused conversation with him. We can only learn to trust him with the things that are on our hearts by trusting him, by praying about them whenever they weigh on us; we can only learn to listen by listening. That’s why stubborn prayer is so important—it’s not about wearing God down, breaking down his resistance; it’s about wearing our egos down, breaking down our resistance. It’s not so much about storming the gates of heaven as it is about opening our own gates and letting heaven storm us.
The bounds of the canon and the limits of its authors
I’ve been reading Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s commentary on Philemon (in the Anchor Bible series), preparing for a future sermon series; in the course of his discussion of slavery, which is an essential part of the introductory work on that book, I was interested to read the following paragraph:
What strikes the modern reader of such Pauline passages [as the Letter to Philemon] is his failure to speak out against the social institution of slavery in general and the injustices that it often involved, not only for the individual so entrapped but also for his wife and children. If I am right in interpreting the “more than I ask” of v 21 as an implicit request made of Philemon to see to the emancipation of Onesimus, that may tell us something about Paul’s attitude toward the enslavement of a Christian; but that “more” has been diversely interpreted over the centuries and its sense is not clear. Moreover that is an implicit request about an individual case of a Christian slave who could help Paul in his work of evangelization. Would Paul have written the same thing to the non-Christian owner of a pagan slave? Would he have agreed with Aristotle’s view about “friendship” with such a slave [that friendship with a slave considered as a slave was impossible]?
There are two issues in that paragraph. The first, the fact that Paul (and for that matter the rest of the NT writers) didn’t condemn slavery and demand immediate, empire-wide emancipation of all slaves, is a vast subject and beyond the scope of a single post. I will note that we should bear in mind that slavery in the ancient world was a significantly different thing, and quite a bit less vile, than slavery in the American historical context; that said, though, the injustice of it (both fundamental and circumstantial) was still very real. The basic argument here, in a nutshell, is that the system of slavery could only be changed gradually, and that it was Christianity which brought that change—a point made quite clearly by M. R. Vincent in a passage Dr. Fitzmyer quotes:
Under Constantine the effects of christian sentiment began to appear in the Church and in legislation concerning slaves. Official freeing of slaves became common as an act of pious gratitude, and burial tablets often represent masters standing before the Good Shepherd, with a band of slaves liberated at death, and pleading for them at judgment. In A.D. 312 a law was passed declaring as homicide the poisoning or branding of slaves . . . The advance of a healthier sentiment may be seen by comparing the law of Augustus, which forbade a master to emancipate more than one-fifth of his slaves, and which fixed one hundred males as a maximum for one time—and the unlimited permission to emancipate conceded by Constantine. Each new ruler enacted some measure which facilitated emancipation. Every obstacle was thrown up by law in the way of separating families. Under Justinian all presumptions were in favor of liberty.
Beyond that is for another post, or series of posts, or maybe a book or three; and while it’s an issue that offers a lot to discuss, it’s also not a new one. What really struck me in Dr. Fitzmyer’s comment quoted above were his closing questions:
Would Paul have written the same thing to the non-Christian owner of a pagan slave? Would he have agreed with Aristotle’s view about “friendship” with such a slave?
The reason that struck me is because it seems to me there’s an assumption there which needs to be considered: namely, that what Paul thought about such questions matters to us, and thus that if we had the answers to such questions, it would affect our interpretation of Scripture. At one time, I would have thought that was obvious—after all, this is Paul, the guy who wrote half the New Testament; of course we want to know more of what he thought about everything. Anymore, though, I don’t agree with that. After all, as much as I believe that God by his Spirit inspired Paul to write the letters which we now have, that only makes the letters authoritative; Paul, as brilliant as he was, was still a sinful, fallible human being. Just because we affirm that the Spirit inspired the thirteen letters of Paul that we have in the New Testament, it doesn’t mean that the Spirit inspired everything else, or even anything else, that he said or wrote or thought.As such, while I don’t know the answers to Dr. Fitzmyer’s questions, I also don’t care about those answers; I have no problem affirming that if Paul in fact agreed with Aristotle, that that’s the reason God kept him from saying so in any of the letters we have. The idea that Paul might have believed something means nothing to me if that belief is outside the bounds of the canon of Scripture, because I don’t follow Paul as such; I only follow him as he follows Christ. I recognize Paul as a fellow redeemed sinner who had his unrighteous behaviors and his un-Christlike ideas and his limits to his understanding just like me, or anyone else; the key for me is that in affirming the inspiration of Scripture, I affirm that the Spirit kept all those things outside the bounds of the canon. Inside those bounds, within the letters we have, we have Paul at his best, guided and shaped by the Spirit’s work; outside, it doesn’t matter.
A bruised reed he will not break
and a smoldering wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.So it is said of the Servant of God in Isaiah 42:3; so it will be when he comes again. Right now, though, we live in a very different world. I was reflecting on this this morning, thinking about the state of affairs in Zimbabwe. If you’ve been following the news, you know that it looks like Robert Mugabe’s succeeded in hanging on to power (though he said he’s “open to discussion” with the opposition), since the opposition party pulled out of Friday’s presidential runoff in the face of the Mugabe government’s terror campaign, and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai sought refuge at the Dutch embassy in Harare. Freedom and justice in Zimbabwe are smoldering wicks, indeed.There is one small, very small, bright spot, though: at this year’s meeting of the PC(USA)’s General Assembly, the Peacemaking and International Issues Committee approved a resolution in support of the church in Zimbabwe, and against the Mugabe government. I hope and firmly expect to see the whole GA approve it; and I further hope that this encourages the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa (UPCSA), to which the Presbytery of Zimbabwe belongs, to take a similar stance at their General Assembly in September. I miss being a part of the relationship between Denver and Zimbabwe—it’s perhaps the biggest thing I miss from having left that presbytery—and I wish I could have been there. I’ll have to get on top of the schedule and see if I can at least watch the plenary session when this resolution comes to the floor; I suspect my friends from Zimbabwe won’t speak then (since they’d be on video for the whole world, including Mugabe and his thugs, to see), but I’d at least be able to share the moment with them a little.Please, keep praying for Zimbabwe.
Skeptical conversations, part VII: The Holy Spirit and the Bible
Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-VI here.
A: Now, the Father and the Son I understand, and I can see how you speak of them as personal; but I don’t understand the Spirit. For one thing, there is no personal image there—“Spirit” seems rather vague and impersonal, much like the Force in Star Wars. For another, “Father” and “Son” are both relational labels, defining one person in relationship to a second person, but there is nothing relational about “Spirit”; it doesn’t seem to fit.
R: The most common answer, at least in the Western churches, is that the Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son; this dates to Augustine, who wrote a book on the Trinity. I don’t like it, at least not phrased that way; I think that understanding of the Spirit tends to depersonalize him, for one thing, and it’s already far too easy to conceive of the Spirit merely as an impersonal force. I think it’s true that there’s a connection between the Spirit of God and the relationship between the Father and the Son—you might perhaps say that the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and Son in relationship, or in some sense the Spirit of the relationship between them—but I wouldn’t want to collapse it any more than that, for fear of limiting the Spirit.
A: I can see that; and I don’t see that it makes any sense to call love, or a relationship, or anything of that sort a person.
R: Well, it has the advantage of explaining where exactly the Spirit came from, and why; something which, as you noted, is much clearer in the case of the Father and the Son.
A: I didn’t think you were all that fond of explaining those sorts of questions.
R: I’m in favor of explaining as much as possible, just not of forcing explanations. In any case, that the Spirit is a person and that he is God are clear from the biblical texts, and beyond that they are primarily concerned with his work; for the Spirit is the one who carries out the work of God in the world, and he is God’s empowering presence with his people. Basically, I would say the work of the Spirit is threefold: he bears witness to the Father and the Son; he mediates the work of Christ to us; and he lives in us, empowering us to follow Jesus and grow in holiness.
The first point is where the doctrine of revelation comes in, because it is the Spirit who reveals God to us, and it is only through his revelation that we can know God at all.
A: Since God is incomprehensible.
R: Right, but also because we are fallen creatures—our reason has been damaged no less than the rest of us. God is too much for us to come to know by unassisted reason, but there’s also the fact that we prefer gods made in our own image, rather than the other way around. In any case, theologians have typically divided revelation into two categories, general and special revelation. General revelation is God’s revelation of himself to everyone, in nature—through the physical world with its laws, through human nature with its laws, and through human history. Special revelation, on the other hand, is communicated supernaturally by God, either directly or through a human agent.
A: That would be the Bible.
R: Yes, and as far as God’s self-revelation, that is the end of it. Now, I don’t agree with the division of revelation into general and special revelation, though to be sure the Bible is not the same sort of thing as a scientific study or a history textbook; but fundamentally, as the German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg has argued, the important point is that God reveals himself through his activity in creation and history. The Bible is of particular importance because it is a particular record, inspired by the Holy Spirit, of particular acts of God in history, but this is not truly a different kind of revelation, because it is all the work of the Spirit in and among us; it is, rather, a different depth of revelation, and it is necessary because without it, we cannot perceive God’s disclosure of himself in nature and human history.
A: Because of sin, I suppose?
R: Yes, for two reasons. One, our sin has blighted the order and beauty of God’s creation. To take the most obvious sort of example, if you go up into the mountains and come upon a valley that has been thoroughly logged, leaving the small river flowing through it brown and choked with soil because of erosion, what does that make you feel?
A: Revulsion for what we’ve done to the earth.
R: On the other hand, a logger might look at it and see a job well done, a job that fed their families and provided wood to build homes for other families. For my part, I don’t think logging is bad, but the way it’s done often is—which illustrates, I think, the way that human sin has disordered and damaged God’s self-revelation in nature. Then too, of course, you have the way that human sin has blighted our history; one might conclude from the study of history that there is a God, but one might also say with Baudelaire that if there is a God, he is the Devil. It all depends on what you look at, and on what eyes you have to see; which is the other point, that our sin blinds us to the truth present in the world around us, leaving us unable to see God’s revelation of himself. As John Calvin, the great Reformer, put it, we need the lenses of the gospel to enable us to see the truth of God.
A: In other words, without the Bible, the rest of the world is worthless for trying to understand God.
R: I don’t know if I’d say “worthless”; but between the effects of sin on the world we see and the effects of sin on us, I’d say that we cannot come to anything really close to a true picture without the Bible. Just look, after all, at all the different cultures that have existed in this world, and how different all their pictures of reality have been.
A: And how different mine is from yours, you are carefully not saying. Which supports either your case or mine, of course. But I have a question: aren’t you putting too much weight on what is, in the end, still a book written by human beings?
R: I don’t think so, for two reasons. One, I believe the Holy Spirit inspired the Bible. I believe he inspired every part of it, working with the minds of its human authors and guiding the writing process so that the texts carry the meaning God intended. I also believe that he guided the church in setting the canon, so that the books we have are the books he inspired. As a consequence, I believe the Bible is a completely faithful and true witness and without error on its own terms.
A: What do you mean, “without error on its own terms”?
R: I mean that I affirm the Bible as without error, when it is properly understood. To take the most obvious case, I affirm Genesis 1-2 as a biblical text without error.
A: So you believe the earth was created in a calendar week a little over 4000 years ago?
R: No, I don’t, because I don’t believe that interpretation is a proper one of that text. People have reached that conclusion because they insist on reading Genesis 1-2 as a scientific text—they take the words to mean what they would mean had they been written by someone writing today. But it’s a liturgical text, not a scientific text, and it doesn’t share our modern preoccupations; we need to understand it in light of its own concerns.
A: What about the inconsistencies in the gospels?
R: I affirm the gospels as true reports of events, again on their own terms, and so I would say of all the histories in the Bible. We do need to understand, though, that the biblical writers didn’t have our standards for writing history, and again that they didn’t share our modernist concerns in these matters; to assume that if they were writing history they must have done it the way we would do it is anachronistic, and quite frankly rather arrogant. So take, for example, the cleansing of the temple. John places that very early in Jesus’ ministry—it comes in chapter 2—while the other three gospels set the story at the end of his ministry, in the week before his crucifixion. If both are telling of the same event, which seems likely, then it seems we have a problem. The question is, though, would the biblical authors have thought so? Setting events down in chronological order doesn’t seem to have been as great a concern for them as it is for us; we even have a bit from an early Christian writer named Papias who tells us that Mark in his gospel wrote down what he heard from Peter, but not in order—and that doesn’t appear to have been a problem to him.
More generally, I tend to follow a critical principle I learned from Coleridge, who wrote something to this effect in one of his critical works: when I meet with an apparent error in a good author, I begin with the assumption that the error is not in the author but in me. After all, these authors were far, far closer than we are to the events about which they were writing, and they knew much more certainly than we do what they were trying to do; it seems to me that to take our limited knowledge of the former and our assumptions and conclusions about the latter and use those to declare that the biblical authors were in error—well, that we should attempt to do anything of the sort only with great humility. It’s a sure thing that more than a few historical details declared false by modern biblical scholars were later proved true by modern archaeology.
A: Such as?
R: The existence of the Hittites comes to mind. The point is, assuming that a biblical author doesn’t know what he’s talking about is, as it is for any author, a problematic assumption; and sometimes, at least, it’s a way of avoiding having to ask whether or not one actually understands what the author is trying to say. In any case, I believe that the Spirit of God inspired the texts, and that he watched over their transmission as well; errors have crept in, to be sure, but nothing has threatened the central meaning of the biblical text.
A: That’s a bold claim.
R: That’s not a claim, it’s a statement of fact. There are a lot of places in the Old and New Testaments where the reading of the text is disputed, and some of them are of significance in one theological dispute or another; but not one of them threatens any of the central doctrines of the historic Christian faith.
A: If God were really preserving the text, wouldn’t he have kept it free from any errors at all?
R: You could argue that, and certainly it would have been a remarkable testimony if he had; but it’s a tricky thing to argue on the basis of what God would have done or not done, because he’s really not that predictable. Let’s just say that it doesn’t challenge my faith any to find variant readings in Scripture.
In any case, the work of the Holy Spirit in inspiring the text is one major reason that I don’t think I’m putting too much weight on it. The other is that it isn’t the words themselves as such that are my authority, but the Spirit of God speaking through the biblical text. The Bible is a trustworthy record of what God has said and done, it testifies to and preserves God’s revelation of himself, and as such it is objectively his word to us; but it is only as the Spirit illumines our minds and hearts to understand it and respond to it, only as the Spirit speaks through the text, that it becomes the word of God to us in our own experience.
A: Do you believe the Spirit speaks to people in other ways?
R: Yes, I do; but I believe that the Devil speaks to people, too, and that we are more than capable of deluding ourselves. That’s why John says in 1 John 4 that we need to test every spirit, because no spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ was God incarnate can be from God. That’s why the Scriptures are key, because we know the Spirit inspired them and speaks through them; they are our sure and certain guide, the lamp that lights our way. I believe that many writers throughout the ages have written true and wise things, and the Spirit does speak to us through their writings, but we must always test these writings against the Bible. I believe the Spirit speaks to us through the people around us, and sometimes directly in one way or another; but again, we must always test what we hear against the Scriptures, which we know are from God.
A: You make it sound easy.
R: Sometimes it is, but of course not always. And to be sure, there are many disagreements over what the Bible teaches; many in the church would disagree with the majority of my beliefs. But this is where the church as a whole comes into play. Yes, we need to test the writings of the church against the Scriptures, and yes, there are many disagreements among Christian thinkers throughout the ages; that is, after all, much of the reason why we have so many denominations.
A: You do indeed. Interpreting the Bible clearly is not as easy as it seemed you were making it sound.
R: On a lot of points, that’s true. At the same time, though, the general consensus on the acceptable range of interpretations is solid. The church very early on staked out the most basic doctrines, those which could not be compromised, and built a fence around them through the great creeds—and while those are still human documents and not to be equated with Scripture, they are very important for us as we seek to understand what the Spirit is saying to us through his word. And in the years since, the arguments within the church have spurred many to write about the things of God, and in the writings of such as John Calvin, Martin Luther, John Owen, Abraham Kuyper, Karl Barth, and many others there is considerable insight and wisdom; and during the Reformation, when differences in belief brought war and the threat of war, Protestant communities in places such as Germany, the Netherlands and England wrote the great Protestant confessions so that no one would have any doubts what they were fighting and dying for. These, too, are valuable guides for us in our interpretation of Scripture.
I don’t make the mistake of setting the tradition of the church equal to Scripture, as Catholics do, but I don’t want to fall into the opposite trap, as do many Protestants, of throwing out tradition. Those who do so claim to be following Scripture alone, but in truth they are exalting not the Scripture but their own interpretation of it, and in the end their own wisdom and understanding. As a practical matter, they are moving the source of authority from the Spirit to themselves, and that is both foolish and arrogant. We need to remember always that the Spirit illumines everyone, not just us, that there are many Christians who are wiser than us, whether alive or dead, and that we need to learn what we can from them. Our theology must always be characterized by humility.
Memo to self: don’t get cocky
“Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.”—1 Corinthians 10:12 (ESV)The present is no guarantee of the future; the moment when we’re surest we’re standing firm is the moment we’re least likely to notice the ground eroding out from under our feet. May we always, in humility, be on guard against the temptations of the Enemy, and the worse angels of our nature, remembering that the fact that we stand now is no promise that we’ll still be standing five minutes from now.“Be careful, little eyes, what you see . . .
“Be careful, little ears, what you hear . . .
“Be careful, little feet, where you go . . .”
There’s a parable in here somewhere . . .
. . . but at the moment, it’s beyond me to know what it is. This from Neil Gaiman (who is, as my wife notes, an unabashed pagan):
I wound up strangely out of sorts today, after my journey down to Dave [McKean]’s. The toilets on many trains in the UK have ridiculously unintuitive ways to open and close doors, with mystery buttons inside the toilet to close and lock the door that are hard to find, even for the sighted. I watched a blind man head into the train toilet. He couldn’t find the door to close it, said “excuse me, can some[one] help me?” until a fat man in a suit sitting next to the toilet stopped pretending he wasn’t there and pressed the close door button for him. Then I watched the fat man hurry down the aisle and past me and back into the next compartment for all the world as if he was embarrassed by what had just happened. Soon enough there came a frantic knocking on the toilet door as, obviously, the blind man couldn’t get out (secret, randomly placed buttons would do it, but you have to find them first). And there was a carriage full of people between me and the toilet, so I waited for someone to get up, press the outside button and let him out. And nobody did. now the knocking started again, louder, and more panicked, and I looked out at a carriage filled with people who were pretending very hard they hadn’t heard, and were all now gazing intently at their books or papers. So I got up and walked down to the toilet and let the man out, and showed him back to his seat, because it’s the least I’d want if I was blind, and it’s how you treat a fellow human being, and for heaven’s sake. And then I went back to my seat, and everyone looked up at me and stared and smiled with relieved “thank god someone did that” smiles, and I sat down grumpy and puzzled and remain grumpy and puzzled about it still. I’m still trying to work out what on earth was going on there—I don’t think I did anything good or clever or nice. I just did what I would have thought anyone would do. Except a train filled with people didn’t, and in one case actively appeared to be running away in order not to. And I puzzle over, was this a carriage filled with particularly self-centred or embarrassed people, has something fundamental changed in the years I’ve been away from the UK (unlikely, and I don’t believe in lost Golden Ages), did those other people really somehow blindly fail to notice that there was a blind man trapped in the toilet…? I have no idea and I write it down because, as I said, it puzzles and irritates me, and if it ever turns up in a short story you’ll know why.
“It is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.”
—Romans 2:13-16 (ESV)
HT: Sara
In defense of the church, part IV: Jesus
I started doing these posts “in defense of the church” (as you can see from parts I, II and III)
in large part because I think the church takes a lot of flak that really isn’t fair; granted that there are a fair number of congregations out there which are truly poisonous (any pastor can tell you that), and a fair number more which are thoroughly dysfunctional (ditto), and another pile on top of that which are preaching something other than grace, to move beyond criticisms of specific congregations to dismissal of the church as a whole seems to me ungracious and unwarranted. Hence my three previous posts in this irregular series.
I have others of that sort I could add to them, and I may well, at some future point; but lately I’ve felt God poking me that there’s something else I need to say first, something that comes out of a place where he’s convicted me in the past. The most basic thing to say in defense of the church, the first thing that needs to be said, is that Jesus loves the church; in Ephesians 5, Paul describes the church as the bride of Christ (and says that we husbands are supposed to love our wives as much as Christ loves the church—remembering always that Christ wascrucified for the church). We’d best be careful, I think, what we say about the church, because I’ve never met a groom yet who took kindly to people ripping on his bride; I don’t imagine Jesus does, either.
Which is not to say that criticism of particular congregations (or denominations, for that matter) is out of line; as noted, there’s a fair number of them that have gone fair wrong. I come out of the Reformed tradition, which makes a point of the three marks of the true church; from our perspective, just because something calls itself a church doesn’t mean it is in any meaningful sense. (If anything, my theological forebears were probably a mite too willing to declare churches to be false churches.) And for that matter, fair, reasoned, gracious critique is important for all of us, as individuals and as the people of God, to grow, and so that’s never out of place or inappropriate. But when we go so far as to denounce “the church” and suggest that God doesn’t like “the church” any more than we do—no, that’s too far. Jesus loves the church, and that isn’t going to change.
Yes, this even means that he loves the people in it who hurt us and make us miserable—he died for them just as he died for the soldiers who crucified him, praying as he died, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” As brutal hard and painful as it is, he wants to bring us to the point where we can love them, too, even as he commands us to love all the rest of our enemies. The love and grace of God are hard things, because they go as much to the people we want cut off as they do to us; if we’re going to accept them for ourselves, we have to be committed to showing them to others. (Which is not to say that we have to be able to do so right away; forgiveness takes time. There are people in my past that I can’t forgive yet, so I know that full well. But we have to be committed to getting to that point, as we heal.) Jesus loves the church—and yes, that includes that pastor, that elder, that deacon, that member; which means we’d best be careful what we say about it, and about them, and in what spirit we say it.
I was going to link to this song, which I posted as song of the week over a year ago; but I think I’ll just post it again here. I like this one a lot, in large part because it continues to convict me, and to call me back to a proper heart for ministry; and because it gives me hope that someday, we as the church will live up to the love Jesus has for us.
Jesus Loves the Church
You say that you believe in us—at times, I wonder why;
You say you see the Father in our eyes.
But I think if I were you, Lord, I’d wash my hands today,
And turn my back on all our alibis.Chorus:
For we crucify each other, leaving a battered, wounded bride—
But Jesus loves the church;
So we’ll walk the aisle of history, toward the marriage feast,
For Jesus loves the church.We fight like selfish children vying for that special prize;
We struggle with our gifts before your face.
And I know you look with sorrow at the blindness in our eyes
As we trip each other halfway through the race.Chorus
I want to learn to love like you; I don’t know where to start.
I want to see them all but through your eyes.
For you believed enough to live amidst the madding crowd,
Enough to die before our very eyes.Chorus
Words and music: Sheila Walsh
© 1988 Word Music
From the album Say So, by Sheila Walsh
Reflection on Amos 5 worship, for a thoughtful friend
“Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!
Why would you have the day of the Lord?
It is darkness, and not light,
as if a man fled from a lion,
and a bear met him,
or went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall,
and a serpent bit him.
Is not the day of the Lord darkness, and not light,
and gloom with no brightness in it?
“I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
I will not look upon them.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like a wadi that never dries up.”—Amos 5:18-24 (ESV, alteration mine)Thus says the Lord:
“For three transgressions of Israel
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,
because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals—
those who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth
and turn aside the way of the afflicted;
a man and his father go in to the same girl,
so that my holy name is profaned;
they lay themselves down beside every altar
on garments taken in pledge,
and in the house of their God they drink
the wine of those who have been fined.”—Amos 2:6-8 (ESV)It can be tempting to take verses like Amos 5:21—“I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies”—as if we can just lift them right out of Amos and apply them to the church today, or to parts of the church we don’t like. Certainly, we may feel, there are an awful lot of churches whose worship can’t possibly be pleasing to God—and this is the word of God, so it applies to us just as it did to Amos’ neighbors in Tekoa; it’s tempting to rise up in the prophet’s place and pronounce the damnation of God on all that we see is wrong in the church. It is, however, a temptation which must be resisted, for our own sakes; it must be resisted because it’s an abuse of the Scripture, and it’s abuse of the Scripture that opens the door to all the other abuses we see in the church. It must also be resisted because it leads us away from humility, and into the trap of spiritual pride.Amos 5 does indeed say something very important about worship, something which clearly applies to us today—but it doesn’t say that God hates all the worship offered him by the Western church, or that all the services and conferences and organizations and rallies are despicable to him. Some of them no doubt are; but this is not a blanket condemnation, except for those who are guilty of the sins of which Amos condemned his contemporaries. To understand why he denounces their worship so powerfully, we need to understand what he’s denouncing. We need to understand the real problem.First off, to be clear, the problem wasn’t that Israel wasn’t worshiping God, or that they weren’t doing so correctly. It’s not that they weren’t a religious people—by any standard, they were considerably more religious than we are. God doesn’t complain that they weren’t showing up to church. They were keeping up their duties, showing up to the temple on the great holy days, offering their sacrifices, playing their music, and so on; they knew the stuff they were supposed to be doing, and they were doing it—all the right words at all the right times, all the right sacrifices done all the right ways, all down pat.The problem wasn’t what they were doing—the problem was why. Their worship may have been directed to God, but it wasn’t about God, it was about them; specifically, it was about dotting all the “i”s and crossing all the “t”s necessary to get what they wanted from God, keeping up their end of the bargain so that God would have to keep up his. That’s why, just to make sure they had all their bases covered, they didn’t just worship the one true God, they worshiped a number of other gods, too—being quite sure, no doubt, to get all those forms just right as well. Of course, the Bible calls that idolatry, and makes it quite clear that God won’t stand for it; but his people just didn’t see the problem. After all, wasn’t it all about getting their needs met? If worshiping another god or two on the side helped them get their needs met, why should God mind?This attitude bore all kinds of bad fruit. God is just, and his law set high standards for how the rich and powerful were to treat the poor and vulnerable, and yet his people felt free to come to worship with the blood of injustice on their hands, as we see both in Amos 5 and in Amos 2 (and in fact in lots of places throughout the prophets). The people of Israel thought they could buy God’s favor by showing up at the temple at the scheduled time and going through the motions, then go back into the “real world” and do business however they pleased. They didn’t understand that real worship begins with surrender—with giving over to God our plans, our ideas, our desires, our fears, our dreams, our visions, our conceptions of justice, our expectations of mercy, our wants, even our needs, and saying, “This is what I would do, but your will be done”; they just wanted to show up on Saturday morning, go through the motions, and walk off with the assurance that God was happy with them for showing up and would, in consequence, give them whatever they might happen to ask for.And that, God says, is false worship, and I loathe it. “I hate, I despise your festivals; I take no delight in your church services. Take away your sacrifices—it makes me sick to look at them. Stop singing and put down your instruments—I can’t stand to listen to your noise.” All their worship was just an empty, cynical production; they were keeping up the shell of their religion, the ritual and the outward conformity, but without any reality at the center—and it made God madder than if they’d never bothered to show up at all. They shouldn’t have bothered, because they were essentially committing religious fraud, and God can’t and won’t tolerate that. Instead of all their show, what he wanted, and what he wants from us, is what he’s wanted all along: for his people to live lives of worship, for what we say in church on Sunday to be reflected at work on Monday.He declares this in one of the most powerful and striking verses in the Bible: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a wadi that never dries up.” “Stream” doesn’t really capture the point here; as one commentator put it, “A wadi in the Middle East is a narrow valley, often a deep channel, through which rapid torrents of water gush during the rainy season, but which may have only a trickle of water or be completely dry in the summer.” When it flows, it brings life and color to the land, which then returns to desert when it dries up. But where a real wadi would flow only sometimes, God calls for justice and righteousness to be like a wadi that never stops flowing, but pours out ceaselessly in a mighty, thunderous flood, bringing life to the nation.Now, in tying true worship to justice and righteousness, is Amos saying that the purpose of worship is to change our behavior? No; but true worship will, nonetheless. Worship brings us into the presence of God to focus on his character, on his beauty, and on all that he has done in creating this world and in saving us as his people—and the more time we spend looking at God, the more we will desire God, and thus desire his holiness. Worshiping God transforms us; spending time focusing our attention on God changes our priorities, our preferences, and our outlook on the world. It’s a gradual change, to be sure, not something that happens overnight, but no less real for all that; the proof of the pudding, so to speak, is whether our daily life, as individuals and as a community of believers, demonstrates and reflects the justice and righteousness of God. When that isn’t in evidence—as it wasn’t among Amos’ fellow Israelites—it’s a sign that however highly we might think of it, there’s something wrong with our worship.Unfortunately, we don’t look at our worship the same way God does. We don’t judge our worship by whether or not our lives are characterized by justice and righteousness, or whether they look like the picture Paul paints in Colossians 3; we don’t examine our hearts to see if we, like the Israelites, are guilty of idolatry, worshiping our false gods of money, pleasure, ambition, and self-fulfillment right alongside the one true God. Instead, we ask, did we have a meaningful worship experience?—Did we enjoy the music?—Did we get something out of it?—Did it move us?—as if whether we found it meaningful was all that mattered, as if this is all about us. When those are the only questions we ask—when our only concerns about our worship are for ourselves and our own opinions and desires—we’ve gone off the rails. Our worship is about God, and what matters first and foremost is whether he is pleased, whether we’ve been focused on praising him, giving him glory, doing him honor; if not, if our concern is more for ourselves and what we think and feel than for God, then we aren’t really worshiping him at all.The bottom line of our worship is this: God calls us to gather together as his people to praise his name, to honor him as our God, to hear him speak to us through his word, to confess our sins and affirm our faith, to lay our needs before him in prayer—and to go out again resolved and empowered to live out his justice and righteousness in a lost and broken world so loved by God. He calls us to take everything we have—yes, even our pain, even our struggles, even our anger, even our grief, just as much as our joy and our faith, our money and our talents—and give it to him, give it completely to him, as our offering. He calls us to give up trying to bless ourselves—let him take care of that!—and instead to bless his name with everything we have, with our words and with our lives, because he is worth it. He’s worth everything we have, and everything we are, and far, far more. If we understand worship in this way, if we seek to worship God in this way, it will change us, and it will change how we live; and so the proof of our worship, if you will, is in the fruit.When are we justified in applying Amos 5:21 to the worship of the church? When the life of the church looks like Amos 2.
Our Swiss-cheese Bibles
Scot McKnight has a piece up on the Leadership section of CT’s website about (and linking to) the hermeneutics quiz devised by BuildingChurchLeaders.com. I don’t actually find the quiz all that interesting, though I think they did a good job putting it together—the quiz informed me that I’m conservative, but moderately so, which wasn’t exactly news to me—but I thought Dr. McKnight’s comments were.
For some reason of late, I have become fascinated with the portions of the Bible we don’t tend to read, passages like the story of Jephthah. Or how God was on the verge of killing Moses for not circumcising his son, and his wife stepped in, did what needed to be done, and tossed the foreskin at Moses’ feet, and God let him alone. I’m curious why one of my friends dismisses the Friday-evening-to-Saturday-evening Sabbath observance as “not for us today” but insists that capital punishment can’t be dismissed because it’s in the Old Testament.I have become fascinated with what goes on in our heads and our minds and our traditions (and the latter is far more significant than many of us recognize) in making decisions like this.What decisions? Which passages not to read as normative. The passages we tend not to read at all.If we’re all subject to selective perception, at least to some degree, it’s important to recognize what we tend to miss or gloss over, especially if we’re church leaders.
He goes on to credit the quiz with helping us do this, which I don’t really think it does, to any significant degree; but I certainly agree that this is something we need to address, because it leads to us missing and misunderstanding what God wants to say to us. It gives us a truncated gospel—one which, funnily enough, usually tends to be truncated neatly to fit our comfort zones.There are, I think, several reasons for this. In churches that use the lectionary, a lot of this is done for you, as the folks who put the lectionary readings together did a nice job of trimming around all the troublesome spots. We do it ourselves, because dealing with those spots takes work—we can’t just toss out the pat answers we’ve all learned, we have to wrestle with the text and put thought and effort into it. What’s more, dealing with those sorts of passages carries an emotional cost, as we come face to face with the fact that we don’t worship a nice, comfortable god who wants us to live nice, comfortable lives. In some cases, as Jared Wilson points out, the Scriptures tell us things we just flat-out don’t want to hear; it’s no shock that we tend to avoid those passages if at all possible.And so we end up with Swiss-cheese Bibles, with great voids in them, and we take our nice neat slices with their nice neat holes in them, and we end up with a much less messy and much less discomfiting faith as a consequence; but then, it seems to me, we end up with a faith much less able to deal with the messy and discomfiting parts of life—they go sailing right through the holes. We need to make the effort to fill in the holes, to consider what parts of the Bible we’re avoiding, and why, and take them head-on; we need to open ourselves up to listen to, and proclaim, the whole counsel of God.