His Challenge is Scripture

His Challenge is Scripture October 7, 2015

Screen Shot 2015-09-19 at 2.11.10 PMWhether we are talking about same-sex relations, about angel experiences, about near death experiences, about church and culture, about salvation, about the ethical life — nearly every topic eventually runs up against what Scripture says (as properly interpreted, as best we can do, as done in consort with other Bible readers, etc).

Eventually we face a question whether we will believe what the Bible says or what an experience leads us to think. At times they are very similar or even the same; at other times they are wildly different.

Which to trust? Who decides which is in the end throws down the trump card?

Harold Lindsell once wrote a screed and called this discussion the “battle for the Bible” and he named names and made accusations and showed his cards on some mighty odd interpretations. His extravagances made the book a blockbuster as well as one that eventually lost favor. While I appreciate the intent of those who call it a “battle,” what we need the most is a compelling theory of Scripture that is consistent with itself, including how the Bible uses itself, and a fundamental faithfulness to Scripture in the mode of prima scriptura. (That’s another discussion we’ve had on this blog, where prima pre-empts the sometimes exaggerations of sola scriptura, that is, what often amounts to nuda scriptura out of context.) A narratival approach to Scripture, or Scripture as Story, has become far more compelling in that it permits the Bible to go where it goes, to leave behind what it leaves behind, and pushes us into the world with hermeneutical categories for discernment. But prima scriptura contains us, and the creeds articulate how the church found consensus on what Scripture means in discernment without replacing or trumping prima scriptura.

Luke Timothy Johnson, in The Revelatory Body, outlines his approach that is challenged by Scripture and how he meets that challenge needs to be seen for what it is. He shifts revelation from Scripture to the body; he does so on the basis of the Bible; on the basis of the Bible he then challenges the Bible. He — his revelatory body — wins the challenge.

Here are two major dimensions of his argument:

Scripture is best understood, not as containing revelation, but as participating in revelation.

When read as a whole, Scripture does not point to itself as the locus of revelation, but points readers instead to the human body as the preeminent place of God’s self-disclosure (38). [“Body” blends from individual and physical into experiences in the body and into a social body like the church.]

No christological centrality in revelation in the body here.

Of the greatest importance, and grounding everything else, is my conviction that God continues to create the world at every moment, and by so creating, continues to reveal Godself in what is coming-into-being. If this understanding of the Living God — an understanding I think underpinning everything said in Scripture — is not correct, then everything I have said in this book is false (231). [Quite the admission to his readers.]

Now a false exclusion:

If God acted only [who claims this?] in the past, and those actions are adequately reported by Scripture, then the Bible can indeed be said to “contain” revelation, and nothing more needs doing apart from the systematic exposition of propositions based on the biblical accounts. The major problem with this is that it posits a God who is no longer active — in effect, a dead god. But if God is, in fact, active in the work of creation, the work that underlies all of God’s “activity” in the world, then authentic faith — and, by extension, authentic theology — must consistently fix its attention on what God is up to here and now (231).

The problem is that false exclusion. No one claims God acted only in the past. Most in the church — if not all responsible theologians and pastors — do not think “nothing more needs” to be done that systematizing propositions [another pejorative term]. But even then, why would a God who acted in the past be “dead”? That’s scare tactics.

There’s more here: the point is that the God who acted in the past acted in the past in determinative ways that becomes the revelation of God, leading to the implication that what God does after that revelation will be consistent with, coherent with, and contained by that revelation. That is what I mean by prima scriptura.

God is in fact active, on that we all agree. But why does that mean we “must consistently fix” our attention “on what God is up to here and now”? Consistently? What does that mean? Exclusively? And when we discern what “God is up to here and now” and it disagrees with what Scripture says, what then?

The challenge, as I have said for Johnson, is Scripture. He ends on what might just be pulling his own rug out from under himself.

Scripture itself, I have shown, declares that, not itself, but the human body is the place where God’s word particularly is expressed and where God’s work is done. But I have also argued that, without being formed by Scripture, theologians are not able to perceive the movement of the Spirit in human bodies as expressing the word and work of God. Scripture participates in revelation first by providing the lens for perceiving human experience, and second by being given new meaning and pertinence through engagement with God’s living work (231-232).

The theologian must know Scripture and the tradition, and must have a creedal framework within which to think about human behavior. But these are only propaedeutic to the learning of … theology as living art, which learning occurs above all in direct engagement with human bodies (233).

Who gets to challenge whom? What gets to challenge what? I find a fundamental dissatisfaction with how Johnson does theology. Scripture, as I read him, gets us going but I’m not sure it does much more.


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