Christianity is Changing
The Fundamentalists and Conservative Evangelicals are right about this: there are only two perspectives, that of God and that of humanity. The phrase they use for this is what they call the difference between “God’s word and man’s word.” With reference to this they mean that the divine perspective is truth while the human perspective is a lie. Of course texts like “Let God be true and every man a liar” (NIV Romans 3:4) provide ‘biblical’ support for this view.
This is an insight worth considering. Let us assume for the moment that this is a correct perspective. Let us assume that there are only two perspectives. How might we discern which is which? The Protestant armed with the sola scriptura principle and a theory of inspiration will claim that the Bible gives us God’s perspective, everything outside the Bible is human perspective. Of course, that is not a novel way of viewing revelation. Islam has held such a position long before Protestants came up with the idea, and there is suggestive evidence that certain, if not most Jews, held such an orientation toward Torah before that. As I am not a scholar of religions, I cannot speak to Hinduism or other ANE traditions which may have had an impact on second-Temple Jewish understandings of the inspiration and authority of Scripture.
The Protestant is thus playing a ‘claim’ game where their claims are true but other’s are false. The presumption that the Bible is revelation itself while other texts ‘come from the devil’, ‘are full of lies’, or ‘are not infallible or inerrant’ has only managed to create an entire market of ill-crafted apologetics, excuses, and some 40,000+ denominations and churches all claiming to correctly ‘hear’ God’s voice in the Bible. The fact is when such lofty and exalted status is claimed for the Bible, but not for the interpreter, an errant interpreter will always err when interpreting an inerrant text.
Two solutions have been suggested to solve this conundrum. The first is the Roman Catholic solution whereby the bishops become the ‘official’ interpreters of scripture. The second is the doctrine of the indwelling of the holy Spirit. Both Evangelicals and Charismatics utilize this argument. No matter how you slice or dice it, it all boils down to: “God gave me this book and God is with me when I read this book. God is faithful to make sure I understand this book, therefore when I read this book, I hear God’s voice.” This rather solipsistic response carries little water as a solution inasmuch as the human side of the equation (the lying side) is not acknowledged; people who take this position cannot admit of self-deception, projection etc.
I would like to suggest several theses for reframing our understanding of the relationship between revelation and the Bible.
1. Jesus alone, not together with the Bible, is the Word of God, the revelation of the Abba by the Spirit.
John’s prologue is the text one can profitably turn to justify this first thesis. C.H. Dodd noted over fifty years ago that all of the statements regarding the Logos in the prologue had parallels to Torah in certain rabbinic traditions (most admittedly post 70 C.E.). In other words, following along the trajectory of identifying Torah, Sophia and Logos (as is done in the Wisdom of Solomon and Philo), one could say that it was through Torah that creation happened, that Torah was light and life, that Torah conquers darkness, etc. One thing alone though could not be said of Torah, namely that ‘Torah became flesh.’ If John 1 is a bit of a ‘midrash’ on Genesis 1 (structured as a hymn according to many scholars), then what is being asserted in the face of those who highly esteem ‘The Book’ is a way of understanding that God has acted outside the confines of The Book in taking on flesh. This is made explicit in John 1:14, 16-18:
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.”
There is hardly a clearer text in the New Testament that challenges the sola scriptura principle than this. Texts do not, in and of themselves, bring revelation. If such were the case then the incarnation of the Logos of God would have not been necessary. Texts do not make God known, according to the prologue, rather the intimate child reveals the Abba.
2.Following Jesus in his hermeneutic is an aspect of discipleship.
Jesus cherry-picked his Bible. In other words, Jesus is no different than the rest of us. I wrote The Jesus Driven Life to demonstrate that Jesus had a very specific method of understanding texts and culture and that he cherry-picked both his textual tradition and the theologies of his culture. He had a clear method for discerning the difference between the voice of his Papa and the voice of broken and hateful human culture. Jesus clearly renounces violence, not only in the area of social intercourse but also in his theology, or how he viewed Papa. Texts that reflect a violent or retributive God are not revelation of the Papa for Jesus. He only uses such texts and engages in arguments with interlocutors that have been taken in by such already. Otherwise Jesus understood his scriptural tradition through a lens that discriminated between revelation and religion. He follows along the prophetic trajectory of the rejection of sacred (religious) and profane (cultural) sacrifice. Both are part and parcel of the prophetic message, both reinforce and undergird each other. Jesus was well aware that ‘sacrificial’ culture and religion was the problem not the solution and he used this understanding as a lens by which to understand sacred texts.
3. We must recognize there are two streams in the Bible, that of religion/culture and that of revelation.
There is great value in being able to recognize two distinct streams that flow through Scripture. On the one hand, one can trace, as it were, a trajectory through the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, and see how in the midst of sacrificially oriented human culture, something else is being born witness to: a non-sacrificial deity, a most unheard of thing. Texts are rather like jars of light, which when cracked, allow the light to escape. One may speak of God’s pedagogical process of bringing humanity (as a species) to maturity (as did Clement of Alexandria). One could speak of progressive revelation but I prefer Clement’s metaphor and prefer to speak of progressive understanding. The scales, veils or layers of religion are slowing coming off our eyes, for we can see the scales, veils and layers as they are coming off the eyes of the people of God in both Testaments, both Jewish and Christian. In the Bible, we have a grand meta-narrative about a God who cares enough to heal us that this God enters human history, and heals that which has been assumed. Even and especially the way we ‘see’ the world. Reading the Bible is to have one’s hermeneutic constantly altered.
4. We can discern between the two streams.
Using Jesus’ hermeneutic as our base and following this approach up with other writers, we can see, e.g., Paul employing this exact strategy when quoting Jewish scripture. The non or anti- sacrificial hermeneutic deployed by Jesus in his rejection of all violence or retribution and his choosing to live in forgiveness and peace, forged a means by which Paul would eventually come to understand the power of ‘grace’, God’s redeeming, liberating, vivacious grace.
5. Living in God’s stream.
Jesus said that one does not pour new wine into old wineskins. Neither does one pour non-sacrificial content into sacrificial frameworks. When this is done, the sacrificial framework bursts apart. It cannot take the explosive pressure of the Really Good News. New wineskins is about changing our paradigms or worldviews, the [sacrificial] interpretive matrices which hold us enthralled and in bondage. Here, in 2014, I think we are on the verge of seeing a significant number of Christians around the world, hear about and accept this new wine and allow the creation of new wineskins. I would call this a recovery of the Gospel, but do not wish to suggest that others before us have not seen it. There have been many who have. What makes our time a little different is the impact of social media with blogs, YouTube videos, twitter and self-publishing. Networks of those who would seek to follow Jesus and renounce the violent sacrificial gods of human culture and take up following the loving Papa are increasing year by year. More and more people, especially those who have left conservative Protestantism, have had their wineskin explode and have found both new wine and new wineskins! They are choosing to live in God’s stream.
As we move forward into the future I hope to add to this healing stream by helping connect the dots between spirituality, doctrine and ethics. The time has come to throw away the crutches of sola scriptura and questionable theories of the inspiration of scripture and move on into the maturity of Jesus. New wine, new wineskins.
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