What is the difference between a dead dog and a dead chemistry professor lying in the middle of the road?

I recently picked up a copy of the second edition of Henry (Fritz) Schaefer’s book Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence? Fritz Schaefer was a professor of chemistry at the University of California Berkeley for 18 years (1969-1987) before moving to the University of Georgia, where he has now been for almost 30 years. I was a graduate student at Berkeley when Fritz was on the faculty and participated in a lunch gathering he had with Christian graduate students for a year. His influence as a Christian and a productive and respected scientist was an invaluable example for me.

This book arose from a series of lectures he has given over the years. He got started lecturing on science and Christianity in response to an incident from his first experience teaching freshman chemistry at Berkeley in January 1984. To cover time after a bit of a technical failure with an expected demonstration … well let’s read his own telling of the story:

I said, “While we’re waiting for the moles, let me tell you what happened to me in church yesterday morning.” I was desperate. There was great silence among those 680 students. They had come will all manner of anticipations about freshman chemistry, but stories about church were not among them!

At least as surprised as the students, I continued, “Let me tell you what my Sunday School teacher said yesterday.” The students became very quiet. “I was hoping the group at church would give me some support, moral spiritual, or whatever, for dealing with this large class, but I received none. In fact, the Sunday School teacher first told anecdotes about his own freshman chemistry instructor, who kicked the dog, beat his wife, and so on. Then he asked the class, in honor of me:

“What is the difference between a dead dog lying in the middle of the road and a dead chemistry professor lying in the middle of the road?“

The class was excited about this and I hadn’t even gotten to the punch line. They roared with laughter. … the difference between a dead dog lying in the middle of the road and a dead chemistry professor lying in the middle of the road is that there are skid marks in front of the dead dog.” It was a new joke at the time, and the class thought it was outstanding. (p. 3-4)

After the class a number of students came down to talk with him – several of whom simply wanted to know what he had been doing in church. Some of the students asked if he would give a lecture on the topic – the first such lecture was in April 1984; the 400th in the summer of 2016 (from a listing in Appendix B of the book).  I was a TA for freshman chemistry one of the terms Fritz taught the class – quite possibly January 1984; the timing is about right.

The lectures are interesting. His story of his journey to faith as a young professor is fascinating (From Berkeley Professor to Christian). I disagree with his conclusions in the chapter Climbing Mount Improbable, Evolutionary Science or Wishful Thinking. Fritz takes an old earth, progressive creation view. He rightly points out the confusion surrounding the origin of life, but I find the evolutionary mechanism for the diversity of life far more persuasive than he suggests. He makes an important point however. This disagreement is not over an essential of the Christian faith. For example, Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne are included without reservation in his lists of scientists who are Christians.  Fritz also takes a somewhat more conservative Presbyterian view (PCA I believe) on some issues than I do – but again not essentials of the Christian faith.

Scientism. I’d like to conclude this post by looking at one of the other chapters: C.S. Lewis: Science and Scientism. In this chapter he digs into the space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength). These books look at the out-workings of “slavish scientific materialism.”

Scientism isn’t a common word today – reductionism is more common and conveys something of the same image today. Concerning scientism: “Webster’s second definition fits Lewis’s usage well; “a thesis that the methods of the natural sciences should be used in all areas of investigation including philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences: a belief that only such methods can be fruitfully used in the pursuit of knowledge.” (p. 123)

C. S. Lewis wasn’t opposed to science, in fact his view seems to be to let the facts be the facts, and this included evolution, but scientific reductionism (scientism) is a real problem. His surviving BBC broadcast acknowledges both evolution and the problems with scientism. In particular humans are not simply the product of evolution – the nature of humans as new men in Christ goes beyond evolution. Start at 8 minutes for the relevant part for this post.

 

The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature, but from God. (11:58-12:06)

Fritz quotes a reply by Lewis to Professor Haldane’s criticism of his space trilogy. In this reply, found in Of Other Worlds, (p. 76-77), Lewis defines scientism as “a certain outlook on the world which is usually connected with the popularization of the sciences, though it is much less common among real scientists than their readers. It is, in a word, the belief that the supreme moral end is the perpetuation of our own species, and this is to be pursued eve if, in the process of being fitted for survival, our species has to be stripped of all those things for which we value it – of pity, of happiness, and of freedom.”  In an age colored by eugenics and the final solution of Hitler’s Germany, such a fear was not unfounded. Science was connected with social Darwinism, and this could be brutal.  Eugenics was quite popular in the US and the UK prior to World War II. William Jennings Bryan’s objections to evolution in the 1920’s had much the same foundation.

Scientism today doesn’t take quite the same approach, but the reduction of humans to nothing but chemical reactions and such remains a threat. Fritz cites several examples in the this chapter, including an article in the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry (his specialty) where an author states “Living systems are wonderfully well-suited to their purpose, but the design is shaped by blind evolution instead of imaginative intelligence.” (p. 133) Another article I’ve found telling is the inaugural article in PNAS by Anthony Cashmore who wrote concerning humans “The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar. The laws of nature are uniform throughout, and these laws do not accommodate the concept of free will.” Humans are nothing special in the grand scheme of things. Fritz comments “The reductionist has no definitive basis for his or her decision to greet or eat a stranger. Such a a worldview should be resisted, as Lewis did so well. I know, as surely as I accept Coulomb’s Law (like charges repel; opposite charges attract), that love is better than hate, and that the truth is better than a lie.” (p. 135) Although not as blatant as eugenics and the creation of a master race, there are significant questions in our culture today. The view that an embryo is nothing but bags of chemicals may be a  threat. The idea that a fetus is not “human” before birth is a larger threat. Many related questions can be posed. When does humanity begin? Are less than genetically perfect humans of value? How much value?  Is a life with Down’s syndrome worth living?

It is important to realize that the problems raised by scientism are not really scientific problems, the solution isn’t to fight the science. The problem is social, grounded in human failings. Fritz concludes the chapter (and his lecture) “My challenge to those of you who are not familiar with C. S. Lewis’s writings is to read his classic Mere Christianity and consider the claims of Jesus.” (p. 136)

Science and Christian faith need not be at odds – many active scientists (a theme running through a number of the essays and lectures in Conflict or Coherence) find the two coherent rather than in conflict.

Is scientism a problem in our age?

If so, where does it come into play?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

Becky is the Discipleship Director at an international church in the Netherlands and blogs about emotionally healthy discipleship at medium.com/wholehearted. She conveys her five kids around town on bikes and studies theology in the middle of the night via the live streaming program at Northern Seminary.

The choices of Bible teachers can build or destroy a learner’s faith. One victim of poor teaching is Reza Aslan, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. He tells of growing up Muslim and Persian. When he was 15, he went to a Christian summer camp, where he heard about Jesus and “intimately felt the pull of God.”[1] Because he had previously felt out of place, his becoming a Christian was not only a religious experience but also a cultural one: “Jesus was American…Accepting him into my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American.”[2] He enthusiastically shared the Good News with his family and friends.

Those who taught him about the Bible had a rigid literal view, so when he later studied history and discovered “errors and contradictions,” “The sudden realization that this belief is patently and irrefutably false…left me confused and spiritually unmoored. And so, like many people in my situation, I angrily discarded my faith as if it were a costly forgery I had been duped into buying.”[3]

Instead of abandoning his academic work, he decided to continue, “delving back into the Bible not as an unquestioning believer but as an inquisitive scholar.”[4] His research over decades led to the thesis for this book: “The more I probed the Bible to arm myself against he doubts of unbelievers, the more distance I discovered between the Jesus of the gospels [sic] and the Jesus of history—between Jesus the Christ and Jesus of Nazareth.”[5] He has now settled into a strange secular faith, declaring that “two decades of rigorous academic research into the origins of Christianity has made me a more genuinely committed disciple of Jesus of Nazareth than I ever was of Jesus Christ. My hope with this book is to spread the good news of the Jesus of history with the same fervor that I once applied to spreading the story of the Christ.”[6]

I wonder if the subtitle of Zealot is a contradictory play on the title of The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah by Alfred Edersheim. The two titles illustrate the central conflict of Zealot: Aslan sets up a rivalry between Jesus the Nazarean and Jesus the Messiah.

The book is beautifully written, full of tension and intrigue. Aslan uses historical and cultural details and skillful sensory images to make alive the setting of Jesus’s life. I liked the Jesus on these pages. I connected with him as I saw him in his environment, dusty, sweaty, working with his hands and his words.

The book is polemical. When Aslan disagrees with someone’s conclusions he uses bold phrases such as, “This is absurd and can be flatly ignored,”[7] and descriptors like, “simply ridiculous”[8] and “fabulous concoctions.”[9]

Aslan sets the scene of the world into which Jesus was born, one full of wandering messiahs and oppressed Jews, one ripe for revolution. He traces the life of Jesus and contrasts the records of the evangelists with other writers of the time (Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger). He claims, “There are only two hard historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth upon which we can confidently rely: the first is that Jesus was a Jew who led a popular Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first century C.E.; the second is that Rome crucified him for doing so.”[10]

He rejects the infancy and childhood narratives in the Gospels, deciding that Matthew added the mention of Egypt to create the illusion of fulfilled prophecy and to make Jesus the new Moses, and that Luke added Bethlehem as Jesus’s birthplace to make Jesus the new David. Aslan affirms that Jesus came from Nazareth and describes it as an “insignificant,” tiny, pauperized town. He says Jesus’s message was that of a true Galilean: God has seen the suffering of the poor.

Aslan sets up Jesus as a disciple of John the Baptist. He writes, “the life of the historical Jesus begins not with his miraculous birth or his obscured youth but at the moment he first meets John the Baptist.”[11] He conjectures that Jesus goes out into the desert after being baptized not to be tempted by the devil but to learn more from John.

He says there is more historical material confirming Jesus’s miracles than his birth or resurrection, and that historians cannot confirm the miracles but can know how people of his time viewed them. There is no doubt about Jesus as a miracle worker who performed healings and exorcisms free of charge, making the priests irrelevant, and sending a message about himself, capable of working by the finger of God. Aslan again brings up his central conflict: “Acceptance of his miracles forms the principle divide between the historian and worshiper.”[12]

Aslan describes the rich Temple priests as lackeys of Rome and shows Jesus opposing both Jewish and Gentile overlords. He says that the triumphal entry and temple cleansing are the moments that declare and define Jesus’s mission, defying the priests and the Romans behind them, and leading to his arrest.

Aslan concludes that the evangelists, writing after the destruction of Jerusalem, tempered the image of Jesus to protect his later followers from Roman attack, changing a zealous revolutionary into a gentle shepherd, a worldly human messiah into an otherworldly spiritual being. He says the evangelists back-filled the details of Jesus’s life to match messianic prophecies because they were “constructing a theological argument about the nature and function of Jesus as Christ, not composing a historical biography about a human being.”[13]

Finally, Aslan follows the development of Christianity through Peter, James, Paul, the Council of Nicaea, and the establishment of the canon. He says Christianity spread outside Jerusalem to Jews then gradually to Gentiles who added Hellenistic ideas to Jesus’s teachings as they wrote in Greek (according to Aslan, because the apostles themselves couldn’t read or write, they had trouble spreading their Jewish version of the story). When James the Just died, the “mother community” in Jerusalem continued until Rome destroyed the city, which cut the link between Jesus the Zealot and the Christian community. Those who gathered in Nicaea in 325 C.E. to permanently define Christianity were Romans, not Jews, because Constantine wanted them to agree on the doctrines of his new religion.

Aslan’s most scathing section is the one on Paul. He thinks Paul not only created a new religion and divorced it from its founder, but also was a contentious egomaniac in the process. Paul gained popularity after the destruction of Jerusalem and hence his writings overshadowed those of Peter and James, actual friends of Jesus, in the canon choices in 398 C.E.

Reza Aslan and the Quest for the Historical Jesus

Aslan’s favoring of Jesus the Nazarean is the opposite of Rudolf Bultmann’s belief about the historical Jesus. Bultmann did not care about the historical material regarding Jesus the man and thought much of it was unbelievable. Instead, he was content with spiritual belief in the spiritual Jesus. Bultmann said, “It is not the historic Christ who is the Lord, but Jesus Christ as he is encountered in the proclamation.”[14]

Bultmann’s student Ernst Käsemann held a middle ground, valuing both the historical Jesus and the spiritual Jesus. Käsemann said, “The problem with the historical Jesus is not something that we have invented; it is the riddle with which Jesus himself confronts us. The student of history can affirm the existence of this riddle, but he cannot find a solution for it. The solution can be found only by those who, since the time of the Cross and the Resurrection, confess that he is…the Lord… For the contingency of history finds its answer in the contingency of faith.”[15]

Aslan at least agrees with Käsemann on the role of faith: “[Jesus of Nazareth] is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means. Everything else is a matter of faith.”[16]

Reza Aslan and History

History can be distorted. Both sides can look at the same facts and interpret them to say what they want them to say. Aslan does this in his book—takes the same historical sources that can lead to faith in Christ and uses them to lead away from him. Two examples are the discussion of the Son of Man and the discussion of pending persecution.

Aslan says that Jesus gave himself the title “Son of Man” over the title “Messiah” that others gave him, that it could mean simply “a man,” that Stephen is the only other person in the New Testament to use that title for Jesus, that the Kingdom of God is linked with Son of Man, and that Jesus is quoting from Daniel. Aslan concludes that Jesus was calling himself king, tried to keep this a secret to prevent consequences, and failed to become a successful messiah.

Chapter 8 of The Kingdom Conspiracy traces an almost identical argument about Son of Man: it’s Jesus’s self-given name, it can mean a human, Stephen uses it, it comes from Daniel. But Scot McKnight comes up with a different understanding: “Jesus chose ‘Son of Man’ to interpret himself because this term ties together both suffering and vindication to his vocation to rule.”[17] McKnight therefore says that Jesus does succeed as Messiah because the Kingdom came with Jesus and will come fully in the Age to Come.

Regarding the potential crucifixions of Jesus’s disciples, Aslan says that Jesus saw his coming death on the cross not as self-abnegation but as a punishment for sedition that he was willing to risk. Jesus warned his disciples it might happen to them too if they followed his zealous ways.[18] N.T. Wright also talks about Jesus’s warning his disciples that they would die if they followed him, but interprets it to mean a willing sacrifice as well as a literal one: “When he told his followers to pick up their own crosses and follow him, they would not have heard this as a metaphor.”[19]

Reza Aslan and Faith

Aslan rejects the Christianity that, in his perspective, Paul invented, but he maintains his affinity for the man Jesus. He declares that he believes only in Jesus of Nazareth. I wonder why he pledges this allegiance at all. After his faith suffered, he could have released a hold on Jesus entirely. It seems the concept of belief in Jesus still has a hold on him. Aslan ends his book with another statement of his secularized faith: “the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should hopefully reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth–Jesus the man–is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He is, in short, someone worth believing in.”[20]

Aslan states that his rejection of faith came from the shock of realizing his early Bible teachers had been wrong. This leaves me quaking in my boots as a Bible teacher. I want to do well at understanding the Bible and teaching it accurately. I want to set up my kids and the people in my church with an accurate view of the Bible that is infused with scholarship, not an unstable view that could lead to a crisis of faith when challenged with history. I want to encourage learning and questioning and diversity of perspectives as I continue to grow. I don’t want to believe that I can have all my theology perfectly correct and then pass on that dogmatism to other people, nor control their access to different opinions and sources. In a community as diverse as my international church of 80+ nations, we embrace the freedom to disagree in order to keep our fellowship in unity.

I mentioned to Dr. McKnight my fear that the way I talk about Biblical interpretation can shake people’s faith so severely. He said, “This kind of crisis caused by bad, non-demonstrable, and too-easy-to-falsify views of the Bible can be a major stumbling block for many, and it can be resolved if people have the fortitude to face the facts and reality.”

What book would Reza Aslan have written if his early Bible teachers had been scholars?

Bibliography

Aslan, Reza. Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. 8th edition. New York: Random House, 2013.

 

Käsemann, Ernst. Essays on New Testament Themes: Studies in Biblical Theology #41. Alec R. Allenson, Incl., 1964.

 

McKnight, Scot. Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church. Brazos, 2014.

 

Neill, Stephen, and Tom Wright. The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986. 2nd edition. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

 

Wright, N. T. The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion. HarperOne, 2016.

 

[1] Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, 8th edition (New York: Random House, 2013), xviii.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., xix.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., xx.

[7] Ibid., 266.

[8] Ibid., xxix.

[9] Ibid., 35.

[10] Ibid., xxviii.

[11] Ibid., 86.

[12] Ibid., 104.

[13] Ibid., 134.

[14] Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986, 2nd edition (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 291. Quoting Bultmann, “The Significance of the Historical Jesus for the Theology of Paul,” 1929.

[15] Ernst Käsemann, Essays on New Testament Themes: Studies in Biblical Theology #41 (Alec R. Allenson, Incl., 1964), 25.

[16] Aslan, Zealot, xxxi.

[17] Scot McKnight, Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church (Brazos, 2014), 131.

[18] Aslan, Zealot, 122.

[19] N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (HarperOne, 2016), 58.

[20] Aslan, Zealot, 216.

By Michelle Van Loon www.MomentsAndDays.org and www.MichelleVanLoon.com

Contrary to the song lyrics, it’s not the most wonderful time of the year for many of us. The jingle bell merriness of the season is like an out-of-tune gong for those grieving the deaths of family members or friends, struggling in the wake of a divorce, suffering the effects of broken relationships, experiencing financial hardship, or dealing with the effects of physical or mental illness in themselves or their loved ones.

My family has been marked in recent years by each one of these losses. There have been years when it has seemed as though all the most lovely gifts and warmest invitations were inscribed with the names of others. Advent’s practices of simplicity and themes of waiting have been a balm for me during the darkest days, as they’ve helped me to fight the temptation to compare what I don’t have with what I imagine others do. The prayers and hymns of Advent are rich with the language of longing, of groans too deep for words. My soul is familiar with the sound of those groans.

Even in congregations committed to the church calendar’s Advent worship cycle, church services during December can be a challenging place to be for those struggling with loss. Most church event calendars are full of various holiday gatherings, children’s programs, and other events that don’t always sync with those in mourning.

That is why I am appreciative of the churches that host Blue Christmas services at this time of year. When our sorrow was fresh and December’s festivities seemed to pour salt in our open wounds, an acquaintance invited my husband and I to a Blue Christmas service at her church. It remains to this day one of the most meaningful holiday worship services I’ve ever attended.

This invitation snippet from a website with a number of Blue Christmas service resources captures the reason behind this service:

“Cries of ‘Merry Christmas!’ and non-stop caroling contrast with the feelings of many people at this time of year. For those suffering from the recent or impending death of loved ones, dealing with recent separation or divorce, struggling to find employment, or facing depression or family crisis, this can be a very isolated and dreary time. Every greeting and every song reminds the grief-stricken of how unhappy life is at this moment. We recognize that a lot of the Christmas celebrations do not meet everyone’s needs. To fill this gap we are offering Blue Christmas.”

Many Blue Christmas services are offered on or near the shortest day of the year (December 21^st), a nod to the darkness of the season as well as capturing the final movement of the Advent season. The liturgy of the Blue Christmas service we attended two years in a row was intentionally simple, and followed this structure.

While about 70% of those in attendance were members of the host congregation, many were visitors who’d been invited by friends, referred via local hospice chaplains or from connections with members of a local National Alliance for Mental Illness chapter. The pastor opened the service by affirming that each of us was there because of loss, and letting us know we were not alone; Immanuel was near. The Scripture readings were punctuated with the familiar, haunting lyrics of O Come, O Come Emmanuel. The liturgical “prayers of the people” (congregational prayer) allowed both space and silence for those who wished to voice their loss or struggle as well as those who chose to offer it in prayer to the Lord in silence.

As a pianist played quiet instrumental music, those gathered were invited to come forward to light individual candles as a way of honoring our loss. Prayer ministers were available to pray with or for us for specific needs, or simply to lay their hands on our heads and offer a blessing over us. The pastor ended the service with a few additional words of words of comfort. Congregation members had baked and wrapped individual loaves of sweet holiday breads, and handed a loaf (or two!) to each person departing the sanctuary.

I left was grateful someone had made a space for us in the midst of the season. The Blue Christmas service certainly didn’t erase our pain, but as we shared our grief with one another and expressed it before the Lord, we were comforted a bit and strengthened to go back into the world to face the holidays, knowing we were not alone in our grief.

For those of you planning holiday services this year, it is probably too late to include a Blue Christmas service in your schedule. But if you’re putting together a file for next year, book mark this idea. A Blue Christmas service is something well worth offering to your community – or partnering with another congregation that’s already having one. It is a profound, practical way to mourn with those who mourn, and honor the One who is well-acquainted with our sorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Kaz Yamazaki-Ransom, a Japanese New Testament scholar. He earned his Ph.D. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and his dissertation was published under the title The Roman Empire in Luke’s Narrative (T&T Clark International, 2010). His works have been published in English, Japanese, and Korean, including two entries in the second edition of Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (IVP, 2013). His research interests include Luke-Acts, narrative criticism, the New Testament and the Roman Empire, and the use of the Old Testament in the New. He is president at Revival Biblical Seminary in Aichi, Japan and the chair of the Japan Evangelical Theological Society, Central Japan Chapter. He blogs in Japanese at “Through a Glass” (1co1312.wordpress.com). He currently lives in Aichi, Japan with his wife, Doria, who is American, and their three teenage daughters.

In the 1980s, discussions regarding the nature of the Bible (i.e., bibliology) caused a heated controversy in Evangelical churches in Japan.  A number of Japanese Evangelical leaders began the process to adopt the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy as the doctrinal basis for Japanese Evangelicalism. The few dissenting voices that pleaded for a more cautious approach on the authority of the Bible were suppressed, and the CSBI became the foundation of the Japanese Evangelical churches. In February 1987, the Japan Protestant Conference (JPC) adopted a statement concerning the authority of the Bible that defended a strong inerrantist position similar to that of the CSBI. Since then the topic of bibliology, especially inerrancy, has been virtually taboo in Japanese Evangelical circles.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of the debate concerning bibliology among Japanese Evangelicals. Most likely encouraged by the current discussion on the topic in Western Evangelicalism, some notable Evangelical leaders in Japan began to voice their concerns about the too-rigid concepts of biblical authority, such as inerrancy and verbal inspiration, and propose a more nuanced approach to understanding the authority of the Bible.

What do you think of Kaz’s “icebox theory” and does verbal inspiration become a deism?

One example is the publication of Mitsuru Fujimoto’s Evangelical Faith in the Bible: Its History and Possibility (Tokyo: Word of Life, 2015). With detailed historical research, Dr. Fujimoto convincingly demonstrated that historically, the Evangelical faith has embraced a nuanced understanding of the authority of the Bible, much broader than what the CSBI would permit. I am glad to call Dr. Fujimoto my colleague and friend.

I myself wrote an article entitled “Apostolic Hermeneutics in the New Testament: A Suggestion for Contemporary Evangelicalism” for the Japanese journal Evangelical Theology, in which I argued that the New Testament writers’ interpretation of the Old Testament was not constrained to the method of historical-grammatical interpretation, which is the standard method of biblical interpretation for contemporary Evangelicalism.

In this essay I would like to share my thoughts about a certain view of the Bible that is held widely among contemporary Evangelicals, namely, the idea of verbal inspiration. When I posted this essay on my Japanese-language blog, as a response to a series of magazine articles by Dr. Fujimoto and other pastors on Evangelical faith in the Bible, the number of hits I received instantly skyrocketed. I don’t have a comment section on my blog, but after my post some believers took to social media to vent their frustration with this new movement. Others, however, commented on how they feel relieved that the hush order regarding bibliology that has been in place for the past 30 years finally seems to be lifting.

Verbal inspiration claims that the divine inspiration of the Bible goes all the way down to the level of the biblical authors’ choice of words. Verbal inspiration is not to be equated with inerrancy, but the two concepts are closely connected. Some think that inerrancy requires verbal inspiration.

The view of the Bible assumed in such concepts as inerrancy and verbal inspiration is that the authority of the Bible lies in the fact that the Spirit-led biblical authors wrote down the Bible as a collection of eternally true propositions about God and the world. It is as if these propositions were preserved in the Bible (at least in its original manuscripts) in a “frozen” form. The readers of the Bible in later ages, if they apply the correct method of interpretation, can “thaw” the frozen propositions to recover the original message by God. This process is called “exegesis.” I would call this an “icebox view” of the Bible.

For the icebox view of the Bible, the concept of inspiration has to do primarily with the point of time in the past when the actual biblical texts were written down, when God “froze” his true propositions and put them in the icebox. The contents of God’s message have not changed since then because, well, it’s eternally true. The correctness of our interpretation solely depends on how we can properly “thaw” the message and retrieve the original true propositions.

People often make the distinction between “inspiration” (the Holy Spirit’s work on the biblical authors) and “illumination” (the Spirit’s work on the readers of the Bible today). Through illumination, it is argued, the Spirit guides the believer and helps him or her to reach a correct understanding of the Bible. I am not denying the idea of illumination at all, but this does not change the basic idea of the icebox view of the Bible. Illumination has only to do with how to redeem the corrupt human reason that is affected by sin, but it does not change the truth of the message that is already there. The same can be said about the distinction between the “original intended meaning” of a biblical text and its “contemporary application.” For the icebox view of the Bible, the authority of Scripture is ultimately based on the propositional truthfulness of the original manuscripts, which remain unaltered since the biblical authors wrote them down. Of course, the problem is that no one today has access to the long-lost original manuscripts.

Now, it seems to me that this way of thinking looks very much like that of Deism. According to Deism, God created an autonomous universe governed by natural laws, and after the “initial impact” of creation, God withdrew from the world and has not been interacting with it in any supernatural ways. The God of Deism created the world as a fully functional “machine,” but after setting the world in motion he walked away and does not care much about it anymore. Interestingly, some Deists argue that they do believe in God’s providential intervention in the world after creation, which makes the analogy with the icebox view of the Bible all the more intriguing. But as long as Deists reject God’s supernatural intervention, such as special revelation, the point is the same: God may interact with the world after creation, but the main force of God’s action concerning the world focuses on its origin.

Of course, every analogy is necessarily incomplete, but my point is this: for both Deism and the icebox view of the Bible, the center of God’s relationship with the world is the “genesis point,” whether that of the perfect world or of the perfect Word. Both of these views put a great emphasis on the initial impact of God’s work, but not so much on the later, continuous interaction of God with what he created. So, in a sense, the icebox view of the Bible is “Deistic.”

But is such a view of the Bible correct?

I firmly believe in the inspiration of the Bible, but the icebox view of the Bible seems extreme and does not fit the reality of the Bible. If the Bible’s authority is based on the propositional truthfulness of the original manuscripts that are long lost and no longer accessible to us, by definition the authority of the Bible as we have it today is imperfect, because the human endeavors to recover the original wording and meaning of the biblical texts (textual criticism and Bible translation) will necessarily remain imperfect. Also, this kind of thinking could produce an authority-wielding situation in the church where those who possess “better” texts and/or more accurate interpretations have more power over others.

When Paul wrote to Timothy that “All Scripture is God-breathed (theopneustos)” (2 Timothy 3:16a), he was not talking about verbal inspiration. He was not talking about the propositional truthfulness of the Bible (and by the way, “all Scripture” here refers to the Greek translation of the Old Testament and not the 66 books of our Bible in its original manuscripts). Instead, he was talking about the function of the Bible, how it “is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (vv. 16b-17). It seems to me that Paul is saying that because the Bible is a God-breathed book, when we as Christians read it in our own historical contexts, the Spirit of God will work powerfully through it and transform us. In this sense, the Bible is an inspired book, the Word of God, but unless real transformation is taking place in our lives, we cannot say that we have read the Bible correctly. Thus, although I wholeheartedly acknowledge the benefit of studying the original languages and rigorous academic exegesis, I am wondering if sometimes an uneducated, simple believer can read the Bible “better” than a professional biblical scholar.

Of course, the non-Deistic Christians who acknowledge God’s supernatural interaction with the world after creation can fully embrace the importance of creation. Likewise, I readily acknowledge the importance of the work of the Holy Spirit in the production of the Biblical texts. But if we put too much stress on that “genesis point,” there might be the danger that we neglect or downplay the importance of the power of God working through the Bible today. Yes, God worked through the biblical authors and helped them to write down the true, authoritative texts for the church. However, the authority of the Bible is not so much the authority of “eternally true” propositions. It is rather the authority of the story into which the people of God are invited to participate, as N.T. Wright says. And for the biblical story to have authority, it has to be told and retold in the ongoing lives of believing communities. God did not walk away from the icebox after he put his frozen message in it, leaving it for us to unpack, but he is continuously working through the Bible when the people of God in various historical contexts read it and participate in the grand story it narrates.

Wright also states that Deism is very close to what he calls the “split-level” worldview, in which the supernatural realm of God and the natural realm of humans are neatly separated. God is understood, to use his expression, as an “absentee landlord.” Deism, according to Wright, “is still the default mode for most of Western culture” (Simply Good News, p. 131).

The proponents of inerrancy and verbal inspiration typically reject Deism for its denial of special revelation, but their underlying assumption—the icebox view of the Bible—reflects the same kind of “split-level” worldview as Deism, and ends up assuming the image of an aloof and detached deity.

This, I believe, is the greatest of ironies.

 

In my New Testament cohort at Northern Seminary I have a bundle of very good students. One of our assignments is a book review, and I will post two of these reviews this week. This one, by Ben Davis, reviews NT Wright’s book on the cross and atonement The Day the Revolution Began.

The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion[1]

A Review by Ben Davis

I

Every Sunday morning, Christians across America listen to sermons from the Bible. Presumably those sermons could include well-known stories out of the Old Testament, or a dense passage from one of Paul’s magnificent letters, or a few poetic verses from the Psalms, or, moreover, a quizzical parable from one of the Gospels. Either way, those sermons are typically from the Bible (as they should be), and, they are typically in some fashion related to the person of Jesus (again, as they should be). At the close of each sermon, it is customary for many pastors to boldly “proclaim the gospel.” To them, and seemingly everyone else in the pews nodding their heads in agreement, the “gospel” is this: “Jesus died for our sins on the cross, taking the full weight and force of God’s wrath for our disobedience on himself so that we might believe in him and have eternal life in heaven.” For many Christians – not least American evangelicals – this is the gospel. This is the “good news” Jesus came to proclaim. This is the God Jesus came to pacify so we could go to heaven.

Do you think Wright overdoes this problem or is this the problem one must continue to emphasize?

What is so unfortunate about equating the good news of Jesus with the forgiveness of one’s sins is that it flattens and narrows the really “good news” of Jesus’ victorious Lordship, and it furthermore radically distorts the meaning and grand scope of his death on the cross, not only for individual sinners, but for all of creation and every person within it. Forgiveness of sins and “going to heaven” are good things, to be sure. They are certainly part of the biblical story. But they do not comprise the good news, which is alone the story about the person of Jesus. What is more, resigning the cross to a mechanism by which one has their sins forgiven is a gross misconception of the meaning of Jesus’s death and all that was accomplished by it.

In his newest book, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion, N.T. Wright takes aim at this misplaced view of the cross and subsequently labors to overcome it by focusing on the full sweep of the biblical narrative, not only a few isolated verses. From Wright’s point of view, the atonement is not an abstract doctrine by which one can know how their sins are forgiven. Instead, the atonement is deeply embedded in the story of God’s cosmic plan of redemption – from Genesis to Revelation – as it climaxes in the story of Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension as Lord over all creation. Through it, sinners are liberated from death to life to be the true image-bearers of God – those who live into their intended vocation as joyful, worshipful beings. To have it any other way, Wright suggests, is to “exchange the glory of God for a mess of spiritualized, individualistic, and moralistic pottage.”[2]

For Wright, it is vital that we understand that the world was fundamentally changed the day Jesus died. And Wright seeks to show us from the Bible why this event was so revolutionary and how it all got started. As Wright says, “The New Testament insists, in book after book, that when Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, something happened as a result of which the world is a different place.”[3]

II

Throughout his 400-page book, Wright traverses a lot of ground. Specifically, he goes into great detail explaining the biblical concept of “sin,” the nature of “atonement,” and the way in which the two relate in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth. Additionally, Wright retools our ideas about eschatology and the kingdom of God: “The ‘goal’ is not ‘heaven,’” says Wright, “but a renewed human vocation within God’s renewed creation.”[4]

Atonement for Wright – and the Bible – is less about a contractual arrangement whereby a person exchanges their sin for Christ’s righteousness, like traders in a public market place.[5] The truly biblical vision, Wright claims, is about a “covenant of vocation”[6]: Adam, and then Israel, had been entrusted with a vocation to be God’s “Image-bearers” in the world. The content of their vocation was to be a “light to the nations”[7] by demonstrating right worship to God.[8] Sin distorted this vocation, however: Israel preferred to worship the creation instead of the Creator.[9] “The primary human failure is,” in other words, “a failure of worship.”[10] As Israel’s Messiah and standard-bearer, Jesus came to fulfill the human vocation by living a life of faithfulness and worship unto God. In himself Jesus held heaven and earth together; he was the presence of God incarnate. He therefore defeated the powers of Sin and Death on the cross – forever ending Israel’s exile – as he suffered in Israel’s place, “giving his life in the place of sinners, as ‘a ransom for many.’”[11] By so doing, Jesus overcame the powers of destruction with the new “power of self-giving love.”[12] The effect of this was – and is! – to rescue people for their priestly vocation as God’s ambassadors to the world, not to take them from the world where they will escape to heaven for eternity.

This forgoing synopsis speaks to the heart of Wright’s argument. But there is certainly a lot in that tightly-woven statement to unravel. Limits of space simply do not allow such an exploration. A word should be said, however, about the way in which Jesus’s atonement is worked out in the four Gospels. In particular, the following sections will focus on Jesus’ use of the Passover to make sense of his own death and its consequent effects. Lastly, we will look briefly at Wright’s interpretation of the Gospels to see how, on his reading, the Gospel writers make sense of Jesus’s death in light of their overall narrative.

III

For Wright, the Passover is the singular event by which to understand Jesus’s understanding of his own death and resurrection. “It happened at Passover time, and it seems clear that this was deliberate on Jesus’s part,” says Wright.[13] Passover symbolized Israel’s liberation – salvation – from the bondage of slavery in the exodus. It was the central feast in Israel’s liturgical calendar, for it both reminded Israel of their former liberation, and it pointed forward to God’s promises to deliver his people yet again in the future. It signaled the end of exile, where God would come back to institute his kingdom and reign over his people. In short, as Wright says, “Israel’s God would become king.”[14] To make the point even more forcefully, Wright says that,

Jesus believed that through his death this royal power would win the decisive victory through which not just Israel but also the whole would would be liberated: ransomed, healed restored, forgiven. The Passover and Exodus themes cluster together in an almost bewildering and overdetermined (sic) fashion: the fulfillment of ancient promise, the liberation from slavery, the crossing of the Red Sea, the coming of God himself in the pillar of cloud and fire, the promise of inheritance. All these, in parables, healings, promises, and warnings, formed part of Jesus’s public proclamation and private teaching. Now they gathered to a greatness.[15]

 

In sum, the full scope of Jesus’s life and ministry was being summed up in his re-centering and performance of the Passover meal. He was reliving a familiar story in which he was, unexpectedly, playing the star role. In light of the resurrection, it provided the disciples with the necessary coordinates by which to locate the meaning and import of Jesus’s cryptic actions in Jerusalem the last week before his death.

Jesus’s words over the bread and cup are no less meaningful. As Wright puts it: “Jesus’s words over the bread transformed this, so that it now said: the new Passover is about to happen, and those who share this meal thereafter will be constituted as the people for whom it had happened and through whom it will happen in the wider world.”[16] Through his actions, Jesus was telling his disciples that God was coming back to redeem his people from the bondage of slavery and death. Through his suffering, God was becoming King. And the blood that was to be spilt as a result of his death, was nothing less than the “blood of the covenant,” a sign that something new was coming into being, a new covenant was being born.[17]

IV

Wright has made the case in previous books that the Gospel writers are, in their own distinct way, telling the story of how God became king in the person of Jesus.[18] In another trajectory, the “four canonical gospels (sic) are careful to link the story of Jesus to the larger story of Israel, going back to prophetic traditions. . . Abraham. . . Adam. . ., and the creation itself. . .”[19] Put differently, while the Gospels tell the story about God becoming king, they also re-narrate the story of Israel through the lens of Jesus. As Israel’s Messiah, Jesus not only represents, but embodies, Israel’s vocation. To a degree, this would have made sense to first century Jews. But the evangelists go further and deeper than anyone could have imagined. Jesus is not only in conflict with the powers of this world (i.e., Rome), he is also waging war against the unseen powers of darkness that have taken hold of certain individuals as a means of challenging Jesus’s authority. For Wright, the notion that God through Jesus is dealing with sin is replete throughout the Gospel narratives. This is not just a one-off event that happens on the cross. No, Jesus had been in conflict with the powers of evil from the very beginning, and the Gospels make this clear to see, if we have the eyes to see it.

As Wright says, “Something has happened to dethrone the satan and to enthrone Jesus in its place. The story the gospels (sic) think they are telling is the story of how that had happened.”[20]

Where does all this lead us concerning the meaning of the cross? What does all this have to do with “the forgiveness of sins?” Well, Wright takes us there as he looks at each of the four Gospels to see how they tell the story.

For John, the entire story of Jesus is about the atonement – God liberating humanity from sin and death – because he believes that Jesus is the light that has overcome the darkness. “’No one has a love greater than this, to lay down your life for your friends’ (15:13); and this, John has signaled in a thousand different narrative clues, is what Jesus is doing. Victory and love, both growing from the story itself: that is John’s interpretation of the cross.”[21]

For Luke, Jesus’s death demonstrates the power of God over the powers of evil, which in turn unleashes the kingdom of God in the world. Perhaps more personally, Luke beautifully portrays Jesus’s self-sacrifice on behalf of all. Being innocent, Jesus took the affects of sin and guilt onto himself – fulfilling what Israel was supposed to do – and died in their place, absorbing their punishment onto himself.

For Matthew, sin was defeated by the arrival of the kingdom of God in the person of Jesus. There is no room for sin in God’s kingdom. Thus, when Jesus arrived, sin was subverted and thwarted and finally defeated on the hard wood of the cross. Sin was further undermined by the fact that God’s kingdom was for the poor, marginalized, and seemingly powerless. As Wright says, “Jesus’s suffering and death are indeed, for Matthew, the means through which God is becoming king, through which ‘all authority’ is being given to Jesus himself.”[22] Furthermore, “this will set the pattern not just for a ‘new ethic,’ though it will be that, but for a new kind of behavior, a new lifestyle, through which the saving rule of God will be brought to bear upon the world.”[23]

Finally, for Mark, Jesus death is seen as atoning for sin because, like Luke, “he is giving his life in the place of sinners, as ‘a ransom for many.’”[24] In Mark’s Gospel, the power of God affected through Jesus by the Holy Spirit to defeat sin was not leavened with darkness. That is, God did not simply outmatch the powers of sin and darkness by their own means. They were defeated by the unassailable power of sacrificial love. Wright notes that, “A new sort of power will be let loose upon the world, and it will be the power of self-giving love. This is the heart of the revolution that was launched on Good Friday.”[25]

V

In conclusion, then, according to Wright, Jesus rights the wrongs of Adam, and thus Israel, by fulfilling their originally intended vocation to be God’s image-bearers in the world. Humans were created to enjoy God and to worship him. Jesus, as the culminating seed of Abraham, put the rightful human vocation back on track. He furthermore inaugurated the kingdom of God, ended Israel’s exile, and single-handedly defeated the powers of evil, sin, and death by dying on a cross for the sake of love. The effect of this releases humanity from the slavery of sin to once again worship the Triune God in love, joy, and freedom. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, the human vocation is to build for the final consummation of God’s kingdom on earth. We are not escape artist. Jesus did not come to earth to take us away to heaven. He came to launch the revolution of new creation, and he has graciously commissioned his disciples to lead the charge.

[1] N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2016).

[2] Ibid., 115.

[3] Ibid., 39. Italics his.

[4] Ibid., 74.

[5] Ibid., 75.

[6] Ibid., 76.

[7] Isa. 49:6b

[8] Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, 77.

[9] Romans 1:25

[10] Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, 85.

[11] Ibid., 222.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 179.

[14] Ibid., 180.

[15] Ibid., 183.

[16] Ibid., 186. Italics his.

[17] Ibid., 192.

[18] N. T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, Reprint edition (HarperOne, 2016).

[19] Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, 202.

[20] Ibid., 207. Italics his.

[21] Ibid., 208.

[22] Ibid., 219.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid., 222.

[25] Ibid.

Beverly Gaventa has become an increasingly, patient and influential voice in Pauline studies. My favorite book of hers so far on Paul is Our Mother Saint Paul. A student and colleague of the architects of the apocalyptic scholars — like J. Louis Martyn and J. Christiaan Beker — Gaventa has been working on Romans most of her career and we are just beginning to get a glimpse of her forthcoming Romans commentary in her new book When in Romans.

Here are some questions for her and her answers:

What is the significance of Phoebe (16:1-2) and her relationship to the letter?

I content that Phoebe is the earliest interpreter of Romans.  She is the one who delivers the letter, as seems obvious. I think she is also the best candidate for the letter’s presenter (i.e., reader) in the Roman congregations.  She is the one who would interpret it, either as she reads or in conversation after someone else read. It’s a bit hard to imagine that Paul dispatched this letter with her without having a long conversation about what he wanted to achieve, but finally she is the one who will answer questions, expand, defend or qualify.

You often ask your students to describe the letter to someone who has never read it. One common reply is it is about “sin, salvation, and sanctification.” Your concern with this reply is its “breeziness.” What do you mean by that?

Of course, Romans is about all those things, but it is about a great deal more.  I characterize that trilogy as “breezy” because it often comes off the tongue too easily, without a lot of thought about what those terms mean, how they are at work in this letter, how this letter is like and unlike other texts in Scripture.

You say that “salvation” is a much more complex idea in Romans than we have imagined. In particular you say it is more “cosmic”. What is this “cosmic” dimension and how should it affect our reading of the letter? How does this view differ with the typical understanding of salvation as the opportunity for an individual to be eternally saved?

“Cosmic” doesn’t exclude reference to the individual’s relationship to God. I wouldn’t characterize that as an “opportunity,” since Paul talks about the individual relationship as one of “calling,” rather than “offer.” I think Paul does have a strong sense of God’s action in Jesus in the lives of individuals. But he also has a sense of the corporate—the social relationships within, across, and beyond believing communities.

“Cosmic” does not deny either of those dimensions to Paul’s thought. It includes them but takes into account also both the redemption of the whole of creation and the cosmic nature of the “problem” at hand. Romans 5-8 makes it clear that the human problem is not just belief or unbelief but human captivity to powers that are larger than human life, powers from which God’s action in Jesus is liberative (redemptive, salvific).

Paul makes little or no reference to repentance or forgiveness in Romans. Why is that important to Paul’s argument?

Precisely because the human problem, as Paul sees it, is larger than simply repenting and being forgiven, he casts the gospel in terms of redemption and salvation. In Romans 5 and 6, he speaks of Sin and Death ruling over humankind, even of humans as slaves to Sin. Slaves have to be set free; they cannot simply repent.

In your discussion of Paul’s ethics you state that our readings have been too restricted. You propose a better starting point for this discussion is to think about worship. Would you expand on that?

Here I take my starting point from Romans 1:18-32, noticing that the originating problem is the withholding of glory from God—worship! Because humans did not worship God rightly, they were “handed over,” resulting in the various behavior Paul castigates there. So, worship is at the heart of things. Importantly, worship is also featured in 12:1, the opening of the “ethical” section of the letter. There Paul uses liturgical language (the offering of the self as a right act of worship) to introduce his comments on various questions we call ethics. The two are so intertwined that we cannot take them apart, although our assumption is that they are separable.