{"id":5936,"date":"2014-07-18T07:15:58","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T11:15:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/peterenns\/?p=5936"},"modified":"2014-07-18T07:54:07","modified_gmt":"2014-07-18T11:54:07","slug":"aha-moments-biblical-scholars-tell-their-stories-10-chris-tilling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/peterenns\/2014\/07\/aha-moments-biblical-scholars-tell-their-stories-10-chris-tilling\/","title":{"rendered":"“aha” moments: biblical scholars tell their stories (10): Chris Tilling"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>The 10th installment of our \u201caha\u201d moments series is by Chris Tilling,\u00a0Lecturer in New Testament at\u00a0St Mellitus College<\/a>\u00a0and Visiting Lecturer at\u00a0King\u2019s College London<\/a>. He is the author of Paul\u2019s Divine Christology<\/a>\"\"<\/em>,\u00a0co-author of How God Became Jesus<\/a>\"\"<\/em>, and editor of the recently published\u00a0Beyond Old and New Perpectives on Paul<\/a>\"\"<\/em>.\u00a0He appeared in the documentary,\u00a0From the Dust: Framing the Debate<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and blogs at\u00a0Chrisendom<\/a>\u00a0(which, I need to warn you, is a bizarre experience\u2013I dare you). He is married to Anja who, everyone agrees, is stupidly out of his league. His hopes to vicariously live all of his unfulfilled dreams through his new son, Karl Lucas Benjamin, who is already being marked out as the first ever multiple Major winning PGA Golf Professional and World Champion Chess Grandmaster.<\/p>\n

[PE: And just for fun, see how many British spellings you can find.]<\/p>\n

\u00a0********<\/div>\n

I\u2019ve really enjoyed the posts in this series, thanks to all contributors. I cannot expect to match their eloquence, especially as I write these words while on paternity leave. So expect some drowsy, below the belt, out-of-order British sarcastic humour below!<\/p>\n

I\u2019m kidding, of course. Having just had our first, I\u2019m totally in love with our new son and I\u2019ve never smiled so much. Right now I think everybody is wonderful.<\/p>\n

Even my old pastor<\/em> who declared all car CD players are \u201cof Satan\u201d because it stopped his flock listening to his sermon tapes<\/em> when driving! \u00a0He was a lovely man, don\u2019t get me wrong, and he always meant well, but he also instructed me not to go to University to study theology but rather get a job in McDonald\u2019s \u201cto keep me humble.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was worried, of course, that I would lose my faith (yes, I went anyway and didn\u2019t<\/em> lose my faith). So, yes, I\u2019ve come from a theologically conservative background. Ken Ham this, dinosaurs-lived-with-humans-as-seen-in-Job that.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I miss those days. Everything was straightforward. And most foundational of all: the Bible was the inerrant Word of God! The logic employed in defence of this dogma was obviously circular, but it was supposedly \u201cGod-ordained\u201d, so who could object?!<\/p>\n

(A) The Bible claims to be the perfect word of God. (B) The Bible is true. (C) Therefore, the Bible is the perfect word of God.<\/p>\n

Try backing out of that beauty! Parsed more formally, this would tend to run as follows:<\/p>\n

(A) The Bible is God inspired. (B) God cannot lie (according to the Bible). (C) Therefore, the Bible is true in all that it affirms (whether those affirmations be about history, science or whatever).<\/p>\n

Slightly more sinister, however, was the way fear<\/em> attached to this circular reasoning. Anybody who disagreed with this was simply deceived (probably by Beelzebub). Best to stay behind a safe wall of Christian academics more intelligent and learned than I. Let them<\/em> deal with the difficult questions about two<\/em> creation accounts, Gospel contradictions, the archaeopteryx, Adam\u2019s missing bellybutton etc.<\/p>\n

Even at University, because of that fear, I didn\u2019t make the most of my studies. Rather than downing Barth, Sanders, etc., I stuck to my safe and sure Ken Hams, Benny Hinns, Reinhard Bonnkes, and Josh McDowells. Only on slightly more intellectually venturous days would I read real scholarship, and then only someone considered \u201csafe\u201d such as Don Carson.<\/p>\n

But during my studies, I had one key \u201caha\u201d moment that began to chink away at my unhelpful armour.<\/p>\n

I read John Goldingay\u2019s excellent book, Models for Scripture<\/a>\"\",<\/em>\u00a0in which he argued that the circular logic noted above is simply not biblical! The Bible itself undermines it because God seemed happy to allow discrepancies to remain in the Bible (all of which were easy to look up and read without the need to accept the claims of \u201cliberal biblical scholarship\u201d).<\/p>\n

Instead, he argued, an inductive approach, one which refused the deductively logical wringer of inerrancy, allowed the Bible itself to shape our doctrine of Scripture. I could thus read and love the Bible for what it is, not what it isn\u2019t (i.e., inerrant in every detail Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy-style).<\/p>\n

But it was not until I decided to begin postgraduate work that things really started to shift for me. In the process I realised that I was beginning to join the \u201csafe wall,\u201d those Evangelical scholars who knew the answers to the tough questions. And slowly but surely, and to my great consternation, I realised that the \u201csafe wall\u201d of believing scholarship was not at all what I had expected.<\/p>\n

One particular \u201caha\u201d moment came when listening to a Walter Brueggemann lecture on \u201cThe character of God in the OT.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brueggemann pointed out that the Bible could say some astonishingly strange things about God, for example:<\/p>\n