For the Christian community to join with Israel in the diasporic work of mission is to insist that the work by which we ‘seek the peace of the city’ and according to which we await the New Jerusalem to come is no less a concrete flesh-and-blood reality than the singular event of Christ’s cross and resurrection. For it is only as such that the Christian is given over to the excess of God’s perfect agape that is the Spirit’s work in history. At the same time, to make the Christian messianic claim is to insist that Israel’s obedience to Jeremiah’s command to seek the peace of the city was itself always-already an embodied sign of the coming reign of God. So it is precisely by way of the reality of and her participation in Christ’s apocalyptic historicity that the Christian joins with Israel in embodying the coming of God’s reign as a mode of apocalyptic hope. For only as it joins Israel in diaspora does the Christian ‘not yet’ become something other than a theological dilemma concerning the ‘delay’ of the parousia and become rather the condition for the political cry of ‘come’, a cry for the messianic inbreaking to occur everanew, in the very contingencies of our own ongoing histories, into the reality of the ‘already’.
Christ, History, and Apocalyptic by Nathan Kerr, p187
Caleb gives a good (if somewhat long) reflection on why he doesn’t abide by Sola Scriptura. His reasons are similar to mine, I must admit. To my mind the whole system just fails to be supportive and leaves one in the giant quagmire of denominationalism that Protestants are so fond of.
Caleb goes after it quite technically, first pausing to reflect on what precisely counts as Scripture. The resulting canon we posses (according to the doctrine of Sola Scriptura) is arbitrary. Sola Scriptura does not define the canon (nor do I see a way it could). And some of the books mentioned within Scripture are either lost, or not part of the canon.
His second point is a wonderful syllogism:
All appeals to Scripture are appeals to interpretations of Scripture.
Interpretations are by definition external and separate from that which they interpret.
Sola Scriptura maintains that any claim external to Scripture itself is necessarily uninspired and therefore fallible.
Therefore, all appeals to Scripture are fallible.
As he writes the major failure of the Protestant Sola Scriptura experiment is the failure to deal with the epistemology. I am no Luther historian, though I would be very interested to see how far he practically took this exercise. I know he himself did not want a radical break from classical Christian teaching. His thesis were given on the basis that his criticisms showed the practices of the day to be un-biblical according to his interpretation. I have read enough of Luther to know that he still exegeted allegorically and still had philosophical/metaphysical influences on his theology and writing. To take Sola Scriptura as far as fundamentalists have is against the spirit of Luther and the Reformation.
I see the only legitimate way to exegete is according to the way the greater church has done throughout her history. A process dependent on what the Church has taught (tradition), what we can understand about the life and times of the written Scripture (reason), and the life of the members of the Church (experience). Bringing these three together is the great difficulty of being honest to the text, to the Church, and to one another. Nor does there have to be one singular answer for all members – as if all members were one part.
Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
Matthew 13:52
That verse has an entirely brand new meaning to me today. Amazing that I could never understand it before, but only now in this place. Ah, illumination.
I am really intrigued by Michael Dowd’s essay which contends that “Biblical Christianity” is bankrupt. He argues largely on the basis of their hermeneutic and uses science primarily as his tool. I agree that the hermeneutics of “Biblical Christianity” are inherently flawed and have not produced valuable insight the Church has not seen before. It is certainly one reason I am no longer a fundamentalist. There are far more beneficial ways to look at the world, God, and the Scriptures – ways in which the Church has been doing it for thirteen hundred years before this biblical literalism came along in the 1970s. But, I do have to take Dowd to task on certain points:
His application of scientism (that is the method of knowing which science purports as the only way of knowing) to other areas not contained within science is incredibly false. This is the error of our age – and it is the same error which “Biblical Christianity” makes. They play by the scientism where “objective” “evidence” is the rule of law. If Dowd was well connected with philosophy he would understand the incredible bait and switch that has happened in this materialistic worldview (something I write about often here). Unfortunately there is no way to be “objective”, and the categorical imperative is woefully unsupportable as a measuring rod for humans. If the only way to know anything was according to the rules of scientism we would know far less than we ought. In fact, the overwhelming majority of “what we know” does not come by the rules of scientism, however we’ve been rationalizing it to ourselves that we do know them according to those rules.
His quote of Aquinas is woefully inadequate for his argument. It can’t be marshaled in favor of his argument because of what Aquinas is doing. Aquinas is making the classic first-mover/uncaused-causer argument in his Summa. Aquinas is not making a naturalist statement about creation – he is making a theological and philosophical statement about creation. And Aquinas is upending the first thirteen hundred years of neo-Platonic Christian theology in the process. He claims that they are the ones that have made the mistake (even though Bonaventure makes a similar, albeit importantly different, first-causer argument centuries earlier).
When talking about a literary passage he argues it is an interpretation. Without question the entirety of Scripture is an interpretation. Just like the entirety of written history is an interpretation. Just like the entirety of every literary work (this blog entry, Dowd’s blog entry) is an interpretation. According to scientism, interpretations must be removed and sifted through to find the “facts” behind them. But in this entire enterprise we are actually not after facts. Dowd doesn’t write to find the facts. The facts are the sun is up there combusting away. We are down here milling around. The earth is spinning. People die, and people are born. The question we are all here asking is “What does all that mean?” or “How am I to interpret this?”. The question is not “What is happenening?”. We can all essentially see what is happening.
Therefore when Dowd is talking about “Life as It Really Is” he is not talking about the facts. We can all understand the basics of the facts. When the Egyptians called on Ra the Sun God it was not because they were confused about how things worked. It was a deeply entrenched interpretation which structured their world and society. That was “Life as It Really Is” to them. For Dowd, scientism is “Life as It Really Is”. Unfortunately, science cannot and can never offer an interpretation. Analysis can never offer meaning. Dowd is talking about the “fact” of evolution and therefore interprets that to mean that, in some way or another, “If God is the creator, then God is the process of evolution.” That is an interpretation, not a fact. And one which all of Christians (ignoring the “Biblical” ones) disagree with.
In all points Dowd is picking on the lowest forms of Biblical Christianity, a strawman. He has placed caricatures of many dogmatic points out there. This is a familiar tactic borrowed from the New Athiests. I am only reminded of the tounge-in-cheek remarks of the Bad Vicar @ 1:22-1:50
In my view, “Biblical Christianity” is also bankrupt. Not because it doesn’t adopt the presumptions and methods of scientism (which are wholly unwarranted within matters of faith and meaning) but because it does an incredibly poor job of understanding Scripture, representing the Christianity it has inherited, and integrating with the wider world.
Evolution to my mind is actually an incredibly strong point against the scientism “objectivity” which philosophically has degenerated into nihilism. Because evolution values life. All organisms are geared to live (current evolutionary theory is being attacked on the premise that “survival of the fittest” is not quite how it works). Evolution “knows” something much greater than all the scientific interpretive grids have allowed it to. It knows that life has intrinsic value and meaning and should continue on. No single philosophical interpretive grid has any statement affirming that, largely because it cannot. Philosophy is rigidly stuck within Kant’s method of knowing and therefore cannot affirm any humanity or meaning.
I know this is one of the main driving forces that has pushed me into a much more Orthodox/Catholic view of things.
My complaint, as I am raising it here, is that translations frequently mislead. The entire concept of Church as a fellowship of believers, meaning a free association of like-minded Christians, is simply not a Scriptural notion, unless your Bible happens to be one of the many that has bowdlerized the clear Orthodox meaning of Scripture. We are saved by union with Christ, by participation in His life. We are Baptized into his death and raised in His resurrection. We eat His Body and drink His Blood. We have participation in the life of one another such that we cannot say to one another, “I have no need of you.” Such examples can be multiplied from every page of the New Testament and not one of them will support the weak image of an associational fellowship. This sad translation of a powerful word has helped support a notion of the individual believer with a relationship with Christ (what sort of a relationship is fellowship?) and his Bible. This is not the language or imagery of Scripture nor the doctrine of the Church.
Is fellowship with God possible? I’m not certain how to answer the question. I’d rather have communion. Father Stephen
Based on my last post and some conversations I am having with friends, I want to try and attempt to think through approaching the biblical text. In one sense I am trying to re-trace my own path leaving fundamentalist territory. In another sense, I am trying to clear a path for others to find their own way out as well.
We have to admit where we are coming from. Inspiration means, on a most basic level, that God is responsible for each word in the holy Scripture. It originated from God, and was not the work of men primarily. Of course, some fully deny that men had anything to do with it whatsoever. As the text has come from God directly it is therefore authoritative and inerrant.
To put it at a more practical level, the Scriptures are perceived according to a story that runs something like this:
God delivered this book to his people so they would know him. It is delievered by God for the Church to tell them what to believe and how to live. God has given it to me so I can read it and know he loves me, and what he expects of me.
I am no spinner of tales but that is close. If you have got a better way to put it please let me know. The three terms working within that storyline frame the entire issue. There is no objective reason that inspiration, inerrant, or authoritative mean precisely what fundamentalists want them to mean. However, without dislodging the story you are fighting uphill to redefine the terms, and thus the battle.
That story is flawed. Those definitions are flawed. They are not supported by the Scripture itself, nor the variagated tradition of Christianity. That tends to become the battleground on which the war is fought. To peel back the layers and understanding of the Scriptures themselves is to use critical study. And to peel back the layers of history is to use historical study. From a fundamentalist point of view this is to concede the war before you’ve even started the battle, a Catch-22. How then have I found my way out of the fundamentlist mess I was previously in?
For starters, the group I came out of has some unorthodox beliefs. And if fundamentalists are always right, someone has got to be terribly wrong and we have got to tell them about it. Scholarly sources that agreed with our positions were studied, and thus critical methods were smuggled in the back door. The methods changed slowly, while the underlying narrative in which I placed the Scripture for the Christian life never changed.
I read about the stories that the Jewish people told about the Exodus. I understood that the prophets retold Israel’s history with their own perspectives and motives. The same goes with the gospels, and particularly Paul. Is it so foreign to think that we are telling our own stories about how we got here, and what we ought to do? Of course not! That is exactly what humanity has always done to understand their purpose. And this is why the very concept of narratives and story is so intriguing to me. It contains so much power.
Mark and Luke are telling their own stories about who Jesus is. It doesn’t matter that certain details aren’t congruous. It doesn’t matter that the stories depict Jesus differently. If I were to tell a story about my parents I am certain it would be different than the stories either of my sisters tell. And if you were to put us together in a room we would recognize we are still talking about our parents. We might disagree when it comes down to our perceptions about their intentions or what have you. That is to be expected. Isn’t it?
Just finished Dunn’s The Living Word which contains one of the single best chapters I have read recently: Levels of Canonical Authority. He also spends a fourth of the book taking apart the fundamentalist hermeneutic strand by strand. Thank you James – I am very thankful lately. I wish I could staple this book to the forehead of many of the fundamentalists I know. Go past your horizons folks.
I came away with any suspicions that the young earth creationists might be wrong, it came from my developing an appreciation for Biblical interpretation, not from the Biology lab. Secular science didn’t turn my head. I learned that the people waving the Bible around weren’t necessarily treating it with the respect it deserved.
What became clearer to me over my seminary career was that many of my evangelical and fundamentalist brethren were not willing to let the scriptures be what they were or to let them speak their own language.
But Ham assumes that anyone who doesn’t interpret Genesis exactly as he does is rejecting the Bible as truthful.
Making this into a literal and “scientific” description as a condition of inspiration is wrong.
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