This is from S.M. Lockridge. (HT: Scot McKnight). I remember hearing this recording played at a Promise Keepers rally in the mid-1990’s in a stadium full of 50,000 men. Awesome.
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Author: David Opderbeck
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An Amazing Museum Picture
I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently, and I was amazed to see that they had this very accurate portrait of what happens between my wife and I each morning when I leave for work:
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Text(s) of Scripture
This is another entry in our Text(s) of Scripture series. Our text is Luke 1:1-4:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.
Thom: Eyewitness is immensely important to the creation and explanation of our Scriptures. If may people have seen something, something must have happened, to paraphrase N.T. Wright. What David touches on with the term certainty I will not tackle here, other than to say that as someone who looks at linguistics/literature/philosophy/theology in a postmodern or postfoundational way, I try to think of certainty as a glass half full instead of a glass half empty. To allude to David’s own blog, we see through a glass darkly—the importance being that we see amazing things, not that sometimes they are obscure or blurry.
The Scriptures are an amazing storybook, a chronicled, multi-genre attempt at telling and retelling the wonderful story of God. This is what Luke is doing here, as he has gone to investigate, articulate, meditate, and create the story of God.
Luke created his gospel. He did it with the help of the Holy Spirit, the breath of God, but Luke was in control. He took up the pen, he investigated, he meditated, and then he made an orderly account for all lovers of God to enjoy. The key here is “orderly,” for it denotes the creational aspect of “good news” making. Luke is the writer, who with the help of a brooding Spirit, (re-)creates the Word. Gospel writing is right out of Genesis, as John alludes to in the introduction of his Gospel. The Holy Spirit is hovering over Luke’s writing as he forms it to be the beginning, the Word.
We are all servents of the Word. We enter into the economy of God with some certainty, much certainty even, yet there comes a time when we doubt or have much doubt. Then what may help us in times of darkness but the light of Christ, the Word, the spoken Story of the cosmos. Luke retells that story, not that we should “know” it academically, as is the status quo of Christendom today. Luke wants us to do something different with our knowledge. He wants us to follow in his footsteps and become storytellers ourselves. Just as the accounts of our Scriptures were handed down to us by those who from the first eyewitnesses and servants of the Word, so we too should take Luke’s accounts and hand them down ourselves through service, worship, and sacrament. We are all co-tellers and co-hearers of God’s story. We truly stand in a long line of believers, playing an immense game of Telephone. Except this time the message is not garbled. It comes out clean, pure, and true. Listen to it, the words handed down to Luke, who now hands them to us, and you will know that it is good.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
David: This passage is very interesting and important for the relationship between the Bible and epistemology. Luke’s use of the word “certainty” here serves as a touchstone for many who argue that the Bible serves as a source of objective, unerring certainty for human knowledge claims. Many emerging / postmodern / missional Christians, in contrast, are uncomfortable with, if not sometimes hostile to, any claims to objective certainty, as well as to an understanding of the Bible that makes the Bible primarily a source of objectively certain propositional statements.
I believe this is an important question for nurturing the faith of young people in the Church and for presenting the faith to those outside the Church in our pluralistic world. I hope I can do a longer series of posts on this, but for now, here is my summary.
In a nutshell, I think this passage establishes the Gospel of Luke, and at least the synoptic Gospels generally, as testimonial witnesses that secure the experience of faith in Christ. I do not, however, think this passage bears all the weight that some conservative evangelicals might want to place on it. I say this for two key reasons: (1) the Lukan passage does not itself suggest that it applies outside the context of the particular contents of the Gospel of Luke as communicated to Theophilus; (2) the Lukan passage, though strong in its language, must be understood in its literary context as the formal greeting of a Hellenistic text addressed to a patron; (3) other epistemological passages in scripture stress the provisional and limited nature of human knowledge even when enlightened by the gospel (e.g., many of the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, 1 Cor. 13:12); and (4) yet other epistemological passages in scripture stress that the ultimate ground of certainty / assurance is the testimony of the Holy Spirit, not an external criterion of truthfulness.
At the same time, contrary perhaps to some voices in the emerging church movement, I do think this passage suggest an important “objective” testimonial role for the Gospels and for scripture in general. Without the Lukan witness to the fact that scripture encodes the community’s testimonial witness about Jesus, it is too easy for our faith to become merely existential. The super-existentialism of Schleiermacher, I think, is a key element in “liberal” theology’s eventual serious problems with even central affirmations of the faith, such as the uniqueness of Christ. Faith is existential in that the primary witness to faith is the testimony of the Holy Spirit, but this faith is not merely ephemeral – it is grounded, anchored, or made secure (terms that reflect the root meaning of the Greek word asphelia that is translated “certainty”) in the recorded testimony of scripture, particularly the apostolic testimony about Jesus. The scriptural witness here, I think, plays a confirmatory, solidifying role, which differs from but compliments the initiating, primary role played by the Holy Spirit.
A little excursus: It’s interesting to note Luke’s other use of the word translated “certainty” in the NIV, asphelia, in Acts 5:23. It refers to the doors of a jail in which the apostles were held being “securely” locked. The word is also used in the LXX, sometimes to refer to physical “safety” (Deut. 12:10), “security” for a debt (e.g. Prov. 11:15), or “sound” or secure judgment (Prov. 8:14). As a lawyer, the LXX usage in Prov. 11:15 intrigues me. Posting security for a debt does not create the debt. The debt is created through some primary relationship between the creditor and debtor (for example, a contract to pay a certain amount at a future date for services rendered). Posting security ensures that the debt will be satisfied – if the debtor does not pay, the creditor may exercise its right to obtain the value of the security interest. The security interest gives the creditor assurance that it can enter into the transaction with the debtor without losing its investment. In a somewhat analogous way, I see the deposit of faith instantiated in the relationship between the believer and God, through Christ, initiated and guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, with scripture as the stable instrument recorded to secure the relationship.
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Resource on Law and Religion
For those who are interested in debates about the interesection of faith, science, public education, and freedom of religion, as well as other issues relating to the intersection of government and religion, see this book review from my friend and law school colleague Angela Carmella in the current Journal of Law and Religion.
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Christians and "The Culture"
Once in a while, the Introduction of a book has me shouting “yes” right from the start. Such is the case with Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. This paragraph in particular stated some things I have been thinking for a long time:
We talk about ‘the culture’ even though culture is always cultures, plural: full of diversity, variety and history. We talk about ‘engaging,’ ‘impacting’ and ‘transforming the culture’ when in fact the people who most carefully study culture tend to stress instead how much we are transformed by it. If we are to be at all responsible agents in the midst of culture, we need to learn new ways of speaking about what we are doing.
Yes!! When I hear or read about “the culture,” it is like nails on a blackboard to me. We don’t inhabit “the culture”; we constitute and are part of many varied cultures, even within the seemingly homogenous world of middle class America. My friend who is a graduate student, another friend who is a contractor, another who is a doctor, and myself as a law professor, all are white (or maybe white, Asian, African-American, and other) middle class guys in suburbia, all worship at similar kinds of churches, but all participate in diverse cultures relating to our different family and professional experiences.
Crouch continues:
The worst thing we could do is follow that familiar advice to ‘pray as if it all depended on God, and work as if it all depended on you.’ Rather, we need to become people who work as if it all depends on God — because it does, and because that is the best possible news. We work for, indeed work in the life and power of, a gracious and infinitely resourceful Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. And we know ourselves well enough that the thought that it might in fact all depend on us would drive us straight to fasting and trembling prayer.
Yes again! I’m looking forward to chewing over this one.
Nooo!
This is one of those amazing things. I’ve been thinking a bit lately about what Biblical “faith” means, how it contrasts with “doubt,” and how these concepts tie together in connection with the way we understand the Bible. Literally moments after praying for some wisdom about this, I thought of checking the Conn-versation blog, and lo and behold — there is a post from a week ago on this very topic. I reproduce that post below, to be chewed on when I have more time:
Over the past year, as I have been posting, lurking, and chiming in here at Conn-versation, and reading and occasionally commenting on Art Boulet’s personal blog, I have continually found myself brought back to the question of what Christian faith really is.
The Bible has a good bit to say on the subject, but it’s really a New Testament concept. The OT explicitly addresses faithfulness, but it’s usually in the context of a quality of Yahweh and the desired quality of his people. The aspect of belief and trust that we typically mean when we talk about faith makes its first appearance in the gospels. Jesus observes faith in the people he encounters, and tends to evaluate it on a quantitative scale: little or great. He seems to be addressing their specific willingness to trust in him personally to accomplish in-real-time salvific acts, manifest most often in healing and life-restoration miracles, which then serve as object lessons pointing to his greater purpose. For the most part, it’s not until the epistles that we get a fuller-blown explication of faith as belief and trust in the person and work of Christ for salvation and eternal life.
In light of this, what does it then mean when we talk about hanging on to faith or losing faith as we ask questions of the Bible? It has occurred to me that conservative reformed Christians have worked hard to ensure that faith is so underpinned by certainties that – well – it doesn’t require all that much faith. To be one of the people of Yahweh requires faith in Jesus, which requires faith in the Bible, which believers can trust completely because the church has doctrinally declared to be inerrant, wholly trustworthy, and perfect down to its very words. Start asking too many untidy questions of the Conn-versation sort, and the whole system, it would seem, is at risk of collapsing, bringing the faith of the faithful along with it.
This is where I’ve had difficulty. Does my faith in the Jesus of the gospels really hinge on Genesis 5 being literally true, as opposed to an Israelite retooling and repurposing of the Sumerian kings list? On insisting as true that Samson was a historic figure and his deeds were accomplished as recorded or that David wrote the Psalms bearing his name? On intentionally burying my understanding of the very different looks of Jeremiah in the MT and the LXX in favor of one Jeremiah only? If these things are equivocal, must it follow that Jesus is equivocal?
Faith requires an element of trust in the absence of concrete proof. It is, as the writer of Hebrews puts it, “the conviction of things not seen.” Given that, to what extent does the church’s admittedly well-intended insistence on the perfection of Scripture as a bedrock of faith begin to work at cross-purposes with trusting in things not seen? It strikes me as requiring a greater measure of faith to go with the kind of Bible we’ve actually got than the kind of Bible we may have at one time thought we had, or the kind that arch-conservatives continue to insist we must have. Is there room for the Holy Spirit to infuse the believer’s soul with the truth of the gospel resulting in faith even when Genesis 1-11 is understood to be literature rather than history?
I think it’s time for some reflections on exactly what we as Christian believers mean when we say we have faith. Is the Bible we have, the one that God in some mysterious way caused to be written, assembled, translated, and passed down by generation after generation of Christians, robust enough to withstand detailed secular and academic scrutiny and still contribute to the creation and growth of faithful believers in the person and work of Jesus to salvation? If it’s not, what are we really saying? Is it, as the conservatives would argue, that God is less than fully God? Or, is it, as I have begun to think, that our faith is less than the faith that Jesus himself commended? Or, is it something else? What do you think?
Here’s a nice excerpt from Michael Barram’s article “Located Questions for a Missional Hermeneutic“:
The Bible itself illustrates the importance of questions in understanding the character and mission of God in the world. Questions punctuate critical turning points in Scripture, in many cases providing the opportunity for a deeper understanding and appropriation of God’s purposes and intentions. Moses asks whom he should say has sent him to Egypt, leading to God’s self-identification and eventual liberative action on behalf of those enslaved by Pharaoh (Exodus 3:13). Isaiah hears the voice of the Lord calling out, “Whom shall I send?,” leading to the prophet’s commission (Isaiah 6:8). Micah clarifies God’s expectations regarding human conduct when he asks, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). Upon hearing John the Baptist’s call for a repentance exemplified by “worthy fruit,” Luke describes the crowds, tax collectors, and even soldiers asking the pivotal, potentially life-changing question, “What should we do?” (Luke 3:10, 12, 14). Mark’s Gospel reaches its climax as Jesus asks the disciples not merely what others say about him, but more importantly, who do they say that he is? (Mark 8:29). According to John’s Gospel, Nathaniel and Pilate both articulate fundamental questions that ironically point to the very heart of Jesus’ identity and mission. Nathaniel asks, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (John 1:46). The obvious answer for John’s readers is “absolutely!” Likewise, Pilate’s frustrated query, “What is truth?” (John 18:38), seems particularly poignant near the end of a Gospel that repeatedly describes Jesus, the Father, and the Spirit in terms of truth. Over and over again, Paul uses a variety of rhetorical questions in his letters to further his primary line of reasoning and to expose erroneous perceptions regarding the implications of his gospel (e.g., Rom 6:1, 15; 7:7).
We could go on to passage after passage in which various questions lead to crucial insights, refreshed priorities, and more faithful discipleship. Indeed, the Bible suggests that seemingly innocuous, inarticulate, and even half-baked questions can prove to be remarkably important. Consider, for example, the lawyer’s surprise in Luke’s Gospel when he has heard Jesus’ response to his question, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). Or how about the confusion and disappointment the apostles must have felt at the beginning of Acts, when they asked, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). Jesus’ answer demonstrates that human expectations are far smaller and more provincial than anything God has in store, even as he clarifies the apostles’ missional calling as witnesses (Acts 1:7-8). It is tempting to suggest that a fairly complete and compelling portrayal of the missio Dei could be written by focusing on biblical passages that feature question marks!
Perhaps more than anything else, a missional hermeneutic should be characterized by the relentless articulation of critical questions.
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