Through a Glass Darkly

A thoughtful entry by Justin Baeder at Radical Congruency sums up some of my own thoughts about Evangelicalism. I’m an Evangelical to the core — grew up in Evangelical churches, youth group President, evangelical college (Gordon College), young adult group leader, promise keeper, elder, worship leader, etc., etc. I couldn’t leave Evangelicalism behind even if I wanted to, not only because it’s in my blood, but also because there aren’t other viable local church communities in which I’d want to raise my own kids (got three of ’em). And by and large I think the broad outlines of Evangelical theology are good.

And yet, and yet, and yet, I’m so very weary of Evangelicalism. I’m weary of our constipated little culture, the way we talk to each other in code words (“that sermon was such a blessing, wasn’t it?), the way we shy away from hard questions and harsh realities of life beyond our suburban gardens. I’m weary of the silly love songs to Jesus on the local Christian radio station and the skate punks wearing “turn or burn” t-shirts at the local Christian skate park. I’m weary of placing everyone in neat categories — “saved or unsaved,” “walking with the Lord or worldly”. I’m weary of fighting with folks who are supposed to be my brothers and sisters about things that seem glaringly self-evident to me (no, “science” does not equal “heresy”, “conservative” does not equal “godly”, and there really is no such thing as a “Christian nation.”) I’m weary of our ignorance of our own history, of the absurd perception that we’ve finally in the last 50 years or so straightened out all the doctrinal questions of the Church’s first 2000 years and now have it all just right. I’m weary of “Left Behind” books and seeing Jim Dobson sputtering on Larry King Live about how the nation’s going down the toilet and reading ridiculous quotes in the Times from Bible study groups that were praying for George Bush’s reelection.

Where are the cries for mercy and justice? Where is the revulsion at the violence of war? Where is the truth spoken humbly in love? Where is the seeking, the striving, the acceptance of ambiguity and uncertainty because of, not in spite of, faith? I don’t want another “movement.” I don’t want to throw out the faith thinking I might save it. I want the real thing. Where is it?

Another Man’s Meat tells and interesting and probably sadly typical story about the difficulty Christians sometimes face when discussing political views outside the “conservative” mainstream. Jollyblogger picks up the thread and also has a somewhat related post regarding the return of the “Moral Majority.” I can add a story of my own: I learned of a “political action” committee in a local church recently, and was discussing the purpose and goals of the committee with one of its founders. She seemed utterly baffled at some of my questions, such as whether it’s really worthwhile to spend large amounts of energy getting Arlen Spector taken off the Judiciary Committee, and why so few Evangelicals seem concerned with the human cost of the Iraq War. I was trying my best not to wear my law professor hat, but she seemed unable to articulate any serious policy reasons for her positions. It was really disturbing, almost creepy in a way — like some kind of group think was making her unable to see merit in any political position other than those she had been fed by Concerned Women for America or James Dobson.

So, I’m very glad to hear from some moderating voices here in the blogsphere. Perhaps we can begin a move towards a “third way” in Evangelical thinking about public policy. Perhaps we can be more consistently “pro life” — as deeply concerned about the effects of poverty and war as we are about banning abortion. Perhaps we can be more consistent advocates of the role of morality in our public policy — as deeply concerned about the regulatory capture and economic and social inequity as we are about same sex marriage. Perhaps we can become not “conservatives,” “liberals,” or even “moderates,” but rather followers of Jesus who humbly yet honestly seek to be redeeming influences in a broken world — “servants” rather than a “majority”; a “Church” advancing against the gates of Hell rather than a “Christian Coalition” pressing for political advantage; the people of God, confident of the coming fullness of His Kingdom, patiently and faithfully awaiting our Lord’s return, rather than another interest group scrambling for “rights” and influence.

Thanks to David Mobley for some good comments on my prior inerrancy post. Having done a bit more reading today, I think I might amend my definition a bit to something more precise, as stated in Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology. Erickson defines inerrancy as follows:

“The Bible, when correctly interpreted in light of the level to which culture and the means of communication had developed at the time it was written, and in view of the purposes for which it was given, is fully truthful in all that it affirms.”

Erickson fleshes out this definition with some important principles, among them that the text’s cultural setting, the purposes for which the text was written, and the pervasive use of phenomenological language to report scientific matters and historical events means that we should not impose modern expectations of precision on the text. Without these caveats, I’m not so comfortable saying the Bible is without error in all that it “affirms”; with them, I am.

A Physicist’s Perspective, another thoughtful and well-written blog, has a good post with an interesting discussion in the comments regarding the definition of inerrancy, which the author defines as “the Bible does not affirm anything contrary to fact.” I couldn’t post in the comments because of a technical glitch of some kind, so here are a few thoughts:

One thing that seems missing is the connection between the Physicist’s Perspective’s formulation of inerrancy and the author’s view of inspiration. Many, if not most, who hold to inerrancy also hold to “verbal inspiration” — that is, God so directed the scripture writers that the very words they used were those intended by God. It’s difficult to hold to this view, however, and at the same time to suggest that incorrect grammar isn’t an error of some kind, if you also hold to the definition of inerrancy stated above.

Similarly, when the author says “scripture doesn’t affirm anything contrary to fact,” I wonder about scripture’s use of phenomenological language that reflects the culture of the writers but is clearly contrary to fact — for example, that the sun “rises and sets,” or that the Earth rests on “pillars.” Certainly the writers seem to be affirming these things, even if such references aren’t the main point the writer is making.

For these reasons, I prefer a definition of inerrancy that says the Bible is without error in “all that it intends to teach.” This is different than saying the Bible is without error only in matters of “faith and practice.” Clearly, for example, the intent of the Bible writers often is to convey the historical facts that provide the basis for our faith. This means the facts themselves, as well as the doctrinal truths they represent, are conveyed to us without error.

The “in all that it intends to teach” formulation allows for a proper application of the grammatical-historical-literary method of interpretation. When we examine passages using phenomenological language in their historical and literary context, for example, we see that the Bible isn’t intending to teach us anyting at all about whether the Sun actually “rises and sets” — rather, scripture uses a perception familiar to the culture from which the text arose to communicate the truth that God is lord over all His creation. Likewise, cultural and literary conventions of what constitutes reportage of a “fact,” such as paraphrasing, collapsing timelines, etc., can be accomodated without suggesting “error.”

This might also have implications for difficult passages such as Genesis 1. While I tend to a day/age view (although honestly I’m kind of agnostic about the whole thing), a “framework” view could also fit into a definition of inerrancy as I’ve described it. Perhaps Genesis 1 doesn’t intend to teach us anything at all about what modern science would consider “facts” about cosmology, geology or biology, but rather intends to communicate truths about God’s creative activity within the literary framework of seven “days.”

I’d like to follow up on the discussion of how a postmodern theology might deal with the “sola scriptura” concept. I’ve mentioned Grenz and Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism as one source of vigorous discussion about the authority of scripture in the context of postmodern theology. To follow up on that reference, I’ll try to summarize the argument in Chapter 3 of that book, titled “Scripture: Theology’s ‘Norming Norm'”. This post will contain some brief thoughts, and hopefully I’ll be able to flesh out some more details in later posts. (In the interests of brevity, I’m not giving page cites, but the chapter is only about 30 pages long.)

Grenz and Franke’s thesis, as I understand it, is that postmodern concepts of how communities read and interact with texts can be useful in a protestant understanding of revelation. They take as one of their starting points Article 1.10 of the Westminster Confession of Faith:

“The Supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of counsels, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other than the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scipture.”

They note that

“[t]he declaration that the Spirit speaking in or through scripture is our final authority means that Christian belief and practice cannot be deterined merely by appeal to either the exegesis of scripture carried out apart form the life of the believer and the believing community or to any supposedly private (or corporate) “word from the Spirit” that stands in contradiction to biblical exegesis.”

This means that the Biblical text is not merely a repository of propositional truths. Instead, “the Spirit speaks to succeeding generations of Christians through the text. Traditionally, this ongoing divine work has been known as ‘illumination'”.

The Christian tradition as well as the Christian community, then, are important aspects of how the text is understood and applied in any context. The text doesn’t exist only in the foundationalist sense of an independent entity waiting to be discovered. In real ways, the text is given meaning as the Spirit works within the life of the Church.

The question Matt asked in one of his comments to my prior post is a good one: if all postmodern theology is seeking to do is understand the text, why not stick with the time-tested “sola scriptura” formulation? For me at least, that isn’t the right question. It’s not, at least for me, that there’s any desire to jettison the concept of “sola sciptura.” Rather, it seems that the concept, and the related concepts of “inerrancy” and “verbal inspiration,” have become encysted against the ongoing work of the Spirit. In some ways (being myself not a Charismatic), I see some of these “pomo” theological ideas as a bridge between the crusty doctrinalism of propositional traditions and the unbounded emotionalism of charismatic and pentecostal traditions. In short, at least to some extent, I see it as a useful way of obtaining better balance.

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Cruising the blogsphere looking for some good “emerging church” sites, I came across Todd Hunter.. I appreciate Todd’s stuff because it’s thoughtful, challenging, irenic, and yet grounded. His recent series of posts on “deconstruction” are spot-on; basically, “deconstruction” isn’t enough and, indeed, “reconstruction” is the more important task.

An engaging post on Wheat & Chaff discusses whether a the “postmodern” emphasis of the “emerging church” movement can be consistent with sola scriptura. The analysis needs to go a bit further — much further, really, I think.

I won’t address the weaknesses of Wheat & Chaff’s portrait of postmodern thought generally, as David at Jollyblogger has already done so in a subsequent post. Although David nevertheless lauds the Wheat & Chaff post, I think the charicature of postmodern thought is enough of a flaw to raise serious questions about its real value. Wheat & Chaff assumes that “postmodern” = “relativism,” which isn’t necessarily a fair or true statement. Clearly, one cannot espouse relativism and hold to any version of scriptural authority, but that is a straw man. Serious Christians who are seeking to engage postmodern thought don’t reject the notion of authority altogether.

A good example of this is the bookBeyond Foundationalism, which is probably one of the most dense and challenging examinations of evangelical theology in the postmodern context. The treatment of scripture in that book doesn’t abandon the notion of Biblical authority. Rather, the phrase the authors use is that scripture is the “norming norm” of the Christian community. In this approach, scripture is normative; indeed, it is the highest norm to which any other norms of the community must be held to account.

How significantly does this formulation differ from traditional formulations of “sola scriptura”? The Westminster Confession states that

“the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.”

Yet the Confession continues as follows:

“Nevertheless, we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word:[13] and that there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the Church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the Word, which are always to be observed.”

The classical Reformed formulation of sola scriptura, then, leaves some room for individual believers and the Church to interpret the written scriptures and to order the affairs of the local fellowship. In some ways, the concept of scripture as the “norming norm” for the Christian community isn’t that different from this confessional view. In either case, there are areas in which the community has authority to set standards applicable to a given culture, time and place.

This isn’t to say the concept of a “norming norm” is necessarily the same thing as “sola scriptura.” The authors of Beyond Foundationalism seem at some points to suggest that the community not only interprets and applies the existing norms of scripture, but also creates the norms through the act of interpreting and applying scripture. Actually, the book is a bit dense on this point, and I’m not sure if I’m representing the authors’ views accurately. So, there may be some points of departure from classical doctrine which might be subject to criticism.

In any event, Beyond Foundationalism isn’t the “emerging church manifesto,” because, as David Wayne points out, the “emerging church” is still something of a disjointed jumble. Nevertheless, it clearly shows that the theology coming out of the emerging church movement isn’t so easy to define as “anti-authoritarian” or “relativistic.”

Recently an “Answers in Genesis” person came to our church. I have some well-developed views about the interpretation of Genesis 1, which are not consistent with AIG’s. What bothers even more than what I perceive as glaring flaws in the facts and logic of the “young Earth” view, however, is the dishonest way AIG portrays the discussion of different views on this divisive topic. AIG’s “ministry theme” for the year sums up their attitude: “Operation Refuting Compromise.”

One fundamental flaw in AIG’s approach is a failure to distinguish a hermenuetical dispute from a dispute about scriptural authority. The introduction to AIG’s “Refuting Compromise” book specifically claims that the dispute is one over the “authority” of scripture. (You can review this yourself in the pages reproduced from the book on Amazon.com; I don’t want to link to it because I don’t want to drive up its Google rating — that’s how strongly I feel about it). If you hold a view different than AIG, you are compromising the authority of scripture. This position is either spectacularly uninformed or just plain disingenuous.

The truth is that many Christians who accept the “authority” of all of scripture, including Genesis 1, hold divergent views about how it should be interpreted. AIG’s real dispute seems to be with the use of general revelation — God’s truth revealed in His creation — to illuminate the meaning of special revelation (the written scriptures).

The concept that God reveals Himself in “nature, history and the constitution of the human being” is well established within the theology of revelation in just about every Christian tradition. (These categories are from Millard Erickson’s excellent Christian Theology.) Nor is the idea that special revelation and general revelation should be interpreted in a consistent way anything revolutionary. (See this article I found recently for a good discussion of this principle from a Reformed perspective).

AIG couches the dispute in terms of “authority” rather than “hermenuetics” because bumping up against the “authority” of scripture scares people. It’s a way of making people think they are being disobedient to God’s word if they question AIG’s interpretation of Genesis 1. Indeed, it’s a way of making a young earth position a principal hallmark of orthodoxy. This is manipulative and wrong.

The real issue is whether the facts we know from general revelation are sufficient to justify a reexamination of some common ways of intepreting Genesis 1 (specifically, the view that the Earth was created in 6 “calendar” days about 7,000 – 13,000 years ago). In my view, there’s no question but that this is so; indeed, the evidence from numerous lines of data in cosmology, astronomy, geology and biology overwhelming establishes the antiquity of the universe and the Earth. The subsidiary question is how to interpret Genesis 1 in light of such evidence. Here, I’m not as certain, although I think a careful gramatical and literary analysis of the relevant scriptures shows that the text can accomodate either a “day-age,” “framework,” or combination “day-age / framework” position. But this is an issue of hermenuetics; if you interpret the passage differently as part of a good faith effort to determine what it truly means, I don’t question your commitment to the authority of scripture.

What AIG is doing truly breaks my heart. I believe it confuses immature Christians who are searching out these issues, dupes uninformed people into believing falsehoods, divides the body of Christ, and drives away many who equate the credibility of Christianity with the credibility of a young Earth that happens to look very, very old. My hope and prayer is that we can someday differ on such hermeneutical issues without resorting to accusations and suggestions of heresy.

Once upon a time I was a fundamentalist. I didn’t know it then — I was only a teenager. I had never traveled, never known many other Christians outside my own tradition. My spirituality was defined largely by things I didn’t do: “don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew, don’t go with girls who do.”

Then I went away to college. Thankfully, it was a wonderful institution with a broad Evangelical tradition. I had friends and teachers who challenged me to think beyond my “negative example” spirituality.

I moved back home, and over the course of many years (too many now to think about), became a leader in the church in which I had grown up. The church had changed in many ways, but still retained some of its fundamentalist roots. And I began to define my spirituality by attitudes I don’t hold — don’t insist on non-essential doctrinal points, don’t focus on cultural externals (drink and dance!), don’t withdraw from the culture. I defined myself as not a fundamentalist. I started to feel pretty good about how wise and broad-minded I’d grown.

Yet I’m wondering if I’ve grown that much at all. I still seem to define my spirituality by what I’m not. How much harder it is to be defined by something I am — to be defined by love, joy, peace, gentleness, faithfulness, goodness, self-control. Maybe there’s room for yet another chapter in this story.

This afternoon I’m raking leaves (I know, it’s a Sunday, and my grandpa’s turning over in his grave, but it has to get done). I hate raking leaves. It usually starts out ok — I fire up the big leaf blower and get all those dry oak leaves on the main part of the yard into a few big piles. I feel like I’m getting lots done. But then comes the hard part. I strap on the backpack blower and head into the brush and trees at the edge of the property, vainly hoping to clear out those damp clumps that cling to the forsythia and pachasandra. It takes forever and I never get it looking really clean.

In some ways this reminds me of spiritual growth. It’s easy, sometimes, to make quick progress on some “big” issue — I avoid getting drunk or saying curse words frequently or flat-out lying. But it’s those pesky things stuck to the underbrush that take the real work. The subtle lack of faith reflected in anxious thoughts, the envy reflected in a reluctance to celebrate others’ successes, the anger over past hurts nursed deep down. These are the places where the seasonal clean-up takes patience and time, and is never really finished.