An Overview of the Story 2

 ... continued from here

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For this reason, our first fly over Scripture will have a lot of Christian glue in it. As Christians, we tend to stick the stories and teachings of the Bible together in particular ways. For example, although it may seem obvious to us, we consider the second half, which we call the "New" Testament, to be the fulfillment or consummation of the first half. We call the first half the "Old" Testament. 

You can see even in the way we have named these two halves that we would say the first half is somehow incomplete without the second half of the story. In theory, someone could label or glue them together differently. For example, a person who did not believe Jesus was the Messiah might see the second half as a kind of appendix telling about a Jewish group that got it wrong.

2. A story typically has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. The beginning of the story sets up some sort of situation or problem that will play itself out in the rest of the story. The ending then sees that situation reach some sort of resolution or destination for the initial situation in some way. The middle of the story is the process of reaching that ending point.

In the story within the Bible, the story starts and ends with God. God is the main character. The story begins with creation in Genesis 1 and it ends with new creation and "forever" in Revelation 22. Mind you, the books of Genesis and Revelation were not written at the same time. Hundreds of years separate the two "scrolls." The people who wrote the words in these books down had no idea these two scrolls would one day be bound together. God knew, of course.

Many Christians would see Adam as the culprit who sets up the biblical story to play out the way it does. Adam and Eve create the problem at the beginning of the story that the rest of the plot is trying to solve. They "sin" in the Garden of Eden. Humanity was meant to live forever from the very beginning, but Adam disobeys God and all is initially lost.

Speaking of glue, most Jews at the time of Jesus probably would not have focused on Adam in their telling of the story. At the time of Jesus, most Jews would probably have started the story more with Abraham, who first appears at the end of Genesis 11. What Christians tend to see as a subplot--the story of Abraham and his literal descendants--is the main plot for a Jewish reader who may or may not see Jesus as the goal of the story. 

In the Christian telling of the story, Jesus is the solution to the problem set up by Adam. Jesus is the "last Adam" (1 Cor. 15:45). Jesus is the climax of the story, the goal toward which the plot is moving. Everything in the story before Jesus is headed toward its fulfillment in him. 

3. One way to tell the overarching story from a Christian perspective is thus to give a story in six "acts." Again, this is the way we are telling the story, gluing the material in these books together from the outside looking in. They were all separate scrolls originally. Someone put these scrolls together and bound them in one big book. If we are to believe in the Bible, we have to believe not only that God directed or "inspired" the writing of them but that God also directed the later collection and putting of them together as a whole.

The first act is the creation, just as the final act is new creation and "forever." Then the second act sets up the problem of the story, the sin of Adam and the situation in which humanity now finds itself. We find ourselves separated from God. We find ourselves encumbered with evil and suffering. We find ourselves surrounded by death. The world is not yet at God planned for it to be. 

Part of the final act is not only eternity, but the final resolution of the problem. In this sixth act, humanity and the world become as God planned for them to be. This resolution of the plot involves both the judgment of humanity but also the salvation of many from that judgment. Judgment and salvation go together because salvation in part is escaping the consequences of the Judgment. 

The middle of the story is thus the movement toward this ending point. If Act I is the creation and Act II is the problem created by Adam and Eve, Act III gives the Old Testament, the time when God works with one specific people group, Israel, to begin to reconcile the world to himself. God reveals himself to this people. He makes a special arrangement or "covenant" with them. This first covenant looks forward to a more complete or "new covenant" that God will make with all humanity through Jesus.

Act IV is the turning point of the story, the point where God actually comes down to earth as a human, as Jesus. Jesus comes to fix the human problem. Through his death and resurrection to life again, Jesus defeats all the forces of evil and suffering in the story. He not only defeats death, but he defeats the strongest villain in the story, the Devil. Jesus satisfies the order of things and makes reconciliation with God finally possible.

Finally, Act V is somewhat unexpected. The Jews might have expected Act VI to be part of the initial coming of Jesus or at least to follow immediately after his resurrection from the dead. Instead, we have two thousand years of intervening time, the age of the Church. About two-thirds of the New Testament is about the beginning of this part of the story. The earliest Christians had no idea this part of the story would last so long.

Act VI thus begins with the "second coming" of Jesus. In Act VI, Jesus completes the mission that he started with his first coming. He brings judgment to those who have not given their allegiance to him, and he brings salvation from judgment to those who have confessed him as their Lord. For those who have confessed him as the Christ, as their "anointed" king, Act VI ends with a blessed forever. They not only escape the judgment, but they are transformed into the humanity we were always meant to be.

4. This is the way Christians generally understand the overarching story or metanarrative of Scripture...

11.4 Scripture as Revelation 2

Previously in this chapter:

• 11.1-3 Overview, Natural Revelation, and the Word

11.4 Scripture as Revelation
11.4.1 God-breathed

• 2 Timothy 3:16 - "All Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for instruction, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness."
• Note that the NT did not always find this God breathing in the literal meaning of OT passages (cf. Matt. 2:15 and Hos. 11:1-2). In Galatians 4:24 finds God breathing through Genesis by way of allegory.
• Also note that 2 Timothy would have referred to the Old Testament, since the New Testament was not yet collected at that time.
• 2 Peter 1:20-21 - "No prophecy comes into existence of one's own loosing, for prophecy was not brought by the will of a mortal but, being brought by the Holy Spirit, people spoke from God."
• 2 Peter is particularly concerned with its audience's belief in prophecies relating to Jesus and his second coming (2 Pet. 3). That is to say, it is not only the Scriptures but the prophecies of prophets in the early church that are likely in view. He is assuring them that prophecy is not a matter of opinion but comes from the Holy Spirit.
• In short, special revelation is much bigger than the Bible itself. The Bible is a subset of special revelation in general.
• 1 Peter 1:10-12 - Contextual study makes it clear that most of the words of the prophets were about the time of the prophets, although there are some ambiguous texts (e.g., Isaiah 53). An incarnational sense of revelation suggests that 1 Peter's understanding of revelation is itself incarnated revelation.
• So a "translation" of 1 Peter 1:10-12 might go like the following: "The Holy Spirit inspired the early Christians to see anticipations of Jesus' sufferings in the Scriptures. God thus planted such potential meanings into the words of the prophets, although the prophets themselves probably only saw the first meanings to their audiences rather than these "fuller senses."

11.4.2 Infallible

• Isaiah 55:11 - "My word will not return to myself empty but accomplishes everything it sets out to do."
• Again, this statement is in no way limited to the books of the Old Testament that were in use at the time of writing. The point is that God's will--here personified as his word--is unfailing. Scripture reveals to us a subset of his overall will. 
• What is God's will in Scripture (cf. Vanhoozer)? Sometimes it is to give its audiences and us commands (in this respect it is authoritative). Sometimes it is to give us promises and anticipations of what is to come (in this respect it is unfailing). Sometimes its purposes were to express the joy, anger, sadness, and feelings of God's people (e.g., in the imprecatory psalms, psalms of lament, thanksgiving psalms, etc). Sometimes its purpose was to inform (in this regard it was inerrant within the level of precision that accorded with God's will).

11.4.3 Authoritative

• All of God's commands are summed up in the Great Commandment: Love God and Love neighbor (see section on Christian ethics). Matthew 22:34-40
• The authority of Scripture relates specifically to its commands upon us. All of these are filtered through the love command. As the ethics section sets out, this is an authority of the whole of Scripture rather than a direct authority of its individual parts.

11.4.4 Means of Transformation

• The Bible has often been treated as a source of information or beliefs, but this is its most elementary function, not its deepest one.
• We know this because "God looks on the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7) and spiritual identity is a function of the heart more than the head (Mark 7:20-23).
• The inspired instruction of 2 Timothy 3:16 has to do with the discipleship of the person, not the mere informing of the mind--correction, training in righteousness.
• The Bible thus uses Scripture to change people--to bring them into relationship with him, to mold them into Christ-likeness, to make them more loving. 
• The Bible is thus at its heart a sacrament of transformation.

11.4.5 Synthesis

• There were original moments of inspiration--the individual books of the Bible were inspired to speak to their original contexts largely within the conceptual frameworks of their original audiences. 
• We do not hereby preclude the possibility of stages in the generation of these books. As Christians, we focus on the canonical form of these texts but don't preclude the possibility of inspiration in relation to "pre-forms" of the canonical text.
• Over the course of the testaments, we can plot an overall, increasing precision in the revelation. In general, the New Testament conceptualizes revelation more precisely than the Old Testament. This dynamic is sometimes called "progressive revelation."
• The Holy Spirit continues to inspire individuals as they read Scripture, never in contradiction of God's revealed character, but to "improvise" for specific contexts (which is essential for the appropriation of Scripture to specific circumstances). We find this dynamic in the sensus plenior of the New Testament use of the old.
• The final revelation, the "last Word" (cf. N. T. Wright) was Christ. All the rest is anticipation, witness to, and unfolding of the witness.

Previous "chapters"
Chapter 1: What is Biblical Theology?
Chapter 2: Theology of God
Chapter 3: Creation and Consummation
Chapter 4: Sin and Atonement
Interlude: A Theology of Israel
Chapter 5: Jesus the Christ
Chapter 6: Salvation
Chapter 7: The Holy Spirit
Chapter 8: The Church
Chapter 9: Eschatology
Chapter 10: Christian Ethics

SA8. The Bible is inspired, infallible, and inerrant.

This is the eighth post on sacraments in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit in this series had to do with God and Creation (book here), and the second unit was on Christology and Atonement.

We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. This third set is on sacraments.
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The Bible is inspired, infallible, and inerrant.

1. In the previous article we discussed some of the variations among Christians with regard to their conceptions of the Bible and some of the terms currently used to describe the Bible. That article focused especially on some possible missteps and extremes in relation to those terms and conceptions. In this article, we want to lay out a more coherent way of thinking about those terms in relation to the Bible.

2. When a person thinks of meaning as static and as something that inheres "in" a text, it is natural to think it sufficent to say that, "the Bible is inspired" as a sufficient encapsulation of its origins in God. But since a text is subject to multiple interpretations, we must ask "which interpretation" of the Bible is the inspired one.

It had an original meaning, so we can say that the original meaning was inspired. We might go further to say that the Holy Spirit continues to inspire meanings in dialog with the text as individuals read with the eyes of the Spirit. The first centuries of Christendom also developed traditional readings of certain key texts, and certain Christian traditions also have traditional readings of certain key texts.

Not all of these readings are or were inspired, but perhaps many are. When we say that the original meanings were inspired, we must mean that they were inspired within their original contexts, because meaning is always contextual. These books were inspired to speak to a certain time and place within whatever their original parameters were. At times those meanings were situational or for a particular time. At other times something more universal was meant

What was God thinking as far as "all time"? Even more, what was God thinking for my time and context? This is where we must often work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12). [1] Many want certainty and absolute clarity, but this is the road to making the Bible into an idol. Surely we might consider many of the common Christian understandings of key verses to be inspired understandings (creation out of nothing, the divinity of Christ, the Trinity).

Meanwhile, the interpretations of some traditions may be God speaking to those traditions, giving them an emphasis for a particular place and time. And some of the meanings I as an individual see could be God speaking to me. The problem of course is telling when God is speaking and when he is not. Any meaning we see that falls outside the law of love or rule of faith is immediately to be ruled out. And there is good reason for us to read the Bible in community so that the Spirit can correct us if we are on the wrong track. [2]

3. God's word never fails. It is infallible, unfailing. God's word does many different things. It commands. It promises. It informs. Sometimes it gives us an opportunity to express our anger, sadness, or thanksgiving.

God's word, as we have said, is bigger than written words. The words of the Bible give us the most important of God's words for his creation, the final Word of which is Jesus Christ (John 1:14). God's words are, in the first place, his will in action, his commands to the creation, the instruments through which he acts in the world. [3] They include words of hope and words of truth.

4. When God's word commands us to do something, that word is authoritative. When we speak of the authority of Scripture, we are most naturally referring to those words in Scripture through which God gives us his commands. It is not the purpose of every passage to give commands, and some of God's commands were for specific times and places. When God speaks a command to us, his command holds absolute authority over us. [4]

Much of Scripture is narrative. It describes things. Sometimes the narratives of Scripture do imply God's will. [5] In other cases they describe events that happened. Description is not prescription. Just because Gideon used a fleece to find God's will does not necessarily mean that we should.

The commands of God to Israel were commands of God to Israel. The New Testament tells us that Gentile believers are not bound by circumcision (Gal. 5:2-4), the food laws (Mark 7:19), or the Sabbath law of Israel (Col. 2:16). There is a drive among some to find some universal principle behind these commands to apply still to today and perhaps we can find some, but this drive is more our obsession than God's. Paul feels no need to find some universal principle behind the law regarding the Jewish Sabbath or Jesus behind the food laws.

Some commands in Scripture had to do with the context or situation in which it was commanded. Do women today need to have authority on their heads because of the angels (1 Cor. 11:10)? Do we need to be careful about wearing clothing of mixed thread (Lev. 19:19)? We have difficulty even understanding the original purpose of these instructions. To require them today would simply be to follow a rule for its own sake with little sense of purpose. Most likely, these commands had everything to do with their original cultural contexts.

So while God's commands hold absolute authority over us, the Church must work out salvation with fear and trembling. God said it to them and that settled it for them. But we need the Spirit and the Church to wrestle with how to apply some commands to today.

5. Some of God's purpose in Scripture is to give us hope. He has made promises to us, promises to come again. Promises to save us from judgment, from Satan, and from the world. He has promised us his love and his justice within the context of his love.

Some of his promises in Scripture were conditional. He sent Jonah to preach coming judgment on Nineveh, but that promise was not absolute. There was the possibility of forgiveness and repentance. In the same way he has promised the world judgment, but he has given us a way out.

In the same way, his promises to Israel at any one time were contingent on their obedience. His election of Israel is "without repentance" (Rom. 11:29), but it is contingent on their obedience. So God's promises are unfailing, infallible, but some of them are conditional.

6. When God's word tells us truths, those truths are inerrant. As we mentioned in the previous post, many American Christians in the twentieth century were preoccupied with the Bible as a source of propositional truths. There was not a little cultural blindness here, for the unexamined assumption here is that the Bible is mostly about ideas and beliefs.

When we read the narratives of the Bible in context, however, their purpose was not primarily to tell us places, dates, and people. Ancient histories and biographies were much more about good and bad examples of character, as well as identifying who God is and who we are, than about historical precision in the way we demand it today. The stories of the Bible give us good and bad examples of character. They tell us who God is and how we are to be as his people. These were the primary purposes of ancient stories.

God also revealed himself in the categories of the people to whom he was speaking. This is the principle of incarnation--God is a God who takes on our flesh (John 1:14). He is a God who meets us where we are. He does not make us come up to his level, which is impossible. He speaks our language. He uses anthropomorphisms. He met them in their categories.

So the picture of Genesis one has two layers of water with the sky in between them (Gen. 1:7-8), and the stars, sun, and moon placed in the sky (Gen. 1:14-17). Paul thinks of himself taken into the third sky (2 Cor. 12:2). Adam is a living soul made up of dust and breath (Gen. 2:7), and the Thessalonians are body, soul, and spirit (1 Thess. 5:23).

The pictures here were not the point of the revelation, they were the flesh in which the incarnated message was clothed. God created the world and has given us light to find our way during the day and the night. Paul was taken into the very presence of God. God has given us life and expects our whole person to be his.

God's word never fails. His words have different purposes. When his purpose in Scripture is to reveal a truth, then that truth will most certainly be without error. [6]

7. Some of God's words are meant to give us hope or to give us a mechanism by which we may express our thanks, joys, sadness, and even anger. God's word always accomplishes what it sets out to do (Isa. 55:11), so in these instances, as in all instances, his word is infallible, unfailing. We might certainly learn something from a psalm of thanksgiving, a psalm of lament, or an imprecatory psalm (one expressing anger toward enemies). But the primary purpose of these psalms was not to inform. The primary purpose of these psalms was to express something.

So we can rejoice and give thanks as we read thanksgiving psalms. We can identify with the sorrows of the psalmist as we read a psalm of lament. And we can vent our anger as we read an imprecatory psalm.

Even here we must be careful. The authority of Jesus demands that we love our enemies. So if we would dwell on an imprecatory psalm while thinking of our enemies, we would be using Scripture to sin. Similarly, God does not want us to lament forever. At some point we must move on, for there is work to do for the kingdom.

8. Inspiration thus speaks to the source of God's word in God. God has breathed words to his people in Scripture. Infallibility is the overarching category for the unfailing nature of those words. God's words never fail to accomplish what he set them out to do. They are authoritative when they command. They guarantee hope in promise. They are without error when they inform. They are a means of catharsis when we are joyful, sad, or angry.

Yet the most important way in which God uses Scripture is to change us. To make us, both individually and corporately, into a holy people. He makes us Christlike. He makes us like him. Ultimately, Scripture is God's word. He can do with it whatever he wants.

Next Sunday: SA9: God uses all sorts of instruments of grace to transform his people.

[1] The books of the Bible do not say, "And for those of you reading in a specific context in the twenty-first century, here's how these principles or these contextual instructions would play out."

[2] We might apply something like Wesley's quadrilateral to "impressions" we think we are receiving from the Holy Spirit. First, does my impression fit with the accepted principles of Scripture--the law of love and the rule of faith? Second, does it fit with what the Church in general has believed and taught, realizing that individual Christian traditions can get things wrong. Thirdly, what do other wise individuals have to say, given their experience--have I sought the counsel of others? Finally, what does common sense seem to say--is it reasonable?

God has sometimes done "unreasonable" things in the past, but most crazy impressions just that--crazy. The more "unreasonable" the impression, the greater the certainty you should expect to have. But if it is unloving and harmful, it is not God speaking.

[3] This is the Hellenistic Jewish background for the word logos as it is used in the Gospel of John and perhaps implicitly elsewhere in the New Testament (e.g., Colossians 1:15; Heb. 4:12-13).

[4] There is a sense in which the word infallible does not fit neatly with God's commands, because God often gives us the freedom to disobey. But God has not failed in any respect in this case, because God in his sovereignty gave us the choice. So Romans 3:3 denies that our faithlessness in any way nullifies the faithfulness of God.

[5] This is the so called "evaluative" point of view of a story, God's point of view.

[6] I have been influenced significantly by Kevin Vanhoozer in formulating the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture in this way. **

SA7: Christians vary somewhat in their conceptions of Scripture.

This is the seventh post on sacraments in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit in this series had to do with God and Creation (book here), and the second unit was on Christology and Atonement.

We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. This third set is on sacraments.
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Christians vary somewhat in their conceptions of Scripture.

1. The New Testament believers clearly knew that Scripture was "inspired by God" and "useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness" (2 Tim. 3:16). However, they did not always find that teaching and correction in the plain meaning of the text. As an example, Paul did not hear a lesson about oxen in Deuteronomy 25:4, the literal meaning of that verse. Rather, he heard a spiritual, metaphorical teaching about how ministers should be materially supported while they do the work of the ministry.

Therefore, from the standpoint of the New Testament authors, the inspired point of Scripture was not always the literal meaning. Throughout the centuries, Christians have always believed that the Scriptures were inspired, that God "breathed" them. [1] They have believed that the Scriptures were authoritative and infallible. That is to say, they have believed that God's commands in Scripture hold authority over God's people and that God's word is both true and unfailing.

But they have frequently disagreed on what the Bible teaches and how we are to interpret it. Indeed, the exponential multiplication of Protestant churches into the tens of thousands suggests that the Bible alone cannot serve as a basis for the unity of the church. [2] This is because there are almost as many interpretations of the Bible as there are people reading it.

Many of the first Protestants strongly disagreed with the Roman Catholic Church on the allegorical or figural reading of Scripture. The problem here is that there is a fair amount of figural and allegorical interpretation in the Bible itself (e.g., Gal. 4:24). Similarly, many Christians in the last 200 years have read the Bible with an openness that God might speak beyond its contextual meaning.

So those who do not like non-literal interpretation must face the problem that the New Testament itself uses non-literal interpretation. The best among these admit that the New Testament sometimes reads the Old Testament out of context, but suggest that this practice was cultural. They would say that we today should not because we are not inspired. [3] There is of course no basis in the Bible for this position.

On the other extreme are those who see hidden meanings everywhere in the Bible and those who regularly receive a charismatic "word from the Lord." These individuals are not unlike the prophets of 1 Corinthians 14. The problem here is how to know "which spirit is of God" (1 John 4:1).

We find a tension in the latter parts of the New Testament between prophetic words of this sort (e.g., 1 Cor. 14:26) and the "deposit" of teaching from the apostles (e.g., 1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 1:14). Augustine and other early Christians would call this deposit the "rule of faith" (regula fidei). God has developed a core collection of Christian understanding, the "faith once delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). Any spiritual words will surely fall within these boundaries and must be "tested" (1 John 4:1) by the corporate body of Christ.

So there are fundamentalists in their use of Scripture and there are extreme charismatics. God will judge them for their hearts, not for their ideas. But the Wesleyan tradition has historically been open to spiritual interpretations within the boundaries of orthodoxy, and the Wesleyan tradition has practiced historical-cultural interpretation, which reads the Bible in context.

2. A bone of contention in the twentieth century revolved around the word inerrancy. Although it is true that Christians throughout the centuries have considered Scripture truthful, twentieth century debates had a distinctly different flavor. The reason is that earlier Christians felt free to interpret the Bible in non-literal ways and earlier Christians were not reacting to the rise of the historical-cultural method of interpreting the Bible.

The earlier sense of the Bible being without error simply meant that, once we understand properly what God is saying through Scripture, that meaning is entirely truthful. In the twentieth century, however, fundamentalists applied this sense only to what they considered the "literal" meaning. And more importantly, the word was used to fight against modern ideas like evolution, source theories of the Bible, or difficult findings from archaeology.

There are some difficulties for this approach because it does not always do what it aims to do. For example, once you take genre into account, it may turn out that the plain meaning of a passage like Genesis 1 does not support the agenda of the literalist. Similarly, if the parameters of ancient history writing were different than the anti-modernist wants them to be, then the plain meaning of biblical narratives will not support the harmonizing goals of the fundamentalist inerrantist.

The best scholars even in the neo-evangelical community inevitably have nuanced their positions. A writer can be inspired in the use of sources, for example. We can also affirm the truthfulness of Scripture while recognizing that the theological precision of the New Testament is greater than that of the Old Testament and that the theological precision of the later Old Testament is greater than that of its earlier parts.

The contextual and incarnational nature of Scripture imply that the original inspiration must have been a very complicated thing indeed. Once we leave the more general sense that the meanings God wants us to see in Scripture are true, we inevitably find ourselves in complex debates over philosophical and historical nuances that, in the end, are generally neither helpful nor do they accomplish what the neo-evangelicals of the twentieth century wanted them to.

Such debates have rarely been spiritually uplifting. They have often displayed the factional spirit of the Corinthian church (e.g., 1 Cor. 1:12-17). It does not seem that they have made the church more holy or Christ-like. They can be debates over minute ideas that threaten to miss the weightier portions of the Law (Matt. 23:23). The previous and next articles hopefully give a more balanced sense of how we might process the truthfulness of Scripture.

3. A colleague of mine once suggested that Christian traditions can get out of balance on any one of the four elements in the so called Wesleyan quadrilateral: Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. [4] Charismatic traditions can get so focused on experience that they have nothing firm on which to ground their thoughts and actions. When it comes to the Bible, individual "words" that are supposedly from God can potentially go far astray from the rule of faith and the law of love, which are the deposit of Scripture in faith and practice.

On the other hand, the Enlightenment and an anti-supernaturalist approach to the Bible has at times used an unexamined and faithless reason to dismantle the very idea of revelation itself. Churches have become Deist, without any sense of God's involvement in the world at all. The books of the Bible became no different than any other book or the holy books of any other religion.

Ironically, the literalist can also find him or herself merely dissecting the Bible on the level of reason, analyzing it on a purely intellectual level, without any real effect on their life today. The Bible can become a mere book of ideas and propositions, a mirror of the reasoning of the interpreter.

Catholic traditions in the past have let their traditions wander far afield from the early church. The spark of the Reformation had to do with the sale of years off of purgatory. Neither Scripture nor the Christians of the first centuries believed in the existence of purgatory, still less that you could lessen your time there by giving to the church on the basis of the extra-righteousness of certain saints. Similarly, there is no clear biblical basis to require priests to be celibate or that the elements of communion become the literal body and blood of Christ, and many other ideas.

No doubt many who believe such things will be saved because Jesus is Lord in their hearts, but this is an example of tradition when it wanders from its original moorings. Of course there are Protestant traditions too. Indeed, we are all parts of interpretive traditions. We can hardly remove ourselves from them. So the offense is not tradition itself but a divisive approach to my tradition within the broader faith.

Finally, it is possible to be imbalanced in one's use of Scripture. John Wesley's use of Scripture has been described as "prima" scriptura more than "sola" scriptura. That is to say, while all discussion for Wesley began with Scripture and while Scripture was the ultimate authority for him, he valued the traditions of Christianity and he utilized both reason and tradition in his application of Scripture.

Fundamentalists arguably skew the use of Scripture when they both insist that it can only be interpreted literally and when they use it as a tool of violence. Any use of Scripture that violates the love of our neighbor is an unChristian use of the Bible. And it is possible to use the letter of the word to violate the weightier principles of Scripture.

4. A final word should be set about the contents of the canon. All Christians today agree that the books of the New Testament canon are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the Gospels. Acts is a history of the earliest church.

Then there are letters and sermons from Romans to Jude. First come the Pauline letters: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. Hebrews may be a sermon. Then the General or Catholic Letters: James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1-2-3 John, and Jude. Finally, there is an apocalypse, the book of Revelation.

However, Christians differ on the precise contents of the Old Testament. They all agree on the books of the Law: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. They all agree that Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther belong in the canon. They agree on Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon. They agree on Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Zechariah, Haggai, Malachi.

However, Roman Catholics, various forms of Orthodox Christianity, and Anglicans also consider Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, as well as additions to Esther and Daniel as part of the Old Testament canon. The church used these books from the very beginning up until the time of the Reformation. Around the year 400 Jerome suggested that these books were in a kind of "second" level canon--"deuterocanonical." They were thus not quite as authoritative as the others, but of more authority than the writings of, say, a church father.

Arguably, Luther downgraded them from the way they had been used before, while in response the Roman Catholic Church upgraded them to "protocanonical" at the Council of Trent in 1545. Perhaps Luther's principal motivation for downgrading them was the fact that 2 Maccabees 12 might be interpreted to give scant evidence for purgatory. Wesleyans have not considered them authoritative, although Wesley did not vilify them either.

There are some variations also many catholic traditions. The Greek Orthodox church considers 1 Esdras to be Scripture and the Ethiopian church considers 1 Enoch to be Scripture.

5. It is thus normative for Christians to consider the Bible to be Scripture, even if there may be some who make it to the kingdom while disagreeing. Christians have agreed on the vast majority of what books belong in Scripture. They have, however, varied widely in their interpretations of Scripture and they have varied in their method of arriving at interpretations.

Next week: SA8. The Bible is inspired, infallible, and inerrant.

[1] The inspiration of Scripture was not seriously questioned until recent centuries. God knows the hearts of those Christians today who do not see the Bible as inspired or as completely inspired. Since we are not judged for our ideas but for our faith, there will no doubt be people saved who do not believe in inspiration with their heads.

[2] This is Paul Tillich's so called, "Protestant principle."

[3] E.g., Richard Longenecker, Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), *. We consider a complete failure the feeble efforts of some to deny that the New Testament authors often read the Old Testament out of context. See Kenneth Berding and Jonathan Lunde, eds. Three Views on How the New Testament Interprets the Old (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008).

[4] Keith Springer.

SA6: The Scriptures are a sacrament of God's transformation.

This is the sixth post on sacraments in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit in this series had to do with God and Creation (book here), and the second unit was on Christology and Atonement.

We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. This third set is on sacraments.
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The Scriptures are a sacrament of God's transformation.

1. It is true that we find information in the pages of the Bible. The books of the Bible are a witness to the most important moments in God's interaction with humanity, not least when he came to earth in the person of Jesus the Christ, died for the sins of the world, and rose again victoriously as king.

In the pages of the books of the Bible we thus hear about the most important events of salvation's history. We hear about how God walked with Israel and the earliest Church. We learn of his character and attributes. We hear about the instruction that he gave them. We hear about the hope and promises he gave them.

There is a fundamental continuity in the people of God. As Israel was the people of God and the earliest believers were the people of God, so are we still the people of God. Their story is our story. The love he showed them is a love he also has for us. The hope that God gave them promises hope still to us. The future of salvation that he promised them is still our promise.

2. To be sure, there are also differences. The words that God spoke to them were first of all words for them. Words only have meanings in contexts, and the original meanings were rich in context. [1] The instructions, warnings, and even the frameworks of thinking in the Bible had much to do with the contexts in which they were spoken and revealed. Only the Spirit can guarantee that we will appropriate them well without taking such distance into account.

The default reader is unaware of such distance. The default is to try to make sense of the words of the Bible using the definitions in our heads--which come from our current world--and then to apply them as best we can make sense to today. The Spirit and the Church are crucial elements in this equation if we have any hope of applying the Bible in this way in a helpful way.

The Spirit helps our weakness. He guides us into truth. The Spirit has already helped the Church develop a kind of intuition about the kinds of things the Bible might or might not say. This is one of the crucial roles the Church plays--developing our intuitions for the reading and appropriating of Scripture. The two greatest intuitions are the "law of love" and the "rule of faith."

3. The law of love is nothing other than Jesus' summary of all God's expectations for humanity. Love God with all your being, and love your neighbor as yourself. Every ethical expectation God has of us falls into this two-fold command. All Christian ethics is summed up therein. Jesus said so (e.g., Matt. 7:12; 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-33). Paul said so (Gal. 5:14; Rom. 13:8-10). John says so (1 John 4:7-8). James implies as much (Jas. 2:8).

If we understood this love command, we would not need any other Scripture to tell us how to live in this world. How are we to act toward others in this world? We are to act for the good of others, whether they are our friend or enemy (e.g., Matt. 5:43-48). We are not to act in a harmful way toward others. Any attempt to employ the Bible in a way to justify unloving action toward others is simply a misapplication of the Bible, no matter how clear we may think it is.

To love God is to submit entirely to his authority. It is to do everything to his glory (e.g., Col. 3:17). There is a tendency to use the supposed love of God to justify doing unloving things toward our neighbor. There is a tendency to use the supposed love of God to place meaningless restrictions on others because it is "just the way God intended things to be." We should soundly reject the first and strongly question the second.

4. The rule of faith is the "right belief" or understanding that God has unfolded both in the Bible and in the Church. Jesus is the "last word," the final revelation of God's character and will. The New Testament is simply the unfolding of that final word, and the Spirit continued to unfold that basic understanding in the early Church. We find these basic insights in the early creeds of the Church, especially in the Apostle's and Nicene creeds. They clarified God's existence as a Trinity and the way in which Christ's humanity and divinity relate to each other.

There are other common agreements that God developed in the early days after Christ. Which books are the Christian Scriptures? The Scriptures themselves do not answer this question. It was in the first four centuries of the Church that God clarified the New Testament canon, or collection of books that give authoritative witness to Christ. Other issues of consensus include a belief that God created the universe out of nothing, that we will be conscious in Christ's presence between our death and the resurrection, and that we will spend eternity on a new earth. [2]

These intuitions, along with intuitions that come from the various branches of Christianity to which we belong, are always present when we read the Bible. They influence the direction in which we take the words. If we are Baptist, we will steer our interpretations in certain ways. If we are Wesleyan, we steer them another. If we are Lutheran or Reformed, we will have yet another set of boundaries.

These traditions influence us even when we are in a non-denominational church. We never simply "just read the Bible and do what it says." To think so is merely to show that we are unaware of the traditional influences on us.

5. So God first spoke through the words of the books of the Bible to the people of God in the past. And the Spirit uses the Bible to speak to people in the present, even when they are not aware of the fact that they may be reading the Bible with different meanings than those words had originally.

The process of determining what these words originally meant is largely a science. It requires us to read words in their literary and historical contexts. There will almost always be some ambiguity and polyvalence to the words in their literary context. And we lack sufficient historical evidence and understanding to know the meaning of the words against their historical context with certainty. We will also always have some degree of unreflectivity about the role our own presuppositions and preunderstandings play in what we think the text meant.

So, although the process of historical interpretation may be somewhat of a science, it rarely yields results that are absolutely certain.

By contrast, the process of connecting biblical texts together and appropriating them for today is not a science. It is, rather, a spiritual and corporate task. We could know the original meaning of a verse for certain and still not know exactly how to appropriate that specific verse for today. This leads us to two important caveats.

The first is that the appropriation of Scripture for today is a "whole Bible" task. Given the contextual nature of individual verses, we are least secure in the appropriation of the Bible to today when we operate on the level of individual verses. We need to locate all individual verses within the context of the "whole counsel of God" and thus the whole of Scripture. The Bible by and large does not tell us how to locate one book in relation to another. This is a task we are forced to do from the outside looking on.

The second caveat is the recognition that since the books of the Bible addressed "that time" (or, better yet, "their times"), the task of connecting it with our time and our context is again a task we are forced to do from the outside looking on. The Bible itself does not directly tell us how to apply it to today. Thus it is important to read the Bible as reflectively as possible and it is very important to read the Bible in communities of faith, where individual whims and fancies are less likely to dominate.

6. All that precedes might still look to the Bible for information--information about what is true, information about how to live. When we look at the Bible in this way, there is the danger that we would look at the Bible as something for us to master. We gain knowledge. We gain power. We might be able to label all the parts, like a dissected frog. [3]

When we read the Bible as Christian Scripture, it becomes a tool of transformation in the hands of God. As Scripture, God is the one meeting us in these words. We must be careful about thinking that the Bible has intrinsic authority, just as we must be careful of thinking that the water of baptism or the bread of communion has intrinsic power. The authority behind Scripture is the authority of God. It is a derivative authority.

If our reading of the Bible does not move beyond itself to the real God (not merely to our ideas about God), then the Bible has only lead us to shadowy images of truth, not to the truth itself.

An atheist might be able to master the science of interpretation. Indeed, an atheist might imagine what the meaning might be if Christian presuppositions were true. An atheist could possibly be a much better interpreter of the original meaning of the Bible than some Christian.

However, the Bible is not Scripture to such a person. That person has not surrendered to the transformation of God through these words. The Spirit does not normally transform these words to become the word of God for that person. [4]

As Scripture, God does much more through the words of the Bible than merely inform. True, God does inform us of his nature, of our story, of our destiny, of the way to live. But much more important is the fact that he changes us. He makes us more loving. He makes us hopeful. He purges our tears and anger. He leads his Church. He leads us in the way we should go.

7. A sacrament is a divinely appointed instrument that God uses to give us grace. Since the Spirit led Israel and then the Church to collect these writings together, God has used them to speak to and transform his people. When we submit to God as we read the Scriptures, he uses them to make us more like him. He reveals to us what he is like and, thereby, what we are to be like in the world.

Next week: SA7: Christians vary somewhat in their conceptions of Scripture.

[1] An older approach to language saw words as signs that pointed to things (e.g., Augustine in De doctrina christiana) or as signs that point to things signified (Ferdinand de Saussure) or a sense that pointed to a reference (Gottlob Frege). With this approach, there is the possibility to see words as timeless in meaning, for you might think that the things to which the words point do not change.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, however, recognized that it is more accurate to say that words "do" things. They are tools. And to know what a word does, you have to know the context in which the word is being used and the "game" the person uttering/writing the word is playing. The same word thus can have very many different meanings, because the same words can be used to do different things in different contexts. Similarly, the use of a word to a listener/reader can be different than the one the utterer/author intended.

This reality explains the wide diversity of interpretations of the Bible even though its readers are reading the same words. It also demonstrates that any approach to the Bible that assumes its words have one meaning that applies equally to all times and places is "pre-reflective." Words just do not work like that.

[2] Christians do disagree on such things from time to time. Such disagreements are not as crucial as disagreements on core beliefs about God and Christ.

[3] Joel Green uses this image in Seized by Truth (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007).

[4] Although God's prevenient grace can certainly draw them through Scripture. And the Spirit can certainly speak judgment to them through Scripture.

Sunday Theology: Scripture--The First Revelations

My video series on theology continues.

The video before this one set the groundwork: Scripture--Sacrament of Transformation

Scripture: The First Revelations

Grudem: The Necessity of Scripture 1

Continuing my weekly series reviewing Grudem's Systematic Theology: http://cafetutorials.blogspot.com/2012/07/christian-theology.html

This week is chapter 6, "The Necessity of Scripture."
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Between last week and this week, I've done a little research on where Grudem gets his "four characteristics of Scripture" from.  Obviously there's no verse in the Bible that says, "Here are the four characteristics of Scripture."  This is the slightly insidious quality of Grudem's approach whereby he thinks he is simply following the Bible when actually there are Christian traditions significantly guiding his interpretive wand.

In this case, it is the Reformed tradition.  The four characteristics of Scripture are a Reformed interpretation of the Westminster Confession (1646).  I don't know if Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) was the first to summarize its position on Scripture in this way, but one article started me in that direction. To reject some of his theology is thus to reject a particular Christian tradition, not to reject God or the Bible.

Here is what he means by the necessity of Scripture: "The necessity of Scripture means that the Bible is necessary for knowing the gospel, for maintaining spiritual life, and for knowing God's will, but it is not necessary for knowing that God exists or for knowing something about God's character and moral laws" (116).  In a footnote, he explains that a person can hear about this message orally, but that "these oral communications of the contents of the Bible are based on the existence of written copies" (116 n.1).

This seems a rather peculiar doctrine. What, for example, was the fate of Christians in the decades between Jesus' resurrection and the first bits of the New Testament?  The gospel had a fundamentally oral character during that time.  Here we once again see the embarrassingly literary orientation of Grudem (and perhaps the later Reformed) view of the Bible. No wonder Van Til hated Barth, who pulls down the curtain of such a post-printing press charade.

Barth rightly recognized that Jesus was the consummate Word of God, Scripture the witness to Christ as the word of God, and Christian preaching as a word giving witness to the witness of the Word of God. Grudem's approach, by contrast, can't see the history of revelation prior to the 400s when the Bible and Christian theology finally became a written package with an orthodox message. He is a typical pre-modern who can't see the historical development that produced his reading of the Bible.

We also see here why this sort of Reformed folk have been scrambling over the New Testament interpretation of the Old.  If we read the Old Testament inductively, we realize that the Old Testament books on their own terms did not have an understanding of Christ sufficient for the knowledge Grudem needs them to have had.  When New Testament authors see Jesus in the Old Testament, they are largely reading the Old Testament spiritually and figuratively rather than literally.

Genesis in context knows nothing of a coming Messiah, nor does Exodus, Numbers, or Leviticus. [1] The Historical Books don't want a king in the first place and then already have one. When early Christians saw Christ in the Psalms and the Prophets, they were again largely seeing spiritual meanings in words that had other original meanings. The messianic psalms were originally royal psalms, for example. And in so far as some passages may look to a future king, they understand only that Israel will one day have a Davidic king again.  They do not look for God to come to earth. The key text in relation to Jesus' death, Isaiah 53, would not have been understood by anyone to foretell the Messiah's death until after the fact, and of course this is a key element in Grudem's understanding of the gospel.

All that is to say that Jesus was a massive upgrade from anything anticipated by the Old Testament read in context. The Old Testament Scriptures meet Grudem's standard of necessity only when they are read through New Testament eyes.  They would not guarantee any Old Testament saint salvation on Grudem's terms. And of course we look forward to see what he will do with children who die before they reach the supposed age of accountability invented to circumvent such problems.

Necessary
Grudem sees three ways in which Scripture is necessary: 1) It is necessary for a knowledge of the gospel, 2) It is necessary for maintaining spiritual life, and 3) It is necessary for a certain knowledge of God's will.

It is surprising to see someone who used to be involved in the charismatic movement have so little room for direct revelation. What if Jesus were to appear in a dream to someone deep in a Muslim country but who had never seen a Bible or heard of its contents? Is it impossible for such a person to be saved since he or she does not have the written word?

Indeed, even Grudem's key Pauline text, "Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God" (Rom. 10:17) is not a reference to Scripture but to preaching about Christ.  There is no scriptural text in Acts 17 and 1 Thessalonians has almost no Scripture. We can wonder if Paul used Scripture in his preaching when speaking to Jews, but probably didn't so much use Scripture when speaking to Gentiles who weren't associated with the synagogue.

The gospel was the good news about real events that had just taken place in history.  It was "live."  Scripture was brought in secondarily.  The living Jesus was the main event, not a book.

Is the Bible helpful for spiritual life?  Absolutely.  I consider it a sacrament of revelation, a divinely appointed meeting place.  By all means, eat the word for your nourishment.

Can God speak to you directly?  Absolutely.  Can God nourish you through other books?  Absolutely.  God can do whatever he wants. Again, it is fascinating to see how Grudem has chucked this part of his charismatic heritage.

Again, the word of God in Scripture is not primarily a reference to Scripture.  The "word become flesh" in John 1:14 is Jesus, and the background for this word is not the written word but the Logos of Hellenistic Judaism.  The word of God in Hebrews 4:12 similarly is not the Old Testament or the written word but this same logos which is the will of God in action in the creation. This fundamental and pervasive inability for Grudem to read the Bible in its historical context is embarrassing.

The necessity of the Bible for certainty in knowing God's will runs into the problems of the previous chapter. The Bible does not come inserted on our hard drives. It is an object of interpretation.  We have to define the words. We have to fit all the words together. We have to work out the potential difference between "that time" and "this time."  We have to do it.

Grudem's reading of Scripture is that of a pre-modern who can't see himself in the mirror.  His Reformed tradition has already done the defining, the joining, the time-shifting for him and he doesn't even know it.  The clarity he sees--and the certainty he sees--is the clarity of his tradition. His Bible is as certain as attending a Reformed church and the assumption that the people here are elect.  Walk down the street to the 40 other denominational churches reading the same inerrant Bible and we'll see how certain and clear it is practically speaking.

Part 2 to come...

[1] The wonderful Genesis 3:15 was originally about why snakes and humans don't get along. I omit Deuteronomy so as not to get into debates about what Deuteronomy 18:15 was originally about.

Grudem: The Clarity of Scripture

Continuing my weekly series reviewing Grudem's Systematic Theology: http://cafetutorials.blogspot.com/2012/07/christian-theology.html

This week is chapter 6, "The Clarity of Scripture."
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Summary
Grudem builds to this definition of the clarity of Scripture (perspicuity is the more technical term): "The clarity of Scripture means that the Bible is written in such a way that its teachings are able to be understood by all who will read it seeking God's help and being willing to follow it" (108).  He rejects a more limited understanding of clarity, one that believes that the Bible is primarily clear in relation to "all things necessary for our salvation and for our Christian life and growth."  He doesn't think the Bible itself sees it this way or puts such a limitation on clarity.

Back up to the first section of the chapter.  Here he quotes a few verses where some teaching seems clear.  Deuteronomy 6:6-7--teach the commandments of the Law to children.  Psalm 19:7--the testimony of the LORD makes the simple wise.  Jesus talks to some of his enemies as if it is their problem that they don't understand, not the fact that Scripture is ambiguous.  Paul writes to Gentiles about Jewish Scriptures and assumes they can understand. So on these paltry instances ripped from their contexts Grudem supposes that pretty much every word of the Bible is clear.

In a second section, he links the clarity of Scripture also to one's spirituality.  So while the Bible itself is written clearly, "it will not be understood rightly by those who are unwilling to receive its teachings" (108).  In his fourth section, he expands on reasons why people misunderstand.  One is a lack of faith or hardness of heart.  For certain, in his mind all disagreements are our problem, not a problem with clarity.

In the end, his fifth section suggests two reasons for disagreements: 1) we are trying to conclude on an issue on which Scripture does not take a position (and therefore on which we shouldn't) or 2) we have made a mistake in our interpretation (we left something out or we have a spiritual problem).

He ends the chapter by clarifying what role biblical scholars (i.e., people who know Greek and Hebrew for him) might then play:

• They can teach.
• They can explore new areas because new issues arise.
• They can defend the Bible against attacks.
• They can supplement the Bible with other things like church history.

They don't have the right to decide for the church what is true and false doctrine.  That's for the "officers of the church" (111).

Critique
The idea of the clarity of Scripture goes back to the Protestant Reformation and, indeed, Martin Luther himself.  Luther debated Erasmus (the key figure behind the Greek text of the King James Version) over whether the Bible was clear enough for individual believers to understand it properly or whether people needed the Church to interpret it for them.  Luther argued that Scripture was clear. Erasmus that it was not.

To hear the issue posed this way often evokes an immediate response--of course I don't need someone to tell me what the Bible means!  But the actual history of the last 500 years tells a definitive answer.  History smashes Grudem's wishful thinking to bits and gives the debate far more to Erasmus than to Luther.  At least on the details, the Bible has been read in so many different ways that it's ridiculous.  In fact there are somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 distinct denominations.  Either Grudem is embarrassingly wrong about the clarity of Scripture or perhaps only one of these tens of thousands of groups is God's favorite and the rest of us are hell bound.

I belong to a small church in the Methodist tradition and I did sincerely marvel once in my teens at how amazing it was that I just happened to be born into the church that had everything right.  What were the odds, I thought.  A year or two into seminary I shifted my perspective.  I began to talk about how my tradition sees things, interprets the Bible, in contrast to other traditions.  At one point such talk of tradition so annoyed a family member that she stopped me and said, "Stop talking about our tradition.  We just read the Bible and do what it says!"

Grudem would disagree.  Those who are predestined and are spiritual see the clarity of Scripture, even down to many details.  Au contraire.  I would assert that truly spiritual people will believe exactly the opposite.  They will recognize that there are equally spiritual people in almost all if not all of these tens of thousands of groups.

There are Roman Catholics who are just as spiritual as Grudem.  There are Methodists who are just as spiritual as the most spiritual Lutheran, who is just as spiritual as the most spiritual Baptist, who is just as spiritual as the most spiritual Assembly of God person.  This is because God is primarily interested in people's hearts, not their understanding.  Otherwise he would correct all the spiritual people who don't agree with me.

Grudem's handful of verses are pretty thin.  The ones in Deuteronomy and Proverbs have to do with knowing and doing the laws that God gave to Israel.  It's hard to know which laws in particular are in view.  Certainly keeping commandments like not stealing, killing, or committing adultery could result in a not too insightful person living a wise life.  But that's light years from what Grudem is arguing about the clarity of Scripture.

It highlights the "proof-texting" dimension of his entire theology--you rip some words out of context and read them in a way that seems clear to you (because of the tradition you're in and not acknowledging).  Jesus does sometimes come across rather strongly in some of the passages Grudem mentions. But what we find is that we are not only hearing Jesus in the Gospels. We're also hearing the gospel writers' presentation of Jesus.  It is at least possible, especially in Mark, that part of what we are hearing is not Jesus' harsh tones but the disciples' own frustration at themselves for not initially getting it.

So why do people disagree about what the Bible means?  The main reason is that it was written to people who lived 2000-3000 years ago whose world was drastically different than ours.  Indeed, someone from Africa is more likely to read the stories of the Bible with the right socio-cultural connotations than someone from North America. It is almost a joke that Grudem would think he's going to pick up on all that just out of the blue.

That's not to say that God can't and doesn't speak clearly to people through the Bible, especially godly people.  But in such instances they're normally hearing a direct word from God, not necessarily what those words meant originally.  I agree with his implication that a scholar is not necessarily more gifted to hear God in Scripture than anyone else.  I agree with him that the church is where God helps us know how to apply the Bible to today.

Scholars are part of that equation, but being a scholar only means you're more likely to know the original meaning, not what God wants for the church today.  To be a scholar of the original meaning of some part of the Bible, 1) you must know the original language of that part.  2) You must know the historical-socio-cultural background that informed the meaning of that part, the "language games" that gave meaning to those words at that time.  3) Certainly an expert should know the history of interpretation, because you would imagine after hundreds of years of scholarship, most of the possibilities are out there and a lot of non-starters have already been weeded out.  4) And of course, you need to know the rules of exegesis and how to read the Bible inductively.  This involves how to do historical research and how to follow a literary text.

Grudem isn't such a scholar, period.  In my opinion, he lacks spiritual discernment as well.  It's possible he's a nice guy, just not someone who should be allowed to teach theology.

McKnight on Wright on Scripture

Here's the link: http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed/2011/06/01/tom-wright-scripture-and-gods-authority/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PatheosJesusCreed+%28Jesus+Creed%29

Bible versus Scripture: What does it mean?

Extraordinarily busy this week and realizing I am not young any more.

I've been teaching "The Bible as Christian Scripture" this week (and will again next week) as the core Bible course in our seminary's MDIV program. You can see a picture of the class.

One of the questions we've been tossing around all week is what the difference is between simply reading the Bible and reading the Bible as Scripture, Christian Scripture no less.

I think for the earlier evangelicals, the answer was fairly straightforward. Perhaps most important, one difference is in the authority you assign to the Bible. When you read the Bible as Scripture, it has authority over you in a way it does not when you are just reading it like you would read Shakespeare. This distinction still works, although speech-act theory and the postmodern critique have sharpened this dimension.

For example, the nature of biblical literature is such that only a small minority of it is in the mode of the imperative. Narrative is the single largest genre. Even the New Testament letters are far more in the form of statements than commands. Rhetoric of the Scripture's authority thus only relates neatly to a small portion of Scripture.

Further, evangelicals fully recognize the distinction between "that time" and "our time," meaning that we do not assume even that the imperatives of Scripture will always apply directly to us today. Older evangelicals usually spoke of principles behind the original imperatives that we then apply in our contexts. In short, authority does not seem the primary category of reading the Bible as Christian Scripture, at least at first glance.

Arguably somewhat of a diversion in twentieth century fundamentalism was to see a particularly narrow understanding of "truthfulness" as the key category of reading the Bible as Christian Scripture--inerrancy debates and such. If narratives dominate the biblical material, then to read it as Scripture meant to take the narratives as minutely historical. The problems here are the vast anachronism of the criteria and the just bad scholarship that often ensued. I am immensely thankful to Asbury Seminary for teaching me the skills of inductive Bible study that create a discipline of listening to the text rather than foisting pre-conceived ideological boundaries on it--a discipline I am now trying to pass on at Wesley Seminary @IWU. Nowhere is the artificiality of much fundamentalist and some evangelical eisegesis more apparent than when applying the skills of inductive Bible study to the biblical text!

At the same time, the postmodern critique has drawn our attention to the fact that the "God-breathed" instruction of Scripture may not always be the "literal sense" of the Bible (I use Paul's use of the ox-muzzling passage in Deuteronomy as an example). We are pushed to the really pressing question, the one twentieth century evangelicalism largely could not see. What meaning of the biblical text is the Scriptural one, the one that is truthful and I must believe, the one that gives me the imperative I must follow, the promise I must anticipate?

Evangelicalism simply adopted the historical method of those who do not read the Bible as Scripture and assumed this was the meaning. Scripture itself does not model this approach when the NT considers the OT to be Scripture. Writers like Richard Longenecker and Fee/Stuart consider the interpretive methods of the NT writers part of the cultural milieu of their day that we cannot adopt. I think this is a major blind spot of twentieth century evangelicalism, one that holiness and Pentecostal traditions have ironically intuited correctly.

The criterion of truthfulness is thus valid, but not primarily in the way twentieth century evangelicalism assumed. And now we also recognize that there are other functions to Scripture other than just to communicate propositions. When we read the Bible as Christian Scripture, for example, the narratives become our identity-forming stories. Truth-communicating speech-acts are not the dominant speech-acts of the text.

I didn't intend to go this long. Here are thus three very important ways in which the text of the Bible becomes Christian Scripture, in my opinion:

1. It becomes our text, not just the text of ancient peoples and audiences. I become part of the same people of God that they were and so their stories become the stories of my progenitors. Their struggles become the struggles of my people. Their issues, my family's issues.

2. I prioritize and organize the biblical texts in a certain way that is not intrinsic to them. Thus we see the limits of inductive Bible study. Inductive Bible study will not tell me that the virgin birth is an essential doctrine. It gets virtually no attention in the biblical texts themselves. No, this is a Christian priority when reading the text and one that does not come from the Bible alone. It is a Christian emphasis and organization of the text's materials that comes from the Spirit in the church catholic throughout the ages. It does not come from the text alone.

The same is of course true of the New Testament as a lens through which I read the Old. And of course many a denominational reading comes into play here as different groups sift through and prioritize the biblical texts. It has to be done. The texts themselves do not do it clearly on their own terms. Luther's "Scripture interprets itself" was vastly unreflective of the organizing principles he brought to the text from inherited Christian traditions, and the fragmentation of Protestantism demonstrates the myriad possible ways the text can be used to interpret the text.

3. Words can take on new meanings. The postmodern critique has shown how this happens and the New Testament use of the Old legitimizes it. Inductive Bible study of Isaiah will not lead me to see Isaiah 7:14 in reference to the virgin birth. But this is a valid Christian reading of the verse that gives it a new meaning.

These are just a few of my thoughts on the difference between simply reading the biblical text and reading it as Christian Scripture.