3/21/09

Various Facebook notes copied to here.

In support of my rant about how Biblical exposition should be centered on the cross and resurrection vs. finding ‘helpful hints’ , here is a quote from Peter Enns that I just read on the way to work today. He approaches the text (this is from his introduction to the NIV Commentary on Exodus)

“not by seeking timeless moral principles in the Old Testament and then seeking to apply them to our lives, but rather by asking ourselves what the Old Testament tells us about the nature of God (i.e., how he acts, what he expects of his people) and then seeing how these things can be understood in light of the gospel. It is reading back into  the Old Testament the final word that God has stamped onto the pages of history—the death and resurrection of his Son. This event is the “answer” to Israel’s story, and God, by his grace, has given us, Jews and Gentiles, the privilege of participating in the final chapter of that story.”

Apply the Bible to your life – not?

For many years I assumed that the main point of Bible reading or preaching was to ‘apply it to your life.’ Without applying the Word, we are like a man who looks at his dirty face in the mirror but does not apply it, as James says.

“Biblical interpretation is undoubtedly one of the chief means of character formation in the church. Character-and community-are formed by hearing and doing the Word. Indeed, the theological aim of biblical interpretation is to grow in the knowledge of God, as well as in wisdom and righteousness. This is the telos of reading the Bible as Scripture (2 Timothy. 3:16). It follows that readers respond to Scripture as Scripture by following, that is, by applying its meaning according to its intent.” —Is There Meaning in this Text?,  Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Vanhoozer in this standard work on epistemology and preaching articulates this view. But I am coming to think that this is not a complete or even a primary way to look at the Scriptures. It is an essentially legalistic concept that all we have to have is to be told what to do, and we can do it. I am moving toward a greater appreciation of the primacy of a relationship with Christ who changes us. This change takes place on a deeper level than is implied by the idea that in this week’s sermon, we’ll hear about how we must manage or money or love our wives.

It is a different process that is going on than just finding the appropriate helpful hints in the text. That is why you could easily have a sermon that is ‘nothing but theology’ and has ‘no application’ and it would still be valuable. In the past I might have attacked such a sermon, but now I think maybe those are the most important — if they point us to Jesus Christ and what we have in him.

N.T. Wright in The New Testament and the People of God  describes the process as learning to live in the stories of the Scriptures. These stories subvert our own stories and challenge us to live in a new story. He talks about the parables in this way but also the Scriptures more generally. Our tendency is to try to abstract ‘timeless truths’ from the stories (which we assume Jesus used just because he was talking to primitive people) but instead, Wright says we need to inhabit those stories.

“It is appropriate for humans to listen to stories other than those by which they habitually order their lives, and to ask themselves whether those other stories ought not to be allowed to subvert their usual ones, that is, to ask whether there really are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in their little philosophies. .. the ‘ordinary Christian’ needs to be open to the possibilities of ways of reading the New Testament, and ways of understanding who Jesus actually was, which will call his or her previous stories into serious question.” (p. 97)

Maybe the church should be doing is teaching people about their relationship to Christ, what the cross is all about, and other basic theology. The living Christ in us can point us to the right decisions in various circumstances.

Maybe that extra exaltation of the Bible leads to that emphasis on principles, whereas if as you say, we view it ‘as a witness to true events that occurred,’ then we would concentrate more on those events and their meaning.

The idea being the Bible is pointing to something else, whereas we end up just pointing to the Bible sort of as an end in itself?

Noll:  ‘They share in common the picture of an evangelical world almost completely adrift in using the mind of careful thought about the world. As the authors describe them, evangelicals — bereft of self-criticism, intellectual subtlety, or an awareness of complexity — are blown about by every wind of apocalyptic speculation and enslaved to the cruder spirits of populist science. In reality, Numbers and Boyer show even more — they show millions of evangelicals thinking they are honoring the Scriptures, yet interpreting the Scriptures on questions of science and world affairs in ways that fundamentally contradict the deeper, broader, and historically well-established meanings of the Bible itself.’ (p. 14. Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)

Kenton Sparks is the author of God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship. The following comments were part of a discussion of Peter Enns book Incarnation and Inspiration, which had led to his firing by Westminster Seminary.

My experience is that evangelicalism has in their midst at least four kinds of scholars. First, there are those who really don’t know the critical evidence (because they found a grad program in which they could avoid it) and so don’t teach it or, if they do teach it, they present the criticism as a straw man that’s easily bested by their fundamentalism.

Second, there are scholars who know something about the evidence and recognize that it’s problematic, but their response is “Hey, we just don’t know everything.” These scholars don’t give much attention to the critical issues because for any number of reasons they don’t want to take the time to mess with it. I call these, the “Don’t worry be happy” scholars. In the Enns situation, they are the scholars who think its bad business that Pete’s in trouble, they realize why Pete thinks what he thinks, but they don’t have the courage to say something in his support.

Third, there are evangelicals who know the critical evidence quite well and privately recognize the serious problems that it creates for standard evangelical theology, but in actual scholarship and discourse they handle themselves pretty much like those in category 2. One only knows their real views in private.

Finally, we have what I’d now call the “Pete Enns” evangelicals. They recognize the problems and are ready to engage them for the sake of God and kingdom.

Some evangelicals simply don’t like dealing with these problems because they fear that it will damage “the faith.” My response: if working through the evidence that’s right in front of our eyes, in the Bible, is troubling for faith – then Maybe the faith isn’t what we think it is.

Comment: I am a graduate of Dallas Seminary in Dallas and we read those evangelical scholars he cites. At the time I figured I knew both sides. Growing up in that world, you don’t know anything else. I am very grateful I stumbled upon some other perspectives such as Sparks and Enns after many years. The long term damage being done by teaching these half (or less) truths by fundamentalists is going to take a few generations to repair, if it ever happens.

Right now though having come to these conclusions, I have to get over being somewhat pissed about having been lied to, and move on. Though it is not really proper to say I was lied to, considering the leaders at places I was just didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

The authors he mentions are Paul Boyer’s  When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture  (Harvard University Press, 1992) and The Creationists by Ronald L. Numbers. These two books I later read and they were influential in a lot of the changes in my thinking about dispensationalism, which I grew up in and also heard at Dallas Seminary, and creationism, which was not talked about a lot but which was in the air I breathed.