Faith Fights: The Bible

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
We are glad that you’re joining us for this relatively new series,
Fights in the Faith,
Faith Fights, the conversations,
conflicts,
arguments, and disagreements that Christians
have had throughout the centuries.
Last week, admittedly, we were in the deep end.
I think we probably left some heads swimming with the two natures of Christ and the Trinity.
Today I think we’re on to a subject that will be more accessible,
certainly more familiar to people as we shift our focus to the idea of our Bible,
the Scriptures.
Where do we get them?
How do we use them?
What do they mean for us?
What does it mean that we call this book God’s Word and that we as Christians regularly
in worship and privately and devotionally turn our attention to it,
hoping to grow in
faith and learn what it means to follow Christ.
And, not surprisingly,
Michael, through the years,
lots of conversations,
lots of discussions,
lots of family squabbles over what the book is,
should be, how it’s used, and what it means for us.
You know, for some people that may be unto itself a little bit of a mystery because if
you took a poll of almost every Christian,
every Christian is going to say that the Scriptures
are important.
They’re going to say that these texts are central,
and yet we have,
for the history of the church,
found many different places of disagreement and even fights over what
we do with these texts.
Though all of us have a Bible somewhere in our home,
especially in a Western American,
if you have any sort of faith history,
you likely have a Bible.
The reality is, I think most of us sort of flatten that to,
“I think I should read the
Bible more.” And what we miss in sometimes our feelings of guilt of not having done as much devotional
reading of Scriptures as we think we should,
we miss of how complex and how nuanced and
how historically we as a church have struggled with figuring out what role in place do these
texts have in the life of a Christian,
and not just a single Christian,
us as Christians plural,
as church families, as people trying to live out the faith in the world.
How do we read them and how are they important?
And Clint,
you know, I think what we discover is,
if we’re willing to go back far enough,
that that’s a conversation and struggle that’s existed from the very beginning of the church.
Absolutely.
I can’t think of an exception.
If you asked any Christian,
“Is the Bible important?”
they would say yes,
but we would quickly find differences of opinion on what that means
and how that plays itself out.
And so maybe an overview would be helpful,
Michael.
Maybe it would help to briefly survey how it is that we arrived at this thing that we
call the Bible.
Had you gone back to the first century and talked to the earliest Christians about their scripture,
they would have known exactly what you were talking about,
and they would have assumed it to be what we call the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible.
Most, if not all, of the early converts to Christianity came from Judaism,
and so they brought with them this understanding that that part of their canon,
the 39 books that
we call the Old Testament,
was scripture.
It contained the Word of God,
the faith stories that they should know.
The commandments of God.
They would have all said that those words were sacred,
and those words mattered.
And yet, over time,
they begin as Christians to also be able to look toward other things—writings,
the letters of Paul,
the stories of the gospel.
This other collection of material begins to form,
and the church also finds it helpful.
And one of the things,
Michael, that happens is there is a kind of separation as those
who come into the church without a Jewish background begin to question at some level
why the need for this other collection of material.
Right.
We missed that.
I went to seminary with a professor whose entire specialty was to read and to understand
and to study how the apostle Paul used Old Testament references in his letters.
And just sit with that for a second,
that Paul was referencing scripture in what we
consider our scripture.
There’s sort of this meta-conversation there.
And what’s really interesting, Clint,
is that as the church began to grow,
and we see in our own letters,
our pastoral letters, all of the debates and struggles over what do
we do with Gentiles,
that the Gentiles would not have had the Old Testament,
nor would have they memorized it or studied it or been able to read the language—a thing that Jews
throughout all time had preserved both the scriptures themselves—what we would call
the Old Testament scriptures—they preserved the language for the text,
and they kept it
going so that they could read it and understand it.
But as the church begins to become more and more filled with Gentiles,
they don’t come with that history.
They don’t come with that knowledge.
They don’t come with all of the generations of families passing on the stories.
And so for them,
these texts become less and less accessible.
And that’s significant because at the same time,
you have early Christian leaders—the
apostle Paul being chief among them,
of course—writing these letters to these communities that are flourishing and growing.
And so we know these churches had access to some amount of what we would call the Old
Testament.
Paul references those in his letters as if they should know it.
So we expect that they had that,
but they naturally began to gravitate towards these
letters being written by these early Christian leaders.
And we find historically that what was at one time small little pockets where a church gets a letter,
suddenly that letter becomes distributed and sent throughout different churches.
And we begin to see that letters begin rising to the top,
and the Gentile Christians begin
to find these letters,
what we would call authoritative or helpful,
and they become part of what is a sort of,
for a long time,
non-official group of New Testament sort of scripture.
I think you’re right,
Michael.
I think one of the first faith fights or squabbles we encounter over scripture is exactly that
question.
Do we need the Old Testament?
There were Gentile Christians who come into the faith.
They lack that background, and they say,
“Well, if we have this gospel and we have these letters from Paul,
why do we need Genesis and Exodus?
Why do we need Isaiah?
Why do we need that stuff?
That stuff doesn’t even mention Jesus by name,
and is it important to us?”
And I think for our benefit,
I think the wisdom of the early church that prevailed,
though it was challenged in those disagreements,
was to say, “Look, when we look through the Old Testament,
we see the same God at work.
We see the work of God in covenant with people,
and it is that covenant that bears the promise
and ultimately the presence of the Messiah.
Our Savior comes from that lineage.
Our Savior would have learned those scriptures.
Our Savior quoted those scriptures and guided His life by them and His preaching,
and it
was,
I think, a mark of wisdom that we decided along the way,
as the family fought this out,
to keep the Old Testament as the Word of God and add to it this growing collection of other
materials that the church also found helpful.
That question hasn’t gone away throughout the centuries.
Every now and then,
you will hear a little resurgence of,
“I don’t need the Old Testament.”
I had a seminary classmate who said,
“I just don’t need the Old Testament,” and I’m glad
that the church has proven that incorrect.
We need those.
We are better able to live out the faith when we have access to the whole story of Scripture,
and I think the church showed wisdom in deciding that.
Yeah, and chief among those debates,
there was a significant movement for a short time
to say that the God of the Old Testament should be read as a different God than the God of
the New Testament, and this roiled the early Christian church because to some it made sense.
The God of the Old Testament seemed vindictive,
seemed very judgmental and angry,
and the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament struck some readers as being the exact antithesis
and they said, “How could God be both of these things?”
And actually, we mentioned in our last conversation that the Trinity becomes a central doctrine
to the church throughout time.
It becomes a touchstone of being orthodox or being in the right faith,
and the early Christians ultimately had to say,
“If God is three in one and Jesus is the substance
of God, then Jesus could not be substantially different than the God of the Old Testament.”
And so that doctrine has implications for what we understand Scripture itself to be,
and so as the church fought over this,
it ultimately came to conclusion to say,
“No, if we believe that there’s a substantial difference between the God of the Old Testament and New
Testament, that’s a problem with our understanding,
not a problem with God.”
And so the Old Testament did become a part of the authoritative Scriptures of the Christian,
and this is essential, Clint, because fundamentally,
when we see in the Gospel of Matthew,
for example, the lineage of Jesus being listed,
we are to understand that not only is Jesus
in the lineage of the Jews,
but so are those who are adopted into the family of Christ
by Christ’s own salvific work.
We, on some level, even as Gentiles, are invited into this story of God’s faithfulness
to the world.
Well, what is that story?
We wouldn’t know it without the Old Testament.
And so I do think that that in popular sort of religion,
that distinction exists today.
I think some people would say,
“Pastor Clint, I don’t really love the Old Testament because
God does some stuff that makes me uncomfortable,” and we understand that,
but I do think the
Old Testament that makes us uncomfortable and seems to be disjunctive to who Jesus
was, that’s a problem with our understanding,
not a problem with God.
One of the things that happened as the church sorted that out is that they began to find
a deeper voice in the Old Testament Scriptures to appreciate the Jesus story.
You know, we are on the verge of Christmas as we record this podcast.
Imagine the Christmas story without the passages from Isaiah.
A child shall lead them.
A maiden shall bear a son.
Imagine the Easter story without the backdrop of the Passover lamb.
Imagine hearing Jesus say,
“My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?” and not understanding
that that’s a quote,
a direct quote from Psalm 22.
As you encounter the full story of the Old Testament,
you see hundreds if not thousands
of points of connection between the Christian story and the Old Testament story,
and ultimately our fathers and mothers in the faith said,
“For that reason alone,
we hear the voice
of God and we see the presence of Christ throughout the Old Testament.”
Yes, it is harder for us to read because it is older, it is rougher,
it is from a different time and place,
but again, the wisdom of the church prevailed,
and I think we are well
served with where we landed in that particular disagreement in not eradicating anything but
adding to it this growing canon,
this growing collection of other stuff that becomes what
we call the New Testament,
and maybe it would be a good point for us to shift conversation
to the New Testament and how it is that those books end up as we know them.
Right, and we need to recognize that the church for hundreds of years was not administratively organized and we,
in our own time and place,
take for granted, especially if you’re Presbyterian,
all of the order,
I mean, we are well ordered people,
but that is not the case of the early
church.
You have to think of a very organic and disconnected sort of reality.
There’s no email, there’s no phone calls,
there’s no wired messages,
right?
There’s absolutely no sort of mass communication.
Everything is happening either in person or through a delivered letter in writing,
and because of that,
as we talked about in our introductory episode about how different places
had different emphasis and how the Constantine and the councils began to sort of bring up these faith fights,
scripture is in the midst of this.
People show up to meetings together with different papers in hand,
and they’re, “Hey, wait,
you’ve got a letter from John?
Oh, no, yeah, well, I got the letter from this guy, Luke,
wait, I never heard of Luke,”
and suddenly they start processing,
“Well, what does yours say about Jesus?”
And the other says,
“Well, yeah, what did Paul say about that issue?”
And then the other says,
“Well, Paul was fighting with Apollos,
and Apollos wrote this thing.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s helpful.”
And there’s this organic process that began to happen,
and here’s the thing that biblical
scholars find so remarkable is that with all of the diversities of a church spread out
geographically with different writings and different texts,
what is remarkable is not
how much diversity and difference there was,
that we take for granted.
What’s remarkable is how quickly historically the letters that we now find in our New Testament
rose to the top and were universally almost agreed to be authoritative in the life of a Christian.
So there is this perception,
I think, among people that somehow the church has a big meeting,
and it votes, you know, thumbs down, thumbs up on each book.
But that’s not, in fact, the case.
The church does have a meeting down the road,
but really it’s to certify what has already
happened.
By the time that happens,
the New Testament essentially exists already in its current
form, in the form that we know it,
the same 27 books,
and the church councils,
the church elders at that time say,
“Okay, that sounds good.
That’s going to be enough.”
So what they really do is kind of close the collection.
They don’t create the collection.
And that process happens as the church says,
“I heard this story about Jesus,” and somebody
says, “No, that doesn’t fit with these.”
And as the church prayerfully and carefully discerned what material they trusted,
in other words, in what material did they hear God speaking in the voice of Jesus Christ,
and in what material did they not?
What wasn’t helpful?
In fact, what was misleading or distracting?
That collection begins to take shape,
ultimately being formed and then approved,
not really created but approved later.
And really fairly early on,
we have those books,
the 27 books that we know as the New
Testament.
And that was,
for as much as Christians have fought over biblical things since,
a remarkably,
a fairly conflict-free—I mean,
certainly there were strong opinions,
but there were not knock-down, drag-out battles over those things.
The church kind of lived into the New Testament,
and then, as it did, it recognized,
“Oh,
I think we have what we need here.”
And at that point,
it was mostly done.
Yeah, and, you know,
there’s a small distinction here,
I think, that we sometimes don’t recognize.
Scholarships suggest that the Old Testament,
particularly some of the older books,
lived as oral history before it became written history.
There’s a sense in which these stories lived on in generations before it got put down on
paper, and then we have it,
and it’s been passed through history.
What’s striking about the New Testament, Clint,
is that it pretty much from day one was written.
We have the verbal stories of Jesus,
certainly we have that in the Gospels,
but the stuff that Paul wrote, Paul wrote,
right, and it was intended to be read,
and there’s a kind
of distinctive to the New Testament in that sense,
that from the very beginning was intended
to be distributed to the people who were seeking to be Christian.
And I do think that’s part of what makes the New Testament so accessible to us even
today is that it was written to real people trying to be people growing in faith and discipleship
of Jesus Christ.
And so there’s a kind of accessibility in that that was there from the very, very beginning.
And the fact that the church naturally did come to this place of sort of universal consensus
as to the integrity and authority of these texts.
And likewise,
this is important.
We do historically have many documents written at the same time as these scriptures that
the church left on the cutting room floor.
Different Gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas,
different letters,
such as the Didache,
which is just a fancy name for the 12 apostles or 12 disciples.
These things were read,
some of them read favorably.
The church said, you know, there’s some good stuff in here.
But they were put away from the authoritative life and teaching of the church.
And as that happened,
we then began to shift gears away from what’s in and out to what
do we do with these and how do they impact us and what does it mean.
And it turns out that that has been very fertile ground for fights through the entire church,
generations of the church.
And maybe the one exception to that, Michael,
maybe even people are familiar with,
especially if they have Catholic background or friends,
family members who have a Catholic background,
you’ll notice my study Bible here has a section of books in the middle.
And they represent this kind of collection of scripture that we don’t consider scripture,
but the Catholic church has traditionally held on to.
It’s called the Apocrypha,
it’s other writings.
And essentially, the thumbnail sketch is that the last stuff of the Old Testament happens about 400,
450 years before Jesus.
The Persians are in power,
and they have allowed the Jews to kind of go back home and begin
building their society.
When the New Testament starts,
we’re for almost five centuries down the road from there,
and we’re under Roman control.
Now, what you pass over there is about 400 years of history,
including one of the great
civilizations of the world, the Greeks.
And so a great deal happened in that time,
and yet there wasn’t anyone writing what became
scripture.
And so this group of books called the Apocrypha are largely writings that happen in that time
between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament.
And the church held on to them for a while.
And in some ways,
it hasn’t really known what to do with them.
During the Reformation,
Luther,
Calvin, and some others said,
“We don’t find these books
helpful.
They’re not compelling.” And they sort of were out,
and I would say they were out for most of the history of Presbyterianism.
In the current day,
if you go to seminary,
or if you get probably a,
maybe not an NIV
study Bible, but if you get a new,
revised study Bible or an anchor study Bible,
you will find these books.
Now, we don’t do much with them.
We might read them.
We might do a study on them at some point.
You won’t hear them preached.
They’re not part of our Protestant canon or Protestant collection,
but they’re in there.
And if you ever encounter them,
it may be helpful to know.
But they represent a disagreement that happens in the church as well.
Should we keep them or should we not,
we landed on the side that said,
“Nah.” Yeah.
The Reformation was a big driver in sort of that conversation because one of the metrics
being brought to bear was,
what scripture do the New Testament writers turn to as their scripture?
And the Apocrypha is not well represented generally in the New Testament writings.
And the idea was,
if Paul,
if James,
if Peter aren’t using these texts in their letters,
at least the ones that we have in our scripture,
then maybe we shouldn’t point to them.
Fundamentally,
I think that’s a good way to phrase it,
Clint, as I think there is a sense
in which these texts have been found helpful by Christians devotionally.
But in terms of giving them authority and credence for the practicing life, faith,
ethics of the church,
certainly the Protestant church has said that these texts don’t make the bar
and the Catholic church has at different times emphasized them,
though I’m not aware of many
doctrines in the Roman church that would somehow rise or fall based upon the Apocrypha.
So I do think it’s a good example of that sorting that’s happened and the recognition
that there has been disagreement on what books should or shouldn’t be in.
But I got to say,
regardless of what side of the line you stand on the Apocrypha,
Protestant, Catholic,
I’m not entirely certain that that debate is substantive in terms of our understanding
of God’s salvific work.
I don’t think it leads us in different directions.
I think there’s just disagreement whether it should be included in our Bible or not.
Yeah, absolutely.
Just one of those things in the unfolding history of scripture that happened along the
way, and you may bump into it.
And if you do,
then you have some understanding of,
“Oh, that’s what that means.”
That’s why I’ve never heard of that book before because it’s in the middle of my study Bible,
which is printed for as many people as possible.
So let’s turn then to,
I think, more practical matters,
Michael.
The idea of how the canon,
the collection got put together and which books got included,
that’s far, far out of our experience.
We study it as history,
you and I learned it as church history,
as theological history.
For the average Christian,
it probably doesn’t mean a whole lot other than I think all of
us have probably raised the issue at some point in our mind,
“How do we come to trust
this book and how do we read it?”
And to me, that’s probably the more interesting question and certainly a question that has
been ripe for disagreements.
What do we understand this book to be?
There are those who think that they can just literally open the scripture and read a single verse,
and that verse is authoritative,
and that verse is factually true,
spiritually true,
intellectually true, historically true, because it says it.
And it won’t surprise,
I think, most of the folks who listen,
Presbyterians have historically not read the Bible that way.
Presbyterians have tried to recognize a broader way of approaching the scripture.
And so, one of the interesting phrases that will evoke some disagreement is the Word of
God.
What does it mean that we call scripture the Word of God?
And when we say that,
do we mean that every word in it is a divine word and we can take
it as if it were simply dictated by the hand of God?
And, again,
Presbyterians have been slow to affirm that.
Yeah, so every Christian,
I think,
arguably has to affirm the authority of scripture.
That scripture has a voice in what we do and do not say and believe.
What Christians disagree on is how that authority should be received.
Is it literal?
When you read the text,
do you read the thing and the thing that is there,
is it directly what it means?
So, we have Paul writing about women’s heads should be covered.
We have in the Old Testament about what kinds of fabrics we could put on our body,
questions about divorce, certainly.
I mean,
the scriptures have this incredibly broad range of topics,
right?
And if you come to the scriptures and you want to say that when I open it up,
put my finger here, it says the thing that is what it is,
we’re going to find ourselves in some very difficult circumstances,
moments in which God has ordered the people of Israel to do
things that would make us very uncomfortable,
like in the book of Joshua, for instance.
Some of the conquest narratives leave no woman or child alive.
That’s going to make us uncomfortable.
There’s other times in which we see disputes about put this person out of the church for his own salvation.
Those are going to make us uncomfortable.
Arguments about food, diet,
I go too far here.
I think the point is what would be helpful to know is that even post-Reformation,
the Reformation people held up the Bible and said,
“Bible alone, this thing is important.”
We have, within our own circles,
debated to what extent should we read the text in
a way that seems to be literal,
or should we allow a broader interpretation of the text
towards itself?
In other words,
if it says this thing about divorce,
but yet the larger sort of overarching
themes of scripture in Christ’s message seem to point towards maybe a little bit more of
a softer understanding of that.
Should we err on the side of the gospel writ large,
all of the text together,
or should we hone in on that particular sentence in that particular book,
which seems to be out by itself?
Presbyterians have historically landed more on the side of reading scripture as a whole
than we have had on the particular words,
though I would personally argue that we’ve
never lost the sense that the scriptures should be authoritative,
that they should matter.
We’ve always said they should matter,
but we have disagreed.
Is it the verse itself that matters,
or is it the gospel,
the good news writ large that
we discover in scripture that matters?
Yeah, this may be a rough analogy,
so help me if I need it,
Michael, and bear with me,
those who are listening.
I think one approach to the Bible is as if it’s an instruction manual.
You pull the instruction manual out of your car’s glove compartment,
and you look up windshield washer fluid,
and it tells you where it is,
and it tells you how often to change it and
what to use to put in there oil,
whatever, where’s the fuse?
It tells you that.
And I think there are people who approach the Bible as if they can do that with the scripture.
They just look in the index,
they find what it says about this topic or that topic, and
that’s it.
I think on the other side where we have tended to live,
we treat the Bible a little more like a library.
There are 66 books in this book.
They come from different times,
different places, different authors.
Some of them have different perspectives on things.
And so when we ask a question like,
“What’s the best way to live our life?
What’s the best oil to use?”
You are now in a reference library.
You are now looking for an answer amidst lots of different opportunities, lots of opinions,
lots of places.
You are hearing different things,
and you are trying to weigh them together with counsel from the church,
our historic interpretations,
our personal devotion.
And it’s not to say that everything is up for grabs and that we each get to make our
own decision on everything.
It is to say that we have never assumed that this book was simple.
And there is a great appeal in simplicity.
There’s a wonderful directness to the idea that if I want to answer a question,
I just look it up and I find a verse,
and that verse settles it.
But that’s not how the scripture works.
And I would argue it’s never how the scripture works.
It’s not how the Old Testament worked for the Jewish people.
It’s not how it worked for early Christians.
It’s certainly not how it worked for Paul.
And I think as inheritors of the Reformed tradition,
we have recognized that it’s not
how it works for us either.
Yeah, well, I have found very helpful personally,
and devotionally, it’s also helpful for more
formal sermon and teaching kind of context,
is I have a commentary series that will combine
some of the ancient churches, pastors and leaders,
theologians,
and they’ll combine sections of commentary, things they wrote about the scripture that you’re studying.
And what you’re going to discover is really a beautiful diversity of interpretations of
scripture.
And this is especially true of the Old Testament.
I think we tend to read the Old Testament with a very kind of flat lens,
often times like Genesis, we read like it’s a science textbook.
I think sometimes we read like a book like Joshua or Judges,
like their history books.
I think what you find that the early church did is they read these stories in many different ways.
There’s entire readings of like St.
Augustine, who is one of the smartest thinkers of all Christian time,
wrote a commentary about the beginning of Genesis,
Genesis 1 and 2,
in which every part of that story is an allegory that has a spiritual meaning.
Now he wasn’t saying that’s the only meaning.
He believed that scripture,
if you came to it with faith and humility,
would have many, many senses, that God’s hand in it is how deep and complex and nuanced it was.
So he pointed out that the apple means this,
the tree means this,
the snake means this,
sort of like a J.R.R.
Tolkien does in his own sort of like narrative fiction,
except Justin’s doing this a thousand
years before and he’s doing it with the actual scriptures.
And the diversity and beauty of that,
Clint, I only mean to say is this.
There’s far more layers to the scripture than I think we tend to give it.
I think we tend to read the scripture on a very sort of a one surface plane.
And that’s not to say that that’s wrong.
It is to say that’s insufficient.
There’s more there than what we find.
And as we sort of see the early Christians reading the Old Testament with these beautiful
diversities of different kinds of readings,
I think that we discover the same readings
can be helpful with the New Testament.
In other words,
when you open a book that was written by Paul,
do you put you and yourself
alone at the center of that book every time?
Because if you do,
I think that’s an insufficient reading.
It’s not just written to us individually,
devotionally, though it is.
It has meaning for us today.
But it’s more than that.
It’s a book to us plural as a church seeking to be faithful.
It’s a book that was written to a church then,
which had meaning to them then.
And that matters.
And it has connections to other New Testament writings,
the gospels to what we know of Jesus
to the Old Testament text and what it meant to the Jews then and to the Christians then.
You can see how these layers are all important.
And I would just encourage us to try to resist the temptation to flatten Scripture into one
simple thing, but rather to let it flourish into sort of a more creative and complex nuanced
thing than we often give it credit for.
I think that for Protestant Christians, for Presbyterians,
what we fundamentally said
about the Scripture is that this is the story of God.
It includes people because God is gracious.
It is about our salvation because God is acting from the first page to the last page from
the beginning of history until the inevitable end of history to redeem people and to save
people, to make people his own people and to give them guidance in how that they live
a life that is righteous and holy and honorable in his eyes.
However,
what we have not said is that each and every word is God’s word as if this was dictated,
as if you can simply take any word that they’re all equal.
What we’ve said instead is that we hear God’s word as we encounter the Scripture,
that as we prayerfully and carefully and thoughtfully work our way into the texts that God has provided
for us, we give God an opportunity to speak.
We find moral guidance,
but the Bible is not just about moral guidance.
We find direction.
We find challenge.
We find forgiveness.
We find the story of Jesus Christ.
But it is not in the words themselves that God speaks,
it is in Christians interacting with the words.
And that sounds like a slight difference,
but it is immeasurably important.
And for those of us who live on that side of the understanding,
we, I think, inherit a much more complex view of Scripture.
It’s not enough to just memorize a verse and then rubber stamp it on moral circumstances.
It demands of us that we put ourselves in the text and that we humbly listen for God
in the text.
It is a moment where we say we believe that as we are guided by these words,
God’s word comes to us through them.
And we make that claim about this book and this book alone in that way.
There are lots of helpful books.
There are tons of things that will help us live the faith.
But what we say of this book is that it alone speaks God’s voice to us as we interact with
it.
But that’s not done by rote.
It’s not done by club.
It’s not done by simply beating it into our heads.
It’s done by humbly submitting ourselves to the movement of God through our interaction with the Scripture.
And it is less simple,
but I would say far more difficult.
So that’s really well said,
Clint.
The problem with literal readings of Scripture alone is they put us at the center of Scripture.
And that is the ultimate human temptation is to make the Scriptures all about us.
And the Reformed tradition has said consistently and emphatically the Scriptures are about God.
This is God’s story,
which God is gracious enough to include us in.
And this is significant because oftentimes the Scriptures begin to look like the people
who are reading them.
Let me give you an example of this.
One of this is actually one of my favorite Bible stories of all time.
Some know that Thomas Jefferson was a deist.
He wasn’t a Christian in the Orthodox sense.
And one of the things that troubled Thomas Jefferson about the New Testament was all
of the fantastic miracle stories.
He believed that Jesus is seen doing in the Gospels.
So to Thomas Jefferson’s mind,
the New Testament was not trustworthy because it’s impossible
for people to walk on water and for sicknesses to be healed with by the Word.
And these things were more like a fairy tale to Thomas Jefferson than they were reality.
But he thought that the Bible was important and had some good stuff.
He was particularly drawn to Jesus’s sort of moral teachings,
the stuff that would make
you a good person,
but not the stuff that seemed historical fallacy to him.
So what he ended up doing was taking a Bible with a marker and just striking out all of
the stuff that to him didn’t make sense.
It didn’t fit in the Bible.
And I have this on my shelf in my office.
You should come and grab it sometime and read it.
It is an incredible sort of historical icon for me of what we’re all tempted to do with
Scripture.
Most of us don’t take markers and start, you know,
scratching out words.
I don’t think that’s probably where most of us start.
But even though we aren’t doing that with a pen or a marker,
I think many of us do sort
of just read past the stuff that makes us uncomfortable and we emphasize the stuff that we like.
And what’s the stuff that we like?
It’s the stuff that fits our worldview.
It’s the stuff that we have begun to think makes sense.
And so that’s the stuff that we gravitate towards.
And when we literally want to begin rubber-stamping Scripture onto situations,
I’m afraid that many times that’s not letting Scripture have its voice,
but rather us using Scripture to validate our voice.
And that is an extreme temptation is for us to take away God’s ability to speak and replace
it with our ability to speak.
Because one of the central themes that we’ve throughout Scripture is that the human spirit
is constitutionally tempted by idolatry,
by making things other than God the most important
thing in our life.
And the supreme form of idolatry is making ourself more important than God.
I think Thomas Jefferson is a living example of what happens when we put ourself over the voice of Scripture.
And I do think we,
when we try to take literal small sections of Scripture and just sort
of rubber-stamp it and say,
“Well, the Bible says,” I always question whether is the Bible
saying that?
Or are we using the Bible to say what we want to say?
And that takes some discernment and wisdom,
Clint, but it’s a problem that we need to
be aware of as those trying to learn and be shaped by the authority of Scripture.
Yeah, it seems to me that one of the struggles that all Christians have with Scripture is
to ultimately confess that it is beyond wherever we are at the moment.
And so,
what I mean by that is that we often come to Scripture with the idea that things are settled.
And one of the realities of the church—in fact,
one of the reasons that the Scripture
has been in the church so often a source of conflict—is that because in each generation
we bring our questions to it,
and then there are differences of opinion as to how it speaks,
and the church throughout that process over and over again has to be formed.
So, questions of world wars,
questions of disease,
questions of freedom,
questions of
materialism,
whatever it is, questions of divorce, whatever it is generationally and
culturally that the church struggles with,
the Scripture is always involved,
or should,
generally is always involved in those conversations.
And as we have them,
we find that we see different things in the Scripture,
and then the church
has to seek discernment in those voices for what it is that ultimately Scripture leads
us to believe and to practice.
And that means that arguments over the text and the meaning of the text are never going away.
And in fact, I would argue shouldn’t go away,
Michael.
They need to be a constant source of evolution for the church.
We need to be in constant conversation with both our world and our word so that we can grow,
so that we have a bridge between the faith that we inherit and the life that we
currently lead.
And I think not only is it a good thing that we have those conversations,
I think it’s an essential thing.
It is, and I think, Clint, that one of the things that we maybe fail to recognize is
how that sets us up for inevitable conflict.
We will fight over Scripture as long as we exist on this side of Christ’s return.
I think the reality is that Scripture is by definition a communal work.
It is something we do together.
We must be humble enough to hear each other’s voices because no single person has the authoritative
understanding of Scripture.
We need each other,
and that’s not just people who live in our place who walk into our sanctuary.
That’s the global church.
There’s people in Africa,
Presbyterian Christians who gather every Sunday,
who have an interpretation
of Scripture that we benefit from hearing to whatever extent we can.
They see things in Scripture that are there, truly,
that we just don’t see by nature of
our own biases and history and experience.
God’s word, I think, is bigger than we give credit for,
and yet oftentimes our fights
are so shallow about the interpretation of a particular thing that we think is going
to help or hurt our case in a particular matter.
I don’t find that a helpful understanding of Scripture,
but I do also think that if
we believe that Scripture is God’s story and we believe that God is the one who will speak
to us through that story,
then I’m not really afraid of the conflicts that come surrounding
Scripture because I believe in God’s providence,
God’s spirit who is animating our own faith today,
God’s spirit who is guiding us into discipleship,
that as we read Scripture together
and as we have fights and conflicts over what this means over this means,
I really believe as a matter of faith that God is going to direct those fights forward,
that ultimately it will become clear because God will make it clear,
not because we’re smart, not because
one side is going to outbest the other side.
Sometimes we get fixated on the moment and we miss the God who’s been working for thousands
of years to bring the kingdom to bear,
and I think there’s some selfishness and pride
in that.
If we can practice a kind of humility in relation to the Scripture and say,
“I believe it says
this and I believe that strongly,
but I might be wrong,” then I think we’re walking in Scripture
in the right direction.
I think that those disagreements are helpful when they have depth,
when there’s substance to them,
when the people involved are able to be thoughtful,
to listen to one another,
to defend their position,
but to be open to the movement of the Spirit.
And then there are other moments,
Michael, when I think as people are sometimes prone
to do, we get in the dumbest kind of arguments.
For instance,
over which translation you read.
And those I don’t find helpful.
What the Scripture says about human life,
about capitalism and materialism and our sexuality and relationship,
those are essential questions that you don’t think you’re reading the right
Bible because it wasn’t translated in the 1600s in Old English,
I find not helpful at all.
I think
if we can engage the Scripture in the deeper places of our life and avoid the
sort of shallow detours that are so often in front of us and easy to take,
then I think we can find a depth and richness to the Scripture that is beautiful and that I see in some of
our ancestors as I read there.
Some of the depth which Augustine or Origen or Calvin,
the depth they find in a single
verse and the direction that sometimes in my own life,
a very single simple passage
of Scripture has provided and meant to me in a time of struggle or grief,
that’s…
I’m interested in that.
If your version of the Bible is better than my version,
I’m not interested in that at
all.
And I think if we can have the right arguments,
we’re better off for it,
but we get caught
up in the wrong ones very regularly.
I don’t want to sound too critical here,
but one of the downsides of the Reformation is
directly connected to one of its upsides,
and that is that John Calvin and the Reformers writ large,
John Knox,
others, Luther certainly was in this camp,
believed very strongly that
every Christian should have access to the Scriptures,
that all of our lives should be
touched by what the Scriptures say.
And so therefore,
we’ve emphasized,
let’s get Bibles into people’s hands,
let’s teach them to read so that they can read the Bible,
let’s help them understand what it means.
The downside of that is throughout history,
we have been tempted by the idea that we are
the only one, by we I mean me,
that each of us individually are the ultimate interpreters
and arbiters of what the Bible means,
because we have the Bible and we know what it means.
And when that happens,
we find ourselves in incredibly shallow water about, well,
you know, I think this translation,
I think this particular word,
I read this book and it convinced me of this.
When we close our interpretive lens to be only about us as individuals,
we have now forsaken
all of the interpretive power of God’s Spirit that connects the church at large.
In other words, we made about us instead of community,
we made about us instead of God.
And so the beauty of Scripture is that it invites us into this story that is generations,
reaches back into generations of humanity.
The downside of Scripture is when we wield it like it is a tool that can be used to our own end.
And when that happens,
Clint, I think we find ourselves not just in shallow water,
I think we find ourselves misusing the Scriptures.
And we are outside of what the Reformers had even hoped.
They didn’t hope that we would become like little popes who each believed we knew the
exact thing that the Bible said.
They hoped that we would study and learn and come to Scripture with spirits of humility
so that we might be transformed by it.
And I think sometimes we get off track.
It probably is worth noting,
Michael, that the New Testament that we call Scripture
is by and large the collection of teachings that people were trying to give the church
about what they called Scripture.
They were pointing out that the collection of what they understood to be God’s Word
said something that most people had missed,
that the Jesus story was present and prominent,
writ large across the Scriptures of their day and age.
And many, if not most,
hadn’t been able to see it.
And so the idea that any of us come as the final authority on Scripture is laughable.
God is the final authority on Scripture,
and that is worked out in the context of the church.
If I think I see something in the Scripture,
it is my privilege to be able to bring it
to conversation with others in the faith to see if God speaks to them in the same way.
And as we all begin to hear together,
then change happens, reform happens.
This is how the church has moved forward for its entire lifetime.
And when we call ourselves people of the book,
which we occasionally do,
that’s what we mean.
Yeah, I think my final word here,
Clint, is I think it’s always helpful to remember that the
Bible was not written in the language that you’re reading it.
It’s been interpreted.
People have sought to say the Bible again in a way that you and I can understand.
And the image that helps me there is the stories of translators who go to tribes in an unbelievably
hot jungle desert or jungle climates.
And they’re trying to figure out how to interpret that our sin is washed away like snow.
How you describe snow literally to a person who has no clue about what happens to water when it’s frozen, right?
They’re going to find words that communicate it as best as they possibly can.
And to us who know something about snow,
that seems kind of laughable.
But if you go back to the scriptures written in a language not our own,
that is what is happening for us.
These words that were given to the church then have been interpreted in a way so that we can,
in our own time and place,
connect with God’s own word being spoken through these words.
And that is, to me, beautiful.
I know it’s a little bit more complicated.
I know it requires a little bit more thoughtfulness.
But if you can be mindful of that when you sit down to read the scriptures,
that I’m not only reading somebody else’s mail,
but I’m reading that mail translated to me in a
language that’s not my own.
And I believe I’m reading it with other people by the power of the Holy Spirit.
God’s going to speak to me in it.
Scripture goes from being a book on your nightstand that you feel like you need to read, to an invitation,
to an encounter with a God by faith who’s actually going to speak to you,
because it’s God who’s doing the work,
not you.
So in other words,
I think this nuanced understanding of Scripture doesn’t take
away from its authority.
I think it increases it.
And I think it makes the encounter with Scripture even that much more beautiful.
Yeah, and to use your analogy,
Michael, I think the promise is that when we open this
and read it, despite all the differences,
the promise we hold to is that the author
is reading over our shoulder,
whispering in our ear to help us understand.
And doing that for individuals and collectively as the family of faith.
And we are not left to our own to sort this out.
We are guided by the Spirit of the very one who gave us this book as a gift to help us
make our way in life in His name.
And we probably need to wrap up,
because I know that both you and I could passionately
speak on this for a long time.
But I am proud and I am grateful for the way that Presbyterians understand the Bible.
I am grateful that we don’t see this as a simple instruction manual on which every page we find
unassailable words that we can use to get our way.
Instead, we find an invitation to relationship.
And we find the story of Jesus Christ and what it means to us.
And that takes some work on our part.
And I appreciate that it does.
And I appreciate our fathers and mothers in the faith who have helped us understand that.
So we appreciate you listening.
Thanks for taking this journey with us.
If we’ve raised questions today,
please follow up with us.
Email,
post them,
send them to us,
call the office, whatever you need to do.
We’d love to have further conversation if we’ve raised questions and we’ll do our best to answer them.
Yeah, everybody, we appreciate the time that we get to spend with you.
And we look forward to getting to continue this series with you as we keep addressing new ways
in which Christians are prone to finding some new faith fights.
Until then, be blessed.
Thanks.