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talking about the Bible [links]

I have really enjoyed the recent conversations about Reading the Bible better and the book of Revelation. I will pick up on those themes tomorrow and Thursday.

Until then, I wanted to point to one of my favorite blogs with professor of Bible J. Daniel Kirk. He has been reviewing a new book about the Impossible Bible and he said something really true about those of us raised or converted into a tradition that reads the Bible in too-tight a way (mostly ignorant of it’s cultural context among other things).

Students who believe in this kind of Bible but then leave the world that makes it plausible by going to, say, a public university or a differently oriented seminary or, worst of all a PhD program and there encounter the real Bible for the first time–well, they lose their faith. Or, they have to go through so much intellectual reconfiguring of their faith that its persistence stands in question.

We see this over and over again in Pastoral circles. It is only going to get worse with people like Bart Erhman (who this happened to) promoting all the ugly stuff that young believers are usually protected/sheltered from .

You can also get the Bible Made Impossible by Christian Smith here.

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Reading the Bible Better (part 3)

Dualism is deadly little disease.  The odd thing is that in our overexposed-undeveloped era of information saturation, terms often get thrown around without a working understanding necessarily being in place.  I’m not talking about full blown mastery of a subject. I’m just taking about clarity.

This can be especially limiting when it comes to reading the Bible. I’ve said before that I am a big fan of the Reformation impulse to put a Bible in everybody’s hands in their own language. I also recognize the danger or limitations if the reader is not discipled or empowered with good tools of interpretation (hermeneutics).

I thought it would be good to throw out two items for clarification that relate to our discussion last week about “A Better Way to Read the Bible”.  I posted in Moving Mountains and Signs that make you Wonder some of these issues, so this would be part 3.

Dualism is not simply the presence of two categories. Jesus and Paul had all sorts of pairings: body and spirit, law and grace, etc. That is not dualism. Dualism begins when those categories are excluding and non-overlapping.
Many of us have been groomed to think in mutually-exclusive oppositional pairs. Democrat-Republican, Creation-Evolution, Lost-Saved, Man-Women, etc.

When it comes to reading the Bible some of us have been told there are two categories: literal and allegorical. It is built on fiction or fact, real or fake, true or false.

This is not helpful. Continue reading “Reading the Bible Better (part 3)” →

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Signs that make you Wonder

Let me just say how much I have enjoyed the conversation this week. One of the dynamic elements of a conversational blog is that sometimes that conversation takes longer or goes in a different direction than expected – this is the nature of dialogue (vs. a monologue). I was supposed to write on allegory today but that can wait till Friday – today we get talk about miracles, the supernatural and signs that make you wonder.

It seems to me that there are two main things to get on the table here.

The first is the phrase ‘super-natural’ comes from specific worldview that came to ascendancy in the seventeenth century. It is very mechanistic. It says that God set up the natural world to work a certain way (like a clock) and the debate was really between folks like the Deists who said the God stepped away after creation and is letting it run like clockwork. The other group believed in intervention and held that God did – from time to time – interfere with the normal mechanisms and do something … super-natural. The activities of angels and demons were outside the perceptibility and predictability of the ‘natural order’ and so on.

That is the supernatural and that is exactly what I do not believe in.

Now, I do believe in the miraculous. The miraculous in this sense is that which is extra-ordinary, outside the expected normality of human experience. Since I am a believer, I attribute that to the power of God who is at work in the world in Holy Spirit.

I want to say again that I do not believe in a solely transcendent God who in ‘his’ holiness can have nothing do with fallen matter and thus resides ‘up’ in the heavens and intermittently ‘breaks through’ the veil of reality in order to intervene in human affairs.

The second thing that we need to get on the table is Biblical language repeated so often in the Gospels of “signs”. What we calls miracles are often referred to as signs. I have even heard them called ‘signs that make you wonder’. This is sacramental language – which is why so many of us are not familiar with it.

A sign, by being fully itself, points to something that is beyond itself. Think of a road sign. A symbol, similarly, is something that participates in that which it signifies without being totally that thing. So in communion, we might say that the bread points to the body of Christ while remaining fully bread. Or that the church is not the Kingdom of God even though it participates in the it. It is a sign that points to a greater reality.

What we would call miracles, what the Gospels often refer to as signs, are activities of God’s presence that point to something beyond themselves while – or by – being fully themselves.

Once these two understandings are in place the conversation takes on a whole new set of possibilities. Once you say goodbye to predictable formulas (mechanistic) then you can move to a conception of a dynamic relationship with a living God. Once you move away from a super-natural mentality (which is often superstitious), you can move to a sacramental participation with the natural world.

God is at work in the world. As Christians we say this proudly and confidently. (I understand those in the Enlightenment who rejected the interventionist view of god and who explained away the miracles in the Bible by simply saying that ancient pre-modern people only interpreted things that way – but that is not where I am at).

If you are into Process Theology, there is a whole second conversation that takes you into all sorts of fun places!  But today I just want to point people to Chapter 7 in the Secret Message of Jesus by Brian McLaren called “the Demonstration of the Message”.  It is wonderful.  I will close here with the words he closes with there.

… this is in large part what I believe the signs and wonders of Jesus are secretly telling us: that God, the good King, is present – working from the inside. The King is in the kingdom, and the kingdom is among us here and now – for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. The King is present in the mess and chaos of everyday life on earth, bringing healing, sight, perception, liberation… The incursion of the kingdom of God has begun. We are under a gentle, compassionate assault by a kingdom of peace and healing and forgiveness and life.

Relational Religion” src=”https://bosanders.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/citysoleilblueboat_4.jpg?w=150″ alt=”” width=”150″ height=”100″ />

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Moving Mountians

I was reminded again in my morning reading of the beauty of following Jesus. It’s something that is never far from my mind but which is always bursting through the crust of everyday life with new freshness like a blooming tulip in the Spring while the landscape all around it is still gray and brown with dirty snow unmelted in the shady edges.

I am also painfully aware of the presence of something quite different when I read the words of Jesus: a gap.  I am stabbed by the realization that Jesus not only spoke a different language than me but that he used words very differently than I was taught to.

Then Jesus told them, “I tell you the truth, if you have faith and don’t doubt, you can do things like this and much more. You can even say to this mountain, ‘May you be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and it will happen. Matthew 21:21  NLT

I was taught to be literal. I was told Jesus was actually saying that if you had enough faith you could do anything! Nothing was impossible. I had, coincidentally, never heard the world ‘hyperbole’ before.

Now it seems so clear. Jesus spoke in parables and Jesus spoke parabolically. He was not a philosopher or a scientist in our modern sense. I have blogged recently about a better way to read the Bible and I think that this fits in with that.

Jesus was not telling us that we could rearrange the topography of our region. He was not telling us that we could reorganize our geological and geographical surroundings.

I feel bad for anyone who has prayed about something – or even ‘claimed’ something – and thinks that it is their fault that it didn’t happen because they didn’t have enough faith. I am horrified that we have taught people to read the Bible this way. In trying to be exacting and literal – in an enlightenment/ modern sort of way – we have warped the message of the Bible to be something that it was never meant to be.

It’s a tough one. Whenever I tell people that Jesus did not mean that we would literally move mountains with just a little bit of faith, one of two reactions happens.

  • they tell me a story about this one time that some people they never met in place they have never been did it.
  • they say something about taking the Bible literally and how I am making it allegory.

The second one really gets me. Because parable is not allegory. Allegory would be like taking the story about the widow who used three cups of flour to make bread and asserting that the three cups of flour represent the three continents that the apostles would take Jesus’ message to: Asia, Africa and Europe.

Allegory is very elaborate. Reading the Bible poetically, prophetically or parabolically makes in simpler – not more elaborate.

I used the example of a person finding out that there is no Santa Clause and the Jesus was not born on December 25th and concluding that Christmas, if it is not literal, has no meaning. They, of course, would be wrong.

So it is with casting mountains into seas by faith. Jesus was using hyperbole to make a point. That does not steal from it meaning, it points like a sign to the real meaning.

Next time: beyond allegory

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Here and Now

I am a big fan of being present. That is especially true in the spirituality of presence. It is also one of the great dangers of our modern technology. It allows us to be somewhere else, neglecting those we are sitting with,  and to be focused on some other time (either future plans or past memories). This has always been a danger. Now, day dreaming or living in regret are one thing but technology enables us and can even encourage us to be some other place or at some other time.

There is a beauty to being here now.

This tendency, if unchecked, can accentuate a mentality in some christians to long for the 1st Century in an idealized form of ‘the early church’ or the ‘church of Acts’.  I have talked often about the error of making the early church singular by quoting books like “The Churches the Apostles Left Behind” , “The Emergence of the Church” and “Unity and Diversity in the New Testament“. The is no ‘Early Church” in that homogenized sense. It was never a singular expression. There was always diversity and variation. I actually think that God likes it that way and wants it to be that way. But that is a different conversation.

My main focus here the is the temptation to long for the 1st century as Bible readers. We should be careful what we wish for. We might not be getting what we think we are asking for. In fact, not only is it impossible … even if it were possible, I’m not sure how accurately our romanticized version would measure up to the real deal.

Two things have prodded me in this area recently. The first is a quote that a freind sent me from Alfred North Whitehead

Whereas you can make a replica of an ancient statue, there is no possible replica of an ancient state of mind.

The second prompt came from a recent comment on this blog. It comes from Jason Stewart:

When I get in these sorts of conversations, I find it very helpful to stress that it is IMPOSSIBLE, not simply difficult, to read the scriptures in the same way the original audience would have. Many times I have made this very point, only to find out later in the conversation that the other person thinks I really mean something more to the effect of: “We should be really careful to make sure we’re reading the text in the same way the first audiences would have”.

Not being a premodern man and lacking premodern man experiences, language, culture, and expectations, makes my reading of the text very very different from his from the outset.

These two thoughts have been rattling around and haunting me. On this weekend where we remember that attack of September 11, I am very aware that in so many ways the 21st century is not like the world that we have known. It is not entirely unlike the world we have known but neither is it entirely similar. I want to be awake to the realities that we find ourselves in now. I think that the first step to that may be coming to terms with the fact that A) We can’t go back even if we wanted to. B) the past was never singular and homogenous. There was always diversity and complexity.

We are here now. I thank God that I have the opportunity to be here and to be here now. There is no other place I would rather be.

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a Better way to read the Bible?

A better way to read (read) Admittedly, this is not how I learned to read the Bible. In fact, I’m not sure that I learned to read the Bible at all. I just read it. I read it like you would read anything else. I just read it and took it at it’s word. It was there in black and white.

However, there were some things about the Bible that made it different than everything else I read: it didn’t have a single author (or even a stated author for many of it’s ‘books’), it was written thousands of years earlier, and it was not written in English – it was translated.

None of that is a problem necessarily. I still got the main point of the book (I think) and was able to pick up on most of its important themes (at least they were important to me). In fact, the more general my reading and the more generic my intent, the better that way of reading works.

The problem comes when you want to either make bigger and broader claims bases on Scripture or the more narrow and specific you want to get.

For instance, if you want to make a big claim about how the universe works or the fate of every human soul throughout history, you end up doing something with the text that it may be unsustainable under further review. If you want to get specific and say that this word in the original text says ____ and therefore women can not ______ , or ministers must ______ … using the text that way may become an issue.

I put forward an idea in my previous post that gives us permission to update, revisit, and re-engage the texts of scripture based on two things:

  1. we do not have a pre-modern mind and therefore have a very different relationship to story, text, idea, and experience than people of the pre-modern world.
  2. we live in a world that is so different, has changed so much, has gone through such radical and traumatic experiences that we would be blind not to acknowledge and account for it.

In my clearest language: I am advocating for a more sophisticated way of reading the Bible and to move away from a simple reading. Like I said at the beginning, I was not taught to read the Bible, I just read it – or so I thought. I had to get rid of the illusion that I was ONLY reading. It is a simply awakening and only requires one thing to get started! You must admit that you are translating when you read. You are not simply reading , you are doing something else – even if it subconsciously  or unknowingly. There is a hermeneutic (way of reading) that is being employed by all of us and we have to come to terms with the idea that our way of reading is not (and can not be) the same way of reading as the ancients did.

Here are four advantages to awakening to the presence of interpretation:

  • We can read the creation stories in Genesis and call God ‘creator’ without discounting or disregarding contemporary science (and especially emergence theory).
  • We can take the story of Jonah or Job and recognize that they are more like movie scripts or plays than they are newspaper reports and not get bogged down in the details.
  • We can believe that the incarnate Jesus calmed a storm (the miraculous) without making the leap that God sent Hurricane Irene or directs tornadoes.
  • We can see that the Book of Revelation is a political commentary (prophetic imagination) about the first century C.E.  and not an exacting prediction about the end of the world.

I believe this to be a better way to read the Bible. It is both more authentic to the text and has more integrity in the world that has developed since the text was written. We are not limited to only the physics and metaphysics of antiquity but we also are not abandoning the whole project and going out on our own. We are providing continuity with the historic trajectory and honoring the tradition.

You can call this a ‘new kind of christianity‘ if you want, or something else, but it is a way a being in the world that honors Christ and engages the world as it actually is. It allows us to believe in miracles without being superstitiously ‘super’natural.  It lets us listen to the wisdom of the ancients without being stuck to their ‘three-tiered’ universe. It provides a dynamic engagement between the classic themes and the world we find ourselves in.

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Jesus and Storms

There has a been a vibrant conversation this week about whether God is in control of the weather. (see what I did there?) I have learned a lot from the people who believe that ‘he’ does send, direct, and control things like hurricanes. They are sincere in their belief and many have really thought about how to reconcile the tensions that come up in the discussion.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a threshold that the conversation stalls at. There is just a moment when these two ways of reading the Bible seem irreconcilable. I am not intending to ‘bridge the gap’ but I do think that there is a way to help those who think that God sends hurricanes to see how those of us who don’t still read the Bible.

I want to talk about Hermeneutics (the way we read the Bible) and specifically the Second Naivete. Here is a 9 minute video by Image of Fish that explains this well.  Here is a quick summary for preaching the text this way.

My thesis is this: when we come to passages like Jesus calming the storm, it is impossible for us in the 21st century to read it or understand it as people did in the 1st century. The pre-modern mind had a different relationship to story, idea, text, and experience than we have. So even when contemporary believers attempt to have a pre-modern reading of the Bible, they can not. When they try to reconcile their world and experience to the world and experience in scripture there is an inherent gap.  That gap must be bridged or accounted for or it becomes prohibitive. The tension represented by the gap becomes untenable for one’s faith.

Here is how I read the storm stories in Matthew 14:22-23, Mark 6:45-52 and John 6:16-21. I believe that the event really happened and the disciples really experienced that moment. I take it by faith. Now I have said before that the point of the story is not for me to walk on water or for me to tell storms to be quiet. The point of the story is to hear the word of Christ to ‘be not afraid’. It this sense, I think that the important part of the text is not physics (how did Jesus walk on water) but poetics (what is the message). The problem for some modern readers is that if Jesus did not literally walk on water then they can not literally be not afraid. It is a 1:1 rational. I get that. and I will even concede that to them if they will talk to me about hermeneutics.

But – and this is a big but – it is quite a leap to move from the disciples’ experience of Jesus calming a localized storm on a sea while he was incarnate, to the contemporary believer watching satellite footage of last week’s hurricane on the Atlantic coast and  asserting that God is ‘in control’ of the weather. That is an irreconcilable set of assumptions.

When Jesus was incarnate he calmed a storm one night does not equal God sent Hurricane Irene.

Some people have a real problem giving up a naivete or even wrapping their head around it. I  had an amazing conversation with a Bible College student about Emergence Theory and the first 3 chapter of Genesis. When I explained how I thought the importance of the text was not a literal report of those first 6 days (or why in one story man is created after plants and in the second story it is before – Gen 2:5-7) but the truth about HOW God works with God’s creation to bring about a new and preferable reality. This person got really annoyed and said “then why even read Genesis at all if it is not real?” I explained that it was real. That really is how god works with humanity and creation.

After a while I said, ” you are like the person that finds out that there is no Santa Clause for real and that Jesus wasn’t really born on December 25th and says “then Christmas doesn’t mean anything- it is not worth celebrating”. You would be wrong. Christmas is the most beautiful thing in whole world. It is the message behind it (the poetics) that give it it’s meaning.

I know that reading the Bible while being aware of the gap (between the pre-modern world and our contemporary mind) can be jarring and disorienting. I get why not everyone will want to do it. But I also think that it is far better than the other option which is to insist on fabricating a pre-modern reading when one does not have pre-modern mind. It just can’t be done with integrity. It is better acknowledge where we are at, admit that things have progressed & changed, and to authentically engage the text from our radical and particular located-ness.Jesus calms the storm

Next time: I will address how much more FUN it is to be a Christian once you embrace the hermeneutical gap!

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How do we read the Old Testament?

I had said (over at FB) that “the God revealed in Christ has a power that is neither coercive nor unilateral.
The God of the Old Testament would never turn the other cheek. Jesus presents to us a view of God that is a radical renovation of previous conceptions.”

As Christians we talk about god particularly not generically. We are not God-ians in a universal sense but Christ-ians in a specific sense.

My friend Ryan wrote a thoughtful response about reading the Old Testament. Here is Ryan: 

In a way, the characteristics of God often portrayed in the Hebrew Scriptures appear to be incomplete. The reason I say that is because the writers and communities that formed those Scriptures were locked into a particular time and place and could only see dimly the pictures of God they were given. I do believe that it is not God that changes, but our understanding of who God is. So I would absolutely agree with your initial post, that in Christ we get the fullest picture of who God is, (i.e. power, grace, mercy, judgment) though we still see dimly because of 1st century culture and our own present one. What Christ does enable us to do is understand what we aren’t able to see in the Hebrew Scriptures without the reality of his incarnation. We can then reexamine the God described in the Hebrew Scriptures with a fuller picture of God’s unique character, through the lens of Jesus. This is truly a gift.

Part of the problem with our modern ways of dissecting Scripture are that we expect the fullness of who God is to be revealed in every single letter and word. This seems to miss the messy and real life process that was undertaken in writing these Scriptures to begin with. Communities of faith, albeit inspired by God, still had to wrestle with the inconsistencies of who they believed or wanted God to be, and who God actually revealed God’s self to be. Because we have the entire canon at our disposal we don’t see the centuries that it took to arrive at the understanding of Christ as the incarnation and fullest expression of God’s self. 1 Peter 1:10-12 provides this perspective, that it was never the intention of the Hebrew Scriptures to be the et. al. portrayal of God, but that when the Messiah was revealed he would make God known. Finally, that same Christ whose Spirit infuses God’s people, is continuing to make God known to us, in order that we might see less dimly and be given the grace of seeing God for who God truly is.

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Earthquakes Hurricanes and Politics

Earlier this week, Michelle Bachmann said something stupid… or at least something that I regarded as such.  Later she said she was just joking. I posted it on Facebook and some people actually tried to defend her thinking that ‘god’ caused the earthquake and hurricane.

I have written before about how God does not direct tornadoes or punish the people of Haiti for some deal their ancestors made with the devil. I have said that Crucifying Job’s God” href=”https://bosanders.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/crucifying-jobs-god/” target=”_blank”>we need to update our concepts and adapt our frameworks (theological, philosophical, sociological, spiritual, etc.) to the realities of the 21st Century and not allow ourselves to get limited by what the ancients believed/understood in the first couple of centuries C.E.

What follows is an amalgamation of my comments in that Facebook conversation. I have modified some of them to account for responses by those in the conversation.

When I say that God did not cause these things, I am talking about  intervention, ‘an act of God’.
Do you believe that God intervened in the natural order to make the earthquake and the hurricane? Did God cause them as part of ‘his’ plan?

I do not.  But I also understand that those who want to believe like Bachmann that god does work this way and that scripture does not allow us to think otherwise … is certainly is one way to be a Christian. – a way I think made a lot more sense in the pre-modern world… but it is one way to be a christian.

That being said, it is not the way that I am looking for. I do not want to be limited to only the physics and meta-physics of the first centuries C.E. As christians, I want to incorporate modern realities, acknowledge scientific advancement and adjust to expanding knowledge. I want to grow up out of humanity’s infancy. This means we adapt and integrate to leave behind some of the previous ways of thinking.
Christianity is a perpetual maturing toward reality and moving from milk to meat.

In this rubric, the Bible is an inspired and authoritative record of God’s dealings with a part of humanity as interpreted and then represented by those individuals and communities in their understanding and capacity.

This is where ‘all or nothing’ thinking really fails us. I’m not saying to  “throw out” the teachings or worldview of those who wrote the Bible. I am saying that we need to integrate. You have to have something old to integrate the new into. Otherwise it is replacement. I just don’t want to be limited ONLY to first century meta-physics. I obviously don’t want to chuck everything Paul said.

Here is why this is so important: part of the good news that the church has to proclaim is that the world is God’s and that God by God’s spirit is present at at work in the world!!
My hesitation here is what you mean by ‘in charge’ because God is not an Caesar-Emperor with ‘thumbs up- thumbs down power’.

  • that conception of god is to miss that counter-narrative provided by Jesus. God is NOT like Caesar. Jesus shows us something different – that God is NOT like the powers of this world.
  • those who miss this counter-narrative, often also miss that the God revealed in Christ is at work in Holy Spirit at this is why we must be Spirit Christians and not Old Covenant Christians just getting out frameworks and word pictures from the days of Kings. Jesus provides a revision to that understanding and a counter trajectory to simply sticking with that previous understanding.

When we say that it is time to update some things we are NOT saying that the ancients knew nothing about physics or metaphysics. Let’s say that they were exactly as proficient in their day as we are in ours. That is all we can do – do the best we can do in our time as they did in theirs.

What I am 100% against is saying that they knew MORE than us and we need to stick with ONLY what they knew!

There is no other area other area of our life where we stick with the knowledge of the 1st century.

 

I wanted to add a link to “making sense of the miraculous” for those who are interested

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