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Hermeneutics

>Black Women, Jews and Hindus

>We need to address how we read the Bible. There is a whole study of how we interact with and interpret texts – it’s called Hermeneutics. Many of us (most? ) are taught one way to read the Bible – that can be devotionally, ‘literally’ *  or allegorically, etc.

There are many ways of reading the Bible – I am not going to pretend that every way is good or that any interpretation is equally valid, helpful, or faithful.  This is why we need to talk about how we read the Bible.

Last week we talked about Jesus and Rome –  pigs and water.  [link here]

I would like to try and build on that for our conversation here.

 Jews

One of the truly horrific aspects of Christian History is the anti-Semitism that has plagued the Church
for 1900 years.  It started early on in the 2nd century** and it peaked in the Holocaust of WWII. There is no way to escape the incriminating evidence of nearly two millennia but I would like to address something rather odd in the argument that lies behind it.

The Jews did not kill Jesus.  This accusation that ‘the Jews killed Jesus’ has been around for 1800 years.  It is ridiculous.

Let’s be clear about two things:

  1. Jesus laid down his life willingly.  In that sense no one killed Jesus. In John 10: 17-18 Jesus says “ The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”
  2. If anyone did kill Jesus (which we already established that they did not) it would be the Italians. Romans are the one who nailed Jesus to the cross! The Italians killed Jesus (if anyone did).

So the question has to be asked: why have the Italians not come under condemnation and persecution for the death of Jesus?  The answers to that are revealing.

The seat of Catholic power (the Vatican) is in Rome… said another way – those who are in power are in charge of the narrative
It is difficult to punish descendants for the actions of previous generations. (unless they participate in the same oppressive activities)

The reason that the Italians get off scott-free tells me something. It tells me that Jesus and the Bible have almost nothing to do with the treatment of the Jews in Church History. This is one of those cases where we do what we would have done anyway and just find Bible verses to hide behind.

 Hindus

Whenever other religions come up in conversation, somebody will invariably go immediately to John 14:6 where Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Now, I love this verse as much as the next choir-boy [I have written about it multiple times]  but there are a couple of things that need to be addressed before it is applied thickly to whatever religious wall we are erecting.

Jesus probably did not know about Hindus and definitely did not know about Muslims***.  Therefore we can say with a fair amount of confidence that Jesus was not – in any way – commenting on whether Hindus or Muslims had a relationship with God.

Look – Jesus was not commenting on Hindus or Muslims! He was making a positive statement about the potential of having a certain caliber of relationship with God – he was not saying something negative about Hindus or Muslims … ALL that I am saying is that you can NOT use John 14:6 for a proof-text of something that Jesus was absolutely NOT addressing.

Go back and read the story in context. Ask yourself “what was Jesus saying – what was he talking about”.  Then draw a circle around it and on the other side of that circle write “everything else” and that is what Jesus is NOT addressing in John 14:6.

 Black Women

There is no easy way for me to ease into this. There is no clever anecdote for me to wade into the subject, so just let me spit it out.

Times have changed… things are different … and we need to learn to listen.

Now, we can all agree that the Copernican Revolution affected the way that everyone – even modern Christians – see the universe (cosmos).  Then there is the influence of people like Newton who deeply impacted our understanding of the world and how it works. Said another way …

between the Telescope and the Microscope we know that the world works very differently than those who wrote the Bible thought that it did.

And that is ok! We are fine. Faith is still possible and the church is still intact. We can deal with new realities and we can adjust to new information.

All of this is to say that we know that the world works differently and we admit that things are different than they were when the Bible was written. This is why it is so important that we listen to people when they talk to us about the impact that the Bible has had on them and their communities.

When women talk about passages in the Bible that have been oppressive or hurtful to them…we need to listen.

When African-Americans talk about passages in the Bible that validate or at least assume slavery… we need to listen.

They are telling us something. They are telling us that the world is not the same as it was in the 1st Century and though it may be less ‘scientific’ than the microscope or telescope – it is not less profound, impactful or true.

I have lots to say about how Paul was (in my opinion) a voice of liberation and progressive freedom in his day.  But what I have to say about Paul in the 1st century is not as important as what black women may have to say about the impact of those same  passages in the 21st century.

*   we have discussed over & over again how no one actually reads the Bible literally.

**  there are many scholars who say that it started in the Apostolic age already in the 1st century.

*** Islam started in the 7th century.

18

>Friday Follow Up: the death of Job’s God

>What an amazing week of conversations on the Blog, Facebook and email!  Thank you all for your contributions.  I have much to think about.  Next week we will address the nature of Divine Power.

Here are the three things that I want to say: 

God is always being incarnated

God is always dying

God is always conquering death

in this sense:  there is a perpetual new life, there is a ongoing crucifixion, and there is constant resurrection.

We are always embodying God. We are forever dying to ourselves. We are continuing to rise (baptized) into a new life.

For the Christian, it is always Christmas, it is always Good Friday and it is always Easter Sunday.

Here are three exchanges I wanted to follow up on:

Dave:  Meister Eckart – “I pray that God would rid me of God”.

Me: This line of reasoning is SOOOOO explosive!

We love it when the Apostle Paul said “through the law I died to the law” in Galatians 2:19
but we may not like it as much as when a John Caputo says “through religion I died to religion” or something similar.

Sara: I’ve been thinking about this idea all day. Was wondering your thoughts on how this play out in our relationships, For instance because Christ died for me and my sins ( including the one where I felt he failed me) Did he not also die for the people in our lives that did not meet our expectations? And because they failed us we hold back our love. (conditional love). God does not conditionally love us so are we suppose to conditionally love other people?

Me: Here is how I would answer this.

1. Jesus died not just FOR our sins but BECAUSE of our sins. We are to blame too.
2. God loves us unconditionally. We are not God. We love conditionally.
3. In Christ (!) we move toward a MORE unconditional capacity to love. We grow, develop and mature in that direction. It is not a destination. It is not a pass/fail assignment. It is not a trick or a test… It is a direction that we move in Christ.

They fail us, we fail God, God forgives us, we forgive them. Let mercy flow, let justice reign, and let kindness ring all around!!

Philip: Gods die, or perhaps more to the point, Gods evolve. The Israelite god does this before our own eyes as we read scripture. But perhaps more interesting is that this evolution takes place in a particular narrative, and only evolves as the people telling the story change. This is interesting to me because it deals less with some ontological change in God and more of a change in us, the storyteller.

That isn’t some lazy excuse like: “god is the same yesterday, today and forever” that’s bull crap. God clearly changes, or at least, when you look at our account of god over a long period of time, you see a character that is not stagnate but incredibly dynamic in how he/she is portrayed. But that’s kind of my point, when we say “that is what God is like” we are using our language, which only makes sense in a certain social context to describe something rather profound. It is inevitable that the character would change as the storyteller changes.
Perhaps if we began to see god as truly “with us”, and not in the “like a best friend” kind of way, but in a way that connects us to god in a real and profound way that blurs the lines of distinction, then that might takes us down a road where our views and descriptions of god are not the process of uncovering the one true god, rather they are the process of expressing the god within and surrounding us (collectively and individually) and the interaction that takes place there.
           



Thanks Bo for the rich and nuanced take on this issue.
ps. I was talking to a older conservative family member who was shocked that I didn’t think God was in control of everything, because as he said ” it brings me great comfort to know that a tragic event happened for a reason” I replied more or less like this “That view of god doesn’t bring me comfort at all, rather that god makes me mad, if God had a reason for a 5 year old being raped then God is a mad man.” Needless to say that conversation didn’t go over very well.

Me:   Philip, thank you for being so honest and clear. Two things I want to respond to:
– You are right that it is not ‘god’ who changes but it is WE who change and our understanding that evolves. That is important, I have been having amazing conversations all week with people telling me about their previous conception of God dying. NOW – it was not the Living God who died but their understanding of God. 


This is important because we are not saying that “there is no God” but that the former conception of “God is dead”. I say this because I believe that the Son of God died and that many conceptions of God died on that Cross.

 

- I got in trouble with someone who was talking about “God being in control” of everything, then later was sad about the passing of a friend. I said “Jesus must have been mad at that guy to kill him like that.” They objected. To which i responded “you can’t if both ways”.



I also wrote about this for Football Jesus [link].

Next Tuesday, the post is on Divine Power. This is what I will tackle.

2

>Christmas is not Easter

>

Christmas is not Easter. They each hold a meaning that is in danger of getting lost when it all collapses into one thing. For the purpose of this conversation, I would like to even pull apart the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Each of these three is essential, and while there is a unity that ties them together, there is something  particular to each one – a uniqueness that we don’t want to lose.
 [if you get what I am saying – go ahead and jump down to the main point… you can just skip the side thought]
Listen to the Podcast [here]

Side Thought: I generally do not like when things get mashed together – especially when I am not sure that they belong together. I think that it often takes away from the very thing that it is suppose to provide our understanding.

There are four gospels.  We love to ‘harmonize’ them make it one gospel – which can be a helpful study tool – but let’s not be under the impression that there is only one gospel account.

Then there is that crazy thing people do with the Anti-Christ. When most people talk about the mythical character, what they actually do is mash together 5 biblical bad guys from  various genres and centuries. You end up with the Prince (of Daniel 9), the False Prophet, the man of Lawlessness, and the Beast jammed into one Big Bad Guy that – if you actually read the four passages in John – don’t sound like a single person or in a single time period.

We already covered the whole Heaven & Hell mashup and the Devil mashup last month (and earlier). But it is a real problem! It’s this darn thing that when Jesus says “wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction” and people automatically swap out ‘destruction’ for ‘hell’ when that passage is clearly not about hell.

So as you can see, this is a real problem. I love that every modern Christian can have a Bible in their hand. But as with most things, there is both an upside and a downside. The downside is that a lazy condensing or mashing together can result in something that leads to monstrous amalgamations.

You might think that I am overstating it, but I actually think that the amalgamations are perverse. This whole shorthand thing that we do with Heaven & Hell, the Devil, Salvation, the Anti-Christ and prophecy drives me crazy. I actually have come to think that they are a form of false-religion that keeps us from true religion (as defined in James )

Oh – one more… when we talk about Jesus‘ miracles by simply saying “he was God” , that sunday school answer actually becomes a real problem. By not celebrating Jesus’ humanity we cripple ourselves when it comes to participating is the kind of miraculous religion that we (who love the Bible) celebrate so much in the book of Acts.

But that is a side note. 

Main Point: Leading up to Christmas, I love to ask church and non-church people of all ages “why did Jesus come?”  The most frequent response is ‘to die for our sins’ or ‘to save us’.  Which is fine enough I guess (on one level) but is really more of an Easter answer and not a Christmas answer.

One of my favorite professors in Seminary made the point (I think that he may have been  quoting James McClendon) that if the whole point is for the just to die for the unjust then Jesus could have been ‘created’ by God as a sinless little baby and plopped in the Arctic, to die in the harsh elements.  That would have satisfied the sinless life expectation of ‘the righteous for the unrighteous’.

But that is not how it happened. Jesus was born to a family, in a place, learned a language, and participated in a culture. That was not a random detail or an accidental circumstance. That is important and central to the story.

If God could have accomplished the atonement in the Arctic – having made Jesus to suffer and die the cruel effects of human existence and to experience an unjust death that would satisfy the wrath of God and heal the broken gulf between God and his creation… since that is how it could have happened (and it could have) – then there is something significant in the fact that it did not happen that way.

No, Jesus was born via painful labor, to a family, with a family name (Bar Joseph), and he learned to speak their language and practice their religion. He participated in ceremonies and cared for his sibling and mother. This is all a part of the incarnation. It is not secondary or inconsequential – it is central.

So here is my theory:  Christmas is not primarily about the salvation of mankind or the redemption of the world. That is what the crucifixion and resurrection are about!  (they – by the way – are not the same thing either and there is something that we are suppose to learn from each of them as well – by resisting the temptation to mash them together into one… but that is for a Pod about 4 months from now.)

Christmas is about Incarnation.  Incarnation tells us that God has drawn near to humanity. We know that God has bridged the gap and that this is in order to restore the broken relationship. In fact, God did not just visit for a day and import, impose, and implement a new order… God dwelt with us.  Literally (in the original language) God tabernacled with us. As The Message has it “God moved into the neighborhood”.

God is not afraid of our sin. God is not offended by our presence. In fact, God became one of us.  And here is the wild twist – God became like us so that we may become like God. This is an ancient tradition called Theosis – made famous by St. Athanasius of Alexandria.

In fact,  what the Incarnation is to the beginning, Pentecost is to the middle. Not only did God become one of us – but God gave us the Spirit of God as a gift to help us along the way and God’s Spirit remains on the earth as a constant presence … but I don’t want to get ahead of myself and mash things together that do not go together.

Bottom Line: the Christian life is not to simply to believe that in a time long, long ago in a land far, far away that God did something … and that if you just believe and receive that ‘truth’, that after you die, then God will take one part of you (your soul) to another place.

No. There is something else going on in the Christmas story. It has to do with the fact that God loves the world. That God became one of us, spoke human language (not heavenly or angelic language) and showed us the way to live.

The goal is not so much to believe right things so that I go to a better place after I die – but to behave like Jesus showed me so that I experience that life of the ages (the eternal life) before I die and then impact this world that God loves so much that God came and visited in person – becoming one of us.

We miss most of that when we mash Christmas and Easter together. Incarnation is the thing that God did and it is what we are suppose to learn (and do) with Christmas: move into a neighborhood, learn a language, give our life and show the way.

The Christian religion is to be – first and foremost – relational.  It is transformational (of both person and place) and this is accomplished by being incarnational. Christmas is suppose to remind of this every year: live in the place, speak the language, love the people, and show the way.

1

>Who Gets In ?

>They say to never judge a book by it’s cover. And this is true. Sometimes the cover is completely underwhelming for the quality of what is inside. Other times the cover is seemingly the best part. I have read two book in the last 5 years that were both wonderful and I think that their titles are the best two subtitles of any books I have heard of.

The First is Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party).

The second is a Generous Orthodoxy: Why I am a missional + evangelical + post/protestant + liberal/conservative + mystical/poetic + biblical + charismatic/contemplative + fundamentalist/calvinist + anabaptist/anglican + methodist + catholic + green + incarnational + depressed-yet-hopeful + emergent + unfinished CHRISTIAN

It also happens that both of these books touch on something that I want to touch on here: phenomenon and attitude.

Crunchy Cons came at a perfect time in my life. My wife and I had been trying to live a different way for a couple years. We had tried to get away from the cycle of credit card debt, eating factory farmed meat and things like that. It turns out that we weren’t the only ones! In fact this book is about how people all across North America had been making some of the same adjustments and coming to some of the same convictions that we had. The interesting part is that there was no manual, no spokesperson, no school that was preaching or teaching how to do it. It was a phenomenon- a spontaneous movement of like minded people all seemingly making the same changes at about the same time. It was amazing to read and to learn that we weren’t the only ones. It was a unique migration — if you will.

A Generous Orthodoxy was a similar story.

Two years ago I made a list of some groups and Christian schools of thought that I hoped to have a conversation with and dialogue about the direction that the church could go. I had grown tired of the partisan arguing between denominations and dogmas of my youth. I knew I wanted to go a different direction. I made this list and said somehow we need to frame the conversation in a way that both Pentecostals who believe that every one who is filled with the Spirit can speak in tongues – and Dispensationalist who think that speaking in tongues died at the end of the apostolic age (when the apostles died) can both be in the conversation.

I’m tired of one group saying that the other group aren’t Christians
or real Christians.

I wanted to have a dialogue between those whose roots go back to the 18th century and John Wesley in England who believe in free will – and of those whose roots go back to the 17th century and John Calvin’s Dutch and Swiss context who don’t believe in free will.

It was a long list.

Six months ago I was part of a conversation between a group that believed not just in the virgin birth but in the immaculate conception (which, for those of you who don’t know isn’t about Jesus Conception but Mary’s conception because later it was thought that she also needed to be conceived this way in order to be without sin otherwise she would have passed it on to Jesus) and another group who believed that Jesus was the Messiah and was sinless but did not believe in a virgin birth for him – that is something that was added quite a bit later. It was added they said because of the belief in that day that sin came through the father’s seed in the sex act and so there needed to be no semen in order for Jesus to have been sinless. There was a third group that was saying it didn’t matter either way – that the virgin birth was not essential for what happened on the cross and in eternity. The first group said it was essential for it was in the Bible and if you don’t believe it then you don’t believe the Bible – that you can not just pick and choose what to believe and what not to. the second group pointed out that the Prodigal Son of Luke 15 was in the Bible and that it was not literal. It was a parable too.

SO you can see that this is a real pickle. I think that the conversation about the virgin birth is a really good conversation. But it’s not going to work if it causes one group to say that the other group isn’t Christians and for the other group to say that the first group are not real Christians but mindless sheep following blindly superstitions of the past.

Part of the problem is that, for so many of us, we no longer have the structures of the past to decide who’s right. We don’t live in an age of the state sponsored church and the church sponsored state. It was easier (in one sense) when to be German was to be Lutheran, or to be English enrolled to in the church of England, were being Dutch meant you were part of the Dutch Reformed Church or for Russians the Russian Orthodox Church. That list could go on and on but you get my point.

So who is going to decide who’s in? The optimist in me hopes that this post-denominational era give us the opportunity to erase some of the old battle lines. The pessimists in me is afraid that we are more fractured than ever before and there is no venue to have this conversation and no unifying authority. Obviously I believe in the power and presence of Holy Spirit. Only the gentle dove is not coercive but invitational, not dominating but participatory and relational. I don’t know what that means to the conversation.

And that is scary. Because there are some big things on horizon!

I was part of a conversation between a group who says that homosexuality is a biblical sin. The other group was saying that those six verses sprinkled throughout the Bible are not about sexual orientation but about an act that we would all still be against.* There was a third group saying that as we explore the human genome, if it turns out that sexual orientation is genetic we are going to have to change how we be those six verses.

Now my only point in all of this is that we can’t afford to have one group saying that the other group, because of this belief, is not Christians and are “out” of the conversation. I am hoping for a construct and a framework so that all three groups get to be “in” the conversation.

This would be the case for those who believe that the world was created 6-10,000 years ago in 6 – 24 hour periods. It would also include those who believe that every ancient tribe had its own origin stories that were told as these epic poems and that what we have recorded in Genesis is simply the Hebrew’s version of it. We would also include those who are agnostics on the issue and say that it isn’t one of the criteria for a relationship with Christ and his Church.

This would be the same for those who believe that we live in the End Times and that Jesus is coming back soon. It would also include those who think that apocalyptic writing was part of a lost genre and that it was a political view of the Roman empire and it has nothing to do with our time – that there is no end of the world. We would also include those who say that there’s no way we can know so let’s not make it an issue.

This would enable people who think that the Bread and the Wine actually become the body and blood of the Lord to take communion with those say that it remains Bread and Wine but that we take it by faith to be those things – as well as – those who say that the Bread and the Wine are symbols that remind us of the broken body and spilled blood. Then Jesus’ prayer in John 17 could be heard and all three groups could be ‘one’ at the Table of the Lord.

My hope is that like “Crunchy Cons” that I am not the only one and this is instead a global desire to move in a direction and that like “a Generous Orthodoxy” we find this attitude.

to listen to the Podcast of this click here

* If you study household codes of the time, you will see that it is what we would call ‘statutory rape’ or something similar that we have legal words for. Remember that things are often lost in translation and that homosexuality is the English word that comes with it’s own baggage. The Hebrew and Greek words are different.

0

>The deal with reading the Bible

>Sorry for the giant delay in posting these here. I will be moving all of them over this week so that they are synced with the website. http://www.everydaytheology.net

3 things in this one: how NOT to read it, WHAT you are reading, and HOW to read it

You can’t read it like a contract.

– By His stripes we are healed.
– The Lord is my shepherd , I shall not want
– Every knee will bow and every tongue confess
– If you confess your mouth and believe in your heart- you will be saved.

We live just after a time (Modernity) where language was viewed a certain way and texts were treated accordingly. The problem is that the Bible was not written in that same period or mindset so … when we use that Modern approach there can be a bit of a gap between what it originally meant and how we read it.

Let’s look at Psalm 23 and specifically just the first line. The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. Well, the problem is that believers in every place in all times have been in want. Does that mean that God is not holding up his end of the deal? Is God breaking the contract? No. You can’t read the Bible that way. God is not actually a shepherd and you will not actually never be in want. You can’t read it like a contract.

A lot of people though – have been taught to read it like a contract. We use this Modern sense of language and say that each word and each phrase is an exact representation of it’s greater reality. That it exactly represents what it is talking about.

But this leads to some pretty complicated situations. Like when Paul says ‘God exalted his name – so that at his name every knee with will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord.’ I am not sure that Paul was saying that at some point in history or after human history that every knee will bow. I am not sure that is the point of his writing that. But when we read it like a contract, we say “It says EVERY… in plain black and white – EVERY”. So then we develop elaborate constructs and scenarios where by God can uphold his end of the bargain and live up to his end of the deal. But I am not sure that it works like that.

People do this with Old Testament prophecies and say “It says that by his stripes we ARE healed – not ‘will be’ or ‘might be’ – we ARE.” As if this in an exact 1:1 equation. “God said, I believe it, that settles it”. But I am not sure that it was meant to work like that. And when it doesn’t…. well then we say ‘Maybe it’s you! Maybe you don’t have enough faith or maybe you have unconfessed sin or maybe your just not one of the elect who is meant to get it.’ You can not read the Bible like a constitution.

Like when Paul says ‘if you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart you will be saved’. But then there are all these other expectations and other times he says ‘if you hold fast to the faith’ as if it were conditional. A lot of time and energy has been spent to try an explain the formula for salvation. The requirements to fulfill the contract. But I am trying to say that you can’t read the letters of Paul like a contract – dissecting each phrase, parsing each clause of the contract.

Just like we have to be careful with Enlightenment individualism and consumer spirituality , we have careful of this view of language and texts. They need to be interpreted through the lens that they were written in.

What is Hermeneutics ?

The definition is simply the study of different ways that texts are interpreted. It looks at the relationship between the author , the text and the reader. Many christian that I have met and talked to have never heard of this word. That really piqued my interest so I looked into it. It turns out that many Christians do not know that there are different ways of looking at a text. Many believers do not know that they are interpreting. I have been told over and over again “I just read the Bible literally”

I said before [link] that no one reads the Bible literally. Even if they say they do, a simple couple of questions and that gets exposed.

All texts need to be interpreted. Some as Poetry, some as history, some as parable, some as prophecy , some as Apocalypse, etc.

So this is why I wanted to bring it up. If we are all interpreting but we don’t acknowledge that we are interpreting… then it is either happening sub-consciously or we are so comfortable with our interpretive devices that it is happening by default or we are deceiving ourselves insisting that nothing is going on but a plain reading of the text.

You have to factor in TheoPoetics

Sometimes we just need to factor in that there are ways we talk about God. This is just a natural implication of using language to do something as amazing and vast at trying to describe transcendent reality and mystical experience.

It could be something as simple as when a child says ‘Jesus lives in my heart’. That is theopoetics. It’s simply the way we talk about God. It doesn’t need to be critiqued and measured in a exacting way. We know that the resurrected Christ didn’t shrink down and multiply himself then move into each person’s cardiac valve. It is a way of talking about God. It’s how we use language.

When Jesus says ‘on this rock I will build my church’ he was not speaking about a piece of granite nor of building a church building. It is a way of talking. The thing is – and this is important – I am not being dismissive by saying this as if the use of poetics means that things don’t carry weight or that they ultimately don’t mean anything.

Jesus was saying that there is something that is foundational and that he is responsible for the activity and entity that is called the church.

When the child says “Jesus lives in my heart” , just because it doesn’t mean that the actual Jesus doesn’t live in her actual heart, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t mean anything. She is talking about the Spirit of Christ indwelling that central place of passion and purpose. That means something! It’s just that the language in inexact. But this is the nature of language.

Actually – this is not a problem at all. If we give each other space and grace and acknowledge that hermeneutics and theopoetics play a role in our religious life and use of the Bible. The problem comes when we think and demand that language work a different way. When we insist that language be exacting and mathematical (this word = this exact definition) we get frustrated like the Pharisees did with Jesus as they demanded specifics and he told them stories!

“Who is my neighbor – the guy two doors down or three doors down?” he was asked. That reminds me of a story about a Samaritan… “When exactly do you rise up and restore Israel as a King?” he was asked. The Farmer sows seed…

Even when Jesus did use numbers he used them with a certain amount of absurdum or hyperbole. “How may times should I forgive my brother – 3 or 4? I mean I can’t just let him walk all over me and do the same thing over and over.” Jesus could have done the clever Rabbinic thing and added the two together and said 7. And that would have been unimaginable and challenging for them! That would have been surprising and prodigal (extravagant). But he does something incredible – he doesn’t just go up incrementally with addition – he goes exponential with multiplication! 70 times 7 !

This understanding of theopoetics is helpful to me. So that when Jesus says ‘if a part of your body causes you to stumble, cut it off.’ Just because he doesn’t mean ‘CUT IT OFF’ doesn’t mean that he doesn’t mean anything.

Just because a beast with 10 heads does not rise up out of the sea literally – doesn’t mean that the passage doesn’t mean anything!

Just because God isn’t actually a shepherd – doesn’t mean that God isn’t LIKE a shepherd. This is the same for ‘Father’ or ‘Rock’ or that ‘he hinds me under his wings’. These are Theopetics. They are the way that we talk about God. It is not exacting language, it is not mathematical or representative. It is expressive. It is expressing something deeper.

That is why I don’t get to hung up on Jesus saying ‘this is my body and this is my blood’. Like if I hold up a picture and say that ‘this is my wife’. It is not actually my wife. It is not representative – it is reflective. It reflects her. Now by saying this I am not saying that the ‘Lord’s Supper’ , just because the bread is not actually his flesh and the cup does not literally contain his blood, that it does not mean anything. It means something. But that something requires interpretation.

Like a child saying ‘Jesus lives in my heart’ – just because it doesn’t mean that literally doesn’t mean that it doesn’t mean anything. It means a lot! It is deep and profound … and that is why we use Theopoetics.

For the Podcast of this click [here]

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>3 old ways to read the Bible

>In Thailand there is a site that is strange to Western eyes. They are called Spirit houses. They look like elaborate birdhouses (sometimes mansions) on the top of tall poles. They are set at the corners of properties. Then small bowls of food will be left at the base to appease the spirits so that they don’t harm the property or the family that lives there.

I bought a book while I was in Thailand that explains some of the cultural differences like this. It was a really insightful moment in the book when it focused on the Spirit House at the Mercedes-Benz dealership. It is quite a contrast between the steel and glass building of the 21st century that house and display creations of luxury and precision, marvels of human design and enlightenment production. While on the corner, There is a remnant of the eleventh century in order to ward off these sometime demonic entities in the spiritual realm.

It is a powerful and intriguing mix of ancient and future. I love these Ancient -Future paradoxes and pictures. ( For more on this see Robert Webber’s series on Ancient Future for the church : here)

I was reminded of this when I was looking into Jon Knox’s study of the last century of Marcion’s 2nd century view of reading the Bible. Marcion was ultimately condemned as a heretic but the problem he was trying to address continues to be a problem and in the end he did push the early church to have a Christian canon that became the New Testament because of this concern.

The main concern & area of contention were these 3 ways to read the Bible.

The predominant way was to read it was Allegorically. It cannot be overstated how pervasive this reading of the Bible was – especially the Old Testament. Because this is out of favor now, and has been really for the last couple of centuries, it is often completely off of people’s radar and frequently left out of the conversation. But this approach had a powerful effect for so many centuries of church history. It has radically impacted the way we read the Bible and the way we talk about God.

Marcion wanted to get away from that way of reading the Bible. But once you do that you run into a very serious problem. What do you do with the seeming discrepancies between the portrayal of God in the Old Testament and the New.

One way was to read it for Dissonance. When one looked at the disparity between testaments, it had to be accounted for. So theories were developed – some illustrated that God had changed. Some thought that Jehovah was not the same God that sent Jesus and whom he called ‘Abba’. Another had God stepping down from Heaven to become Jesus and then returning as a different sort of God. There were lots of theories and many of them were ultimately deemed unacceptable by those who came to power as Bishops in the third and fourth centuries. Which is understandable enough , but it still doesn’t reconcile the differences that even a cursory reading brings to the surface.

If one undertook this, folks like Marcion believed that one would either be left with a Bible you can’t believe or a God you can’t believe in.

This is unacceptable and untenable to most people of faith so we attempt to read for Congruence. This often gets generously labeled as a “literal” reading. The problem is that it requires one to simply ignore the differences that Marcion was addressing. This is what most choose to do and the exact situation that most evangelicals find themselves in trying to reconcile the differences.

People who are really into the Bible often say that they read it literally. But let’s be honest here: no one reads the Bible literally. We are fooling ourselves if we think that we do. It’s not even mostly meant to be read literally. No one actually thinks that a beast with 10 heads will rise up out of the sea. No one thinks that Jesus actually meant to cut off your body parts if they caused you temptation. We all know that there was not actual ‘good Samaritan’ – that story was not a newspaper style account or report, it was a parable. and no one actually thinks that God is a shepherd. It’s imagery – it’s poetry.

No one reads the Bible literally no matter how much they protest and insist that they do. When faced with this somebody might say ‘well, we read the parts literally that are meant to be read literally’. But that is different isn’t it. You can’t say ‘I read it literally’ and by that mean ‘I read half of it literally and the other half as poetry, allegory, prophecy, parable and apocalypse.’ That – by definition – is not literal. No one reads the Bible literally. It is not meant to be read literally. Those who insist that they do are fooling themselves.

So Marcion was dealing with this in the 2nd Century. Then we took it up a notch in the last 3 Centuries in an era called Modernity which introduced a whole new set of concerns and considerations. The past 300 years have seen massive shifts in the way that we read the Bible. This is why I find Ancient-Future so intriguing. It is really helpful where we are.

And now I am even moving on from that and trying to get ready for the next century. I want to participate in the Post-Modern conversation and I want to see what the Bible has to say to it and what it has to say to the Bible.

You can call the approach post-modern or progressive or whatever you want – but my 3 interest are as follows:

3 new Ways to read the Bible.

a) you can’t read it like a contract
b) what is hermeneutics ?
you have to factor in TheoPoetics

That will be our topic in Part 7: Three New Ways to Read the Bible

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