Tag: Creation
1 If You Can’t Say It at a Child’s Grave…
Suffering is our theme for this weekend’s worship. Job’s our text. Sounds awesome, huh?
Having let the cat from the bag, I hope no one stays away because suffering is something that comes to all of us, sooner or later. None of us is getting out of this life alive. It’s possible to read through the entire book of Deuteronomy and never once make a connection to your own life. Read the first couple of chapters of Job, however, and it’s obvious: he is us, just drawn in starker relief.
While suffering is something that comes to all us, it’s also something nearly all of us get wrong. After ten years in ministry, I can’t tell you how many graves, bedsides, funeral homes and ER’s I’ve stood near and heard well-meaning Christians utter the most banal and even destructive platitudes. By and large we have no idea how to speak of suffering, which, when you think about it, is ironic for a people that worship a crucified carpenter.
This week I’ve been rereading David Bentley Hart’s little book, The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami? It’s a life-changing kind of book.
In it, David Hart recalls reading an article in the NY Times shortly after the tsunami in South Asia in 2005. The article highlighted a Sri Lankan father, who, in spite of his frantic efforts, which included swimming in the roiling sea with his wife and mother-in-law on his back, was unable to prevent any of his four children or his wife from being swept to their deaths.
In the article, the father recounted the names of his four children and then, overcome with grief, sobbed to the reporter that “My wife and children must have thought, ‘Father is here….he will save us’ but I couldn’t do it.”
In the Doors of the Sea, Hart wonders: If you had the chance to speak to this father, in the moment of his deepest grief, what should one say?
Hart argues that only a ‘moral cretin’ would have approached that father with abstract theological explanation: “Sir, your children’s deaths are a part of God’s eternal but mysterious counsels” or “Your children’s deaths, tragic as they may seem, in the larger sense serve God’s complex design for creation.” It’s all part of God’s plan in other words.
Hart says that most of us would have the good sense and empathy to talk like that to the father (though my experience tells me Hart would be surprised how many people in fact would say something like it).
This is the point at which Hart takes it to the next level and says something profound and, I think, true:
“And this should tell us something. For if we think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another’s sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them.”
The test of whether or not our speech about God is true, then, isn’t whether it’s logical, rationally demonstrable or culled from scripture. The test is whether we could say it to a parent standing at their child’s grave.
Hart’s axiom shows, I think, how only God-talk that’s centered in the crucified and risen Christ passes the test.
3 The Best Reason NOT to Believe in God
This coming weekend we conclude our fall sermon series, Seven Truths that Changed the World: Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas, with the theme of Suffering.
The author of the book whence we got the idea for this series argues that Christianity’s unique claim is that ‘not all suffering is bad.’ I’ve already mentioned how I think this book is crap (yes, it seems you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover). I’ve come clean about disliking this book but this week it’s different. This week I find its positive treatment of suffering to be both morally repugnant- and the god implied therein- and a profound misunderstanding of the Gospel, in which Death and Sin are the enemies God battles and Christ’s cross is the ‘sacrifice to END all sacrifices.’
The author’s clumsy, tone deaf theology reminded me of an analysis that is the exact opposite in sensitivity: The Brothers Karamazov.
In it, Dostoyevsky, in the character of Ivan, rages against explanation to his devout brother and gives the best reason I’ve ever encountered for not believing in God. Better than anything in philosophy. Better than anything science can dredge up. Better than any hypocrisy or tragedy I’ve encountered in ministry.
Ivan first recounts, one after another, horrific stories of tortures suffered by children- stories Dostoyevsky ripped from the pages of newspapers- and then asks his pious brother if anything could ever justify the suffering of a single, innocent child.
What makes Ivan’s argument so challenging and unique is that he doesn’t, as you might expect, accuse God for failing to save children like those from suffering. He doesn’t argue as many atheists blandly do that if a good God existed then God would do something to prevent such evil.
Instead Ivan rejects salvation itself; namely, he rejects any salvation, any providence, any cosmic ‘plan’ that would necessitate such suffering. Ivan admits there very well could be ‘a reason for everything’ that happens under the sun; Ivan just refuses to have anything to do with such a God.
So, Ivan doesn’t so much disbelieve God as he rejects God, no matter what consequences such rejection might have for Ivan. He turns in his ticket to God’s Kingdom because he wants no part of the cost at which this Kingdom comes.
When I first read the Brothers K, Ivan’s argument, which is followed by the poem ‘The Grand Inquisitor, took my breath away. I had no answer or reply to Ivan. I was convinced he was right. I still am convinced by him.
The irony, I suspect, is that Ivan’s siding with suffering of the little ones is a view profoundly shaped by the cross. It seems to me that Ivan’s compassion for innocent suffering and disavowal of ANY explanation that justifies suffering comes closer to the crucified Christ than an avowed Christian uttering an unfeeling, unthinking platitude like ‘God has a plan for everything.’
1 Are Atheists Blind?
Even after I became a Christian, I found the traditional, philosophical arguments for God’s existence to be dry and unconvincing: ‘God is that which no greater can be thought; God is the first cause of all that is.’
To my mind, there could never be satisfactory ‘proof’ for a God as paradoxical as the one we find in Jesus Christ. Still, if I were to attempt an apologia for God I would point not to the human genome or the Big Bang but to Beauty.
That we’re all imbued with an aesthetic, with an appreciation, love for and visceral need to create beauty- even as we define it in a diversity of ways that is itself a kind of beauty- has always seemed, to me at least, the best argument that there is a God from whom we owe our existence.
I understand the purely ‘natural’ explanation behind the blue glow that shimmers over mountaintops, yet there is no ‘natural’ explanation for why I would find such an occurrence radiantly beautiful. In other words, there’s a sense in which its grammatically incorrect for Christians to use the word nature. It’s created, all of it, and as created it’s all gift that should evoke gratitude and enjoyment.
As a former atheist and recovering cynic, I think I’m correct in saying that atheism’s biggest drawback is how boring it is. In trying to prove what isn’t, atheism too often misses out on what IS in all its splendor.
This weekend we continue our fall sermon series, ‘Seven Truths that Changed the Word: Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas,’ with the theme of creation as a signpost to the Almighty.
As the Psalmist puts it, this week we’re exploring how the ‘heavens declare the glory of God.’ This is same principle is what theologians and ethicists refer to under the category ‘natural law,’ the idea that creation itself bears the fingerprints of the Creator and from those marks we can deduce certain beliefs.
Here’s a beautiful essay by David Bentley Hart on leaving the mountain that towered above his home:
For two years, we have lived in a forest on the convergent lower slopes of two mountain ranges, and above a shallow wooded ravine that descends to a narrow streambed on our side and rises up on the opposite side towards the high ridge that looms above our treetops to the west. During our time here, that mountain has been a commanding and magnificent presence for us, seeming at times almost impossibly near at hand, at other times forbiddingly remote, but always silently, sublimely watchful.
Nearly every morning, no matter the season, it is mantled in clouds, sometimes so heavily that it disappears altogether behind opaque walls of pearl-gray mist.
And nearly every evening, as the sun descends below its ridgeline, the whole mountain is briefly crowned in purple and pale gold, and the southwest horizon, where the ridge descends, is transformed into a gulf of amethyst, rose, and orange.
When the darkness falls, moreover, there is none of the dull rufous pall that the glare of city lights casts up to hide the stars in heavily populated areas.
On clear nights, the sky becomes a deep crystal blue for perhaps half an hour—and then the sky becomes an ocean of stars.
Here in our shady submontane seclusion, cool breezes constantly blow down from the peaks above, and through the southern pass, even during the hottest months of summer. The soughing of the trees rises and falls as the gusts strengthen or weaken, but never wholly abates, and the sunlight—reaching us through the filtering leaves—incessantly flickers and undulates around our house. The birds are so numerous and various that their songs blend inextricably together, and only occasionally can one momentarily recognize a particular phrase—a goldfinch, say, or a cardinal—before it merges back into the larger polyphony. Then only the short, sharp staccato of the woodpeckers is immediately recognizable.
Just now, however, the more dominant music here is the oddly sweet mixed chorus of the woodland frogs, especially at night, but throughout the day as well. The rain this spring, here as in much of the country, has been heavy and regular, and so the ditches are full to overflowing, and gleam like silver when viewed at an oblique slant. The smaller depressions at their edges, also full of water, catch the reflections of overhanging leaves, and the green mingles with the gray of their silt in such a way that they often look like pools of jade. When one comes nearer, however, all the standing water is quite clear and filled with small black tadpoles. Next year’s frog choruses will be louder.
Life abounds under the brow of the mountain. All the woodland creatures one would expect, great and small, are here—deer and black bears, glistening black snakes and tawny foxes, Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds and owls and Blue-Tailed Skinks, and so on. The butterflies at the moment are becoming quite plentiful; there are Black Swallowtails, Zebra Swallowtails, Tiger Swallowtails, but also Red Admirals, and Painted Ladies, and a host of others. And azure and emerald and opalescent beetles and flies are now appearing as well.
The mountain ridge can be reached by foot, if one is willing to make the effort. The best passage to the top lies northwest of our house, and one must follow it first down into the ravine, into its green depths, through the shadows of its deciduous trees and immense Loblolly Pines, over carpets of moss and ferns and creeping juniper, and across the narrow stream that just now is coursing quite vigorously. The best path—not the easiest, but the most idyllic—lies across a small waterfall created by a thick tangle of oak and Asian Tulip roots over a minor subsidence in the soil. Mountain laurel is extremely plentiful in the ravine, and at present is in full blossom. Bronze and golden box turtles lurk in the shade and by the water.
The ascending slope from there is quite gentle at first, and only becomes an arduous climb at a few places. In all, it takes only about two hours to reach the ridge if one keeps moving. If one sets out well before dawn, and arrives at the top in time to see the sunrise, one will find oneself walking as much in the clouds as through the trees, and there is a brief period (twenty minutes or so) when the sunlight first reaches the ridge, at a sharply lateral angle, and one is all at once passing through shifting veils of translucent gold. Unfortunately, it is an effect that no photograph can capture: invariably, it is not only the rich aurous lambency of the scene that is lost, but the impression of depths within depths, layer upon layer.
In any event, I can do none of this any justice. To describe the place with anything like the detail or lyricism it merits would be a long, and perhaps interminable, task. I have relied on pictures simply because I do not quite have the words right now. In a week, we will be gone. Family responsibilities necessitate our moving to a larger house—one very pleasantly set in a grove of tall tress, but not watched over by our mountain. I simply feel as if it has been a rare privilege to live here for the time we have had, and that I ought to pay some tribute to the place before leaving, out of some sense of honor or natural piety.
So one last photograph. I actually took it soon after our arrival here, as my son (age ten at the time) was watching the sunset for the first time from our porch, over the small open glade to our southwest. But at the moment it seems to capture something for me, a mood at once of delighted wonder and deep sadness. It comes as close as I can at present to expressing the farewell that I want to wish this house and that mountain. It is a melancholy with which I suspect we are all familiar at some level, as individuals and as a race, something that haunts us and of which my sadness is only a fragmentary reminder—the feeling of having lost paradise.
You can find the article here.
0 Creationists vs. Bill Nye the Science Guy
Sounds like my sermon Sunday was timely, if I do say so myself. Here is story from the Huffington Post about Bill Nye weighing in on creationism’s harmful effects on American education and taking aim at lawmakers who, trying to score political points, who advocate such measures in education.
On a related note, I received this from a friend in the church this weekend:
It’s listening to testimony from scientists like her that makes me think creationism leaves us with the following options:
1. Sincere (even devout) scientists like her are all, collectively and willfully misleading us about the nature of the world and centuries of scientific discovery.
2. God deliberately deceives us by creating a natural world that points to things like a Big Bang and evolution.
3. Sin is so strong and pervasive our ability to study the natural world and arrive at sound conclusions is impaired.
Option #1 seems paranoid at best.
Option #2 seems to render us a God with little resemblance to the God of Jesus Christ.
Option #3 seems to believe that the power of Sin is greater than the power of grace- as though Jesus did not die on the Cross and did not defeat Sin.
To my mind, none of these seem as reasonable as concluding that Genesis seeks confess something of who God is not how (or when) God did something. Listening to Genesis read in church 4 different times this weekend, it becomes obvious what the text is meant to do rhetorically. The phrases ‘God created’ and ‘it was good’ repeat like crazy. This is the point of the story.
5 A God More Interesting Than Creationism
A Sermon on Genesis 1
June 9, 1993:
The first date. My first date with the new girl on the swim team, who would eventually become my wife.
6/9/93: The opening date of Steven Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park film.
The first movie in which Ali and I held hands.
At the point in the movie when the guy who played Newman on Seinfeld gets his face eaten by a whatever-raptor- at that point in the movie on June 9, 1993 I leaned over and whispered into Ali’s ear: ‘Of course, it’s all a hoax. Dinosaurs never actually existed.’
Of course, Ali had only just met me. She didn’t know I was being sarcastic, and I could tell by the look in her eyes that what I’d just said might disqualify me as a future boyfriend.
When it comes to the Book of Genesis, when it comes to creation, it seems like dates are always at the heart of the matter.
Dates like November 24, 1859:
The date Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species and threw the bible-believing world for a Copernican loop.
Dates like July 21, 1925:
The date a jury in Dayton, Tennessee found high school teacher, John Scopes, guilty of violating the Butler Act, the state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools.
When it comes to how and when it all began and how that beginning squares with the beginning of scripture, it seems like the debate’s always about dates.
Dates like 4.5 Billion:
The number of years ago, according to scientific consensus, the earth was born with a bang.
Dates like 2.5 Billion:
The best scientific guesstimate for when life first opened its eyes in the primordial ooze.
It’s always about dates.
Dates like 6,000:
The date that creationists say God first flicked on the lights and started it all according to the step-by-step sequence in scripture.
Dates like May 28, 2007:
The date that the $27 million Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky, a museum where visitors can find a life-sized T-Rex, who apparently forgot he was a carnivore, cavorting in the Garden with Adam and Eve.
It’s all about dates.
Dates like September 24, 2012:
As in, tomorrow. The date I’ll likely get a handful of emails angry at me for lacing my comments about that museum with sarcasm.
Dates are everything.
Dates like April 1992:
The date I portrayed William Jennings Bryan in the Governor’s School production of Inherit the Wind, the stage version of the Scopes Monkey Trial.
April 1992– that was almost exactly 3 years before I became a Christian. Playing William Jennings Bryan, the famed biblical literalist, I had to learn to say:
Yes, I believed Joshua literally commanded the sun to stop.
Yes, I believed there literally was morning and evening before God created the sun on the 4th Day,
Yes, I believed the Earth was literally only thousands of years old not millions or billions.
April 1992, 3 years before I became a Christian, that was the date I became convinced that in order to invite Jesus into your heart you literally had to check your brain at the door.
That believing in God required you also to believe that centuries of science were all a deliberate hoax.
Or, worse, God deliberately deceives us.
And in April 1992 I decided that such a God literally wouldn’t be worth believing in.
When it comes to the Book of Genesis, when it comes to how and when it all began and who or what was behind it, it seems like dates are always at the heart of the matter.
Which is funny.
Because there’s one date that seldom gets mentioned: 1849– 10 years before Charles Darwin spoiled everyone’s fun.
1849:
That’s the date Austen Henry Layard excavated the ruined Library of Ashurbanipal in Mosul, Iraq. In the ruins of that library, Austen Henry Layard discovered the original creation story.
Maybe you know it.
It goes like this:
In the beginning, when the earth was without form and chaos and dark waters covered the face of the deep, god brought forth life.
On the first day, there was light. Light that emanated from god and god separated the light from the darkness.
On the second day, god created the firmament; god created a dome to push back the waters and god called it sky.
On the third day, god gathered the waters in one place so that dry land could appear.
On the fourth day, god created the sun and the moon and the stars in the sky and named them.
And day six god created humankind to do god’s work and on day seven god rested and exalted in celebration for what he done.
Sound familiar?
And this work of creation- it all begins, when Marduk, a young warrior god, slays his mother, Tiamat, the goddess of chaos, with weapons of wind, lightening and thunder.
And with one half of Tiamat’s carcass, Marduk creates land. With the other half of her body, Marduk fashions the heavens.
And then Marduk declares:
“Blood I will mass and cause bones to be.”
And then from the blood of a slain god, Markduk creates man and woman.
To be his slaves.
As he reigns in Babylon.
When it comes to how and when it all began, it’s all about dates.
Dates like 2,000 BC:
The date this creation story, this Babylonian creation story, the Enuma Elish, was first written down, and probably it was spoken long before that.
2,000 BC: which is, roughly, 1500 years before our creation story in Genesis.
Take a guess where we got our story.
When it comes to the Book of Genesis it’s all about dates.
Dates are everything. But can be easy to forget.
So pay attention, here’s another date for you: 587 BC.
587 BC:
The date that’s the 9/11 of the Bible.
587 BC:
That’s the year Babylon invaded Israel, destroyed the Temple, and left the Promised Land in smoldering ruins and carried God’s People back to Babylon in chains.
587 BC:
The first year of the Babylonian Captivity. The first year Babylon tried to do what any captors do to their captives:
Convince them that there’s no plan or purpose or point to life.
And thus there’s no hope for yours.
Convince them that this world is a dark, violent, eye-for-a-tooth place.
And thus it’s naive to expect anything but suffering to come your way.
Convince them that its written into the fabric of creation:
That we’re made from the blood of victims.
Thus, don’t be surprised if someone makes you their victim.
The world is the way it is because the gods are who they are.
It’s all about dates.
Dates like 586 BC and 585 BC and 584 BC and every year for the next 50 years.
Those are all the years of their captivity that Israel didn’t give up faith.
Those are the dates that Israel, despite their suffering, refused to worship Babylon’s gods.
Because Israel already knew who God was: the one, true God.
That God had heard their cries when they were slaves in Egypt.
Israel already knew the capital G God.
And so in 586 and 585 and 584 and for years after that, they didn’t bow down to Babylon’s story.
They co-opted it.
They took it and they changed it.
To stick it in the eye of their captors.
Because they knew:
There’s only one God.
There was nothing before creation but God.
God created from nothing.
And because God created out of nothing, this world: it’s gift.
You and I: gift.
Everything around us, every living thing, your neighbor, even your enemy.
Gift. All of it. It’s all good.
It’s all given just so God can share his life with us.
Israel Babylon’s story and made it their own.
Because they already knew:
You and I- we’re not made from the blood of victims.
We’re not made to fight and struggle with each other.
We’re made to reflect this God. We’re made in God’s image.
We’re made to give and to love and to listen and to forgive.
And to share our life with God.
And if we’re made to share God’s life
Then you can’t say life is pointless.
Because it couldn’t have a bigger POINT.
God’s people took Babylon’s story and they made it their own.
Genesis 1-
It’s not an explanation of how it all began.
It’s good news to captives.
It’s not a step-by-step description of how it all happened.
It’s a prophetic profession of faith. It’s a slave song.
It’s a defiant declaration that no matter how things seem now our God is good and what he’s made is very good. So don’t give up hope that one day soon he will reconcile whatever is broken in this world.
Dates are always key.
Dates like September 2003.
That’s the date of the first local clergy meeting I ever attended.
There’s lot things seminary doesn’t teach you. ‘Don’t ever go to local clergy meetings’ tops that list. At this meeting, it was all middle-aged fundamentalists and me.
We met for lunch at a BBQ joint. At the beginning of the meeting, the chair, a Brethren pastor ironically named Christian, passed around a petition to the local school board to teach creation science (whatever that is) in the schools.
It wasn’t even a matter of discussion. Christian just assumed we’d all sign it.
And all of them did.
When the petition got to me, I said: ‘Uh…yeah, I’m not signing that.’
‘Why not?’ Christian asked.
‘Because it’s…umm…stupid.’ I said.
‘You don’t believe in evolution do you?’ he asked.
And I replied, in love: ‘Well, I used to believe in evolution but you seem to have successfully remained in the stone age so who knows.’
He frowned and told me I’d never make it in ministry by being sarcastic.
‘We’ll see about that’ I said.
I handed Christian the petition, sans my John Hancock.
And he said: ‘You know, Jason, if a literal reading of Genesis falls away so does the entire faith.’
And the thing is- I knew he was wrong.
And I could prove it because I knew the date.
I love dates. I’ve always been good with dates.
So I gave him the date: 1313 BC, maybe the most important date.
1,313 BC (approximately):
That’s the date of the Exodus. The date God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt. The date Israel started reciting their Credo: ‘The Lord heard our voice and brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm…’
1313:
That’s the date, about 700 years before Israel found themselves slaves in Babylon co-opting a creation story.
1313 vs. 587:
In other words, Israel’s faith in God the Deliverer preceded their faith in God the Creator.
Just because it’s first in your bibles doesn’t mean it was first in Israel’s life with God.
Their Exodus experience is older than the Genesis story.
Their exodus was their genesis.
You can’t say a literal reading of Genesis 1 is necessary for faith because the Jews believed in and had a relationship with and worshipped this God before they ever had this story.
Israel didn’t need a literal creation story to prove that God existed. How silly is that?
They already knew God existed.
Because they knew God.
Because God had delivered them.
Here’s one last date: September 6, 2012.
A couple Thursdays ago. That’s the date I sat in my office and spoke to a woman here in the congregation. A woman who could barely get the words out.
A woman who described her life as pointless, trapped.
A woman who told me she couldn’t swallow that God loved her because she couldn’t like herself.
Here’s the dirty little secret every pastor knows: she’s not alone.
I can name more people like her than not like her.
So hear the good news:
It’s not about dates, not at all. It’s about deliverance.
So if you think your life has no purpose
If you think you have no value
If you feel trapped in a relationship that will never change
If you’re convinced you’re a captive to your past
If you don’t like the person that stares back at you in the mirror
If you’ve had your hopes exiled and are on the downward side of happiness
If you get out of bed every day thinking today won’t be as good as yesterday
And tomorrow will be worse
I want you to know:
No matter how things seem.
Our God is good and what he’s made, everything, is gift.
And that means you’re given to this world as a gift too.
And that means:
The way things are isn’t the way things have to be.
Isn’t the way things always will be.
Because from the very genesis of our faith-
Our God is in the habit of rescuing our present
And redeeming our past
And delivering us into a new future.
Because our God is good
And he won’t rest until things are ‘very good’ again.
0 Ex Nihilo
As we’ve explored a bit already, Christians and Jews read the Genesis story and see in it a God who creates out of nothing. This impacts both how we understand creation and ourselves as creatures and how we understand God.
That God creates from nothing points to the giftedness of creation. Whether God created literally according to lyrical layout of Genesis 1 or whether God created through something like the Big Bang doesn’t really change the substance of what Christians confess in the Creed. Everything is a gift. Everything depends on the graciousness of God.
That God creates from nothing also points to the radical, absolute Otherness, Transcendence and Lordship of God. The Genesis story, and the Abrahamic faiths that grew from it, see an ontological difference between Creator and creation. Ontological is an impressive theological term meaning ‘being.’
Simply (re)stated, though God creates God is not a part of the world nor is the world a part of God. Because God creates from nothing, God is radically other than creation. This distinguishes Christianity from a number Ancient Near Eastern, Eastern and New Age religions that either understand the created world as something co-inhering in the divine life or simply identify the divine with the natural world.
Creation is charged with sacredness because God made it and thus it points to God in an almost sacramental sense. But creation is not God.
1 How is the Bible Authoritative?
I’m thinking about the creation story this week for Sunday’s sermon.
I’ve learned the hard way that there are a few sermon topics that have the potential to get listeners’ dander up if you mess with their preconceived notions:
1. Blood Atonement
2. Heaven (and Hell)
3. Forgiveness
4. Authority of Scripture
I’ve learned the hard way that for many what’s at stake in the creation story in Genesis 1 isn’t what it says about the goodness of God or creation. What’s at stake is whether scripture is authoritative or not. Is it really the Word of God, or how do we understand it as the Word? Can it be trusted? Our need to protect scripture, in other words, often forces us into a way of reading Genesis that would’ve been alien to the ancient Jews and even to a first century Jew like Jesus: a literal reading.
I expect to get some pushback this Sunday. Accordingly, I thought this essay by NT Wright on how scripture is authoritative could be helpful.
Biblical Authority: the Problem
When people in the church talk about authority they are very often talking about controlling people or situations. They want to make sure that everything is regulated properly, that the church does not go off the rails doctrinally or ethically, that correct ideas and practices are upheld and transmitted to the next generation. ‘Authority’ is the place where we go to find out the correct answers to key questions such as these. This notion, however, runs into all kinds of problems when we apply it to the Bible. Is that really what the Bible is for? Is it there to control the church? Is it there simply to look up the correct answers to questions that we, for some reason, already know?
As we read the Bible we discover that the answer to these questions seems in fact to be ‘no’. Most of the Bible does not consist of rules and regulations—lists of commands to be obeyed. Nor does it consist of creeds—lists of things to be believed. And often, when there ARE lists of rules or of creedal statements, they seem to be somewhat incidental to the purpose of the writing in question. One might even say, in one (admittedly limited) sense, that there is no biblical doctrine of the authority of the Bible. For the most part the Bible itself is much more concerned with doing a whole range of other things rather than talking about itself. There are, of course, key passages, especially at transition moments like 2 Timothy or 2 Peter, where the writers are concerned that the church of the next generation should be properly founded and based. At precisely such points we find statements emerging about the place of scripture within the life of the church. But such a doctrine usually has to be inferred. It may well be possible to infer it, but it is not (for instance) what Isaiah or Paul are talking about. Nor is it, for the most part, what Jesus is talking about in the gospels. He isn’t constantly saying, ‘What about scripture? What about scripture?’ It is there sometimes, but it is not the central thing that we have sometimes made it. And the attempt by many evangelicals to argue a general doctrine of scripture out of the use made of the Old Testament in the New is doomed to failure, despite its many strong points, precisely because the relation between the Old and New Testaments is not the same as the relation between the New Testament and ourselves.[1] If we look in scripture to find out where in practice authority is held to lie, the answer on page after page does not address our regular antitheses at all. As we shall see, in the Bible all authority lies with God himself.
The question of biblical authority, of how there can be such a thing as an authoritative Bible, is not, then, as simple as it might look. In order to raise it at all, we have to appreciate that it is a sub-question of some much more general questions. (1) How can any text function as authoritative? Once one gets away from the idea of a rule book such as might function as authoritative in, say, a golf club, this question gets progressively harder. (2) How can any ancient text function as authoritative? If you were a Jew, wanting to obey the Torah (or, perhaps, obey the Talmud) you would find that there were all sorts of difficult questions about how a text, written so many years ago, can function as authoritative today. Actually, it is easier with the Talmud than with the Bible because the Talmud is designed very specifically to be a rule book for human beings engaged in life in a particular sort of community. But much of what we call the Bible—the Old and New Testaments—is not a rule book; it is narrative. That raises a further question: (3) How can an ancient narrative text be authoritative? How, for instance, can the book of Judges, or the book of Acts, be authoritative? It is one thing to go to your commanding officer first thing in the morning and have a string of commands barked at you. But what would you do if, instead, he began ‘Once upon a time . . .’?
These questions press so acutely that the church has, down the centuries, tried out all sorts of ways of getting round them, and of thereby turning the apparently somewhat recalcitrant material in the Bible itself into material that can more readily be used as ‘authoritative’ in the senses demanded by this or that period of church history. I want to look at three such methods and suggest that each in its own way actually belittles the Bible, thereby betraying a low doctrine of inspiration in practice, whatever may be held in theory.
Timeless Truth?
A regular response to these problems is to say that the Bible is a repository of timeless truth. There are some senses in which that is true. But the sense in which it is normally meant is certainly not true. The whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation is culturally conditioned. It is all written in the language of particular times, and evokes the cultures in which it came to birth. It seems, when we get close up to it, as though, if we grant for a moment that in some sense or other God has indeed inspired this book, he has not wanted to give us an abstract set of truths unrelated to space and time. He has wanted to give us something rather different, which is not (in our post-enlightenment world) nearly so easy to handle as such a set of truths might seem to be. The problem of the gospels is one particular instance of this question. And at this point in the argument evangelicals often lurch towards Romans as a sort of safe place where they can find a basic systematic theology in the light of which one can read everything else. I have often been assured by evangelical colleagues in theological disciplines other than my own that my perception is indeed true: namely, that the Protestant and evangelical tradition has not been half so good on the gospels as it has been on the epistles. We don’t quite know what to do with them. Because, I think, we have come to them as we have come to the whole Bible, looking for particular answers to particular questions. And we have thereby made the Bible into something which it basically is not. I remember a well-known Preacher saying that he thought a lot of Christians used the Bible as an unsorted edition of Daily Light. It really ought to be arranged into neat little devotional chunks, but it happens to have got all muddled up. The same phenomenon occurs, at a rather different level, when People treat it as an unsorted edition of Calvin’s Institutes, the Westminster Confession, the UCCF Basis of Faith, or the so-called ‘Four Spiritual Laws’. But to treat the Bible like that is, in fact, simply to take your place in a very long tradition of Christians who have tried to make the Bible into a set of abstract truths and rules—abstract devotional doctrinal, or evangelistic snippets here and there.
This problem goes back ultimately, I think, to a failure on the part of the Reformers to work out fully their proper insistence on the literal sense of scripture as the real locus of God’s revelation, the place where God was really speaking in scripture. The literal sense seems fine when it comes to saying, and working with, what (for instance) Paul actually meant in Romans. (This itself can actually be misleading too, but we let it pass for the moment.) It’s fine when you’re attacking mediaeval allegorizing of one sort or another. But the Reformers, I think, never worked out a satisfactory answer to the question, how can the literal sense of stories—which purport to describe events in (say) first century Palestine—how can that be authoritative? If we are not careful, the appeal to ‘timeless truths’ not only distorts the Bible itself, making it into the sort of book it manifestly is not, but also creeps back, behind the Reformers’ polemic against allegory, into a neo-allegorization which is all the more dangerous for being unrecognised.[2]
Witness to Primary Events?
So, more recently, we have seen attempts on the part of many scholars to make this very difficult text authoritative by suggesting that it is authoritative insofar as it witnesses to primary events. This emphasis, associated not least with the post-war biblical theology movement, at least has the merit of taking seriously the historical setting, the literal sense of the text. The problem about that, however, can be seen quite easily. Supposing we actually dug up Pilate’s court records, and supposing we were able to agree that they gave a fair transcript of Jesus’ trial. Would they be authoritative in any of the normal senses in which Christians have claimed that the Bible is authoritative? I think not. A variation on this theme occurs when people say that the Bible (or the New Testament) is authoritative because it witnesses to early Christian experience. There is a whole range of modern scholarship that has assumed that the aim of New Testament study is to find the early Christians at work or at prayer or at evangelism or at teaching. The Bible then becomes authoritative because it lets us in on what it was like being an early Christian—and it is the early Christian experience that is then treated as the real authority, the real norm. In both of these variations, then, authority has shifted from the Bible itself to the historically reconstructed event or experience. We are not really talking about the authority of the Bible, at all.
Timeless Function?
Another (related) way in which the Bible has been used, with the frequent implication that it is in such use that its authority consists, is in the timeless functions which it is deemed to perform. For Bultmann, the New Testament functioned (among other things) as issuing the timeless call to decision. For Ignatius and those who have taught Jesuit spirituality, it can be used in a timeless sense within pastoral practice. Now this is not a million miles from certain things which I shall be suggesting later on in this lecture as appropriate uses of scripture. But at the level of theory it is vital that we say, once more, that such uses in and of themselves are not what is primarily meant when we say that the Bible is authoritative: or, if they are, that they thereby belittle the Bible, and fail to do justice to the book as we actually have it. All three methods I have outlined involve a certain procedure which ultimately seems to be illegitimate: that one attempts, as it were, to boil off certain timeless truths, models, or challenges into a sort of ethereal realm which is not anything immediately to do with space-time reality in order then to carry them across from the first century to any other given century and re-liquefy them (I hope I’m getting my physics right at this point), making them relevant to a new situation. Once again, it is not really the Bible that is being regarded as the ‘real’ authority. It is something else.
Evangelicals and Biblical Authority
It seems to be that evangelicalism has flirted with, and frequently held long-running love affairs with all of these different methods of using the Bible, all of these attempts to put into practice what turns out to be quite an inarticulate sense that it is somehow the real locus of authority. And that has produced what one can now see in many so-called scriptural churches around the world—not least in North America. It seems to be the case that the more that you insist that you are based on the Bible, the more fissiparous you become; the church splits up into more and more little groups, each thinking that they have got biblical truth right. And in my experience of teaching theological students I find that very often those from a conservative evangelical background opt for one such view as the safe one, the one with which they will privately stick, from which they will criticize the others. Failing that, they lapse into the regrettable (though sometimes comprehensible) attitude of temporary book-learning followed by regained positivism: we will learn for a while the sort of things that the scholars write about, then we shall get back to using the Bible straight. There may be places and times where that approach is the only possible one, but I am quite sure that the Christian world of 1989 is not among them. There is a time to grow up in reading the Bible as in everything else. There is a time to take the doctrine of inspiration seriously. And my contention here is that evangelicalism has usually done no better than those it sometimes attacks in taking inspiration seriously. Methodologically, evangelical handling of scripture has fallen into the same traps as most other movements, even if we have found ways of appearing to extricate ourselves.
The Belittling of the Bible
The problem with all such solutions as to how to use the Bible is that they belittle the Bible and exalt something else. Basically they imply—and this is what I mean when I say that they offer too low a view of scripture—that God has, after all, given us the wrong sort of book and it is our job to turn it into the right sort of book by engaging in these hermeneutical moves, translation procedures or whatever. They imply that the real place where God has revealed himself—the real locus of authority and revelation—is, in fact, somewhere else; somewhere else in the past in an event that once took place, or somewhere else in a timeless sphere which is not really hooked into our world at all out touches it tangentially, or somewhere in the present in ‘my own experience’, or somewhere in the future in some great act which is yet to come. And such views, I suggest, rely very heavily on either tradition (including evangelical tradition) or reason, often playing off one against the other, and lurching away from scripture into something else. I have a suspicion that most of you are as familiar with this whole process as I am. If you are not, you would be within a very short time of beginning to study theology at any serious level.
My conclusion, then, is this: that the regular views of scripture and its authority which we find not only outside but also inside evangelicalism fail to do justice to what the Bible actually is—a book, an ancient book, an ancient narrative book. They function by tuning that book into something else, and by implying thereby that God has, after all, given us the wrong sort of book. This is a low doctrine of inspiration, whatever heights are claimed for it and whatever words beginning with ‘in-’ are used to label it. I propose that what we need to do is to re-examine the concept of authority itself and see if we cannot do a bit better.
The Bible and Biblical Authority
All Authority is God’s Authority
So, secondly within the first half of this lecture, I want to suggest that scripture’s own view of authority focuses on the authority of God himself. (I recall a well-known lecturer once insisting that ‘there can be no authority other than scripture’, and thumping the tub so completely that I wanted to ask ‘but what about God?’) If we think for a moment what we are actually saying when we use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’, we must surely acknowledge that this is a shorthand way of saying that, though authority belongs to God, God has somehow invested this authority in scripture. And that is a complex claim. It is not straightforward. When people use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ they very often do not realize this. Worse, they often treat the word ‘authority’ as the absolute, the fixed point, and make the word ‘scripture’ the thing which is moving around trying to find a home against it.
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0 The Risk of Love
I posted earlier about the Christian conviction that sin/evil is nothing, literally ‘no-thing.’ If you’re like me when I first heard this metaphysical perspective, then you’re head is hurting.
On the one hand, it’s easy to see how logic dictates the nothingness or unreality of evil. On the other hand, putting the matter into these philosophical categories doesn’t necessarily answer our felt questions about why bad things happen to good people (aside: if we’re sinners, then the adjective ‘good’ is an assumption isn’t it?) or why wholesale tragedies like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan occur.
A less philosophical, easier to understand, but only slightly more satisfying way to think about this comes from Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. Its an answer rooted in God’s risk of love towards us.
For Augustine, the drama of the human story and the beauty of the Christ story is that God creates so that we can share life and love with God.
God didn’t create a mechanized universe in which we have no choice but to worship dutifully. God wasn’t creating automatons or servile followers. God was creating friends and lovers. Because God is in the Trinity loving relationship, God wants to share loving relationship with us.
Consider my wife.
What makes our relationship authentic, loving and beautiful is that both of us love one another freely. It’s a free exchange of love. It’s reciprocal. Nothing is forced. If it was, you’d call it abuse not love. You’d think it tragic.
As any friend or lover knows, loving relationship can’t be coerced. If it is then it’s only a pale imitation of the actual thing.
In creation, then, God risks that we might not reciprocate God’s love. God hardwires us for love. God calls us back to relationship through Abraham, Israel, the prophets and Christ but God never forces our hand.
The risk inherent in God’s love is our freedom.
And as we are free to love God we are free to love other ends.
What we call sin is disordered love: love of money, love of pleasure, love of an ideology etc.
And what we call evil is often the wreckage of our disordered loves. The fact remains evil is mysterious and, as the Book of Job (38) amply demonstrates, any theory or explanation of it ultimately proves unsatisfying. As vague and metaphysical as it can sound, I can’t help thinking our calling evil ‘a shadow, nothing, not God’ is as faithful a way of speaking as we can legitimately muster. In the face of suffering, what Christians should speak are not answers or theories but confessions and professions. We should affirm not God’s providence (‘there’s a plan for everything…’) but the scope of God’s love (‘Jesus wept…’).
After all, what is critical for Christians to remember in such discussions- and this is what Augustine was keen to secure- is that the Cross is the full measure of God’s love and character and that all of creation shimmers with that same perfect charity and love.
Explanations may prove elusive but this way of speaking of God forbids faithful Christians from ever consigning another’s suffering to God’s will, and in the face of natural evil Christians should only mourn, help redeem disaster and to keep looking for creation’s goodness that lies below tragedy’s surface.
Because if God is Trinity peace is always a more determinative, if at times hard to see, reality.
0 Hell and Nothingness
So Genesis 1 stresses that you and I, everyone and everything, is good. Thoroughly. Creation and all that is within it is an occasion for God’s joy and delight.
Certainly that’s a naive perspective is it not? I need only travel a mile from my house to Route One to see contradictory evidence of infinite goodness. I need only look at the pictures of those soldiers serving overseas on the church wall to discover that all is not perfect in the world. Right?
Very often it feels easier to believe in Sin, Evil and Broken-ness than it does to believe in God’s goodness or our own. It’s cliche to hear theologians admit that Sin is the only objectively verifiable doctrine Christians espouse. Just think how most street-preacher’s tracts begin not with God’s infinite love expressed in Jesus but with Sin and the wages earned from Sin and only then wind their way to a God who loves me.
Our ‘faith’ in the reality of Evil and Sin is so unshakably strong Christians sometimes speak as though Evil were a Reality or Presence within our world in defiant opposition to God- as though Evil were the villain to God’s protagonist, paired equals squaring off with the fate of creation hanging in the balance.
This way of thinking about evil, though commonplace, was a heresy Augustine himself fought against his entire life. Here’s why:
If you take a logical step back from the passion we feel about a creation that seems always to be suffering, then you see that Evil cannot be its own Reality, Presence or Substance apart from or in opposition to God.
If it were then logically God would not be all-powerful, perfect love, and creation would no longer be the overflowing of an infinitely self-giving God. As David Hart notes, there is a sense in which Christians confess that this world is the only world God could’ve created, not by necessity or limitation but because God is perfect freedom and cannot but express himself perfectly and completely. This is the only world God could’ve created because this is God’s perfect expression of his love.
If David Hart is right about the goodness of creation, then what is evil?
What is sin?
In C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, hell is envisioned as an existence where everything and every inhabitant exists only as a shadow with no solid reality. Lewis’ story is a narrative take on Augustine’s understanding of the sin and evil.
Simply put (okay, not so simple), evil- whether it is natural evil, such as a tsunami, or radical evil, a human act such as the Holocaust- is not a real thing in itself. It has no substance or existence of its own.
The early Church, following Augustine’s lead, referred to evil as a ‘privation of the good’ or the ‘absence of the good.’ John Wesley echoed this same understanding when he defined sin and salvation primarily in a medical sense; sin is a disease of our nature and salvation, as the Greek word for salvation itself means, is ‘healing. All this is to say that for the Church the most consistent way of thinking about evil is that its ‘nothing.’ Literally, it’s no-thing. This is why St. Paul can afford to sound so confident about the ‘principalities and powers’ exercising no more dominion in the world than we afford them.
Just as evil is thought to be nothing in the ancient church, hell then was thought to be not a place of eternal punishment so much as an existence- even in this world- of those who refuse God’s love and goodness; those who live outside of or independent from God, who encompasses all being, eventually and unavoidably whither away into nothingness. Shadow as Lewis describes it.
0 Creation and the Sinking Ship Fallacy
We’re in a sermon series on the ‘Seven Truths that Changed the Word: Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas.’ This weekend’s theme is Creation Ex Nihilo. I seldom reflect too much on creation theology, mostly, I think, because creation theology tends to be abstracted from the particularity of Christ.
But that doesn’t mean creation isn’t an integral part of our faith. It isn’t to say that creation isn’t a part of the Good News. There’s plenty of grist for reflection.
This week I’ve been thinking about those people I encountered on doorsteps and how impoverished their faith-view was because if there’s one thing the Genesis story makes clear about creation: It Really Is Good.
Yes, creation is fallen. Yes, the present world as its splayed across the front pages of the Washington Post is far from what God intended with the opening salvo of the Genesis story. Yes, creation is, as Paul writes in Romans 8, groaning while it awaits Christ’s final redemption. And it’s true we’ve turned what God’s given as gift into an object to be used and abused at our pleasure.
Traditionally, Christians- no, Protestants- have been very faithful when it comes to affirming creation’s broken-ness.
So good, in fact, I don’t think we need to dwell on it anymore.
Traditionally, Christians- no, Protestants- have been sinfully terrible at affirming the goodness of God’s creation.
Christians have even neglected the goodness of creation in the name of faithfulness. Far too often Christians have emphasized the ‘spiritual’ at the expense of the material, thinking that true fidelity required a miserly disposition towards the pleasures of this world.
Misreading St. Paul, Christians have regrettably thought faithfulness required a distinction between the spiritual and the material, between the body and the soul, between the spirit and the flesh. Mistakenly looking towards the pie in the sky, Christians just as often have stressed the goodness of the next life at the expense of this life.
The variety and frequency of error notwithstanding, a Christian confession of God as Creator can abide by no division between flesh and spirit, material and soul. When we say God created the heavens and the earth, we remember that God declared our surroundings ‘good.’ God looked upon our earth, our bodies, our felt experience and called it ‘very good.’
Good food is very good. Love for another is very good. A beautiful vista, a deep friendship, a worthwhile endeavor- they’re all very, very good because that’s how God made them.
Christianity isn’t about practicing a sort of split personality syndrome when it comes to our religious versus everyday lives. Christian selflessness doesn’t mean we regard creation with a miserly disdain. An authentic Christianity sees every moment and every object in our lives as graced. Failure to enjoy life and creation is in a very real sense a theological failure.
Christians are so often so focused on the Cross they forget that God deemed our earthly, fleshly lives good enough to take flesh himself in Christ.
The temptation to divide existence into spiritual and material distinctions is a fourth century heresy called Manicheanism, which in St. Augustine’s day saw the created world as inherently corrupt, broken and even evil. The spiritual, heavenly, world precisely because it was not finite was desirable. Thus the goal of the spiritual life was to escape our earthly lives to the spiritual realm.
St. Augustine devoted a large number of years to debating and defeating the Manichees. Even though modern believers still exhibit a propensity to divide the spiritual from the material, Augustine believed the Trinity warned against any such inclination. If God is Trinity and if Creation is the result of God’s gracious, unnecessary self-giving, then to question Creation’s goodness is, in effect, to question the goodness of God.