The previous chapter emphasized a Christocentric approach to reading scripture as a step toward overcoming biblicism through a more genuinely evangelical reading of the Bible. This chapter continues with more proposals focused on the need to learn to live with more complexity and ambiguity than biblicism allows.
Embracing the Bible for What It Obviously Is
We ought in humble submission to accept the real scriptures that God has provided us as they are, rather than ungratefully and stubbornly forcing scripture to be something that it is not because of a theory we hold about what it must and should be. One of the strangest things about the biblicist mentality is its evident refusal to take the Bible at face value. Ironically, while biblicists claim to take the Bible with utmost seriousness for what it obviously teaches, their theory about the Bible drives them to try to make it something that it evidently is not. Presumably God knew what he was doing in providing his covenant people, through inspiration, with the written testimony of his redemptive work in history. Presumably God is confident—to speak in quite human terms—that the actual scriptural texts he has given his church are sufficient for communicating well the message of the gospel.
To the extent that the critique of this present book is valid, however, biblicism forces a gap between what the Bible actually is and what its theory demands that the Bible be. Thus, it is hard to conclude otherwise than that biblicists are shamefully untrusting and ungrateful when it comes to receiving God’s written word as God has chosen to confer it. In effect, biblicists throw the Bible as it is back in God’s face, declaring that they know what scripture has to be like and that they will make sure that the scriptural texts that God gave us are treated and used not as what they are but as the biblicists insist they must be. Regardless of the actual Bible that God has given his church, biblicists want a Bible that is different. They want a Bible that answers all their questions, that tells them how to have marital intimacy, that gives principles for economics and medicine and science and cooking—and does so inerrantly. They essentially demand—in God’s name, yet actually based on a faulty modern philosophy of language and knowledge—a sacred text that will make them certain and secure, even though that is not actually the kind of text that God gave.
By contrast, we should “confess at the outset, along with the historic Christian church, that the Bible is the word of God [written]. That is our starting point, a confession of faith, not creating a standard of what the Bible should look like and then assessing the Bible on the basis of that standard. . . . Once we confess that the Bible is God’s word, we can look at how it is God’ word.”[228] Goldingay likewise observes: “The fact that the Bible is inspired provides our thinking with a starting point. The nature of the Bible’s inspiration we must learn from scripture itself.”[229]
If American evangelical biblicists are to learn to move beyond biblicism, they must step back from biblicism’s highly demanding theory and move toward a humble, trusting acceptance of the Bible as it actually is, as God actually saw fit to deliver it to his church. They will have to learn to start with the scriptures that they actually hold in their hands, however marked as they are by the fully human (as well as divinely inspired) process that brought them into being.
Rather than saying, “Here is what God must have given us in the Bible, so let us make it so,” a better approach would say, “Here are the scriptures that God in his wisdom has delivered to us. Bless his name. How ought we best to read and understand them?” Such an approach follows the lead of Peter Enns, who writes, “I have found again and again that listening to how the Bible itself behaves and suspending preconceived notions (as much as that is possible) about how we think the Bible ought to behave is refreshing, creative, exciting, and spiritually rewarding. . . . One must observe how scripture does behave and draw conclusions from that. . . . We are to place our trust in God who gave us Scripture, not in our own conceptions of how Scripture ought to be.”[230] Here is how Gordon Fee puts it:
God did not choose to give us a series of timeless, non-culture-bound theological propositions to be believed and imperatives to be obeyed. Rather, he chose to speak his eternal word this way, in historically particular circumstances and in every kind of literary genre. By the very way God gave us this Word, he locked in the ambiguity. One should not fight God and insist that he give us his Word in another way or, as we are more apt to do, rework his Word along theological or cultural prejudgments that turn it into a minefield of principles, propositions or imperatives but denude it of its ad hoc character as truly human. The ambiguity is part of what God did in giving us the Word in this way.[231]
Related to this trusting perspective is the merit of evangelicals embracing a time-honored view of God’s revelation as “accommodating” human limitations.[232] The idea of divine accommodation, or condescension, concerning scripture refers to God’s adoption of his human audience’s finite and even fallen perspectives in his communicating work of inspiring scripture. Accommodation takes seriously the qualitative difference between created, fallen humanity and the absolutely transcendent God—acknowledging that such a God necessarily must accommodate himself to the limits of human perception, cognition, and understanding. It suggests that, in the process of divine inspiration, God did not correct every incomplete or mistaken viewpoint of the biblical authors in order to communicate through them with their readers. That would have been distracting. The point of the inspired scripture was to communicate its central point, not to straighten out every kink and dent in the views of all the people involved in biblical inscripturation and reception along the way.
Many church fathers and theologians across history have taught a few different versions of divine accommodation in scripture, as a means to help make sense of apparent confusions and errors in the Bible. These include Origen of Alexandria, Justin, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Augustine of Hippo, and John Calvin—last but not least for many American evangelicals. “Calvin,” for instance, “likens this divine ‘descent’ to the way a nurse will speak to a child, condescending to our ‘ignorance’ and thus ‘prattling to us in Scripture in a rough and popular style.’”[233]
Contemporary advocates of divine accommodation include Kenton Sparks, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Peter Enns.[234] D. A. Carson too has written that the sixteenth-century reformers “developed a nuanced doctrine of ‘accommodation’ to enable them to think through how the God who is described as transcendent, personal, and noncorporeal could be thought to speak in human words, and a contemporary restatement of that doctrine would be salutary today.”[235] Certain high-profile conservative evangelicals (e.g., Wayne Grudem, Carl F. H. Henry) oppose the doctrine of accommodation, believing that it necessarily attributes error, if not lies, to God. Kenton Sparks very effectively shows those objections to be misguided. Evangelicals today struggling toward a postbiblicist world will benefit from incorporating the notion of divine accommodation into their understanding of scripture.
Accepting the scriptures that God has actually provided us as they are—rather than ungratefully and stubbornly forcing scripture to be something that it is not because of a theory we hold about what it must and should be—is, if anything, the properly “inductive” way of approaching scripture as an authority. This is the kind of believing, trusting attitude toward the Bible that the church has long said proper understanding requires. If we then come across accounts, propositions, or passages of scripture that do not match our deductive theoretical expectations of what the Bible must be like, we are not thrown for a loop, and we do not push back and revolt against what is real. Instead, we take it seriously for whatever it is, give thanks to God for speaking to us through it, and humbly learn what the Holy Spirit might teach.
How is taking the Bible for what it is relevant for our present concerns? Such a receptive approach is more likely to allow different Christians, through reading, discussing, and living the scriptures, to better live with some of the ambiguity about what the Bible seems to teach, to work to de-escalate rather than to reinforce pervasive interpretive pluralism.
Living with Scriptural Ambiguities
Scripture is sometimes confusing, ambiguous, and incomplete—we have to admit and deal with that fact. Biblicism insists that the Bible as the word of God is clear, accessible, understandable, coherent, and complete as the revelation of God’s will and ways for humanity. But this is simply not true. Scripture can be very confusing. It can be indefinite. The Bible can lack information and answers that we want it to have. To say such things seems, from a biblicist perspective, to insult God, scripture’s divine author. But that is, again, because biblicism starts off with wrong presuppositions about how the Bible ought to work.
There is no reason whatsoever not to openly acknowledge the sometimes confusing, ambiguous, and seemingly incomplete nature of scripture. We do not need to be able to explain everything all the time. It is fine sometimes simply to say, “I have no idea” and “We really just don’t know.” Even the Bible itself on occasion acknowledges the difficulties in understanding scripture. In Acts 8, for example, Philip encounters an Ethiopian eunuch who was reading a passage from Isaiah (53:7–8) but who simply could not understand it. “How can I,” he reasonably asked, “unless someone explains it to me?” (Acts 8:31). (Note too that it was only by Christocentrically pointing this man to “the good news about Jesus” that the Isaiah passage came to make any sense to him.) Similarly, the author of 2 Peter admits about Paul’s writings that, “his letters contain some things that are hard to understand” (3:16).
Many theologians across church history (of the sort that American evangelicals respect) have also easily acknowledged the confusions, ambiguity, and “incompleteness” of scripture. Take Augustine and Luther, for example. Augustine wrote about the “problems and ambiguities of many kinds” in scripture that cause some readers to find “no meaning at all, even falsely, so thick is the fog created by some obscure phrases.” Regarding this, he said, “I have no doubt that this is all divinely predetermined, so that the pride may be subdued by hard work, and intellects which tend to despise things that are easily discovered may be rescued from boredom and reinvigorated. . . . It is a wonderful and beneficial thing that the Holy Spirit organized the holy scripture so as to . . . remove the boredom by means of its obscure [passages].”[236] Regarding Luther, the Christian ethicist Brian Brock points out that, while working on lectures on the psalms during the years 1513–15, Luther admitted “that he cannot possibly have fully understood Scripture. . . . Luther believes that the desire for comprehensiveness is futile. . . . Says Luther, ‘I openly admit that I do not know whether I have accurately interpreted the psalms or not,’ a posture he maintained for the rest of his career. Despite his becoming even more sure of his material, he claims only the certainty of familiarity, not comprehensiveness.”[237] Many assume that Luther’s doctrine of scriptural perspicuity entails a refusal to admit confusions, ambiguity, and unevenness in the Bible. But here a distinction between scripture itself and the “matter” of scripture is crucial:
When Luther insists against Erasmus [in their 1525 debate] that the Bible is not obscure or dark but plain and clear, it is important to notice that he does not mean by “the Bible” or “Scripture” exactly what Erasmus meant: this long and complex text, with so many obviously obscure passages. Indeed, he does not precisely say that “Scripture” is clear. He says that res scripturae, the “matter” of scripture, is clear, and he glosses this as follows: “What kind of deep secret can still be hidden in the scripture, now that the seals have been opened, the stone rolled away from the grave, and the deepest secret of all revealed: that Christ, the only Son of God, has become man, that there is one eternal God in three persons, that Christ has died for us, and that he reigns for ever in heaven?” What is clear, we may say, is not exactly “scripture” but “the gospel”—“the rule of faith,” as we may recall it was sometimes called in the early church.[238]
Once again, what comes to the fore as key is not everything conceivable that the Bible apparently speaks to, but the gospel of Jesus Christ. Not all of scripture is clear, nor does it need to be. But the real matter of scripture is clear, “the deepest secret of all,” that God in Christ has come to earth, lived, taught, healed, died, and risen to new life, so that we too can rise to life in him. On that, the Bible is clear. But to try to claim a plenary clarity, consistency, and completeness of information for all passages of all of scripture is futile. There are parts of scripture that we do not understand and probably never will understand. We might as well admit that fact. On some issues of biblical interpretation, as Keith Ward says, “We can afford to be agnostic.”[239] To acknowledge some ambiguities does not undermine the proper authority of scripture with regard to what scripture is actually about. For, as Berkouwer points out, “the confession of perspicuity is not a statement in general concerning the human language of Scripture, but a confession concerning the perspicuity of the gospel in Scripture.”[240]
Dropping the Compulsion to Harmonize
Where scripture is sometimes internally at odds with itself, even apparently self-contradictory, we would do better to let stand the tensions and inconsistencies than to force them into an artificial harmony. Evangelical biblicists have had to become expert harmonizers in order to rescue their approach from the apparent inconsistencies in the Bible. Harold Lindsell, for instance, famously argued in his Battle for the Bible that Peter denied Christ six times before the cock crowed on two separate occasions. This was to overcome the differences between Matthew 26:34 and 73–74, Mark 14:30 and 72, Luke 22:34 and 60–61, and John 13:38 and 18:27 about how many times Jesus said Peter would deny him, how many times the cock would and did crow, and the order of those events. Allert rightly notes, however, that “rather than demonstrate the accuracy and truthfulness of the gospel, Lindsell has actually shown that none of the Gospels give an accurate account of how many denials there were.”[241] To undermine the Gospels in order to force harmony does not seem to be a helpful move.
Vern Poythress, by comparison, offers a more sophisticated approach to harmonizing apparent differences in scripture, by distinguishing between the multiple perspectives, models, metaphors, analogies, interests, and expressions in the Bible versus “the [singular] biblical world view.” “Different perspectives,” he writes, “though they start from different strands of biblical revelation, are in principle harmonizable with one another.”[242] Some of Poythress’s insights are helpful and I think impressive, especially for having been formulated in the mid-1980s before “perspectivalism” hit full-force in the academy. But in the end, because scriptural “perspectives” do not present the same magnitude of problem as the reality of biblical multivocality described in chapter 2 does, Poythress underestimates some of the differences he hopes to harmonize and so papers over the larger challenges with the promise of his “symphonic theology.” His analysis, that is, because it is set within a particular theoretical framework of a certain view of inspiration, truth, and worldviews, has not grasped the fullness of the difficulties involved in avoiding interpretive pluralism. I fear that his case, despite being somewhat more sophisticated than many, may merely perpetuate the persistently unhelpful temptation in evangelicalism to harmonize.
In some cases, to be sure, harmonizations of biblical accounts may actually be right. Events in life can be strange or unlikely enough in any given situation, and multiple reports of them can be truthful but incomplete enough, that such harmonizations can at times actually best represent after the fact what actually happened. But that does not mean that we need or ought to allow a particular, preconceived, deductive biblicist theory about the Bible to force us to address all apparent discrepancies in the Bible through such harmonizing exercises. Many times they are obviously forced and implausible. The harmonizer ends up twisting rather than respecting what the Bible says.
Harmonizing is also usually not necessary. A postbiblicist, genuinely evangelical approach to the Bible can be content simply to let the apparent tensions and inconsistencies in scripture stand as they are.[243] God is not shaken from heaven. Christ is not stripped of authority. The gates of hell do not prevail against the church. The Bible, understood as what it actually is, still speaks to us with a divine authority, which we need not question but which rather powerfully calls us and our lives into question. Meanwhile, if God did not feel the need to provide us, his church, with a fully harmonized version of biblical accounts, then we ought not to feel the need to impose one ourselves.
Distinguishing Dogma, Doctrine, and Opinion
Evangelical Christians need to much better distinguish dogma from doctrine and both of those from opinion, in a way that demands much greater humility, discernment, and readiness to extend the fellowship of communion to those who understand scripture differently. The common confusion of dogma with doctrine, and of dogma and doctrine with opinion, is both a cause of pervasive interpretive pluralism and one of the difficulties that it creates for those who are serious about biblical authority. These three distinguishing terms—dogma, doctrine, and opinion—were highlighted by the Truett Seminary evangelical theology professor Roger Olson,[244] but they point to a truth that has informed the thinking of the Christian church from the beginning—that not every belief held by Christians is of equal centrality, sureness, and importance as every other belief.
Some Christian beliefs are nonnegotiable for any believer—such as the dogmas of the Trinity and Nicene Christology. Other beliefs are those to which groups of Christians adhere with firm conviction but also disagree over with other kinds of Christians—such as Calvinist or Wesleyan systems of theology. Still others are beliefs that some Christians hold, sometimes with strong feelings, but that are far from being central, sure, and most important in the larger scheme of Christian belief and life. Examples of the latter include a preference for baptism by immersion rather than sprinkling, the commitment to homeschooling children versus sending them to Christian or public school, and so on. The most central, sure, and important of these beliefs we may call “dogmas.” Those occupying the middle range of centrality, sureness, and importance are in this scheme called “doctrines.” Those which are the least of these let us call “opinions.”
The problem is that Christians have an extremely strong tendency to inflate the centrality, sureness, and importance of their doctrines so as to turn them into dogmas. They also tend to do the same thing with their opinions by elevating them to the level of doctrine. In addition, Christians also tend to demote the beliefs of those others with whom they disagree to a level lower than they claim for their equivalent belief in the disagreement.
For example, many evangelicals have the tendency to push the “penal satisfaction doctrine of atonement” up to the level of dogma, thereby suggesting that others who do not believe in it in just the way that they do deny a nonnegotiable of all Christian faith and so put themselves out of the bounds of orthodoxy. Or again, some charismatics and Pentecostals believe that having an experience of a “second baptism of the Holy Spirit” stands at the same level of importance as salvation by grace through faith, and so marginalize those who do not share that belief as questionable, second-class Christians. An even smaller group of Pentecostals do the same thing—based on what seems to be, at least for biblicists, the clear teaching of Mark 16:17–18 as illustrated by Acts 28:5—with their belief in the practice of handling snakes and drinking poison. Similarly, some Christians in the American conservative Protestant tradition not too long ago insisted that playing cards, shooting billiards, wearing makeup, and dancing socially were sinful and unacceptable for any “real” Christian. Like hot air, in these ways, the significance, certainty, and salience of various such beliefs tend to rise higher. Meanwhile, like cold air, the urgency, reliability, and value of the beliefs of those with whom one disagrees sink, as they are dismissed, discounted, ridiculed, or ignored.
This is not all about pure theological conviction only, either. Both tendencies clearly follow a well-known and established fact in social psychology: namely, that people predictably tend to inflate the goodness, importance, and credibility of anything associated with the social groups to which they belong (their “in-groups”) beyond what is objectively real and justified; and they predictably tend to depreciate the goodness, importance, and credibility of anything associated with groups that are socially different and to which they do not belong (“out-groups”). It is all unfortunately part of “normal” social-psychological personal and group identity construction and maintenance. But that does not make it right, good, or helpful when it comes to Christian theology and church unity.
What I am suggesting here, then, is this: Christians, including evangelicals, need to learn better, first, how to put and keep their dogmas, doctrines, and opinions in their proper places, and then, second, to stop excluding, dismissing, discounting, and ignoring other Christians who do not deserve that kind of treatment. Everyone needs to take a hard look at their own rankings of their own beliefs and work on pulling down to their proper levels the doctrines that they tend to treat as dogmas and opinions that they tend to treat as doctrines or dogmas.
It should be possible for all sorts of Christians, if they really grasp the difference and importance of these three distinctions, to agree on a short list of beliefs that genuinely belong at the level of dogma, that are dogmatic (in fact, the church already did this very many centuries ago). Then, every Christian should happily extend the right hand of fellowship and communion with every other Christian who professes those dogmatic beliefs. Such an attitude of mutual embrace as fellow believers in the Christian faith by virtue of commonly affirmed dogma—however much they might disagree and debate at the level of doctrine—ought then to come to pervade the subtle attitudes, speech habits, and interpersonal relationships among different types and groups of believers. Such an embrace of fellow believers would go a long way toward overcoming the sin of disunity that currently besets the Christian church today. It would also create a different atmosphere in which Christians who disagree about what the Bible teaches could constructively address those disagreements, perhaps toward overcoming pervasive interpretive pluralism.
Note, however, how evangelical biblicism inherently works against what I suggest here. The logic of biblicism sets up scripture readers to assume that once they have decided what the Bible appears to teach, they will then have come into the possession of absolutely definite, divinely authorized, universally valid, indubitable truth. And that truth will be equally valid and certain for every subject about which scripture appears to speak, whether it be the divinity of Jesus or how to engage in “biblical dating.” Because biblicism interprets the ideas of the plenary inspiration, perspicuity, and inerrancy of scripture (among other beliefs) as it does, it is difficult if not impossible within its terms to prioritize the centrality, sureness, and importance of what scripture teaches—once one has decided what (one thinks) scripture in fact teaches. It is difficult under those conditions to hold a biblical belief tentatively, to acknowledge that one’s interpretation might be wrong, to recognize that alternative interpretations are plausible too, and to admit that something one thinks one read in the Bible is not a faith-defining or communion-breaking issue.
Biblicists sometimes and maybe often do make such concessions about their beliefs, but not because biblicism coherently justifies doing so. They do so rather because the logic of nonbiblicist Christian truths overwhelms the logic of biblicism and pushes biblicism’s adherents in better directions, despite their rigid and poorly discriminating theoretical tendencies. And those concessions are another way in which biblicism is impossible. In this way it also simply cannot be carried out consistently on its own terms.
I suggested in chapter 1 that a biblicist reply to my critique that simply reasserted the adage, “In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in everything, charity,” was inadequate for addressing the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism. Yet that adage sounds something like what I advocate here about maintaining the proper distinctions between dogma, doctrine, and opinion. What gives? The difference is that I do not think this proposal by itself can do much to counter the problems of biblicism. If it serves that purpose, it will have to do so while acting along with most or all of the other proposals advanced in this chapter and probably some other ones as well. Furthermore, my proposal in this book pushes much harder than the standard adage tends to do on Christians actively agreeing on a short list of dogma, actively building bonds of Christian communion across their doctrinal differences, and deflating the importance of many of their own beliefs to the levels at which they appropriately belong.
I am not entirely persuaded by the rule of St. Vincent of Lérins (AD 434) that the catholic faith is defined as that set of things “which has been believed everywhere, at all times, by all.” Very little turns out to qualify as catholic Christianity by those criteria. But I do think it provides a helpful rule of thumb for positioning our own beliefs. Five-point Calvinists have to pause and seriously consider that the majority of Christians throughout history and today believe that they are wrong when it comes to double predestination.[245] Anabaptists have to take seriously the reality that the majority of Christians throughout history and today do not believe that nonviolence, nonresistance, and pacifism are essential elements of the Christian gospel itself. The same applies to every other Christian group, including the charismatic church’s second baptism of the Holy Spirit, the fundamentalists’ purity sectarianism, and so on.
The point is not that every particular Christian group and tradition needs to strip itself of all its distinctives. The point, rather, is in right humility to put those distinctives into proper theological and pastoral perspective, to not make any of them more theologically significant than they are, and to do everything possible to prevent them from serving as unnecessary obstacles to peace and unity. Of course, nobody wants to back down or give up on the things for which their group has long fought, seemingly with biblical warrant, with great conviction—and perhaps even killed and have had one’s people killed over.[246] It can take a lot of swallowing of pride to be able to extend the right hand of Christian fellowship and communion, even to those with whom one shares belief in dogma, when one strongly disagrees about doctrine. Yet such matters of group identity, pride, distinctiveness, and so on are radically relativized in the kingdom of God. And it is possible to enjoy the fellowship of Christian communion with those with whom one profoundly disagrees about not-insignificant matters. Those kinds of moves of humility, unity, and realistic perspective will be necessary if American evangelical biblicists, among others, are, with God’s help, to pull themselves out of the hole of pervasive interpretive pluralism into which they have dug themselves and that undermines the authority of scripture in practice.
Not Everything Must Be Replicated
It is also important for contemporary Bible readers to understand that just because some of God’s covenant people did or obeyed something in their time and place does not mean that it is God’s command for us to do and obey the same things. Biblicists are often unclear about the normative implications for contemporary scripture readers of Bible passages that recount what God’s people did or said in their own day. Sometimes it is believed that God’s people today should do whatever God’s people did millennia ago, precisely because they did it. At other times, however, such cases are dismissed as pertaining only to people in the past. Rarely do biblicists have any explanation for which should be when and why. Some, for example, argue that Christians today should baptize by full immersion because that is what early Christians did (John 3:23; Acts 8:38–39).[247] By this logic, baptizing by merely sprinkling is positively unbiblical. Others likewise claim that women today should not have teaching authority in churches because the apostle Paul did not allow women even to speak in church, “as in all the congregations of the saints” (1 Cor. 14:33–34). Biblicists may well argue that because these practices and others like them can be observed in scripture, they must be “biblical” and therefore universally normative.
Yet most early churches during the apostolic era met in houses (e.g., Rom. 16:5; 1 Cor. 16:19; Col. 4:15). Should Christians today meet in houses? The earliest church in Jerusalem practiced a kind of communal sharing of material goods (Acts 2:44–45). Should Christians today do the same? Paul tells the believers in Corinth that men should not cover their heads while praying but that women should always cover their heads—indeed, “the churches of God,” he says, “have no other practice” (1 Cor. 11:13–16). Should Christians today imitate the universal female head covering among Christians of Paul’s day? Celebrations of the Lord’s Supper during the apostolic era often took the form of the church eating a full meal together (1 Cor. 11:18–22). Ought Christians in the twenty-first century follow that practice? Or what does it mean if the actions of the early church in Acts 6:1–7, in selecting men to “wait on tables,” is normative to contemporary believers? Does it mean all “biblical” churches today should have “deacons”? Or rather that church leaders and members are authorized, by example, to create and “ordain” new positions in the church to fill whatever functional needs arise in various times and places? And, if they do so, what, if any, are the limits? Or do the actions described in Acts 6:1–7 not really teach anything specific for Christians today? The issue of following by “biblical example,” we see, can be knotty.
Complicating this point is what one might mean by “God’s people.” Do real historical and sociological differences between the patriarchs, the ancient Israelites, the Jews in captivity, Jesus’s twelve disciples, Jesus’s much larger following of disciples, the apostles, believers in Jerusalem, and pagan converts across the Roman Empire—all God’s covenant people—matter for instructing contemporary Christians about what practices they should follow? Which practices that different ones of them followed in their day “apply” to Christians today, which do not, and why exactly? Is the default that all former practices apply unless they are explicitly nullified? Or that none are obligatory unless positively commanded as applying to all of God’s people in all places and times? Why is one or the other of these the default? Scripture itself hardly tells us.
My point here is not to drive readers into skeptical despair about learning anything from the Bible about how to live faithfully today. My point, rather, is to undermine simplistic and divisive interpretive habits of some biblicists who easily point to this or that practice of God’s people recorded in the Bible and pronounce that the same practice is binding on Christians today because it is clearly “biblical.” If we are more intelligently and consistently to sort through scriptural practices in order to learn how to live today, we will need a stronger, more coherent hermeneutical guide to foster discernment. Many of the points discussed in the second half of this book can contribute toward the formation of that guide. I cannot here develop specific criteria for making sense of the possible contemporary relevance of the practices and obedience of God’s people of former ages. As I said at the start of this chapter, my arguments here are limited and partial. Obviously much more work needs to be done to better address these issues. Toward that end, these words of Peter Enns seem relevant:
Although the Bible is clear on central matters of the faith, it is flexible in many matters that pertain to the day-to-day. To put it more positively, the Bible sets trajectories, not rules, for a good many issues that confront the church. . . . Different [people] in different contexts will enter into these trajectories in different ways and, therefore, express their commitment to Christ differently. This flexibility of application is precisely what is modeled for us in the pages of Scripture itself.[248]
With this point I would emphasize the relevance of the apostle Paul’s teaching on Christian freedom: “Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ” (Col. 2:16–17, in the context of vv. 13–23; also see 1 Cor. 8:1–13; 10:23–33; 2 Cor. 3:16–18; Gal. 5:1).
Living on a Need-to-Know Basis
God deals with us on a “need to know” basis and we ought to be content with that, rather than insisting on having “certain” knowledge built on scant evidence that God has actually not made very clear.[249] Humans generally tend to prefer to know about the things they are interested in than to not know. Being left in the dark is no fun. Academics and intellectuals, perhaps especially evangelical biblicist ones, are particularly keen on getting answers to their questions, providing research findings, figuring out the systems, nailing down the loose ends, getting all the pieces on the table and put together. I myself am like this.
The “problem” is, God often does not cooperate with us. In his wisdom, God has chosen to reveal some of his will, plan, and work, but clearly not all of it. To the extent that the Bible tells us about matters of Christian faith and life, it clearly does not tell us everything. It certainly does not tell us everything we often want to know. There are many areas of belief, knowledge, doctrine, and ethics about which scripture is not entirely clear, complete, or definitive. If we do not like that, then it’s too bad for us. God is not obligated to answer all our questions, to fill us in on all his plans, to provide us with all the information needed to develop our intellectual and moral systems. In fact, during his life on earth, there were parts of God the Father’s plan that Jesus himself did not know (Mark 13:32). As for us, God tells us what we need to know and instructs us to get on with living in light of what he does tell.
If we had any spiritual maturity, we would be content with that situation. But often many of us are not. Christians want to squeeze out of the Bible definite and reliable knowledge that simply is not there. For some, this concerns God’s “will for their lives.” For others it concerns the “end times.” Some Christians want the Bible to tell them how to raise their children rightly. Others want answers about counseling people with various kinds of problems and illnesses. Of course scripture does not leave us hanging on every question. It certainly does not leave us in the dark about its purpose, center, and key: Jesus Christ. But often the Bible does not provide the information and answers that people demand from it. It just doesn’t. The logic of biblicism nevertheless tends to encourage Bible readers to search the scriptures to find whatever shreds of evidence and tidbits of possibly relevant information might be pieced together to come up with “biblical” answers to their questions and problems. Then when others disagree, pervasive interpretive pluralism is born. In short, the church suffers from pervasive interpretive pluralism in part because too many people insist on the Bible giving clear and complete information, answers, and directions, which the Bible simply does not give. All sorts of “biblical” teachings are extracted from scripture and promoted for validation, but they rely on the flimsiest of textual evidence, and lead to disagreement among believers.
In light of these tendencies, Christians would do well to simply accept and live contentedly with the fact that they are being informed about the big picture on a “need to know” basis. This means believing that if God has not made something completely clear in scripture, then it is probably best not to try to speculate it into something too significant. Let the ambiguous remain ambiguous. Focus first instead on what is clear and direct. What is actually amazing in all of this is how wrapped up believers can become in what is incomplete and uncertain, while they nearly completely ignore the most obvious truths and commands that stare them in the face.
Sometimes it seems as if believers—myself included—distract themselves with the more obscure, speculative, and cryptic issues related to scripture precisely in order to avoid having to face and act on the parts that are very clear and directive. Why address the main issues when one can mess around with peripheral details? It is like a kid fixating all day on exactly how much to shut his bedroom closet door to obscure the mess in his room that his mother told him in no uncertain terms to clean. Wanting and trying to know what we evidently don’t need to know is a great way to avoid having to deal with other, more basic things that we already quite clearly know but prefer to avoid, delay, or ignore. Jesus had a word for this: “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much” (Luke 16:10). Why should God trust us with “advanced” things if we are not even faithful in acting upon basic things? Saint James too had something to say here: “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. . . . The man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it—he will be blessed in what he does” (James 1:22, 25).
Notice too how Jesus, just before his ascension, turns his disciples’ attention away from don’t-need-to-know knowledge and instead turns their gaze on the specific task that he made quite clear to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:7). Oftentimes, I am afraid that we have our hands full with the basics that have already been made perfectly clear to us, but rather than getting down to business with that, we prefer to chase around after relatively peripheral and speculative matters that God has chosen to not make clear to us.
Do not all Christians have more than enough to learn and to do simply to obey the two clear commands upon which hang “all the Law and the Prophets”: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matt. 22:37–40)? But why spend time and energy on such “simple” matters when we can instead beat the Bible’s bushes to come up with answers to our questions about supralapsarianism versus infralapsarianism, premillennialism versus amillennialism, human perfectibility or not, double predestination or not, a literal six-day creation or not, speaking in tongues or not, and so on?
Let me sharpen the point of this stick here before moving on by raising a topic of personal concern as merely one example of the larger problem. Christians generally and evangelical biblicists specifically are badly divided about a host of biblical and theological matters that clearly do not qualify as dogma and that often genuinely consist of nonessential peripherals of the faith. Meanwhile, the vast majority of American Christians ignore one of the most pervasive, clear, straightforward, obvious, and simple commandments in scripture: to give away their money generously. I have in another book well documented this fact.[250] The vast majority of American Christians—who in fact are the wealthiest believers in all of history and the world today—give away relatively little of their money to the church or other worthy causes. Some give nothing at all. Yet the Bible simply could not be more persistently clear and forceful in teaching that what we do with our money and possessions is of major spiritual significance, that God commands his people to give and share their money and possessions generously, and that those who are selfish and stingy with their money and possessions will be judged by God. Giving money away is not rocket science. Nearly all ordinary people can do it. Yet only a minority of American Christians does so faithfully.
Why then do so many Christians get so invested in figuring out the intricacies of various biblical and theological matters about which the Bible is not entirely clear when they already don’t and won’t obey scripture on the very clear and simple matter of being generous with money and possessions? How are such believers to expect God to work to deepen their faith and knowledge of spiritual matters when they simply refuse to do what scripture has already made painfully plain and necessary? Jesus in Luke 16 says: “If you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?” (vv. 11–12).
To be clear, I do not wish to encourage legalism in these matters. Far from it. The real thrust here runs in the opposite direction of legalism. It is all about humbly obeying what has already been clearly commanded as nothing more than faithful servants. I also do not mean to promote anti-intellectualism; I love the work of scholarly inquiry and the life of the mind as much as anyone. But scholarship and the life of the mind are also not all that Christian life is about. I say this tremblingly, since, if anything, evangelicals have historically been eager to jump into pragmatic, faith-driven activism of various sorts, at the expense of patient and careful thought.[251] The problem I am addressing here, however, does not concern careful thought, but rather undisciplined, speculative, irresponsible thought when it comes to reading and making claims from scripture. Even as those of us who love scholarship and the life of the mind engage in “faith seeking understanding,” we must also remember that none of it is worth anything if we first and foremost do not attend to our clear calling to love God with our whole beings and really and truly to love our neighbors as ourselves (1 Cor. 13).
This insight creates an opportunity for American evangelicals not merely to admit and accept but to relish the mysteries of faith. “Mystery” is not a word much used by American evangelical biblicists, because they think their readings of the Bible dispel mysteries and reveal everything we want to know. By comparison, Catholics, the Orthodox, and Anglicans are much more comfortable with the word “mystery” when it comes to God, faith, the sacraments, and theology generally—which itself may also help to explain why many evangelicals avoid the term, precisely in order to distance themselves from these groups. “Mystery” may also evoke for evangelicals an association with premodern mystery religions, which they rightly wish to avoid. Still, concerning God as a transcendent mystery, St. Augustine even said, “If you understand it, it is not God.”[252] Evangelicals today cut themselves off from a relevant and important vocabulary—which, when properly used, often describes well Christian faith and life—when they expunge from their theological vocabulary the category of mystery. They also in so doing perpetuate the problematic tendency in much of evangelicalism toward a dry, know-it-all rationalism in the form of a systematic cognitive covering of all intellectual bases—which ultimately has more to do with modern Enlightenment than scripture.[253]
To recognize and speak about the mysteries of faith does not need to mean problematic forms of subjectivism, mysticism, or obscurantism. It means readily embracing the awesome, sometimes partially understood, often known-yet-still-inscrutable story and reality of God’s work in history and the cosmos through Jesus Christ. Being willing and able to think and speak in terms of mystery will reduce the pressure on former biblicists to know it all, to explain everything, to wrap it all up in a comprehensible package with an inerrant bow. On an awful lot of matters concerning Christianity, we remain partially or totally in the dark—provided a reliable enough knowledge but not filled in on all the details. That is fine. It can be exciting. It is no doubt good for us. Let the mysteries stand. Live despite, in, through, and because of them.
One likely implication of this point is that it is better to err on the side of a minimalist view of what is essential to Christian faith and life than a maximalist view. This proposal continues my previous line of thinking in this book. The more baggage that passengers of a train load into their carriage, the less room there is for other people to accompany them. The more Christians insist on making long lists of theological “essentials” that real or true Christians ought to believe in order to be recognized as within the bounds of the true faith and deserving the fellowship of communion, the more the body of Christ becomes conflicted, divided, and disunified—and the more the credibility of its witness is compromised. Many different Christian traditions—American evangelical biblicism included—tend to proliferate beliefs they consider important, if not essential. But often this comes at a major cost to the unity and proper focus of the church. In other words, believers need to work hard not to turn (what in fact are only) their preferences into doctrines and especially (what in fact are only) doctrines into dogma.
From a sociological perspective, when different groups elevate particular, distinctive beliefs to increasingly higher levels of importance, that serves functionally to establish group identity differentiation and security. And when such differences become matters of disagreement and conflict, which they normally do, that tends to increase members’ commitments to and investment in their own groups—on the general sociological principle that “out-group conflict increases in-group solidarity.” So, sociologically understood, from the perspective of each distinct group, elaborating a maximalist view of essential Christian beliefs serves the purpose of reinforcing their distinctive identity, solidifying member commitment, and maintaining and increasing inflows of resources—all things that organizational leaders like. But that does not make it good or right. Indeed, oftentimes what is sociologically effective in a broken world is anything but good or right. What matters more than the in-group strength of various divided Christian groups is the faithfulness and unity of the body of Christ as a whole. My suggestion here, then, is that movement toward a more minimalist rather than a maximalist view of essential Christian beliefs will both serve the higher interests of the church of Christ and contribute toward overcoming the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism.
Let me try to say this using a different image. When my children were young, we often played with Legos and Duplos on the family room floor, constructing towers and other sorts of buildings. We owned a couple of large bins of building blocks and a lot of miscellaneous people, animal characters, and fancy ornamental building pieces that could be snapped into our works of art. One of our goals most of the time was to build a single structure that used every single piece of building material we owned. That could be quite a challenge, given the volume and diversity of pieces in our possession. Our final products were always embellished with fancy decorative and ornamental pieces snapped onto and spiring up from the main structure—simply because we owned all the pieces and were determined to make them attach somehow. A plastic tiger piece here, a radar antenna there, a smiley face block somewhere else, fifty pieces stacked straight up into a thin tower, horizontal terraces and extensions and arches in the middle, and so on. Often our insistence on using all the pieces meant we ended up building structures that were structurally weak and top-heavy. In all cases, my children found them fun to knock down.
Sometimes it seems that biblicists take the same approach to scripture in the course of building up their theological and moral systems. They do not want to “waste” even one bit of possible biblical evidence by not using it somehow to make a statement or take some “biblical” position. The intrinsic logic of biblicism encourages such a “thrifty” approach to Bible passages. It wants to squeeze as much meaning out of every text as possible. There is, of course, merit in not missing real meanings that scriptural texts contain. But the danger of this approach is to unwisely overbuild a theological structure with so much detail, complexity, and ornamentation that it ends up suffering from structural weaknesses, detracts from the “main event,” and invites others to knock it down. Better to proceed with more modest but solid systems of belief that affirm what most other Christians across time and space also believe and have long believed. Better to focus primarily on the well-established, core substance of the Christian faith for thinking about and communicating the gospel and for considering how best to live in any given sociocultural context.
Again, this is not to put the kibosh on all sophisticated theological inquiry in the name of “back to basics.” Nor does it say that some kind of least-common-denominator theology needs to be imposed on all churches that will wipe out their theological and cultural particulars. Sophisticated theological inquiry and some kinds of church distinctives are, of course, legitimate and even important. But these must be kept in proper perspective in the life of the church, lest Christians end up “majoring in the minors,” stirring up tempests in teapots, and failing to really work out the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic faith that all believers share. The latter, of course, should be challenging enough to keep us busy without having to pile on a lot of nonessential and controversial particulars.
The sixteenth-century Anglican divine Richard Hooker put this well when he said about the Bible, “We must . . . take great heed, lest, in attributing unto scripture more than it can have, the incredibility of that do cause even those things which indeed it hath most abundantly, to be less reverently esteemed.”[254] In other words, the more we try to make the Bible say allegedly important things that are in fact subsidiary, nonbinding, or perhaps not even clearly taught, the more we risk detracting from the crucial, central message of the Bible about God reconciling the world to himself in Jesus Christ.