Spent a very nice Christmas with my in-laws in the great city of Indianapolis. The weather was cold (single digits on Christmas day!) but the food, company and holiday cheer kept us warm.
Thoughts and prayers go out to all the victims of the Tsunami. See here for where and how to send aid.
I see that Among the Ruins is closing up shop. What a bummer – I only recently discovered AtR, but they will be missed.
A Happy New Year to all!
In thinking about the inspiration and authority of the Bible, one thing that I think it’s good to keep in mind is the purpose for which the Bible was written. 2 Timothy says that “all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” That is, it is fundamentally a religious book, concerned with leading us to salvation.
With that understanding in mind, maybe it’s more helpful to see the inspiration of Scripture not as a “micro-level” phenomenon (e.g. getting every word, detail, and fact exactly right) but as a “macro-level” phenomenon (i.e. giving us a true and reliable understanding of God’s character, relations with humankind and acts of salvation).
One theory offered by those uncomfortable with inerrantism is that the Bible’s value lies chiefly in being a witness to God’s mighty acts – i.e. a record of the revelatory events contained in the stories of Israel, Jesus and the Church. The Spirit then can use this witness to make the Bible a means of revelation for us. Some interpreters ascribe a position like this to Karl Barth.
A problem with this theory, I think, is that it doesn’t do justice to the belief that the Scriptures themselves are a source of revelation, rather than just a witness to revelation.
Why is this a problem? Because events in and of themselves need to be interpreted to become meaningful. It requires interpretation to see the crossing of the Red Sea as an act of divine deliverance or Jesus’ death on the cross as an atoning sacrifice that reconciles us with God.
So, I would tentatively suggest that what we have in the Bible is the inspired interpretation of those events. That is, the apostles and their followers provided us with the divinely inspired meaning of, e.g. the life and death of Jesus. And consequently this interpretation is authoritative for the church.
This doesn’t mean that the historical facts are unimportant or that it doesn’t matter if the Biblical authors got the basic facts right. But many people witnessed the events of Jesus’ life without coming to believe that he was the Messiah. There is a “gap” between the basic facts and seeing those facts as God’s saving acts.
Obviously the Resurrection was crucial in the apostles’ coming to understand the significance of Jesus. And I believe that the Resurrection was a public physical event (not just a private vision had by Jesus’ followers). But it still requires an act of interpretation to understand the meaning of these events. And since God would presumably want us to understand the proper significance of these events, it seems reasonable to think that the Spirit was at work in guiding the early Christians in their understanding, an understanding that was eventually recorded in the books of the New Testament.
One advantage of this way of looking at the Bible is that it seems, in many cases, to match with what the Biblical authors took themselves to be doing. It’s long been recognized, for instance, that the Gospel writers did not set out to write “objective” biographies of Jesus. What they saw themselves as doing was setting forth the proper theological meaning of the events of Jesus’ life (Which obviously required setting forth the basic facts of that life).
This also shows, incidentally, the limitations for Christian faith of any “quest for the historical Jesus.” If the NT provides us with the inspired and authoritative interpretation of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, then this will exclude certain competing interpretations (the cynic philosopher Jesus, the revolutionary Jesus, etc.). To confess the Bible as inspired is to confess this understanding of Jesus as authoritative for our lives and the life of the church.
I wouldn’t claim that this way of looking at the issue is without problems. But it does seem, at least at first blush, to be a coherent way of speaking about the Bible’s inspiration and authority that avoids the pitfalls of both conservative inerrantism and a liberal view that denies that the Bible is divinely inspired.
From Spiked Online:
We all have the right to die, with or without its sanction in law. All the ‘patients’ of Dr Jack Kevorkian, currently in prison in America for having gone a little too far in assisting the suicide of Thomas Youk (which was videotaped and shown on CBS’s 60 Minutes), were physically capable of bringing about their own deaths.
Anyone, with a little forward planning and much determination, can kill themselves. The Assisted Dying bill will instead place an onus on doctors and carers to help individuals to commit suicide. One of the most ugly arguments to come from the Voluntary Euthanasia Society is that disabled people should have the right to die, too. We must be clear that we are being obligated to give the proverbial man on the bridge a push (or perhaps to make the bridge wheelchair accessible). …
It is true that many religious groups vehemently oppose the Joffe Bill, but they are not the only ones. They unite with medical representatives and disabled groups, who fear that doctors’ judgements about ‘quality of life’ may imply that their own lives are not worth living. …
In fact, it is those calling for legalisation of assisted suicide who tend to espouse New Age religious values. ‘Self-deliverance’ is the term favoured by Derek Humphry, former Sunday Times journalist and author of the best-selling suicide bible, Final Exit. Delivery to where, Mr. Humphry? Dr Timothy Quill, who admitted in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that he had helped a patient die, has written a book called A Midwife through the Dying Process. To an atheist (like myself), death is not an ‘experience’ but the end of all experiences. Do assisted suicide advocates wish simply to replace rituals formerly carried out by priests?
Finally, you need not be Christian to agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury that ‘the respect for human life in all its stages is the foundation of a civilised society’. …
How should we think about the inspiration and authority of the Bible? What does it mean for the Bible to be authoritative in the church and how is this related to the question of its inspiration? For Protestants who affirm the principle of sola Scriptura, this is a particularly pressing question.
One view that seems to be clearly untenable is the ultra-conservative view that the Bible is totally inerrant in every word. This includes not just broad theological affirmations or historical events, but historical details like the number of people killed in a particular battle, the exact words spoken by Jesus on a certain occasion, etc. Not to mention various statements about the natural world that seem to contradict what science tells us (I’m talking about things like the evolution of life on earth or astronomy, not miraculous events. Nothing that science tells us can rule out, as far as I can tell, that God might act in history; science deals with how things go when left to their own devices, but it can’t tell us if or when God might not leave things to their own devices). In short, it seems clear that the Biblical writings (and in many cases the oral traditions which underly those writings) were products of their time and incorporated beliefs that we would now regard as mistaken.
But surely the inerrantist makes an illegitimate inference when she concludes that if we can’t trust the Bible to be a textbook of science or history, then we can’t trust it to be a revelation of God. Presumably St. Paul had some false beliefs about biology or astronomy, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t get the Gospel right. The inerrantist doesn’t seem to take seriously enough the human element in Scripture, that it was written by fallible human beings with limited knowledge. Rather she adheres to an excessively mechanical notion of inspiration, where the Spirit literally dictates every word to the authors who are little more than passive instruments.
On the other hand, what we might call the extreme “liberal” view emphasizes the human element at the expense of the divine. It sees the Bible as a collection of writings that arose out of the religious experiences of certain groups of people over several centuries. The liberal tends to see the inspiration of the Bible as a point on the same continuum as the inspiration of any great work of human genius. As such it is a decidedly mixed bag (the liberal often likes to stress the high ethical ideals of Jesus with the “barbaric,” “vengeful,” etc. God of the Old Testament) and different parts of the Bible will have lesser or greater value.
The Achilles’ heel of the liberal position is that the Bible seems to lose all of its authority. If the religious ideas of the Bible are simply human products (however exalted) then we have to test those ideas by some external criteria (our own experience, moral/religious sense, etc.), since there is no claim that the Bible contains a self-revelation of God. Rather, it reflects human aspirations toward the divine, many of which may have been supreseded by later experience. The Bible is ultimately subordinated to our own judgment, and it’s hard to see how it can retain its traditional place as normative for the life of the church.
So it seems what we need is a via media between a deeply implausible conservative inerrantism and a liberalism that dissolves any authoritative status for the Bible. Can we find a way to maintain that the Bible is both a product of particular fallible human beings and a self-revelation of God?
More to come…
Marcus explains why he’s batting for the other team now (so to speak).
Interesting piece from A. N. Wilson in the London Spectator:
Rowan Williams is sufficiently intelligent and normal to be aware that in the West, being religious these days is, outside America, very distinctly odd, and trying to defend Christianity against the whole ethos of materialism and scientific rationalism which most intelligent people take for granted is a more than intellectual task. We might very well be living in Christianity’s last days. Many of us who go to church do so a little wistfully, knowing that, unlike Rowan Williams, we do not believe in the ways which our ancestors did. ‘Our prayers so languid and our faith so dim’ is one of the few lines of a hymn which we could sing with gusto. ‘Fightings within and fears without’ might be another.
Yes, Rowan Williams brings cleverness and originality and subtlety to public debate, and those are not qualities to be sneezed at, even if they are repellent to so many bigots in the press and the Church. But he also has a quality which can’t be faked and which is always shown in the life and death of a martyr: holiness. When the last church on earth has closed, that will be the quality which the human race will most miss about the days of faith. The only tests Rowan is failing as Archbishop are ones not worth posing: silly posturings on both sides about homosexuality or women priests. In all the essential things, he is just what the Church and the nation most need. Of course, when it has a godsend, what does the Church of England do? It calls for his resignation.
Unlike a lot of people who write about “red” and “blue” America, Michael Lind has an understanding of the various and diverse ethno-cultural groups that make up the USA. In his book Vietnam: The Necessary War, for example, he discussed how these ethno-cultural factors influenced attitudes toward the politics of the Vietnam war.
Here Lind tries to convince folks on the left that Bush and the Republicans have succeeded not because all of “red” America buys into the values and agenda of the far-right, but because they are able to speak to the broad center, people who support gay rights but are uncomfortable with redefining marriage, for instance.
Lind also underscores that the habit of many on the left to disdain suburban life – a habit that drives “anti-sprawl” initiatives, the jihad against the car, etc. – will only be self-defeating since many, if not most, Americans choose to live that way. He also points out that suburbs are not the desolate wastelands of anomie that many left-wing (and some conservative) critics imagine.
He argues that 18th-century (small-“r”) republicanism still provides a viable framework for American politics. The republican ideal of independent property-owning citizens rooted in local communities is distinct from both liberal welfare-statism and conservative capitalist individualism:
The republican ideal is a citizen with enough property to be independent both of the labour market and of government. This explains why American populism, and much of the US labour movement, has been almost as hostile to the welfare state as it has been to unscrupulous employers. The continental European welfare state was devised in countries with traditions of bureaucratic monarchy and aristocratic paternalism, like Germany and Sweden. Americans have rejected the ideal of a society in which government pays for everything while a benevolent mandarinate governs in the public interest not because we are stupid, but because we are republicans.
When the Bush Republicans speak of “the ownership society,” they are tapping into common American values, not narrow conservative ideology. The most popular New Deal liberal programmes of the mid-20th century were those which diffused property or earning capability, like low-interest loans for people seeking to buy their own homes and loans for college students. Social security and Medicare–both redistributive systems–were carefully packaged by New Dealers as social insurance, to avoid offending republican populist sensibilities.
Lind sounds here very much like the social historian Christopher Lasch who became disaffected with the left and tried to recover a populist vision rooted in the republican tradition (see especially his The True and Only Heaven). Lasch saw both the Leviathan state and big corporations as a threat to the kind of independence valued by the republican tradition.
Lasch accused the modern conservative movement of exploiting the distrust of the mega-state, even while funneling vast sums of money to the military-industrial complex and supporting a variety of unrestrained capitalism that corrodes social bonds. Liberals, on the other hand, exhibited a profound distrust of ordinary people in seeking to replace informal authorities and social structures (families, neighborhoods, churches, etc.) with the impersonal bureaucratic institutions of the welfare state. What was needed, Lasch thought, was a re-assertion of the competence of ordinary people in local economies, intact communities and local democratic self-governance.
Much of the post-election commentary on the left has displayed precisely the kind of sneering condescension toward middle and working-class Americans that Lasch was all too familiar with. I doubt he would be surprised that the left has failed to learn the lessons he tried to teach them. Nor, I suspect, would he be surprised that the right continues to appeal to “conservative values” while championing an economic system that is anything but conservative.
(Lind article via Godspy)
An interesting, if somewhat condescending, report on a growing sensitivity to environmental issues among evangelicals.
This October, the board of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), representing 51 denominations encompassing 30 million American evangelical Christians, unanimously approved a document entitled “For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.” The declaration calls for public engagement in a range of issues, prominent among them “Creation Care”—Christian-speak for environmental activism.
The document states: “We affirm that God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part. We are not owners of creation, but its stewards, summoned by God to ‘watch over and care for it’ (Gen. 2:15).”
Richard Cizik, the NAE’s vice president for government affairs, says the purpose of the document is to “educate evangelicals that our public policy concerns go beyond a few high profile social issues like abortion.”
Cizik is a self-described conservative evangelical, both pro-life and in favor of a federal marriage amendment. In this he reflects the broad membership of the NAE, the largest evangelical umbrella group in the country. Representing 60 percent of the nation’s estimated 50 million evangelical Christians, Cizik thinks the NAE is in a position to send a shot across the bow of a Republican establishment that assumes evangelical support for its entire platform—so long as it includes homilies to faith, heterosexuality and family. […]
It remains to be seen what impact developments such the NAE initiative will have on figures associated with the hard Christian Right, but there are signs pointing toward stronger grassroots evangelical support for protecting the environment than is generally assumed. A poll conducted this year by the Ray C. Bliss Institute at the University of Akron found that more than half of self-identified evangelicals agreed with the statement, “Strict rules to protect the environment are necessary even if they cost jobs or result in higher prices.” Only one-third disagreed outright.
When it comes to the regulation of industry, a majority of evangelical Christians appears to side with Ted Kennedy over George W. Bush.
Thinking about my personal picks for the best music of 2004 brings home the fact that I really do not have my finger on the pulse of pop music. Looking at various people’s “best of” lists makes me realize that I don’t know who about 70% of the artists even are!
Nevertheless, I did manage to find some great new music this year. So, without further ado:
Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose – One of the legends of country music in better from than she has been for years. This is Loretta’s American Recordings and Jack White is her Rick Rubin.
BR549, Tangled in the Pines – Retro alt-country? Punkabilly? Hank Williams meets Social Distortion? Whatever you call these guys, they’re a little bit country and a little bit rock ‘n’ roll, but in a good way.
Mindy Smith, One Moment More – A very good debut from a young singer/songwriter in the vein of Alison Krauss. The duet with Dolly Parton on “Jolene” alone is worth the price of admission.
U2, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb – Sometimes a hundred million people can be right. It’s just a great record, darn it!
Honorable mention: Prince, Musicology – Definitely a fine record. But fails to reach the transcendent heights of Purple Rain despite the hype.
It appears that the assertion of “Merry Christmas” (in preference to, say, “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings”) has become yet another front in the culture war. “Merry Christmas” is now associated with red-state heartland values and separates its user from those godless decadent blue-staters. Christmas itself has become politicized.
But wait, Christmas has always had a political meaning:
My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me–holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him,from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, even as he said to our fathers.
This is what, at least according to the Bible, the coming of the Incarnate Word means. So, the next time you wish someone a “Merry Christmas” remember that you’re in effect calling for a revolution.
A Thinking Reed 