Dr. Platypus

Scot McKnight has a nice piece about the ancient ecumenical Creeds and their place in (Protestant, evangelical, paleo-orthodox and/or emerging) Christianity. He takes a middle road—which obviously gets bonus points from me—between those who would dismiss the Creeds as irrelevant and those who would invest them with the same degree of authority as the Bible. To the first point, Scot writes,

I should note clearly hear that I will happily recite the Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds.  I agree with paleo-orthodoxy that these Creeds reflect important, basic truths about God and Christ.  I also agree that these Creeds establish a pattern for the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel.   The Creeds emphasize the basic Biblical themes of creation, Trinity, incarnation, resurrection and redemption, and proclaim in particular the events of the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.  This is the Gospel that the Church has always proclaimed and always must proclaim, for the Gospel fundamentally is rooted in God’s Trinitarian person and in these kerygmatic events.  The Gospel is the “faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 1:3), which does not change.

He then, however, notes three areas of concern with the ways some believers handle the Creeds:

But paleo-orthodoxy, it seems to me, understands the Creeds to have a greater authority than that of faithfully reflecting a pattern for Gospel proclamation.    For paleo-orthodoxy, the ecumenical Creeds are authoritative for doctrine and theology because they are part of the “history of the Holy Spirit.”  To be sure, the Creeds for the paleo-orthodox are subsidiary authorities to scripture, but nevertheless they are in some sense binding authorities.  In principle, for the paleo-orthodox, the Creeds are reformable in accordance with scripture.  In practice, however, the Creeds for them are functionally infallible (or so it seems to me, and to some other observers such as Roger Olson, who writes to this effect in his book Reformed and Always Reforming).

I find this notion troubling, for several reasons:  (1) it functionally compromises the Reformational principles of sola scriptura (though it formally maintains that principle) and of the priesthood of all believers; (2) it is highly selective – indeed arbitrary – about which parts of the “history of the Holy Spirit” are authoritative; and (3) it leaves unmanageable ambiguities about the status of some creedal statements.

The remainder of the post provides examples of Scot ’s reasons.

I think it was Scot McKnight who suggested that the “New Perspective on Paul” would make a lot more sense to traditional Protestants if they assumed that Ephesians was the epitome of Pauline theology rather than Romans or Galatians. (He may have merely been reporting an observation of N. T. Wright, and I don’t have time right now to look it up.) If that’s the case—and I think it is—then the “Ephesians Road” version of the “plan of salvation” developed by Trevin Wax and now elaborated by Derek Leman will be of interest.

According to Leman, the “Romans Road,” familiar to evangelical Christians, is not untrue, but it is incomplete:

Whereas the Romans Road says, “You can be forgiven and live forever,” the Ephesians Road says, “God is making a perfected cosmos and you can join in.” The Romans Road is limited because it ends in mere acceptance of future blessing. The Ephesians Road is more complete because it ends in all things united in Messiah and calls for us to work with Messiah through the community to bring about healing and redemption for the world.

Here is Leman’s summary of the “Ephesians Road”:

• Salvation is about God’s plan for the world (Ephesians 1), including the election of Israel, the adoption of Israel as the people of God, the inclusion of Gentiles in salvation, and the uniting of all things in Messiah symbolized by the new unity of Jew and Gentile in Messiah.
• Salvation is only by unearned favor (Ephesians 2:1-9), raising us from the dead and saving us from God’s wrath.
• Salvation comes with a calling that must be fulfilled in the community of faith (Ephesians 2:10-22), including good works, kingdom community of mutual blessing between Jew and Gentile, and imaging God to the world.

What do you think?

Katherine,

You write:

2) Are other prophecy sections in the Bible ex eventu prophecy?

This is a subject of some debate. Many would point to the predictions in the Gospels of the impending destruction of the temple (see Lk 21:20ff.) as an example—assuming that this saying was fashioned by the early church and was not in fact something Jesus said. As you can imagine, there is always a danger of arguing in a circle with these kinds of assertions. If I say, “Jesus really said this and it proves something about his spiritual awareness,” then someone else can say, “Jesus could have never said this, and its inclusion in the Gospels proves they were written after AD 70.” This and Daniel 7–12 are probably the major examples some people would point to.

If you’re of a skeptical bent, then pretty much all of the prophecies of the Bible are ex eventu! If, like me, you don’t object on philosophical principles to the possibility of genuine divine intervention, then you have to decide about the date of any particular writing on the basis of other factors (how archaic is the language? what other cultural clues point to a later or an earlier date, etc.). But remember as well that most biblical prophecy had to do with anticipation of events unfolding in the short term, and came with a certain conditionality based on how the recipients of the prophecy responded. (We talked about Jer 18 in class; Jonah is also a good example.)

What we are not supposed to do with Revelation is try to play “pin the tail on the Antichrist” by trying to line up various Bible verses with tomorrow’s headlines. People have been doing that almost literally from the beginning, and so far they have all been wrong! Actually, John tells us we are to “keep” what is written in Revelation (Rev 1:3)—the same word Jesus used in the Great Commission when he said, “teaching them to keep (NRSV ‘obey’) everything that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:20). That sounds to me like John thought his book was filled with things Christians are supposed to do, not necessarily
things they were supposed to figure out.

What do I think about the end times? I affirm what is taught in the Nicene Creed, that Christ “is coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom shall not end.” Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

Once again, I hope this is helpful to you. God bless!

Dr. P.

Katherine,

You write:

1) Job, Esther, and Daniel are all supposed to be fictional characters right? Is there anything else in the Old Testament that isn’t historically accurate, or are all the Writing just stories and legends? And if so much of the Old Testament was oral tradition before it was written down or the final product came from many different sources and then was edited, how can we believe in any part of it as God-inspired and infallible?

“Historically accurate” and “fictional characters” really belong in separate universes. If something isn’t even trying to be “historically accurate,” can it ever be said to be “historically inaccurate.”

For example, Jesus tells the story about a Samaritan who helps a man who lay wounded by the side of the road after he was ignored by a priest and a Levite. What does it mean to ask if this story is “historically accurate”? I would suggest that it means we have missed the point! Jesus is teaching us a lesson with several important theological themes—not least of which is what it means to be a “neighbor” to those around us. These lessons stand whether these incidents ever happened in history or not, and it doesn’t take too much perception to understand that the parabolic genre of the story gives us a strong basis for assuming that, in fact, it is a story that Jesus made up. Does that mean Jesus being “historically inaccurate”? Of course not, and I doubt that anyone’s faith has ever been challenged by acknowledging this fact. History doesn’t even enter into the question; Jesus is teaching a deep spiritual truth by means of fictitious characters and events.

The issue isn’t so much “Is this biblical account accurate?” but “Have I understood the genre of the literature I’m reading?” And there is certainly room for reasonable people to disagree here. Note, however, that the issue we would be debating is not the inspiration or infallibility of Scripture but how best to interpret it.

Furthermore, some genres look a lot like history even though they’re not (novellas, court tales, legends and sagas, etc.). And some “non-history” genres can contain genuine historical details. I’m thinking for example of Homer’s Iliad, written in epic poetry, which was long written off as pure mythology until Heinrich Schliemann found the ruins of Troy and subsequent archeologists demonstrated it really was destroyed by foreign invaders around the end of the Bronze Age. Although some classicists would no doubt disagree, others (like Barry Strauss in The Trojan War) make a pretty convincing case that, in broad strokes, the story of the Trojan War was more or less as Homer described it, even though the Iliad was written centuries before the earliest history writing in the western world (Herodotus, c. 450 BC). That doesn’t mean that Homer couldn’t use that historical core as the basis for a story he intended to tell on the theme of human wrath and arrogance.

The Iliad example also raises the issue of oral tradition, because almost everybody believes that the epic poems that eventually became codified as the Iliad were passed down for many generations in oral form before they were set to parchment. (The Greek alphabet didn’t even exist at the time of the Trojan War!). In preliterate societies, people relied on their memory far more than we do today, and there were often even specialists whose job was to remember the national epics, from the rhapsodes of ancient Greece to the griots of West Africa to the bards of pagan Ireland. So “oral tradition” need not imply second-rate or necessarily erroneous.

Personally, I’m probably more conservative than most when it comes to the essential accuracy of the biblical narratives’ historical core. I really don’t have any qualms about admitting the historical reality of the Patriarchs, the Exodus, or the United Monarchy—things that many scholars find highly dubious. The God I believe in works in history and cannot be constrained to a collection of “timeless truths.” Even so, my sense is that other factors are at play in the Bible than mere historical reporting. Like Homer, the biblical writers had a theme, a message, and they were often quite accomplished at using the literary devices of their day to get that message across.

How can we believe that a story that has come down to us through many generations—perhaps many centuries—of oral tradition and previous literary sources can be “God-breathed”? Well, how can we believe that Jesus is the Son of God if he ever had poopy diapers? How can we believe that he was the promised Messiah if he ever fell and scraped his knees as a child, or spoke in baby-talk before he finally mastered the Aramaic language? In other words, how can we believe that Jesus is who the New Testament claims he is if he was to all outward appearances a perfectly human human being?

Now, you know the answer to this. You learned it in Sunday school or through your pastor’s sermons or on a youth retreat somewhere along the way: Jesus was indeed perfectly human, but he was also perfectly divine. Neither his divinity nor his humanity is diluted in the least. To say otherwise is heresy: we don’t believe in a Jesus who floated three inches off the ground and was surrounded by a golden glow. Rather, we believe in a Jesus who, despite his divinity, experienced everything that being human implies—hunger, thirst, frustration, fatigue, pain, and death—yet without sin. If he hadn’t been truly human, we could never have understood him or embraced him. Far from a liability, his humanity was the one thing that made it possible for him to reveal the divine to us. No humanity, no  (meaningful) communication.

I think what you’re coming to grips with is the fact that the Bible is also a perfectly human document.  Human writers put it together much as they did any other literature from the same time and place, using the human languages in which they ordinarily spoke, the range of literary options available to them in their cultures.

What I hope you will realize, and I expect you already do, is that the Bible’s perfect humanity does not necessarily detract from accepting it as a book that is also “God-breathed.”

Dr. P.

Which is only a problem because I grew up in, and continue to identify with, a spiritual tradition that has often settled for homodoxy instead.

Fortunately, here in the heart of central Georgia is a Baptist church that is at least taking baby steps toward orthodoxy as Fr. Peters describes it: the liturgical year, spiritual formation, etc. Heck, we even have Sunday school classes that study ancient Christian psalmody and Eastern Orthodox spirituality, and we’re going to be offering a class this summer on the Apostles Creed.

Of course, if you asked anybody in the merely homodox Georgia Baptist Convention, they’d probably tell you we were a bunch of “liberals.” Go figure.

My CHR 101 students must be living right, because BioLogos.org has just posted a video lecture by N. T. Wright on “Meaning and Myth,” in which the renowned biblical scholar discusses Genesis 1–3 and what it can mean to claim that this texts is both “mythic” and “God’s word.”

This will be very helpful background material for next Tuesday’s discussion. I’ll probably be plagiarizing from it rather blatantly.

Good words from my favorite Baptist contemplative, Jeanie Miley:

When I was growing up, Mary the mother of Jesus was consigned to a minor role, not because her role was minor, but because in my tradition there was a fear of the worship of Mary.  That fear of Mary and the neglect of her story sort of oozed and leaked over into other attitudes and practices within my religious tradition, but ’tis the season to focus on other things, I think.

Now that I’ve got some history at putting away childish things and attempting to grow up, I”m incredulous about that fear of Mary.  When I expressed to my spiritual director, Bishop Mike Pfeifer, that there were some in my tradition who held to the idea that sin came into the world through a woman, he quickly said, “But, Jeanie, the Savior also came into the world through a woman.”

That statement he made poured the oil of grace over a painful wound in my soul.

By all means, read it all.

Worth pondering:

Perhaps orthodoxy is not an either/or phenomenon—for then one is either orthodox or one is not—but rather something like a continuum. To the extent that we participate in the Truth who is God Himself, we are “more” orthodox; and to the extent that we move away from Him, we become “more” heterodox (i.e. tending toward some “other” [hetero-] kind of glory rather than the “right” [ortho-] glory). And so, the drama of heterodoxy and orthodoxy in the life of the Church becomes fundamentally bound to the drama of sin and grace which plays itself out in the soul of every man and every community in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. This being the case, the true remedy for heresy or heterodoxy in the Church is not polemics, polarization or politicization but the therapeutic regiment of grace.

Last night I was honored to discuss the topic of “Biblical Inerrancy and Biblical Authority” at the First Baptist Church of Forsyth, Georgia as part of their “Great Debates” series of evening services. Below the fold is a somewhat edited and link-enhanced version of what I had to say.

Read the rest of this entry →

Sad.

An InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter can look very different in the fall than it did the previous spring. But the chapter at George Washington University (GWU) in the nation’s capital is dealing with change of a more uncomfortable kind than absent graduates and incoming freshmen.

Shortly before students left for summer vacation, the D.C. chapter split when all ten student leaders resigned to form a new campus ministry called University Christian Fellowship. More than half of the chapter’s roughly 100 students joined them. At issue was student leaders’ worry that the national ministry confuses the gospel by cooperating with Roman Catholics, and has a mission statement that Catholics could sign without violating church teaching on the doctrine of justification—how sinners are declared righteous before God.

As an “un-anathematized” Protestant (at least provisionally; I agree with the Catholic-Lutheran Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in principle, but haven’t really dug into the details), it saddens me to see fellow believers so eager not to find points of commonality with their brothers and sisters in Christ. For example, consider the following consecutive paragraphs in the article:

“If you buy into [N. T.] Wright’s approach to covenantal theology, then you’ve already taken three steps toward the Catholic Church. Keep following the trail and you’ll be Catholic,” said [Taylor] Marshall, who blogs at PaulIsCatholic.com. “Salvation is sacramental, transformational, communal, and eschatological. Sound good? You’ve just assented to the Catholic Council of Trent.”

Wright himself finds strange the notion that he’s leading people to Rome. “I am sorry to think that there are people out there whose Protestantism has been so barren that they never found out about sacraments, transformation, community, or eschatology. Clearly this person needed a change. But to jump to Rome for that reason is very odd,” he said. The best Reformed, charismatic, Anglican, and even some emerging churches have these emphases, he said.

How do Protestants not know that their historic theology goes far deeper and wider than the immediate concerns of the Reformation of the sixteenth century? Never mind; stupid question.

Related:

• When Protestants Attack
• I’m Not Crossing the Tiber, but My Toes Are in the Thames