I missed wishing readers of this blog a Merry Christmas because I was out of town and left fairly quickly. At the last minute my wife and I were able to go to Ft. Worth, TX to see our daughter, son-in-law, and two granddaughters. A good time was had by all of us!
I will be getting some posts going here yet today, so beware!
I have written previously about community and Biblical inspiration and more recently about fear that pushes people away from studying the Bible for themselves. So how about a note on some of the dangers of Bible study?
My attention was called to this topic by this post on Thinking Christian, in which the basis for anti-semitism in the gospels and Paul’s writings is discussed and to some extent despatched. There were two passages in that post that set me to thinking just a bit. The first is:
None of these verses suggest that the whole Jewish nation is responsible for Jesus’ death and none of them promote the idea that Jews should be persecuted. Dowling is clutching at straws here and reading into the text what he clearly wants to see. The texts are so clear, in fact, one wonders whether he has actually studied them with a sceptical view! [emphasis in original]
And this is the second:
Although Dowling’s argument is completely flawed, it is true to say that the Bible has been used by those who wish to promote persecution of the Jews. But this is not the fault of the Bible. It is the result of distorted readings of the text. Unfortunately, ‘the history of the church is about as long as the history of anti-Semitism—if not in the overt acts of Christians, certainly in their guilty silence.’ (Wilson 1984) So the Christian Church has certainly been guilty of perpetuating anti-Semitism by commission or omission. But the actions of the Church must not be equated with the teachings of Scripture.
Now don’t come to any conclusions about Steve Parker’s material without reading it completely. But what interests me here is that he says that it is very clear, even emphatically clear that these texts do not support putting the blame for the death of Jesus on the Jewish people as a whole, and do not support persecution on that basis, and yet, as he acknowledges in the second quote, these texts and others have been used in precisely that way.
So what happened on the way from the first to the second? Generally, some very bad Biblical interpretation, and more specifically application has taken place. The reason for this is that the Bible has been given to us not in a neat, systematic fashion designed to give you direct answers for your moment by moment decisions. Instead, it is presented in people’s experience of God in a range of situations over an extended period of time.
We are always in danger of misapplying scripture simply because we have our own agendas, and we tend to read what we think should be there. I’m always fascinated in my own reading to look at my previous marginal notes and underlining. Different aspects of a passage strike me at different times. There’s no problem with this. We’re human and we can’t keep our attention on everything at every moment. But our human nature also gets us to focus on how the Bible might apply to someone else, or on those aspects that support what we want to do. We can even believe that we are being quite scriptural because we have a Bible verse to quote for every occasion. We might even have reduced it to a simple reference.
In the particular scriptures that caught my attention here, there was probably a very simple process of misapplication. Some Christian in the early, but not too early years of the church was angry at some Jews, perhaps at the Jews, possibly because he simply couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t accept what, to him, was obviously the truth. He wants to force them to believe, and it’s only a short step from forcing people to believe to using force and killing them if they continue to refuse. He looks for justification. “Aha!” he says, “we have it right here in Matthew 27:25. They admit to being guilty of killing Jesus–killing God!”
The text doesn’t actually have to say that. It just has to provide one little wedge of scripture for the action that our hypothetical Christian already wants to take. Very unfortunately, though the specific thought processes are hypothetical, the result is not, and many Christians used the verse in question in precisely that way.
We can easily wonder why there isn’t some kind of footnote or parenthetical remark that God would provide saying, “Don’t take this to mean that all Jews are guilty of the death of Jesus.” That simply wasn’t the issue at the time. I know that there are scholars who believe that this passage was penned precisely with the purpose of placing the blame for the death of Jesus on the Jews rather than the Romans. But even if that was the case, the historical context was a situation in which Christians were distinguishing themselves from Judaism more and more, yet it was still closer to a family fight with many Christians also considering themselves Jews, and thus requiring great care in application in any other situation. It’s quite possible that we should say that Jesus did provide a footnote, in Matthew 5:43-48–“Love your enemies!” Even if this verse did indicate a national guilt, and even if it did allow us to regard the Jewish people as our enemies, we’d still be commanded to love, and love would surely exclude persecution.
I have written about each of these elements before, but I think this brings them into focus:
As a final note, I believe that God gives us the scriptures as part of the experience of the community because he wants us to experience him in the present as a community. We might want a book of facts and detailed instructions. God wants to provide us with a guide for coming into relationship to him and experiencing him in our daily lives. The greatest antidote to hatred in our lives, I believe, is the regular experience of God’s love. When you constantly experience God’s loving presence, you will find it harder to believe that God is justifying hatred.
Christian Carnival CLIII has been posted at Lux Venit. It looks good, but I may not have time to look at much this week. Thanks to Leslie for a good job!
Joe Carter has a wonderful post today, The Fountainhead of Bedford Falls: Comparing George Bailey and Howard Roark, discussing elements of the style and meaning of It’s a Wonderful Life and The Fountainhead. While I might quibble about some points in the evaluation, it’s a well written and thoughtful piece, and you should take a look at it. In fact, what I say here will not make much sense unless you read his piece first. Just be aware that I’m taking off at about a 90 degree angle rather than building directly on Carter’s comments.
But having said that, I want to ask you to think about some things that aren’t in either of these works of literature. You see, I have enjoyed both, while being fully aware of the contrasting views involved. Carter notes:
The fans of The Fountainhead are therefore not likely to appreciate Wonderful Life. Indeed, the messages are so antithetical that only a schizophrenic personality could truly appreciate both George Bailey and Howard Roark. For even though they are surprisingly similar characters, when the spell of sentimentalism has faded the contrasts become clear.
Perhaps I’m just such a schizophrenic. But I think not. Rather, I think that both these pictures give us stark contrasts that are not the day to day personalities we have to deal with. That’s not a bad thing. One of the enduring qualities of the book of Revelation (shameless plug for my study guide), beyond and timelines and specific future predictions one extracts from it, is that it clears up the good guys and the bad guys. We know which is which, we know who to hate and who to love, and we can cheer as the deserving ones get thrown into the lake. A similar fascination comes from watching Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. We know when to cheer and when not to. Evil comes along so dark and obvious that we can be certain all its allies are culpable and certainly not completely deceived.
The Florida Citizens for Science blog has an interesting account of a conversation between Joe Meert (Florida Citizens for Science vice-chair) and John Baumgardner, geophysicist and young earth creationist. It’s worth reading. Joe asks the right questions.
You can find it here.
I was preparing a devotional for my wife’s devotional list on facing fear when it suddenly occurred to me that the verses I was using could also apply to Bible study. I regularly encounter Christians who are afraid to study the Bible. Their concern is that they will get it wrong, but more especially that they will teach someone else wrong.
It’s not surprising that they get to feeling this way, because we do quite appropriately put a great deal of stress on correctly understanding what the Bible has to say. When you add to that the nice note in James 4:1, “Not many of you should become teachers . . .” and the fear becomes set in concrete.
The questioner generally also asks me how the great scholars, you know, the ones who wrote the notes in their study Bible, manage to figure out what the text means. “I read the text, and then I read the notes,” they say, “and I just can’t see how they got the note out of the text!” I have to tell them that sometimes the note isn’t right either. I have quite a collection of Bibles with study notes, and I can tell you that there are substantial differences in what they say.
I’m not one to spend a great deal of time criticizing the media for their treatment of Christianity, but I do think that in general journalists in this country have a really good idea for what’s not the most important story, and as soon as they detect such a thing, they print it immediately. That’s why I like to look at stories from multiple sources because then I can gather together the few facts, and the scattered actually interesting things that they all print.
A case in point is the MSNBC story 2nd Colo. pastor quits over ‘sexual misconduct’ which informs us that another minister at New Life Church has resigned over sexual misconduct. It turns out that the sexual misconduct was by an adult with another adult, both unmarried, several years ago. I’m not trying to make light of the sin here, but considering that New Life Church has around 200 staff members, the possibility that someone had committed a sexual indiscretion within the past six or seven years was pretty good. It is something that should be dealt with, with a key factor being that it is thoroughly contrary to the expressed standards of that church, but is just isn’t news.
But there was some real news in the story; it was just not deemed worthy of the headline. The report says:
The church’s outside Board of Overseers was asked to examine the “spiritual character”? of its 200 staff members after Haggard resigned last month from the church and as president of the National Association of Evangelicals.
“We recognize there will be increased scrutiny of our church in the wake of the scandal,”? Brendle said.
Now that’s responsible behavior, and it’s good news here. We’re not going to have perfect churches, and we will have scandals involving church leaders as long as human beings are leading churches. That’s not an excuse; it’s just a fact. We need to deal with problems as they occur. Hypocrisy is serious sin, and we need to be especially careful about living up to our expressed standards. But in the case of Ted Haggard and New Life Church, the church structure responded promptly and efficiently and dealt quickly with the problem. Then they went the extra mile and brought extra scrutiny on themselves.
I think that responsible handling of a situation is more newsworthy than one young adult leader who was guilty of a sexual indiscretion.
(HT: The Panda’s Thumb)
The way this case is being handled illustrates why religious and traditional beliefs about the physical world should be subject to scientific testing. I don’t mean that one’s beliefs about spiritual matters need to be so tested, but when your beliefs or mine say something about the physical world, then they are testable by scientific means, and the scientific method is not merely the best method we’ve discovered to acquire accurate data about the physical world; it’s the only adequate method.
Traditional prejudices, however acquired, often blind people to facts. Who a person is, where they came from, or what their religious beliefs become more important than any factual data. I like religion, but if I allow the way I think things should be according to my theology, then I will get into the habit of denying objective evidence. Subjectivity is often good in spiritual matters, but it is bad in discovering physical reality.
These six people have been sentenced to death because they are working in a country in which people have been repeatedly schooled to deny reality in any case in which it conflicts with religious dogma or tradition. We need to save them, but we also need to correct the culpable stupidity that makes such an obviously wrong verdict possible.
Visit the Amnesty International web site for updates. Donate if you can. (Thanks to Andrea Bottaro at The Panda’s Thumb for the links.)
I went wandering through the Moderate Christian Blog Aggregator today. I really should do this more often as there are always some really excellent posts. I simply try to read so much stuff that I often don’t get around to writing about all the things I’d like to. In any case, here are some selected entries with my (hopefully) brief thoughts. I am only including posts that are fairly recent.
I’m taking these entries in the random blog order (entries for each blog are in reverse date order) in which they appeared on the aggregator when I looked at it.
Everyday Liturgy
I chose too entries from Everyday Liturgy, though there are others that are great. The first is Negative Capability, which will challenge you to look at faith as poetry rather than as prose, a very fine idea all around! The second is A Gendered View of God, which may help us take a broader view of God and gender.
From Monastic Mumblings, a Friar’s Journey I’d like to highlight Twofold Coming of Jesus Christ, which comes largely from Cyril of Jerusalem, but is an excellent and relevant selection from that.
From In Praise Of Jesus we have a practical, classical sermon from George Mueller, titled Real Faith.
On The Dream Factory Tom Sims tells us that he always chooses hope in his entry These Are the Days.
Bruce Alderman keeps busy at It Seems to Me…. but what caught my eye as a Bible teacher was our need for the word, in which he calls for a subjective experience of the word. I’d note that the objective study has its place, but we do not become transformed by the word through merely objective study. We often look at “subjective” as somehow less than objective. Subjective is different, not less than, not more than, but it is a personal view.
Coops was here provided discussions of God’s fairness in Why does God seem to play favorites? and the relationship between what we believe and going to hell in Does God Damn People Because They Believe Something Different? – A response.
Donny Prater at A Man Coming Alive is Running the Gauntlet of Temptation and learning what’s truly important in life in Bobblehead Spirituality. (Hint: It isn’t bobblehead figures, though he says they’re cool. I’ll take his word for it!)
Kievas Fargo on Sharing a Journey is participating in the RGPB Friday Five with his post Friday Five: Yuletide favorites, and he has some nice things to say about one of my posts in The egalitarian worldview, though I probably shouldn’t mention that. Oops! I already did. 🙂
Bill Vernick at The Wordwright wants us to quit TAMPERING WITH REALITY in the way that we use words.
The Pen of the Wayfarer writes about a comforting vision in A Matinee with the Trinity and some things that can be brought forth by pain in Pain at Christmas, Pain in the Christmas Story.
Gavin (Hit the Back Button to Move Fwd) is responding to a post about far right youth ministries in huffington post on the far right youth ministries, and calling on all to get involved in a challenge to the Methodist blogosphere (though I don’t suspect outside help would be declined!) in your best millennial life now
At E-Merging Daniel is in the video and pics business!
Donny continues his online and ongoing testimony (for which kudos to him!) at Donny’s Ramblings: Diary of a FORMER Pornographer with his latest entry Heartache and Negativity. He may dislike reading negative things at a blog, but I appreciate his willingness to share.
The Pacesetters Bible School Newletter features two new contributors, Rev. Geoffrey Lentz in Signed, Sealed, Delivered and Dr. Bob McKibben with Inspired and Empowered – Apportionments and Connectionalism
Peter Kirk (Speaker of Truth) and I have both been rather heavily involved in responding to Adrian Warnock’s interview with Dr. Wayne Grudem. Peter’s most recent entry on that topic is Adrian Warnock closes his blog to comments… but he’s also asking Does God know what time it is?
Since I often write devotionals for my wife, I’m making sure to feature one of her entries from jodydevotionals at Yahoo! Groups, here message on God’s gifts and our expectations, Monday Morning Devotion 12/18/06. Note that even though all the entries show me as the author that’s because Jody sends them to me and I post them. Even when I write them they go to her first and she selects and edits before deciding what to post.
From my own blogs, I’d like to note some words on trajectories and how they can be used in scripture, a blank verse attempt at Psalm 103, which may be more of a demonstration of my lack of poetic ability. I’m not totally happy with it, but here it is!
Note: I’m going to cross-post this entry on the Pacesetters Bible School Newsletter blog. I’m not certain how trackbacks are going to work, but we’ll see!
Dave Warnock has posted an excellent set of reflections on the Wayne Grudem interview series. I strongly recommend reading it, especially some specific reflections from a Methodist perspective. While I do not use the term “evangelical” and Dave does, the problem is a difference of definition. Some of us try to hang onto words and defend them. I generally discard them as they begin to be used of things with which I do not agree.
