Tag: Bible Study

I’m back to my discussion of inspiration, dealing with the issue of how one determines whether someone can speak for God. In this entry I’m going to look at the last two items on my list, divine widom, and the gift of discernment, which are closely related.

As a preliminary, let me comment that I have noticed that most of the gifts of the Spirit have their “talent” counterparts. There are those who exhibit wisdom, and then there is the gift of messages (or words) of wisdom. There are talented teachers, and then there are those whose ability to help guide a group into understanding spiritual truths seems supernatural. There is a talent for languages, and then there is the gift of tongues as exhibited on Pentecost with everyone hearing in their own language. I don’t want to take up space in this entry by digging more into this idea, so if you think I’m off-base here, we’ll need to wait for another set of entries to discuss it more. But for the moment, I want to suggest such a relationship between a wise person, and one who has the gift of discernment or, I would suggest, shares in the divine wisdom.

I’m combining my discussion, because I think the relationship between wisdom exhibited as wisdom, i.e. a Proverbs sort of wisdom, and the gift of discernment is very close. I think we ignore that relationship at our own peril. The problem is that the gift of discernment doesn’t have some specific physical manifestation to identify it. It can be claimed in the same way as the gift of prophecy, or as any message from God. One person can make the claim of the gift of prophecy, while another claims discernment and backs them up. The result is just as circular as any other test I’ve mentioned.

So let me start with wisdom. I think it is critically important that we pay attention to the fact that the Bible includes wisdom literature. Many of the Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes fall into this category. If you pay attention as you read these books, you will see something significantly different from the message of the prophetic books. The prophets stand on their claim to receive messages from God through the Spirit. Their sanction is their inspiration by God. They invite you to accept or reject their message, and experience the consequences (graphically presented) of your choice.

Wisdom writers, on the other hand, appeal to the nature of the created universe, to the experience of how God works, and to the understanding the community has built up. They are clear that the message comes from God and is a divine message, but it is a process of the mind that has perceived God’s revelation. I don’t believe that this is any less “inspiration” than the prophet’s message, but it invites the reader to participate in another way, by thinking and getting themselves involved in the divine wisdom.

Jesus also spoke in this wisdom mode. There has been a debate amongst historical Jesus scholars about whether Jesus was a wisdom teacher, an eschatological preacher, with the latter being similar to the prophetic approach. I would suggest that the question narrows Jesus too much. Jesus spoke in the form of wisdom at times and in the form of prophecy (Spirit driven speech) at times. One of the reasons I think that those on the outside couldn’t understand the parables was that the parables were not in the form of announcements; rather, they were in the form of seeds. It’s wrong to look for the interpretation of a parable. One needs to look for how a parable can seed into one’s thinking and change one’s whole approach to life. That is divine wisdom operating within.

But divine wisdom is not a purely human endeavor. It is not that people figure out God. Rather, it is that people grow in wisdom by looking into God’s actions, in the physical, spiritual, and moral realms. Psalm 119:104 says we get wisdom through God’s precepts. Sometimes I add this to my list of tests–the obedience test. If we set out to obey God with all our hearts and minds, we will not ultimately be led astray. When we are led astray, it’s because in some sense we have kept an agenda other than finding divine wisdom. Wisdom literature emphasizes that wisdom starts with fearing God (Proverbs 1:7). Following God’s wisodm involves acknowledging him as creator, and finding his wisdom in the creation (Proverbs 8:22ff, Psalm 104). Divine wisdom is one thing that appears to be promised on the only condition that we seek it wholeheartedly (James 1:5).

That divine wisdom forms the foundation for our understanding of discernment in the community. I think by now anyone who has stuck with me through all these essays will realize that I put the greatest weight on the community of faith in discerning God’s message. Abraham had very little community to work with. We’re told in Joshua 24:2 that Abraham’s family were worshipping other gods. He simply had to move on faith. God honored his determination to obey and gave him direction clearly enough. Over time, the community of faith has exercised its discernment in preserving and granting authority to certain written material as part of our body of faith literature. The study of canonization is itself fairly complex. (I talk about this just a little bit more in the Participatory Study Series pamphlet What is the Word of God?) Let me just say here that if we do not believe that God leads spiritually in the community as it selects a body of literature that is authoritative, we should probably give up the notion of any canon at all.

If we do accept God’s working in the community, then the more times we have someone who has heard God’s voice, the greater the body of knowledge we have to work from. I suspect that God expects more in terms of discernment from me than he did from Abraham on this issue. Not because I’m wiser than Abraham, or more spiritual, or anything of the sort, but because I have much, much more material to work with, and thus many more ways to check what I hear.

In sports that allow plays to be reviewed, the reviewer can see the play from various camera angles. Often I look at a play as it’s shown on TV and I see one thing, and then some other camera angle makes it clear that the reality was somewhat different. Abraham had one camera angle. I have many. My lousy spiritual eyesight can be aided by many different views.

I would suggest that the gifts of wisdom and discernment relate very closely to the divine wisdom and need to be judged as such. A “word of wisdom” or as I prefer, “message of wisdom” is something that can be tested by the community at the time it is spoken. We especially compare it to the divine wisdom. Does this word reflect the fear of God? Does this wisdom reflect God’s activity in the world? Is it in accordance with God’s precepts from which we get understanding? An absolute statement by someone who claims discernment can be tested in the same way.

One final comment I need to make has to do with how we find an objective standard. Obviously I believe that the Bible is a valid source for me in terms of faith and practice. Otherwise I wouldn’t belong to a denomination that claims that as a doctrine, and I wouldn’t be a Bible teacher. I think, however, that our witness needs to be more community based. As Christians (and I’ve been speaking in a Christian context here) we need to make our witness clear. We cannot simply provide a list of reasons one should regard the Bible as true; we need to show that the Bible is the book of a community in which God is present. I think this is where we frequently fail. And to bring this entry full circle, we frequently fail because while we’ve accepted some pronouncements as true (which is good), we have failed to let the divine wisdom be planted in our hearts and minds and start to bear fruit.

We need to make divine wisdom the hallmark of our community.

Note: Other articles of my own that I have used in this series include Inspiration, Biblical Authority, and Inerrancy and The Authority of the Bible.

Wayne Leman on his Better Bibles blog, created an exceptional entry on the need for having translations that put the Bible into comprehensible, current English.

Too often in the church we assume that people know things. We assume they know how to find the church, when services are, what is appropriate for them or for their children, what to do in church, where to find a Sunday School class, and many other things. We do the same thing with many of our doctrines. People are assumed to understand justification, sanctification, glorification, atonement, expiation, and so forth.

But many people don’t understand these words, and they don’t know our ways. They may not be willing to expose themselves to potential ridicule by asking what may seem to be a stupid question.

I’m going to refer you to Wayne’s blog for more, but let me suggest quickly that there are two ways we can address this. First, we can translate what we say on a daily basis into real, everyday English. This is something I need to work on! Second, some of the things we do may be incomprehensible because they’ve lost their meaning. Perhaps we need to change our ways, so that we can communicate God’s love more effectively through our actions.

In my initial entry on testing prophets I listed five approaches to determining whether a word someone claims comes from God is actually from God. The third of those items was “Access to inside information, or is in God’s councils.”

You may be wondering, and rightfully so, how I distinguish this from other approaches. Surely this one is totally covered by the prediction or sign test. But I found this specifically in the foreward by Mark Chironna to Jim Goll’s recent book, The Seer, which my wife and I are studying together. The statement there was that “. . . the earmark of a true prophet was that they stood in the divine council and conclave” (p. 12).

What struck me immediately is that this is the type of statement that is commonly made by either theologians or very spiritual people who are experienced in prayer and in dealing with issues regarding the prophetic. I don’t really take exception to it except that “earmark” normally means something like “a distinguishing or identifying mark.” I get regular questions from people who have received impressions, visions, dreams, or heard something that they believe was the voice of God. How are they going to know whether this is God’s leading or not? If someone has claimed that God told them something, how does one know whether they truly are? This “earmark” is unlikely to work well, because the question remains of where the mark is. What does the inexperienced person do?

I have seen this kind of answer in conferences, and people appear satisfied with them, but I also know that when they go home they still have the same basic question–how can I know. In other words, the earmark doesn’t work well, or isn’t visible to most people. I’m going to deal with this more as I proceed through this series. But right now I just want to suggest that the answer to a question like this has to be practical. We can’t just discuss the theology of how inspiration works and assume that people can apply that knowledge practically. Very often I think that those who proclaim the theology don’t themselves know how to apply their knowledge practically and then just play it by ear. That can be very dangerous if the issue is a question of whether someone is speaking for God.

Some also will simply claim that nobody now is speaking for God. (There will also be those who claim that nobody ever has spoken for God, but I’m assuming right now they’re not very intersted in this essay.) But those Christians who claim that the gifts of the Holy Spirit have ceased still need to deal with the issue of Biblical inspiration itself. Anyone can still ask why one should accept the Bible as inspired, and not other works from ancient times. In addition, there are Christian groups who claim that prophets still speak in modern times. (Jim Goll, whose book I cited earlier, is one such.) So in any case, one needs to have some kind of practical approach to these problems.

I’ll continue through the list of tests in my next entry.

For the last few weeks I’ve been talking about inspiration, whether that relates to written scripture, or to someone claiming to be speaking for God. Today I’m going to start discussing the tests of a prophet, which might be equated to tests for inspiration, that are used in Christianity. These find their source somewhere in the Bible.

As I discussed in my previous entry, these tests are derived from the community. In other words, they have their source in tradition. Somewhere along the line I will talk more about tradition, how it can be valuable and also how it can be a problem.

The tests I’ll be discussing in my next few entries are:

• Fulfilled prediction or sign
• Godliness
• Access to inside information, or is in God’s councils
• Divine wisdom
• Gift of discernment

All of these have been claimed to be good methods of deciding who is a true or false prophet.

Let’s look first at the fulfilled prediction or sign. The basic scripture for this particular test comes from Deuteronomy 18:21-22, which says that if a prophet says that something is going to happen, and then that doesn’t happen, they are a false prophet. Note that this is not stated positively, i.e. that one cannot be certain simply because a prediction comes true that the person making that prediction is a true prophet. We’ll discuss that further in the entry on “Godliness” as a test.

This seems to be the easiest test as well as the most objective. We simply look for some external sign, normally a predicted event, and if that does not occur as predicted by the prophet, then we know the prophet is false. But the Bible does make allowances for predictions that are true, but not from God, and we ourselves know that there is a possibility of a prediction being true simply by chance, or because someone knows certain factors and gets lucky. For example, one can look at opinion polls and predict the result of an election. That doesn’t make that person a prophet.

The book of Jeremiah provides many excellent examples of the use of this test. The primary issue between Jeremiah and other prophets was over the status of Jerusalem and the temple. Many prophets were predicting that the city and temple would be saved. They held a doctrine that based on God’s promises to David, the temple could not be destroyed. Jeremiah predicted that Jerusalem and the temple would be destroyed and the rulers and many of the people taken into exile. History proved Jeremiah right, even if his behavior during an invasion did sound like treason.

One more specific example was the conflict between Hananiah and Jeremiah in depicted in Jeremiah 28. Jeremiah uses the visual aid of a yoke that he wears to show that those who accept Babylon’s yoke will survive. Hananiah removes the yoke and prophecies that Nebuchadnezzar will be repulsed. Jeremiah then predicts Hananiah’s death as a punishment from God. In the same year Hananiah dies (Jeremiah 28).

A further problem with this test is the vagueness of certain prophecies. People frequently object when I refer to Biblical prophecies being vague. Usually these people have a very precise interpretation in mind. But there are normally other people who are equally convinced of precisely opposite solutions. A good example is the white horse its rider of Revelation 6:2. Interpretations, strongly stated, include the contradictory positions that the rider is Jesus Christ himself, and that he is the antichrist. Some other interpreters see the early Christian church heading out to evangelize. Obviously not all of these can be true, and so the prophecy must be regarded as vague. Revelation has gone through many interpretations that have been proven false by the progress of history. Remaining interpretations put unfulfilled events in the future. Can one then know by the fulfillment/sign test whether John the Revelator was a true or false prophet?

But the situation gets more complicated yet. In the book of Jonah we have the story of a prophet who makes a specific prediction, one that certainly cannot be regarded as vague, and does not admit of an alternate interpretation. Nineveh was to be destroyed in 40 days. Nineveh was not destroyed in 40 days. One cannot assume that the later destruction of Nineveh fulfilled this prophecy, because it did not occur within the 40 days. Failed prediction! Can we say to the Ninevites, “You don’t have to fear Jonah’s prediction (Deuteronomy 18:22)?” That is certainly not the position of the book. From the perspective of our story teller Jonah does, in fact, have a message from God, but nothing happens.

Some will claim that Jonah is a fictional story written to make a different point. I would argue that whether fictional or not, it likely reflects its authors view of predictive prophecy. But we have a better alternative.

Returning to Jeremiah, now to chapter 18, we have the story of Jeremiah in the potter’s house. He watches the clay pots being made, and sees the potter reshape clay into whatever form he likes. This is often used by Christians, following the example of Paul in Romans 9, to indicate God’s absolute sovereignty, apart from our own actions. But Jeremiah’s point is precisely the opposite. He is telling us that God can change his actions based on repentance. Read the entire chapter. When good is predicted, and people turn to evil, God will repent of the good he had planned to do. When evil is predicted, and the people repent, then God will repent of the evil. The entire chapter is very instructive, and basically carries the same message with reference to prophecy as the book of Jonah.

The historical situation in Jeremiah is substantially different from that in Jonah, however. Jeremiah is responding to the doctrine I referred to above, that Jerusalem and the Temple could not be destroyed because of God’s promises to David. Jeremiah is responding to this that God can change his actions according to the decisions and actions of people. In Jeremiah’s case this resulted in his correct prediction that Judah would fall, and would go into exile. He also predicted their return to Judah with significant accuracy. Jeremiah essentially presented a doctrine that, despite Deuteronomy 18, would allow the earlier prophets, those who had brought messages in favor of Jerusalem and the temple, could be true prophets even though their prediction of an eternal throne for David and for Jerusalem’s prosperity were about to fail.

The final difficulty with this test is simply that the results can be too late. Again let me use Jeremiah for an example. He predicts the destruction of Jerusalem. The majority of those who claimed to be prophets in Judah were predicting salvation for Jerusalem. If you were Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, or Zedekiah, who would you believe? Until the events have taken place, you cannot know whose prediction came to pass. I call this the “dead test” for a prophet, because you’re so very often dead, as were many inhabitants of Jerusalem, before you can finish applying the test.

So this test has some value, in that it provides an objective test, but at the same time there are substantial difficulties in application.

In my next entry on this topic I will discuss the second test, Godliness.

I’m continuing a fairly long series of essays on inspiration. Some of this material will be included in my new book, When People Speak for God, though I haven’t scheduled a time yet when I’ll complete that manuscript.

In my previous entry, The Heart of Inspiration, I said that inspiration starts from any experience of God, not necessarily words that are dictated by God, or even specific messages that are presented to a prophet, but rather from very human people experiencing the presence of God and then trying in their own words to record what they experienced. I suggested that this model explained more of the Biblical text than other major models used in discussing inspiration.

There should be at least some readers who are getting annoyed at the continuing lack of a foundation for all of this, or one could say my use of circular arguments. That frustration is likely to continue. If we had some standard by which to judge divine revelations, it would itself have to be revealed, and then we’d just start the same set of questions all over again. What made this new super-standard into a standard?

In thinking about this, I’ve tried to avoid coming up with an explanation of how I think I should have decided what, if anything, is inspired. Rather, I’d like to look at how I did, in fact, make that decision. And that comes in two parts. First, I grew up with the Bible. From the earliest time I remember, the Bible was presented as true and as God’s word. That was just an assumption in our family and in our church community.

When I was about 10 years old, I asked my father how one could know that the Bible was true. I suggested the idea of fulfilled prophecy as an option. Instead, he told me that one couldn’t know or prove that the Bible was true, this was one of the things we take on faith. I have come back to that little piece of thinking many times in my life.

The second phase came after graduate school, when I left Christianity entirely for a period of time and then returned. Again, I was confronted with the question. I could not be convinced that the Bible was inerrant, and in fact, I remain convinced that the human element shows through scripture in the form of very human failures to comprehend and express the message or the experience of God. Now perhaps I could make an informed choice between various available scriptures. But there was still no acceptable standard by which one could judge the available scriptures.

Muslim friends have suggested I should accept the Qur’an, and therefore Islam, because it is so comprehensive, and answers every question. I’m afraid that I don’t actually find that very attractive in a religion. Now understand that I’m not criticizing Muslims for what they want and what they find in their scriptures. I’m not talking about what I should want, but rather about what I do want. I still know of no way in which to discover what I really ought to want in religion or a scripture. What I do want from scripture is something that is challenging and provides an opportunity for discussion, and the Bible certainly provides me with that.

What I see from this is that my choice of scripture derives from community. From an experiential point of view I am a Christian because I was raised in a Christian family as part of a Christian community. I have studied further and I believe have more reasons than that to remain a Christian, but the bottom line is that the starting point was that I was born into the community. Further, I have continued to have spiritual experiences that relate to the Christian community, and which reinforce my sense of the presence of God. These experiences relate well to the experiences of the scriptures, and thus these reinforce my belief in the validity of those scriptures.

Which leads me right back to what my father told me when I was 10 years old: I’m taking it on faith.