Apostle Paul

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Reading Paul differently than the Protestant Reformers

The Protestant Reformers of the 15th and 16th centuries have handed down to us a way of reading Paul which basically boils down to “Romans and Galatians give us the framework for what Paul really wanted to say; the other letters fill in the details here and there.” Said that way, it’s quite an assumption, isn’t it?

The Reformers were hunting for answers to questions which perplexed them in their day. And they found answers. They calibrated those answers according to the thought systems and categories of their own day and age. The question is, were the answers they found actually what Paul was talking about himself, in his own day? Once you assume that what is on your mind is what was on the biblical writer’s mind, you start reading everything through the  lens of those assumptions; you start hearing and seeing things in the text the writer was not actually saying.

The world’s leading New Testament scholar N.T. Wright proposes a thought experiment. What if we DIDN’T assume that Romans and Galatians are what REALLY count, and that the other letters are second-place  fillers?  “Suppose we come to Ephesians first… Colossians close behind, and decide we will read Romans, Galatians and the rest in light of them (Ephesians and Colossians), instead of the other way round.  What we will find, straight off, is nothing short of a (very Jewish) cosmic soteriology. God’s plan is ‘to sum up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth’ ….and as the means to that plan God’s rescue both of Jews and Gentiles …now coming together in a single family… the sign to the principalities and powers of the ‘many-splendored wisdom of God’. [1]“

If this unity of all mankind, Wright goes on, Jew-and-Gentile as the sign of God’s coming reign over the whole world, had captured the Reformers’ hearts and minds, and they only THEN went and started fitting in Romans and Galatians, what would we have gotten? “…the entire history of the Western church, and with it the world, might have been different. No split between Romans 3:28 and 3:29. No marginalization (in Reformation theology) of Romans 9-11….” Wright goes on to list much more.

In short, we’d end up with a different theology and a different picture of the Gospel. (And, I might add, the Reformers’ teachings would not have been used in anti-Semitic persecution of Jewish people!)

So, should we just assume Romans and Galatians are the real deal and the other letters take second place? Or should we be trying to hear Paul all over again? And if we do, will we find that the Reformers were answering questions in their day, but not necessarily accurately describing what Paul was talking about?  These are the kinds of questions that lead many of us to contend that we continually need new theology, up to date with everything we can learn about the Scriptures, and what the writers were talking about in their own time and situation.

 

 

[1] N.T. Wright Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision. IVP 2009.

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The Bible Is Not the Qur’an

I’ve been reminded recently that many evangelical Christians in America think of the Bible with the same doctrine that traditional Islam uses to think about the Qur’an.  The traditional Muslim understanding of the Qur’an, if I understand it correctly, is that the Qur’an is the literal, actual words of God, spoken in Arabic from God’s mouth, falling directly from His lips.

So a Christian version of this is that many evangelicals think of the Bible in the same way. They see the words of the Bible as the literal words being spoken from God’s mouth. Thus “taking those words literally” makes sense to them.  In this view, the human writer has virtually nothing to do with the words in the Bible, they are merely flesh-and-blood typewriters used by God. It’s as if the Apostle Paul was sitting there eating a kosher beef sandwich with his left hand when suddenly his right hand starts scribbling away the third chapter of the letter to the Colossians. “Yeah, it does that sometimes,” Paul says, “looks like another chapter is coming.” This concept of the Bible, with virtually no regard to the human element, is an essentially Muslim view of Scripture. It’s very common among American evangelicals.

However we know that this is not what the Bible is. We know the human authors were much more engaged than the way I just described. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1: 16  that he does not remember who all he may have baptized.  I assure you, the Holy Spirit knew exactly how many people Paul had baptized. It’s not God who doesn’t remember. It’s the human author, Paul. Likewise, Paul gets so worked up in Galatians that his grammar gets incorrect and he forgets to finish some sentences. In other places Paul paraphrases Old Testament scripture. Also, Paul’s Greek sounds nothing like John’s. John’s Greek is precisely the kind of Greek learned as a second language, not at his mother’s knee. Luke’s  extremely educated Greek sounds nothing like Mark’s. The input of the human authors is evident across the pages of Scripture.

The Princeton theologians of the last century, trying to beat modernity’s challenge to the Bible by using modernity’s own “scientific” categories, lodged the Bible’s authority within the ability to prove its internal consistency. They felt they had to prove it was inerrant in every way, effectively canceling out a view of the human element and circling around to end up with an essentially Muslim view of Scripture. This basically forces them to say the Bible is a scientific guide in areas of geology, planetary cosmology, meteorology, etc. There is no provision for a human author to be limited by the scientific worldview of his day.

The Wesleyan branch of Christian theology, springing from Anglicanism, does not approach Scripture this way. We see Scripture as the infallible word of God in areas pertaining to our salvation – our relationship with God. We are not claiming it’s a science textbook, nor an objective Near Eastern history text,

So my friends with the more Muslim view of Scripture ask “So do you take the Bible literally or allegorically/figuratively?” The answer depends on which part of the Bible you are talking about, of course.

The Song of Solomon is an erotic love song – lots of symbolic language; I won’t embarrass you with examples. Suffice it to say the king did not think the queen’s body shape was literally the shape of a palm tree. The Psalms are prayer-songs. Lots of symbolic, poetic language there: Psalm 23 does not literally mean God picks me up (“Whoaaa! I can see my house from here!”) and puts me down in a pasture somewhere.  Jesus’ parables are stories with a point. We shouldn’t think the story in Luke 16 of the rich and poor men in the afterlife means you can literally speak back and forth between heaven and hell, toll free. Jotham’s fable in Judges 9 is an allegory about trees talking. It’s a story to explain to Israel what is going on right then in their life as a nation. The Bible is not suggesting trees and bushes get together at night when we aren’t looking and hold democratic elections. The Proverbs are not universal , cosmic laws – but they are wise observations about how life usually works.  Chronicles and Kings are court histories, recording the high points of the reigns of Israel’s kings and prophets. Meant to be taken as historic fact.  But even within those literal histories are non-literal language: when Elijah taunts that Baal has “turned aside of the road” it’s a slang/figurative way to say that he is using the restroom! The Laws in Leviticus are actual legal codes in affect at times in Israel’s history. Letters in the New Testament are actually  that: letters from one writer to a church or individual. The Gospels are short treatments of Jesus’ life, announcing that he is the One God sent to redeem the world, and what that means. Etc etc. So the answer to the question “literal or figurative” depends entirely, of course, on which kind of literature in the Bible we are talking about. The language the authors use is bounded in some way by the world of the writer: for instance the writers say the sun rises and sets, although we know that it is the Earth which is actually what is revolving.

If humans are more involved in writing Scripture than just flesh-and-blood typewriters (remember, Paul can’t remember who all he baptized…), in what way are the Scriptures the Word of God? For Wesleyans, the answer is not that the human writers had no influence on the way the Scriptures are written, but that, somehow,  through these human writers, God has spoken to us about His intentions for our relationships with Him, one another  and the world around us. What the Scriptures tell us about God’s intentions “inerrantly reveals the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation.” They give us wonderful insight into the relationship and conversation God has had with our spiritual ancestors over a period of 2000+ years. And somehow, activated by the Presence of the Spirit of God, those ancient written words on the page become the living, transformative Word in our hearts and lives. The Protestant Reformers understood this:  insisting that the words are dead to us until illumined by the Spirit. Thus it is not the ability to prove it’s internal consistency upon which the Bible’s authority rests, it is the Presence of God at work through those words supernaturally in our lives.