Keeping it biblical

I like my big, long titles from previous posts, but I'm also kind of tired of writing them and trying to remember what number I'm on.  So, just supply the first part on your own, and I'll give you the subtitle.

This one comes from a recommendation that someone gave to my wife when she and I discuss our various theological differences.  That person said that we should "keep it biblical" when we have our discussions.  In other words, stick to what the Bible says to help adjudicate whatever differences we may have.  While this could be great advice, it conveniently ignores a couple of things:

1) "Keeping it biblical" doesn't really matter much unless you address the theological framework that shapes your interpretation.  In other words, nobody comes to the Bible with a blank slate.  We all bring our theological framework with us that helps guide our interpretations.

2) People have been "keeping it biblical," starting with the OT, and then with whatever the early Christians wrote, and it hasn't helped anybody come up with a consensus on much of anything.  There has to be a better way.  But first, some examples:

The Lord's Supper

In all of the gospel accounts, Jesus shares this supper with all of his disciples, including his enemy and betrayer, Judas.  Later, in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul talks about eating the body and blood of the Lord in an unworthy manner, and that a person should examine himself or herself before taking communion.  So, these passages seem to give two different answers to the question of who is welcome at the Lord's table.  Jesus welcomed his enemy and betrayer to the table, but Paul seems to be saying "get your sh*t together before you take communion or God might make you sick or kill you."  Which account of communion is going to provide the answer of who should take communion, and how it should be given?  According to my previously provided hermeneutic (interpretive key to understanding/interpreting the Bible), Jesus comes first, second, and third, and then everything else.  So, I'm going to interpret Paul in light of Jesus' practices.  Also, because of my view of sin (it's simultaneously both more serious and more trivial than many evangelicals give it credit for), I'm going to say that Paul is not asking people to remember and confess all of their evil deeds before they take communion.  The answer to what Paul is talking about may come a few verses later when he talks about those who eat without waiting for others.  It may have to do more with caring for others in the community, and being cognizant of what communion is about, than it does about whether or not you said a curse word before church or had a hateful thought about someone a couple minutes into the worship service.

Baptism

What exactly happens in baptism, if anything?  I had learned (as a good baptist) that baptism is a symbol, which means that nothing really happens in baptism.  It is simply an act of obedience to Jesus, who commanded that people be baptized, and it occurs when a person is old enough to make the decision to be baptized.  Well, in that case, what about verses like I Peter 3:21, Acts 22:16, and Acts 2:38, which seem to indicate that something more is going on in baptism than merely a symbolic act?  Honestly, I'm not sure.  I'm willing to live in the tension a little bit and admit that maybe I have more to learn here.  Perhaps participating in the act itself is far more important than whatever interpretation is given to it by those trying to reconcile the different ways of "keeping it biblical" in this case.

Salvation

Here's a couple of good ones: Romans 8 and John 10 (among other chapters) seem to indicate that salvation is a gift from God that can never be taken from a believer.  But, Hebrews 6 (and others) seems to say that it is possible for believers to apostatize and leave the faith.  So, which is right?  I dunno.  And, I'm glad it's not my job to figure out who is "saved" and who isn't.

So, what's the point of all this?  That the Bible is contradictory and wrong?  That it can't be trusted?  Nope.  It's just that you have to pick your poison.  There's no such thing as "keeping it biblical" as if there is some plain way of reading the scriptures that's going to eliminate all the controversy.  Instead, you just have to be clear about what theological framework is going to guide your interpretation.  Do you want to try to list out all the verses and stories on either side of an issue and then pick the side with the most verses on it?  Fine.  Do you want to try to let the "clearest" statements of scripture interpret the most obscure statements?  Ok.  Do you prefer the propositional statements of the NT epistles to the stories of the gospels and OT?  Good for you.  Or, maybe you are a fan of Jesus like me.  Whatever it is, just be clear about what you're doing.

Bible reading and prayer

I thought these two topics deserved a little more treatment here.  I was so screwed up by evangelical "quiet time" ideas that it literally took me years to undo the awful bondage of legalism that I lived under.  And, in a lot of ways, I still struggle with that stuff.

When I first started to get the sense that: "read your Bible pray every day and you'll grow, grow, grow" was that wrong way to go, I didn't know where to turn.  So, like a good evangelical, I turned to the final arbiter of truth to find my way: the Bible itself.  This may seem like horribly circular reasoning: studying the Bible to try to figure out if that Bible itself was telling me to read it.  It sounds pretty ridiculous now.  But what else are you supposed to do if you feel like you are in sin of some sort if you don't read your Bible every day?  Maybe the Bible could rescue me from itself.

Well, the first thing I learned was that prayer is about the most important thing you can do as a Christian.  Not in a sense of some sort of obligation or anything, but just from the simple fact that it's the primary way that we relate to God. There are more verses on prayer in the NT than any other spiritual practice that you can think of - and it's not even close.  That deconstructed the first part of the "quiet time" legalism - that Bible reading and prayer were the equal twin heads of the monster of how a believer relates to God.  Actually, prayer is primary above everything else.  Fortunately, I also learned that prayer doesn't have to simply involve me kneeling at the foot of my bed at night.  God is continuously speaking and relating with me in various ways; the question is more if I am paying attention to those, and then what my response to those is in prayer.  So, prayer can be spoken or unspoken, a thought, attitude or action.  It can be in private or with others, in solitude and contemplation, or in the midst of great noise and chaos.   It could be sung or listened to, written or spontaneous, or any number of other things.  Thank God he escaped the box I had him in!

So, when I turned to the Bible to learn about Bible reading, I discovered that there were a few different phrases in the NT that more or less related to my question: phrases like "scripture," "the word of God," and others I can't remember off the top of my head.  And, of course, there was nothing in there on some sort of requirement for reading that I had to meet, either in regular frequency or duration.  The best that I came to was the exhortation that seemed to ring true through both testaments to: "hear the word of the Lord."  A little bit of history was the next key to understanding what that meant for me.

The NT was written in a semi-oral culture (I forget the exact phrase, but it's something along those lines).  Basically, this meant that there were a few who knew how to read and write, and that people communicated that way, but that the vast majority of people lived without literacy.  Thus, for them, this hearing "the word of the Lord" took place with other believers in worship together, from hearing scripture read and preached.  Without getting bogged down in the details, this has been the case for the vast majority of Christians throughout history and around the world.  It has only been in the past few hundred years in some cultures that many Christians lived in literate cultures where regular, personal Bible reading could be expected of them.

So, in this journey out of legalism, I learned a few important things: 

1) What God really wants for people is to hear his word, whether it comes through personal scripture reading, corporate scripture reading, preaching, or whatever.  To denigrate what happens in corporate worship and claim that God requires something extra of believers is to ignore the realities of history, scripture, and what is happening in other cultures around the world.

2) Having scripture available in your own native language and being literate enough to read it is an incredible gift that should not be taken lightly.  It is a gift - and it comes with no requirements.  Gifts are meant to be gratefully enjoyed, and they lose their blessing when they end up becoming a law to be followed.

So, now I try to savor that gift.  Occasionally I feel the old legalism rising up within me, but when I do, I remember the gift and God's grace that comes with it.

Why I am no longer a conservative evangelical: part 3: scripture and its interpretation

For evangelicals, it would seem that this would be the topic to start with.  But, I think the reality is that practice preceeds and is then intertwined with theological reflection.  Nobody comes up with a theology out of thin air, or interprets/applies Scripture in a vaccum isolated from other people, and then decides upon a course of action.  So, that's why spiritual practices come first, and next comes the ever-crucial topic of scripture and its interpretation.

This is really the crux of the matter for evangelicals who claim so strongly to stake so much of what they do on scripture.  It is the final arbiter in all arguments and it plays a crucial role in the life of evangelicals.  Scriptural interpretation and meaning therefore is of the utmost importance.

Before I ever understood any of this, I first encountered the Bible through its stories in Sunday School in the mainline church I grew up in.  For the life of me, I can't recall any of what was taught in confirmation there.  I'm sure we must have had classes of some sort (maybe they were on Sunday mornings?), but I can't remember a thing about them.  All I remember is that when my family switched to the quasi-fundamentalist Baptist church, I had a pretty solid knowledge of the Bible and its stories compared to others in my grade.  I'm not really sure what they Bible meant to me - if anything.  I was given a red Revised Standard Version Bible when I was confirmed (which I never read).  I did, however, read the Living Bible in high school that was also given to me when I completed confirmation by some friends of our family.  During these formative years I learned a couple of important uses for Scripture that are probably familiar to many evangelicals:

1. The Bible is a book of God's promises where he meets you and gives you comfort amidst your problems.

2. The Bible is God's guidebook where he gives you important guidelines to live by and where he meets you to correct you in your errant ways.

There you have it.  That's what the Bible is good for: personal comfort, promises to claim, and rules to live by.  Along the way in this Baptist church, I also encountered arguments of a different sort that dealt with the nature of Scripture itself.  Above all, it was God's WORD.  I learned words like: inspired, inerrant, and infallible.  And I learned about the dangers of not taking the Bible literally, and I heard horror stories about those who had strayed from its plain, literal meanings.

Unfortunately, what I did not learn at that time was that nobody takes the Bible literally.  Everybody comes to the Bible with some kind of preconceived structure that helps it make sense.  You could call it your own personal hermeneutic, or way of interpreting scripture.  That hermeneutic is guided by your own preconceived theological grid, however rudimentary or complex it may be.  Saying this does not mean that one interpretation is as good as another, or that "literal" readings should simply be thrown out the window.  It just means that we all need to be aware to the best of our abilities of our own preconceptions when we come to scripture.

The best example of this involves the use of the Hebrew Bible or the "Old Testament."  When you read a verse from Leviticus, and attempt to understand and apply it in some way, does it carry the same weight as a verse containing Jesus' words from the Gospel of Matthew?*  My guess is probably not.  You've already made an interpretive decision based on preconceived theological guidelines.  Somewhere along the line you learned that Jesus' life, death, and resurrection meant something substantial had changed between the Old and New Testaments, so you know that reading a verse in Leviticus is different than reading a verse from Matthew.  This is probably the most simple of distinctions, and it only gets more complex from there based on a multitude of other issues.  Yet, at the same time, scripture is simple enough that a child can read it and understand God speaking to him or her.  How can this be?

It is because the important thing about scripture is not that it is inerrant, but that it is one of the places where God can encounter us through the Holy Spirit.  And not just in a personal way, apart from anyone else, but as a community that reads scripture together.

I guess what I am getting at more than anything else is that for the longest time I wasn't aware of how my own theology influenced my reading of scripture.  I thought I just kind of opened it up and understood the plain meaning of the text - that same plain meaning that was available to anyone else if they would just read it and take it seriously.  But, I know now that interpretation is more complicated than that.  Let me give a couple of examples.

1) My mom called the other day and we were talking about her church.  She was comlaining that things there were "too casual."  I asked her what she meant, and she said that she was upset about how casually people dressed when they went to church.  Then, to prove her point (using scripture as her trump card like a good evangelical) she talked about how God instructed Aaron in the Old Testament to wear certain garb at the tabernacle or temple.  This meant that Christians today should also dress differently and more reverently when they go to church today.

I didn't take the time to tease out with her all of the assumptions behind her use of scripture that were absolutely horrible in my opinion, I just kind of mumbled to move the conversation along to some other less ridiculous point.  In her theological interpretation, she assumes that the OT temple is somehow comparable to a building today where Christians meet together to worship.  She assumes that church = building.  She assumes that because God cared about how the leaders of Hebrew worship dressed in the Old Testament, that he must care about how Christians today dress.  She assumes that some clothing is more reverent than other clothing.  And on and on.

Behind this use of scripture lies the theological assumptions and hermeneutic of a conservative, middle class, 60-something year old white woman, who grows even more conservative year after year.  So, how would I have a conversation with her about her interpretation?  Her interpretation clearly makes sense within her overall theological framework - but it is absolutely foreign to mine.  I think it would be nearly impossible to debate the meaning of the text because really our differences lie at a much deeper level that influences our reading and interpretation of the text.

2) Or, take for example the theologies of John Piper or Joel Osteen/Casey Treat.  John Piper's God is a God who is primarily after his own glory.  He is big, sovereign, and uses all things for his glory - even the suffering and death of human beings.  Piper is not afraid to talk about how God causes suffering - because it all somehow is used for God's glory.

The Osteen/Treat God is all about the self-actualization of human beings.  God is after your personal fulfilment - if you do things God's way.  He wants prosperity and blessing for you, and you can get there if you stay positive and faithful.

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You could come up with a little God-typology for probably just about anybody - including me.  We all get a category of some sort.  What I'm saying is that this is the most important level to look at when it comes to scriptural interpretation - our theologies that guide our interpretation.  I could argue with Piper and Osteen/Treat all day long about individual verses or passages of scripture, but I wouldn't get anywhere because our differences primarily lie in the theology that guides our interpretation.

It's kind of a circle that you can't get out of.  Scripture influences your theology, which influences your reading of scripture, which in turn influences your theology, and so on.  So, what does this have to do with me and evangelicalism?  My theology doesn't fit with typical evangelical theology anymore.  So, I read scripture differently.  It's hard to say which came first.  Did I start to read scripture differently, which influenced my theology, or did my theology change which influenced the way I understand scripture?  Undoubtedly, it was both.  But I feel like I am now stuck in a different universe.

* There's a lot that could be said here about the importance of genre, context, and the use of critical tools to aid in interpretation, but there's just not space here.

Why I am no longer a conservative evangelical: part 2: spiritual practices

This was the first area that began to break down for me in my transition from quasi-fundamentalism to evangelicalism to post-evangelicalism.  I think there are many more areas that are important and that hang together to form a somewhat coherent, self-referential web of identity for evangelicals, including: beliefs about sin, worship practices and theology, cultural engagement (or lack thereof), evangelism, eschatology (a Christian view of the future), hermeneutics (interpretation) and the Bible, and a lot more.  But, where the rubber really meets the road is in personal spiritual practices.

For me, this first was called into question after I had been fired from the first church where I had worked with a college and career group and with children's ministries (the quasi-fundamentalist Baptist church).  I had essentially grown up in this church spiritually since my freshmen year in high school, and had had a conversion experience while attending this church in my sophomore year in high school.  I had immense respect for the senior pastor of this church and had bought into what they were teaching there hook, line, and sinker.

I had ended up believing a lot of screwy things while attending this church.  Not to fault them too much, in that every church probably ends up teaching people a lot of screwy stuff.  There's just no way to avoid it.  Anyway, I essentially believed that every other church in the community was in error in some way (this is why the church gets described as quasi-fundamentalist).  It wasn't a cult or anything, but they held a pretty high view of themselves and their beliefs and practices and managed to find fault in just about every other church around.  So, you could imagine my trepidation in leaving this church and attempting to find somewhere else to worship.  After all, that church had exemplary expository preaching, the exact right mix of hymns and praise songs, and they were biblical when other were not (here's looking at you seeker-sensitive and charismatic churches).

So, imagine my surprise to learn that God was not bound within the walls of that church!  God actually spoke through other preachers and was worshipped in other fellowships as well.  Thus, the first step in the deconstruction of my quasi-fundamentalism began.  This led me to question other things I had been taught in that church as well, and that I have found to be common in contemporary evangelical Christianity.  Primary among those things that were questioned were the means of relating with God that were taught in that church.

If one wants to relate with God, the two primary ways above all through which that takes place is via private scripture reading and through a regular, scheduled daily prayer time.  This has been commonly known as the "quiet time."  The "quiet time" is often suggested as the solution to any number of ills.  Are you feeling far away from God? - maybe you have missed a few too many quiet times.  Need some direction or encouragement? - better have a quiet time.  Falling into sinful patterns of behavior?  - you better get your quiet time act together.  And, if you miss your quiet times, it is often suggested that you are in sin because you are neglecting your relationship with God.*  Not every evangelical takes quite such a legalistic line with quiet times, but the pattern remains with just about every evangelical that I have met that the two primary ways of relating with God come through private scripture reading and prayer, no matter how that is accomplished.

The other unfortunate part of this equation is that anything involving other people is devalued because it doesn't really involve your personal relationship with God.  Thus, participating in corporate worship with others is more of just a given - it doesn't really count for much in your relationship with God.  You could get in trouble with God for not showing up to worship with others, but actually showing up and worshipping didn't really give you any points in your relationship with God.  You just pretty much fulfilled your duty and didn't slide backwards.  This could be said with respect to any number of other practices that involve other people.  They were beneficial, but not personal, so they didn't score you any points.

So, what's the problem with the "quiet time," or with private scripture reading and prayer?  Well, I had to figure this out the hard way.  After leaving the Baptist church, I quickly lost the desire to abide by the old rules I had learned about quiet times.  This was a huge struggle with me for many years.  Could I have a relationship with God that didn't depend on my own efforts to connect with him** each day via these quiet times?  Does God speak apart from prayer and scripture?  Does prayer simply consist of me going to a quiet room and speaking to God either silently or out loud, or could it involve something more?  What if I liked to read the Bible in its original languages, or for an hour once a week instead of 15 minutes per day?  Could God accept these forms of behavior?

Maybe it seems obvious to anyone reading this post, but I had ingested a lot of pretty screwed up thinking that literally took years to undo.  I still struggle with feeling guilty about wondering what God expects out of me, and how I must be letting him down because I don't pray enough or read my Bible enough.  Legalism is a pretty ugly way of life, particularly when it gets mixed up with relationship.  Fortunately, I ended up learning that God is bigger and more loving than whatever I do or don't do, and that he can speak through whatever he feels like.

Besides these things, I also learned about many other ways to relate to God outside of just personal scripture reading and prayer.  Some of them are time-tested means that have been used by countless saints throughout Christian history, like: solitude, fasting, meditation, simplicity, service, worship, and many more.  Reading scripture does not have to look like simply ingesting a chapter from Ephesians from the NIV every morning or evening.  Instead, one could practice Lectio Divina or "dwelling in the word."  I also learned through the help of a spiritual director to look for signs of God's relating with me throughout the day - not just at a certain time.  And, I learned that prayer can be much more than what I first thought it was.  It can involve listening, thinking, singing, and it has an important component that involves other people as well (as does Scripture reading).  It didn't necessarily need to be me in a quiet room by myself.

But, most importantly, I learned that God was not looking for me to always be doing stuff to please him.  That was the worst trap of all in all of the quiet time teaching.  You could read your Bible - or not.  Pray every day - or not.  God wasn't going to let go of you, reject you, or write you off because you did or didn't do those things.  You can't manipulate God by what you do to have him like you more.  Likewise you don't fall away from his love for you if you don't do something.  It just doesn't work that way.  One of the best ways to understand this is to look at the stories in the Old Testament and how God's people related with him there.  That might sound a little strange given the amount of laws in the OT, but just look at Abraham's relationship with God, or Job's relationship with God.  There was no manipulation, or guilt, or prescribed daily rituals.  As a matter of fact, it looks like Job's prescribed daily rituals got blown up and he got to know God in a new way after his life fell apart.  God and those guys just related with each other.  And that involved questioning, doubting, loving, praising, neglecting, hating, and any number of other emotions and practices.  I think the only thing God really doesn't want is apathy - but he can deal with that too :)

Well, I'm sure I left some stuff out, but you probably get the picture.  This was the beginning for me.  And once this began to change, so much more began to change as well.

* I wish I could deal with conservative evangelical views of sin here, but it needs to be saved for another post.

** Sorry for all the "he's" and "him's."  Old habits are hard to break, and I'd rather use personal pronouns for God than impersonal ones.