An Evangelical Manifesto

Some prominent Evangelicals, including a favority of mine, Dallas Willard, have put out an Evangelical Manifesto, trying to clarify what it means to be Evangelical.

On the whole, it's a very well-done document, and I would subscribe to it without reservation.

One highlight for me is its affirmation of Scripture: "...we believe that Jesus own teach and his attitude toward the total truthfulness and supreme authority of the Bible, God's inspired Word, make the Scriputures our final rule for faith and practice." (page 6)

I'm really glad they made this a big enough tent for those who don't believe in inerrancy.

The document also takes a very fair and even-handed tone with faith vs. science (which it denies is a conflict), social justice (which it affirms is an Evangelical obligation), and politics (which it affirms as a human activity, but insists is not a defining trait of Evangelicalism).

Here's where you can find and even sign the statement:

http://www.anevangelicalmanifesto.com/index.php

Everybody loves quizzes, especially if they’re about your Bible hermeneutic:

http://buildingchurchleaders.com/quiz/?id=TCTOC

By the way, for any of you who may think otherwise based on my various posts, the quiz says I'm still a conservative!

From my non-favorite quasi-creedal statement:

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy

…
Article XII.
…
WE DENY that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to
spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in
the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific
hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the
teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.

Article XIII.
…
WE DENY that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to
standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose.
We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such
as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or
spelling…

--------

How is it coherent to distinguish "irregularities" in spelling and grammar from errors in history and science? In other words, the Chicago Statement will allow for a Bible writer to misspell a word, but not to misquote a fact of history. Are these categorically different types of error? I don’t see how.

(Someone I know is studying Greek and Hebrew in seminary and vaguely claimed there may be a good answer for this because of something to do with ancient grammar, but he did not sound very confident when he said it.)

---
http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html


(Sigh), the postmodernists on the left, the inerrantists on the right…

Also, you might wonder why I go on and on about these relatively obscure things. The reason is because I believe Prov. 23:7.

I’m really excited (you’ll probably think it’s funny what excites me) because I’ve found an evangelical statement on the nature of the Bible that I actually like:

http://www.fuller.edu/provost/aboutfuller/believe_teach.asp

"Scripture is an essential part and trustworthy record of divine self-disclosure. All the books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, are the written Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice. They are to be interpreted according to their context and purpose and in reverent obedience to the Lord who speaks through them in living power."


Were we to distinguish our position from that of some of our brothers and sisters who perceive their view of Scriptures as more orthodox than ours, several points could be made: 1) we would stress the need to be aware of the historical and literary process by which God brought the Word to us; 2) we would emphasize the careful attention that must be given to the historical and cultural contexts in which the various authors lived and wrote, as well as to the purposes which each had in mind -convinced as we are that the Spirit of God used the human abilities and circumstances of the writers in such a way that the Word which results is truly divine; 3) we are convinced that this investigation of the context, purpose and literary genre is essential to a correct understanding of any portion of God's Word; 4) we would urge that the emphasis be placed where the Bible itself places it -on its message of salvation and its instruction for living, not on its details of geography or science, though we acknowledge the wonderful reliability of the Bible as a historical source book; 5) we would strive to develop our doctrine of Scripture by hearing all that the Bible says, rather than by imposing on the Bible a philosophical judgment of our own as to how God ought to have inspired the Word...

...(Inerrancy's) dangers, when improperly defined, are: 1) that it implies a precision alien to the minds of the Bible writers and their own use of the Scriptures; 2) that it diverts attention from the message of salvation and the instruction in righteousness which are the Bible's key themes; 3) that it may encourage glib and artificial harmonizations rather than serious wrestling with the implication of biblical statements which may seem to disagree; 4) that it leads those who think that there is one proven error in the Bible (however minor), to regard its whole teaching as subject to doubt; 5) that too often it has undermined our confidence in the Bible by a retreat for refuge to the original manuscripts (which we do not posses) whenever problems cannot otherwise be resolved; 6) that it prompts us to an inordinate defensiveness of Scripture which seems out of keeping with the bold confidence with which the prophets, the apostles and our Lord proclaimed it."

How Paul interpreted Scripture

In Acts 13, Paul and Barnabas are teaching in Pisidian Antioch, which is in present day Turkey (I think). Paul has an interesting moment in his sermon where he interprets Psalm 16:10, which says 'You will not let your Holy One see decay.'

Originally, this Psalm appears to be written by David while he flees Saul's persecution, and it seems like the natural, original interpretation would have been that David believed God wouldn't let Saul kill him.

However, in Acts, Paul puts a different spin on it. He notes that despite this verse, David did in fact die, and presumably decay. But having come to believe in the Gospel, Paul argues that Psalm 16:10 in fact refers to the resurrected Christ, who in fact, unlike David, did not decay because of his resurrection.

I can imagine an interesting thought process behind this. I can imagine a younger Paul (Saul) sitting in his Bible classes reading Psalm 16:10 and asking Gamaliel (a famous rabbi Paul is said to have learned from) "yeah, but didn't David actually decay? So what does this psalm mean?" and I can imagine Gamaliel responding, "well, here decay actually means death at the hands of Saul." Maybe Paul accepts this at the time as the only logical interpretation; maybe he thinks 'well, that's an odd way to write the verse, but okay...'

But then years later after Paul comes to believe in the Gospel, he says, "Oh, now I get what Psalm 16:10 really meant: it refers to the resurrected Jesus Christ."

A recent post suggested that often Scripture doesn't err, but we err in our understanding it. That's probably right. I'm also encouraged by Paul's reinterpretation of the Psalm because sometimes I read the Psalms and Scripture generally and wonder if I completely believe what's being said. For example, Psalm 103 describes God as one "who heals all your diseases." But if I read this to simply mean God restores bodily health, I don't fully believe it because while sometimes that's arguably true, other times it's demonstrably false. So in what way is this true? Well, I'm not sure--but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer came from the same place as Paul's interpretation of Psalm 16:10: God heals all our diseases in the resurrected Christ.

So, I'm encouraged both by the possibility that there are greater and stunningly literal interpretations of Scripture that I may one day learn, and also by the notion that all the Scripture is fulfilled in Christ.

"God breathed" in the light of Romans 13:1

Most of you know I do not believe in the so-called "Inerrancy" of Scripture. That said, I've had to wrestle with the argument, based on 2 Tim. 3:16, which says "all Scripture is God-breathed." That argument basically says, if God inspired Scripture, how could God have inspired any errors? Good argument; I'll grant that.

But I have, if not a perfect answer, a verse that helps me. Romans 13:1 says "there is no authority except that which is established by God." Yet, no one claims that all governments are "inerrant" just because they are established by God.

So how could God inspire Scripture that was not "inerrant"? I'm not sure, but perhaps it's in the same way that He could establish a government that was not inerrant.

Or, perhaps, to go further, the same way in which He could create a universe that was not perfect.

This isn't so much an answer to the question, but rather an attack on the logic of the question.

Got Philosophy?

Both Christians and “Scientists”* need some.

Christians’ key philosophical mistake is in the area of epistemology (‘what can be known and how do we know it?’).

--The Mistake: basing their epistemology on the inerrancy of Scripture.

--The Problem: makes Christians too easy to dismiss.

--The Correction: realizing the case for Christ is stronger without the doctrine of inerrancy.

“Scientists’ ” key philosophical mistake is also in the area of epistemology.

--The Mistake: accepting an epistemology of “naturalism.” Naturalism is the idea that the only thing that’s real is what can be empirically observed.

--The Retort: “Like that could even possibly be known!”

--The Problem: it makes people irrationally dismiss God.

--The Correction: admitting that looking for God with a microscope is like looking for a rainbow with a stethescope.

* by "scientists," I mean people who co-opt science and misapply it to politics, religion, and ethics. Unfortunately this is a common practice, and some scientists are also "scientists." But, Jesus, I think, has no problemo with real science.

The Second Curse, mercy on a murder, the message of a non-literal Genesis

Cain’s punishment for killing Abel is that the ground will no longer yield its crops to him. It was bad enough that Man’s work was cursed, that he was to labor in pain and eat by the sweat of his brow. But now the ground will no longer produce anything at all for Cain, sweat or no. Furthermore, Cain will have no home, and he will be a restless wanderer.

The notion that exile from one’s home is the greatest punishment is attested to by Homer, Socrates, and Shakespeare—and before these men said it we see it here in Cain’s curse. Only a chapter ago, Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden. This gets to be a pattern, as we will eventually see the Jews driven from Jerusalem. This is the cursed condition of human beings: we are not at home. Instead we are in a cursed world where even inanimate objects like the ground oppose us. Perhaps all fantasy for the past or the future, heaven or utopia, is rooted in this basic human condition of homelessness. We all ache for a place not like this one. One of our greatest quests in life is to find a “home.”

God is so merciful that even His curse of Cain, the first murderer, is accompanied is tinged by mercy. Cain despairs that as he wanders the earth, other people will kill him. But God proclaims that this shall not be allowed, and God gives Cain a protective mark. What kind of God has mercy on the first murderer? A God who sees human beings, even the most sinful, as his wayward children. God did not hesitate to kill an animal (3:21), but God protects the life of a human murderer.

From passages like these we can see that the Bible portrays human life as sacred. And it’s based on passages like these that may Christians to this day reject abortion, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, and the like.

Also, note another non-literal moment in Genesis. Cain is worried about others in the world who would kill him. Who are these others? It’s not clear, and to this point Genesis has not suggested there were any others. However, who these others are or where they came from is largely beside the point. And I use “non-literal” here loosely, only to suggest that Genesis does not ask us to read it like a news article or a passage from a modern history textbook. If it did expect this, then it is a very poorly written book—leaving such a gaping hole in its facts. But we know that it is not a poorly written book—therefore we should surmise that Genesis does not ask us to be too concerned about who the other people about whom Cain is worried, or where they came from. Genesis does not purport to be history or journalism in the modern sense. Rather, Genesis wants us to know about the fundamental human predicament: we are the creations of a good and loving God, but we are alienated from God by our sin.

Genesis 1: the Bible’s authority, God’s sensibility of abundant life

Children and adults alike wonder at how things, good and bad, came to be. Why is the sky blue? Why do we fight wars? Why am I the way I am? While men grapple with these questions and put forth speculative answers, the Bible answers plainly and clearly: “In the beginning God…”

By this concise assertion, the Bible holds itself out as a primal authority on all things. The first assertions of the authority of the Bible did not come when Paul wrote 2 Timothy 3:16 (…all scripture is God-breathed…). The Bible first asserts its authority in the first sentence of its first page when it purports to speak of the beginning of our existence. When one says anything, one implicitly claims authority to say it and the validity of what is said – or else one speaks nonsense. And the nature and extent of the authority is also implicitly asserted by nature of the thing said. If you say a small thing like “take a right to get to the park,” you assert a small knowledge and authority. If a large thing is said, like “the greatest commandment is to love the Lord,” then one implicitly asserts large authority. Here, the Bible presumes to speak on the primary chronological fact, which can only be based on the knowledge of someone who was there – or at least someone who knows someone who was there. By presuming to tell us what happened “in the beginning” the Bible implicitly asserts great authority.

The first character in the story is God. How important of a truth is that? Yet how often do we forget it. This life, this religion, this Bible, is primarily God’s story. Anyone who attempts to take the starring role other than Him is a usurper, and the story will be full of those. Also, those who attempt to take on the role of God, whether it’s the ego-maniacal Satan or simply you or me, will find the role far more difficult than we imagined, and that we don’t have the strength to carry the burden. The role of God is for God alone, and it is both right for us and good for us to keep that straight. Yet, despite this, God seems willing and eager to share the stage. It is not too difficult to imagine a story about God in which nothing of consequence is ever done by anyone other than God. I bet God did interesting things before any of us came around. Yet we know that this Bible God is more than full of stories of other people, even other people doing God’s work as his co-laborers. And even at the very beginning of the story, we’re about to be introduced to our fore-parents.

Note both from the pages of Genesis and also from a glance out your window the type of things God creates. He has a distinct style, wouldn’t you agree? If anyone has a favorite artist, he knows that each work of art by the singer, painter, writer, or whoever always bears the distinct marks of the maker, whether it’s the subject matter, the tone, the sensibility, etc. So, with God’s creation, for example, God’s inanimate works have a tendency toward the beautiful, the majestic, the spectacular, the bountiful. God is also notable as a creator for His range. Many artists can do only one thing well – but God can do the ocean and the desert, the jungle and the meadow. Yet, despite the range and the contrast, there is coherence. Also, in wildlife, one again notes both consistency and contrast, from the tiger to the duck. All of this probably speaks of God’s personality as one of vast range as well, since it is difficult to imagine a creator who is morbid making a light-hearted comedy or someone who is extremely cheerful and kind making a work of sadism. God is probably as fierce as a bear, strong as a mountain, playful as a puppy, and gentle as a breeze. Of course, one can go only so far with this level of interpretation – but nevertheless it generally seems plausible that the vast range of creation suggests the vast range of God’s personality.

When I consider the wondrous creation with all of its liveliness and beauty, I can’t help but find the view of the universe held by a fatalist or a determinist to be absurd. This is just my intuition, but to imagine that blind fate drove the universe to possess sea creatures that create pearls, sunsets that steal one’s breath, and flowers that thrill the eyes and the nose – it just seems really hard to believe. If a universe is really a grim machine running on ‘cause and effect’ and ‘survival of the fittest,’ it just seems you’d have a grim, ugly universe – perhaps full of gray, beastly monsters, or robots like those from the Matrix. But a Golden Retriever? Yes, I’ve heard that if you gave a group of monkeys an infinite amount of time to bang on type-writers they’d eventually write Hamlet…but if that’s the analogy that encapsulates your view of the universe, doesn’t it seem your thinking has perhaps gone to the circus?

(One scientist, Richard Dawkins, who is very hostile to Christianity compares Christians’ belief in God to a belief in a Spaghetti Monster. I’m saying, however, that the view of monkeys writing Hamlet is much more Spaghetti Monster-esque, than believing in a God who created the incomparable universe we live in.)

Also, notice the bounty of creation, the fertility. “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky. God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems...God blessed them and said ‘Be fruitful and multiply…’…God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures…livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals…” Gen. 1:20-24.

Again, note God’s personality and consider it for application to your life. God creates abundant life. God could have been a minimalist, abstract painter. He could have left the earth formless and void. We often fear what God will do to our lives because we think he has something draconian and inhuman in mind. But look what God did at creation: His sensibility is abundant life.

Maybe I do believe in inerrancy....

...at least as articulated in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy:

http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html

This is a choice passage from the expository statement:

"So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth. Differences between literary conventions in Bible times and in ours must also be observed: since, for instance, non-chronological narration and imprecise citation were conventional and acceptable and violated no expectations in those days, we must not regard these things as faults when we find them in Bible writers. When total precision of a particular kind was not expected nor aimed at, it is no error not to have achieved it. Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed."

However, there are some surprising claims here:

1 - Inerrancy can include incorrect citations.

2 - Inerrancy can include imprecise factual statements if such factual statements would not have been considered a big deal to the human author.

Some observations:

This is fine with me, but it's funny to call it inerrancy. Do we really believe God would misquote Scripture?

This clearly allows for not taking Genesis literally if a writer in that milieu would not have necessarily written literally.

This makes dubious many sermons and doctrines I've heard from Evangelicals basing doctrines out of fine points of grammar or word choice. For example, many cessasionists base their belief on the word "perfect" in 1 Cor. 13.

So, where this seems to leave the inerrantist saying that 'sure, there might be a mistake in the text (by our contemporary definition), but God chose a writer who he knew would make that mistake, and so it's still inerrant.'

So in this sense, I'm okay with inerrancy, but it's a silly doctrine as opposed to simply saying that the text is authoritative based on the validation of Christ and his appointed apostles.

Holy Wars of the Hebrew Scriptures

Does anybody have a satisfactory explanation or characterization of the Israelites' holy wars, such as are described in Joshua, etc.?

The emphasis here is on "satisfactory" explanations - and by that, I mean 'an explanation that you feel good about,' that is, one that doesn't make you cringe as you try to tell it to someone who disagrees with you.

Two questions:

What do you have to believe to be Evangelical?

What do you have to believe to be orthodox (not Greek, just normatively Christian)?

Greek: why bother?

Evangelicals have a fetish for New Testament Greek, and the more I think about it, the less sense that it makes.

Usually, the rational goes something like this: certain ideas just don't come across in the English translation, and so in order to really understand what's being said in the New Testament, one needs to learn the language in which it was written. An English translation misses some of the nuanced meaning of the original Greek. (It's also related to the idea of Innerrancy, which suggests that there are secret codes to be cracked in the jots and the tittles of the original text).

I understand that languages don't translate perfectly, and I'm all for scholarly translation that fleshes out meaning. But I'm just doubtful that my local pastor, who did three semesters of Greek at seminary, can obtain a better translation than that which is already available to me in any regular English language Bible.

The reason for this is because my Evangelical pastor would have to understand NT Greek better than the team of Phd translators who gave me my version of the Bible; and this just can't be the case.

For an example from another context, I took NINE (count 'em) semesters of Spanish in college, and I lived in Spain. I can speak Spanish fairly well. But if I tried to translate the poems of Pablo Neruda for you, it's going to sound bad. It'll sound like the poetry of a 12-year-old, at best.

So this is why I don't understand why people learn Greek in order to interpret the Bible.

I mean, I'm as happy as the next guy that there are "four words for 'love' " in the Bible; but you didn't need to slave over the aorist tense to tell me that; C.S. Lewis covered it pretty good in his book, 'The Four Loves.'

As a side-note, the felt need to learn Greek also plays into a perspective of radical subjectivism and/or cultural relativism because it suggests that a cultural artifact (language) is inscrutable to the outsider. This suggests that truths are not universal, because if they were, they would be translatable to any culture (and therefore language). Personally I am a great believer in transcendent truth, natural law, essentialism, and all things that suggest that the existence of God and God's requirements are written on everyone's heart. Therefore, universal truths will be translatable from any language to any language. The idea that one needs to learn Greek to understand the NT is based on the sense that there are ideas, concepts, etc that are in the Greek that you can't understand in the English. I doubt it.

But, I know there are at least a couple of Greekophiles out there who might be able to dispute this point...

Where does the Bible claim that it’s inerrant?

The positive argument for biblical inerrany goes like this: since Scripture is inspired by God, then it must be perfect, jot and tittle. This is most commonly based on 2 Tim. 3:16, which says that "All Scripture is God-breathed..." There are other iterations, such as 2 Peter 1:20 "...no prophecy ever came about by the will of man..." And further, if Jesus could make a central point of theology from a verb tense (I AM not I WAS see John 8:56-59), then every aspect, literally every nook and cranny, comma and comment, of Scripture must be perfect.

But where does it say it's innerrant? At the very least, it must be acknowledged that there is a significant interpretive leap from "God-breathed" to innerancy. (And then another leap from innerancy to Old Earth/Left Behind literalism).

One of my clever brothers has asked "but how could God inspire fallacy?"

And I'll leave the commenterati with that.

Biblical literalistic inerrancy is based on fear.

It’s not based on fear alone. There’s a positive side of the argument too, which essentially says that ‘if the Bible is inspired by God, then how can anything in it be wrong?’ That is actually an interesting idea, which I’m not addressing now.

But I’ve heard it consistently said that one of the main reasons to uphold inerrancy is that otherwise people will go off the deep end.

Here, I’ll argue that this fear is unjustified:

First, and obviously, people’s potential reaction to the idea that Scripture isn’t inerrant has nothing to do with the truth of the matter. (An interesting question is whether you would lie about it if you knew it would ruin their faith otherwise).

Second, I’ve seen plenty of good evangelicals make bad faith interpretations of Scripture to justify their behavior. Their belief in inerrancy did not reign them in. In fact, a lot of times Christians just do whatever they want without any pretense that the Bible, innerrant or not, justifies it.

Third, good-faith biblical interpretation is possible. The Spirit of truth and an open, honest, and humble heart lead people to a correct understanding of God, His word, His will, and His requirements. A hermeneutic does not save or sanctify. Who ever came to Christ because of a hermeneutic? Who ever grew in Christ or repented of any sin because they were finally convinced that the Bible was innerant and meant to be understood literally? Spiritual things happen by the power of the Holy Spirit through the various means, including the Bible, which He chooses.

In short, to the pure all things are pure. To the vile, all things are vile.

Why are Christians always explaining why Genesis must be taken literally,[1] but the Sermon on the Mount musn’t be.[2]?











[1] http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v16/i1/genesis.asp
[2] E.g., http://members.datafast.net.au/sggram/f557.htm

Open letter to Jeff and people who find Christianity unpersuasive-

There are several important explanations for why sins, big and small, are a big deal to God. Some of them are highly theoretical and abstract; some of them are more common sensical. But before I try to tackle them, I’d like to start with explaining why I actually believe that all sins are a big deal to God.

Mostly I believe it because the Christian Bible tells me so. Basically, a number of years ago my life was a wreck. And what “saved” me was God, whom I understood to be speaking to me through church, other Christians, and the Bible. And so, the Bible has had my trust since before I ever thought about theology. Further, its never lost my trust either, as I’ve found it consistently to be the best and only believable description of reality as I know it.

That said, I understand this leaves the non-Christian at something of a loss. I’ve now started citing as epistemologically authoritative something you doesn’t accept as authoritative. In short, I’m saying that I believe this because I feel that God revealed it to me; the only thing that would really bridge this gap is if my God revealed it to you too. In the meantime, I’ll be happy to offer ideas that are more accessible – based on reason and intuition and the like. But I just wanted to offer this first, for honesty’s sake.

Next time, sin as nature, not deed…