As a follower of Jesus it is my ambition to live in a Jesus-shaped way. In seeking to do this the Bible is one my key resources. Yet understanding how it applies to me can be difficult, for while I have grown up believing that what the Bible says, God says, it is clear that there are things the Bible commands or permits that are not what God says to me today – eg the permission to take a wife as part of the bounty of war; the requirement to return land to its original owners every fifty years; the permission to keep slaves; and the encouragement to wives to call their husbands ‘lord’ and be fully submissive and obedient to them.
I have found it helpful to recognise that the Bible speak to our ethics in two ways:
First, by painting a picture of the world as it should be and one day will be. The movement of both history and Scripture is towards a time all creation will be brought fully under God’s reign. It is a time of shalom, which Christopher Marshall summarises like this
The positive presence of harmony and wholeness, of health and prosperity, of integration and balance. It is a state of soundless or flourishing in all dimensions of existence – in our relationship with God, our relationships with each other, our relationship with nature, and our relationship with ourselves. Shalom is when when everything is as it ought to be. In this sense, Shalom encapsulates God’s basic intention for humanity – that people live in a condition of “all rightness” in every department of life.
(Chris Marshall, Little Book of Biblical Justice, pages 12-13).
Biblical ethics fills me with this vision of the world as it will be and calls me to live out its values in the present. This is what gives Christianity its reformist tendencies. The vision of the reign of God causes us to be discontent with cultural, political, economic, and social systems that impede the experience of shalom.
Second, the Scriptures show us how people worked out their faith in the world as it was. At the same time that the vision of the future creates a reformist streak within us, the reality is that we live within the world as it is, a world that falls far short of the vision of the future. In the Bible this sets up a delicate interplay between seeking to live out the values of the world as it will be and the realities of the world as it was. No-one can escape the cultural, economic, political and religious systems within which they live, so biblical ethics always consisted of an attempt to determine how the values and vision of the world as it will be could be lived out in the world as it was.
At times this worked itself out as resistance – seen for example in the refusal of Christians to worship any God other than the God revealed in Jesus and in the determination to defy social conventions that divided people on grounds of ethnicity, gender, or social status and instead embrace one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.
On other occasions we see an effort to infuse the values of the future into social, cultural and political systems that fell far short of the vision of the future. The household codes of the New Testament are a good example of this. They recognised that first century Christians lived in societies in which the household was organised along patriarchal lines – with a male at the head of the household and wife/wives, slaves and children subservant and subordinate to the male head. Held up against the vision of the world to come this was an ugly structure that diminished people and left them exposed to abuse. Yet it was also the reality in which people lived. The strategy of the household codes was to urge people to infuse the system with love, grace, compassion and kindness. As an ethic for all time it is clearly compromised and inadequate, but it was an ethic that moved first century Christians closer toward the biblical vision. Similarly, the permission given to the Israelites to take wives as part of the bounty of war seems designed not to offer approval of the practise, but, knowing it will happen, to regulate it so as to minimise the harm.
Recognising this pattern in the Bible has helped me move beyond a simple equation of biblical commands with the will of God for all people and all times, or the assumption that some biblical instructions are culturally shaped while others transcend culture. It encourages me to see that “being biblical” does not mean replicating the life of the first Christians, but following the pattern of the Scriptures which is to allow the vision and values of the future reign of God, so vividly and profoundly incarnated in Christ, to shape the way I live in my place and time.
Hey Scott – I agree very much with your article and have been considering this myself recently. I think the best scriptural example of the New testament church working this out was the Jerusalem council in Acts 15 where the preachers in Paul’s church were preaching very legitimately from the Torah saying that it was quite clear that circumcision was for all men for all times. When it was brought to them the council decided that although scripture did say that, they had seen the Holy Spirit present on the gentiles and therefore if God had shown his approval irrespective of circumcision – who were they to insist on it. It has to be a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit in conjunction with a corporate discernment that interprets scripture for us today. On a separate note I was asked to affirm the following statement this past week:
“Do you accept the Scripture of the Old and New Testaments as inspired by God, and as the ultimate, authoritative guide?”
Can I ask, in light of your blog, would you have been able to affirm this statement?
Hi Daniel
Thanks for your comment. With regard to your question, I see nothing in my blog piece that is incompatible with a classic evangelical doctrine of inspiration
Thanks for the reply – I understand your comment about inspiration but what about the sentence affirming Scripture as being ‘the ultimate, authoritative guide’? I found the term ‘ultimate, authoritative’ troubling as surely it is the Holy Spirit who guides us in all truth as my earlier response would suggest?
Hi Daniel I think the whole question is problematic. When we start to unpack the concept of “inspiration” it becomes quite convoluted. Are the psalms inspired in the same way as the prophets? The historical books of the OT often draw upon material from earlier sources. Did the authors of the biblical texts get divine guidance as to when their sources were faulty? Errors in fact are said to be the result of “phenomenological language. How is this any different from saying that the author believed something to be true but was wrong?
Similarly, declaring Scripture to be the ultimate authoritative guide, guide to what? Try to answer this question and once more all sort of conundrums arise. I would argue that the fundamental affirmation of the Christian is that Christ is Lord. Both Scripture and my experience of the Spirit are authoritative to the degree the lead me to Christ.
Now that is a statement I could affirm!! Thanks Scott
Daniel: read Marcus Borg’s: ‘Reading the Bible AGAIN for the First Time.’
He states that every word in the Bible is the word of its writers NOT of God’s.
So, he takes the Bible seriously but NOT literally.
Hi Scott. I have been reading a few of your articles recently, and while I do not agree with some of your views, I respect and value your approach to faith, scripture and Christianity. I believe it is important for all of us to humble ourselves before the throne of God as we seek the truth of His Word- and I think you do that well. Continue writing in faithfulness!
Thanks Alex.
Thanks Scott! A beautiful hermaneutic!
Thanks Ralph
Hi Scott,
Great thoughts, as always. I like your balance of taking seriously Scripture as the word of God to inform our ethics, but avoiding narrow, error-prone interpretations. I also like the balance of past and future “God’s vision” contexts as a way of informing this.
One of the challenges for evangelicals (myself included) is to avoid reducing Biblical interpretation to a set of rules – however sophisticated. We need to hear the word of God in the context of our Spirit-based relationship with God and tested by the gifts active in the community of believers (1 Cor 14). This is a risky endeavour and subject to much human error, as shown in your highlighting of past Scriptural misinterpretations (e.g. Southern white US evangelicals on civil rights). It leaves us with no safe place from which we can claim to hear the word of God unambiguously. If we think we have such a place on a contentious issue, we’re probably not doing it properly.
The great strength of evangelicalism is that we do try to hear the word of God from Scripture, put it into practice for ourselves and proclaim it as good news for the world. We should continue to do this, as indeed you are.
Thanks again,
Stuart
Hi Scott,
A further thought, if I may. My go-to test for hermeneutics is Matthew 4. When the devil quotes Psalm 91 at Jesus, how did Jesus know that Deuteronomy 6 was the more relevant text to apply in his circumstances? How would your framework inform this choice?
Regards,
Stuart
Hi Stuart, I think that two things guide the presentation in Matthew 4. First, Jesus is reliving the experience of humankind in the garden and the Israelites in the wilderness. The Satan comes with half-truths, but unlike the first man and woman in the Garden Jesus does not fall for the lies. Similarly, just as Israel’s trust in Yahweh was tested in the desert and saw them fail, so Jesus’s trust is tested but he proves more than a match for the tempter. Second, the debate between the Satan and the Christ sounds very much like a battle for honour which was typical of public debate in the ancient Mediterranean. On each occasion Jesus bests the Satan, thus showing himself to have the greater honour.
Jesus doesn’t reveal his hermeneutic. We don’t see how he finds his way to quoting the texts he does. We simply get the quotes. So I think it’s difficult to say why he knew that Deut 6 was more relevant. My guess would be that Jesus was attentive to the vision and values of the biblical storyline and sought to honour that, whereas the Satan was simply proof-texting a convenient position.
What do you think?
Thanks for the thoughts. And, indeed, it’s because Jesus doesn’t reveal his hermeneutic that I think it’s an interesting test of any one we want to propose.
I hadn’t considered the parallel of the temptation in the garden, so that’s an interesting reflection.
With regard to the wilderness parallel, the context makes this very strong. If Jesus’ mission is to fulfil the Isaiah 40 promise of the coming of the Kingdom via the “way in the desert” (Matt 3), then the original desert journey out of Egypt is very relevant. Your proposed approach works well here – the “to be” vision of what God wants Jesus to accomplish should draw heavily on the “as was” instructions for the Exodus. Israel learned in the wilderness to rely on the word of God, to not put him to the test and to worship him alone. Jesus’ mission must be based on the same principles and so Deuteronomy applies nicely.
The reason for rejecting the Psalm 91 reference is not so clear. The promise of God’s protection for Jesus is presumably still a truth he can hold on to, but not in the way that Satan is proposing. How does he know that this is not the right Scripture to apply in this case? In context it’s clear that this is coming from Satan, so Jesus knows to reject it on the basis that it will be a twisted form of the truth. If we are to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, we need sufficient spiritual discernment to identify what’s coming from the evil one and what comes from God.
So a good framework for Biblical interpretation can help us greatly in hearing the word for our daily lives. But it doesn’t stop the fact that a degree of discernment, which comes from an active relationship with God and the gift of the Holy Spirit, is still required.
Hi Scott. I quite liked this article. The provocative title makes one think hard about what the Bible states on one hand and what it commands on the other. I like Paul’s statement to the Jews at Antioch in Acts 13 37-38, where he got to the point about their strict interpretations of the law. Here we see his answer is that “only through Christ can forgiveness of sin be achieved, and the freedom( to live a life of the future) grants by this is what the Law (of Moses) could not free us from. I think this illustrates your second point well, because we all seem to want to justify our own interpretations of scripture, because we need to do so from the perspective of life we exist in ( as you say culturally, politically, economically etc). So what he was saying was , if you just want rules, the. Have them if that makes you happy, but in the end you can only find the happiness that God wants you to have from not being tied to rules and commands, but from being freed from the rules and commands. It’s like the saying “ security …… means NOT having to lock your front door when you leave the house”
Hi Scott, I’m sorry to say I’m a little disturbed by this article and this type of reasoning. Not that I disagree with with your conclusions, but rather the approach you have taken. Surely for a Christian, we should be seeking to allow God to speak to us on these topics because we can all have all sorts of thoughts and ideas. Therefore I would think that the starting place for a believer would be the Bible itself – and what does it say that is relevant here. To me the starting place is the words of the Lord Jesus that “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” As I understand it He is saying that this is the basis of everything that is good and right. Therefore if we start here (with a positive, rather than suggesting we can take a critical approach to Scripture) and work down and work this out, we would never even contemplate the examples you quoted in the beginning. My concern is that you have encouraged (I expect unintentionally) a careless, even dismissive attitude to Scripture. I believe that God has provided all the tools in the Bible to truly understand Him and how to obey Him, which includes having appropriate attitudes to our fellow human beings. The apostle Paul was very strong on equality, but you have not quoted him either. What is more, God says that it is His Word that He will use to bring about His purposes in the world (despite the parts that might not apply in our culture). In summary, I’m saying we need to be God directed (Bible directed) and to apply what I guess you could call a ‘top down’ approach, otherwise we just end up with peoples’ ideas. Again, it is not that I have any problem with your conclusions, but rather how you arrived at them. Blessings.
Hi Ray
I am struggling to understand why you see my suggestion as belittling Scripture or as not taking the scriptures seriously. I am not suggesting we can set scripture aside, but that we take account of the manner of its ethical reasoning.
Thanks for your reply Scott. I’ll try to explain better what it is I mean and hope I will succeed. Whether you agree or not, I do hope to be understood, as I believe it is important. I expect we would all agree that Scripture is God’s word primarily telling us about Himself and the relationship that He desires to have with us. A flow on from that is how we should live in relationship with each other. So I believe it is important to establish that as the starting point, rather than the things we should dismiss in it. And I do agree with you that the Bible is not necessarily recommending certain lifestyles that might have existed in the past. (Although I do believe there are some things that we don’t observe well today that we probably should do better – but that is an aside.) However, since the Bible is the book of God’s authority, and He says in effect that every word in it will be fulfilled, we need to treat it very carefully and wherever possible use it as the basis of our understanding and conclusions. I don’t think your article demonstrated that and thus effectively implies that it is not essential to apply Scripture in these considerations. For example, I think one of the passages you could have used for your argument is Matt 19:8 where Jesus says that certain things were permitted because of the hardness of the people’s hearts, not because it was best, or God’s preferred lifestyle. And Stuart Wolf makes a good point above, which relates to things like circumcision, foods, etc. I know that you are not deliberately trying to undermine the authority of Scripture, but I do feel that to some extent, the approach taken by this article does have that outcome. If we are not quoting Scripture as our authority, then what is our authority? Human reason? That can lead us anywhere and is merely a matter of opinion – and not very useful. Particularly not useful in helping people recognise the authority of God and His word. The Lord Jesus said that without Him we could do nothing at all, and I don’t believe He was given to exaggeration. I am sure that you would take that as fact, and although your article does not address that topic, I do feel a consequence of such reasoning as in your article is that of a high degree of autonomy of thought, which I think is quite dangerous for believers. I believe Jesus was also saying that we can’t even think effectively without His help – our enemy is quite able to confuse our thinking. In other words, I am trying to say that when we quote Scripture as our authority (I do recognise that it is possible to mis-qoute it as well) at least we are reinforcing its importance and the place it deserves. Whereas not quoting it has the opposite effect – especially since you are critiquing Scripture. I will leave it there and hope that I have made myself clear. God bless.
Hi Ray, thanks for the additional comment. I’m not convinced that emphasising the authority of Scripture really gets us anywhere. If someone came to me and said they were going to cut off their hand in obedience to the teaching of Jesus, or that interracial marriage is wrong based on the ban on marriage to foreigners in the OT Law we would not accept that they were hearing the word of God to them.
To be meaningful the statement that we affirm the authority of Scripture has to be heavily qualified. For example, we distinguish between old covenant and new covenant – ie we recognise there are things that were once God’s will but now are not; allow for phenomenological language – ie we recognise that there are things that are asserted in the Bible that are factually incorrect but that that is ok; distinguish meaning on the basis of genre; and interpret through a Christological lens. So it’s not really the authority of scripture that we honour but the authority of Scripture when interpreted according to a particular set of rules that we affirm.
Moreover while we theoretically elevate scripture over reason, tradition and experience, in practice we do not and I’m not sure that we ever could. Without the use of reason it is impossible to say anything about the Bible and what seems a reasonable meaning of the text is highly influenced by tradition and experience.
This is why I think we need to be more upfront about placing the teaching and example of Christ as the defining centre and developing tools/approaches such as the one I offered in this blog piece to help people develop patterns of approach that help them deal with the complexity of reading the bible
Thanks for your reply again Scott (I’ve been too busy to get back earlier). You seem not to take account of my original assertion that we should apply the emphasis that the Bible itself uses. The Lord Jesus said which were the important criteria to base everything on. Whereas you seem intent on being your own judge of Scripture – that is by your own reason = same thing. You also acknowledge that some things in Scripture relate to the culture of the day (and as I said, I agree), yet I don’t detect that you realise that wherever we live, and in whatever time, culture also still impacts our thinking, including today. So every person who looks at Scripture does so from a position of cultural bias, which is why I maintain that we are not fit to judge these matters. As I quoted earlier, Jesus said that without Him we can do (achieve) absolutely nothing. Further, I would say that our culture lacks much – ours is a godless society that elevates the value of reason beyond the reasonable – we think we have all the important answers and everything is neatly tied up in a nice convenient little package that we are very comfortable with! I see that as very naive and even conceited, that our view is the most correct one. I assert that the main message of the Bible is that we need to obey God, as laid out in His Word. There is more than sufficient guidance there to easily tell what God wants us to focus on (when doing it ‘top down’) – and that is certainly not the side issues that you have used. Anyway it is not my job to try to convince you of anything – I only wanted to draw your attention to this and attempt to explain what I think is of prime importance. My argument from the beginning is that we must use the guidance provided in the Bible to determine what God says is relevant to us today and what is not. Andris+Heks below seems to think that God needs to be readjusted to suit our thinking. What kind of Supreme Being would that be where He needs to be reinvented by His own creation? Ridiculous when we realise that we would all have different versions to suit our own preferences! The God I have come to know from the Bible is nothing like that – and He has not left me subject to the vagaries of my own limited human ability to reason, based on “fragmentary” knowledge and understanding. He is the God of all knowledge and all wisdom and all truth – Who never changes – the Creator and Sustainer of all things – including me and you – and He has given me guidance in the Bible – He has given me absolutes that I can focus on – and the first one is that he loves me and you. What could be better than that? So much more could be said, but I must leave it there and wish you, “God bless your journey in this life”, Ray
The Bible is only a small fraction of the numerous sacred scriptures which were around in a fluid and liberally tolerant mixture of views for 300-400 years AD. Read the New New Testament that includes some of those other Gospels, such as Mary Magdalena’s, Thomas’ and Judas’ Gospels. For example, while we hold Judas to be a traitor, his action seems in such a different light after you read his testament, that you might be tempted to think that in fact he was the most self-sacrificing and obedient of all the disciples, carrying out Jesus’ request to him in spite of or because of? his deep love for him.
The Bible has to be constantly reinterpreted and re-invented according to one’s connection to God and fellow beings now, not two thousand years ago.