on reading scripture

I've learned so much in the last year or two about reading scripture--about how the Church has done it for two thousand years, about how we do it today. I could say so many things about this, but there's one aspect of it all that has been on my mind a lot lately. I have concluded that one of the most important tasks for the Church when approaching the Bible is to be stubbornly realistic about what this book is and what it's saying.

Scot McKnight's book Blue Parakeet has been

a great conversation partner as I've been thinking about these issues. McKnight wants you to 'rethink how you read the Bible', and he excels at pointing out the cracks in popular methods of reading and interpreting scripture.

As I was reading this afternoon, he began to highlight some of the dangerous 'shortcuts' that he feels are often taken with the Bible. The shortcut that really caught my attention he calls "puzzling together the pieces to map God's mind". People taking this shortcut view the scripture as a puzzle: we're given all the pieces, and we have to put it together to match the picture on the puzzle box. The problem is "we don't really know what the picture looks like. We have to imagine what the original picture was" (p. 50). Basically, we decide before we come to the text what the message of the Bible is, and we force the scripture, as we read it, to fit that message.

One of the greatest pitfalls of this method--though there are many--is that "this approach nearly always ignores the parts of the puzzle that don't fit" (51).

Let's say that again: this method ignores the pieces that don't fit your idea of 'the Bible'.

In the 5th Century, Saint Augustine was involved in a debate with a monk named Pelagius. If you had to generalize, you could say that Augustine was arguing for a very strict idea of 'salvation by grace alone through faith alone', while Pelagius thought some sort of meaningful effort on our part was necessary.

C. S. Lewis commented on this controversy in his Letters to Malcolm, and I think his observation is profound:

You will notice that Scripture just sails over the problem. "Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling"--pure Pelagianism. But why? "For it is God who worketh in you"--pure Augustinianism.

Certainly Augustine and Pelagius had serious, doctrinal disagreements. But, on one level you could also say that both of them are simply appealing to different pieces of the puzzle--and ignoring different pieces.

Lewis concluded that "it is presumably only our presuppositions that make this appear nonsensical." There are a lot of frictions in scripture--this argument just highlights a popular one--and our tendency when faced with these frictions is to try and iron them out. We can't leave these apparently 'nonsensical' creases in the Bible! Scripture, however, doesn't iron these things out--it 'just sails over the problem'. For some reason, we do it anyways, and we have to decide for ourselves which verses and chapters (and whole books?) 'can't possibly mean' what they seem to say.

The 5-point Calvinist has to find away around the fact that "He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world" (1 John 2:2). The Baptist looking to support their view of baptism has to creatively reinterpret 1 Peter, where 'baptism now saves you' (see 3:18-22). I have to find something to do with Romans 9.

We simply can't read the Bible through our prefabricated theological frameworks and read it faithfully. We have to be stubbornly realistic about what the Bible is and what it's saying.

Some Protestants tend to think that they're above this. By jettisoning the Tradition, we have somehow freed the text from any external influences. That's laughable. The only time the words "faith alone" appear in scripture, they are explicitly rejected--James 2:24. What do we do with that? What's the use in claiming 'sola scriptura' if you won't let the scripture speak for itself?

No, this is a dangerous shortcut that no one's above taking.

However uncomfortable this may be at times, we have to allow the Bible to be what it is.

As McKnight, again, points out:

After all, had he wanted to, God could have revealed a systematic theology chapter by chapter. But God didn't choose this way of revealing his truth. Maybe--this "maybe" is a little facetious--that way of telling the truth can't tell it the way God wants his truth told.

Most of the Bible is narrative--it's a story. To our minds, a story is not the most efficient way to outline a theological system. Maybe that's true; in that case, God obviously wasn't trying to outline a theological system, and maybe we shouldn't worry so much about it either.

Of course there are things that are true and things that are false; I'm not saying we can't pull that from scripture. I'm saying that it seems most of our efforts to systematize what we believe, to describe God without simply telling what God has done are problematic. The Bible is simply not systematic enough to allow for that.

We've been given a story about God, and we've been invited to participate in God's story through Christ. Instead of contorting this story into the shape of some kind of abstract philosophy, we ought to rejoice in it for what it is, and we ought to tell it.

Baptists and the Creeds

A hymn I grew up singing said that “My faith has found a resting place, not in device or creed.” A frequent accusation made against Baptist conservatives during the conservative resurgence was that they were “imposing creedalism” on the Southern Baptist Convention.

A rule of thumb for denominational conflict: before making an accusation, make sure that the matter under discussion is actually a bad thing.

iMonk posted on Baptist churches and the Creeds about a month back. Go check it out it you have not; it's a great post.

One of my great hopes for a life in ministry is to see the re-appropriation of the creeds in the life of a Baptist church. Most people in the congregations simply aren't going to have an awareness of the formative history of Christianity and the key (and unthreatening) roles that these creeds played then and have held, universally, since then. I want them to know.

Check out the post!

another post on Evolution

It's not me this time.

I recently discovered the blog of Rachel Held Evans (not to be confused with my wonderful younger sister Rachel Joy Evans), an author and speaker from the 'buckle of the Bible Belt', Dayton, Tennessee. I've really enjoyed Rachel's posts so far, and I'm looking forward to keeping up with the blog.

I thought I'd pass along a post she's recently written on Evolution, that favorite topic of mine that doesn't ever seem to leave the wardrobe front page for too long. Eight Reasons to Give Evolution a Second Chance. If you aren't tired of the topic, check it out. The picture accompanying her post is worth the visit by itself.

I, of course, don't get tired of the topic (for whatever reason). In fact, if anyone's feeling generous today, feel free to hop on Amazon and order me a copy of Richard Dawkins's latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. If you're looking for a sort of popular introduction to the topic yourself, you might want to take a look as well. It's a very nice, user-friendly book, from what I've seen so far.

But, again, I'm not really here to publicize Dawkins. Go check out Rachel Held Evans's blog.

Also, I'd like to leave everyone with Numbers 23:19. This comes from the middle of the story of Balaam, the unlikely oracle of God, that takes up Numbers 22-24. If you're a little fuzzy on the details of this account, go read it. If you like tales of war, comedy, and talking donkeys, this is the one for you. It's wonderful.

Numbers 23:19:

God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?

What does this verse mean to you? What does it say about Evolution, if anything? What does it say about scripture, if anything? How would a compelling demonstration of a long, evolutionary development of life on Earth affect the way you understand this verse? Should it?

for students

A recent conversation made me look back at one of the novels of Charles Williams. The Place of the Lion is one of his earlier works, and it's actually the novel that introduced C. S. Lewis to Williams and sparked the strong friendship the two would share. It is, not surprisingly, a very strange tale, and I'll spare you most of it. But, the scene that I was revisiting this week came alive to me with the second reading in a way that it could never have before.

One of the main characters in the novel is a girl named Damaris, a young scholar who is primarily studying the works of Peter Abelard, a Christian philosopher from the 12th Century. Damaris is driven and ambitious, and she knows her stuff. However, while she knows Abelard's writings, the reader quickly learns that Damaris has no sense of the truths behind his work. For her, Abelard is just a figure, his writings, a corpus--they're ideas that lack any point of reference in reality.

Then Damaris meets Peter Abelard.

It was--it was Peter Abelard himself, Abelard, mature, but still filled with youth because of the high intensity of his philosophical passion, and he was singing as he came: singing the words that he had himself composed, and which a voice of her own past had spoken to her but lately:

O quanta qualia

sunt illa Sabbata

Against that angry sky he came on, in that empty land his voice rang out in joy, and she tried to move; she ran a few steps forward and made an effort to speak. Her voice failed; she heard herself making grotesque noises in her throat, and suddenly over him there fell the ominous shadow... Only for a few seconds, then it passed on, and he emerged from it, and his face was towards her, but now it had changed. Now it was like a vile corpse, and yet still it was uttering things: it croaked at her in answer to her own croakings, strange and meaningless words. Individualiter, essentialiter, categoricorum, differentia, substantialis--croak, croak, croak.

The "ominous shadow" and the thing that cast it are way too confusing to go into here, but the image is striking, nevertheless. The Abelard of Truth, after the shadow falls, is replaced by the only Abelard that this academic has ever acknowledged. He is merely a dead man, though still capable of spewing out technical, Latin, philosophical prattle.

So, this is my word to those of you (us) who find yourself reading through some of the greats in school--Saint Augustine, Sir Philip Sidney, Wesley, or whoever it is (we're actually studying Abelard next week in Church History). Don't let studies drain these people of their reality, of Truth. They are more than their dates and their 'key concepts', and they certainly wanted to communicate more. Listen; engage. Let their voices 'ring out in joy.'

The threat is no where more dangerous than in Biblical studies. The Bible is, of course, the most important piece of literature in Western Civilization, and there's still much to be learned about it. But, that has little bearing on the reading of scripture as the Body of Christ. As Augustine himself once put it: "Whoever thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build up the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all."

Study is good; an education in Liberal Arts or in theology is good. As you pour over these great minds and holy Scriptures from over the millennia, just don't forget to let them speak.

wardrobe turns 4! and C. S. Lewis on formulaic worship

Well, today marks the 4th anniversary of through the wardrobe. --confetti-- We've come a long way in four years... I'd standardized the color of the font, and my name is no longer at the end of each post. There have, hopefully, been other changes as well.

One thing that has not changed over the years has been Lewis's influence on me (and by extension, the blog... just look at the name) and his frequent presence here--check out the 'Lewis' tag at the bottom of this post if you want to see more of him. So I thought it would be appropriate to bring in year four with a word from C. S. Lewis.

First, a prefatory word.

Southern Baptists are not the most uniform bunch.

In fact, that's one of the hallmarks of the denomination: there's no centralized Southern Baptist authority on... well, almost anything. Even those statements

which are intended to cross congregational lines, such as the Baptist Faith and Message, are not imposed on any body. Indeed, sadly, with many Baptists, doing things the way you feel they ought to be done is *much* more important than any uniformity... or unity.

This is one gripe, however, that I have heard from many a Baptist over the years--perhaps something that can be tentatively said to be 'agreed upon.' The gripe goes like this: those denominations with formulaic worship have got it all wrong; how can you honestly praise God if you're just reading words out of a book, or just repeating things without ever thinking about them? You get the gist.

Lately I've been reading Lewis's Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, and this is a topic that Lewis broaches almost immediately in the letters.

Novelty, simply as such, can have only an entertainment value. And they don't go to church to be entertained. They go to use the service, or, if you prefer, to enact it. Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best--if you like, it "works" best--when, through long familiarity, we don't have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.

... every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping.

Most of those who engage in the afore-mentioned griping have probably not ever asked someone who truly enters into liturgical worship what they think the good of it is, or why they prefer it to something more spontaneous and amorphous. There are many answers that might be offered, but this would at least be a part of Lewis's. As is often the case, a perspective from the other side may force some serious reconsideration of the question on almost every level. After all, you don't want to seem to support a 'church service where our attention would not have been on God.'

Any responses? Agreement, staunch opposition, further questions?

James Dunn in Lafayette, LA

James Dunn, author and theologian, is giving a talk at the Church of the Ascension in downtown Lafayette, Louisiana, on Thursday November 19th.

If you're in the Baton Rouge-Laffy area, you should seriously consider going to this. Dunn is, along with N. T. Wright and E. P. Sanders, one of the real pillars of the New Perspective on Paul movement in New Testament scholarship, and actually the fellow who coined the phrase 'new perspective.' He is easily one of the most important NT scholars in the English-speaking world today. I've not had time to read much of Dunn's work, but, in the little exposure that I've had, he has fundamentally changed the way I read Romans.

Again, I highly recommend this event to anyone and everyone who can make it (I wish I could). It's going to be in the evening--I'm not positive of the time--but more details should be forthcoming on Ascension Church's website.

Myth and Reality in the Old Testament pt. 1

For the last few weeks we've been reading Peter Enns's Inspiration and Incarnation for my Old Testament class at DDS. I actually have really enjoyed Enns, and I think his work can be a great help to many people, but I'm not planning on spending much time on that here.

Instead, I thought I might blog through my reading of a book Enns recommends: Myth and Reality in the Old Testament, by Brevard S. Childs. Childs passed away in recent years, but he was in the 20th century an imminent Old Testament scholar. This little book is old (1960!), but Enns feels that it "may still be the best little book on the subject." The subject? Well, "myth and the Old Testament," as you might guess.

I decided to drag everyone reading wardrobe (so, so many of you...) along with me on this journey after I finished the short opening chapter of the book, which I found totally fascinating.

I also decided to drag the readership along because this is an important issue to think about. This is a time when it is not at all uncommon to hear much of our Old (and New) Testament described as 'myth'--and not just by skeptics or more harsh critics. Within the Church there are many people very comfortable with this terminology (myself included, to an extent). We need to be able to at least understand what they're saying, and how what they're saying may be useful and good, as well as how it misses the mark.

SO, if you can, unplug your ears, and let's listen to Brevard Childs a bit and see what he wants to tell us. We can obviously disagree, but let's give him a hearing.

Chapter 1 is about "The Problem of a Definition of Myth."

Childs lays out here what he feels the two most popular definitions of 'myth' on the market are, and why he feels neither will work when approaching the Old Testament texts.

First, is the "broad definition." Here, 'myth' is any kind of statement that concerns "miraculous or supernatural occurrences" and comes from a "pre-scientific and uncritical, naive" worldview. This extends to scripture or any other piece of writing with the right content.

This is, he argues, a philosophical definition. "It stems directly from the philosophical distinction between the supernatural and the natural", and this distinction "becomes the criterion for classifying all material."

This, Childs goes on, is precisely the problem with the definition.

"False categories, unsuitable to the subject, are forced upon it. It means approaching the myth through the eyes of the critical Western mind and restricting from the beginning the kind of reality which the myth can contain."

I added the italics... I love that part.

I think the problem he's describing is not unlike giving people numbers. This kind of designation might work well for the man running the concentration camp, but it is not at all adequate for really describing a person. A number doesn't begin to express anything about what people are or, even more, who the individual person bearing it is.

When modern, Western ideas about 'natural versus supernatural' are used to categorize Ancient texts that were written before these sorts of distinctions were ever made, we may be able to divide things up alright, but we do so at the expense of recognizing the meaning that the text had in its original environment. The meaning the authors intended, the meaning immediately recognized by the people who first received the text.

We can't really recognize and appreciate that meaning if the most important descriptions of the text in our mind are descriptions totally divorced from that meaning.

Second is the "narrow definition." This one originally came from, of all people, the Brothers Grimm. This basically calls 'myth' a "literary form concerning stories about gods", as opposed to other forms, like a fairy tale or a legend.

This isn't a philosophical definition, but, he suggests, just a practical one. It arose from the need to define different types of literature more precisely.

The problem with this definition, according to Childs, is that it is primarily "defining limits on the literary plane." Once we step outside the realm of literary studies, its usefulness is almost non-existent.

Again, even though it's a definition, it doesn't help us get to what a myth really is: "It is not helpful in understanding the function of the myth within the total thinking of a culture." This definition doesn't try to "penetrate to the essence of the myth." How myths operate, what they try to tell us.

He also complains that this second definition doesn't help us get at the big issue of 'myth and the Old Testament': "The problem of the basic understanding of reality contained in the myth and its relation to Biblical faith has not been adequately touched upon in this definition." Well said.

I'm hoping (and assuming) that this 'understanding of reality' and this 'relation' are exactly what Childs intends to touch on as the book gets rolling.

His next step, though, is to seek a third way of defining myth, one that is appropriate for using in Biblical studies.

Stop and consider what's already been said. Childs may have already rejected the definition of myth that you've always used. Do you think his criticisms are accurate? Important?

How are you going to proceed if they do seem consequential, and he just sunk your ship?

Another thing to notice and begin to think about: Childs obviously thinks that myths can speak about reality. For a lot of people on both sides of the question of myth in the Bible, that's going to be a red flag. It's interesting to see where 'conservatives' and 'liberals' line up. One side will say 'myth can't be true', and so 'the Bible is not true.' The other, 'myth can't be true' and so 'the Bible doesn't contain myth.' Here, again, Childs is taking a third way, already distinct because it begins with a totally different premise: myth can be true. I can't help pointing out that C. S. Lewis is in perfect agreement with Childs here (see his essay "Myth Became Fact").

These are issues you'll need to address as we go on, because they are already proving to be fundamental in what Childs wants to suggest.