Category Archives: Biblical Interpretation

The Wicked Bible

In 1631, a London printer reprinted the King James Bible. Unfortunately, the typesetters made the glaring mistake that gave the Bible its name. Instead of reading “Thou shall not commit adultery” the seventh commandment reads “Thou shalt commit adultery” (Ex 20:14). In today’s essay, we will examine, not an unfortunate typo, but a determined strategy of interpretation that intentionally leaves out many “shalt nots.”

In the previous seven parts of this study, I described the scientific, philosophical and theological developments that made plausible the thesis that LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living are consistent with the moral and religious teachings of the Bible. I am not addressing non-believers; they don’t care what the Bible says. Nor am I speaking to progressive Christians; they reduce biblical authority to a mousey “me too” to the spirit of the times. I am writing to Christians who say that they accept the Bible’s authority for faith and morality but argue that the church can affirm LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living without compromising this stance.

In my recent book The Choice: Should the Church Affirm LGBTQ+ Identities and Ways of Living (Los Angeles: Keledei Publications, 2024), I analyzed and critiqued a book by Karen Keen: Scripture, Ethics, and the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships (Eerdmans, 2018). In this book, Keen defends a thesis of the kind I am most concerned for my audience to understand and reject, that is, biblical moral teaching is consistent with LGBTQ+ affirmation.

Keen, along with other authors who defend the same thesis, begins with the tacit admission that, according to a plain reading of the biblical texts and the near universal consensus of the Jewish community and the church for more than 3000 years, the Bible appears unequivocally to condemn same-sex sexual activity. See Genesis 19:1-11; Lev 18:21-24; 20:13; 1 Cor 6:9-10; 1 Tim 1:8-11; and Rom 1:22-28.

In speaking to an audience that believes in the authority of the Bible and reads the Bible within the traditional church, Keen begins with the disadvantage of having the burden of proof. How can she hope to convince this audience of the affirming view? Clearly, she must (1) convince them that the “plain” meaning of the texts is not so plain as they first thought, and (2) if possible, she needs to shift the burden of proof from the affirming to the traditional side. Her book sets about to achieve both of these objectives.

As I come back to her book two years after I wrote my reply, I can now place her argument into the larger framework I’ve developed in this series. In sum, to achieve objective (1), she makes use of the kind of modern historical criticism I discussed in the previous essay under the rubric “Historical Study that Rejects Authority.” As you will see below, her interpretive strategy focuses our attention, not on the texts themselves, but on something behind the texts, that is, on the unspoken motives or aims of biblical moral rules. She moves from the objectivity of the text to possibilities about which we can only speculate. To achieve objective (2), she makes use of the view of reality that Galileo, Descartes, and Locke first proposed and Rousseau, the Romantics, Nietzsche, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir developed to their logical ends, that is, that human beings possess no created or natural, self-revealing essence, identity, or self. Individuals choose and construct who they become. Though Keen does not appeal directly to this postmodern idea, she invokes the private, internal experience of gay and lesbian people as a moral authority that must be respected—an idea that would have made no sense before modernity. Though Keen deals with gay and lesbian issues only, her arguments apply equally to the transgender experience as well.

In the first chapter (“The Plan”) of my book, I outlined the complete argument of her book along with its conclusion. On a macro level, the success of her argument depends on our acceptance of three interpretive principles and acknowledgement of three experiential facts. They are as follows:

Interpretive Principle #1

The Bible’s positive moral teachings provide a vision of justice, goodness, and peace; they are intended to promote human flourishing.

Interpretive Principle #2

The Bible’s moral prohibitions are intended to forbid things that cause harm to human beings and the rest of creation.

Interpretive Principle #3

To apply the Bible’s moral teachings appropriately, we must deliberate about whether or not applying a biblical rule to a situation prevents harm and promotes human flourishing. Applications that harm people must be rejected.

Experienced-based Fact #1

Gay people do not choose to be gay, and the overwhelming majority cannot change their orientation.

Experienced-based Fact #2

Faithful, loving gay relationships do not cause harm to those involved or to the human community. To the contrary, they can display all the fruits of the Spirit listed in Scripture.

Experienced-based Fact #3

A large majority of gay people do not have the gift of celibacy and find that state deeply painful.

Conclusion

Because covenanted same-sex relationships embody justice, goodness, and human flourishing, do not cause harm to the people in the relationship or the human community, and unwanted celibacy causes great unhappiness to gay people, faithful deliberation must conclude that the Bible allows covenanted same-sex relationships.

The Wicked Bible

The chapters Keen devotes to defending the three interpretive principles aim at achieving objective (1), that is, creating doubts about the traditional interpretation of the anti-gay texts. The chapters that narrate the three experiential facts aim at shifting the burden of proof from the traditional interpretation to the affirming interpretation. Apart from the developments I explored in parts one through seven in this series—Galileo, Locke, and biblical criticism—Keen’s arguments make no sense at all. I can’t imagine anyone even thinking of them.

Such interpreters as Keen read the Bible’s “shalt not” as “it depends.” The Holy Bible becomes The Wicked Bible without changing a word.

A Clarification on the Historical Method of Bible Study

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Some readers of my recent essays on modern historical criticism may have come away thinking that I am against studying the Bible within its ancient historical context. I want to make it clear that I do not reject a historical approach to the Bible. In this brief note I want to clarify my views on this subject.

A Distinction

I make a huge distinction between (1) studying the Bible with the church of the past and present, as the accepted authority for the doctrine and life of the church, with the intention of remaining faithful to the original teaching of Jesus and his apostles and (2) studying the Bible as a historical document on par with other books, outside the church (usually in the university), and with no intention of conforming one’s mind to Jesus’s and his apostles’ teaching.

Historical Study Under Authority

It is appropriate for biblical scholars studying the Bible in way (1) to use every bit of historical and linguistic knowledge they can gain to help the church understand the canonical texts of the Bible. Such scholars seek to serve the church by helping it remain faithful to Jesus and the apostles instead of reading current culture, thought and idiosyncratic fancies into the words of the Bible. The goal is to let the texts speak again as they spoke to their original audiences. It is to respect the authority of the scriptures in the form in which the church received them. This way of studying the Bible is a theological discipline and is of relevance to the church.

Historical Study that Rejects Authority

Biblical scholars who pursue way (2) reject the authority of Scripture for Jesus’s and the apostles’ teaching and may also reject Jesus’s and the apostles’ authority itself. The picture of events portrayed in the canonical texts, they argue, must not be accepted at face value but must be interrogated. The scholar’s aim is not so much to let the texts speak as to search for a history behind or underneath or obscured by the text. Often, the purely academic scholar seeks for human origins for the ideas stated in the texts or the history of the literary composition of the texts. This form of Bible study is a humanistic discipline like others pursued in the secular university.

A Distinction Blurred

I do not deny the possibility of reading the biblical documents as of purely human origin and of humanistic interest only. All one has to do is apply the methods of humanistic study to the Bible apart from faith and submission to its authority or any interest in hearing the word of God in the Bible. One can try all sorts of hypotheses just to see how one can make them fit the data. With the right presuppositions and a vivid imagination one can “find” a purely human Jesus, a gnostic redeemer, an apocalyptic fanatic, or a violent revolutionary. One can find multiple versions of “lost Christianity” and pursue an endless variety of conspiracy theories. The humanistic approach can be quite interesting. In my graduate studies I took many courses that read the Bible in this way. Let them spin out their theories! But they have nothing to say to the church. The church wants to hear the word of God.

However, what concerns me is the influence of the humanistic approach on some biblical scholars in Christian colleges, universities and seminaries. These professors are trained in the humanistic approach to the Bible dominant in secular universities and many of them do not get clear on the difference between the reason the church studies the Bible and the reason humanistic scholars study the Bible. Hence, they fuse the legitimate historical study of the Bible as in way (1) described above with way (2). Apparently, they think that they are obligated to pursue the humanistic study (2) and teach its results to their students because they think it is the only way to apply the historical method to the Bible in a responsible way. And they think they are serving the church and strengthening the faith of their students by doing so. They are mistaken.

For the two ways are incompatible. They begin with different presuppositions and aim at different goals. They overlap in some of the data they study and the skills they employ, and these commonalities are often mistaken for overall compatibility. But that is like saying that robbing banks is compatible with the work of a police officer because the two activities make use of some of the same skills and tools!

How Experts Stole the Bible

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This is the fifth in our series of essays examining how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 19), came to be taken seriously by millions of otherwise intelligent people. In this essay we will continue our discussion of biblical authority in hope of discovering how some Christian people could come to think that the church should affirm the whole range of LGBTQ+ identities and behaviors even though the plain sense of the biblical text and the unanimous tradition of the church forbid it.

Faith and Authority

In the previous essay I argued that the most basic reason that the earliest church received the Bible as the authority for its faith and life is that it contains the teaching and deeds of Jesus and the witness and teaching of his chosen apostles. Jesus and his apostles were authorities in the sense that you either believe them and follow them or not. This decision marked the distinction between becoming a Christian and a church member or remaining a nonbeliever and outsider. Late in the first century or early in the second, in the absence of the voices of living apostles, the written and unwritten words of Jesus and the apostles, treasured and passed on by the church, called for the same decision.

Note well that the decision to believe the Gospel was (and is) simultaneously the decision to accept the authority of Jesus and his apostles for all things pertaining to the new faith and life. Moreover, the authority of Jesus’s words and deeds and that of the teaching of the apostles was extended to those writings that the church believed preserved and passed on that teaching, the New Testament canon. That is to say, the church not only accepted the words of Jesus and the apostles as authoritative but it accepted the New Testament as the authority for the location of that inspired teaching.

As I pointed out in the previous essay, by the early part of the second century, the church had for some time been quoting the Four Gospels, Acts, and the thirteen letters of Paul as authoritative for defining Christian faith and morals. By the middle of the fourth century, all 27 books of our New Testament were recognized as canonical, that is, as authoritative. The New Testament canon of the fourth century has remained unchanged since that time—for Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant churches. Though Orthodox theologians tend to quote the ecumenical creeds and the Fathers as authoritative interpreters of Scripture, they recognize Scripture as the foundational authority. Roman Catholic theologians tend to argue from tradition and the authoritative teaching of the church, but they also acknowledge Scripture as the most basic norm. Protestant theologians claim to base all their doctrine and theological arguments on Scripture alone. Scripture, then, is the common language and authority for all three. It is the basis for ecumenical discussion. To refuse the authority of Scripture is to exclude oneself from the historic church in all its forms.

The Scientific Revolution Again

As I argued in Parts 2 and 3 of this series, in developing their empirical/mechanical philosophy Galileo, Descartes, and Locke destroyed the classical and common-sense belief that creation reveals itself truly—even if only partially—in the way it appears to us. They drove a wedge between the human mind and the “external” world. For Locke, human identity, the self, is not determined by one’s place in the order of creation or even by dwelling in a particular body but only by consciousness. The identity of the self is its continuity of consciousness or its consciousness of continuity. One cannot achieve scientific or reliable knowledge of nature or the self by faith, uncritical acceptance of tradition or submission to authority. One must apply the methods of science to examine all truth claims and judge for oneself. Only then can one claim to be a reasonable person.* What, then, of the authority of Scripture?

The Rise of Modern Biblical Criticism

If you’ve read the previous essays in this series, it won’t surprise you when I assert that modern biblical criticism owes its genesis to efforts to apply the methods and standards of modern science to the Bible. From the second to the seventeenth century, the Bible had been quoted, preached and studied by the church as an unimpeachable authority. In its creeds, confessions of faith and theological disputes, the church quoted the Bible as the final word on the subject under discussion. Faith, tradition and received authority had been for eighteen centuries the grounds of the authenticity, truth and certainty of the Bible.

But by the dawn of the 18^th century, the philosophies of Galileo, Descartes, and Locke had made faith, tradition, and authority seem unreliable sources of knowledge. The new science demanded that all traditional truth claims be critically examined by rational/scientific methods. To refuse to examine one’s traditional beliefs critically was to risk being labeled superstitious, gullible, irrational, or in other ways backward. From what I have read, this cultural shift in what it means to be a rational person lies at the beginning of modern biblical criticism.

Of course, the Bible is not a physical object that can be studied by empirical science and expressed in mathematical language; it is a historical text. And some biblical scholars began to develop a science of biblical studies in analogy to the new science of nature.** Among the first principles of such a new historical science of the Bible as it developed in the 18^th and 19^th centuries are (1) read the Bible just as one reads any other book, (2) biblical studies must rid itself of all dogmatic presuppositions, such as those about divine inspiration or the authority of the creeds, (3) interpret the biblical texts within their ancient cultural, religious, and literary horizon, (4) fact or truth claims within the biblical texts must not be taken at face value but must be examined and accepted only to the extent that they are supported by historical evidence.

At first reading, these critical principles may seem to lead only to radical skepticism and unbelief. In fact, however, these four principles were used in the 18^th and 19^th centuries to reach conservative as well as radical conclusions and the whole range of opinion between. Conservative scholars, who trusted the church to have preserved and passed on the original and true faith, used historical critical principles in their efforts to justify the traditional faith on rational grounds. Theodor Zahn (1838-1933), for example, argued that the Four Gospels and the letters of Paul were considered canonical before the end of the 1^st century. In our own day, N.T. Wright (b. 1948) carries on the project of using historical critical principles to support a conservative reading of the gospels and Paul. Other scholars of a more skeptical bent argued that much that had been accepted on faith and authority in the past could not be supported by sound historical examination. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) argued that much of the New Testament teaching about Jesus is not history at all but myth. Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860) concluded that hardly any of the letters attributed to Paul were actually written by him and that much of the New Testament was written in the 2^nd century. According to Baur, the development of the earliest church was driven by division between the extreme Jewish party led by Peter and the Hellenistic party led by Paul. The resolution came only in the 2^nd century with the creation of the catholic church.

The story of the rise and triumph of modern historical criticism is much too long and complicated for me to tell in these essays. But I believe the essential feature of all its forms is this: since the triumph of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment based on it, a person who wishes to be known by peers as an intellectually responsible thinker must not appear to accept any truth claim on mere faith, tradition, or authority. One must, instead, place all truth claims on the witness stand for cross examination. Only those that withstand scrutiny may be accepted with intellectual integrity. As a corollary to this principle, because the number of things we can know with absolute certainty are few, the quality of beliefs may be ranked on a scale that ranges from certain knowledge through various levels of probability to the clearly false. Intellectual integrity demands that one proportion belief to the level of probability. It does not take much imagination to guess that many biblical critics severely reduced the extent of our knowledge of Jesus and the early church compared to that assumed by tradition.

Demystifying Modern Historical Criticism

The social location of the leading historical critics plays an important part in our assessment of their project. To engage at the highest level of modern historical criticism a student must gain an elite education in one of the great universities in the Western world under the supervision of a recognized scholar in the field. One must spend 10 years or more mastering ancient languages and cultures and undergoing thorough socialization into the history of the discipline. The only social location where such rigor can be sustained is the university. The modern university—especially from 1800 to 1960***—is a community of intellectuals bound together by shared academic values: respect in the community depends on adhering to the critical principle mentioned above, that is, the scholar’s conclusions must be supported by reason and evidence alone, not by faith, tradition, or authority. People who do not live within (or near) this elite subculture do not feel the same pressure to conform to this rigorous rationalism as do those whose identity and livelihood depends on its good graces. Indeed, they may find it snobbish, abstract, irrelevant, arrogant, speculative, and irreverent.

Though the number of elite biblical critics is small and they live within the cloistered walls of the university and speak an obscure language hardly anyone outside can understand, their influence extends beyond this narrow circle. (1) Many college students take religion or Bible courses during their college careers at secular or church-related universities. Not many of these courses are taught by top historical critics, but they are taught by the second and third tier students of those elite scholars. Or, students read textbooks that present the skeptical conclusions of biblical criticism as if they were established facts. Perhaps more importantly, students absorb the enlightenment skepticism toward faith, tradition, and authority. (2) University educated people, especially those who attended graduate schools, tend to adopt an elitist identity, which views people of traditional religious faith as unenlightened and backward. They couldn’t defend their elitist views or explain why faith, tradition, and authority are not good grounds for belief. They simply adopt the snobbish attitudes of their teachers. (3) Even professors of Bible, theology and ethics who teach in Christian universities and colleges for the most part received their graduate training under the influence of modern critical scholars. Some of them uncritically adopt the critical methods and conclusions of their teachers and pass them on to their students. (4) The clergy of most denominations are taught some form of historical criticism in their seminary educations and socialized to some degree into the skeptical and elitist academic attitude.

Notes

*Locke himself applied these methods to Christianity in his book The Reasonableness of Christianity.

**Many books have contributed to my understanding of this subject. One of the most important is Werner Georg Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems, trans. S. McLean Gilmour and Howard C. Kee (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972).

***Beginning in the 1960s the postmodern model of the university began to compete with the modern/enlightenment model. The postmodern university abandons rationality to embrace leftist ideology and activism.

Next Time: How progressive exegetes and theologians use the principles of modern biblical criticism to ignore the plain meaning of the biblical texts and find their own thoughts behind, underneath, and beside the words of the biblical texts.

The Logic of Biblical Authority

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This essay is the fourth in our series examining how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 19), came to be taken seriously by millions of otherwise intelligent people. In this essay we change our focus from the culture in general to the church and the Bible. Perhaps we can stretch our minds to understand how a culture that has abandon reason common sense, and knows nothing about the Bible, could fall for the new gender ideology. But now we ask how it came about that the Bible, which so plainly affirms the created order of male and female in its moral teaching, could be taken by many self-identified Christian people as affirming LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living as legitimately Christian. Today we focus on biblical authority.

The Genesis of Biblical Authority

The earliest church looked to the Old Testament, the teaching of Jesus, and the apostolic witness as the authorities that defined its identity. As we see clearly in the gospels, Jesus came to call the Jewish people to repentance in preparation for the coming kingdom of God. He spoke with a new authority, not to reject the law and prophets, but “to fulfill them” (Matt 5:17). Jesus prayed to the God of the Jews as “our father” (Matt 6:9-13). The early church proclaimed the resurrected Jesus as the long-anticipated Messiah (King) of the Jews. It understood itself as a continuation of the chosen people of God. Hence it treasured the Old Testament as one of its defining authorities.

The church, however, read the Jewish scriptures in light of the new thing that happened in Jesus. Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom, his miracles, exorcisms, welcoming of outcasts, conflict with the Jewish religious authorities…and above all his crucifixion by Jerusalem and Rome and his resurrection from the dead—all of these things signaled that God had done something new and completely unexpected in Jesus the Messiah. From now on, the people of God must gather around Jesus, trust him, listen to him, remember him, and follow him (Mark 9:7). Everything must be understood in his light: the meaning of the Old Testament, the character and purposes of God, and the moral life. Hence the words and deeds of Jesus were treasured by the church as of equal (if not greater) authority with the Old Testament.

Jesus’s words and deeds were heard and seen by many people, especially by his chosen twelve apostles. The Twelve and many other disciples, including Paul, were granted an appearance of the resurrected Jesus. It seems that strictly speaking an “apostle” is one personally commissioned and sent by the resurrected Jesus as a witness (Acts 1:21-22; 1 Cor 9:1-2). Because of their unique relationship to Jesus as his designated witnesses and the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit, the apostles possessed authority to proclaim the teaching and deeds of Jesus, to interpret the meaning of his death and resurrection, and to govern the early church with wisdom. Hence the writings that preserved the teaching and the deeds of Jesus and the apostolic teaching were received with the same reverence as the teaching they contained.

These three authorities—the Old Testament, Jesus’s teachings and deeds, and the apostolic witness and teaching—are reflected in our Bibles today: (1) Old Testament, (2) Four Gospels, and (3) Acts, the letters, treatises, and the Apocalypse. Hence the authority of the Bible to which the church appeals today is derived from the authority of Jesus and his apostles. Specifically, the Bible’s unique authority is grounded in its preservation and communication of the original teaching of Jesus and his apostles.

What is Authority?

So far, I have used the word “authority” without defining it. But it is important to get a clearer idea of this concept. Authority is a quasi-legal concept. It implies power, legitimacy, and competence. Authorities are identified as directed to a particular community or subject area—Roman law, the US Constitution, the King of Spain, etc. An authority has the first (as author) and last (as power) word on a subject. Authorities declare what is or shall be and invite trust and obedience or disbelief and disobedience; they do not propose opinions for negotiation or debate. Jesus taught “as one who had authority,” not as a mere commentator or one offering a likely opinion (Matt 7:28-29). He spoke with divine authority, which called for decision, not quibbling. The apostles spoke with authority derived from Jesus—that is from their firsthand knowledge of Jesus and their appointment and empowerment by Jesus to speak on his behalf (Matt 28:18-19).

For those who wish to be recognized as disciples of Jesus, that is, as Christians (Acts 11:16), submitting to the apostolic authority and teaching is essential. Recall what Jesus said to the seventy in the limited commission:“Whoever listens to you listens to me; whoever rejects you rejects me; but whoever rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Luke 10:16). And who can forget what Jesus said to Peter: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matt 16:19).

The Bible Today

The church of today appeals to the Bible consisting of the 36 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament as the authority to define and regulate all things Christian. The Old Testament scriptures collected in our Bibles were already current in Jesus’s day and were held by most Jews to be holy. As one can see from the quotations in the New Testament, the early church appealed to the full range of Jewish scriptures, the law, prophets, and writings. The story of the collection of the 27 books of the New Testament is a bit more complicated.

As far as we know, Jesus did not write down his teachings. He traveled around Galilee, Judea, and eventually Jerusalem teaching by word of mouth. His disciples followed him and listened to him. They witnessed his miracles, words, and his death and resurrection. The apostles, too, after Pentecost proclaimed and taught by word of mouth. After persecution broke out in Jerusalem, believers were scattered everywhere preaching as they went. They spread throughout Judea, Samaria, and Syria (Acts 7-9). The Christian gospel was first proclaimed, passed on, and remembered by word of mouth by faithful disciples and institutionalized in such offices as prophets, elders, and bishops. And as long as the first generation of disciples and apostles were alive there was no great impetus to write it all down. The essential gospel could be memorized and recited in a few minutes. Besides, they possessed the Old Testament with its moral teaching, prophetic admonitions, psalms, and wisdom.

Paul’s letters are our first preserved Christian documents. Paul wrote First Thessalonians around 50 AD, about 15 years after his conversion. With the exception of Romans, Paul wrote his letters to deal with problems that had recently arisen in churches he founded. He did not write with a view of preserving the history of Jesus and the church. But his letters are invaluable witnesses to the gospel and history of the early church.

It is important to distinguish between the act of writing the New Testament documents and the acts of collecting, copying, distributing and recognizing them as authoritative. As we can infer from the Prologues to the Gospel of Luke (Lk 1:1-4) and Acts (1:1-3) and a reference in Hebrews 2:3, the second and third generations began to feel the need to compile and record the teaching of Jesus and the history of the early church. Before the end of the first century Paul’s letters were being copied, collected, and distributed as witnessed by the New Testament book of 2 Peter, the letter of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians (95 AD) and the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (110 AD). The Four Gospels were probably collected and circulated in the late first or early second century. All were listed in the Roman Church’s Muratorian Canon (170 AD) and in Irenaeus’s list of NT books (190 AD). It seems that by the end of the second century most of the 27 books of the present New Testament were recognized as authoritative (i.e., as canonical). A few, however, were disputed and not universally recognized until later: Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter. The gospels, Acts, and the letters of Paul were never disputed and were passed on as part of the apostolic tradition. The disputed books were questioned because of doubts about their apostolic origin. By the middle of the fourth century, they were universally and formally accepted because their connection with an apostle or the apostolic tradition was acknowledged.

A few observations are in order at this point: (1) The teaching of Jesus and the witness of his apostles did not become authoritative because the church recognized them. They are foundational for the church in that the church came into being by accepting them. (2) The first century church taught and passed on the same authoritative tradition by word of mouth and written word without distinction or tension between the two. Only in the middle of the second century did questions arise about the limits of the written canon. Hence only with respect to a few writings—Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter—can it be said that the church deliberated and decided the canon of the New Testament. The heart of the New Testament canon was determined before the church became conscious of the need to set limits to the canon. (3) In this process—whether informal and unself-conscious or formal and self-conscious—the authority of the oral and written tradition derived from the divine authority of Jesus’s words and deeds and his designated witnesses, the apostles. Hence the authority of our Bible derives from its role as the unique deposit of the tradition of Jesus’s words and deeds and the apostolic witness to Jesus.

Next Time: we will pursue the questions: do our Bibles perform this function, and how do we know this?

How to Use Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine

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In my previous essay I made some suggestions about how to read Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God. In that essay I asserted that we should not read the book as if it were Christian theology, philosophy, psychology, or sociology. It is rather a “phenomenology of homo religiosus” or religious man; that is to say, it is a study of the ways in which human beings perceive and respond to the divine. In this essay I will suggest a few ways in which the book can be useful to Christians.

Why Read Peterson?

First, it is important not to be afraid to incorporate the wisdom of non-Christian thinkers into our thinking. Of course, we must do this with care. But faithful church leaders and even apostles have done this from the beginning. In Acts 17, Paul quoted two Greek poets, Epimenides (6^th century B.C.) and Aratus (4^th and 3^rd centuries B.C.), approvingly: “In him we live and move and have our being” and “We are his offspring.” Paul taps into the near universal belief and experience that the divine is near, around, within, and active everywhere. The pressing question within the religious horizon of the Old and New Testaments was not “Is there a god?” but “What is the true nature of the divine?” and “Who is God?” And that is what Paul proclaimed to the Athenians that day.

We, however, cannot presume that our contemporaries experience the overwhelming, self-evident presence of the divine. They do not. It is doubtful that even we who believe in the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit experience it as well as the pagans in Athens did. We wrestle with the question of the existence and presence of God in a way no ancient person did. For many people, belief requires heroic effort. This modern feeling of divine absence is why we need to listen to Jordan Peterson and other thinkers who can awaken us to the universal divine presence felt so vividly by the Athenians and all premodern people.

The Question of God is Inescapable

As I argued in the first essay, Peterson reads biblical texts for their witness to the universal experience of the divine. Human beings are by nature religious, that is, human consciousness is so constructed that we cannot help but raise religious questions, questions of meaning, of life and death, being, eternity, and divinity. Unless we are taught otherwise, we experience the power and beauty of nature, the inner call of conscience, the threat of death, and the lure of love as intimations of the divine. We feel the tension between the upward call toward the good, true, and the beautiful and the downward pull into sensuality and chaos. Peterson criticizes such modern errors as scientism, race and gender ideology, and utopian revolutionary theories (“idiocy” he would say) that blind us to what lies open before us: We live in Someone else’s world and we can never become what we could be unless we respond sacrificially to the divine call.

From a Christian point of view, Peterson does not provide satisfactory answers to the two questions Paul posed and answered in Acts 17: (1) “What is God?” Paul’s answer: “God is the Creator of heaven and earth!” And (2) “Who is God?” Paul’s answer: “God is the One who raised Jesus Christ from the dead.” But Peterson sets the conditions wherein these questions make sense. If we come to perceive the divine all around and within us, and if we feel compelled to choose between seeking the divine and falling into chaos, the next step naturally appears before us. It is to ask: “What and Who are you, Lord? How may I seek you and find you? What would you have me do?”

Peterson and the Bible

Peterson does not read the Bible as the canonical text for the Christian church. Nor does he read it according to the modern historical critical method, which seeks, not to hear the religious/moral message of the text with a view to obeying it, but to uncover the history of the composition of the present texts and to reconstruct the “true” historical events behind the text, neither of which we can know for sure. Peterson takes the biblical texts seriously as speaking universal truth learned in genuine encounters with the divine. Unlike modern historical interpretation, Peterson finds an existentially relevant and religiously compelling message in the Bible. It articulates a command built into human nature that we must obey or disobey. Once we have heard it, we can never return to our naive secular existence.

The church, like Peterson, reads the Bible for its religious/moral message. Unlike Peterson, however, the church reads the Bible as its authoritative scripture, as the normative story by which it measures all its teaching, theological and moral. But it does not contradict the ecclesial reading of the Bible to read it also as a witness to the universal human “perceptions of the divine” as does Peterson. Believers read the Bible as more but not less than Peterson. And this is why a person who is not a Christian can recognize their experience in many biblical texts and a Christian can recognize their experience in some pagan and secular texts. God has not left himself without witness in nature and in human consciousness! Peterson is on the side of the angels here. In my view, then, Christian preachers, teachers, apologists, and theologians could make good use of his work and the work of others like him.

Next Time: Perhaps I will follow up these essays with some reflections on Peterson’s moral and social ideas.

How to Read Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine

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A Reading Guide

I just finished reading Jordan Peterson’s most recent book, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine. In this 505-page, quirky, provocative book Peterson wrestles with certain biblical characters and stories, among which are the creation story, the fall, Cain and Abel, Abraham, Moses, and Jonah. As my essay title indicates, I will not be doing a full review. My aim, rather, is to give you my perspective on what the book is and is not, what it does and does not do; that is to say, I want to help you get the most out of reading it.

What the Book is Not

Not Christian Theology

Don’t read this book as if it were an exercise in Christian theology. Peterson is not a theologian. You will completely miss its important message if you measure his interpretations by the standards of Christian theology, orthodox, progressive, or liberal. Mistakenly reading it in this way will lead you to think at one moment that he is orthodox, the next heretical, and the next completely off the wall. Peterson does not read the Bible as the canonical scripture of the Christian church and does not adopt the methods and language of Christian theology. Don’t critique the book for not doing well what it makes no pretense of doing at all.

Not philosophy

We Who Wrestle is not a book of philosophy. Peterson is not a philosopher and does not attempt to deduce a system of metaphysics from self-evident axioms. Nor does he use logical analysis to clarify traditional philosophical problems and arguments. It’s not philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, or philosophical anthropology. The book is much too mystical, hermeneutical, eclectic, and as I said above, quirky for that. Indeed, at points it reads like a stream of consciousness riff on a theme. So, don’t look for an internally consistent philosophy. You will be disappointed.

Not Christian Apologetics

Peterson is not a Christian apologist, though he could be mistaken for one. Peterson often asserts the “truth” of the religious and moral message of the Bible. He speaks of “inspired” prophets who open themselves to “revelations” of the “divine” and “reality.” And he consistently uses the words “God” “spirit” and “Logos” to refer to the highest Reality toward which we should aim. We should not, however, assume that he uses these words in exactly the same sense as they are used in the worship and theology of the Christian church. He does not. And he always qualifies assertions of “truth” and “reality” with question marks or other markers of tentativeness. In the end, Peterson poses the question of the “reality” of the divine as a decision between directing one’s aspirations toward the good, true, and beautiful or surrendering to the downward pull of evil, falsehood and the ugly. God is defined as the adequate ground of all we hold to be worthy of highest human aspiration. Listen to these words from his conclusion:

All these great, profound and unalterably memorable stories are characterizations of God…God is presented as the unity that exists at the foundation or stands at the pinnacle. In the absence of that unity, there is either nothing that brings together and harmonizes, in which case there is a deterioration into anarchy and chaos, or there are the various replacements that immediately swoop in, in their foul way, to usurp and dominate: the spirit of power that characterizes the Luciferian realm and produces the scarlet beast of the degenerate state. Does that make the divine real? This is a matter of definition, in the final analysis—and therefore of faith. It is real insofar as its pursuit makes pain bearable, keeps anxiety at bay, and inspires the hope that springs eternal in the human breast. It is real insofar as it establishes the benevolent and intelligible cosmic order…It is real as the force that opposes pride and calls those who sacrifice improperly to their knees. It is real as the further reaches of the human imagination, striving fully upward (pp. 502-504).

Not Historical and Literary Study

Peterson does not interpret the Bible in the traditional ecclesiastical or the modern historical and literary way. Don’t expect to learn much about the historical context of the events recounted in the texts or the setting and process of their literary composition. He does not concern himself with whether or not the events recounted in Genesis, the rest of the Pentateuch or Jonah really happened. Interestingly, Peterson’s method of interpretation has more in common with patristic and medieval than modern interpretation. The church fathers and medieval interpreters read the scriptures on four levels: literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical or spiritual. The word “anagogical” means “leading upward.” In other words, to interpret biblical texts in an anagogical way means to seek in the text a mystical or spiritual truth about God and the soul. Peterson does something similar. He seeks evidence in biblical texts of human “perceptions of the divine.” The medieval interpreters were guided by their conviction that God spoke in the texts and if we purify ourselves and listen carefully, we can hear his voice speaking deep truths and mysteries. Similarly, Peterson assumes that these texts, as evidenced by their power to shape definitively and inescapably the culture we live in—that is, what we consider to be good, true, and beautiful—have proved themselves reservoirs of deep truth about the divine and the human. This truth, these perceptions, is what Peterson seeks to articulate.

Not Psychology, Sociology, or Politics

Peterson is a psychologist and draws on his knowledge and experience as a therapist. But this book is not a book of psychology. Despite his many studied observations, opinions and off-handed comments about society and the political order, do not read the book as primarily about society or the state.

What the Book is

A Study of “Perceptions of the Divine”

As the subtitle indicates, Peterson listens to the biblical stories for “perceptions of the Divine.” Think about each word in this expression. First, these “perceptions” are human perceptions. The place where the divine is perceived is in the human psyche; hence the book is a study of the human soul as the locus of divine revelation, not a theology that attempts to speak about God in himself. Second, to perceive is not the same as to think or to theorize. Perception is, if not precognitive, at least preconceptual. In perception, we meet a reality that causes changes in us that we feel but cannot yet name. Peterson is careful to warn us that our “perceptions” of the divine can never be exhaustively translated into clear thought. God is always beyond our comprehension. Third, Peterson speaks in his subtitle of the “divine.” The “divine” is a general term that covers many different “characterizations” of the divine. Whereas “perceptions of the divine” are universal in human experience, the divine is named and characterized only in specific religious traditions. This book is about the universal human openness to and experience of the infinite, the upward call toward perfect unity and perfection, which as Peterson reminds us many times, is “by definition” the divine (e.g., p. 234).

A Phenomenology of “Homo Religiosus”

Peterson does not preface his book with a discussion of his methodology. He talks a bit about meaning and paradigmatic and archetypical stories. And when I hear such discussions I think of the psychology of C.G. Jung, the scholar of archaic religion Mircea Eliade, and phenomenologist of religious experience Rudolph Otto. Having read the book, I would characterize Peterson’s method as a phenomenology of “homo religiosus” (Eliade) or the religious human being. Phenomenology is the study of how things come to appear in human consciousness. Peterson listens to biblical texts, which were produced by prophets and deeply religious individuals, for their perceptions of the divine. That is to say, how and in what ways did the divine—the highest and the best—come to appear in their consciousness? And what kind of transformations happen to people who perceive the divine and made the sacrifices required to respond appropriately?

According to Peterson, these biblical texts voice something universally human. The book’s title is We Who Wrestle With God; not “They” or ‘Those” but “We.” Peterson challenges his readers to understand themselves as part of the “We.” Human beings by virtue of their humanity have no choice but to wrestle with God. The divine is always near, pressing in on us, calling us upward. Our destiny as individuals and as a society will be determined by whether we obey the upward call or in sloth or malice sink downward into chaos and destruction.

Next Time: In Part Two I will propose some ways the book can be useful to the individual Christian, the church, and society.

Push Back and Lift Up: A Review of Two New Books on Marriage, Sex, and Gender

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Today I want to recommend two books devoted to a topic that has increasingly occupied my mind of late:

Rubel Shelly, Male & Female God Created Them: A Biblical Review of LGBTQ+ Claims. Joplin, MO: College Press, 2023. PP. 426.

Rubel Shelly, The INK is DRY: God’s Distinctive Word on Marriage, Family, and Sexual Responsibility. Joplin, MO: College Press, 2023. PP. 182.

The Revolution

Before 2010, I thought most authors advocating the Christian legitimacy of LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living were liberals or progressives located in such mainline denominations as the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, the Disciples of Christ, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. After 2014, however, a chorus of authors claiming to be evangelical have written an avalanche of works urging churches to affirm gay and lesbian relationships as morally equal to traditional marriage. And they say they know this is right because the Bible tells them so. This new development demands a new response from authors holding to the traditional/biblical view of sex and marriage. Does the Bible really support affirmation of LGBTQ+ identities and gay and lesbian marriages? If so, how did the ancient people of God and the church get it wrong all these years? Does the Bible define marriage exclusively in terms of “covenant fidelity” and not also in terms of sexual complementarity?

The Author

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of books are published every year. I can read only a few of them. But when Rubel Shelly asked me to read pre-publication forms of these two new books, I agreed immediately. I knew that these books would be high quality, and I was not disappointed. I’ve known Shelly for over 50 years. He is a man of remarkable intelligence, learning, experience, courage, and integrity. He has served the church in roles of preaching minister, college professor, and college president. At present, he is Teaching Minister at the Harpeth Hills Church of Christ in Brentwood Tennessee. The first book, Male & Female, is longer and more scholarly than the second, though not out of reach for any serious reader. It will be very useful as a college text or as a resource for ministers and elders. The second book, The INK is DRY, is written for popular audiences and would serve well for a church group study. Below are the two endorsements I wrote for these books.

For Male and Female God Created Them:

I wish I could put a copy of Male and Female God Created Them in the hands of every Christian pastor, minister, teacher, and counselor! As many Christian leaders have come to realize, the LGBTQ+ challenge is the question of our age. We must meet this challenge! And Male and Female God Created Them is the book for just such a time as this. Brilliant! Penetrating! Courageous! Yet… fair, measured, and compassionate. Shelly’s analysis and critique of the “affirming” position blows away the rhetorical dust and smoke generated by biblical revisionists and gets to the heart of the matter. His positive explanation and defense of the “traditional” (that is, biblical) view of marriage and sex is the best I’ve read in a long time. If you have time to read only one book on this subject, read this one! Then read it again!

For The INK is DRY:

Are we autonomous animals whose sole end is pleasure or created images of God whose end is to become like God in true love and holiness? The Scriptures clearly affirm the latter. Some contemporary interpreters treat the Bible as if it were written in erasable ink or even in pencil. For Rubel Shelly, however, The Ink Is Dry. Shelly guides us in a study of the most significant texts in the Old and New Testaments that deal with same-sex sexual behavior. He sets these passages in their historical contexts and deals with the clever, and often deceptive, maneuvers of interpreters who dispute their commonsense meanings. I especially appreciate the way Shelly places these passages in the context of God’s beautiful creational design for marriage between man and woman. I highly recommend The Ink is Dry to preachers, elders, college students, youth leaders, teachers, counselors, and anyone else concerned about the moral challenges facing the church today. Readers will find it useful for group and individual study.

Recommendation

Ministers, church leaders, ordinary members, and most of all, the younger generations of believers are bombarded by the secular culture—and increasingly by many in the church—with messages challenging and even ridiculing the biblical/traditional views of sex and marriage. If you want help pushing back against this wave of criticism, misinformation, and temptation, read and study Shelly’s books. But Shelly not only pushes back against its distortions, he also lifts up the beautiful ideal of loving, faithful, life-long marriage between one man and one woman. And that rare combination makes these books “must reads.”

Conclusion: The Certainty of Faith (Seminarian Visits Theology Professor #6)

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Introduction

In their last conversation, the professor and the seminarian concluded that modern academia’s 250-year effort to rationalize faith has failed miserably. Academia’s obsessive desire to avoid believing anything false led it to apply standards appropriate only to mathematics and (perhaps) logic to the Bible. Of course, no theological scholar attempted to translate the Bible into mathematical terms. But the historical and literary methods critical biblical scholars developed aimed to approximate the ideal of mathematical certainty as closely as possible. And they do not limit their efforts to understanding the message of the texts as written. Ordinarily, when we read a supposedly historical text, we imagine the real events as having unfolded as they do in the written texts. Critical scholars begin, instead, with the suspicion—real or methodological—that the texts are not what they seem. The modern scholar’s goal is to escape the spell cast by the text, outsmart the author, and use the text as a source for discovering what really happened.

The Bible is the only source we have for almost every line of the history it contains. We don’t have independent access to the real events, so scholars develop methods—using literary features, psychological plausibility, metaphysical theories, and other criteria—they think capable of distinguishing those events within the texts that really happened from later literary embellishments. Each of these methods and the results their application produces simply generates another set of debates in an endless cycle. But from the point of view of faith, the two most troubling problems are these: the set of historical and theological beliefs considered the closest approximation to mathematical certainty are so few and so trivial that they are of no use to the church. Not only so, even these most probable beliefs are highly debatable. The end results of critical academic study of the Bible turns out to be but a pale shadow of the bright light of faith that the church, drawing on the whole canon of Scripture, has proclaimed, taught and lived for two millennia.

Setting: The professor and the seminarian thought it fitting that the sixth conversation should take place in the local Antiochian Orthodox church. Surrounded by stained glass renderings of Bible history, vaulted ceilings, and illuminated icons, what better setting could one find for discussing the reliability of the church’s faith in Scripture and the believer’s trust in both!

Seminarian: Sitting in this place one has a feeling of participation in something ancient and transcendent.

Professor: And holy!

Seminarian: Something you cannot experience in academic lecture halls!

Professor: Divine and heavenly; not earthly and merely human. A silent presence rather than empty chatter.

Seminarian: Sitting here, now, after all our conversations, I feel changed; all doubt has left me. It’s as if I had been locked in a dark cellar, my captors telling me that my memories of sun and sky, wind and rain, green grass and singing birds were mere wishes based on pretty stories; but now I see the sun and feel his warmth, I hear the birds, the breeze caresses my cheeks. I smell the flowers, I taste the fruits of the earth—and my heart sings. How is this possible? The Reality and Truth that hostile critics tried to suppress and friendly critics attempted to prove—both producing only doubt and confusion—now fills my soul so that I could sooner doubt that I exist in this world in this body than doubt that I am loved by God, saved by Christ, and illuminated by the Spirit. Is this what the church means by the “certainty of faith”?

Professor: Yes. I believe the experience you describe could be what the church designates as “the certainty of faith.” Our parents and the church assured us that the Scriptures embody and preserve the original witness of the companions of Jesus. By the “church” I don’t mean simply the church you experienced as a child. I mean the worldwide church. Pick any century you wish, the 17^th, 12^th, 2^nd or the 1^st. Pick any continent, any country. You will find that every sermon, creed, confession, catechism, prayer, and sacramental rite derives its legitimacy from the teaching preserved in Scripture. And this is true despite heretical movements, ambitious patriarchs and worldly bishops. Scripture always exerts a corrective force that exposes heresy and ungodly bishops. No movement that abandons or twists the scriptures can long endure.

Seminarian: But there are those who deny or doubt that the church is correct in its confidence in Scripture.

Professor: Yes. You can always find someone who doubts the church but gullibly believes the most outlandish conspiracy theory. Consider the source.

Seminarian: But even if we believe the ecumenical church of all time and space that the scriptures embody and preserve the original witness of the companions of Jesus, we can still ask or be asked, “Is their testimony true?”

Professor: Yes. That is a genuine question, and it should not be dismissed too readily as cynical. On one level, asking whether or not the apostolic testimony to Jesus Christ is true has in view two alternative possibilities. It would be false if they were innocently mistaken or they cynically conspired to create and perpetuate a fraud. In responding to these possibilities, I believe we should be careful not to slide back into the endless academic debates about historical probabilities. Usually, when people, even strangers, tells us about an event they witnessed, we believe them unless we have a good reason not to do so. If we happen to know that they could not have been present at the event as they claim or if they have a reputation for telling tall tales, we greet their story with a raised eyebrow . And if the event to which they bear witness were highly unusual but not impossible, we might maintain a bit of skepticism unless their story was corroborated by several other reliable people. Whether or not to believe a stranger cannot be decided with mathematical precision. Such decisions are much too complicated and mysterious to articulate explicitly. In a similar way, evaluating the apostolic testimony and making a decision to believe them or not cannot be made in a scientific way. You have to listen to them, get to know them, and, as they say, go with your gut.

Seminarian: But even if you come to believe that the apostolic witnesses are telling the truth in the New Testament writings, you may still harbor doubts, because you don’t know what you don’t know. It doesn’t seem that we have yet achieved the certainty of faith.

Professor: It’s true. Simply believing the apostolic message—as important as that is—is not yet the fullness and certainty of faith. Why? Because you have not yet experienced for yourself the Reality of what they experienced; it was not meant for them alone, you know! For sure, we depend on the apostolic word recorded in the New Testament for knowledge of Jesus Christ. We can never outgrow it. But with the help of that word, we are led to the living Father, the reigning Christ, and the ever-present Spirit of God. In worship, in prayer, in liturgical reading, in loving service, in suffering, and in meditating on the cross, we open ourselves to the Father, Son, and Spirit who come to live in us and in whom we live. We experience an all-embracing love and a peace that passes understanding. And this is the certainty of faith.

Seminarian: Beautiful! Finally, what about the Bible? We began these conversations with the question of whether or not my parents and the church taught us rightly when it urged us to accept the whole of the canonical Scriptures as the word of God and the authority for believing and living as a Christian. Were they right?

Professor: Absolutely! They were right! Your parents and your church said only what the church has said from the beginning. The church pointed us to the original apostolic witness so that we could hear and believe and experience its truth for ourselves. It urged us to listen to the Scriptures as the word of God. Once we come to believe for ourselves and experience the Reality they experienced, that is, the Father, Son, and Spirit, we return to the church to thank her for her guidance, for preserving and rightly interpreting the Scriptures. Having tasted the truth of that to which prophets and apostles witnessed, we long by means of their writings to sit at their feet as they tell us more about the God whose word they heard and whose power they witnessed. Those chosen ones who walked with our Lord in the flesh, who saw the empty tomb, and to whom the risen Christ appeared are to be listened to, obeyed, and honored until the end of the world. We who believe want to take our place in the congregation of the people of God. We seek not to live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. So, yes your parents were right when they urged you to listen with the ecumenical church of all times and places to every writing, every paragraph, every sentence, and every word of the Bible, and to receive it as from the mouth of God.

Seminarian: These conversations have been life-giving. Thank you so much! I feel a joy and confidence I have not felt for years! But my renewed joy and confidence are grounded not only on my trust in my parents and my childhood church but on my newfound trust in the ecumenical church of all times and places, in the persuasive power of the original apostolic witness, and finally, in the confirmation of the living presence of the Father, Son, and Spirit who pours out his divine love and peace into my soul. Thank you!

Professor: May God bless you always with his living presence and through you bless the lives of many yet to be born.

Seminarian: I hope you don’t mind if now and then I drop by for a visit.

Professor: Of course. You are welcome to stop by. Goodbye.

Seminarian: Goodbye

Academia’s Double Standard, Or Orthodoxy for Me but Not for Thee (Seminarian Visits Theology Professor #5)

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Introduction

Today we listen in on the fifth conversation between a recent seminary graduate and one of his former professors. The previous conversation centered on clarifying the critical standard academia uses to test knowledge claims. Taking mathematics and logic as the ideal sciences, academia measures all other endeavors to secure knowledge by the ideal of clear, exhaustive, and absolute knowledge. In sciences other than mathematics, however, this ideal is unattainable and can be only approximated to one degree or another. Not only so, the level of success in approximating the ideal is always a matter of dispute. Because it is unattainable in fields other than pure mathematics, it is open to abuse and selective application. Our professor argues that the dominant academic approach to the Bible and Christian faith displays just this sort of abuse and endless debate.

Setting: The seminarian and the professor agree that friendly conversation is better when you are sharing food and drink or taking a walk together. Warm and sunny, today is a perfect day for a leisurely walk.

Seminarian: Thank you for suggesting that we walk as we talk today.

Professor: Like sharing a meal, walking together is an act of friendship conducive to honest conversation. Where did we leave our last conversation?

Seminarian: As I recall, we were going to examine the ways the academic method creates doubt about the Bible as a reliable source of knowledge of God.

Professor: Yes. I remember. Tell me, then, in the most succinct way you can how academia attempted to diminish your confidence in the Bible as a repository of divine revelation.

Seminarian: I can summarize it in four words. On hundreds of occasions, in scores of different ways, and to every belief I brought with me to seminary, academia repeated the same challenge: “How do you know?” How do you know the Bible is true? How do you know that every book, every sentence, and every word is inspired or God-breathed? How do you know the biblical writings are authentic, that is, written by authors to whom they are ascribed, composed at the times and in places they claim, and preserved uncorrupted? How do you know that the events they recount really happened? How do you know that the authors’ theological interpretations of the events they write about are true? How do you know that the Scribes and Rabbis that selected the Old Testament canon and the churches and bishops and councils that selected the New Testament canon did not make mistakes in the writings they included or excluded?

Professor: Asking “how do you know?” seems more like a rhetorical ploy than an academic argument. You don’t have to know anything about a subject or offer any alternative explanations for the data, to ask this question. Did they make any positive arguments? Do they attempt to demonstrate the Bible’s unreliability or provide an alternative history or theology?

Seminarian: Yes. They did. And they can succeed in creating plausible doubt at some points. In my experience, however, the “how-do-you-know” question is the only way to mount an effective challenge to faith in the Bible’s reliability as the authority for Christian teaching, because most of the Bible’s message is untestable by universally acknowledged criteria. The Bible is the only source of information we have for almost all the history it contains. You have to take it or leave it. True, there are some areas where the Bible’s statements may be tested. The simplest way to test the Bible’s reliability is to examine it for internal coherence or compatibility with external sources. If the Bible seems to assert two contradictory ideas or incompatible facts, this would be a mark against its reliability for those ideas and facts. If the Bible asserts ideas and facts that contradict or are incompatible with ideas and facts sourced from outside the Bible, one must assess which source to trust and to what degree. To take one obvious example, the first eleven chapters of Genesis, taken as history or science in the modern sense, seems to be incompatible with some aspects of modern cosmology, archeology, biology, and the modern understanding of the course of ancient history. And there are many other places where the Bible speaks of historical events, natural phenomena, and moral principles to which some people claim to have independent access.

Professor: Indeed, examples could be multiplied. Hardly a biblical stoned has been left unturned. Biblical scholars have been studying the Bible in this academic way for at least 250 years. Some hoped that academic study would confirm the truth of faith and others seemed to take delight in debunking it. Some were cautious and reserved and others prone to speculation and flights of fancy. They examined it from every angle imaginable and set it within every ideological schema that has been developed: Hegelian, Marxist, postmodern, feminist, and gay. I have read widely in this literature for 50 years, and as I asserted a few conversations back, for all their efforts not much of substance has changed. If you want to know what the ancient Jews believed about God, creation, and other faith topics you still have to read the text of the Old Testament printed in your Bible, which is for all practical purposes the same as that read by Jesus and Paul. If you want to know about the life and teachings of Jesus, you have to read the New Testament Gospels. If you want to know what Jesus’s original disciples and the earliest church believed about Jesus, you have to read Acts, Paul, John, and the rest of the New Testament documents. Don’t get me wrong, biblical scholars have been very helpful in providing insights into the biblical writings. But when scholars use the biblical texts plus their vivid imaginations to reconstruct a picture of Jesus or the early church that is radically different from that given in the New Testament texts, what are we to do? Trust modern scholars and their methods? Which scholars? What methods? Surely, it makes more sense to trust the original sources even if there is no independent way, acceptable to academia, to prove them true. No matter how many scholars you read, you will still have to make a choice to believe the biblical teaching or not.

Seminarian: If I am hearing you correctly you are saying that all attempts to go beyond faith in grasping the truth of the Bible—whether to confirm or deny it—are futile and unreasonable. Am I right?

Professor: Yes. The Bible’s truth value cannot be assessed with mathematical methods. It makes historical and theological claims, and the methods by which historical and theological claims can be assessed cannot produce “clear, exhaustive, and absolute” knowledge. Academics who nevertheless attempt to transform biblical faith into scientific knowledge will inevitably reduce that faith to a few meaningless historical facts and a short list of culturally acceptable moralisms. Their edited Bible turns out to be even less plausible than the uninterpreted text. Ironically, their failed efforts to rationalize faith actually renders a service to faith. For if the Christian faith could be refuted (or proved) by academic means, it seems that 250 years of scholarly work would be enough to accomplish this task. From an academic point of view, however, it is still inconclusive. And it always will be, for that is the nature of academia.

Seminarian: And that brings us back to the “How do you know?” argument!

Professor: Exactly! Because orthodox/biblical faith cannot be defeated by positive academic arguments, unbelieving academics often resort to the “How do you know?” argument! Because it contains an element of truth, it often ensnares unwary students. It is true that we do not know the truth of the orthodox/biblical faith in the same way and to the degree of certainty that we know that 2 + 2 = 4. So what? Skeptical academics argue or imply that we ought not to trust beliefs grounded in faith. This act, they say, is a failure of rational responsibility and a loss of courage. We ought rather to hold such beliefs in suspense until we can know their truth status one way or another, which implies that we should never embrace Christian faith wholeheartedly and apply it to every aspect of our lives. For we cannot know its truth clearly, exhaustively, and absolutely.

Seminarian: If academics applied this standard to every belief they cherish, they would never embrace wholeheartedly and live by any belief or principle…except perhaps mathematical or logical ones. And you won’t have much of a life if you determine to act guided only by those abstractions!

Professor: But as we all know, the dominant culture of academia does not apply this rigorous standard to every belief and value! Can you imagine the furor that would be created on most college campuses if a guest speaker or a professor were to turn the tables and apply these standards to modern academia’s sacred cows in the following ways? “How do you know that the world is divided into wicked oppressors and righteous oppressed people? Can you prove that all black and brown people are victims of systemic racism? Can you give demonstrable evidence that racism is immoral? How can you prove that socialism is morally superior to capitalism? How do you know that diversity is a moral and social good? How do you know that seeking equity (or even equality!) is morally superior to rewarding merit? How do you know that inclusion is right and exclusion is wrong? How do you know that LGBTQ+ rights are human rights? Indeed, how do you know there are such things as human rights? So, you don’t know? You can’t answer? Well then, you should to hold such beliefs in suspense until you can know their truth status one way or another. If you don’t know them clearly, exhaustively, and absolutely you should not risk living by them or imposing them on others!”

Seminarian: I suspect that such a person would be silenced and perhaps attacked by a mob, fired from their jobs, and even arrested by law enforcement.

Professor: Higher education, too, has its dogma, its orthodoxy. To question it is to blaspheme, and you don’t argue with blasphemy. You silence it and persecute the perpetrator.

Professor: I see that we have been walking for about an hour and its nearly lunch time. Next time, let’s address directly why holding tenaciously to the faith proclaimed in the Bible and attested and passed on to us by the church is a very reasonable thing to do.

Seminarian: I look forward to it!

Professor: See you next time.

Interpreting the Bible the “Humble” Way? A Book Review

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This morning I read Karen R. Keen’s new book, The Word of a Humble God: The Origins, Inspiration, and Interpretation of Scripture (Eerdmans, 2022). Readers of this blog may remember that in September and October 2021 I wrote an extended review and response to her earlier book, Scripture, Ethics & the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships (Eerdmans, 2018). In that earlier book, Keen argued that properly interpreted Scripture allows for acceptance of covenanted, loving same-sex marriages. Her book made a six-part argument. Central to this argument was her view of biblical interpretation:

The Bible’s positive moral teachings provide a vision of justice, goodness, and peace, and they are intended to promote a just, good, and flourishing world.

The Bible’s moral prohibitions and limitations are intended to forbid things that cause harm to human beings, human community, and the rest of creation and to prevent heartache and destruction from disrupting human flourishing.

To interpret and apply the Bible’s positive and negative moral teachings in keeping with their intended purposes, we must deliberate about whether or not applying a specific biblical rule to a particular situation prevents harm and promotes justice, goodness, and human flourishing. Interpretations and applications that harm and inhibit human flourishing must be rejected.

Gay and lesbian people do not choose to be gay or lesbian, and the overwhelming majority cannot change their orientation.

A large majority of gay and lesbian people do not have the gift of celibacy and find such a state lonely and deeply painful.

Therefore:

Because loving, committed same-sex relationships embody justice, goodness, and human flourishing, do not cause harm to the people in the relationship or the human community, and unwanted celibacy causes great harm and unhappiness to gay and lesbian people, faithful deliberation and application must conclude that the Bible allows and even blesses covenanted same-sex relationships.

Reading the biblical texts that condemn same-sex activity in view of these rules of biblical interpretation, Keen concludes that we should not apply these texts to covenanted, loving same-sex relationships. To do so would not promote justice, goodness, and peace but would cause harm and heartache and disrupt human flourishing. These texts condemn only exploitative same-sex relationships.

In a brief email exchange with Keen in 2021, I learned that her new book The Word of a Humble God was forthcoming. I expected that this book would explain and defend the interpretative method she used in her 2018 book. And in a sense my expectation was confirmed, but her argument moves in a long, roundabout way and never actually mentions same-sex relationships. In what follows, I do not provide a full review of the book. My goal, rather, is to isolate and examine what I take to be its essential point.

The book is divided into three parts, The Making of the Bible, Inspiration, and Interpretation. Part One contains four chapters and tells the story of the composition of the Bible in the way one might hear it in a introductory course in a progressive or liberal seminary. The Bible must be understood within its Ancient Near Eastern religious, cultural, and literary context (Chapter 1). It is not the work of one author but the result of community experience and a cooperative effort of reflection, oral tradition, writing, and editing (Chapter 2). The Bible was “not produced in one setting…Scripture developed over time, with later scribes updating and adding their contributions to it” (p. 58). The Bible contains many voices that reflect different contexts and perspectives (Chapter 3). Even the “final” form of the Bible was fixed in a process of assessment and decision, and different branches of Christianity (Orthodox, Ethiopic, Roman Catholic, and Protestant) do not agree on the exact extent of canonical Scripture (Chapter 4).

Part Two deals with inspiration. In three chapters, Keen explains her view of inspiration and differentiates it from other views. She first distinguishes between revelation and inspiration. Revelation “is God’s eternally active presence disclosing the divine Self in various ways” (p. 85). Inspiration “is how that revelatory communication occurred” (p. 85; Emphasis original). Keen lists six views of inspiration, the last of which is her own. She labels her view the “Divine-Humility View.” She states it as follows:

The Bible is the product of God’s humility in sharing power with human beings. It reflects God-given human agency in collaboration with the Creator (p. 86).

The humble God “inspires” the Bible by “collaborating” (p. 99) with humans and working in a hidden way through their experiences to produce the history that culminated in the Bible.

I read and reread this chapter and I still do not know what Keen means by “inspiration,” how she knows that God inspired the Bible, or even why she needs the word “inspiration” to name the mysterious process to which she refers. In Keen’s theory, God’s working seems so hidden that one could never distinguish a product of divine inspiration from a purely human work. And God’s working seems so universal that it becomes difficult to explain how the Bible differs from other modes of divine communication: nature, other religions, philosophy, or inner illumination.

In Part Three, building on her previous chapters, Keen takes up the subject of interpretation. Interpreting the Bible in view of the divine humility involved in its production requires us to come to the text with humility. God hides in the humanity, diversity, and tensions within Scripture. Only as we approach Scripture with humility can we discern God’s word and will. Humility is the gateway to the meaning of Scripture:

The hermeneutical key, then, is the humility of God and our imitation of it. God shares power and serves us. To know God is to do the same. If the Bible reading does not result in using our agency to elevate and serve others, we aren’t doing it right. Any approach to interpretation can be used for selfish ambition; the right reading is the one that embodies humility (p. 173, Emphasis added).

In her 2018 book Scripture, Ethics & the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships, Keen set forth some hermeneutical rules, which I quoted above. We should, she argues, interpret Scripture in view of its divine intention, that is, God’s desire to promote justice, goodness, and human flourishing. We should never interpret Scripture in a way that causes harm, heartache, and destruction. In this book (The Word of a Humble God), she attempts to show that even the mode in which God inspired the Bible models humble love and a servant heart, and it shows that this humble love is what God wants from us. Hence the purpose of Scripture is to model and evoke humble love. Humility is the interpretive key to Scripture.

Although in The Word of a Humble God Keen does not apply her hermeneutics of humility to the question of same-sex relationships, the kinship to the hermeneutics developed in Scripture, Ethics & the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships is obvious. All that is missing is the argument that the traditional reading of Scripture as condemning all forms of same-sex sexual relationships does not embody humble love. An interpreter formed in humble love would not read the Bible in a way that causes unhappiness, loneliness, and shame to gay and lesbian people.

I do not object in principle to the hermeneutics of humble love. The Bible clearly teaches that disciples of Jesus should be both humble and loving. Scripture should not be used as an instrument of torture. However, I object to Keen’s implication that any interpretation of Scripture that causes unhappiness and shame in someone is for that reason alone wrong. This principle is too broad to be of any practical help. In many cases helping people to recognize and repent of their wrong and destructive behaviors–even if it causes them to be sad or angry–can be an act of profound humility and deep love. The question, then, turns not only on whether an interpretation causes someone to be unhappy but on whether the condemned behavior is wrong.

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