Misadventures with the Bible
In recent years the classic understanding of biblical inspiration and its resulting authority in all of life has been undergoing a major revision among some evangelicals.
The revision, on the high end, is evident in the work of N.T. Wright, for example, and I. Howard Marshall; it is evident on the low end in experimenters like Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, and a host of other cultural fashionistas.
Howard Marshall
Marshall, in his 2004 book Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology, was thinking about the ways Christian faith has ‘developed’ across the ages. Much of what he says is unexceptional. However, he does say that some of the images Jesus used to speak of God in the parables are simply unacceptable today, such as God being compared to a jailer (Matthew 18.34) and presiding over a hell (Luke 16.25,28), or killing people (Luke 19.27). These images are incredible to us now, even if Jesus did use them, and the reason is that the Spirit has been enlightening our minds since then.
The Holy Spirit himself is liberating us from some of the very revelation he gave in the course of history! In this sense, under the Spirit’s leading, biblical truth is evolving. We are, in some ways, moving beyond the New Testament, he argues. So much for the apostolic injunctions to stand firm and to follow, hold, and guard it!
Tom Wright
Wright, more adventurous than Marshall, disengages the authority of God from the authority of Scripture rather more radically. In different ways and in different places he mocks the idea that Scripture contains timeless, unchanging truths or that it was ever meant to do so. The authority of God today is experienced as something other than the authority of Scripture. This was his thesis in The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture. Wright offers a baffling illustration to make his point. Suppose a lost Shakespeare play were found today. Four of the acts have survived but we know that originally it had five acts. What would we do? Would we not try to create the fifth act as faithfully as we could so that the play could run its course? That is our situation in the church today. We do not have the fifth act of God’s revelation, the one for our present moment.
The problem with this, of course, is that the fifth act to Shakespeare’s play could be written in any number of ways with any number of outcomes. So it would be with Scripture had God left us to our own wits.
Rob Bell
Among emergents, all of this subtle sophistication is largely passed up, but the same point is nevertheless made. Bell’s Velvet Elvis, for example, distinguishes between Scripture as a trampoline and Scripture as a brick wall. The doctrines of Scripture are like the springs in a trampoline that propel us upward in our journey with God. However, as trampoline jumpers know, the direction in which they are propelled is a tad unpredictable. So it is in life. We can say only what ‘seems’ to be right in terms of what we should believe and do. We have to make our way, in our own way, having been projected by Scripture.
Scripture, to change the image, is not about living in a brick world where nothing changes and where one brick dislodged in the doctrinal wall may threaten to bring down the whole edifice of Christian life. It is not about having one painting, to change the image again, that we carry all the time. No. It is, Bell says, about making our own paintings through our own explorations as we move along. So, to go back to trampolines, would it matter if we took one or more springs out? Such as the Trinity and the virgin birth of Christ, for example? Clearly not, he thinks, so long as there are still enough springs left to get us airborne.
Brian McLaren
Neo, the hipster in McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian, indulges in the generational conceit that the world when it was modern in the 1960s was adolescent, whereas by the 1990s it was all grown up. What evangelicals believed then, they can no longer believe now. This would be fine if the only thing that Neo, a McLaren lookalike in the book, was rejecting was Enlightenment rationalism. But it is not. Neo wants a whole new framework in which we ask, not which religion is true, but which religion is good. Elsewhere McLaren has said that theology is all about the searching, not about the finding. Once we understand, he says, that we cannot know truth in an objective way, our whole perspective on life changes.
Indeed. And, if I may say so, that is true. And it is not only true for me. It is true for everyone. However, I interrupt the argument.
Authority and Scripture
A line connects Marshall and Wright to Bell and McLaren. It is that the authority of God functions separately from the written Scriptures. Marshall thinks the Spirit has liberated us from some of what is in Scripture; Wright thinks the Scriptures were never given to function as absolute truth in our world in the first place; Bell thinks the Scriptures simply send us on our way to do our own thing; McLaren thinks historic faith needs to be de-reconstructed for postmoderns so that the baggage of enduring truth can be dropped.
The common thread across this broad front is that Scripture cannot be fully authoritative at the level of its functioning in the life of the church today. We are in fact autonomous, freed from its language and constraints as we shape our own understanding, in our own way, in the postmodern world. At the end of the day, Christianity is about filling out my story, being propelled on my journey by the Scripture or the Holy Spirit, and being propelled into the (post)modern world. It is not about our fitting into the Bible’s narrative. It is not about seeing it as an objective framework of truth. Why not? Because that does not sit well either with the (post)modern autonomous self or with the (post)modern world. Here is the postmodern preoccupation with the self into which the whole of reality has been contracted, the self at the centre of the universe and, despite all the Christian words that are spattered around, actually refusing to be part of God’s (objective) narrative.
Airy dismissal of doctrine
Everywhere, in fact, there is this airy dismissal of the importance of biblical doctrine and the assumption that it is neither central to nor important in the life of Christians and churches. Indeed, William M. Easum and Thomas G. Bandy’s Growing Spiritual Redwoods says this explicitly. Growing and vibrant churches, they say, are those that have forged their own understanding of Christ. And this is exactly what McLaren does in Generous Orthodoxy. This book is neither generous to those who take a more traditional Christian position, nor is it orthodox. The author has apparently no respect for those who have gone before him and who contributed the classical understandings of Christian faith.
How could the apostles have got it so wrong, one wonders? Why were they at such pains to speak of Christianity in doctrinal ways, as the ‘teaching’, ‘the pattern of the sound words’, and the ‘tradition’, if all of this was irrelevant to building successful, vibrant churches?
Would it be wrong to think that we (post)moderns have finally decided that we know better how to build the church because Paul is irrelevant and lags catastrophically far behind our times? It would seem so.
The amazement of God
How amazed God must be by all of this, since he took such pains to give the church his inspired Word for its instruction and nurture! He has told us what its function is to be. And here we are, at the beginning of the 21st century, writing our own script for our own private spiritual journeys!
In fact, when we listen to the church today, at least in the West, we are often left with the impression that Christianity actually has very little to do with truth. Christianity is only about feeling better about ourselves, about leaping over our difficulties, about being more satisfied, about having better relationships, about getting on with our mothers-in-law, about understanding teenage rebellion, about coping with our unreasonable bosses, about finding greater sexual satisfaction, about getting rich, about receiving our own private miracles, and much else besides. It is about everything except truth. And yet this truth, personally embodied in Christ, gives us a place to stand in order to deal with the complexities of life, such as broken relations, teenage rebellion, and job insecurities.
By truth we enter
It is through Christ and by his Word that we once again begin to enter the paradise we lost and that has left us adrift in a sea of endless meaninglessness. It is by this truth, as it were, that we enter a port. To change the image, it is by this truth that we enter a realm where everything is real and nothing is fake. Should this not be the church’s message? Then why are we hearing so much mumbling on truth issues and so much chatter on so many other subjects? The church is, to put it charitably, very distracted right now. This may well explain why it is struggling for its very life in the West.
Would this not be a great time for the Western church, with its vast material and educational resources, to put itself alongside the church in other parts of the world where God is working in remarkable ways in order to learn? Could it even serve in a backup role? Is this not a time for a little humility?
This extract from The Courage to be Protestant by David Wells, published by IVP, is used with permission. (ISBN 978-1-84474-278-3, price £14.99.)
