In The Originals
Posted on | April 30, 2010 | Posted by Bo Grimes | No Comments |
A lot of evangelicals–many of them very important to my faith formation–believe and assert that Scripture is “without error in the originals.” A lot of seminaries and Christian colleges and para-church ministries require one to sign a faith statement with just such language.
First, there’s nothing I can discern in Scripture that says that. I can understand the conclusion some reach from some of the verses used to justify it, but no where is it a clear, decisive statement like “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” (a command) or “Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance” (something to believe as fact).
We are no where commanded to believe that Scripture is inerrant in the originals nor is it revealed to us as fact. It requires a conclusion to be drawn using human reason and understanding. And, as far as I have read, none of the Church Fathers taught this. Protestants do not have, regrettably, I’ve come to believe, any institutional body of authority called the “Church” to demand that one must accept this as a dogmatic point because it’s what the Church teaches, or I would gladly submit my intellectual qualms about the phrasing and accept it. Instead we have individual denominations and ministries demand we accept it, while others don’t, so it becomes a source of conflict and disunity.
I believe the Bible is God-breathed (this is given as fact) and the only infallible guide (notice the adjective modifies the “guide” not the follower or his understanding of what the guide says) to faith and life, and I believe it is inerrant in all it teaches (but not all that I think I learn from it). Inerrancy isn’t a very useful word. Of course God is right, but do I understand his meaning?
Which is why, precisely, I have a problem with the phrasing. Why put the qualifier “in the originals”? God is without error. Jesus Christ, the Living Word, is without error. However, Man’s understanding will always be full of error. Even if the originals, even if the copies, even if every fragment ever produced is without error, Man is still full of error.
Besides, from the moment the words were put down, from the moment they were spoken or written, from the moment they were put into language it became bounded and limited. Though it never binds or limits God, language is bounding and limiting for Man. This is something the West doesn’t deal with nearly enough. Wittgenstein did (e.g. “That which can not be spoken about must be passed over in silence.”), but not many, except to the point that they try to invalidate language all together.
2 Timothy 3:16, says God-breathed (in the NIV), not God-transcribed. “Breathed” is like when Jesus gave the disciples the Holy Spirit on the first Easter. (“And with that he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” John 20:22) God-breathed allows for a dynamic between Spirit and word that makes it possible for God to guide those with fallible understanding. The phrase “in the originals” implies that if we could but find them there would be no need for the clarifying, prompting and illuminating work of the Spirit.
The limitation lies in us, not the words. It is impossible for God to put Himself so completely into language that we can understand Him totally and without error. Deep calls to deep, and it is the Spirit in us who calls to the Living Word in Scripture.
Another problem with the phrase is it strikes me as an attempt to put the discussion off-bounds. The only reason I can see for adding “in the originals” is because there’s no way to dispute it; we have none of the originals! How convenient. It makes it so much easier to dismiss any challenges. (“Well, you see, if we had the originals here you’d see clearly what God means.) At the same time it focuses attention away from what is truly important; that is, how, exactly, is God trying to transform me into the image of the Living Word by my reading of His spoken word?
Look at the disciples on Easter morning: “Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)” “They still did not understand from Scripture.” ! (Meaning the Tanakh, at that time.) There is plenty that we still can not understand from Scripture, even if it is “without error in the originals,” or in the copies.
Bonhoeffer and Obama
Posted on | April 13, 2010 | Posted by Bo Grimes | No Comments |
Eric Metaxas has just published the first biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in forty years: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. This review at Fox News has an illuminating quote from Metaxas that should sound alarm bells in the age of Obama:
But the legacy that Bonhoeffer leaves future generations is of the untold dangers of idolizing politicians as messianic figures. Not just in the 1930s and ’40s, but today as well.
“It’s a deep temptation within us,” says Metaxas. “We need to guard against it and we need to know that it can lead to our ruin. Germany was led over the cliff, and there were many good people who were totally deluded.”
Bonhoeffer, says Metaxas, was a prophet. He was a voice crying in the wilderness. He was God’s voice at a time when almost no one was speaking out against the evil of the Nazis.
For further reading on Bonhoeffer:
Here is the International Bonhoeffer Society’s English language page, and here is a good article by a member of that society. Here is a general biographical article from the Wikipedia. Here is a list of his books, many of which have a limited preview available. Here is a short selection from his most famous work, The Cost of Discipleship. And here is the poem, “Who Am I?”
Tags: Bonhoeffer. politics > Nazis > Obama > WWII
ELCA Fallout
Posted on | April 6, 2010 | Posted by Bo Grimes | No Comments |
In the cover story of this month’s “The Lutheran: ” “Sexuality issue causes division, sadness — and hope: Assessing the fallout from decisions made at the 2009 Churchwide Assembly, one can read the following:
Jo Hollingsworth, an admittedly left-leaning member of Hope Lutheran Church in Fostoria, Ohio, supports ELCA‘s decisions on sexuality issues. She finds her decision strengthened by her first-ever reading of the Bible from cover to cover in just more than a month’s time.
“In a book this extensive — more than 700 pages — of course the writers contradict themselves. They say gays are anathema, but they say divorce is anathema too,” said Hollingsworth, a lifelong Lutheran. She picked up on another theme as well: “You’d better be careful before you go around condemning people, saying that they are wrong.”
You can not see the full article unless you’re a subscriber, but this is all of Ms Hollingworth’s printed comments. For me they highlight several important problems with Lutherans and Scripture. First, she self-identifies as “left-leaning.” That’s fine as far as it goes–I don’t pretend to believe that there is such as thing as pure objectivity–but one has to question the purpose for reading the Bible cover-to-cover after such a vote, in the middle of a controversy, in light of a political ideology.
If someone is just now, for the first time, reading the entire Bible, and doing so with a leftist bent then of course it will “strengthen” her decision. I can’t imagine any other reason to do so in light of the ELCA controversy on gay rostering than to find what you want to find there. This sense is strengthened by her description of what she read.
“Of course the writers contradict themselves,” she says. Well of course she thinks so. She came at the book already believing the authors are merely human writers of spiritual literature. Rather than focus on the reader, herself, and what God may want her to have ears to hear, she focus on the writers. The “of course” shows how she sees Scripture as literature and found what she expected and that there is not one true author but dozens of “writers.”
It’s interesting that she says they “contradict themselves,” not “one another.” One might expect multiple writers from different cultures over thousands of years to say things that at least appear contradictory. It’s another thing to claim that John, say, asserts one truth in his first epistle and another in his second, or Matthew one thing in one chapter of his Gospel and another in a different chapter.
Nor is she willing to concede that what looks like contradiction may be a flaw with the reader, any reader, including her. One does not have to believe that Scripture was “transcribed”–God’s mouth to the writer’s hand–in the originals to believe that God is indeed the sole author of Scripture who has a consistent message full of mystery and paradox that He wants us to hunger and thirst for so deeply that we “eat this book.” It is a message that must be prayerful sought after in communion with the Holy Spirit and God’s people over decades, not a quick cover-to-cover reading in a month in order to confirm one’s political positions.
Apparently, as evidence that “the writers contradict themselves” she offers this: “They say gays are anathema, but they say divorce is anathema too.” What’s the logic here? That since many Christians shamefully no longer consider divorce to be a problem that we also should think homosexuality is fine and dandy? That somehow seeing divorce as wrong contradicts seeing homosexuality as wrong? Does she understand that a contradiction is saying one thing about some thing and then saying something contrary about the same thing?
What’s more, it sure sounds to me like she at least concedes that Scripture condemns homosexuality. Her solution, then, seems to be that we shouldn’t listen to that condemnation because the writers contradict themselves and also hate divorce. It begs the question of why should we listen to anything Scripture has to say about any moral truth claim.
(Granted this reasoning can be taken too far, as in “You don’t believe God created the world 15,000 years ago so you can’t believe in the resurrection.” This, however, is not the same thing. One thing that is clear from reading Scripture is that when it comes to sexual relations, Scripture consistently proclaims that God-pleasing sexual relationships can only be found within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman.)
N. T. Wright addressed just this kind of thinking in an interview on his views on homosexuality.
So the attempt to get around Paul’s language on homosexuality by suggesting that its cultural referent was different than ours doesn’t work?
At any point in Paul, whether it’s justification by faith or Christology or anything else, you have to say, of course this is culturally conditioned. He’s speaking first century Greek, for goodness’ sake. Of course you have to understand it in its context. But when you do that, it turns out to be a rich and many-sided thing. You cannot simply say, as some people have done, that in the first century homosexuality had to do with cult prostitution, and we’re not talking about that, therefore it’s something different. This simply won’t work. So yes, it is impossible to say, we’re reading this in context and that makes it different. What can you still say, of course, and many people do, is that, “Paul says x and I say y.” That’s an option that many in the church take on many issues. When we actually find out what Paul said, some say, “Fine, and I disagree with him.” That raises all kinds of other issues about how the authority of scripture actually works in the church, and at what point the authority structure of scripture-tradition-reason actually kicks in.
That’s really what’s at the heart of this issue, and everyone knows it, and that’s basically Ms. Hollingworth’s reasoning: Paul says x but I say y. I once had a Christian tell me “I don’t care what the Bible says about abortion.”
If it’s just a collection of sacred stories–and I used to love that word, story, and am growing it hate it because so-called “progressive Christians” are using it in a kind of 21st century demythologizing project–from which we can find our own stories validated, and from which we can pick and choose based on supposed contradictions, ignorance of Science at the time of writing and out-dated cultural notions then it’s not really Scripture at all. It’s merely an edifying good read, like Dostoevsky.
Adultery, pre-marital sex, homosexuality are all expressly forbidden in Scripture. Divorce is allowed because of the hardness of our hearts, but considered sin, and though polygamy was practiced (like divorce) it was not endorsed (like divorce was not endorsed), and may even have been implicitly condemned in such passages as Deuteronomy 17:17 where God commanded that the king “shall not acquire many wives for himself.”
Ms. Hollingworth’s reasoning, and I realize “The Lutheran” could not have done her full views justice, and neither can I, is like arguing “The writers say that stealing is anathema, but they say dishonoring the Sabbath is anathema, too.” First of all, so? Don’t do either, then. Second, just because many people do not “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy” is hardly a rationale for stealing. And finally, it is no way no how a contradiction of any sort.
Church Constituencies?
Posted on | April 1, 2010 | Posted by Bo Grimes | No Comments |
According to a recent Synod newsletter referring to the upcoming Synod Assembly: “Congregations with members who are persons of color or persons whose primary language is other than English: Send one additional lay voting member from each constituency.”
Huh? Did I miss something in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”? Or maybe I misread something in 1 Corinthians 12:13: “For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body–whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free–and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.”
We Lutherans seem bound and determined to model the world. As an issue of justice in the world at large, we should support those with less voice or no voice, those who are marginalized and maligned, but to bring the concepts of constituencies and the politics of interest groups into the church?
In keeping with the spirit of generosity, I imagine this is being done because historically Lutherans churches, in America, anyway (not Africa), are not exactly full of mixed ethnicity. It is a good thing to try to find ways to minister and welcome all.
However, this is not a vision conference. They clearly want varied representation in the voting, which seems to imply that congregations with people of color or who are not native English speakers somehow need mandated help to find a voice in their own home churches. It’s almost as if the thinking is, “We have to enable them to come or the representatives their churches do send will not represent them adequately.”
Creationless Creation
Posted on | March 24, 2010 | Posted by Bo Grimes | No Comments |
Over at Salvo, Jennifer Fulwiler has a great article, “Mad About Babies: What’s Sex Got to Do With It?”
Until a couple of years ago, I was militantly pro-choice. When I heard people make anti-abortion statements, it filled me with a white-hot anger that I could barely contain. Behind my views was a buried but unspoken sense that there was something inherently unfair about being a woman, and abortion was a key to maintaining any semblance of a level playing field in the world.
My peers and I were taught not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. We absorbed through cultural osmosis the idea that every normal person will have sex at some point in his or her life, and that the sexual act, by default, has no significance outside the relationship between the two people involved. In this worldview, when an unexpected pregnancy came up, it was seen as a sort of betrayal by the woman’s body.
Later, after her conversion, she “started to see the catastrophic mistake our society had made when we started believing that the life-giving potential of the sexual act could be safely forgotten about as long as people used contraception. It would be like saying that guns could be used as toys as long as there were blanks in the chamber. Teaching people to use something with tremendous power nonchalantly, as a casual plaything, had set women up for disaster.”
Our society, she argues, as disconnected the once shared conditions for consideration of two questions: When it it acceptable to have sex and when is it acceptable to have a baby. She makes this comparison:
Conditions under which it is acceptable to have sex:
- -If you’re in a stable relationship
- -If you feel emotionally ready
- -If you’re free of sexually transmitted diseases
- -If you have access to contraception
Conditions under which it is acceptable to have a baby:
- -If you can afford it
- -If you’ve finished your education
- -If you feel emotionally ready to parent a child
- -If your partner would make a good parent
- -If you’re ready for all the lifestyle changes that would be involved with parenthood
As long as those two lists do not match, we will live in a culture where abortion is common and where women are at war with their own bodies.
This is just another example, to me, of the Church as captive to the culture. Most American modes of Christianity no longer speaks out against socially acceptable sexual sin (like “responsible” pre-marital sex, living together) and as homosexuality becomes more and more socially acceptable, they will gradually accept that, as the ELCA has most recently. As long as it’s committed and monogamous, it will fulfill the conditions under which it is OK to have sex. And, babies have nothing to do with it.
Tags: abortion > birth control > christianity and politics > homosexuality. > sexuality
Personality Disorders
Posted on | February 28, 2010 | Posted by Bo Grimes | No Comments |
In his column today, George Will argues against the therapeutic society, suggesting that the DSM-IV, about to be revised, “may aggravate the confusion of moral categories.” For example: “Today’s DSM defines ‘oppositional defiant disorder’ as a pattern of ‘negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior toward authority figures.’ Symptoms include ‘often loses temper,’ ‘often deliberately annoys people’ or ‘is often touchy.’ DSM omits this symptom: ‘is a teenager.’”
By and large, I agree with his overall argument. However, after having adopted two older, special needs kids ten years ago, I also know that there is such as thing a personality disorders. It is an endless source of frustration to try and talk to anyone about the trials and difficulties of raising a child with attachment disorder or borderline personality disorder. The basic response one gets is “Oh, A normal teenager.”
If only. I also have three biological children, all different, all typical, all currently teens as well. There is no way to really describe the differences without disclosing private information one rarely shares. Knowing George Will has a son with Down’s Syndrome, I am surprised—though much less than I would have been years ago—that he seems so unopened to the distinctions.
I have fought for years, advocated and suffered, trying to keep the psychological profession from doping my kids up to control them. I have seen how social workers, teachers, psychologist and psychiatrist all leap to conclusions with little data, aren’t interested in the knowledge that only parents can provide, and seek to jump to the easy DSM-IV diagnosis. It makes getting insurance payments much easier, after all.
But still…well, I guess you’d have to live it. ODD is real, and it’s not teenage rebellion. It’s like calling suicidal tendencies the blues.
Capture or Kill, War or Crime
Posted on | February 14, 2010 | Posted by Bo Grimes | No Comments |
In a “Washington Post” story today it was reported that under President Obama there are more targeted killings than captures in counter-terrorism efforts. Senator Bond (R, Mo) says: “Over a year after taking office, the administration has still failed to answer the hard questions about what to do if we have the opportunity to capture and detain a terrorist overseas, which has made our terror-fighters reluctant to capture and left our allies confused.”
I’m confused too. If terrorism is going to be treated by this administration as a crime rather than an act of war, and if those captured are going to be treated as criminals rather than enemy combatants, then isn’t it a crime, the crime of murder, to just kill them without a trial? Let me get this straight. We kill them so that we don’t have to worry about Mirandizing them and finding a place to hold a trial if we capture them?
How long can we maintain this kind of cognitive dissonance? If the Left wants to try G.W. Bush for war crimes, does that mean we would try President Obama for murder?
Red Pew, Blue Pulpit
Posted on | January 7, 2010 | Posted by Bo Grimes | No Comments |
There’s an interesting article today in “The Courier-Journal” about a new survey done by the Research Services of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. “Donkeys are often preaching to elephants in Presbyterian churches, a denominational survey says. Specifically, Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 2 to 1 margin among Presbyterian pastors. In contrast, Republicans far outnumber Democrats among Presbyterian members and elders (lay leaders).”
The article goes on the say “Another survey of 10 denominations (five mainline, five evangelical) affirmed those results. Democrats in the pulpit far outnumber Republicans in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.” Big surprise. As the ELCA’s vote last summer on the rostering of gays showed at the time, the leadership is often out of step with the members, just as in politics.
The article poses an interesting follow-up: “How often do these pastors preach their politics?” Not often in my church, but Republicans have been the object of some derisive comments by my pastor in the pulpit.
Questions: Adam and Eve
Posted on | November 15, 2009 | Posted by Bo Grimes | 1 Comment |
In his song “Could it Be,” Michael Card sings: ”Could it be that questions tell us more than answers ever do?” I often think so. So I am starting a new category as a place marker for me to pose questions that I think can lead to interesting reflections.
First up: What if Adam had told Eve not to eat the fruit and she had anyway?
It might be interesting to speculate on the outcomes, but I think it’s more interesting to speculate on the possibility. I do not think this would have been possible. I think in some mystical way that was lost after the Fall Adam and Eve were truly one. It is important in today’s secular climate for Christians to remember that God instituted marriage before the Fall.
This is one reason why I believe the Catholic rational for marriage as a sacrament is not convincing. Marriage was instituted before there was a need for sacraments. All things were sacred. Though I am Protestant and accept only two sacraments, even if one accepts the other 4 sacraments that Catholics have (not including marriage), I could not see the rational for including marriage.
One could argue that the other six–Baptism, Eucharist, Confirmation, Penance, Anointing the Sick and Holy Orders–were instituted ”by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us.” I don’t believe but two of them were, but God instituted marriage before there was any need for any “means of grace.” God designed us for marriage and for families.
Before there was the need for a Savior, before there was a need for the Church, before there was a purpose for sacraments, when God and mankind dwelt in harmony and all things were sacred, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Marriage between a man and a woman was part of God’s original design for creation. Had there never been a Fall, there would be no Baptism, but marriage would remain. The most would could argue is that it is an attempted recovery of God’s original plan, but I’m not sure I would find that convincing.
Tags: adam and eve > creation > marriage > Questions > sacraments
Defending Polanski Badly
Posted on | September 28, 2009 | Posted by Bo Grimes | No Comments |
In a story this morning in “The Los Angeles Times,” Patrick Goldstein defends Roman Polanski on some empty specious grounds. Basically he thinks that since it’s been so long, the victim has forgiven him, prisons are over-crowded, CA is having financial trouble, and Mr. Polanski has experienced tragedy in his life that he should be released. He seeks to deflect anticipated criticism by saying ” In the coming weeks, the Polanski affair will no doubt become a tabloid sensation, with op-ed moralists, excitable bloggers and the Glenn Becks of the world noisily weighing in on the propriety of his possible prosecution.”
His own piece is exactly that, an excitable, noisy instance of op-ed moralism. Comparing Polanski to Jean Valjean, Mr. Goldstein seeks to make a moral equivalence between stealing bread to feed one’s family and drugging a 13 year old with Champagne and Quaaludes before raping her. He offers only non sequiturs in Mr. Polanski’s defense. To take each in turn:
The tragic events that befall a person have no bearing on the disposition of the unrelated crimes he commits (e.g. his childhood and the murder of his wife). A victim’s forgiveness is a pure and wondrous thing, but for the public interest the state has an obligation to ensure that certain laws are enforced. Image a mother shot by her son. Her last words, said to a police office who arrives at the scene and said in the presence of multiple witnesses, are: “Please do not put my son in jail. I forgive him.” The state must still prosecute. Prison overcrowding is a real public policy and societal problem in need of a solution, but that solution must come primarily from legislation and it must be broad in scope as it addresses classes of crimes. One can not use it to argue for the non-prosecution of one specific case.
He considers the “real tragedy” in all of this to be that Polanski “will always, till his death, be snubbed and stalked and confronted by people who think the price he has already paid isn’t enough.” I do not think one can consider the consequences of fleeing from justice a “price” at all. Being snubbed and confronted isn’t even close to being a “real tragedy,” and I find it reprehensible that anyone can consider that not only comparable but somehow more substantial than the tragedy of being drugged and raped, even if the “real” victim is fortunate enough to be able to forgive and move on. But can we really expect more from someone who makes a moral comparison between a fictional petty thief and a real pederast and rapist?
If there is another tragedy involved in this at all, it is that a celebrity who drugs and rapes a minor can flee justice and have the media argue that this is not, now, worthy of prosecution when one of those poor people the media treats as rhetorical arguments rather than persons would have long, long ago been justly consigned to one of those over-crowded prisons, and not an inch of newsprint would have been wasted defending him. Is this what being a “watchdog” has come down to? Breathlessly lashing out at a DA in righteous indignation for prosecuting a rapist? Arguing that fleeing prosecution and staying free for years is payment enough because of snubbing?
Mr. Goldstein laments the fact that the DA doesn’t seem to have better things to do with his time. One might wish that reporters had better things to do with theirs.
Related Stories: Dodgy Old Men, Amy Davidson, “The New Yorker”