Red Letter Revolution

I have a confession to make: I have been effected too greatly by Greek philosophical ideas. Being a Westerner and tending to think of the world and even God from within a logical philosophical framework, I have inadvertently suppressed with disgusting regularity a foundational idea of the Hebrew Bible: God is personal. By this I am not referring to God revealing to us the nature of the three persons of the Trinity, but rather the nature of how God relates to us. God relates to us personally. He is present and available to us. This idea is often squashed beneath the view of God as (with booming voice) THE UNMOVABLE MOVER, and to the detriment of us who forget that God was a living God before such notions of him were formed. This concept of the Living and Present God is demonstrated in the Pentateuch repeatedly through God’s provisions for the sins of Israel and the establishment of the Priesthood, but it is also demonstrated through the comparison of Yahweh to the false deities as is done in Isaiah. There is a rather humorous section of Isaiah where the prophet offers devastating critique of the idols: If they are greater than Yahweh, why is it you must carve your gods from wood or stone or cast them in metal? Are they not powerful enough to do this themselves? Why must you also clothe and feed these “gods”? The fact is that these idols are simply pieces of rock and wood and metal. They have no life, and certainly no breath. They are utterly unlike Yahweh, who is not only living and has breath, but is in fact the life-breather of all things in existence. In essence, Yahweh is life, is existence itself. He is both the Creator and also the Sustainer. In every infinitesimal second, Yahweh is engaging in Cosmic CPR. If Yahweh were to cease to be, so would all that he had created. He is the linchpin of the universe, and one day, having taken human flesh, he died. That is the great joy of our faith, that God loves us so much, that he took flesh and the one who breathed life into this world, bowed his head and breathed his last. This is the great σκανδαλον of our faith, that the sustainer would die so that we might live.

As I plan for my academic future, I know I must eventually choose one (*ouch*) field of study to focus on. As a sort of theological Jack of all trades, I reluctantly have been flirting with a couple of ideas for specialization, and so, I have been thinking a lot lately about the Fathers and the development of our theology through history that is Historical Theology. This has necessitated a shift in thinking from the Synchronic methodology (I mean this in the Literary Critical sense) I have adopted in my study of the Pentateuch to the kind of Diachronic thinking that I have avoided since trudging through the ideas of Wellhausen and the like. I have been very much negligent in my examinations by shunning the Diachronic approach to Scripture and Theology. And So, I have been meditating a lot on the nature of Biblical Interpretation throughout history. I very much believe that we as the Church not only have the right, but the obligations to examine and interpret scripture for ourselves. I believe we should be able to do this free of traditional restraints. As I am a Baptist, this means approaching the discussion of the Priesthood of the Believer, for example, with a clean slate, that is without bringing with me the concepts of soul competency or even the sort of snide dismissal of the priestly system that is subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) present in Baptist thought into the reading of the text. Do not mistake me, I am not saying that it is necessary to ignore all doctrine when interpreting the scriptures, but rather that it is good to simply follow where they lead without fear of crossing (in my case) Baptist lines. In addition to this I have been developing an appreciation for Canonical Criticism and the ideas of Brevard S. Childs, and in a way that is fueling this thought process. I have been feeling the need to not only evaluate how we interpret scripture today, but also how it has been interpreted Diachronically. However, rather than going century by century I think it would be more profitable to 1) examine a point or two in history where I feel interpretation has gone awry and 2) the way we interpret since the Enlightenment.

First, let me choose an example that is obvious simply for the ease of communicating my point. A nice easy example of the kind of thing I am talking about are the Crusades. Now, I fully realize that there were a great deal of political and economic motivations for the Crusades, but the fact remains that it was at the very least under the guise of Christianity and at the most genuinely sanctioned by it. Regardless, the Scriptures were interpreted in such a manner as to give sanction to such actions. For a specific example here is an account of a speech given by Pope Urban II in response to the call for help from the Byzantine Empire: When now that time was at hand which the Lord Jesus daily points out to His faithful, especially in the Gospel, saying, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me,” a mighty agitation was carried on throughout all the region of Gaul. (Its tenor was) that if anyone desired to follow the Lord zealously, with a pure heart and mind, and wished faithfully to bear the cross after Him, he would no longer hesitate to take up the way to the Holy Sepulchre. (This is from the Gesta Version of his speech) Very clearly the Christian Duty of taking up ones cross is associated with the call to join the First Crusade. I can find nothing in the passage that would lend itself to such a usage other than the idea of dying for Christ. How is it then that one can see Christ’s fervent call to obedience and interpret it as a call to answer the war charge of the Byzantine Empire and a Pope? The simple answer: By living in Medieval Times. The concept of the Papacy and the Church Universal allows the substitution of Christendom as a whole in the place of Christ in that passage, and furthermore lends itself to a sort of Christian Nationalism. The passage then becomes a call to obey the needs of Christendom, and demands we take up our cross for its sake. So what am I saying? Medieval realities often dictated medieval interpretation in a way that is not simply contextualizing but rather eisegetical.

Now I’d like us to briefly look at the development of interpretive method since the Enlightenment, but rather than blathering on about it too much I will instead post some poignant Brueggemann quotes I came across while reading his Theology of the Old Testament and save us some time. Brueggy is discussing the rise of historical criticism and talks about the transition of a scientific rationalistic approach to the historic approach of the 19th century. “When we move into the nineteenth century and especially into the influence of Hegel, we witness the rise of history, which stands in some tension with the older reigning rationalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth and in some ways appeals to a kind of Lockean empiricism. In the nineteenth century “history” became a dominant mode of knowing, so that everything was understood to have a history, a developmental career.” As the popular modes of understanding shift, so does the manner in which we study and interpret the Bible. Brueggy sums it up nicely, “It is of great importance for a student of Old Testament theology to notice that in every period of the discipline, the questions, methods, and possibilities in which study is cast arise from the sociointellectual climate in which the work must be done.” In other words, your interpretation of the Word is directly and sometimes detrimentally dependent on your world view. Brueggemann is speaking specifically about OT Theology, but I feel it certainly applies to theology and interpretation in general.

How do we as Christians fulfill our duty to interpret the scriptures without first subjugating them to our doctrines or even our logical framework? I think one way is the way I mentioned before: coming to scripture without our specific doctrinal boundaries, or, in the terminology of Brueggemann, allowing for all “possibilities.” I challenge you to study a portion of text and ask yourself “How can I interpret this text so that it fits with my worldview?” then ask “How would such an interpretation sound to a first-century Jew?” and finally ask “Is there any theological convenience I have pandered too in choosing this interpretation over another?” Feel free to share your own solution to the problem.

Recently a slew of books have popped up making the bombastic claim that Religion causes evil as opposed to good. Books like God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens for example. The argument is not exactly a complex one. It basically goes like this. 1. Some humans have religious beliefs 2. Some humans with religious beliefs do bad things 3. All religion is bad 4. Religion is false. Hocus Pocus another “argument” for atheism! The same old historical turds appear, given a polished shell of spun gold, masked by a myriad of witticisms and sarcastic humor, but even so, the fetid stink remains. Isn’t it true that the Roman Catholic church burned heretics? Isn’t it true what they say about the Spanish Inquisition? Isn’t it true that many KKK members were bona fide Baptists? All this must of course mean that so-called Christian love is fraud!!!! Frankly, this argument falls flat on its face for two reasons. 1) It is not in the nature of history to record those events that are not deemed meaningful. The wars surrounding the Reformation, the Catholic Response, even the involvement of American Christians in such unsavory events as slavery and racism, these are considered worthy of record by history, but the innumerable examples of genuine Christian behavior. History cares much for the blood and guts, but little are the jots and tittles of everyday Christian love. History cares nothing for an unknown Christian in ancient Rome who set his slaves free, or even for the women who even now labors for free on the sake of the homeless. It is easy to open a history book and think: What a blasted lot of bastards these fool Christians are! Yet, our History books are not much different from the evening news. With that same frozen grin it mercilessly details the rise and fall of nations, but the small good is simply not newsworthy. 2) Just because a person holds to a system of belief and then does something contrary, it does not invalidate that system of belief. At best, it merely invalidates the claim of the individual on that belief system, though even that may not be the case either. If this were not the case, then any practice or position could easily be called false, even atheism. In fact, a specific example comes to mind. The famous Philosopher Socrates was fond of questioning the Religion of his day. He, being a Greek, wondered at the behavior of the gods in legend. They were often guilty of doing things that would get them jailed in Athens. For example, they were fond of raping. Hellen, the woman the Trojan War was fought over, was said to be the result of Zeus, in the form of a great swan, raping her married mother. Socrates wondered, given the behavior of the gods, how any morality could exist. The Greeks would say their morals were from the gods, and Socrates would point out that the behavior of the gods in their myths and legends was often contradictory. As a result, some of the young men he taught rejected outright Greek religion and the existence of morality. Some of these students then became part of the Thirty Tyrants. A group that became the dictators of Athens, and who executed great numbers of people. Should we look at these atheistic individuals and say all atheists are great tyrants? Of course not. Furthermore, many of these atheist writes cling to science(read very slowly with awe) like a child to apron strings. Even their beloved science fails their own standard. After all, wasn’t it science that brought us the nuke? Wasn’t it science that brought us mustard gas? Wasn’t it science that brought us weaponized Anthrax? By their standards can we not lay at the feet of science the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? or the genocide of the Kurds? The argument is simply a faulty one. It relies not on reason or clear thinking, but on knee-jerk reaction. Science is not at fault for how it has been used, and neither is the Cross.