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Our Moral Compass: You Are What You Believe

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When Emma and I were returning from Jacksonville on Monday after Christmas, we made a wrong turn. The GPS on my phone instructed us to stay to the left on I-95, but we couldn’t get to the left because there was a barrier preventing us from merging. This forced us to take a wrong turn as the GPS rerouted. The new route instructed us to take the next exit and travel down a back street for a couple of miles. Emma looked at me and said with confidence, “I don’t believe this GPS, we should’ve just gone straight.” This was really funny because neither Emma nor I had any idea where we were, and her suspicion was completely irrational because the GSP always get us to where we need to go, even when we misread the map and make a wrong turn. Sure enough, we made it back to I-95 and safely home to Cocoa Beach.

I sometimes think, “I don’t know how I ever traveled without GPS on my phone.” Back in the day, I would print maps from MapQuest, and then later I had a Garmin GPS that hung from my windshield. Do you remember those? You could change the voice giving directions to Austin Powers or Snoop Dogg. Now this technology is on our phones and will even warn us of road hazards up ahead. GPS has become so integrated into our lives and the apps on our phones that we don’t realize how much we rely on it.

Pilots, archaeologists, moving companies, farmers, loggers, civil engineers, surveyors, geologists, mining companies, and even Navy SEALs all use sophisticated navigation equipment, and all this advanced technology is grounded in a simple device called the compass. Do you remember the hand-held compass? There was one in the Red Ryder BB gun I got for Christmas as a kid. They were typically round and had a little needle under a glass cover bouncing around on a pin that could point you north. This is a magnetic compass, which you can build with a needle and a cork in a bowl of water.

Another type is a gyrocompass. This compass does not use the Earth’s magnetism to show direction. Instead, a spinning gyroscope works in conjunction with the Earth’s axis of rotation to point to true north. This type of compass is often used on ships and aircraft. We also have the solar compass that uses the sun as a navigational tool.

And then there is perhaps the  most important compass of all when we are trying to navigate life, the moral compass. It’s a compass that points to our True North and keeps our steps on a good and trustworthy path. As we know, a good compass helps us travel with confidence in the right direction, and if it doesn’t, we need to throw it out and get a new one.

Today we start a new year. Many of us are hopeful, maybe even optimistic, about getting a fresh start, about recalibrating our habits and routines to become better people and experience more joy in life. But if this going to happen, we need a reliable moral compass, and there is no better time to check our navigational tools than at the beginning of a new journey.

As we know, there are four cardinal principal points on a compass (north, east, south, and west), and I think it will be helpful to return to our scripture reading this morning, taken from Ephesians, chapter 1, to see how it can help us understand the four cardinal points of a good moral compass.

Although there are many points on the Ephesian compass, the cardinal points help us understand our place in the world and our relationship with God. More precisely, they help us know who we are and who is directing our steps. The apostle Paul starts by providing the north and south points on our compass by saying that we are (1) chosen by God, and (2) we are children of God. Remember that the Earth’s axis is formed by the north and south poles. The planet rotates on this axis. So, metaphorically speaking, being chosen by God and being a child of God are pivotal points on our moral compass. If we get this wrong, the compass will not faithfully guide us.

First, we are chosen, and not just chosen but chosen “in Christ before the foundation of the world” (v. 4). This means that before you were ever born, God destined you for good things like love, peace, and joy. God also destine you to be part of His great rescue plan for the world. This is part of your God-given purpose and identity, and if you don’t understand and claim this truth, then you will not be able to make good decisions that help you live into this destiny.

You have heard me say that the biggest problem with human beings these days is not that they think to highly of themselves but that they think too lowly of themselves. Indeed, modern psychology has taught us that most people who are full of pride are really overcompensating for insecurity. They worry that they are not good enough or smart enough, and that if people see this they will devalue, abandon, or reject them. So, they pretend that they are better than everyone else or smarter than everyone else to hide the fact that deep down inside they feel inferior. This deep-seated fear masked by projection has a way of breaking a person’s moral compass, and when they unwittingly follow this broken compass is leads them astray into thoughts and behaviors that hurt other people and keep them from experiencing true happiness. So, it is crucial that we get the north cardinal point right from the very beginning, that we know who we are and what destiny God has prepared for us.

As we start a new year and face an unknown future, we must remember that from the foundations of the world we were chosen by God, that it is God’s will that we live a good life and experience good things as we are trying to make the world a better place. And when we doubt our value or place in the world and start getting down on ourselves, we need to return to this constant north point—God has chosen me for good things.

More specially, God has chosen you “to be holy and blameless before him in love” (v. 4). Now don’t freak out at the sound of these words because they don’t mean what we often think they mean. Holy does not mean better than everyone else and blameless do not mean morally perfect. Holy means to be set apart to serve God’s purposes in the world. Before the planets were formed, God chose you to do your part in making the world more like He intends it to be, and to be holy means to accept this call, to allow God to set you apart for your specific role, and to serve this role as faithfully as you can. The role might be as simple as sharing the loving presence of God with your family or sharing the story of what God has done for you with a friend in crisis. Or it might be as challenging as becoming a foreign missionary or accepting a call to run for public office. But the important point here is that God has destined you to be part of his great rescue plan for this world, and to be holy means to be set apart in ways that will empower you to serve your unique role.

The word blameless points to the importance of leading a moral life. More specially, it’s a judicial term that stresses the importance of living a life committed to justice and fairness for all people. So being blameless means acting in ways that make the world more just and fair. But even followers of Jesus sometimes fall short, and the only way we can be restored to blamelessness is by asking God for forgiveness. So, we are blameless not in every action but insofar as we live under the cover of God’s grace in Jesus and seek forgiveness.

When we put all of this together regarding the north cardinal point, we start to get a clear idea of our identity in Christ: we are destined by God to be set apart so we can live moral lives that make the world more loving and justice, and when we mess-up, we are the kind of people that own our mistakes, ask for forgiveness and, with God’s help, get back on track. This identity is our true north as Christians.        

Second, we are not only chosen by God, but we are also children of God, which is a little more personal. As it says in scripture, we are not children by nature, but by adoption, which dovetails nicely with the concept of being chosen. All children are special, but an adopted child is even more special because they are freely chosen. Knowing that we are a child of God is the south point of our moral compass, an axiomatic belief that is require for our compass to work.

Now think about what this means. Do children with loving parents worry about their future? Do they wonder how they will survive? Do they even bother themselves with these types of adult concerns? No! Unless they have been seriously abused, they have confidence that their parents will provide for their needs. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount: “ . . . do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ … indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things” (Matthew 6:31-32). Our faith that God is real, that he is closer to us than our own breathing, that he is for us and not against us, that he is working in and through all things to accomplish our good, and that we can trust his protection and provision, all of this is crucial as we seek direction in life. Together, these faith claims, claims that we must come back to over and over again, are the south point of our compass and together with our north point form the moral axis on which everything turns.

The east point on our moral compass is the rock-solid conviction that we are redeemed. Although we sell ourselves into various kinds of slavery that rob us of our God-given destiny and put us on the path to destruction, God does not abandon us. Rather, God find us on the auctioning block and buys back our freedom. In Jesus, God pays our debt, sets us free, and brings us home so we can reclaim our destiny and get back to a joyful existence in which we are serving God’s loving purposes in the world. Knowing and believing that we have been redeemed and that God can make us useful again is an essential element in our identity and the east point on our moral compass.

Finally, the west point of our compass is the certainty that in Jesus we are forgiven. Everything ugly, shameful, dark, and destructive has been blotted out. We don’t need to carry it around anymore like a noose around our neck. We can let it go, give it God, and walk in newness of life. Many people are suspicious Sigmund Freud, but he got at least one thing right, that most of our bad behavior is driven by guilt and shame. So, if you do not truly believe that you have been forgiven then your moral compass will be broken, and all that guilt will destroy you behind your back. You’ve got to let it go and claim your identity as someone who has been forgiven.

When we put the east and west cardinal points together, that we are redeemed and forgiven, it helps us to understand the famous verse of scripture in Psalm 103:12: “ . . . as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”   

To review, the four cardinal points of the Ephesian compass are the north-south vectors of being chosen by God and claimed as children of God, and the east-west vectors that we are redeemed by God and forgiven by God. Taken together, all four establish our identity in Christ; all four guide our steps so we can be joyful and useful; all four are axiomatic faith claims from which everything good proceeds.

I want to end this morning by posing a couple of questions.

First, do you have a good compass? Do you possess the rock-solid belief that you have been chosen by God for good things? That you are a child of God and therefore a person of worth? That you don’t have to be or do anything different for God to love you, because God’s love is unconditional and nothing you could ever do would make God stop loving you or stop pursing you? Do you know in your heart of hearts that you are redeemed and forgiven? Do these convictions shape how you think about yourself and make decisions in your everyday life? If all four of these things are not in place, you don’t have a good compass. But the good news is that God can give you one that works great, and the only thing you have to do to receive this gift is to sincerely confession your sins and ask God to give you a fresh start. Before we move on, I want to give everyone here a chance to do that by offering a prayer . . . . .

______________________________

If you prayed this prayer with me and meant it in your heart, then you can claim a new identity in Christ: that you are a chosen child of God that has been forgiven and redeemed.

Now that you have this new compass, the second question is, will you trust it? Will you trust this moral compass. Trusting the compass means coming back to the four axiomatic faith claims over and over again so you can remember who you are and who directs your steps. This is especially important when the world tells you different, when the world says that your life is meaningless and without purpose, that you can’t trust anyone, that you are irredeemable and unforgiven, that you are beyond repair and will never be free from your guilt. When these things are spoken over you or crop-up in your thinking, trusting you compass means counteracting these lies with the truth of the four cardinal points. Trusting your compass also means that when you are making decisions you ask yourself what would a person do who truly believes that he is chosen, redeemed, and forgiven by God, a person who is destined for good things and has the protection and provision of God? And then letting your faith guide your steps. If God has given you a good compass, then you can always trust it, even when your instincts, fears, or preferences tempt you to another path. So, trust your compass and consult it frequently.

The Land Between: Navigating Transitions

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The “land between” is the place of change and transition. It is where life is not as it once was and there is uncertainty about the future. Some people are suddenly thrown into the land between without any warning.

  • Your boss says, “You are being transferred” (or worse, “Your position has been eliminated”).   
  • Your partner says, “I don’t love you anymore.”
  • Your daughter says, “I’m pregnant.”
  • Your son calls and says, “I’m at the police station.”
  • The doctor says, “The tumor is malignant.”

In a matter of seconds, you are ripped out of your normal life and find yourself in a new and uncertain world.

Others gradually slip into the land between.

  • A marriage slowly erodes until both feel like roommates.
  • The business slowly bleeds out until there is no more money and you have to close. 
  • A parent’s memory slowly fades after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
  • Your health deteriorates after a cancer diagnosis.

This message series (see below) is designed to give you tools to navigate this kind of transitional space in healthy and faithful ways. The land between is a challenging place, and if we are not careful we can slip into self-destructive behaviors that undermine our faith and cause us to lose our way. However, if we stay close to God we can navigate transitions in ways that strengthen our faith and lead to a brighter tomorrow.

Video Links:

Message 1: “I’m Sick of This! Complaining in Times of Transition.”

Message 2: “Bring Your Pain to God: Dealing with Discouragement.”

Message 3: “Divine Provision: How God Works Through Others.”

Message 4: “From Tribulation to Transformation: Finding Purpose in Your Pain.”

God Is Love: Understanding the Doctrine of the Trinity

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The doctrine of the Trinity is the primary conception of God in Christianity, distinguishing it from other world religions, especially the strict monotheism of Judaism and Islam. While pointing to the deepest truth of Christian faith, it is also a divine mystery that is difficult to state adequately.

The purpose of this article is to present a helpful way of understanding the Trinity. As we contemplate the nature of God for the purpose of conceptual clarity, the mystery of the Trinity will not be resolved but deepened. If you finish reading this article and think to yourself, “Now I have it all figured out!” then I have failed you. While I intend to clarify the purpose and meaning of this central doctrine, I don’t want to mislead the reader into thinking that we can exhaustively grasp the being of God in human thought. God does reveal Godself in history, and we can trust that revelation, but we must also maintain intellectual humility in light of the qualitative distinction between God and human beings (i.e., God is the creator and we are the created).

Even though the Trinity is an essential teaching of the Christian faith, it is nowhere explicitly stated in the Bible, though some passages are suggestive (Matthew 3:16-17, 28:19; II Corinthians 13:14). Rather, the doctrine was officially formulated by leaders in the early church, especially at the first two general councils in Nicea (325) and Constantinople (381). Although the church drew some of its technical language from Greek philosophy, the doctrine was not developed to satisfy a penchant for esoteric philosophical reflection. It was carefully formulated in an effort to explicate the meaning of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Christians have always made three essential claims:

  • God is the transcendent creator.
  • God saves us in Jesus.
  • God sustains all of creation and leads it to ultimate fulfillment. 

Understanding the meaning of these three fundamental claims and how they hang together in a coherent way without lapsing into absurdity is what the Trinity is all about.

GOD IS THE TRANSCENDENT CREATOR

God is the creator of all that exists. There was a time when creation was not and there was only God. But God made a decision in eternity to create the world in love and freedom. Thus, God creates space for a genuine other to exist as a creature distinct from God. Then God releases the creative power of being into that space so that the world as we know it can emerge. In simplest terms, God creates the world and sets it free.

We find poetic accounts of creation in the Bible. Genesis 1:1-3 states:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless  and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.”

When Christians read this passage, they tend to associate the term “God” with God the Father, but the attentive reader will also notice the presence of two other characters. First, we see the presence of God’s Spirit: “ . . . the Spirit (ruach) of God was hovering over the waters.” Second, we see the presence of God’s eternal Word: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” Anyone familiar with the prologue of the Gospel of John will notice a connection with this verse. Just as the first words of Genesis 1:1 are, “In the beginning . . .,” so it is with the first verse of John’s gospel:

“In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” (John 1:1-3)

The gospel continues, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Clearly, the author of John is drawing an explicit connection between God’s eternal Word and Jesus Christ. Thus, Christians find it fitting to claim that the Father creates the world through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit, and does so as the one transcendent source of life. In the poetic language of scripture, God creates the world and reigns over it from heaven above. God transcends the world as its creator.

GOD SAVES US IN JESUS

At the same time we say that God is Creator, we also say that God is Redeemer. God creates the world and sets it free in love, but God also enters that world to personally encounter us in Jesus Christ. When Christians talk about God sending Jesus, they are not saying that Jesus is merely a wise prophet or heavenly messenger. Rather, they are saying that God looked down upon the suffering of creation, had compassion, and resolved to become a human being to save the world from sin, evil, and death.

Christians believe that only God can save, but they also claim to experience salvation in Jesus. Therefore, God must in some sense be fully present to humanity in Jesus. Returning to the Gospel of John, we read: “In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1). The Greek term translated “Word” is logos, which connotes knowledge, wisdom, reason, and revelation. The author of John uses this term to refer to God’s mind, heart, character, will, and creative power. When he goes on to say in verse 14, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us . . .” he is making the outlandish claim that God’s heart, mind, reason, logic, and will was incarnate (literally, “enfleshed”) in the man Jesus of Nazareth. This is why he can go on to say, “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God . . .” (1:18). Jesus is recorded as saying in John 14:9, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9). In light of such passages, Christians believe that Jesus embodies the eternal Word of God. God reveals Godself to humanity in Jesus. The invisible God become visible in Christ.

Since Jesus is the incarnation of God’s eternal Word, whose glory we have seen as “the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father,” we can say that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). Since God is fully present to us in Christ, Jesus has the power to save. A messenger can tell us about salvation and even inspire hope for salvation, but only God can accomplish our salvation. And this is what Christians claim about Jesus, that God acts decisively in his life, death, and resurrection to save the world.

When contemplating God’s saving work in Jesus, it seems fitting to focus on the work of God the Son. But in a way similar to the creation accounts in Genesis, the New Testament stories of Jesus include the presence of three divine characters: The Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Consider, for example, the baptism of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew:

“As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’” (3:16-17)

Indeed, throughout the gospel accounts Jesus is always accompanied by the Father and the Spirit, and this leads to another threefold claim: The Father saves us through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. All three work together as one God in perfect love and unity to accomplish the salvation of the world.

In summary, Christians not only claim that God reigns over the world as its transcendent creator, but also that God encounters humanity in Jesus Christ and works decisively through him to save the world from sin, evil, and death.

GOD SUSTAINS CREATION AND LEADS THE WORLD TO ITS ULTIMATE FULFILLMENT

In addition to creating and redeeming the world, God also sustains the world by his Spirit. God creates the world and sets it free, but then floods the world with his life-giving presence. The Spirit of God is the energy by which all things exist, and if God were to withdrawal his presence (even for an instant) then it would vanish into thin air. As we read in Acts 17:28: “For in him we live and move and have our being.” This is what Christians mean when they say that God is omnipresent—God’s powerful presence saturates the entire created order. There is literally no place where the Spirit of God is not. In addition, we claim that God is constantly working through the Holy Spirit to open the hearts and minds of human beings to faith and love, and to bring the entire creation to its full completion. The Holy Spirit woos us in love toward reconciliation with God and lures all of creation toward its ultimate fulfillment.

Importantly, the Holy Spirit is not some kind of impersonal or unconscious energy that we might find in some New Age circles. Nor is the Spirit an independent, quasi-divine power. According to scripture, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus sent by the Father and the Son to continue and complete the work of Christ as we await the new creation. Thus, Christians find it difficult to talk about the Spirit without also talking about the Father and the Son.

THE CENTRAL QUESTION

Now we arrive at the heart of the matter: How do all three of these claims hang together in a coherent way without lapsing into absurdity? Christians experience the presence of God as the one who creates, redeems, and sustains, and we experience God in these ways all at the same time. It’s not as if God ceases to reign over creation when God acts decisively to save the world in Jesus. It’s not as if God stops saving us in Jesus in order to fill all creation with his sustaining presence. Rather, we say that God reigns from heaven as Creator, and at the very same time acts decisively in Jesus to save us, and at the very same time fills the entire creation with his sustaining presence. This is how we experience the fullness of God’s revelation in Jesus, and the only meaningful way to talk about this is to talk about the Trinity.

According to the doctrine of the Trinity, there is only one God, but this one God is revealed to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God confronts us in Jesus Christ as the eternal Son. But God is also apprehended as the Father who sends the Son and to whom the Son points. And God is also known as the Holy Spirit who sustains the world, opens the hearts and minds of human beings in faith, and leads the world to its ultimate completion. The words “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit,” point to one God, but we cannot properly think or speak about this one God except by thinking and speaking about all three at the same time.

FROM ECONOMIC TO IMMANENT TRINITY

An important final point is that God does not lie or deceive. If God reveals Godself as triune, then God is triune. We don’t say, “Well this is how we, from a human perspective, see and experience God, which requires us to think and speak about God as Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. But God could be different in and of Godself.” While Christians are careful to acknowledge the limitations of their theological language, they absolutely refuse to accept that there could be a different God behind the God we see in Jesus. To use the language of scripture, the God we worship in heaven is the same God we encounter in Christ and the activity of the Holy Spirit.

This means that there is relationality in God! As the Cappadocian Fathers recognized, there is a sense in which the one God we worship is constituted by a community of self-giving love. God (in-and-of-Godself) is the eternal self-giving love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What makes the Father the Father is his eternal self-giving love to the Son and the Spirit. What makes the Son the Son is his eternal self-giving love to the Father and the Spirit. What makes the Holy Spirit the Holy Spirit is his eternal self-giving love to the Father and the Son. What makes God one is the eternal, self-giving love that continuously flows and unifies the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. This is the deep meaning of the claim, God is love (1 John 4:8)

CONCLUSION

For Christians, to say that God is love is to say that God is triune. To say that God creates is to say that God is triune. To say that God saves is to say that God is triune. To say that God sustains creation is to say that God is triune. To say that God is one is to say that God is triune. One reason that the doctrine of the Trinity is so important to Christians is because it contains in itself the entire story of God’s activity in the world and reveals what kind of God we serve—a God that is love.

 

To watch the sermon on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2QK_LdXbls  

If you liked this post, then you might also like “Salvation in the Wesleyan Tradition: Grace Upon Grace.”

Why the Bible Is Important to Christians: Rethinking Scripture and Inspiration (Course in Understanding the Bible)

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This is the fourth essay in a collection entitled, A Course in Understanding the Bible. The full collection is organized as follows:

  1. The Bible is Not Infallible: Destabilizing Plenary Inspiration
  2. Going Fishing with Grandpa and Learning to Tell the Truth
  3. God Did Not Write the Bible: The Formation of Scripture
  4. Why the Bible is Important to Christians: Rethinking Scripture and Inspiration
  5. All Reading Is Interpretation: The Application of Perspective in Biblical Meaning

_________________________________________

Once we relinquish the illusion of biblical infallibility and study the process of traditioning that led to the development of the Christian canon (see “The Bible is Not Infallible” and “God Did Not Write the Bible“), we are faced with an important question: Is there a meaningful way to continue talking about the inspiration of scripture? I believe that the answer to this question is yes, and in what follows I offer a brief sketch of what this might look like.

What It Means to Call The Bible Scripture.  In the most basic sense of the term, scripture refers to a collection of writings that are normative for the church because they bear witness to the founding revelatory events on which the Christian tradition is based and to which it refers. While Christians trace their history through ancient Israel, they proclaim that the paradigmatic revelation of God happened in Jesus of Nazareth. So while the Old Testament is an indispensable part of the Christian Bible, the New Testament is given priority in Christian faith and practice because it focuses on this paradigmatic event. Furthermore, these normative texts function to perpetuate Christian faith and discipleship from one generation to another by preserving the memory of these originative events.

What It Means to Say That the Bible Is Inspired.  When we say that the Bible is inspired, we mean at least two things. First, we mean that the Spirit of God inspired people in ancient Israel and the early church to deeply reflect on personal and communal experiences of redemptive transformation and to preserve and communicate these reflections through oral and written traditions. Furthermore, we proclaim that the Spirit of God was at work in the traditioning process by which the Bible came to be to give future generations trustworthy testimony about God’s saving power in the world. Such a claim does not require one to believe that God bypassed or destroyed the humanity of the authors in miraculous interventions during composition. Rather, we might think of God’s activity as a creative, inspiring, guiding, and directing power that lured the authors toward certain insights and expressive ideals. While the documents that constitute the Bible were clearly written by human beings and share in the limitations of the cultures in which they were produced, we believe that they tell the truth about the human condition and God’s redemptive power in this world. Just as God did not have to dispense with the humanity of Jesus to bring us salvation, but worked in, with, and through his humanity to accomplish this purpose, so God does not have to dispense with the humanity of the biblical authors to ensure trustworthy testimony. This is at least part of what Christians mean when they say that the Bible is inspired. (For more on this subject, see the third essay in this collection, “God Did Not Write the Bible: The Formation of Scripture.”)

The second reason Christians say that the Bible is inspired is because we believe that God continues to use this collection of writings to evoke fresh disclosures of God and to mediate new experiences of redemptive transformation. In the power of the Holy Spirit, these texts not only tell stories of redemption in the past, but mediate redemption in the present. They become transparent to the presence and power they describe. As we read these stories of redemption and experience it for ourselves in the process, the trustworthiness of these texts is confirmed. We don’t trust the Bible because it is dictated by God to passive secretaries that are given the miraculous gift of infallible communication (see “The Bible is Not Infallible”). Nor do we claim that these texts are truthful because they constitute a compendium of inerrant scientific, historical, and moral facts (See “Going Fishing with Grandpa and Learning to Tell the Truth”). No, we trust these texts and the God revealed in and through them because they mediate the same kind of redemptive transformation that they describe.

So what do we mean when we say that the Bible is inspired? We mean that God worked in and through the telling and retelling, writing and rewriting, interpretation and reinterpretation of this collection of writings so that future generations would have faithful testimony of God’s saving power in Israel and the early church, testimony that the Spirit of God continues to use to mediate new experiences of redemption for the ongoing transformation of human life and community toward the ideals of the Kingdom of God.

God Did Not Write the Bible: The Formation of Scripture (Course in Understanding the Bible)

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This is the third essay in a collection entitled, A Course in Understanding the Bible. The full collection is organized as follows:

  1. The Bible is Not Infallible: Destabilizing Plenary Inspiration
  2. Going Fishing with Grandpa and Learning to Tell the Truth
  3. God Did Not Write the Bible: The Formation of Scripture
  4. Why the Bible is Important to Christians: Rethinking Scripture and Inspiration
  5. All Reading Is Interpretation: The Application of Perspective in Biblical Meaning

____________________________________

There are many different theories that attempt to explain how the Bible came to be. What follows are some informal reflections on the origins of scripture that are consistent with my experience and studies in theology.

In his book, Good and Evil, Edward Farley explains that human beings experience redemption in three spheres of existence: the personal, interpersonal, and social. In the personal sphere, we experience redemption as freedom from the dynamics of idolatry and the courage to live by faith. In our relationships with others, we experience redemption as forgiveness, reconciliation, and the freedom to love unconditionally (agape).  In the social sphere, we experience redemption as social justice and emancipation from oppressive systems. In these ways, divine redemption breaks into our lives in very concrete and specific ways.

As people in the ancient world experienced the freedoms of redemption, some felt inspired by God to theologically reflect on what had happened and to communicate these reflections with others, first through oral tradition then through writing. The people who were obedient to this divine calling spoke and wrote as human beings. This means that they drew on whatever was available to them in their specific cultural-historical context to describe their experiences of the divine. This included their given language, symbol systems, traditions, religious ideas, and communal stories.

It is important to note that all of these expressions of divine redemption were limited by at least two things. First, divine transcendence. There is always mystery in God’s activity. As theologians have argued extensively, God does not act in the same way that human beings act. Peter Hodgson explains:

“The causality exercised by God is not that of a first cause or material cause, which bring about specific, predetermined effects, but that of a final cause, which offers a possibility, an invitation, a goal. God’s creative power also works as a formal cause, providing patterns or ideals for the shaping of events, but not controlling outcomes. Final and formal causes exercise real influence within a framework of contingency, freedom, and indeterminacy. God orders the world, orients it to the attainment of value, but God does not mechanically control the dynamics of the creative process.” (Christian Faith: A Brief Introduction 56).

Since there is an ontological distinction between God and the world, and since God does not act with the same kind of agency exercised by human beings, theologians like Martin Luther, Karl Barth, and Paul Tillich emphasize that divine revelation has a paradoxical character. It is not only an unveiling but also a veiling. There is a sense in which God remains hidden even as God is revealed. Taken together, all of this points to the fact that God is a (rational) mystery. To speak of God is to point to a higher rationality, a higher truth, which cannot be exhaustively known by means of human language. As those in the mystical tradition remind us, when we say that God acts, there is a sense in which we don’t know exactly what we mean because there’s not a one-to-one correspondence between the words we use and the events they seek to describe. All theological language is analogy or metaphor. This is the first limitation of our attempts to expression divine redemption.

The second limitation has to do with the perspectival nature of human thinking and language.  The way that we experience, interpret, understand, and express the “coming forth” of redemption into our lived existence is always already shaped by a particular symbolic-linguistic worldview, which is limited by all of the blind spots and knowledge gaps associated with finite, located, human beings. There is no unmediated or uninterpreted encounter with God.

Going back to those in the ancient world who played a role in the shaping of biblical content, it is important to remember that most of the stories of redemption started as oral traditions that were passed down for many years before they were recorded by scribes. As these stories were passed-down from generation to generation they were told and retold, interpreted and reinterpreted, adapted and readapted in ways that met the evolving needs of the worshiping community in an ever changing context. The goal was not to construct a modern historiography, but to engage in ongoing theological interpretation that could help a religious community make sense of God, the world, and the relationship between the two in changing and challenging circumstances.

Over time, these oral traditions generated more conceptual thinking about the character of God and God’s relationship to the world. More sustained reflection on the fluid, pliable, theologically interpreted memory of the community functioned to generate theological norms that served in the ongoing adaptation and reinterpretation of the stories (as well as stories and ideas received from other religions). As Walter Brueggemann argues in his book, Theology of the Old Testament, Israel started by attributing verbs to YHWH, then adjectives, and eventually nouns. As the community experienced the redemptive power of God over significant periods of time, they began to see patterns that allowed them to make more general claims about God’s character. All of this gave the community tools for theologically interpreting every aspect of life, which helps us to understand why there are so many different genres in the Bible. As the oral traditions were written and used by the community for various purposes, some of them proved to have enduring value and were collected together as sacred scripture. So the content of the Bible is the community’s theologically interpreted memory of how God acted to save them through a covenant relationship in various ways and in various times and places.

While I reflect on biblical authority and inspiration in another article (see “Why the Bible is Important to Christians“), it is appropriate to mention that part of what we mean by “divine inspiration” is that the Holy Spirit was somehow at work in the traditioning process described above.

All of this helps us to understand that the Bible is not a book but a library of books. The content constitutive of the Bible was shaped by many different people, who lived in different periods of history, spoke different languages, endorsed different worldviews, wrote in different genres, and addressed different problems and needs in the worshiping community.  If you doubt this, simply compare the life and times of Abraham and the Apostle Paul. Some of the books of the Bible have multiple authors and all of them were copied, edited, redacted, and reinterpreted as they circulated among various communities across generations. So the finished product is not a single author book, but a library of books that span the course of centuries.

All of this helps us to see that while God is active in the development of the Bible, it is also a very human text. God acts in redemptive ways and inspires people to think and write theologically about these experiences.  But God did not write the Bible as John Grisham wrote A Time to Kill. Neither did God negate the humanity of the authors by making them passive secretaries or giving them miraculous knowledge of modern science or historiography. The good news is that God does not need to author a perfect book to accomplish God’s purposes in the world and bring us salvation. Just as God did in Jesus of Nazareth two-thousand years ago, God works in and through the humanity of the biblical authors, with all of their limitations, failures, and blind spots, to ensure that they tell the truth in ways that can lead (in the power of the Holy Spirit) to knowledge of salvation.

It’s Dangerous to Read the Bible Too Literally: The Seeds of Religious Extremism

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Civilization is being challenged by religious extremists around the world by groups like ISIS: violent invasions, the seizing of land and property, public executions, taking women captive as slaves, tearing down sacred places of worship, and destroying irreplaceable cultural artifacts. We read reports of public floggings, the imprisonment of women who are the victims of rape, the abuse of the heterodox, and the cutting off of people’s hands for petty crimes like stealing.

Most of us in the West become indignant, protest the uncivilized nature of these practices, and even sign online petitions to make our voice heard. As Christian communities in the West get news about other Christians being intentionally targeted and slaughtered in the most barbaric ways, we feel a special connection that generates empathy for the victims and rage against the perpetrators. We are tempted to think that Christianity is a religion of love and peace that serves as a civilizing force in society, while Islam is a religion of terrorism, hatred, and violence. Armed with the conviction that we are good and they are bad, our hatred is emboldened and we become blind to the seeds of the same kind of extremism and violence in our own sacred texts.

However, almost all the abhorrent practices that we condemn in Islamic extremism can be found in the Old Testament. There are too many examples to cite in a short blog post, but I implore you to read your Bible. As one example, I would invite you to read Deuteronomy 20-21 (and if you have time, go ahead and read through chapter 26). Here we read about brutal behavior that is not only considered permissible but commanded by God. By combining (1) a sense of manifest destiny as God’s chosen people with (2) a strict application of lex talionis and (3) a worldview shaped by a system of purity that requires the purging of all that is “unclean,” the author paints a picture of merciless conquest. We see the total annihilation of holy war: “[regarding the people in the land] that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them . . .” (Deut. 20:16-17). This supposed divine command includes the murder of women and children! As we read these chapters, we see violent invasion and conquest, along with practices such as seizing property, forced slave labor, taking women as captives and raping them to make them unwilling wives, tearing down places of worship, and destroying religious artifacts. As we continue reading in Deuteronomy we find other barbaric practices commanded by God such as the public execution of rebellious children (21:18-21), women who have sex before marriage (22:20-21), and anyone caught in adultery (22:22). We see racism in the exclusion of some people from worship (23:1ff), divine sanction for public floggings, and dismemberment as a punishment for petty crimes. Again, almost everything that we condemn as barbaric and hateful in our protests against Islamic extremism is found in our own sacred texts if we read them too literally.

In fact, one of the primary justifications of religious extremism is the literal reading of sacred texts. This has been pointed-out repeatedly by scholarly assessments of ISIS. For example, in the article written by Bernard Haykel in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (see link below) we are reminded that “The Islamic State is a Jihadi-Salafi movement, which means that its members adhere to a strict literalist interpretation of the texts of the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.” Wherever you find religious extremism that uses exclusion, violence, and fear to accomplish its purposes you will almost always find a literalist reading of sacred texts. While this is not the only cause of violent extremism, it is an important one.

While condemning Islamic extremism abroad, some fundamentalist Christians in America use a similar hermetical strategy to justify their own brand of extremism. While championing a literal reading of the Bible, most ignore almost all Old Testament laws until an ideological bear is poked. They will slog through a sea of divine commands and prohibitions in the Old Testament and quickly dismissing them as outdated or barbaric, until they find one or two verses that support their preconceived ideas about a politically charged moral issue. Once cherry-picked from their larger context, these verses are elevated to the infallible Word of God and used to condemn, exclude, and oppress perceived enemies.

It is not difficult to see that a strict literal reading of the Bible is actually reserved for a narrowly selected group of passages that can be used to justify moral (and political) positions that are developed quite independently of the Bible. Verses that are not helpful in supporting one’s ideology can be rejected as irrelevant, and those that are helpful are elevated as the inerrant word of God. So while the outward manifestations of extremism look very different when comparing middle-eastern Islamic fundamentalism and American Christian fundamentalism today, both seem to share the hermeneutical strategy of insisting on a literal reading of select passages of scripture to justify one’s extreme views.

 

(https://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2015/06/03/pages/0027/index.xml#.VW7Rby9Yo1g.facebook.)