Fundamentalist Bibliolatry

In an interview for the fiftieth anniversary issue of Christianity Today magazine some handful of years ago, theologian John Stott made a surprising statement.  Surprising, that is, to the interviewer and perhaps to many fundamentalists reading the article.  Stott was asked to define who evangelicals are.  His response focused on the centrality of Jesus Christ, that evangelicals may be defined as deriving authority for faith and practice from the God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.

     The interviewer wondered if Stott had not forgotten to mention the Bible, believing that key for evangelicals is the place of the Bible.  But Stott put forward a gentle correction, saying that he wanted “to shift conviction from a book, if you like, to a person.”

      The fundamentalists within the evangelical camp have had this equation reversed for far too long. There is indeed a norming authority of Scripture in the lives of evangelical Christians.  However, Stott says, the Bible has authority “because Christ has endorsed its authority.”  The Scriptures “main function is to witness to Christ.”

      While we can affirm that the inspired Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the unique and normative source for Christian faith and practice, we ought also to remember that our faith is in a person.  Faith—we trust ourselves to the care of a person.

       It is a kind of creeping fundamentalism to claim faith in an object, even one so revered as the Bible.  It is revered, regarded as holy, precisely because it reveals to us a holy person. It is a means of grace.  However, this mediating function does not, cannot, work its work without the ongoing activity of the person of the Holy Spirit.

      Unmediated, Scripture becomes a blank screen upon which we can too easily impose our own ideas, exert our own wills, making claims that are thin on truth.  It is the reverse of letting Scripture interpret us, this bringing a pre-set agenda on how to read the Bible.  It is the opposite of humility before God, to interpret Scripture through the lens of a creedal statement.

     By this mindset have some created an idolatry of the Bible—call it bibliolatry—with their declaring as central to faith concepts of inerrancy and infallibility. 

       The Bible is a living document, though not a person.  The Bible witnesses to a person, God in Christ.  The Bible is a living document when the Spirit of the living God continues to reveal to us God in Christ through its pages, to impress upon our hearts its truths.

        When we replace a transforming encounter and walk with God (the underpinnings of salvation) with a doctrinal statement or creed, however piously constructed, we have turned from God and toward ourselves.  Thus, idolatry.

      It is a movement away from this fundamentalist kind of construction that Stott wanted to initiate in his conversations.  We ought to be moving toward a perspective of having faith in a person.

          The adaptability and applicability of faith, doctrine statements included, is a sign of its life—faith and faith creeds too can be said to be living precisely because they continue to be relevant, to apply to people in ever-changing circumstances.

            This is part of the wonder of God: Who, unchanging in character—Holy and Person, Loving and Just—is eternally adaptable in providing the means of grace that meet us where we are, when we are.

          We are not first and foremost creedal people in the sense that our faith is in a creed; we do not trust ourselves in a list of doctrinal statements.  We are a people of a living faith.  It is precisely when a systematic theology replaces the living God in our esteem and worship that we are in danger of shifting from faith in God to faith in an object.

            So I will venture to say this careful: we do not believe in the Bible, we believe in the One the Bible reveals.

(I wrote the preceding essay a few years ago. The following is a Facebook blog post inspired by a book I began to read recently, very much on the same theme, and which occasioned the posting of the older essay here.) 

When it comes to the primary nature and role of the Bible, there are major differences between fundamentalists and Wesleyans.

Fundamentalists tend to view Scripture as a body of unquestionable divinely given information that must be accepted as something of a rule book for safe Christian living. The Bible itself, with its comprehensive and rationally accessible inerrant divine truths or propositions, is the depository and residence of inspiration. The Bible and its truths are the primary objects of attention.

For John Wesley, for whom the Scriptures are truly the Word of God, the primary role of Scripture resides not in the text as divine information but in the Holy Spirit's use of it for a transforming encounter with the risen Christ, the true Word of God. The primary purpose of the Bible is to glorify God and form the people in the image of Christ. Christ, as the encountered Redeemer, not the Bible, is of primary interest and importance.

The Bible is the means the Holy Spirit uses for inner regeneration and the sanctified life. Its focus is not on issuing propositional truths about God and the world. Formation, not information, is its defining goal. Wesleyans accordingly believe that the authority of Scripture is centered on its Spirit-inspired ability to nurture Jesus' disciples in loving relationships with God and neighbor. The writers of the Bible tell us how to live in these right relationships and do not attempt to set forth a vast body of knowledge--historical and scientific--that Christians must unquestionably accept.

[from "Square Peg: Why Wesleyans Aren't Fundamentalists"]

Re-Atonement: the start of a re-telling of the human story

My current thoughts on theology have danced around the topic of the atonement.  They were sparked by an article in Christianity Today that bemoaned the loss of the centrality of a particular atonement theory in modern evangelical circles.

     The author was describing a trend away from this centrality in tones that he intended as a clarion call to repentance, a return to orthodoxy.  But my own response was the opposite.  I was pleased to note that so many are finding it less than necessary to live with the now-standard notions of atonement.

     And so my thinking goes: I believe in the essence of what lies behind the stories of atonement, but not the specific theories of atonement (blood payment, or satisfaction, or ransom).  These stories made sense in their time, and in context of the biblical stories are entirely consistent.

     But I cannot hold them close to me any longer.  They simply do not make sense.  They do not resonate with me.  I cannot envision a God who would require anything of the sort (neither the sacrifice of animals or of Jesus on the cross) in order to bring humankind into a salvific relationship with God.  There is obvious benefit to us in making sacrifice, but no objective change in what God is able to do...although given my own tendency to thinking in free-will terms, God is self-limiting, and will not/can not override our wanting and acting. 

  Still, all of that refers mostly to OT sacrifices and atonement stories.  The NT atonement references are conscious reinterpretations of the OT, and brilliant.  But again, only within that closed system of thinking do they still make sense. 

    The OT is rife with a religious perspective that we do not fully share—though we readily use its terminology.   The NT appropriates this world view; but the imagery is one step removed from its literalness (see the NT book of Hebrews). 

      To wit: the OT poses the problem of satisfying a divine demand for blood, though this rationale is not explained beyond the reference to the natural blood-life connection.  The NT moves one step beyond the allowable animal substitute, and presents an interpretation of Jesus on the Cross as a new, fuller, better, and now once-for-all complete substitute sacrifice.

     No more animal blood, the act is complete; yet the imagery is itself unexplained, built as it is upon a more literal sacrifice of the past.

And now, while we use the words, notably of salvation by His Blood, this is all upon a system of sacrifices we neither fully understand nor could possibly accept.  What’s more, the ancient OT world had a concept of God very different:  why, for example, does/did animal sacrifice “work”?  Was it ever objectively effective?  Or, as I suspect of our own salvation experiences, was this animal sacrifice also subjectively effective—it worked in a way because of the attitude, etc., of the worshiper?

     This after all is the charge of works righteousness, that somehow contrition brings holiness.  But then if it “works”—if the sacrifice is propitiatory—because the subjective attitude is present and right (and there is great evidence that the attitude was more important than the act) then is there really an objective act involved?  That is, does anything outside of ourselves (i.e., God’s attitude or acceptance or whatever) change?

But maybe there is no (objective, transcendent) record book to be wiped clean.  Maybe there is no judge, prosecuting attorney, defense attorney, etc.—all those roles imagined being played in the cosmic drama of one of the atonement theories.  And maybe there is no jailer, no slave owner, no one from whom we need rescue or monetary debt redemption. 

     Maybe all of the pictures of the atonement the Bible allows us to draw are metaphors after all.  Maybe they are mere attempts to illustrate our (ancient ancestral) perspectives, and each carries deep scars of temporal connections.

     What then are we to do, what to say, how to think?  So what does atonement mean? And how is it "accomplished"?  How can we speak of atonement in terms that make sense—that honestly and faithfully represent our spiritual experiences yet do not wholly rely upon a system of sacrifice that does not represent our physical experiences nor a concept of God that no longer makes sense?

I suggest a new beginning story.  The traditional foundational picture is a story of an ideal life marred by sin.  This is how primeval humankind made sense of what they saw and felt: they saw imperfect life, but felt like it ought to be better.  So they imagined that it had been, and then the very real and obviously true tendency of humanity to do wrong destroyed that perfection.  And then the necessity to get back to full relationship with God led to actions on our part, the sacrifices.

     But what if the Genesis story were reinterpreted, re-read?  The initiating observations are the same: we saw an imperfect life, and the innate tendency (an inclination common to all of us, from birth) to act in ways that are destructive (but which are at root attempts at self-protection, self-care).  All of this remains the same from our subjective observations of how life is—and so becomes part of the new Genesis myth of how things were "in the beginning."

     Remember that a central component of creation is ordering from chaos.  And so my re-read Genesis story continues: into the chaos of this life as we know it enters God.  Slowly, gradually, as we come to know more fully who God is, and come to be changed more completely by the presence of God who is among us, we discover and develop that salvific relationship.  (I should say also that my theology now defines salvation entirely in terms of relationship.)

     This metaphor myth makes sense on two levels, macro and micro; also on levels of the individual and the community.  We may speak of creation as bringing order from chaos in the natural world.  And we can point to other stories of re-creation, like with Noah and the return from exile.

     But then we need to acknowledge that we, too, are part of the natural world.  God’s coming into our lives as a creative force is what revelation and salvation signify.  Religion becomes a way of making sense, and finding meaning, a way of living together as humans and in relation with the world in peace/harmony—this is good.

The re-atonement story is not just where we have come from.  

It is where we are going.

So instead of a picture of the ideal that has been corrupted, it is a picture of the natural world—which feels incomplete and chaotic—that is transformed into the ideal, a vision we all long for and wish for.  This story then is the foundation for what atonement is: God making the first step (prevenient grace), reaching out to us and enabling us to respond (reversing total depravity), and transforming us from our inclination toward evil so that our very desires resonate with God's: this life-giving grace is a continuing, sanctifying grace.

     This approach also addresses the problem of what has been called “inherited depravity.”  Which is to pose the question that arises when one literalizes the Genesis story: how is it that every human being born since has this natural tendency toward the selfish and corrupt and the wrong?  Inherited depravity as a theory answers that since Adam’s sin all are sinners, as if there was some change in the moral genetics.

     But removing the literalness of the story, and then starting at a different point than the ideal Garden of Eden scene, allows us to imagine a different answer.  How is it that we’re inclined toward chaos?  Because chaos is where we are from, and order and Shalom is where we want to go. We are not fallen, but we are feeling the chaos as part of our nature.