Why is biblical interpretation so often a battle field?

Thanks for your reply, Andrew. Let me give the best answer that I am able.

"But he appears to be speaking historically, presumably about a period when core beliefs were first being abstracted and formulated."

 Perhaps, but from much that I have seen concerning postmodernism and the EC movement, one basic claim seems to be that such 'core beliefs' are often questioned, if not out-right discarded. I am open to correction on that, as I am still rather new to this movement, but such has been the impression I have had at times.

"Does the argument about the 'monstrous wars about small points of theology' still apply today? Is it still the case that a small mistake in doctrine may wreck human happiness?"

I think the fact that we are having on this blog and other Christian discussion forums discussions about thing like the Trinity or Godhead and biblical authority are signs that such things as 'small points of theology' and 'small mistakes in doctrine' are still important.

To take it a little further, for those of you skating on the edges of whatever postmodernism is, such concerns should be doubly pertinent. For one thing, Chesterton's words seem to point to the idea that this isn't the first time the church has had to contend with such large-scale changes, and that it can fall into error, but it must retain its balance and not so fall. To use Jesus' words, we must be "in the world, but not of the world".

"Is there not something odd about the idea that God's renewed humanity should be defined by - or so dependent for its identity and integrity on - a set of highly contended beliefs?"

Why should it be odd? I would contend that if "ideas have consequences", beliefs have them even more so. Is it any wonder that if we look at almost any psuedo-christian cult, one thing that can be found as a thread in all of them is the idea that Christ was only a human man? Or that many if not all add works to their mode of acquiring salvation?

We may say that there are some beliefs and practices that while different from those of other believers should probably not be points of contention. Granting that, though, perhaps that only increases the necessity of know what beliefs and practices do 'cross the line', and let us not play games about there being no such line or beliefs on the outside. There are.

This is fascinating, thanks for putting up the response of Pierced’s authors. I was quite surprised at how thin Wright’s usual subtlety of attack was in his article, and am not surprised at the final paragraph or two of the response because of this, where both parties seem to come close to caricatures. But it is good to wade through the measured but robust interplay between them.

Your last line, Andrew, is so much to the point. In these days of sites like this we can no longer pretend that such debates and exchanges are private. And as these are now increasingly public matters, there has to be at least some aspect of witness in the manner of discourse. So what are we to do? The idea that we are publicly nicer to each other just because people can see just reeks of falsehood. Surely what we are approaching is an issue of discipleship in our handling of belief itself, and consequently its expression. A point picked up today in the article in the Guardian where Prof Winston takes issue with Dawkins over precisely this issue of tone and attitude. (Now that’s what I call a Page 3 article!)

I guess we are all conscious of a basic requirement for courtesy, especially in discussion groups. And perhaps that cognitive dissonance that we sometimes experience, that feeling that ‘this is what I will say but its not what I’d like to say’, is a useful goad to the conscience that perhaps the respect that motivates courtesy is lacking. But, of course, this won’t go very far in a medium that is not only public but globally so. What we Brits think of as good manners does not always translate, and is very questionable anyway.

Hi Peter,

Just to clarify, I didn’t mean that Wright’s article illustrates the battle-field in the way Andrew is talking about, rather that it demonstrates almost the opposite and is to some extent an example to us all, frustration included! The authors’ response is interesting too, although I found their claim to be on a more modest mission than Wright’s, and therefore that a defense of PS does not need to take on the scope of critical realism a bit like special pleading. But I do sympathise with his frustration. He has done enough to be taken seriously at any level, and the sense that the authors, recognising that they could not produce a credible piece without addressing Wright, were really trying to find a route from their conclusion that did not appear to ignore him.

well jazzact13, your comments frustrate me, i dont think you heard me.  which is, i suppose, the point andrew began with. 

There are so many dynamics at work when we read scripture, and ten times more when we discuss our reading with others. This site is one of the best when it comes to people hearing each other. Some that pop up a few layers back from the Technorati links are less pleasant places to be. But even here we realise that what we take from the Bible has a great deal to do with what we bring to it, and much of the debate here is about realising what those things are, and dealing with their implications.

Stacy’s point is a good one, I think. If eternity hangs on every word of the Bible, then it is not a book to be taken as one would take a novel or a recipe (although some do treat it like a recipe) And the Bible is both an ancient set of texts and a very modern book. But in its modernity it is a very different book because it is wrapped in the covers and comes with the commentaries of two thousand years of religious history.

But the subject on this thread is why we behave as we do when disagreeing about meanings and significance. Actually, I think it is also about what happens when we agree, because the dynamics of our agreement with those of like minds has a lot to do with how we view those who do not think like ‘us’.

Stacy makes the point that, certainly in the US, many who are most defensive of their position (and aggressive in their stance) are those who also strongly hold to and even define the Bible in terms of its inerrancy. And it often becomes inerrancy rather than the Bible that gets defended.

I don’t think there is an answer to Andrew’s question that works if we try to remain unemotional, for example. Peter misunderstood something in my first post here (I meant that it was the doctrine of PS, not Wright’s defense of his position, that exemplifies a battle-ground). Peter went on to defend Wright’s justified frustration, and I completely agree with him in that.

We each bring to this debate personal histories, and current positions, that colour our words. This site more than many gives opportunity for many who carry painful disillusionment not so much with Christ but with what their experience of Christ has become in the hands of churches. This brings me to an appropriate closing point…

There are several fairly distinct levels of issue when it comes to describing doctrinal battle grounds. The academic battle ground, perhaps, is fairer than the public one because at least the protagonists have been trained, to some extent, in the art of dialogue and dispute. They’re supposed to be big boys and girls and able to take the knocks in the playground. (A rather unrealistic and frequently disproved expectation in my view)

But churches are not populated by theologians, at least, not trained ones. It might be nice to imagine a model where those in the academy were training those who led congregations who in turn taught a nice neat set of ideas to those warming the pews. But this is unreal. It would be nice because, in this topic, we have to give some sort of account of how the subtlety of understandings becomes eroded and more monochrome for the average Joe Christian. But it has always been so. At least now we can assume a level of literacy in most northern congregations, at least now we do not have to compensate for sermons delivered in Latin by creating the essentials of doctrine in stained glass windows.

But the level where the most violent arguments happen is in the largely unconsidered positions of those who have been fed tightly packaged models of understanding. And we should, I believe, not mix our words when describing some of the behaviour as violence and even abuse. Jesus did just that in his accusation of, not the ‘congregation’ but of the religious leaders, who laid religious burdens on people and did nothing to help them.

In reality there are thousands of groups, who lay claim to the name ‘church’ that have sprung up on the back of individuals who fancied starting a church and that have never engaged with any ideas outside the mind of that leader. There was a re-run of a Louis Theroux documentary the other night where he went to just such a group in the US, and found that what they took from scripture, and what they preached as the gospel was ‘God Hates Fags’. But this was a television documentary, itself something of a caricature, and it took what it wanted from those people. And they were only, because of their certainties, only too willing to let it happen. It’s hard not to caricature a group that has so determinedly adopted a cartoon role. Until they claim to be the only ones approved by God.

My point… that when we look up and around, the battle ground gets too complex for practical purposes. So what am I going to do about my way of believing to avoid the cycle of violence? And how am I going to encourage others to hear each other, and read each other, in the way they would like to be heard and read.

Now, on to the day, because the problems of the day are sufficient, to say the least!

Work has taken me out of this thread for some days, and will do again over the next few weeks, so I’ll use this little window to drop in a few thoughts.

There’s so much going on here. At the surface some of the exchanges do as much to demonstrate the point as to answer the question Andrew posed at the outset. Although even here the posts have been relatively restrained.

There seem to be at least three different cords to this thread. Andrew’s question, which has not always been to the fore: some familiar contentions over theological positions, and some interest in what our relationship with scripture, or doctrine, obliges us to do in terms of our behaviour towards others. (Which is closely allied to the second cord)

It might help (me) to make sense if I admit now that I find your posts, Jazzact, a little frustrating. Your way of arguing seems a bit confused and the posts consequently confusing. You do tend to argue in circles, rather. I hope this will become clear as I progress.

For example, in response to my concern (and relating very much to Mathias recent post) about my (our) relationship with the violence that often arises, you said, “…even in the Bible, those who followed Christ, and even Christ Himself, either engaged in actions or denounciations that could be considered harsh, or themselves suffered violence. Paul gives some false teachers over to Satan, and tells the Corinthians to throw a sexually immoral man from their church. Peter and Jude get quite graphic about the doom awaiting false teachers. Jesus takes a whip to money changers in the Temple. And Jesus and most of the Apostles suffered violent deaths and persecutions.”

My point, and Mathias’, is not about the violence done by persecutors outside the church, it is the violence done within the church by those who consider it their task to exclude or excommunicate other followers of Jesus because of doctrinal differences, very commonly differences over the role of scripture. And in this I maintain my position. I do have a choice about the violence I embrace or refuse to embrace in the way that I argue or otherwise engage with people. I do not have a choice about the violence of others, except in how I respond to it. (And I am not suggesting that you are being violent, in any way).

Your examples, incidentally, could be more nuanced than you suggest. Those teachers whom Paul rejected were, commonly, the ones that Israel more widely would have regarded as orthodox, seeking to apply to gentile converts the traditional rules of gentile admission to the righteous nation, notably circumcision and food purity codes. This might not make its point very clearly to those who regard the NT as a Christian document in a way that makes it not a Jewish one, i.e. by a fundamental religious distinction. That separation happened later and in nothing like the unified way of popular understanding.

Incidentally, and no more than that, my take on the exclusion of the man who slept with his father’s wife is that this was a critique of the whole congregation who, out of submission to the Roman practice of patronage, had not only allowed but celebrated what they saw as the ‘freedom’ that particular leader had demonstrated by his action. Paul’s pointed ‘…and you are proud (of this), but should rather have mourned… points to something much more complex than a sexual action that Paul declares would have been offensive to anyone, Jew or pagan, as does his less than subtle sarcasm about perfections achieved. A point not often noted, and that only applies if I am right about who the person was, is the cost this judgement represented to the congregation as a whole. If it were their Patron who was being excluded, then that church congregation would have lost its host and protector, which, in Corinth was no small thing. And there was a cost to Paul as well; particularly in the effect such a judgement would have on the already relatively small body that constituted the church as a whole in the city, and through this on his own ministry.

But whatever narrative you hold with regard to 1 Corinthians, it is not good practice to generalise a specific action of apostolic authority as if it gave mandate out of context. And it is certainly not a good idea, as some that I know have, to use it as a proof text for cheap judgement that amounts almost to abuse.

Andrew’s question can be taken either at the surface or much more deeply. At the surface it might be about why Christians can be so bloody towards each other over issues of interpretation. Stacy raised the point, that the theology of inerrancy might have something to do with this. You didn’t agree. The more this conversation develops the more I think Stacy’s point, at least by implication, is an important one. You said that even without inerrancy there would still be disagreement. I agree, and probably far more than we have in evangelicalism today. But, probably in common with Stacy and others, I would not regard that as necessarily a bad thing.

As I stand back from the culture and in particular from the scope of popular evangelicalism, as I have now for some years, it seems to me that the bulk of the contention is over very few topics. The dominant one seems to be our relationship with scripture and the way in which authority and obedience have become, almost exclusively, the categories within which the Bible is discussed, almost to the point where many people can’t imagine that there are any other ways of looking, faithfully, at the Bible. In this respect Stacy is right. So much of the argument is not about the content or the meaning of Scripture but over its iconic role in the church and, if not inerrancy, then at least the categories of interpretation that lead to inerrancy, are very much to the point.

Philosophically, at least for me, the only surprise is that we should be surprised about this. The roots of Evangelicalism go deep into Scottish rationalism and Locke etc. and they budded first and most deeply in America and in particular in the early days of Princeton and its offshoots. Personally I cannot see the ‘plain meaning’ the accessibility of scripture to the God-given intelligence of the ordinary man that sits as the foundation of this as an interpretive movement, as anything but an invitation to detach scripture from history. My point is not as big as it sounds. Simply that Evangelicalism was, from its outset, part of the radical application of the implications of the Enlightenment that we now call modernism, and its tenets were adopted and applied with less of the critique that is now aimed at post modernism.

Again an aside, this is a point that disappoints when it comes to Tom Wright’s work. I don’t think he has really engaged with PM, or listened, or read, in the way that he appeals for everyone to do in his Fulcrum article. His reactions to PM in most of his writings seem to me to be caricatures at a similar level to those that he mourns in relation to penal substitution.

This isn’t really changing the subject, I would argue that late twentieth century evangelical dogmatism, at quite a general level, has become something of a caricature of early evangelical, let alone early Protestant, dogmatics. And as a movement that has been somewhat cavalier about biblical history, has been similarly unconcerned about the way it has allowed the more deeply considered approaches of Turretin through Hodge to Warfield to be consumed by what seems to me to be little short of doctrine as slogan. (Which is a deliberate caricature, in the traditional purpose of caricature).

You tend to do this as well, Jazzact. You said once that ‘God wrote the Bible’ and others picked up on that. Which then you had to defend. Do you get my point? It is not God’s act of inspiration that is at question, it is the slogan-like inadequacy of saying ‘God wrote the Bible’, with all its hostages to fortune as a statement.

There is something about very casual statements, proposed dogmatically, that causes friction in debate. For example, you said earlier, “I think the Bible itself is pretty clear that ever word of scripture is important. Jesus made a comment about even the smallest grammatical markings in the law not being put aside. I think it is in the Psalms where it is said that God’s word is settled forever in Heaven, and that every word of God is true. In I or II Peter it is said the prophets did not prophecy from their own imaginations, but from how God moved them. There is also the claim the all scripture is inspired by God.”

That’s five separate statements, four about biblical passages used as if they all meant the same thing. The phrase ‘every word of scripture is important’ seems, frankly a little disingenuous. What do you mean by it I wonder, that every word carries the same import and authority? If that is what you mean then I cannot agree that ‘the Bible is pretty clear that’ this is true. To say that every word carries the same, iconic, weight is a very different thing from saying that ‘all scripture is inspired by God’. To be clear, what I mean is that I can read scripture fully under the inspiration of God in a way that is closed under the rubric of modern inerrancy. Under inerrancy, broadly speaking and in the way that it is used today which is very different from its earlier role, every word has to be taken as the speech of God, and carries an imperative that is awkwardly not always the meaning of the text.

Fully accepting that all scripture is inspired by God I can read ‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity’ and learn from it. Under inerrancy, if I were really faithful to its implications, I would have to despair of meaning because that’s what God seems to be telling me to do. Again I must make my point obvious, I don’t believe that many people who think that inerrancy is the issue actually read the Bible as if it were. I don’t think I have ever met, or read, a literalist. In this sense inerrancy becomes an idea, a very dogmatic idea perhaps, but one that functions more in dispute than in hermeneutic practice - in that sense, as a bone of contention. Which is why, in principle, I think Stacy is making a good point.

I would not accept that Jesus’ statement about the endurance of the Law is a statement about the Bible being timeless. It’s not about relativism either. It simply isn’t addressing the same point. Neither, in my view, are the psalmist’s words about the eternal nature of God’s words statements directly or in the first instance about the Bible at all. Unless, of course, one accepts the circular argument that they must be because they are in the Bible.

But I don’t want to give the impression that the problems, and particularly the problems of dialogue, are all weighted against something as simple as inerrancy as an idea. Many who have problems with the idea as it is used today, and reading him as if he were making this sort of point, have massive problems when reading Calvin’s statement that the Bible is ‘the incarnation of God’. They feel that this is almost blasphemous in the way that it appears to usurp Christ’s place. But such would be just as historically insensitive as anything else; it is positively dangerous to extract much that Calvin, or Luther, said outside of their situation and the real battles they felt they were engaged in and this is to do as much with their intensity as their intent. Hyperbole is not always inappropriate, but five hundred or a thousands years later, it becomes extremely problematic.

So, and again I speak only for myself, I would say that Stacy’s point, and the responses that several others have given, should stand simply because so much of the heat of the debate is generated not by sensibly argued, faithfully applied, seriously considered ideas, but by the largely unconsidered, caricatured and frequently trivialised statements that pass for doctrine nowadays in the public arena. The real difficulty emerges when those statements, by their nature, prevent real discourse, forbid questions, and frame their logic in purely binary terms. (Again, I am talking about the ideas as commonly expressed, not about you Jazzact)

Why would anyone want to do this? That’s where I get lost in the whole process. I just don’t get how to be faithful to God, or scripture, without questioning. Bending Socrates to a slightly different point… I just don’t want to live the travesty of an unconsidered faith, and find it hard to understand how anyone can think that honest theological enquiry is anything but an act of worship. But there you go. Apparently some do. And, apparently, through it’s long and variegated history, that which calls itself church has so frequently found the control of those ideas to be more important than people.