I am not an intellectual nor an academic (in my experience they are often seperate states of being). I am not a philosopher or even a dedicated amateur student of theology. But, I do believe in God and have felt touched by Him/Her/It often in my life.
This has led to many quests for understanding and truth and I’ve danced around the fringes of Christianity like a nervous bee most of my life. I have also experimented elsewhere. This never ending search has led me to this site and I would like to thank all involved in putting it together.
I have found an genuine openess and freedom of expression encouraged here, which is refreshing in the light (or darkness) of the current extremism being expressed elsewhere in the name of Jesus.
I have read much of this site’s contents and have come up against a barrier I have found elsewhere, including in discussions with ‘saved’ Christian friends. The emergent theology being discussed is usually predicated on an faith in a human written word and I see quite a lot of hyperbole being used to avoid more fundamental questions.
So is the Bible the word of God? I see the evolution of the early church and the authorship of the Gospels in particular too often debated elsewhere. The very nature of Jesus’ ministry and being appears to be more open to debate than is discussed here. Can an emergent church truely avoid this issue and could a future church follow the teachings of Jesus while separating God’s purpose for him from God’s being and from the politics and confusion of his early followers?
Is a faith felt warmly in my heart a function of my soul’s connection with God or is it learned from books, or am I being assimilated, brainwashed or merely habit forming. Can a psychiatrist tell the difference?
Is the real question: What does my heart tell me God intended for Jesus and what I should do about it, rather than what does a book men wrote tell me I should believe about Jesus?
Confidence in a book?
What if we talked instead about ‘confidence’ in this ‘human written word’ - a less religious word and one less likely to lead us into an idolatrous attachment to the scriptures? I would have thought that there is a general consensus within the ‘emerging church’ that the theology we develop must be in some realistic sense ‘biblical’ - we place ourselves in continuity with the biblical narrative, we regard ourselves as heirs of the promise given to Abraham and therefore as among the people of the God of Abraham. But how we articulate the basis for that confidence, how we defend it, these are complex issues, and I would expect to find a diversity of views - not least because we need to read and respond to the Bible in different ways, and on different levels.
Or what if we talked about faith being ‘shaped’ by a book rather than ‘based on’ a book? I encounter the God who raised Jesus from the dead and sense that he is calling me to follow, but it is scripture that gives shape to that calling.
Presumably the ‘fundamental questions’ that you refer to have to do with whether we can have any real confidence in the Bible as a historical document. If so, I would personally regard that as an entirely valid concern, particularly in view of the traditions of critical scholarship that have shaped how we read historical texts. I would argue, however, that critical biblical scholarship has been, on the whole, no less polemical, prejudiced and reactionary than conservative biblical scholarship, but my impression is that we are currently at the point where a more credible and defensible reading of the Bible is beginning to emerge somewhere between the two positions. I think the emerging church needs to get hold of this reading.
If you’re interested in pursuing this further, you might outline the reasons that you have for distrusting the views about Jesus’ ministry, development of the early church, etc., that you have found on this website. I think the emerging church needs some degree of coherence in its theology, but it also needs candour - intellectual integrity ought to be a high value.
shaping our faith
I like this comment, but wonder if we are narrow when we think of faith being shaped by a book. I agree that scripture, in many ways, helps objectify faith in that it tells the story of God who engaged the world and ultimately us. Nevertheless, it would seem to me that our faith is shaped by our human experience as well (culture, interaction with other humans, the Christian community, how we understand Scripture, tragedy, etc.).
I think what is important is the object of faith and how we can know the object. As Andrew pointed out, a book is not our object. The book tells the story of our object, namely the triune God. But that is one medium of knowing, albeit a significant one that is objective when understood as intended. Creation, I would suggest, is another medium by which we can know the triune God. However, creation, or general revelation, is subjective and should be objectified through scripture.
Albannach raises a good point and I hope to see it fleshed out further.
Is the Bible the word of god?
Albannach, the texts that together make up what we call the “Bible” never refer to scripture as the “word of god,” so it seems that it would be a mistake to do so even for those who have a high view of scripture. Specific sayings that are contained within scripture are referenced as the “word of god,” but never scripture itself. “So is the Bible the word of God?” It seems to me that it would be unbiblical to say so.
I think you are correct that it is implausible to base Christian faith upon the Bible. The most plausible basis (indeed the only available basis) for the Christian faith is the practices of communities that believe that God was acting for the sake of humanity in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. What we believe about the status of the Bible can only be derived from a prior belief about the status of Jesus. That prior belief about the status of Jesus is reasonable or unreasonable to the extent that specific Christian communities are embodying their beliefs about Jesus and his God in such a way that the community and its practices form an inhabitable life-world, that is, a lived-out interpretation of reality, that to some degree demonstrates to the world God’s intent for human existence.
Isn't this a bit odd?
Steve, isn’t this a bit odd? Where does our ‘belief about the status of Jesus’ come from? If we only had the Gospel of Thomas or the Qur’an or the Book of Mormon, wouldn’t we have very different ideas about who Jesus was, or if he was? Would we hold to the belief that ‘God was acting for the sake of humanity in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus’ if we didn’t already have a rather high level of confidence in the Bible? Do we not need to say that some communities embody a more accurate understanding of the identity and purpose of Jesus than others? If so, on what basis would we make that judgment if not by reference to the Gospel accounts of his life as some sort of ‘prior’ authority?
Not odd at all! :)
The belief about the status of Jesus comes from the traditioned community that consists of past and present church congregations. The reason the gospel of mark is regarded as an accurate depiction of Jesus, and not the gospel of Thomas, is not because the former glows in the dark, or mystically exudes truth into the individual reader’s heart, or b/c it dropped down from heaven on angels’ wings, but because the former is regarded as an accurate depiction of Jesus by existing communities and the tradition in which they stand, whereas no existing community does that for the latter. As for Mormonism, their specific texts are regarded as accurate for Mormon communities, but not for non-Mormon Christians, so it is not a live issue for non-Mormon Christian traditions, unless they are engaging in a dialogue with Mormons.
Early members of the tradition in which we stand accepted the gospel of Mark as accurate b/c it accorded with the understanding of jesus that they had been embodying perfectly well without any NT scriptures. We stand in that tradition, so we accept the gospel of Mark as accurate (more or less, depending on who specifically you ask), but the traditioned community is prior to the four gospels; the four gospels arose out of and were accepted by the traditioned community.
“Do we not need to say that some communities embody a more accurate understanding of the identity and purpose of Jesus than others?” Sure. If a given community accepts the gospel accounts as accurate, then that community’s embodiment of the identity and Jesus can be critiqued in reference to the very texts that the community claims to accept as accurate. That doesn’t mean the gospel accounts are prior to the community, that means you are holding the community responsible to the very texts that the community claims to accept as accurate. In other words, if you, Andrew, were to say, “I accept the BBC special on world religions as accurate,” and then made statements at odds with what the BBC scholars were claiming, we could hold you accountable to the commitment you expressed, and call for you to modify your statements or your expressed commitment to the BBC special, at pain of inconsistency.
(Note: By “accurate” in the above paragraph, I primarily mean “an accurate depiction of the identity of Jesus,” and only secondarily accurate in terms of historical detail. The historical detail question is important, but the function of scripture of conveying historical fact is very much secondary to the function of scripture of conveying the identity of Jesus. Here as in the other threads on scripture, I’m drawing heavily on Hans Frei. I think it would be hugely beneficial to stop speaking of scripture as authoritative, and start considering it accurate in this sense. That preserves a place of high regard for scripture, without allowing it to eclipse the person and authority of Jesus and his God.)
My whole beef here and elsewhere is not to denigrate or cease to use scripture. My problem is that scripture has been given pride of place, over and against Jesus and over against the christian community. So for someone like Albannach, the question should be, what does he/she find in particular Christian communities that strikes him/her as a plausible interpretation of reality and God, and how does the lifestyle of particular Christian communities embody a human existence that could plausibly be related to God? The question shouldn’t be, how much of the bible do I have to swallow? Our primary orientation as Christians should be to the God of Jesus, not to ancient texts.
This is the nub of my original point.
Steve says: The belief about the status of Jesus comes from the traditioned community that consists of past and present church congregations. ……… Our primary orientation as Christians should be to the God of Jesus, not to ancient texts.
This precisely where I struggle and so do many others, I suspect. There is no clearly marked path through history to those past congregations anymore than there can be a reliable reading of the text they may or may not have reffered to.
So my new question is: What is a Christian? Is it OK for a Christian to believe that although the word may only ‘shape’ our faith; and it may not literally be the word of God; and that I can’t be sure of the beliefs of all the first congregations, that still I can embody my faith in the name of Jesus and his resurrection.
Alternatively, is it possible that God’s intention was to bring about division by ensuring Jesus came to us before the information age? Our faith would have to be blindly guided by a confused and unreliable historical process, which would inevitably lead to 2000 years of division and horror. Jews continue to believe in the God of Abraham and await the Messiah. Christians await their salvation and Muslims are sure the Angel brought them a new message.
A fundamental belief that God does not make mistakes could suggest that it is OK for everybody to be right and that each may hold part of the truth. Even if Jesus’ ressurection was not real it may be that God’s infinite capacity for loving creativity can have allowed it to become an immediate salvation for some or a deffered salvation for those who came to believe that. It may also be that the other Abrahamic systems are not condemmed in any way because God has the capacity to embrace their love for him too. This could be the case for all other love based and non-harming belief systems, or beyond!
Perhaps when the emergent church and all other belief systems recognise that God is a loving infinite source of creation, and we remove hate and division from all that we do in the name of belief and religion, will we see an emergent peace. Perhaps then God will deliver to those of us who need further guidance the presence of the impecable example of Jesus (whether or not this was truely the case 2000 years ago).
The same logic can be applied to the creationist argument. God will always be beyond the understanding of all science and God is everything. Such a God can create in an instant the illusion of evolution so there is no need for pseudo-scientific arguments to support the creationist view. Alternatively, whatever the truth about evolution and the Big-Bang (or the meaning of Genesis), God clearly allows free-will and the paths to him brought about by it.
God, it could be argued, is the ultimate attention seeking child. Love him and he will reciprocate with infinite bliss. It does not matter what we, his children, named him or how we raised him.
Tradition, language, meaning
“This precisely where I struggle and so do many others, I suspect. There is no clearly marked path through history to those past congregations anymore than there can be a reliable reading of the text they may or may not have reffered to.”
I don’t think I’m understanding you here. I wasn’t intending to put forth a controversial historical claim regarding the Christian tradition, rather to note that whatever Christianity is, it is a tradition, in Alastair MacIntyre’s sense: “A living tradition then is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods that constitute that tradition [i.e., the definition of “Christian” and “God”]. Within a tradition the pursuit of goods extends through generations, sometimes through many generations.”
The issue at stake here is that terms such as “God” and “salvation” are only meaningful and intelligible in the context of a traditioned community. (The same is true for other abstract terms, such as “justice,” “love,” etc.). The words themselves are free-floating and empty of content until they are fixed into consistent patterns by social practices. There are no private meanings; language is a social, not a private, affair. So what “God” means can only be determined by examining concrete social practices of existing communities. (Thus when two nations are killing each other, each in the name of “god,” it is clear that they are utilizing different definitions of “god,” so the word itself sheds no light on its meaning, rather the meaning is given by how the word is used by the community that uses it.)
So I suppose I could ask you the same question you posed to the users of this website, “What is the basis of the affirmations you make about god?” But I do want to say that as a member of the Christian tradition, I agree with a great deal of what you are saying, and share your desire to celebrate love- and peace-based communities of whatever faiths, since whatever else God is, Christians believe that God is for love and peace.
Is Scripture the word of God?
It seems to me that the basic issue here is that of special revelation. If we concede that the Bible is the word of God that has been revealed to humanity then our view of God is limited to propositional statements that require intellectual assent for adherence. But we know that God has revealed himself in many ways throughout history that culminated in the incarnation. This is vitally important for us to understand special revelation. On the one hand it is propositional (God spoke in many forms), on the other hand it is personal (God became man). It is the propositional revelation that helps us understand personal revelation. However, it is personal revelation that connects us to God as a personal god who has revealed himself through the incarnation and through propositional statements about himself.
The Bible does refer to all scripture as being God-breathed. But what constitutes scripture seems to be the question asked. In the context of Paul’s letter to Timothy the scripture that is God-breathed are sacred writings. These particular sacred writings were the scripture in Timothy’s day and constituted the OT. Jesus and Peter affirm the notion that these writings came from God and they held authority for one’s life. Peter tells us the manner in which God moved on the authors was by means of the Holy Spirit and equated Paul’s writings with scripture. Paul tells the Thessalonians that the gospel they received was the word of God. John equates his writings with God’s word.
From this we could argue that scripture, as the content of the 66 books, is authoritative for the Christian life. It informs us of how God has interacted with humanity and shows us the personal nature of that interaction. It affirms personal revelation and testifies to its own propositional revelation. But ultimately our faith is not in the book but in the God revealed in the book, creation and Christ.
"word of god" revisited
Michael, your comments are helpful, thanks. The equation of the bible with the “word of god” is so pervasive that I think the issue deserves careful attnetion. So I have some questions and contestations about your remarks:
1. It seems “propositional revelation” depends on propositions. What is a proposition? If you mean a sentence, spoken or written, by a particular person at a particular place and time in a particular language, fine. Perhaps it would be better to speak of verbal revelation. If you mean something non-sentential, then I think we will have as much trouble tracking down these mysterious propositions as we would unicorns or Santa Claus, so I’m not sure “propositional revelation” is a useful term.
2. “God-breathed” (theopneustos) is highly metaphorical, and doesn’t give us much when we press the term for details. We can say god was somehow actively involved in the process of scripture formation (which doesn’t give us too much: god is actively involved in one way or another in every event that transpires in the universe), but beyond the specific conclusions of 2 Pet 3:16 as to some of the functions of scripture, we don’t have much to go on. Certainly, god-breathed is not equivalent to god-authored, the view that John is promoting on another thread on this site.
3. “Peter tells us the manner in which God moved on the authors was by means of the Holy Spirit” This isn’t true, if you’re referring to 2 Pet 1:19-21. Peter does not refer at all to the “authors” of scripture, he refers to prophets who uttered prophetic sayings that are contained in scripture. This is an important distinction.
4. In terms of the Thessalonians, are you referring to 1 Thess 2:13? If so, the “gospel” cannot be equated with scripture, but you are right to point out that whereas “word of god” is never equated with “scripture” it is equated with the “gospel.” This says nothing about whether scripture should be considered as the word of god, though.
5. A quick search didn’t turn up any references for where John “equates his writings with God’s word.” Could you provide a reference? Thanks. Also I’m not sure the specific references as to biblical authority or scripture “coming from god” in the teachings of Jesus and Paul. A quick search on “authority” in the gospels shows the overwhelmingly primary authority at issue to be that centered in the persons of Jesus and his God, not in texts.
6. “From this we could argue that…” I think this is the crucial move. The belief of scripture as authored by god or as the “word of god” is not itself specified in scripture. The belief that scripture has that status is the product of a series of inferences from biblical texts, many or most of these inferences seem implausible to me. But even if plausible, these inferences certainly cannot be considered authoritative, or spoken by god, in the same sense the bible is to those who are arguing for that status for scripture. So the status of scripture as authoritative rests on grounds that are not authoritative, since scripture nowhere identifies itself as the “word of god” or as god-authored. So, isn’t it fair to say that the view that the Bible is authored by God is unbiblical?
Can’t we just say that Christians should be committed to the claim that scripture is (sufficiently) accurate, given their commitment to the reality of the risen Jesus, and not try to defend the untenable baggage of divine authorship?
Steve, good comments
Steve,
Good comments. Briefly:
1. By propositional revelation I mean revelation from God in language that can be understood by one who is reading it. Is this necessarily verbal revelation? It could be, but then we get into the problem of the extent of revelation. Was God the author or did he inspire the author to communicate in a language that would be understood in a particular context and time?
2. Most modern translation render theopneustos as inspired by God. While this is hapax legomenon it is significant in that Paul indicates the nature of scripture and distinguishes it from other writing. That which is inspired by God is profitable.
3. Granted, Peter does not refer specifically to authors. Nor does he refer to prophets, but men moved by God to utter inspired sayings. The question is how we understand prophecy. Is it a predictive statement regarding the future or is it relating the will of God. I don’t think that we can hold a narrow view of the word as simply being predictive. I take it to mean divinely inspired propositional revelation. Thus, historical, prophetic, descriptive material can be inspired revelation of God.
4. You might have a point. However, when we look at Luke’s description of Paul’s ministry in Thessalonica he states that Paul reasoned with them from the Scriptures (Acts 17:2ff). It was thus the gospel and the Scriptures which Paul seems to equate with the word of God.
5. The reference for John is 1 John 4:6. Those who know God listen and know the Spirit of truth. John seems to be indicating that the listeners are listening to him and others. His words act as the measure for whether or not people are listening to God. In regards to Jesus see John 10:34-35; temptation accounts; Sermon on the Mount; Luke 24:25-27, 32, 44-49. For Paul see Rom. 1:1-2 God’s gospel is from Scripture, 1:16; the law is the law of God (Rom 7); 1 Cor. 1:21 Paul’s preaching is from God, 2:10 scripture revealed to Paul is from God, 2:13 words of spiritual truth are taught by Paul through the Spirit, 7:10; 14:36-37; 15:1-11 Paul’s message of the gospel is from Scripture.
6. I understand what you are saying, but isn’t it true that there are many theological constructions that are not necessarily explicit in the Bible?
Thanks Michael,
The passages you list above make a convincing case that the individuals in question each regarded scripture as: (a) accurate and (b) important. I have no problem at all with this. But the passages in no way, shape, or form indicate that any of these individuals viewed scripture as authored by God. And the inferences that try to get you from here to there are strained. The fact that Paul’s gospel involved “reasoning from the scriptures” does not mean that Paul thought his gospel WAS the Hebrew scriptures. He didn’t. So for him to apply “word of god” to the one doesn’t warrant us applying it to the other. The fact that 2 Peter’s “prophetic words” and “every prophecy of scripture” were spoken by men “carried by the Holy Spirit,” shows a distinction between scripture and the prophetic words contained in scripture. 1 John 4, and many other of the passages, simply don’t contain the word or concept “scripture,” so they can’t be saying anything about the nature of scripture.
Finally, in reference to point #6, yes, theological constructs are to be believed that aren’t in the Bible. My exact point is that the Bible IS just one of those theological constructs, and its status and existence is derived from the traditioned Christian community (whose status and existence, in turn, is derived from the presence of the Spirit of Christ in the community). That doesn’t mean the Bible is not important or (sufficiently) accurate, but just that a notion of divine authorship is not warranted by the claims the Bible itself makes or the commitments the christian community must hold in its task of witnessing to Jesus and the kingdom of God.
God authorship
Steve,
It seems we are missing each other. How do you understand “authored by God?”
Michael
god authorship
I suppose roughly: “what the bible says, god says.” I don’t know, I picked up the term god authorship in this context because John was using it on another thread on this site. I suppose we could distinguish between 1) verbal inspiration, 2) god authorship, and 3) inerrancy. The three usually go together and generally, but not always, go under the banner of the Bible as the “word of god.”
an attempt to sum up or perhaps deviate a bit--not sure which
humbly i stick my toe into these waters … first of all, it seems that the debate is still on whether scripture itself claims to be authoritative, is this correct? all of the recent posts have referred to scripture so this is why i assume so.
so what is being debated now is what scripture testifies about scripture right? either way it doesn’t seem to matter unless we give what scripture has to say validicy, which is exactly what is being debated right—going about things backwards (so can we skip that hurdle?) why do we question the validicy? possibly because we know that men are fallible. and the book was written by men right—oh, or was it authored by God?
is it possible, with everything that we’ve witnessed in the world that there is an all-powerful GOd, seems to be question this leads to.
because, obviously, if GOd is all-powerful, he is able to create such a book, even through fallible men. in essence we seem to be questioning man and tradition. so we admit that there is a god, how do we know who he/she is? by testing the fruit of different teachings which claim to know the way. the fruit of scripture large scale, as mentioned earlier by someone else, how a community lives it out, right? unless GOd reveals himeself in a fashion as with Paul, but Paul knew the scriptures beforehand, he was just a little off.
so i don’t think that we can say it is one thing or another, specifically that gives credance to scripture—rather a number of things that come together for one to arrive at that conclusion, but, yes, God reveals himself in different ways—he definately created us as multi-sensual (pertaining to the senses) creatures. Then, once God reveals Himself, does He testify to scripture? or do we just pick up a random book and say that it holds all truth?
does this make sense?
the word of god
i give thanks for the wise words of albannach, andrew, steve and michael on the subject of “is the bible the accurate/trustworthy word of god ?”
for some time now, i have been aware that each person has a unique story, and often a unique faith (the bag of things they believe). i think that, along with many quakers, that this shows that god talks to each person individually. god gives light to each person to walk by, and it results in differences, because each person is different.
there are many things in the bible that i have found to be true, but i am not going to preach to anyone from the bible (although i might quote from it frequently). i think we are all learning in our journey to god, and i find the bible very helpful for reflection and guidance.
i think that ink on paper cannot fully show us god. like the writer of the gospel of john, in chapter one, i believe that jesus is significant. the bible is not the word of god; jesus is the word of god. and i think that as is written in several places in the bible, god’s word is fulfilled, carried out, does the job.
i have seen and heard many things that prove to me that jesus is still active, his recorded words have impact, the chain of communities that he started have impact, people ask god for answers and they get them (i think that this is because jesus is the bridge between god and man).
it seems to me that it does no good to try and convince everybody to believe the same things, the same system, the same scriptures. we cannot learn how to live as children of god by going to bible school. it is surely more like god to have a daily dialogue with each of us, and ask us to review our position from time to time. it is more like john 3, where jesus is reported to explain to nicodemus about the difference between people who walk in the light and those who wish their (bad) actions to remain in darkness.
faith must lead to action. if people spend all their time squabbling about which version of events and rituals and teachings and concepts are to be accepted, and from which source, we will not be putting our faith into action. god lights the way for us, we do have to walk it. for many quakers in history, this has meant they have to campaign against injustice. what you or i believe about the exact nature of god or jesus, is somehow made irrelevant when we have a moral obligation to feed the hungry, cure the sick, lead the blind; and do so in community.
we have to act together, as a “church”, since the actions of an individual are not strong enough. what each person exactly believes in this “church” is not as important as what the community decides to do to fix problems, and do good. some communities will pray for spiritual healing, other communities will grow organic food, other communities will teach others how to resolve conflict.
to me, god speaks when communities make progress. for me, jesus is alive in the love and care of the people around me. some of these people are devoted to the bible, and the accuracy of the bible, and the authority of the bible, and how genesis 1 to 11 provides all the answers in a logical system, and so they denounce the theory of evolution as if it were demonic. i listen, but i do not always agree.
orthodoxy is not really important, since i cannot coerce anyone to believe as i believe, and neither can you. but we may be able to agree on working together for a goal such as trade justice, or ending human trafficking. because some things will always be common if we are being taught by god himself.
Hanging out our smalls to dry in God's breath.
The final question in my original post was:
What does my heart tell me God intended for Jesus and what I should do about it, rather than what does a book men wrote tell me I should believe about Jesus?
Later I dared to state:
There is no clearly marked path through history to those past congregations anymore than there can be a reliable reading of the text they may or may not have reffered to (I was including Hebrew texts in this).
Comments from Andrew, Steve and Michael have been helpful and interesting, but I see philosophical arguments developing. These still look to me like they are predicated at some level in the belief on what may or may not have been genuinely passed down in the written word or other tradition.
There is ample academic debate on the written word out there already to have caused a nervous twitch throughout post-modern Christendom. I don’t see that a reliance on ‘traditioned congregations’ or ‘the presence of the Spirit of Christ in the community’ - Steve, are any more reliable a source of a reasoned theology.
Surely that presence of Spirit is on the one hand entirely subjective at both personal and community levels, and on the other hand likely to be no different to the presence felt in non-Christian traditions.
I also quite seriously suggested:
A fundamental belief that God does not make mistakes could suggest that it is OK for everybody to be right and that each may hold part of the truth. Even if Jesus’ ressurection was not real it may be that God’s infinite capacity for loving creativity can have allowed it to become an immediate salvation for some or a deffered salvation for those who came to believe that.
Here I am suggesting that God comes to each of us in our entirely human derived traditions and retrospectively embraces them and us within his loving goodness. So that He creates a new truth and there is no need for any philisophical hyperbole or academic deconstrucion, whatever your tradition or the rigour of intellectual study of it. Perhaps God loves the games we play as we love the games our children play.
Steve asked, “What is the basis of the affirmations you make about god?” They come from my heart because I cannot rely on any other source (see above).
So, is an open theology capable of starting from first principles? Is there a non-traditioned well-spring of new truth that is brave enough to not need Jesus, Yahwe or Allah? Surely our loving Father can not have intended anything other than the presence of his son should be an inspiration for living, and not a recipe for thousands of years of horror because somebody, somewhere wrote words, which may or may not have been intended in their original and lost form to be our only only road to salvation. Worse still is that we are in all traditions following the machinations of ancient political imperatives to our eternal doom.
I understand that these can be interpreted as heretical or Aryan inspired rantings but I don’t feel God calling me to rely anymore on human judgements on the past. He has given us a love filled soul, whose presence I feel that has all we need. Write down a theology without one single reference to the past and see how close it comes to current thinking.
How open is open?
Albannach, wonderfully thought-provoking stuff! The critique of historic Christianity is entirely appropriate and I would not want to ignore it. I do not regard it, however, as a good enough reason for abandoning the historical dimension to faith.
Certainly, an open source theology could choose to start from first principles. But ‘open source’ is only a method. Theology is done in all sorts of different context, for all sorts of different reasons. The stated objective of this particular open source theology project is to assist the development of a transparent, community-driven theology for the “emerging church”’. The phrase ‘emerging church’ in the contexts in which it is currently used presupposes a certain type of theological commitment, which includes, I believe, a commitment to trust in and follow the Jesus who started out as a prophet from Nazareth. That is a choice that we make: we choose to follow this ‘person’ and to worship the God whom he called ‘Father’ - and therefore we choose to be part of a tradition, part of a history, part of a narrative about God. To choose (or to be chosen!) to connect ourselves to one particular historical tradition is not the same as needing to have our faith in God mediated and interpreted through a tradition.
That is roughly where the emerging church starts from - at least as I see it. From that point we could certainly go back and examine some of these ‘first principles’, perhaps more critically and with greater intellectual humility than the church has done in the past; but we cannot start from first principles without abandoning the conviction that we have been called by God in Christ.
The other thing I would say is that an ‘open source theology’ expressly recognizes - in fact requires - the active participation of a community in its development. Communities need to make communal judgments about what is right or wrong, true or false, helpful or unhelpful, relevant or irrelevant - but this in turn presupposes some ground rules, and sooner or later these ground rules will take on the character of a tradition. We never escape from the fact of history, and I would say that we would do better to try to understand history (including the story about Jesus) well than to repudiate it in the interests of a highly privatized subjectivism.
Thank you Andrew
I feel inspired to reply quickly to this before I ponder some more.
Thank you for this:
………..which includes, I believe, a commitment to trust in and follow the Jesus who started out as a prophet from Nazareth. That is a choice that we make: we choose to follow this ‘person’ and to worship the God whom he called ‘Father’ - and therefore we choose to be part of a tradition, part of a history, part of a narrative about God………..
This is a common ground I am happy to graze in.
I am going now to ponder further:
……….We never escape from the fact of history, and I would say that we would do better to try to understand history (including the story about Jesus) well than to repudiate it in the interests of a highly privatized subjectivism………..
as objectively as possible, which is where I think I originaly tried to untie some knots with this thread.
rationality and historical criticism
Albannach, the excellent questions you are posing all involve the reasonableness and the basis of that reasonableness of theological beliefs, Christian and otherwise.
When you say: “Steve asked, “What is the basis of the affirmations you make about god?” They come from my heart because I cannot rely on any other source”, the reasonableness of that claim seems to presuppose one or more of these four principles: a) that which Albannach’s heart tells Albannach is to be believed by Albannach. b) that which Albannach’s heart tells Albannach is to be believed by all people.
Or more generally, c) that which any individual’s heart tells that individual is to be believed by that individual d) that which any individual’s heart tells that individual is to be believed by all people.
Besides the obvious problems associated with affirming any of these statements, belief in any of these statements makes a shared understanding of the divine (1) impossible, (2) only possible on the basis of lucky coincidence, or (3) only possible on the basis that one person would blindly accept what a second person’s heart is telling that second person. I think any theology that makes a shared understanding of god impossible or only possible on those bases has severe liabilities.
But you are chiding us here, if I understand you, for ignoring historical criticism of scriptural texts and religioius traditions in formulating our theological positions. I think you are right to do so, and this creates a real challenge, although not I hope an unsurmountable challenge, to Christian beliefs.
I think its helpful to make explicit the differences between scienfic, historical investigations and the pursuit of formulating a comprehensive doctrine. A comprehensive doctrine is a philosophical or theological “theory of everything,” attempting to explain, among other things: why anything at all exists rather than nothing, why human beings exist, why consciousness exists, why the conscience exists, why religious sensibilities exist, why evil, pain, and suffering exist, what the purpose and meaning of human existence is, etc. etc.
Historical investigations proceed on a strict methodology. They attempt to discover “what happened” at a particular time and place in the past. In pursuit of that discovery, they gather evidence, textual, archaeological, verbal, and attempt to infer the most likely explanation for that evidence. In that pursuit, historians refuse any hypothesis that appeals to supernatural beings or happenings. Rightly so! History couldn’t very well progress as a discipline if it were constantly wondering whether or not the animists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, etc. were correct in the supernatural claims they were advancing. So we can acknowledge the validity of the historical method, even while we understand its limitations. The principal limitation in this case, being, that historical investigation assumes that the supernatural does not exist for the purpose of its investigation, without giving any reason to believe that the supernatural does not exist. It’s a practical consideration employed by historians, and rightly so.
The pursuit of formulating comprehensive theories of everything, though, will not be able to rule out the supernatural from the get go, like the historian does, however. So a very different methodology is in place. That creates a tension, since the comprehensive theorist must attempt to integrate information from a variety of sources: theological, historical, scientific, philosophical, and weave this information together into what is supposed to be more or less a coherent whole. The comprehensive theorist, then, may accept a proposition that the historian, by her lights, considers highly implausible, because that proposition solves a philosophical problem that is more problematic than the historical one. Anyone doing comprehensive theory will have to bite some bullets, so its always a choice between which bullets to bite.
Christians (of the sort of Christianity that is most represented on this site) believe some claims that, on the face it, are ludicrous: that a Jewish carpenter was raised from the dead 2000 years ago and that in that action, God was attempting to do something on the behalf of all humanity. What would possibly drive someone to believe something so insane? Well, the fact that this belief is an aspect of a comprehensive theory, and that the comprehensive theory that the belief is an aspect of has more going for it, in the opinion of the Christian, than any competing comprehensive theory that he or she has yet encountered. That’s the only way to evaluate comprehensive theories: in relation to other comprehensive theories.
So, my claim is not that the Christian sets out to do a historical investigation and on the basis of that historical investigation, comes to believe that it is likely that scripture is true, jesus rose from the dead, etc etc. Rather the Christian finds him- or herself in a community that, hopefully, has these three features: 1. Intellectually: a comprehensive theory that has explanatory power for the universe we live in. 2. Morally: the community embodies and exemplifies a lifestyle that demonstrates peace, love, harmony, and justice in a world characterized by violence, destruction, and injustice. 3. Experientially: the Christian finds him or herself experiencing the divine in the context of the community.
If those three things are in place, I think they supply good reason for the Christian to at least take seriously the claims the community is making, such as: Jesus rose from the dead, scripture is sufficiently accurate, etc. If those three things aren’t in place, and in particular the 2nd one has been conspicuously absent from a huge proportion of the christian community, past and present, it seems to me that belief in Christianity is probably irrational.
The attempt to base Christian faith on historical evidence is a dead end. Historians have given us Jesus as cynic sage, Jesus as zealot revolutionary, Jesus as peasant, Jesus as apocalyptic, Jesus as non-apocalyptic, so on and so forth. Confronted with this array of disagreement, I am reminded of an off-the-cuff remark I once heard a well-known historian say: “Socrates and Jesus… two individuals about whom we know almost nothing about.” That is what the historian, as a historian should say. But the Christian, in her attempt to formulate a comprehensive theory of everything, may come to a very different conclusion, and be quite reasonable in doing so.
This has been a wonderful conversation, but it’s putting me considerably behind on my schoolwork, so I will give you respite from my incessant chattering, if I can at all help it.
Historical Investigation and Christians
I think history is replete with examples of Christians appealing to history in defense of their faith. Granted, it wasn’t the only warrant, however, it was significant. Paul refers to traditions/practises/beliefs held by the church which were normative. He reasoned from a historical document for belief in Christ.
The second century apologists argued from history that Christianity was legitimate. Vincent, the fifth century monk, reasoned that Orthodox belief was verified by what was believed always, everywhere and by all (antiquity, consensus, universal). History has played, plays and will play a significant role in our investigation. The biblical text needs to come under historical criticism, but it shouldn’t stop there. It should be critiqued grammatically as well.
Historical investigation, rather than dismissing the supernatural, attempts to explain the events surrounding the supernatural. It is not necessarily making a judgment regarding the supernatural, but neither does it dismiss it. In such, we can have a very accurate view of who Jesus Christ was, who others said he was, how he self-identified, etc. This is as important for the Christian as it is for others. Unfortunately, many have a sort of historical amnesia.
In regards to what Andrew is saying about emerging theology, it must take place in a community, but that community should not be narrow. It would seem to me that it needs the historical community and the contemporary community as well as the global community. But, I would think that whatever theology emerges it should be anchored in history and the biblical text.
What is my heart?
Steve, I hope you are catching up with your schoolwork. I feel (in my heart) that I should reply even if you are not.
When I say I feel something in my heart I am expressing the unexplainable in entirely subjective terms. This is close to the heart (sorry) of the history versus community tradition argument throughout this thread. Communities in faith (any tradition) share a perceived common belief, or enough of one to remain alive and even propagate and grow across generations. These communities will undoubtably meet your three criterion.
I am a very young child joining a Christain community meeting these criterion, or I am an adult finding myself in this new environment. In both cases I have deep feelings ‘in my heart/mind/soul/imagination’ about God, love and being (more tainted by rationalisations in the adult me I suspect). I am surrounded by good people (more in some churches than others) and intense sensations (more in some churches than others) and I start to give my feelings names. In the modern evangelical Christian environment I will call the presence in my heart/mind/soul/imagination Jesus, what else?
Yes, this is influenced by generations of Bible based tradition but had I been born into a Muslim family I would have named that presence Allah. The tags, the names and the language are sourced on the experiences of traditioned generations.
I do not have any significant argument with any of the comments in this thread regarding the differences between the history of the actual events and the evolution of the traditioned communities.
I simply do not believe that God cares how we believe in Him. Those who have chosen to follow the belief that he became man, died to save us and was resurrected and was called Jesus, and has up to three facets are welcome in His Kingdom. Those who believe an Angel delivered a new message to Mohammed are also welcome, as are those who remain faithful to the ways of Abraham and Moses and call themselves Jews. I see no need to condemn in God’s name people who believe in Him or Her as a Sun God or an Earth Godess or follow the Buddha’s example just because of the writings in a book.
My heart tells me that is not and has never been God’s intention, but that it is OK for those who believe it because He loves us all. He will be present as a resurrected Jesus in our Christian hearts because that is what we need of him. He will even bring about the end of times and raise the chosen for those that need that to be true, but all other traditions will be accommodated likewise. Because He is God and can do anything and everything and He is a loving God who has no need to hurt any of us simply because of what our weak human hearts have told us to believe. He will be present in an unfound Amazonian tribe’s collective heart as whatever they want to call him. The book is only necessary for Christians because we have spent nearly 2000 years making it necessary, but it need not be the basis of our future theology.
The common ground for all identifiable derivations of the cult of Jesus is a belief in God as being his Father and our Father. It is the Father that warms my heart but I remain happy to follow the guidance of the Son in the community to which he belongs. I would be glad to share the same space as an equal in God’s eyes with anyboby else who professes to feel his presence in any other name. I would be overjoyed at a theology that could reflect this.
I simply do not believe th
Albannach,
Jesus is what distinguishes Christianity from other religions. No honest scholar challenges his historical existence. We simply have too many historical documents (no matter how contested) that testify to his life and are written relatively soon after his death/resurrection. What is contested his the historicity of his resurrection. Nevertheless, it is his resurrection that is the foundation of Christianity. Without it, Christianity would not exist in any significant manner.
I like how Burridge and Gould (King’s College London) have put it well in their recent book Jesus Now and Then:
This is significant due in part with the understanding of resurrection from Plato to Paul. Tom Wright has a good discussion of this in his book The Resurrection of the Son of God. Resurrection, in large measure to Jews and Pagans, was simply a theory, something hoped for rather than something empirically demonstrable. Jesus’ bodily resurrection and subsequent appearances that sparked a tremendous, ultimately global, movement demonstrated the power of God as the giver of life and hope. Granted, our evidence for this is the Scripture and what we can ascertain from them as early Christian belief/oral tradition. But, as one theologian has interjected, the only Jesus we can rely upon is the one presented in the four gospels and there is sufficient cause to believe that they are reliable.
Ultimately, in spite of a reliable historical record, the question comes down to who I am willing to believe Jesus was. However, a part of answering that question must be an exploration of who he said he was, who those around him said he was and who others have said he was. Along with that an exploration of what he did is needed. In doing such an exploration I think Christians would conclude that Jesus is the Word made flesh, resurrected and giver of life. He is not an exclusive Christian savior, but rather the savior of all humanity. He has not simply died for the so-called elect, but for all.
If we believe this then we must not only give intellectual assent to it but also live in a manner that would produce a corresponding change in behavior. This is where Christians have failed miserably and have given others the perception that Christianity is means of social control rather than a life altering force that brings positive change to the world. We should see that change in the way in which we treat others and God’s creation, but we haven’t.
Our narrative has not coalesced with his and as a result we see a discontinuity with the historical testimony of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The same can be said with other religions as well. There simply must be some intersection of religious others with the person of Jesus. In many ways, we who confess that we are Christians might be just as lost as those who confess other beliefs.
I think you are asking great question that challenge us. Keep them coming.
More than Belief
I’m mostly with Michael on this. But if the trail is not too old and cold by now, perhaps I could add a few comments.
Albannach, I’m sure God doesn’t condemn us for what we believe in. I believe in the sun (I even see it some days), the Devil and all sorts of things, but I don’t worship them. Christianity is more than believing in something, more than just following a creed. It’s not about faith in created things, the sun, a message delivered to Mohammad, or the ways of Buddha, Abraham or Moses. The uniqueness of the Christian faith is that it calls us to and promises us a personal and close (parent/child) relationship with God through faith in the risen Jesus Christ. This relationship then allows God’s Holy Spirit to transform our lives so that we can worship God in Spirit and Truth and love our neighbours as ourselves.This is belief in action, powered by God. It’s God coming to us, here and now, not us trying to work our way to Him by legalism, rituals, traditions, whatever. That’s why it’s unique in world religions and, because it’s God presencing Himself with us by His Spirit, it brings a power we can actually experience and work with. The disciples believed Jesus had risen, but it needed the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to birth the Church. This also makes the faith beyond (in the sense of more than) theology and intellectualism, and here my emphasis might differ from some others on this site. We will not emerge as the Church by a focus on academic discussion and reason, although both will need to play a part.
I’m not being dismissive of scripture here. Our Christian experience of God needs to be rooted, discipled and outworked. The heart, as others have said, can be deceptive. So it’s in the Bible that Christans down the ages have found the foundation for and confimation of their experiences of God. But scripture also provides the discipleship for our maturing as Christians and applying a check for our natural inclinations and experiences of the world (the created) that might lead us to sideline or corrupt our experiences of God (the creator). It will not avail us, therefore, to select only those aspects of the Bible which fit with our human inclinations. Christianity calls us not to be more human, but more Godly.
Because the New Testament has stood the test of critical analysis and is, as Michael says, the most reliable picture of Jesus we have we will need the fullness of its teaching if emerging church is going to mature into something that can contribute to bringing in the Kingdom of God. Yes, as Christians, we are in fellowship, in a sense in contact with the living God, we are His royal Priests, but we are also people of the Book
Heathen Grace
Hey Albannach,
Our small group just finished a three part series on the evidence for our faith, looking oh so briefly at the historical, textual, spiritual (1 John 5:6-9), and philosophical aspects. Perhaps I’ll write a bit someday about this last piece, but in a nutshell: if the concern of a religion is the reconciliation of the human and the divine, which mechanism works best? Actually, it seems to me that only one works at all, a sign of divine boldness and genius.
Having said this, what is the limit to the power of that mechanism? What is the smallest unit of faith in God’s grace that will save? I think you are right to challenge our predisposition to believe that God binds himself to only a single community (ours!). But I don’t think you need to challenge the exclusivity of the Gospel mechanism in order to include other communities. In this vein I present the following article.
PaiX
Heathen Grace
The other night Raquel, a member of my small group, recounted some conversations she had had with her Muslim friends. “They believe they are destined for destruction,” she claimed, “but hope that their submission to God’s requirements may move him to rescue them from their fate.”
The story stunned me. I had already suspected that the current spate of murderous action / pious one-upmanship in the Muslim world is an unexamined admission that the idea that the imperfect can win perfection for itself is a fraud. But there was a new element here: unwarranted favor. If one just replaced the mechanism for obtaining such favor from the actions of the unholy to the action of the holy – and placed works in their proper place as a response to grace (Eph. 2:10!) – Moslems would be good candidates for salvation. I wondered, if the Gospel could be communicated to Moslems by some other means than by Christians, if it simply sprouted out of the ground, without all the bad blood of bad religion, would Moslems say, “Aha! What Good News! This is just what we suspected must exist?”
It reminded me of Job, out in some eddy from the main Judeo-Christian stream, who nevertheless saw Jesus more clearly than any Jew from antiquity, and placed his trust in him. Through raw philosophy he deduced Christ, if not his name. Similarly, Hebrews Chapter 11 gives us a long list of people who, although they knew neither Jesus’ name nor accomplishment, embraced the salvation he won for them. It seems God’s grace works pre-facto as well as post-facto. Can we presume that it can work ex-facto? If “Gentiles…do instinctively the things of the Law,” shouldn’t they be capable of instinctively doing the thing of the more fundamental revelation: the Gospel? Especially so if one believes the Law can only work because of the Gospel – in fact points straight toward the Gospel the way a recipe attempts to capture the essence of an apple pie.
In this realm, the achievement that grace allows faith far exceeds my conventional understanding of it. The only limit I can detect is that of revelation coupled with God’s direct appeal to the heart. And now we’ve come full circle, because if the sacred lies in God’s historic interaction with communities and not in any text, if it is the message that makes a prophet, if every member of a believing community carries that message and is therefore a covenantal prophet, if the Word indeed is in the mouth, if the message can be relayed by both the unliving and the unwitting, then Canon must sprout wherever God may walk. Who will then declare where he hasn’t been, or what his Word cannot achieve?
©2004 M Richter
Theologically Liberal Protestantism
Hi Albannach, I’m not getting as much work done as I’d like, but oh well… I’d love to dialogue further about the idea that the “heart” is a valid source of knowledge, as well as the very notion of a “heart” itself. It seems the trustworthiness of the individual’s consciousness has come upon hard times since Freud’s discovery of the subconscious, with its sub-rational drives and motivations that too easily shape what we think to be rational. It also seems that the notion of a “heart,” which has roots in very Cartesian assumptions (“I think therefore I am”) is in trouble. The 20th c. was not kind to des Cartes, and a whole host of people have challenged, and I think defeated, the whole notion that there is such a thing as an “I” that is distinct from one’s linguistic community. (This is the whole notion of a “decentered” subject). I’d like to pursue that further … perhaps at another time.
Anyways, what most interests me is that I’m unable to distinguish your position from turn-of-the-twentieth-century theological liberalism. If I understand you rightly, you’re advocating something similar to the following: 1. The idea that there is an “essence” of religion that all religions and religious consciousness shares when the historical particularities have been stripped away. 2. A deemphasis of the historical particularities that accompany religious consciousness. 3. Something along the lines of “the fatherhood of god and the brotherhood of man” to put it in Adolf von Harnack’s (sexist) terms as the content of that universal essence. 4. Personal experience as the touchstone and source of religious knowledge (a la Schleiermacher).
All of this is 1910 protestant theological liberalism. But the twentieth century has not treated protestant liberal theology any better than it did desCartes! Scholars of religion, and many theologians too, just don’t believe that there is an “essence” common to religion, or that you can de-emphasize historical particularity or separate religious consciousness from historical particularity, or that religious experience is prior to religious tradition. If you are comfortable holding the sort of position that you are advocating, that’s well and fine, but if you’re suggesting it to us here on this site that we should reconsider the directions we’re pursuing for something more along the lines of Schleiermacher, von Harnack, or Ernst Troeltsch, I think that would be a mistake. To many of us, theological liberalism is played out: been-there-done-that. It’s been devastatingly critiqued by philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of religion, as well as by the massive influx of people out of that worldview (and those churches) since the 1950s. (Which is NOT to say that there is not rich meaning and spiritual experience in those denominations, it’s just to say it feels like an intellectual dead-end to many of us). But … so does theological conservatism, for many reasons that I think you and I would agree on. Anyhow, it seems to me, intellectually, any promise towards pushing Xian theology forward will be “post-liberal,” and “post-evangelical,” “beyond liberalism and fundamentalism.” But everyone working in this fuzzy middle-ground takes historical particularity very, very seriously.
But having said that, it is a crucially important task for those working within particularist traditions to dialogue and reconceive the status and standing of those outside one’s own tradition. I think any formula that says something like “Christianity is right and Buddhism is wrong” is ludicrous, since what we call “Christianity” and “Buddhism” are complex mixtures of countless beliefs and practices, some of them undoubtedly right, some of them undoubtedly wrong. Any formula that says “all religions are right” is equally ludicrous. All we can do is look at concrete religious communities, roll up our sleeves and analyze what seems to be right and wrong in each one, and on what basis we think so, in dialogue and humility, realizing that all of our “religions” are merely our best attempts at interpretating the cosmos, attempts that are riddled through and through with both truth and error, and we should celebrate what appears humanizing, constructing, peaceful and just in all traditions, Christian and otherwise, religious and otherwise, and condemn all that is exploitative, unjust, dehumanizing in all traditions, Christians and otherwise, religious and otherwise.
Theology limited by the mind of 'Man' shock
I don’t want to drag this topic out any more, it’s been a while after all but……..
are not philosophers and scholars mere men offering up opinions for others to scrutinize and challenge?
Is not the creater of the Universe and all else we can ever conceptualise likely to be God?
Can the former ever know the ‘mind’ of the latter? I would need a lot more convincing to accept that anything at all in this context can be brushed aside as ‘ludicrous’.
Is it not ludicrous that despite having 2000 years to convince a needy world of the astonishing message of Christianinty, fewer and fewer are convinced? Something is missing and it won’t be found in any book.
Understandable vs. Understood
I’m still trying to decipher what you wrote. You seem to be arguing for God’s interest and perhaps admission in the formation of theology. I’d like to hear how you distinguish God’s thoughts from people’s thoughts.
Are prophets really greater than “philosphers and scholars?” Are they not also “mere men,” and does not Scripture instruct us how to test prophecy (actually, on balance, there is comparatively little there on testing philosophy or teaching within the community of faith). So it seems the processes of divine revelation and of earthly sense are not so far apart as it first seems. One group claims that their understanding comes from inside; the other from the outside. Insofar as they influence a community in much the same way, why prefer one to the other?
Now let me follow your suggestion and look at the issue from God’s perspective (‘scuse me God, may I have your seat a moment?) If a creature cannot understand the mind of the Creator, why has the Creator expended so much effort to be understood? Just because he can’t be completely understood doesn’t mean he isn’t understandable, just like numbers are infinite, but one can still count them. Even in our human relationships, we prize increasing understanding of one another even though we know the process is never ending.
I’d argue that nothing is missing from the Book and in fact that something can be found in an astonishing number of other books and places. You and Steve both seem to agree on that!
Worshiping at the altar of Minerva
These are good points Motomataru and I apologise for my tendency to disguise my arguments.
I have been striving throughout this thread to seek an opening that allows for the validity of the non-scholarly contribution to an emerging theology. Being in the Book appears not to be a guarantee of reliability depending on the version I read or what I and others feel. Being a peer reviewed and studiously researched book about the Book appears equally unreliable. Similarly, Christian history has moved through fashionable phases and politically and culturally influenced shades of belief for two thousand years, each phase and sect being certain of its validity.
My arguments earlier in this thread are trying to find the open ground between all these strongly held points of view; the clearings in the jungle where the light shines more brightly and growth is fastest. OST appears to me to be one of the few opportuninties in two thousand years to publicly and universally define a theology that could last another two thousand years or until the second coming, if that’s what you believe, whichever comes sooner.
I have also tried to suggest the possibility that God’s ‘apparant attempts to be understood’ are his/her way of telling us that he doesn’t need to be fully understood. To know him by any means is all that he requires. The academic/scientific world is viewed secularly as the level-headed antidote to the religious, yet here in this forum the arguments are constantly predicated on a scholarly/philisophical platform.
Before OST I found myself regulary in arguments where my version of Christianity was tautologically dismissed with arguments like, “I know the Book is right because it says so here, chapter and verse, in the Book, and that must be right because so and so agrees in this or that book about the Book”.
Of course you and Steve are right to get ‘in my face’ and challenge the historical and logical weakness of my position but is there enough bandwidth on this server to hear all the non-scholarly points of view? And will OST be open-ended?
Are all our thoughts God’s thoughts or is this the free will crunch? Perhaps nobody truely knows God and everybody fails miserably to understand Him because that is the price we have to pay for having the ability to question every aspect of our being. Or maybe we can separate will and thought so that all our thoughts are infact God’s thoughts too, and therefore all relevant, scholarly or not, prophets or not.
In the end I suspect that, as throughout history, no one thought or group of thoughts will prevail but strong free wills will forge an OST and other strong wills will break away and forge a less OST, and yet more will go underground and formulate a more OST.
Has anything changed in 2000 or 100,000 years?
Nomination of Candidate for Office of Canon
Your apology for disguising your arguments seemed to me less than heartfelt, Albannach, coming as it did on the heels of that reference to Minerva. For me, you’ll have to peel off another yet another layer of your disguise… :)
My “non-scholarly contribution” is to ask questions in the form of exposition, so I guess I’m not the one to quibble.
I need to go back to see exactly what sort of contribution it is that you feel ought to be included. But meanwhile I’ll ask again, what is your measure of validity? I don’t think it surprising that some require more, and others less, rigor in their discussion. This is, isn’t it?, a matter of faith at some level, so those of great and little faith are directed by Scripture not to despise each other. I’ll leave it to the apostle Paul to decide whether those of greater faith require more rigor or less…
It seems to me that you are at something of cross purposes to decry the historical standards by which theologian, scientist, and non-scholar have determined reliability, and then propose to develop a “Grand Universal Theology” that is reliable. Was their fault that they were not open enough, and our virtue that we supposedly are? I think that every idea requires a point of “closure” in order to be elevated to a belief, because, short omniscience, there is no way anyone can conclusively determine a belief’s reliability.
But, as I ironically realized as I was writing my post, Against Canon (Canon is that thing that determines reliability), there is Someone who is omniscient and who dwells (and speaks and works) inside of us. So we have a prospective canon that (miracle of miracles!) is both as objective as anything could possibly be and yet intimately connected to our individual personal experiences. But we have an agency problem here; namely, none of us is God Almighty and we are bound to screw up every revelation we relate – if for no reason other than, as the poet says, “the spoken word is a lie.” But this is in fact an area where reasons abound; you mention two possibilities in your post, little though I could wrap my head around them.
So I think the process Scripture itself both proposes and has been subjected to, and to which players named and unnamed in our historical narrative have been subjected to (most recently by ourselves, no less!) is ingenious! A sort of ballast of diversity, a counterbalancing of logs from which the fire rages, iron sharpening iron (the sharpest being sharpened by silk or grass), that fractious bride named Church whose honorable parts hasten to cover the unseemly ones lest they be shamed. The Word is active (not evolving – perhaps better to say increasing in resolution), because it is alive and not dead, and because we are alive and but agents of the Word. The Word may not change, but that doesn’t mean that it is not moving, rustling about in the mouths of its listeners in most provocative fashion.
I would warn that it is a mistake to attempt to create a true theology for the ages; it is enough just to make out what God is screaming at us right now. Pistos o logos, the Word is reliable, is repeated several times in the same book from which people attempt to canonize scripture. The phrase itself is relegated to something on the order of “a useful proverb says” in every translation I’ve looked at – I’m still seeking an explanation for that. If logos there is in fact the usual translation “Word,” Paul would be appear to be attributing divine reliability (pistos o theos is typically translated “God is faithful”) to non-scriptural sayings (particularly interesting where no saying is readily at hand, but scriptural truth is).
My contention is that the appearance is in fact correct. Scripture itself outlines a process of determining reliability of any revelation – written, spoken, dreamed or deduced from “mere” creation. Given their dynamic admission of their own writings and sayings into God’s Message, Paul and the other apostles and believers presumably used the very method they suggested to test what God might have been saying to them. In other words, the evidence is that they did as they taught. If so, pistos o logos makes a great candidate for a formula for attesting divine origination. Pistos o logos: the message God spoke to someone has been tested according to the process described in similarly tested records of what God spoke before and has been deemed reliable to the utmost application of our communal faith.
This is not Book validating Book; it is Author certifying a missive, not as perfect, but as reliable. It is much the same as the way he certifies (the Greek word is often translated “sealed” and then misapplied in a “seal the hatch against the Alien brood mother!” sort of way) those who receive it as reliable – namely, it is a process of redemption and sanctification of words. This is why the apostle John can claim, in unison with your call for “non-scholar contributions,” that a sincere believer needs no teacher, for every believer has been given the Spirit. That other apostle, Paul (and his Lord, if I remember correctly), reassures us that those who sincerely learn of the Spirit will remain in unity, as there is only one Spirit revealing one Word. I would even argue that no sincere seeker needs teacher or even what a true teacher might teach, inasmuch as the Spirit reveals and ministers to all without exception (more below), and inasmuch as the escape from the vicious cycle of unbelief is a Creator-requiring miracle. I am saying that we all were unbelievers at one time and that none of us can rightly claim that we came to God wholly under our own effort. But let me point out once more, with pride in my God, that all of this is in scripture itself, in plain sight.
As for your statement, “to know him by any means is all He requires,” I would agree if you meant something like “to apprehend and trust in God’s infinite ability to make us holy as he is holy is all He requires.” I actually don’t think that’s much. To expand upon my post, Heathen Grace, I illustrate as follows:
We know from Hebrews 11 that one does not need to be Christian to be reconciled to God. The unique mechanism by which grace rewards faith works across time, culture, level of revelation and, one presumes, any other dimension one may contemplate.
Although Hebrews 1 establishes the superiority of revelation in Jesus, it does not in fact (contrary to the claims of many) suggest that other revelation has lost the efficacy demonstrated later in that same book. If anything, the intent of the chapter is to connect the Gospel to all other revelation, and to assert that it is in fact the heart of all other revelation.
Inasmuch as other revelation may continue in places where Christ has never been declared, non-Christians may still get saved.
Come to think of it, even among those who have rejected the Gospel for some reason other than rebellion, what is to prevent them from believing non-specific revelation? I know believers who initially rejected the Christian message because of the nasty way in which it was first presented to them. What if they had nevertheless trusted that an unknown God had an unknown way to reconcile them to himself? Worked for Job… But I think they would agree: now it is sooo much better knowing the Way.
Here’s a story I told an ex? third degree Pagan priestess (whatever that is!) who has joined our fellowship. One night during prayer ministry after a community meal, a big Mr. T type guy in mohawk, feather, and vest over bare chest (the priestess apparently recognized whom I was talking about) claimed great accomplishments in a number of occult traditions. “But I’ve never seen any spirit, no matter how intimidating, stand against Jesus,” he said. I was shocked by how someone could share some of the same exact experiences as I, yet remain unreconciled to God. He had received all the revelation he needed, yet remained a miracle away from myself…
The prosecution rests m'lud
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