• Church, silence makes us an ally with the oppressors – it’s time to work for the full inclusion of our LGBT brothers and sisters. #justice
• Loving our LGBT friends while refusing to go to bat for them politically in society and our churches is pure bull****.
• Here’s an old post on why a gay “accepting” church merely perpetuates injustice while paying lip service to “love” bretttilford.com/2011/08/are-yo…
• It is not the words of your enemies that you will remember… but the silence of your friends – MLK youtube.com/watch?v=s30ZKj… #gayaffirming

Below is a 20min video I made as a followup to the facebook posts. I’ll also be blogging through A Time to Embrace this Summer to cover the biblical texts on this topic. I’d highly encourage you to purchase it and follow along.

As mentioned previously, I think the accusation of divine child abuse is a bit unfair when it comes to the penal-substitutionary atonement (PSA), however aside from that accusation, I do have a few theological issues with the theory.

First, I think the PSA is pretty intertwined with a literal reading of the Genesis creation account, which I now think is outdated in light of an evolutionary understanding of our origins. In many ways the early chapters of Genesis are absolutely central to the PSA because they contain the “why” behind the “what.” How many time have we heard a gospel presentation that begins with an explanation of how we’re fallen and separated from God? Theologically that’s Genesis 1-3 language. Of course, even without a literal reading of those stories you can still talk about sin, the wrath of God, and how Jesus took our place, but without a literal reading of that narrative undergirding it, it simply lacks the biblical “punch” it once did. This is especially true as it pertains to very specific doctrines that come straight out of those chapters – like Original Sin – which is also pretty central to the PSA theory.

The second issue is that the understanding of God embedded within this atonement theory is still quite violent – even without claims of divine child abuse. In the PSA narrative someone has to pay… with blood. God can’t just forgive because He’s bound by some sort of cosmic justice that requires a blood sacrifice be offered to atone for the sins of the people. Just let that sentence sink in. God is somehow “bound” to the need for a bloody sacrifice in order to forgive? What the hell is going on here? How did we go from a non-violent Jesus preaching Abba intimacy with a God who forgives before we even ask (parable of the Prodigal’s Son), to an understanding of the cross as a cosmic economic “transaction” where God requires a payment in order to justify his forgiveness. Technically that’s not even forgiveness. It’s also not the God I see revealed in Jesus.

Finally, as I mentioned in pt.1, I think our understanding of the atonement bleeds over into other parts of our theology, which means that a view of God as a vindictive patriarchal deity who needs a blood sacrifice in order to forgive, whether we’re conscious of it or not, ends up casting a shadow over our entire understanding of the Christian faith. At the risk of sounding dramatic, I believe this shadow (often disguised in language about God’s “justice”) becomes the theological justification for things like a downright sadistic doctrine of a literal/eternal/conscious hell where people are tortured with fire, an eschatology that looks forward to the day when Jesus comes back as a horsed bandit complete with a sword dripping in the blood of his enemies, and a supposedly “Christian” nation that believes in God ordained pre-emptive war which is alo rooted in Old Testament genocidal passages that should embarrass anyone who identifies themselves with the Judeo-Christian tradition. But rather than embarrassment at these passages we actually defend them because we honestly think this is who God is. On the contrary, I think we should take Jesus at his word when he says that if we’ve seen him then we’ve seen the Father, rather than backpedaling on the forgiveness and love of God we’ve come to see in Jesus with comments about how we have to “balance” the love of God’s with his “justice” (which again is normally our code word for violence).

Obviously, I think this atonement theory was a mistake in the history of our tradition. However, what’s strange is that some people feel that by questioning it, I’m questioning an “essential truth’ of the Bible. My problem with this is that fact that the PSA theory was barely mentioned for the first 1,000 years of church history, so anyone who claims that you can’t be a Christian without holding to this supposed “crown jewel” of atonement theories simply doesn’t have church history on their side.

For those who are curious in years past I resonated with the moral influence theory and more recently with Rene Girard’s scapegoat theory of the atonement. I’m reading two of his books now: Violence of the Sacred and Deceit, Desire, and the Novel so there may be a post coming up on those in the weeks to come.

The version of the atonement that I grew up with as a conservative evangelical was the penal-substitutionary atonement. The unique claim here isn’t simply that Jesus died for my sins, but that Jesus died in my place. That’s where we get the “substitutionary” language in the title. To expand it a bit further the idea is that we deserved the wrath of God because we’re “fallen” (think Garden of Eden), so Jesus takes our place, satisfies the wrath of God, enabling us to be forgiven without God sacrificing his standards of justice. A common verse to back up some of this thinking is Hebrews 10:1-4, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us…”

This perspective get’s taken to task sometimes by folks who claim this looks like divine child abuse. You have the angry dad who has to take out his rage on someone, so instead of turning it on us, he “mercifully” takes it out on Jesus. It’s obviously a rather twisted family relationship on display. While I do think there’s something violent about this view (as I’ll discuss in my next post), it’s important to understand the deeply “trinitarian” (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) understanding of God that’s right at the heart of this theory of atonement. Viewed through a trinitarian lens, it’s not quite fair to view this as divine child abuse – as though Jesus is somehow weaker or beneath God the Father, and being forced into this against his will. Rather the idea is that Jesus, while fully human, is fully God as well. Viewed in this way it’s God himself, giving himself, to save us from himself. Which preaches quite nicely you have to admit.

Historically, there have been other theories of the atonement (Cristus Victor and the Ransom Theory come to mind) that were actually more popular early on in church history, but among conservative Protestants penal-substitution is far and away the crown jewel of atonement theories. Which raises the question: why do conservative folks get upset when this understanding of the atonement is called into question? I think the reason is the nature of how interrelated theologies come to be. For example, the way we think about God will have a profound impact on the way we view Jesus which will in turn impact our view of the church, Spirit, sin, gospel, etc. In other words, it’s not as simple as switching out atonement theories like flavors of the month because of the dramatic ripple effect this produces throughout our belief system.

For most folks the messiness of this process is reason enough to avoid questioning something like the penal-substitutionary atonement. However, it also explains why those of us who have ventured outside the confines of conservative Protestant theology inevitably end up taking a good hard look at our understanding of the atonement. With a dramatic shift in our understanding of the God revealed in Jesus comes an openness to a dramatic shift in other areas – including the atonement.

More on this to come in part two.

My first understanding of a pure faith was limited to my local church. Like most children, I believed that we were the pure ones – we had the truth. Of course every kid grows up and realizes that their view of the world was very small and limited, and that for all we had right we also had much that was wrong.

In my teens years I viewed the pure faith as found within the charismatic tradition. We were the folks truly experiencing God – we had the secret – the Spirit.

Third, I found it within the larger conservative tradition. We were the defenders of the faith of the apostles, unlike those straying liberals.

Fourth, I believed the pure faith could be found in versions prior to emperor Constantine. We went wrong when we got in bed with the empire, but before that we were golden.

Fifth, I thought it was in a pre-Pauline version of Christianity. He never even mentioned the sermon on the mount so what did he know!

Finally, I thought it could be found in the pure words of Jesus. However, scholars debate over who exactly the Jesus of history was and what sayings, from the gospel accounts, can be attributed to him as opposed to the person/community that wrote the actual accounts we have in our Bibles. There’s some diversity of opinion on this, however most agree that it’s not as simple as reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John and assuming this will give you a “pure” understanding of Christ.

So now I realize, it will never be found. There is no such thing as a “pure” version of Christianity. It has man’s fingerprints on it from the beginning.

Of course, It’s a religious tradition that I still love very deeply but I have to admit that it’s exactly that – a tradition. It doesn’t have the divine pinned down and fully revealed. It is forever trying to name the un-namable and comprehend what it cannot. Maybe for some this confession makes me a betrayer of the faith. But in my mind this humble posture of seeking the divine, rather than thinking we’ve got the niche on all things religious, is actually a humility that’s drastically needed in the church today.

So I’m no longer seeking a pure Christianity and I’m skeptical of anyone who claims to have found it. I’m inclined to think that the messy and incredibly diverse tradition we currently have is more interesting anyway.

Here’s how I’m not going to respond. I’m not going to go the route of criticizing the Bible. I do have a high view of Scripture, however as you’ve probably been able to tell from previous posts, I don’t believe the Bible is some sort of perfect document without any human “fingerprints” so to speak. I make no attempts to defend biblical genocide, slavery, and homophobia. However, as you’ll see, even someone who believes the Bible is a perfect revelation from God, still needs to read broadly in, not only Christian theology, but in secular literature as well. Here’s why: although one may believe the Bible is a perfect revelation from God that doesn’t mean one is a perfect interpreter of that revelation.

Exhibit A is the fact that the Protestant Reformation has caused an almost unceasing splintering of the church. Why? Because even though we claim the Scriptures, as opposed to church tradition, as our foundation it didn’t change the fact that we’re not just readers of the Bible – we’re interpreters of the Bible. Given enough time we’ll come to disagree and when we disagree, history has shown that we’ve been unable to stay in fellowship with one other. A sad state indeed.

So what does this have to do with reading books other than the Bible? Here’s my pitch: if you read little else than the Bible you’ll continue to read the same old passages in the same old ways – it’s not until you begin to interact with great thinkers & writers of the past that you’re opened up to new readings of the text. Take the story of Abraham and the attempted sacrifice of his son Isaac. My guess is you’ve read it and you have a certain interpretation of the story. However, it’s not until you have a profound life change, for example having a child yourself, or that you read someone else’s interpretation that you’re able to, in a sense, read the passage again for the first time. For example, take Rob Bell’s interpretation that the story is primarily about God and the fact that he’s trying to show Abraham that He’s different than other god’s. Child sacrifice was the norm in that day and so God is asking him to do something that might have been somewhat commonplace, however by “staying his hand” God is transcending and abolishing the violent view of deity that Abraham held. Or take Soren Kierkegaard’s interpretation from Fear and Trembling that understands the story as primarily about Abraham and his mighty act of “faith.” However, this isn’t a faith taken in the usual moral sense of believing good and safe “religious” things – this is a faith that transcends the ethical altogether. It is an ethical law unto itself. He posits that either Abraham is a monster or an absolute hero – but he can’t be both. Pastors how would you respond if your parishioner showed up saying that God had told them to sacrifice their child? Those are two brilliant and thought provoking interpretations, however my point in mentioning them is that they’re perspectives I would never have come to on my own.

I think this naive reading of the Bible has hurt us in two ways. For many of us it’s turned us into arrogant lug heads. We think that by reading the Bible we’re somehow smarter than everyone else. We think that the Bible gives us unfettered access to the very mind of God and unfortunately we do real damage in people’s lives by stating our interpretations of God’s word – as the “final” Word. In saying this my purpose isn’t to downgrade or underestimate the Scriptures themselves, but rather to highlight our own human frailty as interpreters of the sacred words.

Second, for many this anti-intellectual stance has turned the Bible into a complete bore. We read the same scriptures in the same way and wonder why it’s not challenging us anymore. My suggestion isn’t that we give up on the Bible, but rather that we read as broadly as possible and let those brilliant thinkers shock and challenge us into reading the Bible with completely new lenses.

Based on his description of the atmosphere surrounding the conversation between religion and science, it’s hard to believe that Whitehead was writing eighty-plus years ago. Whitehead describes the “controversialists” on either side of the science and religion debate who feel that these two disciplines are so fundamentally pitted against each other that to embrace the authority of one is necessarily to reject the other. This is why the word conflict characterizes the relationship between these two behemoths. They seem to be the immovable rock and irresistible force of the modern world. However, Whitehead believed that science and religion could not only “get along” so to speak, but that they were actually mutually enriching. His basis for this perspective was grounded in an evolutionary view of both science and religion, which considered their principles timeless (the observation of natural processes for science and a focus on aesthetic and moral values for religion), but their doctrines as “...in a state of continual development.” (181) Whitehead goes on to list a few examples of this “continual development” beginning with the religious tradition.

Early Christians believed that the return of Christ and the end of the world would occur within their lifetime, of course later generations had to reinterpret and adjust their beliefs to fit reality. In the year 535 a Christian monk named Cosmas wrote a book titled Christian Topography which, based on a literal interpretation of certain biblical texts, deduced that the earth was a flat parallelogram whose length was twice that of it’s width. In the 17th century a Jesuit named father Petavius showed that theologians in the first three centuries of Christianity used phrases and statements that in the fifth century would have been deemed heretical. In the same century (17th) the doctrine of the rotation of the earth was opposed by a Catholic tribunal. In the 19th century the doctrine of an old earth distressed religious people, while in the 20th century it was the doctrine of evolution. Of course, it hasn’t only been religious thought whose doctrines have undergone numerous updates in years past, however Whitehead doesn’t delve as deeply into scientific examples in chapter twelve of Science and the Modern World for the simple reason that the majority of the preceding chapters were focused on this topic. However he does offer a quick summation with the following quip, “Science is even more changeable than theology. No man of science could subscribe without qualification to Galileo’s beliefs, or to Newton’s beliefs, or to all his own scientific beliefs of ten years ago.” (182) He goes on to discuss the insight that in both theology and science certain distinctions and modifications are made through the years so that when a statement is made today it’s understood quite differently than it would have been five hundred, or fifteen hundred, years ago.

For example, logicians assert that a proposition is either true or false – there is no middle ground. However, we now understand that reality is more complex. Often a proposition expresses an important truth, but it isn’t until later that we realize the “truth” was dependent upon certain assumptions which turn out to be misguided in one aspect or another. For example, Galileo said that the earth moves and that the sun is fixed; the Inquisition said that the earth is fixed and the sun moves; while Newtonian astronomers (adopting an absolute theory of space) asserted that both the earth and the sun are moving. Whitehead explains that each of these three statements are “true” provided that you have fixed your sense of ‘rest’ and ‘motion’ by the way required in whichever of the three statements above you’ve chosen to adopt. Another example, is the paradoxical “particle/wave” theories of light. Newton theorized that light traveled in a stream of particles, while Christiaan Huyghens asserted that light traveled in waves. In the 18th century Newton was believed. In the 19th century Huyghens was believed. In the 20th the debate continued as scientist’s awaited a wider vision that reconciles the two perspectives, which as we come into the 21st century, may occur based on changes in our perspective on matter and what constitutes reality at it’s most basic level.

Whitehead felt that we should apply this same principle of “waiting for a wider vision” to areas where science and religion overlap, and thus conflict, with each other. So rather than hastily abandoning doctrines that we have good reason to believe, which inevitably leads to mutual anathemas, Whitehead believed that a clash of doctrines (whether within religion, within science, or between the two disciplines) need not signal a disaster, but rather an opportunity. He states, “The clash is a sign that there are wider truths and finer perspectives within which a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science will be found.” (184)

To summarize Whitehead’s position, he believed that science and religion really are two separate projects, focused on two different aspects of our lived reality. With that truth in mind, they should be willing to submit to the other’s area of expertise. Thus in all matters of the observation of physical phenomena, religion should submit itself to the findings of the scientist, and in matters of moral and aesthetic values science should leave that to the ruminations of the theologian (and perhaps – the philosopher). Of course, as the 21st century is showing, the trick is getting the “controversialists” on either side to agree to these boundaries in principle, and then to begin the messy process of negotiating where those boundary lines fall. I’ll close with a few quotes from Whitehead on this topic.

“On the one side there is the law of gravitation, and on the other the contemplation of the beauty of holiness. What one side sees, the other misses; and vice-a-versa. Consider, for example, the lives of John Wesley and of Saint Francis of Assisi. For physical science you have in these lives merely ordinary examples of the operation of the principles of physiological chemistry, and of the dynamics of nervous reactions: for religion you have lives of the most profound significance in the history of the world.” (184)

“Consider this contrast: When Darwin or Einstein proclaim theories which modify our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying that there is another defeat for science, because it’s old ideas have been abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been gained. Religion will not regain it’s old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. It’s principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.” (188)

“Religion is the reaction of human nature to it’s search for God. The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every modern instinct of critical reaction. This is fatal; for religion collapses unless it’s main positions command immediacy of assent.” (191)

“Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things: something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal and the hopeless quest. The immediate reaction of human nature to the religious vision is worship.” (191)

“The fact of the religious vision, and it’s history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.” (192)

“The worship of God is not a rule of safety – it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.” (192)

—

I was Hope’s youth pastor for her highschool years and like many teens they were very challenging for her, however there were a few beautiful things that stuck out to me about Hope.

(As others have said) First, she was incredibly focused, hard-working and determined to get where she wanted to get in life. She had a clear plan and she was willing to put in the work to get there. I found that a rarity for someone her age, and I appreciated her tenacity.

But second, her tenacity was balanced by a deep focus on the relationships in her life. I think she realized that what really matters most is people, and so she loved all of you very much. I could go on about her life, but others before me have done a far better job of that than I ever could so instead I want to offer answers to, two questions.

The first question is this: where is God in our suffering?

Most of us believe in a God who is “out there” and in control of the universe. We envision the world as a big machine and so God is the person pulling the strings and adjusting the levers of the universe – keeping it all running. At times this idea of God can be very comforting to us, because it offers the idea that someone is in control: nothing is happening without a purpose, so within the craziness of life there is some sense of order.

This can be very comforting until tragedy strikes because then all of the questions come flooding over us. If God is “in control” then why didn’t he stop this? If God is really pulling the levers of the universe then did he in fact, cause tragedy to happen and if that’s the case, how can we really call him good? These are important and extremely difficult questions for people of faith to answer but I think we may have some insight in the Christian tradition by looking to Jesus. If we embrace the idea that Jesus, was in some mysterious way God among us, then this entire view of God as “out there” in the “heavens” somewhere is perhaps, not a very Christian way of thinking about God. Perhaps the problem isn’t our questions, which are all spot on, but actually the way we view God.  In Jesus we have a view of God that offers the following answer to the question, where is God in the midst of our suffering, “he’s right here, suffering alongside us.” In the Christian tradition God dies on the cross, God loses, God undergoes suffering. Obviously, this isn’t a rational argument that explains away suffering but is a way of viewing God that may bring us some comfort.

The second question I wanted to turn our thoughts toward today is: How can we better embrace the beauty of life here and now?

I think too often we fail to embrace the beauty and fragility of life and it’s not until we’re sitting here that we’re forced to admit to ourselves that there will come a time when it will end. This is why death, especially of a young person can be so traumatic because it catches us off our guard, it blindsides us and at least for a moment it forces us to confront the idea of our own mortality. We don’t like to think about our own mortality. Which is why, we spend our lives suppressing and running away from the reality of death. It represents our greatest anxiety – something literally unimaginable. That’s scary and it makes sense why we avoid it. But here’s the trick, it’s not until we face that reality head on, that we’re able to fully embrace our life here and now.

What’s interesting is that Christian tradition which I embrace, has at our worst, been guilty of this as well, but in a different way. At times we’ve been part of the problem by saying something like, “This life is just practice, a warmup, or a dress-rehearsal for the one to come – life begins at death.” But the trick here is that by turning this life into a waiting room, we again drained it of it’s meaning and beauty.

So I want to reject both of the options above: the first being a refusal to embrace life because we’re pretending that it will go on forever, or in the second example, a refusal to embrace life because we’re saying life doesn’t begin until we die.

You see, I think we’ve approached the Bible, our religious traditions, and perhaps even this memorial service with the wrong question, we came asking, “Is there life after death?” when what we should have been asking is this, “IS THERE LIFE BEFORE DEATH?” To me that is the key question and I believe that in Jesus we see the answer, and it is a resounding “Yes!” Jesus said, I have come that you may have life and life to the fullest. So what might this life look like?

Perhaps it’s a bit simplistic and old fashioned, but I’d say life and God are best experienced in the act of love. When we turn to the people on our right and our left and say you are beautiful. It’s the times we spend lingering over a meal with the people that mean everything to us. It’s the moments when we take a stand for justice and peace and goodness in this world. At it’s best, the Christian tradition gives us hope in the face of death and the courage to embrace life.

Let us pray.

I’ve done some reading on the debate between those who hold to an inerrant view of Scripture vs. those who admit it has errors, historical fallacies, and even some diverse theological viewpoints. Again it’s an interesting debate but a good 50 years past it’s prime. Basically every professor of religion at every major University in the U.S. agrees that it isn’t accurate to speak of an “inerrant” Bible. This is also the position of the vast majority of seminaries in the U.S. and Europe. Most of these folks are Christians – just not the conservative variety. The question is no longer “Does the Bible have errors, contradictions, and differing theological viewpoints?” but rather, “What does it mean for our faith now that we know this to be the case? In what sense can we say the Bible the ‘Word of God’? How does this impact our search for Truth within it’s pages?” Difficult, but great questions.

I know some of what I’ve written above will be difficult, and potentially offensive, to many of my Evangelical brothers and sisters. However, my purpose in stating it in such a straight forward way is to help us realize how far out of touch we are with, not only the best minds of our culture (scientists, historians, philosophers, theologians, etc.) but the wider culture as well. I also realize that for many of us this is simply too big a leap to make. We literally can’t imagine a Christianity that is formed, not in opposition to the realities stated above, but with these truths fully accepted and integrated into the heart of the tradition. If that’s the case, then my final plea to you is this: if you’re not willing to go through the pain of integrating these ideas (and others like them) for yourself, then please consider doing it for your kids. Because when you raise your children in a way that causes them to be anti-science and anti-intellectual (either through overt gestures and statements or more passive means) then you’re setting them up for a difficult decision later in life (i.e. college or adulthood). This will be a situation where they may feel they have to choose between, on the one hand, a pre-modern world view (natural/supernatural distinction, three tier universe, and an anthropomorphic {human-esque} understanding of God) that their religious tradition adheres to, and on the other hand a post-modern worldview that’s moved beyond some of these concepts. I’m optimistic there’s a third way – namely, an understanding of Christianity that’s come to grips with a post-modern view of the world, however I don’t know think this is something we’re helping our children transition to very well.

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P.S. This is in no way a secret post to my parents. Part of the reason I’m a Christian today is because they not only provided a great example of what love can look like, but the permission to think for myself and work out an understanding of faith that I can believe in.

Although it’s a simple idea, the concept of hermeneutics (i.e. the study of the theory of interpretation), has profound implications for how we approach the text and our faith as a whole. During the enlightenment we adopted this idea that we could get beyond ourselves (emotions, histories, psychological makeup, cultural biases, etc.) and engage the text with pure reason: like a scientist approaching his experiment: cold, unattached, and uninvolved. In this way, we believed we could discern the clear meaning of a particular text. We could get rid of ourselves and crawl into the brain of say, Paul, John or whoever the writer may have been, and see what they “really” meant. However, at the heart of post-modernism is a deep critique of this idea of “pure reason” and, drawing on that insight post-modern studies in hermeneutics current thinkers have deeply questioned the ability we humans have to understand “the clear meaning” of texts – particularly complex scientific, legal, and religious texts. The reality is that we aren’t uninterested or passive observers – instead we’re readers who bring all of ourselves to the text.

There’s an important point that needs to be made at this juncture concerning religious text’s specifically, just because a text can read in many ways doesn’t mean that an infinite number of interpretations is legitimate. One example Peter Rollins gives in his book How (Not) to Speak of God is the difference between the set of numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… and 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4… If we take these numbers as various interpretations then in the former we see an infinite number of interpretations while in the latter we see a mathematical boundary that contains the infinite. In other words, the phrase “God is love” can be interpreted in many ways – and in fact has been interpreted differently down through the centuries of Christendom. Yet, we see the boundaries provided in the sense that the phrase “God is love” cannot be interpreted as “God is hate”, or “God is hurtful and embittered”.

In the same book, Rollins encourages us to approach the Bible like we would our favorite painting – the point isn’t to leave ourselves at the doorway and approach it purely from the mind of the artist – obsessively focused on what it meant to them. Instead, we bring ourselves to the painting, experience it, which in turn gives rise to our interpretations of it – sometimes multiple interpretations of it through the years. Yet, again we see a sense of boundary because a picture of two people clasped in a loving embrace wouldn’t give rise to interpretations of hatred or disgust. What’s strange is that the more we research a painting’s history and engage in conversation with those from the past (often via books) and those present to us now, we often find that it complicates the meaning instead of clarifying. I think this concept is largely lost on those within the church who refuse to admit that the Bible cannot be reduced to a single interpretation without doing massive violence to the text. The conservative Southern Baptist School I attend exhibits this belief by requiring all undergrads to take 2 semesters of Hebrew and Greek each. Why? Not simply because this will help us be better interpreters of the text (which is true), but rather because we’re operating under the mistaken belief that if we can learn the original languages of the Bible then we can get the correct interpretation. As someone who has taken 3 of 4 semesters required I can assure you that learning the original languages is no magic bullet to laying bare the plain meaning of any scripture. Actually, the opposite is true. It’s not until you immerse yourself in the original languages that you realize the challenging job translators have of taking words, sentences and concepts from one language and recreating them in another. Added to this complexity is the fact that words often have more than one meaning and, the fact that Hebrew and Greek don’t have a particular word order to their sentences as English words do. Instead we rely on endings attached to words to identify them as nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and then do our best to recreate sentences in the way we think the original writer meant them. This is why I can’t help but smile at people who say they want a literal interpretation of the Bible, because they don’t realize that it would literally be un-readable.

I don’t believe the above insights should cause us to throw up our hands in despair and state “Oh great! Now we can’t know anything about the Bible!” Rather I think the point is to realize that jumping into the Biblical text is no easy task and shouldn’t be treated as such. Rather, we should be humbled and driven to seek out communities of faith – not where they claim to lay bare the meaning of the Scriptures (that’s when you should smell a rat), but where we can seek to enter into the holy task of participating in the ongoing conversation with the Church of the past and present.

What if a church membership sheet read like the following:

If you own more than one coat, it must be given away.

If you own more than one car it must be loaned out or given away.

If you have a house with extra rooms they must be given to the homeless.

If you have extra money it must be given to charity.

Sign here: ___________________.

Of course, I wouldn’t be allowed to attend, but still, that would be pretty kick-a.

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P.S. Inspiration for this post came from a talk by Pete Rollins.