Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Take Up and Read

I think we (as Christians) have unintentionally (albeit unconsciously) bought into one major assumption that forms the mind of our culture: the assumption that the Bible is a monotonous, boring uniformity and not a variegated, polyphonic, mesmerising, multi-textured wonder of Almighty God.

To my mind, there is a basic negative assumption that crops up in conversation after conversation. The assumption is basically this: the Bible is boring. Recently, this basic assumption or credo has cropped up in three varied forms:

1. The Bible is unreliable and boring. This assumption cropped up in a conversation I had very recently. The conversation veered around to the Book of Mormon (of all things) and I happened to mention its general and pervasive unreliability as an historical text. In response my friend insisted that the Bible is as full of inaccurate and skewed historical information as any other book. Who was I to say the Book of Mormon was inaccurate? The Bible is just as unreliable. And anyway, it’s much better to rely on what science can tell us, she went on, because only it can offer us an accurate account of the origins of the universe. I challenged her by mentioning a few more (proven) inconsistencies in the Mormon text book and then underlined the fact that science and Christian faith are not incompatible. Science in no way discredits Biblical truth, I insisted. She wasn’t convinced. But she didn’t argue with me. Instead, she simply insisted that the Bible is a boring book anyway, as if this was a crucial and decisive observation that somehow settled the debate. This uninformed assumption about the Bible seemed to be her trump-card, a kind of unassailably reasonable assertion that could not be contradicted. She was convinced that the Bible is boring and because the Bible is boring it is discredited and worse than useless. As far as she was concerned, this observation settled our short debate.

2. A second assumption that has cropped up over the past months in conversation is that the Bible is a barbarous and unenlightened book. Furthermore (you guessed it), it’s boring. An acquaintance of mine (who has probably read a minute portion of Scripture) is more or less convinced that the Bible presents only a grumpy, vindictive deity who is utterly passé in our present age of scientific sophistication. Basically the Bible is laughably out of touch with the way things really are but above all, it’s boring.

3. The third and last assumption I have encountered in recent conversation is the following: the Bible is a refuge for intellectually stunted evangelicals who can’t understand Jesus properly and can’t stomach any kind of thrilling literary and philosophical discourse whatsoever. Only fundamentalists accept the assertions of Scripture as true and trustworthy statements about God. Because Bible-believing Christians are generally hollow, intellectually anaemic and above all, boring creatures, they require a boring scripture with no unexpected turns and no shocking dénouement. The boring Bible is for boring Christians.

These are three instances which reflect different attitudes but underlying them all is that bastion of respectable, modern prejudice: the Bible is a boring book. Amongst the second-hand and blindly borrowed criticisms that the bible is scientifically outdated, presents a morally questionable deity and it is only read and believed by intellectually weak (and/or religiously intense) people, the assumption that the Bible is a boring book underlines them all.

The assumption that the Bible is a boring book is an old and time-worn prejudice. It’s crops up again and again. By way of response to an unbelieving culture at large, before we go about demonstrating the historical veracity of the Bible, its truthfulness, its perspicuity and general reliability, I think the first port of call is to disabuse people of this persistent (uninformed) prejudice that the Bible is a boring book.

In fact, before we even begin to mount all those minute and sophisticated arguments for the intellectual credibility of the Bible and the nature of the God it presents to us, we should instead make much of the lush, unexpected, oceanic, nuanced, layered, grotesque, sublime, symphonic, polyphonic, untidy, multi-genre, heaving library that is the Biblical narrative.

Before we press home the historical reliability and accuracy of Scripture, there has got to be a case for emphasising its mesmerising aesthetic quality, its literary richness and the accompanying undulations of plot; in other words, the epic and shocking beauty, the sheer polyphonic assault that is Scripture. We may thereby assist people in shedding that age-old (and it is getting old) myth of the monochrome Bible.

The Bible is not a monochrome book.

It’s more a glimmering polychrome with flashing lights.

It’s more Gothic than Romanesque.

It’s more a multi-textured, lumpy tapestry than minimalist steel.

Think bleary, loud Technicolor. Not black-and-white.

Call it anything but boring.

The Bible is not a boring book.

To those who will yet insist on capping off any conversation about the Bible with the insistence that it is boring, I can only respond with the chanted words which moved Saint Augustine to open the Bible for himself: tolle lege. Take up and read. Take up that rumbling, uncomfortably vast and heart-stoppingly dramatic Book and actually read it.

As you become ever more aware that the borrowed assumptions of the pundits and nay-sayers regarding the unreliability and/or barbarity of the Bible are wearing thin and you are about to flee into the bastion of comfortable and unexamined prejudice (“ah well, the Bible is a boring book anyway”), pick it up and actually read it first.

Yours,

The Scribbling Apprentice

Friday, June 11, 2010

N T wright: The Historical Resurrection of Jesus Christ

N T Wright on the compelling evidence for Jesus' bodily resurrection from the dead.

An evening with Scot McKnight

Last night, I had the pleasure of going to hear Scot McKnight speak at the Irish Bible Institute (http://www.irishbibleinstitute.org/index.php). Scot is the Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University (Chicago, Illinois) and is the author of more than thirty books, include Embracing Grace: A Gospel for All of Us, The Story of the Christ, Praying with the Church, The Real Mary: Why Evangelical Christians Can Embrace the Mother of Jesus and perhaps most famously, The Jesus Creed: Loving God & Loving Others.

You can view his blog here: http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/bio-scot-mcknight.html

Scot's lecture was a spin-off from his most recent book entitled A Community Called Atonement. The main gist of his talk involved an exploration of atonement theory and the predominant interpretation of the atonement event that has shaped Western Evangelicalism; Penal Substitution. Simply stated, this atonement theory argues that Christ, by his own sacrificial choice, was punished (penalised) in the place of sinners (substitution), thus satisfying the demands of justice so God can justly forgive the sins. It is, in a sense, the default theory underlining most gospel presentations evangelical Christians put forth. Certainly, it is the one we know best. It is the interpretation of the atonement which undergirds so much of our evangelistic material and personally, it is the interpretation of the atonement event which springs most rapidly to my mind whenever anyone asks me why Jesus died.

Scot argued that although Penal Substitution is a central image of atonement as it is presented in the New Testament, it is not the only image. Rather, it is one amongst a rich variety of others. Ultimately, we do the gospel a disservice if we major solely on penal substitution at the expense of drawing on the wealth of alternative images presented in Scripture and elucidated over the course of church history. As Scot observed, the event of the atonement is grounded in a mystery the human intellect cannot control. We do well to remember that each theory (or image) of the atonement touches on the glory of what God has done in Christ but no image can offer us an exhaustive understanding of what the death (and indeed, resurrection) of Christ has achieved for us.

Taking us into the recent history of atonement theory, Scot set the scene for the contemporary debate that has reemerged within evangelicalism over the recent decades. Leon Morris' Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (in response to Dodd), Packer's The Logic of Penal Substitution and Stott's The Cross of Christ have all proved massively influential in solidifying the evangelical emphasis on penal substitution. Taking us further into church history and the thinking of theologians east and west, Scot mapped out three of the major forms of atonement theory through the ages: 1. The Ransom Theory or Recapitulation Theory set forth by major Patristic theologians; 2. The Satisfaction Theory set forth by Anselm (which emphasised the need for a mediator who would be both God and human, thus being able to redeem humanity and satisfy God's nature and glory) and finally; 3. Penal Substitution Theory (propounded by Luther and Calvin). All three (and they are but three of of many) are encountered in the New Testament, but arguably the theories propounded by Calvin and Luther, and before them, Anselm, have become normative for evangelicalism's understanding of the atonement event.

Because Penal Substitution is the thorough-going interpretation of the atonement current in contemporary evangelicalism, it is rare to hear it preached any other way. For example, rarely do we hear the atonement preached as liberation. Option 3 (Penal Substitution as understood by Luther/Calvin) is not the only option. Granted it is one image of the atonement - and perhaps the singularly major one at that. However, it is not the only one. A game of golf is played best with a sack-full of clubs, rather than just the one. Varied kinds of clubs are needed to pitch the ball from all kinds of locations on the green. The same applies to atonement theory: when we rely on only one, we are at an immediate disadvantage - we lose out on the variety and richness of alternative theories that may apply in contexts ill-fitted to the proclaimation of Penal Substitution (for example, as we seek to minister to someone recovering from abuse or someone who is despairing of their personal drug addiction). Because the New Testament doesn't force the atonement through the lens of one theory, we shouldn't do it either.

This, in short compass, was what Scot argued for last night. His lecture was punctuated with conversational chat, wit and some arresting illustrations (like the golf one above). All in all, it was a cracking evening of illuminating discussion. I'll write up another brief post later covering some other interesting things he said.

Yours,

The Scribbling Apprentice.