Where Everybody's Crazy

Let's get all my heresies out in one day.

While I was hunting through How to read the Bible for all its worth, I found something which crystallised a number of problems I have with the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture.

Now to say that I have problems with something doesn't mean I don't believe it. Actually I don't know where I stand on it. The best argument I've heard for it is that the Bible says that the Bible is inspired - which is a seriously broken interpretation of 2 Tim 3:16 (as this page makes clear) - which is very similar to the Da Vinci Code saying that everything in the Da Vinci Code is true. Oddly believers in this argument agree with the first part of that sentence but not the second.

The second best argument I've heard is that the Bible is inspired because the Church recognised its inspiration. Good news for the doctrine of inspiration, really bad news for the doctrine of the authority of Scripture, because Scripture is only authoritative because the Church says so.

But the one that really freaks me out is how textbooks on exegesis, like How to read the Bible for all its worth deal with the fact that within the Bible, the authors break all their rules of exegesis. They deal with it by appealing to magic. Always a bad sign, I feel.

At a number of places in the New Testament, reference is made to Old Testament passages that do not appear to refer to what the New Testament says they do. That is, these passages seem to have a clear meaning in the original Old Testament setting and yet are used in connection with a different meaning by a New Testament author... We, however, are simply not authorized writers of Scripture. What Paul did, we are not authorized to do. The allegorical connections he was inspired to find between the Old Testament and the New Testament are trustworthy. But nowhere does the Scripture say to us: "Go and do likewise".

But of course the Scripture never told Paul to do it either. The message is clear: there are two types of Christian. The first type is the "inspired writer", the second type is the "illumined reader". (I am using Fee and Stuart's terms.) The Holy Spirit, which we are supposed to believe is unchanging and lives in all believers, speaks in a special authoritative way to the first type of Christian, and in a more tentative way to the second type of Christian. The first type of Christian is special and may bend the Scriptural text in any way the Spirit tells him to, and the second type of Christian is ordinary and may never bend the Scriptural text in any way at all.

Oh, and there are no more of the first types of Christian at all. How convenient! This explains why the same unchanging Holy Spirit inspired a bunch of books a few thousand years ago, but has not been particularly interested in inspiring anything at all since then.

When people come up with exegetical and historical contortions like this, and like with the case of Biblical authority, in order to defend a doctrine, I can't help but wonder whether it's a doctrine we need to be holding on to, and whether we'd be any poorer if we let go of it. In this case, I don't think we would.

Incidentally, what does the Bible say about the two-types-of-Christian hypothesis?

Elijah was a man just like us.

Oops.

In this way, two evangelical universities use the same quotes from the same Bible to make exactly opposite points of view about global warming. What could give a clearer insight into the opposing souls of America?

- Evangelicals split on global warming, BBC News

If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.

- Jesus Christ

There are three types of umpires. The first type says: "I call balls and strikes as they are." The second says: "I call them as I see them." And the third says: "It ain't nothin' till I call it."

Hermeneutics - how we know what something means - is a subject that gave me a lot of frustration at Bible college, and continues to plague me. Hermeneutics classes generated far more heat than light; I came away at the end of the course not with answers but with a better class of questions. You go around and around in circles: How are we supposed to read the Bible, and who says? How do we determine the interpretation of a difficult verse, and who has the final say? Can interpretation of Scripture really be a matter of personal conscience - but equally can interpretation really be handed down by a monolithic and authoritarian church?

How do I interpret? Should I take the words literally? Should I take them figuratively? Should I do both, but how do I draw the line? Should I take the words at face value, or should I look for the original intent of the author, or should I take the Tradition, the sense of the reading community through the ages? Should I take the words to be speaking once and for all, or should I take the cultural context of the time into account? If so, how?

And who gets to decide the answer to all these question, anyway? Me? Why on earth should I trust me?

Catholics chide Protestants for "getting rid of the Pope and replacing him with a paper Pope", but my criticism of Protestantism is that actually it makes everyone into a Pope: I read the Bible, I interpret it, I do what I decide it says. If my reading of it says we can have women priests, say, or gay clergy, and yours doesn't, well, that's a shame, and we go our separate ways. We can all pull out our selective quotes, and the Bible is a big enough corpus, and theologians so skilled at sophistry, that you can build a theological position on just about anything you like and claim it as more biblical than anyone else's. Someone else may disagree, but what authority do they have over you if you're both claiming the authority of Scripture? And to make any such decision, you have to appeal to an authority other than Scripture, which exposes the whole "authority of Scripture" thing as a bit of a joke. Without a magisterium, the only authority I can appeal to is me, and I don't trust me. Some people think this means I don't respect Scripture. No. The problem is that I do respect Scripture, and so I want to know whether or not I'm reading it right!

My personal preferred understanding on hermeneutics is that interpretation is a job shared between the reader, the Bible and the community of the Church. This is, I think, quite close to the Orthodox position on the Bible. But we are back to my personal preferences again. No way to break out that cycle.

Anyway, I'm starting to see shades of this whole debate in another area, far away - although not too far - from Biblical hermeneutics: constitutional theory.

By the grace of God I was born in the United Kingdom, where the constitution is interpreted in a very Orthodox fashion. Yes, folks, we do actually have a constitution here, but it's not written in one single document; it's what they call an "uncodified" constitution. The British Constitution is the vast body of precedent, law, parliamentary convention and several significant documents which make up a collective and implicit sense of how the country works; what, in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, would be called Tradition. The advantage of not having a codified constitution is that we cannot have those endless language-lawyering disputes where you claim that your reading of "black" is "white", and so it must be; either "black" has the sense of Tradition, or "white" does.

Of course it's not as simple as that, and there are constitutional conundrums from time to time. But by and large, the tradition ensures that the British constitution is interpreted contextually and corporately, and so hermeneutic questions do not arise.

Where you have a codified constitution, however, you automatically have the question "What does it mean?", followed swiftly by "What does it mean to me?". And we are plunged once again into hermeneutics, only now it's called constitutional theory. Many of the questions that plague Protestant Biblical interpretation also come into play in constitutional theory - and for the same reasons.

For instance, there is the "textualist" position of interpretation. That is, it says what it says; all we have to go on is the text. What does it mean now? The Christian equivalent is called "biblicist". Then there is the "original meaning" position: what did it mean then? This one is common in Christian thought, and is called the historical-critical method. Another school of thought is "original intent": we have to go beyond the text to discover the original intent of the author. I don't know the technical name for that, but we've got that as well, and more besides.

There are many schools of thought, both in constitutional theory and in Protestant hermeneutics. But unlike in the Protestant tradition, in the case of constitutional law, we do have an authority to choose between them: whoever happens to be running the country at the time. There is something rather self-referential about this, because the constitution of a country generally gives rights to and places limits or obligations on the person running the country at the time. Generally there's some kind of "separation of powers" stuff in the constitution which stops this from getting too messy, but since the "separation of powers" stuff is in the constitution, it is open to interpretation by constitutional theory.

It sounds like what I'm saying is what's come to be called the unitary executive theory of the constitution: a written constitution has questions of interpretation, and so someone has to decide upon those questions. If they're in charge, then their interpretation wins. In simpler terms, might makes right. I don't espouse that worldview; I'm a Christian, after all, I'm on the side of the poor and the oppressed. (To put it another way, "Christian Right" is a contradiction in terms.) I think the might-is-right view of interpretation is wrong but hard to argue against, because there is no higher authority to take the argument to. It is the same problem as in Protestant hermeneutics: when the can of worms that is hermeneutics and interpretation gets opened, it is very, very hard to clean up in a sensible way. I may personally think that the unitary executive theory is bogus, and I personally do, but it's prima facie as valid as any other theory, and it currently happens to have all the guns behind it, which frankly is all that pragmatically matters.

The tyranny of interpretation. Thanks, Luther. I'm blaming this one on you.

The other day, a lawyer in the States said:

the Constitution doesn't say that every individual in the United States or every citizen has or is assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn't say that. It simply says that the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended.

That lawyer was technically correct! You can't suspend the right - but that doesn't explicitly say that the right exists. Those who subscribe to a textualist position will be nodding their heads in agreement. Those who subscribe to an original intent position will point out that this is pure sophistry, and the mention of a right implies the existence of the right. The lawyer is correct in that the text doesn't literally say that, but it's certainly strongly implied. They might go on to argue that the original intent position is common sense. I think it's common sense, too. But that doesn't help; the lawyer in question is the Attorney General of the United States, and he rather thinks that a textualist position is common sense. And as AG he gets to decide. And he and his team still have all the guns.

Those subscribing to an alternate view of constitutional theory will be mourning the death of the most basic protection in law, but they won't be able to fault the logic that lies behind its demise. The little-publicised use of signing statements are the same: to execute the law, you've got to interpret the law. And just like Newman's genius Tract 90, which reconciled Anglicanism with Catholicism, it's possible for a highly-skilled sophist to present an interpretation of the law in a completely opposite sense to its intended meaning.

And the separation of powers? Well, someone has to interpret what the Constitution means when it talks about that, too. It's going to be the guy with the guns again.

So in short: The Constitution? It's what you make of it. For very select values of "you". You with the guns. And the really scary thing is, you're going to use them, aren't you?

Is there anything that can be done about this? As another great American constitutional hermeneutist put it, "that depends what the meaning of 'is' is."

I don't want to underemphasise how messed up I've felt over the past couple of days by this whole hermeneutic nightmare. In fact, I've been despairing even of finding a solution, a way of reading the Bible, because any method you choose has the same problem: it's arbitrary, it's non-authoritative, and it has a tendency to reinforce the method rather than the Scripture.

Then this morning a few thoughts popped into my head. One was the parables of interpretation by Soren Kierkegaard. (I don't habitually read Kierkegaard, but he was quoted in "Is There A Meaning In This Text?", which I was scanning while going through my crisis.) He warns against looking at the mirror to see the mirror, not your reflection in the mirror. Another was the opening words of Waterbuffalo Theology: "I will read the Scriptures and theological works with your needs in mind". (I don't entirely agree with that, only partially, but we'll come back to that.) Another was the principle of the liberationists: we all have our prejudices of interpretation, and the most honest way to deal with this is to make your motivations explicit. Another was a thought I had when I first hit the crisis: who says there is only one meaning in a text?

These thoughts combined in the realisation that it matters why you're reading the Bible, and that determines how. You need to have a goal in mind. For personal devotions, we believe, and I believe, that the Holy Spirit leads the believer into all truth. But on the other hand, I don't believe this is the case for the church as a whole; 20,000 denominations later, am I expected to believe that the Holy Spirit has been sleeping on the job? Meanwhile, for academic theology, which basically has no goal in mind, maybe the historical-critical method is as good as any other. For mission, as Koyama said, the goal has to be the needs of the recipient, and that will affect how you read. Of course, as I argued in my critique of Koyama, missiological understanding of theology must start neither from man nor from God but at the interface of the two. But that's an entirely different rant.

And yeah, I realise this whole schema of reading the Bible based on the goal is another arbitrary system that can't be guaranteed to give me the meaning of the text. But hey, I'm being explicit about it, and who says there's only one meaning anyway? The whole point of exegesis and exposition is to reveal the meaning to the ecurrent situation. No, it's no perfect, but I'm comfortable about it.

I'm trying to work on a Christology essay, comparing two passages about Christ. Fine. So I do what the good Bible college student does, and get out the commentaries and see what these passages actually mean.

Like that's likely to work.

This verse begins a new section, linked to the preceding with a "Therefore". Immediately we encounter disagreement. Barrett discovers only "a loose relation" with the preceding and Käsemann refers to "a break in thought", whereas Lenksi speaks of "a close connection" and Boylan sees what follows as "an inference from the section, vv1-11". Lenksi and Boylan are surely right.

Let me get this straight: I'm trying to compare the meaning of two passages, and yet the biblical scholars can't even agree on what Therefore means, and I'm expected to side with Lenski and Boylan about the meaning because Morris tells me to? I thought this was supposed to be the word of God, not the word of Morris. Sure, I can look in another commentary - and discover there another set of disagreements and frustrations.

This is why I'm rapidly getting frustrated with the whole evangelical view of exegesis - it's one thing to claim that you have a high view of Scripture, but you cannot then at the same time claim that the meaning of that Scripture is determined by the intellectual view of whichever modern scholar you prefer, and dammit, there are enough views to choose from.

So ad fontes I cry and go back to the original commentators, the Church Fathers, expecting to find agreement there. How naive I am. I don't know why this is a surprise, I've read Sic et Non, I know the Fathers hardly speak with one voice either. Abelard used this to justify applying your brain to Scriptural interpretation, but looking back over what it's produced, it just seems to turn the Scriptures into the object and us into the subject, and it rapidly degenerates into intellectual playing with words to justify what we want the Scriptures to say all along. I know that this essay expects me to evaluate the opinions of the scholars and come up with my own intellectual take on what the Bible actually means. Frankly, I don't want to play that game.

Now do you see why I want a magisterium? What the heck is the point of having a Holy Scripture if there's no way we can know what it means?

So at this week's Christology seminar, I have to answer the question "Just how universal is Paul's gospel?" Now of course this is a difficult question because we have to separate it from "Just how universal is our gospel?", "Just how universal do we think Paul's gospel ought to be?", "Why do we have such a problem if Paul were found to be universalist?" and so on. I thought I knew the answer: Paul was a universalist.

Then I thought Paul wasn't actually sure, or that he I've come back to the conclusion that he was a universalist. I find this convenient, of course, not because I'm a universalist myself but because I like controversy and I'm sure this is bound to generate some.

So here are my notes for the seminar.

First, a few problems. The first problem is a hermeneutical problem; you can find evidence for both universalist and limitarian positions in Paul's writings, but it depends on what you believe to determine what you consider "clear Scriptural teaching". If you're a limitarian, then the limitarian verses are "clear Scriptural teaching" and the universalist ones are debatable, and vice versa. In the light of that, we have to say that all verses are debatable. It's a bummer, but there it is. Also, coming back to the category problem, Thomas Johnson says that the question of "how can I (as an individual) be saved" is a modernist one, and won't be found in the Biblical literature anyway.

The next problem is that universalism might not mean what you think it means anyway. There's a difference between "the Gospel is effective for everyone" and "the Gospel includes Jews and non-Jews". The latter is clearly a concern of Paul, but I don't think we know - from the verses I'll outline below - whether the former was something he was addressing.

The final problem, before we launch into the fors and againsts, is the distinction between what Talbott calls "reference and predication". Basically universalism wraps up two issues; the first is who is saved (all or a select group?), and the second is whether they are saved or whether they have the opportunity to be saved. The Augustinians say all can be saved, but not all are; the Armenians say that not all can be saved, but those who can be, are; universalists says that both all can be and are saved. When we interpret Paul, we have to be clear to identify when he's talking about reference and when about predication.

Dealing with the reference question, Paul's repeated metaphor for Christ's redemptive work is the duality between Adam and Christ. This is always expressed in universal contrasts: all die, all are raised. Limitarians are placed in the unhappy position of having to say that the first "all" really means all, but the second "all" cannot be taken to mean all. But as Neal Punt, an opponent of universalism, puts it:

Romans 5:18 and its immediate context place no limitation on the universalistic thrust of the second "all men".

As for predication, Paul basically doesn't say anything about it. There is often an argument from silence on this point, and so people like Jim Packer can be found making breathtaking leaps of logic:

All these [universalist] texts are juxtaposed with texts in the documents from which they are drawn which refer specifically to the prospect of some perishing through unbelief. And unless we assume that the writers did not know their own minds, we have to conclude that they cannot in the texts quoted, really have meant to affirm universal final salvation.

So, since there are both universalist and limitarian texts in Paul, Paul must not have been a universalist. (If I am drawn towards universalism, it is because I prefer the company of people who can think clearly.)

Oh, and one more thing: Church interpretation of Paul in the tradition, rather than in modern scholarship. There isn't any. There is no clear teaching on the means or scope of salvation in the nine councils. Not a thing. Yes, that's an argument from silence, I know, but the fact that various Fathers took different positions and nobody sortedthem out once and for all suggests that this was a "live" issue in the apostolic age and no such an open-and-shut case as we've made it these days.

Now, the Bible! Verses with universalist readings:

• 1 Tim 2:4 - salvation of all desired
• 1 Tim 2:6 - Christ was ransom for all
• 1 Tim 4:10 - Christ was savior of all, especially (and therefore not limited to) those who believe
• 1 Cor 15:22 - all made alive in Christ
• 1 Cor 15:27 - all subject to him
• Phil 2:10-11 - all will worship him
• Col 1:20 - all reconciled in Christ
• Romans 5 (cf 1 John 2:2) - all justified and made righteous
• 2 Cor 5:19 - all reconciled
• Romans 11:32 - all receive mercy
• Eph 1:9-10 - all gathered up in him

Verses with limitarian readings:

• 2 Th 1:9
• 2 Th 2:10

Weight of evidence, huh? Generally limitarians don't advance any Pauline texts besides these two, but constrain themselves to arguing about the meaning of the universalist texts - whether all really means all. This is telling.

Church fathers for universalism: Clement, ("We can set no limits to the agency of the Redeemer") Origen, (allegedly declared heretical at EC5 but recent scholarship shows that may well have been a lateraddition) Gregory of Nyssa, Jerome, John Chrysostom, Athanasius. Against: Augustine, Gregory Nazianus, later Latin fathers.

Some final factors for consideration:

• Another of Paul's major themes is that of the completeness of Christ's work and victory. How can it be complete if it is limited?
• Some of the texts refer to being "in Christ", which obviously excludes those who do not choose him, right? But in 1 Co 1:30, being "in Christ" is the work of God, not the choice of the individual.
• Similarly "by faith" does not clearly refer to the choice of the individual. Actually Romans 3:3 says that lack of faith is no obstruction to grace.
• In case you still think individual choice is important in Paul's writings, remember that Paul himself was compelled, rather than chose, to follow Christ.

OK, I'm being melodramatic - I actually don't trust the NIV. But then, for good Evangelicals, that is the Bible so...

We're sitting in Christology, looking at Colossians 1:15-20. Let's count the mistakes:

15. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

"Over"? Wait, the Greek is just a genitive, which really ought to be translated "the firstborn of all creation". However, we can't translate it to that, because Arius lost. Hmmm? Arius was the guy who claimed that Christ was created; he was pretty much universally anathematized at Nicea. JWs reject Nicea and are the modern manifestation of Arianism. They hang pretty heavily on this verse, because if it says "the firstborn of all creation" (which it does) then that suggests Christ is part of the created order.

I submit to Nicea as an ecumenical council of the whole Church. I think Arius was wrong, and I'd be happy to point JWs at the next verse for a clarification ("For...") of what Paul's saying there. But that's not what the Greek says, and there's no excuse for twisting your translation to fit your theology. It's scary to think that the Jehovah's Witnesses have a closer translation of the Greek than the NIV here.

Big overtranslation to make a point.

16: For by him all things were created:

Stop there. The Greek says "en auton". That's "in him". But we can't translate it to that, because this is supposed to be a refutation of gnosticism. Hmm? Well, take out the references to "the blood of his cross" and "the church" in this passage and you've got something which really doesn't refer to Christ at all. I'm with Kasemann here that this is a gnostic hymn with a couple of bits added on by Paul. Or possibly it's Jewish sophiology, the mystical exploration of the Wisdom of God. (Proverbs 8 has a lot of this in it.)

But if it's either of these, the hymn would see "him", whether that's Wisdom or the Gnostic redeemer, as the sphere inside which all creation happened. If that sphere is Christ, though, we get what's called the doctrine of the cosmic Christ, where Christ is the space in which the universe gets created. And we don't want that, so we can't translate it as "in him". Even though that's what the Greek says.

Another overtranslation.

...all things were created by him and for him.

"eis" means "for" now, does it?

19 For God was pleased...

So now we move from talking about Christ to God the Father. Except that we don't. "God" is not the subject of that sentence; "theos" does not appear in the Greek. It's just a completely gratuitous insertion by the NIV translators. Another overtranslation.

My favourite gratuitous overtranslation is 1 Peter 4:1-6. First, we we have to weaken the force of 4:1 - where the Greek says "he who has suffered in his body has stopped sinning", because we still sin, we need to translate that as the more ambiguous "...is done with sin", even though the original is pretty clear. Then, since, we don't believe that the Gospel is effective for dead people, only live people, (despite 1 Peter 3:19) when we translate 1 Peter 4:6, we add the word "now":

For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead.

...because the Gospel cannot possibly have been preached to "the dead". Even though that's what the Greek says. Integrity? What was that?

OK, I know translating the Bible is hard. I wouldn't like to try doing it and I don't suggest I would do a better job, and if I did, I'd probably have my agendas as well. But it's worth distrusting the translations you get; there's an awful lot of overtranslation to make theological points, particularly in the NIV. And given that the preconceptions we have about Christianity are in part formed by years of reading the Bible without necessarily realising that the translators have an agenda, it's no wonder we get mixed up. Urgh.