Permitted To Play

From the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy:

Inasmuch as all Scripture is the product of a single divine mind, interpretation must stay within the bounds of the analogy of Scripture and eschew hypotheses that would correct one Biblical passage by another, whether in the name of progressive revelation or of the imperfect enlightenment of the inspired writer's mind.

From Scripture:

"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you."

There's something wrong with our doctrine of Scripture when Jesus (along with Paul and most other New Testament writers) would be castigated if they applied their hermeneutical methods today.

Note also an instance of "regressive revelation" found in the Scriptures:

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?" He answered, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." They said to him, "Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?" He said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so."

I'm tired of a lot of things in Christendom today, but one my of chief grievances is its need to protect and defends docrtines in such a way that actually silences the text of Scripture. This deep-seated desire for the Bible to be what we say it is is yet another instance of our wanting a god who thinks like us. He doesn't. In speaking briefly about the gospel in his essay "Reading the Scriptures Faithfully in a Postmodern Age," William Stacey Johnson makes this clear in arguably the best sentence I've read all week:

The gospel is not a "foundation" to render our tradtional notions of rationality secure but a remaking of everything, including rationality itself.

I'm convinced that the majority of people under the Christian umbrella have a concept of God that has been largely formed without relation to Jesus or to the Scriptures, and this concept has then been read into said Jesus and Scriptures...with disastrous effect. I include myself in this majority.

The Bible is not a safe place for our wall of presuppositions. It dismantles them, brick by brick. But it does not leave us defenseless. When it is read as it ought to be read, we are introduced to a living person  who is so unlike us yet who is with us and for us. He is at once unknowable yet known, though only in part. He is unsafe, and yet the source of our greatest security and comfort (which, by the way, should utterly redefine what we mean by such words). He does not dwell in temples of stone or in books of systematic theology. He is free, and in Him we also are free. This is the "strange, new world" that the Bible transports us into. We ought to read it as inhabitants of this world. Raymond Brown captures this hermeneutic well:

After all, in the Scriptures we are in the Father's house where the children are permitted to play