The Problem With Literalism Is That It's Full of Literalists

Should we read the historical books of the Bible as having a one-to-one corresponance between "event" and "account of event"? To ask this another way, should we read the historical books "literally"?

Peter Enns argues that we should not. Reading the Bible this way places a weight on it that it cannot bear. Do you agree?

Enns uses an example from the OT to demonstrate his point, but how about the NT? Taking the gospels as "historical books" (in some sense of the term), what are we to make of the differences in the accounts? For example, Mark says that Jesus was anointed with oil a few days after riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. John records this incident as happening before Jesus's triumphal entry into the holy city. Of course you could argue that Jesus must have been anointed twice, but that would just be silly.

What, then, are we to make of this? To some, this proves that the Bible is a sham. To others, this is to be ignored so that a "literal" reading can be maintained.

The theological implications are profound: what do these historical discrepancies do to the doctrine of inerrancy? What do they do to our understanding of Scripture in general?

Discuss!

A New Story? # 7 - Free Fallin'

The story of Genesis is a "compassionate coming-of-age" story. So says Brian McLaren in his book A New Kind of Christianity. It is in this context that the section known as "The Fall" fits.

The Greco-Roman way of viewing this section is of mankind undergoing an ontological shift from perfect to sinful. The perfect state is traded in for a messy story. Paradise is lost.

I've had difficulties with this viewpoint for a while. It's like a chicken and egg scenario: Did Adam sin because he was sinful, or did Adam become sinful because he sinned? Can someone who is perfect do something imperfect? Can someone who only knows one language suddenly utter words in another?

This is usually the point when "free will" is mentioned, but I'm not so sure that solves the problem. Consider where the Biblical story ends: New Creation, with human beings created in the likeness of Jesus. For the sake of argument we'll call this "perfection". If the story of "the fall" is a story of perfection descending to imperfection, who is to say that this won't happen again?

Well, I don't think it will happen again. Therefore I think the beginning of the story was something quite different to the end. Adam was "very good", but he couldn't have been "perfect" in the sense of the absolute finished product. That he wilfully disobeyed God leads me to believe that he wasn't much different to you or me. As I said before, the goal is not for us to recover the life of Adam pre-Fall. The goal is new life in Christ.

Where, then, does this leave "The Fall"? Why the move from unashamedly naked to deep shame? Before there is blessing, now there is curse. Before there is garden, now there is wilderness. Adam's disobedience had major ramifications, but the traditional notion of the Fall seems to put more weight on Adam than a man of dust should have to bear.

Here's another way of framing the opening of the story:

Creation, call, disobedience, decay

I'm running ahead of myself here, but there are two good reasons for tracing the narrative as such. I'll call them "Abraham" and "Jesus".

The call of Abraham was God's first step in his re-creation of a world in decay. The obedience (or faithfulness) of Abraham was the required response, and was a counter move to man's (Adam's) disobedience to God's original call to be his representative on earth. Jesus, as the seed of Abraham, also had a call ("Out of Egypt I called my son"). His obedience unto death was the climax of the old creation and the beginning of the new.

Perhaps a simpler way to frame the story is to list every story's central component: Characters.

God, Adam, Abraham, Jesus, Church

What say you? Does the Fall need to be re-thought in light of the story's ending?

Worth A Watch

There is a good discussion on the Bible that you can watch here. Man of the hour Brian McLaren features, as do Tim Keller, Alister McGrath, and Dempsey Rosales-Acosta. This is well worth a watch, both for its content and its tone. I particularly enjoyed McGrath's contribution. I have yet to read any of his work, but very much aim to rectify that after hearing this.

Feel free to discuss the video in the comments section, by the way.

A New Story? # 6 - The Journey So Far

We've been having a conversation with Brian McLaren over the past week. It started with simply opening our eyes and ears to what he has to say. His most recent book, A New Kind of Christianity, generated a lot of heat when it first came out. The general impression I got was that, ironically, the "Brian McLaren is dangerous" camp were happy with it while the "Brian McLaren might be on to something" camp were unhappy. The former thought that with this book McLaren finally came out of the heretic closet, and so they were happy to have some concrete evidence against thier danger man. The latter thought that McLaren may have veered too off course for them to follow his trail, and so reluctantly they pulled up. Of course many are still side by side with McLaren on his spiritual quest, willing to journey with him to the depths of orthodoxy and unorthodoxy in order to emerge with a hidden pearl of great price.

I am none of the above people. I'm new to this environment. A visitor from out of town, seeing some commotion and asking McLaren what it's all about.

The launching pad for McLaren's exploration is his disillusionment with the traditional overarching story of Scripture and discovery of a new narrative. For McLaren, the old story is neither morally believable nor biblical. It is, rather, a story steeped in Greco-Roman thought, which is wholly different to the very Jewish worldview of the Bible - the worldview McLaren seeks to recapture.

He begins this mission by looking at the creation narrative in new light. The result, so far, is more a severely edited version of the old narrative than a brand new one. McLaren's argument is not without deliberate provocation and obvious contradiction (nothing new for the man who is both conservative and liberal, Catholic and Protestant, Calvinist and Armenian), but I find in many of his thoughts a deep resonance with my own when I am most honest.

The conversation has been interesting so far, and will remain so as we discuss what is commonly dubbed "The Fall".

A New Story? #5 - Creating With Clay

What's cooler than being cool?

"Ice cold!", answer Outkast.

What's better than perfect?

"Good", answers Brian McLaren, author of several books that irk Al Mohler.

"Jewish goodness...is far better than Greco-Roman perfection" asserts McLaren, who appears to be having a go at the Greco-Romans. One of the problems with the Greco-Roman narrative, as McLaren sees it, is that it leaves no room for other narratives. But has McLaren's narrative not just destroyed the Greco-Roman narrative, or at least claimed superiority over it? It surely has, which sounds suspiciously like an imperial, dare I say Roman, maneouver. I don't doubt that it's been pointed out before, but McLaren is merely creating a new "us/them" - the very thing he condemns in the previous chapter.

What the Greco-Roman narrative says to any other narrative that comes its way is "There ain't enough room in this town for the both of us, punk". Is the Greco-Roman narrative right? Is there only room for one sherrif (story) in town? Or can the history and future of the world have multiple overarching narratives? Consider a film like Crash. What is the overarching plot? Is there one, none, or several?

I wonder how McLaren would answer some of these questions, because he seems to say one thing yet do another.

But quibbles aside, his contrast between "perfect" and "good" is an interesting one. Both the six-line narrative and McLaren's lineless narrative begin with creation. The difference, as McLaren would put it, is that one act of creation begins a "state" whereas the other begins a "story". The state is perfect (it was created by a perfect God after all), but the story has room for improvement (and deterioration).

This, I think, is another place where the traditional re-telling of the Biblical story falls down. I'll sum up the myriad things I could say with this: Adam is not the end goal of our existence. Salvation does not consist of getting things back to the way they were before "the fall", because God has more in store for us than what he had for Adam. The creation of humanity was indeed a "very good" thing, but God's story will take humanity beyond Adam. God intended as much from the beginning.

Rather than a static, wound-up creation-product, we must allow for an "open" view of creation; a creation able to grow, able to groan, and able to be renewed by its Creator. Think of her as clay in a potter's hand, being spoiled by sin but being re-shaped by grace. The conventional telling of the Biblical story does not evoke this kind of Creator/creation relationship. Perhaps I'm guilty of a McLaren-esque caricature here, but it is easy to get the impression that God created the world, dusted off his hands after the fall, and then finally intervened through the life of Jesus.

C.S. Lewis says that the Incarnation -- God becoming man -- is the Grand Miracle. It is the event that makes sense out of all other events. But in our popular version of events, it is the event that is a total anomaly; the event that makes no sense whatsoever. We can affirm it, but we can scarcely believe it true; scarcely believe that God was actually pleased to undertake it. This disbelief springs not so much from reverance as from a lack of real, intimate knowledge of God. At root, our story is muddled, therefore our knowledge of God is muddled.

In order to unmuddle, do the existing acts of the six-line narrative simply need to be edited for content; do we need to actually add and cut some acts; or does the whole story need to be thrown on the ol' scrapheap with a fresh one emerging in its place?

McLaren proposed the latter, but so far he has simply edited the first line of the traditional story for content. He does hint at something more radical in one of the endnotes, and it is something I hope to get back to, because it is something that I had been thinking about myself and was very excited to read.

A New Story? #4 - How Should We Now Think?

What do you get when you mix the philosophy of ancient Greece with the power structure of ancient Rome?

(Can anyone think of a way to turn this into a joke?)

You get, according to Brian McLaren, the Greco-Roman narrative- which is the six-line narrative discussed already. McLaren's arguement is that we've read the Bible trough a Greco-Roman lens, though we've scarcely noticed it...just like we scarcely notice a window as we look through it. To sum up a few pages of writing, we've created a Biblical world akin to the world of Plato. It begins in a state of absolute perfection, it falls into the cave of illusion, and its rescue looks like an abondment of this storied world and a return to a state of immaterial bliss. The Roman influence is on our imperialist attitude when it comes to this story - we hold it to be the only story, and those whose lives stand outside of it are enemies to be either assimilated into our masses or destroyed.


Is this fair commentary by McLaren?

The man with the square lenses wants us to see not with Greco-Roman eyes but with the eyes of a Jew. We are not to look "backwards" at Jesus through Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin etc. Instead, we are to look "forwards" at Jesus, through Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah etc. Only in this thoroughly Jewish story does Jesus make sense; not as the Messiah who would re-enforce Israel's national pride, but as the promised, faithful Israelite who would bring blessing to all the nations of the earth, thus fulfilling Israel's call.

Whatever else about McLaren, he is surely right on this. The six-line narrative as it is popularly described leaves no place for Israel. Jesus appears in it like a bolt of lightening rather than as the climax of Israel's (and therefore the world's) story.

(At this point it would be immoral of me not to mention Chris Wright's book Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament.)

Nevertheless, I do wonder - just how "Jewish" are we supposed to think? Paul's address on Mars Hill has been happy hunting ground for emerging/emergent types over the years, but here it seems to work against Mr Emergent's argument. Paul didn't spend his energy trying to get Greeks to see Jesus through Jewish eyes. He created a way for them to see Jesus through Greek eyes.

Some of the questions that arise out of this story are: How paradigmatic are we to view Paul's sermon in Athens? How much was such a way of communicating the Christian story part of his methodology? And if it played a significant part, how should Christian theology look in 21st century Ireland? Greco-Roman? Jewish? Irish!?

The forwards, Jewish way of looking at Jesus is certainly in harmony with Scripture, but is it the only helpful way to look at him? The people of God do not now have to live under Jewish law, but do they have to think like Jews?

I don't know any of the answers to these questions, so I'm going to stop writing now. Please weigh in with any insights.

A New Story? #3 - More Than Belief

Eden, fall, condemnation, salvation, heaven and hell - the six-line narrative that Brian McLaren presents as both conventional and dubious Christian theology. He has many questions, two of which stand out: Is this story morally believable, and is it found in the Bible?

McLaren's answer to both is 'No'.

Where McLaren is mistaken is that you can "find" this story in the Bible. Eden is there. There is the first case of disobedience; the "original sin". There is humanity living in emnity with God. There is the salvation found in Jesus Christ. There is a heaven and there is a hell. The six-line narrative can be formed...if you want it. Is it morally believable, however? Is it, in other words, the kind of story we'd expect the God revealed in Jesus to weave?

I agree with McLaren's 'No' on this...kind of. I think the six-line narrative, as it would be expressed by Joe Church, is inherently human-centric and does an injustice to the character of God. Of course every shorthand (or longhand) version of this epic drama will fall short of doing its chief protagonist justice, but if an overarching story of Scripture exists, I think it has to be about God; the six-line narrative, for the most part, isn't.

McLaren and I part ways as he paints a caricature of specific beliefs held within this narrative, creating the god Theos as a foil for the real God Elohim. According to McLaren, six-line-narrativists (trust me, it will catch on) believe that we are saved and perfected so that Theos can love us again. I don't know anyone who actually believes that, so saying things like this is a waste of ink. But what McLaren may be getting at -- though it goes unsaid -- is one of the narrative's symptoms as I see it: The doctrine contained within is good and sound, but it doesn't quite seem to fit with the big picture, and thus our belief and our experience come into conflict (cognitive dissonance?). For example, we assert that we are loved by God even as we live in wilful rejection of him, but the big picture doesn't portray this kind of God from beginning to end (his love seems to happen somewhere toward the end), so assertion struggles to become experience. Many lives, including my own, deeply struggle to dwell in the love of God.

Unlike McLaren, I don't think there is anything necessarily unbiblical about the six-line narrative. I'm just not fully convinced that it is a helpful depiction of the Bible's story. Perhaps it merely needs to be tweaked? McLaren aims not at a tweaking, however, but at a ripping up and rebuilding. If I thought the the six-line narrative compelled me to believe in the Theos McLaren describes then I'd be by his side with a sledge hammer in hand, but McLaren's deliberately provocative argument makes it almost impossible for me to follow his footsteps. I have always held to a version of the six lines, but Theos is not the God it has lead me to believe in.

Nevertheless, story is always about more than belief and teaching. It involves the emotions, the shared experience. The story of creation, fall, condemnation, salvation, heaven and hell does not emphasize just what Scripture is: a love story between Creator and creatures. Each of the six words does not evoke all that should be evoked. There is no doubt that instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater (never a good idea...trust me), some of the words need to be reclaimed after years of abuse. The Christian language needs to be relearned if our story -- whatever it is -- is to have any impact on us at all.

That being said, a fresh look at the acts in the narrative may lead to more than semantics. It's been a little while since I read the next chapter in McLaren's book, so I'm interested to see what story he proposes. If my memory serves me correct, however, it's not actually that different to the six-line narrative as it is fleshed out by some Christians. We shall see.

A New Story? #2 - Questions

The line begins on the left-hand side of the page and works its way across. It drops straight down until eventually heading right again. Then comes a fork in the road. One prong goes directly up to the level where the line began, and then continues to the right indefinitely. The other way goes down - not straight down, but veering downwards, again indefinitely.

It looks like this (with explanatory words attached):


How did we get to this diagram?

McLaren begins his journey towards A New Kind of Christianity by tackling what he calls "The Narrative Question". "What is the Overarching Storyline of the Bible?" is the foundational question posed by McLaren. This question assumes the Bible to be telling a story, which is an assumption I share. At its heart, Scripture is not an instruction manual, though it does instruct. It's not a repository of doctrine, though it does teach. It's not a book of divine wisdom dropped out of the sky for our enlightenment, though it does contain wisdom and it can enlighten. Scripture is story -- God's story about...well...we'll get there in due course. But McLaren notes that,

To be a Christian...has required us to believe that the Bible presents one very specific storyline...

This storyline, which McLaren seeks to dismantle, is the one diagrammed above. It begins with perfection in Eden, it descends into a fallen world of sin, and then comes the divide - salvation which leads to eternity in heaven, or damnation which leads to eternity in hell.

Does that sound like the story of the Bible in a nutshell?

It does to me. Or at least it sounds like the story that I've been taught, which is a story that seems to be created by Scripture itself. But is this really the story Scripture tells? In the midst of some caricatures, McLaren makes a simple observation and asks a profound question:

Few of us acknowledge that this master-narrative starts with one category of things, good and blessed, and then ends up with two categories of things, good and blessed on the top line and evil and tormented on the bottom....Can we dare to wonder, given an ending that has more evil and suffering than the beginning, if it would have been better for this story never to have begun?

This is a heartfelt question that musn't be swept under the rug. A story depends on perspective. Ask Hitler to tell you about World War II and you might get a sob story about how he failed in his mission and now lives in permanent disgrace. Ask Eisenhower or Churchill the same question and you'll get a very different answer, though they are all talking about the same event(s). Can it be that most people's story -- if we take the above outline to be more or less true -- will turn out for the worst, with the few living to tell a tale with a happy ending? If the story the Bible weaves will largely end up with individual stories of anguish and defeat, why even begin to tell it?

Or perhaps we don't quite have our story straight. Maybe we have misread the Bible; misunderstood what the Storyteller was saying, about both himself and his purposes. Our lines might be going the right direction, but our insight into what they entail might be too narrow in some places and not narrow enough in others. Or, if McLaren is on to something, our lines may be missing the point entirely.

The following questions, asked by Daniel Kirk, are the reason why I am interested in what McLaren has to write, even if he is wrong:

Again the question comes to us how the gospel is actually good news for someone who has experienced nothing but injustice, whose life is defined quintessentially by her status as a victim. Is the gospel good news if it means that such a victim, upon death, will meet a judgment that makes her life of perpetual rape seem like paradise in comparison.

I am not about to abandon everything I once knew, but I do want to be open to a re-shaping of the biblical narrative as it springs from the character of the God who is over, above, and even in, the story: the God revealed to the world not primarily in words on a page, but in the person of Jesus.

A New Story? #1

Brian McLaren is not a heretic. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a heretic, but he's not a porn star.

Honestly, I don't know much about Brian McLaren. Back in my "Catholic" days of being a Christian -- when I used to let various authorities decide what was and wasn't true without any investigation or thought on my own part -- Brian McLaren was a known danger. He was even a step up from the dreaded Rob Bell, which is really saying something.

During the course of my journey towards enlightened bliss, however, I grew tired of the spoon feeding, the policing, the defending and protecting. The same people going after Brian McLaren were going after Tom Wright, and that's just not on! If Wright is a threat to the church then he is a much-needed threat, and his voice demands urgent hearing. But the powers that be would like a safe church, and so voices that attempt to shake her out of her comfort zone are to be screened, steralised, or just silenced. They're banned, 'cause the Regime don't like it, man.

If it sounds like I've simply replaced one group of popes with another (Wright), rest assured that I have not. But what I like in Wright and others (such as Daniel Kirk) is their approach - wrestling with the text of Scripture honestly, and letting it speak for itself to a community eager to hear. This is not to ignore tradition. But as Scot McKnight writes in The Blue Parakeet, we are best reading the Bible when we read it not through tradition but with it. There is a difference.

What's all this got to do with Brian McLaren? Well, I guess I felt it was time to read Brian McLaren for myself rather than letting the opinion of others also be my opinion. And why am I even writing about this? Well, I want to examine a couple of chapters at the beginning of McLaren's latest work, A New Kind of Christianity. These chapters have to do with the Christian story, the story of the Bible.

To sum up, McLaren says we have gotten it wrong.

Expect a conversation between McLaren and I (and perhaps even you?) over the next week or two.

Authority of Scripture

The most powerful argument for the truth of Scripture is a community of people who exemplify the love and power of the God that they have come to know through the New Testament. Apart from the witness of such communities, formal arguments for the authority of Scripture carry little weight.

- Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament

Wright Is Usually Right When He Writes

...or speaks, as the case may be. Have a listen and see what you think. Then pop over here to read Peter Enns writing about the same thing in more depth (and perhaps a touch more controversially -- Oh Peter, when will you learn?). If you have even a passing interest in the Bible these will be well worth your time.

By the way, one commenter under a Tom Wright YouTube clip warns that reading the Bishop's work isn't safe. To this I say: Safe? Who said anything about safe? Of course it isn't safe. But it's good. How much more should this apply to our reading of Scripture, and yet how often do we settle for a safe reading of the text?

But that's a whole other blog post!

How To Read: A Call To Tear Down

Jesus fought the law, and the law appeared to be losing.

This was perhaps the conclusion prominent readers of Scripture were coming to as they observed the would-be Messiah tear down their traditions and rebuild something new in their stead. If there is one thread running through each of the last three posts on how Jesus read Scripture -- and I would contend that there are several -- it’s that his was a reading that generated conflict - conflict with the satan in the wilderness, conflict with his neighbours in Nazareth, and conflict with the scribes and Pharisees in Galilee. One might even say, with the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus’s reading of Scripture was what got him killed, but I’m jumping the gun.

Matthew 9 presents another conflict scene, and once again Jesus and Scripture are at the heart of things. This time he’s not eating with defiled hands, but rather eating with defiled people - tax collectors and sinners. Those pesky Pharisees want to know why this is happening. They appear to be caught between two minds. On the one side, they recognise some kind of authority in Jesus, both in his words and actions. But on the other, he’s just not playing by the rules! And of course if Jesus was truly god-ordained, he would look much like them…or so they thought, anyway. So they ask “Why?” in order to expose Jesus as the charlatan they thought he was.

Jesus is wise to their games, however. He points out that the kingdom agenda of the Pharisees takes care of the healthy; his own kingdom agenda -- the true kingdom of god -- takes care of the sick. Then he tells them to “Go and learn what this means”:

I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.

These words are taken from the prophet Hosea, with YHWH being the speaker. He is the “I” who desires mercy, and not sacrifice. So, what does this mean? How does this relate to Jesus’s table fellowship with the unclean? What were the Pharisees supposed to go and learn? What had Jesus learned from his own reading of this passage?

Whatever else we can say about this passage, Jesus’s reading of it produced the following outcome: He was communing with the sick/unclean, and calling them back to YHWH.

It seems that Jesus read this passage as authority to bypass the sacrificial system -- a system set up by YHWH under Moses no less. The cultic law was always a pointer towards a greater reality, and with Jesus being the very enfleshment of God, that reality was at hand. Therefore the barriers inherent in the system -- barriers between God and man, between the clean and the unclean -- were being done away with in Jesus’s ministry. Compassion was the order of the day; knowledge of God was trumping burnt offerings.

This is why Jesus could fraternise with those whom the law would call “unclean”; this is why he could touch the untouchable. The Pharisees knew the law all right, but they did not know the power of God nor the heart of God. Their interpretation was of the letter, not of the spirit. They read Scripture with a view to exclude; Jesus read it with a view to embrace.

So often we read Scripture in such a way that builds barriers. Here Jesus reads in it a call to tear them down. And at the heart of it all is the desire of YHWH, who longs to know his children and be known by them, from the least to the greatest.

How To Read: Where Is Your Heart?

What happens when the heart just stops?

We usually fake it. We fake sympathy, we fake joy, we fake love. Our lips move, but they are so out of sync with our hearts that you’d swear you were watching Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live symbolically re-enacted.

Much of Jesus’s ministry zeroes in on the heart. His reading of Scripture reflects as much.

In one story from Mark 7, Jesus finds himself confronted by a group of Pharisees. These were the zealous keepers of law, who saw strict adherence to it as the mark of true Judaism. Their law determined who was in and who was out. The question for them was, where did Jesus stand? Could he be trusted by them to do things their way?

Evidently not, because on account of his disciples’ “unlawful” behaviour they were forced to ask him,

“Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”

Jesus replies by transporting the words of Isaiah to the present time:

“This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.”

This quotation highlights a dramatic role reversal not unlike the one seen at Nazareth. The keepers of the law, the ones so scrupulous in their desire to remain uncorrupted, are seen by Jesus to be part of corrupt Israel. And as YHWH judged Israel through Isaiah the prophet, so Jesus was bringing that judgement to a climax through his own ministry.

Unlike much modern usage of Scripture, Jesus did not here employ it to form doctrines or rules to beat others over the head with. That’s not to say doctrines and rules are bad; it’s just that that’s not their purpose. After all, Jesus did not intend to add burdens, but to remove them.

Instead, Jesus reads Scripture in terms of man’s relation to YHWH. We saw this already in the wilderness, where all of his quotations centred on this relationship. The question for the Pharisees was, Where do you stand in relation to the traditions of the elders? The question for Jesus is, Where do you stand in relation to God? Are you far from him, or are you near?

Of course the Pharisees probably thought that meticulous keeping of the traditions reflected right covenant relations with YHWH. For them the two were intertwined. For Jesus, it was a matter of the heart. If our reading of Scripture leads is in any other direction, we are not reading it as Jesus read it.

Finally, his relationship with the Law is again shrouded in mystery here. According to Jesus, it does not matter what food goes into a person’s mouth. This flies in the face of much of what we read in Torah, which speaks at length about what food should and shouldn’t be consumed. And yet Jesus claims elsewhere not to be doing away with The Law, but to be fulfilling it (Matt. 5).

Normally I’d interpret that "fulfillment" as Jesus coming to meticulously keep all of the laws written in Scripture, but Jesus’s words and actions towards the Pharisees and his own reading of Scripture put that interpretation in jeopardy.

How To Read: On The Edge

Never go back. It can only end in people throwing you off a cliff. Jesus demonstrated this old maxim to be true when he took his ministry back to Nazareth, the town where he grew up as the son of a carpenter. He would be going back there as the anointed son of god, much to the initial surprise and eventual disdain of his former townsfolk.

When he stood up to speak in the synagogue he received curious appreciation, as those present puzzled over how Joseph’s son could say such gracious words. The atmosphere soon turned hostile, however, with Jesus’ one-time neighbours looking to throw him over a cliff by the end of his visit.

Why this dramatic transformation of response? The answer lies in Jesus’ reading of Scripture.

The boy from Nazareth kicks off his return home by standing up in the local synagogue on the Sabbath and reading aloud a scroll of the prophet Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour.”

As N.T. Wright is at pains to show, Israel still saw herself as being in exile at the time of Jesus’s ministry. The national hope was for freedom from their Gentile oppressors, the restoration of YHWH’s rule from Jerusalem and vindication of his covenant people. A text such as Isaiah 61 would have been understood on these terms, and not as a sort of timeless, groundless list of good deeds to be done.

Therefore when Jesus sits back down, with all eyes on him, and says “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”, he knows what is going on in the minds of those around him. The question is, what was going on in the mind of Jesus?

As seen in the wilderness, Jesus read Scripture in a way that placed him in Israel’s shoes. He assumed the role of a nation delivered out of slavery and headed towards the promised land, with a specific vocation to abide by: Be YHWH’s people.

Now here he is, quoting from a prophet who spoke to Israel not in exodus but in exile. God’s chosen people failed to live up to their communal vocation, so God removed them from the promised land. Judgement and separation seemed to be their fate, but YHWH would not let these realities have the last word. A new word is spoken; a word of comfort amidst affliction, hope amidst despair. Isaiah 61 represents one such word.

When Jesus reads these words, he reads them as more than the agenda of a charitable person/organisation; he reads them as the promise of return to a people in exile. They are eschatological words. Moreover, he reads them as the meat and drink of his own vocation. Jesus was stepping into the role of the anointed one, the “me” of the passage. The poor, oppressed, and brokenhearted of Israel would receive YHWH’s favour through Jesus’s own ministry. A quintessential christocentric reading of Scripture if ever there was one.

This all sounds like remarkably good news, but there is a sting in the tail. Many of Jesus's hearers supposed he was reaffirming Israel and her covenant with YHWH, but the thought of Jesus judging Israel was completely rejected by the multitude, probably as being contradictory. His fellow Jews read the “oppressors” and “captors” implicit in the Isaiah text as being the Romans, but Jesus not-so-subtly hints at his own people being the opposition to his ministry. (Might we Christians today be guilty of similar misinformed assumptions when we read Scripture?)

Joseph’s son does this by drawing on stories from the days of Elijah and Elisha, who tended to a widow and a leper from outside of corrupt Israel. Again Jesus reads Scripture as a scene in a drama, with himself in the role of Elijah/Elisha and his hometown in the role of corrupt Israel, too hard of heart to mourn and be comforted (cf. Is. 61:2; Mat. 5:4).

This method of reading is obviously extremely effective, because the crowd quickly turns on their former friendly neighbourhood carpenter. The person who they thought just might be their great liberator turns out to be their harsh critic. He reads to them a text of promise to Israel, and then turns around and hints at a ministry to Gentiles. Gentiles! This they cannot stomach. They refused to read the Scriptures the way Jesus read them. They refused to see themselves as oppressors of the poor, takers of prisoners, breakers of hearts. They refused to soften their own hearts, repent, and believe.

The Real Enemy

You know when you’re doing a crossword, and there is one particular long word that you’re stuck on, which, if you cracked it, would help you solve lots of smaller words? Well, reading Jesus and the Victory of God by N.T. Wright is like cracking that long word.

His sweeping portrait of Jesus is full of historical and theological depth, and opens up a fresh way of understanding certain passages that have long been held to mean one thing. Example:

“I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into Gehenna. Yes, I tell you, fear him! Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.” - Luke 12:4-7

The only way I have ever heard this passage interpreted is that the one we are to “fear” is God. Man can kill the body, but God can kill both body and soul, so fear him!

I’ve always accepted this interpretation, but reluctantly, because the very next verses talk about God the Father who remembers the dime-a-dozen sparrows and who cares for us so much more. Therefore, we should “fear not”.

So which is it: fear God because he can kill, or don’t fear because God deeply cares?

Wright makes the point that for Jesus (as seen in the wilderness and in other scenarios throughout his ministry) the real enemy is the satan, the evil one. It is he who has gripped the nation of Israel, and it is he who must be defeated. Therefore if anyone or anything is to be feared, it is he who exerts malevolent power over body and soul.

But, his power is trumped by the power of the Creator, whose goodness toward sparrows is infinitely exceeded by his goodness toward human beings. Of course as Wright points out,

Jesus did not, to be sure, perceive Israel’s god as a kindly liberal grandfather who would never hurt a fly, let alone send anyone to Gehenna. But again and again, not least in the very next verse of this paragraph, Israel’s god is portrayed as the creator and sustainer, one who can be trusted in all circumstance, not the one who waits with a large stick to beat anyone who steps out of line.

I don’t know about you, but I think that makes a lot more sense.

Get behind me, misinterpreted passage!

How To Read: The Wilderness Days

Immediately after being anointed for ministry, Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness. We don’t often think about what he was doing for these six weeks, but I would venture to say that reading (or recalling to memory) portions of Deuteronomy was on his daily “To do” list. I say this because when the tempter approaches Jesus with questions about his identity and vocation, Jesus replies to him with three verses all taken from Deuteronomy chapters 6-8.

“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” - Deut. 8:3

“You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” - Deut. 6:16

“You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.” - Deut. 6:13

Whole books can (and probably have) been written on the temptation narrative, but allow me to narrow the focus by asking, What do these scriptural responses tell us about Jesus’s reading and interpretation of Israel’s Bible?

- Firstly, Jesus obviously viewed Deuteronomy not only as a word addressed to the children of Israel, but a word addressed to him in the present time. The “you shall” that once represented a command to the Israelites now represents a command to Jesus. He has stepped into his ancestors’ shoes, and what was commanded of them by YHWH is now commanded of Jesus - Trust YHWH, do not test YHWH, and worship YHWH.

Of course this begs the question, How much of Deuteronomy was normative for Jesus? Was he adamant in avoiding food with no fins or scales? Or when Jesus quotes from the Law, was he highlighting the “spirit” of the law (trust and worship) while downplaying what we might see as the “letter” (the copious food laws etc)? Did he read Torah as an external rule book making demands on his life, or did he have a different way of reading what we call “law”? So many questions, so few answers.

- Secondly, Jesus’s reading of Scripture is covenantal at its core. Perhaps this goes some way toward answering some of the above questions. The temptations push him towards autonomy, but Jesus relates everything back to YHWH’s gracious initiative towards Israel, and Israel’s vocation to be YHWH’s people. Where the satan stresses independence, Jesus stresses relatedness to YHWH, which from man’s side looks like trust and worship.

Is it thus correct to say that Jesus both trusted and worshipped YHWH? If so, what does that do to our understanding of the term “Son of God”? (More generally, what does that do to our theology/christology?) Through his reading of Scripture Jesus seems to have turned the title “son of god” on its head, seeing sonship not as the chance to exert domineering authority but as a call to trust and obey.

- It is dangerous business quoting imperatives to someone without the power to live by them. As a human being, Jesus was fully reliant on the spirit of God to empower him to trust and obedience. He read Scripture not only knowing the words, but the power of God that lay behind the words (or perhaps in the words, as suggested by his quotation of Dt. 8:3).

Though Jesus identified himself with those to whom Deuteronomy was originally addressed, there were notable differences between the two readers. The chief difference was that where the Israelites were unable to live by the words, Jesus was able. The Law was written on his heart. It was no burden to be carried, but rather it was his meat and drink. Nothing gave Jesus greater pleasure than pleasing the one he called “Father”.

I mentioned that Jesus read Scripture with “covenant” in mind. The question now becomes, which covenant?

- There is also a case to be made for Jesus reading Deuteronomy as a script, or a scene in a drama which was being re-enacted in his own life. It is surely no coincidence that Deuteronomy 8 mentions Israel’s 40 years in the wilderness as a time of testing, and its words are addressed to them just before they move from wilderness to promised land. No doubt this is where Jesus saw himself as standing. His experience of scarcity and solitude in the wilderness was temporary. He would not turn stones into bread for his own selfish gain, but he would wait until his period of testing was over before finally turning the five loaves of bread into enough food to feed thousands.

Jesus knew in some way that the kingdom of god was at hand through his own ministry, which was a kingdom where Israel “would eat bread without scarcity” (Deut. 8:9). But, lots of bread aside, what would that kingdom look like, and how would it be inaugurated? Jesus’s reading of Isaiah 61 (mentioned immediately after the wilderness account in Luke 4) might just have the answers.

How To Read: Jesus the Spirit-filled Jew

Jesus was (and is?) a Jew. As Christopher Wright points out in Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament, that’s the first thing we learn about him in the New Testament. Therefore the first thing to note about Jesus as interpreter of Scripture is that he interpreted it as a Jew, and a Jew (though certainly a controversial one) he remained throughout his life.

As much as we’d like a timeless, generic, non-Jewish Jesus, we simply don’t get him if we take the gospels seriously. Instead, we have a Jesus who had his foreskin removed eight days after being born and was brought up in accordance with the Law of the Lord. And despite popular presentations of him resembling a 70’s progressive rock band member, he quite possibly looked something not altogether unlike this:

A first-century Palestinian man's mugshot

A Jew through and through. I think that’s worth keeping in mind during the course of this journey into unknown territory.

The second thing to keep in mind comes immediately before we get our first Old Testament quotation from the lips of Jesus. Luke tells us in chapter 4 of his gospel that Jesus was “full of the Holy Spirit” as he was led into the wilderness to be tempted. It is therefore vitally important to highlight that the gospels (especially Luke) don’t present Jesus as a lone interpreter, gaining insight through his own ingenuity. According to the gospels, the spirit of god was powerfully present with him, authorising him at every turn and making that connection between him and god.

If nothing else, for Jesus, reading and interpreting Scripture was a triune experience. Even as son, he fully relied on the words of the father made alive by the spirit. Therefore in order to read, interpret and apply Scripture the way Jesus did, being “filled with the spirit” is a prerequisite. But is it a realistic one?

I think so. The Book of Acts mentions the phrase “filled with the Spirit” numerous times, and never does it seem like less of a filling than that which Jesus enjoyed. The same connection between Jesus and the father was available to the early church, and is available to us too.

To drag Paul into the equation, it is the spirit of god that knows the mind of god. Implicit in this statement is the reality that an un-spiritual (or un-spirit-filled) reading of Scripture does not reveal the mind of god. Word and spirit must be conjoined if the text is to come to life and god is to be known.

Merely quoting Scripture was not what Jesus was doing during his dialogue with the satan at the end of his wilderness wanderings. Undergirding his use of Scripture was a present experience of god’s empowering presence.

What might such a spirit-filled reading of Scripture look like? How do we know we’re on the right track? The answers to these questions is what I hope we'll stumble across along this quest.

How To Read

Jesus of Nazareth once had no teeth, but over time he grew some, lost them, and grew some more. There was a point in his life when he couldn’t walk, but through trial and error he eventually managed to scamper around on his own two feet. Despite the romanticism of certain carols, there can be little doubt that he cried when he wanted to be fed, until finally he was able to feed himself.

Jesus spoke his first word (which, if he’s anything like my second youngest nephew, was “camouflage” in Aramaic) and learned to do all sorts of things that human beings learn to do over the passage of time.

Most importantly for present purposes, he learned how to read. And not only to read the 1st Century equivalent of Ann and Barry, but to read the stories of Adam and Eve, Moses and Pharaoh, David and Goliath, Israel and her exile. In short, he learned to read Israel’s Scriptures, and developed a way to interpret and apply them throughout his history-defining ministry.

How one reads, interprets and applies Scripture is of great importance, whether Christian, Jew, agnostic or other. We all have our ways to engage in these tasks, and these ways help shape the kind of people we are and the kind of lives we lead. We can be moved to trust in a gracious God and joyful obedience to his word, or at the opposite end of the spectrum, we can be moved to contempt for this primitive, fictitious God of the Old Testament and disregard for what his (often volatile) word says.

My aim is to explore the ways Jesus read and interpreted Scripture. Since he’s a pretty big deal for Christians, I thought it might be interesting to look at gospels’ portrait of the one called the Messiah in terms of his use of what we have dubbed ‘The Old Testament’.

Do we have something to learn from Jesus in this regard? Might his interpretations of Scripture be instructive for us, or did different rules apply to him? Was there a “centre” or a “focus” to his reading, both in terms of belief and behaviour? Are there places where our understanding of Scripture is in conflict with Jesus’ understanding? What about the whole area of "authority"?

I don’t know the answers to these questions and more, but I hope to somewhat rectify that through examining some relevant gospel passages and through dialogue with those of you interested in such things for one reason or another.

The Nature of Myth

A while back I did a series on Peter Enns's Inspiration and Incarnation (a series now available in my new book at mark-down prices), which looked at issues like the historicity of Genesis, the nature of myth etc and so on. If you want to hear N.T. Wright sum up the thrust of my own series better than I ever could, hop over to this post at the Science & the Sacred blog.

Heretical Nonsense

When it comes to authority -- or authorization -- does the spirit of god (ever) supersede Scripture? At the least, a vaguely positive answer to this question sounds like a terribly messy conclusion to come to; at most, I should be burned at the stake for even daring to ask such heretical nonsense. But what does Scripture say? Or more to the point, how does Scripture itself behave, and how was it treated by those who read it long before we did?

We fins one of the most significant pivots in Scripture -- Old and New Testament included -- in the Book of Acts, chapter 10. Here we read of a Gentile joining god’s covenant community, but in a surprising way. Cornelius didn’t need to go under the knife and have a part of his manhood snipped. He didn’t need to demarcate himself by keeping the food laws. In short, he didn’t need to become a Jew. The spirit of god resting upon this centurian was enough to convince Peter that YHWH was doing a new thing. Circumcision, a fundamental law found throughout the Old Testament, was superseded by a new law -- the law of Christ -- which was radically inclusive of Jews, Gentiles, males, females, free men and slaves.

Paul took this to the nth degree, summarising in 1 Corinthians 7 that what matters is not circumcision or uncircumcision, but keeping god’s commandments…except the one about circumcision, evidently.

What Peter and Paul appear to be doing here is allowing the empowering presence of god’s spirit to shape their ministries in uncomfortable ways; ways that would have once been inconceivable to them as Jews. And what’s more, Peter and Paul are allowing the spirit to shape their reading and understanding of Scripture; it is a hermeneutic of the spirit, which sounds like a reasonable framework of interpretation given the spirit’s unique hand in the Bible’s authorship. These two apostles could never have come to the conclusion that circumcision is meaningless by merely reading and interpreting Israel’s scriptures themselves. They needed a higher authority -- the present experience of the spirit in their lives and in the lives of others -- to guide them towards uncomfortable truths.

The question remains - does the spirit supersede Scripture? Would the disciples have come to different conclusions about Gentile inclusion in the church had they let Scripture be their supreme authority? Or are the spirit and Scripture always and forever in perfect harmony? After all, in Acts 15 James quotes Amos as a witness to what Peter and Paul experienced first hand, and Paul is relentless in his use of Scripture to validate this new work of god spreading throughout the Roman empire.

I think there is an inherent harmony between spirit and Scripture, but I don’t think that implies utter consistency from start to finish, where both are absolutely immutable. For example, we affirm that the spirit of god worked with Moses as he formulated his divorce laws for Israel. But, we also affirm that the spirit of god worked with Jesus as he critiqued those laws by saying that divorce was never actually god’s original intention; rather, adjustments were made in the time of Moses to accommodate for Israel’s hardness of heart (Matt. 19).

What then of some modern day application, such as female teachers in church? Can we appeal to the promptings or gifts of god’s spirit in the lives of women over and against some texts like 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2? Has the spirit once again acted in a surprising way, a way only glimpsed by Paul (Galatians 3, for example) but not fully worked out yet? Might the spirit have said something to Paul in his day, but be saying something different to us? Something perhaps contrary to certain passages in Scripture, but resonant with the overall picture? I wouldn’t put it past him, but my word wouldn’t that open a can of worms.