Category Archives: Bible Studies

Posts which are Bible studies

Proof texting and communion in one kind: the same kind of error

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I just realised an interesting link between proof texting, the theology of which I blogged about yesterday, and the issue I raised in my series two weeks ago about the validity of communion in one kind.

I quoted the following from Frank Viola and George Barna’s chapter on proof texting:

The Protestant scholastics held that not only is the Scripture the Word of God, but every part of it is the Word of God in and of itself—irrespective of context. This set the stage for the idea that if we lift a verse out of the Bible, it is true in its own right and can be used to prove a doctrine or a practice.

That clause “every part of it is the Word of God in and of itself” sounds remarkably like the Roman Catholic doctrine of concomitance, as defined by Fr. John Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary:

The doctrine that explains why the whole Christ is present under each Eucharistic species. Christ is indivisible, so that his body cannot be separated from his blood, his human soul, his divine nature, and his divine personality. Consequently he is wholly present in the Eucharist.

I discussed this doctrine in a previous post. My point there was that this doctrine is specifically Roman Catholic and so should not be appealed to by Anglicans – although it probably lies behind the Archbishops’ advice of which I was so critical.

My point now is a different one. This Roman Catholic doctrine of concomitance, that the whole of Jesus, the Word of God, is present in each of the communion elements, was apparently developed by the original mediaeval scholastic theologians or “Schoolmen”, of whom the best known is Thomas Aquinas. Their scholastic method and use of Aristotelian logic was taken up by the Protestant scholastics that Viola and Barna refer to – in a footnote they name Francis Turretin and Martin Chemnitz. And these scholastics came to the analogous conclusion that every part of Scripture, even a verse lifted out of context, “is the Word of God in and of itself”.

Where do they find that supported in Scripture? I don’t think they can even find a verse lifted out of context to support it. Rather, it is a result of Aristotelian logic as developed by the various scholastics, going far beyond what God has chosen to reveal in his Word.

God doesn’t want us to find him in and through just a part of Scripture or one half of communion, and to rationalise away our rejection of the other element or of the parts of his Word that we find less palatable. He has provided the whole Bible and ordained both communion elements. We should make proper use of all the gifts that he has given.

Bad boys and big bad bears

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In his post Bad Boy Bible Study meets Ship of Fools David Ker challenged me, along with sixteen other bloggers, to outline a sermon on 2 Kings 2:23-24, the story about Elisha and the bears who killed 42 bad boys – although arguably the real bad boy in the story is Elisha:

Here are the rules:

  • You’ve been asked to teach or preach on this passage.
  • What would you say?

Simple, eh?

Well, maybe not so simple. I could decline the tag on the basis that I am not a preacher. But then I am a bit of a frustrated preacher, and so I will accept the challenge. Here is the passage, in TNIV:

From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.

What can I say? I could muse on the significance of 42. The number of life, the universe and everything? But that’s not from the Bible, it’s from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The number of humanity (6) multiplied by the number of perfection (7)? Possibly, and so indicating that the whole of humanity is perfectly cursed by God – no, that must be Alexander’s Sword exegesis. Or perhaps the only significance of 42 is that this was historically the number of boys who were torn in pieces – probably a more accurate translation of the Hebrew than “maul” (compare the same word in 2 Kings 8:12, 15:16 and Hosea 13:8, 16, all translated in TNIV “rip open”, which has perhaps tried to mitigate the violence in 2 Kings 2:24).

But there is one real sermon point I would want to take from this passage. That is about the power of a prophet’s words.

Elisha as a prophet filled with the Holy Spirit had within him the power and authority of God, with which he was able to pronounce a curse on the boys which was not mere words but had immediate effect. Similarly there is authority in our words as Spirit-filled Christians, and by that I mean all true Christians. God has given us the right to ask for anything in Jesus’ name and promised to give it to us (John 14:13-14, 15:7, 16:23, in context). Sometimes he does this even when it is not a good thing, as the Israelites who craved meat found out when they received quail which brought a plague (Numbers 11:4, 31-34). The same is true of Elisha’s curse on the boys: God answered it by sending the bears even though that was not a good thing.

So, as Christians,  we must be careful not to ask for bad things or pray curses on people, but instead we should bless them and ask for what is good.

The Theology of Proof Texting

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Frank Viola, of whose book Reimagining Church I wrote an incomplete review last year, has just posted a link to an online (PDF) version of part of a chapter from an earlier book which he wrote with George Barna, Pagan Christianity. The chapter is called Reapproaching the New Testament: The Bible is Not a Jigsaw Puzzle.

Proof texting is a phenomenon I am very aware of. I know very well how it is used by preachers and others, including bloggers, sometimes apparently allowing them to “prove” almost anything they want to prove from Scripture. I have criticised this approach before; indeed it underlines the fundamentalist approach to the Bible which I discussed in this blog series. But I have never before seen any attempt to justify proof texting theologically. That is not of course what Viola and Barna are doing, but in at the beginning of their chapter (pp. 2-3 of the PDF) they give an interesting explanation of the theology behind it:

The approach most commonly used among contemporary Christians when studying the Bible is called “proof texting.” The origin of proof texting goes back to the late 1590s. A group of men called Protestant scholastics took the teachings of the Reformers and systematized them according to the rules of Aristotelian logic.

The Protestant scholastics held that not only is the Scripture the Word of God, but every part of it is the Word of God in and of itself—irrespective of context. This set the stage for the idea that if we lift a verse out of the Bible, it is true in its own right and can be used to prove a doctrine or a practice.

When John Nelson Darby emerged in the mid-1800s, he built a theology based on this approach. Darby raised proof texting to an art form. In fact, it was Darby who gave fundamentalist and evangelical Christians a good deal of their presently accepted teachings. All of them are built on the proof-texting method. Proof texting, then, became the common way that we contemporary Christians approach the Bible.

As a result, we Christians rarely, if ever, get to see the New Testament as a whole. Rather, we are served up a dish of fragmented thoughts that are drawn together by means of fallen human logic. The fruit of this approach is that we have strayed far afield from the principles of the New Testament church. Yet we still believe we are being biblical.

Ouch!

After an introduction to how the books of the Bible are arranged and divided, Viola and Barna list eight ways in which “We Christians have been taught to approach the Bible”. All of them are varieties of David Ker‘s Alexander’s Sword method. They continue (p. 10):

Now look at this list again. Which of these approaches have you used? Look again: Notice how each is highly individualistic. All of them put you, the individual Christian, at the center. Each approach ignores the fact that most of the New Testament was written to corporate bodies of people (churches), not to individuals.

But that is not all. Each of these approaches is built on isolated proof texting. Each treats the New Testament like a manual and blinds us to its real message.

A bit later they write (p. 12):

You could call our method of studying the New Testament the “clipboard approach.” If you are familiar with computers, you are aware of the clipboard component. If you happen to be in a word processor, you may cut and paste a piece of text via the clipboard. The clipboard allows you to cut a sentence from one document and paste it into another.

Pastors, seminarians, and laymen alike have been conditioned by the clipboard approach when studying the Bible. This is how we justify our man-made, encased traditions and pass them off as biblical. It is why we routinely miss what the early church was like whenever we open up our New Testaments. We see verses. We do not see the whole picture.

There are a few factual errors in the extract. For example, in 1227 Stephen Langton was not “a professor at the University of Paris” but Archbishop of Canterbury; a Wikipedia article suggests that in fact he divided the Bible into chapters in 1205, when, according to another Wikipedia page, he actually was a lecturer in Paris.

But these minor points do not detract from the strong message of this chapter. Viola and Barna clearly show how fundamentally flawed is the typical evangelical approach to Scripture, and so by implication how fundamentally flawed are many of the conclusions derived from it. As evangelicals we really do need to find a better way of understanding the Bible, if our claim to take it as the inspired and authoritative Word of God is to be meaningful and intellectually honest.

Lingamish the Great cuts the Gordian knot of Bible interpretation

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David Ker, the blogger formerly known as Lingamish (that’s still the name of his blog), has started what looks like becoming a fascinating series of Exegetical Sketches by describing the Alexander’s Sword method of interpreting the Bible, and contrasting it with the grammatico-historical method which is at least in theory recommended by scholars. In David’s image, whereas the scholars try to unravel the Gordian knot of complications in the text, preachers who use the method he is describing, like Alexander the Great, simply cut through this knot with their sword. That is, these preachers are

Abandoning in-depth exegesis for relativistic readings anchored by tradition and divine guidance.

Is this Alexander’s Sword method ever valid? Despite my post title, David doesn’t seem to think it is. And I more or less agree. I certainly don’t think that preachers should abandon proper exegesis of the text, although I also don’t think they need to go into some of the murky depths e.g. of source criticism that biblical scholars might lure them into. But once the original meaning of the text has been established through exegesis, surely it is right for the preacher to rely on divine guidance, and refer to tradition, in establishing a reading of the text which is both in accordance with the original meaning and meets the needs of the congregation.

This is of course only a very brief summary of a complex issue, and I’m sure David will go into this in more depth, illuminating the murk, as his series continues.

John 21: Peter as Jesus' friend

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Bill Heroman has just concluded a heroic series of twelve posts in just over a week putting forward A New Take on John 21 (this link is to the final summary post; the individual posts are preface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10). I am not convinced by some of this, such as his argument that this encounter by the beach took place at Tiberias and that Jesus and Peter actually spoke in Greek (actually that was in an earlier post by Bill). But I do find his main conclusion about their conversation rather persuasive, even if I have to say that it was crafted into its surviving Greek form by John rather than being a precise record of Greek words spoken by Jesus and Peter.

I have heard two main lines of interpretation of the conversation about love, and why in the Greek text Jesus uses agapao in his first two questions to Peter, and phileo only in his third, whereas Peter always answers with phileo. One interpretation is that agapao is a strong word for “love” and phileo is a weak word, and so Peter is committing himself only to a lower level of love than Jesus is looking for. The other interpretation is that no distinction is to be made between agapao and phileo, that this is merely stylistic variation.

Into this debate rides Bill Heroman with a radically new proposal, based on pre-Christian Greek usage, that in this context (before the Christian concept of agape love was fully developed, on his hypothesis) phileo is the strong word for “love”, the committed love between friends, and agapao is the weak word, referring to doing favours. More specifically, Jesus’ first two questions “Do you love me?” (agapao) would have been understood as “Will you do something for me?”, whereas Peter’s reply “I love you” (phileo) would have meant “I am your friend”, alluding back to John 15:14-15 and implying “Of course, I will do anything for you, my friend”. Then Jesus’ continuing questioning, especially the final question “Do you love me?” (phileo), would have been his probing of the genuineness and depth of Peter’s friendship.

This seems quite convincing to me. It also implies an interesting take on the call to Christian discipleship, on whether we who call ourselves friends of God (John 15:14-15, cf. James 2:23) are actually prepared to do what he asks us to do. Does anyone have any constructive, or other, criticism of this proposal?

Bill also recently told this wonderful joke, especially for maths geeks like him and me:

One day Jesus began teaching The Kingdom of Heaven is like 3x squared plus 8x minus 9.

The disciples began to wonder about this until Peter said, I’ll bet this is another one of his parabolas.

The “right to spend” must not be a stumbling block

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The newspapers’ scandal of the week here in the UK is that many of our MPs have been caught out claiming inappropriate expenses. These are mostly sums which they technically have the right to spend, and claim back, but which the people of this country, or at least the newspapers, consider excessive. On this matter Bishop Alan has had sensible words to say.

In this context Matthew Malcolm, an Aussie studying here in the UK, has posted an interesting but painful retelling of part of 1 Corinthians 8-10, with the principles outlined there reapplied to the acquisition of wealth. He calls this, in comparison to the commoner application to alcohol, “a far more attentive application of these chapters for Christians today”. Here is an extract from Malcolm’s piece:

But watch out that this “right to spend” of yours does not become a stumbling block to the weak.  For if someone should see you with your knowledge, making a down payment on a Range Rover, won’t their conscience, being weak, be built up to indulge in a hunger for wealth?  So the weak is destroyed by your knowledge – this brother or sister, for whom Christ died.  And thus, sinning against brothers and sisters and damaging their weak conscience, you sin against Christ.

As Matthew himself responds, “Youch”.

Loving Jesus with all your heart

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David Ker has posted another rant about “Jesus is my boyfriend” type songs, in this case specifically “Let My Words Be Few” by Matt Redman. (Is it something about the Mozambique air that makes David rant? At least he withdrew his one about Tutu.) In a comment in reply I threatened to write a post “Jesus really is my boyfriend!” This is that post, but I have reconsidered the title as I don’t want people to think I am female or gay.

So, is it right for Christians (male and female) to relate to God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in the same way as a girl relates to her boyfriend, or a boy to his girlfriend? Is it proper to sing in worship “Jesus I am so in love with you”?

I would suggest to start with that if that is not actually an improper statement it is wrong for any Christian to criticise other Christians for choosing to worship in this way. If it is not helpful for you as an individual or for your church to worship with such words, then you are not obliged to do so, and can ask your church’s worship leader not to choose this song. But if the words are proper worship of God, and presuming that at least one person, the songwriter, found them helpful for his worship, then I really don’t think it is right for anyone to criticise or mock.

In the case of this particular song, as Ferg noted in a recent comment on this blog, Matt Redman has stated that he regrets including these particular words because of the misunderstanding they have caused. I think the remark is in this interview (thanks to Eddie for the link) (but I can’t check just at the moment as I have to be quiet after midnight).

So, to get back to the question, is it proper to sing in worship “Jesus I am so in love with you”? The starting point here must be that we are commanded to love God with all our hearts and souls, indeed with our whole beings, not just with our minds. I know that the Greek and Hebrew words used for “heart” didn’t refer to the emotions in quite the same way as “heart” often does in English. But the conclusion is inescapable that our love for God should involve our emotions as well as every other part of us. And as Jesus is God incarnate we are surely called to love him in this same way, that is, with an emotional love and not just a cerebral or a practical love.

The Old Testament image of God as the bridegroom and Israel as his bride is taken up in the New Testament with the church as the bride. In Ephesians 5:25-33 the love of a husband for his wife is seen as a reflection of Jesus’ love for the church, a love which led him to the cross. Paul doesn’t explicitly teach that wives should respond in love to their husbands (rather, he uses the controversial word often translated “submit”), but this is surely the implication of the teaching elsewhere that the church should respond with love to Jesus’ love on the cross.

The Song of Songs is a beautiful love song in which a man and a woman express their love for one another, in emotional language, even showing romanticism although that word is anachronistic. There is a long tradition in the church of applying parts of this to the love which the church should express towards God, effectively turning it into an expression of “God is my boyfriend”. Isaiah 5:1-7 is explicitly called a love song, but is in fact God addressing his people, so this gives biblical justification for using this genre of love between God and humans.

So it seems to me that Christians should feel in their hearts love towards God and Jesus – a love which I feel. Indeed I would suggest that someone who does not have any feelings of love towards God or Jesus has not really grasped what it is to be a Christian. If this is true it is surely right to express our feelings of love in singing to Jesus love songs, mirror images of the song of Isaiah 5. What better words for such a song than “Jesus I am so in love with you”?

And if our song is a love song, it will of course have what David calls “Trance-like melody… ooshy-gooshy lyrics … Repetition”, which are part of the genre of modern and ancient love songs – look at the Song of Songs, but of course we don’t know its original melody. Just as a boy and girl who are truly in love will not time their embraces, no one who has true and deep feelings of love for Jesus will want to ensure that their love song is “only four minutes long”.

I wonder, if we men restricted our expressions of love to our wives and girlfriends to four minute cerebral recitations of their character, how much would they appreciate that? Instead what they want is expression of true love from the heart, in which we indeed “let our words be few”, little more than “I am so in love with you”. And if that is how we please our human loved ones, surely that is a part of how we should show our love to our God.

Forced to faith: an oxymoron?

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I just came back to an interesting aside in a comment by Dave Warnock on his own blog, from a few days ago. Dave was replying to my own comment there, in which I wrote:

I hold that God does not force people to be saved who specifically reject it.

Dave replied:

I am with Peter in that I do not believe God will force anyone to come to faith (surely an oxymoron).

That word “oxymoron” caught my attention because it seems to go to the heart of why I reject the Calvinist, and indeed long before that Augustinian, position that God predestines certain people to believe, leaving them no personal choice in the matter. It seems to me, as apparently to Dave, to be a self-evident truth that faith or belief is an act of the human mind and will. Indeed this seems to be implied by this dictionary definition of “belief”:

  1. The mental act, condition, or habit of placing trust or confidence in another: My belief in you is as strong as ever.
  2. Mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something: His explanation of what happened defies belief.
  3. Something believed or accepted as true, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons.

If belief is an act or condition of the human mind, and if that mind has any kind of free will, it is indeed an oxymoron to suggest that anyone can be forced to believe anything.

Yet I am very aware that this understanding of faith or belief conflicts with one which can be traced right back to Augustine in the 4th-5th century, as he wrote (in On the Predestination of the Saints, Book I, chapter 3):

the faith by which we are Christians is the gift of God.

I am also aware that there is more to Augustine’s position than this, but I don’t want to be distracted by the details from my main point in this post.

There are nuanced versions of Calvinism, which embrace compatibilism and are not accepted by all Calvinists, according to which human free will is real but also compatible with determinism and divine predestination. I do not reject such descriptions. On this basis it is possible to hold both that God decides who he will give faith to and that each human being decided whether or not to believe.

Indeed the idea of faith as a gift can be found in the Bible, as it is listed in 1 Corinthians 12 as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. But it seems clear that this is not about saving faith. It is often understood as referring to faith for miracles or healing. Nevertheless this does suggest that there is something in the idea that God gives to people the ability to believe.

So is it perhaps impossible for the human mind to believe or have faith in something beyond its normal experience, such as in the saving death of Jesus Christ or that a miracle is about to happen, apart from a special gift of God? Or can it believe such things with sufficient effort and practice? Was Alice or the White Queen right in this exchange?:

Alice laughed. `There’s no use trying,’ she said `one ca’n’t believe impossible things.’

`I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. …’

Then, can the human mind be forced to believe something against its own will? I am thinking here not so much of the Calvinism that teaches that people cannot believe and be saved without God’s help, as of the universalism that teaches that everyone will believe and so be saved. Yes, one day

at the name of Jesus every knee [will] bow … and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord …

Philippians 2:10-11 (TNIV)

But that will be when faith is no longer necessary because all will see the risen Jesus. Will it then be too late to believe? Will the owners of every knee and tongue still be able to benefit from this promise?:

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Romans 10:9 (TNIV)

I don’t know. But I feel sure that there will even then be some who, even though seeing the reality of the Christian message and of the fate in store for them if they do not accept it, will still choose to reject Jesus and the salvation he offers. In fact Jesus himself seems to have predicted just this, at the end of the story of the rich man and Lazarus, when he put these words into the mouth of Abraham:

If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.

Luke 16:31 (TNIV)

God our Saviour … wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.

1 Timothy 2:3-4 (TNIV)

But he chooses not to force people to be saved, and so the inevitable result is that some will choose not to be. We can simply hope and pray that in the end only a few people will not be saved, and by repenting and believing in Jesus be assured that we will not ourselves be among that number.

Results of being filled with the Spirit

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In a comment (the fourth one) on his own blog Mike Aubrey, while making a technical point about the participles in the Greek text of Ephesians 5:19-21, brings out some important teaching about the Holy Spirit:

Most believe that the participles denote the result of the command to “be filled with the Spirit.” … In fact, as far as I am aware every single interpreter of Ephesians since Markus Barth has taken the participles of 19-21 as participles of result rather than imperatival (key words: “as far as I am aware”).

But Mike also argues that there cannot be a break between verses 21 and 22:

What I found was that there is absolutely no other instance where an ellided clause either begins a new pericope or sentence – much less imply a change in mood.

In other words, as I understand Mike’s argument, this passage and what follows up to 6:9 should be understood as follows (adapted from TNIV, 5:22-6:9 abridged):

Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, with the result that you will:

  • speak to one another with psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit;
  • sing and make music from your heart to the Lord;
  • always give thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ;
  • submit to one another out of reverence for Christ:
    • wives, submitting yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord …
    • husbands, loving your wives, just as Christ loved the church …
    • children, obeying your parents in the Lord …
    • fathers, not exasperating your children …
    • slaves, obeying your earthly masters …
    • and masters, treating your slaves in the same way. …

This doubly nested list may not be the normal way of laying out a Bible translation, but it does seem to reflect Paul’s intention here, at least on Mike’s exegesis.

If Mike is correct, this implies that we Christians are not to put our effort into doing these good things like submitting to one another, still less into making others submit to us. Instead we are to allow ourselves to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and as we do so the Spirit will produce in our hearts these good fruits, of worship and thanksgiving and also of the mutual submission which is, or should be, characteristic of the Christian life.

Hear my voice!

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Many of you have read this blog, but few of you have heard the sound of my voice. Now you have a chance to do so. You can listen to me reading David Ker’s Cyber-Psalm 33. This is the one which I said some nice things about when it was first published.

Months ago David asked me to record this for him, but my first attempt by toll-free telephone didn’t work out. So yesterday, in response to his urgent appeal, I recorded it again using the high quality sound equipment at my church (unfortunately it was sensitive enough to pick up the rustling of the paper I was reading from), and sent the result to David for all to hear.

The words “Hear my voice” have been in my mind this week also for a completely different reason. I was asked to lead a church home group meeting on the subject of hearing and obeying God’s voice. This was based on a chapter in the book “Receiving God’s Best” by Derek Prince. He wrote (p.62):

The success of our relationship with God and our walk with Him depends on hearing His voice.

I agree. But I discovered a small problem in that Prince quotes in support Exodus 15:26 and Deuteronomy 28:1, claiming that these are about hearing God’s voice. These verses start almost but not quite identically in Hebrew. In most translations the former refers to listening to God’s voice, and the latter to obeying it. Why the difference in translation? It is just one letter in Hebrew.

The Exodus verse (ignoring the speech introducer) starts im-shamoa` tishma` leqol YHWH eloheyka, literally “if hearing you hear to the voice of the LORD your God”. In Deuteronomy the equivalent words are im-shamoa` tishma` beqol YHWH eloheyka, literally “if hearing you hear in the voice of the LORD your God”. Contrast Genesis 3:10 where literally Adam “heard your voice”, the same verb and noun but with no preposition “to” or “in”.

It seems that there is a subtle distinction here in the Hebrew which Derek Prince may have missed: literally “hear voice” = “hear”; literally “hear to voice” = “listen to”; literally “hear in voice” = “obey”. But the distinction is largely lost in Greek, and so in John 10:27 “my sheep hear my voice” also means “my sheep listen to me” and “my sheep obey me”. Although Prince’s exegesis is simplified, perhaps deliberately, he finds the main point: the prerequisite for God’s blessing is not just hearing God’s voice but also listening to it and obeying it – a point he could have made more explicitly from Hebrews 4:1-2.

Please hear my voice and listen to me reading the Cyber-Psalm. But don’t obey me, obey God!