Kellen cogitates about the recent Ehrman media blitz. Ehrman is the NT scholar who went from Conservative Believer to Agnostic through his study of scripture. (He was on the Daily Show recently. I have him on the DVR but havn’t been able to see it yet…)
In the comments, Plax ends up where I end up, and summarizes nicely what I think is the core of the Reformed tradition:
The Bible is a compilation of books written by human beings. It speaks of God as he revealed himself in the person Jesus Christ, a Jew from Nazareth. Jesus is the revelation of which you and I speak. The Bible is the witness to the revelation.
We don’t worship a book. We worship God the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Compare the PCUSA Confession of 1967, in the Book of Confessions (9.27, 9.29):
The one sufficient revelation of God is Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate, to whom the Holy Spirit bears unique and authoritative witness through the Holy Scriptures, which are received and obeyed as the word of God written. The Scriptures are not a witness among others, but the witness without parallel. …
The Bible is to be interpreted in the light of its witness to God’s work of reconcilation in Christ. The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect the views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current. The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding. As God has spoken his word in diverse cultural situations, the church is confident that he will continue to speak through the Scriptures in a changing world and in every form of human culture.
Ehrman is symptomatic of many who come from a rigid view of scripture and then, when digging down into it, come away with nothing but tatters. It doesn’t have to be that way….
…millinerd offers some interesting comments too.
…and be sure to read through Ben Witherington’s post “Misanalyzing Text Criticsm,” which is helpful, though just because someone has an ax to grind doesn’t for that reason make them wrong (but it is important to think about). (hat tip Kruse).
Good luck with a hermeneutic that takes that kind of confession into consideration!
I never knew the PCUSA articulated their view on the Scriptures in that way . . . but then again, I guess it’s all so fitting considering their praxis.
Peace!
I guess I’m not sure what you mean by ‘their praxis.’ That’s kinda vague.
The confession takes seriously (a) the human nature of the creation of the Scripture, (b) the divine source that inspired its creation and to which it points, and (c) the need to distinguish those and to work them out.
To me, its an act of mature faith to try to wrestle with that. Other hermenutics don’t seem intellectually honest enough to me. YMMV, though.
Glenn,
You said…
I guess it’s all so fitting considering their praxis.
That’s kind of a gross generalization, don’t you think? I mean, I wouldn’t say something like, “Well I’m not surprised by those silly inerrantists considering their praxis,” because that would just lump a whole lot of well meaning people into a mass of perdition out of which one could never hope to escape. Moreover, it would be a vague and nearly meaningless thing to say.
If you mean to imply that PCUSA people are generally “liberal” and by that you might mean to imply that they are actually libertine (viz. not caring what is right or wrong), then I can assure you that you have never spent much time in a PCUSA church with PCUSA people. They can be some of the most nit-picky people I’ve ever known, for better or for worse. And I know for a fact that they care about the Bible and the way we read it. Just spend a few minutes with the Book of Order or the Book of Confessions. These are Calvinists, man.
Perhaps you have some final disagreements with those in the PCUSA, but don’t imply that they don’t care (if I was, in fact, correct about the implications of your enigmatic indictment).
Kairos – thanks for the prayers for my daughter. I really appreciate it. She’s much better.
As for your post: I find it interesting because I didn’t grow up in a PCUSA church. I grew up in a conservative Pentecostal tradition, and I always considered the United Methodist Church to be liberal – until I became one. I am now ministering in a UMC church and have discovered they are far more conservative theologically than I would have guessed. There are a lot of similarities in the UMC and PCUSA regarding their view of Scripture (with the UMC focusing more on Arminian views and the PCUSA focusing more on Calvinist views – although as a Pentecostal, we focused a great deal on Calvin ourselves), but I think the PCUSA has been a little more relaxed and open in their interpretation than the UMC. I think that’s probably good.
There must be a healthy balance. I think if we read the Bible not from just a “life handbook” perspective, but from a “story of God and man” perspective, we see that events and history and science fit much more neatly than it does in the “textbook/handbook” scenario. I don’t even know if any of that made sense, but that’s my 2 cents.
Bryan wrote:
There must be a healthy balance. I think if we read the Bible not from just a “life handbook” perspective, but from a “story of God and man” perspective, we see that events and history and science fit much more neatly than it does in the “textbook/handbook” scenario. I don’t even know if any of that made sense, but that’s my 2 cents.
That made sense, to me at least. Thanks for your thoughts on this… Its good to hear from someone with a pentecostal background and with your current location in the UMC; I don’t hear that voice very often.