Reading Romans 7 and the Evangelical Conviction

If you’ve ever given any detailed attention to the text of the book of Romans before you’ll be well aware of the difficulties that surround chapter 7:14ff. The big debate in scholarship that surrounds this passage comes down to the spiritual status of Paul as he discusses his struggle with sin. There are two main options: Either he is talking about his experiences as a Jew living under the law prior to his conversion to Christianity OR he is talking about his struggles with the ‘flesh’ as a regenerate Christian. The traditional view, from the time of Augustine, has held to the latter option – Paul’s struggles as a Christian. This view has been upheld by the likes of Calvin, Luther, Packer & Stott. The former view though has some notable contemporary proponents such as Moo, Witherington & Schreiner.

After consulting much of the technical exegetical arguments surround this particular text it seems that the evidence tends towards the former view espoused by Moo and co. The problem is that many evangelicals have rather strong emotional ties to this passage as it seems to relate so well to their own inner struggles with sin. So if you challenge the traditional exegesis you are also, in one sense, challenging the spiritual experience of many if not all Christians.

Now what is most fascinating to me is not so much which view is correct (I’m still not 100% sold on either view just yet and need to study it further before I’ll commit to one view, although as I’ve already stated, after having grown up with the traditional view, my initial response to the exegetical evidence is that it presents Paul in his pre-conversion state contrary to the traditional view), what is most fascinating is how we as evangelicals, who proclaim the authority of Scripture – OVER OUR SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE – debate and deal with this particular passage. My contention is that if this was a passage that didn’t appear to infringe upon such a ‘sacred’ and emotionally charged part of our spiritual experience then we would simply have dismissed the traditional view already. We would have looked at the two views, realised that both views had their difficulties, but that the one view seemed to have more evidence for it than the other, and then objectively we’d have chosen the non-traditional view and upheld the authority of scripture to the best of our ability. It seems to me however that instead of this we’re prepared to flirt with denying the absolute authority and rule of scripture in our lives and practice for the sake of upholding our spiritual experience. Simply put: Evangelicals tend to behave highly ‘un-evangelical’ in situations like this.

Surely the convictions that underpin historic evangelicalism should cause us to rise above even emotion and experience when we attempt to discern the Lord’s voice with clarity in the scriptures? I don’t want to play down emotion and experience and their role in understanding the scriptures but all things, even emotion and experience, in the end must be subservient to scripture for us to be true to our convictions as evangelicals – this has to be the case if we truly believe that scripture is our final rule for life and spiritual experience.

To Judge or not to Judge…

I’ve been working on the Sermon on the Mount as part of a post grad program and have found it wonderfully satisfying as well as troubling at the same time.  Jesus’ words are both immensely encouraging and go right to the heart of hypocritical religion.  As I study it more, His words seem to stick to me as I slowly begin to realise my own religious hypocrisy.  One such text that has taken me aback is Matthew 7:1-6.  Jesus begins simply enough:  

“Judge not, that you be not judged.” 

This is his guiding principle for the text; if one of his followers displays judgment then they will be judged.  Before we go further, we need to realise that Jesus was critiquing the deficient righteousness of the Pharisees (cf. 5: 17-48) urging his followers to capture the true meaning of righteousness as putting Christ’s commands into practise.  So we have Jesus warning the disciples that if they display the same kind of critical, harsh judgemental attitude that the Pharisees did by condemning others then they are in danger of the greater judgement (see v2). This he helpfully illustrates in v3-5 where he uses the word picture of a man trying to help his brother remove the speck from his eye.  But Jesus condemns him as a hypocrite!  Why?  Because of the log in his own eye; this was the fault of the Pharisees who condemned others for their failings while not being able to see the greater problem of their own hearts, hearts hardened to God and others.  And so Jesus warns his followers to not fall into that trap of hypocrisy; Christians do not have the right to condemn a man, which is God’s ultimate job.  Ours is to love our neighbour and love God which is the sum of the Law (cf. 7:12).   

But don’t we see Jesus judging others?  The disciples are told to judge false teachers by their fruits so is this a contradiction? No, for the opposite extreme of being judgemental/condemning is just as bad a mistake.  That extreme is to suspend all faculties of critical thought and action.  This would mean to let sin go unpunished within a church community, this would mean allowing false teaching that wrecks faith to go unchallenged and that is why v6 is included in the context. It is puzzling and needs some research but the picture is that of a warning that Christians are not to give what is holy (the pearl) to what is unholy (the dogs and pigs) for they may turn and attack!  The pearl I take it is that is the Gospel message (cf. Mat 13:44-45) which must at some point NOT be given to these “animals”.  The animals come to represent those who are particularly opposed to the Gospel and its implications, who would at any opportunity seek to revile and mock Christ whenever they are given the message. 

So Jesus would have his followers love others by helping them and challenging them in their serving of God and men by not judging and condemning them.  Yet they must show some level of discrimination against serious opponents of the Gospel for the sake of the glory of God. So I take it that as we engage with non believers and believers we are to do so knowing our place, listening and loving.  Yet we cannot accept all that we hear without a critical eye or ear and must be ready to engage and challenge false living and teaching but always be focussing that critical eye to our own lives first (v5). Loving others means challenging their beliefs and life if it does not come in line with Christ’s ethic, but it’s how we do this that is immensely important!   

Witherington and Progressive Revelation?

I’m a firm believer in progressive revelation, as you can see by the number of posts I’ve written categorized ‘biblical theology‘, but when we talk about the revelation of scripture progressing does that mean that everything in the bible is progressing all the time? The short answer is no: God, the ultimate author of the scripture (albeit through human authors) is the same in terms of his attributes throughout the bible storyline. God’s attributes do not progress through the bible so that you get some sort of angry, kill-joy God in the Old Testament who turns into a loving caring and gracious God in the New Testament.

So whilst God remains constant the story of his redeeming a people for himself is in a state of progression with Jesus Christ at the pinnacle. This is most clear in Paul’s writing in Ephesians 3:2-7 where Paul talks about ‘the mystery’ that has now been made known, and verse 7 clarifies that ‘the mystery’ was in fact the gospel of Christ. In the past it was hidden but now, in Christ, is revealed – a clear example of progression in the story and the revelation.

I think these two observations are pretty clear and we’d all be in agreement about them. The big question though is whether or not there are other kinds of progression in the bible. One such type of progression that I’ve recently encountered is the contention that the doctrinal understandings of various Old Testament saints were in a state of progression. So Ben Witherington, for example, in his recent discussion about what he feels are erroneous views concerning sovereignty was confronted by one commenter concerning the fact that Job seems to attribute his hardships directly to God in his well known statement:

“The LORD gives and the LORD takes away. Blessed be the name of the LORD.”

Now clearly Job’s doctrinal position doesn’t agree with Witherington’s critique of Piper. However Witherington doesn’t see this as a problem because as far as he is concerned Job’s theology…

“… is an imperfect, and indeed inaccurate one, not one that a Christian should affirm.”

So because, as Witherington goes on to explain, the bible is a progressive revelation so too is the doctrinal quality of the Old Testament saints. So Job, being one of the earliest saints had a ridiculously inadequate theology of the attributes of God according to this view because he was right at the beginning of the progression.

Now this sounds to me like a bit of a moving of the goal posts. Let’s take this to some logical conclusions: Firstly the whole creation narratives are completely useless in terms of doctrinal content because they stem probably from some extremely early oral traditions that Moses picked up on, in fact Moses must have spent quite some time re-working the creation narrative and sorting out all the doctrinal error since he was probably a bit further along the line in terms of progressive revelation, but then he couldn’t have got it all right either and he must have had some pretty big errors in his writing because he’s still fairly early in the whole progression. As for David and his psalms, well they’re really just a bunch of nice songs now that helps us empathize with him in his struggles, but as far as doctrinal content – useless – he’s at least 1000 years too early in the progression to be of any use doctrinally.

Come on Dr. Witherington, if we go that way where does it end?

The Exegesis of Humble Orthodoxy

“Within the church, not least in home Bible studies and discussion groups and the like, when some interpretation of screwball proportions is advanced, leaders are more and more likely to say something soothing such as, ‘That’s an interesting insight, Charles. Does anyone else have anything to contribute?’ It has become out of vogue for the leader to ask Charles how or where he finds his so-called ‘insight’ in the text, or to get others in the group to criticize Charles, in the hope of bringing the entire group to a common view of what the text means. Within my own discipline, one comes across more and more books with titles such as The Open Text, Reading Sacred Texts Through American Eyes, The Liberating Exegesis. But the question sooner or later becomes this: How can Scripture ever reform us if by our ‘liberating exegesis’ we are invariably able to make it say what is comfortable to us, if we are always able to domesticate it in line with the predilections of our own interpretative community? The challenges we face are deep and complicated.”- D.A. Carson

In our humble orthodoxy are we exegeting the text with humility and openess in order to be faithful and acknowledge all perspectives or are we doing it to avoid having to listen to the demands of God?

Resurgence Conference

Gary Shavey has details on the 2008 Resurgence Conference entitled ‘Text and Context‘. This is such a great topic and something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Now I know us readers in South Africa probably won’t be going over to Seattle anytime soon (unless of course someone out there wants to buy me a plane ticket?) but the talks of the conference usually get posted online and so will be something to look forward. The speakers include Mark Driscoll, John Piper, Jill Gilmore and Matt Chandler. Go over and check it out – there’s a cool little video too.

Context, Context, Context

This a constant refrain that comes out of my hermeneutics lecturer’s mouth. In hermeneutics class when asked a question and you’re unsure of the answer then simply answer with the word, ‘context’ and there’s a fairly good chance you’ll get it right. In terms of determining the meaning of a text context is king and without it you can pretty much make the Bible say what you want. Now this should be quite straight forward – nothing new. What I was thinking of the other day is how many different types of contexts you have to take into account to derive meaning and then make that meaning understandable. As I see it you have the following contexts to deal with:

Redemptive Historical Context: The Bible is a story of God’s work in the world, it is a story of progressive revelation and therefore it means that texts at certain points of the story, if not connected to the broader story, will become nothing more than proof-texts. My short experience in evangelicalism tells me that this is the most neglected context. We have to locate our texts in the bible storyline before drawing conclusions.

Historical Context: Our text has to be located within the history in which it is set. The Bible is a book written by people living in particular historical settings and we have to take that into account and not assume that the people we’re reading about all had Ipods, Macs and watched ‘Prison Break’ every night on television. This context is a bit tricky in that our knowledge of this context is based on disciplines that fluctuate. I experienced this at university in the Classical Civilizations department where there is a large amount of varying opinion as to exactly what historical conditions were like in certain eras – and opinions constantly change as new findings come to the fore. So whilst this context is helpful and necessary, it needs to be treated with humility and I would be wary of the person who puts too much stock into the historical context in order to derive meaning.

Literary Context: The Bible is literature, we have poetry, history, parable, discourse, apocalyptic etc. etc. We need to be genre sensitive and then we need to learn the rules of those various genres and be able to work with them to derive meaning. The Bible is not a systematics textbook where the meaning is just set down for you in neatly packaged propositional statements.

Those three are the standard contexts that you’ll learn about in a hermeneutics class. There are two others that I want to add:

Historical Theological Context: Texts have a history of interpretation, to ignore that history and the gifted people that God has given to the church through the ages is foolishness. We don’t do hermeneutics as islands, isolated from the rest of the church and so this context needs to be recognized.

Personal Context: I didn’t know what else to call this, but we all come to the text with our own baggage and so a helpful question to ask is, ‘why am I reading the text in this way – what from my own context causes me to see the text in this way’. This is a difficult process as you wade through your socialization, enculturation and present context to try and achieve an as objective as possible reading of the text.

From here you would start to talk about conveying the meaning to specific contexts – but that’s a whole new blog post.

Slaves and Women at ‘Conn’-versation

There’s a great post over at ‘Conn’-versation which, in part, discusses William J. Webb’s book ‘Slaves, Women and Homosexuals‘. Webb’s book has been something of a controversial book in recent times due mainly to the new ground he attempts to break in the area of hermeneutics. It’s worthwhile to go over and check out both the post and the stream of comments discussing the ideas of the book – notably Tim Keller chips in with some food for thought on the issue. My opinion (albeit brief) is there amongst the comments too just in case you’re wondering.

“Whence Hermeneutic Authority”- Tony Jones on baseball umpiring

Tony Jones recently addressed the faculty of Wheaton College at their annual theology conference, this year they tackled the issue of the Ancient Faith for the Church’s Future. Interesting topic I think, centring on the importance of understanding our past as we attempt to map a route for anticipate the future. Here is the link to his address “Whence Hermeneutic Authority”, take a look at the abstract:

Tipp O.Neill famously quipped that All politics are local… Maybe so, but the postmodernists have argued that all hermeneutics are local. It is our local communities that shape how we see the world, and as Christians our ecclesial communities that shape how we interact with the texts of scripture. Stanley Fish calls them authoritative interpretative communities; we call them church… But in what way does the grand tradition of church history interact with our local iterations of the faith? Does Chalcedon trump Minneapolis? The emerging church movement offers some insight into how coming generations will navigate this relationship between old and new, for in an age of micronarratives, Vincent of Lerins’s exhortation that orthodoxy must hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. Rings somewhat hollow. Or, maybe, orthodoxy has always been fluid, dynamic, open source.

The basic idea behind the address is simply the hobby horse of the Emergent guys, “One cannot know things for certain.” Here Tony looks at how we ought to rely on local faith communities to define our approach to Scripture and the hermeneutics we employ. He presupposes that since knowledge and understanding is always in flux so ought our definition of orthodoxy. Problem is that this can open one up heterodoxy as an open system means anything can go. One concern I had as I read this was the encouragement for whole sale rejection of what is past as useless to what is present. I take it we are to stand on the shoulders of our fathers and learn from them we seek to understand how to navigate our future. And yet he’s right. Our knowledge of God is in flux, as the church continues to grow, so does its understandings of the Scriptures. I read something interesting about Origen (second century Church father) yesterday, a man that is considered a massive contributor to the modern theology, it was not his teachings or writings that gripped me but rather the fact that he was a eunuch. Having castrated himself based on literal reading of Mat. 19v12, he was barred from ordination. My point being that yes, the churches understanding is fluid as we grow, but if we don’t ground it on what we know for certain how will we progress from the murky waters of ignorance? Especially when we ask the same questions that have been answered by our fathers. But it does throw some light on the question of the authoritative hermeneutic. I mean Origen had it wrong, completely wrong (I hope!), so who has the correct hermeneutic? Or is that presupposing a correct one exists? How do we develop a correct one, or see the faults in the one we have adopted? My issue with Jones is simple; undermining certain knowledge for the sake of acknowledging our lack of total knowledge undermines anyone’s ability to interpret anything. I may be wrong here, maybe I interpreted his paper incorrectly, but who are you to say I did?