What (or who) is inspired?

A recent issue of JETS has an interesting article on inspiration that resonated with some conversations I’ve been having with others recently. Grubbs and Drumm (who wrote the article) cite various recent evangelical theological definitions of inspiration (Warfield, Henry, Chicago, Grudem, Grenz, Erickson, Geisler) and correlate them with generally-accepted accounts of the origins of the texts in Biblical studies, including the use of secretaries, co-authorship, compilation and revision history. They suggest that the former accounts are inadequate to cope with the latter evidence. I think they are right, but I am not sure that the doctrine of inspiration is where the problem lies. In the verse that is the basis for all such claims, it is text, not its author, that is inspired (‘all Scripture is God-breathed and useful…’ 2 Tim. 3:16); many of the definitions Grubbs and Drum cite speak the language of the ‘superintendence’ of the Holy Spirit (so Warfield or Chicago, e.g.) in the production of the Scriptures. If we focus on this, the role of the Spirit in ensuring providentially through any and every historical process of production and transmission of the text, that the text reaches the divinely-intended form, we can affirm any account of inspiration – including plenary verbal inspiration, extending to the MT vowel-points, and/or the Textus Receptus or the LXX if you really want – with supreme indifference to the literary pre-history of the text. The problem is not 2 Tim. 3:16, but 2 Pet. 3:2: ‘…you should remember the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets, and the commandment of the Lord and Saviour spoken through your apostles.’ (NRSV) Inspiration, the divine superintendence of the production of the texts, tends to be linked in classical doctrines of Scripture (right back to the patristic debates over the edges of the NT canon) to claims concerning authorship. The OT books are written by prophets; the NT books by apostles (or those close to them) – and so we speak, and have long spoken in the tradition – of ‘the inspired authors’, moving the category of inspiration from text to author. This is not the core dogmatic claim, however, and might perhaps be understood – even in patristic usage – as an inexact figure of...

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Teaching people to be congregational: renarrating voting

To continue, in a very different key, the theme of the last post… I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we do church meeting badly… (‘we’ = ‘most British Baptists of whom I am aware’.) A part of the problem is, that we are very poor at teaching our congregations to be congregational. This is compounded by the fact that we have chosen to make use of artefacts borrowed from the world around, which stand in profound need of detoxification and renarration before they can be adequately employed. One such is voting. I touched on this (and more on another similar artefact, the ‘business meeting’) in a contribution to a Festschrift in honour of Brian Haymes. Voting at church meeting is a fairly recent innovation in Baptist life: Fawcett suggested it was a good idea in 1797, but it may be that the first recorded use was Maze Pond Church in 1825. At that time, the practice was profoundly counter-cultural, a lived witness that gospel values were different from the values of the world. In England, at that time, voting in parliamentary elections was restricted to about 5% of the male population – all landowners, of course. For a church to take this symbol of cultural privilege and, in prophetic parody, put it in the hands of every member, of every social class, women as well as men, was a piece of genius. A poor woman voting on the call of a pastor was a profoundly powerful visible sign of the Kingdom. Fast forward nearly two hundred years and we assume universal adult suffrage. A vote is our right, and we know how to use it: to promote the interests of the party we support. The continued use of the imported cultural symbol in church meeting is no longer an enacted prophetic protest. It is not wrong to use, but it is potentially toxic; it brings with it implicit meanings that are powerful, and in grave danger of overwhelming the gospel values that must be at the core of church meeting. One symptom of this is the practice of receiving young people into church membership but denying them a vote at church meeting until they reach a certain age; a church that does this has already lost the battle, as far as I can see. Personally, I would like to do away with the practice of voting in church meeting: for a century it was prophetic; for another few decades it was useful; now it is toxic and undermining of the reality of what church meeting is about. If we are to keep it, however (and it may be that there are legal reasons why we must), we need to renarrate it powerfully enough and often enough that our people realise a vote at church meeting is not a way of promoting the interests of our party, but a way of participating in the shared task of discerning the mind of...

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Congregational government and missional church

The excellent BUGB news sweep highlights Mark Driscoll in Belfast [link opens MP3 download] offering his views on congregational government and missional church life. The headline ‘it is almost impossible to be both congregational and missional’. Some thoughts occur to me in listening, that seem worth recording just because Driscoll makes mistakes that seem to me to be endemic: 1. This is an off-the-cuff response at a Q&A session; we should not treat it as his considered and final word on the subject. That said, Mars Hill have chosen to make the MP3 available; the comments are published, with no rider to the effect that ‘I wasn’t sure about how well I handled that one,’ so they are fair game for discussion and response. 2. The most astonishing and worrying thing about the comments is that they are entirely pragmatic. Faced with the question of the most appropriate mode of church government, Driscoll’s response is not to turn to the Bible, or to think theologically about what God calls the local church to be, but to ask what works (where ‘works’ is defined as adding numbers to one particular local congregation, with no consideration of the edification of the saints, the transformation of society, or the wider mission of the church). As a convinced congregationalist, when it comes to church government, my fundamental response to Driscoll’s comments is indifference tinged with sadness. Indifference, because we are called to be faithful, not successful; sadness because someone who commands a great deal of attention as a Christian pastor could, even if only on one occasion, be so publicly negligent of Scripture and theology. 3. It is apparent that Driscoll has not troubled to understand congregational government before criticising it. He repeatedly characterises congregational government as if it were an exercise in democracy: ‘everyone gets a vote’; this is a fundamental misunderstanding: congregationalism takes its stand on the Lordship of Jesus in the local congregation. (Tolmie entitled his chapter on the rise of Independency in London in the 1640s ‘King Jesus’.) Because we experience the present Lordship of Jesus, and covenant together to follow only Him, we eschew any who would call themselves a leader in the congregation as simply and precisely an anti-Christ. Of course, there could then be a debate – the only worthwhile debate about church government – concerning how the congregation hears the urgent and present call of Christ: is it through hierarchy, even male-only hierarchy, or does Christ dwell with all His people, and speak through each, as He shall choose? Driscoll does not even mention the call of Christ on His local congregation. 4. Which leads on to a crucial theological consequence of congregational government. Congregational government assumes and insists that all believers are equally competent, or equally incompetent, when it comes to knowing the mind of Christ. Driscoll mocks congregationalism on the basis that someone who knows nothing about a subject is given a vote. Absolutely, because the question in hand is never ‘What do I think the best thing to do about this is?’ but always ‘What is the call of the Lord Jesus to this people in this situation?’ A question we are all, of course, incompetent to answer – but the Lord Jesus has poured out His Spirit, and so sons and daughters prophesy, the young see visions and the old dream dreams – even slaves, male and female, refused any part in the decision-making process by the culture around, are given the Spirit and so can hear the voice of the Lord callling His church. 5. Driscoll claims that congregational government is impossible in a congregation of over 200. This is of course, as he must know, simple rubbish – there are many congregational churches significantly larger than this, and if he can’t imagine how that could work, well, the limits of his imagination are not interesting data. It may be, however, that there is a practical upper limit for a properly-functioning congregationalism; suppose it was 200, what of it? There is neither example of nor command for a congregation larger than this in the New Testament; megachurches may feed the founding pastor’s ego, and further his/her reputation, but it is not clear at all that they are especially successful in feeding Christ’s sheep, or in furthering Christ’s mission. Perhaps every congregation should, on reaching a certain number of members, plant out, or divide itself, because this is a part of the call to be faithful to Christ? If that were so, it would not be an argument that Christ’s call is wrong or...

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Evangelical ecumenicity, networks, and denominations

A good day yesterday at the Scottish Evangelical Theological Society annual meeting, seeing lots of old friends, including our pastor-elect and his wife, speaking on ‘Evangelical doctrine: basis for unity or cause of division?’ and listening to Fred Drummond, of EA Scotland, talking about the various ‘magnets’ for evangelical unity emerging around the country, mostly focused on prayer or mission. (The theme of the conference was ‘Evangelical Ecumenicity: can evangelicals really work together?’) Fred gave a very hopeful account of the Scottish scene, with many emerging missional networks providing real evidence that people are working together, thinking strategically, and praying unitedly much more than has been the case for a generation or so in Scotland. Notably absent from his description and analysis, however, and picked up in the conversation afterwards, was the place of the various Scottish denominations within all this. The overwhelming sense was that those who are truly missionally engaged regard (rightly or wrongly) their denominational structures (in whichever denomination) as bureaucratic, obstructive, and deadening. I reflected afterwards: there is a necessary bureaucracy in denominational structures: property must be owned; child-protection legislation complied with; and pension funds administered. (The list could be expanded, of course.) Denominations do all this for us, and, in the case of UK Baptist denominations, then tend to recede a little into the background. We don’t fund our central denominations enough for them to have the resources to be too proactive/interfering; and a Baptist ecclesiology with the local church meeting as the primary authority means the only effective power of the denomination is soft, the power to influence or inform. A Presbyterian denomination might delay or even derail a proposed church plant (say); a British Baptist denomination just doesn’t have that power. Two thoughts followed: Baptist denominations are thus at least less of a problem for missional congregations; if a Baptist denomination is going to move from being perceived as a problem to being perceived as part of the solution, it will perhaps need to continue doing the necessary bureaucracy well, but more quietly, and then to become a credible and valued missional network itself (or a partner in a series of such networks). After all, the power of Alpha Scotland or the Crieff Fellowship (two of Fred’s examples) is only soft, but people want to align, to involve, to join, because the soft power is perceived as being a (softly) potent aid to mission. I think that the senior people in both BUS and BUGB are well aware of this dynamic, and that the two denominations are trying hard to make this transition; in part I think they (perhaps particularly BUGB) have actually succeeded, but that some or most of the churches have not noticed yet. (When Neil asks ‘what is [the southern] Assembly for?’ the answer is surely in part ‘it is intended to be a major point of encouragement, influence, and information for missional churches, and churches that are trying to transition to being missional’ – an example of BUGB, with more than a nudge from BMS over the years, acting like a voluntary missional network.) Second, however, I reflect that perhaps there is an ideal situation here, a Coleridgean ideal of a union of the opposites of permanence and progression. A church might look in one direction – here its denomination – for certain necessary points of stability and groundedness, and in another – here its missional network – for a fast-moving, evolving, even liquid, organisation that is fluid enough and fleet enough of foot to always be on the pulse of culturally-relevant action (‘Ancient-Future ecclesiastical structures’!). Part of a denomination’s job in the context of genuinely missional churches might be to act as a slight brake, to say from time to time, ‘in your pursuit of relevant and effective mission, remember your deep roots and your communal story, and pause for reflection before you do anything not true to them.’ Now, I am very well aware that the big problem in Scotland – and across the UK – is not the number of churches that are so missional that they need such brakes applied, which might be why missional networks are presently regarded as attractive, and denominations as dull, but imagining how to plan for a better future is not an irrelevant task. (And is a lot more interesting than...

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