Biblical politics
Can the Bible speak usefully and clearly to contemporary political issues? There are enough examples of people who want to insist the answer is yes, and then display a powerful conviction that one or another secular slate of partisan positions is, astonishingly, completely supported by Scripture. (For a very generous review of a particularly unfortunate recent example, that apparently even manages to defend the practice of torture as Biblically sanctioned, see Krish Kandiah’s blog here…) Perhaps there is an alternative way of addressing the question: if we took a good sample of people, and mapped their political beliefs against their practices of Bible reading, would anything significant be observed? A recent sociological study seems to suggest yes, according to an interesting report doing the round on the web. A good source, by the original author, is the Huffington Post here; it references an unpublished study by a postgrad student at Baylor on the relationship between frequency of Bible reading and a whole series of political/social attitudes amongst American Christians, using a data set gathered in 2007. (Apparently – see comment 3 on this post, the original source, I think – the study is presently under journal review.) The data set (the Baylor Religion Survey, which is well-known and credible) ranked people’s practices of Bible reading on an eight-point scale: ranging from opening the Bible never or yearly, through monthly and weekly, to ‘several times a week or more often’. Assuming the reports are right, there are strong positive correlations, visible and statistically significant moving up the scale, on the following points: frequent Bible readers are more likely to believe in the importance of social and economic justice; frequent Bible readers are more likely to believe that using or consuming less is an important part of being a good person; frequent Bible readers are less likely to see a fundamental conflict between science and religion; frequent Bible readers are less likely to approve of same-sex marriage; frequent Bible readers are more likely to be opposed to abortion; frequent Bible readers are more likely to be opposed to both the death penalty, and harsher sentencing policies more generally. The most striking thing about this is that the positions apparently promoted by frequent Bible reading do not align at all with a simple left-right political division: pro-life, but also green; opposition to same-sex marriage, but also commitment to social justice and penal reform. (It is also a set of positions that I would regard as pretty normal amongst British evangelicals – perhaps we all just read the Bible a lot? [if only…]) I am sure that any particular person’s political beliefs are a complex interaction of all sorts of factors, and that the live options they perceive are largely determined by cultural context (consider how easy it is to call oneself ‘socialist’ in Europe compared to the USA); this study suggests, though, that, within a particular culture, personal engagement with the Bible does have a genuine effect on people’s political beliefs. Interesting – I will try to find the original paper and link or reference when it is...
Read MoreHow much Scripture to preach on?
It won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who knows me, virtually or in real life, that one of the (fairly few) things that annoy me about the contemporary, ‘soft-charismatic’ style of worship that represents the British Baptist mainstream these days is the relative lack of Scripture heard in the services. I’ve written elsewhere about my desire to return to, at least, ‘Old Testament, Epistle, Gospel’ patterns of lectionary reading as opposed to just reading the passage preached on. (We’re just back from holiday in the Lake District, which allowed us to return to the delightful little fellowship at Hawkshead Hill Baptist Church. Three passages of Scripture, read and allowed to mutually interpret, during the sermon; another read and used to shape the worship. Many fellowships could learn from that…) I observe further a strange phenomenon, that in contemporary church life in Britain, the more a particular church/preacher trumpets their high view of Scripture, the less actual Scripture we hear read in their services. The reason for this is rather simple: there is an recent British tradition of ‘expository’ (meaning of scare quotes will become obvious) preaching, traceable back to Martyn Lloyd-Jones, although not much further, and presently reinforced by currently-popular neo-Reformed writings, that measures commitment to Scripture by, roughly, how slowly you preach through it. The practice of spending several years preaching through Romans or Philippians verse by verse-fragment demonstrates, it is held, a high view of Scripture because it is being taken seriously, mined slowly for all of its meaning. I confess to being profoundly unimpressed by this argument, I take it as a theologically-necessary claim that it is impossible to mine the Scripture for all of its meaning; we might get, by such slowness, everything a particular preacher has been able to discover from Scripture, but that is a rather different, and much less interesting, body of insight. And it seems like bad, or at least lazy, preaching. The preacher’s task is to determine and proclaim God’s word for this people, in this place, at this time; to do this, she must necessarily be selective. Her text might well, for instance, be significant in offering a refutation of Melchior Hoffmann’s Christological errors, and at points in history (even British Baptist history), that might have been vital. It is not now. It should be left out, so that what is vital is not obscured in the noise. Further, it has always seemed to me that (roughly) the less Scripture preached on, the more there is a danger of the sermon becoming thematic, rather than expository. I once had the misfortune to worship in a church where the preacher had been working desperately slowly through Colossians; the Sunday I was present (I never returned…) he had reached the injunction ‘Fathers, do not exasperate your children’ in 3:21, and was giving four Sundays to this verse, to examine ways in which we might ‘exasperate’ our children. (He had twenty. All beginning with the same letter.) None of this, of course, was exegesis of Colossians; the text had become the occasion for a thematic discourse on child-rearing. Earlier sermons in the series would, of necessity, have been thematic discourses on Christology, or sanctification. Such thematic sermons might be Biblical, instructive, or edifying (although the one I heard failed fairly badly on each of these criteria); they are not the mark of a commitment to the disciplined interpretation of Scripture as the foundation of the church. The church in question would have described itself as thoroughly committed to Scripture and to expository preaching, but their practice meant that there was no exposition of Scripture at all in their pulpit. I take it (whilst being aware of arguments, ancient and postmodern, to the contrary) that the task of exegesis is, roughly, the determining of the meaning inherent in a chunk of text. (And the task of exposition is the restatement, illustration, defence, and application of this meaning.) Meaning inheres in texts at almost every level, from the whole down. At one extreme, we can ask ‘what does Paradise Lost mean?’ and give a reasoned and defensible answer. Indeed, such work of precis, summary, or abstract is a standard task, set by instructors to teach students the reading and writing of English (and, I presume, other languages), and routinely engaged in by journalists, academics, and other professional writers (‘In his speech he argued…’ ‘This book claims …’ or consider the endlessly popular form of the book review). At the other extreme, how small a text-fragment may still contain meaning? The obvious answer is the sentence; after all, the grammatical function of the sentence is, roughly, to...
Read MoreWhat (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...
Read More‘Biblical’ family life
(I was preaching in our university chapel yesterday, where we didn’t make much of the celebration of Mothering Sunday, but the fact that it was that day prompted me to finish off this post, which I have had sitting around in draft since mid-January.) I read something today – it doesn’t matter what; it was a denominational statement from overseas, and so not very relevant – that made a fairly familiar gesture demanding support for ‘Biblical’ patterns of family life which, in this case, included support for the vocation of motherhood and a resistance to cultural pressures that encouraged mothers to go out to work, an encouragement not to limit numbers of children borne within the nuclear family, and a claim that, within the nuclear family, there was a proper leadership to be exercised by the husband and accepted by the wife. Now, any or all of these points may be good ethical advice (although allow me to express some serious doubts…). Any or all of them may even be demanded by the gospel (although allow me to express some profound disagreements…). But to describe them as ‘Biblical’ is clearly ridiculous, and probably sinister. Why ‘ridiculous’? Well, between them, they assume a normative situation of a nuclear family (i.e., a cohabiting unit of mother and father with their birth-children, and nobody else) which has easy access to safe and reliable contraception and which is economically productive only away from the home. A family living in this situation cannot possibly be living according to ‘Biblical’ patterns, simply because every facet of the situation highlighted in the previous sentence is a modern Western reality, unknown to the Bible (and indeed to much of history since, and to much of the world today). Why ‘sinister’? Well, the document I was reading was a contribution to a debate over church discipline; by invoking the rhetorical device of describing these unhappy and unpleasant ideas as ‘Biblical’ a move was being made to remove mission support and ecclesial legitimacy from honest and faithful people. ‘Sinister’ does not seem too strong. Unfortunately, this rhetorical device is becoming common, and is in danger of gaining a spurious legitimacy on the basis of nothing but repetition. There have, it is true, been attempts to argue for it rather than simply assert it, but none has been remotely credible. The classic, still apparently taken seriously by some people, was a collection of essays entitled Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, a book so poor that when I first encountered a chapter of it as a pdf I concluded that it was a cleverly-constructed spoof – surely no-one could have published arguments that bad?! Unfortunately, much of the book has a veneer of plausibility, since a basic knowledge of Greek and Hebrew is necessary to spot the more glaring errors. In case any reader who lacks Biblical languages is minded to take it seriously, however, let me give one example of just how astonishingly poor, and misleading, the arguments in the book generally are. Considering Junia, ‘outstanding amongst the apostles’ in Rom 16:7: the editors face the standard question: is Junia a woman, or is it ‘Junias’, an otherwise-unknown male name? Their answer goes like this (pp. 72-3 of my edition): ‘We did a complete search of all the Greek writings from Homer (b.c. ninth century?) into the fifth century a.d. [using the TLG] … The result of our computer search is this: Besides the one instance in Romans 16:7 there were three others [these are described]. So there is no way to be dogmatic about what the form of the name signifies. It could be feminine, or it could be masculine. Certainly no one should claim that Junia was a common woman’s name in the Greek speaking world, since there are only these three known examples….’ Presumably everyone has spotted the basic error here already, but just to spell it out: Junia was an inhabitant of Rome, not Athens. In Rome, they spoke Latin, not Greek. The evidence presented is about as interesting as saying that early modern Spanish literature contains very few men named Hans. More directly, no-one is claiming ‘that Junia was a common woman’s name in the Greek speaking world’; most of the recent commentators on Romans claim that it was a common Latin name, citing such standard sources as CIL, Solin, and Lampe, which show upwards of 250 uses, compared to no attestations at all for the masculine ‘Junias’. It is difficult to know what to make of this. The ignoring of standard, and widely published, evidence, and the presentation of spurious but perhaps convincing-sounding arguments instead, could convey an unfortunate...
Read MoreTheology and the Bible
I gave a paper on Calvin last week, picking up on the recent historical work (by David Steinmetz, Richard Muller, and others) that has given us a far better understanding of his context. One result of this is to revise our understanding of how to relate the Institutes and the Biblical commentaries. Roughly, an older way of reading Calvin saw the Institutes as the central text in his corpus, understood as some sort of proto-systematic theology, which everything else – including the commentaries – fed into; a better understanding of Calvin’s work sees his Biblical commentaries (and sermons) as central to his endeavour, with the Institutes not a systematics, but a text designed to aid Calvin in writing the commentaries, and his readers in reading the commentaries. This reversal does, I tried to show, actually make a difference to how we understand Calvin’s theology. I ended the paper, though, with some freewheeling thoughts about the proper relationship of theology and Biblical studies. Here in St Andrews, we have been interested in this relationship for a while, of course – and mostly in the direction of how theology can influence Biblical studies. I can’t speak for my colleagues, who are far cleverer than I am, but it occurred to me in reading Calvin that I had always assumed that the final word was going to be dogmatic: after all our Biblical work was done, the final scholarly aim would be an ordered statement of Christian truth. The great texts of Reformed theology all seem to point in this direction (van Mastricht has his pars exegetica before moving on to the pars dogmatica; the great Leiden Synopsis invited the Biblical professors to feed in to a work of dogmatics, not vice-versa; &c.). This scholarship would then serve the pulpit and the pastoral visit, of course; but the basic intellectual aim was systematic and theological. Calvin’s work suggests otherwise. The final academic task in Biblical exposition. Dogmatics is useful insofar as it serves exposition, and not otherwise. This is a surprising reversal, but one that, the more I think about it, the more I think it might perhaps be right. I have been thinking recently about the proper shape of evangelical theology, (in part because of my work with the Evangelical Alliance). It is obvious that an adequately evangelical theology ought to be determinedly Biblical, but what that looked like (having ruled out Grudem-like proof-texting as both intellectually inadequate and inattentive to the actual shape of the Biblical text) was something I struggle with. My new working hypothesis: it looks like...
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