‘These are the days of Rebekah’

My friend Natalie Collins was on Twitter tonight bemoaning a youth resource that claimed to cover the whole Biblical story in 32 sessions (!…) but that managed to mention only one woman who appears in the Bible in that survey, that woman being Eve. I don’t know the resource, and Natalie didn’t elaborate, but I’m guessing that Eve was not given a positive write-up. I have three daughters who are in youth and children’s programmes at church; it would be nice to think that the people who write the material they will access were actually working to make sure they are aware of the many positive female role-models there are in Scripture, rather than erasing all women except Eve from the story of God. In this spirit, I offer a parody I started to write a couple of years ago, but never did anything with. If you know modern evangelical songbooks, you may be able to find a tune that this fits quite well… These are the days of Rebekah, Who trusted the word of the Lord. And these are the days of your servant Deborah, Who led forth your people in war.   These are the days of Queen Esther, Who rescued God’s people through faith. And these are the days of your prophet Huldah, Who renewed the temple of praise.   Behold God comes, in tongues of rushing flame Opening daughters’ mouths to prophesy in God’s name So lift your voice, sisters of the Christ Out of Mary’s womb salvation comes.   These are the days of the women Who funded the ministry of Christ. And these are the days of the Magdalene, Who first preached of resurrected Life.   These are the days of Priscilla, Who taught male church leaders the truth, And these are the days of your apostle, Junia, Before whom Paul was just a youth.   Behold God comes, in tongues of rushing flame Opening daughters’ mouths to prophesy in God’s name So lift your voice, sisters of the Christ Out of Mary’s womb salvation...

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Serious thinking does not always lead to the same conclusion

Steve Chalke was kind enough to tweet a link to my piece on his invitation to a global conversation; in the same tweet he linked to a piece by Brian McLaren on the same theme. Brian’s piece was entitled ‘The Biblical cat is out of the fundamentalist bag’, which mostly left me straining to think of mentions of cats in the Bible (I don’t think there are any – several lions of course…); the piece was mostly a series of links to interesting posts elsewhere; at the end, though, McLaren writes: …the real question is this: in the privacy of people’s own hearts, will they (will you, will I?) have the courage to think, rethink, question, and consider the possibility that the conventional view of the Bible is in need of radical rethinking – not to reduce confidence in the Bible, but to discover a wiser, more just, more honest, and more proper confidence? This form of argument (‘if you think seriously about X, you will change your mind’) is remarkably common in both academic and church discourse; it seems to me to have two fundamental problems: first, it is simply false; and second, it is utterly unrealistic (apart from those two issues, I’m completely with it…) I take it that the first point is obvious at some basic logical level: even assuming that my current opinions on the truth or falsity of statements are simply random, and also assuming that serious thought will lead me infallibly to truth, then 50% of my opinions will happen to be right by chance, and thinking hard about them will only confirm them. Therefore, a prediction that ‘if you think hard about X, you will change your mind’ will be true 50% of the time, and so no better than the prediction ‘if you think hard about X you will not change your mind’. On this basis, the argument is only interesting if there is some reason to assume that the accuracy of my current opinions are significantly worse than random – if I have somehow become predisposed to believe falsehood. Now, such a situation is not impossible to imagine; indeed the Marxist idea of ‘false consciousness’ – and the wider concept of ‘ideology’ – suggest positively that this situation obtains around certain subjects in certain contexts (and I accept at least some of these analyses, as it happens). That said, McLaren’s point concerned people in churches who had believed what their pastors taught them; does he think that the several varieties of Christian teaching available in our churches are all so bad that they are significantly less reliable than a random choice of opinions? If not, his argument has no validity. My second argument, that the point is utterly unrealistic, goes like this: I cannot be an expert on everything, so I study what I can, and develop a discriminating trust of authorities on the rest; given this, to ask me to distrust credible authorities and investigate for myself on every issue is unreasonable and impossible. I have (random example) not studied the raw data on climate science; I know that there is a very strong scientific consensus around the truth of global warming, and also that some people deny this; I choose to accept the consensus and to modify my behaviour accordingly; is McLaren suggesting that I should do otherwise until I have become expert enough to examine the raw data? This seems to be the import of his argument, but I suggest – on the basis of the analogy I have given – that this position is not just wrong but actually dangerous. Now, if (like a climate change denier) I thought I had reason to suppose that the authoritative voices were trying to mislead on the issue, I would have good reason to expend the energy to grasp the evidence in order to check each proposed fact – but again, McLaren’s comment here is about local church pastors, essentially – is he really suggesting that across the world (or across the USA) local church pastors are en bloc actively colluding in misinformation? (I mean, America is fertile ground for generating bizarre conspiracy theories, but this one would be right up there with the worst…) I believe not just that I have thought seriously about questions of Biblical authority, but that I have thought more seriously than almost everyone on the planet currently about these issues (there are, perhaps, a few hundred people I would bow to…). On almost every issue, I have concluded that in fact what I was taught as a young unreflective Christian was in fact right – no doubt because...

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A global conversation on the Bible?

I was told some while back that Steve Chalke was writing a piece on the Bible, and invited by someone to give a response; I refused on grounds of friendship – I did a formal response for someone else last time Steve published a position paper, and I don’t want to make it a habit… …when I read Steve’s piece, however, I confess to being puzzled; I’ve now read it more than once, and I remain puzzled. So this is just me, responding as Steve asked us to, not with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, but with a ‘why?’ Because I’m puzzled. On the Oasis site where Steve’s paper is posted it is introduced with the line ‘Steve Chalke calls on the world-wide church to have an open and honest dialogue about how we should understand the bible…’; in the paper, Steve says this directly: ‘I want to encourage a global discussion (for this is a global issue) around the following suggested principles…’ (p.5 of pdf). My puzzlement is simple: I thought we’d been having a global conversation, which looks to me pretty open and honest most of the time, for two millennia or so (I’m not a specialist on patristics, and there may be earlier texts, but the first systematic engagement with the question of hermeneutics I can think of is Irenaeus, ad. haer., written around 180AD; serious text criticism begins with Origen’s Hexapla which was put together about 50 years later – certainly before 240). Steve makes no reference either to the history of this conversation, or to its current contours; does he think that all of us who are engaged in it have together contributed nothing of worth? Or is he actually unaware of it? Take one issue, more or less at random: Steve’s fourth bullet point begins: ‘We do not believe that the Bible is “inerrant” or “infallible” in any popular understanding of these terms.’ (Footnote 15 defines the two words, as it happens wrongly, or at least in a very eccentric way.) Last year’s ETS conference was devoted to the topic of inerrancy and last year’s Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference (which I helped to organise and spoke at) was on the Doctrine of Scripture; recent books directly on the subject include – this is just from memory – Five views on Inerrancy, Greg Beale’s The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism (a robust defence of Chicago inerrancy), Andy McGowan’s Divine Spiration of Scripture (suggesting a European tradition of Biblical authority which is not inerrancy, and which is to be preferred to it), Pete Enns’s Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (arguing for an incarnational model of Biblical authority – something I also tried in my contribution to Lincoln & Paddison, Christology and Scripture), &c., &c., &c. In my 2008 Laing Lecture (later published) I specifically addressed the issue of inerrancy in global perspective, pointing out it is a natively North American concept with little purchase elsewhere; a point Mike Bird made from his Australian perspective in his contribution to the Five Views book. I’ve since written about it from a specifically Baptist perspective in five or six other places. The conversation is happening. The books mentioned offer perspectives from four or five continents; this is a global conversation (I’ve only listed books in English; I could name off the top of my head good books on the subject in  at least six other languages, and I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to discover many more). They do not agree (sometimes the clue is in the title: Five Views…), but there are a number of broad agreements on either negative points (‘you might be able to say A, B, C, but it is not possible to say X, Y, Z’) or conditional points (‘if you believe F, you have to also believe G;’ ‘if you believe H, you cannot believe J’). I could offer a similar list for every other point Steve proposes for conversation. Steve appears at several moments in his paper to be unaware of this conversation, or of the broad agreements it has reached – at times he proposes something that has been exhaustively explored in the global conversation decades ago, and found to be inadequate (of course such ideas can be revisited, but the usual manners of the conversation are that you discover why they were judged inadequate and show that there is a reason to regard that judgement as wrong or premature when you revisit them…) The response might come that this is an academic conversation, and it is not happening at the level of ordinary church life. This does not ring true to me: to stay with the same examples, the...

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Theology and Exegesis: an example

To pick up on the theme of my earlier post on the place of theology in exegesis, Justin Taylor has a blog post up today on the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, which serves as an ideal example of what I was talking about. Justin frames the question by asking ‘is [eternal generation] really a Biblical idea?’ He notes that the idea has been seriously challenged in contemporary theology, but suggests that, although he lacks space in the post, a ‘full exegetical defense’ could indeed be offered. (‘Eternal generation’ is the doctrine that the Father’s begetting of the Son is an eternal act; it is a necessary doctrine in classical Trinitarianism.) If ‘biblical idea’ means ‘a doctrine that could be derived by exegesis,’ then I don’t think eternal generation is a Biblical idea – although I have nothing invested in this opinion, and would be happy to be proven wrong. I am fairly sure that no-one in the fourth century thought they could read eternal generation off the pages of Scripture – indeed, it was more often an idea defended in the face of apparently-clear exegesis: Prov. 8:22, a central text in the debates, seemingly teaches a creation in time of Wisdom/the Son (pretty much everyone agreed that Wisdom here is to be understood as the Son – they were apparently less worried about the Bible using feminine pronouns for persons of the godhead than we are). I do, however, think eternal generation is (very close to) a necessary idea, in that we need to believe it (or something extraordinarily similar to it) to have any chance of understanding the Bible. It is one of those ideas that I described in the previous post as ‘imagining what must be the case for everything in the Bible to be true’. (Why the parenthetical hesitations? On the one hand, I feel compelled to assume – for theological reasons; see my Listening to the Past – that the Trinitarian settlement reached at Constantinople was a wholly successful doctrinal development; on the other, as an evangelical, I have to accept the possibility, at least, of a different conceptual development that was similarly adequate to naming the God we meet in Scripture – one based, perhaps, on Chinese or African philosophy rather than Greek. Such a development, though, would have to affirm that the Father-Son relation always is, and that it is a relation of origin, so would have some doctrine very like eternal...

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Can you Adam-and-Eve it?

[For non-UK readers, ‘Adam-and-Eve’ is traditional London Cockney rhyming slang for ‘believe’.] Various sources, print and online, highlight a debate that has taken off in the States on the question of the historicity of Adam and Eve as the two parents of the human race. At least one tenured scholar at Calvin College has apparently lost his job over the question. (Google will get you to lots of sources on the question; I couldn’t find one that summed up both the issues and the recent events in an even-handed way, so I decided not to post a link – if someone else knows of a good one, by all means put it in a comment.) On the one hand, we have a claim that the sequencing of human genomes has provided a body of data that is incompatible with an account of human origins from a single couple; on the other, a claim that belief in a historic Adam and Eve is necessary to the gospel. My scientific expertise, such as it is (an undistinguished performance in a physics degree from Cambridge in the fairly distant past), and my knowledge of journalistic reports of academic research (which is rather more expert and recent) both lead me to suppose that reports asserting scientific certainty are unlikely to be accurate (particularly on an issue where repeated and controlled experiments are impossible; I presume the scientific consensus is more like ‘every plausible model we’ve proposed for the data we have demands multiple ancestor-pairs, and we’ve proposed a lot of models,’ which is certainly a significant claim, but falls some distance from proof, even in the weakened and imprecise sense that word usually carries in science). My topic in this blog, however, is theology, and so the other side of the debate is the one I will discuss. On what basis might we propose that it is important that Adam and Eve were historical figures? Two seem possible: a theological basis; and an exegetical basis. It might be that we can’t make sense of the gospel unless humanity shares a common ancestor; or it might be that the point is incidental to the gospel, but clearly taught in Scripture, and so should be believed (that Jesus was born of a woman is central to the gospel; that his mother’s name was Mary is incidental, but nonetheless to be held to be true). Are there plausible arguments in either direction? Theologically, the best candidate seems to be that some explanation needs to be given for universal falleness/sinfulness, in the face of the necessary teaching that God’s initial creation was good; it seems that some are therefore suggesting that it is necessary to postulate a single ancestor, who sinned, and whose guilt and brokenness was then transmitted through processes of biological reproduction to the rest of the human race. This argument, however, is implausible on a number of grounds. First, the biological transmission of guilt and sinfulness is not a necessary claim. Within the Reformed tradition, federal Calvinism more-or-less denies the point in terms. Adam is established head of the human race by divine decree, not by biological priority: our fates are bound up with his fate because God has determined it to be so, not because of any process of genetics. (Of course, most classical federal Calvinists happened to believe in the biological priority of Adam and Eve, but this was in a sense incidental to their argument, as was the sinfulness of Eve: Adam alone was the federal head. Had it been the case that Eve surrendered to the serpent’s blandishments but failed to convince Adam to follow her, she would presumably have been held guilty of her sin, but her children would have been free of taint, as they were ‘in Adam’ and Adam had not fallen.) Second, the biological transmission of guilt and sinfulness is not just not a necessary claim, but a rather difficult one. To put the point bluntly, moral standing is not encoded in genetic material. More pointedly, Christian anthropology has classically, rightly or wrongly, supposed a human being to be composed of body and soul (or body, soul, and spirit); the body, on this account, is the product of sexual union; the soul either created directly by God and infused into the body, or pre-existing in heaven and joined to the body in utero. But the soul is the primary seat, at least, of moral standing, and so to assume that the biological generation of the body somehow necessarily infects the directly-created, or other-sourced, soul seems difficult. (Even Augustine, so brilliant a mind, struggled and probably failed on this point: he suggested...

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