Using the Bible in blogging debate
Things have been a little quiet on the blogging front lately and I haven't had time to write much though I've still been reading my way through all my regular blogs. One thing that has bothered me for a while is the way that the Bible is used in some of the online debates that rage back and forth. While it is commendable that we turn to the scriptures when seeking to understand and explore Christian doctrine, scripture is often used in such a way that it becomes grossly distorted and is simply dragged out to prove a point, with little or no attention to what the scripture itself is actually saying. I've mused over the issue for a few days and have come up with a few pointers that will help us to use the Bible more responsibly. Here goes:1. Every text has a context in which it finds its meaning. This is really Biblical Studies 101 but we forget it so often. Bible verses do not just exist in isolation for us to pick out and quote at will. Scripture was written in a specific context and situation where it found its original meaning and where it makes sense. Just because scripture is God-breathed doesn't mean that we can take a verse or two of it, put them in a completely different setting and expect them to carry the same meaning and force of argument.
2. Be aware of your own tradition. This is one for the evangelicals especially. I say this because there is often the assumption that while other denominations simply have 'tradition' the evangelicals simply have the Bible as their sole authority. This is of course rather over-simplistic, and often when Protestants say 'the authority of the Bible' they actually mean 'the authority of Protestant theology' which is not the same thing. It is simply incorrect to believe that because one endeavours to read the Bible in a 'plain sense' one has managed to achieve some kind of detached objectivity whereby one is able to expound the Bible completely free of prejudice or presupposition. Every reader and interpreter brings their own theological prejudices and presuppositions to the biblical texts, and it is important to recognise that this is the case. There is no value-free reading of scripture.
3. Remember the difference between systematic theology and exegesis. This has bewildered me for a while, especially during some recent discussions on the atonement. We must first of all remember what kind of book God has given us when approaching the scripture. God has not given an unsorted edition of Calvin's Institutes or Barth's Church Dogmatics to simply reassemble at our leisure into dogmatic theology. Rather, God has given us a series of narratives, letters, remembrances, songs, prophecies and so on - not a series of dogmatic statements or theological creeds. The Bible tells an ongoing story in which the Church now finds itself here in the middle of history as we anticipate and await the consumation of God's Kingdom, and to chop it up into segments and then simply rearranging it so that it resembles a theological manual is implying that God has, after all, given us the wrong sort of book.
Establishing doctrine is not simply a question of taking Verse X + Verse Y + Verse Z to give us Doctrine A. That is not the way in which scripture itself is written or how it has been handed down to us. Establishing complex and intricate doctrines like a doctrine of the trinity, of justification and regeneration, of predestination, of the atonement, and so on is not simply a matter of assembling our favourite verses. The scriptures themselves do not go into the kind of depth on these issues that systematic theology does, and theology itself requires us to ask questions and form answers on issues that the Bible does not supply any kind of information on at all.
4. Don't confuse statements with explanations. Another recent bug bear of mine as the ugly spectre of eisogesis raises its head again. The New Testament is full of theological statements, but it contains far fewer theological explanations - and the two are simply not the same thing. We find statements such as:
"God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement,through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus." (Rom 3:25-26)
Perhaps one of the clearest statements on the atonement in the entire NT, but it is precisley that - a statement. It is not a detailed explanation, and any attempt to make it a detailed explanation is likely to be subject to frustration. The questions that theologians like to ask about how God's justice works, or what blood sacrifice accomplishes, or how this affects the inner-trinitarian relationship between the Father and Son or precisely how this leads to justification by faith are not answered by the text itself. The danger arises when we try and use a text to answer a question that it simply does not answer and in so doing burden the text with a weight it cannot possibly carry. We all have our own theologies of course, but we must be careful to demarcate where the text ends and our systematic theology begins. The text informs the systematic theology, but it does not constitute it.