The Blue Parakeet, 2nd Page 3
1. Reading to Retrieve
Some of us have been taught to read the Bible in such a way that we return to the times of the Bible in order to retrieve biblical ideas and practices for today. There are two kinds of “return and retrieve” readers—some try to retrieve all of it, and some admit we can retrieve only what can be salvaged.
Consider those who seek to retrieve all of it. If Jesus taught table fellowship, such persons sometimes suggest that we should focus on table fellowship and gather in homes instead of big churches. If Paul said we should speak in tongues, we should speak in tongues. If Jesus said we should wash feet, we should wash feet. If Peter says women should not wear gold jewelry or fine clothing, our women should not wear gold jewelry or fine clothing. If Paul says women should be silent, our women should be silent. If Exodus says the death penalty is proper, then it is proper today too (even for adulterers). If Deuteronomy exhorts the Israelites to permit the poor to glean from the crops, then farmers and gardeners need to leave some unpicked corn and beans and wheat and we nonfarmers and non-gardeners should at least find a cultural equivalent. In other words, we are to live out the Bible today by returning to the early church and retrieving all of its ideas no matter how uncomfortable, no matter how politically incorrect, no matter what it costs us. The emphasis here is to practice whatever the Bible teaches—to absorb and live out all of it.
There are some problems here. If we sit down and think about it, it is impossible to live a first-century life in a twenty-first-century world. “That was then, but this is now” is not an empty slogan that came my way to dismiss my questions as a college student. “That was then, but this is now” is bedrock reality within the Bible’s own Story. Furthermore, it is undesirable and unbiblical to retrieve it all. Paul didn’t even do that. What about the words of the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 9:19–23, where Paul says his strategy is one of constant adaptation? Paul’s strategy was to be Jewish with Jews and to be like a gentile with gentiles. If Paul was already adapting first-century Jewish ideas to first-century gentile situations, can we expect to do anything else? Can we imagine Paul wanting to back up in time to Moses’s day? To quote Paul, “By no means!”
What we’ve got in the pages of the New Testament are first-century expressions of the gospel and church life, not permanent, timeless expressions. They are timely expressions; they are Spirit-inspired expressions; but they were and remain first-century expressions. We aren’t called to live first-century lives in the twenty-first century, but twenty-first-century lives as we walk in the light of the revelation God gave to us in the first century.
For some, and you may be one of them, this principle sounds like we are giving away too much. Some believe we are to return to the Bible, but we can retrieve only what we can salvage for our day and for our culture. This, of course, means culture dictates what is of value in the Bible. This is a mistake. But, before we say anything else, I want to applaud anyone and everyone who tries to bring the Bible into our modern culture. This is the impulse of the apostle Paul—and we see it in all of the New Testament writers who adopted the Story and adapted it to their contexts. I can think of a list of creative Christian thinkers today who are exceptional at adopting and adapting, but I’ll avoid listing names.
The danger in “retrieving the essence” is that there can be too little adoption or not enough faithfulness and consistency with the Bible itself. Take women in church ministries as an example. Some contend that the argument over women pastors is a justice issue, and by that they mean equality, rights, freedom, and centuries of oppression. While I have respect for the “justice” issue when it comes to women in church ministries today (a short chapter on justice can be found on pp. 193–203, and the last section of this book on women in ministry will make this clear), I’m not so sure we are to judge what goes on in the church by the principles of our culture: “equality” and “rights” and “freedom.” In fact, I’m certain this is not the way we are called by God to “apply” the Bible to our world—there is more to it than letting culture shape what we do. Before we go any further, we need to insert a parenthetical observation about Bible reading.
Those Days, Those Ways
One of the themes we will encounter in this book can be summed up like this:
God spoke in Moses’s days in Moses’s ways, and
God spoke in Job’s days in Job’s ways, and
God spoke in David’s days in David’s ways, and
God spoke in Solomon’s days in Solomon’s ways, and
God spoke in Jeremiah’s days in Jeremiah’s ways, and
God spoke in Jesus’s days in Jesus’s ways, and
God spoke in Paul’s days in Paul’s ways, and
God spoke in Peter’s days in Peter’s ways, and
God spoke in John’s days in John’s ways,
and we are called to discern how God is carrying on that pattern in our world today.
The gospel is capable and designed to strike home in every culture, in every age, and in every language. (Some speak here of divine accommodation to each culture throughout the Bible’s own history.) Any idea of imposing a foreign culture, age, or language on another culture, age, and language quenches the dynamic power of the gospel and the Bible. We need not become Jews to live the gospel, nor need we become first- or fourth- or sixteenth- or eighteenth-century Christians. Let me push hard for a moment. Yes, I think the first Jewish Christians probably kept kosher. That’s not for today. Yes, the vestments of the Eastern Orthodox Church are brilliant and the liturgical order of services profound—but they are from a bygone era, with a bygone dress code, and a bygone form of expression, and do precious little for most of us today. They are not for today (at least for most of us). Yes, I love the history they unveil. If I appreciate and respect that history, that does not mean I have to live in those days now. I also love European cathedrals—monuments to the piety of a former era. Those cathedrals, apart from tourists and the rare exception, are empty today. I also love Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards, and they were leaders for their days in their ways. But I have no desire to impose their culture on our days and our ways. Frankly, I’m more concerned with their attitudes.
What we most need is not a return to the first or fourth or sixteenth or eighteenth century but a fresh blowing of God’s Spirit on our culture, in our day, and in our ways. We need twenty-first-century Christians living out the biblical gospel in twenty-first-century ways. Even more, if we read the Bible properly, we will see that God never asked one generation to step back in time and live the way it had done before. No, God spoke in each generation in that generation’s ways.
Most of us know one of the major failures of missionary work was the unfortunate (if naive and good-intentioned) imposing of Western ways on African or Asian or Central American ways. We now know that the gospel has the power to generate expressions of the gospel in every language, in every culture, and in every ethnic group. If we know this about current missionary work, doesn’t that warn us about the danger of returning in order to retrieve it all? Next to my desk is a commentary on the entire Bible called Africa Bible Commentary.2 The aim here was to write a commentary on the Bible by Africans for Africans instead of a commentary for Africans by Americans. The apostle Paul would have been the first one to stand in applause of this effort. I can’t resist. Next to that Bible commentary I have a book called The IVP Women’s Bible Commentary—by women for women.3 And, yes, I think Paul would applaud that too.
The way of returning to retrieve it all is not the biblical way. The biblical way is the ongoing but organic adoption of the past and adaptation to new conditions and to do this in a way that is consistent with and faithful to the Bible. I’ve been teaching this idea for a long time, and I have learned to anticipate the next question: Who decides on what to adopt and how to adapt? Will it be you alone, will it be you and your friends, will it be you and your pastor, will it be your pastor and the elders, or will it be your denominational leaders?
Will it be the Pope or the Patriarch? Who decides? This just might be the million-dollar question that will determine how you will live out the Bible today, and it leads to a second way we are reading the Bible so we can live it out today.
2. Reading through Tradition
We need to do a little work before we get to the main point of this section, but our overall point is this: ordinary people need to learn to read the Bible through tradition, or they will misread the Bible and create schisms in the church.
The most alarming danger of the “return and retrieve” way of Bible reading is found throughout the Western world: it seems too often that everybody reads the Bible for herself or for himself, and everybody does what’s right in her or his own eyes. We see this in three groups. Pastors have come up with their own pet theory for how to read the Bible that no one in the history of the church has ever seen. Books and catalogs cross my desk daily with new ideas, and often they are advertised as an idea that’s fresh, insightful, never-been-seen-before-but-straight-from-the-Bible, yada yada yada. Engaging with Christian Bible readers over the years leads me to the third group: God bless ’em, but some folks see some of the goofiest things in the Bible, and I wish I could just blow Holy Spirit air on them and cure them of their silliness.
Before I say another word, though, I must confess: I believe we are called to read the Bible for ourselves (but not entirely on our own). The Reformation’s best and most dangerous, revolutionary idea was putting the Bible in the hands of ordinary Christians. One of John Calvin’s deepest desires in the Reformation was to provide the tools for ordinary Christians to read the Bible by themselves. So what did he do? For pastors, he wrote his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion and his extensive commentaries on the Bible, and for laypeople he designed a catechism and wrote more lay-level expositions. He did this so that ordinary Christians could both read and understand the Bible. In this way, he believed, rightly, that the fires of revival could be set loose. But what strikes me about Calvin’s plan was that he didn’t just plop Bibles into the laps of everyone and say, “Here, read this! Nothing to it! Tell me what you think!” No, he wanted them to learn the Bible right, and to do that they would have to learn some basic theology.
I believe everyone should read the Bible, but no one has ever said that everyone should interpret the Bible for themselves and whatever they come up with is as good as anyone else’s views. I now appeal to the other great reformer, Martin Luther. No one wanted the Bible in the hands of ordinary Germans more than Martin Luther. But Luther knew that bad interpretations create schisms and problems. What did he do? He wouldn’t let schoolchildren read the Bible until they had mastered his Catechism. Even if you think Luther himself was being too strong here (and I do), it should reveal that no matter how much the Reformers wanted to place a Bible on the dinner table of every Christian, they also wanted to provide the readers with a sound method and theology that would lead them to read the Bible accurately. Sadly, in our world today many have neglected this Reformation strategy.
The basic strategy works because no matter who we are, when we open the Bible we read it through what we already believe. Yes, what we believe can be challenged by the Bible and lead us to shifts. But we can’t deny this important starting point: we start where we are, and where we are is what we already believe. In addition to this starting point, another consideration: we do need a good solid orientation to the Bible—the Bible’s best ideas, the church’s finest interpretations—to make sense of the Bible. I applaud Calvin and Luther for what they knew to be important: Bible readers need some basic ideas if they want to read the Bible well. Many leaders today seek to do something similar: alongside learning to read the Bible, a basic theological orientation is also taught to guide the reading of the Bible. This is where creeds and catechisms come into importance. But not all do this: some give people the Bible, tell them to read it, and basically say, “What you see in the Bible is exactly what is there.” This is a case of pastoral neglect.
Because of this neglect, we are now living in a church with a myriad of interpreters.4 And it has caused a mighty reaction today with many evangelical Christians bolting for more traditional churches. The major current in this stream is the appeal to tradition. There are two senses of tradition here, one that I adhere to strongly (Great Tradition) and one that repels me (traditionalism). The first is the Great Tradition. The Great Tradition is how the church everywhere has always read the Bible. (It can be pointed out that never has the church read the Bible always the same in every location, so this is hyperbole for a reality nonetheless: the Great Tradition affirmed by and large by all, such as the Nicene Creed.) There is a wonderful evangelical resurgence today of returning to the Great Tradition of the church, and I mention two examples: Thomas Oden’s The Rebirth of Orthodoxy, and J. I. Packer’s and Thomas Oden’s One Faith.5 Each of these is calling Christians to the core doctrines that the faithful in the church have always believed. They are urging evangelicals especially to take more seriously what I am calling the Great Tradition.
We may learn to read the Bible for ourselves, but we must be responsible to what the church has always believed. We can reduce the Great Tradition to the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, and the importance of justification by faith from the Reformation. These creeds point us toward the nonnegotiables of the faith; they point us to what God has led the church to see as its most important doctrines.
Some are going farther than this, though, and are giving too much authority to tradition. They are saying we need to read the Bible through tradition. The singular problem here is traditionalism. Traditionalism too often becomes the inflexible, don’t-ask-questions, do-it-the-way-it-has-always-been-done approach to Bible reading. It reads the Bible through tradition. What happens then? Those who read the Bible through tradition always see the traditional way of reading the Bible. This approach is nearly incapable of renewal and adaptation.
What do we mean then by traditionalism? There are about six steps in this approach, and it occurs in every church and denomination I’ve been around. Rest assured, traditionalism occurs everywhere. You might say it’s human nature. Here are the six steps, leading to traditionalism:
Step 1: We read the Bible.
Step 2: We confront a current issue and we make a decision about an issue—like baptizing infants or adults—or we frame “what we believe” into a confession, a creed, or a doctrinal statement.
Step 3: We fossilize our decision and it becomes a tradition.
(Somewhere around here we become absolutely convinced our tradition is the one and only perfect interpretation of the Bible.)
Step 4: We are bound to our tradition forever.
(It is now traditionalism.)
Step 5: We are bound to read the Bible through our tradition.
(Somewhere around here we become convinced that God’s Spirit led us to our tradition and that it is nothing less than an accurate, God-prompted, don’t-question-it unfolding in history of what God’s Word says.)
Step 6: Those who question our tradition are suspect or, worse yet, kicked out of our church.
(Somewhere around here we become ineffective in our world and become increasingly cantankerous about how the youth are wandering away from the faith.)
The Bible itself points us away from traditionalism. The biblical authors and the early fathers didn’t fossilize traditions. Instead—and here we come to a major moment in this book—they went back to the Bible so they could come forward into the present. They did not go back to stay there (the “retrieve-it-all” tendency); they didn’t dismiss the Bible easily (the “retrieve-only-the-essence” approach); and they didn’t fossilize their discernments (traditionalism). Instead, each one went back to the Bible, to God’s Word, so they could come forward into their own day in their own ways. But they went back to the Bible in light of the fresh, unfolding revelation of God in Christ, and their adaptations were organically connected to the bedrock gospel ideas in their Great Tradition. This
explains the variety of expressions from Genesis to Revelation; it alone explains how Paul and Peter could preach and preach and hardly quote a word of Jesus. It wasn’t because they didn’t know the words of Jesus. No, it was because they knew them so well they could renew Jesus’s message in their day in their own ways—as God’s Spirit prompted them.
I believe it is important to live within the Great Tradition and to interpret the Bible alongside that Great Tradition, but I also believe it has become nearly impossible for fossilization and traditionalism not to creep in. Is there a third way, a way that both returns to retrieve and also respects the Great Tradition? I believe there is, and it is the way of ongoing and constant renewal that returns, retrieves, and renews by reading the Bible with the Great Tradition.
3. Reading with Tradition
God was on the move; God is on the move; God will always be on the move. Those who walk with God and listen to God are also on the move. Reading the Bible so we can live it out today means being on the move—always. Anyone who stops and wants to turn a particular moment into a monument, as the disciples did when Jesus was transfigured before them, will soon be wondering where God has gone.
In the sixteenth century the citizens of the Italian city of Lucca, in Tuscany, sensed their security was threatened by the mighty nobles of both Pisa (famous for its leaning tower) and Florence (famous for what my dear wife, Kris, calls its “pictures”). The Lucchesi (folks from Lucca) hatched a plan in response to these surrounding threats—transform their thin walls into impregnable walls. So for one entire century, 30 percent or more of the taxes were used to fund the new walls. The Lucchesi built a tall and squat one-hundred-foot-wide wall of dirt, buttressed on each side with bricks. The irony of the story is that neither the Florentines nor the Pisans ever attacked Lucca. Happily, that wall did serve the Lucchesi by holding back a flood in 1812. Today, visitors to Lucca enjoy the 2.5-mile walk around the city atop the wall.