Doctor What?

I'm helping out a prospective Theology PhD guy by proof-reading his doctoral thesis.  In chunks.  As he writes them and sends them to me.  It's tough going.  He says things like:

   Premillennial dispensationalism gained a notable surge in popularity precisely because it made sense of the opposition from society that conservative evangelicals felt whenever they asserted their fundamental beliefs.  Until the neo-evangelicals challenged the legitimacy of the resulting withdrawal from society — of which Henry represented an important initial voice — efforts to preserve evangelical orthodoxy overrode the fundamentalists’ concern for orthopraxy.

  ...and uses a lot of words that Microsoft Word doesn't know, like "soteriology" and "salvific" and "eschatology."  (and "orthopraxy.") Reading all this scholarly stuff reminds me of all the things I once was (and in some cases, still am) scared to think about too much.  I was afraid I would somehow "lose my faith" when I had an honest look at how complicated things might really be, beyond my comfort zone.

   As a kid, I was scared to think much about anything in our faith culture, because to do so seemed very much at odds with 'just believing, you know, what we all believe...'  I was absolutely on board with devoting all brain-space to memorizing and delivering prepared little arguments for "Why what we believe is the only correct way to believe."
   I was subconsciously, but carefully, avoiding hearing any opposing views.  I didn't think my faith could take it.  Because I saw my faith in God as my ability to, through fleshly effort and culturally-trained mental techniques, carefully not jettison a belief package, in a box we weren't to open.  No matter how ridiculous some of it might seem to other Christians, or how little sense some it made to me, if I let my brain click into "on" for too long.

   It was such a cohesive package that many people, upon deciding one small feature of the belief system didn't quite hold water, threw it all out entirely. It was like Jenga. Would all come tumbling down if you didn't keep very, very still.

   I have a very clear memory of the time, at about age 20, when I finally decided "Enough with 'helping' God exist. If He exists (and I think that He does) then He doesn't need me to believe properly, in order for Him to be healthy.  He doesn't subsist on my faith, like the gods in Terry Pratchett's Small Gods.  That's not what's going on.  What's going on, and all that's going on, is if I believe wrongly about Him, then I'm being silly.  I'm wrong about something.  And that's happened before, and things are fine.  Better get used to getting stuff wrong occasionally, instead of pretending to have it all figured out.  It's life. And my beliefs seem to be growing and developing and expanding. They seem to be a seeking after and wrestling match with truth and reality, rather than, as I was raised, a clinging to other people's prepackaged, unopened doctrine boxes."

   It was freeing, really.  To let God be God.  All by Himself.  To try to get to know a bit about who and how and what He was, without feeling the need to create Him, nor to be fully schooled on what human beings had created Him to be.  If He was Himself, then it wasn't about my belief at all.  It was more about understanding who and what He was.  And if He simply "wasn't," if He lacked reality, all on His own merits, then He could just bugger off.  (He hasn't, so far.)

The Inerrancy/Magical Qualities of the Bible

But proof-reading through Dr. What's writing, with all of its allusions to all kinds of writers, reminds me of what I have felt troubled by taking too close a look at.  I mean, when I read a book of the bible, and I check the page on Wikipedia, Wikipedia always says pretty much exactly the same thing.  Something along the lines of: 

While traditionally the book of Hezekiah had been simply attributed to an actual living person literally named Hezekiah, in the twentieth century, a bunch of wankers from Germany have decided that in fact the book was most likely written by seventeen (or, Hertzberg speculates, twenty-three) separate writers, over a period of three hundred years, with extensive editing, additions, redaction and deletions from the original, and bits from Beowulf added in for flavour.  In a basement in Seattle.  So this is obviously all true and is now generally held by modern scholarship.

   I remember the first time I got a chill at University when my professor pointed out that, though we'd always been taught that the guy whose name was on the book of the bible had actually written it, that if we looked carefully, we saw that his death was reported on in the same book.  (This kind of thing had us fundamentalists scrambling to argue that God had certainly shown this writer his own death, and so he'd written it.  In advance.  For the sake of completism.  I mean, we believed God was capable of anything, right?  Especially stuff we imagined Him doing, to make sure the bible ended up being precisely what we imagined it to be?) 

   You see, we had a lot of pressure on us regarding the bible.  We believed that if one sentence was  added or removed from a book of the bible, if one word was wrong, then this somehow invalidated the magic of the whole book, making it not perfect and divinely inspired anymore, and we might as well toss our bibles on the trash heap and head out to sports bars immediately, looking for love and pitchers of cheap beer.

   But there are all kinds of things that bothered me to think about, as to the bible.  The four gospels not seeming to quite exactly line up (four guys in Germany to begin with thought that Matthew was written first, with the other gospel writers copying it and making mistakes, and that Mark was a brief summary of Matthew.  But then Hanz, Fritz, Wilhelm and Franz decided that no, Mark was written first, and then an imaginary, lost gospel by Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation followed, and that Matthew was composed by adding Q stuff to the stuff Mark already said, clearly resulting in the Frankengospel we now clearly understand Matthew to be.

   So, like with so many things, Christians divide as to the bible.  On the one side are people who think it's a rough edit together of stuff that mostly helps us know Jesus, but that every word isn't magic, and that it, like the Church is tainted by mistaken human effort.  On the other are people who believe that not a thought or word is lost in translation in any way, and if one were, then the whole book were bunk.

   So what do I do?  Well, I decide that the bible is a message.  From and about God Himself.  And that we get, if we pay attention, the message, basically.  Imperfectly.  Over our lives.  And I note that going too far in terms of:

a) spending 110% of one's brainspace insisting upon the bible being mostly a cobbled-together hodgepodge,

or the opposite

b)"The bible's 100% true because the bible says it is, and that's good enough for me!"

...all seems to seriously detract from letting the book speak.  Takes time and focus away from letting an actual message get through.  I don't think we're content to see through a glass darkly.  I don't think we're realistic about how much of our own ideas we can't seem to help projecting all over the text, obscuring it from view.   I don't think we like mystery.  I don't think we like the idea that God reveals:

a) only what He wants to,
b) and only what we can handle

...rather than:

c) pretty much everything, if you read hard enough.

   And there are those uncomfortable things.  Like how, long ago, people decided which of many books to include in our bible, and which ones to omit.  Many were omitted.  Even Jewish and Catholic bibles contain books missing from Protestant ones.  Yet the books we have in our bible (and Jesus himself) actually quote many of those books that aren't in our bible.  Because people like Jesus considered them worth reading.  Ecclesiasticus.  Wisdom.  The Maccabees.   Stuff like that.  For example, the book of Enoch is omitted from our bible (because it's weird.)  But Jude quotes it in our bible. And we leave Jude in.

  Also, those little teeny letters at the bottom of the pages (or in the margin down the middle, depending on your bible) reveal that the bible says people are quoting, for example, Isaiah, but the quote they're saying is actually from Malachi or somewhere else (for example Mark 1:2 says in all possible manuscripts "As is written in Isaiah the prophet" and then quotes Malachi.  Despite what the book of Mark says, this is corrected in the King James by altering that bit to say "the prophets." This is to fix or hide the simple fact that Malachi is the one who actually wrote that part, despite what Mark almost certainly wrote. All our oldest manuscripts have Mark citing the wrong book of the bible.)
  And stuff gets quoted in our bible, attributed to people whose writings are in our bible, but which actual quotes don't seem to actually be anywhere in our bible at all.

  And then there are translators' notes, showing that bits here and there are missing from most copies of the bible, calling into question whether they should be included in ours or not, and making one wonder how they got there.  And there are the translators' notes marking the translated word "large" and adding "or perhaps 'small.'"  Or notes affixed to the word "peacocks," which read "or perhaps apes."  Or "tree" which read "or perhaps cave."

   So, I could decide that all of that is a test of my faith, and that rather than being little errors, that it is a purposeful Godpuzzle that actually reveals important secret doctrinal matters, hidden knowledge and prophetic stuff.  Code, if you will.  And I could then do cryptic charts and make acronyms and I could feel like a wizard.
   Or conversely I could conclude that the message of the bible is, as a result of some clear mistakes in the editing/translation/copying process, therefore, somehow lost.  And I could kinda toss the bible out.

  But I guess I don't do neither of these. It's hard.  It's taking time to unlearn how I was raised to read it.  But I read the bible.  Because it's important to me.  I believe the message in it is magic.   The magic that fixes not only me, but the world.  And that it's getting through millennial and cultures and miles and copyings and translations just fine, no matter what maybe occasionally actually happens on the paper.  In 1611.

  And I let it be weird. I let it say stuff that's clearly nothing to do specifically or primarily with me.  I don't pretend, or even believe I can, fully understand absolutely any bit I want to, just because I want to.  I don't force it all into dispensations and charts and Words With Capitals.  I try to let it speak, and see what it says, if it's willing to say anything that I can get.  I believe that without God the Holy Spirit working with me, I'm going to see absolute crap when I'm reading the bible, just any old nonsense, and that I'll use it like someone doing tea leaves or goat entrails.  That it will be more about me projecting my own emotional and spiritual baggage than about anything God is trying to say.
   It's not just about if I know what the words in the bible say.  And the majority of the bible isn't written as rules to be obeyed.  It's also about what my spirit/attitude is.  And hardcore bible reading isn't guaranteed to "loosen" people who are too tightly wound, and who know nothing of grace, ease, peace, kindness, forgiveness and mercy.  We know this because we know avid, lifelong bible readers who are so tightly wound they squeak, and whose bible reading seems to make them merciless and judgmental.

   But I read it.  Carefully.  I try not to make this ritualistic or superstitious.  I try not to do it each morning so I'll have good luck/blessing. I try to turn off that Brethren DVD commentary that tends to play, drowning the bible passages out when I'm reading.  I try to read books of the bible (or failing that, ten chapter sections) in one "go" to avoid self-indulgently slicing and dicing it up into little quotable bits, with no clue about, no vision of, what the whole book is trying to talk about. Mostly, I'm interested in what the ancient people who heard it would likely have heard.  And I'm interested, not just to laugh about how little they understood, compared to us, now.
  I'm wary of how much I might be tempted to warp what I'm reading, just so it's supposedly to, about and for me and me alone.

  And when I'm trying to add my ideas to someone else's discussion, and I want to be convincing?  I do not try to hand puppet the bible, and make it say I'm 'right,' out of a puppet mouth I'm flapping and saying "Oh, look! The BIBLE says I'm right!"
  I do not like to slice and dice and quote tiny scripture scraps out of context, so I can look right.  I think that's blasphemy.  I can't feel right about doing it.  I refer to the bible overall, in themes and writers and events.  I don't quote little phrases and annotate them, chapter and verse, just as if Jeremiah was writing to help me make my points, or that I am making exactly the same speeches as Jeremiah was, and for much the same reasons.
   Dr. What points out that the connections between the points made by evangelicals, and the messages originally intended in the scraps they quote, are often completely indecipherable.  Not unless one is already "sold" on seeing things exactly their way, in which case, the verses all say the same thing to all the like-minded people.  But their interpretations make no sense to everyone else. "This verse is telling us to sell the current church building.  Isaiah is very clear on what we must do." It's like they're trying to build a tower of doctrine to heaven, and God confuses their languages so most people can't even agree on what the terminology should be.

The Divinity of Christ

This one always scared me a bit.  Some people decide Jesus Christ became God (eventually), or was adopted and became God's Son, and others feel he was part of an Eternal Trinity, with him somehow being the Son, but having never not existed, or being created or born, or added in to the Trinity, the word "Son" not meaning what we tend to think it does.

     People have all kinds of stupid arguments about this one.  And like all of these stupid arguments, you can't simply turn to the chapter in the bible with the charts, that explains everything and lays it all out clearly, and answers all of our questions so we understand it completely.  No.  We create those things ourselves and often, really don't see how much trimming and folding and cutting and pasting we've been doing to the bible in order to make them.
   We're not listening to the bible. We're making paper dolls of it.  Making it talk for us, to say we're right.  We're trying to make it serve us and our needs and arguments and views.  Not facing how much of it we can't really, honestly claim to make head nor tail of.  We're making up conspiracy theories like hillbillies in the swamp, imagining they can figure out everything about how the space shuttle works, just by watching a YouTube video of one taking off.  And after a few pulls on the bottle of white lightnin', everyone agrees that Cecil's interpretation "just makes sense."  They were all there.  They saw it make sense.  And that's good enough for them.  YouTube was quite clear.

   I've heard people read the gospels as tales of Jesus walking around doing magic tricks for no purpose other than to say "Tadaah!  I'm God, see?!" Others see it as him showing how, when one works for and with God, even an ordinary human being should be able to do what he did (and in fact, he promised, to do more than what he did, once he was gone).  Hence all his chiding of the disciples for not believing.  Apart from dying for the sins of mankind, Jesus seems to be expecting his followers to do anything he does.  And further books of the bible report that they did.  But I don't hear that people routinely do that stuff today.  So what do you do with all of that?

   In Mark, Jesus says that the Son doesn't know when his return will happen.  He says only the Father knows that.  He's saying that the Son is God, but that the Son doesn't know something God the Father knows.

  IS God omniscient and omnipotent?  I find this kind of thinking troubling to pursue.  In our modern minds, we have taken "almighty" and decided it means the same things as "infinitely powerful/can do absolutely anything at all," even though the writers of the bible had no symbols for or concepts of zero or infinity.  "Powerful enough to deal with absolutely anything He needs to" isn't the same as "infinitely powerful to do absolutely anything I can imagine more.  Infinitely."

  And we decide that God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) are what we call "omniscient," knowing all things there are.  Yet Jesus says he doesn't know something specific. And God speaks of forgetting things (like transgressions).  What do we do with that?  Get our chart paper out and start proving the bible is right and defending it?  Or do we embrace mystery?

  I cannot pretend to have that all figured out.  Oh, I know there's doctrine that people are lining up to try to force me to "take a clear position" on.  But I am not leaping to prop up the bible by explaining away this apparent contradiction.  I don't need to.  The bible is.  I read it. It doesn't need me to justify it.  I don't need to have a chart with my doctrinal "fors" and "againsts" so the right people know to shun me and the right people embrace me.

   One of the things Dr. What wrote about was that evangelicals, the writers he's studying claim, engage with strangers primarily by presenting theories and arguments and trying to get them to feel certain ways about those things.  That does sound like an odd way to make a connection and start a dialogue.  Seems like something that people would meet as a bit of a non sequitur.  How about seeing a physical need or situation and appreciating or bettering it? Like Jesus did?  Even without resorting to miraculous means of doing it?

The One Correct Christian Group

I've gone into this plenty already.  I've decided that this doctrine is what makes Brethren divisions possible/inevitable.  It's the "stakes" people are fighting over.  Claiming the Name.
   But there was a time when I couldn't bear to think about it very squarely, because I feared I'd lose my belief in our church and the lifestyle I'd invested in carrying out my whole life.  Well, God forced my hand on that one.  All in aid of knowing Him and the Church better.  Breaking out of that stained glass house/box.  And knowing Him, unfiltered by that stained glass.  We already see through a glass darkly.  To add an extra layer of (stained) glass?  Didn't make any sense to Him, apparently. It seemed an impediment to my spiritual growth, so He rent it from me/me from it.

Dr. What Talks Funny

He uses these kinds of words:

crucicentrism: this relates to evangelicals focusing on the death of Christ at the cross, to the detriment of pretty much everything else in the bible at all.  He argues that they focus on personal experiences of Christ, on conversion stories that are extremely melodramatic, so they can bear telling and retelling for the rest of that person's life.  He says this means evangelicals are, essentially, focused only on what Christ can do for them personally.  After death.  Says this makes them disinterested in helping others (except to gain more like-thinking followers) or being a positive force in their communities.  He quotes authors who argue that the cross wasn't just about Jesus saving me.  It was about him taking the next step in setting the whole world right, which will culminate in him ruling it one day.  Argues that our gospel has shrunk.  And many evangelicals shut out the real world and enjoy imagining a near-romantic, current, fantasized over, sentimentalized, fanciful personal relationship with Jesus Christ, that they personally are having, right now, and which they feel is Jesus Christ's only concern.  Not shrinking from "feeding him" his lines, just as they imagine they'd want said lines to be delivered, either.  Like a fifteen year old girl kissing her pillow and pretending Justin Bieber is right there in the room with her, incarnate in that foam-filled Ikea soft furnishing.

apologeticism: this relates to a mindset that doesn't spend as much time listening to the bible as it does in arguing that the bible is right and "defending" it against unbelief or differing belief, mostly when it supports their own lifestyle choices.  Turning poetry and lyrics and impassioned pleas to be faithful, into doctrinal "positions."  This means that, upon meeting a Christian who's been reading the bible and has a different focus or interpretation, the usual response is to shut up (or shut out) that person, rather than work things out and learn from each other, both being Christian brothers.

ahistoricism: this relates to a mindset that is closed to and threatened by archaeology and history. 'Nuff said.

social pessimism: this relates to an odd joy taken in the idea that God will burn the world, all the while claiming it's "sad."  To the mindset that isn't open to the idea that the Kingdom of God is the world ruled by God, and that if we listen, we become ruled by God, not in terms of lifestyle limits only, but also in terms of active, positive concerns and ideas and endeavours.
   An argument is made that an overfocus on The World's Problem as being My Personal Sin narrows the focus of the evangelical from Jesus saving the World, and moves their minds utterly away from taking social ills and transgressions of entire cultures and nations as seriously as one's own petty thoughts and desires.  (And then not wishing to make amends for said cultural and national, ongoing iniquities.)
  He argues that this view is worsened by an "us vs. them" attitude about the World, which they exaggerate the hostility of, toward them, innocuous Western Christians as they are, with guaranteed rights.  He argues that this imagined level of hostility toward them can be not only exaggerated, but also self-fulfilling, or self-concocted. Makes them want to fight and hate the World, rather than be agents of God wanting to love and help, rather than merely correct and judge it.

ethicism: this relates to the idea that many evangelicals view the bible as if it were nothing more than an ethics manual, dealing only with right and wrong choices, despite the clear fact that it covers a lot more ground than merely that one area.  Any part of the bible (see: Song of Solomon) which doesn't help enforce "correct Christian living" ends up getting glossed over, more often than not.  Very little of the bible remains, after this exercise.  Because very little of the bible is about ethics only.  But that's what many want to use it for.

conversionism: this relates to the sole focus on "that moment I took my first step of faith" and trying to endlessly retard one's Christian growth and spiritual preoccupation with solely that, and nothing that might happen next.  It is anti-growth and anti-depth.  Keeping folks happily, forever, "in Sunday School."  Slapping down any discussions which involve more than one perspective or consideration or interpretation, and purging out all nuance, insisting that everything be presented as a finished black and white belief decision/position, rather than any kind of ongoing learning experience.

Stuff like that.