Tag: Bible

What a book

Not as clear as I would like

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by Martin Scott
Posted in Personal Perspectives

From as far back as I can remember I was taught (ordered) to read my Bible. Growing up with the King James version I learned by heart some key texts. I now realise that Scripture is not as inherently transparent as one would like to think, and I could well have done without the archaic language, another level of obscurity being added.

Not as clear as one would like. But why would I want it clear? Probably to satisfy my desire for certainty. So much that is unclear and a few verses that (ok quite a few) I wish were not in there. And the other side so much that is clear, clear in terms of behaviour and values. ‘Bless those who curse you… offences will come… love your enemy…’ Clear. Some things very clear and other aspects unclear. That should say a lot in itself. The ones I want clear are tied to what do I believe and the ones that are already clear relate to my attitudes and actions. ‘All Scripture is God-breathed’, we read, and ‘is… useful’. What a great word, ‘useful’. Useful to guide us in life, not to fill us with knowledge.

I like scholarship that gives us background that helps us make sense of what we read… and I do not like scholarship that comes up with something new that undermines what I wanted the text to mean. What a wonderfully annoying book.

I guess the bottom line is we are not a people of the book, after all in the NT era they did not have what we term the Bible, even what we call the OT was not a fixed set of books – Jesus probably read most of what we have… and a few others, such as the book of Enoch, which is a late piece of writing that the name Enoch was attached to to give it some weight! (And in our canon we have a reference to the book of Enoch, with the writer seeming to accept that it actually recorded what Enoch ‘the tenth from Adam’ said.)

I don’t think I am simply a product of the Enlightenment when I say that I am sure there is ‘truth’ in the sense of facts and factual statements, but I think also there is probably some room in God to be barking up the wrong tree theologically… the judgement will always be with regard to what I did not with regard to what I know. A freedom that has boundaries, a freedom to follow Christ. I might (where did the word might come from in this sentence?) think Calvinists are imposing a system on Scripture, but God does not divide the world between Calvinists and ‘the others’. The cross and cruciform living is where the divide comes: and I need to be on the right side of that divide.

I am deeply pragmatic. I accept the books I have – 66 of them – as the canon I read and work from. I don’t pause to think that it is inerrant, nor the only possible canon. That for some would paint me as inevitably going off track from the beginning. But what about my name’s sake: Martin Luther, he had serious doubts about Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation? So I drop back to the pragmatic position. These books have stood the test of time and I have enough in there to work with!

I read a progression, not a linear progression, but nevertheless something unfolding with the revelation of God being ultimately in personal not written form. Jesus being the ‘word’ of God, the express image of the invisible God. Paul’s letters might appear earlier than the Gospels did in written form, but Paul’s Gospel has to be read from the Gospels, not vice versa.

Disputes are (for me) clear within Scripture, some naughty texts dropped in by later ‘editors’ as if they were part of an earlier belief… but all inviting me into the dialogue as to what I believe. I cannot choose to believe whatever I wish and disregard what I read in the texts, but I also have to interrogate certain texts in the light of others, and particularly in the light of what is revealed in and through Jesus.

Scripture seems to allow me to choose a track. Take kingship for example. It seems that Kinship is predominantly approved of (‘there was no king in the land…’) but also we read the very clear exposé that in choosing a king the vote was against God. David as ‘a person after my own heart’ was chosen to end kingship, and as that choice was not made, we read that on the cross above Jesus was nailed the term ‘king of the Jews’. That is how I read it. I could be wrong. But choice is what God seems to give. And my choice has to be guided not primarily by my intellect but by the same choice that was there from the beginning: ‘knowledge (of good and evil)’ or ‘life’. And that means I could (and in that sense probably often do) get it wrong. But what do we mean by ‘wrong’? That kinda ties with the most major way of getting something wrong is to dehumanise – the core of ‘sin’, which Paul affirms that we have all sinned and come short (not of standards as per law) of the glory of God.

I find the book difficult, obscure, clear, inviting, but would certainly be at quite a loss if it was taken from me, at a loss because I lose sight of Jesus all too easily, and even when I get frustrated with what I read there is a constant flow that pushes me to Jesus, the ultimate and final word.

Labels are challenging. I am a Christian but not like… I am an evangelical but not like… I am charismatic but distance myself from… I would find it hard to sign certain creedal statements as I would have to say ‘but what do you mean by that?’, but the central element that shapes me (or at least I like to claim it does) is the centrality of the life, death, resurrection of Jesus; that Jesus is unique, set apart from all other members of the human race; that Jesus was and is God incarnate who came to set us free from captivity; and secondly, that my beliefs are shaped by what I read. What I understand of what I read can evolve (and devolve) but it always has to align with what is central.

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Tough old book

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by Martin Scott
Posted in Theology

Reading Scripture? Love doing that. Imagine doing that though as a Palestinian (and currently when both Netenyahu and certain nationalistic prophets equate Palestinians with the Amalekites!!!)… or reading certain parts as a woman… or as a host of other people. What if one grew up with the pain of definitely not being the ‘favourite’, then go on to read about choice within family, such as God being quoted as saying:

I have loved Jacob,
but I have hated Esau.

Yes it is a tough book at times.

I love to think (and sometimes love to say a little tongue in cheek, ‘the author of Hebrews, she says…’) that a woman (Priscilla) wrote Hebrews. It certainly does not seem that any of the other New Testament books are likely to have been written by a woman so let’s at least claim this one. (Paul does not seem an option – the style and content is just not like his. Maybe Barnabas?)

A woman? Maybe… but we read,

And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel… (Heb. 11:32).

Who was ‘Barak’. In Judges 4, we read of Barak:

At that time Deborah, a prophet, wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel. She used to sit under the palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the Israelites came up to her for judgment. She sent and summoned Barak son of Abinoam from Kedesh in Naphtali and said to him, “The Lord, the God of Israel, commands you, ‘Position yourself at Mount Tabor, taking ten thousand from the tribe of Naphtali and the tribe of Zebulun. I will draw out Sisera, the general of Jabin’s army, to meet you by the Wadi Kishon with his chariots and his troops, and I will give him into your hand.’ ” Barak said to her, “If you will go with me, I will go, but if you will not go with me, I will not go.” And she said, “I will surely go with you; nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.”

The hero(ine)? Deborah. The ‘judge in Israel?’ Deborah. The one who gets rebuked? Barak! Yet we come to Hebrews 11 and not a mention of Deborah, and Mr. Barak is promoted to the list of heroes of faith. What on earth do we do with this? A re-writing of the history? A deliberate erasure of a woman’s part in the story?

This absence of Deborah’s name probably means Priscilla was simply not the author, but it also further highlights that there are biases in Scripture.

Scripture written in another era and not written to us. Not to be judged by our era, and for us not to live in that era. Live within the story but do not be confined to that time as if the story has been fully written, with nothing further to be said. The letters are typical of that era (genre wise) but they are ever so radical. What about Paul’s claim that we are ‘letters’? Ever so radical in our era or nothing to say?

I appreciate why people bang the drum of ‘back to Judea-Christian values’ by which is meant ‘back to the Bible’… but what if we began to think backwards to our day from the future rather than forward to our day from the past? That just might make us highly creative, provocative but deeply relevant to the situations aruond us.

It is a tough old book; but the story being told (even when the wrong names appear and Deborah does not get a mention) if we follow that story will make the book difficult to read but the rewards will be incredible.

Commands to commit genocide; damning whole people groups; gender divisions… all of that is present within what we read… but let’s read about the past and read from the future.

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Story or text?

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by Martin Scott
Posted in Biblical Observations

At the end of the last post I wrote that we need to recover ‘the story beyond the text’. In writing that I am suggesting that there are diverse ways of approaching Scripture. One way would be to view the various texts as somehow dropping out of the sky in a timeless fashion, for surely the Bible is inspired in such a way that each and every text is ‘the word of God’. That would seem to be a way in which we were respecting the authority of the book we consider is our sacred Scriptures. Not my approach.

Story. It seems hard to get away from that. The books of Moses – the ‘law’ – do have some ‘do this / do not do this’ that could be classified as giving us (actually them not us) a set of laws, but the majority of the first five books (the law) are in the form of narratives recounting what took place – story. So much historical reflection in the other books… not a ‘Thus saith the Lord’ without a historical context. The Gospels – narrative. Yes there is teaching and instruction within them but all four essentially present us with ‘Jesus did this, he said this in this setting’ and so on right through to an account of the last days of his life; far more narrative than a set of teachings. Acts – story. The letters – most are in response to ‘in this setting and time with what they are facing I will write this to them’… historical context (so for example even the BIG doctrinal letter of Romans instructing us to pay our taxes is not a simple instruction, but is written into the context of Rome and street protests that were about to erupt over, within months, the taxation situation). Revelation – a context of observing Rome’s policies and values with a wonderful intersection then of earthly observation and apocalyptic vision that interprets and explains what was visible to one and all.

Story is what makes up the majority of our book.

And cos there is story we don’t have to defend all of it as ‘this is literal’. Maybe Jonah was a historical character, probably not though… and probably not even if Jesus thought he was (though I don’t think Jesus thought he was). Certainly I see no reason to suggest an ‘Adam and Eve’ in the sense of six / seven day creation and happened in this way (literally). What I think we need to think about is not the literalistic nature or not but more what would be the story being told. The story of creation would certainly adjust many eschatologies… the ‘first word’ and the ‘last word’ should surely be better aligned than ‘everything will burn up’. Probably the seven days resonate with the seven days of preparation for the Temple before it was filled with the glory of God. Somehow that would align those ancient stories more with the stories of the day from other cultures (and totally transcend them all) and give us (as Christians) a major connection between Genesis 1 and 2 with our comments on Revelation 21, with the whole of creation as a Temple. I think the only burning up in the end will be the various iterations of the ‘left Behind’ type of literature!

Story is so challenging. What if – hold on to your seat belt – Paul planted ekklesiai in each place as he knew that was essential, essential as the first phase of his activity, but that once he had done that maybe there would be a second phase, one that we do not read of in Scripture? We might try and copy phase 1 with our claims of being a biblical church because we read what was done, but fail to understand the why of what he was doing?

Story… and an uncompleted story. I am not suggesting we can continue to write the Bible… but we can and must continue to tell the same story, but it would seem to me that we are not in the same ‘chapter’ of where the Bible brings the story up to. If we do something different that tells a story that is incompatible with what has gone before we will prove to be truly unbiblical; likewise if we simply line up texts and align to them without consideration to the story it will also result in us being unbiblical.

So much could be said about the levels of story that are in our Scriptures – the detailed explanations as to why David (and Solomon) were God’s choices in the earlier historical books of Samuel but once we come to Chronicles no need to ascertain that (abnormal) choice of David and Solomon was from God as those nasty northern kingdoms have gone and only the faithful to David remain, would be one example.

And conflicts within Scripture – now we come to another area of great richness. Take the ‘wisdom books’. Proverbs is clear, there are no exceptions. Job… in some ways an exception… then Ecclesiastes, with the only human who has value is a dead one! Three contributions that we wrestle with so that we come to a level of wisdom that one monolithic approach would not help us get there. Life is complex and the intra-canonical dialogue (probably disagreement) serves us well.

Story, and with the interpretive centre being in the story of Jesus for God has spoken in ‘the Son in these last days’ in a defining way. The Jesus story – now that transforms the whole story.

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Interrogating the ‘young’ Bible

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by Martin Scott
Posted in Theology

One of the concepts I have been working with I put into the form of a rhetorical question. ‘Imaging interrogating the young Jesus (maybe 12 years old)….’ He grew up in his culture, a culture that did not view women very highly and saw Gentiles as rank outsiders (even ‘dogs’). Fully human meant that he did not float above the surface but was shaped by his culture. The remarkable feature is that he came to a place of full maturity – what we could term ‘truly human’ and by the time he was 33 was mature and became a source of salvation for all. Interrogate the 33 year old Jesus and his answers would not have simply stood out in his culture but would make our perspectives look tame. I am all but double that age, growing up with advantages he never had and am no where close to half that level of maturity.

[David Leigh in one of the Zoom groups opened my eyes to some fresh insight how Jesus was so far ahead, in spite of his culture, when in the Temple at age 12 he is questioning the ‘experts’, and it seems clear the questions were pushing them in terms of their interpretation of the Law.]

In the night – always happens – the ticking of the brain in the night… I was thinking that there is something similar going on with the Bible. Interrogate the ‘young Bible’ and we might be shocked by what comes back to us. Ask the mature Bible and we get a different take on things. [Of course the riders are many. So much of what we have was put together and edited in the period of the Babylonian exile, but we still get early ‘young Bible’ perspectives bleeding through.]

It is just another way of saying that the Bible is not a flat book, with all speaking at the same level, or that we are impacted by a trajectory ever moving forward, ultimately guided by life, not by right and wrong. So no big ticking of brain, more a trickle.

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Going beyond the [B]ook

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by Martin Scott
Posted in Theology

For the past few weeks I have been lamenting, well occasionally reflecting. I am not very good at reflecting, and as for lamenting – not even too sure I know what the word means.

My reflectful lament has been over the four books written so far – the two you all rushed to buy and the two in the pipeline for publication. I have realised that the readership will be predominantly people like me (not the majority world). People who have a strong background in the evangelical (and likely charismatic) world but are willing to consider concepts that some think are outside the box. I am not going to get an atheist to read them and desire to join a zoom group, but I sure would love honest dialogue in that direction. Not to ‘convert’ them (when was that part of the job description of the Great Commission?) but to present Jesus as the ‘face’ of God and as the ‘face’ of ‘actualised’ humanity – OK theologically ‘true humanity’.

So I have made a start at writing for that audience, and also for those who do not position themselves completely at that end of the spectrum of faith / non-faith. (The other audience I would love to dialogue with are those born after 1980, so help me God!) I am not writing an apologetic, there are others much better equipped at that, but trying to write something that is open and transparent. It is interesting in trying to do that cos one’s own presuppositions have to be challenged in the process. A few days ago I said to a friend / neighbour who expressed (past tense) he was an atheist, and then (present tense) ‘I would like to believe, but…’, that perhaps faith wise I need him as much as he needs me. I need him to challenge my faith, cos although faith cannot explain everything it must have substance.

I am planning an opening chapter on Jesus and a second one on our holy book, the Bible. In doing so I wrote the obvious concerning Jesus that he grew up in a prejudiced world, that was also fed by an interpretation of the holy scrolls that he looked to. It is hard to believe Jesus also did not have biased perspectives, particularly with respect to Gentiles and women. Scripture clearly says he ‘became mature’ through what he learned, and as I have written in an earlier post he is the great teacher because he was the GREAT LEARNER. It is amazing that he broke through beyond the culture and his own preconceived perceptions. To be fully mature by 33, and in that culture… Here I am all-but double that age and… (Any way to follow this through the interaction with Gentiles and women is very informative to observe the learning process in Jesus.)

The guidance that the holy scrolls gave Jesus is instructive for us and the guidance we receive from the Bible. Today I wrote:

Jesus was so far ahead of his culture and setting, and that his holy book (set of scrolls) both helped to shape his life and thoughts and at the same time restricted his progress. And of course this is something we have to consider also when we as Christians read our holy book, the Bible, consisting of Old and New Testaments.

Never articulated it like this before, but seemed obvious as the words appeared on my screen. We are very grateful for Scripture. Jesus must have been so grateful as he meditated on texts and saw in them his true identity and destiny. I am not sure if the right word is ‘balance’, but let me use that. We have to balance that invaluable guide that the Scriptures are with the realisation that we can also be restricted by the pages we read. Of course there are good restrictions, but there are also restrictions that prevent us moving beyond the pages. Yes beyond. For the Scriptures are to speak of Jesus, not of themselves, and Acts 28 is an unfinished record of the continuation of what Jesus is doing and teaching. A progression beyond has to faithfully follow the trajectory set out but if the whole journey is not described in the pages we have to go beyond.

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Jesus and the Bible

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by Martin Scott
Posted in Theology

The relationship of believers to Jesus and to the Bible is interesting. There are times there are conflicts that seem to come down to whether Jesus is subservient to the Bible or the Bible has to give way to him. At this time this challenge is very visible across the pond with the conflicting testimonies of a man being put forward for public office who is denying the claims of sexual abuse by a woman. There is the ‘he said, she said’ aspect to it. To be wrongly accused is a nightmare, to be disbelieved and blamed for not coming forward earlier is sadly too often the pattern. There is a further aspect that if this took place decades ago surely forgiveness has to apply and this cannot be held against him. Of course I cannot speak into the current situation as I do not know the ‘facts’. I do though want to take the opportunity to push into the inter-relationship of our faith in Jesus and our faith in the Bible as authoritative.

In Spain there is the now very famous case involving the self-named group ‘the Manada’ (wolf-pack) when the five men of the pack sexually assaulted a woman in a doorway in Pamplona in 2016. This was deemed not to be rape as there was insufficient evidence for violence and intimidation – so declared the judges, one saying she clearly did not fight back, there was no evidence that at any time did she, for example, try to bite any of the men on their privates to stop the attack. So the outcome pronounced by the (male) judges on the case was of no violence, no intimidation, therefore it was not rape! The woman in a dark doorway, five men, filming it on cell phones. Such a verdict normalises the objectivisation of women and the ‘what can you expect’ of the status quo. Indeed some people have suggested that if unwanted physical sexual advances that occurred in the context of school / college becomes the bar then so many men would have to rule themselves out of being fit for public office. Such a response unacceptably normalises the behaviour. Yes, forgiveness… yes people change… but there is a culture also that we have to change.

The challenge for believers is to get beyond the Bible to Jesus. If believers do not look to Jesus, how he treated women, his comments on lust, the inclusion of the divorce rights to women, the elevation of women to receive the same calling as men, his response to the woman caught in adultery etc., there will always be a pull to the default biblical culture, the culture of patriarchy. When we end there men will be cut a whole lot of slack, women will be disbelieved and in the majority of situations where they are brave enough to come forward they will still be labelled as they probably provoked it. Our issue with the Bible is it was written in a patriarchal context. Read the Bible without a Jesus-lens and we males win every time. Read it with a Jesus-lens and we have to critique what we read, for we have God speaking to us but the context of the writing is patriarchal. We must not allow the culture to dictate what the voice is saying or to silence the voice. Allegiance to Jesus demands this of us. Allegiance to Jesus relativises every other allegiance, he alone is the Lord exalted to the right hand of the Father. I can love my nation, marry the land and sow myself in but cannot swear allegiance; I can love the Bible, read it, devour it, but it is to the Jesus that the Bible bears witness to that I give my all. I cannot defend behaviour that is bibically-based but Jesus-denying.

I sympathise with anyone falsely accused. That is horrendous and even when acquitted the ‘there is no smoke without fire’ often remains. Finding a way through on the individual cases is not easy, but the culture has to change.

For the culture to change we have to hear Jesus, for only in hearing him does faith come. To hear him we have to hear those whose speech reflects his voice. In the situations I am writing about it will be all but impossible to hear him without hearing the voice of women. This is not tokenism, nor is it positive discrimination, it is to recognise that the clearest sound will be heard outside the established power structure.

In the Manada case the public outcry resulted in the government putting forward a commission that would review how rape should be defined (currently based on the two elements that have to be shown to be present: violence and intimidation). The members of the commission put forward – all males! Not a hope of there being anything other than a superficial shift in the definition.

Jesus did not come to bring about superficial shifts, but deep cultural ones. It is tragic when (male) believers are the main believers who speak up and the status quo is defended. We pray for transformation… that transformation has to include the diminishing of the patriarchal culture, the culture that is assumed and so defended in the Bible. That culture is what was carried to the cross by Jesus. The women at the cross saw a world coming to an end; the women in the garden saw a new world open up. And for us as Paul said ‘if anyone is in Christ there is a new world’…

A while back I was speaking to a Roman Catholic her in the Iberian peninsula and he spoke of his region that ‘even now there are some evangelicals being born again’. I laughed as one might expect. However, maybe that is what we all need, after all perhaps Nicodemus could be a type of the evangelical of his day and it was to him Jesus said you need to be born again (from above), for without it he would not see the kingdom. The Jesus of the Bible opens the door to new birth; the Bible without Jesus can simply confirm my acceptance of the unacceptable culture I contribute toward.

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