Issues Facing Missions Today: 2. Biblical Illiteracy in the Western Church: (a) The Loss of a Concern for Biblical Authority Among Theologians
Issues Facing
Missions Today: 2a. Biblical Illiteracy in the Western Church: The Loss of a
Concern for Biblical Authority Among Theologians
Introduction
The strangest thing happened on the way to the twenty-first
century: the Western Church became Biblically illiterate. This has a direct and dramatic effect on its
mission in the world.
The point being made here is not at all new. In recent years, I have heard the
conversation repeatedly being made in Europe, America, and South Africa. There may be wonderful exceptions to this all
over the world, but one challenge missions faces is a fairly massive element of
the Church being biblically illiterate.
How can we possibly go about the mission of the Church if we are
Biblically illiterate?
Just how did this state of affairs come about? Studying ‘cause’ is challenging. What I present here are analyses that should contribute
to a new strategy to re-establish Biblical literacy even if they fail to
explain the causes fully.
In this post, I will discuss the loss of a concern for Biblical authority among many theologians. This is, necessarily, a more theological
discussion.
‘An Old Bitch Gone in the Tooth’
Ezra Pound,
speaking of soldiers who died for Western civilization, described the West as
‘an old bitch gone in the teeth:’[1]
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.
I think that
he got this wrong, or at least his eulogy came a little too early for the
West. Yet these words fit well when
directed at the oldline denominations that are no longer able to stand up and guard
or hunt. They are left in a smiling heap
of tired bones by the hearth, wise but worthless, and having nothing more to
offer the world.
We have the oldline denominations to thank for the loss of a
concern for Biblical authority in many Western Christian circles and, to some
extent, in those non-Western regions where they have had influence. For example, the challenge of Biblical
authority is keenly felt among world-wide Anglicans as their Western seats of
power have unseated Scripture as the final authority in matters of faith and
practice.
Just look at the struggle among Anglicans in South Africa to
address the social realities this country faces from a Biblical perspective:
Biblical training for ministry is minimal or even non-existent, some bishops
openly oppose Scripture as authoritative, and social agendas in society at
large determine the theology and practices of the Church. The Anglican Church in South Africa is
struggling to have a Christian identity.
British Anglican theologians outside the Evangelical movement, by and
large, have nothing to offer their mature daughter church, except their
encouragement for South African Anglicans to be free from restrictive
authorities that once were the sources of Christian identity—the Bible in
particular.
For Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury,
Scripture does not contain revelation in itself; it rather generates revelation
in the Christian community’s experience.[2] Relocating authority in a community also
emphasises the notion that it is, by its very nature, not static but dynamic.
It is dialogical and therefore
always diverse.
This suggestion (on what is it based?) has an eerie ring to
it. One might well recall the first
theological dialogue in Scripture.
‘Look, Eve,’ said the serpent in the Garden of Eden, ‘the problem you
are facing in this place is that you are approaching revelation from an
author-oriented perspective. As long as
you do so, you will be subjecting yourself to a hierarchical—may I even say
‘patriarchal’?—approach to interpretation.
You presently see revelation as objective truth to be unveiled by an
authoritative author, God, rather than as subjective truth that you yourself
construct. You and Adam need a
community-oriented approach, whereby ‘right and wrong’ will be in your power to
discover, not God’s power to determine.
God is, frankly, afraid that if you begin to determine right and wrong
as interpreters you will have the same authority that he has as the author of
this garden. Have a bite.’
The loss of Biblical authority to community authority has
been given a positive face by many interpreters in the past decades. As Stephen Sykes avers, ‘Christian identity
is…not a state but a process; a process, moreover, which entails the
restlessness of a dialectic, impelled by criticism.’[3] Robin Gill finds this perspective encouraging
for Great Britain: it allows the Church as community to embrace diversity and
process in moral issues rather than seek to come to a definitive position.[4] Gerald West finds this encouraging for
Africa. He insists that contextual Bible
studies, wherein participants allow themselves to be partially constituted by
each other’s subjectivities, need to connect interpretation with social
commitments. West suggests the following
three steps to accomplish this:[5]
1.
Commitment
to Liberation: Be committed to the experience of the poor and marginalised.
2.
Commitment
to Postmodernism: Turn from finding the elusive ‘right’ reading to the
‘useful’ reading. Shift from
‘epistemology to ethics, truth to practices, foundations to consequences.’[6]
3.
Commitment
to Reader-Response Criticism: Realize that the reader ‘creates’ meaning and
does not merely ‘receive’ it.
The Search for a Dynamic View of Revelation
The need for something
dynamic in Biblical revelation found an initial resting place in narrative
theology. Thirty-two years ago, George
Stroup, writing on how narrative theology had given an answer to this need over
the previous ten years, pointed out that there was a crisis over the identity
of Christian community. He identified
four symptoms of this crisis:[7]
…the
curious status of the Bible in the church’s life, the church’s loss of its
theological tradition, the absence of theological reflection at all levels of
the church’s life, and the inability of many Christians to make sense out of
their personal identity by means of Christian faith.
Each of
these symptoms can be related to the problem of Biblical illiteracy, but for
Stroup the primary missing piece was the dynamic dimension of narrative in
Scripture, theology, church life, and personal identity. The narrative move on the theological chessboard,
however, only postponed checkmate. It
was a good move in many ways, but it missed the fact that the power of a
narrative is in its ability to change the reader, not in the reader’s ability
to find multiple uses for a narrative.
For L.
Gregory Jones and Stephen Fowl, the dynamic dimension of narrative theology was
primarily located in the interpreting community. We need to identify the readers’ interpretive interests rather than fret over identifying
the author’s intentions when looking for the meaning of a text: [8]
Rather than pursue this illusory quest for the meaning of a
text, we recommend that we think in terms of 'interpretive interests' … Once we
acknowledge the plurality of interpretive interests, we need not treat
alternative interpretations as failed attempts to discover the meaning of a
text.
The
historians among us may recall any number of attempts of the Church through the
ages to declare ‘failed attempts’ of interpretation to be heresy. Theologians are now pawn stars, reselling these
failed attempts as valuable, alternative, previously discarded theologies and
practices. They are now valued, alternative,
interpretive interests of past communities.
The dynamic
element such postmodern approaches to the Bible and its authority are seeking
need not, however, be located in an undermining of Biblical authority and
revelation. The dynamic element in
interpretation needs to be found in the work of Christ and the Spirit in the
interpreters, the teachers, and worshipers.
In Col. 3, for
example, sexual immorality as Paul understood it from his Biblical (Old
Testament) reading is still sexual immorality for the Christian community in
his day; it is not redefined for a different cultural context in a different
era by a community that holds the keys to the Kingdom apart from God’s Biblical
revelation. Paul does not offer a
license to the Christian community to come up with its own sexual standards in
its own cultural and historical context.
Sexual immorality is never redefined in the early Church over against
what the Old Testament had always said it was.
What is new is the dynamic power of Christ working in believers such
that they are able to 'put to death'--through Christ's death--such sin, for
they can now 'put on'--like a new robe after their baptism into Christ--the
life of our resurrected Lord (Col. 3.5ff).
Just how does a Christian hermeneutic
affirm that readers play a role in interpretation? They need to read with an understanding that the
life-transforming power of Christ spoken of in
the text is a life-transforming power for
them.
As Gordon
Fee writes,[9]
…the aim of exegesis [is] to produce in our lives and the
lives of others true Spirituality, in which God's people live in fellowship
with the eternal and living God, and thus in keeping with God's own purposes in
the world. But in order to do that
effectively, true 'Spirituality' must precede exegesis as well as flow from it.
The Problem of Static, Rationalistic,
Evangelical Theologies
This point
brings the present argument back home. By
no means are all Evangelical theologies static and rationalistic. Yet not a few
Evangelicals have affirmed the authority of Scripture only to find modernistic or
rationalistic ways of denying the power of God among us today. Grace is, on such views, all
about forgiveness and not also about the transforming work of God. Christian counseling is offered as the solution
to struggles in discipleship rather than the power of the Spirit to change
lives. Miracles are relegated to a past
phase of Church history, ending with the apostolic era nearly two thousand
years ago. Justification is so neatly
packaged apart from sanctification that the latter is merely a life expressing
gratitude for the certainty of the former.
Christian theology is a set of doctrines to be affirmed rather than an
encounter with the living God. Prayer is
merely an ordained link in the chain of God’s predetermined plan rather than a powerful
intercession for God to make a difference in our lives. Such Evangelicals may know the Scriptures,
but they do not know the power of God.
They affirm the authority of Scripture only to deny the divine power of
which it speaks.
Conclusion
In
conclusion, the first responsibility for Biblical illiteracy, then, is to be
laid at the feet of the theologians (among whom I stand!), with their crafty
ways of denying Biblical authority. This
is not only true among the hospice theologians of the dying oldline
denominations. It is also true of the
Enlightenment-driven Evangelical theologians who would locate the power of God
in the text of Scripture alone and not also in God’s powerful ministry among his people in our own day. Both remove the Bible a great distance from
the life of believers. This contributes
to Biblical illiteracy in the Church. In
turn, the mission of the Church is undermined in a world that longs to hear
from God and to know Jesus’ resurrection power.
[1]
Ezra Pound, ‘Hugh Selwyn Moberly,’ V.
[3] +Stephen
Sykes, The Identity of Christianity
(London: SPCK, 1984), p. 134.
[4] +Robin
Gill, Churchgoing and Christian Ethics,
New Studies in Christian Ethics 15 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999).
[5] +Gerald West, ‘Reading the Bible
Differently: Giving Shape to the Discourse of the Dominated,’ Semeia 73 (1996): 21-41.
[6]
Quote in Gerald West, Reading the Bible
Differently, p. 27, from Cornel West, Prophetic
Fragments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988): 270-1.
[7]
George W. Stroup, The Promise of
Narrative Theology (London: SCM Press, 1984; 1st publ. John Knox
Press, 1981), p. 24.
[8]
Stephen E. Fowl and L. Gregory Jones, Reading
in Communion: Scripture and Ethics in Christian Life (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1991), pp. 15f.
[9]
Gordon Fee, 'Exegesis and Spirituality: Completing the Circle,' in his Listening to the Spirit in the Text
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), p. 6.
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