Questioning Scripture
This question has been on my mind for awhile now, and, no, it has nothing to do with the DaVinci Code.
The main question I have about scripture is that the Bible never defines itself. So, what is in and what is out is by its very nature a tradition (something which most evangelicals have a problem with). Therefore, if you want to hold the Bible as authoritative, the only source of truth and understanding of God, you must accept the following paradox: the Bible is never defined in the Bible and as such is unBiblical, or you have to accept the authority of tradition, which I do, but by its very nature could be wrong on somethings, and could be challenged by a new insight or understanding. My understanding, right now, is that what is "scripture" is a tradition, and any tradition should be revisited and examined anew.
Part of the problem I have with the traditional understanding of the passage in 2 Timothy is that the New Testament didn't exist, and would exist for a couple of hundred years after its writing. If you look at the context of the letter surrounding it, Paul is encouraging Timothy to hold to the Scripture which was taught to him from his youth. If anything this is the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, not the New Testament. This verse used by so many evangelicals to give authority to scripture actually undermines the authority of the New Testament!
But, in the end, I wonder if we need to redefine what we are referring to as "scripture." Not in the sense that it needs to be more narrowly defined (i.e. only the Gospels; or the Gospels and certain Pauline letters, etc.) but more broadly defined. For example, Jude quotes the Assumption of Moses and Ethiopic Enoch (both Pseudepigraphic books which we have today); should these be seen as some form of scripture, because they make up such a large portion of this book of the Bible?
Or can a Christian accept the teachings of Christ, but feel uncomfortable with the direction that Paul took it? So maybe that Christian loves the Gospels and maybe other books of the Bible, also studies some other writings contemporaneous with the Bible but rejects Paul's letters. Or someone loves the Church Fathers and studies them as she explores Christ's teachings and tries to live her life as they interpreted Jesus rather than how Paul interpreted Jesus.
We could take this to modern writers as well, couldn't we? Should the writings of C.S. Lewis be considered scripture? What about Calvin, Luther or some other Reformation leaders? What about the Pope's writings? Some of what John Paul II wrote seemed quite inspired to me.
Finally, what do we do with those who disagree with us? Is it possible that trying to deal with 5 Christians you might have 5 different scriptures? Is that really a problem? Can't we find some way to accept diversity among Christians? Is the issue of scripture really a hill to die on?
Anyway, these are some of the questions I have on the authority of scripture, some of them are thought out and some are just off the top of my head. Any thoughts/comments/arguments will be welcome provided all remains civil!
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15 comments:
Ben,
Of course Paul was referring to the Hebrew Scriptures in 2nd Timothy, but certainly you do not think this is the only place the Bible describes what is and isn't authoritative!
Jesus gave authority to the apostles "go . . . teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you."(Matt. 28:20) It was well understood that the apostles' teaching was authoritative, which is why Paul often defends his status as an apostle from critics, especially in Gal. 1:11 - 2:10.
Therefore the collection of the New Testament by Church councils had little to do with tradition and was marked by thorough examination as to whether writing was authentic apostolic teaching. In fact, books traditionally held as authoritative, upon examination were excluded from the canon (apocrypha, and many others.)
by the way, to echo Mandy on a previous response, I like hearing these types of questions. Every great doctrine of the Church came from people questioning previous ones.
Dan, thanks for your input. Personally, I have a problem seeing the teachings of the Apostles as authoritative solely because they were Apostoles.
Peter apparently encouraged/taught some observance of kosher law that seperated Jewish believers from Gentile believers. Paul obviously disagreed and corrected him. This leads me to ask "whose authority was right?"
Paul even instructs his churches to not accept a different gospel even if it were to come from him. Obviously, there was some understanding that their teachings could be wrong, or at least distorted.
Your comment also prompts another question. What do you then do if books of the present canon are shown to not be written by who they say they are. Many of Paul's letters are questioned, even by many conservative scholars. None of the Gospels gives direct authorship, so they must have some sort of tradition behind them as to who wrote them. Should they be removed?
Which canon was seen as authoritative, at the begining of the process--which by the way was an idea of Marcion, a good ol' fashioned Gnostic heretic? The apocrypha wasn't removed until the Reformation, much later than any early church father council.
I believe that history still plays out that, in the end, the church councils had to rely on tradition. I still don't know of any part of the Bible that said "this book's in" and "that book's out." Again, that means, to me at least, some reliance on traditions.
I don't mind tradtions, I think they can be great and helpful. I'm primarily wondering if we should acknowledge a more open view of what is scripture.
P.S. thanks for the encouragement on questions! It really means a lot to me. I hope these questions come across not as doubting God, but questioning people's traditional view of God.
Ben,
The problem you have is with Jesus; he gave the authority.
Peter was rebuked for sinful actions not wrong teaching. And it's hard to understand how Paul's exhortation to believe the authoritative teaching came across to you as an admission of fallibility.
As far as the apocrypha is concerned - it was never "removed", that is an out and out equivication deceit of the Roman Church. The church never recognized the authority of these books until the 17th century Council of Trent. The "removal" by the reformers was referring to the fact that the apocrypha was generally copied along with the scriptures and bound together with them. Many reformers upon realizing this said that this confuses what is authoritative and what is not (which had been clearly defined for centuries). They called for its removal in that way.
The Roman Church, like you believes that Scripture should be examined occasionally and even added to (like at the Council of Trent) with the arguement "the Church made the Bible". But even in this case it shifts ultimate authority to the Church itself. They recognize that without an external authority, men will make their own opinions authoritative.
This leads to our upside down culture in the Church where we listen to a preacher speaking "Thus says the Lord", and teaching things that would have been true, whether he'd even been born or not and we say "That's really arrogant of him. On the other hand we hear a preacher tell stories from his own life and "share from his heart" and we say, "Oh, how humble he is."
Dan,
I don't have any problems with Jesus, I have problems with people equating the Apostles' authority with Jesus' authority as the Son of God. The only verse you gave showing that the Apostles had authority from Christ, was a command to go out and teach what Jesus taught. Not to write scripture.
Surely Paul was fallible, was he not? He admits he had yet to obtain his goal of perfection, that we see in a mirror dimly. Paul warns that the possiblity could arise that he would teach something different than he did at first, and to be careful if he or anyone else did so...therefore, he is admiting his fallibility there as well.
Peter's actions (and the men from James as well) "compel the Gentiles to live like Jews." This implies, to me at least, a teaching, even if that teaching (at the minimum) comes through actions.
(Getting back to the original point of the post) the Apostolic authorship of much of the New Testament is either not stated or questionable. Thus it is based in part on tradition, which, as I have stated many times, I'm okay with.
I don't think that definitivly we should reexamine what counts as scripture. That is the very question I have: Should we? Can we? If no, why not? If yes, why, and what should we add? Do we even need a uniform scripture?
Your answer seems to be: No. Don't reexamine scripture, because they were written by those under apostolic authority given from Jesus. We are not, and therfore have neither the right nor the ability to question this authority. Am I misunderstanding you? If I am please correct me. If not, I have problems with that argument, as I don't see any support for it from any "scriptural" authority of the time period.
To the apocrypha, those books were considered canon to a lesser degree, by many Christians prededing the final setting of the canon. That's why they're in certain Christian Bibles (i.e. the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, other oriental Orthodox church) and not in others' (i.e. the protestants--although they were in many Protestant Bibles until about the middle of the nineteenth century).
The fact remains that in the earliest stages of Christianity, there were a variety of books deemed valuable, by a variety of churches. Not until horrible power plays came in did it prove necessary to unify what was in and what was out. It provides convenient measures to lable the loosers as heretics and wipe them out.
Ben, I think a distinction needs to be made. It is true, I'm sure you would agree, that authority is linked to in infallibility but they are not the same thing. Parents can have real authority without infallibility. The authoritative nature of the apostles teaching should be discussed separately first and then the link (if any) to infallibility should be discussed.
Would you agree that the apostles (being sent by Jesus) had real authority, in the same way Israel's teachers had authority before Jesus and the Church does now?
If so, is your only main concern about the NT Scriptures that you're not convinced they were written by the apostles?
I agree they were given authority, but I fail to see the link from their authority to being able to write infalible scriptures.
I only brought up the question of Apostolic authorship as an example of the problems with assuming that their authority = inspired infallible scripture, and really the whole concept of scripture. If the only reason these letters, etc. are in the Bible are because of Apostolic authority, what do you do if it is proven that they weren't written by the credited apostle? Do you then toss it out? If you do, then why not allow for others to form their own set of scriptures which proves useful for them?
Hi Laurel, thanks for reading. And thank you for the great quote. I haven't read either of those books, but they sound interesting. I have the summer off before grad school and I'll definitely add them to my summer reading list. I can't wait to read whatever I want WHENEVER I want!
As I first read this post the other night, I laughed out loud. "Listen to this, Joel," I said, and started reading bits of sentences to him: "the Bible is never defined in the Bible...the New Testament didn't exist...uncomfortable with the direction that Paul took it...SHOULD THE WRITINGS OF CS LEWIS BE CONSIDERED SCRIPTURE...?"
Of course, these fragments would have meant nothing to him had he not been forced to listen to me nights when I can't sleep for asking these same questions. It was only last week, as I pulled out for the dozenth time a particular Lewis passage that has been helpful to me that I pondered the possiblity that his writings were God-breathed. And it was two weeks ago that I sat in Sunday school and, smacking the table, declared Paul's begrudging attitude toward marriage to be crap (and in the process, no doubt, causing some to question whether I could be fit for leadership if I question inerrancy.)
The trouble is, things really start to fall apart for me as soon as I give the slightest ground on this. How can I rationally use scripture to demonstrate how much God cares for the poor while ungracefully circumventing the passages about homosexuality or divorce and remarriage or women in leadership, just because my (post)modern sensiblities (read that with irony, not with arrogance) suggest that God cares less about these things now than He did at that time? So far, I can't do this rationally, and it makes me nuts.
And so Joel soothes me to sleep by sounding a lot like Rilke, and tells me I need to live with not having all the answers. And I try to believe that God is good, and He is love, and that this is as good a starting point as I'll find.
Thanks for the great comment, Lauren. I too feel the anxiety of the schitzophrenic world of questioning the authority of the Bible while using it to defend my own understanding of God. Right now, I'm becoming more comfortable with that world. Finding new ways to express respect for the Deity to which the writers, redactors, or whomever point while acknowledging that those same writers were human and can easily allow their own views to cloud God's views.
The fear I have is that I become so comfortable with not having the answers that I forget to look for them. I believe God wants to reveal himself to us, that He truly wants a relationship with people. That means to a certain extent God has to be able to be known. I believe the Bible offers the best way to know God, but I know it's not inerrant, and I know man's opinions creep into it. What else could Paul mean in 1 Cor 7.12?
Just thought I'd chime in here and add something that hasn't been touched on--the hierarchy of scripture. I'm sure Ben could go into this a lot better than I can but when has that stopped me before?
A lot of Christians are surprised when they open up a Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) and find that it's arranged in a completely different way i.e. not in a more linear timeline like the Christian scriptures, but in different groupings--Torah, Prophets and Writings. This is because Jews don't view scripture as "salvation history" but as a kind of hierarchy. Different scriptures have more authority than others. The Psalms are not given the same level of authority as, say, the Torah.
Most Christians have a view of scripture that puts it all on the same level. I don't think that the verse in Timothy that says "all scripture is inspired by God and profitable . . ." would negate this understanding of hierarchy. The Psalms are profitable, but they don't trump Torah.
You could certainly use this in the N.T. as well. Paul could never trump Jesus, for example.
Personally, I feel that Paul has been very misused. In my opinion, his letters were never meant to be taken out of their context as letters to particular churches with particular situations that they were dealing with. One size doesn't fit all. This is backed up by Paul himself when he gave different advice to different churches in regards to marriage. I think it's very dangerous to universalize instruction when we don't fully know the context it was given in. For this reason I take Paul with a grain of salt. Most of his teachings are being given on the topic of how Gentiles will be allowed into the faith. This obviously isn't a problem we have today in Gentile dominated Christianity. While I think understanding Paul in the proper context can definitely help with understanding our faith, I do not agree with many of the misinterpretations of Paul that occur when people are ignorant of context or simply project later understandings or problems onto the early church. That's very dangerous.
I also wanted to throw in the fact that is often forgotten by Christians--that effective faith was formed without the use of N.T. scriptures at all. This makes me think that the O.T. would trump the N.T. if you were to put it in a hierarchy arrangement. I waver when it comes to the gospels simply because HELLO that's Jesus and his own words. Jesus used the prophets and O.T. writings to effectively proclaim his authority as the Messiah. Throughout his ministry he quotes from the O.T. The road to Emmaus story has him explaining himself through Moses and the prophets and later through the Psalms. He didn't come out of the blue with all his own brand new truth.
I kind of feel like if this worked then why do we have put so much weight on these later scriptures that, like it or not, weren't originally necessary for salvation. CLEARLY we need the gospels to tell us about the words and life of Christ. But I think too much supersessionist weight is put on the rest of the N.T.
And since I'm writing a book here, I will continue. For hundreds of years Christians got along without a set canon. There were basic books that were used rather universally and then others that were used by some and not by others. I think canon IS without a doubt a tradition of men-- unless we’ve lost God’s list somewhere. Perhaps that’s included in the index of the book of Q. : )
I've always had the feeling though that if we let go of the idea of a set canon that things would go straight to hell and the whole of Christianity would fracture. People wouldn’t recognize the scriptures of others and there could be no possibility of conversation. But who am I kidding? Look at Christianity today! Even with a fairly defined set of scriptures it’s already fractured beyond belief. People can put so many different spins on the same scripture that we really don’t need to worry what having a more open canon would do to us. And really it was only when Constantine wanted a uniform Christianity for the health of the empire that canon became a problem. Uniformity is overrated in my opinion. With such a diverse world there can be no true uniformity. And really who wants it! If we could be civil with one another (a major accomplishment) we could all learn so much and be enriched by the diversity of the Christian world rather than threatened by it.
I do think we need to have a core, but a smaller core than we have now. And hierarchy would definitely help with that. Could we all agree on Torah and the gospels? You could start from there. I think the core of Christianity should be the ethics (always balanced by love and compassion as modeled by Jesus) linked with the status of Jesus as Messiah. Then I think people should just go crazy. If we’re honest we already use many authors outside the Bible as a sort of canon. C.S. Lewis has been used in this conversation as an example of that. I’m partial to Anne Lamott (which might get me stoned by some).
I really think hierarchy is the missing link in the proper understanding and use of scripture.
Ben, Paul is not giving his opinion in 1Cor 7. Looking at the Gospels, his "Not I, but the Lord" refers to when he is repeating the teaching of the Lord Jesus. "I, not the Lord" refers to when he is adding more teaching. But that new teaching is just as much from God as Paul explains earlier in his letter in 1Cor 2:1-13.
Jaime, when you talk about a heirarchy are you assuming that Scripture contradicts itself? If it's God's word, how could that be?
Is it not God's word?
P.S. Isn't the Christian Bible (O.T. and N.T.) arranged by genre also?
Hierarchy is the reason we don't stone adulterers today. Torah says yes, Jesus says no. All God's word.
The Bible definitely contradicts itself. But speaking in terms of contradictions and innerancy puts a spin on it that I'm not comfortable with. It removes culture and time making the Bible seem one dimensional--like it came from the sky, carved in stone, never to be changed. Putting it like that makes it seem like if the Bible contradicted itself we would have to throw the whole thing out.
There are so many things to consider. God obviously doesn't have one set truth for all time. There were concessions (divorce--according to Jesus--meat eating, kosher law, etc.) and other cultural considerations.
The Bible is full of oddities and contradictions. Why is David incited to take a census by God in one account and by the devil in another? Same story--big difference in the details. Why was it okay for Abraham to marry his half sister when that was later outlawed in the Torah? Why were multiple wives and concubines allowed earlier in the Bible but not in the N.T.? Because not everything written in the Bible is set in stone. There are things that are permissable at one time that are no longer acceptable (for whatever reason) at others. Some commands and concessions are cultural. Some things (like the census story) are just odd. I don't think this in any way diminishes the power of scripture. I think worrying about innerancy is the wrong way to go about it.
And, yes, there is a measure of genre-izing in the Christian scriptures but nothing like the Tanakh and not with the same purpose.
Dan, we're just gonna have to disagree on the 1 Corinthians passage. I looked at it again, and I think clearly Paul is saying that this section is his opinion verses a direct teaching from Jesus. The question of authority comes up again...and we can just go in circles.
Jaime, you go girl! I love you!
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