Being Honest About Scripture, Pt.1 - Irony

The Irony of Scripture

Several pastors who have gone on to their reward are sitting around the local watering hole in heaven. Yes, this is not a baptismal font. It is a watering hole. It is heaven after all. They are commiserating about some of their tougher assignments as clergy in divisive congregations. The apostle Paul is standing nearby and he has been eavesdropping. He joins the conversation and begins to talk about his experience with one of his charges located in Corinth. One pastor interrupts him saying that the group already knew the story as they had read his correspondence.

Paul sits dumbfounded asking, “How did you get hold of those old letters?” When the group tells him that they are part of Holy Scripture, he shakes his head in amazement.

When Paul instructs his protégé Timothy about scripture, he is pointing him toward the collected texts of the nation. He is referring to long narrative accounts of the people of God struggling to be in covenant with Yahweh. He also is most likely recommending the moving poetry of the prophets who give voice to the Word of God. That is the scripture that “is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.”

How could anyone consider Paul’s pastoral letters scripture?

There is a certain irony at play in our Christian scriptures. A comparison of the two parts of the Christian Bible is instructive. Clearly, the writings of the Old Testament are drawn from foundational documents originally written for an enduring community. They relate the history of that community, the eidetic myths and the foundational covenants. The oracles of the “prophets,” many written in the form of briefs for a law suit, rehearse the struggle to be faithful to those covenants. The “writings” complement the cultic dimensions of the symbolic life of the people as they struggle to sustain those covenants.

The New Testament writings are remarkably different. They are primarily tracts, sermons, pastoral letters, or reports of obscure visions - all created in the context of a loose set of apocalyptic expectations. While the Old Testament was meant to be an enduring document for a people on a long journey, the New Testament is more rightly understood as occasional writings meant to nurture a community that expects radical change – an urgent end to the present order of things. Elaine Pagels helpfully speaks of these texts as temporary “war literature” whose intent is to sustain an interim community through a transition time until the certain victory is claimed. In this sense, the New Testament only became community scripture much later and when it did, it required a radical reinterpretation of the intent and the images of the original writers.

So when we honestly look at the Christian Bible, it is particularly ironic that we find in our Old Testament the story of a religious community’s foundational writings appropriated and retrofitted to seemingly predict the events and claims made in the New Testament, a use never intended by its original writers, and we find in the New Testament writings occasional texts which over time became transformed into community foundational literature, a function they were never meant to play either.

Recently several posts have emerged around the question of whether our present canon is inspired by God. Frankly, it is not obvious to me what people are saying when they make such a claim. Paul certainly argued that the ancient Israelite texts were inspired by God. But, I find little evidence to suggest that the latter Bible writers made such a claim for themselves. Now they certainly thought that what they were writing was important, maybe pretty good stuff. In that way one might claim that they were inspired to create the texts, like a moving lyric might be crafted by an inspired musician. One might even say that God had a hand in the creative process. Clearly over time these texts were considered by the church to be inspired, but in general the original writers forwarded no such point.

I deeply suspect that what most people mean when they say that scripture is inspired is to say that God wrote the words. But in truth, only Muslims have historically made the claim that the very words of their sacred writings were dictated.

The Qur’an speaks of the three Abrahamic faiths as “people of the book.” In fact, both Christianity and Judaism are more appropriately understood as people of the books.

In the late sixties, the staff of the community renewal movement that I worked with on the Westside of Chicago developed a concept they called the “briefcase library.” This was a list of some 20 books recommended for reading and study by persons working with that group to further racial justice and congregational revitalization. It was a compendium of foundational writings that formed the basis of the common mind of that movement and documented the essential concepts under girding their methods and strategies. In the same fashion, the book, we Christians speak of as the Bible, is not really a coherent singular piece of writing, but is better thought of as an essential library recommended by the church as the foundational writings necessary for the ongoing formation and edification of the members of the Christian movement.

Moreover, the writings, we Christians call the “Old Testament,” originally were not a book at all, but a series of scrolls sometimes preserved in jars, at other times stored on shelves. The Christian New Testament as it began to become canon, originally circulated in codex form, i.e. folded papyrus sheets. But in the beginning, it was circulated in the forms in which it was written, a series of religious tracts and pastoral letters. These circulated for over 100 years before they were edited together as a collection and only much later were they bound under one cover where we might speak of them as a book.

While there have historically been recurring efforts to harmonize the images and stories in the texts of our scriptures, honesty requires the recognition not only of particular differences and apparent contradictions, but moreover the recognition of an underlying antagonism between various factions in the movement revealed in the various texts. We should not be surprised; the letters of Paul directly speak of the tensions and controversies in the early Christian movement. I believe that one can find in the gospel of Matthew concrete allusions critical of Paul, whose theological view of the requirements of the Jewish Law differs markedly from Matthew’s own view. John’s caricature of Peter as a disciple who always seems to miss the point and is always a little slower than the “beloved Disciple” speaks for itself.

So what are we to make of these differences? I fervently believe that in today’s world, where pluralism in no longer just an idea but a lived reality, an honest recognition of the original pluralism in the New Testament texts can pave the way for greater understanding and dialogue.

I became interested in how we could think honestly about matters of faith and religion in the late 1960s when I first encountered British scholar John A.T. Robinson’s short book, Honest to God. In the book, now in its 40th year edition, Robinson traced the theological movements of the 20^th Century and called for recognizing the need for new and different patterns of thought about the notion of God more relevant to the “one-story” universe, the context in which we regularly thought about every other subject but religion. Robinson’s call for honesty served as a paradigm shift for my own theological and religious development over the years, although with the advent of the diverse theological movements among women and non-Western Christians in the last half of the 20^th century, most of us have traveled far beyond the places that Robinson envisioned. The virtue of intellectual honestly in our studies and reflection however, seems just as relevant today as it did then.

In much the same vein, John B. Cobb Jr. recently published a book called Becoming a Thinking Christian. In it, he sets forth the challenge to local congregations to engage in a spirit of theological reflection that both affirms the Christian tradition, yet also recognizes the perspectives of the post-modern world in which we find ourselves. Cobb calls for theology that does not require that we as 21st century, scientific, globally concerned individuals “check our minds” at the door whenever we reflect on matters of religion and faith.

Photo Used With Permission: I-stock Photo, jbarnettphotography