Divisions within the Churches of Christ (Non-Instrumental)

The following is a link to a very brief summary of the different groups within the non-instrumental Churches of Christ illustrating the difficulty of speaking only where scripture speaks...

churches of Christ

Shakes in a Church!!

Chomsky on Liberation Theology

Perception Test

You might be emergent if...

Modernistic Homosexual Interpretations

The religious scriptures forbidding homosexuality were written in what was still a highly rustic milieu. Therefore they ought to have no hold on the present, at least as regards sexuality. When there is, in Bertrand Russell's famous words, "a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men," little in the way of moral progress can be achieved. Opposition to homosexuality, in whatever form it appears, indicates not so much a lower intelligence in the individual but participation in a consensus of opinion which represents a lower order of intelligence attained by civilized man. Let's hope a wiser, kinder, and more humane consensus will prevail.

John Zerilli, "Christians, Homosexuality, and the Same-Sex Marriage Question," The Humanist (May-June 2010), 32.

Phyllis Trible on Feminist Hermeneutics

Here is a link to an article by Trible helpfully explaining and demonstrating a feminist hermeneutic.

Humility in the Right Location

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition . . . [and] settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 31-32

John Calvin and Multiple Meanings

Scripture, they say, is fertile and thus bears multiple meanings. I acknowledge that Scripture is the most rich and inexhaustible fount of all wisdom. But I deny that its fertility consists in the various meanings which anyone may fasten to it at his pleasure. Therefore let us know that the true meaning of Scripture is the genuine and simple one [verum sensum scripturae, qui germanus et simplex], and let us embrace and hold it tightly. Let us not merely neglect as doubtful, but boldly set aside as deadly corruptions, those pretended expositions which lead us away from the literal sense.

From his commentary on Galatians in Greene-McCreight, K. (1999). Ad Litteram: How Augustine, Calvin, and Barth Read the "Plain Sense" of Genesis 1-3. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. Pg. 97

Jesus Wore Pants!

Printing Press

God suffers because there are such multitudes of souls to whom His sacred Word cannot be given; religious truth is captive in a small number of little manuscripts, which guard the common treasures instead of expanding them. Let us break the seal which binds these holy things; let us give wings to truth that it may fly with the Word, no longer prepared at vast expense, but multiplied everlastingly by a machine which never wearies --to every soul which enters life!

Johann Gutenberg (The Modern Age, p. 30)

Morality of Literary Understanding

...With regard to the moralityof literary understanding, Augustine advocates what is for him the prime hermeneutical virtue, namely, charity. This is a far cry fromt eh typical modern appraoch that puts a premium on distrust and suspicion, a strategy best exemplified perhaps by an essay by W.K. Clifford entitled "The Ethics of Belief." Clifford argues that it is immoral to believe something unless you first have sufficient evidence or proof: "To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." In contrast, Augustine's treatise On the Usefulness of Belief states that "nothing would remain stable in human society if we determined to believe nothing that we could not scientifically establish." With regard to reading, it "is most honorable to believe that an author was a good man, whose writings were inteded to benefit the human race and posterity." The first hermeneutic reflex, therefore, should be charity towards the author. If we come to a text believing that there is nothing in it, we are likely to go away as empty as we come. Augustine encourages readers to approach texts, paricularly the classics and especially the Scriptures, in the expectation that they contain something valuable and true...

...There is something in the text that is not of the reader's own making. The believing reader must not violate but venerate this "other." For readers come not only to knoweldge but also to self-knowledge when they allow the text to have its say. The interpretive virtues that I will commend throughout this work also figure among the cardinal virtues of Christian theology: faith, hope, love, and humility. These are the same virtues that make society possible. Life together is largely interpretation; good hermeneutics makes good neighbors. The Golden Rule, for hermeneutics and ethics alike, is to treat significant others--texts, persons, God--with love and respect.

Kevin Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 32

Messy Hermeneutics

Interpretation is not an exact science. Understanding--be it of God, works of art, ourselves, or others--is both messier and more provisional than explanations that work with causal laws. Why should this be so? Three reasons: 1) because what we're trying to understand is often singular and unique, 2) because meaning is a matter of seeing the parts in relation to larger wholes of which finite human interpreters have only partial glimpses, and 3) because interpreters often have vested interests for seeing things in one way rather than another and lack the requisite virtues to see things as they really are coram Deo (before God).

Kevin Vanhoozer, Everyday Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 36

Paul's use of the the Old Testament

When Paul quotes Scripture, he regularly intends to refer, not simply to the actual words quoted, but to the whole passage. Again and again, when you look up the chapter from which the quotation is taken, a flood of light streams back onto Paul's actual argument. Among many favorite examples, I mention 2 Corinthians 4:13. "We have the same spirit of faith," declares Paul, "in accordance with Scripture--'I believed, and so I spoke'--we also believe, and so we speak." What does the quotation of Psalm 116:10 add to his argument? Surely believing-and-so-speaking is rather obvious? Isn't that what one normally does? Yes, but look at the whole psalm--the one we know as 116 in the Hebrew and English, divided into two in the Septuagint. It is a prayer of one who is suffering terribly, but who trusts in God and is delivered. In other words, it is exactly the prayer of someone in the situation of Paul in 2 Corinthians 4. Paul has the whole Psalm in mind, and wants his readers to catch the "echoes" of it as well.

N.T. Wright, Justification (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009), 33.

The Fragility of Words

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 1.5 in Wright, Justification, 86

"Natural" Readings

...What seems "ordinary" or "natural" as a reading of a particular biblical text may owe everything to habituation within a tradition (Think of the medieval reading of "repent" as "do penance"!) and nothing to actual awareness of what Paul was talking about. The legend that makes the point most strikingly is the Calvinist commentator who headed the story of Salome's dance and the Baptist's beheading as "the dangers of dancing." That seemed natural enough at the time.

N.T. Wright, Justification (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009), 83.

Finishing the sentence began by exegesis with theology...

The church can and must, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, develop words, concepts, discourse of all sorts, out beyond the narrow confines of exegesis. That is what happened with Athanasius, holding out for the nonbliblical term homoousion to express, against Arius, the radically biblical view of the divinity of Jesus Christ. We cannot reduce the task of theology to that of biblical commentary.

N.T. Wright, Justification (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009), 81.

She's a witch!

Role of Tradition in Jewish Exegesis

R. Eliezer says: If they had not brought the circumcision knife on the eve of Sabbath it may be brought openly on the Sabbath; and in time of danger a man may cover it up in the presence of witnesses. R. Eliezer said moreover: They may cut wood [on the Sabbath] to make charcoal in order to forge an iron implement. R. Akiba laid down a general rule: Any act of work that can be done on the eve of Sabbath does not override the Sabbath, but what cannot be done on the eve of the Sabbath overrides the Sabbath.

Shabbat: 19

The Exaggerated Importance of Extra-Biblical Texts

It is remarkable how frequently there is the tacit assumption that we can be more confident about how we interpret secondary first-century sources than we are of how we interpret the New Testament writers themselves. But it seems to me that there is a prima facie case for thinking that our interpretations of extra-biblical literature are more tenuous than our interpretations of the New Testament. In general, this literature has been less studied than the Bible and does not come with a contextual awareness matching what most scholars bring to the Bible. Moreover, the Scripture comes with the added hope that there is conherency because of divine inspiration and that the Holy Spirit will illumine Scripture through humble efforts to know God's mind for the sake of the glory of Christ.

John Piper, The Future of Justification (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007), 34-35.

Gospel of Thomas

Careful examinations of the Gospelof Thomas by Klyne Snodgrass and C.M. Tuckett have shown that this text reflects not only a knowledge of all four canonical gospels but also familiarity with the editorial work of all the evangelists, including John, the so-called Fourth Evanelist. Thomas also reflects a knowledge of the editorial work of Matthew and Luke even in the Greek version of Thomas. It also reflects a knowledge of various of Paul's letters, Hebrews, 1 John, and perhaps even Revelation. One has to ask, Who could the author of this document have been, and when could he have written to know all these sources in detail? The answer is surely that he is someone who lived in the second century and had an admiration especially for James, who was martyred in AD 62.

Ben Witherington III, What Have They Done with Jesus? (San Francisco: Harper, 2006), 32.

Evolutionary Theology?

It is simply historically false to suggest that the intellectual boundaries of Christianity were not defined until well after the New Testament era. The evidence taht they already existed in the New Testament era is compelling. However, as offshoots and aberrations from the earlier and more apostolic faith arose in the second through fourth centuries, the church was forced to more clearly define Christological orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Then indeed the boundaries were more rigidly and firmly put in place. But this is not because before the fourth century what existed was a "free-range" Christianity that would have considered Gnosticism (or, for that matter, an inadequate Christology or polytheism or libertinism) a legitimate variant on a Christian theme. It is because the specific problems raised by such later deviations had not yet formed, or had not yet fully formed, in the New Testament era.

Ben Witherington III, What Have They Done with Jesus? (San Francisco: Harper, 2006) 224-225.

The Active Word

The word creates and sustains…Genesis 1:3; Psalm 33:6; Hebrews 1:3; John 1:1-3

The word is a sword…Ephesians 6:17; Hebrews 4:12-13; Revelation 1:16

The word saves…James 1:21; Psalm 107:20

The word is personified…Isaiah 55:11; Psalm 147:15-18; Acts 6:7, 12:24, 13:49

The word equips…2 Timothy 3:16-17

The word builds up…Acts 20:32

The word sanctifies…John 17:17

The word gives life…John 6:63, 68; Acts 13:46, 48; Phil. 2:16; 1 John 1:1

The word sustains…Matthew 7:24-27

The word is a lamp…Psalm 119:105; 2 Peter 1:19

The word abides forever…1 Peter 1:25; Psalm 119:89, 160; John 10:35

The word gives hope…Psalm 119:43, 74, 81, 114, 147, 130:5

A Brief History of Interpretation

A very helpful summary of the history of biblical interpretation by Dr. Thomas Long...

http://community.tncc.edu/faculty/longt/REL200/intro-comp-interp.htm

Presbyterians Revisit Traditional Trinitarian Language

A feminist rendering of trinitarian language...

http://www.christianpost.com/article/20060321/presbyterians-consider-triune-mother-child-and-womb/index.html

Homosexuality and Religion

A (mostly balanced) discussion of the issues related to homosexuality and religion including biblical interpretation.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/homosexu3.htm

A short example of homosexual hermeneutics...

Anti-gays hide their bias behind the Bible - CNN.com

Gregory of Nyssa on Song of Songs

Comment on Song of Songs 1:13...

The location of the heart is said by experts to lie between the two breasts. Here is where the bride says that she has the sachet in which her treasure is kept. Also, the heart is said to be a source of warmth from which the body's heat is distributed through the arteries. The body's members are thereby heated, animated and nourished by the heart's fire. Therefore the bride has received the good odor of Christ in the governing part of the soul and has made her own heart a kind of sachet for such incense. And so she makes all her actions, like parts of the body, seethe with the breath from her heart so that no iniquity can cool her love for God in any member of her body.

Homilies on the Song of Songs 3 in J. Robert Wright, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: OT IX (Downers Grove: IVP, 2005), 306-307.

Gregory of Elvira on the Song of Songs

Explanation of the Song of Songs 3.29

These two hands are the two covenants of the old law and the gospel. When it refers to his left hand, it indicates the old covenant, but the right hand is the preaching of the gospel. The old covenant is inferior because it is placed beneath the head of the church, who is Christ, whereas the right hand embraced the church, meaning that old sins were covered by the sacraments of the gospel. Whoever goes forth in faith, therefore, and serves Christ with devotion, leaves the old person beneath himself and embraces anew the body of Christ, which is the church.

Gregory of Elvira in J. Robert Wright, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: OT IX (Downers Grove: IVP, 2005), 314.

Ambrose on the Song of Songs

Comment on 8:1-4

What are the breasts of the church except the sacrament of baptism? And well does he say "sucking," as if the baptized were seeking him as a draught of snowy milk. "Finding you without," he says, "I shall kiss you," that is, finding you outside the body, I embrace you with the kiss of mystical peace. No one shall despise you; no one shall shut you out. I will introduce you into the inner sanctuary and hidden places of Mother Church, and into all the secrets of mystery, so that you may drink the cup of spiritual grace.

Ambrose, Consolation on the Death of Emperor Valentinian, 75 in J. Robert Wright, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: OT IX (Downers Grove: IVP, 2005), 362.

The Goal of Study

Read whatever chapter of Scripture you will, and be ever so delighted with it--yet it will leave you as poor, as empty and unchaged as it found you unless it has turned you wholly and solely to the Spirit of God, and brought you into full union with and dependence upon him.

William Law, The Power of the Spirit (Fort Washington, PA: Christian Literature Crusade, 1971), 19 quoted in Cymbala, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, 140.

Origen and Literal Meaning

Let no one suspect that we hold that Scripture does not contain real history, or that the precepts of the Law are not to be observed to the letter, or that what is written of the Savior did not happen in reality...Much more numerous are the truly historical passages than those which are to be taken in the purely spiritual sense.

Origen, On First Principles in George Montague, Understanding the Bible, 35

Hermeneutic of Love

Whoever, therefore, thinks he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand them at all.

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, in George Montague, Understanding the Bible, 47

Exegesis is a dust cloth...

But, inconvenient or not, we are stuck with the necessity of exegesis. We have a written word to read and attend to. It is God's word, or so we believe, and we had better get it right. Exegesis is the care we give to getting the words right. Exegesis is foundational to Christian spirituality. Foundations disappear from view as a building is constructed, but if the builders don't build a solid foundation, their building doesn't last long.

Because we speak our language so casually, it is easy to fall into the habit of treating it casually. But language is persistently difficult to understand. We spend our early lives leaning the language, and just when we think we have it mastered our spouse says, "You don't understand a thing I'm saying, do you?" We teach our children to talk, and just about the time we think they might be getting it, they quit talking to us; and when we overhear them talking to their friends, we find we can't understand more than one out of every eight or nine words they say. A close relationship doesn't guarentee understanding. A long affection doesn't guarantee understanding. In fact, the closer we are to another and the more intimate our relations, the more care we must exercise to hear accurately, to understand thoroughly, to answer appropriately.

Which is to say, the more "spiritual" we become, the more care we must give to exegesis. The more mature we become in the Christian faith, the more exegetically rigorous we must become. THis is not a task from which we graduate. These words given to us in our Spiritures are constantly getting overlaid with personal preferences, cultural assumptions, sin distortions, and ignorant guesses and pollute the text. The pollutants are always in the air, gathering dust on our Bibles, corroding our use of the language, especially the language of faith. Exegesis is a dust cloth, a scrub brush, or even a Q-tip for keeping the words clean.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, 53

Eating the Word

Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, page 18

C.S. Lewis

"An author doesn't necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else."

In a letter to professor Clyde S. Kilby about his novel Til We Have Faces. 10 Feb 1957

W.H. Lewis ed. The Letters of C.S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1966) 273.

Community Hermeneutics

Reading within community occurs as we approach the text conscious that we are participants in the one faith community that spans the ages. This consciousness involves recognizing the theological heritage within which we stand as contemporary readers of the text. Because we come to the text as participants in a trajectory of faith--because we come as those who seek to understand the whole of scripture as the instrumentality of the Spirit's speaking to us--we do well to keep in view what the church through the ages has considered this biblical "whole" to be.

Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 91.

Subjective Reading

Biblical scholars have been slow to awaken from the dream in which positivist science occupies a space apart from interests and values, to awaken to the realization that our representations of and discourse about what the text meant and how it means are inseparable from what we want it to mean, from how we will it to mean.

George Aichele in Grenz, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 85.

Illumination and Subjectivity

A theology of Word and Spirit need not lapse into subjectivism, however. What leads to subjectivism is the articulation of such as theology in the context of a basically individualistic understanding of the event of revelation. In other words, the problem of subjectivism arises only when we mistakenly place the individual ahead of the community...We, in turn, acknowledge individually that the Bible is scripture because we participate in this listening and confessing people. And it is this corporate confession of the Bible as scripture taht forms the context for our hearing the Spirit voice in its pages as well. Our participation in the Spirit-illumined congregation facilitates our personal experience of the Spirit's illuminating work.

Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 68

Authority of Scripture

The ultimate, final authority is not Scripture but the living God himself as we find him in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ and the message about him constitute the material norm for our faith just as the Bible is the formal norm. The Bible is authoritative because it points beyond itself to the absolute authority, the living and transcendent Word of God.

Donald Bloesch in Grenz, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 67.

Westminster Confession of Faith

The Supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of counsels, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other than the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.

The Danger of Theological Systems

In effect, the scholastic theological agenda meant that the ongoing task of reading the Bible as text was superseded by the publication of the skilled theologian's magnum opus. If the goal of the theological inquiry was to extrapolate the system of propositions the divine Communicator had inscripturated in the pages of the text, it would seem that systematic theology could--and eventually would--make the Bible superfluous. Why should the sincere believer continue to read the Bible when biblical truth--correct doctrine--is more readily at hand int he latest systematic compilation offered by the skilled theologian? Why read, that is, for any reason except to determine for oneself that the theologian's conclusions are indeed biblical truth--that this theologian had captured the one, true biblical system of doctrine?...In this way, theologians exchanged the desire to give voice to the text itself for the attempt to read through the texts to the doctinal system the texts concealed. Despite the well-meaning, lofty intentions of conservative thinkers to honor the Bible as scripture, their approach in effect contributed to the silencing of the text in the church.

Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 63.

Making the Bible Relevant

If the Bible has grown strangely silent in the church, we might follow the pathway suggested by commentators such as Hans Frei and lay the blame for this tragedy at the feet of theologians and biblical scholars themselves Of course, Christian thinkers did not set out to silence scripture. Rather, the Bible's loss of voice came as an unintended result of well-intentioned persons who sought to recover the Bible and save theology in the wake of the Enlightenment. The irony of this situation is that in a sense scripture caught laryngitis from its would-be physicians.

Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 58-59.

Wittgenstein

For Wittgenstein, meaning and truth are not related--at least not directly or primarily--to an external world of "fact" waiting to be apprehended. Instead, they are an internal function of language. Because the meaning of any statement is dependent on the context--that is, on the "language game"--in which it appears, any sentence has as many meanings as contexts in which it is used. Rather than assertions of final truth or truth in any final ultimate sense, all our utterances can only be deemed "true" within the context in which they are spoken. Further, viewing language as a "game" presumes that language does not have its genesis in the individual mind grasping a truth or fact about the world and then expressing it in statements. Rather, language is a social phenomenon, and any statement acquires its meaning within the process of social interaction.

Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville, Westminster John Knox, 2001), 42.

Allegory and Martin Luther

Even though he called allegorizers "clerical jugglers performing monkey tricks," Luther himself was known to engage in the occasional allegory.

His interpretation of the Good Samaritan:

the man going down to Jericho = Adam and all humankind
the robbers = devils who robbed and wounded us
the priest = fathers (Noah, Abraham) before Moses
the Levite = priesthood of the Old Testament
the good Samaritan = Lord Jesus Christ
oil = grace

from Robert H. Stein, "The Parables of Jesus in Recent Study," in Word and World 5/3 (1985), 249.

Plundering Culture

Now these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themeselves but dug out of the mines of God's providence which are everywhere scattered abroad, and are perversely and unlawfully prostituting to the worship of devils. These therefore the Christian, when he separates himself in spirit from the miserable fellowship of these men ought to take away from them and to devote to their proper use in preaching the gospel. Their garments, also--that is human institutions such as are adopted to that intercourse with men which is indispensable in this life--we must take and turn to a Christian use.

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine