McKnight on Parables

Parables are more than cute, homespun illustrations. Jesus' parables are revelatory kingdom dreams. They summon us into the world where God's kingdom takes root and grows and spreads. They summon us to a better world, to the kingdom of God, and they summon us to a kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. The parables of Jesus, in fact, are revolutionary scripts that enter into our heart of hearts, rattle us anew, and call us to complete surrender. One can say this yet another way: The parables of Jesus are opportunities for God's grace to enter into our lives to transform us.

This parabolic dream kingdom begins, Jesus says, with the imagination. First you listen to his stories and enter into them imaginatively, the way you enter into your favorite novel's characters. Then, because you've entered Jesus' kingdom plot, you've discerned kingdom life in a deeper manner. Then you give your One.Life to the Kingdom.Life.

The parables of Jesus are his sleight-of-hand trick. You begin thinking about very ordinary things, like fields and farmers and workers and women baking and men picking wheat and wounded people, and suddenly you find yourself transported into a brand new world and a brand new way of thinking. This vision of Jesus will take a conversion of our imagination; or, better yet, the parables convert our imaginations from self-centeredness to love.

A Christian, then, is one who follows Jesus, devotes his or her One.Life to the kingdom vision, and uses her or his imagination to see what God can do in this world. This imagination is nothing other than kingdom imagination shaped by Jesus' parables.

Scot McKnight, One.Life: Jesus Calls We Follow (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 44.

Scripture as missional and identity-shaping

The best way to describe Scripture is that it is identity-shaping. The Bible tells us who we are, where we are, and where we are going. In fact, its identity-shaping, Spirit-mentored direction propels its readers into a missional life. Eugene Peterson warns of the danger of making the Bible after our own Trinitarian image: my Holy Wants, Holy Needs, and Holy Feelings. Instead, if we read the Bible aright, we are remade--since the Bible as been sent as a word from God to us--into God's image, the perfect Eikon, Jesus Christ...

...This is what it is meant by Scripture being missional: Scripture is designed by God to work its story into persons of God so that they may become doers of the good.  Scripture is missional because it is designed to create restored Eikons who are in union with God and communion with others for the good of others and the world. Scripture, I somethings have to tell myself, is not designed just to be exegeted and probed and pulled apart until it yields its (gnostic-like) secrets to those who know its languages and its interpretative traditions and who can then divulge their gleanings behind pulpits on Sunday mornings or in monographs and academic journals (very few care to read).  Scripture is missional because it is designed to create missional people who learn from their missional praxis how to see Scripture as amissional text that shapes them so that they can live in the story that the church tells in Scripture.

Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 146-147.

Bibliolatry

Telford Work, a gifted scholar, makes just this point:

While the Bible is basic to Christianity, it is also marginal--in that God alone occupies the center of the faith, and that both belief in God and the believing community predate and will succeed Scripture's present form and roles.

At the center of the Christian faith is the Trinity, and the gospel and atonement are about restoring cracked Eikons to this Trinitarian God. Beginning our understanding of Scripture with the Trinity is to claim the personal nature of everything Christian.  Whenever the Bible replaces the Trinity, we have bibliolatry. The first Christians believed that God's story entered a new chapter with Jesus, and they were living in that story before they sat down to write it.  So we need to get this straight: our faith finds expression in Scripture but that faith is in the Trinitarian God and not in the Bible.  Our faith is in the Bible in the sense that in it we hear the Trinitarian God whom we have come to know.  I do not think that we can know the Trinitarian God apart from what we learn of him through the church's Bible, but even conceding this allows us to keep God front and center in terms of what Scripture is.

Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 143

The Double-Love Hermeneutic

Whoever, therefore, thinks that 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 it at all.  Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way...However...if he is deceived in an interpretation which builds up charity...he is deceived in the same way as a man who leaves a road by mistake but passes through a field to the same place toward which the road itself leads.

Augustine in On Christian Doctrine from Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement, 142

Hans Boersma on Metaphor

Metaphors are a divinely given means to avoid idolatrous claims of knowledge. Metaphors are nonliteral descriptions of reality.  They are an acknowledge that we need to access the world around us in an indirect fashion, and that the idea of direct and complete access is an arrogant illusion that violates the multifaceted integrity of the created world.

in Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 39.

McKnight on Metaphor

Metaphor is more than ornamental decoration on a more fundamental propositional reality, more than a homey story in a sermon or a cleaver picture to illustrate a point.  Metaphors need not be stripped of their literary beauty to discover under them their propositional reality. Au contraire: metaphor is not a linguistic stage rehearsal but the performance itself. Anthony Thiselton claims in New Horizons in Hermeneutics: "Metaphor produces new possibilities of imagination and vision; narrative creates new configurations which structure individual or corporate experience."  Again, Thiselton: "If metaphor, therefore, present possibility rather than actuality it is arguable that metaphoric discourse can open up new understanding more readily than purely descriptive or scientific statement." The effect of seeing metaphor as possibility is that metaphors are not in need of decoding or unpacking but of indwelling. Said another way, by receiving the metaphor into the soul, the soul learns the reality. THus, we not only indwell the metaphor, the metaphor indwells us. The charitable, loving approach to a metaphor is to let it have its way with us, and only by surrendering to it does it yield its truth.

Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 37.

Southern Baptists and the NIV 2011

In a major, but not unexpected move, the SBC has taken an official stance against the NIV(2011) primarily for its use of gender-inclusive language.  I don't doubt that some of their concerns are in fact legitimate.  Anyone who doesn't have any concern about a given translation is either ignorant of the messiness of doing translation work or is simply hopelessly dogmatic (see the whole "KJV only" subculture within Christendom).  That being said, the SBC's decision is silly.  It seems as if our politics is showing.  Because of a pervasive paranoia about feminism and liberal political speech taking over culture at large and our churches in particular, many have come to see gender-neutral language as a vast left-wing conspiracy.  This strikes me as ridiculous.  When Paul addresses the brothers of a church, are we to believe that he was only addressing the men of the church (or even men of a certain age and theological disposition)?  The goal of translation is to faithfully take (in this case) an ancient text and allow it to speak to a new culture and a new time.  The task of translation is never finished because culture and language is never finished changing.  We must never stop critiquing our translations - especially those of us who preach/teach.  But we should also be very careful that we don't turn or favorite translations (or even the Bible itself!) into an idol that actually gets in the way of Christ.

Here is the SBC resolution (with thanks to Scot McKnight):

WHEREAS, Many Southern Baptist pastors and laypeople have trusted and used the 1984 New International Version (NIV) translation to the great benefit of the Kingdom; and
WHEREAS, Biblica and Zondervan Publishing House are publishing an updated version of the New International Version (NIV) which incorporates gender neutral methods of translation; and

WHEREAS, Southern Baptists repeatedly have affirmed our commitment to the full inspiration and authority of Scripture (2 Timothy 3:15-16) and, in 1997, urged every Bible publisher and translation group to resist “gender-neutral” translation of Scripture; and

WHEREAS, This translation alters the meaning of hundreds of verses, most significantly by erasing gender-specific details which appear in the original language; and
WHEREAS, Although it is possible for Bible scholars to disagree about translation methods or which English words best translate the original languages, the 2011 NIV has gone beyond acceptable translation standards; and

WHEREAS, Seventy-five percent of the inaccurate gender language found in the TNIV is retained in the 2011 NIV; and

WHEREAS, The Southern Baptist Convention has passed a similar resolution concerning the TNIV in 2002; now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That the messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, June 14-15, 2011 express profound disappointment with Biblica and Zondervan Publishing House for this inaccurate translation of God’s inspired Scripture; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we encourage pastors to make their congregations aware of the translation errors found in the 2011 NIV; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we respectfully request that LifeWay not make this inaccurate translation available for sale in their bookstores; and be it finally

RESOLVED, That we cannot commend the 2011 NIV to Southern Baptists or the larger Christian community

Emerging Church Hermeneutics

Emergents sometimes exercise a deconstructive critique of the Bible’s view of God. Sometimes I hear it in ways that are no more interesting than Marcion’s old (and heretical) critique of the violent God of the Old Testament. Yet upon close inspection, the rumblings are subtler and more sophisticated, and the struggle is palpable and genuine. For some emergents, the Bible includes portrayals of God that cannot be squared with their understanding of a God of love.

Scot McKnight, “The Ironic Faith of Empergents,” Christianity Today, September 2008, 63.

Emerging Church Hermeneutics

A trademark feature of the emerging movement is that we believe all theology will remain a conversation about the Truth who is God in Christ through the Spirit, and about God's story of redemption at work in the church. No systematic theology can be final. In this sense, the emerging movement is radically Reformed. It turns its chastened epistemology against itself, saying, "This is what I believe, but I could be wrong. What do you think? Let's talk.”

Scot McKnight, “Five Streams of the Emerging Church,” Christianity Today, February 2007, 38.