Preface

The Future of the Bible in America

Chapter 1: A Little History

Sally’s Story

Sally was baptized in a Roman Catholic Church as a child. But a few months later her parents started attending a Greek Orthodox Church. While the new priest accepted her Catholic baptism, he told her parents she had not been baptized correctly. He argued that a child should be immersed completely under water three times in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Catholic priest had poured water over her head three times. Consequently, her parents had her baptized again.

When Sally became a teenager, she attended a Baptist Church. There she was told that her childhood baptism didn’t count because she wasn’t old enough to know what she was doing. They urged her to say a prayer they called the “sinner’s prayer,” to “ask Jesus into her heart” so she could be “saved,” and to be baptized again—certainly by immersion.

In college she went to a Lutheran Church. When the minister found out she had been baptized not only twice, but three times, he was horrified. Come to find out, a few centuries ago some Lutherans and Catholics even put people to death who practiced rebaptism of this sort.

Finally, in her adult life she found herself attending a Friends Church in the Quaker tradition. She was almost afraid to ask what they thought about baptism. When she finally brought up the subject, the pastor replied softly, “Oh don’t worry. Baptism isn’t an essential part of a Christian’s life. Most of us in this church have never been baptized.”

Baptism is only one of countless issues over which Christians of various groups disagree. While this story is fictitious, it illustrates a common experience. You will often find that different Christian groups have strong beliefs that contradict the strong beliefs of other Christian groups.

Such disagreements are often so sharp that one group will “de-Christianize” the other. That is, they will not even consider people from other groups to be Christians. The result is over 20,000 denominations or organized Christian groups in the world.[1] Needless to say, non-Christians often find it hard to believe that Christianity is the path to truth when Christians themselves disagree to such a great extent.

What is even more intriguing is the fact that the vast majority of these groups are Protestant churches that strongly claim to get their beliefs and practices from the Bible. Many Christians not only believe that the Bible is the ultimate authority for a Christian. In many cases they teach that the Bible is the only true authority for a Christian. Like Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism, such groups claim that “Scripture alone” is a sufficient basis for Christian belief.

This situation raises a number of crucial questions for us as Christians. For example, even if we believe that the Bible is absolutely authoritative over us—which Bible? That is, which interpretations of the Bible are the truly authoritative ones? Is there one Christian group that has it right, while all the others have it wrong? Or do most Christian groups have some things right as well as some things wrong?

I myself come from a relatively small Christian group in the Methodist tradition.[2] I remember having a conversation once with someone about some of the things we believe in our tradition. The person immediately objected to the word “tradition.” She didn’t think I should think of our beliefs as a tradition. Rather, “we just read the Bible and do what it says.”

Indeed, I used to think this same way. I used to be amazed that I just happened to be born into the group that had the correct understanding of the Bible and God—out of all the different Christian and non-Christian faiths out there. I still have confidence in the basic beliefs of my tradition, but I also recognize the vast number of cultural and historical influences that have helped shape why we think the way we do.

Clearly there must be more to it than the simple “I just read the Bible and know what it says” approach. After all, when thousands of individuals are taking this approach and coming up with widely different interpretations, something else is obviously going on in the process. This observation leads us to one of the central questions of this book: who decides what the Bible really means? With so many contrasting interpretations, how can we know which ones are correct?

Someone might suggest that God will show us if we are truly listening. But this answer doesn’t work. We find truly godly people in every church and denomination. The more people you know from other traditions, the more you realize that no church has a corner on spirituality. For whatever reason, God just doesn’t correct all our misunderstandings. If God did, there would be one group to which all the truly holy people belonged. But no such group exists.

So maybe we should go with Catholic and Orthodox interpretations, since these groups have been around the longest. After all, these were practically the only Christian groups for almost 1500 years! Until the split between east and west in 1054, the only real option for the overwhelming majority of Christians was Catholic. And from the split until the Protestant Reformation of the 1500’s, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions were basically it. Do we really suppose that God had no part in any of the beliefs Christians had for the majority of Christianity’s history—that God basically stepped out of the picture for a millennium?

Yet it is equally clear that the beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church in 1500 differed in some significant ways from those of Christians at the beginning. Protestants have long pointed out this fact and tried to “get back” to what the first Christians believed, particularly as found in the Bible. Some Protestants see the continuity of “true” belief in smaller groups throughout history who were persecuted by the church at large.

But of course these groups also differed widely from each other in belief and practice. And if the solution is to “get back” to what the first Christians believed, then we are right back to our problem. Whose interpretation of the New Testament is the one that truly represents what the first Christians believed?

Perhaps even more crucial than the question of whether the Bible is authoritative is the question of which interpretation is authoritative.

So who decides what the Bible means? Perhaps even more crucial than the question of whether the Bible is authoritative over us is the question of which interpretation is authoritative. Christianity currently drifts in a mindless ebb and flow that claims the Bible as a major source of its belief and practice. But in reality we constantly smuggle in all kinds of other beliefs and practices that don’t actually come from the Bible.

Some of the things we smuggle in are good. But many of them are arguably harmful and have nothing to do with God. This book aims at unveiling some of the forces at work beneath the surface in the way Christians in America use the Bible today. Surely self-awareness can only help us discern better when we are truly speaking for God and when we are giving divine sanction to all too human and cultural ideas. This book is a call to a greater depth and maturity in the way we use the Bible in church and life.

The Protestant Split

To get a handle on the incredible diversity of Protestant churches today we have to go back to the 1500’s when practically everyone in the Western world was Roman Catholic. It was a time when the power of the Roman Catholic Church was on the wane. It was a time when the Renaissance was on the rise, and interest in the Greco-Roman world as it was before Christianity was high. It was at the end of a period when the Roman Catholic Church had arguably reached an all time low in terms of open corruption and hypocrisy.

In this era when most people were still illiterate, the Church kept the Bible in the hands of the educated. It was to be read in Latin and preached only by trained interpreters in appropriate locations. Translating the Bible into the vernacular—the common language of a given people—was a serious offence for which you could lose your life. John Huss was tricked into capture and burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English. Although John Wycliffe thankfully escaped execution, his remains were later exhumed after his death and burnt at the stake for translating the Bible into English.

Beyond all these issues, it is clear that many beliefs and practices in the Roman Catholic Church had developed well beyond anything the New Testament apostles might have imagined. One issue where several of these factors intersected was that of “indulgences.” A young German monk by the name of Martin Luther found them particularly offensive.

To understand indulgences, we have to understand the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory. The New Testament itself speaks about a place of fiery torment for certain individuals. For example, Revelation speaks of a time when “anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire” (20:15).[3] But the New Testament doesn’t answer clearly all the questions we might have about sin, death, and judgment. For example, the New Testament considers intentional sin as something a Christian should not do (e.g., Rom. 6:1, 12; Heb. 10:26; 1 John 3:9). So what are we to do with the vast number of individuals who are baptized as Christians, yet whose lives are not completely pure?

Christians throughout the ages have resolved this problem in various ways. Some Baptists today suggest that if someone is truly a Christian, he or she will not go to hell no matter what sins they commit after coming to Christ. Some in my denomination suppose that a person is on the way to hell after even a single intentional sin—even if that person was truly a Christian. For the Roman Catholic Church the answer is purgatory. Purgatory is a place of torment to which baptized Christians go to “do their time” before they get into heaven. It is a kind of half-way house for those who will ultimately go to heaven but whose lives are not holy enough to get in immediately at death.

When you consider the typically superstitious medieval mind, purgatory was a major concern for the common person. How long would they have to spend in purgatory? And the Roman Catholic Church could use this fact to raise money. As Pope Leo X prepared to build the beautiful Vatican building that now stands in Rome, he faced the question of how to raise the funds to build it. An easy answer was to sell “indulgences,” which amounted to time off of purgatory for donations to the church. Some saints, particularly holy individuals, had extra merit to give away. If you donated to the Church, you could transfer some of this merit to anyone you wished and thus save yourself or someone else time off of purgatory.

Enter a German Roman Catholic monk named Martin Luther. In a different time or place he would almost certainly have died at the stake. But it was a time when the political power of the Pope had become weaker and the discontent of local peoples at foreign interference in their business was high. With all these factors swirling around him, he was primarily interested in promoting the truth as he understood it.

So when a man named Johann Tetzel came to town to sell indulgences, Luther was incensed. Luther clearly was someone who had difficulty keeping his mouth shut when he believed strongly in something. Tetzel was a great salesman. One of his famous sales pitches went something like this: “When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” Countless people in his audiences rushed to donate money so that they or their family could avoid purgatory.

Luther’s response to things of this sort became clearer and stronger over time. These ideas are not found in Scripture, in the Bible. Therefore, the Church should not be teaching them. The Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, or “Scripture alone,” grew out of the fact that so many beliefs and practices in the Roman Catholic Church had developed long after the books of the New Testament were written. To this day the ten thousands of Protestant groups we mentioned earlier believe that if you cannot demonstrate a belief or practice from Scripture, then it is not legitimate.

Many good things came out of these conflicts. For one thing, the Bible came into the hands of anyone who could read. Luther went on to translate the Bible into German. And after several other English translations, the one commissioned by King James of England became the English standard. With the recent invention of the printing press, the Bible would become an incredible catalyst not only in the growth of literacy but also in the way the English and German languages developed over time.

Secondly, a number of questionable developments in Roman Catholic thought and practice were reversed in Protestant circles. While Paul lends biblical support to the value of certain Christians remaining celibate, the Bible lends no support to the idea that all ministers must be. This “policy” of the Roman Catholic Church has no doubt contributed to some of the problems that church now faces in America.

And on what biblical basis could the church truly keep the Bible out of the hands and languages of the common person? I personally do not think the doctrine of purgatory in itself is as unbiblical as Protestants treat it, but it is nevertheless not a teaching we find in the Bible. And the practice of selling indulgences is an addition to an addition to the Bible.

But at the same time, most historical reactions like these end up going to opposite extremes. On the one hand, while Luther removed some Christian beliefs and practices that the Church had added to its beginnings, he retained many others that really are not clear in Scripture alone. Does the Bible clearly teach infant baptism? It is possible that it is assumed in passages like Acts 16:31-34. Nevertheless, Luther retained the practice. In other words, while Luther said “Scripture alone,” he remained squarely within the historical traditions of Christianity.

I believe so many today do the same thing: they say they get all their beliefs from the Bible when many of them come more from the legitimate historical traditions of Christianity. We will argue in chapter four that evangelicals are playing games with the Bible when they interpret it to present the equal divinity of Jesus with God the Father, as well as the Trinity. To be sure, I believe in these things. But I will argue that these beliefs really developed into something like their current form well after the New Testament was finished. They are some of so many beliefs and practices that mainstream Protestant churches even today take from Christian tradition and “read into” the Bible’s words. I am not so troubled that we see these things in the words. What is dangerous is that we do not acknowledge the legitimate role the Spirit working through the church of the ages has played in the fact we see them in the words.

In his day, Luther debated with the Roman Catholic Church over the clarity or “perspicuity” of the Bible. A Roman Catholic Renaissance scholar named Erasmus argued that the common person was not equipped to interpret the Bible rightly, that the meaning of the Bible was not ultimately clear without the church to interpret it.[4] In contrast, Luther argued that the Bible alone was sufficiently clear for a spiritual person to understand.

The fragmentation of Protestant Christianity into so many ten thousands of groups with different beliefs in and of itself demonstrates the inadequacy of any rigid understanding of “Scripture alone” as the source of belief and practice for Christians.

I think Luther’s heart was right in this whole debate. But the fragmentation of Protestant Christianity into so many ten thousands of groups with different beliefs ends any debate we might have on this issue today. It simply isn’t even a question. Luther’s opponents were clearly more correct than he on the clarity of Scripture’s meaning. We might debate over whether the Bible is clear on matters of salvation and other central matters. But the claim to rely solely on the Bible as the basis for all our beliefs requires that we see some small part of vast Christianity as the truly spiritual group that truly knows what the Bible means. We must consider all the others less spiritual than the little group that has it all right.

In contrast to Luther and modern evangelicals, the more rigorous and consistent a group is with its view of “Scripture only,” the more obscure and off the wall the group usually turns out to be. This approach is that most taken by the countless small cults we find scattered here and there. Groups with this approach are most likely to commit suicide while a comet is passing by or to go off to South America and force everyone to drink Cyanide.[5] We vote these groups most likely to affirm one of their members as the Messiah and end up dead in a torched compound in Waco, Texas. We will discuss this dynamic in the next chapter.

It is time to reform the Reformation and reclaim the “catholic” element of Christian faith.

Along with many other voices in the church today, I am pronouncing the Protestant Reformation at an end. We’ve reformed long enough. It’s been long enough for us to let go of the hard feelings we had toward the Roman Catholic Church of the 1500’s. Now we need a reformation of the reformation.

In these words I am not suggesting that Protestants need to rejoin the Roman Catholic Church or that we need to have a single, visible church. Indeed, there are some real advantages to a universal church without a single political structure. Further, I believe that the Roman system still has elements that do not represent the way God would have the whole church to go. I personally regard the doctrines made official in Vatican 1 in the late 1800’s to include some significant missteps in Roman Catholic development. Given the massive split with the Roman church in 1054 by the Orthodox and the mass exodus in the 1500’s by the Protestants, any developments in the last millennium clearly need to be revisited, at least in my mind.

But I am arguing that we Protestants need to reclaim our catholicism, small “c”—our continuity with the church universal through the ages. Even the existence of the Bible as a set of authoritative books requires us to put faith in things that happened centuries after the New Testament books were written. I affirm doctrines like the Trinity, the dual nature of Christ, and the creation of the world by God out of nothing. But I have a hard time finding them expressed in the Bible in anything like the way we now believe them. My belief in them means I am placing as much or more faith in the church of the ages as I am in the Bible itself.

Some Basic Explanations

We have the rest of the book to explain why there are so many different interpretations of the Bible as well as to strategize over what we might do about it. For the moment I simply want to introduce the three basic reasons for the diversity. As simple as these three reasons are, their implications are immense for how we should read the Bible.

The three principles are

1. Words can mean many different things.

2. The Bible has many, many words

3. All of these words were originally directed at ancient audiences.

1. Words can mean many different things.

One dictionary I have lists forty-seven different English meanings for the word fire.[6] Consider the following sentences, each of which uses the word fire in a different way:

1. Get some water, he’s on fire.

2. He’s on fire for the Lord.

3. The Israelis have called a cease fire.

4. He’s been going through fire and water lately.

5. You’re playing with fire if you go there.

6. You’re fired.

7. Come on baby; light my fire.

8. Fire! [to a group of people in a burning building]

9. Fire! [at the comfort of a log fireplace to one's spouse after walking a half a mile in a blizzard to get to your cabin]

10. He began firing questions at me.

To know the meanings of the word fire in each of these circumstances, you need to know a lot more than just the word. You have to know the “game” you are playing. You need to know the context and all the different ways a word is used in English speaking culture.

When we take this flexibility of language and apply it to the Bible, we can see that two readers of an English Bible are going to take different words different ways and come up with different understandings. In each case, the “dictionary” you bring to the words completely determines the meaning you see there. It is no surprise that a Baptist will largely see Baptist meanings in the words, Lutherans will see Lutheran meanings, Catholics will see Catholic meanings, etc. We might almost rephrase the question “Who decides what the Bible means?” as “What dictionary is the right one to bring to the text so that an authoritative meaning results?”

2. The Bible has many, many words.

This fact multiplies the potential ambiguity considerably. A slight difference in the way one word is taken can lead to a domino effect. Before long you have meanings that diverge quite significantly from someone else.

But ultimately, we are skirting the real heart of the issue here. The Bible was not written as a single book, as if the apostles all got together one day, opened themselves to the Holy Spirit who then dictated to them what to write. Rather, these books were written over many centuries in three different languages to address many different contexts and many different situations within those contexts.

We cannot read these books for long before we realize that each author had his[7] own style and vocabulary. Because words change meanings over time, the words of the Old Testament usually do not mean exactly the same things that their New Testament equivalents do. As different people have different ways of talking about the world, even different New Testament authors will use words differently from others. You cannot assume that a word in one part of the Bible means the same thing as a word in another or indeed that all the authors thought in exactly the same way about the same topics.

The Bible does not tell us how to fit all these books and words together. This activity is something we do from the outside of the text looking in. The implications of this fact are immense. The most important factor in determining what the Bible as a whole means is one the Bible itself cannot and does not actually provide for us. The very idea of the “Bible alone” thus turns out to be incoherent at its very foundations.

3. All these words were originally directed at ancient audiences.

This truth is the most difficult of all for many of us to grasp. We are so programmed to think that the Bible is God's word to us that we can scarcely get our heads around the fact that it was actually written first to someone else.

And yet this is exactly what it says. 1 Corinthians says it was written to the church of God at Corinth. Romans was written to Christians at Rome. Deuteronomy was addressed to Israel. Again, most of us have no idea how differently the Bible’s words strike us from the way they struck their original audiences. As soon as we begin to apply these words to ourselves and take the “you” of the text to be us, we have started reading these words differently than Jesus, Paul, or Isaiah first meant them. We have started down the road of reading these words out of context.

I wouldn’t say that this way of reading the Bible is necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps indeed God primarily speaks through Scripture by making the words come alive in terms of my own personal “dictionary.” But we will grow in our understanding of the Bible if we also recognize that my dictionary does not come equipped with many if not most of the original meanings. What does it mean to be “out of your mind” in 1 Corinthians 14:23 (NIV)? Our English dictionary just does not come equipped with the ancient meaning, which probably had something to do with what happened in the pagan mystery religions of Paul’s world. How many people today know what an ancient mystery religion was? They did.

Here is the point. It doesn’t matter how good the English translation is, we just don’t come equipped with countless meanings necessary to know what the words of the Bible meant originally. The Bible just wasn’t written to us. As Christians we believe it has significant implications for us, but it was not written to us. We can trace the vast majority of the disagreements over what the Bible means to a failure to realize this very simple truth: the Bible was not originally written to me and I don’t come equipped with nearly enough knowledge to know what it did originally mean. In many cases even the most knowledgeable scholar will have to make educated guesses about the original meaning.

Again, I do not necessarily think in the end we have to know the original meaning of the Bible for God to speak to us through it. But as long as we do not even know the difference between how we read these words and what they meant originally, we will continually and subtly mistake our thoughts for those of God.

The most crucial step in the process of appropriating the Bible is one the Bible itself cannot tell us how to do.

The task of bridging the gap between “what it meant in that context” and “what it might imply for our context” is at times a very small gap. At other times it is immense. Simply doing what they did is not really doing the same thing they did if the connotations and meaning of those actions play themselves out differently in our world than it did in theirs.

And since these words were not written to us, the Bible itself does not tell us how that will play itself out. Once again, the most crucial step in the process of appropriating the Bible is not one that the Bible itself tells us how to do. It is something we do looking at the text from the outside. This fact again shows how inadequate the concept of the Bible alone is in reality. There need to be other controls by which the appropriation of the Bible can take place appropriately.

The Christian Use of the Bible

This book is about the role the Bible should play in the life of a Christian. I see two main ways that the Bible legitimately functions in the life of Christians both as individuals and as the church universal.

The first is what I like to call the sacramental use of Scripture in the lives of individuals and the church. For Protestants in particular, the Bible has become a sacrament, a means of grace through which God reveals himself. More often than not, such revelation God gives is only tangentially related to the original meaning of the Bible. God dances with the words in the text and makes it come alive to you as an individual or to some group you belong to. In a moment, the Bible becomes the Word of God to you.[8]

I would thus distinguish between the Bible in its original meaning and the Bible as Scripture. Part of what it means to read the Bible as Scripture is to invest its words with an authority that applies to us today. But to take its words in relation to us today is to begin to take its words out of context. The Bible as Scripture thus takes on different meanings from what the Bible meant originally. As we will see, the Jewish Scriptures may be the same words as the Christian Old Testament. But the first is the Bible read in terms of its original meaning while the second is the Bible read as Christian Scripture.

The Christians of the ages, as us, were neither programmed nor equipped to read the Bible in terms of its original meaning. The original meaning approach is largely a product of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, we cannot deny the legitimacy of studying the original meaning of the Bible—after all, this is what Paul and Isaiah actually meant. But at the same time, some of those who first pointed out what this might mean were understandably looked askance at by Christians and the church. Baruch Spinoza, an unorthodox Jew himself, was one of the first to point out the possibility of reading the words of the Bible in the way we read other kinds of words (1600’s).

But individuals and Christians generally do not read a letter like 2 Thessalonians as they would read normal words. Certainly a letter like 2 Thessalonians takes on a greater authority than an ordinary letter would when we read it as Scripture—this is one difference. But even beyond this distinction, Christians tend to take the “you” of the text as a reference to themselves other than, as it was originally, a reference to the ancient Thessalonian church. This loosening of the original context and meaning is what activates the sacramental quality of Scripture. The church of the ages, in addition to solitary Christian individuals and groups, has heard God’s word in this way. As we will discuss in subsequent chapters, many Christian groups and individuals have certainly misheard God’s voice when reading the Bible in this way as well.

But it is surely also a legitimate Christian enterprise to read these words for what they actually meant originally. And surely these words hold some authority for us when we read them in this way as well. The question is, Do they have as much authority as when God speaks directly from the words. It is at these points that we have the most room to grow and mature in our understanding.

I would suggest that the original meaning of these words is of varying authority in relation to us today. For example, the authority of the Old Testament over a Christian is mediated through the New Testament. The Old Testament laws about what to eat are not authoritative over us directly today, as the New Testament declares all foods clean (e.g., Mark 7:19). Other commands and teachings clearly related particularly to aspects of the ancient context that do not connect in the same way to our world (e.g., head coverings for women in 1 Cor. 11).

When we read the Bible in terms of its original meaning, its words are authoritative in relation to their position in the history of the church. They are the teaching of the “apostles and prophets” (Eph. 2:20) and so clearly have greater claim to authority than the teaching of a Billy Graham or Rick Warren, as inspired as these individuals might turn out to be. The New Testament is the logical starting point for discussing any issue, for it is the most immediate witness to Christ.

But we would also claim that God has continued to reveal himself throughout the ages in resolving issues that the New Testament either did not resolve or where the books of the New Testament were addressing concerns from that time. Particularly when we find contrasting voices on an issue in the text (e.g., implicitly on the role of women in the ministry of the church), we can see later church history as the field where God works out such issues. When the New Testament has not challenged the social structure of its day (e.g., on the issue of slavery), the church may eventually take on such issues.

Legitimate appropriation of the Bible must stand within the boundaries of

1. the love ethic of Christ and

2. the historic faith of the church.

The New Testament does not work out any number of issues that the later church weighed in on. For example, the New Testament is unclear about the nature of life between our death and resurrection, as well as on exactly where we will spend eternity. But Christians now almost universally believe we will be conscious somewhere in between our death and resurrection, and we generally see heaven as our ultimate destination. Some cults—using the Bible alone—have understandably produced verses that at least seem to support contrary views. But God presumably has worked out the Christian view on many of these things in the church beyond the pages of the Bible.

In general, this book claims that any interpretation of Scripture is acceptable if it conforms to two basic rules:

1. No interpretation that advocates hatred toward other individuals can legitimately be called Christian.

It is an illegitimate use of the Bible. There are of course any number of passages in the Bible that seem to espouse such hatred. Psalm 137:9 thus blesses anyone who would bash a Babylonian baby against a rock.

The authoritative center of Scripture on all such questions of ethics is clearly Jesus’ summary of the Law in Matthew 22:37-40, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. It amounts to “Love God and love neighbor,” where neighbor clearly includes one’s enemies as well (cf. Matt. 5:44). Any ethic that claims to be Christian must conform to this ethical center, and any appropriation of the Bible that violates it is an illegitimate use of the Bible regardless of the Bible’s original meaning.

2. No interpretation that stands outside the clear consensus of the church universal can legitimately be called Christian (with the exception of true prophetic movements).

To be sure, I believe in Christian prophets as well. God does reform the church from time to time, so I would not give current Christian consensus absolute weight. To do so would be to deny some of the key claims of the Protestant Reformation. Some of those claims seem to have stood the test of time, and even the Catholic Church has reformed itself on some of these same issues. When is the last time you saw an indulgence salesman? There must be room for change and correction, although such change will normally be a matter of centuries.

At the same time, the teaching of the “prophets” among us will have to prove itself over time. It will probably take much longer than the lifetime of any one individual. I believe there is a “prophetic movement” currently at work in the church that is leading to the full acceptance of women in all roles of ministry. I believe that the principle “neither male nor female in Christ” entails within it an end to any arbitrary distinctions in the roles men and women can play in the church (Gal. 3:28).

But I also realize we have practically 2000 years of church history to fight against. I can find more support for my claims in Scripture than I can in the history of the church until recent times. For my lifetime I must play the prophet, predicting that within the next century or so even Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics will ordain women. I believe the church of the future will assume the ordination of women in the same way no one debates whether Christians should own slaves today.

I consider many other issues to be laid to rest. The New Testament in its original meaning is ambiguous about what it might mean for Jesus to be the “firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15) or for the Word to be divine (John 1:1). But the next four hundred years afterwards worked out these issues. Today anyone who denies the Trinity or the dual nature of Christ as both fully God and fully human has some explaining to do. They must claim to be a reforming prophet, in which case there seems little support in the church for them. Or more likely they must submit to what God has revealed to us through the church in dialog with Scripture.

It is an extension of the Bible to think of the church universal as the body of Christ, the collection of all the Christians who have ever lived both past and present.[9] If we think of the Holy Spirit as the spirit that enlivens the body of Christ, then surely we are best in touch with the Spirit when we are in touch with the saints of the ages. I as an individual Christian may have the Spirit in me too, but the more “Spirit” I am in contact with, the more likely I am to hear God’s voice authentically. It is thus when I am reading the Bible in community and in communion with the saints of the ages that I am most likely to use it legitimately. This is the fundamental claim of this book.