05 When the Church Universal Decides

Chapter 5

When the Spirit in the Church Decides

More than the Bible

The Church of England, the Anglican Church, has always straddled the fence between catholicism and Protestantism. On the one hand, it withdrew from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1500’s like other Protestant groups in Europe did. The trigger for its withdrawal was the desire of King Henry VIII for a divorce—and the Pope’s refusal to grant it. Neither side was particularly virtuous in the matter, for the Pope at that time might have granted the divorce if the woman in question had not been the daughter of the King of Spain, who happened to be breathing down his neck at the time.

Yet Henry VIII himself had earlier written a treatise against Martin Luther, the father of the Reformation and Protestantism. Henry was thus not your ordinary Protestant. Anglicans like John Jewel would argue in the following years that the Church of England was still catholic—just not Roman Catholic.[1] The Orthodox tradition in Greece, Russia, and the east make similar claims to be a part of the “church catholic,” the universal church in continuity with the tradition of the ages. Groups like these view the Roman Catholic Church as a part of this broader catholicism, just not the exclusive bearer of the tradition.[2]

One feature these “catholic” groups have in common is the greater role that the traditions of the church play alongside Scripture. While they all consider Scripture a very important element in the equation, it is not the sole element. At times of course this approach has led to periods where the Bible played little role in the life of such churches. But we would be wrong to think such was always the case. The Roman Catholic Church of today has a high reverence for Scripture, as do Orthodox churches.

Martin Luther protested against several aspects of the Roman Catholic Church of his day, particularly with regard to traditions that went well beyond the teaching of the Bible. For example, he rejected the insistence of the Roman Catholic Church that priests be celibate. He rejected the idea of purgatory as an intermediate place for the dead—dead individuals who were destined for heaven but not yet pure enough to go there. He especially rejected the idea that you could get years off of purgatory by donating money to the Church.

Many of Luther’s reforms were no doubt needed in the Roman Catholic Church of his day. After all, Rome itself “cleaned house” in the years that followed.[3] However, as is so often the case, Luther set in motion a reaction that would become an over-reaction. The nature of language in conjunction with the nature of the Bible’s books has resulted in a situation where the Bible alone can never be the sole source of Christian belief and practice. The Reformation principle, “Scripture only,” would set in motion a process that would fragment Christianity into tens of thousands of little groups who all thought they knew what Scripture alone taught.

We will see in this chapter that Christian tradition has always played a role in the legitimate appropriation of Scripture. Those who interpret the Bible without regard for Christian traditions inevitably end up founding cults like that of David Koresh. From reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin in the 1500’s to the conservative evangelicals of today, legitimate biblical interpretation has always drawn on Christian tradition as a guide in biblical interpretation.

Christian tradition has always played a role in the legitimate appropriation of Scripture.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, provides us with a good Protestant model for redressing the excesses of the Protestant Reformation. Certainly the eighteenth century Wesley sounded like he was just as convinced in the idea of “Scripture alone” as any other reformer when he was challenging the Roman Catholic Church.[4] But his roots in the Anglican Church led him in practice to resort to tradition, experience, and even reason in his appropriation of the Bible for his day.

Wesley’s method of appropriating Scripture is sometimes called “Wesley’s Quadrilateral,” although Wesley himself didn’t come up with the term.[5] The idea is that while Scripture is the central and determinative element in the equation; tradition, reason, and experience also are valid sources of truth. If you would, they are filters through which we pass the Bible’s teaching. For example, some in the Wesleyan tradition have used this quadrilateral as a model for determining God’s will for your life. You ask if your course of action fits with Scripture, with what other Christians have said and are saying about it (traditions), with your experiences and the experiences of others, and with common sense (reason).[6]

Our pilgrimage through this book requires us to modify the Wesleyan Quadrilateral slightly. One observation we have made throughout is that our thoughts and experiences are always an inevitable element in biblical interpretation. In other words, human reasoning and experience are always factors in our appropriation of the Bible. They are the “round house” through which all the trains of knowledge pass. We can do nothing else; here is how it stands.

Human reasoning and experience are always factors in our appropriation of the Bible. They are the “round house” through which all the trains of knowledge pass.

When we ask what the Bible’s meaning is, we are thinking. If the Holy Spirit speaks to me, I am experiencing something and then filtering that experience through my reflection. I have to connect the teaching of one part of Scripture with that of the others. In short, it is never Scripture alone determining its meaning. The most determinative factors in the meaning I see are outside the text, elements I bring with me to the text.

We are at an excellent point in history to redress the imbalances of the Protestant Reformation both on the Roman Catholic and Protestant sides. It is time for us Protestants to own up to the fact that tradition has played as great a role in our appropriation of Scripture as the words of Scripture itself. Not to own up to this fact creates a situation in which we allow random interpretations to go unchecked with the authority of God.

At the same time, it seems difficult to think of all the developments throughout the history of the church as some straightforward evolution. Must all ministers be celibate today because the church of the late Middle Ages insisted on celibacy? We always seem to run aground on the shore of persecution and excess when God’s church is mistaken for any one political church entity. Somehow we need to allow for mistakes and passing phases in history.

This chapter asks how we can discern the unfolding of God’s revelation in Scripture and in the traditions of Christians throughout the ages. We are especially interested in how those traditions have influenced the way we read Scripture. We can be sure that God’s Spirit is the ultimate source of all such truth. Surely the Spirit speaks both to individuals and to communities of faith.

If God’s Spirit lives in the body of Christ, then it is when we are in fellowship with the church of the ages that we are most likely to hear God’s Spirit on any particular belief or practice.

But we are on safest ground when we are reading the Bible in communities of faith.[7] The more Christians, the more likely we are truly hearing the Spirit. We can draw this principle out: we are most likely of all to hear God’s Spirit when we are in the “communion of saints” throughout the ages. If God’s Spirit lives in the body of Christ, made up of all Christians in all times and places, then it is when we are in fellowship with the church of the ages that we are most likely to hear God’s Spirit on any particular belief or practice.

Rebuilding Our Faith in the Church

The way the Protestant tradition has sometimes downplayed the significance of the church and Christian tradition is deeply ironic in some respects. For example, we would not have a New Testament if God had not worked through the church to collect and recognize the authority of its books. We would not have a New Testament if there had not been a church. We would only have individual books that various Christians used.

We would not have a New Testament if there had not been a church to collect and recognize the authority of its books.

I should make it clear that I am not talking about some political body or denomination when I speak of “the church.” Rather, I refer to everyone whom God has claimed as his own by placing his Spirit on them (2 Cor. 5:5). I don’t wish to get into the many legitimate debates over who is truly “in” and who is not. It’s not important for our argument to define the precise boundaries of the church, other than to say that the church overlaps significantly with all those who have considered themselves Christians throughout the ages. I do not think that we find the true church in some small, relatively obscure group that has the truth all to its own. I believe that the universal church is ultimately invisible, that it has existed since the days of Christ, and that only God knows for sure who is truly in it and who is not.

If we have faith in the Bible, then we must have faith that God worked through the Christians of the first few centuries to “ratify” which books were authoritative enough to be considered Scripture. Remember, each of these books was written individually at a different time and place. They only became an authoritative collection because the church came to affirm their authority. The books of the Bible are thus sometimes referred to as the “canon,” from a Greek word that has the sense of a measuring rod. In other words, these are the books against which Christians should measure themselves.

On the one hand, most Christians agreed on the bulk of these books within a century of when they were written. The books themselves came into existence over at least a fifty year period, starting with the letters of Paul in the 50’s and extending at least until Revelation in the 90’s.[8] They were written in various locations across the Mediterranean world, so a process of collection ensued in the decades that followed.

By the end of the 100’s, the four gospels, Acts, and the letters of Paul were considered Scripture by most Christians. Of course there were also other groups like the Gnostic Christians who had any number of gospels that they produced and considered authoritative. But these groups and their writings did not stand the test of time. If we adopt the model of the Spirit working through the church of the ages, we wonder if the ultimate extinction of these groups shows that God did not ultimately want their form of Christianity to be the form. We may find many of them in the kingdom of God, but the Spirit did not lead the church in their direction.

While the bulk of the New Testament found relatively early consensus, some of the other books faced lengthy debate. Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, Revelation—these books had their proponents and their detractors. 1 Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter—these books also had their proponents and detractors. The ones that look familiar to you are the ones the church ultimately came to consider Scripture. Not that the church necessarily thought the others were bad books—they just did not ultimately assign them as much authority as the other ones.

It is interesting that the contours of the New Testament canon were not set by a church council or meeting.[9] In other words, the canon was not set by a vote.[10] Certainly there were political figures involved, but the church managed to reach a general consensus on the canon without the kinds of debates it had on issues like the divinity of Christ. The first instance (we know of) when someone suggested the precise list of books we now call the New Testament was in AD367 in the Easter letter of a man by the name of Athanasius. While some debate continued in the century thereafter, this suggestion seemed to resonate with the church.

Aside from some early misgivings by Martin Luther, the church has not questioned this list ever since.[11] If we are to have faith in the Bible, we must have faith that God was working in the minds of Christians to lead them to this list. God did so despite some apparent misunderstandings these early Christians had.

For example, you will search long and hard to find an original meaning scholar of the Bible who thinks that the apostle Paul wrote the book of Hebrews. Yet the acceptance of Hebrews into the canon coincides largely with the belief that Paul was its author. Apparently God wanted it in and brought it in, working around the misconceptions of the Christians involved.

Those who believe that the books in our Bibles are authoritative must at least believe that God worked in the church beyond the New Testament in this one area.

The “Scripture alone” position thus finds itself in a “chicken and egg” situation: which came first, Scripture or the church? While the individual books of the Bible came first, they did not become “authoritative Scripture” without the church. Those who believe that the books in our Bibles are authoritative must at least believe that God worked in the church beyond the New Testament in this one area. But if he worked in the church on this issue, isn’t it just possible that he has been working in the church on other important items as well?

Development within the Bible

If we believe that the Bible is a model for how God reveals truth to his people, then perhaps the Bible itself has something to say on this issue. Did God ever unfold truth over a long period of time between the books of the Bible? Did he sometimes tailor his revelation for particular times and places? Indeed, we do see such development of belief in the course of the Bible, particularly in the time between the Old and the New Testament.

The Bible itself models the idea that God sometimes unfolds his revelation over long periods of time and even tailors it for particular phases of history.

For example, the bulk of the Old Testament has no real sense of a personal, conscious afterlife. On the contrary, the psalmist says, “Turn, O LORD, save my life; deliver me for the sake of your steadfast love. For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?” (Ps. 6:4-5). Similarly, Ecclesiastes says that “the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other… All go to one place” (Eccl. 3:19-20).[12]

The only place in the entire Old Testament where we find undisputed teaching on the afterlife is in the book of Daniel. And even here it is not clear that everyone will experience it: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2). The vast majority of the Old Testament, not to mention all Jewish literature thereafter until around 200BC, shows no real concept of the afterlife.

The situation could not be more different when we come to the New Testament. The entirety of the New Testament assumes the reality of the afterlife, particularly a future resurrection in which our bodies return to life in some sort of transformed state (e.g., 1 Cor. 15). If we are to maintain our Christian beliefs, we must conclude that God turned on the lights of revelation in the time between the two testaments with regard to this issue. In other words, we witness a development in understanding within the pages of the Bible itself.

An even more fascinating example of such development takes place in the time between the writing of 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1. 2 Samuel 24:1 reads, “[T]he anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them…” In comparison, the later book 2 Chronicles reads, “Satan stood up against Israel, and incited David…” The contrast is shocking: Chronicles says that Satan did something that Samuel says God did!

The difference is that between 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles, some Jews had come to accept the concept of a Satan, a heavenly figure who tested people’s loyalty to God. Thus in Job we see the Satan testing Job and reporting back to God (Job 1:6-12; 2:1-7). Before Israel had gone into captivity, they spoke of God as the cause of both the good and the bad things that happened to them. But after Israel returned from Babylon, many of them would now think of Satan as the direct cause of such bad things.

But even at this point the Jews did not think of Satan as an evil angel who stood in diametric opposition to God. The Satan of Job and Chronicles still works under God. It is not until around the time of Christ that we find a Jewish writing equating the serpent of Genesis with Satan.[13] Here is another good example of a new “definition” the New Testament brings to the words of the Old Testament that was not the original definition.[14] Genesis itself does not mention Satan. It is the New Testament that leads us to understand the serpent as Satan. We must conclude again that God turned on the lights of revelation on this issue over time and that the Bible demonstrates a development in understanding within its own pages.

We can also recognize that the New Testament sometimes reverses or changes the direction of the Old Testament. We have already seen such a change in our earlier discussion of the Sabbath.[15] The Old Testament assumes the importance of the Sabbath. In fact, Israel stoned a man to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath (Num. 15:32-36). But for whatever reason, the New Testament condemns someone who would require a non-Jewish Christian to keep the Sabbath (Col. 2:16; Rom. 14:5-6).

God sometimes gave instruction in the Bible that accommodated particular audiences—even though it wasn’t his ideal.

Another example of such a reversal is Jesus’s teaching on divorce. The Old Testament places no restrictions on divorce but assumes it (e.g., Deut. 24:1). Indeed, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell of a time when those Jews who had married foreign wives were commanded to divorce their foreign wives and children (Ezra 10:3). Yet Jesus says, “It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives” (Matt. 19:8). In other words, God sometimes allows his people to do less than his ideal—even in his biblical instruction.

We must apparently accept that God sometimes unfolds his revelation over long periods of time, for we can witness this process within the pages of the Bible itself. And even in the Bible God sometimes gave instruction that accommodated particular audiences—even though it was not his ideal. We have certainly seen time and time again that God more often than not revealed biblical truth within the categories of his audiences. The crucial question now is whether God continued these processes beyond the pages of the New Testament and into the church, perhaps even to today.

Development beyond the Bible

Can we identify beliefs that are essential to Christian faith as we know it, yet that are not clearly taught in Scripture? Are there even things we accept today that even conflict with the biblical categories, but that we have not allowed ourselves to admit because we want to base our beliefs exclusively on the Bible without recourse to the church? More than any other, this is the most crucial question of this book.

Our beliefs about Christ seem to provide us with an important test case. Are the things we believe about Jesus clearly taught in the New Testament or are many of them beliefs that ultimately come from Christian tradition about Jesus? Certainly the early church debated vigorously the exact nature of Christ’s humanity and divinity. Was Jesus fully human, or only somewhat human? Is Jesus divine in the same way as God the Father or only in a similar way? Are God the Father and God the Son in fact the same person? If not, do Christians believe in one God, two Gods, or maybe even three Gods?

I would argue that the books of the New Testament did not settle these issues. Indeed, I would argue that the New Testament at times lent its support more to the arguments of people we now think of as heretics than to those who supported what we now believe. I do not make this claim to undermine what we currently believe. On the contrary, I am presuming that God has brought his people to believe the right things about Jesus. What I am arguing is that God brought the church to affirm these things after the New Testament—that the development of Christian doctrine and ethics continued beyond the pages of the Bible.

God brought the church to affirm a number of things about Christ after the New Testament.

The New International Version (NIV) provides us with several great case studies on this subject, because its translations often mirror evangelical theology. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way it translates certain key passages about Christ. Thus the NIV translates Philippians 2:6 in this way: Jesus, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped.” When it translates the verse this way, it supports the Christian belief that Jesus was fully God in his nature. The Council of Nicaea in 325 affirmed that although God exists in three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), he is only one God consisting of one substance.

The NIV similarly translates Colossians 1:15 in the following way: Jesus “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” By translating the last phrase “firstborn over all creation,” the NIV avoids the impression that Jesus is a part of the creation—he is not the firstborn of all creation. This way of translating the verse assists us in holding to another conclusion of the Council of Nicaea: Jesus was “eternally begotten of the Father, begotten, not made.”[16] The Council denied the claims of a man named Arius, who believed that Christ was the first thing that God created.

I would argue that the NIV is an excellent Christian translation at these points in the sense that it facilitates a Christian reading of these verses. But I would argue it ultimately does so because of the influence of legitimate Christian tradition, in particular the influence of the world-wide councils of the church’s first few centuries. The Council of Nicaea in 325 affirmed that God is a Trinity: he is one God consisting of one substance while also in some mysterious way being three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 affirmed that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine, one person with two natures. These are things that Christians throughout the ages have believed, both Protestant and Catholic. An individual or group that does not believe them has some serious explaining to do.

Yet I would argue that the NIV has not rendered these verses strictly in terms of their original meanings—it has taken some interpretive liberty in the light of later Christian tradition. Thus the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) renders Philippians 2:6 more literally: Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited.” There is a significant jump from the phrase “form of God” in the Greek to the NIV’s “being in very nature God.” As you might suspect, the Greek original has given rise to an immense body of scholarly literature. Some think the phrase “form of God” only means that Jesus was like Adam, who was made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). In contrast, most scholars think it referred to Jesus as pre-existent in some way.

With so much ink spilled over this verse, I could not hope to convince anyone of my understanding in a paragraph, probably not even in a scholarly article or book. It is indeed possible that it refers to Christ’s existence before he was born, although this interpretation is not nearly as clear to me as it is to many others. More significantly, I notice that “form of God” is in contrast to “form of a servant” and think it is much more about the royal status of Christ than about some aspect of his nature.[17] In the end, I just want you to see how helpful the judgment of the later church was in nailing down our beliefs on the pre-existent Christ. In a very real sense, we don’t have to worry about the original meaning of this verse because God has settled what we are to believe about Christ through the church.

The NIV’s translation of Colossians 1:15 is even more to the point. Again, the NRSV gives us a less interpreted translation: Jesus “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” A Christian named Arius argued strongly in the early 300’s that this verse implied that Christ was, in the end, created by God and not “of the same substance” as God the Father. He believed that Christ was the firstborn of God’s creations. Arius would have agreed that Christ was “over all creation” as well, that Christ was pre-eminent over everything except God. But he believed that God made Christ and thus that there was a point at which Christ had not existed.

Enter another man named Athanasius. He argued strongly not only that Christ had existed from all eternity, but that he was of the same substance as God the Father. The church came to conclude that Christ was not less than God in any way. Athanasius would not even accept the compromise that Christ was of a similar substance to God the Father. He must be of the same substance. While the debate continued long and heavy after the confrontation between Arius and Athanasius, Christians eventually came to accept Athanasius’s view. And this is what we Christians believe today.

But notice that the New Testament doesn’t come anywhere near to asking these questions, let alone to answering them. When Paul says, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you,” he mentions all three persons of the Trinity. But he never gives us anything like a statement on how these three relate to each other—especially a statement like we now believe.

In the end, Arius’s interpretation probably came closer to what Colossians originally implied. The language of Colossians is very similar to language that some Jews of that day used to talk about God’s word, his logos. We know that early Jewish Christians drew on these traditions because the Gospel of John uses the same language: “In the beginning was the Word [logos]” (John 1:1). These Jewish traditions considered God’s word to be God’s firstborn son too, “neither uncreated as God, nor created as you, but midway.”[18] In other words, while they gave supremacy to God’s word, they still placed it on the created side of the line. Since the New Testament used this imagery without objecting to this aspect of it, it seems likely that the New Testament authors did not take issue with the idea that Christ was created. It was not an issue that came up on their radar.

We see also that the New Testament places Christ beneath God: “When all things are subjected to him [Christ], then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). To be sure, Christians like Athanasius had ways of reinterpreting verses like these to fit with the idea of the Trinity. For example, some argued that it was only the human side of Christ that would be subordinated to God the father. His divine nature would of course remain equal with God as it was for all time. But we have once again moved into questions that lie well beyond those of the New Testament.

Ironically, the desire to make the original meaning of the Bible the ultimate source of what we believe repeatedly leads some scholars to play games with the original meaning. Such scholars force their interpretations to agree with absolutely legitimate beliefs that really come from God’s inspiration of the church beyond the pages of the Bible.

In all these cases it is of course possible to argue that the traditional beliefs of the church are in fact the original meanings of these verses. Protestant scholars interpret the Bible this way all the time so that they can maintain the sense that they do not rely on Christian tradition for their beliefs, only the Bible. But time and time again we can seriously question whether they are coming up with the most probable interpretations in terms of the original meaning. It would be deeply ironic if a desire to make the original meaning of the Bible the ultimate source of what we believe repeatedly led to playing games with the original meaning, forcing it to agree with beliefs that are absolutely legitimate, but that really come from God’s inspiration of the church beyond the pages of the Bible.

Do we really need to argue that these interpretations of Paul’s writings are the original meanings in order for us to accept them as valid Christian appropriations of these words? Indeed, it seems more likely in these instances that the original meaning must take second place to the beliefs God has led Christians everywhere to affirm and hold for over 1500 years. Is it in fact the cultural presuppositions of our age that presumes the authority of Scripture must lie in the original, historical meaning of a passage? We saw in the previous chapter that if we have to know the original meaning to find God’s voice, most Christians throughout the ages are in trouble. Is it possible that God more uses the words of Bible as a mirror in which the church sees itself and the directions in which God is leading it?

We can see this contrast of perspective in the different translations of the New Testament. Most Christians today have no problem at all with what we might call “modern” translations of the Bible. Yet some will still remember a time when some Christians fought tooth and nail for the King James Version (KJV) as the only valid English Bible. Certainly we can understand why someone raised on the KJV might be surprised to come upon statements like the following: “The earliest manuscripts and some other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20.”[19] If you had grown up reading these verses as part of the Bible, you would immediately suspect that some faithless person was tampering with Scripture.

But the background to this debate is the fact that the Greek text behind the KJV was edited in the 1400’s and 1500’s when the oldest copies of the New Testament we had dated to the Middle Ages. Since then we have discovered substantial manuscripts of the New Testament that go back to the 200’s and 300’s. These earlier manuscripts generally agree with the later ones, but there are some exceptions. The ending of the Gospel of Mark is a case in point. We have good reason to believe that this ending did not really start appearing in copies of Mark until the 300’s.

The historical orientation of our culture has generally led Christians, including Christian scholars, to assume that what we need to do is “get back” to the original text. This drive is similar to the drive to get back to the original meaning of the Bible or to get back to the “historical” Jesus. Accordingly, nearly all modern translations follow the earlier text of the New Testament simply because it is indeed more original than the Greek text behind the King James.

But consider our discussion of relevance in the previous chapter. It is not the original text that Christians used from the 400’s till the 1800’s—it was the “church’s text” that served as the basis of the King James. This text must not have been too faulty, for God didn’t object to its use. Indeed, this text makes clearer some of the Christian beliefs that crystallized in the first centuries of the church. It is the text we find in the vast majority of handwritten copies of the New Testament. It is not the original text, but it is the church’s.

By and large it has not been the original meaning that has spoken to countless Christians throughout the ages. Thus Christians have consistently read the Old Testament with Christian eyes rather than in terms of its original meaning. Indeed, the Greek Orthodox Church does not even consider the original Hebrew Old Testament to be Scripture. Rather, their Old Testament is the later Greek translation of the Old Testament that the New Testament used as its Bible.[20] It is a text that fit with early Christian beliefs about Christ more easily than the original Hebrew text did.

We have now seen that Christians also read the New Testament with the eyes of Christian traditions about the nature of Christ. These beliefs were hammered out in the first few centuries of the church—they were not the debates or issues of the New Testament authors themselves. In many cases these beliefs force the original meaning of the Bible into a subordinate role in the formulation of our faith. They illustrate that God continued to unfold revelation in the lives of his people beyond the pages of the New Testament.

Balancing Continuity with Change

This sense of development in the church leaves us with many questions. Did such development end with the early councils of the church? If we did not stop with the New Testament, it seems hard to stop with the first five world-wide councils. But I prefer not to think of such development in terms of the decisions of political bodies. There were councils whose decisions we do not hear of today, because their conclusions did not stand the test of time.[21]

God’s movement in the church is patient. Sometimes he accommodates the hard-heartedness of generations. Sometimes he meets cultures with context-specific beliefs and practices.

Thus Christians everywhere have come to recognize that the institution of slavery is ultimately incompatible with the essence of Christian faith. We cannot point to any universal council where this idea was ratified. It bubbled up from the Spirit speaking in the church. By faith I believe that the same process is currently at work with regard to women in ministry and in the home. I suspect in two hundred years even the Roman Catholic Church will have women priests! It simply violates our spiritual common sense to suggest that women are spiritually inferior to men in any way.

God’s movement in this manner is patient. He has shown no hurry in reaching these destinations. For centuries he can show a willingness to accommodate the hard-hearts of generation after generation, just as he did in the Old Testament with regard to divorce. No doubt there are eras during which God meets various cultures and contexts with particular understandings that are not meant to endure but that nevertheless meet the needs of those times and places. We must always allow for prophets among us who lead us in directions that only become consensus generations later.

And while I have sharply criticized the idea that the original meaning is the “be all and end all” of the Bible, I believe it also has a role to play. Once we know how to read the Bible in context, it becomes more difficult to hear God’s voice by random words ripped out of their context. Even though scholarly paradigms can change, God meets us in the categories we have, “stooping to our weakness.”[22] So even when our understanding of the original meaning turns out to have problems, God can speak to us where we are at in our understanding.

And ultimately I believe we can conclude many true things about the original meaning. If these understandings are true and God is a God of truth, then surely they also become a factor in how God moves the church forward. In other words, the original meaning can become a part of the way God’s Spirit speaks to the church. If we are allowing for passing phases in the thinking and practice of Christianity, then perhaps at times God uses scholars like Martin Luther to redirect traditions that have departed from the original meaning in inappropriate ways.

We recognize God’s movement best when we look back at the Spirit’s working in the church over time.

It would seem that we recognize God’s movement best when we look back at the Spirit’s working in the church over time. We can never be absolutely certain where he is leading in our own day. But if the Spirit of God lives in the entire body of Christ, then we are on safest ground when we are in dialog with the early church through the Scriptures, the church of the ages through tradition, as well as the visible church of today.

Guiding Principle 2: Interpretation within the Faith of the Church

We arrived at the first guiding principle for biblical interpretation in chapter three. Any interpretation that fits with our love of God and our fellow human is an appropriate interpretation of the Bible—whether it is the original meaning or not. This guiding principle relates primarily on how we use the Bible when we are trying to know how to live out our lives in this world.

We are now ready to supplement our guidelines with a rule of thumb for questions about what we should believe. Here the guiding principle is that our beliefs need to fit with the beliefs that God has “bubbled up” into the church through the Holy Spirit. Any interpretation that fits with the faith of the church throughout the ages is an appropriate interpretation. This is true even if those interpretations are not the original meanings the Bible had.

Any interpretation that fits with the faith of the church throughout the ages is an appropriate interpretation whether it is the original meaning or not.

To avoid the pitfalls we have witnessed so often in history, it seems we must also allow for prophets who challenge the prevailing views of the church as well. But we should not be too ready to accept such challenges. If they do speak for God’s Spirit, rarely will we see the church as a whole move in their direction until long after they are dead. This process may seem puzzling to us. Why does God work in this way? The answer that makes the most sense to me is that it is because God truly cares for us. He is more concerned with meeting us where we are than with making sure he gets his due.