Chapter 4

Chapter 5: The Exodus from Mainline Churches

The chapter begins with the common tale of a seminary student who might find increasing knowledge of the Bible but a decreasing sense of its relevance. We note anecdotally the exodus of many from mainline churches to evangelical churches where it is perceived that “something is going on” (A Seminarian’s Tale). The two middle sections deal with the uncertainties that pertain to finding the original meaning of the Bible even after we recognize what it is. The “scientific” nature of such study often leaves us with a Bible that looks something like a dissected frog—we know a lot about it, but it is dead (The Uncertainty of the Original Meaning, Scholarly Paradigm Shifts). The final section reaffirms that the core values of Jesus and so many themes in the Bible are still relevant and worth fighting for, the kinds of things that light a fire in the hearts of people who love God (Good News by Any Name).

· A Seminarian’s Tale

· The Uncertainty of the Original Meaning

· Scholarly Paradigm Shifts

· Good News by Any Name

Chapter 5

When Scholars Decide

A Seminarian’s Tale

Seminaries are graduate schools where most of the students are preparing to become ministers. In many denominations you can’t be fully ordained unless you have a seminary degree called a Masters of Divinity. Seminaries are professional schools—they don’t necessarily presume that you have studied religion previously. The result is that you will often find a number of second career students at a seminary whose first careers had nothing to do with religion at all.

We can tell a tale that many, though not all seminarians have experienced. Many have entered their study of the Bible at a university or seminary with great enthusiasm and vigor. Perhaps the person has heard God calling them to ministry and is eager to “save the lost,” to spread the good news. Maybe they have even risked a change in career in the excitement of serving God’s people. This individual may be someone who hears God’s voice regularly in the words of the Bible and is thrilled with daily reading from the “Word.” They are excited to think of getting a degree that involves serious study of the Bible.

They then experience something like the pilgrimage of this book. They learn how to read the words of the Bible in context. Resist though they might, the facts are irresistible. They increasingly realize that these words were not originally addressed to them. They once heard God’s voice leap off the pages of the Bible without any thought of the original context. Now they get bogged down in things like Greek and “word studies.” They take professor after professor and find not only that each one is absolutely convinced he or she has the correct interpretation. They also find that these teachers frequently disagree with each other on what that “correct” interpretation actually is.

A recent conservative book on the process of biblical interpretation helps make our point.[1] It outlines a four step process for appropriating the Bible for today: 1) determine the original application, 2) evaluate the level of specificity of the original application, 3) identify cross-cultural principles, and 4) find appropriate applications that embody the broader principles.[2]

This procedure makes perfect sense in the light of our pilgrimage thus far. First you figure out what the Bible meant originally in its original context. Then you determine how closely that teaching was connected with the specific context it was addressing. You separate the “all time” significance of this teaching from that which related specifically to “that time” and “that instance.” With these principles in hand, you reapply the teaching to “our time.”

The mind of the seminarian has now become incredibly enlightened with this dose of seminary medicine. But there are also several potential side-effects. Many have lost the joy of reading the Bible they once had. It is now hard work that involves commentaries, dictionaries, and grammar books. Of course some are thrilled at the challenge and find the process exhilarating. Others sub-consciously feel empowered with a secret knowledge of Greek and Hebrew that they can use to trump the uninitiated.

Some now feel incompetent to interpret the Bible. They see no way they will ever be able to interpret with the incredible genius and skills they have seen in their professors. They have either consciously or unconsciously decided not to preach from the Bible in their ministries. Perhaps their grades have told them they have no business talking about what the Bible means. Even if they were once confident about what God has to say, they now feel thoroughly indecisive about what the Bible really means.

For others the meaning of the Bible has become irrelevant. They have understood what it means to read in context, and they now see little connection between its world and their world. They’ve also decided consciously or unconsciously not to use Scripture in their preaching. Perhaps they have even become angry at the Bible and at those who speak of its authority and inspiration.

If we have to know the original meaning to hear God’s voice in Scripture, then the vast majority of Christians who have lived for the last two thousand years are in trouble.

We get the sneaking suspicion that if the Bible is truly “God’s Word,” it must somehow work more simply than this complicated process. What of the illiterate medieval peasant whose best knowledge of the Bible came from the pictures on the stained glass windows on the nearby cathedral? After all, the mass and Scripture were read in Latin. What of the countless Christians out there who really do seem to hear God’s voice in the words of Scripture—even though the meaning they see has little or nothing to do with what it meant originally? In short, if we have to know the original meaning to hear God’s voice in Scripture, then the vast majority of Christians who have lived for the last two thousand years are in trouble.

The Uncertainty of the Original Meaning

We can raise a number of other questions about the quest for the Bible’s original meaning. We have already raised the question of relevance. Even more difficult is the question of whether we can even know the original meaning with certainty. Suppose that you have studied enough to be counted among those who know the most about the Bible. You have become an expert at Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic grammar and have an exhaustive knowledge of ancient history and literature. You know a great deal about what words could mean in the ancient world, as well as its varied cultural and historical settings.

We simply do not have enough information on the original contexts of these individual writings to conclude definitively on countless different issues.

Suppose you have also become a master of the voluminous history of interpretation for every passage in the Bible. You have read every book, every article, and know all the possible interpretations that have been made throughout history. Even if we could find scholars of this caliber, they would doubtlessly still disagree on the original meaning of countless passages in the Bible. We simply do not have enough information on the original contexts of these individual writings to conclude definitively on countless different issues.

One of the more puzzling passages in the New Testament to me is found in 2 Thessalonians 2. This passage addresses the question of how the Thessalonians will know when the “Day of the Lord,” Judgment Day, has arrived. Of course the first thing that strikes me is how they could even have this question. I have grown up with such a cataclysmic sense of God’s judgment that I can hardly fathom how someone could think it had already happened. Here is the first hint that my assumptions must be significantly different in some way from those of the Thessalonians.

The letter talks somewhat cryptically about the things that will happen in the time leading up to the Day of the Lord. It speaks of a “rebellion” and a “man of lawlessness” who “takes his seat in the temple of God” (2 Thess. 2:3-4). But it does not say who is rebelling or what temple. The temple of Paul’s day was destroyed in AD70, and the passage says nothing about a temple being rebuilt in the future, let alone about the one that was standing then being destroyed.

The passage goes on: “Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you?” (2 Thess. 2:5). Here is a painful demonstration that this letter was not written to me. I don’t remember Paul talking about these things because I was not there in Thessalonica. This letter was not addressed to me. I don’t know what rebellion or man of lawlessness he told them about.

The ambiguity gets worse: “[Y]ou know what is restraining him” (2 Thess. 2:6). Yes, the Thessalonians knew, but I don’t. The passage then shifts from talking about what is holding the man of lawlessness back to who is holding him back: “until the one who now restrains it is removed. And then the lawless one will be revealed” (2:7-8). I can make some educated guesses about what this letter was talking about, but we ultimately don’t have enough information to decide with certainty. Gaps like these in our background knowledge put a huge damper on any effort to know the original meaning of the Bible—and thus on any claim that the authoritative meaning of the Bible is the original meaning.

Paul’s view of the Jewish law provides us with an excellent case in point. A group of diverse, internationally renowned scholars of Paul’s writings gathered together in 1995 in the hope of reaching some consensus on Paul’s attitude toward the law of Moses.[3] After a week of discussion, some of the most distinguished Pauline scholars of an entire generation were unable to reach consensus on the issue.

Time and time again we will find that scholars disagree wildly on the meaning and/or significance of a passage. It is not that we can’t identify more and less likely interpretations. Indeed, we can eliminate a great deal of interpretations fairly easily. Thus anyone who would argue that the gospels originally viewed Jesus as the “bad guy” is clearly mistaken.

But even within the clear bounds of context we can almost always find room for multiple potentially valid interpretations. Even when we have tried our best to take off our personal, denominational, and cultural glasses, we will find ambiguity. Even if we resist the urge to harmonize and make the meaning fit with what we already believe, uncertainty will still abound. The original meaning may be a more stable meaning than the passing trends of individuals, churches, and cultures. But it is still potentially quite uncertain.

Changing Scholarly Paradigms

The previous chapter mentioned how church groups often have very specific perspectives they bring to the biblical text, “rules” for how to process the things the Bible says. We compared these “glasses” or frameworks of thought to scientific paradigms and theories. I talked about how a church might have a very specific understanding of the Spirit that it brings to every place where the Bible mentions the Spirit.

We observe in the history of the Bible’s interpretation that the scholarly guild of interpreters also runs through various phases in which a particular paradigm is in vogue. Then we will see a revolution in perspective, leading to a new paradigm. There is always the possibility that some new treasure trove of ancient manuscripts will be found that completely revolutionizes the perspectives about which scholars are now so convinced. This ongoing possibility of a future paradigm shift also calls into question the all-sufficiency of the original meaning of the Bible as an absolute path to God’s voice.

We face the ongoing possibility that some new evidence or hypothesis will completely revolutionize the perspectives about which scholars are currently so convinced.

On the one hand, I am not completely pessimistic about these changing revolutions. We can identify a number of ideas that have basically remained the same since scholars began to read the Bible’s original meaning with a heightened awareness of its ancient context. We can thus identify certain constants throughout the last two centuries. Further, while new evidence could certainly alter our understanding of countless things, we do have an adequate sampling of material from the ancient world to make reasonable suggestions about the big picture of that world.

And the amount of scholarly attention to the minute possibilities of the biblical text is astounding. For example, there were already at least forty different interpretations of 1 Corinthians 15:29 by 1950.[4] With so many budding scholars scouring over the text, all looking to make their mark by way of some new, groundbreaking interpretation, surely most of the possible ways of reading a verse like this one have already been suggested by someone somewhere.

We all know that a multiple choice test is easier than a “fill in the blank” one. In other words, the scholarship of today is more likely to be aware of the “naughty data” that creates paradigm shifts than the scholars of even fifty years ago. It’s easier to be a good scholar today because you have so many different shoulders to stand on and so many electronic research tools and databases at your disposal. So even if we can identify 30 different possible interpretations of 1 Corinthians 6:18, there are only two really strong candidates.[5]

One example of a scholarly perspective that has remained constant for over a hundred years deals with the relationship between Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The wording of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is so similar at times that some literary relationship almost certainly existed between them. In other words, either they have used each other as sources in some way or they come from a common source. The similarity in wording is not simply a matter of Jesus’ words, so it is not just that the disciples remembered what Jesus had said.[6] The verbal similarity extends to how the story is told, even to how it is summarized (e.g., Matt. 8:16; Mark 1:32-34; Luke 4:40). And the same basic stories are also laid out in the same basic order, the same basic collection in a life that included countless more events than these.

Since the late 1800’s the explanation that most scholars have given for this phenomenon is that Mark was written first and that Matthew and Luke then used Mark to provide a basic framework for their own gospels. They then supplemented Mark with their own sources, perhaps even one other major source that they both shared in common. We could list countless other proposals that scholars have made over the last century and a half, but none have ever supplanted the “prevailing paradigm,” which we might call “Markan priority.”

But this is not to say that we have not witnessed some significant “paradigm changes” as well. In particular, the last two decades have seen an explosion in the study of oral tradition and the gospels, the recognition that the ancient world was far more oriented around speaking and hearing than around writing and reading. This development has brought with it a greater recognition of how the process of story-telling works in an oral culture. We remember that the stereotypical poet who told the stories of Homer was blind and recited forty-eight chapters worth of story from memory. Today we recognize illiterate Muslims who can quote the entire Koran from memory.

These considerations have caused gospel scholars to modify their paradigms somewhat. It is not as unfeasible as it used to be that oral tradition of gospel length could be memorized and passed along orally. Perhaps even more significantly, we cannot dismiss the historicity of Jesus’ words and of events in the gospels simply because they may have gone through a phase in which they were passed along by word of mouth and not written down. In other words, oral tradition may vary wording and details around the edges, but in general it is a reliable way of passing information.[7]

To be sure, these considerations have affected the century old consensus on how the gospels came together. The new “oral paradigm” has brought an interesting re-examination of Markan priority. But Markan priority remains the prevailing hypothesis. In other words, even though scholars have modified their paradigm somewhat and we find a less certain guild than twenty years ago, this theory has stood the test of time. It remains the hypothesis most scholars think best fits the evidence we have.[8] It is an example of a scholarly consensus that has remained constant over time despite amazing developments that have taken place around it.

I also believe that changes in paradigm like these can move us closer to understanding the original meaning. For example, the recent consideration of orality has actually moved us closer to understanding the original meaning and history of the words in the gospels. We can identify a similar revolution in the understanding of Paul that has taken place in the last thirty years among Pauline scholars, sometimes called the “new perspective” on Paul.

Up until the 1970’s, scholarship interpreted Paul through the eyes of what I might call a “Lutheran paradigm.” To put it in oversimplified terms, Paul was an individual racked with guilt at his inability to keep the law, to keep from sinning. Judaism was a religion in which you had to be good for God to accept you—you had to earn your salvation. But try and try though he might, Paul was beset with a constant sense of defeat.

In a moment of conversion, Paul realized that no one was good enough for God to accept him or her on the basis of how s/he lived. Paul discovered the doctrine of “justification by faith alone,” the idea that God declares us “not guilty” of our sin on the basis of our belief in Christ rather than by our deeds or works. This doctrine became the centerpiece of Paul’s ministry from then on, as the Jewish Saul became the Christian Paul.

In the last thirty years, scholarship has challenged almost every comment in the last two paragraphs. In many cases scholars have done so in a way that is thoroughly convincing. At some points this “new perspective” on Paul makes so much better sense of the evidence that we are amazed it took so long for us to see it.

For example, Paul’s writings do not really give us the sense that he struggled with a guilty conscience.[9] Certainly Martin Luther did, the father of Protestantism and the lens through which the scholars of the last four hundred years read Paul. But Paul himself does not give off these signals. Words like “forgiveness” and “repentance” only appear sporadically in his writings, while Paul frequently tells his audiences to imitate him (e.g., 1 Cor. 11:1)—something that indicates confidence rather than a sense of inadequacy. Indeed, Paul says that he kept the Jewish law blamelessly before he came to Christ (Phil. 3:6). The key passage that earlier generations took as a “guilty Paul” (Rom. 7:9-24) seems more a theoretical discussion than an autobiographical one.[10] In short, the pre-Christian Paul was probably much more like the Pharisee of Luke 18:9-14 than the young Martin Luther.

Further, the bulk of the Jewish literature at our disposal indicates that Judaism was a religion of grace, not of works.[11] Jews would have agreed with Paul that “all have sinned” and would have agreed that we can only find acceptance with God because he is gracious. Luther at this point once again read his own debates against the Roman Catholic Church into Paul’s debates with his opponents. Paul’s debates focused on whether a non-Jew needed to keep specific aspects of the Jewish law in order to be accepted by God, not on whether we could earn our way to heaven by way of “good works.” And for Jews, it was not a question of “getting in”; it was a matter of responding appropriately to God’s grace—“staying in.”[12]

Several other aspects to earlier paradigms about Paul have also faced challenge in these years. Was justification by faith really the central element in Paul’s thought, since he only really draws on the concept extensively in Romans and Galatians? Did Paul really focus on faith in Christ or should the phrase be translated the “faithfulness of Christ”? Should we really think of Paul being “converted”—did he really think that he changed religions when he came to Christ? Certainly it is wrong to think that Paul changed his name from Saul to Paul when he came to Christ. Acts continues to call him Saul even ten years after he became a Christian.

Of course the new perspective on Paul has been around long enough for it to be challenged as a paradigm also.[13] And we probably cannot identify any consensus yet on the items in the preceding paragraph. But I believe we have seen definite breakthroughs in our understanding of Paul. I think we genuinely understand Paul better today than we did forty years ago. While the new paradigm may change in its details, I think it too will stand the test of time.

Yet the fact that biblical paradigms can change so drastically must give us pause. What if they unearth some new cache of ancient documents tomorrow? What if those new documents put an entirely different spin on issues we had long since thought settled? The Dead Sea Scrolls had this effect when they first appeared. Despite our confidence on various issues, we will never be sure we have it right while we are on earth.

Despite current scholarly confidence on many issues, in the end we can never be certain that we have it right.

We can identify any number of other paradigms that have come and gone, leaving us wonder how anyone ever believed them. A notorious one is the myth of the Gnostic Redeemer that pervaded the scholarship of the early twentieth century. According to this paradigm, a movement known as Gnosticism pervaded the ancient world at the time of Christ. This Gnosticism taught about a heavenly being who came down to earth from the realm of light to rescue humans, who are sparks of light imprisoned in material bodies. According to this paradigm, the early Christians took Jesus to be this heavenly being and incorporated him into the myth.

But of course this paradigm has almost no legitimate basis for it whatsoever. We have no direct evidence that the Gnostic movement even existed in any coherent form until the second century after Christ. Some of the primary sources used to construct the theory date to the 600’s and 700’s—astoundingly later than the New Testament. The theory can only work if we piece it together from scattered comments here and there at the time of Christ and suppose hypothetically that they all existed together somewhere at the time, even though no instance of it has survived.

In the end, it is much more likely that the Christian message came first, and these later Gnostic texts drew from it. This suggestion fits the evidence we have much better. Hypotheses are like pictures we draw out of the data available to us, data that is like dots of evidence on a page. A good hypothesis is one that sticks closely to the available dots, incorporating most of them into its picture and not drawing too much where there are no dots. Like so many paradigms that shift, the picture of the Gnostic redeemer drew the heart of its picture outside the dots we have. It was a pretty picture, but it required us to hypothesize the existence of a lot of dots that weren’t there.

Hypotheses are pictures we draw out of the dots that are available to us. A good hypothesis sticks closely to the available dots and forms the heart of its picture from them.

I personally believe that future scholars will look back at some recent trends in the study of Jesus with a similar puzzlement. It is true that a comparison of the four gospel presentations of Jesus in detail raises a number of questions about how it really happened and what was really said. Even if it is possible in the end to fit these portraits together on a historical level, they do at times give us quite different “feels.” If we had stood there on the countryside, would we have experienced Jesus as the mysterious, yet very human individual of Mark or the very openly divine person of John?

Thus for well over a hundred years scholars have drawn a potential distinction between the “historical Jesus” and Jesus as the gospels portray him. This distinction has given rise to the so-called quest for the historical Jesus, the quest for who Jesus really was, what he really said, and what he really did. Solutions to the quest vary. On the one end of the spectrum are those who think that the gospels basically give us Jesus as he really was, even if the gospels each come at him from a different vantage point. On the other end of the spectrum are those who believe it is impossible to know anything about the historical Jesus at all and that the real Jesus is lost to history.

One paradigm for understanding Jesus that has recently gained a significant following basically sees Jesus as a teacher of popular wisdom. This perspective, best represented by a group of scholars called the Jesus Seminar, argues that Jesus did not see himself as a messiah and that he did not teach anything about God’s approaching judgment or his eventual return to earth. These scholars have little confidence in the gospel portraits as we now have them. Instead, they sift through the gospel material, as well as through other documents about Jesus from the ancient world.

I personally believe that future scholarship will view this paradigm in much the same way we now view the Gnostic Redeemer myth. Like the Gnostic paradigm, the Jesus Seminar constructs a view largely on the basis of later sources and hypothetical sources. Thus they look to later writings like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter. It is certainly possible that these writings have incorporated earlier material in them, but the Gospel of Thomas in particular shows influences that are much later than Jesus. In other words, I think later scholars will agree that these writings have little new to tell us than what we already have in the New Testament gospels.

This portrait of Jesus also draws heavily on a hypothetical reconstruction of a source used by Matthew and Luke. If you remember from above, most scholars believe that Mark was written first and that Matthew and Luke have used it to provide the skeleton of their gospels. But we go on to notice that Matthew and Luke also have a great deal of teaching material in common that is often worded similarly. Scholars have often suggested that both of them were drawing on another common source for this material, material that is sometimes called “Q” after the German word for “source.”

Of course we have no copies of this document—if it even was a written source. The idea of its existence is plausible enough. But when we begin to talk about stages in its development or the community that produced it, we are getting more and more hypothetical. I personally am not opposed to asking questions like these, but clearly we are swimming farther and farther out into uncertain waters.

And it is in these waters that we find the Q of the Jesus Seminar. It is a place where all the teaching of Jesus relating to God’s coming judgment and Christ’s role in it has been stripped away. I want to be careful here. I don’t feel that we can just dismiss all of the criteria and methods the Seminar used to arrive at its conclusions. But in the end I feel that other more obvious features of Jesus’ life and message prevail.

While the Jesus Seminar represents a very significant portion of Jesus scholarship at the moment, we can also observe another segment of the guild that argues strongly for a Jesus who saw himself in messianic terms and who preached the coming judgment of God.[14] While the Jesus seminar focused on the words of Jesus, proponents of this more messianic Jesus focus equally on the events of Jesus’ life. As an aside we see again the immense flexibility that words in themselves have and how they need to be grounded in something beyond themselves!

Everyone agrees that Jesus was probably baptized by John the Baptist—why would anyone make up a story that put him in a subordinate position to John? Yet we know both from the New Testament and the Jewish historian Josephus that John preached the renewal of Israel, that God was doing something in history. When Jesus was baptized by John, he assented to what John was doing. Here is our first objective hint that Jesus saw himself as part of something God was doing in history, not just as a wise teacher.

Most agree that Jesus appointed twelve disciples, even if there are some tensions in the gospels as to what the exact names of the twelve were. Twelve is a highly suggestive number, as it was the number of the tribes of Israel. In other words, it seems to suggest some agenda for Israel beyond simply wise teaching. Yet Jesus did not consider himself as one of the twelve, which probably means he thought he had an even greater role. Could he have thought that he was the messiah?

The next generation of scholars may look back at the current scholarly paradigms in puzzlement.

We could present other evidence both from likely events and sayings that point toward a Jesus who believed that God was on the verge of doing something fantastic in history and that he stood at the very center of it. To those who are new to these kinds of discussions, these comments will seem like understatements. Of course Jesus did; he was God. My point is not to deny these aspects of our Christian faith.

My point is to show how paradigms influence even those who know the most about the evidence. Even the best scholars are affected by the glasses they wear. Paradigms come and go. New evidence is discovered, and a whole generation re-examines the biblical texts in its light. I am optimistic that we know a great deal about the original meaning of the Bible. But the next generation of scholars may also look back at my paradigms in wonder.

The complexity of the preceding discussion may amaze you. Your jaw may be hanging open to realize how extensively scholars debate issues you have never heard about. This fact brings us back once again to the question of relevance. If we must reach some degree of certainty on all these things, if we need to know about these issues to understand the original meaning, isn’t the vast majority of Christendom in trouble? Isn’t there a more excellent way?