Church T and A

Is there a right and a wrong way to seek wisdom from Scriptures? In other words, is there a morality to Bible study?

On a personal level the question has an easy “yes” when you recognize that using the Bible to exalt yourself or to justify your dirty deeds or to be like W.C. Fields “looking for loopholes” is wrong. But in the larger picture, with the diversity of churches claiming different meanings and varied understandings, the answer seems to be NO. As long as you feel like the Holy Spirit is guiding you, you are free to bring your understanding of God’s Word to light and to hang on to it as truth.

The pursuit of knowledge has its own fierce morality. The scholar is bound to reveal truth whether it is convenient to his theory or not. The scholar should use methods that are logical, reasonable and repeatable. And the scholar needs to be free from interference or influence in their pursuit of truth. These are good morals and have lead to many discoveries but they have also, especially the last one, made the ideas of Tradition and Authority amoral words.

These days the word “tradition” is synonymous with “old school” and “out dated”. We would be shocked if a scientist or historian said they were discarding their findings because they contradicted with tradition. We think tradition just reflects old bias’s that we have outgrown. In our popular culture tradition is something to be thrown off and overcome in pursuit of the new and better.

In the same way in Protestant churches the word tradition has the stink of evil clinging to it. Tradition is the work of man used to obscure the pure words of God. Didn’t Jesus fight those tradition loving Pharisees? Didn’t Paul resist the Jewish influences that tried to pull Christianity back to traditional Judaism? Tradition is an unnecessary addition to the Bible and should be rooted out whenever it rears its ugly head.

The word “authority” has a more visceral negative effect on us. We value freedom and equality so authority is the antithesis of those necessary goods. How can we consider ourselves free and be subject to an authority we can’t question? Where is the equality in one person/organization setting themselves up as above us?  What movie or TV show does not show authority being resisted or torn down? We hate authority with the exuberance of a rebellious teenager and are proud of it.

The “protest” in Protestantism is, of course, against the authority of the pope and the Catholic church. The Reformation claimed to set believers free to seek God in their own way and to understand Scriptures without the heavy hand of church authority holding them back. This freedom was highly successful if you believe that hundreds and hundreds of different denominations making various claims to truth is the best representative of Christ on earth.

Let’s try to come up with a definition for Tradition and Authority we can agree on.

Tradition is the transmission of customs and beliefs that has been passed down to us from the past. In theology it is the assertion that there are doctrines with divine authority that are not specifically found in Scripture.

Authority is the power and/or right to give orders, enforce obedience, have control, to influence, to set direction, etc. The origin of the word is “originator” or being the “author” of a thing. So the inventor of the bucket has the right, as a creator with an intention, to say buckets are for carrying water; they are not a hat.

The secret to not letting these words get away from us and take on other meanings is to

NOT ASSIGN A MORAL CHARACTER TO THEM.

So in theology we shouldn’t label the word tradition as right or wrong but instead ask… are their really doctrines not found in the Bible that have divine authority. In the same way we shouldn’t ask if authority is good or bad but… does the church have the right to be the sole source of doctrine.

Jesus preaches, teaches, lives a godly witness, dies and rises. And he commissions! Did he say “go teach whatever you feel like”? Of course not. Jesus taught his disciples with words and actions. He promised the Holy Spirit so they would remember what he said and have the power to proclaim His message. In this way he made them His successors (no, not as Redeemers but as proclaimers).

Why would Jesus want successors?  Well duh…

Christ wanted the fullness of his revelation of salvation through him to be proclaimed everywhere to everyone and he entrusted this job to mere mortals. Sinners even. Does it not make sense that he would want his successors to pass on his teachings to others so they could pass it on and on and on? He didn’t just want any ol’ teachings passed on but he wanted HIS words passed on. Sounds like the definition of “tradition” and if you think about it this tradition of salvation needs a guardian.

Have you ever played that game called telephone? Its where you whisper a sentence to one person and they whisper it to the next and on down the line and everyone laughs at how much the sentence has changed when the last person in line recites what they think they’ve heard. Wouldn’t it have been better for the first person, the one who made up the sentence, to guard their words as it went down the line? They could have written it down or made them practice or commanded them to speak loud and clear. The game would be ruined but the sentence would be preserved.

You’re probably saying the Bible is the only safe source of Christ’s words but think about where it came from.  Jesus didn’t write anything down. The Gospels and Epistles came many years after his death and Resurrection which means in the meantime it was oral traditions and the teaching of the Apostles that informed people of salvation through Christ. Which means the Gospels and Epistles were a product of oral teachings.

The words in the Bible though do not cover every circumstance of life nor can we imagine they capture every sacred teaching. Read the earliest church writings after the New Testament and you see that from the very beginning there were traditions that had their source in the genesis of the Church and were not merely made up as they went along. So these traditions were not of men but of God.

“Tradition is the living transmission of the message of the Gospel in the Church.”

In giving the Church the commission to transmit and, therefore, to guard his teachings Christ was giving the Church the authority to do this. Its called “the responsibility of authoritative teaching” and with it comes the obvious need to make authentic interpretations of the sacred words that had been passed on. These authentic interpretations are necessary to prevent false conclusions coming out of Scripture and sacred tradition.

For that matter the New Testament as we all use it has its source in the teaching authority of the Catholic Church that sifted through all the writings on hand at the time that claimed they were true and compared them to the Sacred Tradition that had been passed down and guarded since Christ so they could reject what was false.

Do we wish the Church had played Telephone for 2000 years and just hoped what came out would be close to right?

I’ll admit that in this short post I probably haven’t convinced anybody to trust in the tradition or authority of the Catholic Church. For me it was the mess the church has become when it divorced itself from tradition and authority that pushed me toward Catholicism. It seems to me the diversity of denominations is the tradition of men, not the sacred tradition of the Catholic Church.

On top of that is the habit of faith. How can I trust the one true Authority I can’t see if I cannot trust His successors who I can see. There are not moralities of belief but there are virtues of it. Humility and meekness are not traits of the world but they do lead to the kingdom of God.

Death by Dichotomy

Imagine a toddler who is tired, hungry and maybe cutting a tooth. The poor kid staggers around with just two choices fueling its rage and misery: “I want it!” and “I don’t want it!” that probably come out as “Mine!” or “No!” All its screams and tears revolve around these two extremes believing one or the other will make him happy. Desperate and deluded parents offer rational compromises and distractions but the toddler will not hear of it. The extremes are easy, the extremes are decisive, the extremes are strong, and for a hurting toddler the extremes are all she has.
It would be nice to say we all grow up and never fall into the either/or trap again but our world seems to be driven by false dichotomies. From politics to economics to religion and beyond our choices are reduced for us to polar opposites. Its not that we start out believing in one extreme or the other but somehow we just naturally recognize one of the choices as wrong which seems to only leave us with the other. We’re not totally sure about our choice but we know one thing, it is not that other one, that wrong extreme and so we embrace our choice. At this point, in many ways, our rational, logical thinking has died, killed by a false dichotomy.

What is the dichotomy presented to us by many bible scholars?

On one side we have fundamentalism that sees everything in the bible as literally true. They make the bible their sole foundation for truth (including scientific and historical truth) while leaving it open to private interpretation.

On the other side we have rationalism that treats the bible as a man-made object that should be dissected and criticized by experts. The bible is reduced to just another religious-historical-literary tome without supernatural aspects or origins.

The German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was hung by the Nazi’s for being part of a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler dealt with another false dichotomy in his book “The Cost of Discipleship”. The choice here was, you could say, between grace alone and works alone. Lutheranism is famous for emphasizing that we are saved by grace and our works have nothing to do with it which makes Bonhoeffer’s view of this choice all the more amazing. Of course he did not agree that our salvation merely boils down to grace vs. works but he said if that is how you think then it would be better to be a works alone Christian than a grace alone believer! At least, he said, the one struggling to earn his way to heaven wants to please God and recognizes her shortcomings. The ones who have seized the free gift from God and gone on their merry way serving themselves are the ones in eternal danger.

In the same way, I think, if you are stuck in this fundamentalism vs. rationalism mindset you are much better off, in an eternal sense, to be a fundamentalist! At least the fundamentalist believes in a creating, loving, all-knowing, moral, saving, incarnate God. The end of rationalism is agnostic dithering or the cold, hard hopelessness of atheism.

Thanks be to God these are NOT our only choices!

Part of the problem comes down to definitions of terms. To quote Pontius Pilate, what is truth? In RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) class we learned there are more than one kind of truth. Scientific truths, say, have to be observable, testable, and provable. Historical truths need reliable documentation from, preferably, many sources and eye witnesses. Religious truth can only be revealed by God and is spiritual, which is to say it is beyond the lab test yet spiritual truth is revealed to us in the natural world as well. To compress all these truths into one is the fundamentalist error. To throw out the spiritual truth is the rationalist error.

What does religious truth deal with? God’s plan for our salvation!

Now we need to define another phrase: inspired by God. This does not mean God dictated, word for word, the Scriptures to the men who wrote it. It means God placed religious truth into the writers (not scientific truth or historical truth) and they expressed it in various literary forms common in their day. He didn’t reveal the whole of religious truth to every writer. The whole, the complete did not come until Jesus Christ revealed God’s plan for salvation in person a couple thousand years ago.

So if the bible is inspired by God it is no doubt protected by God and so the human authors taught without error. Inerrant! Here’s another word that needs definition. Does it mean God created the universe in six twenty four hour days or that a guy named Noah crammed a bunch of animals on a ship? No. It means that the truths we need for salvation (religious truth) are without error in the Bible.

Does this mean the Bible is a hodge podge of humbug and truth?

No! Scriptural truths are coherent but recognized in two senses: the literal and the spiritual.

The literal meaning of the text is determined by the various literary forms used from poetry, to stories, to bookkeeping, to history, etc. The literal meaning can be found though the use of scholarly methods using sound rules of interpretation (more on this later).

The spiritual meaning of scripture reveals the unity of God’s plan for salvation. To find this you have to examine events in light of Christ, see how these events lead us to act justly and look for the eternal significance in the text.

If you are wondering how the Bible can be considered true if every word, every story, every event, etc. is not absolutely and literally true then talk to Santa Claus. Well, not literally because there is no fat guy at the north pole with a bunch of elves and magic reindeer. Sorry. But considering the lie many of us parents have foisted on our children when they were little there is a close parallel here with the Bible.

Santa may not be true just as many of the stories in the Bible are not literally true but consider some of the objective truths that can be gleaned from Santa Claus. Gift giving is good. There are right and wrong ways to act. Our actions have consequences. Guys with beards are awesome. Parents could use this Santa story, which is not literally true, to teach actual truth to their children. In a similar way the Bible does not have to be 100% literally true in order for God to use it to teach us his religious truth, to show us his plan for our salvation.

So Scripture needs some interpretation in order to glean God’s spiritual truth from it.

How do you do this? How do you interpret Scripture without going in twenty different directions at once? This is where the teaching authority of the Catholic church comes in which I will discuss further next week.

In the mean time I pray we all can resist the lure of the extremes as we seek life through God’s truth and not death by dichotomy.

Central Things

Calvary Chapel, Eagle

Grab a blank sheet of paper, not lined or graphed… no cheaters, and make two short parallel lines a couple of inches apart.  Now make a dot halfway between the lines; don’t measure it, eyeball it and make your best guess.  Now use a ruler to see how you did.  My guess is you will be within a sixteenth of an inch of the true center.  Our eyes, it seems, are naturally drawn to the center of things.

For Calvary Chapel churches the center of faith is the Bible. Now don’t fly off the handle; yes Jesus Christ crucified and risen is their Lord and Savior and they worship God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They gather to worship and pray and serve but at their core they are a learning community.

Chuck Smith founded Calvary Chapel back in the 1960’s.  He left the Four Square church because he saw it as too experiential and not focused enough on the word of God. He avoided all other denominations for the same reason; they’re focus seemed to be on a system and not on the scriptures. His preaching style reflected this as he gave expositional rather than topical sermons and taught sequentially through the Bible rather than picking out bits here and there.

This thorough and in depth preaching style that takes into account the meaning of the original language and historical context is a self identifying feature of all Calvary Chapel pastors and churches. There seems to be a sort of pride in how thorough these sermons are as the guest preacher yesterday described taking nearly half a year to preach through 1 Corinthians at his home church and weeks to just get through the last chapter of Colossians.

The service was not all talk.  It opened with song and prayer meant to prepare the congregation to receive God’s word.  Some of Calvary Chapel’s roots are found in the 1960-70’s hippie Jesus Movement with it’s legacy of contemporary worship music and informal worship service. Most Protestant churches have adopted these practices to some extent.

After all this talk about how sermons are in-depth teaching opportunities yesterday’s sermon was topical and not expository.  This was by necessity because the preacher was a guest giving a single sermon and so did not have the leisure to take months to expound on one book of the Bible.  His topic was on a believer’s need to “Live Relationally” within the church.  His main text came from the last chapter of Colossians where Paul lists several people with whom he has a vital spiritual relationship.

I appreciate the pastor’s emphasis on how church is our spiritual family.  It is not a business relationship where we choose who we deal with based on what they can do for us. A church is a family and you don’t pick your family based on self serving reasons. My favorite line in the sermon, which I can’t wait to use, came as he listed all the ways people at church can be less than perfect and downright irritating; he said:

Welcome to the family!

Calvary Chapel believes it has struck the right balance in theology by staying centered on the Bible as a teaching church but my eye saw something else yesterday. This is something I have only half noticed over the last several weeks. The physical look of a church shouldn’t matter since there are innumerable architectural styles and locations vary from living rooms to school gyms. But once inside a worship space the eye picks out the center without even trying.

The center of the churches I have been attending of late has been the pulpit.

The center has not been the cross or the altar; one or both of which have been absent from most of the churches. There is no prominent visual reminder of sacrifice in these places.

What is the center, the identity, the definition of Christianity?

Is it the sacrifice or the sermon?

The sermon points us to and explains God’s word and TELLS us all about His love. The sacrifice SHOWS us God’s love. We need to see reminders that God defined love for us by showing us how to put others before ourselves. That God did this for his rebellious children shows us what it means to be family. By all means churches, preach to me and teach me but don’t forget to SHOW me who God is and why He matters and should be the center of my life.

What draws your eye when you walk into church? What does that say about God?