A New Kind of Christianity 2
Sorry for the delay in this post, its been overdue for a while.
McLaren's second question in A New Kind of Christianity (HarperCollins 2010) centers around the subject of scripture & authority. He calls it the 'Authority Question,' a question that has lingered among emergent circles for quite some time and is one of the foundational doubts within emergent faith. As an interested follower of Jesus, this question of authority is one that I have studied over the last couple of years and has deep implications with how I process my faith.
How Should the Bible Be Understood?
McLaren begins by asserting his commitment to the scriptures and how vital they are to the life and mission of a Jesus follower. I guess this is a reaction to many rabid criticisms against emergent types, that we are anti-Bible and anti-scripture (an accusation that originated from conservative types towards liberal theology/protestantism types in the 19th-20th centuries). He states that even as a young boy the Bible captured his imagination and stimulated him to pursue a career in literature, and when he became a minister he was elated to devote his career to studying the text that had motivated him as a child. However, McLaren soon found that his quest for a new Christianity inevitably brought him to the subject of the text he loves: the Bible.
McLaren says we've "gotten ourselves into a mess with the Bible." He illustrates this mess in three topics: Science, Ethics, and Peace. For science, McLaren claims that Christians have historically demanded that the "Bible be treated as a divinely dictated science textbook providing us with true information in all areas life," spanning from creation to biology to physics, etc. This literalist view of the text has, more times than not, set Christians on the wrong side of apparent truths throughout history: think Galileo and the orientation of the solar system, Darwin and the theory of evolution, and contemporary theories of quantum physics (Higgs Boson), ecological crises (Global Warming), and psychology/psychiatry. (I think Jeremy will have something to say about this comment in regards to psychology: "I heard stories of suicides committed by young Christians whose churches would not allow them to get psychiatric help... She had been counseled by her pastor to pray and fast as the only 'biblical cure' for depression and forbidden to seek professional help... Similarly destructive patterns of Bible abuse are being repeated even now.") The second example of our mess is rooted in Ethics: "The Bible, when taken as an ethical rule book, offers us no clear categories for many of our most significant and vexing sociological quandaries." McLaren is of course pointing to the many sociological questions (abortion, capitalism, communism, socialism, schizophrenia, system racism, human rights, energy efficiency, sustainability, space travel, to name a few) that have come into focus since the Bible was constructed. McLaren says that the Bible has been forced time and time again to provide answers to questions it doesn't address, and in the process we have abused the text in the process. Third, McLaren sees the Bible being used more and more frequently as a weapon instead of an instrument of peace. We are using the Bible as justification for alienation and even murder (ex: Tutsis vs. Hutu in the Rwandan genocides, and Jews vs. Palestinians in the modern day Middle East conflict). To borrow a phrase from Miroslav Volf, we have used the Bible for exclusion--not embrace.
Now, interestingly enough, McLaren writes: "There is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God says." This statement brings to mind the crucial question: How should the Bible be understood? As God's Word? Or as our word? I find this question of hermeneutics to be fairly informative to the question of authority. How we read the Bible sets the precedence for most (if not all) of theology and life for Jesus followers. Of course, how we read the Bible is going to primarily informed by how we think the Bible came about. McLaren doesn't speak much to this topic in the course of this section, that is the topic of how the Bible came about. What he does do is comment on the current state of the Bible, how we see it now. I had an old testament professor in college who said that it doesn't matter how the Bible came about, rather what is important is that we have it today and how we should interpret it today, in our time. I mostly agree with this, and this is Brian's task in the question of authority, to evaluate the Bible as we have it today--not necessarily debating the issue of how it came about. However, I cannot let go of the fact that how we believe this text to have originated has deep implications on how we're going to interpret it today. You can't have one without the other, in my opinion. I guess, at least temporarily, we'll have to leave the question of what hermeneutics does to overall theology on the table, but this is a topic that I'm deeply interested in and so we'll more than likely return to it in another series of posts.
For now, McLaren sees the mess we're in with the text and proposes that our quest for a new kind of Christianity requires us to address the problem of the Bible with approaches that sanely and fairly engage with "honest scientific inquiry," that provide "constructive and relevant guidance in dealing with pressing personal and social problems," and a path to peace not the way of the myth of redemptive violence. These approaches in turn should, and must, address the mess of science, ethics, and peace.
From Legal Constitution to Community Library
McLaren spends a good chunk of this section presenting readings of the Bible in regards to pro-slavery movements in the United States during the 19th century. Without going into too much detail, McLaren exhibits how Christians have used biblical texts and its presumably unquestioned authority to justify evil. Aside from the three messes we are in (above), McLaren posits that the chief problem with the Bible is how we read it: "Very few Christians today... have given a second though to-much less repented of-this habitual conventional way of reading the interpreting the Bible that allowed slavery, anti-Semitism, apartheid, chauvinism, environmental plundering, prejudice against gay people, and other injustices to be legitimized and defended for so long." Essentially, McLaren argues that we are as guilty of the same as the Christians who argued in defense of slavery during the 19th century on the foundation of biblical authority.
McLaren believes that we need a new way to read the Bible, and this way involves a self-critical turn.
McLaren sees our use of the Bible as more like citations from a legal constitution. That is, we can take certain texts completely out of context and apply them to situations today; much in the same way that our democratic judicial system works today: use past cases as justification for present conflict. The problem with this reading, however, is that it ignores the vibrancy and the life of the text. When we reduce our use of the Bible to a legal constitution we ignore the timeliness of the text, as well. We have to take into consideration several important questions: why the text was written, when it was written, and to whom it was written. All of these questions inform how we read the text today, an interpretation ignorant of these questions is arbitrary and baseless.
Instead, McLaren proposes that we read the Bible, not as a legal constitution, but as a community library. Now, let me hash out this image for a minute. When McLaren says library, he intends to draw upon the imagery of thousands of volumes all providing a hub of information. For example, when one goes to the library, there is a huge (some would say indefinite) amount of resources available. However, what is interesting about these resources is that not all of them are in coherence with each other. That is, you can read about a topic through multiple perspectives in one visit. McLaren calls this the self-critical turn, and he posits that in order to read the Bible in a more mature and responsible way, this turn is necessary. Additionally, the image of community library forces us to recognize the timeliness of the text (mentioned above), as something that is situated in a specific place and time written by and for a specific people (read: culture). Essentially, the community library hermeneutic turns the constitutional hermeneutic on its head. If the Bible is viewed as a community library, then the Bible must have a multiple voices about the similar subjects: "A culture, then, is a group of people who say different things about the same things. They propose a variety of answers to the same basic questions. To be part of the culture means that you agree that your culture's shared questions are vitally important, whatever answers you prefer or propose. Seen in this way, the Bible would be expected to contain the very opposite of the internal consistency we require in a constitution; we would expect to find vigorous internal debate around key questions that were precious to the theological culture in which it was produced." This approach reveals internal inconsistencies (within the text) as non-threatening to its message because the message is precisely the crafted combination of many cultures and their respective opinions/beliefs about the subjects which the Bible faces.
Revelation through Conversation
Naturally, McLaren takes the image of community library and builds upon it to form a robust theology of the Bible. He addresses an issue I find interesting among Christian circles: the topic of inspiration in regards to the text. In my journey I've had many friends tell me that the Word of God is inspired and we shouldn't question it or read too much into it because that confronts the inspiration of the text. Recently, I've tried to get away from these words 'inspired' and 'authoritative' because when you really think about it, what do you mean when you claim the text is 'inspired'? If you mean that humans wrote it, but God 'inspired' it, then really you are saying that humans were merely a channel that God used and ultimately, God wrote the Bible not humans. I think authoritative does a similar jump, but is less radical. McLaren presents a reading that avoids this hopscotch in authorship: "Constitutional assumptions [of the Bible] sneak into the definition of the word 'inspired,' so to say, 'The Bible is inspired' comes to mean, 'The Bible is an inspired constitution.' The same thing happens with a world like 'authoritative.' An authoritative library is very different from an authoritative constitution. An authoritative library preserves key arguments; an authoritative constitutions preserves enforceable agreements."
So McLaren proposes that authoritative is less of a bad word than I think it to be in terms of how we read the Bible. But, we must see the text as a library, a resource of arguments and theologies, the literature of a culture invested in a relationship with this deity Yahweh. In this way, when we read the Bible we are really engaging in a conversation with the diverse population of characters across different cultures and their respective voices.
What I find helpful about a library is that you add to it. Who's heard of a library that is sealed off from the public? It wouldn't be much of a library then, would it? McLaren doesn't take the metaphor this far at the risk of blurring the authority of scripture. (Remember, he still sees authority as a good word.) One of my questions, however, about authority has to do with how we deal with contemporary theology and literature in comparison to 'ancient' theology and literature. Is the Bible something that stands up and above any other literature? Or is it just literature as one would expect, albeit nonetheless intriguing?
Wes
