Gays, Women, and How to Stop Reading the Bible Immorally

Today I'd like to discuss how I arrived at my position on gender roles and LGBT rights. Specifically, I am a feminist, and I am gay affirming. So how did I arrive at those conclusions biblically?

To answer that I need to discuss my three core sources of theology, which are the Bible in conversation with science and ethics.

Ethics as the Lens for Biblical Interpretation

Ethics is the art of thinking morally. Ethics is inseparable from biblical interpretation because if we are not reading and interpreting and applying the Bible in a way that is moral and good and loving, then we are simply reading it wrong. That premise is the baseline for how Jesus read Scripture, and for how we should read it, too. When people do the opposite, taking things that are obviously immoral, and reasoning that if the Bible says it, it must be moral, they are calling evil good, and thus get the Bible and life dead wrong. It's worth noting that this is something that Isaiah, the biblical prophet most quoted by Jesus, specifically criticized, "Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil" (Isa 5:20). So if we think that doing so is a faithful reading of Scripture, we are kidding ourselves. It is a misreading because it is immoral.

We need to interpret Scripture through the lens of love, we need to ask as we read "is this interpretation good and loving?" Biblical interpretation must be done through the lens of ethical evaluation, and to fail to do this is to fail to do the central most important task of biblical interpretation. To fail to do this is to read in a way that promotes evil in God's name. 

This all may sound self-evident. Of course we should read the Bible morally, and this requires that we learn to think ethically as we read. But an ethical evaluation of the biblical text goes against the grain of how one learns to do biblical exegesis in seminary, where students are taught to not ask ethical questions in the name of scholarly objectivity, and where the compartmentalized nature of specialization keeps ethics detached from exegesis. To the extent that this is true, seminaries are failing to train future pastors, professors, and theologians properly.

Because of this deficit, I have had to go out of my way to bring ethics into conversation with theology and biblical interpretation. I'm so glad I did. My theology, as well as how I interpret Scripture, has been profoundly deepened and enriched by learning from good ethicists. Two contemporary ethicists who were formative for me as a young evangelical were Ron Sider and Glen Strassen. More recently I have learned a lot from David Gushee and Russell Moore. 

What's critical is that the main focus of the ethicist is not interpreting the Bible, but addressing the moral questions of our day, critically asking how we can live in a way that is good. Like the prophet, the ethicist must be independent from the tradition. This focus is crucial because otherwise the ethicist becomes an apologist for status quo interpretations (and I can unfortunately think of a few ethicists who fit this description). Doing ethics in this sell-out way is of course... ahem... unethical, and it also means we lose the very thing that makes ethics valuable: helping us to think morally. 

Again, this is precisely how we should be reading the Bible -- not with the aim of maintaining the status quo of the power tradition, but with the aim of letting the Bible lead us into loving practice. Scripture is not an end, it is a vehicle, and ethics is the key.

Science and the Importance of Having a Theology Based in Reality

Practically applying this is where psychology comes in, and more broadly where science comes in. Science is the study of how reality works. Social science is the study of how humans work in that reality. The way this functions is that science comes about by trying stuff in the real world and seeing what happens. It's about experimentation, observation, practice, evidence-based.

I don't think it can be stated enough how important it is that our interpretation of the Bible coincides with reality. The trouble is, Christianity has often seen science as a threat. When one thinks of this conflict between faith and science what comes to mind is often questions of natural science, evolution vs creationism for example. But social science poses a far more substantial threat to stuck-in-the-past theology because it speaks to what is moral and good. Social science, for example, tells us that beating children is bad for them, which challenges the traditional view, found in the Bible, that it is good for children to beat them. Social scientists know this because they observe what happens to children who are beaten, and observe that this harms them.

Again, this really should be a no-brainer. We should be able to look at the effects of what we do, and observe whether we are causing harm or promoting good. Science provides us with tools for doing this as objectively as humanly possible, and puts us on a path of continually seeking deeper and better understandings of how we humans function based on observing us in our lives. It's not perfect of course (nothing we humans do ever is), but science helps us get to places way beyond where we could go without it. Again this is not only true for how natural science helps us with things like medicine and technology, but also for how social science can help us to be... social.

Again, my theology has been deeply influenced by learning from psychology. The fact that I'm married to a psychotherapist is of course why I know much more about the practical world of contemporary psychology than I got from college text books. We've learned an awful lot in the century since Freud, including lots of insights from the neurosciences, and psychology is not just about lying on a couch and talking about your mom.

The bottom line here is that when I approach theology and biblical interpretation, I am always looking for how this will work in practice. I observe that Jesus was, too. Of course science did not exist at the time, but reality did. Science is simply a tool to help us to measure that reality better, and I'm deeply grateful for it. 

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

So let's bring all of this together in relation to gender roles (both impacting women's roles as well as LGBT issues). I recently read this in the "what we believe" part of a church's website in the city where I live. I'm sure you can find a similar statement from a church in your town,

"Adam and Eve were made to complement each other in a one-flesh union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women, such that marriage ultimately serves as a type of the union between Christ and his church. In God’s wise purposes, men and women are not simply interchangeable, but rather they complement each other in mutually enriching ways.

God ordains that they assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord. In the ministry of the church, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and to be developed to their full potential in the manifold ministries of the people of God.

The distinctive leadership role within the church given to qualified men is grounded in creation, fall, and redemption and must not be sidelined by appeals to cultural developments." (emphasis added)

So to sum up, as you can see in what I highlighted in bold, they not only are not gay-affirming, but they also think that women should assume a lesser role, submitting to their husbands. That submissive role is the ceiling for a woman's "full potential" in life. Only men can be leaders in the church.

Here's the kicker: All of this "must not be sidelined by appeals to cultural developments" which translates to, we will hold this view despite what we can observe about how people work and how reality works (science), and we will hold to this view despite what we learn from asking whether this stance restricts and harms people, treating them as if there were less than they can be (ethics).

This is an example of reading the Bible detached from science and ethics, and thereby detached from reality and morality.

Typically, when discussing what the Bible has to say about a topic such as gender roles, the conversation is restricted to the sphere of biblical arguments. This is true whether one is making an argument for or against women's equality. They might bring in cultural context, they might look into the Greek, they might question the authorship (implying for example that if Paul didn't write 1 Timothy it's okay for us to discount its rather sexist perspective).

That's all fine and good, but what is left out of this is bringing the Bible into conversation with science and ethics, that is, connecting the Bible with reality and morality. Let's try this out with women's roles:

It is easy to observe that women are perfectly capable of assuming roles that have been traditionally reserved for men. We have women who are CEOs of major corporations, women who are chief of surgery, women professors, women Presidents, and plenty of women pastors who are all doing just as good of a job as their male counterparts. So to claim that they cannot lead is demonstrably false.

So the way I arrive at the conclusion that women should be able to assume leadership roles is simply that they obviously can and are, and so any interpretation of the Bible denying this strikes me as one that is detached from reality. Indeed, as we read in the above statement of belief, it is intentionally so. 

Imagine going to this church as a woman. Let's further imagine that you are the female dean of a seminary, and are responsible for equipping scores of future pastors. But suddenly when you enter the doors of this church you are not allowed to be on the board of elders or even to lead a Bible study. This is of course completely absurd. It's like walking through the doors of this church is equivalent to walking into a time machine, teleporting you into the patriarchal past, undoing the progress of centuries. The church has made itself into an irrelevant island, clinging to the past, not because it is good or true, but just because this is their frozen tradition.

So allow me to sum up in a single word my reasoning for why women should be seen as fully equal to men: Duh.

My reasoning for being gay-affirming is similar. It is essentially the same reasoning taken by those in the mental health field. A major part of what they do is help promote human flourishing. Because of this, the question they have asked, and indeed the question they ask with everything, is this: What is best for people? What leads to harm, and what leads to flourishing? How can we best help people to live well?

What they found is that while there is simply no evidence that same-sex relationships are themselves harmful, there is a considerable amount of evidence that the condemnation and rejection the LGBT community faces is profoundly harmful. Further, attempts at changing a person's sexual orientation have proven to be deeply harmful.

So if we ask, "how can we help someone to find life?" If we ask the moral question "what does a person need most?" The answer I am led to is that they need to know they are loved, just as they are, and for who they are. That's true of everyone. 

Further, I can see nothing at all that is harmful about two adults in a mutually loving relationship. This is not like having an affair which does harm another person. It is also not like being a sexual predator who harms others. These are issues of harming others, via betrayal and dominance. When people try to make parallels between LGBT people and sexual predators it is a false parallel. I wish I didn't have to spell that out, but based on the current discussions on bathrooms and the T part of LGBT, apparently I do. Harming others has nothing to do with one's sexual orientation or identity.

So again, I attempt to look at the reality of life (science), and ask tough ethical questions. The conclusion I come to is that there's nothing wrong with being gay, and there is something very wrong with the way that gay people have been made to feel condemned and rejected by fellow Christians. That's where repentance needs to happen.

I maintain that it is vital that we employ the tools of both ethics and science as we engage these and other questions of biblical interpretation, and that to fail to do so will lead us to an immoral reading detached from reality. 

Fear, Fundamentalism, and Moral Development (part 2)

Last time I discussed human moral development, and how fundamentalism functions to keep people at underdeveloped levels of moral development, characterized by black and white thinking and fear. This time I wanted to look at how we can work to move ourselves and others away from moral immaturity and towards higher level moral thinking, based on understanding Jesus' message of enemy love.

Consider what goes on in our heads when we get mad: I stop seeing things in terms of "us" and instead see everything as me against you. I feel the need to defend myself, not to hear you. I need to have my side validated as "right." If I am accused of doing something to hurt you, my focus will not be on expressing care for you, let alone remorse. Instead I will focus on justifying myself. You misunderstood, I didn't mean it. I'm innocent, and I am the focus.

All of this is me-focused, rather than we-focused. When we feel threatened, our brain shifts into self-defense, self-protection mode. That self-focus has a valuable function (it preserves your life when there is danger), but it also means that if I switch into this mode when I'm having a disagreement with my wife that I will see her as the "enemy" through the distorted lens of my self-protective bubble. 

Sociologist Christian Smith has described American (conservative) Evangelicalism as "embattled and thriving," and both of these are true. In fact, Evangelicalism thrives precisely by fostering feelings of outrage and fear. Perhaps that's why it's growing, while the Catholic church under pope Francis is shrinking. Remove the fear and everyone heads for the exits. Sad but true.

Fundamentalism is all about maintaining that self-protective bubble. Those on the inside are good, those on the outside are seen as a threat. There is a strong need to be right. Because outrage and fear are fostered in a fundamentalist environment, being in that environment for an extended time is very much like being angry all the time. That us/them thinking has the positive function of creating a deep sense of belonging and identity within the group, but at the same time it moves those inside further and further from empathy--which is at the very heart of how Jesus saw those who were considered "outsiders" by the fundamentalism of his day.

In short, fundamentalism is a form of tribalism that fosters and perpetuates this anti-social self-focused state, stunting a person's moral growth. The longer a person spends in that environment, the more morally impaired they become--like living in a building filled with asbestos. Asbestos is meant to protect you from fire, but poisons your insides. Fundamentalism is the same.

This self-protective reaction can be a response to physical danger, and it can also come as a response to perceived threats to our self-worth--feeling disrespected, shamed, rejected, abandoned, unloved. Both of these are core needs. We might even call them primal. So when we feel that either of these are threatened we can "freak out." 

This "freak out" response is our body's response to perceived threat. When we are triggered, the social part of our brain (called the cerebral cortex) gets shut down, and our brain is driven by its fear center (the lymbic system). That's why you can't see the other, and become so self-focused when you're triggered. It's physiological. This physiological emergency brain shut-down function may be good for a caveman being chased by a woolly mammoth, but it's not so great for relationships.

We need to develop morally and socially beyond that caveman response. We can all become triggered when we feel our value is threatened--when we feel disrespected, shamed, rejected, abandoned, unloved. What we need to do when we feel triggered like this is learn to break out of our self-protective bubble. 

That begins by learning to recognize when we are triggered, and taking time to calm down so we can "see" socially again. This is again physiological. We need time for our brains to come back online. But what we can do is develop self-awareness, like a person who recognizes when they have had too much to drink and hands over their car keys, we can learn to recognize when we are socially impaired due to a lymbic reaction of our brain.

The next step is to seek to see the perspective of the other, too, to move from "me" to "we." That's empathy--which is both central to both moral development, and to the way of Jesus. If this is with someone we love, that empathy can kick in as soon as our cerebral cortex comes back online. So all we may need is to allow time for this. If we are talking about an "other," then we need to work to develop that empathy, to move from seeing them as an "enemy" or "threat" to seeing them through the lens of love. Jesus was all about pushing us to widen our circles to include those we put on the outside.

That's how we can work on ourselves, but what about when someone else is triggered and emotionally reactive? How can we help a person who is morally impaired to break out of that self-focus? To put it in gospel terms: How can we rescue them from the dominion of fear, and reconcile them to Christ and his kingdom way of love? Again, when a person is reactive, this is a response to a perceived threat to their value and worth. So communicating to them that you genuinely value them, and value their concerns can create a safe space for conversation rather than defensiveness. Love disarms. 

Of course a person needs to have insight and self-reflection themselves. They need to take responsibility for their moral growth. But "disarming" a person by affirming and validating them can create the safe space to help make that possible.

What also is often necessary when seeking to reconcile two parties in conflict is the help of a trained mediator. A mediator, who is both neutral and validating to both parties, can work to repair trust. 

That's pretty much the opposite of the approach of Christian apologetics which is not set up to seek to understand the other, to disarm with love, or to reconcile the other. Apologetics seeks to win an argument, but in the process loses the person. Again, that whole antagonistic "I win, you lose" approach is one of low moral development. We need to learn to win people, not win arguments. 

Here's an amusing thought experiment: Imagine a debate--say between an atheist and a Christian-- where instead of each  speaker attempting to "win" the debate by "proving" that their position was superior, the moderator instead worked to get them both to understand and validate the other's feelings and concerns, so that in the end the two grew closer.  I want front row tickets to see that!

"God has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God" (2 Cor 5:20).

Fear, Fundamentalism, and Moral Development

There's a great clip from Richard Rohr by my buddy Travis Reed at Work of the People. In it, Rohr discusses how a major problem with the Bible has to do with who is reading it,

"If you put the word of God in the hands of an angry young man, they're going to misuse it, abuse it, distort it, murder the text, to make it fit their own agenda...  The Bible is best put in the hands of mature human beings who are not filled with anger and fear and agenda."  -Richard Rohr

The reason that we will never get to a time where there will not be fundamentalism is because fundamentalism has to do with a lack of human moral development. It is a reflection of  immaturity, and unfortunately, to turn a phrase, you will always have the immature among you. 

The real problem is not with the Bible, but with how we read it -- whether we read it like Jesus did as a vehicle to move us towards compassion, or read it like the Pharisees did in a spirit of unquestioning obedience that leads to hurt. In other words, the problem is not so much with the Bible as it is with people who are at a very low level of moral development which is characterized by black and white thinking and fear.

The theory of moral development, pioneered by Lawrence Kohlberg in the 1950s, observes that as humans we go through stages of development morally. The morality of small children is characterized by black and white thinking and motivated by avoidance of punishment. As we grow older, and our brain develops, we become capable of higher forms of morality such as empathy, understanding the perspective of another, and doing things not to avoid punishment, but because we care for others.  

Little kids exhibit low level moral development because their brains are not developed enough yet to be capable of these higher moral functions (which is incidentally why children should not be tried as adults in our legal system). When adults exhibit low level moral development, this is a problem. It's moral immaturity.

It is important to stress here that by the term “fundamentalism,” I am not referring to those with conservative or traditional beliefs (many of which I myself affirm), but rather to a way of approaching belief that is authoritarian, judgmental, self-righteous, and ultimately fear-based. Such a fundamentalist environment encourages people (by means of shame and fear and threat) to remain at a low moral developmental level. Fundamentalism fosters fear, rather than helping people overcome it. It consists of indoctrination that stunts a person's moral development, and the more time a person spends in that environment, the more their moral growth atrophies. 

The same is true with watching Fox News, or spending time in other toxic environments like internet comment boards filled with viciousness. Fundamentalism takes many forms: There's religious fundamentalism (including atheist fundamentalists), political fundamentalism, and so on. Basically, any ideology or belief system can be approached in a morally immature way, characterized by otherizing, fear, and black and white thinking. The more you feed on that diet of fear and anger, the more it stunts your moral growth, the more it shrivels the soul. When they say "you are what you eat" that's not talking about food.

The problem is that, rather than recognize this black and white thinking and fear as indicative of low level moral development, fundamentalism instead upholds this as moral virtue. Compromise is seen as failure, compassion as weakness; hate and judgment become virtues.

We need to recognize these things for what they are, and that is an underdeveloped morality. To the extent that we foster staying at that low level of moral development, we make people less good. That is what a fundamentalist church does. 

But it is not just churches. Our public discourse -- whether this is grandstanding politicians, shouting pundits on the news, or the toxic posts on the comments section of any big internet site -- is characterized by people who exhibit very low level moral development: fear based, black and white, otherizing, incapable of understanding complexity or finding compromise. This moral immaturity is so prevalent that it feels like the norm, but it is not normal to have so many morally stunted adults (let alone is it the ideal), it's very broken.

To put this in typical Christian terms, it is a sin. I don't say that to place shame, but simply to underline that fostering moral immaturity as a virtue is bad. It hurts people because of how it otherizes and reacts in fear, leading to violence -- especially when we have morally immature people in positions of power and influence. Jesus in the Gospels spends quite a bit of time confronting this in the Pharisees. So while it is uncomfortable to be "negative" and to point out the problems, it is important to do so for the health of our ourselves and our society. So I want us to take note of moral immaturity that masquerades as a virtue.

Next time I'll talk about how we can work to move ourselves and others away from moral immaturity and towards higher level moral thinking, based on understanding Jesus' message of enemy love. Here's part 2.

My article in Sojourners on wrestling with violence in the Bible

My feature article just came out in the latest edition (Jan, 2012) of Sojourners Magazine. It is called:

"The Way of Peace and Grace: How Paul wrestled with violent passages in the Hebrew Bible"

You can read it online at the SoJo website for free (you just need to register).
EDIT: For those who don't want to register, here's a direct link to a
PDF of the article

As the title suggests, it deals with how we can faithfully wrestle with really disturbing passages in the Bible that seem to advocate and even command committing violence in God's name. As I've mentioned before, most commentaries tend to either justify or downplay these passages. What I propose is a very different approach: if we learn to read the Bible the way that Jesus and Paul did, we can deal with them like they did.

In the Sojourners article I deal in particular with how Paul wrestles with violent passages from the Old Testament, disarming them and putting them under Christ. You'll need to read the article for the details, but Paul's approach is pretty awesome. If Paul read the Old Testament like this, then I think its fair to say we would be on pretty solid ground if we read it that way too.

I'm really excited about this article, and am thrilled to finally be able to share it. As far as I know, it represents a unique contribution to biblical scholarship. I've found scholars making similar conclusions about Paul, buried in the middle of some obscure footnote in a dense technical commentary, but I have not seen anyone connect all the dots like this. In fact, books like the Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament miss (or intentionally omit?) this pattern in Paul's reading entirely, even though Paul does this constantly. In doing so, they completely miss how Paul reads his Bible and arrives at a gospel of grace that is so different from how he previously read his Bible before his conversion to Christ.

What's more important than scholarship though is how we, as followers of Christ, read the Bible as Scripture. Adopting Paul's way of wrestling with these violent passages opens up a way for all of us to read the Bible that does not force us to check our conscience at the door. Jesus and Paul didn't, and neither should we!

So if you've ever wondered how Jesus or Paul could have read the Old Testament and arrived at a loving, radically grace-focused understanding of God, then check out the article.

Why the Cross Matters (Pt 2)

Last time I left off speaking of Paul's exegetical declaration "I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Co 2:2). The cross has a profound affect on how we read the Bible, and is key to its proper interpretation. This time I want to focus on how the cross affects how we think and how we live, that is, how it is the key to a Jesus-shaped ethics.

Paul's stance of seeing everything through the lens of "Christ crucified" completely revolutionized how he read Scripture, and it also revolutionized how he lived his life, and his understanding of what it meant to follow God. That is not just pious talk, Paul radically changed his approach to faith, going from a faith which led him to violently persecute the church, to one that led him to endure persecution in Jesus name. He went from legalism to grace, from religiously justified violence to enemy love and nonviolence. At the heart of that change is the cross. Having listed all the things he used to see a central to his faith, Paul writes, "I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ" (Phil 3:8). Now what does it mean to "gain Christ"? He continues, "I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. (v 10-11). Notice the pattern here of knowing the power of the resurrection by becoming like him in his death.

This echos the pattern Paul has set up in the previous chapter where he tells of how Christ "being in very nature God... made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant" (Phil 2:6-7) and how that act of self-giving and dying to self resulted in "every tongue acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (v 11). For Paul, saying "Jesus is Lord" means that the crucified one is Lord, and thus that God has proclaimed the way of the cross as both God's way and our way. This is, as Michael Gorman calls it, Paul's "master story" of both the narrative of God's actions in Jesus, and of our model of ethics as we take up our cross and follow. Paul in fact directly connects the example of Christ in the opening hymn of Philippians with how we should act. He introduces it by saying, "In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus" (v 5). Our way of life needs to be the way of the cross, the way of doing "nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others." (v 3-4).

Paul makes an identical point in in Romans when he says we are to live as a "living sacrifice" (Ro 12:1) so that how we think, see, and act is formed by the cross . He continues, "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (v 2). Notice here, as in Philippians, Paul draws a direct connection between Christ's sacrificial death and our ethical response. In fact, more than any "theory" of the atonement, what we see in the NT again and again is a connection made from what Jesus did, and what we should do. The cross leads to ethics. From the perspective of the New Testament, this is not a side point, it is the main point.

Paul goes on in this chapter to outline what that looks like. It involves being "we-focused" rather than "me-focused," caring for those in need, demonstrating humility and compassion... but the crux of it all (if you pardon the pun) is summed up in his concluding statement "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good" (12:21). We see here that Paul's understanding of the Christ crucified, and what it means for us to declare the crucified Jesus "Lord" is deeply tied to what we see Jesus doing throughout the gospels in his teaching and ministry. That is, in order to understand the cross we need to get that all of what Jesus did lead up to the cross. The way of Jesus we see throughout the gospels is the way of the cross. Paul directly makes that connection for us.

Why does the cross matter? Because the atonement is inseparable from ethics, and from exegesis. Understanding the cross properly does not just have an impact on our own personal salvation and relationship with God (as important at that is!), it also changes how we see our world, what we value, and how we treat others.

Why the Cross Matters (Pt 1)

Today is "Christ the King Sunday" and that seemed like an appropriate time to begin a series of posts I wanted to do on why the cross matters. This time I wanted to address how the cross affects how we interpret Scripture. I've said before that we need to read the Old Testament through the eyes of Jesus in order to properly understand it the way the New Testament does. However I want here to make that more specific: we need to take all of what we read and bring it to the cross in order to understand it correctly.

This can be clearly seen in how the cross shapes our understanding of who God's true messiah is. Peter along with the majority of his fellow Jews at the time had expected the messiah to be a warrior king who would lead Israel to conquer the gentiles by the sword, just as Joshua had done for Israel when it entered the promised land. Their hopes of having a just world free from oppression were tied up in this being brought about through violence and bloodshed in the name of God, freedom, and justice. It is an ethos that I'm sure we all recognize as being alive and well today as well, but it was decidedly not the way of Jesus. Jesus did not come to kill the gentiles and sinners, he came to reconcile and save them, and he did not plan on bringing about this "deliverance" by military conquest, but by giving his life on a cross.

This was an idea that was so completely foreign to Peter that when he heard it, he exclaimed to Jesus "never Lord!" Peter says this immediately after he has declared that Jesus is the messiah. The two go hand in hand. Peter's idea of the messiah, based on what he saw in the OT was one of a war lord who redeems through violent force. But Jesus says to him "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men" (Mt 16:23). I'm sure you've heard many sermons on the first part of that sentence, but I want to highlight the last part: you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men. Jesus thinks that Peter's understanding of the messiah--an understanding that the majority of biblical scholars would agree is solidly founded on the Old Testament texts--does not represent God's way but man's. So Peter and we need to completely redefine everything the OT says about the messiah in the light of the cross.

We in fact need to do that with everything we read in the Old Testament. We need to take it to the cross and see how it is transformed by it. We need to apply the theologica crucis to all our exegesis. An exegesis of the cross if you will. Take for example the story of David and Goliath. There we have the tale of how the little guy overcomes the giant. But notice that the little guy still overcomes that giant by killing him. What we need to ask is how this story is like the cross, and how it is not. What in this story points us to the cross, and what in this story needs to die. In Jesus we have the story as well of the little "mustard seed" of the kingdom accomplishing big things, and we have the picture of Jesus overcoming and fighting evil, but the enemy is not other people, it is evil and death itself. Jesus does not win the battle by violence and force, but by going to the cross.

It is crucial that we apply the cross to all of what we read in the Bible. This will often necessarily mean deliberately subverting the intended meaning of a passage in the Old Testament--reading it in a way that may appear to be, as Paul says, "a stumbling block" and "foolishness" to some. The theology of the cross carries with it exactly such radical consequences. It means not only our dying, but also the crucifixion of destructive religion itself. This is precisely why the religious leaders of his time wanted Jesus killed. But as Jesus says, if we do not learn how to bring the cross into our exegesis and let it shape how we interpret Scripture, we will likely end up like Peter misreading the Bible and promoting "the way of man not God." This is in fact exactly what Paul did before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. He had read his Bible and saw in there that the way to defend God was through violent zeal, and he exercised that zeal, that violence in the name of God, in persecuting the church. But after he met the crucified Lord, he read those same Scriptures and saw a completely different narrative. So he proclaims boldly "I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Co 2:2).

Getting Historical Jesus Study Wright and Wrong

I recently blogged about why the historical study of Jesus is a waste of time. There I argued against the prevalent mode of historical Jesus studies, which has been to pick which sayings of Jesus are "authentic" and toss out the rest. Apparently, I am not the only one who has problems with this. For example a few months ago Scot McKnight wrote a scathing article in Christianity Today where he made many of the same points I did in my previous blog post here. In his response to McKnight, NT Wright argued that there is a "massive gulf" between the way he (and a few others) do historical Jesus studies, and the kind of historical Jesus studies that McKnight and I are criticizing. What Wright does in contrast is all about understanding the historical context and worldview of the time so that we can then read the canonical text without projecting our own assumptions and worldviews into it. This is something that I could whole-heartedly embrace. So I guess I should re-title that blog post "why the historical study of Jesus was a waste of time until NT Wright came along."

That said, there are some problems that folks have raised with Wright's historical reconstruction of Jesus. I'd like to discuss two of those here and then offer my own thoughts about them. They are (a) the existence of heaven, and (b) the doctrine of justification. So pretty heavy-duty topics. Let me also say at the outset that I offer these critiques with great respect. NT Wright is not only a brilliant scholar, he is also a caring pastor with a real heart for people and for ethics, so I know that the issues I'm raising here are ones he cares about too.

Imagine There's no Heaven. NT Wright has made a point of saying that the NT does not teach that Christians go to heaven when we die. One example of this is an interview he gave in Time magazine called "Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop." Instead Wright focuses on the larger message that we will all one day rise when Jesus comes back. That of course raises the question: where are my loved ones now? Markus Bockmuehl gave a talk at this years Wheaton Theology Conference (check out the link for video and audio of all the talks) where he demonstrated persuasively from biblical evidence that Wright was wrong about this (or at least that he is only telling half the story). Believers when they die will indeed go to be with Jesus and the community of the saints and be in heaven with God. In the following panel discussion session, Wright does not really disagree with Bockmuehl (although he feels a bit misunderstood), and instead stresses that the reason he focuses so much this non-heaven line is because he wants to get away from the escapist notion of heaven that is so common. Fair enough, but that's like saying God does not exist because people's faith is too escapist (which is of course exactly what the New Atheists do).

So what we have is a matter of emphasis: The NT says that we go to heaven (or if you prefer, we go to "be with Jesus"), and it says that we will all rise in the great resurrection. The focus of the NT is on the later. What then happens is that Wright will be quoted by Time or some other news source which will then simplify this to "Christians Wrong About Heaven" and next thing you know folks are going claiming there is no such thing as heaven (and I've heard seminarians claim exactly that). Wright does not mind this so much because he believes that it is important that we draw our attention away from heaven which he associates with escapism. Here he is making a legitimate ethical point (our concept of heaven should not be escapist), but he is doing so with the wrong means (saying as a historian and scholar that the Bible does not teach that we go to heaven).

This illustrates something that happens all too often with historical Jesus studies: Scholars will use their authority status as historical experts to make ethical points. The very same thing happens when other historical Jesus scholars claim that Jesus did not actually say something which... big surprise... they don't like. Now it is certainly valid for these scholars to make such ethical points, but we need to be very careful here. It is very important to be forthright about the ethical claims that are being made, and not mask these behind the mantle of objective historical research. That would be a misuse of both ethics and historical study, and do a disservice to both disciplines.

What Wright is saying is an ethical point: we should care for this earth. We should be involved in healing our world here. I totally agree with him on that (and highly recommend his closing talk). But that is really an ethical and theological issue, and needs to be discussed openly as such. Frankly, I do not find Jewish apocalyptic helpful at all in working towards this. I find on the contrary that it muddies the waters quite a bit. Maybe that's just me, but I think the focus needs to be on how we can implement the kingdom teaching and actions of Jesus right now in our lives, and not on grasping some foreign concept of eschatology from another worldview. That gets our focus off of what it should be on, which is embodying Christ-like action in our world.

Does Luther get Justification Wrong? Another issue is related to Wright's take on the New Perspective on Paul, which basically says that Paul in Romans is not focused on answering Luther's question of "how can I find a gracious God?" and instead is arguing against issues of food laws and ritual observances. Now I've personally been a proponent of the New Perspective (in particular the version espoused by James Dunn). I find it brings a lot of things to light that had been missed before, like how the gospel deals with issues of religious violence, and exclusiveness. I think it is fair to say that the New Perspective gets Paul right historically in a way that Luther does not.

That said, I think that Luther did manage to see how Paul's message of grace in his own time spoke directly to the issues that Luther was dealing with in his. A first step in biblical interpretation is to understand the original context and meaning, but then we need to go beyond that ask how the text might speak to our own pressing questions. Otherwise it just becomes a letter dealing with issues that were important in the past, which are no longer relevant to us today (food laws, circumcision, etc).

So I think it would be a mistake is to say that the New Perspective is the one right way to read Paul. Wright however does seem to place precisely that kind of priority on his historical reading, and that is what I would want (lovingly I hope) to challenge. The New Perspective definitely has many profound insights that we need to hear, but then so did Luther and the protestant reformation. Why can't we hear and learn from both of them? The other Martin Luther (King Jr.) also read the New Testament and found it speaking to issues of racial justice and equality, applying it in ways that the original authors also had not directly envisioned at the time. Do we need to dismiss that too because it is equally unhistorical? On the contrary, I'd say that what Luther and MLK were doing is exactly what we are supposed to do too. We too need to learn how to read the Bible and see how it message speaks into our lives and world today. That is after all the theological task: not just to correctly read the past, but to construct a vision for how to apply the gospel to our time. That means we will need to deal with things which were not even on their radar back then: world hunger relief, globalization, medical ethics, and on and on. Historical grounding is a great place to start, but it is not where we should stop.

Exegesis #2 - ethics guides exegesis

There are many disturbing things in the Bible. One that shakes me the most are the accounts of genocide in the Old Testament. Just as suffering, tragedy, and injustice in our lives can cause us to doubt God's goodness, so can such passages. One of the best pieces of advice I have heard for dealing with questions of theodicy like these is the idea of suspending judgment, as Doug Easterday puts it "everything I understand about God is loving and good, and the things I don't understand... I just don't understand yet." This approach allows one to admit pain, ask questions, but to still hold on. It is about living in the tension, about trusting in God's character, rather than in our limited understanding.

There is however a danger in this. That danger is to accept evil, to stop seeking, to stop crying out. Here we say, "Well, I don't understand what is going on, but if God did it, it must be good. " The difference here is quite subtle on the surface, but the consequences are severe because it basically means we shut down our conscience and call evil good.

Take for instance the aforementioned example of the genocide accounts in the Old Testament: If you heard about this happening anywhere in the world today - in Germany, in Afghanistan, or Darfur you would clearly see it as an atrocity, as horrific, as profoundly evil. If anyone claimed that God told them to do it, we would without exception declare them to be mad. And yet it is common for us Christians to find passages like this in the Bible, and to make arguments as to why this was justified and God's will. This is not just true of average joe Christians - you will find this same type of cognitive dissonance arguments in Bible commentaries, and made by major theologians too.

What's going on here? Isn't it a no-brainer that mass killing babies is bad? So why do Christians (Christians who are appalled at abortion I might add) argue that this would be fine to violently slaughter babies? What would make smart people say such absurd things? What would make loving people justify such horrific practices? I believe it's in part because we somehow think that it is our job to defend God's actions and the Bible. So no matter what it says, we feel compelled to rationalize why God was right to do this. Whatever it says, we reason, must be good, no matter how ghastly. But does God really needs us to defend him? More likely, the real reason behind this is that we feel that if we allow for any critique of the Bible, that the whole thing may collapse under our feet, leaving us nothing to stand on.

So we turn off our moral conscience as we read the Bible, calling evil good, and darkness light Some theologians even go so far as to teach that we should not trust our "worldly" understandings of right and wrong (apparently being opposed to mass slaughter of infants is worldly) and instead let the Bible define for us what is right (meaning that if the Bible tells us to kill babies we should accept this as good). I would like to assert that such an approach is profoundly damaging and irresponsible. God gave us a conscience, and to go against it is one of the most damaging things a person can do to their soul. It is flat out abusive - and I do not use this word lightly. In fact, this is precisely what abuse is about: a person is made to do something that they feel is wrong, and is told that their perceptions are in fact wrong. What is happening to them is not bad, they are bad. This can have devastating results on how a person perceives themselves, their world, and on their relationships - including their relationship with God. No matter what the authority is - your pastor, a parent, a theologian, or a holy book - you should never ever do something, or believe something, that goes against your conscience.

Biblically, the result of this kind of blind adherence to the Bible, regardless of how hurtful it is, is exemplified by the Pharisees (who are not exactly put forward as a model of correct exegesis!). In fact, the #1 rule of theology is that if our understanding of God makes him appear to be evil or unjust, then our theology is wrong somewhere down the line. If we understand something to imply that God is a monster then the answer is not to declare that "monsters are good", but to say "I just don't understand," and live in that tension and weakness until we do understand what is going on.

Going a step further, our understanding of Scripture must always, always, always be done through the eyes of Jesus, and with the heart of Jesus. We need to make sure that our interpretation of the Bible is in line with what we know firsthand from God in a living relationship to be good, loving, and just. Simply put: ethics must guide exegesis. These ethics are not formed from our flawed interpretation of rules in a book, but learned through our firsthand experience of knowing what love is in a personal transforming relationship with Jesus Christ. Then our conscience will "not be conformed to the world, but transformed by the renewing of my mind" so that we will "know the good and perfect will of God". When we then approach the Bible with the mind and heart of Jesus, we will be able, like him, to question false interpretations, having his heart move our own, learning through the Spirit to see people as he does, learning to think as he does.

If we take Jesus as our model for how to properly interpret Scripture, we see that he constantly challenges interpretations of Scripture that block people from grace. His direct knowledge of his father's will and character was his guide for interpreting, redefining, and critiquing, how the Bible was understood. He let his ethics guide his exegesis - his understanding of what love was and who God was was his guide to how he read and understood the Bible. Ethics proceeds exegesis. Or to put it differently: relationship with God is the lens through which we need to interpret Scripture. We love the Bible because in it we find Jesus, but we do not have a relationship with a book, but with the living Word, Jesus Christ. Scripture is not an end in itself, but points us to that relationship, and in turn, that living relationship helps us to understand and interpret Scripture.

This does not mean that our interpretation is infallible just because we know God's heart through relationship. We need to always be aware of our limited perceptions and blinders, and to approach the Bible (and life and faith too) with humility. But one thing we must never do is close our hearts and turn off our conscience when we read.