When the ‘plain reading’ is not the ‘best reading’ of the Bible

2012/07/23 Graeme Leave a comment

You might not hear this at your church, but you should: Don’t just ‘read’ the Bible (study it).

It might seem like the best way to think about reading Scripture, but it’s not. There is an argument that the “plain reading” of Scripture is the best reading thereof. Of course, this entirely depends on what “plain” means. In most cases, the people arguing for this are looking for a literal and simple reading. And in most cases, this does not take into the intricacies of language, culture, history and context.

Let me give you a few simple examples.

Let’s say that I told you that someone I know had kicked the bucket, what would you respond? If you’re an English first language speaker, you will probably say, “I am sorry to hear that” or “Shame”. It is a figure of speech that means that someone has died. Figures of speech are one key reason that we cannot read the “clearest reading” of Scripture – you have to be sure that you understand (and even spot) the figures of speech. Here’s a particularly racy Biblical example: it really does appear that “uncovering his feet” is a euphemism for oral sex in ancient Middle East culture. This certainly changes the story of Ruth and Boaz (but does explain why Boaz was so enthusiastic about Ruth). Seriously, I’m not making this up. The Bible is full of sex, without embarrassment.

And this leads to a second example. Our cultural lenses shape how we read things. So, for example, you probably have a picture of Jesus being born in a stable with lots of straw and animals all around. This is not true. In Bethlehem, like other Middle Eastern towns at the time, private homes had two levels – the lower level was the general living area, with an open hearth for a fire. At night, the family would sleep on the upper level, and bring their animals into their home to sleep on the lower level. Even a tiny knowledge of Middle Eastern culture will tell you that no woman in that area would EVER be sent to a barn or stable to give birth all on her own. Mary would have been taken into someone’s home, and given birth in the general living area, and Jesus placed in a manger that would have been handy.

Continue reading When the ‘plain reading’ is not the ‘best reading’ of the Bible →

General, Theology

When science and the Bible disagree…

2012/07/20 Graeme Leave a comment

“When science and the Bible disagree, just wait around a few decades and science will eventually catch up”. It was a funny line, and it got the expected laugh from the youth group. I was a teenager then, and part of that group – and the line stuck. But then I studied science through high school, earning a distinction for it and being infused with a passion for it by one of the best science teachers of all time, Graeme Crawford. He eventually went on to found an entire group of schools that now bear his name in South Africa – but he was just my science teacher, and he was brilliant.

I am no scientist, but I know enough science to know that if science and the Bible disagree, it’s now very unlikely that this is science’s fault.

Here’s something your church should say more often: listen to the scientists.

The issue is not that the Bible is wrong either. It’s our understanding of the Bible that needs correcting. And quite a lot of that correcting seems to be focusing now on how to interpret Genesis 1-11, and how literally we take these chapters. This is being challenged by issues as diverse as the age of the earth, our understanding of the Higgs Boson, the definition of marriage and our understanding of what forms of homosexuality are acceptable to God. All of these issues – and more besides – ultimately come back to Adam and Eve and what was going on in the Garden.

I’ll be posting on this over the next few weeks, but as a starter, you might enjoy this infographic from the clever people at Biologos forum on how we know that the world is billions of years old:
Continue reading When science and the Bible disagree… →

Church, Future trends, General, Missional, Theology

ReKnew – a new blog for those on the kingdom journey

2012/07/18 Graeme Leave a comment

I have known about Greg Boyd for some time, and am thrilled to have found his latest project. It’s a ministry and blog called ReKnew. Greg is a great thinker and advocate for a new kind of missional Christianity.

The welcome note on the blog is inspiring:

When most people think of “Christianity,” they think of the religion of “Christendom” that began in the fourth century when an Emperor named Constantine allegedly converted to the faith and then granted Christians a lot of political power. This religion has been the dominant face of Christianity for the last fifteen hundred years. The foundation of this religion is a picture of a Caesar-looking god who rules the world by brute power, and a corresponding concept of his kingdom as “the Church triumphant” – a conquering army that aspires to rule the world by acquiring political power.

This once mighty religion is in the process of dying. In fact, it’s been decomposing in Europe — where it once reigned supreme — for almost a hundred years. And while the “Christendom” mindset continues to have loud and passionate advocates in its last holdout, America, it has turned the corner in this land as well. All the clamoring of those who are today fighting to “take America back for God” (“back” to when?), and who continue to espouse a Caesar-looking, all-controlling God, represent that last roar of a dying lion.

While many grieve the demise of the Christendom religion, we at ReKnew celebrate it! For it’s our conviction that this religion has often had little to do with the true movement that Jesus came to unleash into the world—the movement he referred to as “the kingdom (or reign) of God.” In fact, we believe this civil religion has often been one of the greatest obstacles to the advance of the true kingdom. Because of how dominant Christendom has been throughout history, many have been unable to see through the dark cloud of this religion’s controlling God and conquering kingdom and behold the loving God and servant kingdom Jesus revealed.

The Good News is that this dark cloud is fading and we are beginning to see the light of a new day! And as the darkness fades, we are seeing people around the globe catching this vision of a God who looks like Jesus, and of a kingdom that looks like Jesus—humbly serving the poor and the lost, and sacrificing himself out of love for the forgiveness of his enemies.

Out of the rubble of this crumbling religion we are seeing a new kind of disciple rising up, fearlessly calling into question previous certainties; boldly rethinking what it means to believe in God and the Bible; bravely reimagining what it means to “do church” and advance the kingdom. More and more, we are seeing people abandon the security of their civil religion to become part of a beautiful revolution.

This has been my own personal journey, and I’m sure it has been for many of you as well. And this is why we’re here.

ReKnew is here to stand at the forefront of this exciting new thing that God is doing in the world. Will you join us? We want to do all we can do to help mobilize and spread this rising movement of kingdom people who are rethinking what it means to be a “Christian,” what it means to have “faith,” and what it means to be a follower of Jesus. We want to join others in imaginatively exploring the shape that post-Christendom discipleship and the post-Christendom Church might take. And we want to join others in boldly rethinking everything Christians have always assumed they already knew.

To recover the self-sacrificial revelation of God in Christ, and to advance the servant kingdom he inaugurated, it is time for us all to take a fresh look at everything.

It’s time to ReKnew our hearts and minds before God.

Indeed.

19 July update: The ReKnew Manifesto has just been uploaded. It’s a great read.

Book reviews, General, Global issues, Missional, Theology

Christian bookstores and their chokehold on the industry

2012/07/11 Graeme 2 Comments

I have never liked Christian bookstores much. Back when I was a theological student, I could never find any books by the authors that my conservative textbooks were warning me about. Sure, some of the warnings were valid, but I still don’t appreciate having my reading list vetted and censored for me. And then, South African Christian bookstores refused to stock some of the best selling Christian authors of the last two decades, including Brian McLaren, Rob Bell and Tony Campolo amongst others. That’s when I stopped buying anything from them (luckily, Kalahari, Loot and Amazon provided me with other options).

Then, last week, Rachel Held Evans wrote a very insightful blog entry on this topic. It sounds as if America is even worse than I remember South African being. How do we let bookstore owners and publisher editors shape and mould our theology. And aren’t these the same people who fuelled the “Left behind” rapture theology with badly written fiction books? Scary.

You can read Rachel’s blog here, or an extended extract below:

Continue reading Christian bookstores and their chokehold on the industry →

Church, General, Leadership

Pastors and Business Leaders: Learn from each other

2012/07/09 Graeme Leave a comment

I discovered the website for Catalyst conference recently, and there is a great archive of resources available there.

According to their website, Catalyst was conceived as a Next Generation Leaders Conference in 1999 by Andy Stanley, Reggie Joiner, John Maxwell, Lanny Donoho and several young leaders. Catalyst was created to meet the felt need that existed within the church leader space for a leadership event that was focused on a new generation of church leaders. Since inception, over 100,000 leaders have made the annual trek to Atlanta to participate in the Catalyst Conference experience.

One of the resources was a summary of an excellent interview about what church and business leaders could learn from each other. It’s well worth a read:

Church Leaders, here are a few things you can learn from Business Leaders:

1. collaboration – business is built around partnerships and collaboration. Many times you will see competitors in business partnering together if it makes business sense and they can create a profitable return. We have a tendency in the Church to be protective, selfish and isolated, whether it’s between denominations, associations, or other churches in our communities. Especially the pastor right down the street from us.

2. excellence – if a business doesn’t create a great product, no one will buy from them and they will go out of business. And if you aren’t good at what you do, whether a designer or consultant or restaurant owner or UPS driver, then you won’t last. Sometimes in the church we have the tendency to make excellence a low level priority, and we don’t demand that staff members constantly get better. I’ve written several times about doing what you do with excellence. And pastors, don’t be afraid to ask your business leaders to get involved in helping you create excellence with what you do.

3. execution – the business world is built on “getting things done on time.” Again, without this as a core value, businesses will fail. Church leaders can learn a ton regarding execution from the business leaders sitting in your seats or pews on Sunday morning.

4. measure success – businesses measure their success mostly based on return on investment- the idea of creating a profit. There are definitely other factors, but that one is key. You have to measure your success in order to know if you’ve accomplished your mission. In the Church, many times we are not as intentional at measuring our success because we’re in the “people” business. But I believe the Church is doing the most important work in the world, and to not hold ourselves accountable and constantly measure whether we are creating “Kingdom” profit is not good stewardship.

Continue reading Pastors and Business Leaders: Learn from each other →

General

25 interviews to challenge your stereotypes

2012/07/05 Graeme Leave a comment

I am a fan of Rachel Held Evans, a writer and blogger. On her blog this past year she has chosen 25 different people to interview, and then opened up the process to her readers to suggest and vote on the best questions to be asked. I have enjoyed all of them, been challenged by many of them, and hated a few (yes, I enjoyed the ones I hated – in fact, maybe I enjoyed those ones the most: that was the point of the series, I think).

Here are links to the full series of interviews, provided by Rachel today on her blog. Enjoy.

Believe it or not, this week marks one year of your interviews via the “Ask a…” series. You’ve submitted over 1,000 questions to our 25 interviewees. I don’t know about you, but I’ve learned so much from these exchanges as many of my assumptions, stereotypes, and misconceptions have been challenged by actually talking with all these smart and gracious people.

Let’s celebrate a year of successful interviews by revisiting each one. The most popular interviews are in italics. You can always find each entry in the series here.

Enjoy!

Ask an Evolutionary Creationist

Ask a Calvinist

Ask a Gay Christian

Ask a Quaker

Ask an Orthodox Christian

Ask a Muslim

Ask a Unitarian Universalist

Ask a Christian Libertarian

Ask a Christian Conservative

Ask a Christian Progressive

Ask a Pacifist

Ask a Pentecostal

Ask a Nun

Ask an Environmentalist

Ask a Pagan

Ask a Seventh-Day Adventist

Ask a Feminist

Ask an Egalitarian

Ask a Messianic Jew

Gender, General, Sermons, Social Justice, Theology

Child-like interpretations of the Bible

2012/07/01 Graeme 1 Comment

Over the past few days, I’ve been engaged in some interesting conversations that all began with a simple picture I posted on my Facebook status. It’s largely about same sex marriage, but the 60+ comments in the thread get very quickly to issues of how we interpret the Bible. If either topic interests you, I think you’ll enjoy the interactions on my Facebook timeline.

Then, this morning, the preacher at the church I attended made some excellent comments about how we understand the Bible. The basic message of the Gospel is so simple that a child can understand it. In fact, in order to understand it you need to approach it with child-like (not childish!) faith and trust. But there are parts of the Bible that are very complicated and complex, because they are talking about God. If they were easy to understand it would make a mockery of who God actually is: above and beyond us.

Our preacher was much more eloquent than this. And it’s a wonderful point to make. The simple parts of the Bible are simple enough for a child to understand and accept. And we need help with some of the other parts that are difficult to understand.

But it struck me that there is a corollary to this thought – and that is about what children might believe about God before we impose our doctrines on them.

In the Facebook conversation during the week, one of the common themes of those people arguing that homosexuality is wrong is that this is “the plain reading of the texts” on this topic. This sounds like a strong argument, but it is not – for many reasons. But here’s one more reason.

If you asked a 7 year old child if they thought that God hated two men just because they loved each other and wanted to be together, almost every innocent child in the world would say, “No”. Surely God doesn’t hate them just because they love each other? (By the way, this test applies to many self-evident truths: does God like it when people lie or steal? Is God happy when Daddies and Mommies divorce? I think children would provide the right answer to almost all “self evident” sins).

So, if children would not understand why homosexuality would be considered wrong by God, then it must be the case that this issue is one of the “difficult to interpret” parts of the Bible.

It’s a simple point, really, but an important one. The seven verses/passages that talk against homosexuality are definitely in the category of “difficult” and need careful interpretation. They cannot just be taken at “face value”. And they do NOT say what they seem to say at first reading.

The same, by the way, is true of Genesis 1-11 and the age of the earth, the sections on slavery, the instructions about nobody with disabilities being allowed to serve in church leadership, tattoos, levirate marriage, polygamy, war, sacrifices, and many other issues. It’s an interesting test, this child-like understanding of God. I like it.

So here’s something your church should be teaching: listen to the children BEFORE you teach them your bigotry.

Fun, General, Theology

Old Testament instructions (and how to apply them selectively)

2012/06/30 Graeme Leave a comment

This is just for fun. Sort of.

I was sent this information by a friend of mine recently. It is laugh out loud funny – at least it was for me. Yet, the underlying issue (of how we interpret the Bible) is serious indeed. But read other entries on this blog for more cerebral engagements with the issue.

A few years ago, an American radio host ranted about homosexuality (and then later retracted her comments and took out full page newspaper adverts to apologise). Dr Laura Schlessinger (“Dr Laura”) broadcasts a 3 hour long, radio program each weekday on a network of over 500 radio stations in the U.S. and Canada and has an estimated audience of 20 million people. She holds a Ph.D. in physiology (not psychology).

In her radio show, Dr Laura had said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance (she said more too about her feelings about homosexuals). The following response was posted on the internet. Its source has been credited to many different people, and is best regarded as an essay clearly meant for a wider audience than just Dr Laura. It is a reminder that many belief systems pick and choose their way through Biblical teachings in determining what is “right” and “wrong”. Authorship remains unconfirmed.

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination… End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God’s Laws and how to follow them:

Continue reading Old Testament instructions (and how to apply them selectively) →

FutureChurchNow by Graeme Codrington