Theological Position Statements

Position Statement: Biblical Interpretation

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I’ve made allusion to some of my underlying theological positions (my theological “givens,” if you will) in previous posts, but it’s dawned on me that I ought to have some posts that can be linked to easily that reveal my positions (and therefore biases) in my approach to theology so that my readers better understand where I’m coming from (whether or not they agree–there’s plenty of room for reasonable disagreement on many, many theological issues).

I’m going to start with a concise explanation of my position on Biblical interpretation–specifically, my attitudes toward Biblical literalism and inerrancy.

Let’s start with 2 Timothy 16-17: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,  so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

I do not reject this premise at all; I believe it. However, I absolutely disagree with the premise that this statement means that the Scriptures should be interpreted literally (there are times for a literal interpretation, to be sure–Jesus’s statements about the Great Commandments are uncharacteristically plainly stated and should be taken for what they are) or that they are infallible.

By way of argument, consider Adam and Eve. In the second story of the creation of Adam and Eve, God gives Adam spirit and life by breathing into him. He is literally “God-breathed,” and, yet, he is thoroughly fallible, mistaken in many things.

Further, God uses humanity to do God’s work, but in a cooperative, not a coercive manner (well, maybe Jonah). Moses is called by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, but he is not forced. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus changes him deeply, but it is knowledge, not threat, that makes him a disciple of Jesus. Even Jesus Himself, in the garden of Gethsemane, has the opportunity to reject God’s call upon him, though He does not.

When read as a whole, we see in the Old Testament an continuing revelation of God’s self to the Israelites and an evolving understanding of the nature of God in the Israelites. At the time of Abram we see a man called from polytheism, but at the time of the Exodus we see an understanding of God that is henotheistic (there are many gods but ours is best/strongest/etc.)–even the Ten Commandments begin with a henotheistic understanding, “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” True, that statement remains metaphorically accurate in a monotheistic understanding, but because the rest of the Commandments are quite literal, I think we must see it in the henotheistic context.

The OT prophets seek to change the minds of the Israelites from henotheism to true monotheism and to shake off polytheistic ideas about the nature of gods. When Elijah battles the priests of Ba’al (Hadad, most likely) on Mount Carmel, he is making the theological statement (through derision of Ba’al in part) that the God of Israel is not a mere localized deity, is not possessed of human needs and limitations (like travel and sleep) but is rather transcendent and omnipotent.

In large part it takes the Bablyonian Captivity for the Isrealites to grow into the understanding of God to which God has been leading them for centuries (or, depending upon your preferred timeline, millennia). In Ezekiel’s vision we see the image of a mobile God who can follow the Jews to Babylon, who is with them even when they are not present at God’s temple in Jerusalem.

Given the record of the need for continued revelation from God to drag the Jews to a better understanding of God (just as revelation continues to do, whether this revelation proceeds from Scripture or elsewhere), it stands to reason that the writers of the Old Testament (and New, for that matter) sometimes get things wrong. When we read that God has commanded Saul to kill all the women, children and animals of the peoples he has conquered, we should be offended if we are being asked to take the statement literally.

Adam Hamilton’s Making Sense of the Bible makes very good arguments on this subject. For my part, I tend to follow the understanding of the German theologian Karl Barth. Barth reminds us (I am admittedly simplifying his argument for sake of time and space) that the Scriptures are not the capital “W” Word of God–Jesus is (see the Gospel of John). Therefore, we should read all Scripture through the lens of Jesus Christ. That in the Bible that does not comport with the person and teachings of Jesus is something added by man and not by God.

Does this make Biblical interpretation difficult? Absolutely, and humility in approaching the subject ought be the first lesson we learn in the practice of theology.

Jesus speaks metaphorically in the parables for a number of reasons–I think even the most literal of Biblical interpreters would admit to that. So why do we think that other parts of the Bible, particularly those written in styles of literature that rely upon metaphor and symbolism (the OT poetry, the apocalyptic and prophetic modes of both the OT and the NT) should be read literally?

When we believe that only God is infallible, why would we believe that the human contributors to the Bible were made so? When what we see in both the Biblical text itself and in the experience of our lives is that God creates opportunities for humans to work with God but does not force them to do so, why would we believe that God essentially put every word to paper with God’s self? When God came to earth in Jesus Christ as a sacrifice, a teacher, a prophet and an example to us, why would we assume that Scriptures are alone sufficient? When Jesus himself tells the Pharisees and the Sadducees and, yes, even the Disciples that they have misunderstood the Scriptures, why are we so ready to say that a single and narrow interpretation is the only reasonable one? In a world so complex that the head spins to think of it, why would we expect that the answers we find in the Bible are simple, straightforward, and without nuance?

On the other hand, when the Bible is so plainly full of Truths both existential and metaphysical, why should we assume that the proposition is all or nothing–that the Bible has no fallibilities or is completely worthless?

Brief Outline of My Theology

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Since this blog is, in part, about my theological ideas, I figured it’s only fair to provide some background into my approach and the broad-strokes theory of my approach to Christian theology. I have been working on a book laying out the core tenants of this approach (an early chapter draft of which was posted on the blog), but I don’t expect to be returning to moving forward on the book until after finishing at least the first draft of one of the two novels I’m currently working on.

Let us begin with the brief statement that I take as true the statements of the Apostles’ Creed—to keep this a “brief” outline, I’m going to need to take a few shortcuts.

We begin with an existential approach. I mean a few things by this. First, I start with human perception and experience to develop philosophy and theology—there simply is no other good place to start. Second, I acknowledge the difference between essence and existence—what things are and what they seem are not always the same. We may sometimes approximate the objective truth—which I maintain does exist as the true creation and will of God—but our own failings in understanding and perception mean that we must be constantly be guarded about our confidence in our own understanding. Hence, I adopt a position of epistemological skepticism regarding human knowledge with the caveats that I believe that direct revelation from God is possible to reveal objective truth to individuals (but because of the existential divide between individuals objective truth must be experienced directly and cannot be argued or explained to others with true efficacy) and that I believe that limited human understanding is sufficient to approach absolute truth, though we may never understand the absolute in its glorious infinitude of complexity. Human understanding is at best asymptotic—we may veer ever closer to the Truth, but it yet remains out of our full grasp.

As a minor aside, this approach acknowledges the value of human logic and rationality for building arguments to draw our understanding closer to absolute Truth while admitting the limitation of logic to fully do so—we are to be critical thinkers and to weigh evidence (thus relying on science were appropriate) while acknowledging that not all Truth is to be derived from logic—some may only be derived from ineffably experience.

The existence of God and God’s will underlying creation means that I must break with non-religious existentialist philosophers. I do not believe that the result of the existentialist approach is meaninglessness in the universe. Rather, the divide between objective truth and meaning as established by God and our own limited existential understandings creates a slippage that is best referred to, I think, as ambiguity. I’ve written several posts about ambiguity and the results of such a state on the blog, but they’re probably worth summarizing here.

Ambiguity creates a space of freedom for mankind. To paraphrase Joss Whedon: “If nothing we do in the universe matters, the only thing that matters in the universe is what we do.” In other words, ambiguity allows us to create meaning—God has called us to be agents of co-creation through this existential quandary. With God’s absolute meaning not readily available to us, we are forced to participate in creation in defining what has meaning and what meaning should be assigned to all aspects of existence. There is, I think, of necessity some amount of suffering that must be attached to such a state of being, though I acknowledge that this assertion fails to provide anything approaching a complete theodicy (though human inability to fully resolve the problem of evil seems to reinforce my arguments about epistemological skepticism and our ability only to approach the approximation of Truth). Thus, the existential approach to Christian theology (at least as I argue it) sees a great goodness in ambiguity, despite the existential angst it may sometimes cause us. Ambiguity allows for freedom of will, relationship and participation in Creation—an active role for humanity. In particular, I follow Paul Tillich’s ideas about humans as creators of meaning—primarily as storytellers. There is neither room nor will at present to address other aspects of his own existential theology.

Humans create meaning through relationship—Thing A is more like Thing B than Thing C. Only by comparison can we create meanings; unlike God we do not create ex nihilo but only from the building blocks with which we have been provided. We determine what is hard by opposing it to what is soft, what is pleasant to what is unpleasant, what is good to what is evil. Again, it is important to understand the careful distinction here between God and man. God may know good without evil, because God creates and understands the absolute. We do not. This is not relativism, where meaning itself is flexible. Our meaning may be measured against the absolute meaning of God, though not by us.

It is no coincidence that we create meaning by relationship—our purpose is relational. We are told that our God is love and love, of course, is about relationship. I believe there is good reason to believe that we were created for relationship—with God and each other.

If one accepts that we create meaning through vast webs of cognitive relationships, categories and comparisons, then we find a ready definition of both sin and holiness through the comparison of the meanings we create for ourselves with the meanings God intends in the creation and maintenance of the absolute. Sin is a state of being—one caused by ascribing to improper meanings (and thus improper relationships to the detriment of both sides). “Greed is good,” a definitional meaning clearly rejected by God in the person of Jesus Christ provides a ready example. One who accepts that meaning will be pushed out of positive, righteous relationships—with money and material things, with others, with justice, with self, with God.

On the other hand, we are told in the Sermon on the Mount to make ourselves “perfect as [our] Father in Heaven is perfect.” We define this as holiness; it is the natural consequence of adopting meanings and relationships between things more and more in line with the absolute meanings established by God. Often, we call this process of re-evaluation and re-definition of meaning “sanctification.”

Therein lies the power of Christianity—by the will of the Father, through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ and with the help of the Holy Spirit, we are able to desire to redefine our world as God would have us do. The start of this journey is, I believe, the heart being “strangely warmed” as Wesley would recall or, in another sense, being “born again.”

Why all of this? Because God desires relationship with us, but relationship itself only has meaning when freely entered into. Thus, God created humans to have free will, that we may create meaning and relationship for ourselves, but also gave us grace, that we might learn to choose what is good and to reject what is not. God wants us to be both free and good, for that is where relationship with God lies. I invite you to ponder the complexity of that combination—it is no surprise that faith is full of mystery, theology full of frustration.

In a previous blog post, I’ve stated that I call this theology “New Mysticism.” This is a matter of the acknowledgment of the non-logical (perhaps I should say “extra-logical”); that any knowledge we have of absolute Truth comes from God’s revelation. The most powerful form of this revelation is the Word of God—as Barth would define the term—the person of Jesus Christ. This must be separated from our understanding of the Bible as the “Word of God.” The Bible contains divine revelation for us, undoubtedly, but the true power of the Bible is its propensity for drawing us into a personal experience of the person of Jesus, not simply its usefulness as a tool to scour with our logic for glimpses of the absolute. In other words, the person of Jesus Christ is the divine manifestation of absolute meaning and Truth, our “north star” as it were. Jesus is not simply the teacher of the Truth (although he is that); Jesus is Truth itself. This understanding supersedes logic because Truth is the very nature of the universe itself, to which logic is subservient.

This approach allows us to appreciate other religions—these are full of people who are actively seeking after divine Truth and meaning, and perhaps finding some modicum of it here and there—while maintaining the assertion that Christianity is “the more excellent way,” because the center of Christianity—the Triune God—is Truth itself knowable only through direct experience of relationship with the Truth.

Please understand that such short space does a poor job of laying out the theology I have been (and still am) developing according to my own understanding and experience. It absolutely fails here to explore the many ramifications and consequences of such a theology. I have at best only touched upon some the expected points of a systematic theology—Christology, pneumatology, etc.

Nevertheless, I hope that this brief outline piques your interest—these ideas pervade all of my theological posts on the blog and you will be able to explore it more fully by reading through my various posts. One day, soon if God is willing, I will present it in greater length in book format, stepping through these points and more chapter by chapter.

In the meantime, I look forward to your comments, criticisms and questions as I continue to develop this theology into something truly systematic and—as much as any theology can be (which is to say “not really”)—complete.

New Mysticism

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When I tell people that I’m an amateur theologian, they often ask what kind of theology I write about. That’s a tough question. In the past, I’ve responded by saying “existential Christian theology” or loftily explaining that I’d like to describe Christian theology in a way that makes it understandable, relevant and attractive to the millennial generation, on the verge of which I sit myself. To what extent that’s a reconsideration of current theologies or just a new marketing scheme, I don’t know. Neither does that matter so much, as the only really-persuasive, heart-changing thing about Christianity is the person of Jesus Christ.

All of that aside, as I’ve developed and organized my theological precepts in writing for this blog, I’ve come to realize the importance of mysticism in my own understanding (however limited it may be) of the divine. Were I to undertake the arduous task of writing a systematic theology, I think now that I might title the school of thought “New Mysticism.”

Dictionary.com (in the second entry) defines mysticism as “a doctrine of an immediate spiritual intuition of truths believed to transcend ordinary understanding, or of a direct, intimate union of the soul with God through contemplation or ecstasy.”

We live in a postmodern age, skeptical of any answers this world could provide us. On the one hand, we see extremists telling us that there is no possible argument about the truth, that it is painted in harsh tones of black and weight, never mixing, never graded. On the other there are those who tell us that there is no such thing as Truth, that everything is a matter of perspective, or society or culture, that everything is relative.

Every day, science continues to astound us with the complexity, strangeness and splendor of the natural universe, all the while failing to answer life’s most important questions. Neuroscience shows us the many ways in which the brain might be tricked into misperceiving; we must become skeptical of our own ability to know and understand the universe around us. But there are more things in heaven and earth, dear Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The myth of progress has failed us; we have more ways to entertain ourselves, more things to do with our time, ways to communicate and travel faster than ever before, and yet the worst of our problems remain to plague us. We are disconnected and disaffected; disparity in power, wealth and opportunity yawns wide between societies and individuals; we still exploit one another, play games of “us” and “them,” fear and hate one another.

The myth of a bygone Golden Age is a bad joke. Those who tell us we can “make America great again” want to do so by reliving the darkest parts of our history—oppression, suppression and regression. Human nature has always been what it is; our past reflects this.

Should we not look toward what we might make of ourselves rather than what has been? Should we rely on revolutions in science and technology that might cover over the darker parts of our selves rather than healing one another’s souls and becoming something better?

Why do we look to the world for our answers? Nothing satisfies. We have been gifted the power to craft and create purpose and meaning and we have ignored it. Look at the wonder of the stories we craft—and then look upon the fallenness of the world we have wrought.

When logic fails us in answering the great existential questions, what are we to do? We look elsewhere. We look to hope. We look to faith. We look to love. None of these is logical, yet they answer more meaningful questions than all of our intellectual works.

We look beyond the world we see, to the invisible we sense only by other means, means at once inexplicable and undeniable. We look to the God who moves beyond all things, reaching for us if only we will let ourselves be grasped, whispering to us if only we will open our ears to hear.

In the relationship God seeks with us, there only is to be found Truth, there only is the source of all meaning worth making, there only are the answers we cannot find through our own faculties, great though they may be. The answers are found in relationship, not in understanding.

I know no other word for that than mysticism. I have never experienced the unio mystica, never spoken in tongues, never had an ecstatic experience of the divine. I do not mean that we should attempt to seek God through asceticism, nor do I mean to advocate for any particular “mystical experience.”

I seek a mystical way of living, one that follows the example of Christ by placing importance on the things that cannot be seen and grasped but that are more powerful than anything we find in this world—relationships, meaning, love. It is my belief that, to do that, we must free ourselves from the notion that we have the ability to understand, much less control, all things, we must be open to receiving the transcendent touch of a God who graciously condescends to be present with us. Most of all, we must live in light of the change that such experience brings to us—and we must endeavor to share that change with a world desperately in need of it.

That I think, is a mysticism of its own kind, a mystical view of existence that does not sharply differentiate between the mundane and the spiritual, but holds them together in tension. In this way, I think that it is fair to call it “new,” though I may be falling prey to the myth of progress myself.