Master 242: Christian Doctrine Series, Part 1
Introduction.
Doctrine of the Word of God, part 1.
So I'm trying to lead my Sunday school class, at church, through a series on the major doctrines of the Christian faith. This has proven to be quite a challenge. As usual, the bulk of the challenge lies in the fact that there is such an extraordinary wealth of information on any one of the topics we take up. You could could run multiple college courses on even a single aspic of a given doctrine. And I'm trying to treat each of the doctrines in two or three forty-five minute sessions? Ridiculous!
Additionally, I'm trying to teach the material in such a way that the students can appreciate, more directly, the relevance of these doctrines to their lives. I've taken as a guiding principle (which might be obvious to some but I think it's at least worth making explicit) that the doctrines of the Christian faith only make sense if one takes seriously that what God intends and desires for those who follow Him is something quite radical. (Of course the details of that need to be filled in, but that's at least a helpful starting point.) There's a strong temptation, especially for long-time Christians, to settle for something less than God's best. We get the idea that being a decent, basically moral person is about the extent of what God requires and wants of us.
Francis Chan, opens the preface to his book, Crazy Love, with the following rhetorical question from Francois Fenelon's The Seeking Heart: 'To just read the Bible, attend church, and avoid "big" sins--is this passionate, wholehearted love for God?' C.S. Lewis also challenges this conventional view in his Mere Christianity. (See my blog post, Master 238: The Little Things.)
If you think that just getting a little bit of God into your life is what Christianity is all about, then the doctrines of the Christian faith aren't going to make sense to you. The Word of God. The Holy Spirit. The Church. The moments of salvation. Of course, building that background into any lesson is only going to add to the amount of material that you've got to convey.
It also strikes me that the major doctrines--at least in their more-or-less familiar formulations--did not spring up in a vacuum. I'm generally attracted to an historical approach to understanding ideas anyway, and it strikes me that the impetus for formulating the doctrines probably came from conflicts and debates that rose up over the course of the history of the church. The earliest followers of God might not have had anything as spelled out as a "Doctrine of the Word of God." They probably did not articulate the presuppositions that undergirded their practices of conscientiously studying and abiding by the words that God had spoken to them through the prophets and apostles over time. But when controversy arose--when someone wanted to add to the canon or developed clearly problematic views about the nature of inspiration or authority, then it became necessary to formulate the doctrines. Appreciating this historical context, I think, helps us to better appreciate the need for and importance of these doctrines, but, again, presenting this historical background requires still more time.
So that's the challenge that I'm dealing with. I haven't yet figured out how to resolve it, but I do often find that blogging is a helpful way for me to process ideas so I'm going to do that at least with this first doctrine--the doctrine of the Word of God. The complete list of doctrines that I would touch on are these:
Doctrine of the Word of God
Doctrine of God (esp. the Father)
Doctrine of Humankind (including the Fall)
Doctrine of Jesus Christ
Doctrine of the Holy Spirit
Doctrine of the Application of Redemption (i.e. Salvation)
Doctrine of the Church
Doctrine of the Future
Wayne Grudem, in his Systematic Theology defines a doctrine as "what the whole Bible teaches us today about some particular topic." (25) Given that definition, of course, it is possible to take up as doctrines much more narrowly-focused topics, but these at least pick out some of the most important points.
--
Since I am a member of the Free Methodist Church, I will use their Articles of Religion as the backbone for my explorations of each doctrine. This is how paragraph 108 reads:
"The Bible is God's written Word, uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit. It bears unerring witness to Jesus Christ, the living Word. As attested by the early church and subsequent councils, it is the trustworthy record of God's revelation, completely truthful in all it affirms. It has been faithfully preserved and proves itself true in human experience.
"The Scriptures have come to us through human authors who wrote, as God moved them, in the languages and literary forms of their times. God continues, by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, to speak through this Word to each generation and culture.
"The Bible has authority over all human life. It teaches the truth about God, His creation, His people, His one and only Son, and the destiny of humankind. It also teaches the way of salvation and the life of faith. Whatever is not found in the Bible nor can be proved by it is not to be required as an article of belief or as necessary to salvation." (Free Methodist Book of Discipline, 2007)
--
How should one approach teaching the doctrine of the Word of God? Of course, one could just read off a set of propositions and leave it at that. "The Bible is God's written Word, uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit", etc., etc. But what's the motivation for articulating the doctrine in this way? And what hangs on the truth or falsity of these propositions. Many people are far too used to their Christian experience being filled with lots of propositions that they do not understand but that they are told they must affirm or else suffer the consequences. But what are those consequences? In his synopsis of Bible doctrine, Charles Rylie lists nine different theories of biblical inspiration. What hangs on accepting one rather than another?
Taking this as our approach to understanding the doctrines is, I suspect, not going to be very helpful for us. It won't do to just present all nine theories of inspiration, list their various pros and cons, evidences for and against, and then pick one. That's certainly not how the "inspiration" component of the doctrine of the Word of God developed through the course of history. Another problem with approaching this doctrine in this way is that such an approach fails to draw a clear connection between adopting the correct theory of inspiration (for instance) and actually meeting with God in the biblical text. In connection with this point, some might point out that it is possible to hold, intellectually, what is widely believed to be a false theory of inspiration and still encounter God in the text. (And I'd be willing to grant that this is possible.) But this suggests that what theory of inspiration one holds is irrelevant to whether or not one can meet with God in the text.
At this point, I've only introduced this language of "meeting God in the text" without saying what that means. I'll clarify that later, but want to at least place that idea in our minds as one of the principle aims of Bible study. The Word of God was given to us not just to convey information or tell us about historical events or give us a series of models to either follow or eschew. The Word of God, more fundamentally, offers a venue in which the seeking person can be certain of meeting God. But already, we're getting ahead of ourselves.
What should we take as the guiding question that will help us to make sense of the various parts of this doctrine and its relevance to the Christian life as a whole? Here's one suggestion: What must we believe about this text and in what ways should we approach this text, so as to make sense of and share in the experiences of the men and women who guided their lives by this text? Let me clarify what I'm aiming at in this question. The men and women whose stories we find recorded in the Bible enjoyed a certain kind of relationship with God and experienced many things in the course of their interactions with Him. Their experiences serve as a model for us today. Their interactions with God provide guidance and clues for how we should approach God and what we can expect from Him. Some of this material will be taken up when we talk about the doctrine of God.
Some of their experiences involved reading and acting in accordance with the written word of God. When the Torah said to do something and they did it, God responded in certain ways. When the Torah said to do something and they didn't do it, God responded in other ways. But this kind of interaction doesn't just reveal something about God. It also reveals something about His word. The Torah, apparently, provided reliable insight into God's desire and will for His people, because when the people obeyed or disobeyed the words of Torah, God reacted as if they were obeying or disobeying Him. The sensible thing to say is that God wrote down His will for His people. He gave them the Torah.
Now, right there, you get certain familiar elements of the doctrine of the Word of God. We could talk about the authority of the Torah, the inspiration of the Torah, and the canon of the Torah. This is the kind of approach that we want to take when assessing the characteristics of the word of God as a whole. I first framed our guiding question in this way: What must we believe about this text and in what ways should we approach this text, so as to make sense of and share in the experiences of the men and women who guided their lives by this text? But as I continue to reflect, it strikes that this formulation is a bit too subjectivist. So let's rephrase the guiding question: What must be the character or nature of this text, such that (1) it had the impact that it did on the lives of the men and women who interacted with it and (2) we can expect to share in those experiences by so interacting with it? To put the question in slightly simpler form: What explains the impact that the Bible had and continues to have in the lives of the people who abide(d) in it?
If the explanation of the Bible's impact is that it is the inerrant, inspired, authoritative word of God, then, if we want to be similarly impacted we should approach the text in that way--as the inerrant, inspired, authoritative word of God.
Here we're still summarizing the main points and we'll get into some of the details later (although this is already proving to be immensely helpful for me). The next natural question that, I think, arises is: What happens if we fail to approach the Bible in this way. And here's one big problem with the way that many people, I think, try to make sense of the doctrine of the Word of God. Many people think that failing to approach the Bible as the inerrant, inspired, authoritative word of God just means failing to affirm a particular proposition about the character of the word of God. But that leads to an unfortunate caricature of God and His way of revealing Himself.
We might imagine to people: Angela and Bernard. Angela believes that the Bible is the inerrant, inspired, authoritative word of God. Bernard is like Angela except that He denies inerrancy. Now if we think that the crucial difference between these two is just that one affirms and one denies a certain proposition, then we can come away with the goofy idea that God is supposed to speak to Angela through His word and not to Bernard just because of what one believes and the other doesn't. God sits up in heaven and observes, "Angela believes that the Bible is inerrant so I will reveal Myself to her. Bernard denies that the Bible is inerrant so I will not reveal Myself to him." Is that why affirming or denying inerrancy is so important? Certainly not! But this is the kind of caricatured picture that, I suspect and fear, plagues many Christians who have been taught the doctrine of the Word of God only as a set of propositions without properly relating them to our life and walk with God.
What is the better way of thinking about the problem of denying inerrancy? (And I realize that I haven't yet tried to articulate just what inerrancy amounts to. Just go along with me for now. I'll take that up later.) Why is it that the person who denies inerrancy should not expect to share in the experiences of those men and women throughout history who have committed themselves to abiding in the word of God? Answer: Because the person who denies inerrancy will be inclined to reject, ignore, and revise what they take to be errors in the Bible. If, indeed, the Bible is inerrant, than the person who thinks that the Bible contains errors will tend to ignore passages that he or she takes to be erroneous. If the Bible is inerrant, than the person who chooses to ignore those passages will probably act and live in ways inconsistent with God's revealed will and intention. And the person who lives in ways inconsistent with God's revealed will and intention cannot expect to enjoy the same kinds of experiences and relationships as the person who does act in accordance with God's revealed will and intention.
Now you may not, at this point, believe that the Bible is inerrant or have an opinion one way or another, but I hope that you can see why the inerrancy of Scripture matters and why it makes a difference. It makes a difference, not because having the wrong doctrinal beliefs automatically puts us on the wrong side of God, but because having wrong doctrinal beliefs opens us up to acting in ways contrary to God's will and inconsistent with His character. And if you take seriously that acting in accordance with God's will and character is important, failing to do so looks like a big problem.
Believing that the Bible is inerrant doesn't involve just believing a proposition. (e.g. "The Bible is inerrant--true!) Rather, believing that the Bible is inerrant involves a readiness to submit one's life to the directions revealed in Scripture. It involves actually being guided by the Words of Scripture--not picking some to follow and discarding others, saying that some are true and judging that others are not. And the latter sort of belief is what will reinforce conviction in the proposition, because one will enjoy the experience of actually meeting God in the text and in one's life as one faithfully follows Him.
--
At this point, having summarized my main approach, I actually think I'll take up some of the details in a separate entry. There's quite enough to think about in this entry as it is.
Again, all the usual caveats and qualifications apply. As I explore this topic just a little, I'm struck by the chasm that separates my lay-speculations from the work of professional theologians. Hopefully what comes out here will at least be a bit helpful. Until next time, then.
--
God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.
Doctrine of the Word of God, part 1.
So I'm trying to lead my Sunday school class, at church, through a series on the major doctrines of the Christian faith. This has proven to be quite a challenge. As usual, the bulk of the challenge lies in the fact that there is such an extraordinary wealth of information on any one of the topics we take up. You could could run multiple college courses on even a single aspic of a given doctrine. And I'm trying to treat each of the doctrines in two or three forty-five minute sessions? Ridiculous!
Additionally, I'm trying to teach the material in such a way that the students can appreciate, more directly, the relevance of these doctrines to their lives. I've taken as a guiding principle (which might be obvious to some but I think it's at least worth making explicit) that the doctrines of the Christian faith only make sense if one takes seriously that what God intends and desires for those who follow Him is something quite radical. (Of course the details of that need to be filled in, but that's at least a helpful starting point.) There's a strong temptation, especially for long-time Christians, to settle for something less than God's best. We get the idea that being a decent, basically moral person is about the extent of what God requires and wants of us.
Francis Chan, opens the preface to his book, Crazy Love, with the following rhetorical question from Francois Fenelon's The Seeking Heart: 'To just read the Bible, attend church, and avoid "big" sins--is this passionate, wholehearted love for God?' C.S. Lewis also challenges this conventional view in his Mere Christianity. (See my blog post, Master 238: The Little Things.)
If you think that just getting a little bit of God into your life is what Christianity is all about, then the doctrines of the Christian faith aren't going to make sense to you. The Word of God. The Holy Spirit. The Church. The moments of salvation. Of course, building that background into any lesson is only going to add to the amount of material that you've got to convey.
It also strikes me that the major doctrines--at least in their more-or-less familiar formulations--did not spring up in a vacuum. I'm generally attracted to an historical approach to understanding ideas anyway, and it strikes me that the impetus for formulating the doctrines probably came from conflicts and debates that rose up over the course of the history of the church. The earliest followers of God might not have had anything as spelled out as a "Doctrine of the Word of God." They probably did not articulate the presuppositions that undergirded their practices of conscientiously studying and abiding by the words that God had spoken to them through the prophets and apostles over time. But when controversy arose--when someone wanted to add to the canon or developed clearly problematic views about the nature of inspiration or authority, then it became necessary to formulate the doctrines. Appreciating this historical context, I think, helps us to better appreciate the need for and importance of these doctrines, but, again, presenting this historical background requires still more time.
So that's the challenge that I'm dealing with. I haven't yet figured out how to resolve it, but I do often find that blogging is a helpful way for me to process ideas so I'm going to do that at least with this first doctrine--the doctrine of the Word of God. The complete list of doctrines that I would touch on are these:
Doctrine of the Word of God
Doctrine of God (esp. the Father)
Doctrine of Humankind (including the Fall)
Doctrine of Jesus Christ
Doctrine of the Holy Spirit
Doctrine of the Application of Redemption (i.e. Salvation)
Doctrine of the Church
Doctrine of the Future
Wayne Grudem, in his Systematic Theology defines a doctrine as "what the whole Bible teaches us today about some particular topic." (25) Given that definition, of course, it is possible to take up as doctrines much more narrowly-focused topics, but these at least pick out some of the most important points.
--
Since I am a member of the Free Methodist Church, I will use their Articles of Religion as the backbone for my explorations of each doctrine. This is how paragraph 108 reads:
"The Bible is God's written Word, uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit. It bears unerring witness to Jesus Christ, the living Word. As attested by the early church and subsequent councils, it is the trustworthy record of God's revelation, completely truthful in all it affirms. It has been faithfully preserved and proves itself true in human experience.
"The Scriptures have come to us through human authors who wrote, as God moved them, in the languages and literary forms of their times. God continues, by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, to speak through this Word to each generation and culture.
"The Bible has authority over all human life. It teaches the truth about God, His creation, His people, His one and only Son, and the destiny of humankind. It also teaches the way of salvation and the life of faith. Whatever is not found in the Bible nor can be proved by it is not to be required as an article of belief or as necessary to salvation." (Free Methodist Book of Discipline, 2007)
--
How should one approach teaching the doctrine of the Word of God? Of course, one could just read off a set of propositions and leave it at that. "The Bible is God's written Word, uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit", etc., etc. But what's the motivation for articulating the doctrine in this way? And what hangs on the truth or falsity of these propositions. Many people are far too used to their Christian experience being filled with lots of propositions that they do not understand but that they are told they must affirm or else suffer the consequences. But what are those consequences? In his synopsis of Bible doctrine, Charles Rylie lists nine different theories of biblical inspiration. What hangs on accepting one rather than another?
Taking this as our approach to understanding the doctrines is, I suspect, not going to be very helpful for us. It won't do to just present all nine theories of inspiration, list their various pros and cons, evidences for and against, and then pick one. That's certainly not how the "inspiration" component of the doctrine of the Word of God developed through the course of history. Another problem with approaching this doctrine in this way is that such an approach fails to draw a clear connection between adopting the correct theory of inspiration (for instance) and actually meeting with God in the biblical text. In connection with this point, some might point out that it is possible to hold, intellectually, what is widely believed to be a false theory of inspiration and still encounter God in the text. (And I'd be willing to grant that this is possible.) But this suggests that what theory of inspiration one holds is irrelevant to whether or not one can meet with God in the text.
At this point, I've only introduced this language of "meeting God in the text" without saying what that means. I'll clarify that later, but want to at least place that idea in our minds as one of the principle aims of Bible study. The Word of God was given to us not just to convey information or tell us about historical events or give us a series of models to either follow or eschew. The Word of God, more fundamentally, offers a venue in which the seeking person can be certain of meeting God. But already, we're getting ahead of ourselves.
What should we take as the guiding question that will help us to make sense of the various parts of this doctrine and its relevance to the Christian life as a whole? Here's one suggestion: What must we believe about this text and in what ways should we approach this text, so as to make sense of and share in the experiences of the men and women who guided their lives by this text? Let me clarify what I'm aiming at in this question. The men and women whose stories we find recorded in the Bible enjoyed a certain kind of relationship with God and experienced many things in the course of their interactions with Him. Their experiences serve as a model for us today. Their interactions with God provide guidance and clues for how we should approach God and what we can expect from Him. Some of this material will be taken up when we talk about the doctrine of God.
Some of their experiences involved reading and acting in accordance with the written word of God. When the Torah said to do something and they did it, God responded in certain ways. When the Torah said to do something and they didn't do it, God responded in other ways. But this kind of interaction doesn't just reveal something about God. It also reveals something about His word. The Torah, apparently, provided reliable insight into God's desire and will for His people, because when the people obeyed or disobeyed the words of Torah, God reacted as if they were obeying or disobeying Him. The sensible thing to say is that God wrote down His will for His people. He gave them the Torah.
Now, right there, you get certain familiar elements of the doctrine of the Word of God. We could talk about the authority of the Torah, the inspiration of the Torah, and the canon of the Torah. This is the kind of approach that we want to take when assessing the characteristics of the word of God as a whole. I first framed our guiding question in this way: What must we believe about this text and in what ways should we approach this text, so as to make sense of and share in the experiences of the men and women who guided their lives by this text? But as I continue to reflect, it strikes that this formulation is a bit too subjectivist. So let's rephrase the guiding question: What must be the character or nature of this text, such that (1) it had the impact that it did on the lives of the men and women who interacted with it and (2) we can expect to share in those experiences by so interacting with it? To put the question in slightly simpler form: What explains the impact that the Bible had and continues to have in the lives of the people who abide(d) in it?
If the explanation of the Bible's impact is that it is the inerrant, inspired, authoritative word of God, then, if we want to be similarly impacted we should approach the text in that way--as the inerrant, inspired, authoritative word of God.
Here we're still summarizing the main points and we'll get into some of the details later (although this is already proving to be immensely helpful for me). The next natural question that, I think, arises is: What happens if we fail to approach the Bible in this way. And here's one big problem with the way that many people, I think, try to make sense of the doctrine of the Word of God. Many people think that failing to approach the Bible as the inerrant, inspired, authoritative word of God just means failing to affirm a particular proposition about the character of the word of God. But that leads to an unfortunate caricature of God and His way of revealing Himself.
We might imagine to people: Angela and Bernard. Angela believes that the Bible is the inerrant, inspired, authoritative word of God. Bernard is like Angela except that He denies inerrancy. Now if we think that the crucial difference between these two is just that one affirms and one denies a certain proposition, then we can come away with the goofy idea that God is supposed to speak to Angela through His word and not to Bernard just because of what one believes and the other doesn't. God sits up in heaven and observes, "Angela believes that the Bible is inerrant so I will reveal Myself to her. Bernard denies that the Bible is inerrant so I will not reveal Myself to him." Is that why affirming or denying inerrancy is so important? Certainly not! But this is the kind of caricatured picture that, I suspect and fear, plagues many Christians who have been taught the doctrine of the Word of God only as a set of propositions without properly relating them to our life and walk with God.
What is the better way of thinking about the problem of denying inerrancy? (And I realize that I haven't yet tried to articulate just what inerrancy amounts to. Just go along with me for now. I'll take that up later.) Why is it that the person who denies inerrancy should not expect to share in the experiences of those men and women throughout history who have committed themselves to abiding in the word of God? Answer: Because the person who denies inerrancy will be inclined to reject, ignore, and revise what they take to be errors in the Bible. If, indeed, the Bible is inerrant, than the person who thinks that the Bible contains errors will tend to ignore passages that he or she takes to be erroneous. If the Bible is inerrant, than the person who chooses to ignore those passages will probably act and live in ways inconsistent with God's revealed will and intention. And the person who lives in ways inconsistent with God's revealed will and intention cannot expect to enjoy the same kinds of experiences and relationships as the person who does act in accordance with God's revealed will and intention.
Now you may not, at this point, believe that the Bible is inerrant or have an opinion one way or another, but I hope that you can see why the inerrancy of Scripture matters and why it makes a difference. It makes a difference, not because having the wrong doctrinal beliefs automatically puts us on the wrong side of God, but because having wrong doctrinal beliefs opens us up to acting in ways contrary to God's will and inconsistent with His character. And if you take seriously that acting in accordance with God's will and character is important, failing to do so looks like a big problem.
Believing that the Bible is inerrant doesn't involve just believing a proposition. (e.g. "The Bible is inerrant--true!) Rather, believing that the Bible is inerrant involves a readiness to submit one's life to the directions revealed in Scripture. It involves actually being guided by the Words of Scripture--not picking some to follow and discarding others, saying that some are true and judging that others are not. And the latter sort of belief is what will reinforce conviction in the proposition, because one will enjoy the experience of actually meeting God in the text and in one's life as one faithfully follows Him.
--
At this point, having summarized my main approach, I actually think I'll take up some of the details in a separate entry. There's quite enough to think about in this entry as it is.
Again, all the usual caveats and qualifications apply. As I explore this topic just a little, I'm struck by the chasm that separates my lay-speculations from the work of professional theologians. Hopefully what comes out here will at least be a bit helpful. Until next time, then.
--
God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.
posted by Metaphysician_delta | 2:45 PM
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