Welcome, I embark on this journey with friends and family and I am unsure where I will end up, or if I even want to go there, but I feel this journey can‘t be avoided.
I start with the story of my life, not all of it, but I begin with a time a few years ago when I was handed small white book.
I was handed this book by my good friend Mike. It was Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, by Rob Bell. I, like many others, was burnt out on the “faith.” Tired of tradition with no heart, tired of people not reaching out or not willing to touch the world around them. Burnt by the people who act like their lives are all together and was struggling to fix myself. It was in this dreary state of mind that I read Velvet Elvis the first time. Refreshing I thought was this man’s view of following Jesus (if you haven’t read it you should). Even though I found it interesting I was struggling with my own demons and with a powerful addiction that almost destroyed everything I hold dear and so the book had no lasting impact on me. The next few years of my story were of pain and struggle but I was brought to a place of desperation, the lowest place in my life I have ever been. I longed for change, I longed for the love of a creator that I was sure I wasn’t interested in me. Out of my longing I picked up 2 books that changed my life forever, True Faced (probably number 1 or 2 on my favorite book list) and Velvet Elvis.
Rob Bell’s book (Velvet Elvis) was so incredibly encouraging to me that I found him on-line and started to listen to him (I had seen his church’s website before but not paid much attention). Amazing; probably the only word I would use to describe it. He was funny, a great story teller, in touch with modern America, and had a talented way of looking at our Bible from the eyes of the ancient Jewish culture Jesus lived in. I had never heard anything like this before and I grew up in the church! I started to have this conversation with friends and I realized something: I realized change is in the air! There seems to be a major shift happening, at least in America’s youth, and this shift is all over the map. To some it’s a search for “your own truth.” To others it’s a desire to shake off religion and remember what it’s like to passionately serve God. I am here now at this shift and I get excited. I wonder, “what will happen? Do I actually get to be a part of a new movement? What kind of church am I preparing for my son?” I honestly find myself so enthralled about the possibility of being part of something new. Not just change for changes sake, but a part of the church that the Spirit of our living God is using to reach the world! I wonder, “what new is going to happen?” I hear murmurs of the ancient spiritual disciplines re-appearing. How awesome would it be to be a part of a church that acknowledges and respects God in such a deep way!
This story of my life, of seeking in my desperation, is the one I am using to start the question I am writing about today. I am ready to be a part of a movement but I must hold on to truth. Is truth relative?
So here are the questions I am going to pose.
Is the Bible literally, historically true? Is the Chicago statement on biblical inerrancy true?
This question, I think, is at the core of some of the changes going on in the circles I am hearing. I find much positive in the church as it is changing, but I will stand and say it must be based on a truth that we must subject ourselves to.
I am no theologian and any discussion here is of a lay person but I pray it is deep and I look forward to how it will challenge me.
“Theology, Narrative and Authority
I shall now argue that the conception of the task, the way of reading the New Testament, for which I have been arguing in the last three chapters, enables us to do what pre-modern Christian readers assumed they could do without difficulty, and what the ‘modernists’ found so many problems with, namely, to use the New Testament as in some way authoritative. This is not to go back to pre-modernism. We have abandoned biblicistic proof-texting, as inconsistent with the nature of the texts that we have (and anyone who thinks that this means abandoning biblical authority should ask themselves where the real authority lies in a method that effectively turns the Bible into something else). Nor can it easily be done within modernism itself. For better or worse, there has existed within the world of modernistic New Testament studies a kind of practical agreement to split off ‘descriptive’ and ‘normative’ readings of the Bible from one another. If we choose to move from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’, from description of the past to authoritative statement, that is a choice made, it is felt, from outside the historical task itself. But need this in fact be so? Is there another model, consistent with serious literary, historical and theological study, which will result in the New Testament exercising that authority which Christians from the beginning have accorded to it?
Here I have a suggestion to make, which seems to me fairly obvious though not often explored. Since (a) stories are a key worldview indicator in any case [comment: this statement stems from a long discussion, prior to this excerpt, of worldviews and the importance of narrative stories therein], and (b) a good part of the New Testament consists of stories, of narratives, it might be a good idea to consider how stories might carry, or be vehicles for, authority. Stories may seem at first unpromising as a starting-point for authoritative exegesis. But we may be able to conceive of a working model which would make the point clear.
Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play, most of whose fifth act has been lost. The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a remarkable wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged. Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own. Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.
Consider the result. The first four acts, existing as they did, would be the undoubted ‘authority’ for the task at hand. That is, anyone could properly object to the new improvisation on the grounds that some character was now behaving inconsistently, or that some sub-plot or theme, adumbrated earlier, had not reached its proper resolution. This ‘authority’ of the first four acts would not consist—could not consist!—in an implicit command that the actors should repeat earlier parts of the play over and over again. It would consist in the fact of an as yet unfinished drama, containing its own impetus and forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in an appropriate manner. It would require of the actors a free and responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency. This model could and perhaps should be adapted further: it offers quite a range of possibilities.”
-I’d love to write more, but I think I’ve plagiarized quite enough from N.T. (Nicholas Thomas) Wright’s “The New Testament and the People of God”, Volume 1, Part II, Chapter 5 (pg. 139-140) Copyright ©1992 (quite before his time… and still writing great stuff)
I hope this is legal… in any case I highly recommend this book to anyone whose interest is sparked here.
Thoughts?