Edgework

A rejection of ambiguity places a demand on the biblical text that it simply cannot deliver. Furthermore, it places personal faith on thin ice. If it can be shown, for example, that even one text falls short of scientific accuracy, that could be enough to scuttle one’s trust in the Bible as God’s Word, and perhaps even one’s faith in God. “How can you trust a God who leaves us with an imperfect book?” some would say.

As a young Christian, I identified this kind of “angst” in Harold Lindsell’s book, The Battle for the Bible (1976). Lindsell takes great pains to explain how the apparent discrepancy of the measurement of the molten sea Solomon built (2 Chronicles 4:2) does not invalidate a modern mathematical formula. The text says that the sea was ten cubits across and thirty cubits in circumference. According to mathematical theory, a ten cubit diameter should yield a circumference of 31.4 cubits. Lindsell solves this discrepancy by suggesting that the sea walls were probably four inches thick and that the circumference described in the text referred to the inside of the sea. So an outside diameter of ten cubits would yield an inside circumference of 30 cubits. Aha! The Bible can be trusted after all! God doesn’t make mistakes! This kind of reasoning seemed somewhat problematic back then. Now it appears to be quite foolish indeed! Does our faith in God stand or fall on such trivialities?

In Inspiration and Incarnation (2005), Peter Enns suggests that “…We are to place our trust in God who gave us Scripture, not in our own conceptions of how Scripture ought to be” (15,169). It may be true that we crave certainty with respect to every subject the Bible addresses. However, that does not negate the fact that the Bible leaves room for a good deal of ambiguity and the need to wrestle with the biblical text to find suitable applications in our modern world.

In Discovering Biblical Equality (2005), Gordon Fee says the following about ambiguity in Scripture:

“God did not choose to give us a series of timeless, non-culture-bound theological propositions to be believed and imperatives to be obeyed. Rather, he chose to speak his eternal word this way, in historically particular circumstances and in every kind of literary genre. By the very way God gave us this Word, he locked in the ambiguity. One should not fight God and insist that he give us his Word in another way or, as we are apt to do, rework his Word along theological or cultural prejudgments that turn into a minefield of principles, propositions or imperatives but denude it of its ad hoc character as truly human. The ambiguity is part of what God did in giving us the Word in this way” (370).

Another way of speaking about ambiguity is to recognize that in producing a revelatory Scripture, God had to accommodate himself to two things: first imperfect human beings in various places and times would be doing the actual writing, and second, faulty human beings would be reading and interpreting the text. That is why Christopher Smith, in The Bible Made Impossible (2011) can say that “…God did not correct every incomplete or mistaken view of the biblical authors in order to communicate through them with the readers. That would be distracting. The point of the inspired Scripture was to communicate its central point, not to straighten out every kink and dent in the views of all the people involved in biblical inscripturation and reception along the way” (129).

Instead of trusting a perfect text, Smith suggests we do better to trust the “Rule of Faith” which was already operative in faith communities before many of the New Testament texts were written. As a matter of fact, this “Rule of Faith” was the standard used to judge the validity of books chosen to become part of the biblical canon.  Smith contends that, “All of Scripture is not clear, nor does it need to be. But the real matter of Scripture is clear, ‘the deepest secret of all,’ that God in Christ has come to earth, lived, taught, healed, died, and risen to new life, so that we too can rise to life in him” (132).

In his book, New Testament Social Ethics for Today (1984), Richard N. Longenecker suggests that sometimes a development of theological understandings is apparent even within the biblical text itself, which makes it dangerous to simply extract a single text and run with it. There may be more said on a particular subject in subsequent writings. For example, Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom is expanded and fleshed out in greater detail in Jesus’ teaching. “It is a model that appeals by way of analogy to the relationship between a growing plant and its original seed…yet that growth is always controlled and judged by what is inherent in the seed itself” (25).

Longenecker acknowledges that in the New Testament we have a declaration of the gospel, ethical principles that arise from it and an account of how those principles were applied in differing situations in the apostolic period. He notes that “The way that proclamation and its principles were put into practice in the first century, however, should be understood as signposts at the beginning of a journey which point out the path to be followed if we are to reapply that same gospel in our day” (27).

Another way of saying the same thing is to think in terms of trajectories set within Scripture: ideas or visions which are not fully developed, that with time and under the direction of the Holy Spirit, find a faithful endpoint even beyond the bounds of the biblical canon. Two examples of this could be the ultimate emancipation of both slaves and women. While some reject the “trajectory” principle, I think it helps to point out how ambiguity in Scripture can in fact lead us along the way of the Spirit in our times.