Edgework

We have spent considerable time by now making the argument that, based on the example of Jesus and Paul, we too need to read the Old Testament through a nonviolent grid. Leaving behind those elements of the text that do not square with the revelation that comes through Jesus frees us to fully embrace the good news of the gospel as enunciated in the New Testament.

But that leads us directly to the question of how to read the New Testament nearly 2000 years after it was written. Can we assume that once we turn the page and find ourselves in the New Testament we can finally accept everything that is written at face value? Has the imperfect witness of the Old Testament suddenly become a perfect witness of God’s will and God’s ways?

Many evangelical Biblicists insist that the New Testament is, in fact, infallible, inerrant, internally consistent and universally applicable down to the smallest detail. Furthermore they claim that all honest and sincere readers of the New Testament can readily discern God’s pure and full revelation to modern-day followers of Christ.

In his book, The Bible Made Impossible: “Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, Christian Smith disagrees with this perspective. “What I say here is simply that the Biblicism that in much of American Evangelicalism is presupposed to be the cornerstone to Christian truth and faithfulness is misguided and impossible. It does not and cannot live up to its own claims” (ix).

For many evangelicals this statement, no doubt, brings on the waving of red flags with the warning that such thinking is a sellout to Liberalism. Smith, however, makes the argument quite forcefully that honest  Bible reading does not inevitably lead us toward Liberalism. So my call to the evangelical community is to join boldly with those in our midst who are leading a quest to find a more faithful way of reading the New Testament in the context of the 21st century.

Most Bible scholars agree that some characteristics of the biblical text in the Old Testament carry over into the New Testament. For one, all of the individual books that make up the New Testament are written by human beings as were the books of the Old Testament.

There are, to be sure, various theories among scholars about how divine agency was involved in the writing of the New Testament. But the fact remains that these “books” and “letters” were written by “ancient” writers to “ancient” people who were removed from our experience by nearly 2000 years. And both writers and readers held to a pre-modern worldview that conflicts significantly with the worldview we have come to accept in our day. And, as we saw in the Old Testament, these various writings “say and teach very different things about most significant topics” (x). So if we are looking for a “Word from the Lord” that is relevant and meaningful for us today we will need to first enter that ancient world to discern what meaning the text had for its primary audiences.

And, furthermore, just as Jesus and Paul anticipated a clearer vision about God and what God requires, so too, we must take seriously the presence of the Holy Spirit Jesus promised who will teach us all things and remind us of what Jesus had taught (John 14:26). In other words, the New Testament is not a handbook about faith and life for time immemorial. It is a living testimony about the presence of Jesus in an ancient faith community that wrestled intensely with issues and questions it faced. Although many of those questions are not ours today, we can draw encouragement and insight from this account. With the New Testament as our backdrop and the Holy Spirit as our guide we can wrestle faithfully with the questions that face us today.

No matter what interpretive paradigm we use when reading the New Testament, invariably we will come across “leftover” or “outlier” texts that are not congruent with this paradigm (44). Lists of such texts are unavoidable and we all have them in our back pockets. These lists vary, depending on the church or denomination one has grown up in or adopted later in life. Sometimes we are aware of the lists we carry and have gone to considerable lengths to “interpret” or “contort” these texts in order to rehabilitate them – usually with limited success. At other times it seems we are not even aware they exist.

So with differing paradigms and varying lists we come up with a great variety of interpretations. We know instinctively that they can’t all be right. So where does that leave us? Does each little group cling to its preferred texts, however they are selected, and leave behind those texts that don’t square with what it believes to be true?

In her recent book, Executing God: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught about Salvation and the Cross, Sharon L. Baker offers what I think is a helpful proposal. Basically she says we should choose our “preferred” texts, not on the basis of our personal or group sentiments, but by following the example of Jesus and Paul.

“I’ll be right up front with you from the very beginning. I am going to privilege certain texts of Scripture. We all do it. For centuries we have privileged the biblical passages that speak of God’s retribution, vengeance, wrath and punishment… We have subordinated the biblical texts that portray God’s restorative justice, love for enemies, extravagant forgiveness, and mercy. I will privilege the teachings of Jesus and the Old Testament prophets who proclaimed God’s desire for peace, nonviolence and love of others – even to the point of loving our enemies” (6).

In other words, she adopts a nonviolent grid through which to read the New Testament, just like Jesus did when he read the Old Testament. We will unpack this idea further in coming essays.