What does the Bible say about....?

 In discussions about homosexuality people often turn to the Bible for an answer. The big problem with this approach is that it turns the Bible into something which it is not, a sort of religious  encyclopedia. Typical of this approach is the question: "What does the Bible say about....." It seems to suppose that the Bible says something about everything in life. One often even hear preachers comparing the Bible with a manual or a handbook.

 Dangerous:

Attractive as this may sound, it is a dangerous approach. Taken to its logical conclusions it leads to bigger questions. If one could for instance ask the question: "What does the Bible say about the nature of the earth?" you would have to conclude that the earth is flat and rests on pillars. The only reason many Christians don't do that is because we had 500 years of hard scientific proof that convinced us that this is not the case. It took a while to get used to it, but I know of no one that would insist that similar descriptions from the Bible describe the reality of the earth anymore. It would have been nice if the Bible told us that sickness could be caused by germs or a virus, that the earth revolves around the sun, that coca-cola is bad for your teeth etc. That is however not the case. The Bible is simply not an encyclopedia, and to treat it as such is actually a form of disrespect even though it is disguised in a tux and a black tie. This approach tends to read the Bible a a collection of verses written to modern individuals instead as books written to specific people with specific questions in the past. Treating the Bible like this often result either in heresy, hurt or unbelief. 

“the fountainhead of all false biblical interpretation and of all heresy is invariably the isolation and the absolutising of one single passage.” (Oscar Cullmann, The State in the New Testament, 47).

It is therefore better to drop the 'about' part of the question when approaching the Bible and simply ask: What does the Bible say? This is not easy, because our heads burst with questions and our conflicts crave a judge's hammer that will easily settle arguments, preferably in our favor of course.. Let me illustrate the difference:

'Biblical giving':

A few years ago, I heard a preacher give a powerful sermon on giving. He preached about the widow who gave her last two copper coins (Mark.12:41-44) in such a compelling way that at the end of his sermon people were flooding to the front of the church to empty their wallets. Ironically most of the money probably paid for the preachers plain-ticket to the Bahamas. I have also noticed that it is usually not the widows who preach from this passage.  The sermon that resulted from this passage was the result of asking the question:"What does the Bible say about giving in church?"

What is the result when one approaches the same passage not with the question:"What does the Bible say about giving?" but rather with the question "What does the Bible say?" or in this case, what is the author of the gospel trying to say with this passage. The passage gets a whole new meaning. Let us look at the broader context of this passage.

The incident with the widow occurs at the end of a series of conflicts between Jesus and the religious leaders in Jerusalem (Mark. 11:27-12:40) and right before the words of Jesus about the destruction of the temple (Mark. 13). Actually the tension between Jesus and the temple already comes to the surface after His entry into Jerusalem (Mark. 11:1-26). Just preceding the incident where this old widow comes to give her copper coins, the author relates that Jesus said:

"Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and like greetings in the marketplaces and have the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts, who devour widows' houses and for a pretense make long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation." (Mar 12:38-40)

This widow giving her last coins illustrated the failure of the temple and it's leaders to do what was just. A closer reading of Mark 11:1-26 reveals how the story of the cursed fig tree is intertwined with the cleansing of the temple and the eventual destruction of it. The story of the exploited widow giving her last coins is a most concrete example of the bad fruit of the temple system in the time of Jesus. All of this is simply not seen when someone read the passage of the widow in isolation as an answer the question: "What does the Bible say about giving?".

When read as part of the carefully composed gospel of Mark, asking what the author is trying to say, the passage of the widow giving her coins is not in the first place about giving, but an tale about God taking the side of those who are exploited by religious leaders. What happened however is that this preacher in his expensive suit already knew what he wanted to say about giving. All he needed was a text to give it a legitimate basis. He found his text and he got his money, sadly ignoring the bigger warning the whole passage had in store for him and others like him.

A similar thing happens when people in the debate about "What the Bible says about homosexuality?" usually read Romans 1:24-32 and fail to see how the passage is part of a whole letter, with an agenda they themselves often ignore: equality before God and the unity of the church. Perhaps when I have time, I will write more about that.  For now it is sufficient to say. Don't ask what Paul says about homosexuality in Romans. Simply ask:"What was Paul trying to say?" Taking seriously what Paul is trying to say in the whole letter should keep us busy for a while.

Anti-Intellectual Christianity produces Anti-Christian intellectuals.

While hunting down a newspaper article about a new interest in the Bible in some Dutch churches, my eye caught the title of an article on the content page of an otherwise unimposing little magazine called Mission Frontiers.

Under the theme: “Are we losing more than we’re gaining” I noticed the words “An Anti-intellectual faith and the tragic consequences for Britain’s Evangelical Awakening. “ I just had to read the article and smuggled the magazine to our office consoling myself that it is already an older issue and that no-one at the base seems to read them anyway.

In his article Jonathan W. Rice relates how the evangelicals impacted British society in the 18th and 19th century. They played a key role in ending slavery, abolishing sati and infant sacrifice in India, bringing education, rehabilitating prostitutes, reforming prisons, lunatic asylums etc. Yet they were also known for their petty legalisms and repressive behavior codes. The mixed results are summarized by a historian in the following way:

“Between 1780
and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most
aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in
the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, tender-minded, prudish
and hypocritical”

One of the saddest results of their “practical” religion however was the intellectual weakness of it.

"True Christianity, they believed, did not entail entering the marketplace
of ideas. They did not think it worthwhile to intelligently engage the skeptics,
German Biblical critics, agnostics and atheistic philosophers of their day.
Instead, they claimed, God had called them to a purely practical faith: to send
forth missionaries, to help the poor and downtrodden, to better peoples’
manners. These were the things pleasing to God; not intellectual debate or true
apologetics."

Rice goes on describing how as a result of this Anti-intellectual tendency an alarming number of the children and grandchildren of these Evangelicals turned from the faith of their parents. He tells the tragic story of the classic author George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) who at some stage wrote that she would be happy if the only music she ever heard again would be worship music. A couple of years later she rejected Christianity after reading Hennell’s Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity and Strauss’ Life of Jesus and became an ardent atheist.

What makes this anti-conversion of Evans so sad is the fact that the claims of both Hennell and Strauss have been completely refuted in modern times. Rice asks why Evangelicals from the 19th century failed to produce solid responses to Straus and others. Hennell and Strauss however have their modern day equivalents in the Jesus Seminar, Michael Baigent etc. Rice heckles the lack of response to the Anti-Christian propaganda of Arun Shourie in India and I am afraid that the situation for a few exceptions of people like McGrath and Wright is not much better in Europe or America.

The Anti-intellectual tendency of evangelical and charismatic Christianity of our day has bothered me for years. In the last year however as I started to participate in discussions on an internet forum, I have become increasingly aware of the unpaid bills of the section of Christianity in which I have been actively involved over the last two decades.

I have heard stories like that of Mary Ann Evans from different people. One of the key elements is usually a very naive literalistic reading of the Bible and some of the infallibility claims made about it. When people discover that the world is not as black and white as they have learned, it seems that they are often shocked into blindness. If only there would be guides who could take them by the hand and lead them through their first shocked moments into appreciating the rainbow of the colorful riches of a personal God displayed in the Scriptures. Were it not for a couple of people like Ed Sherman, Dirk Bouman, Wilrens Hornstra and the books of Wright, Peterson and others, I guess I might have chosen the safe dark corner of blind intellectualism where things fit nicely into the black and white categories albeit that all things end up being black.

Anti-intellectualism is an easy but in the long run devastating response to the new antichristian voices of our day. The Anti-intellectual sounds I often hear even in my own Christian community somehow remind me of the unwise choices of bank managers in the last couple of years. The immediate results are not bad. We can simplify faith with formulas and slogans. In the long run however, we pay a dear price when we do not teach people that loving God is not only done with your heart, but also with your whole mind.

The whole article of Rice can be read in the Archives of Mission Frontiers in the March-April 2008 issue under the title: “An Anti-intellectual faith and the tragic consequences for Britain’s Evangelical Awakening. “

Jesus Juice - John 2:1-12

A recent discussion in our community made me think of some of the problems I had as a young South African Pentecostal Christian with the idea that Jesus might have actually turned water into wine. (See John 2:1-12) In the church I went to the consumption of alcohol was seen as a grave sin by many. Even from people, including my parents, who were less prone to pronounce this judgment on someone who would drink the occasional glass of wine, I always got the feeling that alcohol in any form could better be avoided as something that inevitably leads to abuse.

To me this attitude in a society where the abuse of alcohol is a very real problem that has devastated many families is quite understandable, although the fact that it is understandable would no longer automatically convince me that this is the only appropriate attitude towards all alcoholic beverages. Racism could be explained in a society that has been plagued by racially motivated violence, but it could not be acquitted on that basis. I know this example is extreme but I am using it to show that an explanation could not automatically be accepted as an excuse. But wait, I am digressing.

It was clear to me. If wine was not inherently evil it was at least potentially poisonous. How on earth could Jesus make something like that? When I learned about the quantity of the water turned into wine, the problem became even worse. It became apparent that this miracle did not concern the small quantity of communion wine which would be allowed to wet the lips in some less spiritual churches. It is actually amazing that as a young person in the 20th century, my biggest question did not concern the question whether Jesus literally changed the chemical substance of water into that of wine, but whether that substance would in any way resemble the one that could only be purchased by adults under certain restriction at specific licensed stores. God’s infallible Word could not possibly embarrass us as Bible-believing Christians in such a way! There must be a good explanation.

I was relieved to hear that I was not the only person thinking that. A well known evangelical speaker , wife of a pastor in a traditional church, solemnly declared that Jesus, who loved people would never make wine that could be intoxicating and thus damaging to families. I was also comforted to hear from another speaker that there are different words in the original language for wine and that some of them could actually refer to mere grape juice.

After the recent discussion I revisited some of these explanations on the internet and noticed again the serious inconsistencies present in evangelical hermeneutics.
Let me quote an example written by one Chuck Northrop:
“ ...Consider these examples of the word "wine" being used in Scripture with reference to unfermented grape juice. Joel 1:10 says "The field is wasted, the land mourneth; for the corn is wasted: the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth." (This refers to grapes dried up in the fields, which could not be intoxicating.) ...”

Now I may be stupid, but I see no indication in this description of economic crisis suggesting that the grapes were still in the fields unless of course you ignore the reference to the land mourning. In fact, the phrase about the wine is followed by one about the waste of oil, another liquid just as common as wine in the ancient Middle-Eastern home as part of a parallelism. What makes this argument even worse is the fact that this references comes from the Old Testament where the source language is Hebrew whereas the reference to Jesus turning water into wine belongs to the New Testament which was written in Greek. So even if the writer of this article could prove that the word translated with wine in English could mean non-alcoholic grape juice, which he doesn’t, his proof is still irrelevant as John’s account of the changing wine does not concern a translation of that Hebrew word, but the translation of a Greek word for which he has no similar proofs.

It is this kind of conjuring that not only makes a mockery of Christian apologetics, but also discredits the very Bible such people profess to believe. This type of explanation is not seriously interested in what the Bible really has to say on the subject, but more interested to use (read abuse) the Bible to defend a point of view that is already fixed in concrete.

The evidence from both the text and history seems to point to wine that probably contained at least some amount of alcohol. I like the idea of someone that the wine Jesus made, although real wine, would not have an intoxicating effect on any guest, no matter how much of it he drank. Yet even though I like the idea, the problem with it is that it again reads things into the Bible that is simply not supported by the text.

Our reading of the Bible will be healthier if we would simply recognize that when coming to the Bible we need to first put our questions aside and try to understand what the original intent of the writer was. What questions were the author of the fourth gospel trying to answer. What was it about Jesus that he was trying to say in relating this incident? Simply put: Is our reading of the Bible determined by what we think or is our thinking formed by what we read?

Apart from the issue of hermeneutics in this matter there still is the issue of theology. We are often encouraged not to limit God because for Him “All things are possible!” This actually usually refers to expecting God to do certain types of miracles. It somehow never occurs to people that if what they sing is true, it could also be possible that God is not going to act according to their expectation. Maybe it is possible that God does not always choose to heal, not because He cannot, but because He can choose not to.

Maybe Jesus is the kind of person who could make 600 liters of wine, and yells “Prost” as he raises a glass with his friends!
What would it take to dislodge us from the religious icon we have painted in our minds? Can we try to understand what Jesus was doing at a wedding in a small Galilean town and what this incident wants to say about Him? Can we allow Jesus to be a living person that does things that may conflict with some of the opinions we hold or do we prefer Him to conform to our idea of what is proper? If so, we need to consider the possibility that we are no less guilty of making a graven image than some more traditional forms of Christianity we often criticize for what we see as disguised idolatry.

As a young Pentecostal I was secretly proud that we were not caught up in dead tradition like "some" churches. We had the "new wine" of the Spirit, which we of course did not see as a problem because the wine was spiritual. We may have been oblivious to the pain and devastation sometimes caused by our self-assured “Spirit-drunken” utterances in the family of God. I sometimes wonder if it would not benefit the family of God if we would be a bit more moderate in the consumption of some of our newfound wines. The older I get, the more I appreciate the conclusion of an ancient writer who spoke of the vanity of the doings of man including our certain theologies. He also writes:
(7) Go, eat your bread in joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do. (Ecc 9:7)

Even in the middle of the challenges that new knowledge about science and history bring to my faith I still believe that for the Bridegroom all things are possible, not only changing water into grape juice, but also making real good wine.

O thirsty ones, come drink with me
A priceless wine, a fountain free
His living water turned to wine
The taste, the smell – for sure divine

O sinful ones, behold Him there,
The grapes of wrath He treads – despair!
The cup of anger He did toast
Our lives to Him have mattered most

Beloved ones, now to the feast!
With loud applause welcome the Groom!
His words are sweeter than the wine
It rings: “Beloved, you are mine”
Raise up your glass, filled to the brim!
The wine He kept till now is best.