Theology for God's Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement.3
1.
The
Book
The Bible plays a vital role
in God’s SCRM. Every movement, especially a “great campaign of sabotage,” needs
a Field Manual of Operations, and that, I suggest, is how, in most respects,
the Bible functions for God’s people. The respect in the Bible is unlike a
Field Manual of Operations, however, is the most important. It serves as a
sacrament, sign, and servant of God’s SCRM.
1.1
The
Bible as the Living Word of God
The SCRM God communicates
himself and his will and way for us in the Bible. “Jesus Christ as he is
attested in Holy Scripture is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life
and in death.”[1] So
claims the remarkable Theological
Declaration of Barmen written by the Confessing Church as a witness against
the Nazi regime in Germany in 1934.
“As he is attested in Holy
Scripture” – the Jesus we find in the pages of the New Testament witnesses to
the living Word of God that effect and grows our relationship with God. This
relational connection with God’s SCRM-in-person gives us a personal stake in
the movement. In and through him we too share in God’s SCRM.
The living Word in and
through the written Word speaks to each of us calling us to return to who we
truly are and the vocation for which we are made. The Word who bound himself to
us and made us his own and now gives himself to us as life itself. “For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the
death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by
his life” (Rom.5:10).
In
light of this personal address from God to us in the Bible, can we then speak
of the Bible as a love letter from God to us? James McGrath, biblical scholar and popular blogger, says
not. Recently he posted this on his blog.
“Few assumptions prevent people
from understanding the Bible as much as the idea that it is a love letter from
God to them. Every part of that – that God wrote it, that it is a love letter,
and that it is written with you in mind – is badly mistaken, and so the
combination thereof creates a lens that radically distorts and obscures the
Bible.”[2]
On the other hand, no less a theologian than Dietrich Bonhoeffer
apparently did so describe the Bible. One of his students remembers this from
him: "There, before the church
struggle, (Bonhoeffer) said to us at the new Alexanderplatz, with
a simplicity like old Tholuck might have once used, that we should not
forget that every word of Holy Scripture was a love letter from God directed
very personally to us, and he asked us whether we loved Jesus.”[3]
So what do we say? Yea or Nay?
McGrath dislikes
all three parts of it: divine authorship, it being a love letter, and that it
was written with the contemporary reader in mind. I suspect he has in mind a
kind of “Jesus is my boyfriend” sentiment that some praise songs and worship
practices invoke. I too would reject that sentiment.
Bonhoeffer is a
rather different matter, I think. He certainly thinks God is speaking to us
through the Bible. In a letter to his brother-in-law in 1936 DB writes:
“That is because in the Bible God speaks to us. And one cannot
simply think about God in one’s own strength, one has to enquire of him. Only
if we seek him, will he answer us. Of course it is also possible to read the
Bible like any other book, that is to say from the point of view of textual
criticism, etc.; there is nothing to be said against that. Only that that is
not the method which will reveal to us the heart of the Bible, but only the
surface, just as we do not grasp the words of someone we love by taking them to
bits, but by simply receiving them, so that for days they go on lingering in
our minds, simply because they are the words of a person we love; and just as
these words reveal more and more of the person who said them as we go on, like
Mary, “pondering them in our heart,” so it will be with the words of the Bible.
Only if we will venture to enter into the words of the Bible, as though in them
this God were speaking to us who loves us and does not will to leave us alone
with our questions, only so shall we learn to rejoice in the Bible . . . .”[4]
But for DB this divine speaking takes place in context of a
living relationship between God and his human creatures. Just prior to the
quote above he stresses that we must listen to God speaking in the Bible with
an insistent humility actively seeking and even questioning what we hear.[5] This
is very different from kind of sentiment I suspected above lay behind McGrath’s
quote.
This kind of approach to hearing God speak in the Bible is
the only way we will receive an answer to our questions. DB acknowledges this
approach is different from academic reading (which has nothing wrong with it per
se). It just does not get to the kind of relational listening Bonhoeffer
thinks vital and necessary. Here we come to the love language. DB believes that
God loves human beings. And that in that love God takes the first step toward
us. And he engages us in the reality of our lives whatever that might be at any
given time. This is the kind concreteness Bonhoeffer is famous for pursuing.
Again, very different from a sentimental approach.
So, at least for DB, we can say that God does speak to us in
the Bible and that it is appropriate, even necessary, to call this relationship
to the speaking God a relationship of love. But he adds following the quote above
that God speaks where God chooses, a place, he writes, “that will probably be a
place which does not at all correspond to my nature, which is not at all
pleasing to me.” Bonhoeffer identifies this place where God speaks as “the
cross of Christ.” And here is the death of that sentimental approach. What we
hear from God will not always be warm, fuzzy, and comforting. It may be a word
of devastating judgment. And yet still a word of love. “This is no place which
is pleasing or a priori sensible to us. But this is the very place God
has chosen to encounter us.”[6]
DB even claims we should practice a “sacrifice of our
intellect” in matters that remain opaque, perplexing, questionable.
“And
who would not in fact bring his or her own sacrifice of intellect into such a
situation, that is, with the acknowledgment one does not yet understand this or
that place of the Scripture, in the awareness that even this will one day be
revealed as God’s own Word? I would rather do this than only to say, following
some suitable opinion: ‘This is divine, that is human.’”[7]
Many would disagree with Bonhoeffer, not willing to
sacrifice their intellect for anyone, even God. And many seem willing today to
divide up what “following some suitable opinion” they deem the human
(dispensable) element in the Bible from the divine.
I believe here we have a watershed moment in our time. Can
we allow God, as a loving parent, to have secrets beyond what we can fathom or
accept and still embrace his Word as a whole as a word of love to us? Can we
allow ourselves to say “I do not understand how God could do this and am sorely
tempted to disregard it for my moral and intellectual well-being, but I will
not. I will hold open my questions and trust that someday, someway, God will
answer them.”
Only such a relationship to God through Scripture as DB
describes, or something very like it, can sustain the stresses of such a
practice. But only in that it is of a piece with our whole journey with God (as
Bonhoeffer was already learning and would keep on learning in excruciating
ways). Only the parental love of God can sustain us. Even if that love
outstrips our knowledge or stretches our morality, or is the tough love of
judgment and wrath. This is the genius of DB’s approach. And it is this we need
to recover in our time. An insistent, humble confidence that God speaks to us
and bids us follow him into the darkness of a cruciform existence that
paradoxically turns out to be the light of the world (however dark it may be
for us at this or that time).
I don’t know whether McGrath would agree to any of this or
not. But with Bonhoeffer I continue to believe that in love God speaks to our
darkness and distrust in the Bible calling us to deeper communion and
commitment as befits a genuine family.
1.2
The
Bible as the Written Word of God
The Bible not only communicates/reveals
God himself to us, it also reveals his heart, that is, his passion, plans, and
commitments to and for his creation. We have seen that God’s heart for us makes
him a subversive counter-revolutionary deity in a fallen world in revolt
against him. Thus his written Word to us resources our own life as members of
his SCRM. It does this in various ways, all important to create and sustain a
movement in the interests of his love and passion. The Bible gives us
-the vision of God for creation,
-the story of humanity's rejecting that
vision, and God's continuing passion and strategy for a pursuit of his
erstwhile human creatures and their communities,
-the victory of God over the powers of
sin, death, and (d)evil in Jesus Christ, and
-the equipping of his people to live
and love as they were intended in witnessing to God's victory and participating
in his guiding his creation and creatures to their full and final flourishing
(narrative, gospels, prophecy, apocalyptic).
-a history of some of the earliest
development and growth of this movement (Acts),
-nuts and bolts for the training in and
practice of God's Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement (wisdom, teaching,
epistles). Chief among these teachings is Jesus' exposition of life in the
movement in the Sermon on the Mount in Mt.5-7. -a challenge to the coherence of the
movement (e.g. Ecclesiastes, Job) and responses to meet and process these
challenges (e.g. Psalms, Daniel).
It is within the community of faith,
the SCRM that these convictions attain their plausibility. This gives the movement
its plausibility structure. The social and cultural setting that makes our convictions
supportable or plausible is critical. Outside this community, trying to go it individually
as a Christian, we will fail. Outside such community we are left at the mercy
of other communities to attack or seduce us with their convictions and
plausibility structures.
All this, I take it, is a way saying
what the Paul of the Pastoral Epistles says of the Bible in 2 Tim. 3:16-17: “Every
scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for showing mistakes,
for correcting and for training character, so that the person who belongs to
God can be equipped to do everything that is good.” The Bible points us to God,
puts us in touch with God, and prepares us to serve God as his SCRM.
1.3
The
Bible as Enacted Word
God comes to us personally
through his living Word, Jesus. And he comes to us through his written Word,
the Bible. But he also comes to us through his enacted Word, the sacraments.
These rituals, baptism and the Eucharist,[8]
give us the opportunity to both kinetically and imaginatively encounter the
living Christ and practice the skills and moves necessary for faithful
prosecution of the struggles of God’s people.
From the perspective of God’s
SCRM, these sacraments can be re-visioned to gain traction within this
framework. Indeed, I suggest that military imagery is especially helpful here
and lifts up aspects of these acts frequently overlooked. I refer specifically
to seeing baptism as induction into the military and the Eucharist as the
rations that nourish and sustain soldiers in military action.
The Holy Spirit uses the
Liquid Word of baptism and the Edible Word of the Eucharist to seal, that is,
confirm and make effective, the Preached and Written Word of the Bible.[9]
Baptism is a sign of
initiation into God’s people, akin, I suggest, to induction and basic training
into the military. Both give us a new parent (Uncle Sam/God the Father), a new
identity, a new family, new resources and skills, a new inheritance or goal,
and a new vocation (to serve in God’s SCRM).
The Eucharist sustains and
nurtures us in Christian living. Again, we might liken it to the “rations” a
soldier lives off while in action. In the Eucharist we experience a preview of
the great feast in God’s kingdom which is our hope, receive provision for
present need, and we practice the skills needed to do and be the people God
calls us to be. Undeserved welcome, friendship, peacemaking, hope, and
stewardship chief among them.[10]
These sacraments are “means
of grace” because they initiate and sustain us as members of God’s people and
through whom we meet the risen Christ and grow in relation to him.
Another way to state the
significance of these sacraments and their importance for us is to think of
baptism as the beginning that never ends and the Eucharist as the end that has
already begun. We never outlive or outgrow our baptismal call to live for
Christ and God’s kingdom; so too, we experience here and now, in part, hope of
life and friendship with God and one another in his new creation forever and
ever. We live, as I like to put it, between the Font of baptism and the Table
of the Eucharist. The various graces of each enfold from opposite directions
making that imaginative space between the font and the table in the sanctuary a
matrix of grace that forms us as God’s people.
Yet another way to reflect
on the significance of these sacraments is to say that in baptism Jesus’ SCRM life
becomes ours, while in the Eucharist, our lives become SCRM lives in his.
For all these reasons and
more, it is incumbent on us, I believe, to pay far more attention to these
gracious gifts God has given us to train and sustain us as his people. It is
here at the font and the table that we will find the equipping and enablement
we need to serve in God’s SCRM.
1.4
The Authority
of the Bible
The authority of this book lies in its use by God through
the Spirit to “author” a SCRM. Inerrancy or errancy plays no role here. If one
has met the God who shines in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6) and been
grasped by that Vision of his Desirable Future and caught up into service in
his SCRM the matter is beyond inerrancy or not. It's a matter
-of the faithfulness of this God encountered.
-of the truth of his cause.
-of the immeasurable greatness of his presence in and among
his people.
This, I take, is a paraphrase of Calvin's insistence on the
inner witness of the Holy Spirit as the essential mark of the reality and truth
of scripture's testimony. His emphasis here is reflected in A Declaration of Faith:
Then it becomes a matter of faith seeking understanding. We
submit to the Bible, errant or not, as God's chosen vehicle to make himself
known to and guide his people.
[1] http://www.ucc.org/beliefs_barmen-declaration.
[3] http://ftc.co/blog/posts/bonhoeffer-and-the-costly-enjoyable-kingdom.
[5] Geoffrey B. Kelly and E. Burton Nelson, eds. Testament of Freedom (New
York: HarperOne,
2009),
425.
[6] Ibid., 426.
[7] Ibid.
[8] I am aware that some
traditions have more than these two sacraments and others don’t call them
sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist (or the Lord’s Supper or Communion) are
recognized by all traditions as special acts that are central to Christian
existence and worship.
[9] See A Declaration of Faith, ch.6, par.5.
[10] My unpublished paper “Living
Between the Font and the Table: Why Only the Sacraments Can Save Us Now”
explores this greater detail. Available as pdf upon request from author.
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