And the Spirit said to Philip, "Go over and join this chariot."
So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, "Do you understand what you are reading?"
And he said, "How can I, unless someone guides me?"
(Acts 8:29 - 31a)As I become closer to Christ, I look back on my childhood and think, "Wow, I didn't know what goodness was! I made a lot of bad decisions in my youth." As I continued to grow closer to God, I looked at myself as I was a few years ago, and said the same thing. As I continued to grow closer, I looked at one year ago, and then month ago, and then yesterday. Now I look at today and think, "Good heavens, I have no idea who God is at all." I am so unversed, so unlearned, so ignorant of God's nature and His will. I am horribly ignorant, and also horribly unnerved.
All my life, I have thought of God as something that He's not. It might be even better to say that I've looked at pieces of Him, little descriptive attributes or qualities that He has (He is love, He answers promises, He is truth, He gives life) and didn't connect them all very well. I say now that I am beginning to understand Him better, but, how do you know when you hit the REAL TRUTH of who God is? Mustn't you always be humble and admit when you're wrong?
I think that part of the answer is this: Truth is real. There are real, true, logical answers to questions about reality. With good reasoning comes increased clarity, and the closer you get to the great Truth, the clearer the world gets, and the more clear it becomes how central God is to all things, without which nothing is possible. God is true.
I think it is the humble person who understands that he or she must submit to Truth. Contrary to what I was taught growing up, humility is not saying that you don't know in all situations; humility is being subservient to truth and really pursuing it, wherever it leads and in whatever it holds. When you know whether or not there are cookies in the cookie jar, it's not humble to say that you don't know. That's dishonest. A humble person here would say that, yes, there are cookies in the cookie jar. Humility is expressed in being able to listen and learn, not jumping to hasty conclusions (Treebeard would be greatly displeased), using your knowledge where it is applicable. And in respect to the great search for God, it is quite humble to look at the great holy men and women of the past who spent their entire lives reasoning from the Scriptures and from their spiritual leaders and engaging their knowledge of God into their lives, and contributing those understandings to the great conversation about God that has collected and continued through the history of the Church. Discarding this breadth of knowledge, which persists through time, without a thought is like discarding the knowledge of previous mathematicians or scientists without a thought.
I'm afraid this is going to be terribly unpopular, but this is how I've been coming to understand the issue and I see no way around it. The terrifying thought has been creeping up in me is that reading out of the Scriptures and pulling out my own interpretations as best I can understand them, without collaboration with others who know better than me and can reason better than me, is a horribly dangerous notion. We say that Scripture is the final authority, but when I engage Scripture this way, aren't I actually appointing myself as the final authority on how to interpret what those passages mean? Doesn't that make me the Pope of my own religion, and aren't I making God in my own image, however I see fit? Or, in a softer way, doesn't that mean that I make the Bible conform to what I understand? On what grounds do I say "no" to what the Church has been saying for 1,500 years? Me, in my sin that I can't even always see for lack of clarity; me, in my laity and mere 23 years; me, without a deep understanding of the Bible, church history, theology, philosophy, or God in the first place? No, that's a pride that I never wanted or thought to look out for.
Very well, then. I must abandon this way.
Dear Jannica,
ReplyDeleteI admire your post and your desire to seek truth. As Protestant Christians, we believe that the Holy Spirit reveals truth to each of us personally when we read the scriptures. As Jesus Christ said, "I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes." (Mt. 11:25) Though it may seem prudent at times to count on the traditions of the church which have changed through history, in fact we must become as children and understand the scriptures simply: take them at face value. We ought not to apply any hermeneutical methods from outside the scripture, because the inspired scripture can speak for itself through the Holy Spirit.
Unfortunately, the 1500 years of "what the Church has been saying" is full of factual errors and even contradictions. In fact, it is false! So if you are looking for truth, you won't be finding it there.
Only by drawing nearer to God can you find the truth that you are looking for. When your mind and heart are purified from sin, the Holy Spirit can work upon your intellect and allow you to interpret holy scripture correctly. You don't need the old church hierarchy, politically biased and philosophically corrupted, to tell you how to think! Your relationship with Christ through His Holy Spirit can supersede such enslavement. Claim that today and find truth.
Sincerely,
Dallas Willard
Thanks for your insight, Dr. Willard! First, please - please - continue this conversation with me. Or, if you have no intention of doing so, please comment again and tell me so. I am searching for God as deeply as I can, and need all the information, guidance, and sharpening I can find. Perhaps you'll be able to answer these questions for me. Forgive me if anything I say seems either discourteous or elementary. It is NOT my intent to put anyone down, but only to avoid falsehood. I want to know God truly.
DeleteBut more importantly, finishing this conversation is where our forefathers have failed. I desperately want to start no more new churches, but instead fix the one we have. This can only be done through long, arduous, patient, humble conversations. Therefore, forgive me where I err and am ignorant, continue with me here, and let us reason together. I will go through your response paragraph by paragraph. It seems that I will also have to break this up into several posts in order to respond within the maximum character count per response.
1. This is your first paragraph:
DeleteI admire your post and your desire to seek truth. As Protestant Christians, we believe that the Holy Spirit reveals truth to each of us personally when we read the scriptures. As Jesus Christ said, "I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes." (Mt. 11:25) Though it may seem prudent at times to count on the traditions of the church which have changed through history, in fact we must become as children and understand the scriptures simply: take them at face value. We ought not to apply any hermeneutical methods from outside the scripture, because the inspired scripture can speak for itself through the Holy Spirit.
As best I understand your first paragraph, you're saying this: "It is possible to understand the Bible at face value, because the Holy Spirit helps us to understand what it means." I can no longer honestly ascribe to this hermeneutic for a few different reasons: the number of Protestant denominations suggests otherwise, this understanding of the Holy Spirit’s role is used by Mormons, and I’m not convinced that becoming like children means to dispose of reason. This is all, of course, assuming that I want to know God as well as I possibly can. But let me go into these thoughts one by one.
First, the sheer number of different Protestant denominations seems to testify that trying to understand the Bible at face value is not a good idea. If it were easy to understand, wouldn't we all agree on the message of the Bible? Instead, we have controversy everywhere: free will vs. predestination; faith vs. works; sola scriptura vs. prima scriptura; whether or not God knows the future; whether or not God has a spouse picked out for you; and so on. I've even heard of churches splitting over the color of the hymnals that were in the pews! This has troubled me immensely since I was a highschooler, and especially when my agnostic and atheist friends would press me for answers. That's not to say that God is not present and cannot work through people who haven’t studied a lot – on the contrary, the Bible explains that the law is written on our hearts. I only mean to say that probably neither you nor me have the knowledge of God as much as it is possible to know Him as Protestants. The nature of Protestantism is that I can supply no authoritative answers when there is a lack of orthodoxy without becoming a scholar. But surely, it's absurd to say that all Christians ought to be scholars - yet how could a layman possibly make an informed decision on what pastors to listen to when there is a buffet of churches and theologies to pick from? One could say that where God is, you will see Him in the people, but that is also misleading. There are at least two issues here: there is the true knowledge of God, and there faithfulness (here meaning the quality of following through with what one knows to be true). One can have no knowledge and no faith, no knowledge and faith, knowledge and no faith, or knowledge with faith. It's clear that God works within anyone who pursues Him, whether they're knowledgeable in His ways or not, but that does not imply that we ought to aim for or be satisfied with the lack of knowledge. Scripture says that the wise lay up knowledge, and the mouth of the fool brings ruin near (Prov 10:14), and also that a Christian must transform not only his heart, soul, and strength, but also his mind (Rom 12:2, Matt 22:37). Rather, seeking whatever we can know about God is a good thing! But all this is to say that the number of conflicting doctrine in Protestantism is good reason not to read the Bible at face value. There clearly is much more to be known – Christ was not divided, and neither ought our opinions. The New Testament warns us against disunity and claims the singularity of doctrine over and over.
Secondly, believing that the Holy Spirit grants truth to me in this way is a very important presupposition to Mormonism. A nine-month period of discussing theology with some Mormon missionaries taught me to fear this assertion. They explained that if I just prayed, and prayed earnestly and truly to God, that He would reveal to me too that the Church of the Latter Day Saints was God's true church, using James 1:5-6 to defend the practice. That confused me - I asked my pastor about the Mormon church, and why we think that God gives us factual information in this way. He replied that it was basically a contemporary Gnostic heresy that the early church decried long ago. Having an entire religion based on the revelation of a single man is unfalsifiable and therefore very unwise. And as I talked to the missionaries more, I learned that they claimed apostolic succession through the revelation to Joseph Smith! That was the last straw, and I could dismiss Mormonism after that. I am still unsure exactly in what ways, then, God grants wisdom to His children, but surely, it cannot be in this way, which is also the way that you are suggesting.
DeleteThirdly, this understanding of becoming like a child is internally inconsistent. It cannot mean what you’re saying it means by its own merit. If we are to become like children in this sense, that really means that we’re using whatever knowledge we have and applying it to Scripture. As I said before, certainly if the Holy Spirit gave us truth in this way, then we could not have so many radically different understandings. Now, I understand that children do understand things at face value – but this is also we advice from children. Often, we laugh at what children say, because it’s cute to see how they use their small bank of knowledge to come to conclusions. I don’t think that this is what Jesus is suggesting we do by becoming childlike. Rather, he is talking about the humility of a child, and I think that’s more like the humility of submitting to truth wherever it leads. Adults are full of commitments to causes and ideologies and can be embarrassed by “flip-flopping” from one side to another, but children don’t usually think about social issues. They simply seek understanding. I think He’s talking about childishness in that way. The way you’re suggesting I think is internally inconsistent, though, because it sounds like you’re asking people to give up reasoning as you read the scriptures. If this is the case, then revelation is strictly personal, because no reason can interfere with your understanding. You can’t listen to others, talk to others, compare ideas, or anything, because that compromises the childlike understanding. Most importantly, this also means that you can’t call another person’s revelations wrong. And now we have created a permanent division between all Christians and embraced relativism, which clearly has no place in the church. Truth is necessarily singular in nature, and basic tenants of reality cannot be compromised.
These reasons contribute to why I can no longer accept sola scriptura. Please let me know if I have left open loopholes or misunderstood you.
2. This is your second paragraph:
DeleteUnfortunately, the 1500 years of "what the Church has been saying" is full of factual errors and even contradictions. In fact, it is false! So if you are looking for truth, you won't be finding it there.
I am yet unsure exactly what the Church has been saying for 1500 years. I am only aware of the intense fracturing of theology past about that point. I don’t know a lot about the old churches yet and am interested to know what you or others have found contradictory. However, in conversations similar to this one between my agnostic and atheist friends, I’ve seen (and I’m sure you have too) that in these kinds of conversations, Christianity is often simply misunderstood. The nature of the Trinity is that He is three, yet one – what a difficult concept to understand! An atheist may call this out as a blatant contradiction, but it is not in reality. Similarly, I pray that whatever contradictions you know are not misunderstandings, but are actual contradictions.
One difference I have noticed between the old churches and Protest churches is the understanding of the Gospel message. The old churches emphasize Christ’s triumph over death, exclaiming that Christ has made a new way through faith, good works, and joy. Protestant churches that I have attended emphasize Christ dying for our sins, and belief in Him and His sacrifice leads to eternal life. Now, bear with me here, because I know these ideas are not the same, but the language used to discuss them is just a few shades distinct from one another, as it is in all talk near the deepest of truths. My journey on any path without sola scriptura as a guide is young and inevitably immature. I was wondering if you had any comment on this difference. One comment I’ve heard is from Dr. David Platt at The Church at Brook Hills: he explained in one sermon entitled “When Faith is Hard and the Burden is Heavy” that the gospel is explicitly not about becoming better people. Christ takes away the need for all self-improvement. But the old churches have always aimed towards self-improvement, since it is an expression of the indwelling of the Spirit. I believe the Lutheran Church does or used to also ascribe to this understanding.
One very important implication of calling the Orthodox and Catholic churches wrong, though, is this: it means that I am declaring Jesus’ utter incompetence in establishing His church and disseminating His message. Is that really a claim that we want to make? It is a dangerous thing to call the old church wrong and myself right – and the nature of Protestantism is that I disunify myself from the old church and do not work together with them to make it right again. This looks like a very, very precarious situation.
Thus, in this way, I would be making claims more massive than I am comfortable with in my meager knowledge-base to discount 1500 years of Christianity. Even if truth has become distorted in the old church, it seems that the Christian spirit ought to drive me back to them, and start making philosophical changes there, in that age-old conversation.
3. Your third paragraph says this:
DeleteOnly by drawing nearer to God can you find the truth that you are looking for. When your mind and heart are purified from sin, the Holy Spirit can work upon your intellect and allow you to interpret holy scripture correctly. You don't need the old church hierarchy, politically biased and philosophically corrupted, to tell you how to think! Your relationship with Christ through His Holy Spirit can supersede such enslavement. Claim that today and find truth.
I absolutely agree with some of the sentiments that you’re asserting – your relationship with Christ is crucial, your must draw nearer to God, you must purify yourself from sin. Yes, yes, and yes! However, the bits about the Holy Spirit helping me interpret have already been dealt with earlier, so I won’t be redundant by repeating it. However, this is the part I must disagree with most fully. I most certainly need the old church to help guide me in my thinking. Let me try to explain why.
Imagine that a girl wanted to become a scientist of some kind. She first must go through her normal schooling, then go get a BA or two, and then probably a masters, and perhaps a Ph.D, depending on what she wants to do. Let’s say that the girl we’re talking about is very excited about her career and wants to work immediately out of high school. Anywhere she applied to, she would be made fun of – she must do her schooling so she understands what is going on in her field. To skip schooling would be preposterous! And naturally, this is the same in theology. Just like any other field of knowledge, there have been many theological disputes and developments that have lasted over 2000 years. To claim knowledge without studying what others have said and done would be the absolute crucifixion of reason. To say that I can think on my own is a lie from modernity. My head is filled with ideas and thoughts of my generation, my schooling, my church, my upbringing, my surroundings, the internet, whatever books I’ve read, and whatever movies I’ve watched, to name a few. To make matters worse, logic is not taught in public school, so most people don’t even know how to weigh their thoughts very well or pick out falsehoods. To say that one thinks freely is simply false. We are slaves already to whatever philosophical presuppositions have gripped us most tightly, for whatever reasons. We are already blinded.
Is it not better to say that to give up oneself to Christ and to give up enslavement to corrupted thinking is to give into the way of Christ? As best I understand now, isn’t the act of putting on Christ the act of putting on the way He thinks and acts? Perhaps mimicking His reactions to the world? Learning, knowing, and acting out his statutes? Isn’t our very being, when it looks as close to His as possible, the deepest communion we can offer, as living sacrifices? I think that sentiment is one that we can agree with, but the particulars will differ. I feel like Christianity as a whole is so fractured because we don’t all believe the same things enough to even work together. Would you ever find a Catholic witnessing together with a Mormon? Or a Calvinist with an open theist? Or an Orthodox with a Methodist? Perhaps on central issues, depending on the individuals, but the theologies themselves are not compatible. This is not acceptable. From my experience, this absolutely contributes to the poor witness that Christians have in the world. What rational person would turn Christian at the sight of our disunity?
Now, again, I am still young in these matters and am seeking more wisdom and understanding. Please, expose my thinking where I am wrong, and correct whatever I have misunderstood. I am eagerly awaiting your rebuttal! And as with all things, peace be with you.
Dear Jannica,
DeleteI'm not trying to have some complicated argument about church history. I'd lose...I have more of a philosophical background anyway, I'm no historian. It's just that even after this response, I find many of your presuppositions troubling to your overall views on interpretation of scripture and the Christian tradition. I'll just provide some brief comments on each section of your tripartite response.
1) What you say about the Mormons is true, but a few liars don't ruin the hermeneutic by trying to use it dishonestly. Simply put, without the belief that the Holy Spirit can allow for an individual to interpret scripture in an authoritative manner, there can be no belief in the authority of the words of scripture. How do you think that any kind of interpretative tradition was started? How could it have been anything other than individuals interpreting scripture through the Holy Spirit in an authoritative manner, just like I’ve prescribed for you? St. Ignatius of Antioch is a good example, as is St. Clement of Alexandria.
Our discussion of the meaning of the Matthew 11 passage (becoming like a child) is neither here nor there. There's no use arguing about the meaning of a particular verse when our larger argument is about how to interpret each particular verse, is there? How droll. Yet I would like to note one part of your response to this, which seems a common theme in your argument; that Protestant churches splitting from each other means that none of them can be right, and therefore the principal of private interpretation through the Holy Spirit cannot be true. "If the Bible were easy to understand..." you point out, we'd all agree on it. Well, we don't all agree on it, you say, so Modus Tollens, it must not be easy to understand. Simple enough. But haven't you forgotten the Holy Spirit? Nobody's saying the Bible is "easy" for humans to understand, only that it's possible to understand with the help of the Holy Spirit. And there's nothing easy about achieving unity with the will and understanding of the Holy Spirit.
This is why I don't accept any of your arguments under (1). So the Mormons treat this hermeneutic wrongly. Well, the Coptics and Nestorians treat the traditionalist hermeneutic wrongly. Is that evidence against Catholicism or Orthodoxy? Also, the evidence of Protestant church splits does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that private interpretation of scripture through the Holy Spirit is impossible. Perhaps many of them are simply out of tune with the Holy Spirit's promptings. And those who achieve good doctrine and unity are the closest to the Holy Spirit's guidance. Granted, nobody has it perfect because nobody can be the Holy Spirit. But I would say that one's interpretation of scripture can still have authority even if not "perfect"; that is, without having a full and unencumbered understanding of the text.
Concerning (2): well, it looks like we're going to have our complicated argument about church history after all. Again, I'll try to be brief. I'll begin by pointing out a few contradictions in "old high church" traditions that demonstrate them to be far from infallible, as they claim to be. Perhaps I'll focus first on Catholicism. One fine evening when I questioned a Catholic theologian about the Immaculate Conception of Mary, I asked if the argument about original sin didn't prove too much: that is, if Mary had to be born immaculately to avoid a sin nature, wouldn't St. Anna have to be as well? And so on and so forth up to Eve? He said this was a legitimate question, but Catholic doctrine teaches that since this is a dogmatic pronouncement, one must believe it before analyzing it, thereby freeing it from rebuttal through automatic assent. I countered that this (obviously) establishes a bad precedent for a sort of “ecclesial command” theory which is little more than a dishonest theological positivism.
ReplyDeleteHere’s another, this time for our Eastern friends: reading Eusebius, the first church historian, reveals a lot of contradictions from early church traditions. Did you know that he argued against Papias’ “apostolic tradition” by name because this tradition spoke of premillenialism, and Eusebius apparently held amillenialism? Did you know that also according to Eusebius, 2nd century bishops in different localities could not agree on the date of Easter? How about St. Irenaeus, who cited 1st century apostolic tradition as saying that Christ was crucified at the age of 50? Or Sts. Cyril and Augustine, who both accept the myth of the parallel LXX translations, which have been shown false by scholars beyond a shadow of a doubt?
But all this aside, as I don’t expect to be able to address such issues in this medium. You should, though, be aware that Catholic and Orthodox churches will tell you many things as historical fact, when there is actually much evidence to be desired.
I think the most important part of (2) is when you say that disagreement with Orthodox and Catholics is to declare Jesus’ utter incompetence. Is this because Christ established these churches, and they reigned unchecked for so long before the Protestant Reformation? I need not remind you of dissenters: coptics, iconoclasts, Albigensians, Lollards...all forerunners of the Great Reformation of the Church, preaching a message of freedom and forgiveness. But even those aside, is it really necessary to declare that because human individuals made bad decisions, Christ himself is compromised? Isn’t it wiser to look at church history as a whole, and understand that without the narcissism of the Eastern Church, the West would not have broken off, and without the oppressive and corrupt practices of the Western church, there would be no Great Reformation? No John Wycliffe, no Martin Luther, no Jonathan Edwards, no Charles Spurgeon, no C. S. Lewis?! In fact, divine providence stretches through all time and sanctifies even the most sordid past...as He has done in all our lives. This does the opposite of compromising Jesus Christ- in fact, it shows Him to be all the more powerful.
Maybe the best way to respond to (3) is simply to end with a similar story of a girl who wants to be a scientist. Having just graduated from high school, she doesn’t know much about science (her school only gave her one lousy class), but she does know the basic principles of the scientific method, and is determined to become a great scientist. However, her father is the greatest scientist who has ever lived, and he can teach her much, much more and better than any university could. All she has to do is talk to him. But if she doesn’t respect her father, and shows a bad attitude and mistreats him, their lessons aren’t going to go very well. The closer relationship she develops with her father, though, the more she understands his passion for his field and makes it a part of her life as well. In this way, she will far surpass those who study books or perform experiments written down in manuals. She has the truth right from the source.
DeleteThat is what it is like to interpret scripture according to the Holy Spirit.
Best,
Dallas