Two Reasons We Evangelicals Dislike Historical Criticism

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Let’s talk about why the modern study of Scripture makes us evangelicals twitchy.  Modern study of Scripture (particularly, historical criticism of the Bible) makes us anxious because it treads dangerously near the toes of:

  1.  Our doctrine of Scripture
  2. The doctrines we derive from Scripture

Issue #1 has gotten the most air time in the debate, for obvious reasons. But I rather suspect that we wouldn’t be nearly so uncomfortable about issue #1 were it not for issue #2; that is to say, I’d wager that we wouldn’t be so divided over the way the historical criticism requires us to nuance our description of the truthfulness of Scripture if we didn’t also derive the rest of our doctrines from Scripture.

We sense that tweaking the way we understand the truthfulness of Scripture might jumble our construals of the doctrines rooted in Scripture. Perhaps more pointedly, we’re afraid that historical criticism will tell us that the Bible is untrue and that, as a consequence, we’ll have to conclude that our theology is false too. We worry that the floor could fall out from under our belief and that makes our stomachs turn.  All this anxiety is totally understandable and it’s rooted in an earnest and pious fidelity to teachings of the Church and the revelation of God. 

 

The thing is, however, I’m not sure that doctrine “on the other side of” historical criticism will be much different than it has been for centuries. Of course, it’s hard to say for sure, since we evangelicals haven’t queried the theological ramifications of historical criticism very incisively. We know that some historical-critical scholars have made suggestions would gum up non-negotiable doctrines, but we’re genereally not sufficiently well-versed in historical criticism to respond to those scholars on historical-critical grounds. Consequently, we’ve tried to do an end-run around historical-critical modes of debate by saying that the historical-critical discipline is incompatible with our doctrine of Scripture (issue #1, above) and that it leads to all manner of heresies (issue #2).

 

So let’s talk about these issues.

 

First, the truthfulness of Scripture: in popular discourse, we tend to describe Scripture as authoritative, true, and without error.  In broad-strokes, I’m happy with that. But we all know that there’s a fair bit involved in figuring out what Scripture is saying in order to affirm that message as true. 

At a basic level, we’re accustomed to this process. We know that you have to read the biblical texts in their literary contexts, to define words based on their ancient meanings, to understand biblical utterances in their cultural milieux, to define the intention of a text in accordance with its ancient genre, etc.  In short, as a rule we let ancient culture and literature modify our expectations of what the Bible is and how God uses it to reveal himself.

The problems arise for us when some biblical texts appear to do things that are both typical of ancient literature and potentially problematic for our doctrine.  We don’t mind seeing things like vaticinium ex eventu (“prophecy after the fact”), non-scientific depictions of primeval history, and pseudepigraphic authorship in lots of pieces of ancient literature, as long as those things don’t appear in our ancient literature.

It’s understandable that we would balk when certain features of ancient literature run up against some of our presuppositions of what the Bible is. Nobody likes adjusting their presuppositions, even if an inductive study of Scripture suggests that we should do so. But I wonder if we’d be relatively more amenable to adjusting our presuppositions about the nature of the Bible if we didn’t also have to worry about the impact such adjustment would have on the rest of our theology.

 

This brings us to issue #2: the impact of historical criticism on other doctrines, which we derive from Scripture. Now, as an evangelical I am committed to the belief that Scripture is the foundation of our theology. Still, we also need to bear in mind (what will be obvious to most evangelical theologians) that that there is more involved in deriving our doctrine from Scripture than simply highlighting a biblical text/theme and then applying a fancy Greek or Latin title to it. Systematic theology is rather more complicated than that.

Consider the doctrine of the Trinity: you won’t find the language of God being “one divine essence in three hypostases” in the New Testament; it took the Church a lot of reasoning and synthesis and exegetical debate to get there, and I think that we’re better off for it. Similarly, over the centuries Christians have developed sacramental theologies; we’re big on, e.g., baptism and communion. But we don’t do baptism for the dead, even though Paul mentions it (1 Cor 15.29). Why not? Because the mere presence of an idea in Scripture doesn’t constitute sufficient grounds for including that idea in a contemporary doctrine. The formation of Christian theology entails lots of considerations, especially the applications of Christian tradition, human reason, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. 

This should be old-hat to any evangelical theologian. Still, this general awareness notwithstanding, evangelicals have offered very few trenchant evaluations of how historical-critical views impact our doctrines. I worry that we tend to be more arm-waving than adroit in our analysis. It seems like we’re afraid that, if historical criticism pokes at our favorite doctrinal proof-text, then our whole theological system will come tumbling down. And to my mind, this indicates that we evangelicals are performing well-below our potential.

I’m not saying that we should do historical criticism just so that the cool kids at SBL will let us sit at their tables. (They already do!) I am saying that historical criticism raises questions that demand more attention than we’ve hitherto given. It may be that historical criticism will prove a bull in our dogmatic china-shop, that we’ve got to lock it out because it cannot but shatter our theology. But we don’t know that to be the case yet, because our best and brightest have not engaged historical criticism with the same vigor that they’ve applied to exegesis, linguistics, and doctrine.

 

In short, historical criticism does impact our view of Scripture (issue #1), but not in ways for which we lack analogies. I think most of us would be happy to tweak our doctrine of Scripture to accommodate historical criticism if only we were certain that historical criticism wouldn’t eviscerate the other doctrines we derive from Scripture (issue #2). (In the spirit of making this case, I got together with a bunch of my buddies and wrote a new book called Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism).

This is not to imply that historical criticism is toothless. Historical criticism does impinge upon our understandings of biblical texts that are important for our theology.  That means we should explore the issue soberly, asking how exactly historical criticism might influence our doctrines and evaluating whether historical criticism proves disastrous for the faith. By and large, we evangelicals haven’t done that. We’ve tended to be stand-off-ish and sometimes bellicose. I think that we can do a lot better than this. I think we’re braver and more prudent and more patient than our public image sometimes reflects. And even if we’re not, I believe the Holy Spirit can make us so.

Living and Active: Renewing Evangelical Theologies of Scripture in the 21st-Century

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There are at least two sides to this question about the relationship between evangelicalism and the modern study of scripture. On the one hand, how to navigate the fine line between historical-grammatical approaches and historical-critical perspectives? Most evangelicals are comfortable with the former while some are concerned about the latter because it leads to skepticism and presumes to undermine the authority of scripture. The posture of faith suggests that Christian readers and interpreters, no matter how learned, ought to approach the Bible in a submissive rather than critical stance. The historical-grammatical study of scripture is helpful for such servant-readings of the Bible since it helps the community of faith understand the world behind the text better, which in turn illuminates the world of the text by providing assistance in discerning an original intent of the scriptural authors. Thereby, readers are edified when they understand the biblical text in its original context.

For me, the motivation of the critical approach is the key. If not from the standpoint of faith, then criticism persists for its own sake. On the other hand, believers ought to, in faith, pursue questions as they might appear. Truth is truth, wherever it may be found, and scholars and researchers ought to pursue such within their various communities of inquiry. Many such matters will be contested, and it is part of the life of faith, and of the scholarly vocation, to engage with these issues. Will there be casualties? Yes! Can these be minimized if evangelical scholarship is nurtured in part within faithful communities of inquiry? Absolutely. The end result is a more robust, world-engaging, insightful, and fruitful Christianity that probes deeply, analyzes critically, self-corrects over time, and increases community understanding and spiritual growth.

I am more interested, however, in another line of questions related to evangelicalism and the historical study of scripture: that which relativizes such study or at least suggests that it ought to be complemented by other more contemporary options. Coming from the Holiness-Pentecostal tradition, I am partial to pietistic approaches to the Bible which minimized concerns about the world behind the text in favor of taking up matters related to the world of the reader in front of the text. As is well known, pietist reactions have perennially questioned historical-grammatical-criticism for its own sake; on the other hand, pietist hermeneutical practices have also been criticized for their subjectivist tendencies. This opens up to the major question regarding objectivity and subjectivity bequeathed by modernity to contemporary discussions in epistemology.

I think that there are at least two trends in contemporary scholarship which invite a fresh reconsideration of elements of the pietistic model. First, there is a growing realization that a presuppositionless exegesis is well-nigh impossible; put positively, the lines between biblical and theological interpretation are difficult to draw. This means, at least in part, that scriptural exegesis is influenced by other factors than just historical-grammatical considerations. The horizons of the text and of readers and interpreters converge to some degree in every act of interpretation. Faithful interpretation of scripture therefore occurs in light of the reception history of the Christian theological, doctrinal, and dogmatic traditions. What scripture meant, and what scripture means, while distinguishable at one level, is interrelated at another level.

Second, recent trends in biblical hermeneutics include narrative and literary approaches that have emerged in the wake of the legacy of Karl Barth, Hans Frei, and other renowned theologians and scholars. The narrative quality of the scriptural tradition invites readers to “live in” the biblical text in ways anathema to strictly historical-grammatical approaches. Hence the modernist paradigm which posits an impassable chasm (Lessing’s “ugly ditch”) between the world of the text and the world in front of the text is giving way to a plethora of interpretive strategies which suggest that these are not mutually exclusive. Contemporary dramatic approaches to scripture (e.g., promulgated by Kevin Vanhoozer among other evangelicals) also presume that the Bible is not just a set of propositions about past facts (although it certainly is that) but also a set of speech-acts where ongoing readings are performative modes of bringing about God’s intentions (i.e., of saving the world). In these senses, what scripture meant and means cannot be divorced from what it was designed to achieve; reading and praxis, hence, are intertwined, as is meaning and application, to use more traditional notions.

My pentecostal-charismatic perspective resonates with these developments. As helpful as have been modern historical approaches, Christian faith invites inhabitation of the living reality of Christ in the present. The Word of God hence tells us about what happened in the past not for its own sake but for the sake of God’s ongoing and eschatological salvation plan. Scripture hence always has the capacity to speak to each person and each generation, no matter how far removed from the original or even in translation, because “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12, NRSV). The words of scripture thus derive from and function not on their own but through the Holy Spirit. As St. Paul also said, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6).

To be sure, this interrelationship between Word and Spirit means that interpretation assuredly involves the human element: the living word of God comes alive to historical, embodied, and needy creatures and addresses them in the fullness and messiness of their situation. Sometimes, the latter overwhelms the work of the Spirit and a rampant subjectivism distorts God’s intentions. Herein lies the fine line then between a kind of prophetic insistence that this is the way of the Lord, and one that is willing to be corrected by the wider community of faith. If it were not for courageous prophets who were willing to say, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” important reforms and correctives may not have taken place; yet this can also open it up to a multiplicity of such “prophetic words” that end up dividing the one body of Christ into many factions (rather than members) and the one fellowship of the Spirit into dis-united segregation.

People filled with the Spirit of Christ will no doubt continue to proclaim the living word of God in contemporary times and places. However, “Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said” (1 Cor. 14:29), so each interpretation of scripture ought to be subjected also to the discerning judgment of the interpretive community, perhaps even the guild of scholars, in order to discern if and how the retrieved word is the living word of God for any time and place. The work of the Spirit through the biblical text is not necessarily thereby subjected to the whims of the community (or communities) since there will also be occasions when the latter is corrected by the enspirited word of God. Such is the unavoidably dynamic character of life in the Spirit as it informs the life of the mind and the scholarly study of Scripture as the very Word of God.

 

Historical Criticism and Evangelicalism: An Uneasy Relationship

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Modern biblical scholarship—also referred to as historical criticism, and less often today “higher criticism”—has an uneasy history with evangelicalism. In fact, evangelicalism’s intellectual component is largely a sustained response to the methods, philosophy, and conclusions of historical criticism. In some cases that response has come in the form of the rejection of historical criticism, in other cases a synthesis or adaptation of its methods and conclusions with evangelical theology.

The tensions are rooted, I feel, in the core commitment of the evangelical movement to the authority of Scripture. Since Scripture is divine revelation, i.e., God’s self-disclosure, its “authority” is tied explicitly to inerrancy and a number of corollaries such as historical accuracy and the essential theological harmony of Scripture.

Scripture’s function in evangelicalism is to lay down the basic map of Christian thought and practice, what we are to understand about God, Christ, Scripture itself, the human condition, and Christian practice. The task of historical criticism, on the other hand, is to peer “behind” Scripture and inquire as to its origins and meaning as understood within the cultural context in which the various texts were written. These two diverse approaches to Scripture are not easily compatible.

In principle, evangelicalism is not inimical to historical inquiry. In fact, one of evangelicalism’s hermeneutical pillars is the interpretation of Scripture in its historical context and in line with its original, intended, meaning—what is typically referred to as “grammatical-historical interpretation.”

The tensions with historical criticism are not over the mere idea of investigating Scripture in the context, but in manner in which historical critics get there and the conclusions that they reach. In both respects, historical criticism has tended to undermine evangelical premises of biblical authority.

What complicates matters considerably for evangelicals, however, is that the general contours of historical criticism are widely persuasive, even universally so outside of evangelical (and fundamentalist) communities. I see four general, interrelated, aspects of historical criticism that are well established in biblical scholarship and also, in various ways, at odds with mainstream evangelicalism’s understanding of the nature of Scripture.

1. Biblical origins. The Old Testament we know today has a lengthy developmental history, both oral and written. The drawing together of these traditions that did not commence in earnest until the Babylonian exile (6th c. BC) and did not come to an end until sometime during the Persian period (roughly 5th and 4th centuries BC) at the earliest. This does not mean that the Hebrew Bible was written out of while cloth during this period. Some books or portions of books clearly were, but many others were added to or updated in some way.

Issues surrounding the formation of the New Testament are similar, but involve a much shorter period of time.

2. Perspectives of the biblical writers. When speaking of their past, the Old Testament writers were not working as modern historians or investigative journalists to uncover verifiable facts (as we might put it). They were more storytellers, conduits for generations—even centuries—of tradition, which they brought together to form their sacred text. In the Old Testament we have Israel’s national-religious story as seen through the eyes of those responsible for giving it its final shape.

This is not to say that they invented these traditions on the spot, but they “packaged” their past as they did to address their present crisis—exile, return, and an uncertain future. Israel’s inscripturated story both accounts for this crisis and also points the way forward to the hope that God has not abandoned his people but has a glorious future in store for them.

A similar issue holds for the New Testament, where the Gospels reflect the experiences and thinking of various Christian communities a generation and more after Jesus’ ministry on earth. They, too, are presentations of Jesus and the early missionary activities that reflect the perspectives and needs to the respective communities.

3. Theological diversity. Given historical criticism’s focus on matters of biblical origin, the diversity of the various biblical texts is highlighted with no pressing concern, as we see in evangelicalism, to draw these diverse texts into a harmonious whole. Hence, historical criticism speaks freely of the different theologies contained in Scripture.

One practical implication is that the evangelical hermeneutical methodology of allowing “Scripture to interpret Scripture” tends to fall on deaf ears among historical critics. Reading Genesis, for example, through the eyes of Isaiah or Paul in order to understand the meaning of Genesis would be like reading Shakespeare through the eyes of Arthur Miller and expecting to gain from it an insight into what Shakespeare meant.

4. The problem of historicity. This last aspect of historical criticism in effect summarizes the previous three: the Bible does not tell us what happened so much as what the biblical writers either believed happened or what they invented. This is not to say that historical critics think nothing of historical importance can be found in Scripture, but that any historical information is inextricably bound up with the perspectives and purposes of the biblical writers. 

There are other ways of outlining the nature of historical criticism, of course, but this will do to highlight why tensions exist between historical criticism and evangelicalism. The former presents us with a Bible that the latter is loathe to accept in toto because of its significant theological ramifications.

Yet, most evangelical biblical scholars understand the persuasiveness and positive impact that at least some aspects of historical criticism have had on our understanding of Scripture. One need only glance at a decent evangelical Study Bible or commentary to see that impact. 

The tensions between evangelicalism and historical criticism have not been settled, nor will they be in the near future, at least as I see it. There seems to be an implicit détente, where it is acceptable to mine historical criticism and appropriate its theologically less troubling conclusions but to draw the line where those conclusions threaten evangelical theology.

This sort of back and forth dance can ease tensions temporarily, but it virtually guarantees that each generation of thoughtful evangelicals, once they become sympathetically exposed to historical criticism, will question where lines should be drawn and why seemingly arbitrary lines have been drawn where they are.

The fact that these inner-evangelical tensions keep coming up anew each generation after suggests that older solutions to these tensions are not persuasive but more a temporary stopgap measure to maintain evangelical theological stability. A possible way forward is to promote an explicit synthesis between evangelical theology and historical criticism in order to achieve, potentially, amore more lasting peace. The difficulty here, however, is that such synthesis might threaten the very structure of evangelicalism to the breaking point.

I am an advocate for such a synthetic discussion, though I would also stress that historical criticism is not the end all of biblical interpretation for the spiritual nourishment of the church. But where historical matters are the focus, historical criticism is a non-negotiable conversation partner.

As I see it, the pressing issue before evangelicalism is not to formulate longer, more complex, more subtle, and more sophisticated defenses of what we feel God should have done, but to teach future generations, in the academy, the church, and the world, better ways of meeting God in the Scripture we have.

Inerrancy is Theological Flat-Earthism

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 I have just finished my first year teaching at Stonehill College, a liberal Catholic school in the Holy Cross tradition. I taught science-and-religion classes and most of my students came from traditional Catholic families. Prior to moving to Stonehill I taught similar courses at two evangelical colleges—Gordon and Eastern Nazarene. 

In reflecting with friends on my first year at Stonehill—which I thoroughly enjoyed, thank you for asking!— I have found myself posing the following question: Would I rather have students that know almost nothing about the Bible, or who know a lot of stuff about the Bible that has no context, or is not even true?

Let me start with my experiences at Eastern Nazarene. The typical evangelical student there—and most were not Nazarene—was raised on the Bible. They were encouraged to read the Bible, which many of them did; they learned Bible stories in Sunday School class and how to locate any passage relatively quickly; many participated in some form of Bible quizzing; all were taught to think of the Bible as the “Word of God,” and for most of them this translated into an uncritical belief that God had “written” the Bible himself, using the nominal Biblical authors as secretaries taking dictation. 

The belief that God had “written” the Bible turned it into a single-author book, which meant that passages from disparate sections could be combined to create arguments, just as Euclid’s axioms could be combined in different ways. Snippets from Daniel, Peter, and Revelation could be combined to argue that the United Nations was the power base from which the anti-Christ would emerge. 

The belief that every statement in the Bible is, on its own, a “true proposition” creates enormous hassles for teaching any topic that even touched on the Bible. I recall an honors seminar where I was leading a discussion about Cartesian dualism and trying to help the students understand the reasons why a more monist view of the self has supplanted Descartes’ view. One of my honors students responded: “Monism can’t be true. Jesus told us to love God with our “hearts, souls and minds” so there must be more than just one aspect to our humanity.”

The concept of a “Biblical Worldview” has become a politically charged, highly influential and much-abused concept and people like the late D. James Kennedy, Brannon Howse, James Dobson, Tim LaHaye and others have created “packages” of ideas and presented them as “the” biblical (=Christian) approach to the problems of our time. The result is that many young people have a vague idea that the Republican platform comes from the Bible. Many of my first year evangelical students actually believed that universal healthcare, progressive tax structures, and social justice were unbiblical positions.

By far the greatest problem however relates to science. Biblical inerrancy is the primary reason most evangelicals reject mainstream scientific ideas like evolution and the Big Bang.  Most of the students entered my classes at Eastern Nazarene believing that evolution was the devil’s lie.  I had one honors seminar largely ruined by a student who felt compelled to clumsily defend biblical inerrancy at every turn, regardless of the topic. For more than two decades I had biblical inerrantists like Ken Ham condemning me to hell and trying to get me fired for leading college students astray. I spent many long painful hours in administrator’s offices dealing with these controversies, trying in vain to explain that a college education should disabuse one of the notion that the earth is 10,000 years old. Such is the legacy of biblical inerrancy, even at a denominational college with a faith statement that explicitly rejects it.

At Stonehill College my students know almost nothing about the Bible. They couldn’t find Jeremiah to save their lives; and none of them could tell me what happened to Adam and Eve after they ate the forbidden fruit. But not a one of them reject evolution and all of them learned somewhere along the way that Christians should promote social justice. None of them bring implausible biblical notions to class that interfere with the learning of new ideas.

These are largely practical concerns, some of which could be cleared up with better teaching. But the central concern is the inerrantist position and I don’t think that is salvageable.  I was raised with this and defended it with great and obnoxious vigor as a college student. I have since come to view inerrancy as a sort of “theological flat-earthism”— a strange position that requires the rejection and distortion of so much generally accepted knowledge that embracing it forces one onto an ideological Fantasy Island.

Inerrancy strikes me as so thoroughly refuted that we need to be done with it. It has been crushed with a mountain of examples, small and large—and small ones, like getting the value of “pi” wrong, are just as troubling as large ones, like Matthew misquoting Isaiah.

Furthermore, even dyed-in-the-wool fully pedigreed inerrantists can’t agree on what their inerrant Bible says.  Here is a link to a remarkable program on the Trinity Broadcasting Network in which various inerrantists—Ken Ham, Hugh Ross, Ray Comfort—all argue with each other about how long the days of Genesis were and whether the Bible mentions the Big Bang. (http://www.creationconversations.com/video/ken-han-ray-comfort-hugh-ross-debate-on-tbn). Watching Ham and Ross trying to “out-inerrancy” each other would be hysterical if it were not such a problem for Christians.

Finally, inerrancy has a bewitching ambience as a “high” view of scripture. After all, what could be “higher” than the belief that God actually wrote the Bible? This puts scholars everywhere on the defensive, forced to explain how their non-inerrantist view of scripture is not the result of sliding down some slippery slope toward ever “lower” views of the Bible with smaller and smaller roles for God. Inerrancy is like a black hole that pulls everything nearby into its orbit and ultimately swallows it up. On countless occasions I have had people assure me they were not “inerrantists” but, when I asked them to point to an “error” in the Bible all they could do was mumble something about the limitations of human interpretation. (I note here that “not-inerrantist” should be synonymous with “errantist.”)

Very few evangelicals ascribe any meaningful human dimension to Scripture, in effect making it entirely divine—a view considered heretical when applied to Jesus but somehow appropriate when applied to scripture. Christian inerrantists seem to have a Muslim view of their own holy book.

Inerrancy has become a gigantic anchor holding Christians back, preventing them from finding sensible positions on so many topics. It’s time hauled up that anchor and learned to sail.

 

Topic #3: Evangelicalism and the Modern Study of Scripture

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Launch Date for the Conversation: July 1, 2013


Modern biblical scholarship has broadened interest in studying the Bible from a work of the church to also having a legitimate place within the academic work of the secular university.  This movement has also transformed the way Christians approach their Scriptures. Modern biblical scholarship has expended considerable energy studying both the history behind the biblical text we now have and the way readers, who sit in front of the biblical text, construct meaning from it. These movements have raised concern among many American evangelicals about diminishing the Bible’s unique status as God’s authoritative, clear, and relevant revelation. On the other hand, many evangelicals contribute significantly to such biblical studies and find them useful for hearing and obeying God’s voice today. In response to some of these movements, some evangelicals are working to develop more explicitly Christian modes of engaging the Bible. In light of these issues, some “leading questions” are:

 

  1. In what sense is the Bible authoritative for American evangelicals? What does it mean for Christians to use the Bible properly?
  2. What are the implications of the belief that the Bible has both human and divine authors?
  3. How relevant to evangelical use of Scripture are historical inquires into the authorship of the various biblical texts and into the events recounted in the Bible?
  4. How complicated is the process of reading? Is it a relatively straightforward process of information extraction or something more? Is reading Scripture different from reading other literature?
  5. Is Scripture without error? What does this mean? Is a claim of inerrancy falsifiable—at least in theory—through scientific inquiry?
  6. What does it mean to apply Scripture to one’s own life and the life of the church? What are the boundaries for properly doing this? How are bygone hermeneutical approaches, such as patristic readings, to be judged? Should we imitate the way the New Testament authors read the Old Testament? How do we know that our hermeneutical procedures are correct?
  7. To what extent can Christians and non-Christians work together on reading the Bible well? Can the study of the Bible within secular settings be helpful to American evangelicalism? Can evangelical Bible students be properly trained at non-evangelical institutions?

 

Knowledge claims and exclusivity

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Exclusivity of Christian faith has its origins in the monotheism of the First Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me” (Ex 20:3).  Exclusivity in truth and knowledge claims seems to appear early among human beings. Along with proto-scientific claims regarding truth and error, revelation claims implied truth from a sole divine origin as against all rival “revelations” (cf., the extraordinary work by Jan Assmann, “The Price of Monotheism”, 2009). There are varying degrees of exclusivity. The move from having no other gods to there being no other gods was a massive intensification of the original revelation claim.

Any truth claim carries with it an element of exclusivity. But not all truth claims are equal. I have suggested often to my students that they consider a simple but useful three tiered hermeneutic:

1-      Physical rationality sufficient for comprehending the natural environment

2-      Interpersonal rationality sufficient for comprehending the human environment

3-      Doxological rationality sufficient for comprehending the Creator / creature environment

For human reasoning, rationality is practiced in order to identify and to relate. Rationality works to achieve epistemic integration and everything that might promote and protect life in the world and its destiny. At some point collective wisdom could be fairly certain when some things are nearly invariably so and not so. Rationality tests knowledge claims. Knowledge claims which stand up under multiple tests by many human observers over time achieve a kind of exclusivity against rival claims. Much of the success of the scientific method is based upon such critical processes.  But the knower has to guard against reductionism in reasoning. Reductionism happens whenever higher forms of rationality are “reduced” to lower forms for comprehending the merely the physical environment.  As complex as the physical environment is, the interpersonal cannot be reduced to the physical neither can the doxological to the interpersonal.

In any theological method worth its salt, truth claims are at a premium. But even the would-be-theologian has to remember that doxological rationality is irreducible to physical rationality as well as interpersonal rationality. All three levels of knowing are operative together but no more than as overlapping epistemic domains. The exclusivity of Christian truth claims are those which are not shared by any other faith.

Exclusivity claims can be sullied from the get-go by ulterior motives. Ulterior motives are present, for instance, wherever an official religion is established for the purpose of enhancing political authority. Political interests undermine doxological reasoning just they do to ethics, to science and to every other realm of culture. Whenever the state officially sanctions a religion it thereby creates a very pressing problem of a false exclusivity. Exclusivity in Christianity arises solely from its understanding of God’s claims upon humanity, not from human authorities. Government elevation of a church or other religious body in a “superior” position to all others places an unbearable burden upon  its members that actually tends to undermine the Christian faith itself. The Gospel makes exclusive claims for all Christian churches; no other source of Christian exclusivity exists.

“Exclusivity” can be lined up next to other terms that Christians have used to indicate ultimate truth claims. Modern apologetists have defended Christianity as “absolute” according to developmental theories of religion. Christianity stands at the apex of cultural evolution as an achievement both of divine providence and the design inherent within natural processes. According to Christian philosophies of history (e.g., salvation histories, dispensationalisms,  covenantal theologies)  humanity was destined to transmit Christian faith as an idea or ideal to itself and to its world. There are echoes here of the two great NT authors, John, with his “the whole world could not contain the books” which could be written about Jesus (Jo 21:25); and Paul, with his “in him are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Co 2:3). Most important to evangelicals along with Catholic and Orthodox, is a locus classicus: “there is no other name…by which we must be saved” (Ac 4:12). Christian Scripture makes a doubly exclusive claim, that there is no other heaven and that there is no other means of entrance. Although there is no agreement regarding which institution of the church holds or can hold exclusive claim to possess the gospel in its fullness, there is this exclusive claim associated with Jesus. A modification of the patristic sensibility is worth mentioning here:  “extra christum nulla sallus”: salvation is impossible outside of Christ (rather than the formula “outside of the church…”). But in a very real sense, absoluteness is a more apt term than exclusivity.

If exclusivity or absoluteness in Christian faith is focused upon salvation in Jesus Christ, then there is also the requirement of acknowledging that there are differing views of the afterlife in the world of religions. Christianity presents an extension of the exclusive Abrahamic hope on account of the sole mediation of Christ for humanity. From a Reformational perspective, in addition to the “five solas” mentioned in the previous contribution, one could add a sixth: “sola veritas”, “truth alone” – meaning, not found elsewhere. This is the salvific truth immediately before us. While the Bible is often presuming truth agreements with its many non-Jewish, non-Christian interlocutors, saving truth is exclusive to the gospel’s claims about Christ. The Johannine “ego eimi”, “Iam” passages, which quote the first person of the Lord in his direct speech, includes “the way, the truth and the life…no one comes to the Father except through me” (Jo 14:5). This statement of both exclusive relation to God and to salvation could not be clearer or more universal. The whole world, after all, is the object of God’s saving love through Christ (3:16).

Exclusivity claims can be profound hindrances to Christian faith: they can be mistaken for insider knowledge that is valuable only to a particular community or individual. In other expressions, exclusivity can be obscure, even esoteric and require initiation before anything can be understood, let alone appreciated (the gnostic danger in the term). This is where one might speak (inaccurately) of “mystery” in Christian faith. Although mysterion is a key Pauline term (cf., Ep 3:1-7), it is not meant to convey something which is impenetrably “mysterious”, or “mystifying”, something known only to initiates and “supra-rational” or “non-rational”, acquired, e.g., through ecstatic experience. “The mystery of the world” is that God was reconciling it to himself in Christ crucified and risen (2 Co 5:19). What we know is that this divine exclusivity claim has its effect upon everyone who responds to the gospel in faith. What we as Christians individually and in the churches think we can make out of this exclusivity other than to proclaim it is not so self-evident.

What Is an “Exclusivist,” Anyway?

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What is an “exclusivist,” anyway? It sounds like a very nasty thing to be. Sean Carroll is a physicist who teaches at Caltech. He speaks a lot (he was in our neighborhood just a few days ago, giving a public lecture at Fermi Lab) and writes a lot (he’s very good at both). He has a wonderfully titled blog, Preposterous Universe, which features this epigraph at the top of the page: “in truth, only atoms and the void,” a saying attributed to the Pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus. Clearly Sean Carroll is an exclusivist, too: a naturalistic exclusivist. But of course any account of How Things Are excludes rival accounts.

Christians—not just evangelicals but Christians generally—have good news to share. That inspired my grandmother to go China as a missionary around 1920. When she was younger, she had dreamed of becoming an architect, but that path wasn’t open to her. Eventually, she took a degree from Moody Bible Institute, then worked for a while as a city missionary in Aurora, Illinois, west of Chicago. Much of the work she did there involved helping immigrant families. For her, providing practical aid was simply part of sharing the gospel.

When she went to China, in her mid-thirties, she met a missionary whose wife had recently died, leaving behind a little son (who was to become my Uncle Larry). My grandmother and the widower were married, and in due course had two children: my mother, Elizabeth, and my mom’s brother, Edward, a couple of years younger. My mom lived in China until she was 11 years old.

My grandmother was a very strong presence in my life. My parents were divorced when I was five years old, and Grandma came to live with us. She would have relished the opportunities open to women today. She loved to build things (a predisposition my brother shared with her—I didn’t), and she always had at least one project going. For years she was a choir director, and she and my mom often sang duets. She read in the Bible every day.

I remember trying to understand, as a boy, how “salvation” worked. What about all those people in China? What about people who had lived in parts of the world where there were no missionaries at all until recent times? And so on. “God looks in the heart,” my grandmother told me.

And my grandfather? When he came back from China with his wife and children, the U.S. was in the depths of the Great Depression. Soon after their return, he announced that the Lord had called him to itinerant evangelism, leaving my grandmother with the responsibility of providing and caring for the children. He would return home now and then before setting out again. What could be more important than bringing souls to Christ? One day, when he was about to depart, my grandma told him that if he left this time he shouldn’t plan on returning. He left. I never met him (nor did I know this back story until I was in my twenties.)

A lot of missionaries visited our house when I was a boy. Some were retired, some were on furlough. Listening to their conversations, I heard a range of opinions and attitudes expressed, just as I did in the various churches we attended over the years. Some missionaries emphasized the utter wrongness of the cultures to which they intended to bring good news. Other missionaries talked of the way in which God had prepared the hearts of the people they sought to serve: “It was as if they had been waiting for us to come—waiting for the gospel.”

Evangelicalism as I experienced it, then, was a good deal more varied than some accounts (my good friend Karl Giberson’s, for instance) might suggest. What I was taught was this: every human being has an opportunity to reach out and grasp the saving hand of Christ—a choice with eternal consequences. Not all evangelicals agreed, then or now, but neither is this an eccentric minority view. How exactly Christ’s redemptive work is accomplished in all times and places is not for us to say. We put our trust in a God who is perfectly loving and perfectly just. A hymn that we sang often when I was a boy—and still sing today—puts it well: “I know not how this saving faith to me he did impart.”

What matters finally is not who said what to whom, but whether what’s said is true. Hence Democritus, via Scott Carroll: “in truth, only atoms and the void.” There are rival accounts of the preposterous universe we inhabit.  If the good news that Christians proclaim is true, no apologies are necessary, no hesitation in sharing it is called for.

Off Every High Horse I Ever Rode

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I’m going to reply to Karl Giberson’s essay in two ways, agreement and reservations. This month’s topic comprises an intimately challenging set of questions for me, as a Quaker Christian settled on the East Coast – a few miles from Yale, in fact, where I lived, researched, studied, and taught during recent years. I feel I need to be extra-careful in stating my views—well, actually, in forming them: that’s still going on.

Quakers of the “unprogrammed” sort, like myself, acknowledge our sect’s Christian roots but do not have liturgy (except in the marriage ceremony), clergy, preaching, a prescribed theology beyond the advice to see the “Light” of the divine in every person, or even writings we identify as scripture. Many unprogrammed Quakers describe themselves as refugees from religious dogma, arrogance, and presumption, and I appreciate that Quaker communities of both the past and the present have tried to exclude these things from their witness.

This, however, makes it awkward that I have had Christian experience—first that, a great surprise at a difficult time in my life—and then belief—which has surprisingly held on and strengthened. Openly gay Quakers and gay members and clergy of allied liberal denominations sometimes hold me in judgment for my more or less traditional Christianity. Many of them have been threatened with the fires of hell for what they’re deeply convinced they can’t help; they were told that the Bible and a just yet merciful God certified this punishment. So how can they listen to me without scorn when I voice my reliance on the supreme authority of the crucifixion, pretty much according to Romans?

But, well, the crucifixion is the answer I found: after an excessively long, quite liberal education (liberal in both the academic and the political senses: I studied the ancient pagan classics in centrist to leftist institutions), I was backed into an intellectual and emotional corner, and there was no way out but to make peace with that event two thousand years ago—but Quakers were going to let me make my own peace, so I belonged with them.

The conservative Christian part of my circle—including Catholics and Fundamentalists—struggles to accept this, and here, too, the issue of sexuality is a major source of conflict. In discussions with them too, I can’t keep my seat on a moral high horse, for the very reason that I do know the churched part of the gay community fairly well. But in these encounters, this means I can’t write off all resistance to “openness and affirmation” as ignorant and mean-spirited. Most gay men in fact don’t easily stay faithful to one partner; most lesbian couples lack a strong erotic bond and thus the visceral staying power that even troubled straight couples tend to show. I would never condone political oppression or hate speech based on clearly blasphemous predictions about another human being’s eternal fate; but on the other hand, I remember a Union Theological Seminary lecturer on “Gay Theology” commending a student for brushing aside the popular concentration on committed gay unions and insisting that even a one-night stand could be as holy as a lifelong marriage and deserved similar respect.

To the question of Christian exclusivity I offer the (probably very annoying) response that I suspect God wants me to be where I am, helpless and stuck. Right, religious authoritarianism is noxious. But my individual alarm at, for example, being targeted for indoctrination/induction/submissive-marriage-to-whichever-male member-of-the-church-is-looking-for-a-wife is counterbalanced by alarm at certain ideas opposed to authoritarianism that have wreaked subtle havoc on our society.

Once I heard a middle-aged lay preacher declare how uncomfortable she had always been with teachings about sin; now, she knew why: she had been sexually abused as a child, which made her not a sinner but a victim. She really seemed to believe this was a satisfactory solution to the problem of sin. To liberal Christians generally, even to those who are not survivors of childhood trauma, the idea of sin has become more and more offensive and its definition further and further separated from commonsense about human life and human nature: that all of us have experienced mistreatment and gotten our own back with interest, one way or another. Maturity can’t come about without the recognition of our own appalling behavior—and any special pleading for it—as just that. The Judaeo-Christian emphasis on pitiless self-examination—supported by the confidence in God’s love and care—is also the only possibility I know of (and I bet I’ve seen every kind of New Age spiritual-but-not-religious fad there is) for ending eons-old cycles of unthinking exploitation and revenge and becoming a species worthy of the belief that God created it for a transcendent purpose.

I don’t reckon that, if it is to keep giving that hope, our religious tradition is hugely tinker-with-able. A divinity student I know found himself rejecting certain theological alternatives simply because he was facing a lifetime of pastoral duties. To assert that divinity is within the nature of things rather than above it is to tell people that they have no ultimate appeal. Here are their suffering and despair, and beyond these is only an eager array of human authority, “spiritual” and “scientific” and even frankly commercial, claiming to hook them up with the essence of the universe—much more subtly and panderingly claiming this than the average TV preacher does, but (to me, anyway) more scarily claiming it for just this reason.

As a sort of refuge from both sides, inherited ritual and theology really do appear to matter. It’s important to have, for example, a rite that says a religious community recognizes and supports a couple’s marriage, the requirements for this rite depending on the community’s experienced judgment. For its part, theology by definition has to contain logic—and what overrides the logic of life? Theology’s fundamental logic doesn’t even require a belief in God: we are forced to conclude—from what we know about our own behavior—only that if there is a God, He is unimaginably wiser than we are, and that we must therefore judge any ideas and actions in His name the hard human way, over time, by the fruit they bear.

What to Expect from Exclusivists

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In the spirit of these respectful conversations, I will resist the temptation to be put-off by Karl Giberson’s less than generous claim that exclusivists are “driven by some sort of jingoistic pathology—a defensive need to be a member of the one true tribe that holds ‘absolute truth,’ and maintains its hold on that truth by excluding others.” I choose to take Karl as being a provocateur rather than as unkind.  I also take his statement as an honest indictment against some exclusivists for only half-believing what they say they believe. For if exclusivists truly believe that Jesus is the only way to God, they would exhaust themselves, their time, and their resources to reach those who have never heard the good news that in Jesus they can have forgiveness of sins and the hope of life everlasting.  And, furthermore, they would preach the gospel in tears, pleading that their hearers might be saved.

Rather than being haughty and triumphalistic, we would expect earnest exclusivists to go out of their way to share this good news,

“with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?

If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, he who is blessed forever, knows that I am not lying. At Damascus, the governor under King Aretas was guarding the city of Damascus in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall and escaped his hands” (2 Corinthians 11:23-33 ESV).

We might expect them to leave the comfort of their common trades, sell all they have, and live among people groups who have never heard of Jesus. They might, say, leave the shoe repair trade in England to go to India, where they would learn the language of the people, translate the Bible into that language, work to overcome the inequities of the caste system, bury their wife, and finally die on the soil of the people they had come to love so deeply as William Carey did in Serampore, India, in 1834.

Or, we could imagine someone who is an exclusivist believing fervently that God loved the word so much that those who believe in Jesus might have eternal life.  And because they believed that, we could imagine them leaving New England on a dangerous voyage to Burma to plant their lives among the people, accommodating in many ways to their lifestyles.  If they really believed what they said they believed, we would expect them to persevere for forty years, even through tremendous hardship, like the death of a child, the death of two wives, and twelve years with no convert.  Such was the life of Adoniram Judson who gave his life for Christ and died in the Bay of Bengal in 1850.

Some exclusivists might even move to China for half a century, devote themselves to learning several dialects of a notoriously difficult language, adopt the dress of the Chinese nationals, lose several children to death, and give themselves to establishing a mission organization to reach a people they came to love deeply in Jesus.  This was the work of Hudson Taylor who said, “The Great Commission is not an option to be considered; it is a command to be obeyed.”

We might expect an exclusivist to at least be cautious about the implications of universalism, religious pluralism, or latitudinarianism. For if the good news is true, then not to believe it or not to urge others to believe it would be dangerous and foolhardy. 

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error”  (1 John 4:1-6 ESV).

Now, I will agree that these stories may not represent every exclusivist.  But they could be repeated over and over down the ages of church history.  Pathological jingoists? Hypocrisy? That would be a terribly cynical and uncharitable reading of their lives.

Although I do not have time to develop the argument, it seems to me that some forms of inclusivism are even more authoritarian and mean-spirited than most exclusivists’ claims. What would be more authoritarian than to tell the late Christopher Hitchens that he would have to spend eternity in the presence of God whether he wanted to or not?  And what would be more mean-spirited than to consign Richard Dawkins to a blissful immortality with the Jesus he so adamantly denies? 

 

The Hypocrisy of Christian Exclusiveness

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I grew up a few hundred yards from St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in the tiny village of Bath, New Brunswick, Canada (population 600).  My house was on “Church Street,” reflecting the dominant position of the church in the village. My boyhood friend Michael from next door attended that church with his family, as did many of my other friends.  We played sandlot baseball on the huge lawn beside St. Joseph’s and once labored heroically for several days to dig out an unused flagpole that stood inconveniently behind second base.  The pole came down during Saturday afternoon mass. Michael heard the cheering from inside the church and knew that we had been successful. Father LeBlanc, who endorsed our baseball initiatives and had given us permission to remove the pole, later told us he didn’t think we would have the tenacity to dig the huge hole that would be required. 

I lived in the shadow of St. Joseph’s for 18 years but was never once inside.  

Catholics, with rare exceptions, were not Christians, you see. They did not have Jesus as their personal savior and their beliefs were not biblical—they prayed to Mary, for goodness sake! Their highly liturgical services were structured in such a way that the Holy Spirit had no space to move; their sanctuaries were filled with images and symbols imported from pagan religions and possibly even inspired by Satan.  And they presumed to earn their way to heaven with good works.  Catholic perdition was everywhere on display: they drank alcohol—even in their communion!— sponsored Bingo gambling on Friday nights, and sometimes even held dances in the basements of their churches.

The small town of Bath also had many protestant churches: there were two flavors of Baptist—Calvinist and Arminian. I was Arminian and knew that many of the Calvinists had lost their salvation even though their theology said they couldn’t. There were liberal Anglicans who didn’t believe in Jesus’s imminent return, and lived accordingly. And there were several Pentecostal groups, one of which believed that you were not a Christian if you had not spoken in tongues. My supervisor at the grocery store where I worked was a  “Jesus only” Pentecostal who told me I was not a Christian because I had been baptized with the wrong Trinitarian formula (“in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”)  Genuine Christians were baptized–as adults, of course— “in the name of Jesus.”

I attended Eastern Nazarene College and then taught there for over 25 years. I grew weary of the endless talk of “holiness” and how the Nazarenes had it and the rest of Christendom did not. Many in that tradition claimed to have had a sanctifying “second work of grace” that eradicated their sinful nature and let them live lives of sinless perfection—claims that seemed contradicted by their actual lives. One chapel speaker lamented the dearth of Nazarene Churches in eastern Canada and spoke of that area as a “mission field,” seemingly unaware that the region was Canada’s Bible Belt, albeit one without enough holiness churches apparently.

Somewhere along the way this theological hairsplitting became incredibly offensive to me.  I no longer have any interest whatsoever in conversations about who has the right theology. It seems to me that these conversations are driven by some sort of jingoistic pathology—a defensive need to be a member of the one true tribe that holds “absolute truth,” and maintains its hold on that truth by excluding others.

I also think that this sectarian flag-planting has become a form of “easy Christianity,” where the simple but significant challenges of Jesus to love our neighbors have been replaced with complicated but largely irrelevant discussions of who has the best handle on the “truth.” This easy Christianity provides the consistent spectacle of fabulously wealthy white male religious leaders leading divisive and fractious movements on everything from gay marriage and contraception to the age of the earth and global warming while remaining absolutely silent on the plight of the world’s poor. These are movements I am confident Jesus could not join, and leaders he could not follow.

 

I can’t put all this in any grand theological system and I don’t even want to try.  My hope would be that the fractured and warring tribes within Christianity would get their own house(s) in order before we start pronouncing on those outside. But this does not seem to be the direction things are heading.