Brian McLaren and the Bible
Brian McLaren is well known as a leader in the North American 'Progressive' movement, which many are finding a refreshing change from the 'civilization wars' amid evangelicals about Scripture and authority and its implications for theology and discipleship. He came to prominence with his 2004 bookA Generous Orthodoxy, which sought to cut through the polarisations often nowadays in evangelical debate.
His virtually recent book is Nosotros Make the Route by Walking, and he has been on a Great britain tour promoting it, with Paula Gooder and others as dialogue partners. As role of their Bible fence series, Brian had an online discussion with Andrew Wilson from King's Church in Eastbourne, and their two perspectives feature in a pair of articles in this month's Christianity magazine. Both manufactures are bachelor gratuitous online; McLaren's is here, and Wilson'south response is here.
To me, McLaren's position has three major problems to it. The showtime is that he starts with an unhelpful confusion in titling his article 'Jesus didn't treat Scripture as infallible; nor should we.' This is unfortunate, and throughout his piece McLaren uses 'infallible' and 'inerrant' interchangeably. That might be fine in ordinary conversation, and there is some debate about what these terms mean, and how they are related to one another. But in most discussion most the dominance of the Bible they are distinguished and the two terms have quite different meanings and each has its own history.
The idea of 'inerrancy' comes from B B Warfield and the so-called Princeton movement. It has the sense that Scripture is 'without mistake in all that it affirms' which is most unremarkably taken to mean that any factual statement should be taken as literally true. The best known modern statement of the position is the Chicago Argument on Biblical Inerrancy from 1978, which includes in Article XII:
Nosotros deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are express to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and scientific discipline. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on cosmos and the flood.
To my mind, this fails to take seriously the social and historical context of the Bible's human authors, and in result it imposes a modernist and literalist mindset on the text of Scripture. It is the sort of idea which has led to headlines that 46% of Americans assertive in a literal, six-twenty-four hours creation, and many have an anti-scientific outlook. At the 2013 meeting of the Evangelical Theology Society, the conservative evangelical NT scholar Ben Witherington argued that the term 'inerrancy' is simple the incorrect word to employ to depict the Bible'south authorization.
By contrast, the notion of 'infallibility' includes the idea of effectively accomplishing what the text is intended to exercise. If the witness of Scripture is intended to testify to the truth about God, and bring people to faith, so to say Scripture is 'infallible' it to say that it is able to achieve that, and can be trusted to do so. The term goes back at least every bit far as John Wesley, and it is arguably the thought behind Reformation agreement, such as Article V in the 39 Manufactures of Religion—and in fact is plant in Scripture itself. A classic text in the OT comes in Is 55.10–11:
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven,and do not render to itwithout watering the world
and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
so is my discussion that goes out from my mouth: It will non return to me empty,
but will attain what I desire and attain the purpose for which I sent it.
And Jesus deploys similar ideas when he talks of his word 'not passing away' (Matt 24.35 and parallels).
McLaren's criticisms of people wanting 'absolute and incorrigible confidence' applies to the notion of inerrancy, and in the chief I would agree with him. Just his goal of seeking 'a proper confidence, born out of being teachable, and a hunger and thirst for justice and truth' is happily met by seeing Scripture as infallible—able to do what God intends information technology to—without having to claim that Scripture is 'corrigible', in need of our correction.
The second effect I struggle with is the way McLaren advocates a kind of supersessionism—Jesus' teaching has corrected and replaced what has gone before. I completely agree with McLaren on his characterisation of diversity within the canon and Jesus' place in this:
Their statements and counterstatements are not contradictions; they are conversations. Wisdom emerges from their unfolding conversations over many generations…In this, Jesus emerges as the ultimate discussion of God to whom all the scriptures point. As we read in John and Colossians, the invisible God is fabricated visible not in words on a page merely in a human being on a cantankerous: word made mankind.
I also agree with his comments about estimation; Jesus is inviting his contemporaries (and therefore us) to read in a new manner:
When he says, 'You have heard information technology said…but I say to you' in Matthew five:21-22, and when he challenges traditional Sabbath restrictions in Luke 14, he is challenging traditional understandings of the Bible and introduces what we might call 'a new hermeneutical principle': namely compassion.
Interpretations that lack basic man compassion, he suggests, are faulty interpretations. He is non only tweaking conventional understandings, he is correcting them.
But correcting 'them', the interpretations, is a very different thing from correcting Scripture, and Andrew Wilson is correct to highlight the departure. There is no evidence whatsoever that either Jesus or Paul ever thinks that they are correcting Scripture. Why does Jesus insist we read Scripture with compassion? Because that was the intention behind its writing!
The Lord is gracious and empathetic, slow to anger and rich in dearest (Ps 103.8; compare Ps 145.8, or Ex 33.19, or Ex 34.half dozen, or Ps 86.15, or Joel 2.thirteen, or Is 49.15, or two Kings thirteen.23, or Neh 9.17, or 2 Chron 30.9, or…go the idea?)
In his response, Wilson offers a good summary of Jesus' attitude to Scripture—during a like task to John Wenham in the first chapter of his classicChrist and the Bible (which I read as a teenager).
[Jesus] regards the scriptures as sufficient to prompt repentance (Luke 16:31), as fulfilled in his life and ministry (Matthew v:17-20), and equally truthful, even when they are describing scary acts of divine judgement (Luke 17:22-37). In one fascinating story, he describes the scriptures as 'the word of God', which 'cannot exist broken' (John 10:35).
The red letters, in other words, repeatedly affirm the black ones: as inspired; as true; as God's unbreakable word.
McLaren ends up collapsing the difference between the text and its interpretation, and this leads him into misreading the manner the NT relates to the sometime. When Paul says in Galatians v:6 that 'circumcision counts for naught; the just thing that counts is religion expressing itself in beloved', he is not 'correcting' Levitical laws, every bit McLaren claims. In Paul's own terms, his wide discussion of 'circumcision' is in fact a reinterpretation, fifty-fifty if it does not run into our criteria of what interpretation should look similar. Agreement this is crucial; as Wilson comments:
Post-evangelicals often present the options as (1) an infallible Bible and an infallible Church building, or (two) a correctable Bible and a correctable Church. Simply if we were to nowadays these options to Jesus or Paul or Moses – or Gregory, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Wesley, Spurgeon and the residuum – I suspect they would splutter in astonishment and tell u.s. almost selection (three): an infallible Bible, and a correctable Church. That, surely, is the style to preserve divine authority and human humility; a word from God that never fails, and people that frequently exercise.
The virtually basic trouble with supersessionism is that it is, at bottom, anti-Semitic. In McLaren's words:
Jesus and Paul model a new manner – a Christian style – of approaching the scriptures.
That is, they manipulate with the old way, the Jewish manner. Jesus and Paul, not Jewish? Plenty said.
My third and last problem with McLaren'due south arroyo is his attitude to history—or lack of it. We are steeped in a culture where the old is archaic, and the new is the but thing worth considering. In fact, we are so steeped in it that nosotros do not fifty-fifty realise. Just as fish are the last to find the h2o, we are unaware of this deeply ingrained attitude. I wonder if fifty-fifty the title of McLaren'due south book is a symptom of it: the only road that really matters is the brand new one that we make by our own walking, as if no-one had ever trodden this path before us.
Past contrast, every NT author appears to live past the dictum of Jer half dozen.xvi: 'Wait for the ancient paths'. They were interested to the point of obsession in how they could prove that this surprising, dramatic, unexpected new affair that God was doing in this foreign and inexplicable Jesus was in fact the same old (make new) affair that God had always washed.
And so Paul includes from the beginning the 'first thing' that had been passed to him and which he passed on is that it all 'according to the Scriptures' (1 Cor fifteen.three–iv). His great struggle in Romans nine–11 is an attempt to establish continuity between the 'gospel' and God's dealings with his people Israel. At the start of the first gospel, Matthew goes to enormous lengths to locate the birth of Jesus in this OT story—and to modernistic eyes he tries far too hard, forcing text which we think don't fit! At the end of Luke, Jesus 'interprets' (rather than 'explains') all the Scriptures well-nigh him (Luke 24.27).
This sense of history is driven by two concerns. The first was credibility in the ancient world, where annihilation 'new' was doubtable, and the ancient traditions were venerated. Hence Josephus writes his amends for his people every bit 'TheAntiquities of the Jews.' Only a 2d concern was theological: how could nosotros continue to proclaim that 'God is one' (Deut 6.4) if he acts in 2 unlike ways? It is no coincidence that Marcion splits God into two: the loving God of the NT revealed in Jesus contrasted with the mean demiurge of the OT. Anyone who proposes that the NT corrects and replaces the OT is walking down the same path.
At that place are things in Andrew Wilson's response that I would want to question. At that place are difficult things in the Bible that are difficult to understand, and sometimes the start word needs to be 'wait', followed by 'think', earlier nosotros move likewise quickly to 'obey.' And I am not sure that Wilson's word 'unbreakable' is the first metaphor I would go to to describe the Bible. Information technology makes it sound likewise much like toughened glass. (Wilson takes the term from John 10.35, just the give-and-takeluo doesn't normally have the pregnant of 'interruption'; information technology is used of freeing from a binding contract, or untying a ship at anchor. The sense, then, is that we cannot simply loose ourselves and roam costless from our Scriptural moorings.) But I will happily requite Wilson the last word:
The all-time way of protecting ourselves from twisting the Bible to fit our agendas, which is always a danger, is non to continually try to correct it, but to continually seek to be corrected by it. Jesus, equally always, is at the heart of Christianity. And then if we are confused about something – like how we should view the Bible in a generation that dislikes authority, for case – we can plough to him.
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