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good story, tell it again

Ok, the previous two posts were more or less introductory so that I could get to what I consider to be the really interesting stuff. I’m sure you are just like me and you lie awake at night wondering “How would the Abraham stories have been received by the people as Moses was composing them?” Or maybe another way of asking it, “Why did Moses tell these stories to these people in the way that he did?”

Let’s play make believe. Pretend you are one of the Hebrews who has been freed from Egyptian captivity and now you are wandering around the Sinai Peninsula. As you are moving from place to place, Moses is writing and sharing stories of your ancestors. Among those stories, perhaps the most famous of them is Abram’s call to leave his home and follow God into a new land.

You don’t have to be the ancient equivalent of a Hebrew rocket scientist to start putting two and two together. You (and frankly all your fellow travelers) might think, “Hmmm… leave one place to follow God to another? Sounds familiar. Isn’t this exactly what we are doing right now?” Hold that thought.

Then come the promises – great nation, great blessing, great name. Let’s take them one by one.

I will make you into a great nation – Becoming a “nation” is tricky business in the Bible. It is about both having a number of people and having a land. The Hebrews may have been numerous, but they didn’t have any land that they could call their own. When we are introduced to Abraham in Genesis, he was a man without a nation. When we are introduced to not-yet-Israel in Exodus they are also nation-less. Both Abraham and Israel were on their way to becoming a nation. They were both looking for their place in the world.

I will bless you – In some ways, this is just an extension of the promise of nationhood. However, it is more than just blessing in sort of a bland generic way. When they find themselves in the land, they will have fruitful lives. Shalom (or peace… or wholeness) is what is being promised. They will have a life that radiates the goodness of being in the life giving presence of the one they know as Yahweh. Again, imagine a disenfranchised people who are discouraged and hopeless. The Abrahamic blessing is a powerful reminder that this isn’t the end of them. In fact, it is just the beginning.

I will make your name great – When I was teaching on this passage, I made the observation that this promise isn’t as much about being famous as it is about legacy. But what I didn’t get around to was discussing the importance of naming. When one “names” another in ancient cultures (and maybe to some extent today as well) it is a sign of the namer’s authority, or dominion, or ownership.

Take for example, the retelling of Adam naming animals in Genesis 2. This isn’t simply a cute scene in which he is sort of randomly passing out names. Cow, bird, iguana… The point is that through Adam’s naming, he is demonstrating dominion or rulership. Likewise, when God says that he’ll make Abram’s name “great,” that is loaded with overtones of rulership. In giving him a new name – Abraham – God is in essence saying, “You are mine. You belong to me. You have a new identity that is defined by my choosing you and naming you.”

Right about now, we (as imaginary Hebrews) are beginning to pick up on some not so subtle clues that this isn’t just a story about Abraham. Can you think of another “person” who God gave a new name? There are a few, but I’m thinking specifically about Jacob. During one episode in which Jacob and God re-enact the WWF out in the countryside, God gives him the name Israel, which means something like “wrestles or struggles with God.” Maybe not the name they would have chosen for themselves, but that’s precisely the point. They didn’t get to choose their name; God did the naming.

Once again, imagine you are “Israel,” or perhaps you are “struggling with God” out in the wilderness. As Moses is sharing these stories, they are reminded that God has named them. They belong to God. And he has made promises to Abraham, and therefore to them as well, that they will become a nation in the fullest sense. They will have a land. They will be blessed. And perhaps, most importantly they will be given a new identity by the One who names.

What God’s Chosen People are discovering as they listen to Moses retell the time-worn tales is that those stories are as much about them as they are about Abraham. It doesn’t mean that Abraham’s story isn’t true. It does mean that Moses is perhaps making a point of highlighting certain aspects of Abraham’s story to draw lines connecting Abraham’s story to theirs.

And now fast forward one-thousand years to the time shortly after the exile, and imagine how these stories might have been heard by the nation who “struggles with God” all over again. The same stories and the same promises are re-appropriated for God’s people in a new time.

Then maybe fast forward another two thousand years, and we are no longer in the realm of imagination. Our own reality is that we all too often find ourselves “struggling with God.” And like all God-wrestlers over the centuries, we too are longing for our place in the world, a desire for blessing manifested in Shalom wholeness, and a new identity given to us by the great covenant-Maker.

I think I’m about done now. There is lots that could be said about the fourth promise, “You will be a blessing … to all peoples,” but you quite simply can’t say all that there is to say.

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Who wrote the Bible?

So yesterday, I attempted to discuss the whos, whens and whys of Genesis’s genesis, but I didn’t get very far. And by that I mean that I got nowhere. In this post, I’m hoping to address the “who” and the “when/where” issue. You sort of have to tackle them together, because they go hand in hand. Let’s start with the who question though.

Of course, an obvious answer would be that God is the author. That’s why we call it “God’s Word.” However, how he wrote it is a bit complicated. While possibly a surprise to some, it doesn’t appear that God himself dusted off some parchment and sharpened a quill and set himself to the busy task of penning Genesis through Revelation, only to drop the completed tome from the skies – gold leaf pages, leather bound, and in English no less – perfect in every way.

While we may have preferred to receive the Scriptures in that way, for whatever reason God chose human beings – fallible, limited, frail, time and culture bound people – to write and compile those things that He wanted to communicate to humanity. I’m not saying that Scripture itself necessarily shares in all the shortcomings of humanity, but it would also be a mistake to say that the Bible is devoid of human characteristics. Utilizing ordinary people wouldn’t necessarily have been my way of going about things if I were God, but apparently he has ideas of his own. I suppose to be a Christian means that I am to trust that he knows what he’s doing.

But back to the matter of which person wrote Genesis, as with all things Bible this is debated. The most conservative view of authorship of which I’m aware has Moses “writing” the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible). He certainly would have had the available time – forty years to be exact – as he and the nascent nation of Israel wandered around the Sinai wilderness.

Other views would tend to see the Pentateuch (and much of the Old Testament) as having undergone an editing process over some centuries and not coming into its final form until a few hundred years prior to Jesus’ birth. In this case, it might be more accurate to describe the “author” less as a writer and more of a compiler.

While I’m not necessarily put off by either of these options, some people get very nervous with the idea that the Scriptures may have undergone “editing” or revising. For some reason, we seem to think that the only means by which God could have faithfully communicated his Word to us is if there had been an unbiased ancient journalist present at the time gathering first hand observations. The facts and nothing but the facts. One can be certain that this was not how the Scriptures came about.

My own opinion is that the formation of the canon was a highly complex process that involved first-hand accounts, stories passed down over generations that were both oral and written, all of it re-worked in such a way to have a coherent message that spoke to the contemporary situation in which the writer/compiler found him or herself. It seems plausible (even likely) to me that much of what we have in Genesis through Deuteronomy was initially drafted by Moses himself, but that perhaps it isn’t until sometime around the Exile (or more likely the return from exile) that it came into the form that we more or less have today.

Of course, something like what I have just described must be the case, at least in part, in even the most conservative of scenarios. Moses wasn’t born until the Hebrew people were slaves in Egypt (i.e. Exodus 1), so for him to have written Genesis would have meant that he was strongly dependent on an oral tradition that had been passed on over centuries. The Pentateuch suggests that Moses and God frequently had some one-on-one time so it is possible he got the info he needed in some of those gab sessions. Even if that were the case, it doesn’t seem likely that he could have written Deuteronomy 34, since it records his own death. Someone else (Joshua?) must have finished things up for him.

Right? Right.

Ok, tomorrow we do some finishing up of our own and turn to the upshot on all of this. Namely, what does any of this have to do with the way we understand Genesis 12 and 15.

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audible sacraments

Quick one here. Finishing up with a final helpful thought from Scripture and the Authority of God by N.T. Wright. In his discussion of preaching the Word, he describes sermons as “audible sacraments.” And as an Anglican bishop, he is someone who doesn’t throw the “s” word around lightly. So here we go…

[Sermons] are not simply for the conveying of information, though that is important in a world increasingly ignorant of some of the most basic biblical and theological information. They are not simply for exhortation, still less for entertainment. They are suppose to be one of the moments in regular Christian living when heaven and earth meet.

Not sure anyone would ever describe my preaching as the meeting place of heaven and earth, but holding out that hope for my teaching ministry (or anyone’s) seems like a worthwhile goal.

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Father, Son, and the Holy… Bible?

Ok, so enough of semi-controversial YouTube videos. Time to get that flame inducing garbage off the top of the stack and get back to my bread-and-butter, boring reflections on biblical interpretation. So let’s turn to the non-controversial subject of inerrancy.

There are numerous ways of viewing the Scriptures that seem to get things a little out of whack. Some views are too high and make claims about the book that it doesn’t claim for itself. Others are of the opinion that it is a book no more inspired than any other great great literary work. And still others who wouldn’t even give it that much credit.

As you might guess, true to my father’s Buddhist roots, I hold something of a Middle Way. I trust the Scriptures and hold what I think many would call a high view of Scripture. I read it, study it, memorize it, attempt to live it, teach it, and so for some it might appear that I border on bibliolatry.

I do consider myself to be an inerrantist, but I’m pretty sure my definition of inerrancy would be so unrecognizable to those who are proper biblical inerrantists that I would be excluded from the club. So as with most things religious (I’m going to start using this word to describe myself more, heh), I guess it all depends on who is doing the defining. My belief in God’s inspiration of the Word is going to be too high for some, but it is probably deemed too low for others.

Almost time to cue N.T. …

Over the years, I’ve grown less concerned with the actual mechanics of inspiration, and more concerned with the role the Scriptures are meant to have in the life of the church and world. Wright’s book on the Bible, Scripture and the Authority of God, helps to clarify a host of issues surrounding our understanding of the text. And in typical Wright-ian fashion, he puts forth something that is somehow ontologically lower, but effectually higher than your typical Bible believer. You get a little of that here…

The apostolic writings, like the ‘word’ which they now wrote down, were not simply about the coming of God’s Kingdom into all the world; they were, and were designed to be, part of the means whereby that happened, and whereby those through whom it happened could themselves be transformed into Christ’s likeness.

This way of understanding Scripture gives full weight to the importance of proclaiming the Word. Without getting mired in sticky debates about whether it is “true” or not, one can still hold to the legitimate belief that Scripture is one of the primary means by which God reveals himself to the world in a powerful way.

As the following quote suggests, recognizing that the proclamation of  the Bible (or even simply reading it aloud) as a powerful means of calling God’s purposes into being is about as high a view of Scripture as one can hold…

The creator God, though utterly transcendent over and different from the world he has made, remains present and active within that world, and one of the many ways in which this is so is through his living and active word. This reflects God’s own nature on the one hand; it is a natural and normal thing for this God to speak, not some anthropomorphic projection onto a blank deistic screen! On the other hand, it reflects the fact that, within God’s world, one of the most powerful things human beings, God’s image-bearers can do is to speak. Words change things – through promises, commands, apologies, warnings, declarations of love or of implacable opposition to evil. The notion of ‘speech-acts,’ which we referred to already, is fairly new in philosophy. It would not have surprised the ancient Israelite prophets.

Words change things. How much more so when they are the very words of God?

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approaching the word

In a couple weeks, our church is starting a new series of messages in which we are planning to preach through the whole Bible. Ambitious, I know.

How much time would you guess we have given ourselves to complete this little project?

Ten years? Three years? One year?

How about a little over three months? Ok, so what sounded “ambitious” now sounds plain dumb. Obviously, we aren’t planning to cover every single verse. We’ll be skipping whole chapters. Most of our favorite Bible stories will remain untold. No Joseph and his colorful coat. No Samson. No David and Goliath or Bathsheba (why do we love that story so much). In fact, whole books are going to be left untouched. Leviticus, Ruth, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, most of the prophets, to name a few.

So where do we get the nerve to think that we are preaching through the Bible in any meaningful way? Well, if preaching through the Bible means detailed analysis of every single verse, then we are going to fail… epically so. No, our aim is something paradoxically less and more.

Our intent and hope is that we would know the story of the Bible. The overall flow. The narrative of God.

Not just our favorite stories. Not the Ten Commandments. Nor Psalm 23, the Lord’s prayer, and John 3:16.

Think more forest and less trees.

The truth is that people are better equipped to explain what the Harry Potter series is about than what the Bible is about. There are reasons for that being the case, and I’m not going to take the time to delve into all that. But needless to say, we think that becoming familiar with the grand narrative of God’s activity in human history is a worthwhile use of our time on Sunday mornings. Not just for pastors, but for everyone who would seek to faithfully live out that story.

I’m all for sustained rigorous systematic study of the Scriptures. I’ve given a good chunk of my life to it, and I think probably more people should than do. But we are talking about knowing and living the story of God faithfully in our age. It would be possible to commit ourselves to knowing the details of God’s word and miss the point of what Scripture is about and for in the first place.

So with a series of messages looming large on the horizon, I’ve been thinking (again) about how we engage the Scriptures and how they are meant to function in our lives. Really, this whole post has been just a lengthy introduction to some insights from a certain familiar British New Testament scholar. A few months ago, I read his book entitled Scripture and the Authority of God, and I was reminded of a couple things he had to say.

We read scripture in order to be refreshed in our memory and understanding of the story within which we ourselves are actors, to be reminded where it has come from and where it is going to, and hence what our own part within it ought to be.

I had a few more quotes from the book, but as is my custom I’m going to string this out over the next few days.