The Faith of the Bible
John Ottens
At some point, a Bible student realizes with dismay that Bible scholars agree on almost nothing.
The creation is as perplexing as its consummation; God started making stuff sometime between six thousand and sixteen billion years ago, either with the immediacy of a conjurer or with the patience of a gardener, and He will return to set it right either tomorrow or several millennia hence or never or two thousand years ago, accomplishing this by a process either astonishing or subtle or imperceptible or imagined.
John Ottens
The creation is as perplexing as its consummation; God started making stuff sometime between six thousand and sixteen billion years ago, either with the immediacy of a conjurer or with the patience of a gardener, and He will return to set it right either tomorrow or several millennia hence or never or two thousand years ago, accomplishing this by a process either astonishing or subtle or imperceptible or imagined.
Ethics and economics and political engagement give us a further nest of interconnected and impossible questions. What about war? What about poverty? What's the gospel? Who is Jesus, and Who was He, and why did He come to the earth? What about mission, evangelism, justice? What is humanity? What about slavery? How about equality? How about marriage, sex and the sexes, virtue and law and institution and creed? What about fate and prophecy, promises and fear-mongering? What about forgiveness and retention of sins? How does that work?
The classic domains of theology we find to be just as murky in the perspicuity of the Holy Scriptures, with trinity and incarnation and angels and gods and devils constantly fading into illusion or bursting into caricature.
Anyone who thinks that all or any of these questions can be settled easily (or indeed, can be settled at all) has not weighed the evidence or the arguments fairly. None of the debates are conclusive, nor can they be.
When I completed my undergraduate degree in Biblical Studies, my list of Bible verses that could be interpreted with confidence had grown perilously small, but what I found on that list gave me great comfort:
'Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.'
'On this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.'
'When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth.'
Of course, those three verses are minefields for an interpreter at least as much as any other verses in the Bible (most notoriously, there's the question 'what exactly does Jesus mean by "this rock"?'). However, there is a necessary, minimal meaning that must be present in all but the most dogmatically determined interpretations:
The apostolic Church has divine aid, and that same Church will never disappear from the earth.
That's the faith that remained for me after a long period of seemingly irresolvable doubts. I wonder if it might be the only sure doctrine that Scripture alone (that is to say, Sola Scriptura) can really offer a believer.
The Bible, I realized, can in the end be interpreted well, because Christ and Scripture and Church are bound together, and our Lord has been teaching His Church how to read for two thousand years.
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Posted by: Idrian | August 28, 2012 at 02:37 PM