FOUNDATIONS UNDER FIRE
The Church’s Solid Biblical Foundations
“The
Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord”. This hymn by Samuel Stone (1839-1900) is a great favourite. Its inspiration comes especially from 1
Corinthians 3:11: “No one can lay any
other foundation than the one that has been laid, Jesus Christ”. “Zion stands, securely founded” on the Rock
of Christ (hymn 190). But
Jesus Christ, the one foundation and cornerstone, God’s eternal Word, cannot be
isolated and separated out from the words of God recorded in the apostolic and
prophetic writings. The church is built
“on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ himself as
its cornerstone” (Eph 2:20). The
Formula of Concord reminds us that “the prophetic and apostolic writings of the
Old and New Testaments [are] the pure, clear fountain of Israel” [Solid
Declaration, Kolb-Wengert edition, p. 527, par.3]. So any attack on the truthfulness and integrity of these
wellsprings undermines the one foundation, Jesus Christ himself. For he is the central content of these
writings. Luther
called the Old Testament the “swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ
lies, and to which the angel points the shepherds. Simple and lowly are these swaddling cloths, but dear is the
treasure, Christ, who lies in them” (American edition, vol 35:236). To attack the swaddling cloths, then, is to
endanger the Baby enfolded in them. Or
to use the modern metaphor, we need to be careful that in throwing out the
bathwater (or some of it) we don’t throw out the Baby as well. The
foundational prophetic and apostolic writings are described as wholly truthful
and inerrant. This is in keeping with
the nature of their primary author:
“God never lies” (Titus 1:2).
The Cretans, on the other hand, are “always liars” (Tit 1:12); indeed,
“every man is a liar” (Ps 116:11).
Every human being has had that tendency since Eve told that first
whopper in Paradise (“nor shall you touch it” - Gen 3:3). Luther sums this up in the Large Catechism,
“My neighbour and I – in short, all people – may deceive and mislead, but God’s
Word cannot deceive” (Kolb-Wengert, p. 464, par. 57). And again, “the Word of God is not false or deceitful” (Epitome,
Kolb-Wengert, p. 505, par. 13). This
has important consequences for our pastoral care. Because God’s Word is totally reliable, we can be sure that God
grants faith to infants who are baptised (KW 464:57). Because God’s Word is totally reliable, we can believe the
promises about Christ’s Real Presence in the Lord’s Supper (KW 505:10-14). Because God’s Word is reliable, you and I
can turn to it in confidence when we’re distressed. On the other hand, the more we call its authority and truthfulness
into question, the less likely we are to turn to it for help, guidance, and
comfort. Foundations Under Fire
The
church’s foundations are always under attack from our culture (“the
world”). When I say “culture”, I’m not
thinking of the many positive aspects of our culture – all the daily blessings
of “food, drink, house, home, fields, cattle, money, goods”, family, sports,
languages, customs, festivals, music and so on. All these are the Creator’s good gifts. No, what I have in mind are the sinful aspects of our culture
(“the spirit of the world” – 1 Cor 2:12) whenever its sets itself against God’s
Word and his church. This is culture in
the sense of worldly “philosophy” (Col 2:8).
The shock waves of these “flaming arrows” (Eph 6:16) fired at the church
come in constantly new forms. The Key Issue:
The Relationship Between Theology (The Word of God) and Culture
The
key questions belong to a field of study called “hermeneutics”, the art of
biblical interpretation. To what extent
were the biblical writers bound by their time and culture? Are some parts of the Scriptures
“time-bound”, meant only for people at that time ? What abiding truth do we find there, what is there that has
eternal relevance? And how do you
decide? How does the distinction
between the Old and New Testaments play into this? These
are serious questions. There is a huge
time span and cultural gap between our world and the world that was first
addressed by the Word of God. There is
the distance of time. Modern readers
are no longer familiar with what the biblical writers mean by “high places” and
“calf idols”. There is the distance of
culture. What did the expression “head
covering” mean to the Corinthians?
There is geographical distance to overcome. Unless you’ve visited the Holy Land, you may not understand that
you “go up” from Caesarea to Jerusalem and “go down” from Jerusalem to
Jericho. And there’s the distance of
language. The Scriptures were written
originally in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, which means the church has the
ongoing challenge of interpreting/translating them so that they speak to us
intelligibly today. Sensitivity,
then, both to the biblical world and the modern world is necessary if people
are going to hear the Word of God today.
But while we must be aware of the distance between then and now, we dare
not magnify these cultural factors so much that they obscure what the Word of
God would say to us. Just as we study
Shakespeare’s times, his language, and culture so that we can better appreciate
his plays, we study the Bible’s languages and culture so that we can hear the
Word of God more clearly. We
need to beware of the modern arrogance (inspired partly by Darwinism) that
thinks we are so intellectually and scientifically superior to earlier
generations that we have to dismiss their primitive ideas – for example, their
faith in miracles or in Jesus’ divinity and his bodily resurrection (R.
Bultmann). Some conclude that what Paul
said about women’s role in worship or about homosexuality couldn’t possibly
apply in our more enlightened age. Thus
culture takes precedence over the Word of God. When
one works cross-culturally one is often initially struck by all the
differences. But the more familiar you become with the other culture the more
you realise that while the surface configurations of culture may be very
different, underneath all people share the same human condition and need the
same gospel message. Examples
I
would like to give some examples of how Christians sometimes allow their
cultural biases to take precedence over the Word. 1. Papua New Guinea a. Magical, mythical thinking Papua
New Guinean Christians generally hold the Scriptures in high esteem. They haven’t been saddled with
“higher-critical” approaches to the Bible of us “whiteskins”. But sometimes their own cultural baggage,
their traditional magical and mythical world-view leads them to some strange
misunderstandings of the Bible. For
example, many think that Adam and Eve’s real sin was having sexual
intercourse. That is because in PNG, if
a woman prepared food and gave it to a man, that was a sexual invitation. So when Adam and Eve slept together, that
was eating the forbidden fruit.
Occasionally, in more developed forms of the myth, some people believed
the wicked son Cain resulted from Eve having intercourse with the snake,
whereas the good son Abel resulted from her relationship with Adam. So their magical, mythical worldview
prevented them from catching the intended sense of Genesis 1 – 3. b. “Big man” thinking During
my last years in PNG I was surprised by another misunderstanding. My students had trouble grasping what John the Baptist meant when he said he
wasn’t worthy to untie the strap of Jesus’ sandal (Jn 1:27). They thought that John really did not want
to untie Jesus’ sandals and carry them, because after all, John was a “big
man”, an important man almost as important as Jesus himself, and so he was
making excuses so that he wouldn’t have to untie and carry those sandals. So, it seems, they were misled by the “big
man” hang-ups of their culture, and they had trouble hearing that text. Our cultural hang-ups have that tendency:
they are the “noise” that prevents our ears from catching what the Word of God
means to say. 2. Examples from the Western World a. Litigious thinking The
last few decades have seen our western cultures becoming increasingly
litigious. Everyone wants his day in
court. Christians are easily carried
away by these cultural trends, to the point where court cases between church servants
and the churches they serve have become increasingly frequent. This has happened despite the apostle Paul’s
stern words forbidding Christians from taking each other to court (1 Cor
6:1-8). Paul begins his chapter on the
topic: “How dare you go to law before
the unrighteous people!” In other
words, “How dare you wash your dirty linen in public!” Yet Bible commentators like W.H. Mare have
tried to get around Paul’s clear words.
Mare claims that “By ‘dare’ Paul strongly
admonishes rather than commands
Christians to take their legal grievances for settlement before qualified
Christians”. In other words, Paul is
frowning on the practice of Christians’ taking their disputes to secular courts
but he isn’t forbidding it. Our
litigious culture has great trouble hearing this text. b. Evolutionary thinking Our
scientific cultural establishment ridicules anyone who takes a basically
literal view of the creation story. You
are immediately labelled as a “fundamentalist” or a “biblicist”. Under this barrage, many Christians duck for
cover and try to salvage their intellectual respectability by taking the middle
road known as “theistic evolution”. On
this view, God (“Theos”) has guided and directed the whole evolutionary
process. While
this approach may get other “enlightened” Christians off our backs and may
persuade some non-Christians as well, it carries no weight at all with the
leading exponents of evolutionary theory, people like Stephen J. Gould and
others. Why? Because “the literature of Darwinism is full of anti-theistic
conclusions, such as that the universe was not designed and has no purpose, and
that we humans are the product of blind natural processes that care nothing
about us. What is more, these
statements are not presented as personal opinions but as the logical
implications of evolutionary science” (Philip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, p.
8,9). Richard Dawkins is an Oxford
zoologist and a leading advocate of evolutionary science. His book, The Blind Watchmaker “is a sustained argument for atheism. According to Dawkins, ‘Darwin made it
possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist’” (Johnson, p. 9). When
Christians try, then, to marry their Christian views about God the Creator with
modern evolutionary science, they are in fact (generally naively and
unwittingly) trying to marry Christianity with atheism. Any talk about design and purpose is
anathema to the leading opinion-makers in evolutionary science. We face the question: What is more important to us, our
intellectual respectability and standing within our culture, or our faithful
hearing of the Word of God? c.
The thinking of the “sexual
revolution” When
I was a student at Melbourne University in 1965-66, part of the “in”-reading
for intellectually-minded Christian students was Bishop John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God. This book appeared in England (SCM Press) in 1963. The first Australian edition was April,
1963. Then it was reprinted in May,
June, and August, 1963. Robinson popularised
the more radical, critical theology of scholars like Rudolf Bultmann, Paul
Tillich, James Pike, and others. Robinson’s
second last chapter is entitled “The New Morality”. Here he popularises (with a few qualifications) the “situation
ethics” of Joseph Fletcher. Fletcher
basically rejected the Ten Commandments, saying that all that was necessary was
that you do whatever’s the loving thing to do in each situation. As Robinson describes it, this is “a
radical ‘ethic of the situation’, with nothing prescribed – except love” (p.
116). Once
Christians abandon the Ten Commandments, they are easily pulled this way and that
in their moral choices by the prevailing winds of the culture. Since the 1960s we have often seen
Anglicans, Lutherans and other “main-stream” Christians thoroughly confused and
adrift when it comes to their moral attitudes.
How ironic that it was a bishop of the Church of England who helped
launch the “new morality” in the 1960s, and that it is another Anglican bishop
(Peter Hollingworth) who stands at the centre and suffers as our secular society, lacking any other taboos of a
sexual nature, finally takes a stand on the one remaining taboo! d. The pluralistic religious thinking of our culture Bendigo
is the chosen site for the largest “stupa” (temple) of Tibetan Buddhism outside
Tibet itself. The eight-storey
building, whose foundation stone was laid earlier this month by the man who
ranks second only to the Dalai Lama, will be a replica, identical in size, to
the great stupa of Tibet. Buddhism,
both in its Tibetan and other forms, has become extremely popular in the
western world. But in Bendigo itself
and in towns not far away we have all sorts of other religious choices. Daylesford and Castlemaine are known for
offering alternative life-styles, with New Age religion, paganism, etc. Under
the pressure of all the alternative cults, the constant calls for tolerance,
it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Christians to uphold Jesus’ words: “I am the way and the truth
and the life. No one comes to the
Father but by me” (John 14:6). The
Anglican Dean of Sydney, Philip Jensen, ran into fierce criticism at this
installation last month, when he preached on the uniqueness of Christianity. At
the same time, within Christendom itself, there’s increasing pressure for us to
become so tolerant that we ignore important doctrinal issues among the churches
and press on impatiently towards church unity at all costs. Of course, it can be most helpful when
Christians of various denominations sit down together and humbly and
prayerfully seek to learn how God’s Word speaks to their differences. Misconceptions and prejudices can be
overcome, and in God’s good time barriers to church unity may be removed, and
removed in a way that doesn’t compromise the truth. May God grant it! But we
need to curb our impatience, remembering that the church is already one: the Lord knows those who are his in all
denominations, and in all languages and nations (2 Tim 2:19). He keeps gathering his one holy church
through the Word and sacraments. e. Feminist thinking and the Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW) Since
I’ve often spoken and written on the topic of women’s ordination, most recently
at the retreat in Hamilton last year, I don’t want to go over old ground. Rather, I’d like to share with you a
conversation that took place on the ABC’s “Religion Report” last Wednesday
evening (May 21st). I only
caught the tail-end of the conversation, but what I heard was, I believe,
significant for showing us the spirit of the Movement for the Ordination of
Women within The Anglican Church and, to a greater or lesser degree, in other
churches. The
occasion, if I remember rightly, was the 20th anniversary of the
Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW) in the Anglican Church of
Australia. The ABC marked the occasion
by interviewing about six women, all of whom had played a role in MOW. The women looked back with some satisfaction
on the movement’s progress: about 400
ordained women (I presume that’s 400 Australia-wide), “a lot more inclusive
language than there was”, etc. At the
same time they lamented the lack of progress in the Sydney diocese. Sydney was described as a “hideous
exception”. MOW in Sydney was “hanging
on by its toenails”. The legalistic attitude
there was “distressing”. Worst of all,
the debate on the issue within the Sydney diocese was only “mediocre”; in fact,
it was “embarrassing to debate with the Archbishop of Sydney”. What
fascinated me particularly was that last comment about how embarrassing the
women found it to debate with Sydney’s Archbishop, Peter Jensen. On the face of it, this could be interpreted
in two ways: (1)
It
was embarrasing to debate with the archbishop, because every time they tried it
they were soundly defeated by his grasp of the relevant biblical texts and his
adeptness in seeing through and destroying their counter-arguments. But while this may be a legitimate way of
explaining their statement – and may indeed be the actual situation - it is surely not the way they wanted to be
understood. As was evident from their
tone, what they meant was rather: (2)
It
was embarrassing to debate with the archbishop because he was so obviously
inferior to them, so far beneath them intellectually in any discussion of the
issue. This
comment, and the tone in which it was made, reminded me vividly of the spirit
and attitude Paul contends with in his first letter to the Corinthians. Far more than any other congregation, the
Corinthians were affected by a spirit of boastfulness and intellectual
pride. The statistics say it all: Of fifty-nine occurrences of the “boasting”
word group in the New Testament, thirty-nine are found in 1 and 2
Corinthians. And of eight occurrences
of the words that mean “being puffed up” (being “arrogant”) in Paul’s letters,
six occur in 1 Corinthians (4:6, 18, 19; 5:2; 8:1; 13:4). It was this confident self-assertiveness (Luther called it “the theology of glory”) that fomented the rivalry and divisions in the Corinthian congregation (chapters 1-4). And it was that same self-confident, boastful spirit that had led to all the vying for the floor and talking on top of one another at their worship services (chapter 14). Finally it leads to the women’s being allowed a speaking /teaching role in worship that it was not theirs to assume (14:33-40). Paul asks them sharply: “Did the Word of God go out from you, or are you the only ones that it reached?” (14:36). In other words, “Why do you think you’re so special, so superior to all other Christians who’ve gone before you?” By
contrast, the apostle Paul – a man with an education second to none – was
determined not to parade his knowledge nor to rely on his way with words. He only wanted to know “Jesus Christ and him
crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). In contrast to
the intellectuals and orators the Corinthians admired, Paul came to Corinth “in
weakness and in fear and in much trembling” (2:3). He placed all his trust in the power of God’s Word, and prayed
that the Corinthians would do the same (2:4-5). Just
as Paul’s opponents in Corinth were enamoured of their own intellectual and
rhetorical prowess, so the women interviewed on the Religion Report showed a
fairly high regard for their own abilities.
It is that kind of spirit that leads to the mocking of others as
“legalistic”, “fundamentalistic”, “biblicistic” and generally too “embarrassing”
to be worth talking to. The
theology of the cross, on the other hand, rests content with a straightforward
exposition of the Word of God, and if that doesn’t persuade the hearers, it is
content to suffer and leave the outcome in God’s hands. “When the foundations are
destroyed, what can the righteous do” (Psalm 11:3) In
Psalm 11:3 we read: “When the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous
do?” [Please
note that when the Old Testament speaks of “the righteous”, it doesn’t mean
“the self-righteous”. Quite the
opposite! No, “the righteous” are those
desperately needy, humble people, (like King David) deeply conscious of their
sins, people who find in the Word and grace of God their help and refreshment]. What
can we do as the Lutheran Church and other churches face the crises of our
day? Much could be said here, but I’d
like to say briefly that (1)
we need to be repentant people. The
great penitential chapters, Nehemiah 9 and Daniel 9, show Ezra and Daniel
lamenting and confessing their own sins in solidarity with everyone else. They don’t point the finger at others for
the disasters that have come over Israel; no, “we have sinned and done wrong” (Daniel 9:5). (2)
We
need to be “in the Word” more and more, for our sake and the sake of
others. “Your Word is truth” (Jn
17:17). (3)
We
need to be people of prayer. In
particular, we need to pray the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer as Martin Luther
explained them. Those petitions are
concerned that “the Word of God is taught in its truth and purity”, “that God would break and hinder every evil
counsel and will that would not let us hallow his name, nor let his kingdom
come, such as the will of the devil, the world, and our flesh”, and that,
finally, he would keep us “steadfast in his Word and faith unto our end”. Greg
Lockwood, May 27th 2003 |