What Lies Beneath

Yesterday morning, while yet half-awake, my mind started wandering to a hypothetical conversation with a friend about the trustworthiness of Scripture, whether we can really trust it as a reliable (let alone infallible) revelation of God and His will for us. He was emphasizing the humanity of its authors, their personal biases and cultural issues, and man’s imperfection. Recently, I have been reading a book for a seminary class called The Ministry of the Missional Church, by Craig Van Gelder. In it, he posits that the Holy Spirit is continually at work building the Kingdom of God and that it is the Church’s task to join in on that work (although the Church itself is the primary vehicle a sovereign God has chosen to use to accomplish that lofty goal).

It seems to me that one’s theological presumptions in this matter weigh heavily in how one deals with, say, certain elements of Biblical criticism; for example, if single books are really the products of several editors, using multiple sources, etc. If these understandings are true and if the story ended there, then I would share my friend’s concern about the reliability of Scripture and its possible pollution by human authors. But what I realized during my quasi-dream state is that such a view extends beyond the issues of Scriptural trustworthiness, and presumes certain things about the very nature of God.

If the books and letters of the Bible are essentially just human documents with ideas about God, no more holy or Spirit-breathed than any other essay or treatise on the subject, then underneath that assumption lies a rather Deistic view of God, where He is rather distant and unloving, not concerned to be known on any authentically personal level, leaving us to struggle even harder than we already do understand or obey Him. If, however, Van Gelder is right, and God has been and is actively involved in His Church, building up His kingdom, then it follows that God would leave an accurate record, love letter, and instruction manual to His children, mysteriously but successfully working with (and often in spite of) human personalities and flaws to attain this goal. It makes sense to me then that such a God would also have guided the church councils who defined the canon just as much as He did the authors themselves, especially considering the importance of the work. It also follows that the same Holy Spirit has continued to work in and through the Church to this very day, guarding this sacred revelation, and enabling His body to live out this humanly-impossible missio dei on earth.

Reflecting on the continued work of the Holy Spirit in the world has not only reaffirmed my hope in the work of the Church, but in the very trustworthiness of the God-breathed Scriptures themselves.

The Perils and Paralysis of Political Paradigms

A good friend and I were eating lunch last week and, as we often do, got to talking about various political, social, and spiritual issues. Building off of pervious conversations, it has been determined that I am something of a Tree-Hugger, and he falls more in the vein of what I shall call a Neocon. Like him, I oppose abortion and share his conviction on many other “conservative” issues, but when it comes to being intentional about being green, our paths divide. To me, my environmental convictions are perfectly congruent with my theology, believing that part of following Christ is the realignment of one’s materialistic ambitions to seek the greater good, and being a good steward of one of God’s greatest blessings to us, planet earth. My friend notes that many environmentalist types, if not most, are also pro-choice. He challenges me by asking how I can support abortion. I told him I don’t, but he said that environmentalists are for abortion because they want to keep the population down. He said he felt like we really don’t need to worry too much about the earth, that it is quite capable of repairing itself (we can cut down the trees for clogged housing developments, but eventually the trees will grow back). Although I disagreed with his last point, I tried to explain to him that A≠B in every case, and that just because I support one of “their” ideas, this doesn’t mean that I share all their other conclusions. This made perfect sense to me, but such a “misalignment” didn’t fit within my friend’s rather dichotomistic political paradigm.

Michael Budde in The (Magic) Kingdom of God (Westview, 1997) criticizes the Church’s frequent accommodation to the ideas and paradigms of mass culture, one that stands in opposition to so many of the Church’s values and its vision for life. Liberal and Conservative alike frequently criticize “the media” for its undesired influence on our lives and values; I believe a large part of that critique should be focused on the political arena—and not just the realm of law and policy, but the political pop culture and media exploitation of politics and party. Popular media seems to reinforce if not create these types of “obvious” political alliances and paradigms, where an “if A=B, then B=C” logic rules. Such a logic may make sense mathematically, but doesn’t work out as well in the realm of politics, where political alliances vary across nation, era, even election season, and where people thankfully don’t have to think like everyone else they might be grouped with, as politically disadvantageous or perplexing as that may sometimes be.