Sacred Saga Ministries - Jim's Blog

Faxed from Heaven?

Posted on Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 09:05AM by

Sacred Saga Team in Doubt, Historical nature of Christianity, NT Canon, docetism, faxed from heaven |

Faxed from Heaven?

Last week I received an email from a woman who had just read my article “Evangelicals and the Canon of the New Testament.” She was a bit shaken by questions and doubts about the canon of the New Testament (funny that no one ever has real problems with the canon of the OT) and how she could be sure if the church got it right. So far, we have had a couple of exchanges about her questions.

This incident has taken me back about 22 years to 1987. (To put this in historical context as to how long ago this was—it was the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation!) I was teaching a class in Introduction to Theology for San Jose Bible College (now William Jessup University). The class was taught at Los Gatos Christian Church and was populated by laypeople who had no conception of what I would consider the most basic grounding of how we got the Bible.

On this particular evening, the topic was the canon of the New Testament. I traced the history of the development of the canon from the early second century through the recognition process until the final consensus recognition by the church in the late fourth-early fifth century. (Note: despite what Dan Brown said in The Da Vinci Code, Constantine has absolutely nothing to do with the canon, nor was the issue canon ever addressed by any of the universal councils of the ancient church.)

Coming face to face with the fact that it took 3 ½ to 4 centuries for the church to agree on its canon pushed one student in the class into a true crisis of faith (at this point in his life he had been a Christian about 20 years). Is not the Bible, especially for us as Christians the very word of God? How could it be that the foundation of our faith did not come together in the form we have it now for nearly 400 years? If this is the case how can we be sure of our faith since the early church did not have the inerrant scriptures that we take for granted now? How can we have any certainty and assurance that the Church got it right?

What is ignored in this reaction is that the Holy Spirit is active in the historical process, guiding the Church. He is not bound and chained between the leather covers and the gilt edges of our Bible. God is working his purposes in history.

These two incidents about the same topic speak volumes to me as a biblical scholar, theologian and educator. We as evangelicals do a lousy job of grounding our flocks in the most basic background truths of how we received our faith. Actually, I would go further and say that church leadership is actually culpable before God at this point.

The woman with whom I have been having the current email conversation says she feels “tricked” by the church. She has been taught that she can and must have an attitude of absolute certainty toward the truth of the scriptures. But if scriptures arose out of an historical process absolute certainty is impossible. (Note: absolute certainty can only be had in the realm of mathematics. Anything touched by the historical process can only achieve relative certainty at best—this is one of the things that makes Christianity unique among the world religions: it is a faith based in God’s work history, not in its moral teachings, etc. To take this a step further Christianity would be true even if the Bible had never been written. The fact that God saw fit to give us his word in a durable form is an act of grace on His part.)

Sir Leigh Teabing, the intellectual gadfly in The Da Vinci Code takes great delight in saying that the Bible was not “faxed from heaven” but was the work of men, as if this in some sense discredited the inspiration and authority of the Scripture and brought Christianity down to a merely human invention. The common perception is all or nothing—Scripture is human or divine. Jesus is God or Man. If we cannot know with absolute certainty we can know nothing at all. All of these dichotomies are patently false.

While we on some level acknowledge that God got his hands dirty (so to speak) by entering into the historical process via the incarnation, on another level, a deeply emotional level, we do not quite believe this to be true. Jesus was after all God. He could not really have lived life like us. One of my college professors denied that Jesus ever felt the pull of sexual temptation. We have trouble really believing that Jesus was so human that he had to urinate and defecate like we do. It is so earthy, so dirty. It is not spiritual.

Likewise when it comes to the scriptures we on a deep emotional level have a hard time believing that the scriptures arose out of an historical process. They are true, they are universal, they apply to everyone equally. (In fact while they are the ipssima verba [the very words] of God, they are also the words of the human authors spoken from their context and worldview and understanding).

I would suggest that this attitude while understandable is ultimately heretical (in the proper sense of the term-not just that I don’t like it or that is something I have never heard). This understanding is heresy because it actively undercuts basic truths of Christianity. Our spiritual sensibilities unconsciously pull us toward doceticsm, the early heresy that denied that Jesus was fully human (he only appeared to be so). We also approach the scriptures with a docetic mindset—they are divine and only incidentally human. In both instances, we fall into heresy. Jesus was fully human and fully divine. Scripture too is fully human and fully divine. Both the Word of God living and the Word of God written participate fully in the historical process. The significance of both transcend history but do not escape from it.

This is a key part of the offense of Christianity: its historical particularity. Enlightenment critics found it a stumbling block that God would privilege one particular time (the early first century), one particular place (Roman dominated Palestine), one particular people (the Jews), one particular individual (Jesus of Nazareth), and one particular event (the crucifixion and resurrection) to be the locus of his revelation . It offends the sensibilities.

Yet this is in fact what God has done!

Reader Comments (12)

Lovely article again, Jim. I recall writing a paper in your class years ago as an MDiv student on inerrancy and concluded that faith and not historical evidence would ultimately ground our doctrine of Scripture. I think quite a few classmates found that difficult to take. Even a multidimensional model of inspiration trouble many evangelicals. The intellectual dishonesty (i.e. duplicity) of the evangelical church is the reason why the poor woman responded this way. Just look at our pulpits across the great US of A. Do you see most of these pastors having understood hermeneutics enough (and various criticisms) to preach even a half decent message? The answer is surely negative. In fact, most to me, are unfit for human consumption. All I have to say is this. Our Docetic view of Scripture has to go. Our bibliolotry has to go. Otherwise, the non-evangelical will continue to (rightly) laugh us out of every conceivable venue we try to enter. The very fact Dan Brown and the likes of Bart Ehrman can even unsettle us says more about our crappy our evanglical faith than the alleged evil intention of these men.

March 16, 2009 |

Sam Tsang

I totally agree with you. Evangelical churches seem to enjoy the mantra "Ignorance is bliss." Is our God so fragile that He might get toppled by an honest telling of the facts? It's a lot better to wrestle with the mystery than to blindly latch on to a creed or catch-word. My experience with many catch-word indoctrinated people is that when you turn a blind eye one too many times, you lose the ability to see altogether.
Thanks for the article, I gain some new insight every I read your blog.

March 16, 2009 |

Helen Tsang

Thank you for such a thoughtful and thought provoking article. This issue of canon has long plagued my discussions of faith, both with God and with other travelers. I appreciate your perspective and ability to put into words some of those thoughts I find to tenuous to grasp myself.

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