Literal Truth, Inerrant God

Spirituality Column #250
August 23, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Literal Truth, Inerrant God
By Bob Walters

A popular online news organization recently posted a feature story about why it’s a mistake to read the Bible literally, and folly to think the Bible is inerrant.

Written by a Christian professor, the article cited predictable scholarship and supporting evidence. The Bible itself claims to be “inspired and useful” (2 Timothy 3:16), but not inerrant. Revelation (the Bible’s final book) in parts is impenetrable. Even the brilliant St. Augustine had to allegorize (or, “say it was something else”) the story of Jonah and the whale. The four Gospels don’t agree about what happened on which days of Holy Week when Jesus was betrayed, tried, crucified and resurrected.

Lots and lots of stuff in the Bible doesn’t seem to add up.

Well, it’s a good day for the Devil when he can sow doubt about the Bible, and by extension, about God. The double-entrendre headline, “4 reasons not to read the Bible … literally,” may be harmless, or could imply: The Bible is wrong, so if the Bible is the story of God, then God must be wrong. Hallelujah, we can ignore the Bible and God!

Misinterpreted or not, the headline harkens rehashing.

You see, a Christian faith conversation centered on literalism and inerrancy of the Bible will quickly go out-of-round for the simple reason that the conversation isn’t truly centered. The Bible is something dramatically more important than “literal” and “inerrant.” It is truth, which almost always involves more than simple calculation.

If the issue is, “The Bible doesn’t add up,” then let’s go to math class. Let’s add up a list of numbers, terms and factors; we’ll get a defensibly inerrant answer. But, if the “list” is actually a quadratic equation and calculated with the wrong method, say, addition, we’ll not only get the wrong answer but entirely miss the point of the exercise because we have mistaken its central purpose, which is not addition.

Secularist logicians and sadly more than a few Christians miss the “answer” of the Bible because they refuse or confuse the Bible’s central purpose – revealing God’s truth. Scripture’s message isn’t simple addition, it’s a cosmically complex equation of faith, hope, love, truth, creation, relationship, separation, loss, betrayal, death, redemption, eternal life and perfection. It’s the ultimate story problem.

And what’s the story? Jesus Christ is the literal truth about an inerrant God, and we – each of us personally – is a loved and important part of the equation.

That is the true center of the Bible.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) was horrible at high school math but scored higher in math than verbal on the SAT. Go figure.

The Importance of Patience

Spirituality Column #200
September 7, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

The Importance of Patience
By Bob Walters

“The passion of our Lord is a lesson in patience.”

St. Augustine wrote that in the fifth century, echoing the even-earlier Christian writer Tertullian of Carthage from approximately AD 200. It is God’s nature to be patient, said Tertullian, and impatience is the primal sin of Satan.

In religious and philosophical writings, there is no shortage of lists when it comes to virtues, those earthly constructs we pursue to try to find God.

We have the Four Cardinal Virtues from antiquity – prudence, justice, courage and temperance. We have the Gospel’s three theological virtues – faith, hope and charity. We have the fruit of the Spirit from Galatians 5:16 - “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”

Better not leave off mercy, forgiveness, humility, modesty, wisdom, religious devotion and fear of the Lord.

It’s easy to come up with a long list, but patience is a specific attribute of Jesus Christ that teaches us much about God’s love for mankind.

Patience, you see, wasn’t considered much of a virtue by the ancients. Sure, it’s in the Bible, but to the Greeks and Romans “perseverance in adversity” was admired, not Godly patience. What the King James Version calls “long suffering” and “slow to anger” while “forgiving iniquity and transgression” (Numbers 14:18) was the novel lesson of Christ on the Cross.

Patience. When you can be patient, you are being Crucified with Christ. Tertullian taught that patience is not endurance or fortitude, but hope … hope in the Resurrection. And it is a sign of longing for the good things to come; things that are promised nowhere but heaven.

“On Patience” was among Tertullian’s master works, though history tells us he was not an especially patient man. Yet he wrote, “When God’s Spirit descends, patience is always at his side.” Patience, Tertullian redefined, is what it means to be “like God.”

This survey of Christian patience came thanks to the church historian Robert Louis Wilken, who recently put together a terrific work called The Spirit of Early Christian Thought. It landed in my mailbox not long after I renewed by subscription last year to “First Things” magazine.

Wilken has done us an enormous favor by forming this wonderful and clearly written study on the formations of the Christian story.

Otherwise, I’d never have the patience to read these ancient works.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) needs to read everything he can get his hands on about patience. FYI, this is column No. 200.

Storming the Intellectual Ramparts, Part 4

Spirituality Column #196
August 10, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Storming the Intellectual Ramparts, Part 4
By Bob Walters
Last in a series

Author Mark Noll graciously replied to an email I sent after I finished reading his “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.”

I wondered, now 16 years after Christianity Today named “Scandal” its 1994 Book of the Year, if he thought Evangelicals were gaining ground intellectually. I asked if there was a follow-up book in the works.

He responded that as it happens, he has just recently finished a manuscript that Eerdman’s in Grand Rapids will publish next year, titled “Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind.” Noll said that the book “tried to make a positive statement concerning how traditional Christian belief can support strong intellectual life.”

He also referred to a postscript he wrote for the new book that is a revision and expansion of an article he wrote for First Things journal, Oct. 2004, “The Evangelical Mind Today.” He lists 10 areas where positive impact is being made. I’m looking forward to the release of the book.

Noll points to a couple of glaring intellectual weaknesses in modern evangelicalism. One is the nearly total absence of serious consideration for tradition and the 1800 years of Christian thought that preceded the great evangelical revivals.

Missing from evangelicalism are the likes of Augustine, Aquinas, Galileo, Luther, and Calvin. Similarly Jonathan Edwards, C.S. Lewis, even Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, are immense Christian intellects given less stature in the evangelical community than a Sunday preacher.

Sorry … not to harangue any specific preacher, but to put a point on it – deep feelings do not equate to deep theology, or bedrock, true, biblical understanding.

We cannot study great music without studying great musicians. How could we possibly study great theology without studying great theologians?

Quoting Galileo, “It is most pious to say and most prudent to take for granted that the Holy Scripture can never lie, as long as its true meaning has been grasped.”

A second glaring weakness is evangelical separatism, a resistance to engaging the Christian mind and energy in the whole spectrum of modern learning, from political science to economics to linguistics, history, science and literary criticism.

Says Noll, “Personal faith in Christ is a necessary condition for Christian intellectual life, for only a living thing can develop.” Evangelicals definitely have the heart, soul and strength of personal faith … Noll insists we plug in our minds.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) figures this is a good stepping off point as school begins. Take Christ along, in your heart and mind.

Defining Life in the Spiritual Lane

Spirituality Column #184
May 18, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Defining Life in the Spiritual Lane
By Bob Walters

Our Wednesday night Bible study weathered a lively exchange recently regarding whether human beings were mortal or immortal before “The Fall” of Adam and Eve.

Most of us in the Western church assume that if not for the sin of Adam and Eve, we would physically live for ever. Death, Genesis 3 seems to say, only entered the world after Adam and Eve’s sin of trying to be like God without God: eating from the tree of “God’s knowledge” at Satan’s tempting against God’s strict orders not to.

It turns out there is more than one school of thought on original immortality, even though most of us have heard only the one above. At issue are a couple of fairly major topics:

- God’s intention of Natural life vs. Spiritual life

- God’s intention of death in Creation.

Our teacher – a former Cambridge lecturer, Bible translator, and expert on Eastern Orthodoxy – cited Patristic (Church Fathers) sources suggesting that God created humans as He did all other life, to live a natural life and die a natural death. What makes humans the “image of God” is our spiritual immortality, not our physical immortality. It’s our Spirit life that sin puts to death, and our Spiritual death that Jesus Christ hung on the Cross to defeat.

This our instructor said to a room full of thoughtful Evangelicals, schooled in “Sin Brought Death,” not “Natural Death Happens Anyway.” It was a split, animated discussion. It was Western St. Augustine vs. Eastern St. Athanasius.

Evangelicals like straight, dependable answers, with straight, dependable definitions for faith’s day-to-day questions: What is sin? What is forgiveness? What is grace? What is life? What is death? What is salvation?

Thing is, anyone can learn “about” God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, church history, other religions, meditation, faith systems, theology. For these pursuits, definitions are helpful and can make religion seem easy, if superficial. Defining a relationship – actually knowing someone, like God, for example – defies labels.

God’s goal is not our mastery of definitions or doctrine. God is hungry for our loving, freely-found relationship with Him through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit; and our love for each other.

God gave us a brain to discover Him, and learn. Let’s not sell God, or ourselves, short with narrow definitions. There is a big history of Christianity that precedes modern religious “definitions.” Learn, and love, all you can.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is going to read “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” by Mark Noll, and will report back.