Category: Theology

The first thing to realize, is that God did not write the Bible. It contains words attributed to God, but it is not words directly from God.

They Said God Said

It’s important to understand the distinction. Is the difference between what I say my mother said, and what my mother actually said. I hear things through a filter.

It is the same with the authors of the Bible. God may have truly spoke to them, but it is filtered through their personality and cultural context. It is just like light through stained glass, the stained glass changes the hue and color of the light.

If we don’t keep this in mind, we can interpret the Bible literally. Which is going to cause all kinds of problems. The Bible constantly counterdicts itself. How can that be if it was written by God.

God Did Not Write It

The truth is that God did not write the Bible. Men wrote the Bible. They wrote it from their perspective, their limited understanding, and they’re biased and prejudiced viewpoints. And these come through in the text.

So he must read the Bible as the words of men about the message of God. The message of God is sometimes blurred, sometimes distorted, and sometimes insightful.

The Bible is Not Univocal

We should take the Bible seriously, but not literally. We have to interpret each author within their own cultural and historical context. The Bible is not univocal. It doesn’t have one author, it has many. Therefore one author should not interpret another.

This is important. Too often a uniformity is forced upon the text. And this uniformity distorts the text, causing it to be misunderstood. Only the author can interpret the author. Only Paul can interpret Paul. So it’s important to know which letters are from Paul, and which ones are not.

I say that because we know that 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus were not written by the apostle Paul. We can call the author pseudo-Paul. Whoever it was, he wrote after Paul was already long dead. His language and style of writing is different. Therefore, these letters should not be used to interpret the other Epistles of Paul.

Rethinking Our Interpretation

This is only the beginning of rethinking our interpretation and understanding the Bible. It’s important to realize that the Bible is not a book, but a library of books written by different men, in different situations, at different times, with different historical and cultural contexts, and woth different agendas.

The Bible was not written by God. It is written by men. Therefore they should be used and interpreted carefully. We should honor the differences and not negate them with a uniformity they never had.

Three Views

The Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church hold that the Ecumenical Councils are infallible. That means that there were no errors in what the council proclaimed.

The Protestants, on the other hand, only accept the Ecumenical Councils insofar as they declare doctrines that can be found in the Bible. Bible. In other words, Ecumenical Councils, in the Protestants view, cannot dictate new doctrines.

As a progressive Christian, I take a middle path. I take the Ecumenical Councils as authoritative, but not infallible. That is, an Ecumenical Council hold sway until or unless it clearly contradicts other doctrines proclaimed by other sources of evidence.

Four Sources

To recap what I’ve said before, I take four sources of authority for determining Doctrine. They are scripture, tradition, reason, and personal experience. I hold all four of equal authority. The truth is found in their Harmony. When all all four sources agree, we have the truth.

Ecumenical Council Can Be Corrected

Ecumenical councils are the highest authority within this source. What I’m calling Tradition is also known as sacred tradition in the Roman Catholic Church, but I prefer to call it Ecumenical Tradition.

Now an Ecumenical Council can be corrected, if there is strong evidence that the Ecumenical Council is wrong from other sources of authority. An Ecumenical Council should not, however, be contradicted too readily. To do so requires an ecumenical agreement of a multitude of qualified leaders and scholars.

Individual theologians have the right to offer evidence that a Ecumenical Council is wrong, and even offer a corrected version. But only the ecumenical consent of the church can make the change authoritative.

Social justice, according to Wikipedia, “is justice in relation to the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society where individuals’ rights are recognized and protected.”

Listen to the words of Jesus in Matthew 25:41-46:

“Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You who are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’) Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life.”

Social justice is a moral obligation for all Christians. This is justice, not only for those that are Christians, but for all people. This is part of loving our neighbor as ourselves. It’s about being God-like, for “God so loved the world” (John 3:16). Not just Christians!

A Christian is a person who accepts and seeks to follow the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. That means that Catholics, Orthodox, Protestant, Latter-day Saints, Christian Science, and Jehovah Witnesses are Christians.

Now members of these very broad groups do not believe the same things. Many would not consider members of the other groups to be “true” Christians. But each would consider themselves to be real Christians.

Are They Saved

A second question, is what does it mean to be saved. This is more complicated, because it requires us to interpret Scriptures and list criteria. I can only answer that from my own belief system.

Salvation

A person is saved if and only if they have turned from a self-centered life to a God-centered life through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ as Lord, Savior, and God. Let me unpack that.

Conversion, in my view, is turning from a self-centered life to a God-centered life. This is also the core idea of repentance, a change of mind. The change is from loving self first to loving God first.

Faith is trust. You must place your trust in the person of Jesus and accept what he did for you on the cross. He died for your sins so that God can forgive you and give you citizenship in his kingdom. And unless Jesus is somehow God in the flesh, none of this makes sense.

Now how all this is possible is part of the Christian Community’s struggle to understand the gospel and apply that to our lives. It is when we reach a collective consensus that a creed becomes authoritive or a canon gets closed. I am simplifying this a lot.

True Christians

Now back to our question. Now if we mean by true Christian one who is also saved, then members in each one of these groups will have Christians who are saved and Christians who are not saved. This is exactly what Jesys taught:

“Let both of them (saved and unsaved) grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn” (Matt. 13:30).

Osmosis, as I am using it here, means “the process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas, knowledge, etc.”(Oxford English Dictionary).

I’m using osmosis instead of assimilation, because I want to emphasize the unconscious nature of that assimilation. The ancient authors lived and breathe in a cultural background. They were not aware of its influence on them. It is only later in the modern and postmodern period that we have become more self-critical.

Unconscious Assimilation

By cultural osmosis I’m talking about the early Christians unconscious assimilation of ideas, values and perspectives of the culture in which they lived. The obvious example is patriarchy.

In the process of trying to understand the Bible, we need to separate cultural contamination from genuine revelation. This is not always clear.

The Law of Love

In ethical issues, I would argue the best way to discern what is a cultural contamination and what is a general revelation, is to go back to the principle behind the ethics of Christianity. Christianity. That is, love.

If we truly understand. Love, then we will truly understand what ethics derive from that. Love does no harm (Rom..13:10). Therefore, if an action harms somebody, it is most likely wrong. It is not just a cultural construct, but a universal application of the moral law of love.

Modern Cultural Osmosis

But equally true, we need to be careful of our own cultural osmosis. It is very easy to unconsciously accept the modern and postmodern ideas. We must carefully discern what is truth and what is cultural assimilation.

How we do discern what is the cultural assimilation? It is by following the evidence. First, we have to realize our tendency to be biased. Second, we need to understand confirmation bias. And third, we need to honestly evaluate the evidence for and against a position.

Personally, I find it most helpful to try to prove the opposite point of view. Instead of trying to confirm what I already believe, I try to confirm what I don’t believe. That way I’m more honest with the evidence.