I was reminded of a book my company published recently, From Inspiration to Understanding: Reading the Bible Seriously and Faithfully. I haven’t had time to write the “reflections” post I usually write regarding each book I publish, but some of those reflections would surely reflect the attitudes that Bird expresses.

Today in my Google Reader I find the headline Gospel of Mark found dating from 1st century. The first line of the post attributes this to Christianity Today: “Christianity Today has just published news that the earliest copy of the Gospel of Mark has been found.” The link, however, goes to Christian Today (India), (not Christianity Today) where the headline is the not quite yet accurate “Earliest manuscript of Gospel of Mark reportedly found.”

Note that the TEXT of both the post and of the Christian Today article is largely accurate. It’s the headlines I’m complaining about.

Now I’m not trying to beat up on the blogger who posted this, but I do want to correct some false impressions. First, this is not “the gospel of Mark.” It is a fragment, a tiny piece. Finding an early fragment is extremely exciting, but it is not the same as finding a whole manuscript. I think this is important because very often when speakers tell Christian audiences that there are thousands of Greek manuscripts, people assume that these are all complete copies of the various Bible books, or even complete copies of the New Testament. In fact, they vary from fragments containing portions of a couple of verses up to complete copies of the New Testament. Not surprisingly, the complete copies tend to be later.

Second, this fragment of Mark has not yet been published. The claim is simply that one paleographer has dated it to the 1st century. We need to wait for publication and study by other scholars before we jump on the dating of this manuscript.

It’s important to keep all this in mind, because misinformation lives forever once it makes it onto the Christian circuit. There will be claims years from now that there is a copy of Mark that comes from the first century even if further study shows that the fragment is not from the 1st century.

Since I write this blog primarily for non-scholarly readers, I want to make these things clear. Please don’t believe every sensational headline about the Bible. Let these things be tested.

I would think a more relevant question would be “Is that any way to treat a student?”

But that aside, I would certainly attract the wrath (and sarcasm) of this teacher. My Greek New Testament is heavily marked, and it’s the replacement for one that I used until it fell apart. I collect Bible editions and many of them have such markings, though none so many as the Greek and Hebrew Bibles I carry with me.

More importantly, I think this displays an inappropriate emphasis on the form. The book is holy as an object, not because of its contents. The marking shows a deep interest in the contents, but the teacher misses that point, and sees only the “desecration” of the object.

Idolatry? Probably too strong a word, but it unfortunately points in that direction.

I’m not a cessationist, though I think it is important for people on the charismatic side of the spectrum to be careful in what they claim. The more false claims there are, the more likely people are to reject any and all claims. For me the most important reason to oppose cessationism is that I see no biblical warrant for suggesting that the Holy Spirit would cease to put these gifts in the church as long as there is a church.

In fact, I suspect the main reason we have for denying that the gifts can continue is that we are embarrassed, either because there are no gifts (and we feel there should be), or because there are gifts and related behavior that is embarrassing, such as false claims and sensationalism.

In the fifth comment on the Jesus Creed post, the commenter goes back to 1 Corinthians 13, and the “cease” language in that chapter. I’m not going to go into detail here, but I previously posted my notes on 1 Corinthians 12-14 (follow the links to the next post at the top right, and you can work your way through the whole series). I believe 1 Corinthians 12-14 must be seen as a unit within the larger context of 1 Corinthians, and in that context, I don’t think the expectation that the gifts would cease relates to any time while there’s still a church.

In fact, Paul is dealing here with some of the embarrassments I listed above. The Holy Spirit is active in the Corinthian church, but people are active as well, and people like exciting things. How do spiritual gifts fit in with being spiritual people? How do we relate as a body to spiritual things? Those are the questions Paul is answering.

But is cessationism another gospel? “Another gospel” is one of those epithets we use to attack those with whom we disagree strongly, ever since Paul used it in Galatians. It’s a way of setting a particular teaching outside the bounds of fellowship.

I disagree with cessationists, but I’ve met plenty of cessationists who believe in God’s present and active power, but who simply don’t believe that God works through giving gifts to individuals. For example, for them there is no active gift that would make a person a healer or miracle worker, but the church can get together and pray for someone and a miraculous healing is possible. I would note that I agree that gifts aren’t given to individuals as such, but rather to the church, but Paul clearly envisions individuals within the church exercising those gifts. So while the gift belongs to the body, the individual is the steward.

Thus I disagree with cessationists, but I don’t see where they would merit the title of teaching “another gospel.” In fact, suggesting that if one’s beliefs do not reflect the whole Gospel as taught in the four gospels one is teaching another gospel, means that we would be deciding fellowship based on our understanding of everything in the four gospels, which would surely mean that just about every doctrine would become an essential determiner of fellowship.

Any time we’re off track on one of these doctrines there is obvious danger. But I’m pretty sure all of us are in error on something, possibly many things, and somehow the church struggles on. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to correct bad doctrine. It just suggests we should do so as graciously as possible and avoid anathematizing phrases.

The class is related to this blog as we’re starting with the book Learning and Living Scripture, which I co-authored with Geoffrey Lentz. Once we’ve worked our way through that book, sort of to get everyone on the same page, we’ll choose one of the Participatory Study Series study guides to do next. Right now I think Philippians: A Participatory Study Guide by Dr. Bruce Epperly has the inside track, but no decision has been made.

One of the key elements of the participatory study method is sharing. By sharing we don’t mean telling other people what you have learned, though that can be a part of it. Sharing includes hearing from others, and getting a sort of “check” on the conclusions you’ve drawn. It might include talking to others in your church or to friends and neighbors, but it also involves taking your ideas to commentaries and hearing the words of experts.

It can involve many ways of responding to the text, including art, stories, poetry, paraphrases, translations, exegetical discussions, and so forth.

For example, one exercise from Learning and Living involves Psalm 19. One class member, Jan Edmunds, painted a picture, which you can see to the left (click on the image for full size). David Blanton wrote poetry. I provided a short story. Another class member brought a photograph, which I don’t have, unfortunately.

There may be some who wonder whether we spend time actually studying the text, or whether we just respond to it. While sharing (and the associated accountability) is very important, we do indeed spend time studying the text. You can find out more about the method on the Participatory Bible Study web site (as opposed to blog).

I plan to post regularly about what is going on in the class. It won’t just be material from our responses. I may summarize our discussions of some details of the text, for example. I have the permission of the members to share. So I’m creating a new category here called simply The Way, and it will be for posts about the class. I welcome responses to what we post here.

Today we will be working on the exercises from chapter 9 of Learning and Living. (Note that all members of the class had some exposure to the method so we skipped past some earlier exercises.) We will be discussing the ways in which our expectations of a certain type of literature help shape the way we will understand it.

Why was it right for God to slaughter women and children in the Old Testament? How can that ever be right?

And the first sentence of his answer is the title of this post.

I can hardly tell you how many ways this bothers me. I say that just in order to get on the nerves of the folks who like to quote Paul “Who are you, o man, to answer back to God?” (Romans 9:20). I’m just this human who, like many people in the Bible, including prophets, isn’t satisfied with leaving all the questions unanswered, even when I know I’ll hardly get started on finding the answers. It’s interesting how certain Christians quote Paul in Romans 9, while others are more likely to quote Habakkuk or one of the Psalms where people question God quite a lot.

Unless you add that God will never “please” to do something wrong, Piper’s statement makes nonsense of any idea of right and wrong. It is not meaningful to say that God is good or God is loving, both statements found in the Bible, and then to suggest that no matter how unloving or ungood an action of God may appear, it’s really OK because God willed it, or “pleased” to do it. But if mass slaughter isn’t wrong, what is wrong?

Thus the first half of Piper’s answer is, in effect, a non-answer. It states simply that whatever God does–and I’m fairly certain that for him, whatever is alleged in scripture that God does is something God actually does–that is acceptable. And for many people this seems to be adequate.

In one way I don’t mind that. I too believe God does what is right (ignoring, for now, the question of whether it’s right because God does it or God does it because it’s right), and if he doesn’t do what’s right, there’s nothing I can do about it in any case.

But in this case we’re bringing different arguments in scripture together.  The Bible says both that God has commanded the death of many, many people, or has killed them himself, and also that God is good and that God is love. Put up against what I might think about God, perhaps Piper’s answer has a point. Put alongside the Bible’s indications of how God cares about humanity, I think it fails completely.

It’s beyond a simple blog post such as this to give my own response, but I will point to a book I publish, by my former teacher Dr. Alden Thompson, Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?. Alden takes quite a conservative approach to scripture and yet takes both of these items, the stories of God’s destructive acts, and the assertions of God’s love, care, and goodness. Piper, on the other hand, empties any assertion of God’s love and goodness of any meaning.

Piper regards the question of God’s commands to kill as more difficult than that of God killing directly, but I think with this he makes an even more dangerous error:

With Joshua there was a political, ethnic dimension, God was immediate king, and he uses this people as his instrument to accomplish his judgment in the world at that time. And God, it says, let the sins of the Amorites accumulate for 400 years so that they would be full (Genesis 15:16), and then sends his own people in as instruments of judgment.

From this I would conclude that being ruled closely by God would make atrocities committed right, and very likely more common. This is consistent with the first part of Piper’s answer. I must concede to Calvinists this: They are philosophically consistent. I just don’t believe that consistency is a very good indicator that a philosophy reflects actuality.

On the contrary, I believe that we must either find some better reason why these stories occur in the Old Testament, or we must seriously back off of any pretension that “God is good” or “God is love” has any meaning at all.

We regularly argue that it must be that all the Canaanites deserved to die. A Calvinist will certainly note that we all deserve to die. Yet what is the basis for this? Were they more wicked than others? Pointed out the 400 years, as Piper does, suggests that. But I don’t think the evidence would support such a claim. What effort was made to bring them to God? What reason might there be to suggest that Israel could not have brought the Canaanites to repentance through proclamation?

This latter is not, in fact, what I would suggest as a solution. But I do think it points out the difficult with Piper’s solution.

As I have time, I do intend to address this topic some more. Even the smallest portion of an answer requires many threads brought together.

… In how many other “Bible” churches out there has “Biblical” become a code-word for an ideological platform that serves a purpose completely foreign to God’s mission but cherry-picks verses out of the Biblical text to justify itself?

Good question! (Of course, his question follows an example.)

Nonetheless I want to sound another warning: Let’s watch out about the abuse of the word “unbiblical” as well.

Declaring something unbiblical also requires a view on what the Bible does and does not require, but instead of declaring a particular view in bounds, it declares it out of bounds. It can be abused in the same way. The word “biblical” is a positive adjective which tends to lead people to accept a statement, even if it has no biblical warrant. “Unbiblical” is a negative adjective (in most churches) which tends to make people reject an idea, even without biblical warrant.

So am I saying one can never use the adjective “biblical?” No. What I am suggesting is that many of us use it, and its opposite, too much. We use it as a sort of shorthand for “you ought to believe this” (or not), rather than as a statement backed by the appropriate study and research.

Instead, I suggest that we skip the adjective and do the work. If you provide a sound backing from the Bible, appropriately interpreted, for what you say, others can apply the adjective “biblical” to it. If not, well, not so much!