A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [45]
Now here’s where things get interesting: if God says Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu spoke nonsense, yet they were quoting or paraphrasing statements in Deuteronomy, which in turn claims to be quoting God, does that mean Deuteronomy is nonsense too? Which God is to be believed? Is it the God speaking in Deuteronomy, who says, “Do good and good will always happen to you; do evil and evil will always happen to you?” Or is it the God that says the simple moral formulas of Deuteronomy are nonsense when echoed by Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu? I can only conclude that neither Deuteronomy nor Job speaks nonsense, but rather that we speak nonsense when we practice verse snatching from Deuteronomy, the middle of Job, or anywhere else. Why? Because revelation doesn’t simply happen in statements. It happens in conversations and arguments that take place within and among communities of people who share the same essential questions across generations. Revelation accumulates in the relationships, interactions, and interplay between statements.
In this light, the biblical text doesn’t give us cement blocks and mortar with which to construct a building of certainty from the ground up. It gives us a bunch of hammers and chisels in the form of stories and questions. With these tools we chip away at human constructions, and revelation is like the breeze or shaft of light that streams through the cracks. The Word, or Self-Revealing of God, in this light, isn’t a bunch of lessons, morals, doctrines, or beliefs that God dictates or otherwise encodes. It is an event, a turning point, a breaking open, a discovery, a transforming and humbling and ennobling encounter that occurs to readers when they engage with the text in faith—the text with all its tensions and unresolved issues intact.
To say that the Word (the message, meaning, or revelation) of God is in the biblical text, then, does not mean that you can extract verses or statements from the text at will and call them “God’s words.” It means that if we enter the text together and feel the flow of its arguments, get stuck in its points of tension, and struggle with its unfolding plot in all its twists and turns, God’s revelation can happen to us. We can reach the point that Job and company did at the end of the book, where, after a lot of conflicted human talk and a conspicuously long divine silence, we finally hear God’s voice.
Or not. Because if anything is clear in the aftermath of the Reformation, it has to be this: we human beings can interpret the Bible to say and mean an awful lot of different things. We can very easily confuse “The Bible says” with “I say the Bible says,” which we can then equate with “God says.” (A friend of mine says that the average religious leader begins by humbly speaking with God; then he speaks humbly of God; then he speaks proudly for God; and finally he speaks arrogantly as if he were God.) Ever since the leaders of the Reformation claimed sola scriptura—“Scripture alone is enough!”—we’ve had an avalanche of evidence that reasonably bright, sincere, and well-meaning people can find just about anything in the Bible, not to mention what the less bright, sincere, or well-meaning can find.
So we have to turn back to sola scriptura and ask, “Enough for what purpose?” Enough to provide quotes to create constitutions that legitimize the authority of those who extract the quotes and create the constitutions? Yes, enough to create hundreds of constitutions and legitimize thousands of authority figures! Enough to justify splits in denominations and sometimes bitter competition among systematic theologies? Yes, enough to justify thousands of splits and to inspire centuries of bitter competition! Enough to keep preachers and theologians and writers in business for centuries? Yes, and I’m one of them! And so are my loyal critics! But clearly, these outcomes aren’t