Let’s lay aside the old question that leads us to the two bucket approach. And instead of asking what is cultural and irrelevant and what is eternal and applicable how about if we acknowledge the entire text is cultural and that none of it is written to an audience in 2010 and in spite of what we are often told, inspiration doesn’t not make it universally applicable. The last number of posts has demonstrated that problem. So what about this as a new possibility…
How does an inspired text exert or exercise a shaping influence on the life of the reader(s)? The key word is “how?” In the past it was through extracting what we thought were timeless truths from a time bound text, sort of trying to figure out the eternal kernel in the culture bound husk. But what if we admit the obvious, it is all cultural and it can’t be otherwise.
When we acknowledge it is all cultural that is not he same thing as saying it is all irrelevant. That would be to attach this new question to the previous two bucket question where what is cultural is considered irrelevant. What we are doing here is saying the two bucket question was a manufactured polarity or duality. The whole biblical text was written by people in very particular cultures, to people within very particular cultures making EVERTHING that was said very particular. So how does a text with cultural particularity or specificity exercise influence and shaping authority…a generation later, a culture away, a millennium or two later?
Now there might be other questions that could be asked and I am all ears to hear some of the ideas out there. So please fire away. But let’s at least start with this new question.
This new question opens us up to some challenging but very fruitful possibilities. Here is how. The old two bucket question broke down because we realized as cultures evolve values change. Now I know to a Christian that sounds like heresy…but that is simply our poor training we have unreflectively engaged. We all would agree the cultural value placed on the institution of slavery has changed or the value place on woman being silent or the institution of child sacrifice (God literally asking Abraham to kill his first born son in the inspired text). These have all changed through time. That observation, and the reason the bucket theory breaks down, is part of our way forward…I think.
What happens when we start to call out that each culture being written to and each author writing is at a particular stage of development or stage of cultural progress and we HAVE to take THAT into consideration as we think about the bible? Inspiration does not mute the cultural-ness of the text?
Can you see any implications of this?
And by the way we have several churches that have signed up small groups for the Trek Tribe if you haven’t read the manifesto do so ttTribe-Manifesto. Join us here and get in on the journey.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Ron, do you think the idea of what is sometimes called “progressive revelation” plays into what you’re trying to get at? If so, is it ongoing today? Can we read the old, cultural texts but find new, progressive revelations in them?
One thing I gathered from a book by Luke Timothy Johnson that was very important to me was the way he pulled a model of discernment from Acts 15. The way the church looked at their understanding of the movement of the Spirit among them (and in particular among the Gentiles) enabled them to read and understand scripture afresh.
I can go with you Ron that ALL of the text is culturally contentualized and that does collapse the two bucket question. The new questions that are raised when we make this realization are far more challenging to engage in a “Christian” context as you hinted at but that seems to be the problem with the Christian culture there is very little desire to dig deeper and treat the text honestly.(I know I am over generalizing but my own church experiences as a pastor have revealed this to be true) Maybe it is a fear of offending or disobeying God or maybe it is because in a Gutenberg world “text” is god.
To your question about how a culturally bound text can exercise authoritynover our lives, I would say plainly that it can’t. Unless of course we were dealing with not just a text but a “living word”. If the text is ALIVE then we must engage it as we engage all living things. One of the fundamental marks of a living thing is that it grows, moves and even changes. Can you think of any living things that do not move or change, even in the smallest and most subtle ways? I can’t…
If the scripture is a “living word” then it must be allowed to grow, move and change over time like all other living things…. Right? A living text is an instrument through which God speaks while we have largely treated the text as a text book where God SPOKE once and for all and for all time. That engagement of the text locks it into a dead space where the only value is to find the “original intent” but a living word might have slightly different intentions at different points along the line of cultural development and personal development. The “living” quality of the text unlocks a vibrant and fresh encounter that, through the mystery of God’s participation in the reading and applying of the text, can take into a account a whole range of new cultural specifics that are resident in our time that were not even on the horizon in the mind’s of the writers and the cultures they were rooted and enmeshed in.
Is it really the text that has any authority? Or the Spirit of God that moves through these sacred and ancient stories and enlivens them anew each morning to bring meaning and depth to our experience of living?
Why are we so afraid of the mysterious and sometimes strange ways that God speaks through the scriptures to people in communities? Why would we rather collapse a living word into a series of intellectual points that we must extract, whether theological, moral/ethical, doctrinal, cultural or otherwise? I would further a guess that it has a LOT to do with control issues deeply embedded within the organizational structures of our churches and denominations.
Do we have enough faith to let the scriptures speak differently to different people who have different histories and experiences that shape what they hear? Can we let the text be a pointer towards truth in a pluralistic world or must it remain a set of propositions that deny access to truth to anyone who doesn’t see the text through our particular biased theological lenses?
I was typing too many words at the same time that Jeremy above made a quite similar point with only a few sentences….
Ron, I also accept that all text and revelation are limited by the particular culture and “life story” of the writer. We believe in a God who has revealed Himself to us, and not one that has somehow been conceived – which would definitely commit him to the cultural basket! Our God, the Creator and Originator of everything, far exceeds our ability to even begin to comprehend the essence of his Being. Knowing our limitations, He introduces Himself only as “I am”! He has revealed only partial glimpses of Himself through interaction with inspired individuals, who have passed it on to us through the written Word.
Surely it is only common sense to accept that the recipients of these revelations and visions were similarly handicapped in their capacity to fully comprehend what was being revealed to them. There were also limitations to their vocabulary to fully describe these revelations. I also agree that many of these revelations were targeted towards a specific group of people at a particular time in history for their specific situation, and are not therefore necessarily applicable, verbatim and universally, for all time.
Our task is to glean the Eternal Truths and Concepts that have been revealed (and, in fact, are still being revealed) and contemplate their implications, and how to apply them to our world today.
Carel couldn’t say it better. Thanks for your post. Some how it seems like common sense to me too but for some reason the conservative evangelical, which makes up a big portion of popularized preaching unfortunately, is concerned about saying their cultural location was a lens (you used the word handicap) in their capacity to fully see. That seems to be so obvious as to not need stating and yet this is where the debate rages. Thanks for your words and observations. And thanks for your part in the tribe. This is going to be a fun ride.
Just a small push back – Carol said our task was to glean the Eternal Truths and concepts that were revealed but isn’t that the “two bucket” theory at work?
I would say that our task is to learn to discern the same Spirit of God that Jesus was connected to and Paul taught “lives within us” and then follow that spirit out into our world and allow it to speak to our lives, our culture and our positions on any given issue. This seems very different to me, but maybe I am missing something, than looking only at the Bible as the source of what to apply to our lives or how to engage with the world we find ourselves in. Jesus, in John 3, seemed to be talking to Nicodemus about a different kind of life led by the spirit like the wind blowing through our lives. This seems a very different task than trying to discern Eternal Truths….
I don’t think the church knows how to train people to “discern the Spirit within” which is a much deeper level of discernment than “gleaning from the text”. Carol please don’t take my words the wrong way, I am only pushing back because I am confused by Ron’s affirmation of “gleaning Eternal Truths” which is exactly what I understand to be the problem with the Two Bucket theory, what are we going to use to separate the Eternal from the cultural?
I feel we must move into a new age of the spirit , an age that looks within as much as it looks at the scriptures. (which I am committed to as a living pointer to the One True God) If, as Paul taught, God lives within me, then I can find Eternal truth within myself, if I am taught the path. Our churches are not teaching this inward path even through Jesus gave us some very inward self-reflective direction when He said “The Kingdom of God is Within You” and he also have use some practical, although challenging and ego shattering, tools to live out this new way of the Spirit, like Do Not Judge. That is a pointer towards our inward dialogue and the mechanisms of our inner life.
Have I misunderstood the Two Bucket theory or Carol and Ron’s posts, or am I just confused?
totally fair push Christian and while I can’t guess what Carel meant by that exactly, here is the source of my affirmation and what I am reading in his post give the fact that the beginning of Carel’s comments seems to indicate he totally “gets” and resonates with what I/we are trying to deconstruct. The eternal truths I think we want to affirm, though I don’t think this is actually the goal of our textual reading, hence all these posts and The Bible as Improv, is that at some point in time we are going to make some ethical calls. I think those ethical calls will be in keeping with what we think are the “eternal truths” we think Jesus espoused – but more importantly per your – post embodied; hence the need to “discern the Spirit within.” I think when Jesus says everything is summed up in these two things…. love God, love your neighbor as self, we are hovering over “eternal truths.” I affirm that pursuit. Now how that plays specifically, a la your last comments on the most recent response to my post today, like with the homosexual question etc…is I think a discernment issue..NOT one bit an apply a static bible verse to an issue situation. I am sure if we aren’t careful, (and I am thinking this is your point and rightfully made) what we end up with is just another canon within a canon if we use the language of “eternal truths.” The two eternal truths of love God and love your neighbor are now the two new principles (canon) against which everything is evaluated. For me there is a yes and no in that. Are those truths that “apply” today? Yes. Is it because I have used some methodology that has just managed to keep them in the eternal and therefore relevant bucket? No. But this gets to the heart of this whole enterprise which I think you do understand thoroughly, and I might say as well as anyone I know who has read Improv, the whole notion of reading the text for propositions is somehow wrongheaded and bound to end us at an impasse. I see no way around it, especially not in any more sophisticated hermeneutical theory that continues to propagate two buckets. So thanks for the push. This is the value of pushing for clarification there is so much in my head when I make a quick response that there is no way possible to unload all that is necessary to be clear, and I CONSTANTLY forget that. Thanks
Thanks for the response and I totally agree that Carol’s total post shows he ‘gets it’ but I am still wrestling with what “it” really is. You say that that sometimes we have to make ethical calls but do we do it by using the scriptures or do we do it by obeying the Spirit’s voice within? I know this is a tricky question and can be explored at greater length on the tribe forums. I also understand that quick responses always levee room for misunderstandings. I believe it is NT Wrifh who says we live in a world where, s leaders, we are constantly attacked for what we didn’t affirm when we speak or write. But because ther is so much that needs to be said we aways suffer from the sin of omission in our speaking and writing. We simply can’t say it all…
Thanks again clarifying.
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