How To Read The Bible - A New Hermeneutic
What Works For Me
When Reading the Bible
by R.E. Slater
August 16, 2020
revised & edited August 24, 2020
The Many Worlds of Hermeneutics
I originally wrote this piece as a single composition as I did not wish to have any of it read alone in its parts as each part is necessary for the other part. However, it is a long piece and so, with reservations, I have divided it up for the convenience of the reader. But for those who wish to read it as a whole I have left the original intact and titled parts 1-6. Thank you. - res
PART 4 - The Difficulties of Leaving Holy Traditions
When faced with a complex subject such as how to read the bible, the principle of Occam's Razor comes to mind.... Occam's Razor states that "the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one." In this case, the bible says God is Love. His Incarnation says God is Love. His life, ministry, crucifixion, death, and resurrection says God is Love. And His promise to save His creation says God is Love. More simply, God Loves all the time.
Why then have our teachings and doctrines of the bible been so off target? We think of God as judge, jury, death, angry, too holy, too separate, too transcendent, too far away, unconcerned, uncaring, disinterested. We watch God's earthly church place itself in all kinds of nationalist or racist political entanglements, vindictiveness, hardened, hateful, disapproving acts and actions (e.g., separating and caging border children, homosexuality, Muslims). But where is the God of Love in all of this? Between you and me, I don't think God was ever a part of this. This is the sin which grips our hearts - which rejects God's love as true truth - so incredible His majesty to comprehend.
If love is not there, neither is God
Let me summarize. God has said in the bible "He Loves us". God has shown His Love to us in multiple ways and on multiple occasions. God has backed up His words of Love by His actions of Love on the Cross for us.
1 - God says He loves creation and God came to show us He loves creation - not only to man but to all creation. Since we typically define creation in terms of ourselves we naturally think we are the exclusive receptors of God's loving intimacy, presence, and work. But even as God has been reconciling mankind to Himself He also has been reconciling creation to Himself.
Because of God's love, I, and others, have been writing of God's amazing LOVE and what this means to us across the bible's many spectrums, permutations, perturbations, and probabilities as we can.
2 - Along the way I have discovered amazing theologies to help me speak more clearly of God's love including the language of science. A language I insist must be used to its fullest - even when it disagrees with the bible. A bible pieced together and collected from many oral traditions which were written down over a series of historical events (from Genesis to the exile) to which the ancient mindset spoke of God as they could through their own thoughts and imaginations.
In this amazing collection we know as the bible, the Spirit of the Lord guided ancient men and women in their revelatory insights of God's revelation, who subsequently passed along God's self revelation through their lives, experiences, minds, languages, and culture. This then gives to the Jew and Christian the credibility to their faith based upon the very ancient testimony of Scripture.
Yet even when science claims creation to have been created without formal design, in random chaos, and without any specific ending but all endings, I choose to keep the cold hard facts of science over what the bible says. Why? Because the language of science is describing God's creation exactly as it is in its structure, makeup, and nature from historical past to historical future.
Science was something the ancients did not know. They described God and His creative works in Genesis and throughout their lives in personal or tribal terms as they understood God to be - through their own language and culture. Their legends spoke of an Adam and an Eve, a sacred Garden, an evil snake, and difficult choices reflecting divinity.
The postmodern Christian will use these same concepts but speak of them differently, using scientific terminology when possible - as I have done through the years - and come out with the same biblical teachings: "God is Love and Loves His creation." The difference is in the story but not the God who declares Himself our Father, Creator, Saviour, Redeemer.
3 - A chronological reading of my progressive wanderings through the epistemic wildernesses lying ahead of me years ago will show my path was never straight. And yet, under the guidance of the Lord, my Father-God gave certain knowledge to my spirit that everything He was doing past, present, or future, was being done by His love which guided me true as my Cornerstone and centering foundation.
4 - Examples of things I have discovered about God's Love along the way?
- Violence in the bible? Nope, not of God. But by the hand of religious men claiming God as one thing Who was never that.
- The killing of women and children, boys and men because God said so? Nope, not true. And when done by man's evil hand than his judgment be upon his own misguided head teaching holy war and not holy love.
- God's judgment upon the kingdoms of this world? Only insofar as He warned wicked men - religious or not - to love one another and not hate. But by man's own actions judgment comes by unloving words and deeds.
- Is Death or Hell from a Loving God? Death... Yes, it comes to all creation as a natural process. But Hell? From a God of LOVE? Not there. Blame Dante. Blame the early Hellenized Church. Blame fanciful Intertestamental eschatologies and early Gnostic writings. If anything, Hell is found in man's own present where his/her sin judges his/her life choices on this earth now. But Hell after death? No, I refer to a final spiritual death as a singular event, or even a series of death events, as an Annihilation of all existing relationships to creation, others, self, and finally to God. Annihilation is not Hell, nor is it Purgatory. These latter concepts are metaphorical descriptors, or theologoumen, describing our present experiences on earth rather than in death when they are meaningless.
- A theologoumenon is a theological statement or concept that lacks absolute doctrinal authority. It is commonly defined as "a theological assertion or statement not derived from divine revelation," or "a theological statement or concept in the area of individual opinion rather than of authoritative doctrine".
Conclusion
For myself, the former borderlands of my faith are but tomorrow's hinterlands of a yesterday gliding further and further into the rearview mirror of my bible-driving Spirit guide. I've left the wildernesses of unhelpful biblical infallibilities and inerrancies, spoken by misleading doctrines and unquestioning preachers of my faith, to tour the greening countrysides of an open and relational process faith whose very terms are the weighty words I took pains to describe post after post after post. Such terms moved me to rewrite the structures of a postmodern constructivist theology through the Spirit's eyes, and the weightier foundations, of God's love. If God's Love is not there in Christian doctrine then neither is God Himself.
So too with God's Person, Deity, His experience of Creation, His past, present and future, along with all we, His creation, experience in ourselves, with each other, and with God's cosmos. Whoever, or whatever, God is - and He is Many Things - God is above all else, LOVE. All things, all words, all actions of God must be defined exclusively by His Love. It is what God is.
So when centering Christian doctrine on a God of Love instead of Reformed doctrine what might this mean in Christian terms? Or, rather than placing the bible in the center of the Christian faith - from which so many inconsistent or contrary things are taught from it - I find it more preferable to place the Author of the bible, Jesus, in the center of our Christian theology. Can you fault me for doing this? I, and others like me, find a greater hope and truer truth in recentering all theology around Jesus, the God of Love, than is found in the opinions and perspectives of other Christian doctrines admitting God's love while centralizing and practicing everything but God's love.
A New Theology Brings With It New Terms and Consequences
So what changes when we do this? A lot. And dramatically. But I don't think for the worse. If anything it may be for the better as it places spiritual responsibility into our hands to speak and do the right thing. We can no longer blame God, the devil, or others for our lack. All accountability comes forthwith into our own lives. How we use our lives and how we treat others.
Nor may we wait upon some prophetic future, such as "Jesus' Coming," when its plain that if we do not act now no future kingdom of God will ever arise as it cannot become without His church becoming. So says Process Theology. Live with it. My response to those who repeatedly say, "Lord Come," has always been the rejoiner, "Lord, Become" referring back to the Exodus phrase where YHWH says, "I AM WHO I AM BECOMING." God becomes with His creation as His creation becomes in Him. Its a both-and relationship. Not one way. But both ways. Its call partnering (sic, some may remember the classical doctrinal teaching of the Divine-Human Cooperative).
Here's a few other non-Reformed (or, non-Calvinistic) examples:
- Is God a God of Justice? Yes, BUT Love came first. God Loves, and because He Loves, justice for others is founded in the hoary foundations of God's Love. Holiness, Righteousness, Justice do not come before God's Self. A Self, Essence, or Divine Ontology defined in terms of Love. These attributes are the result of God being a God of Love. To order God's attributes in some kind of priority over Love would be to miss this important ontological fact of God's Self. The doctrines I left were the doctrines which prioritized holiness and judgment over love (sic, loving justice). It's an important distinction many have missed.
- What can we say about the unknown future? Yes, you heard me right. The future is not determined by God. God is Sovereign but not in the ways Christianity has taught. His divine sovereignty rests in terms of His divine love which guides a freewill creation created with agency in its soul. Divine Love gave to creation its agency. It wasn't decreed by God but transferred from God, or many will say, from God's Image, into creation's very bones.
- What can we say about the Christian expectation of a Divine Eschatology full of wrath and judgment? Is this something we should expect from God? Since a wrathful future is neither generative nor valuative it is not of God. I can no longer teach an eschatology filled with Tribulation, an Armageddon, or a Final End Time where Hell and Death are Thrown Into the Pit of Fire. These unloving futures are NOT of God. These events have been presently - as they had been historically, and will be later humanity's future - repeatable human events insofar as man refuses to love one another. Doctrinally vouchsafed "biblical periods of judgment" are not from God's loving hand but from our own.
- But what about the book of Revelation? Anybody can write a fanciful future, the Apostle John did based upon popular gnostic eschatology. And I'm sure he fully believed it even as late Greek Hellenism would have regarded the future as determined by the gods who operated at the hands of fate and fortune. As a postmodern, Process-based Christian, I cannot consider such ancient language as in anyway helpful when by science, process theology, open and relational theism, God is seen repeatedly as a loving God experiencing the present with us moment by moment. This makes the future unknown, undetermined, and pregnant with future possibilities.
- Teachings of Heaven or Hell? We make them here on this earth. Be mindful then to love one another. And as you try to love with God's love know that God is there to help through hardship, oppression, hatred, even death. The world can be a very wicked place even as it can be a very beautiful place made in God's image. However, nor do I advocate for a universal salvation but a responsible agency taking seriously to live out God's love.
This Isn't Your Father's Christianity Anymore... But It Is His Faith
And so, when I read the bible, of its stories and teachings, I must read of God's love or of the absence of God's love in its pages.
When I read church creeds and doctrines which may express God as an unloving God doing unloving things, I know this is not the God I know, or the bible describes, but a God contrived by the human heart to explain its sinful actions and thoughts about others and the world.
Whether racism, xenophobia, hatred for other religions, or trying to explain Christianized forms of exclusion, these are not from God Himself nor His Word. God loves all men. All races. All genders. All sexes. All religions and cultures. Let us learn to speak to all men, especially the ones different from ourselves, in God's language of love.
This then is how I relearned to read the bible. I threw out all my evangelical and churchly rules and started over in the language of divine love. To that I use all the discoveries found from literary, historical, psychological, sociological, ecological, and scientific sources. They helped me to understand the past, present and future of God's world. I would be foolish not to be conversant in these extra-biblical disciplines while ever mindful of exegeting the bible within its anthropological contexts.
So too in my ever-inquisitive conversations with others in this life. I cannot understand God or His Word if I cannot converse with people. Nor can I speak of God to others without knowing God's people. People come from all kinds of backgrounds, experiences, beliefs, learnings, insights, and personalities. I would be remiss not to study humanity and try to understand its many comportments. Society informs my reading of the bible as do the sciences, the Scriptures, literatures, essays, and journalisms. The people I meet teach me something everyday about life - from the good to the bad. They are all welcomed to walk with me even as I am privileged to walk with them for as long as the relationship might last. In the same way the bible walks and talks with us as we do with the bible. Its a relational thing because God is a relational God
Learn to listen, to love, to forgive, to try again. Peace my brothers and sisters. May God's Love dwell richly in your words, deeds, and spirit, in whom the Lord God has written His Spirit of Life upon your heart.
R.E. Slater
or
No comments:
Post a Comment