Our Messy Bible

Last month, I attended a weekend forum sponsored by ACT 3, the ministry of my friend John Armstrong.  The forum was led by Peter Enns, who spoke on topic Reading the Old Testament as Jesus Did.

Enns is the author of a popular but controversial book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (2005, Baker Academic).  In this book he addresses the difficult question of what Christians mean when they claim that the Bible, a book whose words were written by men, is also the inspired word of God.  Enns presents an incarnational model that upholds divine inspiration while acknowledging the contextual and cultural influences of the human writers.

Throughout the forum, Enns suggested that we approach the Old Testament as the writers of the New Testament did.  How did Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul and Peter handle the OT?  Not very well, if they are judged by standards of modern evangelical scholarship.  Suppose one of these NT authors was enrolled in a modern seminary that holds to the inerrancy of Scripture. And suppose he applied verses from the OT to Jesus  in the manner found throughout the NT.  What kind of grade would he receive?  He would fail.

Yet that same seminary would consider the NT author to be inspired by God. 

At the very least, this should make us wonder whether our methods for approaching the Scripture are reasonable.

Here is a simple example.  Matthew 2:14-15 describes how Joseph took Mary and the baby Jesus and fled to Egypt to protect them from King Herod.

So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

Matthew is referring to Hosea 11:1:

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.

When we examine this passage from Hosea, we are faced with two undeniable facts.  First, that passage is not prophetic.  Hosea is writing about the past sins of his people, not making predictions about future events.  Second, that passage is about Israel, not about a coming Messiah.  To use that verse as Matthew did is to ignore Hosea’s original intent and to apparemtly take it out of context.  This is exactly what seminarians are taught not to do.  Poor Matthew flunks out.

But poor Matthew isn’t stupid.  He knows the OT very well, even better than we do, and, from the earliest days his writings were considered authoritative.   So how do we reconcile these facts?  To do so, we need to understand that the NT is not simply a continuation of the OT.  The NT is truly “New.” The NT presents a radical reinterpretation of Israel’s history in light of the death and resurrection of Christ, which were not on the OT writers’ radar screen. (Yes, the death of Jesus is foreshadowed in the OT, but the OT authors didn’t realize it.  And we search the OT in vain to find any clear description of the resurrection.)  The death and resurrection of the Messiah were God’s best-kept secrets, truly startling and revolutionary.

So what is Matthew really saying?  By applying Hosea 11:1 to Jesus, he appears to be saying that Jesus Christ is the new Israel.   Some passages in the OT (for example, Exodus 4:22) portray Israel as God’s firstborn son.  Matthew takes this privileged position of Israel and applies it now to Jesus.  The juxtaposition of Israel and Jesus is found in other places in the NT as well (Gal 3:16). So Matthew knows what he is doing.  He is not simply looking at Hosea 11:1 and asking, “What is the contextual meaning of this verse?”  He is scanning across the panorama of OT history and reinterpreting it in light of God’s new revelation of his kingdom.

In discussing how the NT writers approached the OT, Enns suggests that we look to the Talmud.  The Talmud is a rabbinical discussion of Jewish law and history that was written shortly after the NT.  Talmudic scholars also took verses out of immediate context.  They were, in a sense, trying to accomplish the same thing that the NT writers had done.  They were reinterpreting the history of Israel in light of the terrible recent events, including the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in 70 AD.  They were trying to understand whether the Jews were still God’s chosen people, whether God still had a plan for them, and what that plan might be.  But because they had rejected the resurrection of Christ, they ended up with a very different perspective.

For scholars who want to address the difficult questions that modern people are posing about the Bible, conservative doctrines of scriptural inerrancy are a virtual minefield.  Enns frequently ventures into this minefield.  He acknowledges that the Bible was not written as a modern history book.  The order of presentation is not necessarily chronological. Events are described multiple times from different points of view, and the details in various accounts do not always agree.  One of the best known examples is when Jesus drove moneychangers out of the temple.  Matthew, Mark and Luke place this event during Passion week, just after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  But John places it at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, just after the wedding at Cana (Jn 2:12-22).  Some have tried to resolve this dilemma by supposing that Jesus cleansed the temple twice, once at the beginning of his ministry and once at the end.  Enns does not support that view.  He believes that the literary forms used by the NT authors did not presume that every detail of every story would be a precise, factual record as might be obtained if the events had been captured by a video camera.  Small discrepancies were an acceptable part of oral history and did not cast doubt on the truthfulness of the story or the spiritual messages it was intended to convey.  For his willingness to voice these opinions, Dr. Enns has been sharply criticized by some former students and colleagues at Westminster Theological Seminary.  I am not familiar with the specific charges and issues of this controversy, so I will not say anything more about it.  I will say, however, that after listening to this man lecture for approximately six hours, I was impressed by his thoughtfulness and sincerity, his deep respect for the Scripture, and his refreshingly winsome approach to the Bible.

The forum was attended by approximately thirty Christian leaders from a wide variety of denominational backgrounds.  About one-third of the time was devoted to discussion among Dr. Enns and members of the audience.  Despite varied backgrounds, we were kindred spirits and learned a great deal from one another.  One lesson that emerged again and again was this:  Much of the Bible remains a mystery to us.  The Bible is a rather messy book, and we don’t need to be embarassed by its messiness. God could have given us a book of rules and doctrines with apparently perfect internal and external consistency.  But he didn’t.  He gave us a sprawling narrative written by real people over long periods of history.  History is filled with difficulties, and these show up everywhere on the pages of Scripture.  Yet we also believe the Bible to be God’s word, written exactly as he wanted it to be. 

Today’s young Christians – the next generation of spiritual leaders – are not afraid to ask the tough questions that some of their immediate predecessors have been dodging.  Too often, my generation haa responded to tough questions with pat answers, disapproving glances and exhortations to “just believe.”  Yes, God wants us to believe.  And he also wants us to be brutally honest.  He gave us a Bible that is brutally honest.  He respected us enough to give us a messy book, trusting that we have the maturity to handle it as creatures of reason and good sense.  For that, we should be thankful.