Bully’s Blog

or A Thimbleful of Watery Bible Broth

The Modernist Bible is very thin. The Old Testament is a mix of myth and history, and Revelation is just a general picture book of the gospel’s work in the world (or a polemic against first century Rome). It boils down basically to some key statements by Jesus and the letters of Paul. And even here, there are problems. Evangelicals love Paul because he communicates like a Greek, but even evangelicals choke on some things he says.

Part of the reason is that evangelicals have no imagination. Even the ones holed up in glorious gothic cathedrals actually think more like a modern mega-mall-type church when it comes to the Bible. Their theology has the minimalist, pragmatic architecture of Communism. It is soulless. Duane Garner says:

“So, trying to do theology and to read the Bible, and to live without engaging the imagination — it leaves us without an image of the future, it leaves us with very little in the Bible that we can actually benefit from.  Take out the stories, take out the poetry, and what are you left with? It’s difficult for me to relate to the sort of mindset that’s only content with the barest and weakest and most anemic expressions of faith : “If we could just boil this down to the essentials, then we’ve got it.” Wouldn’t we much rather become a people who are enraptured with the stories and the songs that the Bible gives us, even if we don’t understand them all, even if there’s some mystery there, and then bust out with a creativity of spirit that says, “How can we celebrate this; how can we sing that; how can we recognize this; how can we mark that?”

It’s the very nature of our five senses to pull us into whatever is there: scent, rhythm, texture, vision. This is the way God’s word pulls us in. It draws us in with its beauty to participate in it. And so the mature Christian imagination is concerned with story, and poetry, and creativity. We hear the stories, we know the stories, we see their beauty, and we see our own part in the story, and the continuation of the story. The Christian imagination understands life as meaningful history, the structure of which is revealed in Jesus.”[1]

The modern mind is incapable of receiving the Bible as it was intended. We don’t know what to do with it! We know it’s the Word of God, but our compromise with modernist misconceptions won’t allow us to receive it. [2]

The problem is that the modern mind thinks it has surpassed the ancient and medieval minds. The truth is that modernism, in its desperate attempts to distill reality down to its true essence, has lost its grip on reality. The Bible is just ideology, and its fully developed worship culture is locked away while we attempt to fight godless pop-culture with a thimbleful of watery Bible broth.

We stubbornly refuse to live in the world the Bible describes. Consequently we have to “change” the Bible. On a blog recently I saw a comment that 6 day creationism was the result of a “culturally specific and dubious reading of Genesis.” I’m a 6 day creationist, so I think it’s the other side that has the culturally specific (modernist) and dubious reading of Genesis. [3] The modern evangelical mind attempts to transcend Genesis, but in reality, Genesis actually confounds the compromised modern mind. [4]

When theologians spend more time (or all their time) ruminating on Barth, or even Calvin—we have a problem. Second-hand theology is part of our glorious heritage and its world-changing influence cannot be minimised. But even these writings are an interpretation of Scripture from a human perspective. The more modern the theology, the more gnostic the interpretation. God gave us Armani and Versace suits and we wear clothes from the charity bin to formal occasions.

When second-hand theology obfuscates the primacy of Scripture, we deny by our thinking and practice our verbal commitment to sola scriptura.

“We must become open to the Bible, so that it can do this work. In order for this to happen to us, we need total Bible saturation.

We live in an age of tremendous Bible ignorance. Even conservative seminaries do not teach much of the Bible; they teach everything else, but assume that the men will learn the Bible on their own. Pastors are told that laymen are stupid, and cannot be taught much of the Bible. They are told to give out “three point” sermons. This must not continue.

The goal of total Bible saturation is that our common sense is reshaped. This takes time. It probably takes a generation. Because we are estranged from the Biblical outlook, much of the Bible seems strange to us. The Bible comes to us as “formal language”. That is, it is “high language” that directly challenges our outlook on reality. We must learn it and live with it until what the Bible says becomes our common sense, what we instinctively operate with day by day.” [5]

The reason we spend nearly all of our time with Paul, and with the great theologians, is because we do not have a mind, an imagination, shaped by the Bible. It is no wonder that Christians in less-developed countries often “get” the Bible better than we do. They have a more highly developed sense of the symbolic nature of the physical world. [6]

The pragmatic theology of the modernist, like Communism, is in the end shown to be totally impractical, because its foundation is the atheistic fantasy world of evolution, human reason and philosophy. The real world is the world of the Bible, and it is full of scents, rhythm, texture and vision.

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[1] This quote was pilfered from Tim Nichols’ blog, where he comments on the results of this lack of imagination in our evangelism. See Skeletal Evangelism.

[2] See Michael Jensen’s assessment of this problem in Is Scripture Enough? and his honest admission in This IS the word of the Lord - and thanks be to God…

[3] See Sweeping Genrelisations.

[4] See Dodging the Silver Bullet.

[5] James B. Jordan, Crisis, Opportunity and the Christian Future. Available from www.biblicalhorizons.com

[6] I highly recommend Angels in the Architecture, by Doug Jones and Doug Wilson.