My friend Matt has been blogging about how postmodernism, with its openness to narrative, is a great opportunity for the gospel. But evangelicals need to sort themselves out first. Otherwise, to the world, they are just a bunch of Patsys. Patsy Biscoes that is.

The big problem is the fact that many evangelicals plainly do not believe the “stories” in the Bible. Compromised with the world’s academia, they lose any real authority to share these “stories” with any gravity whatsoever. Can you imagine any of the patriarchs sharing “stories” around the fire and qualifying it with “but this is just a true myth.” No wonder evangelicalism is a laughing stock to its vocal, “enlightened” opponents.

Then we have the gooey emergents on the other end, who love stories but whether or not they have any basis in reality is irrelevant.

Gnostics on the right. Gnostics on the left. Western Christianity is given the status of ideology and nothing more. And yet God still works in it by His Spirit. “Lord, forgive our arrogant, apostate, vaccillating, intellectualised, world-pleasing unbelief. It must be a stink in your nostrils.”

James Jordan recently wrote:

“This is just plain sad. A few shards and fragments from the ancient world are blown up into a whole system of thought that contradicts the Bible, and evangelicals then buy into it. It may be time for serious Christians to pack it in as far as the evangelical scholarly world is concerned. We can learn from them here and there, just as we learn from Jews and liberals here and there. But unless it shapes up, the future does not lie with this compromised religion.” [1]

Telling stories when we ourselves are not sure of their validity is not the best way to share the faith. It is an embarrassment. It’s a good thing the pomos will go for the story regardless. We need the narratives, but we also need rigorous faith-filled scholarship. Patsy Biscoe’s faith puts the faith of many scholars to shame.

Matt comments:

That’s why I love Tom Wright. He hasn’t hidden behind the pulpit, nor retreated into the academy. he straddles both worlds with a vigorous Christ centered scholarship. he truly believes the narrative of the bible, and is concerned hold theology and history together, without it slipping into just mythology.

Better get a better metanarrative

Matt also writes concerning the relationship between modernism and postmodernism:

…the enemy of our enemy is our friend. Postmodernism declares that all such large stories — “metanarratives” — are destructive and enslaving, and must be deconstructed. The pomo attack on gospel-denying modernism is useful for us. Postmodernism is a necessary critique of modernity. But the current problem is that though the postmodern turn in philosophy and culture has sneered at the great modernist imperial dream, it hasn’t been able to shake it. We live in a time where modernity and postmodernity refer not so much to a datable chronological period but more to two different moods and controlling narratives. Our world is both modern and postmodern. And I don’t see this changing for sometime. We can not go back to being just modern. And could postmodernism survive without the thing is it critiquing? The two ideas have become utterly dependent on each other.

Modernism, like feminism and communism, simply replaced the old exploitation with a new exploitation. Postmodernism doesn’t even have this to offer. Postmodernism is not a system in itself. It is just a critique, which is why it can’t “shake off” modernism. Pomo is helpful in exposing the cracks in modernism so we can inject the gospel, the only true builder of cultures.

The foundation of modernism is evolution, and the currently popular history of “ancient man”. Until this is thrown out, Western Christianity is still stuck within a modernist metanarrative, and can only ever be a manmade ideology. [2]

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[1] James Jordan, Did God Speak Hebrew to Adam, Biblical Horizons #209.
[2] See also The Only True Foundation for Anthropology

One of the big problems with modern theology is its habit of categorising parts of the Bible into literary genres. For sure, the Bible contains historical prose, visions, poetry and songs. But many passages won’t actually fit into these neat little pigeon holes without hamstringing their intended purpose. And as it turns out, these “genre-lisations” are excuses to compromise with humanistic pop-philosophy and pop-history.

The three main gripes I have are misuses of the genres poetry, polemic and apocalyptic.

Poetry

There’s plenty of poetry in the Bible. But Genesis chapters 1-3, or even 1-11, are not poetry. Yes, they are carefully structured and often chiastic (symmetric), but they do not possess the forms of Hebrew poetry.1 Classing them as such is an excuse to relegate them to the realm of ideology instead of history. Yes, the Hebrews were “event orientated” in their literature, but the jury is still out on whether this was actually an oral tradition. Maintaining that Adam couldn’t write (or that Christ’s disciples didn’t write a gospel immediately, a la Dr. John Dickson) is a view based on pop-history, not the Bible.2

Polemic

“A polemic is part of the prophet’s speech, but not the speech of a king. Not to imply it is ‘beneath’ the king, but it seems to be a rhetorical crowbar to pry open ears.”3

The prophets were the Lord’s lawyers, bringing a covenant lawsuit to covenant breakers. This is not technically polemic. Or, it was as polemic as a sheriff turning up on your doorstep to serve papers.

It seems that certain passages of the Bible are classed as ‘polemic’ because we have problems with the actual history, at least, the parts that embarrass us because they ride against pop-history.

The same goes for early Genesis. None of Genesis is polemic for the benefit of Moses’ people. It is not addressed to them, and shows no signs of being an attack on ancient gods or a modification of Ancient Near East suzerainty covenants. Genesis is very clearly the original. The problem is our unbelief.

Neither is Revelation a polemic against Rome, despite what Richard Bauckham says.4 It concerns the Old Covenant people and their compromise with Rome. They were Covenant-breakers, and the Covenant structure is laced throughout the Revelation like brandy in a Christmas pudding (Get a review copy of my book Totus Christus to see this in action).

The only real polemic in the Bible might be the speeches of Job’s accusers, as they stitch their case together to scapegoat him. And they were the bad guys, the snakes in Job’s wilderness.

Apocalyptic

This one applies mainly to Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation. The parts of these prophecies that don’t fit our interpretation of history get relegated to ideology, akin to the Jewish fables of the intertestament era. They lose their grip on actual history.

Sometimes this is understandable. Those who rightly refused to see Ezekiel 38-39′s Gog and Magog as a future battle still found it hard to pin it on something historical (including David Chilton). Jordan figured out that it was fulfilled in the book of Esther, and the Covenant “Egypt to Canaan” structure of Ezekiel confirms this (among many other more minor proofs). The prophecies of Isaiah concern the Restoration Covenant era, but this was an expansion of Israel’s spiritual influence. Because history doesn’t record a physical Jewish empire, the oracles are misunderstood and applied to the first century directly, or to some future Israel (applying oracles that concerned the Restoration of ancient Israel to modern Jews who are actually outside the Covenant!).

The apocalyptic sections of the New Testament suffer that same fate. Dispensationalists don’t understand that these concern a major change in the spiritual realm that was played out upon the first century Jews and the Roman empire, but the confusing imagery used is all firmly rooted in the Bible’s Covenant structure. It speaks a language we don’t understand.

So, these passages may be classed as apocalyptic, but unlike the Archibishop of Canterbury, we cannot conclude that John did see Jesus but it made him insane, and Revelation was the result!5 Nor can we cop out and say Matthew 24 jumped to the end of time, or that Revelation is just a general picture book of the church in the world. These prophecies commanded a moral response from their first audiences. All was to happen soon, upon this generation. Anything after that is just application, however helpful and important this may be. The prophecies are rooted firmly in history (a point which Bauckham makes, despite his misunderstanding of the purpose of the Revelation).

Apocalyptic is by definition a revelation of near historical events. It is not ideology from the subconscious of man for the purpose of rallying the troops or defining cultural identity.

None of these genres are an excuse for gnosticism, which, according to Jordan’s definition is this:

“Throughout history, the Christian Church has had to guard against the heresy of gnosticism. Gnosticism is not an ordinary heresy, because it does not manifest itself as a set of defined beliefs. Rather, gnosticism is a tendency: the tendency to replace the historic facts of Christianity with philosophical ideas. Gnosticism is the tendency to de-historicise and de-physicalise the Christian religion. Gnosticism transforms history into ideology and facts into philosophy. Gnosticism tends to see religion as man’s reflections about God and reality instead of as God’s revelation of Himself and His Word to man. As a tendency, gnosticism has always plagued the Church, and it is alive and well today, openly in ‘liberalism’, and in a more concealed fashion in ‘evangelicalism’.”6

So why is the Bible written the way it is? Peter Leithart writes:

As much as pragmatic Americans might wish it to be otherwise, the Bible is not an answer-book.  It includes advice, and laws, and rules, but a lot of it consists of puzzling prophecy, ancient history, obscure parables and apparently abstract theology.  What are we supposed to get from that?  We ask for an answer key, and God gives us poetry. Can’t we just skip the story and get to the moral?

No we can’t.

God gave us the Bible to guide us, but also – more fundamentally – to form us. By studying the Bible, hearing it, reading it, learning from it, we are being remade.7

So, it is we who are being recategorised, reformed according the Covenant. But we fight against it, and use literary genres to mask our unbelief and make the Bible palatable to an unbelieving world.

I guess this article is a polemic against gnosticism.

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1. “Given the ratio of verbal forms, the statistical evidence for the text [of Genesis] being prose is overwhelming.” See Francis Humphrey, “The meaning of yôm in Genesis 1:1–2:4”, Journal of Creation 21(2):52–55, August 2007. Article online at www.creation.com
2. See James B. Jordan, Toward a Chiastic Understanding of the Gospel According to Matthew, Part 1, Biblical Horizons Newsletter No. 94. “Matthew is the first of the gospels; there can be little doubt of this. The notion that Mark was first because Mark is shorter is nonsensical. Matthew was one of the disciples and was a man of letters. Who better to take notes during Jesus’ lifetime? Moreover, immediately after Pentecost there would have been a demand for a book containing the teaching and works of Jesus. The Jews were a people of the book. Each time God did a great work, a new part of Scripture was written to tell about it. The 3000 converts on the day of Pentecost would have expected such a book, and we can be pretty sure that Matthew set right down to write it. Doubtless he spoke with the other disciples, and perhaps Matthew’s gospel is to some extent a joint work. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that within a month after Pentecost copies of Matthew’s gospel were in circulation.”
3. Sorry, can’t remember where I found this quote.
4. Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation.  The use of “commercial imagery” to describe worship that is used in Revelation begins in Genesis 2 and appears many times throughout the Old Testament. See Worship as Commerce. If you want a handle on that, get into James Jordan’s lectures.
5. “The rantings of John the Divine about his theological rivals are part of the by-product of the very vision of the Living One that shows these ravings for what they are, by showing the radical and unconfined purpose of God in Jesus Christ” … ” we aren’t called to believe and endorse all they say, only to ask ourselves what we are taught here about the strangeness and sometimes the terror of the Word of God to fragile minds.“  Rowan Williams, Open To Judgment, p. 115-116. (Thanks to David Field for this).
6. James B. Jordan, Creation in Six Days, A Defense of the Traditional Reading of Genesis One, Chapter 4: Gnosticism Versus History.
7. Peter J. Leithart, Exhortation, Second Sunday of Trinity.

Rev Dr Malcolm Brown papers over the Grand Canyon at
http://www.cofe.anglican.org/darwin/malcolmbrown.html

and CMI critiques his article at
Church of England apologises to Darwin
Anglican Church’s neo-Chamberlainite appeasement of secularism
http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/6048

“… it is important to recognise that the anti-evolutionary fervour in some corners of the churches may be… an indictment of the churches’ failure to tell their own story – Jesus’s story – with conviction in a way which works with the grain of the world as God has revealed it to be, both through the Bible and in the work of scientists of Darwin’s calibre.”

Rev Dr Malcolm Brown (who looks like a nice man) surely must understand that the philosophy of evolution is exactly the reason for the decline of Christianity in the west, and the rejection of what he calls Jesus’ ‘story.’ It contradicts at a very fundamental level both the Old Testament and the obvious beliefs of Jesus Himself. A child can see that. I recommend the critique of Brown’s article and would be interested to see Brown’s response.

From CMI’s critique:

“…philosopher Daniel Dennett calls Darwinism a universal acid that ‘eats through virtually every traditional concept’—mankind’s most cherished beliefs about God, value, meaning, purpose, culture, morality—everything.”

Universal acid. There you go. Apologising to Darwin for ill treatment is one thing. Serving his wormwood to the world’s thirsty is quite another. That is the true failure of the church, Rev Dr Brown: compromise with philosophy masquerading as science, and denial of the obvious consequences. It was the very basis for our culture’s rejection of God. It freed us from the logical constraints of belief in a Creator.

Without resorting to sophistry, or fluffy gnosticism like Brown’s, a belief in evolution logically leads to a rejection of the Scriptures. They are chalk and cheese, oil and water.

How about this clanger: “Christians will want to stress, instead, the human capacity for love, for altruism, and for self-sacrifice. There is nothing here which, in principle, contradicts Darwin’s theory.”

So the “eat your neighbour to survive” of natural selection somehow developed into self-sacrifice because it was socially practical? Brown’s article contradicts the clear teachings of the Bible, and not just early Genesis.

The Bible uses the word beast to describe “might is right” living. It clearly teaches that Adam seized dominion, instead of humbling himself and receiving it as a gift (like Joseph, Daniel, Mordecai and of course Christ). Either he was innocent when tested, or already condemned by living in a “might is right” world. It is a rejection of the Scriptures by sleight-of-hand.

Or this: “It is vital that Darwin’s theories are rescued from political and ideological agendas that are more about controlling human imagination and unpredictability than about good science.”

Ideas always have consequences. Why else would there be such a fight about this one in particular? It is incredibly naive to think such a ‘rescue’ is possible. It is actually the divorce of ideology from reality.

Darwin’s STORY cannot exist in a vacuum. It is a fight between one history and another, between one ‘truth’ and another. Darwin effectively rewrote history. Whether or not he understood the logical consequences is beyond the point.

Brown’s article would be comic if it wasn’t so tragic. Based on the following definition, he is a gnostic:

“Throughout history, the Christian Church has had to guard against the heresy of gnosticism. Gnosticism is not an ordinary heresy, because it does not manifest itself as a set of defined beliefs. Rather, gnosticism is a tendency: the tendency to replace the historic facts of Christianity with philosophical ideas.

Gnosticism is the tendency to de-historicise and de-physicalise the Christian religion. Gnosticism transforms history into ideology and facts into philosophy. Gnosticism tends to see religion as man’s reflections about God and reality instead of as God’s revelation of Himself and His Word to man.

As a tendency, gnosticism has always plagued the Church, and it is alive and well today, openly in “liberalism,” and in a more concealed fashion in “evangelicalism.” James B. Jordan, Creation in Six Days, A Defense of the Traditional Reading of Genesis One, Chapter 4: Gnosticism Versus History.

So, which is it? Either the Bible is history or ideology. If ideology, it has no authority. It has no connection with Brown’s imaginary ‘real’ world at its very heart. Everyone seems to understand that except theistic evolutionists. And the CofE wonders why Christianity has become irrelevant.

CMI’s article ‘Univeral Acid’ is here:
http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/594

“The Kingdom of God is not advanced through politics and ideology, but through proclamation and charity.”

–James B. Jordan