Gnosis.
Many of my fine Christian friends, pastors, and teachers routinely made the claim that they were Bible-believing Christians, and they were committed to the whole Bible.... What I discovered is that we all pick and choose.… No one does everything the Bible says…. [The point is to understand why we pick and choose and] to do this in a way that honors God and embraces the Bible as God’s Word for all times.
~ Scot McKnight, Northern Seminary
a theological interlude
“We all pick and choose” when it comes to interpreting the literal words of the Bible, says McKnight, a New Testament professor at an evangelical seminary in Chicago. How bold! How offensive. How refreshing.
I don’t think anyone would disagree when I say that the most fundamental, most orienting artifact of the Christian church is the Christian Bible. Nothing informs our understanding of the person and message and mission of Christ more than this sacred text. These books are, arguably, our greatest window into the Person that we know and love and follow.
At the same time, we have spent two thousand years arguing about what the Bible means and just how, exactly, to wrap our lives around its words. Literally thousands of churches have taken their stand on this question in very different ways, even while declaring that any faithful reading of the book would lead others to see it exactly the way they see it. Ambiguity, mystery, and nuance are not exactly favorite ideas when it comes to interpreting this volume that has stood such test of time.
Many who are struggling with the church these days are particularly troubled by how the Bible is used as a power tool to enforce certain perspectives and villainize others. Open-hearted, open-minded discussions of contrary readings are hard to find. I love that the Zondervan publisher has released 24 volumes in The Counterpoints Series, offering divergent biblical views of just about every contentious topic in the church today. Go Zondervan!
When it comes to being a Christ-follower in the twenty-first century, few things matter more, it seems to me, than widening the spectrum of possibilities on how we hold this cherished text.
When it comes to taking the Bible seriously, we have to acknowledge that Professor McKnight is right: We absolutely do all “pick and choose” which scriptures to take literally and which to take poetically or historically or figuratively, etc. Which begs the question: Is taking every word literally the same thing as taking it seriously?
I hope not! If so, then every homosexual should be immediately stoned to death (Lev 20:13), we should all beat our children with rods (Prov 23:13), we should all sell every possession and give the proceeds to the poor (Lk 12:33), all women should be completely silent in the church (1 Cor 14:34), should wear head coverings to pray (1 Cor 11:5), and shun “elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes” (1 Pet. 3:3). The fiercest of literal interpreters will quickly find reasons to explain away why these verses (and hundreds more) no longer apply in our day and time. As they should.
We actually have some important precedents for picking and choosing scripture:
For starters, the New Testament writers translated every single word of Jesus (except four in Mt 27:46) from the language he spoke, Aramaic, into Greek. They picked and chose which Greek words they thought best captured the sense of his Aramaic words.
Then the New Testament writers picked and chose which conversations, which miracles, which activities to include in their writings. Among thousands of possibilities, they chose a relatively few number to convey the gist of what was important to them.
Then the Council of Rome in 382 curated (code for “picking and choosing”) which books of the many, many floating around were worthy of being considered inspired… and came up with 73 books, 7 more than Protestants now claim.
In 1522 Martin Luther (and a team of colleagues) made a monumental translation of the Bible from both Latin and Greek sources into German. His team picked and chose the German words to best reflect the Greek words which best reflected the Aramaic words of Jesus. As an aside, he also translated and included the Apocrypha (9 extra books this time).
Twelve years later, Luther then “picked and chose” those Apocryphal books to move into an “Inter-testamental” section between the Old and New.
That sounds like a whole lot of picking and choosing… and that’s before we wrestle so many years with later to apply these precious words into our modern lives. Which instructions were cultural, and which were timeless? Which were ceremonial, and which were moral? Which reflected the writers’ best understanding at the time, and which would now benefit from further revelation?
That, my dear reader, is the point.
When Jesus said that he would send the Holy Spirit to “teach you all things,” surely he meant that this process of interpreting words and meanings and applications would be a continuously ongoing task… and then provided the very tool we would need for that task! If it was the original words themselves, which we no longer have, only copies of copies, that were the only trustworthy voice for our lives, I imagine Jesus would have taken the time to write them down himself and make it unambiguously clear to his disciples that these specific words would be their salvation. But of course that would have made the Holy Spirit superfluous.
No, the clear implication of Jesus in sending the Spirit is that his followers across all time would need the quality we call discernment, which Paul makes explicit in 1 Cor 2:14, “The person without the Spirit…cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.” Exactly.
More than anything, Jesus was emphatic that his listeners would be guided by the scriptures, but that they are not enough; only direct relationship with God would suffice for discerning what is true and how to live it out. He challenged the church of his time, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me” (Jn 5:39). That’s the necessary crux, and that is our confidence when it comes to discerning how to pick and choose—our real-time connection with the Spirit of God.
The early church had a word for this; in the Greek it was gnosis, meaning experiential knowledge. The Discovery Bible says that “gnosis (applied-knowledge) is only as accurate and reliable as the relationship it derives from.” How do we know how to apply the words of scripture? We know because we are in intimate relationship with The Living Word. It’s personal. “Alive and active,” Hebrews says, not fixed and static. It’s always moving, evolving, and being shaped as our relationship with God grows and as God continues to progressively reveal what is true. Even the words of Jesus are not God’s final word. He is God’s best word, but not the last (Jn 16:12).
We must admit that, for thousands of years, power and patriarchy have done the picking and choosing for us! We have unwittingly yielded the right to define spiritual reality to the “experts” and have been robbed of our agency, our birthright to discern the divine whisper ourselves. I’m not suggesting that we discern in isolation; no, we need the voices of the entire faith community as context for seeing clearly. But at the end of the day, we cannot, must not abdicate our own responsibility to know and follow the Spirit first-hand. This is call to gnosis.
growing your soul
Why does this really matter? Because our souls cannot grow when they are pot-bound. The words of the Bible minus the relational guidance of the Spirit constricts and skews the soul. What word of God is alive and active in your heart today?
serving our world
The world needs us to hold our sacred words with more openness of spirit, to let them breathe and grow within us.
takeaway
Pick well, Choose well.