Tag Archives: evangelical theology

The Living Word

In my experience, evangelical Christianity seems enamoured with the belief that it is ‘biblical’ in ways that other groups are not. Generally, there is an implicit vitriol for Catholicism (as well as mainline Protestant groups such as the Episcopal Church and Presbyterian Church USA) which are seen as somehow not ‘biblical’. It is as if ‘the Bible’ is a static, unchanging document which can be understood fully without plumbing the depths of its roots, contexts, and history of transmission (to name but a few elements!). However, I have become fairly sceptical of such language because ‘biblical’ is almost always encoded and encapsulated with a pre-existing structure of beliefs. It’s amazing that ‘biblical’ in today’s context almost always means a brand of conservative American evangelicalism which believes women are ‘equal but different’ (meaning they can serve the congregation as, say, ‘children’s pastor’ or ‘worship leader’ but not as ‘pastor’), same-sex marriage is an ‘abomination’, and baptism must be done only to adult-ish converts fully immersed in water (and sometimes even with a specific language without which the baptism is somehow invalid). What many of those who purport a ‘biblical’ Christianity don’t realise is that it meant something completely different two hundred years ago (women couldn’t serve, full stop), four hundred years ago, and so forth. Eight hundred years ago, ‘biblical’ Christianity meant either western Catholicism or eastern Orthodoxy depending on where one lived.

So, let’s assume that ‘biblical’ Christianity means some kind of adherence to some ‘broad stroke’  concepts and/or principles which can be interpreted through some systematic approach to the biblical texts. Which approach? There are many; and throughout history, there are many different methods and interpretations which can be seen as plausible — some even contradictory or mutually exclusive. However, even if we take the bigger assumption that there is only one ‘ultimate’ set of principles (and all the others are classified in terms of acceptable deviations which is often none). Even within the Bible, that which is considered ‘scripture’ is frequently recontextualised for new meanings and interpretations. There is a slew of good scholarship (e.g. Brevard Childs’s The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture) which show how Christianity over two thousands years has recast just one of the biblical texts over time. Other scholarship has shown how, within the collection of biblical texts, intertextual relationships have modified or recontextualised older texts (e.g. Richard Hays’s Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul). I bring these up not to suggest that the biblical texts can be absolutely anything as in some sort of relativism, but rather there is a  degree of give and play in the interpretation of those texts.

However, this wiggle room in the practise of interpretation is rendered mute by the evangelicals who speak about the ‘obviousness of scripture’. For them, not only is there a single interpretation to the text, but the current one must have always been the only interpretation (even when the history above shows otherwise). This also ignores the great amount of work which goes into producing a translation of the texts which render them in contemporary language. By ignoring this process, adherents to this practise construct an artificial ‘Bible’ through which their own beliefs and traditions are masked as being directly handed down by God, through Christ, the original disciples, and early Christianity.

Interestingly, the problem does not end there. Instead, many evangelicals who speak about ‘biblical’ Christianity include Judaism from its beginning through the Second Temple period. For some evangelicals, even the Jewish figures in the HB/OT were closet Christians who believed in Christ, a triune God, and so forth. However this is done only by exploiting the terminology of ‘Judeo-Christian’ and reading early Judaism as a thoroughly Christian venture which just happened to have been called Judaism. In other words, there is no double identity  of Jewish-Christian to mediate in the early Church (e.g. the first disciples), but a single identity of Christianity made double through a virtual colonisation of Judaism. To put it bluntly, then, ‘biblical’ Christianity is nothing more than the same oppressive Christianity of history masquerading itself as some kind of new development which has recovered some imagined ‘golden era’ of the past which is no more ‘biblical’ than the other Christian groups which are cast as failing to be ‘biblical’.

 

Hermeneutical Jujitsu

One of the intriguing aspects of Trayvon Martin’s death is the hermeneutics implicit in Zimmerman’s ‘self-defence’. For those unaware of the story, here is the oversimplified play-by-play: Trayvon Martin, a teenager, was walking from a convenience store through a neighbourhood in the rain wearing a hoodie. Zimmerman, a late-twentysomething civilian neighbourhood watchman, thought Martin was suspicious and phoned the police to report Martin. Zimmerman then, against the recommendations of the police, followed Martin. There was a confrontation which ended with Martin being shot by Zimmerman (who was armed) and Zimmerman having minor injuries. The case was not investigated at the time because Zimmerman claimed self-defence (he said that Martin, a hundred pounds lighter, knocked him to the ground with one punch then began bashing Zimmerman’s head against the pavement).

Florida has a ‘Stand Your Ground’ law which states that people who feel threatened and are not engaged in a criminal activity have the right to use as much force as necessary to protect life and property. This is what Zimmerman used. However, the theological importance here is hermeneutical. Such a law and application of it reflect the general American evangelical ethos of interpretation, namely that of radical subjectivity and situationalism (contrary to their claims to objective and/or absolute truth). Notice that the law is about how one feels — that is, how one interprets one’s situation — and then authorises the person to act as jury (of their interpretation) and executioner (of the offending object). The only objectivity allowed because of this law is how others would act in the same situation, devoid of any relationship to other laws and ethics. In other words, they argue that because representatives of the legal community (police, judges, etc) are unable to see the event unfold firsthand, those legal figures are also unable to reconstruct them accurately. Therefore, it is up to the individual who feels threatened and non-criminal to decide justice.

This is exactly how American evangelicals treat biblical interpretation: since no human living today was there to witness it, there is no way we can reconstruct reliably the biblical narratives and contexts. Therefore, it is up to the individual who feels spiritual to decide its meaning. This is exactly why beliefs such as premillenialism (e.g. Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind series, Hal Lindsey’s Late, Great Planet Earth) persist despite scholarly work which has discounted (if not disproven) such. The proponents of these beliefs are, in effect, standing their ground against the threat of the scholarly community. Which is why the scholarly community as a whole is seen with contempt (e.g., they’re not real Christians) because their work which seeks to construct theology and biblical studies through less subjective (though not necessarily objective) means is seen as a threat to the evangelical belief in sola scriptura – radically interpreted to include individual, divergent interpretations — because it means interpretations can be measured and found wanting (we’ll ignore the fact that evangelicals already practise this, though with the understanding that their interpretation is always already ‘correct’). The real threat, perhaps now obvious, is the loss of individual absolute authority over one’s faith to some kind of communal faith (i.e. tradition).

To return to Trayvon Martin, the issue is the same: do individuals have absolute authority to determine that they are threatened and what amount of force is constituted as necessary? States like Florida have argued that individuals do have this authority* to both determine one’s situation as threatened and that no usage of force is too excessive even if the event can be reconstructed to show that both are demonstrably false. As long as Zimmerman remains free without scrutiny, the state of Florida, and perhaps the federal government, believe that individual absolute authority is more important than any kind of social whole such as the state or country which has been created to protect the life, liberty, and property of those who might otherwise be mistreated because of such individual absolute authority. In other words, ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws make it explicit that it is more important for one to feel threatened than for any threat to be proven. They imply that it is more important for one to react with any force necessary to erase such perceived threats than for authorities to protect people’s lives.  Or, in the frame of the Trayvon Martin case: it is more important for Zimmerman to be proven as the victim of a non-crime who acted in ‘self-defence’ than for the ‘Stand Your Ground’ law to be revealed for what it is: the authorisation of untrained individuals to perform the duties which were previously reserved for personnel trained in law enforcement.

 

*NB: Interestingly, police officers acting both on- and off- duty do not normally have this authority. If they shoot someone who they suspect of criminal activity, they are still investigated by other police officers to see if they used excessive force.

Churches in the World

This is part 3 of 5 in the Sunday responses series

Dear Unnamed Church,

If you want to ‘see God moving’ and see renewal in your church, stop spending all of your time and money on the building. Today, you told us a story of an area in Africa that was ravished by civil war. Before this war, there was a nice Bible college which was a good part of the community. After the war, you were happy to report that the Bible college was rebuilt while the community is still a jungle (literally with trees growing in houses). That’s not right.

Now, you’re talking of ‘repairing’ your building. Look at it: it doesn’t appear in dire need. In fact, it’s underused as you don’t have the people to use it. You want your members (there’s four ways to join!) to give money to do work on the building. You ask your members to spend a few Saturday morning in a year to do more work on the building. Yet you have at least four paid ministers on staff. You ‘offer’ services multiple times a week (Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday night, and one other night). Perhaps you’re navel-gazing and hoping to find some fuzz or lint there that looks like God. Guess what: God is outside of your church. If you would step outside once or twice, you’d see that.

Problem of Evangelicalism

As I was recently hearing an Evangelical minister speak about the early church, I think I finally realised the one part of Evangelical thinking that really irks me. I’m not saying this is the only problem in Evangelicalism, but it is perhaps the most dominant. I say this as someone who otherwise ‘feels’ Evangelical and as someone who willingly attends an Evangelical church (and has done so for several years).

The problem, as I see it, is that Evangelicals want to straddle history, having one foot firmly planted in modern Protestant Christianity and the other foot in what it considers ‘historical’ Christianity. With the first foot, Evangelicalism remains a product of post-Enlightenment thinking, theology, culture, etc. Add to this the fact that many Evangelicals promote ‘modern worship’, that is worship music done with a live band of some sort, an emotive vibe, snazzy audio-visuals, etc. In this sense, Evangelicalism is very much a contemporary, ‘modern’ franchise.

On the other hand (or foot in this case), Evangelicalism wants a kind of ‘return’ to what it sees as the earliest part of Christianity, skipping over the ‘bad stuff’ in between. While this in itself isn’t a bad thing, it does so at the expense of ignoring its own historical context. The earliest part of Christianity for Evangelicalism tends to have the following: a ‘parting of the ways’ between Judaism and Christianity; a non-institutional relational model; and if the group doing the remembering is influenced by the charismatic/pentecostal movements, miracles, signs, and wonders. I wish to address all three of these as anachronistic misreadings that stem from Evangelicalism’s own attempt to forget its past.

Regarding the first point, the ‘parting of the ways’, I’ve been increasingly troubled lately by those who assert this as the scholarly opinion has shifted greatly from it. What I mean by the ‘parting of the ways’ is whether or not Christianity and Judaism ‘parted ways’ early and quickly. A standard Evangelical perspective — one that I had heard while attending an Evangelical school of theology — is that by the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem (70 CE), Christianity had ‘grown up’ and moved away from Judaism. Yet, there is a range of good scholarship which is currently considered to be the accurate historiographical understanding (e.g. Daniel Boyarin’s Border Lines, Judith Lieu’s Christian Identity in the Jewish and Greco-Roman World) that has greatly contested that view. The very notion of ‘orthodox’ Christianity did not emerge until later (i.e. 2nd/3rd century CE at the earliest) and only retroactively was it applied to predecessors who passed the tests were admitted into ‘the earliest church as an unsullied virgin, the standard and ideal by which all subsequent developments would be measured and to which the church would ever seek to return’ (Lieu, 95). One cannot simple say that the Christian split from Judaism came quickly because of, for example, the Biblical texts; the Biblical texts did not become the Biblical texts as such until much later (4th century CE). From the work of the heresiologists (Justin Martyr and later), developed a notion of Christian ‘orthodoxy’ that excluded not Judaism but the hybrids in between the two. In fact, Boyarin argues (and I’m inclined to agree here) that the very notion of ‘religion’ did not emerge in the West until this time as Christian identity moved away from a geo-social one (e.g. Greeks, Jews, Romans, etc) and towards recontextualised spectrum with ‘pure’ Christianity on one side and ‘pure’ Judaism on the other — with both groups actively excluding any hybridity between them. The arguments from scholars such as Lieu, Boyarin, et al also matches archeological findings which suggest that in the first couple of centuries of Christianity, a significant portion of Christian groups met in the (Jewish) synagogues, oftentimes sharing the same spaces/places as Judaism. In short, the two were very much intertwined and no separation occurred as quickly as Evangelicals (and others) may believe. The result of this is that any notions of ‘early Christianity’ and ‘Christian orthodoxy’ to which Evangelicals return are imagined rather than actual, virtual constructs of a present. Or, to cite Boyarin, the ‘attempt by a newly formed group to claim hegemony over traditional patterns of belief and practise by portraying themselves as ancient and originary is almost a defining characteristic of the discourse of orthodoxy’ (Boyarin, 59).

A second aspect of ‘early Christianity’ promoted by Evangelicals is the idea that the early church wasn’t an institution (which sounds better/clearer than saying it wasn’t institutionalised). For them, the early church was somehow dynamic, relational, community-oriented. This has the general implication that at some point, all of this was lost and was traded in for a hierarchical corporate model, losing the cool vibes Christianity once had. Sometimes this is further emphasised in reading passages such as the beginning of Acts where thousands (or millions) converted. While I think it would be wrong to reduce the Evangelical opinion to a numbers game, that certainly seems to be a symptom of the greater misunderstanding. For one, perhaps there weren’t mass conversions in, say, the 12th century because (almost) everyone already were Christian! Sure, they might not be the kind of Christian modern Evangelicals are, but none of the early Church was. Secondly, this kind of interpretation blurs the institutional model of Evangelical denominations. Sure, there is no titular pope (another popular misconception of Evangelicals I will leave for another day), but there most certainly is a hierarchy to churches and denominations: the ministers/pastors/teachers (however the clerical staff is titled) have pecking orders (whether it be Senior Pastor, Lead Preacher, Chief Visionary Minister, etc); the denominations have steering committees that determine boundaries of theology within the denomination, etc. A church is free to leave the denomination, but let’s not delude ourselves that Evangelicalism is somehow non-institutional. Let’s also not delude ourselves in thinking that the older Christian denominations ‘got things wrong’ on the basis of their organisation: Jesus (nor Peter, Paul, etc) was not Tony Robbins, a CEO, or an entrepreneur — don’t treat him as one.

The final aspect of the Evangelical imagination of early Christianity I wish to consider is the focus on signs, wonders, and ‘spiritual gifts’. Let me be clear from the get-go that I am not concerned about whether these things have happened and/or if they continue to happen. Those two discussions are secondary to whether or not these are over-emphasised by charismatic Evangelicals. This problem stems from two other issues. The first is how one reads the Biblical texts. In short, the over-emphasis is a result of reading the Biblical texts as modern historical texts which care about accuracy. For instance, Acts mentions miracles such as surviving being bitten by (presumingly deadly) snakes, people being raised from the dead, miraculous healing, etc. Just as with the thousands being saved at Pentecost in Acts, the author (like many of her contemporaries) did not have our modern ways of accuracy nor our concern with such accuracy. It didn’t matter if it was ten thousand or ten million, the point was that it was a lot of people. Likewise, it didn’t matter if entire cities were being healed by the millions, the point was that the spread of the good news was changing lives and, perhaps, actual physical healing (according to our modern understanding of such). Secondly, and quite related to the first, there is a confusion between the ‘highlight’ accounts of a Biblical text such as Acts and the reality. Keeping with Acts, one must bear in mind that it covers a wide variety of locations and times — much like a year-in-review news broadcast. A more modern comparison would be reading or watching a review of WW2. The difference between the reality and the review is a magnitude of years: the review, for instance, will cut out the ‘boring bits’ of inaction throughout the battle at Stalingrad to distill the major tactical points (wasn’t there a film about a decade ago??). To compare the distilled version with the unabridged account will make the latter mind-numbingly boring with a few moments of glory. And that’s the point: the stories of miracles in Acts are highlighting the abnormal events that might be interesting rather than giving a detailed account of the everyday life.

The general Evangelical interpretation of early Christianity is anachronistic, reading modern Evangelicalism as a model for understanding early Christianity. This causes it to overlook or disregard its own historical development, and this is something to which I protest. The history between Paul and 2010 (or 1980, 1910, 1800, etc) is important and cannot be thrown out simply because one disagrees with it.

Sex and Theology

I decided to wait until certain “celebrities” had lost their limelight before breaching this subject.  Conservative evangelical arguments revolve around two things: sexual abstinence and anything not abortion.  However this leads to problems once reality sets in.  Perhaps the biggest campaign is an abstinence-only pledge.  However, very few evangelical teens actually follow through with this to marriage (source).  In fact, evangelical teens are no different than other teens regarding sexual practices with only one exception: evangelical teens delay their “debut” 18 months longer to age 16.  This combined with the push for abstinence-only education leads to evangelical teens not knowing how to effectively use contraception.  As a result, groups which have high abstinence-only pledge rates (read evangelical teen groups) also have higher rates of STDs and unwanted pregnancies (source).  All of this leads to the conclusion that sexual education should be an important part of any teen’s upbringing.

A second strand in this discussion is the reaction on failure.  While many would believe that a family which pushes for abstinence-only would be devastated when a teen revealed her being pregnant, the opposite is the case.  Most evangelical families are nonchalant on hearing this news.  This eventually leads to early marriage, divorce, and other “dysfunctional” dynamics which society–particularly socially conservative society–abhors.  In othe words, conservative evangelicals tend to breed an environment which fosters the very things they abhor.