Wrong Question

The starting point is me. The substance of my authority is the a witness from the Holy Spirit. If He does not support my teaching by a witness in your spirit, then there's nothing to discuss.

I do my best work when people ask questions, because the Lord uses them to reveal understandings which lie hidden in the the store of information I've already absorbed in my 50 years of living, 41 of them under His calling. Even the wrong question is instructive. While I bluntly chided my friend Tim on the basic question of the proper view of Scripture, the question is actually very interesting. My brief rejection of the question is hardly the end of the matter.

I still use the phrase "infallibility of the Bible" for my Western/worldly minded brothers and sisters, but I'd much rather they know I think the question itself is silly. The reason I still use the phrase is because my assumptions in practice are no different from what it implies. I do not question the Word, but I will question my understanding of it, as well as just about anybody else's understanding, at times. In my mind, all discrepancies and inaccuracies are merely apparent. Sure, I even embrace the necessity of there having been transmission errors, too. I do make a bit of the question of original documents, because that is the one thing worth fighting for, in my opinion. In so doing, I am utterly certain it reflects the cultural understanding from the which the Bible was born.

That, of course, is my standard battle cry. Until we make a reasonable effort to read the Bible through Hebrew eyes, we aren't going to understand it properly. I agree with Barth about one thing: All our mutterings about faith must remain anchored in Christ. Since He's not around in the flesh these days, I tend to think in terms of the Holy Spirit. While this puts me at risk of endless arguments from those (mostly Charismatics) who feel they own that territory, I still prefer to talk about a Spirit-centered study of God and His Book. As long as we all understand I mean by that something mostly different from the mumbo-jumbo hucksterism of TV and radio fame, we might get somewhere. Thus, I don't so much embrace Eastern versus Western as I do Spiritual versus worldly. That these two greatly overlap respectively requires I mention the difference in passing. Another significant point is this Eastern/Hebraic/Spiritual viewpoint is not what most Jews held at any given time, given the long record of prophets pointing out that very problem. However, it was the thing to which they were called to aspire.

I reject Barth's massive repetoire not because I'm too lazy to read it, but because I've read too much of it already. He and nearly all theologians since about 400AD had bought into a mental framework different from that of Scripture. It's not just the tools of logic -- deductive versus inductive, etc. -- it's a whole raft of assumptions. They kept straying into the stratosphere of human reasoning, and lost contact with the ground of God's command to live the Gospel. While Tim has already argued Barth and some of his friends really did have a practical message from all this, I contend they wasted an awful lot of time and energy getting there. To the degree they did any good, they could have gotten there a lot sooner. As it is, most of them missed the point on far too many applications.

The starting point is me. If it's you doing the writing, then the starting point is you. I would say it's really the Holy Spirit, but that gives too many excuses for climbing the lofty heights of mental struggles. Nice view, but it's a vacation from reality. Get back to work. It's starts from you and me. Since I'm writing, it's me. The substance of my authority is the a witness from the Holy Spirit. If He does not support my teaching by a witness in your spirit, then there's nothing to discuss. "There's nothing to see here folks. Move along," is the favorite put-down on Slashdot when someone posts an article stating the obvious. In an effort to win His stamp of approval, I have to invest my self, as in Galatians 2:20, into the effort to understand well enough to have something to share. On top of that, I have to be goaded into teaching by His calling on my life. If what you read causes you to believe He wants to use me to teach you something, then my authority is established.

That's the starting point. It carries a distinctly Spiritual assumption which is quite hard to put into words as a simple proposition. The very idea we can accomplish much in propositional language is foreign to Scripture. The prime example is Jesus teaching in parables. His point was to exclude those whom His Father had not drawn. Truth polarizes, because those who don't get it aren't supposed to, and those who do probably can't tell you in words just what they get. Tim approaches this via deconstructionism, but I contend that's taking the long way around. If you approach the Bible from a spiritual viewpoint, you realize it says this via using it as a basic assumption. So I start from the point of trusting God to make His Word in my mouth (or keyboard) useful to His people.

Others aren't supposed to get it, especially those in whom the Holy Spirit does not dwell. All the mighty struggle of great minds to make it palatable to those outside is wasted effort, in a sense. Indeed, it's a form of disobedience. Our mission is quite simple: Speak the truth of God, all the more so by living it. All the rest is His business. Whether the audience is lost, saved or some mixture, it's the same. If someone doesn't get it, that's not your problem. Stop trying to make them get it; that's the Holy Spirit's prerogative, and you aren't Him.

If the audience is culturally, geographically and historically far away from Jesus' fresh footprints in the sand, then it's yours to also bring them to that understanding, place and time. As some put it, we are to incarnate the Word, bring it/Him to life. Absolutes were never possible from the moment of the Fall, so don't fret. God expects obedience. Surely that assumes what He expects of you He will put within your reach? What other purpose is there for calling you into His Kingdom? Theology from a Spiritual viewpoint embraces your best understanding of what Old and New Testaments testified. The leg up you need from those who trod the path before is the method chosen by God to propagate His message. Questions about whom you trust to get that leg up is between you and God, but if you ask me, Barth and his ilk are a waste of time. If you go off chasing rabbits about whether the Word is infallible, you have strayed from the path of the Great Commission. That's also true of questions born from a corrupted understanding which assumes the human rational mind has any great part in it.

The only point in studying Barth and friends it to realize how wrong they were. Struggling with questions not answered in Scripture is asking the wrong questions. To the degree anyone today actually thinks like Barth, we see how much work we have to do getting people to adopt the Spiritual Mind.