A Recent Day in our Kitchen

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Thursday, January 20, 2022

How to Stop Using the Bible (and let it start using you)

“What is worse, speculation refers to something said elsewhere in another time and place to which one is ordered to submit” (Luther’s Outlaw God, Vol. 1:  Hiddenness, Evil and Predestination, Steven Paulson, 2018, p. 100)

When we read the quotes of others, their wisdom on life, we engage them as something we are to take and do something with, something we are to use to gain agency or position up against what is possible (possibility is the modality, not necessity). The things that are said are something for us to “understand,” stand under, as in submit to as authoritative for us to accept (or reject) and use (or not use) to move us forward in our quest for completion of the law (law = whatever demand(s) is held over us, whether self-imposed or otherwise). What’s important for us in life is to get things right. This assumes that there is such a thing as “the correct, “the right,” a law, the law, that should be if not more accurately said, must be, fulfilled, completed. 

We normally read and use Scripture in this fashion. It is a compilation of accounts and stories that we are to use in order to get things right. What matters to us is getting things right (again, this is what it means to live by and with the infrastructure of the law). 

All of this pertains to what Luther was explaining to Erasmus in the Bondage of the Will (1525). Erasmus insisted that Scripture was obscure and needed to be understood (and one could only go so far in that understanding until things “were above us” and not for us to know). Luther insisted that Scripture was as plain as day and simply needed to be heard. The difference was in the seeing how God lives, operates in relationship to creation. For Erasmus, God lives in the modality of possibility within space and time. There is this understanding of life with God, relation to God, that is expressed in the modalities, the ways of communicating/relating from life in relationship to time: possibility, contingency and necessity. Erasmus saw the true nature of the relationship to be possibility because God would not have given the law, the commands, without the expectation that they be enacted, obeyed, completed. Luther saw that true nature as “necessity,” but bridled under that philosophical term because what he was describing of God’s foreknowledge and determination was a “necessity” that did not act within a legal superstructure. It was a necessity that was outside of the Law altogether. Life was (is) not about getting it right, and finding ways to do that with some combination of strengths, agencies, from persons (what is our responsibility) and God (what is God’s responsibility). For Luther, necessity operated out of the Promise of God to and for us because that is who and what God is. God is unmerited mercy. God has laws to give (with a  2-fold purpose: civil order and pressing us toward the mercy) but God is not the Law. 

Thus, the stories of the Scripture are not to be used by us to figure out how to get life right. They are the story of God and how God’s mercy will not be denied. Not about how we are to work to get things right but about how God works to get things right: that “rightness” being where there is no meritorious relationship, there is no “righteousness” save for the righteousness of God (Luther in the Hiedelberg Disputation: “We are not loved because we are lovely. We are lovely because we are loved”). The gospel, good news, is not then about how God fixes us so we can now get things right (or has made us right by Godself in relation to the Law), but that there is no law that requires in the first place that we get things right. Christ, God enfleshed so as to make no mistake about it, is the end of the law. 

Christ fulfills the law (Jesus: “I have come not to abolish, but to fulfill the law”) by demolishing its use as a tool for relationship to God [when Jesus says he isn’t going to “abolish” what he means is that the law’s purpose of civil order and spiritual pressure bringing us to confession of our total reliance on God still stand, still are viable [the Lutheran tribe of Christianity’s Book of Concord’s (1580), and still the working confessional documents today) so-called “civil use” and “theological use]. What Jesus is doing in “fulfilling’ the law is demolishing its “third use, “ the way of using the law to make good with God. Of course, Jesus had no familiarity or use for the later developed theologies about the law that I am talking about here. He did not think (I’m pretty sure of it!) “hey, I’m going to demolish the third use of the law. Watch me.” No, it was simply that the legal standard of the Torah that he and his religious contemporaries knew so well was not about a standard for a standing with God. His arguments, for example, about how we are not to worry about life, look at how the flowers in the field and the birds of the air have no cares….why would you worry?, are all about seeing the relationship to God as a given, a gift. 

The Bible, the Scripture, then is not then a book for us to use to understand God, but rather is a book God uses to understand us. 

We don’t figure out obscurities in the narrative. The narrative is as plain as day. We may not be comfortable with it, but there it is (e.g. Exodus 4 where God is the assassin, Job, where God sets Satan loose on Job, 1 Samuel 2 where God kills, passim, and even this one: Romans 1 where homosexuality is called a sin. Now on that one, the homosexual one, there is a lot to say, but I’ll just say this: I think Paul’s words on that in Romans 1 are just wrong, in that they are culture bound and lack the knowledge of science. I am not a Biblicist, I am a Jesus follower and I think Paul got following Jesus wrong on the homosexuality question. That being said, the text itself is as plain as day. Paul says homosexuality is a sin. I’m not going to say he didn’t say that. I’m going to say he is wrong based on my take on the science of today and the unconditional hospitality of Jesus).

God who creates also redeems and also sustains, all.  And this God will not be denied, not even by our denial.

The Bible is a strange book for us not because it has ancient incantations that are culturally anachronistic  but because it speaks a language where God does all things in relationship to us and we do nothing in relationship to God. This language is just not natural for us. In fact, and here’s the sin of it all, in it all, we object to it because we no longer are the operative player. We are benched by God in the game of salvation.

But, miracle of miracles, even our objection is overruled because it cannot be otherwise. It is of necessity. Since God is God and God is Mercy, there simply will be nothing than complete and utter mercy, in all space and time. End of story. Beginning of life!