Do Preachers protect their congregations from the hard sayings of the Bible while trying to convince those same congregations that all of Scripture is the “Word of God”?
If you read my review of Mark Roncace’s book Raw Revelation: The Bible They Never Tell You About you would have seen this quotation (from pg. 4):
“The raw Bible is just too hard to swallow, or at least that is what preachers think. So they cook the Good Book. They butter it up and water it down to suite our tastes. They distill the Scripture, filtering out the unsightly and unpalatable passages. Just as processed and packaged foods are barely reminiscent of what first comes out of the ground or from the animal (think mac and cheese or hot dogs), so too the clean, attractive Bible that they present in church is a far cry from the real thing. Like parents who don’t feed their children peas and carrots because they fear the kids won’t like the vegetables, or worse, won’t like mom and dad, so too preachers give us, the children of God, a candy and cookie Scripture because they want us to be happy and them to be liked. Consequently, we aren’t properly nourished.”
In his book Roncace lambastes Preachers of all stripes (pg. 5): “…fundamentalists, evangelicals, Pentecostals, main stream moderates, left wing liberals, emergent church pastors, prosperity preachers, mega-church celebrities, mini-church part-timers, and the list goes on and one.” He says that these Preachers know about the problematic passages of Scripture, but refuse to preach them.
I have been in circles where this is not true. I have heard Preachers proclaim troublesome texts with boldness and without shame. Roncace’s observation is true in general though. He uses a very good example citing how many people quote Jeremiah 29:11, “‘For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.’” Yet most Preachers won’t apply Ezekiel 5:8 the same way: “Behold, I, even I, am against you, and I will execute judgments among you in the sight of the nations.”
For Preachers who choose their texts, who do not follow a guided Lectionary, should there be more attention given to the uncomfortable texts of the Bible on Sunday? Should passages about genocide, rape, abuse, or the invasion of foreign armies be proclaimed as often as the more pleasant passages, or at least as often?
February 10, 2013 at 8:15 am
This video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGx7q4O6w2w tells you how Valentine was worried with Claudius ruling over marriage banning, in a good way.
February 10, 2013 at 10:03 am
I totally agree with this premise. All too often we are enamored with what will “preach” and what we are familiar with rather than venture into the less traveled and less charismatic parts of the Bible.
February 10, 2013 at 10:04 am
As a one-word answer, I’d say yes, but with a big “however”. That would be that they also wrestle deeply, personally and then “in public” about the nature, purposes, etc. of Scripture. I don’t think Christianity has done a whole lot better, e.g., than Islam has in being able to help the religion as a whole (or its center of gravity) move beyond the baser, more competitive/violent aspects (or stages) it has had. In general, the more literalist and “inspired from above” viewpoint, the more difficult to make sense of biblical violence, ethnocentrism, etc. in relation to the nature of God which is supposedly (i.e., also to literalists) both righteous AND full of love, grace.
February 10, 2013 at 10:07 am
On Facebook a pastor I know made these observations worth considering:
(1) “I’ve of course run into this while preaching myself. Chapter by chapter through the Hebrew Bible is a preaching challenge. However, sometimes, not preaching on a text is not about hiding anything, it is about safety. For the sake of kids and those who might be traumatized by certain passages, I feel it is better to tackle some parts of scripture in a smaller, more intimate setting, where attention can be given where its needed.”
AND
(2) “All scripture might be useful, but all scripture doesn’t have to be used in the same way. i would hate to have to preach the Levite’s concubine while kids or survivors of abuse are in the audience.”
February 10, 2013 at 10:11 am
Also, for sake of discussion, I want to ask “why” we should preach these texts as all equal in light of (1) some concept of a “Rule of Faith” that agrees there is a “Christian” understanding of God that may not always jive with the Bible and (2) if we deny this “Rule of Faith” why do we affirm the canon that formed alongside it?
February 10, 2013 at 10:22 am
Howard
I agree, but I think part of the problem for many is how do we develop a methodology for sorting out what stories in the Bible should be reconsidered and what stories should be embraced. Some say we should embrace them all. Others say that there are stories that reflect God “better”, but how do we know this? Roncace would say that there aren’t stories that reflect God better because God is evolving himself. The same God who commands the genocide of the Book of Joshua demands that we care for orphans and widows because it is the right thing to do. Some passages may appears easily dividable, but others not so much.
February 10, 2013 at 12:42 pm
In order to answer this question I believe we must begin with, “What is the purpose of the sermon?” Until we answer this I don’t think we can arrive at an answer to your question. As a pastor I have worked in 3 different churches, two Pentecostal Churches that would pick and chose passages based on the liturgical season or on whatever they felt needed to be spoken on, and now in a United Methodist church that follows the Lectionary. These times have helped me to understand that the purpose of the sermon, no matter how the text is chosen at first, either personally or through a Lectionary. Even in the Lectionary we still pick the text, like I mostly pick the Gospel readings and the Pastor usually picks Pauline Texts.
I believe the purpose of the sermon is to grow, challenge, encourage and ultimately invite the congregation into the larger narrative of the Scriptures so that they might be transformed by their participation in the story. As pastors I believe we are to help bring the world of the text to the people by illuminating the relevant information that would make it come alive to them, so that through their new understanding they would be challenged to then go out into the world and be agents of change and transformation.
So should we serve these texts on a Sunday Morning? Sure, but not as sushi! We can not ignore them because they are apart of the narrative and some parts are more jagged than others. So as pastors we have to guide our people through these difficult texts and help them to appreciate the whole council of scripture. But when you only have 30 minutes once a week there are a lot of other things that you want to be talking about to help your people. So I would suggest moving forward that these texts need to be cooked, maybe seared, in order to help make them palatable. Perhaps moving forward we can stew them together with other passages in order to help the digestion process. (Okay I am done with the cooking metaphors) Does that mean that I am going to smooth out some of the difficult parts? Maybe, but I don’t think cognitive dissonance is for Sunday Mornings.
February 10, 2013 at 6:35 pm
Indeed, Brian (as to your response of 10:22 a.m.), developing “a methodology for sorting out what stories…” is a core issue. It is not easy from ANY major paradigm of theology and understanding of the nature of Scripture (including my favored Process one, or related Progressive ones). While traditionalists would probably protest this, I believe that all of us, including them, end up relying on certain intuitive (perhaps being “general revelation”) and universal (or nearly so) moral judgments, at least for the large strokes of creating such a methodology. If anyone tries to do it exclusively from within Scripture itself, don’t they succumb to the error of circular reasoning?
February 10, 2013 at 6:49 pm
I think pastor’s should teach their congregations hermeneutics from the pulpit; that way when engaging these hard texts people will have resource to fall back in when confronted with the raw nature of scripture. This, of course, presupposes that said pastors understand what hermeneutics are in the first place.
February 10, 2013 at 6:53 pm
Bobby
I can see your perspective here. I think that ultimately, if I were guiding a Church, I would seek to make Sunday a time when the Triune God is worshipped. This means glorifying God the Father, exalting the person of Christ, and experiencing the Spirit. That doesn’t exclude the possibility of dealing with difficult texts, but as you noted, with time limitations, it may mean being selective. I think there are other avenues for dealing with tricky passages.
Howard
Of course, if we resort to so-called “intuitive and universal” moral judgments we run into the wall of reality, which tells us (especially in this age of globalization) that the idea of intuitive and universal is mythological. If things were intuitive we would debate the limits of war, or whether governments should enact a death penalty, or the role of women in society and religious groups, or the morality of homosexuality, or whether there is a stage when aborting a fetus is murder. Now, Scripture doesn’t give us black-and-white answers either, but I think it is very hard to prove that outside Scripture humans “just get it” if we’d look into our hearts.
Patristic authors seemed to affirm the validity of the Old Covenant Law, noting that some stipulations for worship were given to prevent Israel from idolatry (sacrificial system, Sabbaths), others were given because of the hardness of people’s hearts (i.e., the condescending of God, seen in God providing room for divorce under the Law), and then there were “natural precepts” like not murdering, not stealing, not committing idolatry, that some people knew, even outside Israel, because the Logos (Word, preincarnate Christ) went into the world teaching them. SO there is a sense that within the Christian tradition we may speak of some sort of “natural Law”, but I think it remains complicated.
February 10, 2013 at 6:54 pm
Bobby G.
…or that our hermeneutics “work”, which isn’t always the case without begging the question, at least in many evangelical circles.
February 10, 2013 at 6:56 pm
I think that we also must come to terms with an ontology of scripture; which must take shape with from the realization that scripture is not an end in itself (just as creation in general isn’t). If scripture’s instrumental nature is emphasized, and its proper orientation pressed (Jesus Jn 5.39); then we indeed will have a properly shaped, and genuinely Christian hermeneutic when engaging tough texts of scripture. I don’t think this is annexing scripture or placing it into a competitive relationship between two canons (i.e. scripture versus God in Christ or something); but it is understanding scripture in a non-dualist way, and allowing that reality to shape our heremeneutics. So a concrete example of this (or maybe just a suggestion which opens up room for more discussion), is that we must engage the passages of scripture that deal with genocide, rape and other ethical dilemmas, through a cruciform hermeneutic that never attempts to address these kinds of passages but through redressing them with the reality of God’s love demonstrated at the cross; and to understand this cruciform shape as the lens through which these hard passages can make sense vis-a-vis the Christian God (with a continuity between the God of both testaments).
February 10, 2013 at 7:03 pm
Bobby G
I think this Christocentric/Cruciform hermeneutic has much potential. I’d like to think about how it might be “fleshed out”. I know theologians like Origen would say that when we come across something disturbing like the genocide of the Book of Joshua that seems to teach us something contrary about God to what is revealed in Christ we should stop and seek to “deeper meaning”, the “spiritual” meaning.
Do we go that direction? Do we read the genocide as not literal, but figurative of God’s defeat of Satan at the cross, or something like this?
OR
Do we go the direction of some evangelicals: this genocide isn’t permission for genocide in general, but it portrays a unique point, canonically, that to preserve Israel, the people that would bring the world Messiah, the Canaanites had to be purged, because God knew something in his foreknowledge that if we knew we’d agree with his command?
OR
Something else?
February 10, 2013 at 10:09 pm
Well, not even the easy texts are taught, so why think the hard ones would be? Most Christian pastorss will expound on nine of the ten commandments while glossing over the clear Word of God regarding the Sabbath.
To answer the question, yes, I think all scripture should be taught, not just convenient scripture. People in the pews are generally a lot smarter than some pastors give them credit.
February 10, 2013 at 11:17 pm
Brian,
I read the genocides as literal, I don’t see any reason not to other than the ethical problems they have the potential to cause for us. In my nascent thinking about a cruciform herm. I am thinking more in terms of engaging these texts with the notion that God is not a God who is far away but present (even in the prefigural in the history of Israel–to the incarnation) even in the midst of the grossest kind of judgment of sin. I think the OT genocides, for example, ought to serve to amplify the breadth and depth of what Christ absorbed for us (including the Philistines/Canaanites) in his life before the Father at the cross. So we don’t read the genocide’s as incidental to who God is, but instead as refractory events that only take on total clarity as we understand that death (sin) is not the last word of God, but the death of death which is swallowed up by the life of God in Christ is. I find it strange that we so often balk at the genocides of the OT as if these are more atrocious events than God incarnate dying like an innocent lamb led to slaughter for all of us.
Maybe a spiritual/theological gloss (while not eliding the literal) could be that Israel as the son of Yahweh (as they are referenced as in the OT, I’ll have to find that reference) could, again, be understood as God’s assault on sin (these corrupt nations) through the sullen and vexed humanity of his own covenant people (which would typological find referent in the anti-typical reality revealed in Jesus Christ who assumed a ‘fallen humanity’). So Israel then, theologically could (should) be associated with the dialectic of God’s judgment, while the church with God’s grace and mercy (all bound up, ultimately in the person of Jesus Christ for us)–and both realities could be present for Jews or Gentiles at one level of intensity or another (I mean both God’s grace/mercy and judgment all at once). If you indulge me (and I say this because this comment is going to be long … longer than I usually like reading at my own blog
), here is George Hunsinger’s commentary on Barth’s hermeneutic that might fit with an approach I am suggesting:
So my approach would be a Christian theological exegetical exercise, but one that is also sensitive, at some level, to an Evangelical approach as well. But I would, un-like Evangelical exegesis (with its tetheredness to the LGH etc.), would want to understand God’s ultimate purpose in Christ as the control and condition by which I read these problematic texts in a way that could never be understood if it were to ruptured from the person and work of Jesus Christ as the orientation of all of creation (over death through His life and the recreation of creation through the triumph of the resurrection-ascension-and consummation).
At the end I would qualify this, once again, by asserting; that if we can somehow presume that a genocide in the OT is greater than the genocide that happened in God’s own life in Christ on the cross, then this hermeneutic I am suggesting will never work.
February 11, 2013 at 10:12 am
Rick
I wonder how the Gospel’s depictions of Jesus definition of Sabbath, and Paul’s apostolic guidance as regards Sabbath in the Gentile world, factor into the “nine of ten commandments” preaching.
Bobby
I think, in part, we struggle with the genocides over against the crucifixion of the Son of God, not because one is “worse” than the other, but because it can be difficult to understand God as the same God who willingly gives of himself, unto death, for us, yet who can command our death, especially the death of innocent children, or the helpless women of ancient societies. This is something of a struggle in early Christianity. Marcion’s assertion that the OT God isn’t the Father of Jesus, but a divine Despot ruler from whom Christ saves us, shows that quite early there were people wrestling with how the God of the Book of Joshua could be the God of Jesus.
It seems that you are willing to give some nod of the head to Origen’s solution, but not quite ready to deny the historicity of Israel’s invasion of the land. I can understand that. It seems overtly apologetic to wipe away Israel’s invasion in favor of a merely spiritualized solution. Does the solution you present tie closely to the second one I proposed, namely, God’s plan to rescue humanity demanded the survival of his people, who would bring forth Christ, and because Christ is central to this story, the genocide is necessary?
February 11, 2013 at 10:50 am
Jesus and Paul observed the Sabbath. Regarding Jesus, there were degrees of difference with authorities (who put varying fences/eruvim on Torah) on what could and could not be done, but they all referred to the seventh-day Sabbath. Paul’s teachings and language were complex, and therefore let people come to differing conclusions whether the entirety of God’s Law applies to Christians, which parts of it do and do not apply, what Paul rails against, etc. Unfortunately Paul can be who people want him to be and to have said what people want him to have said. I tend to keep Paul at arm’s length, but the New Perspective on Paul challenges old assumptions articulately.
February 11, 2013 at 10:53 am
It is quite evident that Jesus obeyed the Sabbath, though some of his contemporaries challenged this, apparently. I think Paul obeyed the Sabbath as well, though it is impossible to tell how stringently. I agree that the NPP has forced us to revisit Paul’s relationship to the Law, even the Sabbath, but it does seem that Paul didn’t require Sabbath observance for Gentiles.
February 11, 2013 at 11:09 am
Dr. Leander Keck, of Disciple Bible Study fame, characterized Paul as truly believing in the imminency of the Second Coming, and given that, temporary shortcuts to facilitate all believers coming into the faith was OK.
February 11, 2013 at 11:17 am
That could explain it, though it would need to be unpacked more. Why the Sabbath, but not this or that? Did his eschatological views lead him to interpret the Law as being necessary where it is centrally moral (e.g., no adultery, theft, idolatry)? If so, what does this say about his basic understanding of the Law?
February 11, 2013 at 11:22 am
The woman who preached at my church a few weeks ago briefly discussed Psalm 137, though it wasn’t the primary text. I’d say there may be times to talk about some of these passages on Sunday sermons, but it shouldn’t be the focus of a sermon. Churches should ready to address these things in adult education classes though – if you do a class on the Psalms, you’d better spend a lot of time on the nasty ones and not just ignore or glibly rush through them. I’m suspicious of any easy and dismissive answer for Joshua, parts of Judges, Psalm 137, etc., whether it’s from a conservative or liberal perspective.
I may post a bit on Joshua later.
February 11, 2013 at 11:29 am
We’re talking about Biblical texts here, but I know one preacher who felt he could not teach what he leaned in seminary because the congregation was too “iggnerrnt” (I can still hear him saying that). Could the same elitism apply to some not teaching hard texts?
February 11, 2013 at 11:52 am
Elitism could be part of the problem, but I think many pastors have had experiences where after preaching difficult texts many congregants reacted negatively, usually out of unfamiliarity with those texts.
February 11, 2013 at 1:55 pm
Brian,
I wouldn’t say OT genocide is necessary or the cause or what initiates God’s salvation in Christ (that would be God’s life of Triune love and creative grace); but that the type of judgment reflected in the judgment of sin (that occurred in the genocide) is motivated by God’s (ultimate) love and not gratuitous wrath. And so who God has revealed himself to be in Christ (at the cross in particular), must condition how I understand what happened in the OT in continuity with who God ultimately is. So I walk by faith, not rationalist certitude and explanation. And what informs faith flows from the blood of Christ slain for all.
I don’t follow the preservation (of Israel for the Messiah) argument that you sketched (meaning I don’t own that as my own approach). I am willing to live with some problems and travail I guess you could say.
February 12, 2013 at 12:09 pm
Brian asks “.. “why” we should preach these texts as all equal in light of (1) some concept of a “Rule of Faith” that agrees there is a “Christian” understanding of God that may not always jive with the Bible and (2) if we deny this “Rule of Faith” why do we affirm the canon that formed alongside it?”
Notwithstanding the theological arguments ([2 Tim 3:16]) there are methodological reasons. The fallacy of ‘Hasty generalization occurs when we reach inductive generalizations based upon insufficient evidence and base conclusions on evidence without considering all of the variables.
Consider the counter-arguments I make about the doctrines of ‘Gentiles’ and linguistic meaning of ‘ἔθνος‘; or the ones I make questioning theology of ‘Church’ also based upon the suggestion this doctrine of based upon hasty generalizations built up from misuse in translation of the word ‘ἐκκλησία‘. A simple word comparison with how those words are used in the OT Greek against their underlying Hebrew shows that there are NT Christian doctrines built up from fallacious thinking.
Another argument I’ve made previously is about the nature of the entire bible. It makes complete sense to gauge doctrine against the entire bible, and to see both covenants within a framework of whole scripture progressive continuous synergistic revelation (without shade or variation).
Another observation I’ve made about seeing the entire doctrine of the bible is based upon what doctrine the bible itself contains as milestones for what the bible sees as important, saying:
“*Of the Bible’s 31124 or so verses, approximately 23210 of those verses are OT. Though 74.57% of the Bible is OT there are Christians and Christian ministers alike who publicly argue the OT is obsolete, not necessary; despite [2 Timothy 3:16]. Although the OT points to Christ, its purpose is greater than even this (single point).”
and:
“*Of the Bible’s 31124 or so verses, approximately 6641 OT verses, and 1711 NT verses are predictive or prophetic. In total, 8352 of the Bibles verses are predicative or prophetic, which is just under 27% and yet Christians and Christian ministers alike often shrug off or write off prophecy as unknowable and uncertain.”
The OT constitutes 74.57% of the entire bible – yet there are Christians’ not studying it (to understand). Think they are missing anything perhaps? Nearly 1/3 of the bible is prophetic, so isn’t biblical history and metaphorical vocabulary of prophecy somewhat important? Even if we can’t agree on prophetic fulfilment we can have meaningful discussions about bible history. If the bible interprets the bible we can also have meaningful discussions on what symbols represent.
Even difficult texts provide topology to the landscape of doctrine we credit to God (and His inspiration). It’s like claiming to be a geologists, but only ever having studied one’s back-yard.