Wright is careful in his examination of this question. For him
respecting the authority of scripture is not about saying “Well, we
just believe the bible and so we must of course be respecting it’s authority.” A
statement like this is too easy because a person might possibly
believe the bible in any number of ways, many of which might actually
fail to respect it’s structure (which is key for him) or do injustice to its core message, let alone honor
what the phrase “the authority of scripture” is really shorthand for.

What does that phrase make you think of? What does it mean to you when you think
about honoring the authority of scripture? As you think about your
response, consider what I read when I first began studying this
subject on my own as a new Christian, 25 years ago. The bottom line of
that research endeavor can be summed up in this equation:

No errors (scientific + theological + historical) + trustworthy
manuscripts = authoritative scripture

In other words, I learned that one could trust the bible – that the
bible was authoritative in the Christian’s life – because the copies
we had accurately represented the original documents and because the
original documents were without error of any kind.

That worked for me for a few years but eventually came crumbling down.
For starters, our copies aren’t perfect.  Just go to your bible and
read the last chapter of Mark and you’ll see that there is a debate as
to which copies to use for the end of his gospel. Beyond this, pick up
a Greek New Testament like the NA27, look at the associated apparatus, and you’ll see that there are
(mostly) minor manuscript alternatives (i.e. textual variants) on every page.
Upon discovering such things I no longer had confidence that our
copies were perfect. As a result, there began an erosion of the authority of the
bible in my mind about 20 years ago. In retrospect, this wasn’t because something authoritative was altogether absent, rather, it was that I was looking for authority in the wrong place.

There was, of course, a way forward for me or I wouldn’t be a pastor now. The solution came to me slowly, over the
course of a few years, and once it did I would never think of
scripture in the same way, let alone ever be the same person.

What happened? To summarize a long story, I transitioned from faith in the bible (e.g., “I can trust the bible because some equation holds”) to faith in God.
To put it more precisely, I came to believe that the Lord was able to
speak to his people through his scripture even if the bible we had in hand wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t the bible that spoke, it was Him, through the bible!

As I would read in Wright’s book 20+ years later,

…the phrase ‘the authority of scripture’ can make Christian sense only if it is shorthand for ‘the authority of the triune God, exercised somehow through scripture… All authority is from God… scripture itself points away from itself and to the fact that final and true authority belongs to God. (p. 21)

What this means to Wright, and how it worked out in actuality in my life, is that we must see

the role of scripture not simply as being to provide true information about, or even an accurate running commentary upon, the work of God in salvation and new creation, but as taking part within that ongoing purpose… Scripture is a means of God’s action in and through us – which will include, but go far beyond, the mere conveying of information… God is continually revealing himself… (p. 27)

Here’s the point of all this: God speaks! Notice the tense there. He speaks today. It strikes me that the equation on which I relied two decades ago was an attempt to prove that God once spoke (notice the tense!) and that we had a reliable record of that. I have no such need to prove that God spoke yesterday (though I do, without question, believe that he did) because God speaks to me through his word today! As he speaks to me through scripture, he nurtures my growth, challenges my bent heart and mind, convicts me of my need for Christ, and comforts me with his undeniable love.

I’ve got some more thoughts on this topic, but that will suffice for now. In my next post I’ll be highlighting Wright’s thoughts on how to read this bible through which God speaks to us today.

Traveling with you,
Reed

Hebrews 1:1-2 in Greek with English interlinear from NA26

The typical ‘pro-life’ response to this question is something akin to saying (yes, I present it as a caricature here) “Don’t have an abortion now that you’re pregnant because two wrongs don’t make a right.”

This (somewhat callous) response is natural if one is working from the typical argument that the embryo or fetus is a person and shouldn’t be terminated as a result because they are a) innocent and b) have rights. I talked a lot about why I think this isn’t the foundational line of thinking we Christians should hold to, as a people called to faith, on the abortion issue. That goes for the issue in general, as discussed in my message over the weekend and in my post the other day, as well as for the issue in this specific context. Yet others, who are to be respected, make this a chief line of argumentation. This is understandable and works better in secular debate but misses (I think) the very gift we must offer women facing this circumstance. It also misses the best of what we are called to as a people of faith.

The gift we have to offer – a great gift indeed – is best seen in retrospect. Not a retrospective look at how this has played out in any woman’s life but rather how it worked out in one man’s life. This man, who was a few years younger than me, was brutally tortured and then unjustly executed. To say that he was unjustly executed is an understatement; he was completely innocent of the crimes of which he was accused. Yet this man, while being tortured, held no anger in his heart against his torturers, but rather, sought their good. Of course I’m talking about Jesus, crucified on a cross.

To be tortured on the cross was an unimaginable horror and yet, because of his trust in our Father, Jesus endured it and remarkable things happened as a result. The bible says that we were redeemed (Romans 3:23-25) because Jesus refused to cut short our Father’s redemptive plan (Matthew 26:39; Romans 3:26). Not only that, but all of creation was redeemed because Jesus refused to go his own way (Colossians 1:20). And in a remarkable turn, even the very image of injustice itself – the cross – was redeemed from being a symbol of oppression, injustice, and pain and was transformed into the very picture of hope, justice, and salvation for billions of souls. All this happened through as Jesus trusted in His Father’s power and love. Jesus endured that cross because of the hope and joy set before him – the hope of a redeeming Father on the other side (Hebrews 12:2).

The gift that we have to offer any woman facing this situation is this hope. Hope in the redemptive power of our God beyond any circumstance, beyond any cross, beyond any wrong even rape or incest. The gift that we have to offer – and which we must offer – is hope in the God who can bring good into the world and into our lives even beyond a terrible evil that has occurred. I have read of women for whom such redemption has occurred either through the blessing their child became to them personally or to others through adoption. Perhaps this is the healing they needed, not the healing of forgetting the past, but the healing that comes as God changes the meaning of the past by working in the present to bring good from evil.

As the people of Christ, we are not about what people shouldn’t do but rather about the fact that there is good news to be found in Jesus. To offer only the former or even mostly the former is to fail in our call to be a blessing in our world. And the good news is that we know a God who redeems not only individuals but the broken pieces of our history, corporate and individual. It is to this God that we must point everyone. It is to this loving God which we must especially point those who’ve been trampled under by the feet of injustice. And then, in reflection of this redeeming God we must love those in need as he loves them, with a radical, self-sacrificing, healing love, expressed daily on behalf of another.

There is no easy answer here. But the answer we have to give – Christ and the healing that comes through faith and trust in him even in this – we must give. To anything less is to cheat another human being from the hope we find so transforming.

As it stands in our society the debate is really about personal rights. The two key words there are “personal” and “rights.” That is, persons are deemed to have rights under our constitution. The abortion debate, in taking up this concept, focuses on two main issues in response:

• When does a person become a person (people vary in their answers) because only persons have rights?
• When two person’s rights conflict, who’s rights trump the other’s?

These are the questions – as I understand it – that Roe v. Wade deals with. And they are fine, I suppose, from a secular perspective. But they don’t reflect the foundational biblical lens through which I believe we should be looking as we seek to navigate this issue faithfully.

In the first place, the question of when a person becomes a person has been answered differently by faithful Christians down through history. This is not because some people are shying away from the bible while others are holding to it, but rather because the biblical evidence on the issue of when exactly “personhood” begins is open to several valid lines of interpretation. Pillars like St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas all thought that “ensoulment,” or what we might today call ‘personhood,’ began at varying points after conception (here’s an adequate and readily accessible overview). We will never, this side of heaven, come to unanimity on when personhood begins. Besides, whether or not a wombed child is a person isn’t the most basic question, here, from a Christian’s viewpoint. I don’t believe that abortion is wrong on the basis that it is the killing of a person. Yep, you read that correctly (reread it carefully and notice that I don’t say that it is right to kill a person at any stage of development; rather, I said that there is another more foundational reason that abortion is called a sin down through church history). More on that in a moment.

But first, my second point is that as Christians we should really reconsider whether we really have ‘rights’ to do anything we want or not. While our government grants rights to us as its citizens the case can be made that Christians have willingly given up their own rights and instead have committed to following Jesus’ lead in every aspect of our life, which includes how they use their bodies (e.g., see 1 Corinthians 6:13 with regard to sexuality and Philippians 1:20 with regard to life and death and everything in between). More radically, a case has been made by Stanley Hauerwas that as Christians it is not only Christ who has a say with what we do with our bodies, but other Christians as well (note: while I bristle at his language about the non-sacredness of life, I recommend this though-provoking article based upon a talk Hauerwas gave to his denominational leaders about abortion… it challenged, and shaped, my thinking on this issue).

In light of this, I am pro-choice: every Christian has choice as to whether or not they will give to Christ his choice over how they use their body. Do we always? Certainly not, but this is the ideal.  Which gets us closer to the foundational reason why I believe abortion to be wrong.

So what is wrong with abortion? Two things, I think.

Foundationally, I believe abortion to be wrong because we are not, by making that choice, acting in faith: we are not trusting that God is at work in every pregnancy (not that he caused every pregnancy, but rather that he is soveriegnly at work in shaping every wombed child; see Psalm 139, which first about God and his handiwork and only second about when we might think life begins). So, in a sense, it is wrong because it is lacking faith, which is what every person is called to in relation to God.

Tangentially, abortion points to the wrongness of how the church has been the church. We haven’t even approached the call to radically love the other, to bear the burdens of the other, in the form of any woman facing this choice. The truth is that women with an adequate social, economic, and education foundation make the choice of an abortion far less frequently than those without such support (compare the projected decline in abortions using legislative vs/or economic means). I am convinced that we must as a church do a much better job supporting those who need our help: this includes not only the unborn but the women who carry them. We must stand for, not against, women in difficult circumstance. We must lobby for better support from our government on their behalf. But most importantly, we must be ready to offer 100% support, in the form of love, financial assistance, education, or housing, to any woman who has need in this area.

More on this tomorrow when I begin to deal with the questions given to me after service… the first of which is this: “I understand that abortion is wrong for birth control methods, but what about in cases of rape or incest… is it really wrong then?”