Biblical Literalism

Someone posted the following diagram on Twitter, with a note that it was the Bible's description of the universe: 

That struck me as being the ultimate in Biblical literalism. 

The problem with taking metaphors too literally is that you fail to see the wood for the trees, and miss what is actually being said. And there is also the danger of reading into a text a lot of things that are not being said.

In my youth there we often used other metaphors for the world (cosmos) we live in. One was "Spaceship Earth". I wonder whether, in about three millennia's time, someone will produce a drawing of whatever their current conception of a spaceship is, and say, in all seriousness, that that is how the ancients of the 20th century pictured the earth?

Another metaphor that I have often used in sermons, is based on a song by the Beatles that was popular about the same time as the "Spaceship Earth" one. I din't know if the Beatles themselves conceived it that way, but I used it in sermons describing the world in the time of Noah: We all live in a Yellow Submarine. Combine the metaphors and you get a submarine capable of travelling in outer space, which, of course, is what the Polaris missiles of those days did. 

The point of those metaphors, of course, is that both submarines and spaceships have limited resources and a confined space in which to preserve the life of the occupants. And in the days of Noah, men were filling the earth with violence .in a confined space. Do that in a submarine, and sooner or later an armour-piercing projectile will make a hole in the hull and the waters above the roof and below the floor will come flooding in. Not windows in the firmament, but bullet holes in the hull. The effect is the same. It lets in the water. But it's a metaphor. 

If anyone has a problem with biblical literalism, and wants to go beyond it to see the big picture, I recommend reading a book by Anglican bishop John Davies, called Seven Days to Freedom, which gives a better understanding of the creation story in Genesis chapter 1.

Jonestown - 30 years on

On the 30th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, the media are running anniversary pieces. Such bizarre behaviour as mass suicide is usually attributed to "fundamentalists", but in this case it was actually group from a "mainstream" Protestant denomination.

GetReligion “The press . . . just doesn’t get religion.” — William Schneider:

Jones was a minister in good standing of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), an absolutely normal denomination at the heart of the liberal Protestant ecumenical establishment. He was an idealist on the left and, as everyone knows, this kind of theocratic, cultish behavior is supposed to take place on the theological right, not the left. That’s where the wackos reside. Correct?

Thus, there has always been a tendency to avoid in-depth discussions of what Jones believed, what he preached and how his idealistic, progressive congregation — one committed to racial equality, free health care and social justice — evolved into an armed camp of suicidal killers lined up at a vat of cyanide and fake fruit juice.

Orthodoxy and Evangelical Protestantism

Benedict Seraphim has drawn attention to this report on Biola University and the Orthodox (Biola? Sounds like some kind of health drink!).

For those who may be interested, it is a comprehensive statement of what Orthodoxy looks like from an Evangelical Protestant point of view.

It has some serious flaws, however.

In the first item, on "justification", it points out, quite correctly, that Orthodoxy does not accept the Protestant idea of forensic justification (based as it is, on the notion of penal substitution). But it makes the error of supposing that the Orthodox understanding of Theosis is comparable to the Protestant understanding of justification. A fairer comparison would be between Theosis and the Protestant understanding of sanctification. There may be differences, but at least it would be like comparing Cheddar with Camembert, rather than comparing chalk and cheese.

Much of the remainder of the document seems to make the Orthodox Church look like the Roman Catholic Church in precisely the areas where the Orthodox Church sees itself as differing from the Roman Catholic Church. The problem here is with the frame of reference. The Biola report looks through Western spectacles, with a Western frame of reference, and does not really take into account the different frame of reference.

We have found the enemy and he is...

I was surfing the Web this morning, and came across an announcement that the Institute for Progressive Christianity his holding a symposium on The Fight against Fundamentalism.

It struck me as rather odd, and indeed likely to be counterproductive. There are surely more important issues to engage the attention of Christians in the world, whether they call themselves "Progressive" or "Fundamentalist" or "Emerging" or "Mainstream" or "Evangelical" or even "Orthodox" -- issues like climate change, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and Somalia, trade imbalance, health and many more.

Why Fundamentalism?

Many years ago I was at a student gathering to discuss ecumenical cooperation among Christian students in South Africa, which was under threat from the Dutch Reformed Churches, who were advocating the splitting of the Students Christian Association into four separate ethnic bodies.

There was a visitor from overseas, Albert van den Heuvel. and in referring to the Gereformeerde Kerk, commonly known as the Doppers, the most conservative and fundamentalist of the three Dutch Reformed Churches, he said that Karl Barth had once said of the Doppers that one should not worry too much about them, because they believed that the Bible was the Word of God, and so one day God would speak to them through the Bible. And it was interesting that it was when South Africa had a Dopper president, F.W. de Klerk, that the opposition parties were unbanned, and negotiations begun that led to the first democratic elections in 1994.

Now historians may argue about whether that was caused by F.W. de Klerk's Dopper conscience, or simply his political savvy, but the fact remains that it was a Dopper president.

Now some Fundamentalists may have strange and very unChristian political and social ideas, but the point remains -- they believe the Bible is the word of God, and so some day God will speak to them through the Bible, and they will realise the error of their ways. Treating "Fundamentalism" as the enemy is really not likely to help in the process.

Orthodoxy and premodern and postmodern thinking

Bishop Seraphim Sigrist recently posted some notes for a paper he read on Christianity and Society in the Christianity and Society discussion forum, and has now posted a report on the retreat where he read the paper. The retreat was held at a Coptic centre, and his report is illustrated with some Coptic ikons of the desert saints and led to some interesting discussion in which Bishop Seraphim referred to a piece written by William Dalrymple on the role of miracles among Coptic Christians, and especially among the monks of the desert today.

I think this piece by Dalrymple is from his book From the Holy Mountain, in which he compares Near and Middle Eastern Christianity today with what it was like shortly before the Muslim conquest in the 7th century.

What it brings out most clearly are some of the characteristics of the premodern worldview. Compared with Western Christianity Orthodoxy is generally premodern, but in Coptic monks this can be seen in a particularly pure form.

What is interesting is to compare this approach to miracles to that of Western Fundamentalism, because the latter is clearly imbued with moderniity, and even modernism. The Western Fundamentalist approach to miracles seems to be that miracles are important because they are thought to prove some doctrinal or ideological point. Miracles have been taken up into a system of rational argumentation, and this approach is characteristic of the modern worldview. Read almost any theological discussion in Usenet newsgroups, for example alt.religion.christian and you will see that even when Christian fundamentalists are arguing with atheists, both presuppose the same modernist worldview.

I became acutely aware of this in discussions with some Calvinistic Baptists in Durban some thirty years ago. It was apparent that to them the resurrection of Christ was an important "fact", because it was in the Bible. But it did not seem to be a significant fact. It was merely a kind of adjunct to the importance of the Bible and so another matter for rational argument and prooftexting. If one said to them "Christ is risen and the angels rejoice, Christ is risen and Hell was angered for it was mocked" they saw no cause for rejoicing but went scurrying to find proof texts to show that such rejoicing was unseemly and that it wasn't so.

Compare this view with that of the Coptic monks, for whom rational argument occupies a much lower place in the scale of priorities. Miracles are not there to "prove" anything about anything, they are just there to enjoy the commuinion of saints and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.