A Pentecostal Hermeneutic

I had the joy of hearing New Testament scholar James Alison last summer.  Going to see and hear a theologian of whom you are a “fan” of is often a weird experience.  You consider them a “big name.” Certainly hundreds will come to hear him/her.  Usually there are ten or twenty people.

Alison is one of the most fresh and energetic Bible readers, I know.  This isn’t the place to explore some of his brief allusions such as

• The Cain and Abel story as a reverse image of the Romulus and Remus myth.
• The stories of Joseph as a reverse image of the Oedipus story. 
• Alison’s whimsical suggestion that “being wrong” should be one of the most identifying traits of Christians who are saved by God’s grace.

The night I saw him, Alison began with the provocative suggestion that early Israelite culture, influenced by their pagan neighbors, probably practiced infant sacrifice.  The story of Abraham offering Isaac may have originally been a story of infant sacrifice.  (There are still some seams and clinkers in the text that point back to its original thrust.)  But like a blacksmith working and bending a piece of hot metal, the story was pressed and pushed, altered and amended until over time it is the beautifully troubling tale we have today—of God providing, the lamb in the thicket a brilliant foreshadowing of Christ.  Likewise the odd story in Exodus 4:24-26, of Moses and Zipporah, may also be a remnant from the practice of infant sacrifice, where perhaps circumcision comes to replace sacrifice of the eldest son. 

Agree or disagree, like it or don’t, Alison’s theories are interesting.  But the possible presence of infant sacrifice in the scriptures is not his point.  Instead he points to what he suggests are the comments of two biblical prophets about this terrible scandal in ancient Israel’s past.  Ezekiel (20:25-26) basically seems to put these words into God’s mouth, “Okay, way back when I did give Israel some bad commandments, such as to sacrifice their first-born, but it was only so they would know that I am a fierce and demanding God.”  Ezekiel defends the ugly past as ugly, but still of God.  Meanwhile, Jeremiah (19: 3-6) conveys God saying, “No I never gave any such command about infant sacrifice.  It would never even enter my mind.  Those who attribute it to me were wrong.  These are the commands of false and bloody god.”

As we wrestle with God’s word, especially some its parts that seem barbaric and bizarre, are we more to be like Ezekiel—“OK, it was pretty bad, but sadly necessary back then,” or Jeremiah—“No, I never commanded what some people said I did.  It would never enter my mind”?

Alison (and Jeremiah, too) is provocatively practicing what I call a “Pentecostal hermeneutic” (hermeneutic meaning tool or method of interpretation).  By that I’m suggesting that the Holy Spirit is a a key, but of course very elusive, untamed player in our interpretation of scripture.  The Spirit is who makes scripture come alive, who brings up to the surface fresh streams that were subterranean in the scriptures before, who empowers us, like a skilled blacksmith to beat and bend scripture to new situations.  I know this will strike some as dangerously open-ended and subjective, but I believe it is both very Reformed (equally Word and Spirit, where the Holy Spirit is the One who makes the scriptures become alive and important) and very faithful to what we see happening in scripture itself.  The story of the inclusion of the gentiles in Acts 15 strikes me as the preeminent example of a Pentecostal hermeneutic.  “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…”

The other option (ironically practiced by most Pentecostals today) is what Alison calls the “Koranic temptation.”  Like Muslims and their Koran, this way of interpretation, sees holy books as so fixed, so charmed, so static, as to be beyond interpretation.  The reader, like Ezekiel, is always on the defensive, always protective from probing and change.  While some Christians would call this a “high view” of scripture, it actually treats scripture more as a flat and lifeless fossil, where there is no role for the Spirit.

Whatever you think of Alison’s case-study on infant sacrifice, he does us good service in reminding us that scripture is alive, that the Spirit builds on (and sometimes bends, too) the old, to speak afresh and anew to every age.  Moreover, while we see, and sometimes celebrate, the many ways Pentecostal Christians have influenced today’s church, adopting a truly Pentecostal hermeneutic for the Bible might be the gift we need most.

Shrinkage

The RCA has decreased in membership every year since the Nixon administration, or maybe it was Carter. This shrinkage is the source of great consternation. Typically it is taken as evidence that as a denomination we are asleep, irrelevant and unfaithful. Probably.

But maybe there are other factors at play in our shrinkage. Three things come to my mind.

Discernment

I once read an article by a Christian Reformed Church minister during the middle of the 1950’s, (I wish I could remember more about the author). It was a time when mainline church membership was thriving.  Babies, a home in suburbia and church membership all seemed to go together. This CRC minister, however, said it was an era of decay and deception. A “true church of Christ,” he argued, should expect to shrink and be ignored in such decadent times. Eventually, we should expect nothing but a “faithful remnant” when Christ returns.

So how do we know when to play the “shrinking equals faithfulness” card, rather than the “shrinking equals unfaithfulness” card? I’ve yet to hear anyone suggest that RCA’s declining membership is evidence of stalwart resolve and integrity. Might it be?

Demographics

The RCA has had the misfortune to have the bulk of its congregations located in the northeast and upper Midwest. Maybe our slowness to start new congregations in the Sunbelt, our original reluctance to plant churches if there wasn’t an enclave of Dutch last names can be cited as unfaithfulness. But demographics have not been in our favor.

From my days in upstate New York, I recall small towns that once boasted of being the carpet-capital of the world, the glove-making or the shoe-making centers of the universe. A man could support his stay-at-home wife and family with a lifelong job in those factories. The towns, and the RCA churches in them, hummed. Those days are gone. Not only are the towns and churches much smaller, they also suffered from “brain-drain,” where the best and the brightest left.

Was this shrinkage a sign of unfaithfulness? Those who were uninformed, who lived in regions that were thriving, seemed to believe so. Often there was a quiet implication that if we just loved Jesus more, if we prayed as much as people in the Sunbelt, then our congregations in upstate New York would grow. But eventually some of the shifting demographics came to the Midwest. Then RCA congregations in California and Florida, that once could do no wrong, found themselves old and shrinking. Today, I notice that many of the “poster-child” congregations of the RCA from 10-15 years ago are struggling. They declared that they were going to “do church in a new way.” But now they face transitions in leadership, financial squeezes and a newer ring of exurbs farther out, where the growth and young people are located today.

Who Left?

It is pretty much accepted without debate that the people who left the RCA left for churches where the worship was more lively, the faith more fervent and the theology more conservative. To compete, then, we must start congregations that seem like Pentecostal and Baptist churches. However, Hope College sociologist, Don Luidens, has evidence that suggests there has been a quiet, but steady erosion of people from the center-left in the RCA. These people want more liturgical worship, thoughtful ministers and a socially-progressive church. They would say they want a truly Reformed church. Typically they’ll say, “I didn’t leave the RCA. It left me.” Many have drifted to the Presbyterians, Lutherans and Episcopalians. Truthfully, many have just stopped being part of a church. Perhaps our shrinkage is a result of unfaithfulness, but the unfaithfulness has been to our Reformed heritage, a willingness to sell our birthright for mess of pottage, and an unwillingness to trust our tradition. 

I’ve asked more questions than provided answers. I don’t have the answers. But maybe we should be asking different questions about our shrinkage and what truly accounts for it.

Dancing On a Grave

I've noticed blogging here has dropped off significantly since the General Synod decision to end the Church Herald.  Like everyone else I am curious to see how and when this "orderly cessation" takes place.  In the meantime, it casts a bit of a pall over the these blogs.  I have had several thoughts I considered blogging about, but given the future of the Church Herald, it felt somehow inappropriate, like I would be dancing on a fresh grave.

Right before General Synod, I was contacted by Terry DeYoung, managing editor of the Church Herald, to offer my take and evaluation on these blogs.  I never got around to responding to Terry, but if I had I would have said that I felt like it was really just beginning to take off. that we were seeing some glimpses of what these blogs could be and do.  I found the discussions of the Belhar Confession an especially helpful example of the potential of these blogs.  So I am sad to see the Church Herald go, and I am also sad that presumably these blogs will disappear with it.

Pentecost, the Spirit and the Church

This Sunday, May 31, is Pentecost. Along with Christmas and Easter, Pentecost is one of the three great festivals of the church. Of course, Pentecost marks the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the church as recorded in Acts 2.

We try in our congregation to make a big deal of Pentecost in our worship, with all sorts of extra flourishes. Just as the Holy Spirit is the low-profile member of the Trinity, so Pentecost has seemed pretty minor compared to Christmas and Easter. Several years ago in Sunday School, a young boy, after hearing the story of Pentecost, responded, “How come I’ve never heard that story before?”

Talk of Pentecost always raises questions about the role and work of the Holy Spirit today. In the past few decades, the influence of Charismatic-Pentecostal Christians upon all Christian churches, including the RCA, has been huge. A few weeks ago, Church Herald blogger Dave Cheadle wrote about the importance of the “signs and wonders” as evidence of the power of Holy Spirit in the church. http://heraldblog.squarespace.com/dave-cheadle/2009/5/12/full-gospel-preaching-words-signs-and-wonders.html

I am largely sympathetic and supportive of these charismatic impulses in the church. I accept and believe in most of the more “far-fetched,” extraordinary gifts and outpourings of the Holy Spirit.

No doubt Pentecost and the Holy Spirit may have been ignored and undervalued for centuries, but I am beginning to feel that we are to a point of overcompensating for those centuries of under-appreciation.

In my pastorate, I have found that the church of Jesus Christ is really a lot more like the fragile, all-too-human, yet wondrous, grace-filled churches we encounter in Paul’s letters than the church as it is portrayed in Acts. I have grown weary of being beaten up and guilted and made to feel inferior because our churches today don’t meet the inflated standards portrayed in Acts. (My growing aversion to Acts is especially odd given my fondness for its companion volume, Luke).

I have grown cynical about “Spirit-filled” Christians lecturing quiet, faithful believers about their lack of joy and evidence of the Spirit. In my experience, if you look ten years later, that “Spirit-filled” Christian is now burned-out, says it was all “just a phase” while the quiet, faithful Christian is still plugging away. Increasingly I see churches that ten years ago shouted about “doing church a new way” now in crisis, looking for counsel, assistance and still more money from what they once called “dead-churches”. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church seems to indicate that over-fascination with the Holy Spirit has always led to an inherently unstable, divisive, and prone-to-arrogance kind of faith.

Sunday we will celebrate Pentecost and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in a big way. I am increasingly convinced that the most important signs and wonders from the Spirit are gifts like long-term faithfulness, quiet compassion, unseen service, perseverance, sensing the presence of God in ancient traditions, and the Spirit-given ability to live and love together for the long haul. Blessed Pentecost.

Fleeting Expletives

Late last month, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that TV networks are responsible for “fleeting expletives”—coarse, offensive language that briefly, often inadvertently, slips into their broadcasts, typically during interviews.

I am not a legal scholar and please don’t stop reading because you aren’t either. My interest is less in the law and the Federal Communications Commission, and more in what makes language offensive and how Christians might think about all this.

The Supreme Court decision dealt primarily with the so-called “F-word” which celebrities occasionally let fly during award show presentations. As I understand it, the dissenting justices argued that “offensive language” is such a fluid, arbitrary and capricious category as to make prohibiting it nearly impossible. Again, I’m no lawyer, no expert, but I think I tend to agree with the dissenting justices.

I remember when I was young and someone told me that to raise the middle finger was bad. My young mind just couldn’t figure out how one raised digit could possibly have the power to be bad. I concluded that the middle finger must have some sort of magical power, like the ability to cast spells. It is this memory that makes me sympathetic to justices who argued that offensive language is an arbitrary, contrived category. Why one finger but not another? Why this word but not another? Strangely the F-word has morphed into an almost ubiquitous term, the Swiss-army knife of modern English, able to be used in nearly any sentence, to convey both positive and negative sentiment. Its original and offensive sexual connotation seems far in the past.

I have long wondered why in the “hierarchy of swearing,” it is the "offensive language"--terms from the bedroom, bathroom and barnyard that have been considered “worse” than the theological, religious words—words that Christians might claim are irreverent, even blasphemous—hell, damn, Christ, etc. Eight-year-olds on family hour sitcoms routinely blurt out “Oh my god...” Yet the world and the FCC seem far more concerned about words that may be crude and boorish, but hardly sacrilegious.

I am afraid that this will all be misunderstood as championing coarse language. Instead, I am trying to point out that it is simply coarse, perhaps offensive, but not blasphemous. As a Christian, blasphemy, taking the Lord’s name in vain, are my concern and what I am more concerned to avoid.

I’ll let someone else tackle the issue of “swearing-lite”—gosh, heck, darn. I’m pretty sure it won’t be the FCC or the Supreme Court.