Relocating To Elfland

A single sentence from Kenton Sparks on the Biologos website captures a view of scripture that is rapidly gaining ground in evangelical circles: “Scripture is a casualty of the fallen cosmos.” There you have it: like the humans who wrote it, scripture is fallen. It needs to be redeemed. It needs to be saved. Sparks is pretty explicit about this:

“Scripture is in need of redemption and . . . God is working to redeem it. . . . Even the New Testament, in spite of its special position and redemptive role in the canon, is by no means fully redeemed. It still envisions slavery as an acceptable social practice, maintains a very low view of women at points . . . throws ethnic slurs at Cretans . . . and includes Paul’s angry wish that his opponents at Galatia would ‘go the whole way and emasculate themselves.’ ”

And the conclusion of the matter:

“The Bible, with its two Testaments, plays a vital role in God’s redemptive work. Taken as a whole, it is a steady and valuable guide for God’s people as they seek to know him and to love their neighbors. But ultimately, the redemption of both Testaments, and of the cosmos and humanity, is accomplished by the death, burial, resurrection, ascension and return of our savior, Jesus Christ. Until that final day comes, we shall continue to struggle with the problems of pain and suffering, and with the problems in Scripture. These are our problems that Christ has graciously taken upon himself.”

Well, that’s reassuring to hear, isn’t it? Someday Jesus will save even the scriptures, so we won’t have to trouble ourselves anymore sorting out what’s scientifically accurate, historically reliable, morally acceptable, etc., from all the stuff that isn’t. Boy, will that be a relief.

There was a time when one would have thought it wholly superfluous to point out in Reformed and evangelical circles how problematic this is. One would have thought it goes without saying that if the Bible is to retain anything like the position of authority it has held in the history of orthodox Christianity – if it is to retain any meaningful ultimacy as “the Word of God” – then human beings should not be in a position of parsing it to determine where it is really, divinely true, and where it is not only fallibly human, but even sinfully human. But alas, the days when such naiveté could be indulged are long past.

Pete Enns might tell you I’m writing this because I’ve missed the God of the Bible altogether. I just don’t get it that it’s not “a problem for God to enter into the human experience and allow that human experience to shape – from beginning to end – how the Bible behaves.” (Apparently, for Sparks, “from beginning to end” includes sin and the need for redemption. I’ll come back to that.) The God of the gospel is Immanuel. He enters our fallenness completely. But I, you see, insist on a fundamentalist, bibliolatrous, exclusivist, “finely-tuned system of theology” required by my platonic god who refuses to get his hands dirty in the real human situation.

On the subject of systems, I find it curious that the view of scripture put forward by Sparks and Enns is often portrayed as a mere corollary of Chalcedonian orthodoxy. We believe the Incarnate Word of God was not only divine, but also human – fully human. We must, therefore, embrace that the written Word of God is not only divine, but also fully human, including errors and even moral lapses that need to be redeemed. But doesn’t the analogy break down at just this point? Whatever human weaknesses beset the Son of God on earth, sin and the need for redemption were not among them; to affirm that they were is to deny that He was in any position to redeem anyone else. We might go further, in fact, by way of the communicatio idiomatum, and say that the absolute truthfulness and moral perfection of His divine nature were properly attributable to His human thoughts, words, and actions. And in saying such things we would not (pace Enns) be drifting anywhere near the frightful marshes of Platonism.

Reasoning by analogy back to the written Word, we must say – indeed, we stake a great deal on it – that even as God did not cease to be God when He became the man Jesus Christ, He did not cease to be God when He authored the scriptures through human writers. We need to be more precise still: the Triune God revealed in scripture did not cease to be that God when He inspired the scriptures, the God who knows all things and whose every word may be trusted. Here I am struck by the relevance of something J. Gresham Machen wrote in Christianity and Liberalism:

“Does not the liberal preacher say that the Bible is ‘divine’ – indeed that it is the more divine because it is the more human? What could be more edifying than that? But of course such appearances are deceptive. A Bible that is full of error is certainly divine in the modern pantheizing sense of ‘divine,’ according to which God is just another name for the course of the world with all its imperfections and all its sin. But the God whom the Christian worships is a God of truth.”

Reading this, one thinks Enns may be right to say that two different views of God operate behind these two different views of scripture. One is the God revealed in scripture, who remained so in the very act of inspiring human writers, ensuring pure words that require no redemption (even as, in the Incarnation, He ensured a pure human nature that required no redemption); the other is a god who either virtually disappears into his human writers (only in their entirely, authentically fallen words, undisturbed by any external power, do we encounter his), or stands apart from the human writers such that their words can be his only after the fact (Nestorius comes to mind).

To sharpen this point about different deities, it’s no accident that what transparently drives Enns and Sparks toward their radical view of scripture is what they perceive to be the irresistible force of modern science. They believe with modern science, for example, that evolution is an established fact, and that God must therefore have “created” the cosmos using the evolutionary process. But that is simply another way of positing that God “created” the cosmos using such processes as naturalistic science can discover, observe, test, and predict. God set the stuff of the cosmos in motion (there’s the Christian bit), then stepped back and let nature run its course (as understood by naturalistic science). Beyond the initial act of setting things in motion, the forces of nature are cosmically ultimate; put another way, those natural forces (or what Machen called “the course of the world with all its imperfections and its sin”) are “god.” In the context of such a deistic cosmology, it’s difficult to see how any other view of scripture could emerge than the one to which Enns and Sparks subscribe. If God surrendered sovereignty over the cosmos once He created it (being bound now by its unalterable laws, which science continues to discover), then how could He possibly have retained sovereignty over the thoughts and words of human writers of the Bible? How could He not have been bound by their finitude, fallibility, and sinfulness?