A Poke in the Faith: Challenges to evangelical faith and how to survive them David Matthew – 2nd Edition

​I have followed the writing and reviews of David (www.davidmatthew.org.uk ) since I first met him a few decades back and always enjoyed listening to his teaching when given the opportunity. He is a considered and thoughtful teacher and writer and like many has changed his position on numerous theological positions over the years.
His latest book A Poke in the Faith is something of a positioning of many current issues from his perspective and the book leaves few stones unturned. Many of the fundamental issues of evangelical faith come under the spotlight including biblical inerrancy and interpretation, young earth creationism, same sex marriage, atonement theology, Calvinism, original sin – basically all the hot potatoes within the evangelical world.
What sets David apart from many other writers is the compassion with which he approaches the topics and his desire to help those who hold a fundamental position to see things from the progressive perspective which he has now embraced.
We do well to give due consideration to David’s book since he has ministered in the same world as many who walk the evangelical path and perhaps retirement affords the opportunity to speak more freely. One thing is for certain the issues raised here are not going away – the recalibration of faith is inevitable – and to use David’s words – in many regards, desirable. What we pass onto the next generation is of critical importance and this book is fuelling a debate that needs to be had.
 
I read David’s book over the summer of 2020 in Kindle. The annotations here are direct quotes from the book as highlighted to me as I read it. You would need to read each stand alone chapter to get the fullness of what he is saying but I find the quotes a useful reminder of the essence of the position he has taken.
Chapter 1 – Tower of Faith
 
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This, you may think, is a minor change from the traditional portrayal of God as sin-allergic. But it has major knock-on effects. It suggests, for example, that God didn’t in fact turn his back on Jesus when he was on the cross, as we have traditionally been taught. That could affect your understanding of some gospel basics—and thus alter the way you present the message to others.
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The block-pushers say, yes, it is God’s Word, but it also had human authors, who were less than perfect, as well as being people of their era. That means they had some old-fashioned ideas that we now know were mistaken. As a result—and this is a potential tower-shaker for many—there are errors and contradictions in the Bible. For example, was a single demonised man called Legion restored to normality by Jesus at Gadara, or were there two of them? Mark and Luke’s versions of the incident say one, while Matthew’s version has two. There’s no agreed explanation for the difference. And it’s not an isolated case, because Matthew elsewhere doubles things up like this.
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But if science is, as someone wisely said, ‘thinking God’s thoughts after him’, we should surely have nothing to fear from its findings?
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We have identified, then, four typical blocks in the average Christian’s belief-tower: (1) Adam was our literal first parent; (2) God shudders and turns away from sinners; (3) There are no contradictions or errors in the Bible; and (4) Genesis is a scientific account of material origins. All four, plus many others, are today being widely pushed and poked, drawn out of the tower and moved. As a result, many people’s ‘tower of blocks’ belief-systems are in danger of toppling. They are suffering from the desperately unsettling condition called ‘cognitive dissonance’, as beliefs they have held dear are shown to be open to question.
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It is vital to remember that the heart of your faith is Jesus, not the Bible.
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Jests like this often hide an element of truth, and in my experience some evangelical Christians come dangerously close to putting the Bible, rather than Jesus, in first place. As one writer puts it, they ‘tend to lock Jesus Christ up inside the covers of a book.’
 
Chapter 2 – The Place of the Bible
 
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This pattern is suspect, I believe. It makes absolutely everything dependent on the Bible, which is usually where a ‘tower of blocks’ approach to theology begins—and we have decided we don’t want that. The Lord himself comes first, not the Bible. Our love and loyalty belong to a divine being, not to a book.
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It may surprise you to know that, for the first few centuries of the Christian era, most people didn’t have the Bible. It wouldn’t have done them much good if they had, because the common people were illiterate. The Old Testament was well settled by then. The writings that eventually made up our New Testament were in limited circulation, but it wasn’t until 397AD that an official council of church leaders gave formal recognition to those twenty-seven books. It would be another thousand years before printing was invented, so even the official New Testament, since copies had to be made by hand, didn’t circulate widely.
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Then, in the sixteenth century, came the movement called the Reformation, associated with names like Martin Luther and John Calvin. This affected only the western church. It was a powerful movement that rocked the whole of Western European society and its colonies. It pointed out the widespread corruption in the Roman Catholic Church’s priesthood and the suspect nature of many of its doctrines and practices, and looked for change. Most significantly, its leaders went to Scripture to find the way forward, convinced that the Bible alone was a reliable source for finding God’s will on matters of Christian doctrine and practice. And so the Reformation divided the western church. Different countries either signed up to remain loyal to Roman Catholicism and the Pope, or set up new national Protestant churches on Reformed lines.
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The point is: Bible-reading had caused division.
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Though many of their members may never have heard the term ‘the perspicuity of Scripture’, they hold to it unswervingly. And what has been the result? Where has this freedom to ‘do what the Bible teaches’ led? To an appalling lack of unity! The Protestant church worldwide today consists of around 9,000 different denominations. So it’s nil points for unity, that’s for sure!
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Maybe we should think again about the claim of Jesus, who said, ‘I am…the truth’. If ultimate truth is to be found in him as a person, the divisive ‘book’ bit becomes less important.
Chapter 3 – What the Bible is Not
 
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What happens to us when we die? Since people die every day, it’s a commonly-asked question, and you would expect the Bible to be clear on this topic, at least. Alas, it is anything but clear. In fact, it’s highly confusing. I’d be interested to know how you would answer the question, and the reasons for your answer. But I could safely bet that if I asked ten people for their interpretation of the Bible on this, I’d get at least half a dozen different answers.
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‘You go either to heaven or to hell,’ some would say, simplistically. If pressed, though, they would have a tough time backing that up from the Bible. For one thing ‘going to heaven when you die’ hardly figures in its pages at all. And if by ‘hell’ they mean–as most evangelicals probably would—everlasting conscious torment in fire and brim-stone, that too is hard to substantiate.
 
Chapter 4 – More on What the Bible is Not
 
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But there are two major weaknesses in this approach. For a start, in this verse God is addressing a particular people. He is talking to the ancient Israelites. Why should we expect everything he said to them to be valid and relevant to us today?
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The second weakness is that God spoke this promise to his ancient people in particular circumstances. They had recently left slavery in Egypt and were en route to the Promised Land. Their long journey was through the desert, requiring strength and stamina; weak and sickly folk would not make it. God graciously assured them, therefore, that provided they honoured and obeyed him, he would see to it that they didn’t fall ill in that grim environment. You and I today are not tramping through a Middle Eastern desert.
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The plain fact, too, is that this approach just doesn’t work. Now don’t get me wrong: I believe that God heals today, and I have seen him do so more than once. But he doesn’t do it every time. In fact, he doesn’t do it most times, if we’re frank.
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But even most of that, the scholars are saying, is not what modern Western readers would regard as ‘straight history’, meaning ‘a clinical, objective account of what factually took place’.
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That is most unlikely. But they did share the same ancient, pre-scientific worldview, and they shared the convention of that era of composing ‘myths’ to explain their origins as distinct peoples.
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Don’t let the word ‘myth’ scare you. In this context it doesn’t mean ‘fairy tale’, like Jack and the Beanstalk, or Jason and the Argonauts. It’s a technical term to describe the stories framed by ancient peoples to explain their origins and their place in the world. Genesis is firmly in that category, not in the ‘straight history’ one.
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He includes, for instance, a lot of Jesus’ teaching—and deliberately puts it in five blocks, in a conscious attempt to echo the ‘five books of Moses’, the Pentateuch, and show how Jesus superseded even the mighty Moses so revered by the Jews.
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If you’re going to impose modern Western historiographical standards on him, you will be disappointed. John, unlike the others, has the crucifixion taking place on the day of preparation of the annual Passover festival. That’s when the Passover lambs were killed, which fitted nicely with John’s portrayal of Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’. He was making a point, emphasising that Jesus was the fulfilment of everything that the Old Testament Passover had foreshadowed. We tend to frown on such ‘tinkering with the facts’, as we see it, but in John’s day that wasn’t frowned on at all. It’s the way people always wrote history: they adjusted it to make a point.
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Far better, I believe, to let the Bible be the product of its own time and culture, and not lay upon it expectations of conformity to the modern mind-set.
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There are many problematic passages like these in the Bible. Face it. Scripture is inspired by God, yes, but it is, at the same time, an intensely human book, with the features of a less-than-perfect humanity all over it. That’s the way God ordained it to be, and that’s the way you should accept it. If he was happy to accommodate himself to human weakness, you can safely go along with it. This may alter the way you use the Bible from now on. But there’s no reason why it should topple your tower or throw your Christian commitment into doubt.
 
Chapter 5 – What the Bible Is
 
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If the ‘story’ aspect is as central as this, it’s vital that we read the Bible accordingly.
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Failure to approach the Bible in the ‘bigger picture’ way leads to getting details out of proportion. We end up building major doctrines on minor passages, and that’s dangerous. And, I might add, it’s one of the reasons for some of those 9,000 denominations. So determine to keep the whole story of Scripture in mind at all times.
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Some of the Old Testament writers and compilers included material drawn from extra-biblical sources like the Book of Jashar, quoted in Joshua chapter 10. Luke put his material together rather like a student doing a research project, accumulating data from various different sources, then organising it into what he felt was the best order, before writing it out in its final form.
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Evangelicals have commonly used the terms ‘infallible’ and ‘inerrant’ to describe the Bible. These mean different things. ‘Infallible’ means it doesn’t mislead the reader. That’s probably an acceptable claim. But remember what we said earlier about the ‘perspicuity’ of the Bible—the notion that any ordinary reader can, through reading it, arrive at the truth. The plain fact is that many have read it and reached wrong conclusions entirely. A few hundred years ago many Americans, for example, supported the slave trade on the grounds that both the Old Testament and the New give slavery the OK. And the Dutch settlers in southern Africa, Christians all, genuinely believed that they were justified in killing the native black population and taking over their land. They saw themselves as new Israelites colonising a new Canaan, and felt that the Bible approved of their exterminating the native inhabitants
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Of course, you are saying to yourself that it isn’t the Bible itself that’s misleading, it’s the faulty way the Americans and Dutch interpreted it. You may well be right. But that doesn’t alter the fact that, if the Bible is open to such deadly misinterpretation, it can hardly be classified as infallible.
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How the belief in inerrancy came to prominence is interesting. For a long time, evangelical Christians believed the Bible to be God’s inspired Word without defining what exactly that meant. Then, in the nineteenth century, liberal scholars began to cast doubt on many aspects of the Bible’s integrity. This naturally provoked a defensive reaction among evangelicals, who worked hard to build a strong case for their traditional position. As often happens in such circumstances, they tended to over-react. And they did so by insisting that every single word, every letter of the Bible was one hundred percent reliable, meaning exactly and literally what it said, no more and no less. The Bible doesn’t even claim that for itself, but its defenders felt it had to be all or nothing.
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Then Luke goes on: ‘And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.’37 That last statement is a key one. It reminds us that the whole Bible, Old Testament as well as the more obvious New, is centred on Jesus. Everything else about it is secondary to that.
 
Chapter 6 – Evolution and its Implications
 
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Those editors were guided, it seems, by their desire to give the Israelites a sense of their long-term relationship with God as his special people, and so ground them firmly in their national history. That view makes a lot of sense. I personally have no problem accepting it as the Pentateuch’s likely source without needing to jettison my conviction that it remains God’s revelation.
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To some there is an alarming implication here. ‘Are you suggesting,’ they ask, ‘that Moses didn’t write all of the Pentateuch, even though Jesus likely believed he did?’ Yes, is the honest answer. In his incarnational humanity Jesus experienced the limitations that all humanity experiences. He got hungry and tired, for instance, and he lived with the worldview of his period, including its angle on the Pentateuch. The fact that he was, at the same time, the Son of God is irrelevant to this issue. In being ‘made in human likeness’ he became a man of his times, and that need cause you no problems. Your salvation is not in doubt. God had his hand on the whole thing!
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Scholars are of the broad opinion that it was largely to answer such questions that what we call the Old Testament was brought together, under divine direction, partly from existing sources and partly by the creation of new documents. Its purpose was to remind the Jews of their glorious past and thus provide a foundation for them to build on. It assured them that, in spite of the appalling setbacks they had suffered, they were still the people of God. As Peter Enns summarises it: ‘The creation of the Hebrew Bible…is an exercise in national self-definition in response to the Babylonian exile.’ They were saying, ‘This is who we are, this is the God we worship, and on this basis we can move forward.’
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Now here’s an important point: the opening creation story in Genesis has seven days, not just six. On Day Seven God rested and, in the context of the functional view that Bible scholars have proposed, this is the climax, the most important day of them all. What is it all about? Here, the scholars assure us, we are into temple terminology. That is the only way an ancient reader would have understood it. God has sorted out the chaos and put working systems in place, so now he can ‘rest’ in the sense of enjoying a stable state of affairs. With the job done, he can ‘go home’, so to speak, and run things from there. And since he is God, ‘home’ means a temple, which by definition is the dwelling-place of a god and also the control-centre from which he runs things.
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All Ancient Near Eastern people viewed their stone-built temples as symbols of the cosmos, and the Israelites were such a people. So the creative work of God described in the opening chapters of Genesis is in fact the construction of a cosmic temple for him.
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Viewed this way, the ‘creation accounts’ in Genesis are not about material origins at all, whether of the universe in general or of humanity in particular. They are theological stories that tell us what God is like, how he brought order out of chaos, got the cosmos-temple into sound running order, then moved in as God and governor over it all. Arguments about the age of the earth are completely out of place in this context.
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Accepting this view leaves us free to look at the available scientific evidence for the age of the earth and the origins of humanity, without being pressured to choose between that evidence and the words of Genesis. And that evidence points to an old earth, and to evolutionary factors in the multiplication of species, including the origins of humankind.
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First, I’m personally satisfied that, in God’s purpose, homo sapiens evolved, through early humanoids, from even earlier life-forms. I feel no pressure at all to harmonise that with what Genesis says about Adam and Eve, for the reasons given above. At what point the ‘image of God’ became part of humanity we have no idea, and probably never will, so I don’t lose any sleep over that.
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Second, we’re talking evolution here, not evolutionism.
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Rejoice in God, his Word, his world, his endless creativity, his vastness, his love and his condescension in Jesus. As Paul put it, in a different context, ‘All things are yours…’53 Science, and its findings, are yours!
 
Chapter 7 – Violence in the Bible
 
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If your tower is not to wobble, you need to find a satisfactory position on this. I’ll offer a suggestion, therefore, on behalf of those writers who have taken the trouble to explore the issue in depth. Let’s start with the question, ‘What is God like?’ Then follow it with another: ‘How do we discover what he is like?’
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The only way round this is really quite simple. Scripture, while it is all God’s revealed Word, is an unfolding story, in which not all the elements carry the same weight. Old Testament portraits of God are not in the same league as the final magnificent portrait painted by Jesus. Indeed, the perceptions of God experienced by the ancient Israelites were mere glimpses of him—and often jaundiced ones at that—compared to the full and open revelation of his nature that we later find in Jesus Christ.
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As for the Israelites, they were people of their times, and those times were violent ones. They naturally perceived their God in the same way in which the nations around them perceived their gods. For those nations, the gods were tribal deities who delighted in patting their own people on the back and urging them to zap their enemies. The Israelites certainly thought that their God was urging them to violence and slaughter, but this was a warped perception. God, we might say, groaned and went along with them out of his covenant commitment to them. But he longed for the day when they would see him for the way he really was.
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That day came with Jesus. We have noted already John’s clear statement that Jesus alone has made God known. Other New Testament writers echo his statement. The writer to the Hebrews says, ‘The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.’ No-one else is that, only Jesus. Paul agrees: ‘In Christ,’ he exclaims with wonder, ‘all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.’ So, what is God like? He is like Jesus! He wants no part in violence and brutality.
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If you give every portion of Scripture equal weight you will have to build up your picture of God from all the parts. You will end up with a composite picture that is confusing, highly unsettling and, frankly, untenable. You will have a Jekyll and Hyde kind of God, who is loving and kind but at the same time trigger-happy and even brutal. You can never really relax with him, because you never know whether, if you snuggle up too close, he might suddenly have a violent spell and crush you before you can back off. This is certainly not the God whom Jesus revealed.
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Once you get a grip on that, everything falls into line and you can see Old Testament characters and practices for what they were. I have personally found this quite liberating, and I now read the Old Testament with a new relish, thanks to this simple insight.
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Remember: Jesus is infinitely more important than the Scriptures that reveal him.
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Then, in the synagogue, jaws dropped all round when Jesus did the craziest of things: he put a full stop after the word ‘favour’, stopped reading there and closed up the scroll, before announcing, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’ He had deliberately missed out the last bit, the bit about the vengeance of God, the best bit, the bit they were looking forward to nodding their heads to with grim approval!61
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Now fast-forward to New Testament times. Jesus is travelling to Jerusalem. Needing to find lodgings for the night, he sends messengers ahead to a Samaritan village to find somewhere, but the locals don’t want him staying there and refuse to accommodate him. What, then, do James and John do? Recalling the Elijah incident, and reckoning it to be a good biblical precedent, they say to Jesus, ‘Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?’
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Some might say that Jesus, being who he was, had the sole right to do this sort of thing with the Old Testament. But I’m afraid his followers did the same! Take Paul, for instance. In Romans 15 he quotes some Old Testament passages to back up his point that the Gentiles have every reason to glorify God for his mercy towards them. If you look at the original passages you will notice that they contain some strong statements about God’s vengeance, just as the Isaiah one did. But in quoting them Paul misses those statements out completely, and keeps only the bits about the Gentiles rejoicing and praising God for his mercy.
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But when you look back to Hosea 13, the source of Paul’s quotation, you will find that, in context, it is saying the very opposite: death is being invited to come and destroy the people of Israel as punishment for their waywardness. It is saying, ‘Death, where is your sting? Bring it on and strike them!’, but Paul has it saying, ‘Death, you have been at last disempowered!’ Violence is not on Paul’s radar—by choice, because his God, revealed in Jesus, is not a violent God. Paul tweaks Scripture accordingly.
 
Chapter 8 – Bible Interpretation
 
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It’s one thing to know what the Bible says, and quite another to determine what it means by what it says.
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How wrong! Tell that to the black Africans who were murdered or enslaved because their murderers interpreted Scripture as justifying their actions. Or tell it to displaced Palestinians today whose olive groves and houses have been bulldozed by Israeli settlers encouraged in their takeover by Christians with dodgy Zionist hermeneutics.
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The other camp sees marriage as a partnership of equals, and in the church allows no restriction on women teaching or being leaders. Both camps honour the Bible. It’s their hermeneutics that leads them to these different conclusions. I have shifted ground on this issue myself, so let me outline my own journey—and in the course of it we will touch on another issue mentioned earlier: slavery.
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Answers gradually fell into place. I came to realise, over time, that at least some of the New Testament’s commands and directives, because they were issued at a specific time in history and into a specific cultural situation, may never have been intended to set a pattern for all time and every culture.
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So, we have here signs that the New Testament is pointing beyond itself to a future where things will advance beyond the sticking-point of first-century society.
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It was along these lines that my own understanding developed. As I adopted this revised hermeneutical approach, the way I perceived the relationship between New Testament commands and current practice underwent a profound change.
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For myself, I believe this is what God wanted, what we should expect, and what we should put into practice today. That’s what being truly ‘biblical’ means. This is ‘redemptive movement’ hermeneutics, and it is here to stay.
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Jesus: the interpretive key
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I have hinted at it more than once already, and it is this: Jesus is the key to understanding and interpreting the whole Bible.
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That fits well with a couple of points we noted earlier. One is that the Bible is a story whose culminating point is the arrival on the scene of Jesus. It’s all about him, as we know from the Bible-study that Jesus himself presented to the two on the Emmaus road: ‘He explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.’73 The entire Bible leads up to him, is all about him and centres on him.
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The ‘Jesus principle’ trumps everything else.
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If the Bible is all about Jesus, we have no business interpreting the Old Testament as if Jesus had never come. Here is where the Christian Zionists get things so disastrously wrong.
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The prophet Hosea operated in eighth century BC Israel. He was a tender-hearted man who wrote mainly about God’s love and mercy towards his people.
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‘Out of Egypt I called my son.’ God’s ‘son’ here, of course, was the nation of Israel. In saying this, Hosea was looking way back into Israel’s history, to an event that had taken place over 600 years earlier. Remember that.
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It’s really quite simple when you grasp the ‘Jesus principle’. Matthew and his readers knew full well what Hosea had been originally referring to. But Matthew now understood that all the Old Testament writings led up to Jesus, the Israelite par excellence. Jesus, as God’s Son in a unique sense, embodied the nation of Israel. He was the one true Jew. Like them he came out of Egypt and, as Matthew would go on to show, suffered the same wilderness temptations as them, but handled them much better. This theme of Jesus as the true Israel crops up throughout Matthew’s Gospel and elsewhere in the New Testament, and it is thrilling stuff for us believers.78
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And ‘moral merit’ means ‘displaying the qualities that Jesus himself displayed’. We approach statements, therefore, in the way Jesus said we should evaluate prophets: ‘By their fruit you will recognise them.’ This principle will help us not only to assess Old Testament cases but also keep us on a safe course as we follow the trajectory from the New Testament through history and into our own times. If a course of action bears fruit that is wholesome, upbuilding, loving and compassionate, we will accept it. If it results in hurt, grief, sorrow and pain, we can turn away from it as not in line with the mind of Christ.
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Can you live with that without wobbling too much? It offers a way forward that requires responsible reading and evaluation of the Bible, but it is a thousand times better than the bondage to the text of Scripture that has plagued so much of evangelicalism in the past. Anybody can work to a rule-book; it takes maturity to make wise choices.
 
Chapter 9 – Bible Interpretation and Sexuality
 
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We do that by recognising that Jesus introduced certain ‘meta-laws’. These were major directives, applicable to a host of situations, and they overrode, if necessary, the particular rulings of the Law. Like loving God first, and loving your neighbour as yourself. Like taking the plank out of your own eye before fussing over the speck in someone else’s. Like doing to others as you would have them do to you. Like loving your enemies. These expressed the spirit of the Law, which trumped the letter every time.
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We should note, too, that while ‘detestable’ seems a strong term, the same word is used of the shellfish, rabbit-meat and pork that Israelites were not permitted to eat.
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That’s it. Perhaps the most striking thing to us today is that there’s nothing at all about homosexual orientation—sometimes called same-sex attraction—as distinct from homosexual acts, and certainly nothing about the origins of such an orientation. Nothing, either, about sex inside a committed gay relationship between consenting adults of equal status, which is no surprise, since such relationships didn’t figure in the cultural mindset of the day.
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One such factor, some would say, is the death penalty for homosexual practice. That surely places it at the ‘major’ end? But the death penalty in Old Testament times was also prescribed for what today many would consider relatively minor offences, including adultery, blasphemy, being a dishevelled priest, collecting firewood on the Sabbath, and contempt of court. It was even prescribed for children who were stubbornly disobedient to their parents. Perhaps, therefore, we should not give too much weight to this factor, or many of our teenagers would be dead by now.
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The fact is, say the challengers, this kind of tussling with the Old Testament passages is irrelevant since—and there’s no escaping this—we are not under Law. We reject murder, not because of the sixth commandment but because of the teaching and ethics of Jesus. When it comes to homosexuality, Jesus had nothing at all to say, so we have to apply to it the broad principles of love and acceptance that he clearly did teach.
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Will their view, we might ask, some years down the line, mellow along the same lines as did the line on divorce? I personally think it’s inevitable, and desirable.
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It was virtually always imposed and non-consensual. In fact, homosexual acts were a way in which a dominant person asserted power over a passive one. It was a power game.
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The challengers keep bringing us back to the ethical hermeneutic that Jesus adopted, based on the principle of love—‘love’ meaning what’s in the person’s best interests, as Jesus would see it.
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We could begin, perhaps, by accepting that the love we are to show towards those with different sexual orientations, whatever else it entails, includes an effort to get alongside them and understand their situation. So, let’s say that a teenage girl in your church confides in you one day that, ever since she became sexually aware, she has been attracted to other females, and can’t feel the slightest attraction towards boys. Because of the church’s tacit line on this, she has felt guilty and doesn’t know what, if anything, she can do about it. She asks for your confidential advice. What do you say to her?
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Others would take a more gentle line. ‘Well,’ they would tell her, ‘according to the Bible, the lesbian attraction you are feeling is indeed wrong. But we’ll remain your friends, and we’d advise you not to make your orientation known more widely than absolutely essential. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to pray for you. We advise you to avoid situations with other females that may lead you into temptation. Try instead to spend more time with boys, and let’s trust that, in due course, the Lord will heal you and make you normal.’
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That should never have happened, and I still feel bad that I was unable to help him. Today, the block-pokers would flag up Jesus’ ethical hermeneutic, and would encourage him, without hesitation, into a committed same-sex relationship. That—they and many others would say—is the only love-directed way forward. It’s what follows when you pursue a trajectory of redemptive movement in your approach to Scripture and its interpretation. On that basis, the New Testament, as it stands, is not the final word on this subject.
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We live in a far-from-uniform world. Some people are born with severe deformities, or a mega-high IQ, or a lack of skin pigmentation, or autism linked to incredible artistic skills, or genitals that don’t fit the binary norm, or super-sensitive taste-buds, or a dodgy gene causing some impairment, or ultra-flexible joints, or spina bifida, or whatever. Does the love of God extend to these ‘different’ individuals? Of course it does! And we, too, should surely love everyone, opening whatever doors are necessary to enable all of them to live as fulfilled a life as possible, which is God’s desire for us all. That, the block-pokers insist, is sound biblical interpretation.
 
Chapter 10 – Heaven and Hell Under Fire
 
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Re-embodiment will be a reality one day, of course, but not until the final resurrection. In a sense, therefore, the dead believers don’t currently need a ‘where’, since they don’t occupy any space, whether in ‘heaven’ or elsewhere.
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Eternal life literally means ‘the life of the age to come’.
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Most who say they believe this don’t really believe it. If they did, they would spend every waking moment grabbing people and urging them to ‘accept Jesus’ in order to avoid it, and they don’t.
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The good news, you might point out, is that, through Jesus, hell can be escaped. Fair enough. But if hell isn’t in fact everlasting conscious torment, the whole thing needs reviewing anyway, and that is what has been going on recently on a large scale. And besides, escaping hell certainly wasn’t the good news that Jesus and the early Christians got so excited about.
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Berkhof states: ‘The position of Scripture with respect to this matter may at first seem somewhat dubious. It speaks of God as the only one who has immortality (1 Tim. 6:15), and never predicates this of man. There is no explicit mention of the immortality of the soul, and much less any attempt to prove it in a formal way.’ Yet he still argues for it—quite unconvincingly, in my view.
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If we give any weight at all to the overall balance of Scripture in this matter, we can reach only one conclusion: that God alone is inherently immortal, but that he also bestows immortality as a gift upon those who, through Jesus, are his own. In that case, it is a mistake to say that every human being has an immortal soul. ‘Where will you spend eternity?’ thus becomes an inappropriate question.
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Some Christians believe that those who never heard the gospel, plus those who rejected it during their lifetime, will have an opportunity, at this post-mortem point, to embrace Christ and all he has achieved. If they do, immortality will be conferred upon them. If they do not, they will be consigned to hell. But they will not be there forever, because they are not immortal. They will suffer a sentence deemed just—in both duration and intensity—by Christ the Judge. And that sentence will end with their annihilation: they will cease to exist. If you rule out the post-mortem opportunity for salvation, the scenario still holds good. Hell will not last forever.
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But back in the eleventh century, theologians like Anselm saw things the other way, and on that basis argued that, because God is an infinite being, sin against him requires an infinite punishment, namely, torment that never ends. It’s a deeply flawed argument and we do well to throw it out as unacceptable. But old ideas die hard, and this medieval reasoning lies behind the traditional view of hell that many still embrace.
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Judgment comes in two varieties: punitive and restorative. Punishment, too, comes in two varieties, which we might call retributive and organic. Evangelicals have tended to assume that God’s judgment is punitive, and that the punishment he dispenses is retributive. The block-pokers, however, favour the alternatives in both cases. We need, therefore, to be clear what we mean by them all.
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Which is God’s kind, do you think? Theologians and scholars today are insisting that it’s the organic variety. God, they hold, has built the universe in such a way that sin—departure from his loving guidelines—automatically brings painful consequences. He doesn’t therefore need to be angry or retributive. They see the ‘wrath’ statements as metaphorical, or as anthropomorphisms, and remind us that the Scriptures are on a trajectory towards an understanding of God as one who is opposed to violence—as we saw earlier.
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A restorative judgment would be based on efforts to help her get herself sorted out. The aim in it all would be to restore her: to get her back on her feet again as a wiser, more responsible person for whom drink driving is an absolute no-no. Which approach to judgment is God’s kind, in your view? The block-pokers are saying it’s always the restorative kind.
 
Chapter 11 – Belief Systems
 
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Recent years have seen a significant movement of Christians in Britain and America out of their charismatic and Pentecostal churches into the Eastern Orthodox Church, which now has branches throughout the West. When asked why they have taken this step, most say they want a greater sense of continuity with Christians of previous centuries and that the EO Church, which didn’t even have a Reformation to throw it off course, provides just that. And, they add, they find a deep security in the set-in-concrete liturgies.
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I am convinced that both of these systems have caused untold damage through the ‘idolatrous veneration’ they have inspired in some of their followers—and I am not alone in voicing that conviction.
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These are nine historical periods in which, it is alleged, God dealt with his people according to different criteria. These dispensations were: (1) Innocence—from creation to the fall;  (2) Conscience—from the fall to the flood;  (3) Civil government—from the flood to Babel;  (4) Promise—from Babel to Mount Sinai;  (5) Mosaic law—from Sinai to the Upper Room;  (6) Church—from the Upper Room to the rapture;  (7) Tribulation—from the rapture to the second coming;  (8) Millennium—from the second coming to the Great White Throne judgment; and (9) New Creation—from the Great White Throne judgment though eternity.
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As far as I can tell, Dispensationalism is on the decline, remaining strongest in conservative quarters in the USA but with decreasing influence elsewhere. If you have moved in Dispensationalist circles yourself, this may be a wobbler for you, but I would encourage you to explore the happier alternatives outside of those circles.
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The central theme for him was God’s sovereignty. Whatever else God was, he was first and foremost the sovereign God: he controlled everything. He it was who ruled the affairs of humanity, set up and deposed kings and, most important of all, dispensed saving grace to those who, in his sovereignty, he had elected to salvation. But it was not until the following century that his ideas were developed, and taken further, by the likes of the English Puritans. They worked his seminal teachings into more of a fixed system of doctrine which, not surprisingly, came to be known as Calvinism.
Just as Dispensationalism has its nine dispensations, Calvinism has its ‘five points’—five major, interconnected doctrines usually summarised in the acronym TULIP. The five points are: (1) Total depravity—every aspect of human nature is corrupted by the fall;  (2) Unconditional election—God chooses some (not all) to receive salvation without regard to any merit or action of their own;  (3) Limited atonement—Jesus died to deal with the sins only of the elect (not of all);  (4) Irresistible grace—God works irresistibly in the lives of the elect to bring them to a place of saving trust in Christ;  (5) Perseverance of the saints—because their election, the application of Christ’s atonement, and the granting of repentance and faith are all God’s doing alone, he will complete the work by ensuring that they stay faithful till their dying day.
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Calvinists, it has to be said, have a track record of intellectual and spiritual snobbery. They widely allege that only their system is worth the label ‘biblical’, and that it’s the only one able to cope with rigorous intellectual analysis. This is an empty boast, and one that assigns to the human intellect a greater value than I suspect God himself puts on it. Besides, if ‘total depravity’ is true, the intellect is unreliable anyway—including the intellect of Calvinists.
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In recent times there has been a resurgence of the system, chiefly in the USA, where it has been labelled ‘the new Calvinism’. It has gained popularity through the writings of John Piper and others. But while many have run to it for security, and absolution from the need to think too much, many others have become deeply disillusioned with it and are stating their reasons openly. If you have been an avowed Calvinist yourself, it will pain you to examine those reasons. It could be a major wobbler for you, because since Calvinism is an integrated belief-system, an attack on any one of its five points is an attack on the whole, and you will feel as if somebody is kicking away your crutches. Be assured, you can wave goodbye to Calvinism without your spiritual world disintegrating. But it won’t be easy. So brace yourself for a few knocks.
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That certainly fits with Jesus, who was the perfect representation of the Father’s nature. So, if you want a hub out of which all God’s other attributes radiate like the spokes of a wheel, love is surely that hub. But Calvinists are unyielding on this. They present us with a system in which, as Scottish theologian James Orr has noted, ‘love is subordinated to sovereignty, instead of sovereignty to love’.111
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There is an old Calvinist saying that ‘those who find themselves suffering in hell can at least take comfort in the fact that they are there for the greater glory of God.’ That is an appalling statement by any measure and is incompatible with the God of love revealed in Jesus. One ex-Calvinist put it this way: ‘God’s desire to glorify himself had not only subsumed but consumed all his other desires, so that the only thing I understood about God was that he would glorify himself. Love, justice, and goodness had been warped beyond recognition as they were sucked into the black hole of glory.’112
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‘But you’re missing the point,’ retorts the Calvinist apologist. ‘God is under no obligation to save anybody at all, because all are wicked sinners. So the fact that he saves any is wonderful, and is a tribute to his amazing grace.’
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Is there any way of reconciling God’s sovereignty with his granting us freedom of choice? Yes, say Calvinism’s critics. He can sovereignly determine to limit his control of us. And this, they add, is exactly what he has done. He has sovereignly consented to not normally interfere in either natural law (like gravity) or human freedom. Calvinists themselves get very technical when writing about such issues. Their arguments are of a philosophical depth to which the mind of the average Christian cannot reach. That can’t be right. God, in his wisdom, knows what we are like and he has constantly shown himself concerned to reach us where we are. You can know his love without being a philosopher!
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In more recent times, however, a challenge to Calvinism has come from another direction. This is known as ‘the open view of the future’, but is sometimes referred to as ‘the open view of God’, or ‘open theism’. It questions Calvinism’s insistence that not only does God know everything that will ever happen, before it happens, but that he actually causes it to happen.
 
Chapter 12 – Sinners By Nature?
 
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The gospel is needed, of course, because we are sinners. All Christians agree on that—even though the gospel is far more than just a solution to personal sin.
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We call it ‘the fall’. That’s not a biblical phrase, so we should be careful not to over-emphasise it. Certainly, the sin in Eden never gets a single further mention in the Old Testament.
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In simple terms, it holds that you and I are born sinners, by virtue of our physical descent from Adam. Sin is our constitutional bent. We are sinners by nature, not just by practice, and thus, it adds, we are under divine condemnation from the moment we are born.
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Many of us have assumed this doctrine to be a fundamental of the faith. But the block-pokers remind us that it isn’t. Significantly, the Eastern Orthodox Church has never embraced it. That branch of the church acknowledges that death is a result of Adam’s sin—‘as in Adam all die…’—but not guilt or a sinful nature. Over the centuries, Christians of other persuasions have also called the doctrine into question. The fact is, until around the fifth century AD, when Augustine shaped it up, it was virtually unknown. Let that sink in: for centuries there was no ‘original sin’ block to poke!
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Whatever it means, we noted earlier that there is progression in the Old Testament. Later generations of Israelites came to understand God’s nature more clearly than their predecessors, often resulting in a complete overthrow of earlier beliefs. This is a case in point. The prophet Ezekiel, centuries after Moses, declared, ‘The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child.’
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Clearly, in Paul’s thinking here there is some kind of connection between Adam’s sin and negative effects on the rest of us. What that connection is has been disputed.
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The line you take will be affected by, among other factors, whether Adam and Eve were literal individuals—the first members of the human race—or are ‘ciphers’ representing humanity as a whole. While Paul almost certainly took the first view, we saw earlier that DNA evidence disputes that claim. If Paul is right, he does seem to be teaching here that some sort of harmful spiritual infection is passed on biologically. But if, instead, we consider Adam to be a cipher, we will read the passage differently. We will see it as just picturing the way human beings are in general, in an archetypal way.
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Saint Augustine (5th century AD) took Paul in the first way. What’s more, he gave the apostle’s statements a sharper focus than Paul himself did. In so doing, he produced the doctrine of original sin that was accepted by the church in later generations. Then, at the Reformation (a thousand years after Augustine), John Calvin tightened it up even further.
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So we have three stages in the doctrine’s development. The early church taught, and the Eastern church still does, that what we have inherited from Adam is death. The Western church, following Augustine, teaches that we inherit both death and guilt. And Reformed Christianity, following Calvin, holds that we inherit death, guilt and a sinful nature. It’s the latter view that most evangelicals today assume to be ‘what the Bible teaches’, and it’s this that the block-pokers are questioning.
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Augustine worked with a Latin version of Romans. Scholars for years have pointed out that it was a bit dodgy on this verse, not accurately reflecting the original Greek. As a result, Augustine took Paul to be saying it was guilt that was spread through Adam’s transgression, whereas the verse is saying that it was not guilt, but death.125
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But this, the block-pokers insist, is reading into the phrase something that isn’t there. On the contrary, Paul says (in verse 14) that Adam is a ‘pattern’, or ‘type’—he is ‘typical’ of all human beings. If you and I had been put in the same situation in Eden as was Adam, we would likely have sinned in the same way. The phrase ‘all sinned’ means just what it says: every one of us ha sinned. No-one denies that, and the fact that we all die proves it. But that’s a far cry from Augustine’s doctrine of original sin.
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Calvin said that our inherited sinfulness wipes out any residual traces of the image of God in us. We thus suffer from ‘total depravity’, the notion that every aspect of our being leans firmly towards the ‘bent’ side. We are rotten through and through, with no leanings at all except towards sin and evil. Yes, we may at times do a few good things, but none of them are pleasing to God, because they come from a polluted heart and thus from ulterior motives. And that polluted heart, in turn, came from Adam.
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Yes, it does. It means that when I see people who, as far as I know, don’t have any sincere Christian faith, doing good things, I rejoice, and praise God for it. Indeed, I see God in it—traces of what we might call ‘original blessing’. But if I hold to original sin, I will have to write it off as ‘empty good works’ that cannot please God or bring any lasting benefit because they are the product of a sinful nature. Like make-up on a corpse. I’m glad to be rid of that attitude. Instead, I can express my appreciation to the person. I could maybe even drop in the comment that, in doing the good they did, they expressed the heart of God. That could lead to a fruitful conversation!
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But we can accept all that without needing either Augustine’s doctrine of original sin or Calvin’s cynical notion of total depravity. What a relief!
 
Chapter 13 – Gospel and Kingdom
 
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No-one is likely to take issue with that answer. They might, however, ask what ‘believe in’ means, what the significance is of ‘Lord’ and ‘Jesus’, and what ‘saved’ refers to—saved from what?
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Maybe we should try to back off from our received understanding of what the gospel is, clear our minds, and try to look as if with new eyes at the great story of the Bible to discover what exactly gripped the first Christians and determined the message they proclaimed. New Testament scholar Tom Wright has spent many years doing just that, so, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, we will look at his conclusions and see where they take us. He is a man of deep godliness with a pastoral heart, as well as a brilliant scholar, so you should not construe his questioning of traditional views of the gospel as attempts to wobble anyone’s faith. Quite the opposite: he is keen to help you keep your faith on track. So what, in his opinion, is the heart of the gospel?
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He reckons that the good news, in summary, is that God has acted decisively in Jesus the Messiah to begin the mending of his broken world.
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The ‘back story’ of the gospel
God is love and created the world to be a place suffused with his own love. His intention was that human beings, the pinnacle of his creation, would be his agents in running the world and filling it with his glorious presence. Because love cannot be forced, he gave his human creatures a freedom of will which, tragically, they used to break away from him and do their own thing. Sin started messing up human lives, and the whole created order suffered as a result.
In response, God began moving towards a solution to the problem. He made a covenant with Abraham, and with his descendants, the people of Israel, to be with them and bless them. The aim was that they would be a living example of how great life was under God’s direction, so that they would be, as Isaiah put it, ‘a light for the Gentiles’, exporting his blessing worldwide.
But the Israelites proved incapable of it. Indeed, instead of being the answer to the world’s problem, they showed themselves to be part of it—they were sinners as much as the Gentiles, though they didn’t see that for a long time. When they ended up exiled to Babylon, they thought that was the problem. But it wasn’t. Even those who returned from it were still messed up, and still struggling with foreign domination. Gradually it dawned on the nation that the real issue was much deeper than exile: it was a sin and alienation problem, one they shared with the rest of humanity.
But God was on the case. He had promised that he would, in due course, come in person to put things right. He would do so, in fact, in the person of Israel’s Messiah, his anointed King.
That Messiah was of course Jesus, who turned out to be not exactly what the people of Israel had been looking for. Far from being the military Messiah of popular Jewish expectation, who would blast the Roman occupiers of Palestine, give the Jews their independence again, put the Gentiles in their place and reign in glory from Jerusalem, Jesus announced a kingdom of a completely different kind. He would come in self-sacrificial love, not blasting the Romans but submitting to crucifixion by them—and forgiving them in the very act. Through the cross he would end the real exile of universal bondage to Satan, sin and death.
Then came the shock ending to Israel’s long story: Jesus’ resurrection from the dead!
The Jews had always believed that, at the end of time, God would raise everybody, but his raising of one man, Jesus, not at the end of history but in the middle of it, astounded everyone. It meant that the promised kingdom had now arrived, with God himself as its King, in the person of the God-man, Jesus. Here at last was one who brought all the ancient promises within reach. He had been through death and come out the other side with a glorious new body. Now he was saying to all who could accept it, ‘I’m the Pioneer. I’ve been through the lot and emerged victorious. So, if you want the same experience, hitch your wagon to mine and I’ll see you, too, through death into resurrection and the great new creation.’
This was the good news that the early Christians proclaimed. ‘What a King!’ they said. ‘We’re used to hearing the Roman Emperor calling himself “Son of God” and telling us that his accession to the throne is “good news” for the empire’s citizens, but all that pales into insignificance beside this King and his claims! Jesus is Lord, not Caesar!’
They announced that those who entrusted themselves and their future to King Jesus would know a deep sense of being freed from their sins and joined to Father God. They could begin, through living a life of love, as Jesus had done, to mend the broken creation. They could make the world a better place. It would be tough at times, often demanding sacrifice or even death, but they could endure that gladly because of the glorious future assured by Jesus’ resurrection. And that future was that, at the right time, King Jesus would return in person to complete the job of putting the world to rights. His people would then live forever with him, not in a disembodied form in heaven, but on a totally renewed earth. That earth was one to which heaven would have come down and where, in unimaginable joy and fulfilment, they would at last be God’s agents in running his world, a world full of his glorious presence.
That is the ‘good news’! God has been faithful to his ancient promises. He is King, running the show through Jesus, who has died and risen again. The new world has begun. The future is bright: Jesus is coming again to finalise his kingdom. Get on board! Let it dawn on you that you yourself have died and risen with him—and get yourself baptised to declare your recognition of it. Become part of the new community of those already on board, who are ‘infecting’ the world with God’s love! This is not a religion. It’s not a fresh philosophy or moral system. It’s news! Something has happened and things will never be the same again!
Nothing here about going to hell unless you repent. No going to heaven either, for that matter. No ‘sinner’s prayer’ to pray. No emphasis on ‘accepting Jesus as your personal Saviour’. For people with a traditional evangelical concept of the gospel, this shifting of emphasis and priorities could be a wobbler. Try not to let it affect you that way. Instead, let the excitement of it grip you and move you up a gear in your walk as a Christian. This, I believe, is good news for you as well as good news to share with everybody else.
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It is fair to say that the central theme of the four Gospels is the establishment of God’s kingdom in the person of Jesus.
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By the time of Jesus everybody was thinking about it, and most were talking about it, too.
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That’s why Jesus was careful not to let his disciples tell people that he was Israel’s Messiah, or was cagey about it when pressed by Jewish leaders. He didn’t want the crowd grabbing him and trying to force him into a politico-military role he had no intention of playing.
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Then there’s the famous passage in Isaiah 53, which undoubtedly foretold Christ’s sufferings: ‘He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities…and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.’ Tom Wright has shown clearly that Jesus himself conceived of his coming death in terms of that key chapter.
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Some have mixed in some questionable ingredients, to say the least. For instance, they have introduced the idea of appeasement. This is the notion that, at the cross, God vented his wrath on Jesus, punishing him for our sins. They thus portray God as violent and bloodthirsty, like so many ancient tribal deities whose savage wrath had to be appeased. Worse still, he took it out on an innocent sacrificial victim: Jesus. That element has dangerous implications, because if God can use violence to solve problems, it legitimises our own use of it. And that’s not just playing with words. Over the centuries many have used this argument to justify their own violence. Within my own lifetime ‘liberation theologians’ more than once urged African leaders to go to war against apartheid South Africa on the grounds that, if God at the cross used violence to get good results, we can do the same.
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If that is true—and I believe it is—then God did not in fact punish Jesus. Instead, it was the wrath of human beings that crushed Jesus, as all the powers of evil, sin, death and destruction somehow converged on him as he suffered and died. God permitted it and used it, for sure, but that’s different from saying that God punished him. It was not God who caused his sufferings and death, but sinful human society, represented by the Jewish and Roman leaders of the time. Think that through, because it’s a key point.
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Then he adds, ‘Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.’ And we were mistaken to do so, he implies.
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Interestingly, while at the Reformation Luther turned his back on all that and reverted to the older Christus Victor view (which we will come to), Calvin stuck with the Latin view with only minor modifications, which is why penal substitution, including some of its dubious bits, forms part of the Calvinistic belief-system today.
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It also presents God’s motive as primarily anger rather than love—his love for sinners becomes the result of his appeased anger, whereas John 3:16 famously states that his love for them was the cause of his giving his Son.
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In view of these important caveats, I myself can go along with penal substitution in broad terms only, taking care to avoid the dubious aspects often attached to it. You must decide for yourself what your own position will be.
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‘Christ is victorious’, and it is the title of a book on the subject by Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén, first published in 1931.
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One key way in which it differs from the Latin view is that, in the latter (penal substitution), the atonement is a payment made to God on man’s behalf by Christ as a man, whereas in the Classic view (Christus Victor) the atonement is a work of God himself from start to finish.
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It is this confederacy of evil that Jesus came to conquer. By his death he succeeded in driving out ‘the prince of this world.’ He achieved his aim, which was to ‘destroy the devil’s work’ and to ‘break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil’, and in so doing he was able to ‘free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.’142
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Read the New Testament with this conquest in mind and you’ll wonder how you missed its centrality before. It’s on virtually every page. Even before his death Jesus embodied the defeat of these evil forces.
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He was the victorious Christ, and he conquered through love alone!
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But it does not accept that, in some literal kind of way, our sin was transferred onto Jesus, nor does it accept that he placated an angry God’s wrath. God’s anger never burned against Jesus. Instead, God allowed the agents of evil to have their way with Jesus and turned it round for good.
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On this basis, ‘becoming a Christian’ can end up as just an assent to the propositions, with little or no effect on everyday living. That is why so many who have at some point ‘got saved’, answered the ‘altar call’ or ‘prayed the sinner’s prayer’ live lives indistinguishable from those of their ‘unsaved’ friends. But conscious union with the victorious Jesus is a constant spur to live out its intensely practical implications. Is that your experience?
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It’s an appealing picture and I admit to having taught along those lines myself in years gone by. But I couldn’t do it now, because I believe it goes well beyond anything that Scripture presents. The only Bible verse used to support it is 2 Corinthians 5:21, which in the NIV says, ‘God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’ I can’t go into the exegesis of this verse here, but scholars today commonly give it a quite different interpretation, seeing it, in its context, as a statement about Paul’s apostolic ministry rather than anything to do with imputation.149 If that’s a wobbler for you I encourage you not to worry. You can throw out imputation completely and lose nothing of the good news, which has other facets equally or more glorious than that.
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There’s one other point to make about all this. In Hebrews it is not God who cruelly puts Jesus to death. Nor, incidentally, is it the Jewish and Roman mobs—though this is where the rest of the New Testament places the blame. No, in a surprising attribution of dual roles to Jesus, the author of Hebrews portrays him not just as the victim but also as the offerer: Jesus offers himself!
 
Chapter 15 – Justification and All That
 
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Today that way of using the term has become so widespread that most don’t realise that the apostle Paul, who employs it regularly in his letters, uses it in a quite different way. And that is dangerous. If by ‘justification’ Paul means one thing and we, in our use of it, mean something else, we are heading for problems. Biblical scholars, in recent years, have drawn attention to this anomaly and sought to correct it. N.T. Wright has been at the forefront of this activity and, in so doing, has drawn the wrath, in particular, of some prominent Calvinists. The exchange of fire is still going on, so you need to be aware of it and its implications for what you believe and the way you talk about it.
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‘Righteous’ in English is a different word entirely, but it has a link with ‘just’. I know, to look at them you would never think the two words had anything in common. But in the Greek of the New Testament there is a single word152 which, in our English Bibles, is sometimes translated ‘just’ and sometimes ‘righteous’. The fact that the translators have to choose indicates that its meaning is a slippery concept to handle.
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As we have seen, biblical scholars have been questioning this. Their misgivings have not been about the fact that, through faith in Jesus, we can be reconciled to God, but about the way this comes about.
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They have jettisoned the whole ‘imputation’ idea as foreign to Paul’s thinking, but they have also clarified the biblical meaning of ‘justify’. It does not in fact mean ‘to make righteous’ but ‘to declare righteous’—and that’s a bigger difference than you might think.
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So ‘works’ do have a place in the overall picture, though not as payment for salvation. Interestingly, Paul himself has no problem with ‘boasting’ about what he has achieved and sees it as standing him in good stead on the day of judgment—because it is an effective sign that the Spirit of the living Christ has been at work in him.156
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Too much introspection is not helpful either. We all have a self-centred tendency to put an unwarranted emphasis on the ‘me and Jesus’ aspect of justification. This is at odds with Paul’s consistently broader perspective. While it remains true that you are personally justified by faith, Paul always has in mind justification’s connection to God’s covenant with Abraham, by which he promised to put the world (not just you) right through him and his Israelite descendants. That covenant found its fulfilment in the one true Israelite, Jesus, through whom we are declared ‘Not guilty’. Your personal justification is just one small part of the greater purpose of God, which concerns mending the whole of creation, not just you.
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All this means, of course, that the obsession of some Christians with Zionism and the current State of Israel, in the belief that the Jews have some separate role in the purpose of God, is completely misplaced. If you have held Zionist sympathies, that could be a wobbler.
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The Greek for ‘gospel’, you may know, is euangelion. It means ‘good news’ and was widely used in Paul’s day, long before the Christian message came on the scene, to mean the political good news that Caesar was Lord of the whole world, that the benefits of living under his rule were second to none, and that people needed to submit to him to secure those benefits. This ‘good news’ was always trumpeted on the emperor’s birthday.
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Seen this way, the Christian message was more than a private affair concerned with how an individual may find God. It had a public dimension, in that it boldly confronted the claims of
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The gospel has political implications today, too. I don’t mean that God lines up with socialists and not conservatives, or vice versa. He will never side with any political party. I do mean, though, that Christians can’t help getting involved with influencing and improving society—and that is a political activity. In nations where the state believes that this is its own prerogative, to be a Christian is to be considered subversive and dangerous. It invites persecution.
Let’s be clear about this. In the New Testament the ‘gospel’ is not primarily a system of personal salvation, nor even the good news that there is a way of salvation—though that is, of course, implied. It is fundamentally the proclamation that Jesus of Nazareth has been raised from the dead and has thereby been shown to be Israel’s promised Messiah. And since God’s purpose through the Messiah has always been to reach every nation, and to put the whole world to rights, the claim to be Israel’s Messiah is simultaneously a claim to be the whole world’s true Lord. Paul’s ‘gospel’ was ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’. It’s a kingdom thing!
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Are you up to taking the risk? If a ‘me and Jesus’ focus has made you shy away from too much contact with ‘the world’, this issue could be a major wobbler because it will require a complete refocusing of your Christian purpose. It could re-invigorate your whole life!
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The Greek term translated ‘righteousness’ (dikaiosynē) has been over-simplified, the scholars assure us. Its meaning is in fact variable and determined by its context. Unfortunately, many English translations of the New Testament, traditionally leaning on the Reformers’ sixteenth-century interpretation, do little to dispel the confusion. Let’s look at a few common New Testament phrases that include this word.
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Contrary to Reformed views, then, God’s righteousness is not synonymous with his salvation. It is not his, or Christ’s, righteousness imputed to us; it is the reason why God has saved his people. We are saved because God has proved righteous in honouring his commitment to the Abrahamic covenant. This is important, because there is a view among Calvinists, and others of the Reformed persuasion, that the interpretation given by sixteenth-century Reformers, like Luther and Calvin, to certain passages of Scripture must be true for all time. That is not right. They were men of their era, and they looked at Scripture through the spectacles provided by their historical situation. That situation was one of strong reaction to the corrupt Roman Catholicism of the time. While that led them to rediscover some permanently relevant truths in the New Testament, they also came to certain conclusions that more recent study has shown to be questionable. This is one of them. Don’t let it throw you, because it changes nothing in your walk with the Lord.
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The Greek adjective behind ‘righteous’, ‘just’ and ‘justified’ is dikaios. It takes us back to the Jewish law court that we visited earlier, where a judge settled a case by pronouncing ‘dikaios’ (‘Not guilty’) over either the plaintiff or the defendant. It didn’t mean that the person was ‘made righteous’. It meant he was ‘declared righteous’ as a legal status; he was judged to be ‘in the clear’. A good English alternative would be ‘vindicated’. And that’s how, as believers, we stand with God.
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The NPP, however, detaching itself from the sixteenth-century mentality and examining the mindset of Second Temple Judaism (the Judaism of Paul’s day), sees the ‘works of the law’ something different. Its proponents maintain that the Jews in Paul’s day never, in fact, saw God’s favour as something they could earn by their good works. They universally recognised that God’s choice of them as a people was an act of his grace alone. If this was the case, what did Paul mean when he said they ‘sought to establish their own’ righteousness?
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Paul, according to the NPP, is showing in Romans that reliance on these ‘Jewish badges’ is no guarantee of covenant membership. On the contrary, he insists, the Jews have for the most part shown themselves to be ungodly. Worst of all, they have rejected God’s revelation of Jesus, their Messiah, and have failed to put their faith in him, while many Gentiles, who never had the Jews’ ancient privileges, have been flocking to him and God has accepted them. Israel has been redefined. Membership of the covenant community is by faith in the Messiah alone, just as it was for its founding father, Abraham, who believed God and found acceptance long before the law was given or circumcision introduced.
 
Chapter 16 – The Wider Hope – and Beyond
 
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There are some worrying aspects to it, however. One is that Christians can sometimes look down on ‘outsiders’ in a way that is anything but helpful. While most don’t intend to convey a ‘holier than thou’ impression, they often do. They classify outsiders as ‘sinners’, and sometimes make this clear to them as part of their ‘evangelism’. A second worry is the unspoken assumption that the great majority of outsiders will probably remain outsiders—in other words, that true believers will always be a minority of humanity, because only a few believe the gospel. If you have the traditional view of hell, that is a major problem.
 
Accepting Trinitarian theology will affect the gospel message you proclaim because, on this view, ‘Although all people are already objectively redeemed by Jesus Christ, not all have yet personally and subjectively awakened to and accepted what God has done for them. They do not yet know who they truly are in union with Jesus.’173 Your evangelism will aim, therefore, not to get them to repent and believe so that spiritual realities will be changed, but to repent and believe as God’s appointed way of accepting what are already spiritual realities. It’s a major difference. It also dilutes the ‘us and them’ distinction, in that we will no longer view non-believers as ‘outsiders’ or ‘the opposition’, but as children of God whose need is just to discover how much their Father loves them. That could lead to a softer manner often painfully lacking in some forms of so-called evangelism.
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What we have been describing is the theology popularised in William Young’s 2007 novel, The Shack, which caused a big stir when first published.
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More recently a friend of Young’s, Baxter Kruger, has filled out some of the theological detail implied in the novel, and many find the general position represented by his work to be an attractive middle ground between inclusive universalism and exclusive Calvinism.
 
Chapter 17 – A Bridge Too Far?
 
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Maybe the minds and personal wiring of intelligent people like Marcus Borg enable them to live on such a flimsy diet, but the great majority of ordinary folk can’t do it. We need something meatier and more substantial, something with a flavour of real historical events.
 
Chapter 18 – Where do I Go from Here?
 
Most important of all, perhaps: don’t idolise the Bible. Respect it, yes. Hold on to your conviction that it is the Word of God, but without being enslaved to notions of inerrancy that simply can’t stand up to serious scrutiny. Determine to grasp its bigger picture in a more comprehensive way and let that bigger picture be your guide, rather than focusing too much on aspects like the minutiae of Greek verbs and prepositions. Back off from too much proof-texting. Keep Jesus central in your hermeneutics, and determine to spend more time in the four Gospels that present him and his kingdom message.
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