One In Jesus

While I would not wish to burden the reader with an essay on hermeneutics, we should pause briefly to reflect on just how we test one competing interpretation of scripture against another.

We have already stated the first rule of interpretation — know your own biases and avoid interpreting to satisfy them. It is far too easy to find a shallow, too-convenient argument that just happens to support what you want to believe and then persuade yourself that the argument is God’s own truth.

Second, we must not take the most difficult passages, impose our preferred views on them, and then use our human conclusions to reinterpret (or just ignore) the plainer passages that don’t suit our prejudices. For a seeker of the truth, the path is clear: start with the basics, meaning what the Bible says are the basics. And then work toward the more ambiguous passages. Continue reading →

I’ve added some material to “Avoiding Our Biases and Bad Habits” starting at Overlooking the Old Testament and the Gospels.

That section is new, and the final section is expanded.

Before we begin this study in detail, we must remind ourselves of certain key principles:

1. Grace extends to this area too. A Christian will not be lost if he or she in good conscience violates God’s will regarding women. Such a Christian will be wrong, will have sinned – and will be forgiven. Nowhere does the Bible say that God will not forgive or will apply a stricter standard in this area.

2. The biases we discussed earlier, being the biases that we all have, are particularly strong in this area. The relationship of men and women is very, very strongly influenced by culture, and it is very hard to avoid reading popular culture into our interpretation of the Bible. Continue reading →

[As promised, I’m starting a series on the role of women. These posts will be shamelessly ripped off from my book Buried Talents, which is available in full text on this site.

However, I’m updating it. In particular, a number of internet forums have discussed it extensively, which have provided some additional material and forced me to dig more deeply here and there. And I’ve re-edited it a bit to make it more suitable for posting on a blog. So I’ll be tossing some new stuff in here and there for those who’ve been through this before.

I decided not to wait until May. It just seems right to get the material on out there for discussion.]

The Christian community has struggled with understanding the Bible’s teachings on the role of women in the church since the First Century. The Restoration Movement,[1] of which I am a part, has struggled with these teachings since its inception. In fact, the Restoration Movement’s long insistence on congregational autonomy and the right of each Christian to interpret the scriptures for himself (or herself)[2] has resulted in quite a divergence of opinion over the years.

And yet, while it is easy to document a wide variety of opinions among the leading thinkers of the Restoration Movement, our practices within the Churches of Christ have been remarkably uniform. Our uniformity is all the more remarkable given how very little biblical support there is for much of what we do (and don’t do). Continue reading →