What do we do with difficult Scripture passages?

Posted on May 24, 2012 by

I could tell he was reluctant to ask his question, but I encouraged him that any sincere question was welcome. He seemed shocked at himself for actually expressing his doubt aloud, but he blurted out anyway: “I just don’t understand how this kind of verse can be the Word of God!” The passage that was troubling him was Psalm 137:8-9:

O Babylon, you will be destroyed.
Happy is the one who pays you back
for what you have done to us.
Happy is the one who takes your babies
and smashes them against the rocks!

The first thing I said in response was that I would be troubled by anyone who didn’t find this passage disturbing! I could immediately see the relief on his face. He later explained that he was afraid we would think he was some kind of heretic or atheist because he dared to even wonder about a particular verse of Scripture. We went on to discuss this passage in its context. But before I share more with you about this specific case, I want to step back and look at this more general question: What do we do when we run across a passage of Scripture that really troubles us or even makes us doubt? How do we handle it when it seems the Bible might be wrong?

When facing such a problem, it’s easy to fall into one of two extremes. We can just rely on blind, irrational faith, insisting that if the Bible says it—no matter how illogical or silly it sounds—then it’s true. The problem with this approach is that we may be holding sacred our own mistaken idea of what the Scriptures are saying, not what the Bible actually communicates. (We’ll see some examples of this below.)

But then, at the slightest hint that the Scriptures might be in error, we could also simply reject the Bible as inspired or infallible. We can assume that all the critics are right and the Bible is a merely human book, describing the beliefs of people in the distant past. The problem with doing this is that the Bible has a long track record of refuting its critics. (We’ll see some examples of this below also.) If we too easily reject the Scriptures, we might find ourselves rejecting the very Word of God.

So what do we do? It’s interesting that even Christians in the relatively early history of the church had to face difficult passages of Scripture. Sixteen hundred years ago, the pastor and scholar Augustine described how he approached these kinds of challenges. His methods are still sound for us today, and we’re going to look at each of his three suggestions. But we begin with a fourth step that I’ve added (with which I’m sure Augustine would agree):

1. Pray
It often goes without saying, but the first step in studying the Bible—especially when struggling with something difficult to understand—should always be to pray. If the Bible was written through the divine inspiration of the Holy Spirit, then we need the illumi-nation of the Spirit to properly interpret the Scriptures. We need to humbly ask God to help us understand the heart of what he’s telling us in his Word.

2. Check the translation
It’s easy for us to get the wrong understanding of a Scripture passage because of an unclear translation. This is especially true of older translations that use more archaic English. I love the King James Version. I grew up with it; it was the only Bible I knew for years. But I can’t tell you how many times people have come to me with a passage they don’t understand in the KJV. When I show them the passage in another, more clear translation, the response is usually, “Ohhhhhh, that’s what this means.”

For instance, many people are confused by Jesus’ desire to “suffer the little children [Matthew 19:14],” not realizing that today this would be expressed as “allow the little children” or “don’t prevent the little children.” So if you’re reading something that doesn’t make sense, try reading it in a different translation. Many times, reading the same passage in different words can help you better understand the passage.

3. Check the notes
Augustine would say ‘check the manuscripts.’ This sounds overly technical and even intimidating to many ordinary Christians today. Thankfully, we can all check the manuscripts; all it takes is reading the notes in our Bibles. If you check the little footnotes in your Bible, you’ll see a few of them that say something like: “The oldest and most reliable manuscripts do not contain this passage.” These notes refer to verses that the vast majority of biblical scholars agree were accidentally added to the text centuries after it was originally written. We know that these passages shouldn’t be included as Scripture. Here’s an example from John 5:4 (from the KJV):

For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

This was apparently someone’s attempt to explain why the people were trying so hard to get into the pool. At first, this explanation was written in the margin, but it eventually was incorporated into the text itself. But—by comparing all the thousands of manuscripts we have available—textual scholars can ascertain the original reading and the spurious addition (and even determine the general timeframe when it was added). So we don’t have to accept this odd and superstitious reading as part of John’s gospel.

Another example is the reference to handling snakes in Mark 16:18. Here again, practically all biblical scholars agree that this section of Mark was not part of the original. So after making sure that you understand the translation of a difficult passage, check for notes to make sure that it was genuinely part of the original text. (Anything that was added is likely to be problematic [like snake-handling], but just because a text is difficult doesn’t mean it’s not part of the original.)

4. Work to truly understand the passage
If you’ve verified that the translation actually means what it seems to mean, and there are no notes in your Bible indicating that the passage isn’t authentic, then it’s time to push up your sleeves and do the work necessary to properly understand the passage. While the essentials of the Gospel are crystal clear in Scripture, not everything is as easy to immediately grasp. Speaking of Paul’s letters to the churches, Peter wrote that “some of his comments are hard to understand [2 Peter 3:16].”

In passages such as John 6, we see Jesus teaching things to the people that were difficult to hear and accept. He knew that many of them were following him for superficial reasons, not because they understood the spiritual significance of what he said and did. So he would occasionally teach hard truths, to distinguish between those who had “ears to hear,” and those who weren’t willing to truly hear. We need to not reject a passage right away just because it disturbs or confuses us. We first need to make sure we accurately understand the passage.

In the passage we began with, Psalm 137:8-9, who is speaking? It’s not God. The author is one of the refugees from conquered, destroyed Jerusalem. He’s a Jew who now lives in the land of his conquerors: Babylon. He is overwrought with what has befallen his people and his homeland, and he longs for vengeance against the people of Babylon. He cries out for them to experience the same horrific fate that they’ve perpetrated upon his people. The psalm is very expressive and even moving in places, but it doesn’t express the heart of God, but the heart of these devastated Jewish refugees. Once we’ve done the work to understand the passage in context, it still disturbs us, but we don’t have to accept it as the will of God for these people. [For more on this, see The psalms: Prayers to God that speak to us.]

An earned benefit of the doubt
We don’t want to fall back on a blind, subjective faith in Scripture. On the other hand, we need to realize how often the Bible has proven itself accurate against the attacks of the critics. A classic example concerns the existence of the Hittites. The Old Testament refers many times to these people, portraying them as a major power and sometimes foe of Israel. Not that long ago, if you had suggested in a secular university that this biblical portrayal was historically relevant, you would have been laughed out of class. Everyone knew the Hittites were a biblical myth, at most a minor, insignificant local tribe. That is until a few decades ago, when archaeologists began uncovering confirmation of the Hittite empire. As it turns out, these Hittites had a rich, longstanding culture, they were dominant over a widespread territory, the other major powers of the region considered them a threat, and they existed during the same timeframe that the Bible describes. Score one for Scripture.

This same kind of scenario has played out again and again. Many times the Bible has proven itself to be far more accurate than the supposed “experts.” This doesn’t mean we should just assume it can never be wrong, especially in our interaction with skeptics and unbelievers. But it does mean that none of us should too quickly dismiss the claims of Scripture because of the current consensus of skeptical critics. We need to resist the temptation of a knee-jerk reaction, either in support of a particular reading of the Bible or in opposition to it. Especially for those who are followers of Christ, we must:

Work hard so you can present yourself to God and receive his approval. Be a good worker, one who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly explains the word of truth.
2 Timothy 2:15

Other posts in this series:

A matter of faith: Believing the Bible

The Bible: Are we really reading what they wrote?

Why we can trust the Bible

Posted in church life, Taking Root, theology | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Why we can trust the Bible

Posted on May 17, 2012 by

If I asked you, “Why do you believe the Bible?” some of you might respond by sharing your personal experiences, how the Holy Spirit confirmed the truth of God’s Word within your spirit. You might describe how he helped you to just know that the Scriptures are the infallible Word of God. I have no interest in challenging this kind of assurance because I know the Spirit does work like this in our hearts and minds. But is this the only reason for trusting the Bible?

Imagine if you were talking with a Mormon. He asks you why you believe the Bible is the Word of God, and so you share your Spirit-given assurance. He responds by telling you about how he prayed to God to let him know if the Book of Mormon was really true, and how he felt a “burning in his bosom” from God that assured him that the Book of Mormon was indeed the Word of God. What now? Do your spiritual experiences cancel out each other? Are both conclusions true (even though they contradict each other)? It seems we need some objective criteria in seeking to determine the validity of the Bible.

Start with Jesus
In establishing the authority of Scripture in the life of the believer, I don’t begin with the Bible itself, but with Jesus. The historic Christian faith is based on the person of Jesus Christ. And even without an inerrant Bible, we can have complete faith in Christ. For instance, we have very convincing historical evidence confirming not only the existence of Jesus, but the historical events of his ministry, crucifixion, burial and physical resur-rection. [For more on this, you can see my series on the historical Jesus, beginning with In search of Jesus. I've neglected this series for too long, but hope to add to it soon.]

Many scholars who study Jesus and early Christianity don’t believe the New Testament is divinely inspired or infallible, but most of them still accept the New Testament gospels as generally reliable historical sources. Not only do we know historically that the earliest Christians worshiped Jesus as God, but we’re also challenged by Jesus’ own teachings as recorded by people who heard him. These statements are so striking that they’ve caused people such as CS Lewis to make observations like this one:

I am trying here to prevent the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else He would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Lewis later concluded: “Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.”

[I realize that I've just barely scratched the surface regarding the historical evidence for Jesus, and that I haven't addressed here any of the counter arguments. This is why I'm devoting an entire series to this topic. I would encourage you to be clear about what you believe about Jesus before tackling the exact nature of Scripture. I believe in the Bible because I believe in Jesus, not the other way around.]

I believe in the Bible because I believe in Jesus.

But how is this emphasis on Jesus relevant to our current questions regarding the authority and trustworthiness of Scripture? Well, if we accept the New Testament gospels as generally historically reliable (as most scholars do), and if we are convinced by the historical evidence concerning who Jesus was and what he did, and if we want to follow Jesus and pattern our lives after him, then what Jesus believed and taught about the Scriptures becomes incredibly important. And we get a clear picture of his views on the pages of the New Testament gospels.

Jesus’ view of Scripture
It doesn’t take long in our reading of the gospels before we see how Jesus consistently relied on and appealed to the Scriptures. When he is tempted repeatedly by Satan in the wilderness, each time he responds with the words of Scripture (Matthew 4:1-11).  We see this appeal to the authority of Scripture in his frequent challenge “Have you not read . . . [e.g. Matthew 12:3; 22:31; Mark 12:10].”

When Jesus is challenged by the Sadducees, he responds by telling them, “Your mistake is that you don’t know the Scriptures [Matthew 12:29].” He goes on to quote a specific passage of Scripture and use this passage to teach definitively about the resurrection from the dead and the nature of God. In Matthew 15:1-9, Jesus challenges an unbiblical practice of the Pharisees, saying, “You cancel the Word of God for the sake of your own tradition.” In other words, he uses the Scriptures to determine the validity of someone else’s spiritual practice. In John 10:22-42, Jesus quotes a certain passage of Scripture, emphasizes a single, specific word, and then insists that “the Scriptures cannot be altered.”

After Jesus’ death and resurrection, he spoke to two disciples who didn’t realize who he was. Finally, Jesus lovingly rebuked their hopelessness:

“You foolish people! You find it so hard to believe all that the prophets wrote in the Scriptures. Wasn’t it clearly predicted that the Messiah would have to suffer all these things before entering his glory?” Then Jesus took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
Luke 24:25-27 

Over and over again, we see the place of absolute trustworthiness and authority that the Scriptures held in the life and ministry of Jesus. One could be excused for describing Jesus’ view of the Scriptures as “evangelical.” It seems apparent that we should follow him in his devotion to the Scriptures.

Jesus’ apostles
In Matthew 10:1 (and parallel passages), Jesus chooses 12 of his followers to be his apostles. Later, Paul and James are also described as apostles of Christ. What does it mean to be an apostle? One aspect of their ministry is fairly common to us today. We’re very familiar with someone representing and speaking for another person or group, and even exercising authority in their name. If a US ambassador or the Secretary of State speaks to a foreign government in an official capacity, everyone understands that they speak with the authority of the US president.

This is what the apostles were; they were official, personally-commissioned represent-atives of Jesus Christ. They taught and wrote his words with his authority. This is intrinsic to the role of the apostle, and it was universally understood in the 1st century church. This is why, in their letters, both Paul and Peter identify themselves as apostles of Christ. This is why they write with authority, instructing the believers regarding salvation and the Christian life.

This is why Paul could remind the Corinthians that what he wrote was a command from the Lord himself (1 Corinthians 14:37). This is why he explains how God was revealing his eternal plan through his apostles and prophets (Ephesians 3:1-5). This is why they could make demands in the name of Christ (1 Thessalonians 2:6; Philemon 1:8). This is why, though Paul sought to lead in humility and gentleness, he makes clear that he will exercise his apostolic authority for the sake of the flock (2 Corinthians 13:2-10). This is why they could decisively and authoritatively correct false teaching (for a clear example of this, see the entire letter to the Galatians). And this why they could praise the Thessalonians with these words:

Therefore, we never stop thanking God that when you received his message from us, you didn’t think of our words as mere human ideas. You accepted what we said as the very word of God—which, of course, it is. And this word continues to work in you who believe.
1 Thessalonians 1:13

And the Thessalonians weren’t alone in this. From the very beginning, the followers of Jesus “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching [Acts 2:42].” Years later, Peter would write this about the letters of Paul:

This is what our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you with the wisdom God gave him—speaking of these things in all of his letters. Some of his comments are hard to understand, and those who are ignorant and unstable have twisted his letters to mean something quite different, just as they do with other parts of Scripture.
2 Peter 3:15-16

Did you notice how Peter includes Paul’s letters with “other parts of Scripture”? The earliest believers universally followed this devotion to, and adherence of, these apostolic writings, viewing them as divinely inspired and infallible Scripture.

The Bible’s claims about itself
The Old Testament is filled with strong claims about its own authority. But let’s look at two claims from the New Testament:

Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding, or from human initiative. No, these prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.
2 Peter 1:20-21

All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work.
2 Timothy 3:16-17

Now, don’t misunderstand. We’re not saying that we have to believe the Bible is the Word of God because it says that it’s the Word of God. We don’t want to return to the circular reasoning we discussed a few weeks ago. But the Bible does make some very strong claims about itself. These claims challenge us just as the statements of Jesus challenge us. These claims demand that we make a tough choice: Is the Bible what it claims to be, or not?

If these claims are wrong, they’re either the diabolical rantings of 1st century charlatans, or the grandiose fantasies of well-intentioned, but self-deluded, fanatics. The idea that the Scriptures are not truly the inspired, inerrant Word of God, but that they’re still somehow spiritually beneficial to us and even authoritative for the church is ultimately incoherent and nonsensical. To paraphrase Lewis, the biblical authors have not left that open to us. They did not intend to.

If the Scriptures are neither evil spiritual manipulation
nor wide-eyed fairy tales,
then they must be what they claim to be—the Word of God.

The internal consistency of the Scriptures
Imagine trying to compile writings on a single theological subject from a 100-year span, all by authors who were native English-speakers and who were educated at Oxford. Would anyone mistake these writings for the work of a single author? Would these works even fit well within a single compilation?

The Bible was written in three different languages; on three different continents; by more than 40 authors of incredibly varying educational, social and cultural backgrounds; over a period of 1,500 years. And yet it uncannily seems to be the product of a single, unifying mind. And this perception isn’t diminished by in-depth study. No, the more one digs below the surface in the Scriptural texts, the more the cohesive nature of Scripture is hard to deny. Though there were many human authors responsible for the biblical books, it’s difficult to escape the guiding hand of a divine Author who stands behind the whole. The more one studies, the more unavoidable the conclusion that the Author of Genesis is also the Author of Revelation.

But what about things in Scripture that do seem inconsistent? What about passages that appear to be problematic? We’ll look at some of these issues next week.

Other posts in this series:

A matter of faith: Believing the Bible

The Bible: Are we really reading what they wrote?

What do we do with difficult Scripture passages?

Posted in church life, cultural interaction, Taking Root, theology | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

The Bible: Are we really reading what they wrote?

Posted on May 10, 2012 by

Did you ever play the game ‘telephone’? That’s where you sit in a circle, and the first person whispers some nonsensical phrase to the next person, something like: “Sally sold all her shells.” Each person whispers it—only once!—to the next person until the phrase gets all the way around to the last one in the circle. Then they venture their best guess as to what they heard (“Sand your soles or else”?), and everyone gets a laugh at how badly the message got mangled.

It’s not unusual to hear people compare the way we’ve received our current Bible translations to this children’s game. But is this a fair comparison? Let’s think about this. What if the statement being repeated wasn’t a silly, meaningless phrase? What if it was a profound truth so important to the people repeating it that they’d be willing to die for this belief? Would this improve the accuracy somewhat? And what if they wrote these truths down, and then others made new copies from these written accounts? Wouldn’t this make the end result more trustworthy? Maybe this children’s game isn’t really the best match for how the Bible has been passed down over the centuries.

Here’s another of the most commonly repeated, but erroneous, criticisms about the Bible:

What we have with the Bible are translations of translation of translations.
How can we know what we’re reading is what they actually wrote?

These kinds of statements just reveal that most people don’t know much about the process of translating the Bible. Unless you read ancient Hebrew and Greek, you’re going to require a translation of Scripture in order to read it. Usually these translations are produced by teams of scholars who are skilled in both their knowledge of ancient languages and their knowledge of the Scriptures. They never begin with another translation of Scripture; they always begin with a careful study of the original languages used in the ancient manuscripts. So the statement highlighted above is simply wrong.

But even considering all of this, is the process foolproof? No, it’s not. But scholars seek to ensure that this process—and the end result—are as free of error as possible. This isn’t just true for the study of the Bible, this is done for all important ancient works. There’s a whole scientific field that has developed because the need for these kinds of studies: textual criticism. (This doesn’t mean critical in a negative, tear-it-apart kind of way, but an exacting, precise manner of studying ancient texts, including the Bible.) There are three criteria that these scholars consider in determining how trustworthy an ancient document is:

1. How early is the oldest manuscript?

2. How many manuscripts do we have?

3. How much of the content is in doubt?

Let’s evaluate the New Testament using the same tests that we’d use for any other ancient book:

How early is the oldest manuscript?
We don’t have any of the original, “first-edition” biblical manuscripts. This may surprise some people, but we don’t have the original manuscripts (called “autographs”) for any piece of ancient literature. Obviously, the earlier the earliest copy is, the more we can be sure that it’s accurately conveying the original writing. How early are the copies we have?

Let’s discuss some comparative writings from antiquity so we know what’s acceptable. Many of us read Plato in school. Plato wrote around 400 BC. The earliest manuscript for any of Plato’s writings dates from approximately 900 AD. That’s a difference of 1,300 years. And no one in a political science class ever suggests that we don’t know what Plato actually wrote. Let’s look at a couple of examples from the 1st century for a better comparison. The earliest manuscript for the Jewish historian Josephus is from the 11th century, and for the Roman Tacitus from the 9th century.

In comparison, the earliest manuscript from the New Testament is part of a gospel of John and it’s dated approximately 125 AD. If John wrote his gospel around 90 AD, as most scholars believe, this means the time that elapsed between his writing and our earliest manuscript is only around 35 years. In the study of ancient literature, this is astounding! We have many very early manuscripts, and we’re finding more manuscripts all the time. [A fragment of the gospel of Mark was recently discovered that scholars say dates from the 1st century. If so, this will now be our earliest manuscript. The findings are due to be published later this year.] How does the New Testament handle this first test? I’d say pretty well!

How many manuscripts do we have?
It’s almost embarrassing to compare the number of New Testament manuscripts to other ancient works. If we have 20 copies of an ancient work, it’s generally considered very well-attested. For Plato, we have only 7. For Tacitus, we have only 3, but Josephus fares better with 133 manuscripts. Next to the New Testament, the most manuscripts for an ancient work are for the writings of Homer, for which we have a little less than 2,500 manuscripts. Very impressive.

How about for the New Testament? Well, if we count only the Greek manuscripts, we have over 5,700 (and the number is still growing). Textual critics also highly value ancient translations of works into other languages. If they can compare how a certain Greek word was translated into Latin, Syriac and Armenian, for instance, it gives them greater insight into the original Greek meaning. In addition to the 5,700+ Greek manuscripts, we have over 10,000 Latin translations, thousands more in other various languages, and over a million (that’s right million) quotations of the New Testament in the writings of the early church leaders. In fact, if we didn’t have any New Testament manuscripts at all, we could duplicate almost all of the New Testament by using only the quotes contained in the early Christian writings. And we should remember that this was a faith and a Book that was outlawed for the first 300 years of its existence. How is the New Testament doing so far?

Why is it so important to have a lot of manuscript copies? Let me give you a real illustration. Classes in Bible college or seminary will sometimes do an experiment. Let’s say we have 30 students. The teacher recites, in English, a certain passage of Scripture (maybe a chapter from a gospel such as Matthew), and the students copy down what they hear the teacher reading. Now it’s highly doubtful that we’ll have 2 identical copies produced in this experiment. They’ll all have variations. And there won’t be a single perfect copy produced. Everyone will make some mistake. Some will just misspell a word here and there, but some will miss a whole phrase or put down an entirely wrong word. But here’s what’s important: not all of the students will make the same mistake. Even if 3 students make the exact same mistake, we can correct their mistake by comparing it with the other 27. So, by comparing the 30 different copies, we can determine the correct original reading. Do you see how this works? Do you think having over 5,700 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament is important? So just how much of the original New Testament reading can we determine by comparing these manuscripts?

How much of the content is in doubt?
No two manuscripts of the New Testament are identical. Critics of the Bible sometimes toss out this fact as if they’re revealing some deep, dark secret. But every first-year Bible college or seminary student knows this, and all Christians should be aware of it. All this proves is that the transmission of the New Testament wasn’t highly controlled (which calls into doubt many of the more outlandish conspiracy theories regarding the early church). As we’ve seen, we should expect these differences in the manuscripts, what the scholars call “textual variants.” The question is, how serious are these variations?

There are hundreds of thousands of variations in the New Testament manuscripts. This may sound bad, until we realize that every time even one letter is changed in the spelling of a word, this counts as a variation. If 3 letters are different, then that counts for 3 variations. Many of these, if not most, might not even have been considered errors at the time because the people were accustomed to great variation in how they spelled things like names. Other differences involve variations that are so slight we can’t even reflect the differences in our English translations. Almost all of the differences between New Testament manuscripts involve these very minor variations.

So the question is, how much of the actual text is in question? And the answer is less than 1%. And there is no essential Christian teaching that is dependent on one of these few uncertain texts. What are some of these passages that we’re not quite sure about? Here’s one example from Romans 5:1:

Therefore, since we have been made right in God’s sight by faith, we have peace with God because of what Jesus Christ our Lord has done for us.

Most current translations read as this one does, “we have peace” with God. But, in some Bibles, we’ll see a note telling us that some early manuscripts read “let us have” peace with God. “Not a huge difference,” you might say. Yet this is how exacting the biblical scholars are. They invest great amounts of time to even studying such relatively subtle differences. Another one we could mention is 1 John 1:4. We can’t be entirely sure whether he wrote so that “our joy may be complete” or that “your joy may be complete.” Despite the offhand dismissals we often hear in casual conversation, we are actually certain of the reading of the New Testament in over 99% of the text. So when we test the New Testament, we see that we have extremely early manuscripts, a wealth of manuscripts to study and compare, and we’re therefore able to be very confident that we’re reading what the original authors wrote.

But what about the Old Testament?
While we do have thousands of Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament, the numbers are not quite as impressive as the New Testament. There is a much greater span of time between the last writing of the Old Testament and the earliest manuscripts. Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, our earliest Old Testament manuscripts were relatively recent (10th century AD).

Part of what gave scholars confidence in the Old Testament text is knowing the exact nature of the process for copying it. Professional scribes were trained to copy the Hebrew Scriptures, and they went to extreme lengths to make sure they didn’t alter anything in their copying of the text. They would count the total number of words and letters in a book, and in specific sections of the book. If the numbers varied, they would destroy their copy and begin again. They would count to the specific word at the very center of a book and sections of a book. They would verify even the middle letter of a book or section of a book. Any variation and they would scrap their work and start all over again. (And I thought I was a perfectionist!)

One of the most electrifying discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls (found between 1947 and 1956) was a complete Hebrew manuscript of the Old Testament book of Isaiah. This newly discovered copy of Isaiah was 1,000 years older than the oldest manuscripts previously available. How would the 10th century Hebrew manuscripts compare to what had been copied 1,000 years earlier? The results were breathtaking. The versions were practically identical, with only a few minor variations. This, after 1,000 years of copies and recopies. Amazing!

So we enjoy overwhelming evidence that when we read the Bible, we’re reading what was originally written by the biblical authors. But how do we know that what they wrote is actually true, and even the inspired, infallible Word of God? We’ll continue exploring this subject next week.

Other posts in this series:

A matter of faith: Believing the Bible

Why we can trust the Bible

What do we do with difficult Scripture passages?

Posted in church life, cultural interaction, Taking Root | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

A matter of faith: Believing the Bible

Posted on April 26, 2012 by

Our church’s study time is interactive. I often ask for a response from the people, and they can raise their hands and ask questions during the teaching. This past Sunday, the interaction got a little more intense than usual. There was some question as to the interpretation of a particular passage, but the underlying tension seemed to be more about how we view the authority of Scripture. Since this is a vital issue for us as believers, we’re going to explore this topic for the next three weeks.

We begin by making clear our position on the Bible. While we have people attending our church who hold differing viewpoints (whom we love very much), our church is an evangelical Christian church. We believe the Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God, and that it is without error. We accept Scripture as the final authority for the Christian faith, for our church life and ministry, and for our individual Christian lives. We measure every idea, tradition and action according to the standard of the Scriptures.

So the question for most of us isn’t whether we believe the Bible. We do. We have faith in the Scriptures as God’s Word to his people. But a question we should explore is: What kind of faith do we have in the Bible?

What kind of faith do you have?
There are two different kinds of faith, and we need to know which kind we have:

objective faith

This kind of faith is focused on the object of our faith—who or what we believe in. It’s faith that is justified because the object of our faith is trustworthy. It’s a surprise to many non-Christians that they use faith all the time. When you go to work every morning, you do this because you have faith in your employer. You believe that they’ll keep the business operating and pay you at the appropriate time. If you had good reasons to not believe this, you probably wouldn’t keep going to work. This is objective faith. You go outside of town and climb up into a hollow, metal tube, which is controlled by someone you don’t even see, and expect this contraption to take you hundreds or even thousands of miles over sea and land—and even get you to your destination in time to catch another metal tube! Why do we do this? Because we have a sufficient faith in the airlines to transport us from one point to another.

The Christian faith is an historical faith. It’s based on a real, historical person and event. At the heart of our faith is the person of Jesus Christ and his resurrection from the dead. We make this truth claim and put it out there for anyone to examine and either verify or refute. [For more on this, see In search of Jesus.] If someone suggests that it really doesn’t matter whether Jesus rose from the dead or not, we’re quick to point out that the actual, literal truth of the resurrection is the basis for our faith. As the apostle Paul said, if Christ has not been raised from the dead then our faith is useless, we are still guilty of our sins and we are to be pitied more than anyone in the world (1 Corinthians 15:17-19). If the resurrection is not true, then at best we’re just playing church, believing in a myth. The Christian faith is an objective faith; it’s focused on the truth that we believe (not on the mere fact that we believe something).

subjective faith

Have you ever heard someone say, “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, just whether you sincerely believe”? This is subjective faith. The emphasis isn’t on the trustworthiness of what we’re placing our faith in. It’s really a faith in faith itself. When a friend or family member patronizingly pats you on the hand and says, “I’m glad your faith works for you,” their understanding of faith is a subjective one. When people speak of a blind leap of faith, they’re referring to this kind of faith.

The problem with subjective faith is clear. If the emphasis is on the faith itself, and if it doesn’t matter if the object of one’s faith is trustworthy or not, then we can just believe any ridiculous thing we want. You want to believe that UFOs are coming to pick you up, or that the rock in your backyard is your god? Go right ahead! As long as you sincerely believe! Subjective faith is irrational faith. People who have this kind of faith aren’t willing for the object of their faith to be examined and verified or refuted. Because the issue for them isn’t whether the object of their faith is trustworthy or not, it’s just that they believe.

What kind of faith do you have in the Bible?
Read the following dialogue and tell me what kind of faith this is:

“Why do you believe the Bible?”

“Because it’s the Word of God.”

“But how do you know it’s the Word of God?”

“Because it says it is.”

“But how can you be certain about what it says?”

“Because it’s the Word of God.”

Do you see how this ends up going round and round in circles? (That’s why it’s called “circular reasoning.”) In this case, the believer isn’t really giving an answer. Their answer is essentially that they believe the Bible because they believe the Bible. It’s a non-answer. What kind of faith is this? This is subjective faith, isn’t it? The focus isn’t really on the trustworthy nature of the Scriptures, but on the individual’s faith. I believe because I believe. Is this the kind of faith we find modeled in Scripture itself? Let’s see:

Many people have set out to write accounts about the events that have been fulfilled among us. They used the eyewitness reports circulating among us from the early disciples. Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I also have decided to write a careful account for you, most honorable Theophilus, so you can be certain of the truth of everything you were taught.
Luke 1:1-4

This is the very beginning of Luke’s gospel account of Jesus. Notice that others had already written gospels. But Luke still takes the time to investigate everything carefully. Why? Why not simply believe? Why not believe the gospel accounts just because they’re gospel accounts? Why not tell his friend to believe what he was taught because that’s what he was taught? No, Luke takes the time to be certain of the truth that he believes and that he presents to others. He’s actually so bold as to examine the gospel accounts and verify whether they are indeed trustworthy. Is this a good thing? Absolutely.

That very night the believers sent Paul and Silas to Berea. When they arrived there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. The people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, and they listened eagerly to Paul’s message. They searched the Scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth.
Acts 17:10-11

“Aha!” someone might be thinking, “See, they searched the Scriptures.” But let’s think about this. Who were these people? They were Jews. So what Scriptures would they have been searching? The Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. As Jews, they already accepted the Old Testament as God’s Word. But what was Paul presenting to them? The New Testament Gospel of Jesus Christ. And did he insist that they believe this Gospel based on what the New Testament Gospel said? No, that would be circular reasoning. It would be irrational. He allowed them to examine his message using the truth they already had.

We see something similar in the way Paul addressed Gentiles in Athens (Acts 17:16-34). He begins by relating to their worship of an unknown God, offering to explain this unknown God to them. He speaks of how there is one God who created everything and everyone, and how this God desires for all people to come into relationship with him. Along the way he quotes from their own writings. He ends by telling them of Jesus and his resurrection from the dead. But notice that he never once expects the people to believe what he’s telling them because “the Bible says.” Everything he says is very biblical, but he doesn’t appeal to the Scriptures as authoritative. Why not? Because these people have no reason yet to accept the Bible as authoritative!

We need to remember the instructions we receive in 1 Peter 3:15-16:

And if someone asks about your Christian hope, always be ready to explain it. But do this in a gentle and respectful way.

A big part of our Christian hope is what the Scriptures tell us, and we need to be prepared to explain to people why we can draw this hope from the Bible, why it’s trustworthy. And we need to offer more than just that it’s the Word of God.

A test case
Imagine that you’re having a discussion with a Mormon and a Muslim. Each of you has a different faith and you use different books as your highest, most authoritative guides. So you gently and respectfully challenge your friends as to why they believe in the Book of Mormon or the Qur’an. They each say that they believe in their Scriptures because they’re the Word of God. Do you accept their claims? Why not? If you disagree with them only because you believe the Bible is the Word of God, you’re at a stalemate, aren’t you? Each of you believes in your holy book simply because you believe in your holy book.

But let’s say that you’re familiar with both religions’ books, and you know of serious problems with these books that would cause a person to doubt whether they are, in fact, God’s Word. So you share your concerns with your friends, right? What are you expecting of them? You want them to listen to your challenge of their holy books. But to really listen to you they must be willing to consider the possibility that their holy book is not actually the Word of God. They must be so committed to the truth that they’re willing to reexamine their beliefs to make sure they’re truly sound.

Are we willing to do the same thing? Are we willing to not only respect another person enough to hear out their challenge of our Scriptures, are we willing to respect the Bible enough to see whether it stands up to the challenge? If not, what are we afraid of? If the Bible is the Word of God, won’t it be able to withstand any challenge?

In the study of logic, there’s a fallacy known as “invincible ignorance.” This is the attitude that “I already have my mind made up, and I’m not going to listen to anything different.” It’s an adult’s way of plugging their ears and yelling so they can’t hear what you’re saying. Some may act like they’re listening politely to you, but eventually you find they’re not willing to truly hear anything different than what they already believe. This is an irrational, subjective faith. It’s not healthy and it’s not the faith that the Bible teaches. We must be prepared to put the Bible through the same rigorous tests that we require of the Book of Mormon, the Qur’an, or any other supposed holy book.

But are we now judging Scripture?
We often emphasize that Scripture tells us when we’re right or wrong; we don’t judge when Scripture is right or wrong. And this is true of the Bible in the same way it’s true of other standards on which we rely. I’ve often compared Scripture to a level, or a scale, or the instruments in an airplane. But do we place automatic, blind faith in these standards just because they’re supposed to be reliable? My father introduced me to the idea of a level. My first trust of a level was as much a trust of him as it was the level. But then he demonstrated the level for me, and I saw for myself how it could show whether a surface was truly level or whether it was slightly off. After using it a few times, I trusted it absolutely. But I was convinced of its trustworthiness.

We may think we trust the Bible just because it’s the Bible, but if we think back to when we came to faith in Christ (or came back to faith in Christ), most of us had some reasons why we began to believe the Scriptures. Now we may have had different reasons. Maybe you believed the Bible is the Word of God because your parents told you this, or a pastor or church leader. Maybe you felt God speaking to you through the words of Scripture. Maybe you were like Luke and the Bereans and you examined the claims of the Bible carefully before placing your faith in the Scriptures. But we all had some reason for our initial belief.

Most of us had certain reasons for originally placing our faith in the Bible.

Now, do we ever reevaluate our trust of a standard? What if you stepped on a scale and it told you that you weighed 43 pounds? Would you start celebrating because your diet is going a lot better than you imagined?! Or would you suspect something is wrong with the scale? If you just filled your car with gas and then the indicator still reads empty, do you go back and fill up all over again out of blind faith in the gas gauge?

Fine, but should we ever reevaluate our beliefs? Yes, if want to have confidence in what we believe. Should such an idea scare us? Only if we’re more committed to our beliefs than we are to the truth. Some Christians have the mistaken idea that if we really have faith we’ll never feel doubt. But faith isn’t never having doubt; it’s being convinced despite our doubts. We don’t want to be wishy-washy, constantly switching back and forth between believing and not believing. But there are times when Christians reexamine what they believe—and this is healthy. Facing our doubts strengthens our faith.

When a believer experiences doubts about the truth of the resurrection, we don’t rebuke them for their doubts or blithely dismiss the challenges they’re facing. No, we help them work through the questions and issues; we show where the truth of the resurrection is so sound that it can withstand any of these challenges. Many scholars who are now highly effective at studying the historical evidences for the resurrection began as Christians with serious doubts.

What about the Bible? If we read a passage in Scripture that is deeply troubling to us, is it sinful for us to reconsider our belief in Scripture as the inerrant Word of God? No, it’s simply being intellectually honest. Of course, we shouldn’t immediately reject the Bible as infallible just because we’re struggling with a certain passage. But by reevaluating the nature of Scripture, we’re demonstrating that our faith in the Bible is not a blind, irrational faith, but one based on the trustworthiness of the Bible itself. If this trustworthiness is challenged, we must reevaluate it. We are people of faith, not fanatics who arrogantly refuse to consider the possibility that we’re wrong. And by reexamining the trustworthiness of Scripture, we gain a stronger, more mature faith in the divine nature of the Bible.

There once was a man who believed he was dead. His doctor had tried everything to convince him that he was actually alive, but to no avail. Finally, he had the man read books all about blood, and how it works in the human body. The man finally conceded the fact that dead people don’t bleed. So the doctor pricked the man with a needle and showed him the blood trickling down his thumb. To which the man exclaimed, “Oh my goodness—dead people do bleed!”

This is invincible ignorance. It’s the irrational faith of a person who will not even consider the possibility that what they believe is not true. This is the faith of the cultist, not of the Christian. We seek a mature faith in Christ and the Scriptures, not a childish faith of sticking our fingers in our ears and outshouting any opponents.

Should a Christian ever reevaluate their faith in the Bible as the infallible Word of God?

If there is absolutely nothing that could cause you to reconsider whether the Bible is the Word of God then you’re probably more committed to your own personal beliefs than you are to what is actually true. As shocking as it might sound, if the Bible isn’t true, we shouldn’t want to believe in it. Our first commitment must be to truth itself. This helps ensure that we’re worshiping the true God rather than our own preferred beliefs.

Thankfully, we have very convincing evidence that the Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God, without error and trustworthy as an infallible, authoritative standard for our faith and lives, leading us to the one true God. What is this evidence? Why do we believe the Bible? We’ll explore this next week.

Other posts in this series:

The Bible: Are we really reading what they wrote?

Why we can trust the Bible

What do we do with difficult Scripture passages?

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Me and Jesus: Must Christians “go to church”?

Posted on April 20, 2012 by

I want you to meet Sally. Sally is a Christian. She’s placed her faith in Jesus Christ. She prays regularly and reads her Bible. But Sally doesn’t go to church. She interacts with other Christians on Facebook, and occasionally she’ll hang out at a coffee shop with believers who happen to be there. Sometimes she even gets into in-depth discussions about things like Jesus and faith and life. But, like a growing number of Christians, she isn’t part of a regularly meeting group of believers.

Is this a healthy lifestyle for a Christian? Why do people decide to not ‘go to church’? There’s actually a number of different reasons—some we would recognize as legitimate concerns and others might seem more like petty complaints. Let’s see what reasons Sally might give for how she approaches the Christian life. (These are actual comments that I’ve heard from real people.)

“I’ve had it with the institutional church.”
Some who read this are thinking right now, “Amen!” and others are rolling their eyes. I understand the desire to leave the “institutional” church. I spent three years in the house church movement, and I relate to many of these concerns.

When we look at the history of the church, we see that we do have a tendency to become focused on the church as an institution. It’s not hard to find examples of this, both in the past and in our churches today. But this isn’t a “church” problem, it’s a human one. We just seem to easily fall into focusing on systems and forms; we’re comforted by a familiar setting and structure, and end up perpetuating our church organization rather than the essence of the Christian faith and mission.

The problem is that any group of Christians who meet regularly and have even the slightest form or structure will face this temptation to slip into an institutional way of thinking. Can we avoid this danger by avoiding any form of organization and only meeting together with other Christians in random ways? Not if we’re going to be biblical in the way we live the Christian life. [More on this below.] We will always deal with the temptation to be less than loving to our spouses, but this doesn’t mean we should just walk away from the concept of committed marriage. We’re constantly tempted to be a “good Christian” through our own human efforts, but we shouldn’t therefore give up on the goal of becoming mature through the life of the Spirit.  In the same way, the continual temptation to institutionalize, and do church our way, is one we will always face in this lifetime—and God intended it to be this way. We’re supposed to struggle with this.

“The Bible doesn’t tell us to go to church, it says we are the church.”
And Sally is absolutely right. Of course you can hear the same thing taught regularly in the vast majority of “organized” churches. The fact is that most pastors and church leaders long to lead a church that is spiritually organic, vibrant and thriving. They don’t want people to “go to” church, they want people to truly be the church. They’re not desiring to be the president of some cold, formal institution.

Now this doesn’t justify everything that happens in churches, and many times these same church leaders might do things that unintentionally work against this kind of vibrant church life. But is walking away really the answer? We need to remember that just as we are each a work in progress, growing into spiritual maturity, so each church body is a work in progress. Many times we expect the church to have arrived, but:

Just as each Christian is growing into the image of Christ,
so each church is growing into the image of Christ.

And God intends for each of us to help a local church body grow into the image of Christ. Again, the struggle is part of the process. Just as we are being sanctified, so is each church.

“We don’t have to meet somewhere to be the church;
wherever believers are, there’s the church!”
A friend recently sent me an article where the author wrote: “Asking me where I go to church is like asking me where I go to Jacobsen.” [Jacobsen is the author's last name.] “I am a Jacobsen and where I go a Jacobsen is.” In one sense, this is very true. When the Bible speaks of the church, it often means all believers in Christ. “Being the church,” using the word ‘church’ in this way, means simply “being Christian.” So, wherever we go, we should be the church. Yes, but . . .

What people such as this author are missing is that this isn’t the only way the New Testament uses the word “church.” It’s not even the most common way. We do see references to the universal church, but we also see churches (the churches of Judea [Galatians 1:22; 1 Thessalonians 2:14], the churches of Galatia [1 Corinthians 16:1; Galatians 1:2], Macedonia [2 Corinthians 8:1, 9:2], etc.). Going further, we see mention of specific churches, e.g. the church of Corinth, the church of Ephesus, the church of Philippi, etc. The New Testament speaks of individual churches in specific locations.

This isn’t simply referring to that part of the universal body of Christ who happens to be in a particular place at a particular time. If this were the case, we wouldn’t have the frequent references to plural churches. The Bible would simply speak of ‘the church currently in Judea,’ not the churches of Judea. You can’t have multiple universal churches. That doesn’t work. We also have references in Scripture to “the whole church” coming together or doing various things (Acts 15:4, 22; Romans 16:23;
1 Corinthians 14:4, 5, 12; 1 Timothy 5:20), which shows that a specific, gathered body of believers is in mind.

It is true that we are all part of the universal church; it is not true that we are all part of the church of Ephesus. What we find in Scripture are intentional, committed, regularly meeting, even organized [gasp!] groups of believers. There was something more to being a part of these churches than merely being a believer. So it’s simply not accurate to say that ‘wherever we are, there’s the church’ if we’re talking about the same kind of local churches that Scripture speaks of. We’re missing something very important if we neglect this truth.

“But wherever two or three gather in Jesus’ name, you have church!”
This is a very common sentiment, even in very traditional churches. But it’s a misunderstanding of Jesus’ statement, taking it completely out of its immediate context (Matthew 18:15-20). This is not what Jesus said. Jesus was actually speaking of the need to confront a sinning brother or sister. At some point, if the sinning believer will not repent, a Christian may need to “take your case to the church.” (Obviously, Jesus isn’t meaning for us to take our case to the universal church or to some random group of believers who happen to be in the coffee shop. We must have a church to which we belong in order to take our case to them.) Jesus is assuring them that he’s right there with them in this process of church discipline, it doesn’t matter how few they are in number. We can’t twist this to mean that any group of two or three Christians constitutes a church!

So what does the Bible teach us about our church involvement?

Don’t neglect meeting together.
Hebrews 10:25 warns us to “not neglect our meeting together, as some people do.” Now, this doesn’t tell us how often to meet together, what day of the week we’re to meet, or where we’re to meet—but it’s very clear that we’re not to neglect regularly meeting together. The very word we translate as church (ekklesia) means an “assembly” or “gathering”! You can look at practically every New Testament reference to God’s people in a specific locale, and you’ll see them gathering. A Christian who doesn’t gather regularly with a local church is as abnormal as a member of a physical body (an eye or a foot) that doesn’t ‘gather’ with the rest of the body. If isolation wasn’t a real danger, we wouldn’t be warned against it in Scripture.

Committed to a specific local body of believers.
It’s also obvious from Scripture that we’re to be committed to a specific church. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians and the Thessalonians, he referred to previous letters that he had written to them (speaking to them directly: “to you”). He wrote of what he had taught them while he was with them. If these churches just included whoever happened to be hanging out together at any given time, then Paul’s letters make no sense. Paul had to have known that most of the same people who were part of these churches before were still part of the church. These had to be distinct groups of people who were committed to meeting together on an ongoing basis.

Hebrews 13:17 tells us to obey our spiritual leaders and do what they say, that their work is to watch over our souls. The recipients of the letter were also to “Greet all your leaders and the believers there [Hebrews 13:24].” But how can we have “our” leaders and how can they watch over our souls if we’re not regularly involved in a certain group of believers who are committed to meeting together on an ongoing basis (i.e. a church)?

The idea of Christians who aren’t part of a local church is completely foreign to everything the New Testament teaches about the church.

But what of those who have been hurt, or who can’t find a healthy church?
Having written all of this, I know there are far too many unhealthy churches. And there are too many communities where it’s difficult to find a truly vibrant fellowship. This really bothers me. There are people who have been deeply hurt by the very churches and church leaders who should have nurtured them. This bothers me even more.

Now, it’s easy for some to respond with well-worn cliches: “There are no perfect churches.” “If you find a perfect church, don’t join it or it won’t be perfect anymore!” “You need to just be faithful and bloom where you’re planted.” Of course, there’s some truth to these comments, but too much of the time we use these kinds of replies to dismiss the very real pain of true brothers and sisters in Christ. People have been hurt by churches, and others are longing to find a healthy church family to be part of and can’t seem to find one. This should grieve all of us.

But I want to encourage those who feel like giving up on the local church. I know what it’s like to look everywhere in your area for a healthy church. But I believe that God will always provide for us some group of sincere believers who want to truly grow and mature and serve, Christians with whom we can fellowship and to whom we can commit ourselves. If you’ve been hurt or disillusioned by churches, my heart goes out to you. I would never suggest that the problem is all with you. I too have been hurt and disillusioned by churches. But still we must strive to be what God has called us to be—
not just as individuals, but as part of a local church body.

I’ve often thought that it would have been so much easier if Jesus had just established the way for us to come into relationship with God and live in harmony with him—and left it at that. Then we could simply be a loose movement of individual followers of Christ. If we happened to get together occasionally—beautiful!—but it wouldn’t be necessary. We could avoid all the hassles and temptations of having a regular, organized group.

But Jesus didn’t just establish a relationship between us and God, he established a relationship between us and each other. He established a church, and his church includes local churches. And he gave, through his apostles, specific guidelines on how the church is to be structured, who is to lead it, and what it’s supposed to do. So the local church is to be organic, but it is also to have a certain organization. If we don’t like this, we need to take it up with the Head of the church, because this is the way he designed it. We need to stay vigilant to not begin focusing on the organization at the expense of the life of the Spirit. But we must also not neglect the organization that the Spirit has provided for the life to flow. A body needs both blood and a cardiovascular system through which the blood flows.

Just as we are to love Christ as he is, and not create a false Christ in our own image, so we must love the church as defined and taught in Scripture, and not try to re-imagine it in a way that’s more pleasing to us. The church is at the heart of God’s plan (Ephesians 3:10-11), so we should seek to be thoroughly immersed in the life of the church according to God’s plan in Scripture. Jesus loves the church, and so must we.

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Do we have to be baptized to be saved?

Posted on April 12, 2012 by

Let’s start this week with a couple of questions: When Jesus taught the importance of putting new wine into new wineskins [Matthew 9:17], was he mostly concerned with preserving literal wine? When Jesus told Peter and Andrew, “Come, follow me, and I will show you how to fish for people [Matthew 4:19],” did he mean they would go out with literal, physical nets and scoop up new converts?

We all know the answers to these questions because these kinds of references are common in Scripture. All through the Bible, God uses physical illustrations to convey spiritual truths. When Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman about “living water” (John 4:10-14), we know he wasn’t referring to some specially-infused literal water; he was speaking of spiritual life and using water to illustrate and contrast it with the woman’s natural life. When Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be “born again” (John 3:3-4), and Nicodemus responds: “How can an old man go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?” every reader understands that Nicodemus is missing the point (probably intentionally).

Some become confused when Jesus says of the bread “This is my body” and of the wine “This is my blood [Matthew 26:26-28].” They assume this must be meant literally. (Of course, that would be a problem since Jesus was still standing there in front of them with his body and blood intact!) But we use this kind of language all the time. If I take out a photo, hand it to you, and say, “This is my wife,” have I just literally handed you my wife? As with baptism, communion is a physical act illustrating a spiritual truth.

One of my favorite passages to show how this works is John 13 where Jesus washes his disciples’ feet. Peter resists Jesus, questioning what he’s doing. Jesus responds with an interesting comment: “You don’t understand now what I am doing, but someday you will.” Peter understood all too well that Jesus was humbling himself, but there was a spiritual truth that Peter was not yet getting. The continuing exchange confirms this deeper spiritual dimension:

Jesus replied, “Unless I wash you, you won’t belong to me.”

Simon Peter exclaimed, “Then wash my hands and head as well, Lord, not just my feet!”

Jesus replied, “A person who has bathed all over does not need to wash, except for the feet, to be entirely clean. And you disciples are clean, but not all of you.” For Jesus knew who would betray him. That is what he meant when he said, “Not all of you are clean.”

Notice, Jesus is using physical elements and acts to communicate spiritual realities. If we miss this in Scripture and over-interpret the physical elements, we’ll end up with erroneous ideas about the Christian life.

Scripture uses physical actions to illustrate spiritual truths.

Baptism as illustration
Why is all of this important? Because there are many passages that use the physical act or water of baptism to illustrate specific spiritual truths. We want to make sure we don’t misunderstand what the Scriptures are teaching. For instance, many passages speak of baptism in the sense of the person being ‘washed.’ Some have assumed that it’s the physical act of baptism that washes our sin away. In Acts 22:16, Ananias tells Saul (aka Paul):

What are you waiting for? Get up and be baptized. Have your sins washed away by calling on the name of the Lord.

I appreciate the way this translation (NLT) makes it clear that one’s sins are not washed away by being baptized, but by calling on the name of the Lord. Baptism is a physical act that illustrates this spiritual truth. If you read each passage carefully, you’ll see the primary spiritual truth and the way it’s being symbolized. Here’s another example from Titus 3:5:

He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us though the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.

Notice again, the emphasis is not on some physical act of washing, but on rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, thus making us spiritually clean.

But what about . . . 
There are three passages some use to claim that baptism is necessary for salvation. The most common one is Mark 16:16:

Anyone who believes and is baptized will be saved. But anyone who refuses to believe will be condemned.

Now we could point out that this passage says that the ones condemned are those who refuse to believe, not those who refuse to be baptized. But there’s a bigger problem with using this verse. All current translations have a note after Mark 16:8 explaining that the earliest and most reliable manuscripts don’t include this section (16:9-20). For hundreds of years, Bible scholars have known that these verses are almost certainly not found in the original text of Scripture. (Interestingly, this is the very section that speaks of handling snakes!) We just shouldn’t base an important teaching on such a highly questionable passage.

1 Peter 3 describes how Noah’s family was saved through the water of the flood, and then continues in verse 21:

. . . and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God.

Notice how the passage itself takes the emphasis from the physical act and the physical element and places it instead on the believer’s faith toward God. Peter is comparing two different examples of how water illustrates God’s saving work in our lives.

The third passage is from Acts 2:38:

Peter replied, “Each of you must repent of your sins and turn to God, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. Then you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

Some have taken advantage of a certain ambiguity in this passage. We can use the word “for” in a couple of different ways. I can say ‘I’m going to the store for some milk;’ I can also say ‘I’m going to the store for my wife.’ I’m using the same word, but in quite different ways. If I’m going to the store for some milk, I’m going in order to acquire the milk. But if I’m going to the store for my wife, I’m not going for the purpose of acquiring my wife, am I? I’m going to the store because of or in response to my wife.

Which way is this passage using the word? It’s helpful to see similar wording in John’s comment in Matthew 3:11, “I baptize you with water for repentance.” We don’t have to think long about this before we realize that it doesn’t make sense for them to be baptized in order to repent. If they weren’t already repentant, they wouldn’t be willing to be baptized! The fact that they would humble themselves and be baptized was powerful testimony to the authenticity of their repentance. So they were being baptized because they had repented.

Why is this important?
We need to be clear about this. If Peter was telling the people they needed to be baptized in order to receive forgiveness of their sins, then there is something other than faith that is required for salvation. And this flies in the face of all the passages that connect salvation and forgiveness of sins with faith alone. We could give scores of such references, but here are two examples:

All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.
Acts 10:43

Then he brought them out and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”

They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, along with everyone in your household.”
Acts 16:30-31

Salvation and forgiveness come simply through placing our faith in Christ. If baptism is necessary for salvation, then there is something—in addition to faith—that we must do. There is a good act we must perform. But this idea contradicts the vital truth taught in Ephesians 2:8-9:

God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.

So, in Acts 2:38, Peter was saying that the people must be baptized not in order to be forgiven, but because they had been forgiven.

We aren’t baptized to be saved;
We’re baptized because we are saved.

We must be careful not to fall into the error that we see in Galatians. These people were being drawn to the Old Covenant Jewish law, and had made circumcision a “Christian” necessity. But Paul was adamant. If they added any necessary action or law to the purity of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not only were they corrupting the Gospel but they were altering it to the point where it was an entirely different gospel (Galatians 1:6-9). If we add something to the Gospel as an essential requirement for salvation, we’re in danger of falling away from God’s grace and being cut off from Christ (Galatians 5:2-4).

We must not take Scripture passages out of context and cobble together isolated phrases to make baptism into something that God never intended. We do encourage believers to be baptized as the Bible teaches. But we must not weaken the scriptural truth that, by God’s grace, we are forgiven and saved solely through our faith in Jesus. We celebrate baptism as a public declaration of a person’s faith in Christ. And we practice the physical act of baptism in water to beautifully symbolize a profound spiritual truth: our old life of sin has been washed away from us, and we now live a brand new spiritual life in Christ.

Other posts in this series:

What is baptism?

Who should be baptized?

Posted in church life, Taking Root, theology | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Who should be baptized?

Posted on April 5, 2012 by

There’s an ancient saying you may have heard, and it expresses an important principle we seek to emphasize in our church:

In essentials—unity
In non-essentials—liberty
In all things—love

This is a healthy principle for any church to follow, but it’s especially appropriate for a church such as ours. Church without Walls is the only English-speaking church in our area. Because of this, we have people attending who come from very different church backgrounds. We don’t want to compromise our commitment to the historic, biblical gospel of Jesus Christ. But we also don’t want to exclude sincere followers of Christ by being overly narrow and dogmatic regarding secondary issues. We want to major in the majors, and minor in the minors. So we don’t form official church positions on non-essential doctrines unless it’s necessary for us to function together as a church body.

I deeply appreciate groups such as the Evangelical Free Church of America who strive to keep their association open to “believers only, but all believers.” Within this fellowship of churches you can find congregations that have differing views on predestination, eternal security, speaking in tongues, the rapture, baptism, etc. It’s not that they view these issues as unimportant; they study and discuss these scriptural teachings often and in depth. But they don’t see these as essential issues over which Christians should divide, nor do they refuse to fellowship with believers of differing views.

We too strive to be as open as we can. Everyone is welcome to attend our church services, and we want any sincere follower of Christ to feel they can be part of our church family. But an individual congregation must sometimes be more definitive about these issues than an association of churches. For instance, a church may welcome Christians who believe in speaking in tongues and those who do not. But each church is going to have to decide how they will handle the issue of speaking in tongues during the church service. They don’t have the freedom to not have a clear stance. When faced with such challenges, we have resolved to not automatically fall back on any particular church tradition; we listen carefully to all traditions, but seek the clear teaching of Scripture as our supreme authority and guide.

The issue of baptism has unfortunately been a divisive one in the history of the Christian church. All church traditions believe in the importance of baptism. [Some are dogmatic about the specific mode of baptism, although our church is not. See What is baptism? for more information.] All church traditions also believe in baptizing new believers in Christ. On this, there is no debate. But some churches baptize infants, and some do not. From time to time, we’re asked, “Will you baptize our baby?” When we explain that, no, we don’t baptize infants, but that we can have a special time when the parents and church dedicate themselves to the care and growth of the child, the response is often a confused, “Why don’t you baptize infants?”

The purpose of this post is not to criticize churches who do baptize infants. It’s not to convince them that they’re wrong, or to call into question those Christians who were baptized as babies. This is simply to explain why we don’t baptize infants. Why do churches such as ours not follow this long-standing church tradition?

We don’t find it taught in Scripture
There is no place in the Bible that directly teaches the baptism of infants. If the normal means of people entering the church community is to be baptized when they’re babies, it’s very surprising to see no mention at all of this in Scripture. Think about the incredibly important place that the baptism of a child holds in certain church traditions, and then compare this to the silence of the Bible on the subject. Something doesn’t seem to fit, and throughout history many have questioned whether this practice comes from clear biblical teaching or from church traditions.

In the section below, I list passages describing baptism, some of which describe the baptism of whole households. Now, some assume that these households would have included infants who, therefore, would have been baptized. The problem is that the text doesn’t tell us this. Does every household include babies? Think about all the households around you. How many have infants? We need to be careful not to fall into circular reasoning. We can’t speculate that the households who were baptized in these passages included infants, and then try to use these passages to establish that infants were baptized!

So we don’t find any clear teaching or examples of baptizing infants in Scripture. But there’s an even more important reason why we don’t see the baptizing of babies in these passages.

Baptism always follows faith
Last week, we explored the significance of baptism in first century, Jewish culture [What is baptism?]. We learned that baptism was a common way of publicly declaring one’s conversion to a new faith. Even with just this basic understanding, we see that infant baptism doesn’t fit the concept. Converting is something that one must do for oneself; you can’t convert for someone else. An infant can’t convert.

Consistently in the Scriptures, the people who are baptized are the ones who believe:

Those who believed what Peter said were baptized and added to the church that day—about 3,000 in all.
Acts 2:41

But now the people believed Philip’s message of Good News concerning the Kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ. As a result, many men and women were baptized.
Acts 8:12

Then he brought them out and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, along with everyone in your household.” And they shared the word of the Lord with him and with all who lived in his household. . . . Then he and everyone in his household were immediately baptized. . . . and he and his entire household rejoiced because they all believed in God.
Acts 16:30-34

Crispus, the leader of the synagogue, and everyone in his household believed in the Lord. Many others in Corinth also heard Paul, became believers, and were baptized.
Acts 18:8

Now, again, all Christian traditions practice the baptizing of new believers. But what we need to see is that it’s not just that believers are baptized in Scripture, but that these are the only people we see being baptized in Scripture. Over and over again, baptism is tied to belief. So not only is this the common sense understanding of the practice from its historical context, but it’s also the consistent biblical teaching. For these reasons, we practice what is known as “believer’s baptism”—we only baptize people who can testify to their personal faith in Christ.

The church is made up of believers
The biblical teaching of believer’s baptism is closely connected with the biblical teaching of a believers’ church. The differing traditions not only have a different understanding of baptism, but of the church community. Some Christian traditions see much more continuity from the Old Testament to the New Testament. They feel that that there is little difference between the Old Covenant people of God and the New Covenant people of God. [To read more on the differences between these covenants, see Should Christians obey the Ten Commandments?: Christians and the Old Testament Law.]

The Old Covenant people of God included all of the physical descendants of Israel. The sign of becoming part of this covenant people was circumcision. Every male infant was circumcised, and therefore became part of the covenant community. But while every physical descendant was part of the covenant community, not every Israelite was in true covenant relationship with God. Paul says in Romans 9:6 that “not all who are born into the nation of Israel are truly members of God’s people.” So we have the entire covenant people—of whom all the male children bear the sign of the covenant; but we also have a remnant, a people within a people, the true covenant believers and followers of God.

Now, we can see baptism as, in some ways, analogous to circumcision. It’s a physical sign that someone is entering the New Covenant people of God. But then some assume that the New Covenant community of God works the same way as the Old Covenant community. They believe there are large numbers of people who are part of the New Covenant community, but that only a remnant within this covenant people are truly saved—a church within the church.

The problem with this is that, again, we don’t see it anywhere in Scripture. We don’t see anywhere in the Bible where the New Testament church includes unbelievers. The Old Covenant was established with a specific nation, Israel, but the New Covenant is not. Where people were physically born into the nation of Israel, we don’t find in Scripture where anyone can be physically born into the New Covenant community of God’s people. Quite the contrary, to become part of the New Covenant community of Christ requires a new spiritual birth. We can’t find in the New Testament any distinction between members of the church and members of the body of Christ. The New Covenant community of God is the church, and the church is made up only of believers.

With no animosity intended toward other sincere believers, we must conclude that this idea of infant baptism comes from a confusion of the New Covenant with the Old. It rests more on tradition than it does the clear teaching of Scripture.

It’s interesting that throughout the Old Testament (and even a few times in the New) people are distinguished as either the “circumcised” or the “uncircumcised”—meaning those who were part of the Old Covenant people of God or those who were not. Corresponding to this, church traditions that baptize infants have historically distinguished between the “baptized” (those in the covenant community) and the “unbaptized” (those who are not). But Scripture never distinguishes people as the “baptized” or “unbaptized.” Not even once. Instead, over and over again in the New Testament, people are described as either “believers” or “unbelievers.”

We see baptism as beautifully symbolizing the spiritual reality of our salvation. We also understand it to be a public declaration to everyone of our faith in God. It is a sign that one has entered the covenant community of God—the church; but one must be spiritually reborn to be part of this covenant community. This covenant community includes only those who have thus been regenerated. So baptism is only appropriate for people who place their faith in Christ and commit to following him. Baptism is for believers.

I love Keith Green’s old saying: “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian anymore than going to McDonald’s makes you a hamburger.” In a similar sense, I would say

If you baptize someone who hasn’t placed their faith in Christ,
all you have is a soggy unbeliever.

“But what if I was baptized as an infant?” Churches who baptize infants also take their children through some form of confirmation. The culmination of this process is usually a time when they stand before the congregation, publicly declaring to all their faith in Christ. For some this is merely a religious ritual, a traditional rite of passage; but for others this is deeply meaningful, a profound, public expression of faith and commitment. Some Christians eventually feel the need to be baptized because they have never truly made a personal, public declaration of their faith, while others don’t feel this need because they have made such a public declaration. “Let each be convinced in their own mind.”

Baptism is meant for those who place their faith in Christ, but is it necessary for salvation? We’ll tackle this question next week.

Other posts in this series:

What is baptism?

Do we have to be baptized to be saved?

Posted in church life, Taking Root, theology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments