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The Hermeneutic of the Apostolic Gospel
Robert Hach
“But as for you,
continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, . . . hav[ing] been
acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for
salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:14, 15).
“If anyone has ears
to hear; let him hear” (Mark 4:23).
The renewal of the New Testament
(NT) Christian faith calls for a radical paradigm shift, that is, a shift from
and ecclesiastical/mystical paradigm to a rhetorical/hermeneutical paradigm.
The term rhetoric signifies the art of persuasion, the process of
employing language to influence behavior through belief (i.e., faith), while
the term hermeneutics refers to the art of interpretation, the process
of understanding language in both spoken and written forms. Rather than
religious experience of God that is mediated through ecclesiastical
organizations and mystical sensations, NT
Christian faith is a rhetorical/hermeneutical experience of God. That is,
an experience of persuasion that grows out of an understanding of the biblical
message.
Christian Faith as Rhetorical/Hermeneutical Experience
The biblical message, according
to the testimony of the Bible itself, is Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom of God, which reveals God’s promise to
forgive sinners and to resurrect the community of faith from death to
everlasting life in his eschatological
kingdom (from Greek, eschaton, literally,
last, as in the last things: the parousia of Jesus, the resurrection of
the dead, the day of judgment and the kingdom of God). The purpose of reading
the Bible is to understand and be persuaded
by its message, thus coming to a rhetorical/hermeneutical (and
life-transforming) experience of God. To call this experience both rhetorical and hermeneutical Is to call
attention to the message itself, which is, when understood, the persuasive
power of God, the power of the truth about humanity’s God-given purpose and
destiny.
Understanding the Bible message
is the prerequisite of persuasion regarding its truth—which is to say that
understanding is indispensable to NT Christian faith—in that one cannot intelligently believe what one
does not understand. While this common-sense assertion should be obvious
enough, in the wake of nearly two millennia of ecclesiastical Christianity, it
is anything but a truism.
Since the second-century rise of
the monarchial bishop, which marked the birth of ecclesiastical hierarchy in
the Christian community, Christians have been commanded to believe what they
were told by ecclesiastical authority, held to be the earthly extension of the
authority of the risen Lord himself. The difference between the authority of
the NT Jesus and the ecclesiastical authority that eventually usurped his
government of the Christian community, however, is that, during his days in the
flesh, Jesus invited, and prodded, his hearers—both his disciples and the multitudes—to
understand his words; Jesus’ authority was (and is) the authority of truth, which rules not over but from within the
heart. And Jesus’ apostles carried on this tradition of spiritual (as
opposed to legal) authority in their proclamation of Jesus’ gospel of the
kingdom to all nations. By comparison, ecclesiastical Christianity rhetorically
invented incomprehensible doctrines (most notably, the Trinity) and demanded
belief (or at least the profession of belief) under the threat of
excommunication and, sometimes, execution 9a threat that was often carried out,
as in the notable case of Michael Servetus).
Ecclesiastical Christianity,
thus, substituted the legal authority of coercion for the spiritual authority
of persuasion, that is, for the inner authority of the conscience informed by
faith in the biblical message (which the Bible calls “the word of God”). The
concept of faith has been reinvented
by ecclesiastical Christianity to mean, on one hand, and unquestioning
subjection to ecclesiastical authority and, on the other hand, a mystical
experience of God in the (third) Person of the Holy Spirit, who takes possession of those who surrender
to ecclesiastical authority, filling their hearts with worshipful feelings.
(When one questions an ecclesiastical doctrine, one is considered to be, and
typically considers oneself to be, questioning one’s faith in God, and therefore, can hardly help feeling out of touch
with the ecclesiastical Spirit.) Biblical revelation
(Greek, apokalypsis, literally, unveiling: the unveiling of what was formerly
a mystery) appeals to human understanding—which is to say that what is beyond understanding has, by
biblical definition, not been revealed (see Deut. 29:29)—whereas
ecclesiastical revelation appeals to hierarchical authority and mystical
experience. What cannot be understood must, therefore, be “taken on faith,”
often defined as a “blind leap” into the arms of “God,” who delivers the soul
for safe-keeping into the hands of ecclesiastical authority. This amounts to persuasion without understanding, a
faith that takes possession of the soul, at least insofar as one’s relationship
with God is concerned.
The NT faith of Jesus, by
comparison, takes the distinct form of a persuasion that depends on understanding.
To experience God’s Spirit (Greek, pneuma, and Hebrew, ruach, literally, God’s breath,
the biblical metaphor which signifies God’s earthly presence, mediated through
the revelation of God’s word, breathed
into and through God’s OT and NT messengers) is, accordingly, to understand the biblical message so as to
be persuaded of its truth. In stark contrast to the experience of
possession—which relieves “believers” of the responsibility of
self-government—Jesus told his disciples, as to their continuing persuasion
regarding his message, “If you abide in my word, you will know the truth, and
the truth will make set you free” (John 8:32).
Faith, defined in terms of understanding
and persuasion, is the gift of God in that the biblical message—Jesus’ gospel
of the kingdom, including its testimony to his death and resurrection—is itself the gift: Apart from the
message, there is nothing to understand, nothing of which to be persuaded, and
therefore, no possibility of faith in the apostolic sense: “So faith comes from
hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). Faith is a gift,
also, in that it can be rejected: unlike the irresistible “third Person of the
Godhead” of ecclesiastical Christianity, the spirit/breath of the God and
Father of Jesus does not coerce hearers to believe (which would be the case if,
in Calvinistic terms, faith is a “gift” that “the elect” cannot help but
accept, and correspondingly, that the non-elect cannot help but reject): God’s
spirit/breath, in the form of the inspired
(or in-spirit-ed) message, persuades hearers who voluntarily open their minds
to understand it. Which is to say that NT Christian faith is a rhetorical and hermeneutical spirit, one
that persuades through understanding rather that possesses through
indoctrination, as does the hierarchical /mystical spirit of ecclesiastical
Christianity.
The Bible, both OT and NT
scriptures, is obviously the primary source of information regarding its own
message. Nevertheless, reading the
biblical text and understanding the
biblical message are not necessarily the same experience: one can read the
bible and fail to get its message. Perhaps the most significant obstacle to
understanding concerns the hermeneutical difference between the original readers
of the NT documents and subsequent generations of Bible readers.
The Hermeneutic Circle
The interpretative concept of the
hermeneutic circle is a useful tool
for grasping the difference between how the original recipients of the NT
documents read them (or, more precisely, heard them, in that most first-century
Christians were probably illiterate) and how they have been read by each
subsequent generation of professing Christians. The hermeneutic circle reveals what is called the fore-structure of understanding: Whenever one hears a message
or reads a text, in order to understand it, one must relate it to one’s
previous experience with, and therefore, one’s already existing
understanding—called one’s preunderstanding—of
the subject matter in question. Which is to say that one can only understand in
light of what one has already understood. This means not that one’s
understanding cannot be corrected or otherwise changed but that one’s understanding can develop, whether in the same direction
or in a divergent—even, perhaps, radically different—direction, only by
interacting with what one has already understood. At its most basic level,
the hermeneutic circle reveals the
obvious truth that one can only understand what one hears or reads concerning
“God” with reference to one’s previous experience with God.
Their hearing of the apostolic
gospel, then, had radically redefined the God-experiences
of both first-century Jewish and Gentile believers by confronting their pseudounderstandings—conditioned by various
forms of Judaism and Paganism, respectively—with Jesus’ revelation of the
kingdom of God (granting that first-century Gentile polytheists had far mote
redefining to do than their monotheistic Jewish counterparts). As a result this
new knowledge of God, mediated through their faith in Jesus’ gospel, became
their new pseudounderstanding for all
that they heard and read from the apostles and their associates thereafter.
Which is to say that they understood the apostolic documents in the light
of—wholly with reference to—Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom of God.
By comparison, when subsequent
generations of professing Christians have read the Scriptures, their preunderstanding had already been
fixed—having presently been lorded over for many centuries—by the traditions of
ecclesiastical Christianity, all of which, since the fourth and fifth centuries,
have their theological roots in the neo-Platonizing and Gnosticizing Church
councils that formulated and authorized ecclesiastical theology. For most of
the first 1500 years of ecclesiastical Christianity, the scriptures were the
possession of the “clergy” and, by ecclesiastical decree, were unavailable to
“the laity” (who, for most of the time, were largely illiterate anyway). Even
with the invention of the printing press and onset of the Protestant
Reformation, however, the increasingly widespread reading of the scriptures
produced understandings that could only result from interactions with the pseudounderstanding already established
by ecclesiastical Christianity. (A preunderstanding
rhetorically invented by the do-called “revelation” of God-in-three-Persons,
who ruled over a paternalistic and hierarchical religious empire by means of a
written law, also ostensibly “revealed” in the Bible and, therefore, authorized
as “the word of God” and enforced by priestly mediators.) Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom of God, as
foretold by the OT prophets and proclaimed by the NT apostles, had long since
been lost as the revealed and, therefore, God-given preunderstanding for accurately interpreting and, therefore,
understanding the scriptures. The “gospel” which eventually emerged to take its
place was (and is) one that was shaped by that ecclesiastical preunderstanding and, therefore, that
confirmed and upheld it. Today’s “gospel” of evangelical Christianity continues
to confirm and uphold the Neo-Platonic and Gnostic presuppositions (including
the myths of the immortal soul and the preexistent God-man) that began with
the Church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries (especially the Council
of Nicea in 325 C.E. and the Council of Chalcedon in 451 C.E.).
Integral to the ecclesiastical
stranglehold on biblical interpretation is the equation of the Bible with the
word of God (see the attached appendix: Biblical Word of God). The belief that
the Bible—rather than the apostolic gospel about which the Bible is inspired to testify—is the word of God has, for all
intents and purposes, placed the defining and nurturing of Christian faith in
the hands of “the clergy,” the ecclesiastical leaders who have assumed the role
of the official interpreters of scripture. When they mount their pulpits to
deliver their sermons, rather than acknowledge that they do so to propagate a
particular ecclesiastical tradition, they presume to “preach the word of God,”
as if they were inspired messengers of God. And “the laity,” to the vast
majority of whom the Bible appears virtually impenetrable to their
understanding, therefore, rely on the clergy to tell them what the Bible means.
Which is to say that, in order to “hear the word of God,” the laity depends on
the clergy, which identifies God’s word with whatever version of the
ecclesiastical tradition that clergy is authorized to transmit, a tradition
that for centuries has buried the biblical message under and accumulation of
alien dogmas and decrees under the auspices of the Bible itself, thereby
presenting those dogmas and decrees as “the word of God.”
In such a
rhetorical/hermeneutical context, reading the Bible and hearing the word of God
can be two radically different experiences. One may read the Bible diligently
and yet fail to understand its message, in which case one has failed to hear the word of God.
Jesus addressed this very problem
with the admonition, “If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear” (Mark 4:23; see
also Matt 11;15; 13:9, 43;
Mark 4:9; Luke 8:8; 14:35).
One can have “ears to hear” and therefore, perform the physical act of hearing
but fail to “hear” because one failed to perform the mental act of hearing, which is understanding. To truly hear the word, then, is to understand: “As for what was sown on
good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it” (Matt.
13:23). Paul calls this (in the original language) “the hearing of faith” (Gal.
3:2). Just as, during Jesus’ days in the flesh, one could hear without hearing, failing to understand Jesus’ message despite
standing in his physical presence, so today, one can hear without hearing, by failing to understand the words that one
reads in scripture. To read the Bible without getting the message is to miss
the point; is to fail to hear the word of God.
For Jesus, as for Paul and the
other NT apostles and prophets, as well as their OT predecessors, faith in God’s word cannot exist apart from
understanding (see Deut. 32:28-29; Psa. 14:2; 32:8-9; Pro. 2:1-15; 28:5;
Isa. 29:24; 41:20; Jer. 3:15; 4:22; Dan. 12:10; Hos. 4:14; 14:9; Matt.
13:13-15, 23; Mark 7:14; Luke 24:45; John 8:43;
Acts 8:30,
35; Rom. 3:10-11; 1 Cor. 12:3;
Eph. 4:18; 5:17; Col. 1:9-10; 2:1-2; 2 Tim. 2:7; 1 John 5:20)
The purpose of spoken language
is, of course, to be understood; without understanding, words are merely
unintelligible sounds or indecipherable marks: To attribute power to incomprehensible words is to believe in magic,
not truth. That way leads to possession. However, when the language of
truth (whether in spoken or written form) meets understanding, the intended
effect is persuasion. This is the way
an intelligent Creator interacts with his human creation, human beings having
been created “in the image of God” (Gen. 1:27).
Hearing and believing the
apostolic gospel, then, is the prerequisite to understanding the scriptures in
that the gospel forms the revealed
preunderstanding for an accurate interpretation of scripture. As Jesus told
the Jewish leaders. “You search the scriptures because you think that in them
you have [aionion, literally, coming-age] life; and it is they that
bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life”
(John 5:39-40). As for his disciples, “beginning with Moses and all the
Prophets, he interpreted to them in
all the scriptures the things concerning himself… ‘that everything written
about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be
fulfilled’. Then he opened their minds to understand
the Scriptures” (Luke 24:27, 44-45). The message
of the Hebrew Scriptures was concealed, which is to say that when it was spoken
by the prophets and, subsequently, preserved in writing, the word of God fell
largely on deaf ears, until “the mystery that was kept secret for long ages”
(Rom. 16:25; see also Eph. 3:1-6) was revealed through the proclamation of
Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom of God.
A telltale difference between
children and adults is the difference between authority and reason as respective
bases for belief. Children’s beliefs are based on authority: Their ability to
reason remaining as yet undeveloped, children believe what they are told by
adults. The preunderstanding that
conditions children’s beliefs is that all-knowing superiors—parents, teachers,
and other authority figures—make and speak the rules that control their
reality. This, essentially, is the preunderstanding
of God, employed and imposed by ecclesiastical Christianity, that induces
Christian adults to depend on religious experts—the ecclesiastical mediators
between “God” and humanity—to tell tem what to believe and how to believe. This
passive and subordinate mental posture constitutes a refusal to grow up
spiritually. Adults, because they posses the God-given faculty of reason,
possess the God-given ability, and therefore, responsibility, to understand their way to faith in the apostolic
gospel.
For what is the criterion of
persuasion—the means of determining what beliefs are apostolic—if no our own
understanding, our ability to reason? Obviously, the alternative is to let
someone else decide, some authoritative or charismatic figure who is willing to
relieve us of our God-given responsibility of self-government (the true meaning
of freedom), which consists of being “renewed in the spirit of your mind” (Eph.
4:23) by “the truth [that] is in Jesus” (Eph. 4:21); this—the hearing (i.e., understanding) and believing (i.e., being persuaded) of Jesus’ gospel of the
kingdom of God—is the true leading of God’s Spirit (or breath), resulting in human behavior being “transformed by the
renewing of the mind” (Rom. 12:2). The historical tension between reason and
faith is a by-product of the hierarchical/mystical paradigm of Christian faith,
which is the rhetorical invention of ecclesiastical Christianity, A renewal of
the rhetorical/hermeneutical paradigm of Christian faith dissolves this
tension: “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord” (Isa. 1:18).
Not that reason—the Enlightenment
doctrine to the contrary notwithstanding—is necessarily opposed to authority or
tradition. For authority to be valid, however, it must derive from truth, which always invites understanding as the
means to persuasion, resulting in a voluntary submission rather than and involuntary
subordination (which is the evil fruit of coercion). Tradition must always be
subject to question and challenge, that is to say, subject to change when the recovery
and discovery of truth requires it. True
spiritual authority exists only in the absence of religious hierarchy.
Jesus submitted the truth of his message, which was rooted in the prophetic
tradition of Israel, to the understanding of his hearers, who thus “were
astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority,
and not as their Scribes” (Matt. 7:28-29), for whom the unquestioning
observance of “the tradition of the elders” was paramount (Matt. 15:2; Mark 7:3).
While the starting point and
continuing reference point of first-century Christians for understanding both
the Hebrew Scriptures, retrospectively, and
the apostolic documents, prospectively,
was Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom of God, the fact is that twenty-first-century
Christians so not begin at the same place. We begin, each to one degree or
another (all probably more than we realize), with a preunderstanding shaped by ecclesiastical Christianity that works
against our best efforts to hear God’s word when we read scriptures.
Nevertheless, making ourselves aware of the pervasive presence of that
ecclesiastical preunderstanding
prepares us to call it into question to whatever degree it is confronted by
biblical testimony about Jesus and the kingdom. In any case, the interpretive
task remains formidable.
The (in this case) vicious
hermeneutic circle dictates that we must both have heard the apostolic gospel
in order to interpret the scriptures accurately and interpret the scriptures accurately in order to hear the
apostolic gospel. That is, we must accurately interpret both the OT and NT scriptures
in order to understand Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom, and simultaneously, use our inevitably imperfect understanding of
Jesus’ gospel to accurately interpret the scriptures.
Fortunately, we can benefit from
the assistance of a growing portion of biblical scholarship, which seems
increasingly less inclined to conform to the ecclesiastical status quo: NT
scholars continue to make remarkable progress in uncovering the historical
origins of Christian faith (though “the wheat must continually be separated
from the chaff”), so much so that inquiring twenty-first-century Christians can
come closer to understanding the socio-cultural and ideological settings of
Christian origins than at any time, perhaps, since the first century. Equal in
importance, we have one another, with whom to engage in the mutual edification
of persuasive discourse regarding the scriptural testimony about Jesus and the
kingdom of God. This kind of self-edifying community of faith, all of the
members of which are engaged in the process of understanding and persuasion
(i.e., of “the hearing of faith,” Gal. 3:2), has, I think, always been God’s
alternative to the hierarchical self-perpetuating authority of ecclesiastical
tradition.
The Rhetorical/Hermeneutical Purpose of Inspiration
Due to the first-century
proliferation of pseudo-gospels (see 2 Cor. 11:1-4
and Gal. 1:6-9) and the eventual apostasy that became ecclesiastical
Christianity (see Acts 20:17-35; 1
Tim. 4:1-3; 1 John 4:1-6), the
NT writers emphasize (far more than has generally been recognized) the inspiration of their message; that the apostolic gospel—the same gospel of
the kingdom proclaimed by the historical Jesus—is the word of God. Not only
the preservation but also the authorization of the apostolic gospel as the word
of God—foretold by the OT prophets and confirmed by the apostolic sign that
accomplished it—is, accordingly, the primary function of the NT writings, so
that Christian faith thereafter might rest, amidst the subversive forces of the
ecclesiastical apostasy, on a sure revolutionary foundation until the coming of
Jesus with the kingdom of God.
If this is the case, one of the
most grievous hermeneutical errors Christians make when interpreting the NT
writings—with unfailing ecclesiastical approval and support—is to misapply information
and instruction regarding the prophetic gift of inspiration. Rather than recognize that the primary purpose of NT
references to God’s “Spirit” (that is, God’s breath) is to authorize the apostolic gospel in the minds of NT
readers, Christians have been led to believe that “the Spirit” works in their
lives—and especially in the lives of their ecclesiastical leaders—as the spirit
worked in the lives of the inspired
messengers of the apostolic generation. This misapprehension thus serves to
authorize not the apostolic gospel but the ecclesiastical pronouncements of the
“clergy” along with the charismatic utterances of “laypersons” as well. And
this same pretension to inspiration is at the root of the ecclesiastical dogma
that the Holy Spirit was active in leading the Church councils of the fourth
and fifth centuries “into all truth,” and it undergirds the authority of
ecclesiastical tradition in general.
When the Jesus of John’s Gospel
says that “the Holy Spirit” . . . will teach you all things and bring to your
remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26) and “will guide you into
all truth” (John 16:13), the pronouns “you” and “your” apply to none other than
his hearers, the apostles, whom he sent “into the world” with his message (John
17:14-18). These words are intended by John’s Gospel to authorize the apostolic
message as deriving from the historical Jesus himself, as the revelation of
God’s breath. In the context of this
discourse, Jesus addresses the reader, but his inspired messengers, the apostles. Of course, the text itself
addresses the reader, but the purpose of John’s Gospel in presenting Jesus’
final discourse is not to inform the reader that he or she will be inspired to remember and to testify
about and to know “the truth” but to
authorize the apostolic gospel as the inspired message (that is, the word
of God) and, thus, to commend it to the reader’s understanding so as to
persuade the reader to believe it and behave accordingly.
Likewise, when the risen Jesus of
Acts promises baptism “with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:5), he has just instructed
his apostles “through the Holy Spirit…about the kingdom of God” Acts 1:2, 3)
and subsequently tells them that “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit
has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea
and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), about which the
remainder of Acts testifies. Which is to say that the baptism with the Holy Spirit as well as “promise of the Holy
Spirit” (Acts 2:33; see also Luke 24:49;
Acts 1:4) and “the gift of the
Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38; see also Acts 8:20; 10:45) are all NT
references to inspiration, the
promise of the prophetic gift (see Acts 2:16-18)
which is “poured out” at the first Christian Pentecost on the original
apostolic community (Acts 2:33), which is baptized (from Greek, baptizo, literally, to immerse) with the
prophetic spirit and, subsequently, passes it on to others “through the laying
on of the apostle’s hands” (Acts 8:18; the exceptional case is that of the
first Gentile believers, who receive the prophetic gift in the same way as the
apostles, according to Acts 10:47
and 11:15-18).
All of which is to say that
Christians who claim to have been baptized
with the Spirit or to have received the giftinspiration for themselves. While they may, at the same time,
disavow any claim to apostolic or prophetic authority, this presumption to the
direct operation of the spirit in their lives tends to have the effect of
usurping the authoritative role of the apostolic gospel, replacing the guidance
that comes through understanding the message with “divine interventions”: Being
“led by the Spirit” (Gal. 5:18) degenerates into a matter of direction via
mystical sensations or charismatic utterances. Moreover, in view of the
ecclesiastical equation of the Bible with the word of God, any interpretation
of scripture becomes, ipso facto, “the word of God,” a revelation of God’s
“Spirit.”
of the spirit are (at least in biblical terms) claiming
Paul’s use of the pronouns often
makes a distinction between his readers (“you”) and himself and his inspiredour
hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6), the first-person plural pronoun “our” signifies
that Paul’s reference is to his and Timothy’s (see 2
Cor. 1:1a) inspiration
to proclaim the gospel: “For what we
proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus
Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your
servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor. 4:5); Paul’s use of the pronoun “your” with
reference to the Corinthian community of faith (see also 2 Cor. 1:1b-2) clarifies that Paul and Timothy,
along with the other first-century inspired
messengers, viewed themselves as “servants” of, not lords over (unlike the
subsequent ecclesiastical rulers of Christendom), those to whom they had
proclaimed Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom of God. associates (“we”). For example,
When Paul says, God “has shone in
To point out that NT references
to God’s “Spirit” are typically references to the first-century inspiration of the NT message is not to
deny the work of the spirit (God’s breath)
in the lives of Christians of
subsequent centuries, including our own. It is, rather, to argue that the
ongoing work of God’s breath is not inspiration but persuasion, that the breath
of God fills and fuels our lives as we internalize,
by “the hearing of faith” (Gal. 3:2), and externalize,
by “faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6), the inspired (or in-spirit-ed) message. Which is to say that the power of God’s spirit works to persuade
us, through our understanding, to believe the gospel and to behave
accordingly. The “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal. 5:22-23) comes, then, when “the
seed [which] is the word of God” (Luke 8:11’ also “the word of the kingdom,”
(Matt. 13:19) is “sown on good soil [which] is the one who hears the word and
understands it [who] bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in
another sixty, and another thirty” (Matt. 13:23).
The misapplication of the NT
references to God's "Spirit" has aided and abetted in the
proliferation of pseudo-spirits, of religious superstitions in the name of
Christian faith, due to the inability of Christians to "to test the
spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out
into the world" (l John 4:1). When "the Spirit" began to be
identified with the religious experience of a "Person of the Godhead"
rather than with the inspired message
of God (the understanding and persuasion of which is itself the experience of God's
presence), Christian faith began, not coincidentally, to turn into ecclesiastical
Christianity, art organized religion of authority figures and authority
structures which substituted its own ecclesiastical kingdom for the eschatological
kingdom of God.
The NT intention of the apostolic
and, therefore, inspired
"we"
is to preserve the historical Jesus' gospel of the kingdom, authorizing it as
the word of God: "We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us;
whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of
truth and the spirit of error" (l John 4:6). None, but the apostles of
Jesus have ever had the God-given right to speak in these terms.
When the scriptures are used to
testify to the apostolic gospel, as Paul says, "The Spirit gives
life" (2 Cor. 3:6). On the other hand, where the scriptures are used
without reference to the apostolic gospel, to further a religious or political
or other agenda (as were the OT scriptures by first-century rabbinical Judaism),
"the letter kills" (2 Cor. 3 :6;'see also 3:7-15). History bears
witness to the killing sprees of Christendom: the "pogroms inflicted on
Pagans and Jews, the crusades against Moslems, the inquisitions and, later, the
witch trials directed against Christian "heretics"; and, once having
been disarmed and neutered by the Enlightenment, its more subtly coercive
imposition of religious guilt and fear on Christian dissenters of all kinds.
Such is the evil fruit of ecclesiastical Christianity's enshrinement and
employment of the Christian Bible sans the apostolic gospel.
Conclusion
The message of the Bible - Jesus' gospel of the kingdom -
begins with the announcement that "the kingdom of God
is at hand" (Mark 1: 15): that the kingdom, in which God will bless all nations with true freedom and
equality (that is, with true humanity), is on the horizon, visible to the eyes
of faith in light of Jesus' resurrection.
The apostolic gospel reveals, moreover, that Jesus' resurrection from
the dead provides us with the hope of resurrection from death to life in the
coming kingdom of God and that Jesus' death on the cross provides us
with the assurance of God's love: that God the Father is with us and for
us in whatever trials we face in this age and will not hold our sins against us
at the end of the age, and that the day of judgment, therefore, will be
the day not of our destruction but of our salvation. The
practical outcome of Jesus' gospel of the kingdom is that the hope provided and
assured by the risen "Jesus Christ and him crucified" (I Cor. 2:2)
empowers us to love and worship the one true God (rather than Things) and to
love and serve one another (rather than things).
That
Jesus' gospel of the kingdom is the word of
God, foretold by the OT prophets, proclaimed by the NT apostles, and preserved
in and authorized by the apostolic writings, is the rhetorical/hermeneutical
truth that the faith of Jesus, which reveals the hope of the
kingdom and the love of the Father, is all-sufficient to equip us for life in
this age and to prepare us for life in the age to come.
Appendix: The Biblical Word of God
According
to both OT and NT scriptures, the word of God is a spoken message rather than a
written artifact. Biblical narrative testifies to the coming of the word
of God to God's inspired messengers, who spoke God's word to Israel and
the nations; biblical poetry expresses the response of God's people to
the word of God, which they heard from the prophets; biblical wisdom applies
the word of God to the individual lives of God's people; biblical apocalyptic
previews the eschatological future promised by the word of God.
The
Bible, by its own account, is about the word of God: a
prophetic-apostolic history of God's word, from God's creation of all
things in Adam to God's new creation in Christ. As such, the Bible preserves
the word of· God, authorizing the prophetic-apostolic message as the
progressive revelation of the one true God, and when properly interpreted, the
Bible explains the meaning of the word of God; the intended effect of
all of these biblical functions is that God's word be spoken and heard anew by
each generation.
The
biblical account of "the beginning" (Gen. 1: 1) portrays God, by the
power of his "Spirit" (Gen. 1 :2, Hebrew, ruach, literally,
"breath" or "wind," but typically transliterated
"spirit" from the Latin, spiritus), as speaking the
creation into existence (see Gen. 1 :3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26). The
"Spirit" (that is, the breath) of God is the biblical metaphor
for God's earthly presence, which is always a mediated presence, breathed by
God into and through his prophetic spokespersons and, therefore,
taking the form, first, of the inspired messengers and, second, of the inspired
message.
According to both OT and NT scriptures, when God's
"Spirit" came upon persons of his choosing, they characteristically prophesied,
that is to say, they spoke the word of God (see Gen. 41 :38; Num.
11:25,29; 2 Sam. 23:2; 2 Chr. 24:20; Neh. 9:30; Isa. 59:21; 61:1; Eze. 2:2-3,
7; Joel 2:28; Zech. 7:12; Matt. 10:20; 12:18; Luke 4: 18; John 3:34; 6:63; 15
:26-27; Acts 1 :8; 2: 17-18; 1 Cor. 2: 12-13; 12:3; 2 Cor. 4: 13; Eph. 3:4-5; 1
Thes. 5:19-20; 1 Tim. 4:1; 1 Pet. 1:10-12; 1 John 4:1-6; Rev. 19:10). Beginning
with Abraham, to whom "the word of Yahweh came . . . in a
vision" (Gen. 15: 1), the biblical narrative testifies to the coming of
God's word, first, to the patriarchs of Israel
and, subsequently, with the birth of the Israelite nation, to Moses and the prophets, whom God
thereby inspired to speak the word to the people of Israel. With
the coming of God's Anointed, the word of God "became flesh” (John
1: 14) in the person of Jesus, who spoke the word to the Jewish
remnant of Israel
and, through his apostles and their prophetic associates, to all
nations.
To point out that the biblical word of God is a spoken
rather than a written word is not to call into question the inspiration of
scripture (see 2 Tim. 3: 16). It is, rather, to bring into focus precisely what
the scriptures have been inspired to do. The scriptures function as an
account of the work of both old-covenant and new-covenant prophets, who spoke
the word of God, in the former case, to old-covenant Israel
and, in the latter case, to both the Jewish remnant of Israel and to
all nations. As such, the scriptures are, collectively, the inspired messenger
in that they stand in the place of the apostles and prophets. When their
message is understood, then, the scriptures proclaim (as did the
prophets and apostles before them) the word of God. (When, however, the
scriptures are understood to be the word of God, any message that one presumes to find
on any page therein then becomes "the word of God.")
Paul identifies his message, which he calls "my
gospel," with the "proclamation of Jesus Christ" (Rom. 16:25a),
that is, the gospel of the historical Jesus; further, Paul calls this message,
which began with the historical Jesus and continued with Paul and the other
apostles, "the revelation of the mystery" of God's will (Rom.
16:25b); finally, Paul claims that it is equally the message of "the
prophetic writings" (Rom. 16:26a), referring to the Hebrew scriptures and,
perhaps, to the then-emergent writings of the Christian apostles and prophets
as well. Paul's claim, then, is that the spoken message of Jesus, his own
spoken message, and the message of the scriptures are one and the same message,
which "has been made known to all nations, according to the commandment of
[literally, 'the God of the coming age,' Greek, aionios to bring
about the obedience of faith" (Rom. 16:26b).
The "obedience" to which God calls "all
nations," then, is not obedience to the ten commandments or to the
scriptures themselves, either OT or NT scriptures or any combination thereof; rather,
God calls the nations to ''the obedience of faith": the
"commandment" of God is to believe the message spoken, first, by
Jesus and, subsequently, by Paul and the other apostles, and which turns out to
be the message which God had been progressively revealing through the prophets
throughout the history of old-covenant Israel. This is the message that the
NT Jesus characteristically calls "the gospel of the kingdom of God"
and Paul "the gospel of Christ" (Greek, Christos, and Hebrew, Messiah,
the literal meaning of both being Anointed, used with reference to
prophets, priests and kings, and ultimately, to the promised "Son of
Man," that is, human being, whom God would anoint, or choose, to
rule God's kingdom). The "commandment of God," then, is to believe
the gospel and to behave accordingly (faithful behavior being the thrust of
the practical exhortations and admonitions of the apostolic letters with regard
to the life produced by faith in the apostolic gospel). The function,
therefore, of "the prophetic writings," the purpose of their inspiration,
is to preserve Jesus' gospel of the kingdom of God,
authorizing it as the word of God and, therefore, to call the nations of every
generation to "the obedience of faith."
Which is to say that, biblically speaking, the word of
God is not the Bible but the gospel. The NT Gospels refer to
Jesus' gospel of the kingdom of God as ''the word of God" or simply
"the word" (Greek, logos: Matt. 13:19-23; Mark 2:2;
4:14-16,18-20,33; 16:20; Luke 1:2; 5:1; 8:11-13,15,21; 11:28; John 1:1, 14;
12:48; 14:24; 17:6, 14, 17). Likewise, Acts of the Apostles identifies the
apostolic gospel- the message the apostles proclaimed about Jesus and the
kingdom of God - as "the word of God" and ''the word of the
Lord" and "the word" (Acts 4:4, 29, 31; 6:2,4, 7;8:4, 14,25;
10:36,44; 11:1, 19; 12:24; 13:5,7,44,46,48-49; 14:25; 15:3536; 16:6,32; 17:11,
13; 18:11; 19:10,20): When Paul "proclaimed ... the gospel," his
believing hearers "accepted it not as the word of men but as what it
really is, the word of God" (1 Thes. 1:9, 13). Likewise, for Peter,
"the living and abiding word of God . . . is the gospel that was preached
to you" (1 Pet. 1:23, 25).
When first-century Christians read (or more precisely,
due to widespread first-century illiteracy, heard the reading of) any of the
apostolic documents that we know collectively as "the New Testament,"
they had already heard the apostolic gospel spoken to them by one or more of
the apostles and/or their prophetic associates (called "evangelists,"
from Greek, euangelistes, which comes from euangelion, literally,
good news, or gospel; a first-century "evangelist" was, literally, a
bearer of good news, a gospelizer; see Acts 21 :8; Eph. 4: 11; 2 Tim.
4:5). As a result of having heard the apostolic gospel, that spoken message had
become their reference point for understanding every piece of information or
instruction, every exhortation or admonition conveyed to them by the apostolic
documents. They knew that the purpose of these documents was to strengthen
their faith in Jesus' gospel of the kingdom
of God by broadening
their understanding of its meaning and, thus, deepening their persuasion of its
truth. And by broadening their understanding and deepening their persuasion, to
motivate them to a life of faithfulness, that is, to a life of acting
consistently with the truth of the gospel, specifically, a life of hope in the
one true God and of love for one another and others as the gospel reveals that
God has loved one and all in his Anointed. In sum, Jesus' gospel of the kingdom of God was the starting point and
continuing reference point of the original recipients of the apostolic
documents for understanding all that they read therein.
The priority of the apostolic gospel over the
apostolic writings clarifies that the central purpose of the apostolic writings
is to preserve and authorize the apostolic gospel. By preserving and
authorizing the message which the historical Jesus passed on to his apostles,
the apostolic writings serve to equip Christians of every generation to engage
in both mutual edification and persuasive discourse regarding the apostolic
gospel.
Paul promotes this ideal of a self-edifying Christian
community that was to remain and flourish after the passing of the apostolic
generation of inspired messengers of Jesus' gospel. The inspired messengers,
whom he identifies as "apostles" and "prophets" and
"evangelists" and "pastors and teachers" (Eph. 4: 11), were
given by the risen Lord to the community of faith - when he "poured
out" (Acts 2:33) God's breath on the apostolic community at the first Christian
Pentecost, in fulfillment of Joel's prophecy (see Joel 2:28-32 and Acts 2:
16-21)—for a specific purpose and for a specific period.
The purpose of the inspired
messengers was to "to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for
building up the body of Christ" (Eph. 4: 12). Paul's use of
"saints" (Greek, hagion, from hagios, literally, holy,
or sanctified) as a general description of Christians· shows how
high was his regard for the work of God in Christ" which amounted to the
genesis of a "new humanity, created according to God in righteousness and
holiness of truth" (Eph. 4:24). His use of "ministry" (Greek, diakonias)
for the collective work of "building up the body of Christ," or
edifying the community of faith, exposes the grievous error of ecclesiastical
Christianity in its invention of the clergy-laity dichotomy (which occurred
with the second-century rise of the monarchical bishop over the local Christian
community, the other "elders" becoming the monarchical bishop's
"clergy"). The inspired messengers functioned, therefore, to
spread Jesus' gospel of the kingdom, establishing a local community of faith
within each city—which was the work of "evangelists," such as Philip
(see Acts 21 :8;8:48)—and to "commit [the gospel] to faithful men who
will be competent to teach others also" (2 Tim. 2:2), which was the work
of "pastors and teachers," such as Timothy and Titus, who committed
the inspired message to the "elders" of the community: older
believers whose faithfulness and maturity enabled them to lead the younger by
example and persuasion (see I Tim. 3:1-13; 5:1-2, 17-20; Tit. 1:5-9; 2:1-5; 1
Pet. 5:1-5): The inspired messengers received the gift of prophecy
through the laying on of the hands of the apostles (see Acts 8: 14-20; 2 Cor.
12: 12; 2 Tim. 1 :6), who led the work of spreading the gospel and establishing
local Christian communities, assisted by other "prophets," such as
Agabus (see Act 11 :27-30; 21: 1 0-11) and the four daughters of Philip (see
Acts 21:9).
The period of the inspired messengers,
according to Paul, was to last "until we all attain unity of the faith ,
and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, ... so that we may
no longer be children, ... carried about by every wind of doctrine ... "
(Eph. 4:13, 14). Which is to say that the inspired messengers were given
by the risen Jesus to lay the spiritual "foundation" of the
international Christian community (Eph. 2:20), thereafter to be led in every
locality by mature believers (i.e., "elders"), who would bring
others to maturity in faith (see also 1 Cor. 16: 15-18; Phil. 3: 12-17; I Thes.
5: 12-14).The inspired messengers, thus, laid the groundwork for a
community of faith wherein, "speaking the truth in love, we are to
grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole
body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped; when each
part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself
up in love" (Eph. 4: 15-16). The goal of first-century inspiration,
in other words, was - and remains- a self-edifying international
Christian community, that is, a community established on the faith of Jesus,
able to pass on its faith from generation to generation, having outgrown the
need for inspired messengers and the signs that accompanied them (see 1
Cor. 13:8-12; see also John 13:34-35; 17:20-23).
Paul apparently entertained both
this spiritual ideal of international unity and maturity in the faith and the
prophetic realization that a great apostasy from the faith was well on its way
to wreaking havoc on his apostolic work (see Acts 20:29-30; 2 Thes. 2:7; 1 Tim.
4: 1-3; see also 1 John 2:18; 4: 1-6). In so doing, he refused to allow the
impending darkness to obscure "the light of the knowledge of the glory of
God in the face of Christ revealed in his gospel (2 Cor. 4:6), and preserved
and authorized in his and the other apostles' writings.
By identifying both the word
of God and the breath of God with the inspired message of the
Bible, that is, with Jesus' gospel of the Kingdom of God,
rather than with the Bible itself, we allow the Bible to assume its God-given
place in the Christian community. Not as a "blueprint" for a
religious organization of authority figures and authority structures called
"the Church" (a rhetorical invention of ecclesiastical Christianity,
linguistically unrelated to the NT Greek, ekklesia, literally,
"assembly," used in both a literal sense, with . reference to
first-century Christian households, and a metaphorical sense, with reference to
both the international and local Christian community). Nor as a written
"code of conduct" that ecclesiastical law enforcement officers,
called "clergy," impose on the "laity." Rather, the Bible
fulfills its God-given role of preserving and authorizing the apostolic gospel—Jesus' gospel of
the kingdom of God—so that the Christian community can
govern itself by "speaking the truth in love" (Eph. 4: 15), that is,
by means of its understanding and persuasion regarding the
biblical message.
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