‘There Is No Christian Theology that Is Not Social and Political’: God of the Oppressed, Part 4

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Having discussed the inextricable connection between God-talk and the social context out of which such talk arises, James Cone in God of the Oppressed (1975) turns his argument to the nature of divine revelation – arguing that God reveals Godself in social contexts. So just as theology can’t be separated from the real-world circumstances of the theologian, so understanding God cannot be separated from the real-world circumstances in which God is revealed.

I think this is the key chapter of the book, the foundation on which the rest of it builds:

A Meditation on Luke 10

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus.

“Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 

He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

And Jesus said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 

Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 

Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 

So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 

But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 

He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 

The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’

Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

He said, “The one who showed him mercy.”

Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Centaurs, Harry Potter and the Book of Revelation

Once you teach a class focusing on a single book of the Bible for 10 straight weeks, you notice allusions everywhere, even if the author didn’t have that in mind.

Last week, it was while I was reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to my daughters.

The scene was when Harry and his friends are serving detention in the Forbidden Forest, looking for a unicorn who seems to have been wounded by someone or something – an act of unimaginable evil.

The group runs into some centaurs, and quickly grow frustrated at their enigmatic answers; they read portents of danger in the stars but provide no practical help.

Firenze, a centaur with apparently different views on relationships with humans, eventually rescues Harry from a sticky spot. His centaur brethren are less than pleased:

“What have you been telling him?” growled Bane. “Remember, Firenze, we are sworn not to set ourselves against the heavens. Have we not read what is to come in the movements of the planets? … Centaurs are concerned with what has been foretold! It is not our business to run around like donkeys after stray humans in our Forest!”

Firenze responds with some heat of his own: “I set myself against what is lurking in this Forest, Bane, yes, with humans alongside me if I must.”

Later, Firenze tells Harry, “The planets have been read wrongly before now, even by centaurs. I hope this is one of those times.”

It strikes me this could apply to many interpreters of Revelation – so certain they have read the signs correctly, they disengage from the world around them. Evil runs rampant, but that’s just what the prophecies foretold so there’s nothing that can be done. Better to wait for the rapture and let God take care of business.

But that’s not the message of Revelation at all. It’s very interested in this world – in the powers that control it and the ability of the followers of Jesus to resist them. It’s filled with warnings about assimilating into the dominant political and economic cultures and compromising the self-sacrificing example of Jesus.

In fact, to take it one step further, I’d argue it’s precisely because so many Christians have trained themselves to look for portents in the heavens that they have become so vulnerable to the whispers of Revelation’s corrupting and violent Beast.

Let me be clear: Donald Trump is not the Beast. To the extent any world leader ever was the Beast, it was probably Nero. But the Beast as a symbol for the rapacious and seductive power of empire lives in every time and culture, including ours.

And perhaps no one better personifies that power in our time and culture than the American president – especially when that president uses fear and paranoia to amass power and wield it against the marginalized.

This is one of the greatest and saddest ironies of the current American moment: Numerous Christians raised to scrutinize world leaders for signs of the Beast have fallen prey to it. Senses dulled by the drugs of fear and paranoia fed them by the False Prophets in their pulpits, over their airwaves and on their televisions, they have embraced the Beast’s promise of security and victory in this world, abandoning the values of grace, love and self-sacrifice typified by the Lamb and his promise of eternal security and victory in the next.

To merge the metaphors, we are now deep within the Forest, and the Beast is lurking. A large number of Christians, believing they read the stars correctly, have abandoned the fight against the Beast – many have even embraced it, mistaking it for a savior who will lead them to safety. Which of us will stand against it, no matter who is alongside us?

The prophecies of Revelation have been read wrongly many times before now, even by Christians. I hope this is one of those times.

7 Revelations About Revelation

People sometimes look at me a little funny when I tell them my favorite book of the Bible was when I was growing up was Revelation.

Yes, that Revelation. The one with the beasts and fire and blood and war.

Here’s the thing. In the Plymouth Brethren tradition in which I was raised, the worship time includes a lot of dead space – stretches of silence while everyone waits for a man, believing he is led by the Spirit, to rise and offer a scripture or a hymn for us all to sing or a prayer.

And when you’re only allowed a Bible with you to fill those interminable spaces, you go to the most action-packed book of the canon, the one that is literally apocalyptic.

Unfortunately, when Revelation is your favorite book and you grow up in the religious tradition begun by the man who literally invented the rapture-tribulation interpretation that forms the basis for much of the way people view Revelation today, your view of the book – and consequently your view of God – can get a little dark.

So when the opportunity arose to teach a class on Revelation at my church – well, OK, I’m a member of the adult education committee, so maybe I carved out an opportunity for myself – I jumped at it. What better way to understand a misunderstood book than by having to explain it to others?

I expected the class to be fun. I expected to learn something. I didn’t expect to finish it with the feeling that Revelation is once again my favorite book.

So how did that happen? How can a 10-week class so thoroughly redeem a book that scares so many people?

Well, since Revelation is filled with sevens – seven churches, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls – here are seven, um, revelations that came from the class, mostly courtesy of the excellent “textbook” we used: Revelation and the End of All Things by Craig Koester.

1. We all know Revelation, whether we realize it or not.
2. Revelation never intended its message to be hidden from its audience.
3. Revelation constantly subverts readers’ expectations.
4. Rather than a linear story, Revelation is cyclical.
5. The judgments are real, but so are the promises bookending them.
6. We all fight the Beast.
7. God’s grace is beyond what you can imagine.

Reading a Different Revelation

When I was a kid, my favorite book of the Bible was Revelation.

Granted, this almost certainly was because it was easily the most interesting book to read for a kid who wasn’t allowed to bring an activity bag or any other distractions for worship service – also known as the slowest 45 minutes of my week. All I had was my Bible, and beasts, earthquakes and other calamities helped the time fly right by.

Obviously, growing up in a conservative evangelical faith tradition, I learned the “left behind” interpretation of Revelation, or to use the fancy technical term: premillennial dispensatiionalism. Rapture, Tribulation, World War III, Armageddon and all the rest.

Fast forward two decades or so, and I’m now teaching a class on Revelation at the Episcopal congregation my family attends. Far from repeating the code-book style of interpretation so common in American Christianity, we’re trying to find a healthier way of reading the book that would be recognizable to the original recipients. After all, it seems like the ultimate practice in arrogance to assume that a letter written 2,000 years ago is somehow all about you, and it certainly does us no favors to uncritically accept a reading that argues, as philosopher-theologian Randy Harris once called it, that “God so loved the world that he sent World War III.”

Scriptural Perspicuity: Summary and Next Steps

Last part of the thrilling trilogy! Part 1 | Part 2

So returning to our original questions, it seems to me we answer them this way:

1. How do we define scriptural perspicuity?

Very carefully! But basically that the Bible is clear enough about the basics of the gospel that any person of reasonable intelligence can understand them without mediation from an authority figure.

2. Does the Bible claim perspicuity for itself?

I don’t think so. Parts of it claim a high level of authority for other parts of it, but none of it seems to claim perspicuity as we’ve defined it, and parts seem to expect the very mediation we define as antithetical to perspicuity.

3. Has the church affirmed perspicuity?

It depends on the church. For 1,500 years, the church generally did not – and the largest Christian group, the Catholic Church, does not. Without researching it, I’d guess the Orthodox Church does not either. Perspicuity is strictly a Protestant doctrine, first articulated in its clearest form by Martin Luther 500 years ago.

4. What have been the fruits of perspicuity?

Division, division and more division. Perspicuity, which relies inherently on the clarity of the text, is undermined by its own results, which show significant and vehement disagreement about the text by people whom perspicuity has taught to believe are simply seeing what is clearly there (which means others who don’t see that must be deluded by Satan or acting in bad faith).

Given those responses, I can only conclude that perspicuity is a failure as a doctrine. It is not supported by the Bible itself, relatively speaking does not have a long history of church affirmation, and where introduced leads to results that fatally undermine its own premise.

So now what?

A Brief Review: ‘Texts of Terror’ by Phyllis Trible

Quick, name the absolute worst parts of the Bible.

Chances are, you thought of one of these four stories [TW]:

The rape and dismemberment of the concubine in Judges, the rape of Tamar by her half-brother, the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter in order to fulfill a vow he made to God, and the use, abuse and expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael.

These stories – all of them describing violence against women without overt condemnation by either God or the narrator(s) – are what Phyllis Trible calls “texts of terror.”

Somewhat surprisingly, she analyzes these passages not to explain them away or redeem them with a pro-woman retelling, but to simply sit with them, to understand the fully the depth and breadth of the horror these passages inflict on the characters – and therefore on us, the readers who cannot help but sympathize with them.

In so doing, Trible hopes to memorialize them. These four women – two of them nameless, one of them voiceless, all of them utterly vulnerable to the whims and lusts of powerful men – do not get preached from pulpits, featured in liturgies or adhered to flannelgraphs. Yet they are essential parts of the Judeo-Christian tradition. If nothing else, they personify, as Trible expertly highlights, the qualities of the “suffering servant” in Second Isaiah’s famous prophecies.

Although originally referring to Israel, Christians, taking cues from the gospels, have appropriated the “suffering servant” of Isaiah 53 to describe Jesus – “a man of sorrows acquainted with grief,” “as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth,” etc. Trible moves in the opposite direction, identifying these four women as suffering servants, and given the longstanding Christian confession of Jesus as the sufferer, implicitly identifying them as Christ figures.

Most poignantly, Trible makes this association explicit in her analysis of the concubine in Gibeah. Echoing the more famous tale of Lot in Sodom (do these stories reflect a single event buried deep in Israel’s memory and adjusted as needed for different contexts? I’d say it’s likely, but that’s not Trible’s concern here), the concubine and her master spend the night in an old man’s home, where men of the city arrive and demand the male guest be given to them to rape. The man offers the concubine instead, and she is raped and tortured until morning (and potentially killed, although Trible points out the text seems to indicate the concubine’s master actually murders her once they arrive back to his home in Ephraim). Trible describes the key moment this way: “Truly the hour is at hand, and the woman is betrayed into the hands of sinners.”

Trible’s insight and deft handling of the texts make Texts of Terror a swift and insightful read – I’d almost call it a joy, but the subject matter makes that an impossibility. She refuses to get bogged down in questions of authorship, redaction or historical criticism, all things I enjoy getting bogged down in, but which would serve to distract from the women at the center of Trible’s focus. Her goal is to dig as deep as possible into the texts as they are, under the assumption that the text we have is there for a reason, no matter how it got that way.

Therefore, Trible points out patterns and structures of the original Hebrew that have become invisible under the layers of translation and interpretation that have accumulated over the millennia. Some of these are brilliant and beautiful; others feel like more of a stretch. But all of them are fascinating and demand careful consideration. Almost uniformly, Trible ends up highlighting how the original text mercilessly marginalizes and degrades these women.

But that’s the point: Trible is “telling sad stories,” as she puts it in her introduction. That they are sad does not mean they are worthless. Indeed, sad stories often tell us more about ourselves than happy ones. They force us to wrestle with the world as the world is, with God as God is, and with the Bible as the Bible is – not as we wish those things would be. For wrestling with them, we hopefully emerge stronger, with greater insight on what it means to be a “suffering servant” in whom we should see the life and work of Jesus.

Published 34 years ago in 1984, Texts of Terror remains a vitally important work, one that should be on the bookshelf of every preacher, every counselor and every church leader. In a day where many women are finding their voices for the first time, we would all do well to return to Trible’s classic, in which she helps four ancient women cry, “Me, too!”

The Irony of Scriptural Perspicuity

Part 2 of a series on the perspicuity of scripture. Part 1 dealt with defining “perspicuity” and discussing what the Bible says about itself. Today’s post deals with church history and the results of this belief.

What does the church say?

Well, that depends on the church!

But really, just as the Bible was written in a time of few educated elites and many illiterate followers, so too did understanding the scriptures require centuries of mediation through educated church leaders.

Of course, those circumstances changed practically overnight with the invention of the printing press and the printing of the Bible in common vernacular, followed by Martin Luther’s revolution that fragmented the Western church.

Because Luther rightly objected to excesses and abuses perpetrated by a church that had grown secretive and corrupt, the notion that church leaders could be trusted to appropriately mediate the scriptures to their congregants took a severe blow. Why should we assume these greedy, mendacious priests are accurately synthesizing biblical precepts when they are using their positions to enrich themselves and maintain their temporal power?

Thus Luther, in On the Bondage of the Will, laid out for the first time an argument for the  comprehensive perspicuity of the Bible:

But, if many things still remain abstruse to many, this does not arise from obscurity in the Scriptures, but from their own blindness or want of understanding, who do not go the way to see the all-perfect clearness of the truth. … With the same rashness any one may cover his own eyes, or go from the light into the dark and hide himself, and then blame the day and the sun for being obscure. Let, therefore, wretched men cease to impute, with blasphemous perverseness, the darkness and obscurity of their own heart to the all-clear Scriptures of God. … The Scripture simply confesses the Trinity of God, the humanity of Christ, and the unpardonable sin. There is nothing here of obscurity or ambiguity. 

That last sentence seems more than a touch unintentionally ironic; the Bible of course nowhere confesses the Trinity as such, and what Christian hasn’t spent a long time wondering what exactly is “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” (the one unpardonable sin, according to Jesus)? In a lengthy defense of the Bible’s clarity, Luther cites a case in which a key Christian doctrine must be inferred from the text and a notorious example of an unclear and troubling statement from Jesus himself.

So it took roughly 1,500 years and the Protestant Reformation for the church to include any prominent or official doctrine of scriptural perspicuity. Which doesn’t mean it’s not true – just that we should recognize this was a significant departure from the historical understanding of the church, one that we should therefore treat with caution.

What are the effects?

One way to test a relatively new doctrine is to assess how it changes the church itself. To “judge it by its fruit,” so to speak.

What is the fruit of this doctrine, this idea that the Bible is so clear that anyone, including children, can read it and understand the basics of the gospel?

Namely, massive division on a scale never previously seen in the church. Perhaps the ultimate irony of the doctrine of perspicuity is that it has led to the creation of literally thousands of schisms among people who felt the Bible was so clear on a certain point that they could no longer worship in good conscience with those who believed otherwise. There are easily more than 1,000 – perhaps as many as 2,000 – Protestant denominations worldwide. There are easily thousands more intracongregational and -denominational splits that have led to much heartache and bitterness.

It is no coincidence that these splits have become more common since Enlightenment modernism, with its democratic and egalitarian assumptions. There is obviously nothing wrong with those assumptions per se; they were and remain vital to the liberation of oppressed people around the globe. But when applied to the Bible, they have led to a largely unexamined embrace of the notion that anyone can and should open it without any guidance and understand the gospel – and, on the flip side, an unexamined hostility to the notion that ministers or scholars should play any significant role in mediating the text to others with less training.

Yet if we look at two traditions that have most radically adopted the democratic ethos of modernist egalitarianism (well, for men, anyway) – the Plymouth Brethren and the Stone-Campbell Movement – they are perhaps the two most schismatic groups in church history.

Both movements were born through the notion of unifying fractious denominations around the basis of just doing what the Bible says, following its plain teachings in the establishment and organization of congregations and worship, relying heavily on the “pattern” established in Acts.

Yet within 50 years of their establishment, both movements experienced massive splits – the Brethren between “exclusive” and “inclusive” camps, the Stone-Campbell Movement between the instrumental, largely northern Disciples of Christ and the a cappella, largely southern Churches of Christ. While the former eventually became a formal mainline denomination – the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) – the southern branch became increasingly fractious, with congregations dividing over increasingly trivial matters – down to how many cups to use in communion. Likewise, a chart of Plymouth Brethren splits and reunifications is like trying to trace strands of spaghetti cooked in a bowl.

What does it tell us about the alleged perspicuity of scripture that those who hold most strongly to it are the most likely to disagree so vehemently about what it says that they cannot remain in fellowship with each other?

Perhaps it tells us that the Bible is not so perspicuous, after all.

Part 3 will conclude with some potentially disconnected thoughts about scripture and how we should view it given the challenges it poses to the doctrine of perspicuity.

How Clear Is the Bible Anyway?

To some, the Bible is a brook – a refreshing stream that flows gently through a meadow. Its waters are clear: Anyone can look into them and understand what they must do to get across safely to the other side.

But I wonder more and more whether the Bible is something else entirely – a swift river, dark and cloudy, its depths hiding potentially treacherous rocks that could unbalance the unwary traveler and send her tumbling downstream. Venturing into its waters is best done with someone who knows the path and can show the traveler where to step and how to avoid the deepest, darkest areas.

I wonder, in other words, whether the Bible should be treated much differently than we typically do in American Protestantism, where we assume anyone can crack it open and learn who God is and how to “get saved” in Jesus’ name. Maybe the Bible requires more care – and more community – when we read and interpret it.

What I’m talking about is the perspicuity of scripture. For something to be perspicuous is to be clear, like that gentle brook. (Why don’t we just say the clarity of scripture? Because obviously there’s no reason to use a 10-cent word when a five-dollar one will do.)

To explore this topic, we need to answer some questions:

1. How do we define scriptural perspicuity?
2. Does the Bible claim perspicuity for itself?
3. Has the church historically affirmed its perspicuity?
4. And what historically have been the results of belief in scripture’s perspicuity?

Today, I’ll look at the first two questions.

How do we define the perspicuity of scripture?

No one knows!

OK, that’s not entirely true, but a brief search of the internet finds a lot of people recognizing that the term itself is, ironically enough, unclear – and then spending a LOT of time and words trying to define it.

I don’t get the sense that anyone argues that all parts of the Bible are perspicuous; rather, perspicuity is a general sense that the Bible is clear in its primary teachings, particularly the gospel message of sin, salvation, and Jesus’ role in saving us from the one and facilitating the latter.

As usual, the best popular-level definition probably comes from Wikipedia (yes, I could use a theological dictionary, but the point is to have a definition as popularly understood today, not as scholars understand it). I’ll underline some key phrases:

The doctrine of the clarity of Scripture (often called the perspicuity of Scripture) is a Protestant Christian position teaching that [quoting the Westminster Confession] “…those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.” …

Lutherans hold that the Bible presents all doctrines and commands of the Christian faith clearly. God’s Word is freely accessible to every reader or hearer of ordinary intelligence, without requiring any special education. Of course, one must understand the language God’s Word is presented in, and not be so preoccupied by contrary thoughts so as to prevent understanding. As a result of this, no one needs to wait for any clergy, and pope, scholar, or ecumenical council to explain the real meaning of any part of the Bible.

To boil that down, we might say the perspicuity of scripture is the doctrine that the Bible is clear enough about the basics of the gospel that any person of reasonable intelligence can understand them without mediation from an authority figure. 

But let’s be honest: That the phrase is so hard to define, and that its implications have to be cordoned off with multiple caveats and conditions, is a big red flag that this stream is far muddier than we might assume.

What does the Bible claim for itself?

Of course, “the Bible” does not claim anything for itself as such because the authors typically did not realize their texts would become canonized, but several of them did recognize other texts as bearing that kind of weight. Typically, this involved early Christians, including Jesus himself, quoting from the Hebrew scriptures with a sense of their authority, but it also includes later New Testament authors adding special weight to Paul’s letters.

So, for example, 2 Tim 3:14-17:

But you must continue with the things you have learned and found convincing. You know who taught you. Since childhood you have known the holy scriptures that help you to be wise in a way that leads to salvation through faith that is in Christ Jesus. Every scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for showing mistakes, for correcting, and for training character, so that the person who belongs to God can be equipped to do everything that is good.

In this most famous of passages about the nature and purpose of scripture, referring to what Christians now call the Old Testament, the author clearly sees the texts as being mediated through teachers – perhaps parents or synagogue rabbis (“since childhood”), perhaps even Paul (“you know who taught you”), to whom this letter is traditionally attributed.

Other New Testament verses commonly cited as referring to scripture paint a similar picture – or don’t actually refer to scripture at all despite how they’re frequently used. For example:

Heb 4:11-13:

Therefore, let’s make every effort to enter that rest so that no one will fall by following the same example of disobedience, because God’s word is living, active, and sharper than any two-edged sword. It penetrates to the point that it separates the soul from the spirit and the joints from the marrow. It’s able to judge the heart’s thoughts and intentions. No creature is hidden from it, but rather everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of the one to whom we have to give an answer.

Although many cite Heb 4:12 (“sharper than any two-edged sword”) in a scriptural-authority context, it’s clearly talking about the actual word of God, or God’s voice; it comes after an extended riff on the power of that word in sparking the creation of the universe and establishing the Sabbath.

There are many passages like this. Google around for a list of verses talking about scripture, and you get a host of references, especially in the OT, to “the word of God” or “God’s judgments” that actually refer to God’s verbal commands. Of course, some of them were eventually recorded and became part of the Hebrew scriptures, but I don’t see these passages as being intended to describe the authority of the text itself.

Deut 6:6-9 does discuss what Israel should do with God’s commands – namely, write them down, “recite them to your children,” and talk about them constantly. Assuming these commands eventually became part of the Hebrew scriptures, this passage envisions a mediated relationship with them, where their meaning is initially delivered by parents and other members of the community.

Back in the NT, the author of 2 Pet 3:15-16 discusses the writings of Paul, which have rapidly gained authoritative weight among the early assemblies:

Consider the patience of our Lord to be salvation, just as our dear friend and brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given to him, speaking of these things in all his letters. Some of his remarks are hard to understand, and people who are ignorant and whose faith is weak twist them to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures.

Paul’s letters are explicitly given the same weight as “the other scriptures” yet they are certainly not described as perspicuous! Rather, they are “hard to understand,” opening them to pernicious misinterpretation. Yet many Christians today consider Paul’s letters, especially Romans, to be quite clear in establishing a large number of doctrines, ranging from salvation by grace alone to the alleged sinfulness of gay sex.

Not surprisingly, Paul himself had something to say on this topic, in Rom 15:4: “Whatever was written in the past was written for our instruction so that we could have hope through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures.”

This doesn’t really say anything about the perspicuity of scripture, but it’s worth pointing out that Paul frequently engaged in creative reinterpretation of his scriptures, engaging in exegesis that often turned the plain-text reading of certain passages on their heads (the moving rock in the wilderness in 1 Cor 10, the respective connection of Israel and the gentiles with Ishmael and Isaac). He did not act like, nor did he ever argue that, scripture was so abundantly clear anyone could understand it without help.

But of course why would he? The Bible was written in an oral culture; few people had the ability to read what was written, and those who could did so aloud so others could hear it. The scriptures we have were written with the assumption that they would be mediated through an educated elite to the illiterate masses.

Which is why Jesus and Paul themselves served as mediators of scripture to their audiences. For example, Luke 24, where Jesus meets two disciples on the Emmaus road and “interpreted for them the things written about himself in all the scriptures, starting with Moses and going through all the Prophets.” Although Jesus calls them “foolish” for their inability to understand that the OT scriptures referred to his death and resurrection, it’s probably not a coincidence that this happens all the time in the Gospels.

Over and over again, the only person who seems aware that he is the fulfillment of various prophecies about the Jewish messiah is Jesus himself. And it’s up to him to mediate those scriptures to his audiences, which included intelligent, highly educated people who struggled to find the perspicuity Jesus claimed to find in them. The Gospel of John illustrates this well: “Examine the scriptures, since you think that in them you have eternal life. They also testify about me, yet you don’t want to come to me so that you can have life. (John 5:39-40)” On the one hand, yes, Jesus does tell his audience to “examine the scriptures.” On the other hand, his audience here was the religious leadership responsible for teaching the scriptures to their congregations and they were struggling to find in them what Jesus said was there.

Not only is Jesus frustrated that “Jewish leaders” can’t see him in their scriptures, but he also rejects the idea that “eternal life” can be found in those scriptures, as opposed to himself. This is a statement that does not receive as much attention, I don’t think. In our bibliolatrous times, scripture is often seen as providing if not eternal life itself, at least the key to eternal life. And it may very well do that, but Jesus explicitly says here the point of scripture is to point to him, and he, not it, will give eternal life. Again, this cuts against our traditional notions that scripture is perspicuous on matters pertaining to the gospel and salvation – that in order to be saved, you must do the work of reading and understanding the text well enough to find Jesus, believe the right things and pray the right prayer.

Now, of course, people who argue for the perspicuity of scripture have their texts, too, including some of these same ones! They argue that if it can be understood by children, as Deut 6 implies, it must be perspicuous. But I’d argue the scriptures give the responsibility of teaching children its precepts not to itself but to their parents and religious leaders. Likewise, there’s a lot of reliance on references to God’s laws or judgments in the Psalms, but relying on poetry for establishing doctrine is a fundamental category error.

Before we leave the texts, I’ll point out practically how we can be led astray by the idea of the self-evident clarity of the Bible. One article laying out the case for perspicuity argues, “The Bible is clear in all that is necessary for man to know in regard to his sinful state, his need for salvation, and the means of attaining that salvation, faith in Christ (Romans 3:22).” Ah. Except it’s not actually clear that Rom 3:22 says anything about having faith in Christ. Scholars argue – persuasively, in my view – that the correct translation of the Greek grammar there is that righteousness comes through the faithfulness of Christ. Not so perspicuous!

In Part 2, I’ll combine the next two questions into a brief, overly selective history of the church’s interaction with the notion of scriptural perspicuity.

Kill the Beast: Disney Musicals, the Book of Revelation and You

Beauty and the Beast is probably my all-time favorite Disney musical.

My aunt took me to see the theatrical version on Broadway for my 14^th birthday, and that sort of experience tends to be pretty formative (my 13^th birthday was Phantom of the Opera, and I can still basically recite that play by heart without needing the music). But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the depth of the story:

• It’s a call for open-mindedness and diversity that was pretty unusual for its day (1991) and remains relevant today.
• Its heroine, Belle, is a much stronger woman character than had been typical to that point (only Jasmine is comparable until we hit the Tangled/Frozen era)
• And its climactic song, unimaginatively titled “The Mob Song,” is a rousing and chilling exploration of how fear turns people into the beasts they so despise and war against.

I’ve been thinking more about this song lately, especially its 2017 live-action version, which makes the subtext more explicit when Gaston’s sidekick, Lefou (played by the wonderful Josh Gad), mutters to himself: “There’s a beast running wild, there’s no question/But I fear the wrong monster’s released.”