I’ve come across the idea, a few times recently, that the Bible doesn’t speak to everything. In the context I’m hearing it, this means that there are lots of matters of faith and practise that the Bible doesn’t tell us what to do on, so we have to figure it out for ourselves.
Which is true in a sense and in another is also completely and totally wrong.
It is true that there are matters that we consider in our lives that the Bible will not give us direct instructions for. It is clearly true that the Bible doesn’t tell me what to have for lunch today, for example. Except, the scriptures do have a lot to say about eating, about what we can eat, about who we can eat with, about how we should approach the act of eating, and about how eating remakes the world.
Even with my trite example, while it’s true that the Bible won’t tell me what to eat today, it’s not true that God’s Word doesn’t approach the question, rule some things in and out, give me different categories for thinking in, and teach me what good character looks like in ways that are relevant to (seemingly) mundane everyday activities. If you regularly read nuakh you’ll have picked up that I think eating is anything but mundane.
The doctrine of sufficiency
What we’re talking around the edges of here is what we’d typically call the doctrine of sufficiency. The broad idea is that the Bible is sufficient for us. There are different ways of formulating the doctrine, but the absolute baseline is to say that the Bible is sufficient for faith and practice.
What we’re saying when we say that is that God’s Word tells us what we need to know for being Christians and being churches even if it doesn’t, for example, teach us advanced mathematics. There is knowledge not in the Bible, but there is nothing lacking in it.
It’s usually this thread that people are pulling on when they tell me that the Bible doesn’t speak to that question. It’s certainly true that the Bible doesn’t speak directly to how to calculate the area of a circle.
My concern arises for three reasons: the arenas I hear church leaders say this in, the strange views of the Bible it implies, and the denigration of theology it leads to.
Pragmaticism reigns
I mostly hear this comment in discussions of church government or church practice. I’m in circles who lack robust historical tradition and have a tendency to learn from the business world rather than church history how to run churches well. The general idea is that the Bible doesn’t really tell us what a Pastor is or how we should structure ourselves or how to solve particular disagreements, so therefore we can do whatever works best in our situation.
The first part, that the Bible doesn’t give us specific instructions for how churches should organise themselves, is true if you were expecting the Bible to give you an organisational chart. Of course, by expecting the chart you’ve already imported a bunch of assumptions that the Bible not only doesn’t make but I think actively points away from.
It’s a view of the Bible that’s what we might call ‘Biblicist’ expecting the Bible to be a book of instructions that we follow directly.
Even if that were the case, the conclusion (we can do what we want) doesn’t follow from the premise (the Bible doesn’t give us an org chart). At the very least we need to see what the Bible does have to say on the question and then that will start to inform our discussion.
In other words, pragmaticism—doing whatever works—is not the way the way that the Church is supposed to conduct herself. God cares about our means, and every discussion should be informed by a rich theological framework of what the Bible has to say about the issue.
What this implies about the Bible
It concerns me what this implies about how some Pastors think about the Bible. As a kid I was taught that the Bible is the Best Instructions Before Life Ends. Which is the sort of thing that kids get taught, but it’s utter nonsense. The Bible isn’t an instruction book.
Are there some imperatives for us to follow? Yes. Lots. Even those are not ‘instructions’ though, because when we hear ‘instructions’ we think ‘rules for a board game’ or ‘strange pictures that might help me assemble this flatpack’ not ‘teaching.’
Lots of the Bible is written in a host of genres from poetry to history to apocalyptic that don’t naturally lend themselves to turning into simple instructions, so we assume the Bible doesn’t speak to a question.
We sometimes make our hermeneutics about deriving ‘principles’ from these passages which we can apply to situations, which is better than nothing. The problem here is that we start to think that the Bible is a book of principles hidden under narrative mush. It isn’t. God gave us the Bible in the form he did deliberately. It’s not a mistake.
The scriptures are there to teach us wisdom, which means we need to think about broad principles, but also about the grain of a narrative. We need to allow the stories to slowly shape our thinking over years of immersion in them.
We’re called to learn wisdom, the step beyond receiving the teaching where you can apply it to other scenarios than the ones used to teach you the wisdom. This is the meta-movement from Priests to Kings in the Old Testament. You might think that sounds a lot like the pragmaticism I mentioned above, but it has two important differences. Firstly, you need to be apprenticed to that teaching for many years to develop wisdom, and secondly the wisdom develops along the guardrails that we are taught by the teaching—it simply extends them into scenarios in ways that are faithful to the original teachings.
Which is to say that the Bible speaks to everything once we learn how to appropriately wield it.
Theology dethroned
The other saddening implication of this view of the Bible is that it denigrates theology.
Theology is the task of taking us from the text of the Bible towards everything else in the world. It’s the development of wisdom as we continue to think through what all of this means. We do that along with the riches of the saints of the past who have thought long and prayed long and reflected for us, and we do that in concert with and along the grain of the Biblical text.
Theology is the Queen of the Sciences. The fact that Universities have forgotten what they’re for doesn’t make it any less true. Theology is the discipline that gets to play in everyone else’s arena, because Theology speaks to everything, because the Bible speaks to everything, because God is the creator and sustainer of everything.
To go back to the church government example, the Bible has numerous passages that speak to these questions in both Testaments. Then we can start to explore narrative developments within the Old Testament and from the Old into the New. Then we might start to see that large swathes of the Biblical text are relevant to the questions at play, and we might begin to develop the character and wisdom needed to answer the question at hand.
We’re too shallow in our thinking, we need more theological reflection in our churches.
“But Tim! That’ll take months, we need an answer now!”
It’ll take decades, actually, because we’re not looking just to learn but to be changed by the text. Of course, we sometimes have to act because circumstances force us to, but we must remember two things before we do so:
Churches are led by elders because it takes a lifetime to gain the wisdom needed to lead them, the usual situation is that elders are old.
Pastors aren’t CEOs with targets and teams and decisions, they’re Gardeners. It takes a long time to grow a tree. Sometimes you just have to wait and watch it grow.
Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash
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