This past Sunday (October 14, 2018), we again discussed the first of MC USA’s Three Renewed Commitments, “Following Jesus,” specifically, the words, “As an Anabaptist community of the living Word, we listen for God’s call as we read Scripture together, guided by the Spirit.” Thus the title of this section (2.2) “Anabaptist Understandings of Scripture.”
Class began with people writing their responses to the question “What, or Who, is the Word of God?” Class ended with people reading each other’s answers. Those were:
- Jesus, per John’s Gospel
- Consideration of others’ needs, and one’s obligation to yourself and Christian values
- Jesus is the Living Word; the Scriptures are the Written Word
- Jesus, “I am the word of life”; Scriptures- “in these is life.”
- Bible; God’s Spirit; Community of believers
- Holy Spirit; Bible; The voices of the downtrodden
- Jesus/God personified
- The story of his people’s lives throughout history
- Who-Christ; What-Scriptures
- Life, light of the people, true light, grace and truth
- Jesus
- Jesus and the written Word-Scripture
- The neighbor or associate’s words or actions that stir me towards God
- What: God’s Word; Who: for all humans
- What I observe in the “community” around me
- Jesus Christ, Creator, Giver of Life, truth, scripture
- Bible- Scripture- human perspective on relationship with God in our time/place- understanding of God’s perspective as considered in fellowship of believers
- The book of God’s creation of the World
- Love
The responses above reflect the historic Anabaptist understanding of the Word of God. With Protestant churches, Anabaptists hold to the Hebrew canon of 39 books, and the basic canon of 27 New Testament documents as the inspired Word of God, written. Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches put much store also by the Apocrypha, or “Deutero-canonical” books, like I and II Maccabees, Sirach, etc. These were affirmed at later dates.
To a degree exceeding the other groups mentioned above, Anabaptists have typically stressed Jesus as “the Living Word” (John 1: 1-14) as the key by whom the Written Word is to be interpreted. Therefore, when something in the Old Testament seems to clash with something in the New, such as the wars of Joshua and the peace teachings of Jesus and the apostles, we give extra weight to Jesus’ words and example. This does not negate the authority which Jesus ascribed to his Hebrew Scriptures (“for they speak of me”). In the example of Joshua’s warfare, Jesus transforms that history more than he negates it, by leading 12 disciples (not twelve tribes) toward Jerusalem on a war against sin (not against sinners) bearing a cross (the inverse of a sword) on a holy war of liberation that will require at least as much courage and consecration as Joshua showed, but to die for sinners, not to kill them. It’s not then a simple matter of peace versus violence as it is of the kind of war Jesus and we are to fight, and with what kinds of weapons (Eph. 6:10ff).
If we hold Jesus to be the interpretive key to the whole Bible, we must remember as well that we have no other Jesus than the Jesus of the Bible. Otherwise, there is “an extra Jesus in our exegesis,” whether a patriotic, flag-waving Jesus of civil religion (the worst example being “the German Christ” of the pro-Nazi state churches), a progressive, leftist, Jesus, a self-help, lift-yourself-up- by-the-bootstraps Jesus of “the Power of Positive Thinking,” a white racist Jesus of South African apartheid or American white power groups, and more.
Anabaptists have also long stressed the importance of reading the Bible together, trusting the Holy Spirit to illuminate and unfold meanings and applications through our engagement with the Bible and each other. That reflects the confidence of the first Anabaptists in the power of the Spirit to use the Bible to speak to believers and congregations directly, and not only through a hierarchy with reference and access to history, tradition and advanced learning. Reading the Bible together should minimize the fear of church hierarchies, that people reading the Bible on their own would break off into a million “churches of one.”
Still, Anabaptists have plenty of church splits. And our first Anabaptist ancestors were debtors to traditions of Biblical interpretation that they did not often acknowledge or even recognize. But they kept the horse before the cart, by evaluating tradition in light of the Scriptures, rather than vice versa.
In a day when the likes of Dan Brown (Author of The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, etc.) pass in the popular imagination and the media for theologians and historians, we should remember that, yes, the Bible did not drop down to us from heaven one day, complete with all sixty-six books already bound together in Moroccan leather, and in their current order. The Word of God came to us over a long history through the people of God, just as now the people of God come into being through the Word of God.
Is that a wonderful symbiosis or crude circular reasoning? You decide. But don’t fall for the stereotypes currently abroad, of old, fat, powerful and privileged men in the Vatican deciding which books would become Scripture on the basis of whatever would best guarantee their authority and power, a la Dan Brown and others. For one thing, there was no Vatican until long after the church recognized and recommended the current canon. And if there are any fat, old, powerful, privileged men calling shots in the Vatican, or in any other church hierarchies, church history, past (The Reformation) and current (state and federal investigations of child sex abuse) shows how the Bible critiques and challenges the church and its leadership rather than legitimating or protecting them from criticism.
For both Jews and Christian, the recognition and recommendation of the Biblical canon was driven not by power nor privilege but, in part, by persecution. For the Jews, first the Exile, and then severe persecution under the reign of Antiochus IV, of the Seleucid Empire (2-3 Centuries before Christ), forced the question, Which doctrines and documents, among the many and varied floating among us, are worth dying (and therefore, living) for? The same question was thrust upon the Church by persecution in the Persian and Roman Empires, especially in the persecution of Diocletian (3-4th Century AD), when the Romans not only went on search-and-destroy missions against Christians, but against their writings as well. The Bible, then, did not come to us from the top of society down, to legitimate and strengthen human autocracy, power and privilege (though it is often misused that way). The written Word of God comes to us from below, in human structures of power and privilege. That should have something to do with how we interpret and apply it.