Imagine, for a moment, being present at a lunch table where a handful of pastors and church planters are discussing the best way to do church. Instead of a mere exchange of ideas, the conversation becomes more like a debate as one pastor critiques another planter’s techniques for veering too far off the path of how the “New Testament church would have done it.” Scripture citations fly across the table in passive aggressive attempts to show how one methodology is more “biblical” than another.
Let’s hop over to a Sunday School table of die-hard Fundamentalists. They are celebrating their spiritually-safe-guarding standards of holiness. They love the Old Testament and its “be on the right side or perish” language. They effectively create links between Israelite ceremonial laws and the convictions which separate them from the godless world around them. American conservatism is God’s new Israel, and as such, they bemoan the direction of America by quoting II Chronicles 7:14, “If my people which are called by My Name will humble themselves and pray…” Not all the OT Hebrew laws are relevant to today, these Fundamentalists say, but the “principles” of strict and separate living demand that Christ’s followers prove themselves by seeing the hidden links between OT Law and pious standards in a modern time.
In both examples, these Christians live as a kind of archaeologist and feel lost with Bible passages poorly defining how specifically they should participate in church, budget their time, choose a profession, accomplish tasks throughout their day, etc. If the Bible’s account of an ancient methodology is incomplete (which it often is), debate ensues and friends become former friends. The ambiguity sends these “archaeological” Christians into a frenzy, and they look to their Bible scholar of choice to prove their interpretation.
Archaeological Christians are making the perfect, inspired Word of God a worthless heap of paper and ink. We can’t just quote Hebrews 4:12 (“the Word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword”) and make this reality go away. We pull a phrase or concept from Scripture and isolate it from the narrative in which it rests. We then take our name-brand Methodist dust brush and lightly wipe away the unhelpful modern “bias” which will warp our view of this isolated concept. We peer at it in the sunlight and wonder at its intricacies. We look for the ancient Koine Greek markings which carry a clue to God’s cryptic road map to spiritual success. We hold it up to another person’s Bible phrase that appears to contradict our own discovery and point out how their name-brand Southern Baptist dust brush is actually dirty and can’t reveal the ancient concept properly. We measure our spiritual success by having the better textual discovery using the better name-brand Bible dust brush. We are fools. We are creating cults out of ancient cultures.
The Bible is not a manual, and the reason for this is simple. For all of the Bible’s concrete statements on a variety of human issues, there is a great deal of ambiguity. If you think I am wrong, meet good and brilliant men standing in a hundred different theological corners. This ambiguity serves to embolden archaeological Christians to eradicate the “dissenters” from local church community, charity, and at various dark moments of Christian history the right to live altogether.
So if Christians are not to be archaeological (in the manner under discussion), what are we then to be?
We ought to live in to our role as Image-bearers: determined, redemptive, compassionate, complex, creative, and innovative.
Before we can properly know the God of the Bible in our role as Image-bearers, we must acknowledge a couple things.
First, we must dispel the notion that Christians have the one-up on others as being instruments in God’s hands. Through all of church history, theological consensus agrees that Scriptures clearly define a human as an Image-bearer, regardless of that human’s affection for the One True God. Theological consensus also agrees that God is always working. The story of Esther (wherein the name of God is never mentioned) depicts a story where God is clearly working. Cyrus illustrates God’s intent to use “pagans” to deliver relief to His people in bondage to foreign nations. God instructed Elisha to oversee Jehu’s anointing to be the next king of Judah: Jehu was one of the evilest kings in Hebrew history (chew on that when trying to make a case about how to vote according to conscience in this 2016 election), but effectively carried out long-overdue judgment against Ahab and Jezebel.
God uses evil men like Jehu just as masterfully as He uses His most faithful prophets.
Second, we must all acknowledge that God is complicated. I am not saying that God is unknowable, but I am saying that His paradoxical nature confounds us and prevents us from completely wrapping our minds around Him. Consider how God endorses a Hebrew conquest of Canaan and then rejects an armed coupe as Jesus Christ is led to His death on the cross. These are not contradictions easily resolved with dispensationalist or covenant theology: these are paradoxes. A paradox says that in many cases, on the surface two mutually-exclusive truths coexist and even complement each other. Paradoxes do not reveal erroneous ideology so much as they reveal our inability to grasp the fuller picture (i.e., our own cognitive limitations).
A paradox says that in many cases, on the surface two mutually-exclusive truths coexist and even complement each other.
For centuries, scientists made discoveries confirming the existence of gravity while watching unintelligent creatures harness flight in apparent disregard to the force of gravity. We still manage to poorly grasp the full reasons why flight works. We now know how to fly ourselves, but even the smartest physicists eventually throw their hands in the air as they can only grow to know more that they do not know.
God’s paradoxical nature becomes a thing of beauty as we consider how He uniquely manifests Himself to and through us as His Image-bearers.
We are Image-bearers (Genesis 1-3). The stories of the Bible are accounts of God showing up and tasking humans with a calling to illustrate God’s plan to redeem civilization from sin, death, and pain. God called Abraham to create a nation which would offer the world its first taste of holiness (said another way, being set aside for something special). God called Kings Saul and David to deliver the Hebrews from oppression. God called Hosea to show remarkable kindness and favor to a prostitute. God is calling-driven; that is, He has a plan for His Image-bearers, and He weaves it masterfully into one amazing narrative.
So what is the Bible? The Bible is a story of stories. The Bible divinely illustrates how God manages His Image-bearers throughout history with a profound display of grace.
The Bible is a story of stories.
And what is grace, aside from this word’s evangelically-impregnated branding agendas? Grace is the unexpected diamond under layers of black coal; grace is a bastard becoming a king; grace is a poor man inheriting a billion dollars; grace is a martyr burning at the stake but dying with a heart full of thankfulness; grace is thriving when there are no resources; grace is God showing up and astounding everyone with favor toward the unfavorable.
As Image-bearers, manuals are of no use, because our paradoxical Creator appears to break all the rules. As Image-bearers, we are privileged to witness God revealing Himself to us with reckless abandon in a few very specific ways, and when we discover this and embrace it, grace oozes from our hearts, minds, hands, and feet. When we see God revealing Himself to us in specific ways, the narratives of the Bible come to life and shed light on our modern journey where methodology is less important than is following the Holy Spirit.
As Image-bearers, walking in the Spirit (Ephesians 5) means raising our awareness for how God is always working in our realm of influence (rather than merely in Washington, DC or in the Middle East). As Image-bearers, meeting other Image-bearers is an opportunity to see God working in ways that are foreign to us and even conflicting to our own understanding of God, at times. That is okay, because God is complicated.
As Image-bearers, what we know is equally important as what we will do about what we know. As Image-bearers, we have a greater responsibility to discover how God has specifically manifested Himself in us and how God intends to reveal a unique facet of grace through us to the world by our actions.
So it is with great joy that I call for a retirement of archaeological Christianity in favor of a living God working through His Image-bearers. We are the continuation of a story, and we are liberated from the cultural restrictions of an ancient age in which the inspired narratives of Scriptures were penned.