[Post continued from above...]And if you are a Christian who believes as the ecumenical creeds believe, then you use that doctrine.
Yes, I use that doctrine; however, when exegeting a passage, there is an attempt to place all biases aside -- including those created by doctrines and creeds.
Major fallacy here -- you cannot be unbiased, and if you actually attained your goal of being unbiased, you would have lost all your reason to read and interpret in the first place. If you were truly unbiased, reading this particular set of writings (the Bible) would no longer have any interest to you because what they had to say would become unimportant. You only read the Bible because you are biased to think that you might learn something from it and that God might be speaking to you through it. These are already powerful biases, and if you jettison these OR EVEN WANT TO JETTISON THEM you are misunderstanding what it means to be a Christian interpreter of Scripture.
We read the Bible because we are Christian. We are biased because our lives have been grasped and transformed by Christ, and we want to learn more about who it is that did that and grow in our love and trust of him. We also read the Bible so that the joy which we found in the Christian proclamation can overflow to others in a message that properly reflects what Jesus did and is doing.
These are biases that should be embraced and reveled in, not eschewed or downplayed.
But in no case can you ever actually be unbiased. To be so would be to think that you can achieve an even more-or-less situated position in life. You are situated where you are as a created, finite human being and cannot escape that situatedeness. You are not God; you are God's creature. God has placed you in a situation where you see and understand based upon the categories that you already have, and most of the time, you don't even recognize what you see as a particular category but simply "the way things are". It's like being a deep-sea fish that never comes to the surface and doesn't even know that it's living in the ocean -- rather, the world is simply what it is, and to think that there might be a terrifying place where there is no water doesn't even occur to you.
The "unbiased" approach is simply a cover for the will-to-power. Rather than being honest and forthright about biases, such an approach attempts to deceive the hearers that your particular set of biases have some privileged position to which they do not have access. As such, it is a rhetorical power-play and nothing more.
Are you saying that we should accept as God-breathed teaching a reading of James that says that we are not justified by grace through faith but also by works?
I'm saying that we have to honestly read what James is saying.
I see that you did not answer my question. If you are contending that James is really teaching that salvation is not by faith alone but by works as well, please come right out and say it. Assuming that you accept James as inspired by God, that would mean that you believe that this is divine, God-inspired teaching as well. Do you or don't you?
He says very clearly that we are justified by works and not by faith alone (2:24).
If you're saying that James does teach that the central tenent of the Gospel is wrong -- that is, if you think that he is denying that we are justified by grace through faith -- you are misreading James. Quite simply, James is speaking of something that Luther and Christians have always taught -- that faith is a living, active, powerful thing that issues forth in good works. It is inconceivable that such a faith would not help the neighbor. Of what benefit or advantage (ophelos) would that faith be? Rather it would be dead.
I believe that we see tensions within scriptures between different schools of thought... The Bible does not present one nice, coherent theology, but many theologies. Of those many that are found there, some have been deemed "orthodox"; some have been deemed "Lutheran". If one truly approaches scriptures with an unbiased attitude, one will find non-orthodox and unLutheran interpretations.
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You read this way, too. Your doctrine that the Scriptures which are breathed by the same God could teach contradictory things is a doctrine.
Yes it is. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 doesn't say that scriptures will not contradict itself, but that it is "useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that all God's people may be thoroughly equipped for every good work."
If you are saying that Scripture is in fact God-breathed and it "contradicts" itself, then you are saying that God contradicts Himself. Is this your contention?
Rather, speak of complimentary doctrines, or if you want to sound more technical, speak of irremdiably vague governing doctrines (such as properly distinguishing Law and Gospel) that find their specificity in their actualy application. There is nothing contradictory about such governing doctrines that take into account the situation and needs of the person being addressed. Rather, governing doctrines like being a theologian of the cross or properly distinguishing Law and Gospel feed off of this encounter and help us to address the right Word of God to a particular person for that time. It doesn't mean that the doctrines are contradictory or really even in tension; rather, it means that doctrine is a complex whole (that is why I sometimes use the word "narrative" to refer to this complex whole) out of which application flows.
And I frequently ask, who is the author of your sermons? Are they inspired writings/proclamations? If you do not believe that God breathes life into your sermons, why bother with them? They would be no different than a high school student reading a paper in class.
I am the author my sermons, and insofar as they agree with the inspired Word of God, my sermons are the proclamation of that Word as well. So in this sense, yes, I agree that they are inspired. But they are not written by an apostle or by a follower of one, neither have they been set apart by virtue of their universal usage in the Christian congregations of the Church and so are not paradigmatic instances of the proclamation like the Bible is and neither do they carry that authority.
This is an easy, non-mysterious distinction to make. God's Word is to be preached, to be proclaimed, and if I proclaim my words while purporting to proclaim God's Word, I put myself in a situation where I need to make sure that there aren't any millstones near at hand. So yes, in a sense you can speak of the spoken Word being inspired, but this does not thereby make it equal or on a par with the biblical witness. Rather, the biblical witness functions as a norm over the spoken Word, even as the spoken Word is privileged above the written Word in the order of salvation (ordo salutis) in that it is principally through the spoken Word (which includes the Sacraments) that God creates and nurtures faith. The written Word (the Bible) is the source of the proclamation and norms it. But both are the Word of God, even as Jesus himself is, in fact, the Word of God incarnate and so the one from whom the others "forms" of the Word derive.
If you understand this, it is easy to see how a sermon is, in fact, the spoken Word of God as long as it proclaims the same message that the written Word proclaims. You also easily understand how what is normed (the sermon / spoken Word) does not itself become the norm (the written Word). My sermons do not norm the Bible. Neither does my practice of baptism or the Lord's Supper serve as a norm to judge the Bible's teaching on the issue. Rather, Scripture is the source and the norm of the spoken Word even as the spoken Word is that which is principally used to bring salvation to folks.
Pretty simple, really.
We have the OT as a gift. However, when Paul preached to the Greeks, he didn't quote the OT at all. Rather he quoted writings familiar to the Greeks. Luke makes very little use of the OT in his story of Jesus. One can read it, understand much about Jesus without knowing the OT. Similarly with John. Most people probably don't recognize the parallels in John 1 with wisdom literature. (There we have a problem about which canon should we use. There are writings that are considered (deutero-)canonical by some Christians and not by others.)
Yet Paul did not settle for only using "writings familiar to Greeks" in the long run. Look at the book of Romans. There you find Paul engaging in scriptural exegesis (and basing his whole argument on that exegesis) to a Gentile congregation. If you want to fully and sufficiently understand what God did, you need the entire corpus of Scripture. Even basic Christian proclamation requires a knowledge of the biblical God of the OT. That's one reason why, at the Aeropogus, when Paul gets to the resurrection of the dead (a biblical concept), the discussion breaks down. They didn't buy it because they didn't have the proper categories.
But if one tries to make [the Scriptures] all say exactly the same thing, the interrelationship is lost. If the whole body were a foot, where would the body be? It's their differences, I find, that make synoptic studies so interesting. It is the tension between Paul and James that make them both come alive. It is seeing how Revelation adapts literally hundreds of OT images that help us make sense of that book of symbolism.
One doesn't have to adopt non-Christian categories of interpretation -- like Adoptionism, for example -- to properly understand the variety in the Scriptures. Yes, like I said earlier, we have four Gospels because we need all four to give us a full and sufficient rendering of the life of Jesus. But this is easily done without importing in non-Christian perspectives and assumptions as if these would somehow help us read our own Christian texts.
To repeat, the aim of the biblical critic is to approach scriptures as unbiasly as possible. It is precisely when I find a biblical text challenging me, that the bible really fulfills its God-breathed functions. If all I find are truths that I already know, the Bible hasn't taught me anything. It hasn't rebuked or corrected anything. A statement in the introduction of The Five Gospels is: "Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you" (p. 5). Such a Jesus is likely to be your own projection of Jesus rather than the one actually found in scriptures.
Why do you adopt the bias of desiring to be a "biblical critic"? I agree that such would try to approach the Scriptures "as unbiasly as possible". Of course, like I said above, this is a fallacy and really a cover for the will-to-power; it is simply a rhetorical power-play. By maintaining such a myth, "biblical critics" do regularly deceive the people to keep their chairs in universities and other places even as the results of their work --
by your own admission -- do not serve the Church, the very people for whom the Scriptures were given in the first place. Rather, their efforts serve themselves (many times out of a good, though misguided, heart!) frequently allowing them to maintain their academic "respectability" and so their chosen livelihood, or serve an idle speculation about what might have happened rather than engaging people with the message of redemption in Christ.
Why would you want to adopt the bias of a biblical critic?
As to finding where the text actually challenges you, that's easy. It doesn't require a PhD or an MDiv or a BA or even a GED. A child can find that out. I read the 4th commandment to my kids from time to time, and they get the point. My 6 year old son and I had a long conversation about baptism, our eventual deaths due to sin, but the hope of the resurrection as being the great hope. He understood that he, too, will die, and he understood that is true because "the wages of sin is death". But he also understood the greater hope that we have in what Jesus has done for us -- that even death will be overcome on the Last Day.
It is easy to be challenged by the Bible. There is no reason to make it sound so mysterious or difficult.
As to finding a Jesus' congenial to yourself, hmmm. My online observation of your apparent desire for ambiguity and your corresponding projection of such ambiguity upon God and His Word seems to correspond to your injunction. Physician, heal thyself.
Though I will also agree that, being sinners, we all do this. None of us want to let God be God and remain "merely" as His creatures. But this is how we have, in fact, been created. And we do praise God for it, and we will always praise God for it as we live with Him in eternity.
