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.
Biblical exegetes do not have to be Christian. Jews and Muslims interpret scriptures. The Bible is taught as literature in colleges. Interpreting scriptures and proclaiming the gospel are not the same thing. If, in a homiletics class you simply read the book of James, do you think the instructor would say that you had preached the gospel, or preached only law?
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.
There is a difference between devotional reading of scriptures and exegetical reading. For devotional reading I will use the CEV or The Message. For exegetical work, I use the Greek. For devotional reading I seek to open myself to hear what God is saying to me. For exegetical work, I work at uncovering what the author was saying to his first readers.
But in no case can you ever actually be unbiased.
True, but one can be less biased. I recognize my biases. I have said of particular passages, "I don't agree with this." Why, because it doesn't fit my gospel-centered bias.
you don't even recognize what you see as a particular category but simply "the way things are".
I disagree. It is through reading people who see things differently than I, such as Crossan, or Borg, or perhaps Bauckham's
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, (which Irl G. recommended,) that helps us see things from a perspective different from our own bias. It may not change our bias, but it will help clarify our biases.
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.
Again, it is an attempt to be
less biased, not unbiased. It is consciously reading commentaries by people who I know have different biases than I. It is pretending, as much as possible, each time I read a passage, that I'm reading it for the very first time, which usually results in seeing things that I hadn't seen before.
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?
I believe that James is a God-inspired teaching -- it's just not Lutheran in its emphasis.
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.
I argue that when you impose justification by grace through faith into James, you are misreading him. You are imposing a doctrine (a good and most important doctrine,) onto a writing where it is not found.
Three times James uses "justified"
2:21 Was not our ancestor Abraham justified
by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar?
2:24 You see that a person is justified
by works and not by faith alone.
2:25 Likewise, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified
by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road?
How can you read those passages and say that James is not promoting justification by works?
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.
James uses language much different than Paul's "faith active in love." See above for James language of "justification by works".
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?
Yup -- something common in Hebrew thought based on verbs. Saying that God loves, can lead to contradictory actions of spanking a child or hugging a child -- often parents do this with the same child over the same incident. Punishment and reward -- contradictory actions, but all based on the common motivation of loving the child.
It might be better to talk about paradoxes than contradictions. Another one is "God accepts us just the way we are" and "God changes us." Both are true. They could be seen as contradictory.
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.
To repeat a criticism I stated somewhere earlier, it's one thing to talk about scriptures, e.g., properly distinguishing Law and Gospel, it's anothing thing to actually exegete passages of scriptures. You argue the doctrine of justification by grace through faith -- something I have argued as being the core of my theology. However, I present scripture passages that clearly state a belief by James of justification by works. That's the language he uses. As I asked in an earlier note, which takes precedence our doctrine or biblical passages?
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.
Granted our sermons do not have the authoritative stamp of approval of the Church, yet, if they are the inspired Word of God that we proclaim, they contain the same power as scriptures to produce and sustain faith. If not, why bother preaching.
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.
I argue that as "Word of God" it contains the same power as scriptures. It does not have the same universal authority as scriptures, but as the Word that Isaiah promised would not come back void, the gospel in our sermons has that power.
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.
Ah, but we've been arguing whether or not the written Word always proclaim the orthodox doctrine of the church. In preaching, we Lutherans are bound to have a law/gospel bias. We are bound to stress God's actions on behalf of sinful humanity -- both convicting us of sin and forgiving those sins. Not all passages of scriptures proclaim that doctrine -- thus the rise of many different denominations.
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.
I would argue, and use as evidence the ELCA Confession of Faith, that there are norms that rank higher than scriptures in our preaching and teaching: the doctrine of the Trinity, the confession of Jesus Christ as savior and Lord and the power of the gospel for salvation to all who believe.
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.
I'm not saying that we adopt non-Christian categories, but that we try as much as possible when exegeticing scriptures, to approach them with no categories -- to read them again for the very first time.
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.
I am a biblical critic because I want to try and clearly understand what the Bible proclaimed to its original audience, how they were likely to respond to the message, how the message may be understood and applied in contemporary situations, how people today respond (in their various ways) to the message. It's also a fallacy that one can't reduce the amount of bias one uses in approaching scriptures.
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.
I am not sitting in a chair of a university. I am a pastor who preaches to people every week. I am an exegete who provides "notes" to literally thousands of pastors on the gospel text each week -- with the idea of what is preachable about the texts.
Why would you want to adopt the bias of a biblical critic?
Because that is the best way to reduce the imposition of my own ideas onto the text, and let the text speak for itself. More often than not, such a study leaves me with more questions than answers. The latest question based on Luke 12:19 (part of Sunday's gospel). The rich fool says to himself: "You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry." The question it poses for me is about storying up funds in a pension account that will last for many years, so that in retirement, I (or others) can take life easy, will have sufficient funds for food and drink and entertainment. Is storing up funds in retirement accounts being foolish? Does this text speak against it? I don't yet have an answer or a sermon on that issue, but those are questions that I plan to deal with -- that I believe the text asks us. (Again, I'm not arguing about the Bible, but strugging with a text in the Bible.)
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.
The Gospel of John has been described as so shallow that a child can wade in it and so deep that it can drown an elephant. It's another one of the Christian paradoxes: Christianity is so simply that children can understand it; and so complex that the greatest minds on earth cannot fully grasp the infinite God.
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.
I just present what I see in the texts (usually in their original language) and there is almost always choices to be made in translation and interpretation and application, e.g., Should Mark 1:1 include "son of God?" Why or why not? If it is included, should it be translated "the son of God" or "a son of God" -- the Greek does not have the definite article "the," but translators can give arguments why it should be included. The Greek is ambiguous. I just call things the way they are -- some people are not comfortable with hearing how many "human" decisions go into translating scriptures which can be quite ambiguous in their possible meanings.
