1. SCRIPTURE – KEY TO THE FUTURE

Chapter1.The Beginning of Wisdom

1.1.1 Introduction

It is the fundamental thesis of this book that within the scriptures of what we commonly call the Old and New Testaments is to be found the key wisdom that can enable humanity to survive the gathering crisis – crises – that today threaten to engulf global human society. To make such an assertion, however, is to invite halleluiahs from ‘Bible’ Christians followed by howls of rejection when the nature of the message becomes clearer, while on the other hand the secular world and a large segment of the Christian audience will simply switch off, dismissing such a claim as ‘same old same old’ and irrelevant.

Let me say then, at the outset, that I do not ascribe in any sense to a biblical literalist approach to scriptures and consider all proponents of so-called ‘biblical prophecy’ as false prophets and teachers as defined even within their own texts. Far from bringing the world ‘salvation’, the fundamentalist movement of the past generation (since the late 1970s), in its Protestant, Catholic and Islamic guises, has been destructive of life and, in reality, of faith and, unchecked, would bring humanity to an end. If there is anything anti-God in our world it is to be found in religious fundamentalism. However, I do not intend to make a tiger, paper or otherwise, out of fundamentalism, as it is clear that, as the first decade of the 21st century is drawing to a close, that this whole movement has exhausted its impetus and is going into steep decline. The irony is that as the biblicists go into retreat and well-earned oblivion, there is one more a real opportunity for the world, beginning from the Christian community, to re-discover the Bible and its power and relevance for life – and for the continuance of human life on a global scale.

In this chapter I will attempt to provide the basis for a new understanding of scripture. To achieve this I need to make two positions as clear as I am able. The first is that we must accept these writings fully and openly as works of fallible and culturally conditioned people whose approaches and understanding were governed by the general conditions within which they lived, coloured by the specific issues and crises about and around which they wrote and shaped by the specific background and experiences of the individual writers. At his human, cultural level there is absolutely nothing that any of them wrote that can carry an imperative of ‘infallible truth’ either as propositions or as irrefutable witness to issues of fact. These writing are testimonies in exactly the same sense as we may treat a testimony given in a court of law in our own day (allowing for different standards of what was acceptable as ‘truth’ in their day as against ours). We cannot escape responsibility of having to make judgement calls about the truth or otherwise, accuracy or otherwise and allowances for all the variables of human nature.

The second position stands in tension to the first, logically in complete contradiction yet to be held with equal strength. These two bodies of testimony are grace-gifts from God, utterly unique in all of human history because they testify to an utterly unique process of the action of grace within and among humanity and are to be treated with the utmost respect as, in fact, the most important treasure humanity possesses. Without this testimony, humanity is lost in every sense of the word and our future as an entire specie is doomed.

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1.1.2 Scripture in context

Thus we approach the scriptures with two sets of wisdom and we need both in full. In this chapter I wish to focus primarily upon the second set, the recognition of the scriptures as humanity’s supreme possession, the key to its future, the grace-gift from God. To do this, though, necessitates a grasp of the physical circumstances that gave rise to these writings. To say that they are a grace-gift from God is not to divorce them from their physical context but rather the opposite. They are a grace-gift from God to this present generation of global human society in the midst of the most threatening crisis in human history. In other words, they are a grace-gift precisely because of our physical context. They are grace-gifts to us because they were grace-gifts to two completely different communities in their times of crisis. The writings never were and can never be divorced from their physical context either in in their origination or in the appropriation.

Now this insistence could lead us to throw up our hands in despair. How can we know the physical contexts of such a huge range of writings, generated over many centuries and with our limited knowledge of the past? Does not such an assertion make us prisoners of scholars and historians?

To the first objection my response is that the nature of the crises that gave raise to both bodies of writings is clear and relatively simple to grasp. Certainly there is almost unlimited scope to go deeper and deeper into understanding and appreciation as scholarship opens up new realms but this is as it has always been. To the second objection, we should be affirming the product of scholarship as a full and wonderful gift of the Holy Spirit to our age and rejoice in what God is doing in the church. Far from imprisoning faith, scholarship has set it free with a liberty that is fully a gospel liberty.

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1.1.3 Testimony

An important point in the rehabilitation of scripture for the church is to put new names to our two bodies of writing and from this point in my writings I shall use such new names. There are two distinct communities involved; the Hebrew community of the Palestinian people of the seventh to second centuries BC and they generated a corpus of testimony to their unique experience. Christian tradition called this body the ‘Old Testament’ but this terminology denigrates its significance, a denigration that has lead to a major neglect of these writings in our own day. Throughout my writing I shall use the term ‘Hebrew Testament’ (and in so doing make no distinction over against those writings referred to as the Apocrypha). The second community that generated a second body of writing as testimony to its experience was the apostolic church of the first two centuries AD and this body of writing, traditionally called the ‘New Testament’ I shall refer to as the Apostolic Testament.

What is important about the name change?  The key lies in the word, ‘testament’. In legal terms, a witness in a court case ‘testifies’ to what se has seen or heard. Witnesses give evidence and, in general, the outcome of the case rests on the relevance and credibility of their testimony. That is the analogy behind the word used to describe these writings: they are two bodies of ‘testimony’ before a court as to what the testifiers saw, heard, felt, thought and did. We who read these testimonies are in the same place as any jury. It is our responsibility to weigh and assess the evidence contained in the testimonies.

To press the analogy of the court further, we also have advocates whose role it is to attempt to persuade us, the jurors, not only to what weight to give the evidence but how we should interpret it. In addition to the raw testimony itself, the advocates will bring in ‘expert witnesses’ whose task it is to explain to the jurors just what it is that they are seeing and hearing in the raw testimony. So it is that we have our theologians and scholars and historians and exegetes who add their voices to the basic testimony.

Continuing this theme, this is a case in which there are a number of teams of advocates, each team seeking to persuade us, the jury, that their particular interpretation of the evidence is the most likely one to follow. We have to decide, then, also between these competing advocates and make our judgement as to which interpretation carries most credibility. There is one team of advocates, for example, who is saying that every word of the body of testimonies, both or them and all elements within them, must be accepted as absolutely true in every detail and without question, even allowing for inconsistencies. Another set of advocates is telling us that their ‘expert witness’ is infallible and we must accept his judgement without further question.

Again, as in a court of law, we the jury listen to these advocates and must weigh up what weight to give to their respective interpretations. We have complete freedom to do so as nothing obliges us to buy into whatever any of the advocates are saying. In a criminal trial, the prosecution attorney may tell the jury it has no choice but to find the defendant guilty. The jury is under no obligation to conform to that demand.

So, by analogy, then, to a court of law, we have two bodies of writings that have been put before us as testimony. The next question is, whose testimony are they?

The one body comprises of writings that emerge from the Hebrew community from the seventh to the second century BC, all of them generated in Palestine. The second body of writings were generated by the Christian community of the apostolic and sub-apostolic church from 50AD to as late as 180AD. These documents came mainly from Asia Minor and Roman Europe.

This now leads us to the most important question. To what are they testifying? On the surface they appear to be about totally disparate situations, yet in essence that are about the same issue and belong indissolubly together. Furthermore, to return to the analogy of the court case, the case is not about the events to which they testify, things that happened over twenty centuries ago. The issue ‘on trial’ is immediate and contemporary. This case before us, to which the Hebrew and Apostolic Testaments are offered as evidence, is about global humanity in the 21st century and what is happening to us.

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1.4 Salvation is at stake

This trial on which we are the panel of jurors is not a criminal trial. We are not here judging guilt or innocence. Rather, the trial is about determining what will ‘save’ humanity. The contemporary evidence that is before us is that global humanity is in danger of self-destruction. There are many competing claims as to what path can lead us out of this trail that leads to destruction. Our job as jurors is to decide between competing parties. There are non-Christian parties to this trial: the testimonies of the Hebrew and Apostolic communities are only one part of the body of evidence. The task of the Christian advocates before the court is to make a convincing case that these two bodies of testimony are the critical ones in determining the way forward for contemporary global humanity.

This returns us to the question of what it is that the testimonies relate, with the added question as to how relevant can be testimony that is thousands of years ‘out of date’ in relation to the present crisis.

The answer begins with an analysis of what is the real nature of the human crisis. Certainly humanity is faced with a ‘perfect storm’ of physical forces that, coming in conjunction with one another, threaten to overwhelm us all. However, the real crisis that has overtaken humanity, and not just the West, is that we have lost ‘faith’; we have lost all sense of meaning and worth and have found only emptiness at the centre of the universe and no reason for ethical living.  Although the last quarter of the 20th century saw an upsurge of religion in the West and in Islamic societies, by the end of the first decade for the 21st century, when I write this, this upsurge is spent and retreating rapidly.  The real global crisis is that the outer environmental changes, devastating though they might be, are coming at a time for humanity when the inner resources are running dry and what resources there are, in all cultures, are manifestly inadequate to the challenge to survival.

It is to this situation that the combined testimonies of the Hebrews and apostolic church are addressed. Both communities faced in their time crises that we not just outward but inward. In each case, the inner resources of the community at the point of crisis were manifestly inadequate to the situation and in each case the extinction of the community appeared as the inevitable outcome. In each case the community found the faith and inner resources to triumph and emerge not just surviving but completely transformed, re-invigorated and leading to a radically new life.

What is more, the testimony of the second community, the apostolic church, is that their experience of triumph and transformation was built upon what the Hebrews had achieved and the testimony they had created ion their achievement. Without the key of the Hebrew Testament the apostolic experience could not have occurred.

What the Christian advocates are saying is that, in our contemporary human crisis, the crucial inner crisis, the two testimonies of the Hebrew and Apostolic communities provide the key interpretation of existence and the key models of response to outer crises that will enable contemporary humanity to achieve victory and transformation also.

A core word in the whole discourse is ‘salvation’. The word has largely lost meaning in recent generations because Christian usage had narrowed down the content of the word to apply to what happens to an individual ‘soul’ when the person dies. The ‘saved’ soul goes to ‘heaven’ to be with God: the ‘unsaved’ soul goes to hell, eternally to be punished and separated from God. As the world both inside and outside the church abandoned this concept (which was never authentically Christian but derived from paganism) the concept of ‘salvation’ appeared to die with it. In itself this has created a major crisis for Christianity which, the sectarians apart, has been left without an effective message of the last half-century, resulting in a rapid decline in adherence. The effort of the conservative reaction over the last part of the 20th century to recover the message of salvation only succeeded in so far as a high-energy religiosity could be maintained and has waned as the energy levels have lagged.

Yet the conservative reaction has been pointing in the right direction. The key to human ‘salvation’ does indeed lie in the scriptures and in faith in God and however much the conservative reaction has been based on half-truths and radical distortions it has been genuinely a grace-gift from God and therefore part of the story of salvation in the contemporary world.

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1.1.5 The Events

The events to which each of the testimonies point are very different yet of the same nature in that they were both events that appeared to destroy the faith of the community. The Hebrew experience was of the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple and the exile to Babylon. The first century experience was of the crucifixion of Jesus who was seen by his disciples as the messianic leader who would set Israel free. Both events threatened to destroy what in both cases was a small, weak and fledgling community of people with a new-found faith.

In each case, Hebrew and apostolic, the community found, into the face of the faith-destroying event, not just a regained faith and not just a survival but a transformed community that would prove so enduring that both, after thousands of years and many persecutions and vicissitudes are still surviving.

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1.1.6 The central important of the Hebrew Testament

The experience of the Hebrew community and their embodied testimony is key and we neglect their testimony at risk of making the Christian testimony meaningless. When the apostolic community came, many centuries later, to deal with their own faith-annihilating crisis, the Hebrew testimony provided them with the means by which to pioneer their way through to the emergence of the Christian Church. Without what the Hebrews had achieved, quite apart from the fact that it was the resultant community that provided the very context for the apostolic event, the interpretive framework would not have been present for them to have made any sense whatever of Jesus and what happened to him.

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1.1.7 Scripture as critically important

The 21st century confronts a contemporary situation that threatens to annihilate faith and the very existence of the human global society, if not humanity itself. Nobody can predict the future with any certainty – and certainly not spurious ‘biblical prophets’. When predictions of earlier generations are re-visited about what life would be like today those are so far off the mark as to be risible. Even at the personal level, prediction is impossible. Nevertheless, if what is happening in our world in these early years of the 21st century continues without a radical change in direction, global humanity is in deep, deep trouble and, by the end of this century human society cold be existing as scattered subsistence communities in a global wasteland.

This catastrophic decline and disintegration will shatter faith – all forms of faith and in fact the recent upsurge of religion will only serve to accelerate the collapse of faith as disillusionment set in. What the scriptures hold out to us is the key to rediscovery of faith and of faith transformed into the face of the event that appears to destroy faith, and through this re-discovery, to emerge with a transformed human community.

This is why the scriptures are so critically important to us.

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Go to the next chapter 1.2 Credibility

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Chapter 2: Credibility

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