No private interpretation VI. So exactly who or what is the believing community?

In the last couple of post I have been suggesting that we allow the “believing community” to test, refine and deepen our understanding of Biblical truth. I want to emphasize that I do not mean to say that this is to be independent of the Holy Spirit. As I said earlier, even Paul felt he had to confirm what the Spirit has told him concerning the Gospel (Galatians 2:1, 2). If Paul felt this way, surely we need to too! Coming back to the subject in hand, I said specifically (Feb 22) that fullness of truth can be found (confirmed) only in the furnace of loving interaction and debate within the the community of believers down through history, and across the globe. But exactly who or what is the believing community?

It is a good question. Are we talking about Christians, are we thinking about the Church? I deliberately avoided using these terms, though I feel I need to say why. The problem is that we don't all mean the same thing by either of these words. Lets look first at the word Christian. Like many Biblical words it has come to mean something other than what it originally meant. In Acts 11:26 we read “the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch”. So first and foremost a Christian in the Biblical sense is a disciple. The closest we have in our culture would probably be graduate student, or close follower of Jesus Christ, but even that is not the whole thing. Today in the West “Christian” can mean anything from not Muslim or Hindu to “born again believer” (a term which has also lost its meaning) to only someone who belongs to my Church or group. But the word Church is likewise ambiguous. The Greek work is transliterated ekklasia the called out ones. So the Biblical idea of Church is that is it “the body” (Colossians 1:18) i.e. those who belong to Him as His disciples. It is not a building, it is not a denomination, it is the people.

The first references to the “Church” (and therefore the most important in terms of the Biblical understanding of what the word means) includes the one in Acts 5:11. Here it is referring to those who were giving sacrificially to each other (Acts 4:32f), but also those who “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:42). In light of this, I want to suggest that it is appropriate to take the phrase “believing community” in what I am writing here, as those who are substantially and faithfully following the example of the practices and teachings of this early “Christian” community (Church). Again we need to ask what does that mean, and how are we to differentiate between those who do this, and those who merely claim to “do it Biblically”? After all those who are widely regraded as cults make this claim. This is where my phrase “ down through history, and across the globe” comes into play.

Let me say up front, that we must not put anything on a par with the Scriptures, which of course are precisely the Apostles' teachings, and include both Old and New Testaments (i.e. Acts 8:35). In particular, it cannot be the Bible plus anything. This is one place where we must be firm in our stand. To quote the Intervarsity statement of faith again (and I will say more later) the Scriptures are both unique and divinely inspired. The cry of the reformation was “Sola Scripture” - Scripture alone. There is a problem however, and it is that we all bring our baggage to the Scriptures, and we all read them through our cultural glasses. We must prefer Truth to tradition, but we are all at some level, resistant to change. This is one very good reason why we need each other across space and time (geography and history), and why I have described it as a furnace. I don't pretend it is easy, but then neither is growing up. The Scriptures themselves tell us “As iron sharpens iron so man sharpens man” (Proverbs 27:17). We are diamonds in the rough, and need to rub up against each other under the care of the Holy Spirit in order that those rough edges be rubbed off. It can be painful. Is it any wonder we cut each other loose! But when we do this we are neither walking in love, nor in maturity (Ephesians 4 again), and it is moving in the exactly the opposite direction to God's primary purpose in sending His Son (Ephesians 1:9,10). It also short circuits His work in our lives.

But while the Scriptures alone are to be the supreme authority upon which we base our teaching, it should also be clear that not one of us has arrived in our understanding of them. In particular while we inhabit these bodies we will all at some level and in various places in our understanding, be out of balance. And hence we will (again at some level), in our own minds and in the collective minds of the fellowships to which we belong, be holding private interpretations. There are many reasons for this. They relate to the biases and peculiarities of our environment, to our woundedness, to our reactions and over reactions to the error we see in other parts of the body. However the primarily reason is because we have listened to the enemy who kills, steals and destroys. He has an agenda which is the exact opposite of God's primary purpose in redemption. He loves to cause division and to keep us from the fullness of all that God has provided, and he uses all our wrinkles, weaknesses and finiteness in his quest to isolate us from each other, and so pervert the truth. The architect behind the Roman Empire's strategy of divide and conquer was Satan. We need to be aware of his devices, since we all too often far too willingly cooperate with him in his strategy. We do this though pride, through ignorance, through our weakness and woundednesses.

I want to close today's post with some guidelines. In our quest to understand the Bible, our tools in summary are the various expressions of the believing community across time and geography. We need to understand “believing community” to mean those who stand in accord with the early church as described in the New Testament. The New testament church devoted itself to the Apostles teaching. This was in the process of being written down. The primary reason, by the way, that the various writings were included in the New Testament cannon, was that from the beginning the early Church regarded them as authentic.

You will see immediately using these guidelines that this excludes a number of cults. What I am saying is that many (though not all) cults add to the Bible, and place their addition either above or on a par with it. In doing so, they produce interpretations of the Bible that deviate from the historic Christianity of the early Church. A general principle is that if a teaching is unique, it is very likely to be wrong. This is not to say that there will not be insights into Scriptures, that are new to us. Secondly, the Bible distinguishes between the essentials and the deep things of God. In my post “milk and meat”, I suggested that there is a central message that is and was clear to the early church, but that there are also things which are deep and hard to understand. There are things upon which the believing community in space and time agree. These things are the basis for our unity. Such things include the unique divine inspiration of the Scriptures; the dual nature of the deity and humanity of Christ; the physical bodily resurrection of our Lord (more later); the justification by God’s grace to all who repent and put their faith in Jesus Christ alone for salvation; the indwelling presence and transforming power of the Holy Spirit; the victorious reign and future personal return of Jesus Christ; the existence of a personal and very real enemy who is intent on destroying our unity and witness and robbing us of our inheritance etc. etc. (this list is not meant to be exhaustive).

Thirdly the task is formidable for all sorts of reasons, but was important enough that even without the distance of time and culture that we face, the early apostles felt it necessary to devote all their time to teaching the Word and to prayer (Acts 6:2-4). This being the case, it should be obvious that the task is so big that no one group or denomination could possible answer all the questions that need to be answered. The fact of the matter is that we are hugely dependent on the believing community even for questions of which texts should form the basis of the Scriptures, as well as which translation should we use. Since every translation is at some level an interpretation, we will want to be sure the Scholars who translated the Bible we use are believers. Arbitrary decisions about which translation is “the inspired one”, are naive and divisive. A missionary friend of mine in Argentina was asked if he used only the King James version. But there is no Spanish King james version! We must get past such pat and shallow answers to complex questions. To give such answers is to do the very opposite of loving God with all of our minds.

The task is certainly challenging, but we need to realize that the process (Ephesians 4 again) is every bit as important as the end result. Also to repeat an earlier point, there is sufficient agreement among the believing community that we can be fully confident of the basics. This certainly includes the last two questions I raised in the last paragraph. In particular though there was a proliferation of hand copied manuscripts as the Church grew, in the end the variants are minor, and we can say with confidence that no major teaching of the New testament is compromised by the differences in these manuscripts. The same is true of the translations accepted by the believing community. I have used KJV, NKJV, NIV, NASNB, then Amplified Bible, the Message etc. in my quotations. There are many others. We must not also forget, that God is alive and at work in His Church to bring us to “unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God”. His purposes will not be thwarted. He is God after all!