Speaking with Dead People

            In light of my last blog I think that I should clarify my thoughts on one particular topic, the role of writings outside of scripture and what if any authority they ought to have over the church.  The short answer is that they should have absolutely no authority.  However, in the past I have been accused of trying to give them authority simply because I place value on old writings and the opinions they express.  I would love to clarify my attitude towards them and, since it is my blog, I will!

            The root belief underneath the high value I place on books outside of scripture is my conviction that there is value in Christian dialogue over the right meaning of scripture.  That is my base conviction in this.  As Peter said,

2Pe 1:20,21  But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

In other words, you don’t get to just decide what a scripture means.  God meant something when he said it.  If you suggest it means something contrary to what God meant, you are wrong.  So when we read scripture, we try to understand, “What did God mean by this?”  Sometimes it’s very simple to figure out.  Sometimes things are very difficult to understand.  In the same letter Peter wrote,

just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you,

as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction (2 Peter 3:15-16).

So here we see three very important statements.  First, some things in scripture are hard to understand.  Second, when people distort them it leads to destruction.  Third, it is a result of untaught and unstable Christians misunderstanding the scripture.

            All of this is to say one thing.  Dialogue between Christians over what scripture rightly means is a good thing.  What a person suggests may be wrong.  The interpretation may be bad, but dialoging between Christians about the meaning of scripture is good.  When you and I discuss rightly interpreting a passage, my thinking is stretched, my personal biases in the way I read the passage is exposed, verses I might not have thought of get introduced, and my personal blind spots get revealed.  All this is bad if you are mostly concerned with your pride, but it is all very good if you are concerned with rightly understanding the word of God.

            This effect is compounded when we discuss scripture with those from a different culture.  Not only are my personal blind spots revealed, but cultural assumptions that have affected my thinking get exposed and tested.  Assumptions which I hold to that would have never been exposed by others who hold those same assumptions get corrected when discussing with Christians from different cultures.  Perhaps they are sound, perhaps they are faulty, but at least now they are in the light for us to evaluate by God’s word rather in my blind spots.  Does that other culture I’m interacting with have blind spots too?  Absolutely.  But probably not all the same blind spots as mine.

            All of this is compounded greatly when we begin to interact with Christians of past generations.  Nobody said it better than C.S. Lewis,

Every age has its own outlook.  It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.  We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.  All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny.  They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions.  We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth.  None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already.  Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.  The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.  Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past.  People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.  They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.  Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

            Will the authors of these old books be wrong about some things?  Absolutely.  But probably not the same things I am.  And these books are filled with men wrestling with the meaning of scripture and trying to teach and explain it.  And so in these old Christian books that have stood the test of time, I am allowed to dialogue with saints of the past over how to rightly understand the word of God.  I will have opportunity to see many of their faults, but they will also have opportunity to expose many of mine.  And through the process, we come to a better understanding of scripture.

            Sometimes, men who have never placed a value on such old books and the corrections and balance they can bring take great offense to suggesting they are important.  I suspect they take offence not because they hate the old books, they’ve not tried them, but rather their offense comes from the very human principle that when you suggest something is important for us, we will almost always interpret that statement as “you are unfit because you have neglected this.”  That, I think, is what they hear and what they are bristling over.  It is the notion that they are less because they have no knowledge of them which offends them. Let my closing be two fold.  First I will give a clarification of where I stand.  Do I think these old writings hold authority over the church?  Absolutely not.  Do I think reading them should be a requirement for church ministry?  Absolutely not.  Do I think they are healthy and benefit the reader and their church?  Yes I do.  I value them, because I value Christian dialogue over the meaning of scripture.  Second, I will close with a quote from Charles Spurgeon,

“It seems odd, that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others.”