Of course, the earlier paradigm uses the language of God’s grace and compassion and love, but its own internal logic turns being Christian into a life of requirement and rewards, thereby compromising the notion of grace. Indeed, it nullifies grace, for grace that has conditions attached is no longer grace. (p. 23).
The notions of biblical infallibility and inerrancy first appeared in the 1600s, and became insistently affirmed by some Protestants only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (p. 24)
The emerging paradigm sees the Christian life as a life of relationship and transformation. Being Christian is not about meeting requirements for a future reward in an afterlife, and not very much about believing. Rather, the Christian life is about a relationship with God that transforms life in the present. To be Christian does not mean believing in Christianity, but a relationship with God lived within the Christian tradition as a metaphor and sacrament of the sacred. (pp. 26-27).
Being Christian isn’t about getting our beliefs (or our paradigm) “right.” (p. 31)
CHAPTER TWO — Faith The Way of the Heart (p. 34)
Faith becomes primarily a matter of the beliefs in your head—of whether you believe the right set of claims to be true. Yet the twin notions that being Christian is about “believing” in Christianity and that faith is about “belief” are a modern development of the last few hundred years, as we shall soon see. Prior to the modern period, the most common Christian meanings of the word “faith” were not matters of the head, but matters of the heart. In the Bible and the Christian tradition, the “heart” is a metaphor for a deep level of the self, a level below our thinking, feeling, and willing, our intellect, emotions, and volition. The heart is thus deeper than our “head,” deeper than our conscious self and the ideas we have in our heads.1 Faith concerns this deeper level of the self. Faith is the way of the heart, not the way of the head. pp. 35-36).
Growth in faith as trust casts out anxiety. Who of us would not want a life with less anxiety, to say nothing of an anxiety-free life? If we were not anxious, can you imagine how free we would be, how immediately present we would be able to be, how well we would be able to love? Faith as radical trust has great transforming power.(pp. 42-43)
Faith as fidelitas does not mean faithfulness to statements about God, whether biblical, credal, or doctrinal. Rather, it means faithfulness to the God to whom the Bible and creeds and doctrines point. Fidelitas refers to a radical centering in God. (p. 43)
For the emerging paradigm, the Bible and the Christian tradition are understood as a giant metaphor through which we see God. Christian faith is about living within the Christian tradition as a metaphor of God.
Significantly, the last three understandings of faith are all relational.
- Faith as visio is a way of seeing the whole that shapes our relationship to “what is,” that is, to God.
- Faith as fidelitas is faithfulness to our relationship with God.
- And faith as fiducia is deepening trust in God, flowing out of a deepening relationship with God. (p. 47)
At the center of the Christian life are two relationships that are ultimately one. The first relationship is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, life force, mind, and strength.” The second relationship, “like it,” is “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
And the passage concludes with “Upon these two relationships hang all the law and the prophets.”15 In the time of Jesus, the law and the prophets, the first two parts of the Hebrew Bible, were all that had been canonized. Thus Jesus declares that the whole of scripture hangs on these two relationships. The Christian life is as simple and challenging as this: to love God and to love that which God loves.
This is the central meaning of faith. Given the premodern meaning of “believe,” to believe in God is to belove God. Faith is about beloving God and all that God beloves. The Christian life is about beloving God and all that God beloves. Faith is our love for God. Faith is the way of the heart. (p. 53)
CHAPTER THREE The Bible The Heart of the Tradition (p. 54)
The Bible as a Historical Product— Because I have recently written at length about the Bible as a historical product, I here present the central points in summary form:
- The Bible is the product of two historical communities, ancient Israel and the early Christian movement.
- As such, it is a human product, not a divine product. This claim in no way denies the reality of God. Rather, it sees the Bible as the response of these two ancient communities to God.
- As their response to God, the Bible tells us how they saw things. Above all, it tells us how they saw their life with God. It contains their stories about God’s involvement in their lives, their laws and ethical teachings, their prayers and praises, their wisdom about how to live, and their hopes and dreams. It is not God’s witness to God (not a divine product), but their witness to God.
- As a human product, the Bible is not “absolute truth” or “God’s revealed truth,” but relative and culturally conditioned.
- To use a nonbiblical example, the Nicene Creed uses the language of fourth-century Hellenistic philosophy to express the convictions that mattered most to the Christians who framed it. It is not a set of absolute truths, but tells us how they saw things. So also the Bible tells us how our spiritual ancestors saw things—not how God sees things. (p. 56-57)
Just as this view of the Bible does not deny the reality of God, it does not deny that the Bible is “inspired by God.” But it understands inspiration differently. … Within the emerging paradigm, inspiration refers to the movement of the Spirit in the lives of the people who produced the Bible. The emphasis is not upon words inspired by God, but on people moved by their experience of the Spirit, namely, these ancient communities and the individuals who wrote for them. (p. 58).
Like the earlier paradigm, the emerging paradigm sees the Bible as sacred scripture. But unlike the earlier paradigm, the emerging paradigm sees the Bible’s status as sacred, as “Holy Bible,” as the result of a historical process, not as the consequence of its divine origin. The process is known as canonization. The documents that now make up the Bible were not sacred when they were written, but over time were declared to be sacred by ancient Israel and early Christianity. The process took about five centuries for the Hebrew Bible and about three centuries for the Christian Testament. (pp. 58-59).
The Illuminating Power of Historical Context
Rather than a literal-factual interpretation, the emerging paradigm employs a historical-metaphorical interpretation of the Bible. Both adjectives are important, and I begin with the first. A historical approach takes seriously that the Bible comes to us from the distant past. It was not written to us or for us, but for the people who lived then. It thus emphasizes the importance of historical context: the illuminating power of setting a biblical text in its ancient context. It helps us to see what these words meant for the communities that produced them.
For example, it is greatly illuminating to hear the words of the second half of Isaiah in the context of the Jewish people’s exile in Babylon. The words come alive in that context. (p. 60).
The Truth of Metaphor
As I use the word, “metaphor” is a large umbrella category. It has both a negative and positive meaning. Negatively, it means nonliteral. Positively, it means the more-than-literal meaning of language. Thus metaphorical meaning is not inferior to literal meaning, but is more than literal meaning. (p. 61).
“…as metaphorical narratives, they can be profoundly true, even though not literally factual. (p. 62). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
- I have been told that the German novelist Thomas Mann defined a myth (a particular kind of metaphorical narrative) as “a story about the way things never were, but always are.” So, is a myth true? Literally true, no. Really true, yes. (p. 63).
- A Catholic priest once said in a sermon, “The Bible is true, and some of it happened.” To make his point obvious: the truth of the Bible is not dependent on its historical factuality.
- The same point is made by a Native American storyteller as he begins telling his tribe’s story of creation: “Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” (p. 63)
For some Christians, the historical factuality of the Easter stories matters greatly. As a result, I am sometimes involved in public dialogues about whether the tomb was really empty, whether the resurrection involved the physical body of Jesus, and so forth. In a recent dialogue, a conservative scholar completed his case for affirming the literal and factual truth of the Easter stories by saying, “In addition to all these historical arguments for being confident that Jesus rose physically and bodily from the dead, there is one more reason I know these stories are true—and that’s because I walk with Jesus every day.”
At the conclusion of my response, I returned to his closing point and said, “I accept completely the truth of your statement that you walk with Jesus every day. Now, if I were to follow you around with a camera, would there be a time during the day when I could get a picture of the two of you?” I continued, “Of course, that’s silly. But my point is, I think your statement is really true, even though I don’t for a moment imagine that it’s literally true.” (pp. 68-69)
Believe whatever you want about whether the story happened this way; but now let’s talk about what the story means. (p. 71)
One final comment about a metaphorical approach: metaphor means “to see as.” Metaphorical language is a way of seeing. To apply this to the Bible: the Bible not only includes metaphorical language and metaphorical narratives, but may itself be thought of as a “giant” metaphor. The Bible as metaphor is a way of seeing the whole: a way of seeing God, ourselves, the divine-human relationship, and the divine-world relationship. And the point is not to “believe” in a metaphor—but to “see” with it. Thus the point is not to believe in the Bible—but to see our lives with God through it. (p. 71)
The Bible as Sacrament
By a sacramental approach, I mean seeing the Bible as sacrament. Indeed, this is one of its primary functions as sacred scripture. A sacrament is a finite, physical, visible mediator of the sacred, a means whereby the sacred becomes present to us. A sacrament is a vehicle or vessel of the sacred. In Christian language, a sacrament is an “outward and visible sign” that functions as “a means of grace.” Sacraments are “doors to the sacred” as well as bridges to the sacred. Something finite, something of this world, becomes a means whereby the sacred becomes present to us. (p. 72)
For the emerging paradigm, the Bible—human in origin, sacred in status and function—is both metaphor and sacrament. As metaphor, it is a way of seeing—a way of seeing God and our life with God. As sacrament, it is a way that God speaks to us and comes to us. This view of the Bible’s function can be extended to the Christian tradition as a whole. (p. 74)
CHAPTER FOUR — God, The Heart of Reality (p. 76)
But a panentheistic way of thinking about God is an alternative form of theism. It is just as biblical as supernatural theism. Indeed, in an important respect, it is more biblical and more orthodox than supernatural theism, for it emphasizes both the transcendence and presence of God, whereas supernatural theism in its modern form emphasizes only the transcendence of God. (p. 86)
The Character of God –
In the first way of imaging God’s character, God is a God of requirements and rewards. Like an ancient king, God is the lawgiver and judge who has requirements that must be met. It is what I and others have called “the monarchical model of God.”
The second way of imaging God’s character sees God as a God of love and justice. This is a frequent emphasis in the Bible. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible use the language of love to speak of God’s relation to Israel. God is the lover, Israel is the beloved. The God of love is also the God of justice. The two are related, for in the Bible justice is the social form of love.
An important clarification: unconditional grace is not about how we get to heaven or who goes to heaven. The notion that salvation is primarily about “going to heaven” is a distortion; and when it is seen as primary, the notion of unconditional grace leads to the notion that everybody gets to go to heaven, regardless of their life and faith. However, unconditional grace is not about the afterlife, but the basis for our relationship with God in this life. Is the basis for our life with God law or grace, requirements and rewards or relationship and transformation? Grace affirms the latter.
The Christian life is not about believing or doing what we need to believe or do so that we can be saved. Rather, it’s about seeing what is already true—that God loves us already—and then beginning to live in this relationship. It is about becoming conscious of and intentional about a deepening relationship with God.
What’s at stake in the question of God’s character is our image of the Christian life. Is Christianity about requirements? Here’s what you must do to be saved. Or is Christianity about relationship and transformation? Here’s the path: follow it. Both involve imperatives, but one is a threat, the other an invitation. (pp. 91-95).
CHAPTER FIVE — Jesus, The Heart of God (p. 97)
