We are not theologians by any means in the traditional sense of the word.  Sure, we practice theology informally all the time, but we aren’t trained professionals.  We haven’t been to seminary.  We can’t rattle off the doctrinal views of Edwards, Calvin, and Luther off the top of our heads like some of our more distinguished theologian friends can.  (*cough* David Bawks)  But based on an interesting dialogue I (Angel) was a part of in my Doctrine of the Holy Spirit class at Wheaton a few years ago, we have what we feel is a pretty solid understanding of how scripture should be interpreted.  It is logical, reasonable, and probably biblical.  But it is not intuitive, easy, or what either of us were taught to believe growing up.  It also seems to directly contradict much of the teaching and assumptions we see in mainstream evangelical culture today.

A model of traditional Protestant revelation

The above diagram was drawn on the board by a classmate during the discussion I mentioned.  It shows the Holy Spirit inspiring the original biblical authors to write the Word of God.  The Word of God then inspires the individual and the Church at large.  There is really no inspiration outside of the Word.  Even when the Holy Spirit inspires me with a direct word for my life, it is usually by using something in the Bible.  We have come to refer to the Bible in the Church today as “God’s Word” almost flippantly, without stopping to think about what we mean.  Then, because we translate scriptures like John 1:1 to refer to Jesus as “the Word,” the Bible begins to take on supernatural properties mirroring the person of Jesus.    We stand on the Word and claim it over our lives.  We pick out scriptures and believe that they mean something to our specific situations, whether it is that I will get this new job because “God has plans to prosper me and not to harm me, to give me hope and a future” or whether it is that God will bless America if it keeps His name on its coins because “blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD.”  We can be falsely led to put our trust not in God Himself, but in His Word.  We become, as one professor at Wheaton put it, Bible Deists.  We don’t say we believe this, but in practice, we act as though God created the Holy Scriptures and then sat back to watch His Word save the world.

I didn’t realize that I thought this way until my sophomore year at Wheaton, when I started to really think about what I meant when I claimed God’s Word for my situation.  I also began to see the contradictions in believing in spiritual gifts for the Church today, in the Holy Spirit’s active voice, and yet thinking that all of the practical implications of my Christianity (read: rules) came ultimately from the Bible.

We totally get why the above diagram became integral in the Church’s thinking about revelation.  When Luther promoted the doctrine of sola scriptura, the Church was in a pretty bad state.  The Church was equal with God.  The diagram was basically missing the Bible altogether.  Something needed to be done.

In the past couple hundred years, we’ve gotten past the initial faults of the Church that first led us to this extreme elevation of scripture, and now we think it’s time to come to a more balanced view.

A balanced view of revelation

As our dialogue in Doctrine of the Spirit class continued, this diagram was drawn on the board to compare with the traditional view of revelation.  In this view, the Holy Spirit still inspired the biblical authors to write the scriptures.  However, the Spirit also inspired and continues to inspire individuals and the Church community, using both direct revelation and the Bible.  Why is this an important distinction?

1) It more clearly shows the distinction between God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, author of all revelation, and everything below.  In the traditional diagram, we see three levels.  The Trinity is giving revelation through the Spirit to the biblical authors, creating the Bible.  Then the Bible is passing that revelation onto the community/individuals, and all further revelation from the Spirit is filtered through the Bible, which is put on a higher level (easily leading us to Bible Deism).  Again, I know very few Protestants who would actually say they believe that this hierarchy exists.  But the way we live out our theology indicates that we believe it. When our particular sect of Christianity comes up with an idea that much of the Church community disagrees with, and we say that it doesn’t matter, we’re sticking to our guns because that’s what the Word of God says, we are actually adhering to that traditional view of revelation.  Some of you are probably balking at what I just said.  You’re thinking my reasoning would allow for things like the current trend in the Church ordaining homosexuals.  If everyone else tells us to ignore what the Bible says about homosexuality or to interpret it differently, should we just cave in?  This kind of thinking can only lead to liberal immorality, right?  But I’m not saying we throw out the Bible altogether.  What I am saying is that the reasoning that “The Word of God says it, so I live it, no matter what anyone says” might lead to some great stances.  But it can also lead to churches who teach that speaking in tongues is of the devil, that drinking any alcohol ever puts you in danger of hell, and that anyone who doesn’t believe in pre-trib rapture can’t do anything for the Kingdom of God.  I actually had a meeting with a ministry leader once who said those exact things to me.  He said that their ministry refused to work with people who spoke in tongues, believed in social drinking, or didn’t uphold pre-trib rapture theology.  “We just try to follow what’s in here,” he said, patting his Bible lovingly.  (He had no idea that I was a life-long Pentecostal who prays in tongues pretty regularly.)  So this same reasoning can get us some great, beneficial doctrines that promote holiness and the will of God, but they can also lead us down a path of nitpicking, hypocrisy, and false interpretations of scripture that ostracize quite a lot of faithful, holy believers.

2) The distinction between the traditional view and the balanced view is important because it allows for the canonization of scripture to be just as important as the writing of scripture.  I know many nonbelievers who think that Christians are insane for thinking the Bible is anything special because it was put together by humans, and we admit it.  It would be different if Christians claimed that God shipped the book down straight from heaven and someone found it in a cave somewhere, but we don’t.  We affirm that the scripture was put together by the community, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.  You see, this is the primary distinction (we believe) between Christianity and every other religion that even comes close.  Our God IS a living God. He is active, present, speaking, through every stage of our personal lives and the history of humanity.  He didn’t stop speaking when the Bible was written, and He didn’t stop speaking when the Bible was canonized.  We trust that scripture is trustworthy because we trust that God was directing the process of preserving the scripture.  And even when translation errors have occurred, we trust that He continues to direct the process of preserving accurate scripture.  Misinterpretaton and mistranslation do not negate the validity of the scripture because we know that the Holy Spirit has worked through the Church and will not stop working through the Church to bring about God’s purposes. Many years ago, scripture was used to uphold the ideology of slavery.  Hopefully, none of us would take that stance today; our culture has changed its view, and the Church as a whole has changed its view.  The traditional view of revelation (sola scripture to the extreme) would logically dictate that things like slavery, which are technically “upheld” in the Bible, should continue to be upheld.  (Paul says if you are in slavery to remain there and be the best slave you can be.)  But the balanced view of revelation says that God not only works through the text of the Bible, but also continues to work through individuals and the Church community to bring about cultural shifts, societal transformations, and prophetic movements of grace.  These three things–the Bible, the Spirit speaking to individuals, and the Spirit speaking to and through community–are intimately related and should be inseparable in the lives of Christians.

3) Without these three areas being in completely equal, integrated standing with one another, you will always get gross errors in Christianity. As we mentioned, when Luther posted the 95 theses, the Church was being led horribly astray.  Community trumped everything.  Individuals couldn’t understand the Bible or sermons or have a personal relationship with a God who didn’t even speak their language.  Church leaders decided what holy living meant, and didn’t take scripture into account as much as they took their own whims and financial needs into account.  But now in many churches and ministries, like the ministry I mentioned above (when the guy told me they were just following what the Bible says), the gross error comes when putting the Bible above everything else.  Who cares what God speaks to individuals?  Who cares that someone had an undeniably real experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues?  Our view of the Bible doesn’t allow for it.  Who cares if loads of other believers think there might be other valid views of the end times besides pre-trib rapture?  I guess they’re all going to hell because our Bible teaches pre-trib, baby.  Obviously this view of scripture trumping the other two elements is problematic.  It places too much sovereignty on individual interpretations of the text and allows for no accountability from other believers.  (Which ironically enough isn’t even biblical, 1 Cor. 12:12-25) Finally, when the third element of individual revelation becomes greater than the other two, you get errors like cult leaders who decide that because God spoke to them, no matter how much it may contradict the words of the Bible or the rest of the Church community, their followers should commit suicide, do drugs, practice group sex, and worship the cult leader.  Okay, so that’s an extreme example.  A more common example might be that you date someone who’s really pretty terrible for you and isn’t very godly, not because you found support in biblical ideas for dating them or because you had the counsel and wisdom of the body of Christ, but because you were in love with them and God told you to do it.  Or maybe you heard what you wanted to hear…  But we never mishear God, right? 

Hopefully this makes pretty good sense to everybody and doesn’t sound too heretical.  Again, we are not saying that the Bible isn’t the inspired “word” of God.  We are just saying that it is not THE be-all, end-all WORD OF GOD.  There is only one LORD and His name is YWH, not HOLY BIBLE. We can’t treat scripture like a spell we cast over our lives to charm our way into God’s blessing and abundance.  Relationship with Him, the living, active God is the primary goal of our lives, and as uncomfortable as it may be, as much as it means wrestling with many perspectives and ideas, we think that means that the Bible needs to be viewed as a living document too.  Not because we can change the text to mean what we want it to mean, but because we are limited creatures who probably already have a lot of inadequate understandings of scripture and need to be tempered by the Holy Spirit’s action in our lives daily and in the history, past and present of the entire Church community.

We wanted to present this post before we get into some other issues that we care deeply about and may think differently about than mainstream evangelical viewpoints.  Our views have been largely shaped by the personal journeys God has taken us on and by many wonderful believers in our lives.  We still believe the Bible is relevant, breathed into by God, and useful for instruction, but we also believe that scripture must be interpreted through the lenses of the Holy Spirit’s constant interaction with us as individuals and with the greater community of believers.  Like we said in the first paragraph, this is probably biblical, certainly logical, but not easy.  It requires us to engage with many different views and to have an intense, active dialogue with God.  But we want to challenge you to take the hard road.  Don’t believe things just because the Bible tells you so.  That’s great for easy issues like “Does Jesus love me?”  But for more complex issues, nuance is important.  God blessed us with brains and more importantly with relationship and discernment in the Holy Spirit.  Let’s be good stewards of our gifts and commit to engage the difficult issues. Because of our emphasis on the Spirit’s equal revelation to individuals and community, as well as through scripture, we may have some opinions that make people uncomfortable.  Just sayin.  We’re pretty sure Jesus made people uncomfortable too.  Hopefully we’re able to do it for the reasons He did and not just because we’re awkward, weird, and difficult.  But you, our readers, can be the judge of that