Occasionally I'm drawn into those Facebook discussions about complicated matters. My goal is always to discuss the complications openly, to allow the complexities of the biblical account to be what they are -- complex. While I do think there's a unity to the message of the Bible's diversity, I don't think that unity is about morals. That would make the Bible about us, we humans. No, when the Bible speaks with a unified voice, it speaks about God -- a strange, new word that brings together the divine and the human. That strange, new word is Jesus.
Often discussions about complicated texts will bring in folks who make a claim: Their particular position is biblical, and therefore "Christian", in a way that mine obviously (to them, at least) is unbiblical and therefore, by implication, unChristian.
Take homosexuality, for example.
This isn't a post about what I think. (That's for another day.) It's about how we Christians develop shibboleths -- code words for who's "in" and who's "out". Think Judges 12 here.
In other words, biblical is a code word for a community's sociological litmus testing of where that particular community's boundaries might be.
Are Catholics biblical? Methodists? Pentecostals? Amish? Presbyterians? Episcopalians? Baptists? And on and on? It seems everyone would own the word biblical. And if that's the case, if biblical can embrace all this diversity, then I struggle to understand how, when we discuss a "biblical" approach to a controversial subject, that anything other than a diversity of opinions will emerge. Strictly from an empirical standpoint, the Bible doesn't produce homogeneity of opinion. Rather, it produces heterogeneity of opinion. That is a fact. The Bible itself doesn't produce consensus. And if you think that it could or should, you're just not a serious person.
A conversation seeking to find a "biblical" view isn't heading toward a fixed destination. Rather, such a conversation will be airing a diversity of views that share a family resemblance. The word biblical here is the name we have for that family resemblance. Similar to the label "McCarter Family Reunion". Biblical means something like McCarter Family Reunion.
Phrased another way, biblical is a shibboleth for who's the particular brand of Christian (most often identified by the speaker). It's a shibboleth.
Biblical definitely doesn't describe the attempt to conform to or recreate the church we find in the pages of the Bible. Take the public confession of sin -- exhomologesis -- for example. Its tragic consequences led to the history of penance and confession of which lots of us know.
I know of no Christian body that looks like the church revealed in the New Testament. Can you point me to one? And if we can't, what does that say about how we are using the word biblical?
Suddenly it's very clear that biblical doesn't mean "doing what they did in the Bible". Because no one is doing that. Take marriage, for example. So what does biblical mean? Again, whatever it means, it's clear that it doesn't mean biblical.
So what does it mean?
I think it's pretty clear. Biblical is a word Christian communities use to describe their hermeneutical strategies. Biblical is a word that is used to describe how a particular faith community reads the Bible. What this means is that the word biblical is a sociological label, a way of describing the interpretive strategies of a particular community.
When Rev Franklin Graham said recently that Christians who support same-gender marriage couldn't possibly be followers of Jesus because such support wasn't "biblical", he was doing the same thing I'm talking about here.
Again, this isn't the place I want to talk about what I think. I want to highlight what's really at play here so we Christians can be honest with one another, and the world. We don't all read the Bible with a unanimous voice. We never have. But we're all still biblical.
When a faith community gathers to discuss if a view is biblical or not, they are asking how a particular view sits with their hermeneutical history and norms. The issue isn't if a position is biblical or not (because, as I noted above, no one is being biblical) but if a position would cause a sociological rupture, a tear in the hermeneutical fabric that has held this community together. If the position can be woven into the hermeneutical web then it is declared biblical. But if the rupture is too great then the view is declared unbiblical.
So, in short, biblical is a shibboleth.
When a conversation about what is or is not biblical opens up on Facebook (or face-to-face), it helps to acknowledge that using biblical is itself a sociological stress test. Can this hermeneutical community, given its history and norms, accept a change in this area without significant rupture? How much stress can we tolerate? That's the question under consideration. How much stress can we tolerate?
Not whether or not someone is a follower of Jesus.
In my reading of the Bible, that's not something measured by hot button moral issues, but by the truth of one's life -- that Jesus is both "my Lord and my God".