The 4th part of The Naked Gospel by Andrew Farley is called Burning Matryoshkas, but the basic content is about justification and regeneration.  In this section Farley displays another aspect of a hyper-dispensationalist  method of interpretation- literalism.  The result is some profound distortions of the doctrines of justification and regeneration, and their effect on sanctification.

Properly understood, a literal method should take figures of speech, metaphor, genre and more into account to proper understand the author’s intention.  Literalism often ignores these literary tools, thereby distorting the author’s intention.

He attacks the view that our justification is positional.  He never really defines justification, but as he discusses it we find a fundamental rejection of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness as the foundation of our justification.

“God’s plan was actually an exchange of nature. … People who place their faith in Christ undergo a miraculous exchange at the center of their being.  Who they were in Adam is no longer there.  They become a new person, a child of God who is in Christ.  The key event causing this exchange is a death, burial and resurrection with Christ.  This miraculous exchange is not figurative or symbolic but literal and actual.  The spiritual part of every Christian has literally and actually been crucified, buried, and raised with Christ.”

In Paul’s writings we find the concept of being “in Christ”.  We enjoy a spiritual union with Him.  Since he is our representative, instead of Adam, all that happened to Him happened to us.  When Jesus literally died and rose again, He did it as our Substitute so we receive the benefits of His actions.  In Romans 4, one of the key phrases Paul quotes from Genesis is that Abraham’s faith was “credited to him as righteousness.”  Justification is the removal of our guilt (imputed to Christ at His death) and the imputation of His obedience to us.  Though we are not personally righteous, His righteousness is credited to all who believe.  Luther would say we are “at the same time just and sinners.”

“We find it difficult to grasp the idea that God calls us righteous because we actually are righteous. … But we’ve been perfectly cleansed.  And we’ve been made perfectly righteous at our core through spiritual surgery.  This is the only reason we can enjoy even a moment of relationship with Jesus Christ.”

So Farley essentially holds to a view of justification that is about infusion (instantaneously, unlike the Roman Catholic view) rather than imputation.  He is conflating justification and regeneration.  As a result, he distorts both justification and regeneration (and sanctification).

“I believe that Romans 6, for example, should be read in the same way we read the rest of the epistle- in a literal sense.”

This would seem strange to Paul who says we were baptized, or identified with,  into His death.  Paul sees baptism as a sign, but Farley sees it as imparting a spiritual reality meaning my old man died, was buried and raised in my baptism.  Not that I partake of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection but that I really died, was buried and raised.  Later on he will make a big deal about the phrase “count or consider yourselves dead to sin”(6:11).  This is the same verb found in Romans 4 regarding Abraham’s faith considered as righteousness.  In Romans 4 it is in the past, here in the present.

He wants us to know that it is not we who sin- we are no longer sinners but have a completely new nature.  The flesh is merely a spiritual parasite.  But if you want to be literal with Paul, he literally says “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”  So, am I alive or dead?  I’m confused.

Farley argues that we are perfectly good and righteous (not positionally, actually).  We continue to struggle because of the power of sin and the flesh.  We fail to live out our new identity because we don’t understand how free we really are.  The flesh uses the Law to promote sin, and has many a wrong desire.  But the flesh isn’t me, I’m not a sinner (so much for Paul calling himself the “greatest sinner” in the present tense, 1 Timothy 1:15).   He ends up taking Romans 7:14ff as pre-conversion, even though there is a shift in from past tense to present tense at that point.  This is used to say Christians shouldn’t struggle with sin.  As before, the Law has nothing to do with sanctification, and neither to we.  He quotes Philippians 1:6, but forgets to hold it in balance with Philippians 2:12-13.

6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. … 12 Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,  13 for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose. (NIV)

His passivism finds no place in Philippians 2.  Paul continues to  ground our activity in grace- for God works in me so I will will and work.  He sounds much like a hyper-Calvinist here (yes, a plethora of errors).  He views sanctification as monergistic rather than synergistic.

“We must realize that saying no to sin is not saying no to ourselves.  As God’s workmanship, our regenerated selves are not the problem.  Sin is the problem, and our calling as new creations in Christ is to say no to sin and to say yes to who we truly are.”

Sounds great, but aren’t we to “purify ourselves” as John says all who have this hope do (1 John 3:3)?  What we find is that this is the proverbial “tar baby”.  As a Reformed Christian, I understand that all doctrines are connected to one another in the gospel.  You can’t mess with one without messing up others.  It snowballs on you.  The snowball effect here makes this book a frustrating read.  Every time I turn a page it seems like I’m encountering another problem.

I understand that Andrew Farley is frustrated by much of what passes for Christianity in America today.  I am too.  But rather than embrace a tried and true theological heritage, he descends into obscure and distorted/distorting views.

Andrew Farley would do himself (and us) a great big favor by reading Piper’s book Finally Alive! and Thomas Boston’s Human Nature in its Four-fold State to understand the true nature of regeneration.  He’d find that our regeneration is indeed total, in this sense: every aspect of our being has been changed.  It is imperfect in this life.  It is not just our bodies that will be glorified, but we will finally be like Him (though we’re becoming like Him) only when we see Him face to face (1 John 3:2).

I’ve come across this lecture by Rev David Simmons, an Episcopal priest from the US, entitled Literalism: The Heresy of the 20th Century. I had never heard biblical literalism described as a heresy before, which is why it caught my attention. It is a very interesting overview of how the Scriptures came to be interpreted literally in modernism and what are the implications of such an approach to Scripture. See what you make of it.

Watch the following clips below:

In her comment to the previous blog entry: http://wp.me/pmBNc-67  my daughter,Kat, observed that the gentleman who was so concerned about my satanic and ‘unsufic’profile pic of Kali may have been raised with very rigid views about cultures other than his own and this could have effected his ability to see the Kali Ma art as anything other than ’satanic’.

Gorgeous Kali Ma

In fact, this concerned gentleman’s viewpoint is rather Fundamentalist, which is certainly far from the “Sufic” perspective of Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan who founded The Sufi Order in which both this gentleman and I are initiated, and whose Universal teaching descends from the Chisti lineage. (Again, see first blog entry: http://murshidava.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/why-fear-the-mother/ ).

In actuality, this gentleman’s observations about what isn’t ‘Sufic’ don’t make much sense, but fear rarely does and this is why I feel focusing on the gender issue, although I agree with Emine that it is salient, might potentially render the deeper issues moot. Fear, seems to me to be the salient issue, here, and those movements arising from fear which entrap our imaginal lives in a strangulating literalism, which are so destructive to vitality, to the human heart and soul– movements such as the Inquisition, the Crusades, the Crucifixion, modern Jewish interpretations of the meaning of the Holy Land as a literal place which we (I am a Jew, after all) have a right to kill fellow human beings in order to protect and never mind the Law, and current Islamic Fundamentalist interpretations of the Jihad, which was meant to be an inner war, and a path toward mastery of the Self, but never an edict for men, women, and children to strap bombs to their bodies and physically annihilate themselves and others.

So, yes, it is true that people conduct all sorts of sacrificial rights in the name of the Mother, Kali Ma. It is true that in India children are still being sacrificed and mutilated in the name of the Mother. However, that is what people do with religion, with the Message coming to us from the Infinite Source of Life- we turn it into things it is not. And, yet, even our foolishness and ignorance reveal the Message, for, how, ultimately is child sacrifice and mutilation different than the sacrifice of children in the Holy Land, in Iraq, in Afganistan, in Darfur, in the AIDS pandemic, and in any other place where we allow our fear and hatred to erupt into violence or neglect rather than active caring and compassionate concern?

Sufis often say that Allah is on All Sides. One can see that here so clearly: even when human interpretations become twisted by the darkness of ignorance and limited understanding, even then, truth will shine through, revealing ourselves to ourselves and conveying lessons and opportunities to grow beyond those limitations- all that is required is that we have, as a humanity, the courage to look in the mirror.

La illaha il Allah hu. If there is nothing but the One Being, what is not the One Being? What is not a reflection of Message? What is not an opportunity for Awakening? And yet, one does need to develop the capacity to see. The persistent disorder of seeing which makes it easier for many, still, to assign evil to the feminine face of God when She is depicted as a whole being rather than as a dismembered series of aspected ‘Shes’ or to see male depiction as somehow more real, valid or wholesome than female depiction…that is a subject for another day… for another blog entry.

A headline in yesterday’s paper read “Mom expected God to provide food, daughter testifies,” regarding a New Jersey court case on child endangerment. Back in 2006 an unemployed mother decided, based on what her religion dictated, that God would sustain her family. Her children nearly starved to death after eleven days without food. In a society where those who take their religion literally like to wear it on their sleeves, and politicians receive excessive adulation for their piety, this case is a splash of ice-water honesty. Reality is, people starve to death. Many of them children, many of them religious.

The non-biblical adage “God helps those who help themselves” can properly be traced to Algernon Sydney, a seventeenth-century British philosopher. Quite apart from this noteworthy comment, Sydney was also aware that taking the verses of the Bible out of context you could prove just about anything. He famously wrote, “If you take the scripture to pieces you will make all the penmen of the scripture blasphemous; you may accuse David of saying there is no God and of the Apostles that they were drunk.” Found guilty of treason for his own words taken out of context, Sydney was sentenced to death. Today many people believe his words are biblical.

God help the man who speaks the truth

Perhaps the reality is that people do not want to own up to responsible religion. Believing that God dabbles almighty fingers into the realms of physics, biology, and chemistry every day, violating the laws of nature, they suppose that our little planet is the focal point of a grand cosmic scheme. Meanwhile, a glance at the paper reveals evil perpetrated in the name of God, and a glance at history reveals sensible thinkers facing the gallows.

Why do the people who so passionately uphold a literal view of creation often pair this perspective with the view that God is going to destroy creation at the Parousia?

Am I the only one that sees a problem with this mixture?

MCA

The bible is a curious document. Some, for fairly self-serving reasons, suggest that it must be read with childlike wonder, allowing the Spirit to guide understanding. While this is certainly part of the process, there is no need to deny our rational mind when doing so.

Many suggest that treating the bible as an ancient document and analyzing it much as we do Herodotus’s Histories, or Plato’s various discourses is wrong. That this is in opposition to their belief that God provides all that is necessary for the average person to read and understand God’s “plans.”

For the past several weeks, I’ve been immersed in Genesis. I’ve been studying Jacob and the various stories about him. I am not unfamiliar with them in general and in specific instances, I know a fair amount. While doing graduate work some years ago, I wrote a 100 page paper on Rachel and Jacob and the issue of the household gods.

To recognize that so much of this material was of very ancient origin, and has been collected during the Solomonic period and later in the Davidic dynasty is instructive, since the fair hand of the redactor often speaks to concerns of those times in the theological reflections that can be drawn from the various patriarchal stories they construct.

Somehow, some believe, that such study some how sullies or reduces the impact and import of God’s “word,” in doing so. I disagree most vehemently on this point. It is through serious exegetical review that the true wonder, the true talent, and may I say, the “inspired” brilliance of their work is truly understood.

To be sure, the bible is one of those unique documents that allows of many layers of understanding. Thus, it is accurate to conclude that the casual lay reader can gain a certain aptitude by simply reading and reflecting on the common everyday understanding of the words in the text. However, there will be much that is badly distorted by this method, and some of it leads to rather dangerous conclusions that can last for generations.

The Patriarchs were flawed individuals, and no attempt is made in the writings generally to cover that up. Surely the Yahwist tends to gloss over the shortcomings of these Israelite stalwarts a bit more than the the Priestly tradition does with its no nonsense approach to “just the facts.” But in the end, we see Abraham, Isaac, and assuredly Jacob as very average, very sinful men. In some sense, we are shown that God’s plans prevail even over against his very servants working against his plans.

There is security in this. We can relate to such individuals. But I think something more is said here than meets the eye. Something that begs us once again to remember that there is something special at work here in this document, perhaps unlike most others. There is an absence of “agenda” in a true sense. What do I mean?

As we examine so many of the early stories in Genesis, we find that often we are given benefit of two different traditions which speak to the same general theme. There are two creation stories, there are two Noah stories, there are competing genealogies. There are contradictions in names and places, reasons for doing X or Y which differ, and so forth.

The compiler or collector who created the “finished” document known as Genesis, was not unaware of these things. He is not stupid. On the contrary, he/they was/were quite brilliant. They quite knowingly presented both traditions or perhaps more than both. Here and there, each created transitional material to tie one series of stories to another. They, of course, had a point of view, and they often stated it.

Yet, they did not remove the “difficult” passage or tradition to make their exposition more convincing. They honored the long history of different traditions by presenting them fairly to the reader. And in doing so, we conclude quite rightly, that the readers (the original ones at least) were not burdened by any sense of “literalism” and did not see these stories as factual accounts of history. They were understood as theological statements of various kinds. And they may well have been offered to explain the importance of places and things. Attaching them to Jacob’s history or Abraham’s becomes a convenience.

An example suffices. We all know that Abraham was first commanded to circumcise. Yet, we learn that such practices were known and practices throughout the realm, not just by the Hebrews. And we learn that such practices were not common to Abrahamic peoples, and were generally not tied to ritual purity or cultic practices initially as the text suggests.

Rather, after the exile, when these texts were finalized in writing, circumcision became important. We are returning to Jerusalem after 400 years in Babylon. Who is still an Israelite and who has succumbed to the Babylonian way of life? The writer urges that those who are for Jerusalem are those who will define themselves as Hebrew by circumcision. That is when the practice became part and parcel of what it meant to be an Israelite. It was “read back” to  the time of Abraham. Much of the “prophetic” nature of Genesis stories are just this, behavior and belief which is now part of who we are, and is read back into our history as being the place from whence it came.

Contrary to the idea that reading experts on the bible somehow secularizes the message and takes us away from God, the result is just the opposite. The faith exhibited by the collectors and redactors is such that they trusted by inspiration, that the reader could get the “proper” understanding by including everything, the ugly with the beautiful. And when we discern this truth, we are awed more deeply that this work is of deep theological import, than we could ever be by the rather pedestrian and trite understanding we might get by “literal” interpretation.

Here’s a very interesting video on the dangers of fundamentalism, and the difference between literalism and fundamentalism – John Dominic Crossan

Quote from John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism

‘The fundamentalists will appeal to the need for emotional security by trafficking in religious certainty. The system they create will survive momentarily – it might even flourish for a time – but it will not endure. Delusions can be immensely satisfying. For short periods of time people seem to enjoy turning off their brains and listening to those who assure them that all is well. [...] Fundamentalism is both an expression of and an assisting cause in the terminal sickness that hangs over religious life today. When the depth of that sickness becomes obvious, it will leave in its wake disillusionment, despair, and pain. No seeds of renewal are contained in a literalism that is itself afraid of truth.”

—

I would have to add that there is also a form of fundamentalism present in Atheism – it’s trafficking not in religious certainty, but rather in an exagerated confidence in science, and particularly in the extent that theories such as evolution can explain all reality. I have to say that I don’t have a problem with the theory of evolution, except Darwin himself did not claim absolute truth, and he was open to other theories that may explain reality better.

I attended a paper at a conference a while ago that argued that the early Semitic worldview was largely orthopraxic, in contrast to a dominant Greek worldview that emphasized correct thinking, or orthodoxy. It went on to discuss early Judaism and Christianity as originally orthopraxic traditions that, once assimilated into this Greek philosophical worldview (largely through apologists and scholars) shifted toward an orthodoxic soteriology.  This is why many in modern Christianity care more about your perspective on Christ’s ontological relationship with God than about how you interact with your neighbors and family.

James McGrath shared a witty cartoon in a post on biblical literalism that grazes across this issue and reminded me of it. Thanks for the cartoon, James.