Reading the new testament by the church's light
by stan Purdum
In the final chapter of Mark, the gospel writer tells of the resurrected Jesus commissioning his disciples to continue the work he had begun. Jesus told them to “Go into all the world and write down the good news for the whole creation.”
Well, no, that is not exactly what Jesus said. What he told them was to “proclaim the good news to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15, italics added), and the difference between writing and proclaiming is significant. The good news was eventually written down -- that is how we got the New Testament -- but before that happened, a whole lot of proclaiming took place. Beginning at Pentecost, the followers of Jesus began telling the Gospel, often citing the Hebrew scriptures as pointing to Jesus. As Paul would later explain it to the Romans, “So faith comes from what is heard ...” (Romans 10:17, italics added). Certainly some of the writings that eventually became the New Testament began to be circulated within the lifetimes of the first Christians, but the full collection of the 27 books of the Christian scriptures were not stamped as scripture until the fourth century. In other words, the church came into being before the New Testament did.
Yet we sometimes act as if it were the other way around, that the New Testament gave birth to the church. Perhaps you have noticed churches that identify themselves as “New Testament churches.” Generally, what the people in those faith communities mean is that they have gleaned from the New Testament the worship, fellowship, and church administration practices of the first-century Christians, and that they then try to operate their churches accordingly. One denomination goes as far as to ban instrumental music in their worship because they can find no biblical record of the early church doing so.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with using the New Testament church as a model for church life today, it can support the mistaken idea that the New Testament was the foundation document upon which the church is built. In turn, that notion leads some to conclude that the New Testament is all they need for Christian faith, with participation in a church being optional. Others even go to the extreme of making the Bible the sole arbiter of all matters of faith, saying “If it’s not in the Bible, I don’t believe it.”
In fact, the church was birthed on the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it was verbally proclaimed by the first Christians. It was their faithful testimony that brought others in and caused the church to grow rapidly beyond its beginnings in Jerusalem.
To be sure, the New Testament eventually emerged from the labor of specific Christian authors, including Matthew, Luke, Paul and others, but at the time they wrote, they had no idea that their words would eventually be considered scripture. When Paul corresponded with Timothy saying “and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 3:15), Paul was referring neither to his own writings nor to those of Peter, John, the unknown author of Hebrews, nor to any of the other writers whose works were eventually included in the New Testament. He was referring to the “law and the prophets,” the Old Testament.
Church historian Justo Gonzalez points out that the process by which the stories of Jesus and the writings of the apostles eventually became scripture was not unlike how parts of the Old Testament came into being:
The writers of the New Testament did not consciously set out to write Christian scriptures parallel to those the church had in common with Israel. Rather, they interpreted the events of Jesus’ life and of the life of the church in the light of the ancient scriptures of Israel. In doing so, they provided the earliest Christian interpretations of the Bible, and these in turn came to form part of the Christian Bible -- just as the prophets’ interpretation of the exodus came to form part of the Hebrew Bible.1
In time, of course, it became important for the church to gather documents about the Christian faith, but some of that probably happened without planning. As apostolic teachings and stories of Jesus were committed to writing, it was quite natural that these documents would be circulated and read in the churches. Paul himself directed that one of his letters -- Colossians -- be read not only by the original recipients but also be passed on to the church at Laodicea (Colossian 4:16), though he also certainly was not considering his work as “scripture.”
One reason for the intentional gathering of the documents, however, was the unrelenting march of time. The eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection were growing old and would soon be passing from the scene. What is more, as Christianity spread, the vast majority of new Christians never had the opportunity to meet the original witnesses. Other means had to be found to preserve the story of Jesus, summarize the church’s beginnings, and link both of these things to the church’s present and guarantee a continued witness into the future. Thus, collecting the written works about Jesus and the correspondence of the apostles became imperative.
Another factor was also in play. Some writings were being circulated in the name of the apostles that were not from their pens and did not contain true apostolic teachings. Thus, simply as a protection against misleading claims, false accounts, and questionable doctrine, the church collected and sanctioned written material that reliably represented Christ and the church.
In the opening lines of his gospel, Luke alluded to the proliferation of accounts about Jesus that were in circulation and to the fact that the faith had been transmitted by eyewitnesses. Luke wrote without criticizing the other accounts, but his words convey that a large number of “gospels” existed:
Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you ... so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed. (Luke 1:1-4, italics added).
Important as it was that Christian scriptures be created, there is always a concern whenever something that has been growing by word of mouth is committed to writing -- the concern that not everything has been captured or that some things are not fully explained. Our language about the documenting process even hints at that loss when it says that something is “reduced to writing.”
Of course, in the case of the Bible, we are dealing with material about which our faith says God’s inspiring activity was at work, so it is fair to trust that nothing essential was lost in the writing process. Paul insisted that “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). We have already noted that he was speaking only of the Hebrew scriptures, but it is not unreasonable that we now think of both testaments as divinely inspired for those purposes of reproof, correction, and training in righteousness. Nonetheless, for many ethical issues, matters of social concern, questions about Christian behavior, and even basic beliefs, we today often have to rely on more than the New Testament alone to decide a course of action. That is why The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, in discussing the sources and criteria of our denomination’s theology, identifies, in addition to scripture, three other touchstones: tradition, experience, and reason. Within those four, scripture is primary, revealing the Word of God “so far as it is necessary for our salvation,”2 but it is not assigned a solo role.
The tendency to think of scripture as a separate entity from the church got a big boost in the sixteenth century when the Protestant reformers felt compelled to part company with the Catholic Church. One point of disagreement was over the role of scripture. At the time of the split, the Bible was not available in the language of the common people, and so the populace had to rely upon the church to tell them what the Bible said. Martin Luther, however, had found the answer to his search for peace with God through reading the Bible and not exclusively from the ministry of the church. He thus concluded that the church was not teaching the whole message of the Bible and in fact was mistaken in some of what it was teaching. For Luther, the Bible became a higher authority than the church, though he never meant it to replace the church. In time, he insisted that the Bible could be its own interpreter, and that aided by the Holy Spirit alone, readers could learn from the scriptures everything essential for salvation.
This position came to be called sola scriptura (Latin, “by scripture alone”). On one occasion, a cardinal urged Luther to recant what he had said about the Bible by reminding Luther that the pope was the interpreter of Scripture. Luther replied, “His Holiness abuses scripture. I deny that he is above scripture.”3
Luther went so far as to say that any church practice that was not commanded in scripture was not required, but another of the reformers, John Calvin, pushed this concept even further. Calvin maintained, much like some “New Testament church” people today, that any church practice that was not actually commanded in scripture was forbidden. Yale professor emeritus of history, Jaroslav Pelikan, puts sola scriptura in clear historical perspective when he writes:
As a matter of historical fact ..., the Christian scriptura has never been sola. When the Christian movement began, it had the [Hebrew scriptures] as is scriptura and, alongside it, the primitive proclamation of Jesus as its fulfillment. Then, by the time this proclamation had itself been written down and fleshed out into the New Testament scriptura, the church also had the creeds and the liturgy, on the basis of which it decided what the New Testament, and behind it the [Hebrew scriptures], meant for Christian life and faith.4
The reformers idea that the Bible could be its own interpreter -- and the subsequent translation of the Bible into the languages of the people -- opened the scriptures to many, and eventually millions benefited in their spiritual lives. At the same time, however, the idea that the plain sense of the Bible was open to any sincere reader led some to divisions among Christians as different readers reached different conclusions. James Bernstein, a man who grew up Jewish but who in adulthood became an enthusiastic convert to Christianity, tells of how this Bible-as-its-own-interpreter concept eventually made a problem for him:
The guidelines I used in interpreting scripture seemed simple enough: When the plain sense of scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense. I believed that those who were truly faithful and honest in following this principle would achieve Christian unity. To my surprise, the “common sense” approach led not to increased Christian clarity and unity, but rather to a spiritual free-for-all! Those who most strongly adhered to believing “only the Bible” tended to become the most factious, divisive, and combative of Christians. ... We would even argue heatedly over verses on love!5
That can hardly be what the early church had in mind when it began collecting the writings about Jesus and Christianity for use of the generations to come!
So how can we read the New Testament so that its story and message of salvation continues its work of power, mercy, and grace within us without falling into the trap of intellectual or spiritual arrogance? We do so by reading the New Testament by the church’s light -- by understanding that the New Testament arose from the church and not vice versa. We should not consider scripture as a thing apart from the church, but rather look to the church for help in hearing God’s will through the scriptures.
Here are some ways of reading the New Testament by the church’s light:
1. Use a modern translation. The old King James Version is beautiful but it is written in 16th-century English. The Bible is tough enough without making it harder. There are many good modern versions, including the New Revised Standard Version, the New International Version, The Good News Bible, and others. All of these have developed as works of the church to make the scriptures more accessible and understandable.
2. Use a study Bible. These are special editions of the translations that have “Helps” such as introductions to the books, explanatory subheads above chapters, and footnotes about difficult passages. Two good ones are The New Interpreter’s Study Bible and The Oxford Annotated Bible.
3. Keep a list of things you do not understand from scripture. Later, you can ask other Bible readers, your pastor, or look in commentaries that explain the passages.
4. Read the stuff you can grasp first. When you get bogged down, skip ahead. You will eventually fill in, and church study groups and biblical helps published by the church will assist you.
5. Attend worship and Sunday school. God often uses good leaders and teachers to guide you as you seek to understand the scripture.
6. Check your own interpretations against the church. From time to time, some Bible readers have reached dangerous and even distinctly unchristian conclusions from things they have misunderstood in the scriptures. Worse, some have acted upon them and wrought havoc on others. Much of this could have been avoided if those readers had checked their conclusions with the church rather than assuming their own reading of the Bible was the last word of authority needed.
7. Most of all, don’t give up. Bible reading is a lifetime adventure, and well worth the time you spend doing it.
J.B. Phillips, the British scholar who produced an especially effective paraphrase of the New Testament called The New Testament in Modern English, once said that while preparing it, it sometimes seemed to him as if he were working with bare wires without the electricity being turned off.6 That is an apt description of the New Testament, for the scriptures convey the powerful story of our Savior and the electrifying message of our salvation. But to carry Phillips’ comparison a bit further, for electricity to deliver its benefits, it must be channeled and hooked up to the practical instruments that perform specific tasks. Much of the time, the church is that channel. Certainly the Bible is meant to read and understood with the help of God’s Holy Spirit, but not in isolation from the church. It is in the life of the church that the power of God’s word is channeled for our benefit and for the salvation of the world.
1 Justo L. Gonzalez, “How the Bible Has Been Interpreted in Christian Tradition,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 83.
2 The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, www.umc.org/interior.asp?mid=1664.
3 Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Meridian, 1995), 144.
4 Jaroslav Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages (New York: Viking, 2005), 180.
5 A. James Bernstein, Which Came First: The Church or the New Testament? (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 1994), 3.
6 Cited in ChristianityToday.com, http://ctlibrary.com/6099.
This article was originally published in Adult Bible Studies Teacher
Well, no, that is not exactly what Jesus said. What he told them was to “proclaim the good news to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15, italics added), and the difference between writing and proclaiming is significant. The good news was eventually written down -- that is how we got the New Testament -- but before that happened, a whole lot of proclaiming took place. Beginning at Pentecost, the followers of Jesus began telling the Gospel, often citing the Hebrew scriptures as pointing to Jesus. As Paul would later explain it to the Romans, “So faith comes from what is heard ...” (Romans 10:17, italics added). Certainly some of the writings that eventually became the New Testament began to be circulated within the lifetimes of the first Christians, but the full collection of the 27 books of the Christian scriptures were not stamped as scripture until the fourth century. In other words, the church came into being before the New Testament did.
Yet we sometimes act as if it were the other way around, that the New Testament gave birth to the church. Perhaps you have noticed churches that identify themselves as “New Testament churches.” Generally, what the people in those faith communities mean is that they have gleaned from the New Testament the worship, fellowship, and church administration practices of the first-century Christians, and that they then try to operate their churches accordingly. One denomination goes as far as to ban instrumental music in their worship because they can find no biblical record of the early church doing so.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with using the New Testament church as a model for church life today, it can support the mistaken idea that the New Testament was the foundation document upon which the church is built. In turn, that notion leads some to conclude that the New Testament is all they need for Christian faith, with participation in a church being optional. Others even go to the extreme of making the Bible the sole arbiter of all matters of faith, saying “If it’s not in the Bible, I don’t believe it.”
In fact, the church was birthed on the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it was verbally proclaimed by the first Christians. It was their faithful testimony that brought others in and caused the church to grow rapidly beyond its beginnings in Jerusalem.
To be sure, the New Testament eventually emerged from the labor of specific Christian authors, including Matthew, Luke, Paul and others, but at the time they wrote, they had no idea that their words would eventually be considered scripture. When Paul corresponded with Timothy saying “and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 3:15), Paul was referring neither to his own writings nor to those of Peter, John, the unknown author of Hebrews, nor to any of the other writers whose works were eventually included in the New Testament. He was referring to the “law and the prophets,” the Old Testament.
Church historian Justo Gonzalez points out that the process by which the stories of Jesus and the writings of the apostles eventually became scripture was not unlike how parts of the Old Testament came into being:
The writers of the New Testament did not consciously set out to write Christian scriptures parallel to those the church had in common with Israel. Rather, they interpreted the events of Jesus’ life and of the life of the church in the light of the ancient scriptures of Israel. In doing so, they provided the earliest Christian interpretations of the Bible, and these in turn came to form part of the Christian Bible -- just as the prophets’ interpretation of the exodus came to form part of the Hebrew Bible.1
In time, of course, it became important for the church to gather documents about the Christian faith, but some of that probably happened without planning. As apostolic teachings and stories of Jesus were committed to writing, it was quite natural that these documents would be circulated and read in the churches. Paul himself directed that one of his letters -- Colossians -- be read not only by the original recipients but also be passed on to the church at Laodicea (Colossian 4:16), though he also certainly was not considering his work as “scripture.”
One reason for the intentional gathering of the documents, however, was the unrelenting march of time. The eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection were growing old and would soon be passing from the scene. What is more, as Christianity spread, the vast majority of new Christians never had the opportunity to meet the original witnesses. Other means had to be found to preserve the story of Jesus, summarize the church’s beginnings, and link both of these things to the church’s present and guarantee a continued witness into the future. Thus, collecting the written works about Jesus and the correspondence of the apostles became imperative.
Another factor was also in play. Some writings were being circulated in the name of the apostles that were not from their pens and did not contain true apostolic teachings. Thus, simply as a protection against misleading claims, false accounts, and questionable doctrine, the church collected and sanctioned written material that reliably represented Christ and the church.
In the opening lines of his gospel, Luke alluded to the proliferation of accounts about Jesus that were in circulation and to the fact that the faith had been transmitted by eyewitnesses. Luke wrote without criticizing the other accounts, but his words convey that a large number of “gospels” existed:
Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you ... so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed. (Luke 1:1-4, italics added).
Important as it was that Christian scriptures be created, there is always a concern whenever something that has been growing by word of mouth is committed to writing -- the concern that not everything has been captured or that some things are not fully explained. Our language about the documenting process even hints at that loss when it says that something is “reduced to writing.”
Of course, in the case of the Bible, we are dealing with material about which our faith says God’s inspiring activity was at work, so it is fair to trust that nothing essential was lost in the writing process. Paul insisted that “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). We have already noted that he was speaking only of the Hebrew scriptures, but it is not unreasonable that we now think of both testaments as divinely inspired for those purposes of reproof, correction, and training in righteousness. Nonetheless, for many ethical issues, matters of social concern, questions about Christian behavior, and even basic beliefs, we today often have to rely on more than the New Testament alone to decide a course of action. That is why The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, in discussing the sources and criteria of our denomination’s theology, identifies, in addition to scripture, three other touchstones: tradition, experience, and reason. Within those four, scripture is primary, revealing the Word of God “so far as it is necessary for our salvation,”2 but it is not assigned a solo role.
The tendency to think of scripture as a separate entity from the church got a big boost in the sixteenth century when the Protestant reformers felt compelled to part company with the Catholic Church. One point of disagreement was over the role of scripture. At the time of the split, the Bible was not available in the language of the common people, and so the populace had to rely upon the church to tell them what the Bible said. Martin Luther, however, had found the answer to his search for peace with God through reading the Bible and not exclusively from the ministry of the church. He thus concluded that the church was not teaching the whole message of the Bible and in fact was mistaken in some of what it was teaching. For Luther, the Bible became a higher authority than the church, though he never meant it to replace the church. In time, he insisted that the Bible could be its own interpreter, and that aided by the Holy Spirit alone, readers could learn from the scriptures everything essential for salvation.
This position came to be called sola scriptura (Latin, “by scripture alone”). On one occasion, a cardinal urged Luther to recant what he had said about the Bible by reminding Luther that the pope was the interpreter of Scripture. Luther replied, “His Holiness abuses scripture. I deny that he is above scripture.”3
Luther went so far as to say that any church practice that was not commanded in scripture was not required, but another of the reformers, John Calvin, pushed this concept even further. Calvin maintained, much like some “New Testament church” people today, that any church practice that was not actually commanded in scripture was forbidden. Yale professor emeritus of history, Jaroslav Pelikan, puts sola scriptura in clear historical perspective when he writes:
As a matter of historical fact ..., the Christian scriptura has never been sola. When the Christian movement began, it had the [Hebrew scriptures] as is scriptura and, alongside it, the primitive proclamation of Jesus as its fulfillment. Then, by the time this proclamation had itself been written down and fleshed out into the New Testament scriptura, the church also had the creeds and the liturgy, on the basis of which it decided what the New Testament, and behind it the [Hebrew scriptures], meant for Christian life and faith.4
The reformers idea that the Bible could be its own interpreter -- and the subsequent translation of the Bible into the languages of the people -- opened the scriptures to many, and eventually millions benefited in their spiritual lives. At the same time, however, the idea that the plain sense of the Bible was open to any sincere reader led some to divisions among Christians as different readers reached different conclusions. James Bernstein, a man who grew up Jewish but who in adulthood became an enthusiastic convert to Christianity, tells of how this Bible-as-its-own-interpreter concept eventually made a problem for him:
The guidelines I used in interpreting scripture seemed simple enough: When the plain sense of scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense. I believed that those who were truly faithful and honest in following this principle would achieve Christian unity. To my surprise, the “common sense” approach led not to increased Christian clarity and unity, but rather to a spiritual free-for-all! Those who most strongly adhered to believing “only the Bible” tended to become the most factious, divisive, and combative of Christians. ... We would even argue heatedly over verses on love!5
That can hardly be what the early church had in mind when it began collecting the writings about Jesus and Christianity for use of the generations to come!
So how can we read the New Testament so that its story and message of salvation continues its work of power, mercy, and grace within us without falling into the trap of intellectual or spiritual arrogance? We do so by reading the New Testament by the church’s light -- by understanding that the New Testament arose from the church and not vice versa. We should not consider scripture as a thing apart from the church, but rather look to the church for help in hearing God’s will through the scriptures.
Here are some ways of reading the New Testament by the church’s light:
1. Use a modern translation. The old King James Version is beautiful but it is written in 16th-century English. The Bible is tough enough without making it harder. There are many good modern versions, including the New Revised Standard Version, the New International Version, The Good News Bible, and others. All of these have developed as works of the church to make the scriptures more accessible and understandable.
2. Use a study Bible. These are special editions of the translations that have “Helps” such as introductions to the books, explanatory subheads above chapters, and footnotes about difficult passages. Two good ones are The New Interpreter’s Study Bible and The Oxford Annotated Bible.
3. Keep a list of things you do not understand from scripture. Later, you can ask other Bible readers, your pastor, or look in commentaries that explain the passages.
4. Read the stuff you can grasp first. When you get bogged down, skip ahead. You will eventually fill in, and church study groups and biblical helps published by the church will assist you.
5. Attend worship and Sunday school. God often uses good leaders and teachers to guide you as you seek to understand the scripture.
6. Check your own interpretations against the church. From time to time, some Bible readers have reached dangerous and even distinctly unchristian conclusions from things they have misunderstood in the scriptures. Worse, some have acted upon them and wrought havoc on others. Much of this could have been avoided if those readers had checked their conclusions with the church rather than assuming their own reading of the Bible was the last word of authority needed.
7. Most of all, don’t give up. Bible reading is a lifetime adventure, and well worth the time you spend doing it.
J.B. Phillips, the British scholar who produced an especially effective paraphrase of the New Testament called The New Testament in Modern English, once said that while preparing it, it sometimes seemed to him as if he were working with bare wires without the electricity being turned off.6 That is an apt description of the New Testament, for the scriptures convey the powerful story of our Savior and the electrifying message of our salvation. But to carry Phillips’ comparison a bit further, for electricity to deliver its benefits, it must be channeled and hooked up to the practical instruments that perform specific tasks. Much of the time, the church is that channel. Certainly the Bible is meant to read and understood with the help of God’s Holy Spirit, but not in isolation from the church. It is in the life of the church that the power of God’s word is channeled for our benefit and for the salvation of the world.
1 Justo L. Gonzalez, “How the Bible Has Been Interpreted in Christian Tradition,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 83.
2 The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, www.umc.org/interior.asp?mid=1664.
3 Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Meridian, 1995), 144.
4 Jaroslav Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages (New York: Viking, 2005), 180.
5 A. James Bernstein, Which Came First: The Church or the New Testament? (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 1994), 3.
6 Cited in ChristianityToday.com, http://ctlibrary.com/6099.
This article was originally published in Adult Bible Studies Teacher