bible
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“Do you really think I’d make that up?”
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“I did that because I love you.”
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“You’re too sensitive.”
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“It’s not that bad. Other people have it much worse.”
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“I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of this.”
Finished reading: Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Robinson writing on Genesis, but I enjoy her writing enough it was definitely something I was going to read. Structured as a narrative commentary, Robinson doesn’t employ chapter breaks or other touchpoints within the text itself. It’s fascinating to read a commentary by a Christian writer who takes the text seriously but not necessarily literally. If there is a broad “point” to her book, it is to feature the uniqueness of Genesis among the Ancient Near Eastern texts, and to highlight the theme of unmerited grace that runs through it. From God’s forgiveness of Cain to Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers, Robinson tells us that Genesis is set apart from the other ANE texts this way.
I appreciated her book, but didn’t enjoy it as much as reading her essays. I need to pick them up for a re-read.
Playing the Jeremiah 17:9 Card
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it?” – Jeremiah 17:9, NKJV
I had someone play the Jeremiah 17:9 card on me the other day. We were winding up a long email conversation wherein I finally was able to make clear that the standard evangelical hermeneutical approach to the Scriptures isn’t particularly appealing to me any more - that there are other approaches I find more compelling. (Brian Zahnd’s post Jesus Is What God Has To Say captures it pretty well for me right now at a high level.)
Once I got that message across, the message from my conversation partner was simple: beware your motives and understanding, because, after all, the heart is deceitful above all things!
In the evangelical circles I’ve spent my life in, Jeremiah 17:9 is used as a sort of ultimate trump card. If a discussion starts to go sideways, if someone comes to a logical conclusion that something they’ve been taught just can’t be correct, if someone questions how God could possibly be in the right for, say, ordering the murder of innocent children, this is the fallback. Of course your heart rebels against that thought. Your heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked! You need to accept that what we are teaching you is correct and ignore any prompting inside you that says otherwise!
There are problems, thought, with the Jeremiah 17:9 card.
Logical Coherence
First: playing the Jeremiah 17:9 card is logically incoherent. How did the card player become convinced of the rightness of their position in the first place? Undoubtedly through some combination of study, reasoning, and internal desire (even if subconscious) to hold that position. So how does the card player know that it isn’t his own heart that is deceiving him rather than yours deceiving you? If our heart (i.e. our reasoning as supplemented and powered by our instincts) is deceitful, what basis do you have for claiming that yours is so much less deceitful than mine that your conclusion is right and mine is wrong?
Other Bible Verses
I don’t recommend pulling single verses from their context and using them to justify positions. It’s a bad way to understand the Bible. But if you’re going to play that game, there is a broad selection of other verses about the heart that might provide an alternative perspective to Jeremiah 17:9.
Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." - This sounds like your heart has something good in it that needs to be protected!
Psalm 51:10: “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me." - The psalmist sure seems to think that purity of heart is a goal worth asking for and attaining to.
Proverbs 3:3: “Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart." - We can have love and faithfulness written on our heart!
Ezekiel 36:26: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." - If God gives me a new heart and a new spirit, maybe that new heart is good?
2 Corinthians 9:7: “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver." - This one is kinda fun… decide in your heart what to give! God will be happy with this!
Psalm 119:11: “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you." - This one speaks directly to the effects of discipleship upon the heart - the heart is improved and the result is less sinning!
Hebrews 3:12: “See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God." - The existence of a “sinful, unbelieving heart” implies the existence of a holy, believing heart that is turned toward God.
Proverbs 23:15: “My son, if your heart is wise, then my heart will be glad indeed." - Solomon suggests that a heart can be wise!
I hope the point here is clear - if you want to play the game of cherry picking to proof-text your point, why is the Jeremiah 17:9 card a more valid and applicable cherry than any of these verses?
Potential for Gaslighting and Abuse
Gaslighting is a strategy in which a perpetrator bends another person’s sense of reality and belief system, making that person second-guess themselves in a way that is beneficial to the perpetrator. Typical gaslighting phrases include things like this:
It’s not hard to see how “the heart is deceitful above all things” could fit right in to a gaslighting strategy. A spiritual leader abuses a person in some way. That person responds with a concern. This doesn’t feel right. Something is off here. The leader points right to Jeremiah. Your heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. Don’t trust it. And the abuse continues as the victim is further confused between the truth of the matter clear to their conscience and the deception and malpractice of their abuser.
Finally
A robust examination of discernment - how it works, how we integrate our instinctual “gut feelings”, how we experience the influence of the Holy Spirit, how we come to understand God’s Word and leading through the wisdom of community - would require far more words than I could write here. Whatever discernment is, though, it’s certainly not so simply summed up as “your heart is deceitful, don’t trust it”.
Instead of living in a constant spirit of fear, Christians should live in a spirit of confidence that God is guiding them. If you’ve made it this far, you’ll forgive me one proof-text for this that also suggests God wants us to use our minds, too.
For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV
_Playing card illustration via the Redemption CCG Fandom wiki._
A High View of Scripture?
About a year ago I started getting interested in historical criticism as it relates to the Bible. As I explored and read several books, I kept wondering: where was this discussion, or even the acknowledgement of this topic, in the evangelical tradition in which I grew up?
Most all I’ve ever encountered in evangelicalism in this area is that the Bible is made of up 66 books, that they’re “inspired” and “inerrant”, with varying levels of nuance about what those terms mean. I can’t remember ever hearing a discussion about how, when, or by whom the books of the OT and NT were assembled; only that that the collection of 66 is canonical and that’s basically that.
Where, I lamented on Twitter, were any evangelical takes on anything approaching historical criticism? This question did lead to a dear Episcopal priest in Wisconsin sending me three of his seminary textbooks on the topic (thanks again, Rev. Mike!), but from the evangelical perspective, I didn’t encounter anything much more nuanced than what I found on the “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” bumper sticker.
Enter Dr. Craig Allert’s A High View of Scripture?: The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon. Allert is a professing evangelical and professor at Trinity Western University in British Columbia. A High View of Scripture? is published by Baker Academic as a part of their “Evangelical Ressourcement” series. The book’s purpose, says Allert in the introduction, is to “investigat[e] the implications of the formation of the New Testament canon on evangelical doctrines of Scripture.”
This study has been lacking in evangelicalism, he says, and we are poorer for it.
[The] neglect of the canon process has left evangelicals with an inadequate understanding of the very Bible we view and appropriate as authoritative. For the most part, evangelicals seem unconcerned with how we actually got our Bible, and when we do show interest, we rarely relate the implications of this concern to how this might affect a doctrine of Scripture. This is ironic since evangelicals hav been quite loud in proclaiming the ultimate authority of the Bible; surely that proclamation should be informed about how the Bible came to be.
Dr. Craig Allert, A High View of Scripture?, p. 12
In A High View of Scripture?, Allert draws heavily on the church fathers and early church writings to distinguish between Scripture and canon, to explore how the word “inspiration” was used early on to describe various writings and practices, both canonical and not, and how the church wrestled with the question of what writings were considered canonical well into the 4th century.
After taking a few chapters to overview the history, Allert asks some hard questions about how we should have that history inform our doctrine of Scripture. How should it affect our understanding of Scripture when we acknowledge that these “inspired” texts were not delivered on a platter as an autographed, bound volume, but were assembled and agreed upon by the church over a period of more than three hundred years?
Allert affirms the authority and inspiration of Scripture, but balks at “inerrancy”, since the Scripture doesn’t use that word of itself, and since the definitions of “inerrancy” are challenging, frequently seeming to be constructed post hoc in support of the theologian’s predetermined interpretations. While evangelicals prefer to be known as focused on “the Book” and dismissive of “tradition”, Allert insists that we can’t have a healthy doctrine and understanding of Scripture without acknowledging and embracing the fact that the early church played a key role in the formation of the canon of Scripture and what it means.
I very much appreciated A High View of Scripture? and would highly recommend it to my evangelical friends. We need more of this sort of thing. Not to use historical “criticism” to diminish the Scripture, but to reject the impulse to skittishly rush past canon formation on our way to Scriptural authority, and to recognize that our reliance on the Scripture need not be weakened by acknowledgement of the human participation in its writing and assembly.
A Cheap Pun for your Wednesday
Growing up in the church as I did, and appreciating wordplay and humor, I’m of course familiar with most of the Bible-related puns that float around such circles. For instance:
Q: Who was the shortest man in the Bible? A: Bildad the Shuhite (shoe-height!)
and
Q: What’s the only American state mentioned in the Bible?
A: Arkansas. You know, in Genesis “Noah looked out of the ark and saw…”
and the ever classic
Q: Did you know that Honda was mentioned in the Bible?
A: Yeah, in Acts it says they were “all together in one Accord”!
Yesterday I was listening to a recent episode of Nomad Podcast, though, and they in passing had a one that I hadn’t heard before and so as a service to my loyal readers I will pass along.
Q: Who was the greatest financier in the Bible?
A: Pharoah’s daughter. She went to the Bank of the Nile and collected a profit (prophet)!
You may groan now.
(I have a sister-in-law who calls these “Hubbs jokes”, and while I think the appreciation of cheap puns surely extends outside my family, I’m proud to carry on the tradition.)