John Mark Hicks

In the December 2019 issue of the Gospel Advocate, Dan Owen offered a brief response, in part, to my recent book Searching for the Pattern. I thank Dan for reading the book, and I am grateful for his article as it calls attention to an important concern about how we read the Bible. I wish I could link to the article for my readers, but it is unavailable.

Dan quotes this sentence from Searching for the Pattern (p. 119), which he finds problematic: “In other words, the rule or canon by which Christians walk is not fundamentally or foundationally the New Testament as a written document.” He then quotes another sentence: “The rule or pattern, according to the apostle Paul, is not a detailed blueprint pattern for church practices, but the cross of Christ and the inauguration of a new creation.”

Dan does not question whether there was a rule or canon before the New Testament existed as Galatians 5:15-16 indicates. His point, however, is that the New Testament comes to us as a rule or canon that contains the teaching of the apostles. Consequently, he thinks I proposed, “to some degree, a false dichotomy” (40).

However, I do not dispute that the New Testament is a rule or canon. It is the teaching of the apostles handed down to us through divine inspiration. The question is what within the New Testament is essential, normative, and necessary for the faith and practice of the church. As Dan notes, we must read each biblical text in context and in the light of the whole story of the Bible (42). Consequently, we must discern through a contextual and wholistic reading of the Bible what is required for Christian faithfulness today. In other words, we must discern what in the New Testament canon is an essential rule for the contemporary church. What I claim is that the rule is, in summary, the cross of Christ and new creation.

Dan wrote, “Those who reject the apostolic documents as inspired and immediately authoritative for our lives will travel down a very different religious road from those who accept only the theological ideas in the core gospel as normative” (40).

I believe, as I affirmed above, that the apostolic documents are inspired. I am not exactly clear, however, what “immediately authoritative” means. If one means something like, “when it is clear that the apostles intended to require X as normative for all churches in all times by writing Y, then we ought to obey.” I affirm that. The question, then, is how do we discern that?

But if Dan means that whatever is asserted or taught by the New Testament is “immediately authoritative” in the sense that “when the Bible says X, we automatically and without discernment do or replicate X,” then this is problematic because the Bible tells us to do many things we do not do, including women wearing veils, enrolling widows and only those over fifty-nine, or greeting each other with a holy kiss among many other particulars.

Where Dan and I agree, I think, is that through contextual and wholistic study of Scripture, we seek to discern what God requires of us and the kind of life and practices into which God calls us. The truth of this contextual and wholistic study, I suggest in my book, is summarized in the gospel (e.g., the work of God through Christ in the Spirit; the rule by which we walk, according to Paul, in Galatians 5). This is the means by which we discern what is and is not normative for the practice of the contemporary church. I believe this because this is what I think the inspired apostolic documents teach.

Where Dan and I disagree, it seems to me, is not so much about the inspiration and authority of the Bible but how to discern what is normative and required from reading the Bible. At the same time, we share lots of common ground. Through a contextual and wholistic reading of the Bible we may, as committed disciples of Christ, see the grand story of God as the truth, and that truth is the mystery of God’s reconciling work in Christ through the Spirit.

This entry was posted on January 16, 2020 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Hermeneutics. Tagged: Hermeneutics, Patternism, Rule of Faith, Searching for the Pattern. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.