Weekend Reads: God's words

Language for God in Patristic Tradition: Wrestling with Biblical Anthropomorphism

By Mark Sheridan

“This book will keep the preaching pastor out of a whole lot of trouble,” the foreword promises. I disagree. Language for God in Patristic Tradition: Wrestling with Biblical Anthropomorphism (IVP Academic, 2015) analyzes how ancient writers interpreted biblical language in ways “worthy of God.” But it ends up suggesting that the church fathers thought—and that modern Christians ought to think—that some parts of the Bible are so wrong that they need to be creatively reinterpreted. Author Mark Sheridan (a Benedictine monk in Jerusalem) not only presents Origen, Chrysostom, and some other fathers of the church as allegorizers, he all but endorses their efforts to “neutralize” difficult texts by reinterpreting them into something worthy of God. He summarizes one modern commentator and then comments, “Naturally he does not call what he is proposing an ‘allegorical’ interpretation, but it is certainly not a literal one. The text says one thing and he proposes to read it as saying another.”

To Sheridan, this is apparently a good thing. It is also exactly the kind of activity that will get the preaching pastor into a whole lot of trouble. Sheridan says, “There is no reason why the ‘real’ and permanently valid meaning for Christians should be identified with the ‘original’ meaning of the Old Testament texts.” In other words, God had no idea what He was writing in the first place. Is that really worthy of Him?

The problem Language for God points out is very real. How do we take Scripture when it ascribes to Him bodily parts (the arm of the Lord, etc.) or interior disturbing passions (wrath, repentance) that a more developed theology indicates are not literally features of the Godhead? The solution lies not in letting go of the literal but in finding the true meaning, the thing Scripture was saying all along.

Ten: Words of Life for an Addicted, Compulsive, Cynical, Divided, and Worn-Out Culture

By Sean Gladding

With his earring and long goatee, Sean Gladding doesn’t look like your typical pastor. But then, Ten: Words of Life for an Addicted, Compulsive, Cynical, Divided, and Worn-Out Culture (IVP Books, 2014) doesn’t look like your typical exposition of the Ten Commandments. Here’s the premise: A local pastor decides to have an informal discussion with the other coffee shop regulars about how he can preach the Ten Commandments to his congregation. They take one commandment a week, and the resulting dialogue is both stimulating and (almost) believable.

Theologians talk about the “setting in life” for which particular Bible passages were originally written. Pastor John, the semi-official moderator of the dialogues in Ten, is no exception. He emphasizes over and over that God gave the Ten Words to the people of Israel to train them for freedom. They were a bunch of ex-slaves, fresh from Egypt, and they needed to know how to use their freedom together—because, as John points out, these commandments can only be fully kept in community. How do you honor your father when he molested you? How do you respect your neighbor’s property when there’s no agreed-upon system of boundaries?

The law as a law of liberty—that’s how Gladding presents the Ten Words. Thus, it’s taking God’s name in vain to use the commandments as a club to make people guilty. That’s not why God gave them. But they do reveal our guilt, not because they are bad but because we are. Pastor John reads Romans 7 to the group in the last chapter, and explains that God did what the law, weakened by flesh, never could. The God who brought undeserving Israel out of Egyptian bondage brings the underserving human soul out of Satanic bondage, into the glorious liberty of the obedient children of God.