"That quote cracked something open inside me." Me too -- thank you, Brian Zahnd! I love how you lay out the choices here, Beau. Option 3 has changed my life... my view of God, people, myself. After years of constriction, I can feel the increasing spaciousness in my soul... does that make sense? The ongoing process, of learning how to apply the Jesus hermeneutic, has been like jumping off a cliff -- and receiving a warm hug -- all at once. I just finished the book "A More Christlike Word" by Brad Jersak, and it was very helpful.
I love that book too!! It’s a great one. Thanks for sharing your journey. That makes perfect sense. I love the way you put it…”spaciousness in my soul” YES! 🫶
[EDIT: Forgot "Hebrews" was in the NT, changed "two OT quotes" to "an OT quote"]
It's ironic that you use an OT quote to refute "God changed" but then run with "the OT sometimes got it wrong." Not that I claim to speak with any certainty about it, but my conversations with Jesus lead me to believe a bit of both (2 & 3.)
I'm not sure "unchanging" even makes sense conceptually. It's one of those qualities, like omnipotence or omniscience, that kind of fizzles out into absurdity when taken to its literal conclusion. God is unchanging...but can also speak and move and do things? You have to twist both the meaning of "unchanging" and the intentions of individual Bible authors to get it to make any sense. The truth shines through more clear when you don't try and fit it in that box.
I mean, I'm pretty open to thinking God was loving the whole time, but one can be unwavering in love without being unchanging. But I do kind of believe incarnation may have changed God enough to lead to the radical differences we see between OT and NT. The notion that God incarnated _intending_ to do a bit of final wrathful judgement only to have a change of heart once he walked in our shoes particularly seems to track with a lot of the differences even within the NT. This is best exemplified in Jesus saying (paraphrasing) "you should cut off the bad arm before it drags you into hell" before getting dragged into hell to save the bad arm.
Finally, you're discussing the NT's "infallibility of purpose" in other comments, but I think there's actually as much of a contrast between early-NT and late-NT as there is between early-NT and OT. The Deutero-Pauline epistles and Revelation read like they're trying to claw back the radicalness of Christ's message and re-establish a more judgmental God. I think they're all human stories about encountering the divine, at least as fallible as the truest human stories. And I think it's important to recognize this, because a lot of The Story gets told between the lines, in the changing and contrasting views from each book's author.
I hear you Beau. For me, suggesting the OT 'sometimes got it wrong' is incorrect, and I think that perspective might be / no, is risky. I think they were inspired to write the text, and as you say the lack of some details or the areas and accounts of conflicting detail (OT & NT) or the grayness in which it was penned just leads us to Him and calls upon us to wrestle with it, dig in, ask, pray, and even just sit with it (full stop). I'm called to let the Holy Spirit help me to make sense of it over time, but not to try and make it all 'humanese'. For me that's what faith looks like. Not understanding or reconciling it all, but still believing it all as truth. Beau!! Keep on digging....love your writings and wisdom and I can just see that onion being peeled!!
Gonna probably need more than a ‘comment’ 😉 but I’ll just go with …if you believe the writers got some of the OT wrong, what would convince you that the whole of the NT is entirely right? 1 Corinthians 13:12
This is SUCH a great question that gets to the heart of how we understand Scripture's authority and reliability. Let me share how I approach this distinction between inerrancy and what I'd call "infallibility of purpose."
When I say I believe in the Bible's infallibility of purpose rather than strict inerrancy, I mean that Scripture unfailingly accomplishes what God intends it to accomplish (which I think is to primarily to reveal God's character, His redemptive plan, and the person and work of Jesus Christ). This doesn't require every historical detail, genealogy, or numerical account to be precisely accurate in the way we might expect from a modern historical document.
I like to think of it this way: if I tell you a parable to teach a profound truth about love or forgiveness, the power and truth of that lesson doesn't depend on whether the characters in the story were real people or whether every detail happened exactly as described. The truth being communicated transcends those particulars. Does that make sense?
Regarding the New Testament specifically, there are several factors that give me confidence in its reliability about Jesus, even while acknowledging potential minor inconsistencies elsewhere in Scripture:
1. Proximity to events: The NT documents were written much closer to the events they describe, often by eyewitnesses or those who knew eyewitnesses.
2. Multiple independent sources: We have multiple accounts of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection from different authors with different perspectives, yet they consistently affirm the core truths about who Jesus is and what He accomplished.
3. The transformative consistency: The early Christian community's dramatic transformation and willingness to suffer for their testimony suggests they encountered something genuinely extraordinary.
4. Theological coherence: The NT's portrait of Jesus and the gospel message demonstrates a profound internal consistency that points to divine inspiration, even if some peripheral details might reflect the human limitations of the authors.
Your reference to 1 Corinthians 13:12 is improtant…"Paul himself acknowledges our limited perspective this side of eternity. This suggests that expecting perfect clarity and precision in every detail might not be how God intended Scripture to function.
Rather than seeing this as undermining biblical authority, I see it as God working through human authors in their historical contexts to communicate the essential truths we need for faith and life. The Bible's purpose isn't to be a modern history textbook or scientific manual, but to be God's revelation of Himself and His redemptive work…and in that purpose, it is completely trustworthy.
What do your thoughts on this distinction?
I'm curious about your perspective on how we balance Scripture's divine inspiration with its human authorship.
And I’m happy to chat via messenger or something if you’d rather! But I thought this might be helpful for others to see too. Again, such a WONDERFUL question!
Hey I am working on an article titled, The Initial Juxtapositions: Understanding Progressive Nuance, where I touch upon these concerns. I hope to share it with you when I am done writing it. Would you be interested in commentating upon it?
Brilliant divinely inspired Monster vs ——-> MESSIAH! I too have been pondering, discerning, and reflecting on these essentially exact same concepts leading to this revelation as recently shared by The Holy Spirit. Your post/article is literally Jesus’s Holy Spirit directly working in and through you during Pentecost week to definitively confirm this absolute truth and facts for me and eventually many/all other children of God, so we can work together including this as an essential part of The Great Commission’s Good News.
Jesus = agape LOVE, and everything in the Bible can and should be viewed and interpreted and discerned through the lens, role modeling, teachings, and message of our Lord, Savior, and Sacrificial Servant Jesus Christ. Without a doubt, God beyond coincidence nudged me to recently start following you on FB and literally just today download and subscribe to your Becoming Mainline Substack so can read this revolutionary article, way, truth, life, and light of Christ at this Godincidence time.
"That quote cracked something open inside me." Me too -- thank you, Brian Zahnd! I love how you lay out the choices here, Beau. Option 3 has changed my life... my view of God, people, myself. After years of constriction, I can feel the increasing spaciousness in my soul... does that make sense? The ongoing process, of learning how to apply the Jesus hermeneutic, has been like jumping off a cliff -- and receiving a warm hug -- all at once. I just finished the book "A More Christlike Word" by Brad Jersak, and it was very helpful.
I love that book too!! It’s a great one. Thanks for sharing your journey. That makes perfect sense. I love the way you put it…”spaciousness in my soul” YES! 🫶
https://substack.com/@orangedogdiary?r=av56d&utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page
“Jesus is the destination. Jesus is the interpretive key. He's the light that shines backward through the whole story.” - Love this. Thanks
Thanks for reading! Blessings to you.
https://orangedogdiary.substack.com
[EDIT: Forgot "Hebrews" was in the NT, changed "two OT quotes" to "an OT quote"]
It's ironic that you use an OT quote to refute "God changed" but then run with "the OT sometimes got it wrong." Not that I claim to speak with any certainty about it, but my conversations with Jesus lead me to believe a bit of both (2 & 3.)
I'm not sure "unchanging" even makes sense conceptually. It's one of those qualities, like omnipotence or omniscience, that kind of fizzles out into absurdity when taken to its literal conclusion. God is unchanging...but can also speak and move and do things? You have to twist both the meaning of "unchanging" and the intentions of individual Bible authors to get it to make any sense. The truth shines through more clear when you don't try and fit it in that box.
I mean, I'm pretty open to thinking God was loving the whole time, but one can be unwavering in love without being unchanging. But I do kind of believe incarnation may have changed God enough to lead to the radical differences we see between OT and NT. The notion that God incarnated _intending_ to do a bit of final wrathful judgement only to have a change of heart once he walked in our shoes particularly seems to track with a lot of the differences even within the NT. This is best exemplified in Jesus saying (paraphrasing) "you should cut off the bad arm before it drags you into hell" before getting dragged into hell to save the bad arm.
Finally, you're discussing the NT's "infallibility of purpose" in other comments, but I think there's actually as much of a contrast between early-NT and late-NT as there is between early-NT and OT. The Deutero-Pauline epistles and Revelation read like they're trying to claw back the radicalness of Christ's message and re-establish a more judgmental God. I think they're all human stories about encountering the divine, at least as fallible as the truest human stories. And I think it's important to recognize this, because a lot of The Story gets told between the lines, in the changing and contrasting views from each book's author.
I hear you Beau. For me, suggesting the OT 'sometimes got it wrong' is incorrect, and I think that perspective might be / no, is risky. I think they were inspired to write the text, and as you say the lack of some details or the areas and accounts of conflicting detail (OT & NT) or the grayness in which it was penned just leads us to Him and calls upon us to wrestle with it, dig in, ask, pray, and even just sit with it (full stop). I'm called to let the Holy Spirit help me to make sense of it over time, but not to try and make it all 'humanese'. For me that's what faith looks like. Not understanding or reconciling it all, but still believing it all as truth. Beau!! Keep on digging....love your writings and wisdom and I can just see that onion being peeled!!
Gonna probably need more than a ‘comment’ 😉 but I’ll just go with …if you believe the writers got some of the OT wrong, what would convince you that the whole of the NT is entirely right? 1 Corinthians 13:12
This is SUCH a great question that gets to the heart of how we understand Scripture's authority and reliability. Let me share how I approach this distinction between inerrancy and what I'd call "infallibility of purpose."
When I say I believe in the Bible's infallibility of purpose rather than strict inerrancy, I mean that Scripture unfailingly accomplishes what God intends it to accomplish (which I think is to primarily to reveal God's character, His redemptive plan, and the person and work of Jesus Christ). This doesn't require every historical detail, genealogy, or numerical account to be precisely accurate in the way we might expect from a modern historical document.
I like to think of it this way: if I tell you a parable to teach a profound truth about love or forgiveness, the power and truth of that lesson doesn't depend on whether the characters in the story were real people or whether every detail happened exactly as described. The truth being communicated transcends those particulars. Does that make sense?
Regarding the New Testament specifically, there are several factors that give me confidence in its reliability about Jesus, even while acknowledging potential minor inconsistencies elsewhere in Scripture:
1. Proximity to events: The NT documents were written much closer to the events they describe, often by eyewitnesses or those who knew eyewitnesses.
2. Multiple independent sources: We have multiple accounts of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection from different authors with different perspectives, yet they consistently affirm the core truths about who Jesus is and what He accomplished.
3. The transformative consistency: The early Christian community's dramatic transformation and willingness to suffer for their testimony suggests they encountered something genuinely extraordinary.
4. Theological coherence: The NT's portrait of Jesus and the gospel message demonstrates a profound internal consistency that points to divine inspiration, even if some peripheral details might reflect the human limitations of the authors.
Your reference to 1 Corinthians 13:12 is improtant…"Paul himself acknowledges our limited perspective this side of eternity. This suggests that expecting perfect clarity and precision in every detail might not be how God intended Scripture to function.
Rather than seeing this as undermining biblical authority, I see it as God working through human authors in their historical contexts to communicate the essential truths we need for faith and life. The Bible's purpose isn't to be a modern history textbook or scientific manual, but to be God's revelation of Himself and His redemptive work…and in that purpose, it is completely trustworthy.
What do your thoughts on this distinction?
I'm curious about your perspective on how we balance Scripture's divine inspiration with its human authorship.
And I’m happy to chat via messenger or something if you’d rather! But I thought this might be helpful for others to see too. Again, such a WONDERFUL question!
Hey I am working on an article titled, The Initial Juxtapositions: Understanding Progressive Nuance, where I touch upon these concerns. I hope to share it with you when I am done writing it. Would you be interested in commentating upon it?
Brilliant divinely inspired Monster vs ——-> MESSIAH! I too have been pondering, discerning, and reflecting on these essentially exact same concepts leading to this revelation as recently shared by The Holy Spirit. Your post/article is literally Jesus’s Holy Spirit directly working in and through you during Pentecost week to definitively confirm this absolute truth and facts for me and eventually many/all other children of God, so we can work together including this as an essential part of The Great Commission’s Good News.
Jesus = agape LOVE, and everything in the Bible can and should be viewed and interpreted and discerned through the lens, role modeling, teachings, and message of our Lord, Savior, and Sacrificial Servant Jesus Christ. Without a doubt, God beyond coincidence nudged me to recently start following you on FB and literally just today download and subscribe to your Becoming Mainline Substack so can read this revolutionary article, way, truth, life, and light of Christ at this Godincidence time.
Thank you SO much and keep it up!