Theology of Regret

*This post first began about six months ago, and has been resurrected in light of new clarity.

Regret can be crippling – for the present and for the future. By that I mean, the fear of future regret (that you will make a choice you will later wish you hadn’t) and present regret (that you have previously made a choice that you wish you hadn’t) both have the potential to stunt the decision making process and render current living clogged. Which is worse anyway: fearing the the wrong decision will be made or constant longing to change past decisions?

One day, in kindergarden, I came to school dressed as a Native American Indian - headdress … vest … the works. In a spurt of adventurous passion, the type that usually only comes when you’re a kid, I swung furiously at my crayon box with my tomahawk slicing it clean in two pieces like a block of wood. I immediately regretted that decision. And timeout. 

In the seventh grade I lied about cheating on a geography test. My friends and I didn’t get caught because my teacher trusted me. I deeply regret what I did. I wish I would have understood the value of honesty and character.

Sometimes I would lie awake in my in bed for hours at night and think about decisions I made – haunted by what I had done (or not done) and paralyzed by the reality of the permanence of time.These days are marked by major decisions – for myself and my friends. I guess we’re getting to that age deciding what we’re doing with our lives. I lie awake in my bed these days too because I’m afraid I’ll do the wrong thing and wish for the rest of my life that I had done it differently. **

Like I mentioned above, this post began about 6 months ago, right after my life had undergone some major changes – marriage, new home, new people, new school. Everything comfortable and familiar was essentially changed. I still don’t sleep that much…but for different reasons as of late.

So how do we think about feelings like these? What role does regret play as we try to understand God and ourselves better? There are a few guys in Scripture who I think dealt with these question as well. I’m gonna take a shot in the dark and assume that Judas Iscariot might have lived (however briefly or minutely) in a little regret. But seeing as how he hung himself and after falling from the gallows, his guts burst out over the ground, his story isn’t exactly our locus classicus. Peter might have dealt with regret with more maturity – first denying Christ, then becoming a key component in preaching the gospel to the Jews (though he did have an ever-so-ambiguous falling out in Gal. 2). But really, both of these examples fail to characterized the type of regret that grows out of fear of failure – which I think is the kind in question. That doesn’t matter though as it seems my methodology is flawed too – reading my situation back into the text. So how do we proceed?

Rather than using the text to diagnose a condition and find a prescription, like the Bible is the spiritual WebMD, my first instinct should be to seek to conform my life to the patterns and rhythms of the text, and thus to God himself – as Paul says, not the wisdom of the world, but to God’s wisdom: the gospel. Through identification with God through Christ, the Holy Spirit can illumine all the ways that the patterns of my life are fundamentally out of sync with the way of the cross. The Holy Spirit through Holy Scriptures shows that Israel’s restlessness in the wilderness and their reluctance to enter  the Promised Land kept some of them from God’s rest, which serves as a pattern for the type of eschatological rest that God yet desires for his church today and in the same way a pattern for my life as I am restless and reluctant to trust God in daily life, as I fear, and as I regret. 

By God’s grace, the joy that results from a contented heart is, slowly, creeping into a soul, which at its core has for many years been driven by performance and success.  And a life motived by these factors, I found, sows restlessness and doubt. But a life that is daily submitted before the God who faithfully leads and cares for his children, indeed who faithfully led his people into the promised land, whose love for an unfaithful people led his Son faithfully to the cross, and whose power defeated death and rose him from the dead and sat him at his right hand, is a one that lives with no fear of regret.

Over the course of the past 6 months, God has showed me how utterly helpless and needy I am of him. I live in a world (theological academia) that (sadly) demands a steep fee (not just money) for the product that its students seek, and I struggle to pay. But God leads and delivers me daily into his rest, into the sweet satisfaction of contentment and trust. 

Grace and Peace, 

Seth

Text and Meaning

*This post is actually about 6 months old and has been existing only as a draft since that time. Hopefully its publishing represents and end to the writing drought which has characterized my life recently. 

For some, post-liberals like Lindbeck, the story (the text of the bible) cannot mean on its own – it only becomes meaningful when it is embodied in the practices of those who are reading it. The meaning of the text is then collapsed into the interpretive community. For the Pentateuch, Brueggemann  applies this line of reasoning by claiming that what we have is Israel’s testimony to YHWH – “who God turns out to be in Israel depends on the Israelites or, derivatively, the utterance of the text” (from his Theology of the Old Testament). So the God who is YHWH is ultimately dependent on the case made by the witnesses. In this case, YHWH is not just an idea floating around, YHWH is the concrete practice embodied by Israel. Brueggemann’s point is that we cannot “get behind” the text to see if God is really the way he is outside of the text, which is partly true. But the problem, which is one of a poor theology of scripture, is that this view assumes that the text is only a human testimony and fails to see that God is not just described in the text, he is also the primary communicative agent. God’s speech and action generates Israel’s actions, not the other way around. God speaks and acts, thus we have the text and doctrine, only then do our practices make sense of the text.

As of late, I hear wisps of conversations in postmo, twenty-something, Christian circles which vaguely resemble the thought that meaning only comes from practice and theology is really only a product of the community. I’m afraid that some students of theology come away from their education without a solid theology of the nature of Scripture (among other things) and are prone to buying into the latest trendy movement.

I hope that we don’t forget that God speaks and acts first. I pray that we postmo, twenty-somethings are bold enough to see trendy theological movements with a critical (but no cynical) eye.

Grace and Peace,

Seth

The Reliability of the New Testament: Despair or Hope?

Recently, I attended the Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary – the topic was “The Textual Reliability of the New Testament: A dialogue between Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace”. 

The seminar was stimulating, to say the least, for me, but rightfully so – seeing as how the topic is directly pertinent to what I do with my life. I think it is fair to say, though, that the issue being addressed is pertinent to all who claim to believe in the inspiration of Scripture (whatever that might mean for you). The question, “Can we trust the Bible?” is a serious one. What hangs in the balance for Christians is not just an ancient document like Plato’s Republic or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which found to be changed would not really affect the livelihood of anyone to any great degree, but the explicit revelation of God to his people, which really does have the potential to shape lives.

The problem with text criticism in the church (the disciplined concerned with studying the available manuscript evidence for a written work, when the original is no longer in existence, in order to discern the original wording) is that most Christians are completely ignorant of the discipline (they assume the KJV Bible that they read is exactly what Paul wrote) or they have been mislead by a popular level book (like Misquoting Jesus). For the most part, this is the church’s fault for leaving the lay community in the dark about text critical issues. After all, text criticism is not a new discipline. The scholarly community has been engaging in text criticism for quite some time (really since Erasmus and even earlier) and the major text critical issues (which are exaggerated in recent pop level books) have been dealt with for at least 50 years and have had no effect on orthodoxy. 

Where the church could have (and should have) been proactive in informing the Christian community (and those on the fringe) about text criticism, a small percentage of scholars have capitalized (and I do mean financially) on this issue by playing off society’s fascination with what I like to call “the scandalous Jesus”. Now the church is on the defensive – reacting to a brush fire which is increasingly fueled by sensationalism. Leading the “scandalous Jesus” craze is NT scholar Bart Ehrman, author of the NYT best seller, Misquoting Jesus.

Bart Ehrman “discussed” the reliability of the New Testament with evangelical NT scholar Daniel Wallace a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary (and one of the leading scholars and text criticism and Greek – he wrote his 400+ page dissertation on the Greek word “the” – yowza). Much could be mentioned about the debate, but I will keep this as brief as possible.

To my surprise, at the end of the day Ehrman and Wallace agreed on a lot. Here is what they agreed on: There exist over 5,000 extant manuscripts written in Greek which date from as early as the second century (around 50 years after Revelation was written). There are around 138,000 words in the Greek NT we have today. For every word in the New Testament, there are at least two variants (not uniform in wording) which comes out to about 400,000 variants. This means there are more differences than words in the NT. No two manuscripts are identical. The scribes who copied these manuscripts obviously made mistakes – sometimes unintentionally, sometimes intentionally. Many pop-level books basically leave this information here to dangle in front of the unsuspecting reader, but this is not the end of the story. And people like Ehrman know it. In short 99% percent of the differences are either unintentional mistakes in spelling and other nonsense errors or intentional, theological “glossing” that is easily identified, which means that the large majority of the variants in no way affect the meaning of the text. Of the 1% considered “meaningful and viable”, none directly affect or change doctrine. This means that both Ehrman and Wallace essentially agree that the transmission of the NT from the earliest manuscripts to the latest was for the most part careful and faithful. More importantly, this means that they both agree that we can essentially get back to the original wording of the earliest manuscripts.

Where do they disagree? The only ammunition Ehrman had was the ambiguity surrounding the transmission of the text from the original (1st century) to our earliest copies (2nd century). He constantly repeated, “all we have are copies of copies of copies…” His basic assertion was that we simply have no way of knowing what happened to copies in that first century. His position is one of despair. For Ehrman, because we cannot know what happened, it follows that there was utter corruption of the text within that first century. Therefore, we cannot trust the wording of the 2nd century manuscripts. Therefore, Jesus is probably not who the NT portrays him to be.

Is our only option despair? Absolutely not. Astute readers will recognize that just because we don’t know for certain what happened in those first fifty years, it does not follow that the text must have been corrupted. In fact, we have many reasons to believe that there was faithful transmission in the first century. There is much to support this view, but I will only mention a few things. For one, the transmission of the text was rather faithful from the 2nd to the 3rd century, so why not from the 1st to the 2nd? This would be especially true considering the testimony of the eyewitnesses still alive in the first century. Also, we must remember that texts were not copied like the telephone game. The text was carefully copied by trained workers by hand and even more, they had earlier copies by which to check their work. In the telephone game, this would be equivalent to the last player checking with the 3rd, 2nd or even 1st player in line for wording. The last wording would be must more faithful to the original!

Much more could be said about the debate and about the issue of text criticism, but this post is already quite lengthy. I hope more than anything that it was encouraging to you. Remember, we are people who start with faith and seek understanding. Hope overshadows despair. 

Seth  

induction

today, i joined the club. seems like a useful way to waste my time.