EngineeredTheology

Introduction
The book begins by pointing out that we tend to pick and choose what we take away from the bible. There are many who say they follow the bible, but what of things like sabbath, foot washing, surrendering of possessions (all of which are advocated in the NT but seldom practiced). Most don’t want to admit that they use the “pick and choose” method, and are fully convinced they fully follow the bible. There are difficult passages in the bible which have become commonplace to us (and no longer revolutionary), these are the Blue Parakeet passages (there is a story with an explanation for the name).

Two major methods of interpreting the bible are discussed; Read and Retrieve (taking each passage and retrieving the essence to work out today), and Reading through Tradition (reading each passage how they have been traditionally read through Christian history). The best proposed method is to Read with Tradition (retrieve the essence of each passage, but to give respect to tradition). This allows the interpretation to differ from the historical, but protects against the hyperinnovation.

Part 1 – Story
There are standard shortcuts that we often take in reading the bible, to more easily contain what we are reading.
1) Morsels of Law – the bible is a collection of laws, telling us what we should and should not do
2) Morsels of blessings and promises – reading the bible to extract the various blessings (think of daily bred). Ironically no one makes a compilation of morsels of curses
3) Mirrors and inkblots – people reflect onto the bible their own beliefs (if you are a republican, you would see Jesus as a republican)
4) Puzzling together pieces – the bible is a puzzle, and a systematic theology just needs to be developed to understand it.
5) Maestros – The people in the bible are our models to emulate (think “What would Jesus do”)

The bible should be read like a story. It is a wiki-story that continually developed as the authors developed their version of God’s overall story. This larger story is the development from
Oneness -> Otherness -> Otherness expands -> One in Christ -> Perfectly One. We were designed for oneness, and the bible is the story of how our otherness will soon become perfectly one. As we see this story, we must not jump from Genesis to the N.T. as we will miss out on discovering how God will bring about oneness – through covenant community.

Part 2 – Listening
McNight stresses the importance of separating the Bible from God.

God gave us this papered Bible to lead us to love his person. But the person and the paper are not the same. (87)

We should not be asking what the bible says, but what God says to us in the Bible. Having the correct doctrinal theology is of no use if we do not practice what it says. A correct relationship with the bible involves listening to what God says to us through it, and acting on that voice.

Part 3 – Discerning
Listing the 10 commandments, McKnight acknowledges that Christians have universally dismissed these. We pick and choose which commands from the bible we follow (even with Jesus and the N.T.). With the examples of divorce and remarriage, circumcision, the style of Christian women, earth-centred cosmology, death penalty, tongues, and all things to all, McKnight offers advice of how the bible should be interpreted. In general, this interpretation leads to no specific rules, but understanding the motives behind them and correcting the relational problem that causes them.

Part 4 – Women in Church Ministries Today
I will not review this section in depth because I found it very week (and will discuss in the review)

McKnight uses the examples of Miriam, Deborah and Huldah in the O.T. to demonstrate the authority women had in the bible. From the women in the N.T. he chooses Mary, Junia, Priscilla, and Phoebe to show roles women did perform to argue they still should have these same roles.

I hear often the informal critiques of the emergent church movement as dangerous because of relativistic thinking. Usually it plays out as “they don’t believe the bible is true” or “they don’t believe Jesus is the only way” or “they don’t believe in X” – substituting X for whatever astounding point is that makes the critique more sensational. I suspect the real frustration with relativism (and I’ve hard this used against Rob Bell) is that many in the emergent church find ways to not give straightforward answers to yes or no questions. It is not due to an attempt to be evasive or dishonest, but some questions cannot be so simply answered.

To begin the explanation, we must start with the idea of a worldview. As we grow up, we learn facts. If, as someone was growing up, they also told by their parents often that they are really smart. They learn to read before their friends, they head to school and their teacher comments how well they are doing. We would expect the child to take these facts and put them together in a logical fashion to build a worldview – I am smart. Once this is put together, every piece of evidence is measured against their worldview. If the child gets an A on a test, it agrees nicely with their worldview. If an F, they will need to explain that in terms of their worldview (I am smart, but I must have been tired, or the teacher was bad, or the test was unfair). As time goes on, the worldview can change. If a student begins to do more an more poorly on tests, these facts begin to get more difficult to explain; the worldview must be modified to accommodate this new information. So, the worldview is deconstructed, and a new worldview is built with the new pieces of data – I am average.

Raw data has no meaning of its self. It must be filtered and assembled together with other data to create meaning. Raw data is always objective “I was driving 60 MPH”, “John 1:1 is X in the NIV” and comes from standard measurements. Meaning is always subjective “I was driving too fast”. Making sense of data (providing meaning) is the process of taking a new piece of data, comparing it with the other data we have assembled (worldview) and assembling it together in a logical way to create meaning.

It is because of this that statements such as “I read the bible for what it says (objectively)” is nonsensical. It would imply that if they were asked what the bible says about a topic (say abortion) they would pick a verse out at random and allow the hearer to make their subjective analysis. Any organisation automatically puts meaning behind the text, which means their own personal worldview has been read into it, and therefore must be subjective. This is where my standard (and understandably annoying) response to “but the bible says X” comes from (e.g “the bible says a lot of things”). What scares many people is that if we cannot ever definitively say the bible says X about something, it then implies the bible says nothing.

The way out of the dilemma is to understand the reason why I can not say “the bible says X”. The reason is because my worldview is built on a very small sample size of all the data. I respect people who have different worldviews because they have different pieces of data to work with than I do. It is no longer an argument between “right” and “wrong”, but a give and take to understand why someone would put the puzzle together in a certain way. Hopefully by understanding them, I can strengthen my worldview to more fully encapsulate more data, and take one step closer to truth. Truth, much like perfection, is a target – never a destination.

Truth does exist, but I am not so arrogant to believe that I have it pinned down.