About the time I decided that I personally wanted to become a follower of Jesus I embraced the latter two labels 'evangelical' and 'charismatic'. At that time I understood the former to mean that being a 'Christian' or 'saved' was something you could experientially know to be true. The latter being that the Holy Spirit today gives spiritual gifts to followers of Jesus, including the gifts of healing, prophecy, visions, other langauges etc. The term 'evangelical' also included an emphasis on the Bible contrasted with an emphasis on the church. At that time 'charismatics' were generally a subset of 'evangelicals' and most 'evangelicals' in the UK were in some way open to the Holy Spirit.
We lived in the US for a couple of years and were shocked to find charismatics and evangelicals on opposite sides. Most of the evangelicals we met were dispensationalists who appeared to believe the gifts from the Holy Spirit died out in the 'Apostolic era'. They appeared to elevate the Bible to being the sole way that God communicates with us. I felt they almost worshiped a different Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Bible.
In my spiritual walk recently I have come to think more about the Bible and have been thinking about how we see it on two levels: firstly as a historical document and secondly as the written word of God. And it's deliberate that I didn't write the 'written Word of God' as some evangelicals would. The Bible itself refers to Jesus as the Word and not itself! I read in another blog 'The Bible: contains God's word and is how I hear what God wants to tell me' That statement worried me as it implied this was the only way God communicates with people.
A few years back I was sitting in a restaurant on the bank of the Nile in Egypt chatting over a meal with a friend of mine about the possibility of making a series of TV programmes about the parables of Jesus. One of the parables that we discussed was the parable of the wedding feast found in Matthew 22:2-14
This parable is about a king who sends out invitations to a bunch of people to come to the wedding feast of his son. All those who are invited find different reasons why not to come. So the king sends his servants out into the streets to fill up his wedding banquet with everyone they can find.
The parable is normally interpreted as being that the Jews were the people originally invited to the wedding feast but turned away and that the people now invited are the Gentiles [ie non-Jews] who become followers of Jesus. But the parable doesn't end where I finished it above. When everyone is in the feast the king comes through the banqueting hall and finds one person in unacceptable clothes and kicks him out. I always thought this totally unfair, I mean here was someone dragged off the streets and now being complained at for not wearing decent clothes! People then interpret the parable with questions like: How should we dress for Christ's wedding?
Now that brings me on to how we see the Bible as a historical document. The original writers wrote within a context or as I like to put it 'they saw life through a grid'. We as readers of the Bible read within a different context or 'we see life through a grid but a very different grid'. In the example of this parable we don't know one vital part of Middle Eastern custom - something I learnt at that meal on the banks of the Nile - that when an important person throws a wedding banquet they provide new 'wedding clothes' for all the guests to change into when they come into the banquet. So the person thrown out had decided not to accept the gift of clothes from the king! Quite a different slant on the story.
From that one example I often wonder how much of the Bible we miss. I also think how we need to be careful about the principles we draw out from the Bible and how trying to find really strict detail is pretty well impossible.
The Bible is a record of God's dealing with mankind. In that record it shows God speaking and interacting with men and women through the ages. The process of writing changed it from spoken word to written word. In a conversation there is space to ask questions for clarification, space to interact. Interaction with a written document is a one way process.
So coming back to the time I decided to follow Jesus:
'At that time I understood the former to mean that being a 'Christian' or 'saved' was something you could experientially know to be true. The latter being that the Holy Spirit today gives spiritual gifts to followers of Jesus, including the gifts of healing, prophecy, visions, other langauges etc.'You can see that what I was doing was deciding to follow someone who is very much alive and who very much wants to communicate and interact with me. Not a legalistic set of rules but a relationship.
That has now become my starting point - not to interpret Jesus through the Bible but to interpret the Bible through my relationship with Jesus. OK, so what if I hear wrong? Well, I still treat the Bible as the 'ultimate authority in matters of faith and practice' which probably still makes me an evangelical but the concept of sola scriptura is something that I would now see as relegating God to being subservient to the Bible. God is alive and well and wants to communicate with us and not that 'that Scripture is the only inerrant rule for deciding issues of faith and morals'.
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