New Philadelphia News Across the Pastor’s Desk I have launched a new series entitled, “The Hard Texts of Scripture.” My purpose is to establish the Moravian method of interpreting the scripture in the light of Jesus Christ. It may help for you to know my personal confession regarding Scripture which I believe to be the Divinely Inspired record of God’s revelation of Himself on the plane of human history, a revelation which hits its apex in Jesus Christ. First, I believe that the Bible is infallible, in the sense that it will accomplish all that God purposes for it to do. In Isaiah 55:10-11 we read: 10 For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return not thither but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, 11 so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty,but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it Second, I believe that the Bible that we have is the Bible that God intends us to have. As we read in 1st Timothy 3:16-17: 16 All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness… Though the apostle wrote primarily about our Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible in Greek Translation) which was the scripture of the Church in the time when the New Testament was still being written, I happily apply this text to the New Testament, too. I say that, “the Bible we have is the Bible that God intends us to have,” knowing that we possess thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament books alone; and that there are more variations in the manuscripts than there are words in the whole New Testament! Not one of those variations affects the Orthodox faith as we know it; but the plethora of extra manuscripts and words has something to teach us: Inspiration is more vital than verbal. It is the ideas behind the words that count, much more than the words themselves. Because of that, it is perfectly okay to translate the scriptures from one language into another.
In the first few weeks of the series we have discovered that some texts of Scripture are both pre-Christ and sub-Christ, that is, some texts don’t measure up to the Word of God that was made flesh in Jesus Christ. We cannot imagine Jesus barring people with disabilities from service in the Christian ministry, as Moses once barred them from service at the altar. Likewise in Deuteronomy 23:22 Moses commands: No bastard shall enter the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth generation none of his descendants shall enter the assembly of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 23:2 RSV) Yet we cannot imagine Jesus rejecting a person for the circumstances of his or her birth. Nor can we imagine Jesus stoning someone taken in adultery as Moses clearly commanded. Thus we conclude: There are some texts of scripture that are pre-Christ, and some that are sub-Christ. Let me give a few more examples. In Acts 10, we learn that the dietary laws of the Old Testament no longer apply to us. In Ephesians 2 we learn that we are no longer bound by the laws of commandments and ordinances that Moses used to make Israel not just “odd,” but an “oddly powerful witness for God.” The cross makes us odd in a different way. As St. Paul says in 1st Corinthians 1:2224: 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Well then, does this mean that the Old Testament no longer has meaning for us as Christians? Absolutely not! The Hebrew Bible was the only Bible that the New Testament Church had. It simply means that, as Paul tells us in 2nd Corinthians 3, we must read our Old Testament with “unveiled face.” As he says, we are concerned not with the letter of it, but with the Spirit of it, because “the LORD is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” I have much more to say about how the hard texts of Scripture are measured against Jesus Christ. Come out and hear it! Pastor Green