There has to be a dialectical response to ecumenicalism and dogmatism that balances the need to be faithful to the biblical text without condemning everyone who is not exactly like us.

Signposts had a post a few weeks back that asked whether it was fair to use Paul’s writings to make moral decisions today:

I am wondering if we are placing some unfair expectations on the bible. It seems to me that whenever the Church encounters a perceived moral or ethical issue it runs to the bible. Not a bad practice but one that maybe full of problems. I am wondering if we asking something of the bible that is unfair.
There is no doubt that books of the bible like Leviticus were written to construct laws of behaviour for society and laws for judaism. But, can we say the same thing about Paul’s letters or the gospels? What would Paul think of the attempts to solve an ethical issue in 2003, in parts of the world that he didnt even know existed, by dragging out parts of a letter that he wrote to a Church in say Corinth or Rome?

To answer the question directly, no, we can’t expect the Epistles or Gospels to provide a model for civil government, nor should we legislate morality in a pluralistic society. They were intended to guide the church, not the government. But I think it’s overwhelmingly obvious that we can and must use them to discern God’s will, including moral standards that may be unpopular.

I offer this not as a chance to bash Signposts, but as a case in point that we must take doctrine seriously. The homosexuality issue has surely shown us that much. For the Christians that have not been able to look at the Bible and agree that homosexuality is wrong according to God, there may be little hope of ever being able to discern God’s will again. We have to be faithful to Scripture.

It is hugely unpopular to criticize the doctrine of another church group these days. It comes off as dogmatic or judgmental. Barring circumstances where it would be counterproductive (e.g. getting in people’s faces), we need to do a much better job of calling each other to task.

Having said that, though, we can’t respond by being overly picky and dogmatic about every little thing. The Bible can be interpreted well, though not perfectly. I’m not saying that if we get our hermeneutic right, we’ll all be one big happy and doctrinally unified church. People will come to different conclusions about many things, and that’s fine. What’s not fine is when we say that it doesn’t matter how you interpret the Bible.

Take this example from the recent PBS special “Family Fundamentals: What happens when conservative Christian families have children who are homosexual?” The web site offers two theologians’ interpretations of the various texts dealing with homosexuality. The “pro” commentator offers this:

Paul was ambivalent about sex, certainly male-male and female-female sex, but also sex between husband and wife. Those finding a pro-family agenda in Paul must ignore his broader attitude about sex and marriage.

In other words, the issue is Paul’s attitude, and not God’s will. Read the site to see what I’m talking about. We have to take the text more seriously than that, or it’s useless except as a cool fantasy storybook.

But how do we do this without being jerks to everyone that disagrees with us? (the link is to an extremely well-designed fundy everyone-is-wrong-but-me site; via Jordon Cooper). How do we determine what we think the text says to us? First, I think there are good and bad hermeneutics, and we need to have more inter-denominational or cross-border discussions on what defines good hermeneutics. We will not come up with an ironclad set of rules that will lead us to identical conclusions, but we can at least agree to take the text seriously and search for assumptions - starting points - that we can agree on.

I know this will probably never happen between the Anglican church, the Orthodox church, the Catholic church, and the evangelical world. But within the evangelical world, we need to take responsibility for actually having a hermeneutic. If you’re a pastor or teacher in your church, make sure you teach your people hermeneutics.

The situation we find ourselves in, quite perplexingly and dangerously, is that we often believe things that we cannot really reconcile with Scripture. Take the example of women being allowed to do everything men can do in the church. I personally hold this standpoint, but I do it fully confident that I am interpreting all of the relevant texts fairly. I don’t think most people can do that - we just kind of gloss over it because we think it’s obviously not applicable to us today. That is bad hermeneutics, or rather, a lack of exegesis.