The Blue Parakeet

my question as a college student was this one: “How did we know Paul’s words were really only describing a symptom of a person of good deeds instead of a literal requirement?” Some suggested to me to quit asking such pesky questions and just follow along,

Why do some issues become so incredibly politicized—like same-sex relations—and others—like greed and materialism and military violence and torture—are nearly ignored?

More often than not, it is a person who enters into our world that shakes up our thinking and gets us asking this question. Perhaps we encounter someone who speaks in tongues or someone who thinks they can heal others or a friend’s daughter who is a lesbian and a Christian. It’s one thing to say we think homosexuality is sin, which is the uniform church tradition and the best explanation of the Bible in its context, but it’s a completely different pastoral reality when we know a gay or a lesbian and that someone happens to ask us why we believe in Leviticus 20:13a but not in 20:13b—the first prohibits homosexuality, and the second insists on capital punishment for it.

if we are asked why we think the instruction from nature in Romans 1 about homosexuality is permanent and applicable today, but the one in 1 Corinthians 11 is evidently disposable.

Here’s what Paul says about “nature” in Romans 1:26: “Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.” But those same persons don’t think Paul’s instructions about nature in 1 Corinthians 11:14–15 are permanent: “Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory?” (emphasis added in both passages). So a lesbian asks why some embrace the appeal to “nature” in Romans 1 while their wives have short hair and their sons have hair pulled back into a ponytail. What then does “natural” mean? Why do we think it’s permanent in one case and temporary in another?

What about the words of the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 9:19–23, where Paul says his strategy is one of constant adaptation? Paul’s strategy was to be Jewish with Jews and to be like a gentile with gentiles. If Paul was already adapting first-century Jewish ideas to first-century gentile situations, can we expect to do anything else? Can we imagine Paul wanting to back up in time to Moses’s day? To quote Paul, “By no means!”

We aren’t called to live first-century lives in the twenty-first century, but twenty-first-century lives as we walk in the light of the revelation God gave to us in the first century.

if we read the Bible properly, we will see that God never asked one generation to step back in time and live the way it had done before. No, God spoke in each generation in that generation’s ways.

The Reformation’s best and most dangerous, revolutionary idea was putting the Bible in the hands of ordinary Christians.

We may learn to read the Bible for ourselves, but we must be responsible to what the church has always believed. We can reduce the Great Tradition to the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, and the importance of justification by faith from the Reformation. These creeds point us toward the nonnegotiables of the faith; they point us to what God has led the church to see as its most important doctrines.

We need to have profound respect for our past without giving it the final authority.

We show serious respect for our past when we learn our church history, when we learn how major leaders read the Bible in the past, and when we bring their voices to the table as we learn how to read the Bible for our time.

In 1551 a certain Stephanus divided the New Testament into numbered verses. We are thankful (with some groans). Thankful, because now it is much easier to refer to a specific part of the Bible. It is easier to say “John 1:14” than to say, “That line in the Bible where it says, ‘The Word became flesh.’

God did not give the Bible in order that we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it. The

God’s idea of redemption is community-shaped.

The story of the Bible has one book devoted to husbands and wives, the Song of Songs, and before one ever reads Ephesians 5 or 1 Peter 3, one should dip deeply into the Song’s intimate secrets. The framing of a husband and wife relationship in terms of love—the kind of delightful, playful love found in Song of Songs—completely changes things.

How many of us know our doctrine about the Bible but don’t do what the God of the Bible says? To paraphrase our Lord’s brother, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if people claim to have [the right view of the Bible] but do not practice what it says?” (James 2:14, retooled).

Our relationship to the God of the Bible is to listen to God so we can love him more deeply and love others more completely. If God’s ultimate design for us is to love God and to love others, we can acquire that love only by learning to listen to God.

When we read the Bible as Story and develop a relationship with the God of the Bible, • we learn to listen to and for God in the Bible as we read it; • we are attentive enough to recognize God’s voice and let it in; • we absorb what God says so that it floods our inner being; and • we act on what we have heard from God.

Unfortunately, too many of us spend too much time arguing about the meaning of “inspiration” and not enough on the point of it all. The Spirit who guided the author through a history and a community to the moment when he put quill to papyrus is the same Spirit at work when you and I sit down with our Bibles.

If you are doing good works, you are reading the Bible aright. If you are not doing good works, you are not reading the Bible aright. If you are in the first group, keep it up; if you are in the second group, make some changes.

If you think these are easy questions to answer, I would recommend getting your ear closer to the ground. The issue of “applying” the Bible is not that simple. We are learning that there’s a lot more discerning going on than we thought. It is all about adopting and adapting, and we need to get our leaders together to start thinking more about this.

Why talk about this? Because it is the claim that we follow Jesus alongside the obvious reality that we don’t follow Jesus completely that leads us to ponder how we are actually reading the Bible.

What needs to be realized is that this practice of not reciting the Lord’s Prayer whenever we gather together is contrary to what Jesus said (and what the church has historically done).

the apostle Paul encountered a new situation in which he had to discern how the teachings of Jesus could be lived out when a non-Christian spouse deserted a Christian spouse. Was divorce also permissible for this situation? In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul discerned it was permissible. Paul knew precisely what he was doing—adding to what Jesus had taught. In 7:12 he says: “To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord).” What did he discern? “But if the unbeliever leaves, let it be so. The brother or the sister is not bound in such circumstances; God has called us to live in peace” (7:15).

What the New Testament trajectory teaches us about divorce and remarriage is the need to remain firmly committed to marriage while permitting divorce in cases where the marital covenant has been destroyed. The pattern is to discern the underlying reason for the fractured relationship and then to judge if that reason is acceptable.

The early Christians were at a stalemate. To deal with their differences and discern how to live, they convened the first church conference in Jerusalem. What we find in Acts 15 is the pattern of discernment. The early Christians discerned that circumcision, the (don’t forget this) ageless command to Abraham, was not necessary for gentile converts. This was an innovation. James, brother of Jesus and now leader of the church in Jerusalem, came to the conclusion that gentile converts needed only to offer a minimal respect for those commandments that had always distinguished the Jews from the surrounding nations (15:16–21). Here we find a pattern of discernment, a pattern of listening to the old, understanding the present, and discerning how to live that old way in a new day. What we find in Acts 15 is a way of conservation (a “resident-alien” like understanding of gentiles) and innovation (no need for gentiles to be circumcised).

Paul’s opponents knew, or thought they knew with certainty, that Paul was disagreeing with God’s word! In terms of this book, Paul’s statement was a blue parakeet observation, and this whole book converges right here. How did Paul discern that circumcision didn’t really matter?

If this didn’t confuse some of Paul’s criticizers, what about this? “Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Keeping God’s commands is what counts” (1 Corinthians 7:19). His opponents would have said, “Isn’t circumcision one of those commandments?” For Paul, circumcision was clearly a commandment of God for all time, but paradoxically it was now no longer necessary for those who were “in Christ” because real circumcision was a matter of the heart. Which means circumcision is forever, but it morphs from a physical to a spiritual act. (You’re not alone if you think Moses would have muttered and shook his head when Paul said these things.)

the pattern of discernment varies from age to age and from church to church and from person to person within a church.

Paul’s adaptability to context has drawn attention. Gordon Fee, a New Testament scholar, speaks of Paul’s “apparently chameleonlike stance in matters of social relationships.”7 The apostle began a sermon to philosopher types by exploring the gospel in philosophical terms (Acts 17:16–34). When it came to traditional Jewish food laws, he evidently just turned his head (see 1 Corinthians 8; also, written later, Romans 14:2–3, 6). Why did Paul do this? Because of the gospel, because Paul knew the King and His Kingdom Story. If one wants to be completely faithful to Paul today, one would have to submit every act and every idea to the principle of what furthers the gospel the most.

the goal of God’s plan for all creation is the kingdom, the new heaven and the new earth. That kingdom, as already stated, is made of a king (Father, Son, Spirit) who redeems a community (Israel, church) so they can enjoy God’s gracious, peaceful, and just rule in God’s special place for them (land, New Jerusalem) as that redeemed people know God, worship God, love God, and do God’s good will through the gracious empowerment of the Spirit. In other words, the solution is the King and His Kingdom. The redemptive benefits of God’s work in King Jesus are all designed to usher cracked Eikons, sinners, into this new people of God and participate in knowing, worshiping, loving, and obeying God. The King and His Kingdom Story is the Bible’s one and only General Plot.

God’s act of atonement in Christ was designed to deal with the deep and incurable sinfulness of humanity which expresses itself in: 1. rebellion against God’s authority, 2. infidelity which issues in breakdown of the relationship, 3. disloyalty which has interrupted a friendship, 4. ingratitude which has imperiled love, 5. stain which has rendered humanity repulsive, 6. perversity which has landed us in exile, 7. offensiveness which has put us in debt, 8. lawlessness which has made us guilty, 9. and failure which leaves us far short of our destiny.

Atonement then is not just about erasing these sins but creating the true virtues on the far side of forgiveness: 1. Obedience 2. Faithfulness 3. Allegiance 4. Gratitude 5. Purity 6. Following Jesus into the Kingdom 7. Containment by the will of God 8. Law-abiding from the heart 9. Achieving our purpose

New creation is as much about the body of Christ, the church in the world, as it is about you and me experiencing personal conversion.

world. Read the Bible, and what you will discover is a whole lot of Israel and a whole lot of church. The Bible is about the people of God far more than individual persons and their redemption, though the latter is vital for the flourishing of the former. No personal redemption, no redeemed people of God; but no people of God, no place for the redeemed to flourish in God’s way.

we need to locate women in the King and His Kingdom Story. This is the big idea: In Christ, Paul says, there is not only no longer slave and free but neither is there “male and female.” Paul does not erase embodied distinctions, but in Christ and in the church, gender no longer matters. In the final kingdom of God, one’s gender will not be a mark of status or lack of status. All will be equal, yet radically unique. But if we focus too much on the redemptive benefits, we may well say, “Women like men are totally equal before God in that each can be saved. But there are roles assigned to men that women can’t do.” That contradicts what Paul says in Galatians 3:28 and clearly contradicts what women did in the early churches.

We must say something not often admitted by Bible-reading, God-loving Christians: He who writes the story controls the glory. What’s the point? The Bible was written by men, and the Bible tells stories from the angle of men. We admit this because we admit that God spoke in those days in those ways, and those days and those ways were male days and male ways.

The question we need to ask today is this, and this question strikes to the heart of how we read the Bible: Do we seek to retrieve that cultural world and those cultural expressions, or do we live the same gospel in a different way in a different day?

Chrysostom wrote, “God’s purpose in ordering marriage is peace. One takes the husband’s role, one takes the wife’s role, one in guiding, one in supporting. If both had the very same roles, there would be no peace.”12

it knows that reading the Bible through a long-established church tradition needs to be challenged. Why? Because tradition does not reflect the original innovation in the message about and practice of women in the Bible, most especially in the churches of the apostle Paul.

Jesus told us the Spirit would guide us. This book is an attempt to sketch how that guidance works itself out for many of us. Here are Jesus’s words, which I will quote before we look at the biblical exceptions that provide a map for our guidance: “But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come” (John 16:13).

Sadly, some think Genesis 3:16 is a prescription for the relationship of women and men for all time. Instead of a prescription, these two lines are a prediction of the fallen desire of fallen women and fallen men in a fallen condition in a fallen world. Fallen women yearn to dominate men, and fallen men yearn to dominate women.

So, when we come upon the two silencing passages, we need to learn to read them out of the story of the Bible. We need to remind ourselves of this: • Women in the Old Testament exercised leadership. • Women in the Old Testament spoke for God as prophets. • Women in the New Testament era were gifted by God’s Spirit for such things as teaching and leading. • New creation begins to undo the fall, which means that men and women are drawn back into being “one” in Christ.

One of my closest friends, a brilliant scholar of the New Testament, made this observation about the situation at our church in light of the context of Paul’s words: “Scot, some at your church don’t seem willing to ask if insisting on head coverings might do the opposite of what Paul was actually doing.” In other words, insisting on head coverings does as much (if not more) damage to the gospel today as not wearing head coverings did in the first century. How so? If we demand women do something so totally contrary to culture that non-Christians are offended or turned off, we should reconsider what we are doing. Paul didn’t want the dress of Christian women to bring a bad name to the gospel, so he asked them to wear head coverings; by contrast, demanding women to wear head coverings in our world may do the very same damage to the gospel. (In fact, I’m quite sure it would.)

“What this means for Christianity in traditional Asian or Muslim contexts is that too much too fast could endanger the church’s witness and credibility. But in much of the Western world, too little too slow could neutralize the church’s impact in society just as effectively.”

Here’s a question I hope you can toss around with your friends: Do you think Paul would have put women “behind the pulpit” if it would have been advantageous “for the sake of gospel”? I believe Paul would exhort us to open the cages and let the blue parakeets fly and let them sing.

Culturally shaped readings of the Bible and culturally shaped expressions of the gospel are exactly what Paul did and wanted and practiced: what occurred in Jerusalem was not what happened in Corinth, and what happened in Corinth was not what happened in Rome. That’s exactly what Peter and the author of Hebrews and John and James and the others were doing. Culturally shaped readings and expressions of the gospel are the way it has been, is, and always will be. In fact, I believe that gospel adaptation for every culture, for every church, and for every Christian is precisely why God gave us the Bible. The Bible shows us how.

“Professor Bruce, what do you think of women’s ordination?” “I don’t think the New Testament talks about ordination,” he replied. “What about the silencing passages of Paul on women?” I asked. “I think Paul would roll over in his grave if he knew we were turning his letters into torah.”