In defending his downtrodden brethren, he is not afraid to speak the truth to anyone, and he annoys some powerful people, both inside and outside Christ’s church.  For protection against them all, he cries out to God.  He is doing God’s work, and he knows that this means that he is a fellow-laborer with God’s whole apparatus of righteousness: true history, doctrine, the saints of the past and the holy angels, the very forces of nature, and right on up to the direct intervention the Triune Creator.

We also find someone who does not speak in quite the way that we would, and this tempts us to simply dismiss him.  We have seen that a charitable reading gets us past those hurdles and shows us that St. Patrick has much to teach.  My charge to you is to practice this same charity with other believers, ancient and modern, and to emulate the virtues of this fragrant saint.  Make God’s priorities your own; subordinate your desires to His calling and accept the trials that come your way.  As with Patrick, some of those trials will be God’s judgment on your sins, and you must acknowledge the justice of God’s judgment and repent.  Other trials will be the result of the world hating you for the same reasons that it hated Jesus, and you should accept those trials in the same manner that Christ did.  As we align ourselves with God’s requirements in this way—that is, as we trust God in the way that Patrick did, we will be able to call upon God boldly for protection, and to say with the psalmist, “In God I have put my trust; what can man do to me?”

***

Read Patrick’s own writings at Irish Christian.

The Scriptures are quite clear that the wine served at the Lord’s Table is wine—alcoholic, possible-to-get-drunk-on, wine. The Scriptures are equally clear that Jesus instructed us to eat and drink at His Table. It is highly inappropriate for us as Christians to start messing with the menu. I mean, imagine the scene: we come to church and hear the call to worship. The ceiling opens, the walls grow thin, and we are carried into the Holy of Holies in the heavenly tabernacle to worship our God as priests of the New Covenant. We offer our praises; we hear a word from God, and then Jesus, the priest after the order of Melchizedek, invites us, children of Abraham by faith, to come eat bread and wine at His Table. Can you imagine, in that setting, quibbling with the Lord about what He serves, and trying to make a substitution on Jesus’ menu?

Yet this is exactly what we do when we insist on something other than bread and wine. The proper course of action here is obvious: submit to Christ and eat and drink what He serves.   Simple.

Unfortunately, we come from a culture where there are long-standing bad connotations attached to alcohol—so much so that drinking grape juice is assumed to be the default position. There couldn’t be anything wrong with that, people think, and anyone who wants to see wine in a communion cup has a long, hard uphill battle to justify their position—as biblical as it plainly is. However cloaked in explanations, it is idolatry to elevate our tradition above what God actually says in His Word. The only thing we can offer in defense of our well-meaning brethren is that most of them have never given it a second thought, and those that have are often mired in a few centuries’ worth of very bright folks muddying the waters–which is to say that the idolatry is rooted very deeply in American church culture.  We won’t get free of it overnight.

That said, there is always a tension between where we ought to be—perfect holiness—and where we actually are, and we have certainly not attained perfection either. As Christians, we are called to love one another and stir one another up to love and good deeds. As we seek to grow the Church to maturity, we must do it without losing anyone, and without provoking them to rebel against the truth. So we change incrementally. The fruit of the Spirit is patience.

In practice, this means that if insisting on wine in the communion cup will have the practical effect of dividing the Body, then we can’t do it. The Table both celebrates and sustains our unity; to divide the Body over the way we observe the Table is to partake in an unworthy manner – and this we must not do. If necessary, we will serve Welch’s with joy and thanksgiving, rightly discerning the corporate Body of Christ that eats and drinks at the table. We will look at the grape juice in our cup and pray, “Lord, this is wrong. It’s wicked. Please bless it; the alternatives are far worse. Please hasten the day when we can stop committing this sin without doing something worse in the process.” And confident in God’s mercy, we will eat our bread and drink our ersatz wine with gladness and simplicity of heart.

Of course, the brother whose convictions run toward Welch’s ought to be as willing to drink wine for our sake as we are to drink Welch’s for his; no one should be willing to breach the unity of the Table over what’s in the communion cup.  In our case, we will seek to serve both wine and Welch’s at communion, so that each person can choose as he will, and no one’s conscience need be troubled by what he drinks.  This is not a perfect solution, by anybody’s lights.  But perfection is reserved for glory, and in the meantime we trust in God’s mercy.

Wine means what God says it means. Lack of wine is either a form of fasting or a curse from God. God says wine is our labor blessed by His hand—which is to say it is the result of man having dominion over the earth, which is fulfilling his role as the image of God. It is God’s blessing. It is the gift with which Jesus blesses a wedding, the drink served by Wisdom, part of the Ascension offering lifted to God in the morning and evening sacrifices, the drink that Melchizedek the royal priest brings to Abraham and the drink that Christ serves to Abraham’s children by faith at His Table. Wine is rejoicing and fellowship.  Good lovemaking is better than wine—but not much else is.

As with any blessing, wine can be abused, and Scripture is filled with warnings about that; it is a wicked mind that turns God’s blessing into an occasion for sin. It’s an equally wicked, pinched, joyless mind that thinks rejecting God’s good gift is a holy thing to do. Both of these sins stem from a lack of gratitude.

My charge to you is to think of wine in this way, and to behave as Moses and Solomon instructed: Go and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has accepted your labor. Do this that you may learn to fear God and keep His commandments, because that is your whole duty.

Of course we defend the notion of hermeneutical science by repairing to some of the older definitions of the word science, chiefly the ones that boil down to “knowledge.”  And there’s nothing wrong with referring to hermeneutical knowledge.

But today, when you hear the word science, you think of experimental science, that endeavor begun by Christians as an investigation of God’s creation, but which has today morphed into a false god in its own right–and one which our society publicly worships.  In our eyes, science gave us rocket ships, birth control, the microwave oven, the vacuum cleaner, cheap produce from Chile, and Christmas vacations with Grandma, even though she lives on the other side of the country.   Religion, on the other hand, gave us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials and 9/11.  So we worship science, by which we mean both God-less humanistic empiricism and knowledge about the real, tangible world — as sharply opposed to the fantasy world of religion.

(In truth, science, even done by atheists, continues to survive on the borrowed capital of its Christian roots, but that’s another post.)

The point here is, science today is the name of an idol, and attaching the idol’s name to something gives it a veneer of respectability which is, of course, borrowed from the idol by association.  Hence Brand X Whitening Strips, scientifically proven to make your teeth gleam, Acme Weight Loss Pills, scientifically shown to reduce weight by an average of 10 pounds in 3 months, and so on.  Scientifically in this usage means really, actually, in the real world — again, as distinctly opposed to the fantasy world of religion.  Can you imagine someone advertising Brand X Whitening Strips as religiously proven to make your teeth gleam?   Endorsed by five pastors instead of five scientists?

In this climate, when an American evangelical talks about the science of hermeneutics, he is dressing biblical interpretation in the borrowed robes of godless empiricism in order to make it respectable to our God-hating society.  “No, really,” he whines,  “hermeneutics is an objective science.”  This is just begging for table scraps–and from the table of demons, at that.

There are two sets of problems here.  The first is that too many of us believe our own propaganda.  Many evangelicals today, especially of the more conservative sort, really do think that the study of the Bible is a purely empirical matter, and when they contend vociferously that hermeneutics is a science, they really do mean the word in an idolatrous way.  They mean that when you set up your textual sausage-grinder with the proper set of hermeneutical principles, you can shove a text into the top of the grinder, turn the crank, and the meaning comes out the side in a nice, neat casing–and the same meaning comes out the same way, no matter who turns the crank, as long as the principles are right.

Therefore, so the reasoning goes, a great exegete can be a towering saint, a liberal buffoon or a heresiarch; doesn’t make any difference.  If he’s a scholar and his hermeneutics are sound, then…

The problem here is that God did not write the Scriptures to be studied as a detached academic pursuit, but to be studied diligently in order to be believed and obeyed — every word, every letter, every last i-dot and serif.  To claim that an academic curiosity-seeker can subject the text to his idolatrous sausage-grinder and get the same meaning as an obedient saint is just silly.  If it happens, it is a miracle, and purely God’s kindness to the academic.

To read the Word of God is to encounter God Himself speaking, and this cannot be done in a neutral way.  The reader is always for God or against Him, and this orientation greatly influences the interpretive endeavor.  But that’s only the beginning.

The other bit is that a believer who has believed the propaganda is going to miss much of the Bible too.  The Bible is not a science experiment.  It is not a systematic theology text.  It cannot profitably be read like one.  The Bible is art, and God is the artist.  It is laden with associations, symbols, foreshadowing, jokes, double entendres, and connotations.  Words don’t mean just one thing; metaphors adorn nearly every sentence; symbols abound.  Literal meaning is present — richly present — but in the same way that it’s present in a good painting.  We have no extant photographs, but let us suppose (correctly, I should think) that the Mona Lisa looks like the model who sat for it.  It is a good likeness; the literal meaning is there.  If we look at the Mona Lisa and say, “a photograph would have been better” — that is the literalist’s eye, and it’s true as far as it goes.  Sort of.  It misses a great deal of richness and depth that is present in the painting, and would not be in the photograph.  The Bible is a painting, not a photograph.  It is literally true, just like a painting — and not like a photograph.

So to return to the matter of how we describe the interpretive endeavor: Hermeneutics is not so impoverished and so easy that we could call it a science.  I have a suggestion for a substitute term, one that takes into account that God is an artist and it takes an artist’s eye to read His word skillfully–but which also takes into account that there really are rules and systematic principles involved in interpretation.  Here it is: hermeutics is a discipline — an art and a craft.  The word craft suggests a craftsman, and we all recognize that craftsmanship matters, and varies from one craftsman to the next.  The principles may be timeless, but each person incarnates them a little differently, and those differences matter.

If this is the case, what would we expect to see?  We should expect that different interpreters interpret differently.  And as they grow in the image of Christ, their craft increases and their art expands–and they converge on one another, because they are growing closer to the same Triune God.

This, I submit, is what we actually see in the world.  Academics can be, and often are, bitter enemies–as are academically-oriented pastors (you know who you are, boys).  Men who walk with God find ways to be friends with one another.  The more they walk with God, the more they recognize one another as fellow godly men–even though they may differ deeply on academic theological matters.  Moreover, in matters of worship and practice, they converge on one another.  They may ‘do the theological math’ differently, but they increasingly come up with the same answers, however framed in the language of their respective traditions.

*****

I would love to hear some feedback on this.  Fire away — what do you think?  What have I missed?

• “What does bread mean to me?” – a question of individual emotional association, or
• “What does bread symbolize in the Bible?” – part of our question, an important part – but to ask the question this way is to stop with the academics, which is missing the whole point.

We live in a meaningful world.  Everything means something; everything is a message from a loving, majestic Triune God.  Only when we begin to ask what each thing means do we begin to understand the world and our place in it.  So what we’re asking is what bread means in the world itself.  When you see a loaf of bread sitting on the counter in your own kitchen, what does it mean?  The Bible does speak about the meaning of bread, not just because bread symbolizes something in God’s Word, but because bread symbolizes something in God’s world—the only world there is.

Bread is provision, it is blessing, it is strength.  It is the product of dominion, a cooperation between God’s blessing of the crops and man’s labor in the fields, the mill and the bakery.  Every loaf of bread is God’s kindness, a demonstration of the image of God, of God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven, and when we eat this blessing, we receive strength.  And so, of necessity, every loaf of bread is also a call to thank God.

Knowing this about bread, begin to ask yourself what the other things in your life mean.  Don’t be afraid to find that you don’t know.  God wants you to know; He will teach you if you will trust Him.

If we think of ourselves as pilgrims in space—now we’re here on earth, but we’re on our way to our home in heaven—then we will behave like rats on a sinking ship. That is, we won’t care at all about the ship. But this is exactly the wrong lesson.

You see, we are pilgrims in time. Heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world.*  We wait for the coming of Christ’s kingdom, and then what a feast we will have—the Lord’s Table, with Christ himself drinking the cup with us in His Father’s kingdom. That kingdom will not be in a far-off heaven, but right here on earth—the very same earth we are commanded to cultivate and protect.

Therefore, we live not as pilgrims who are going away, but as pilgrims who are waiting for this world to be turned into our home. And this is the good news that we carry out to our neighbors: this world is passing away, and its lusts. Stand apart from it, and seek the Kingdom of God. Christ died for us so that we need not fall in love with the temporary; He has freed us to seek a home in His eternal Kingdom.

____

*I am indebted to N. T. Wright for this lovely turn of phrase.

Jesus tells us it is His memorial, and in biblical terms this means not just that it is for us to remember Him, but also that it is a reminder to God of what Jesus did for us, a reminder to God that we partake of Christ’s body and blood, and that we are what we eat. Theology tells us that God needs no reminders, and as far as it goes, this is true. Jesus tells us to remind God regularly. “Why?” we want to know. Perhaps for the same reasons that we pray without ceasing even though God knows our requests before we ask. Perhaps for other reasons. The most pressing thing, however, is not to know why, but to obey God’s command.

This is one of the necessary lessons of worship that must spill over into the world: the mysteries are many, our understanding is weak, and we obey in spite of it all. Not because we understand, but because we trust the God who guides us. In that trust God answers our prayer: “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

I occasionally meet a well-meaning Christian who objects that it’s not right for a human being to cultivate the imitation of animals, and that therefore the animal stylings in martial arts should not be practiced by Christians.  God commanded us to have dominion over the creation, including the animals, and we must approach the world like men, not like subordinate creatures.  Or so goes the objection.

Obviously, we’re sinners, and we can always find a way to mess something up.  I’d like to say right up front that an animistic approach to an animal style would be a serious problem.  Adopting a totem animal, seeking a spirit guide, all those things, should be forsaken by Christians.  The question here is not whether an animal style could be wrong—obviously, yes—but whether it must be wrong.  It is possible to practice an animal style in a way that is compatible with Christian belief?

I believe it is, and I will follow two lines of argument.  The first is that the Bible itself teaches us to learn from and imitate animals, in order to be better men.  The second has to do with the biblical meaning of animals—but we’ll get there in due time.

In Solomon’s instructions to his son, he writes, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise.”  In the following instruction, Solomon enumerates the ways in which his son ought to be like the ant.  According to the prophet Hosea, when Yahweh describes himself going to war against Israel, he compares Himself to a lion, a leopard, and a bear.  Jesus is described as the Lamb of God and the Lion of the tribe of Judah.  If it is always bad for a human to behave like an animal, why does God say that He does?

That, really, is a sufficient answer.  If God tells us to learn lessons from animals, and compares Himself to animals when He is fighting, then why should we be afraid to learn lessons from animals about fighting?

Thus far sound, obvious theological reflection—a trifle pedestrian, perhaps, but safe enough ground.  But if we’re willing to think a little more poetically, the Scriptures give us a great deal more to think about.  This will, of course, be more indirect.  We’ll have to consider angels, creation, the meaning of animals and the role of men in the world.  But if we can follow the path the Bible lays, we may find ourselves a good deal richer for the effort.  We’ll begin with the angels.

Descriptions of angelic beings are relatively sparse in the Bible, but there are some common themes.  Consider the following:

Each one had four faces, and each one had four wings.  Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the soles of calves’ feet. They sparkled like the color of burnished bronze.  The hands of a man were under their wings on their four sides; and each of the four had faces and wings.  Their wings touched one another. The creatures did not turn when they went, but each one went straight forward.   As for the likeness of their faces, each had the face of a man; each of the four had the face of a lion on the right side, each of the four had the face of an ox on the left side, and each of the four had the face of an eagle.  (Ezekiel 1:6-10)

Before the throne there was a sea of glass, like crystal. And in the midst of the throne, and around the throne, were four living creatures full of eyes in front and in back.  The first living creature was like a lion, the second living creature like a calf, the third living creature had a face like a man, and the fourth living creature was like a flying eagle.  The four living creatures, each having six wings, were full of eyes around and within. And they do not rest day or night, saying: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, Who was and is and is to come!” (Revelation 4:6-8)

Descriptions of angels in the Bible draw on a variety of animal features.  Some angels appear as men, but many others appear as animals, or an odd mixture of animal parts.  Hold onto that thought for a moment, and let’s consider the order of creation.

The angels already existed when God made the earth.  We know this because when God is taking Job to task in Job 38, He says that the angels rejoiced at the earth’s creation:

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell Me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements?
Surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
To what were its foundations fastened?
Or who laid its cornerstone,
When the morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Later in the creation week, when God filled the sea and skies with fish and birds, and the land with animals, the angels were already in existence.  Which means that it isn’t so much that angels look like animals, as that animals look like angels — or angel parts.  Man is the image of God; animals are the images of angels.

Man was given the animals as part of his dominion, and although our dominion has continued to extend and improve, we are a long way from maturity.  We have mismanaged the animals God committed to our care in just about every way possible.  Some kinds of animals have gone extinct because the world is cursed for our sake; other kinds we have driven into extinction through neglect, inept management, or worse.  We have frequently swung the pendulum to the other extreme and worshiped the animals in various ways, which is just as grievous a sin.

So we have a long way to go.  But the animals are there, in part, to help us grow to maturity.  When we can lovingly manage the animals God put on earth, we will have really accomplished something.  And in eternity, it will not just be the animals God commits to our jurisdiction, but the angels they are made to resemble (1Cor.6:3).

Putting all this together, how should we think of an animal styling in martial art?  God has built lessons into the creation, in part through the animals.  So there are lessons about movement and perhaps fighting that we can learn in that way.  And in learning these lessons, we are not just learning from animals but from the earthly images of angels.

But let’s take it beyond that.  In fact, let’s consider an absolute worst-case scenario.

Let us suppose that in the jungles of Indonesia lives a minor demon resembling a bat (or, as we just learned, bats resemble the demon).  In the guise of a bat spirit he has established contact with an up-and-coming shaman, insinuating himself as the man’s spirit guide.  He guides the young man to Fork-Island Village (so named because it’s on an island in the middle of the fork in a river).  As the young shaman enters the village, the village shaman, a wizened old man, staggers out of his hut, shouts out “The bat!  The bat!” and dies.

Seizing the opportunity which his patron demon has created for him, the young shaman ensconces himself as the shaman of the village, and through his influence, the village begins to worship and sacrifice to the bat-demon.  The village champion, in collaboration with the shaman and through a series of trances where he meets the demon, begins to formulate a martial practice around bat-like motions.  The demon has been watching humanity for the whole of its history, and has learned far more than he could ever teach a human in one lifetime.  As long as the champion continues to worship him, the demon teaches him things about combat and human anatomy that he could never have otherwise learned.  The champion grows more skilled and vicious than ever, and the young men of the village beg him to teach them.  Soon they, too, are journeying into the jungle with the shaman and the champion to enter into a trance and meet the bat.

Five generations later, Fork-Island Village is large, well-defended, and prosperous.  The Bat-Style of Fork-Island Village is spoken of in hushed whispers, and its champions feared for miles around.  It is said that an adept can move in utter silence through the night, kill an adversary from across the room merely by pointing at him with his sacred blade, and disappear as though he had never been.  It is said that a true master of the Bat-Style can fly, and fall upon his enemies without warning from the night sky.  How much is truth and how much is fanciful rumor, or stories spread by the villagers themselves as psychological warfare?  No way to know.  And as it is presently taught, with worship of the bat-demon as the point of entry and a continuing, integral focus of the martial art, no Christian should study it.

But let us further suppose that some members of that village move into the cities, and thence to the West.  The father of one family converts to Christianity.  Serving only Jesus, he no longer enters trances to meet the bat.  He no longer offers sacrifices to it.  He breaks his sacred blade, dedicated to the bat, and throws it away.  But he keeps the physical practice, the movements, the knowledge of the human body’s vulnerabilities, the skills of redirection, physical deception and decoy, striking blows that penetrate deeply into the body; he’s still as adept a fighter as ever he was.

He moves in next door to you.  You go out and help them carry in boxes.  A few days later, he asks to borrow your lawnmower.  You let him.  He returns it scrubbed clean as the day you bought it, with a full tank of gas.  You invite him to church, and discover that he’s a believer.  He joins your church, your kids play and study together, and your families become friends.  One day you see him doing some funky kung-fu-looking thing in the backyard.  You ask him what he’s doing, and he tells you the story and asks you if you want to learn.

Could you, in good conscience?

Why not?  Whatever he has learned about how the human body works, how to move it and how to damage it—if it’s true, then it’s God, not the demon, who made the body that way.  He has learned truths about creation that God put into the creation to be discovered.  Those who uncovered this knowledge should have served Christ with it.  If he is now doing that, then he is doing what his ancestors—and the demon—ought to have done all along.  You have a chance to join him in that, and to be a living rebuke to the bat-demon and his worshipers, a demonstration that their secrets reveal the glory of God, as all creation does.  Why not do it?

• First, there are no ‘forces of nature’ in the way we commonly mean it, any more than there are ‘creations of man’ in the way we commonly mean that.  All these things come from the hand of God.
• Second, there is only one proper response to this: to praise the Lord, and to make your thoughts sweet to Him.

We find it difficult to do this, because we focus on the things we do not like, and so zoom in on those tiny things that we refuse to see anything else.  You must praise God even for those things, and my charge to you this week is to follow the strategy of the psalmist.  Back off, look at the whole world, and praise God for all of it.  Then, in that context, re-examine your discontents, and praise God for those things too.

God requires us to believe His word, and sanctified imagination is absolutely necessary to faith.  But there are temptations here that we must avoid.  When you allow your imagination to carry you so far that in doctrine or in practice, you are contradicting Scripture, you have gone too far.  Even if you don’t do that, if you allow your particular way of imagining the thing to become a point of contention so that the argument divides the body, you have sinned.

There is a parallel temptation in the other direction: the temptation to say “It’s all a mystery” and then ignore the things the Scripture does say.  You must subject yourself to the discipline of the Scripture; you must believe what it says, not cultivate a sort of devotional ignorance.

And so the charge is this: Submit to the Scripture.  All of it, straight up the middle, with no fancy footwork.  Whatever the Bible teaches you to believe and do, make it a part of you.  Let your sanctified imagination roam free on the mountains of the Bible—but stay within the limits that the Bible prescribes for you. Sanctified imagination is only sanctified so long as it is obedient.