Apprenticeship to Scripture

In last week’s edition, we discussed the advantages of thinking about Christian disciples as ‘apprentices’—that is, as the kind of learners who devote themselves to learn a new knowledge-based practice from their Master, the Lord Jesus Christ.

In this week’s edition, we’re going to bring the idea of ‘apprenticeship’ to bear on the question of how to read and apply the Bible to our lives. And (eventually) we will cycle back briefly to the issue of church and ‘worship’ that started this train of thought running.

Two things, though, before we go further. Firstly, I do recognize that the ‘worship’ issue is not the most pressing question in the world, especially at this moment. And to be truthful, it doesn’t quite get my juices flowing as it once did. But it does serve as a convenient illustration for a larger and more important point that is the real subject of this week’s post.

And secondly, the larger issue (of how to apply the Bible) is indeed a very large issue, and I have struggled to keep the length of this week’s edition down, without really succeeding. It’s a longer than usual Payneful Truth this time around. Happily, though, I am on holiday next week, and won’t be posting anything next Monday—so you have two weeks to chew your way through the exciting adventure that is …

Apprenticeship to Scripture

Being ‘biblical’ in our thinking and action is a bit like ‘healthy eating’. Most Christians would like to think that they are at least trying, but it’s not always clear what qualifies.

For example, is a practice or concept ‘biblical’ if it fits within the bounds of what the Bible permits, or is at least silent about—or is that too low a bar? Is something only ‘biblical’ if the Bible explicitly commands or positively endorses it in some way? Or is acting in a biblical way more about the theological vibe that you get from putting together the various teachings and themes of Scripture? Or is it some combination of all of these?

How does one start with all the various things that the Bible asserts, teaches, describes or exemplifies, and then conclude (in any particular situation) what would be the good or right or ‘biblical’ thing to do? It’s not always straightforward.

With regard to church and worship—as an illustration—is it perfectly reasonable and biblical to use the category of ‘worship’ as a primary way of describing our gatherings, and in particular the singing we do in our gatherings, as many churches do? (As in, ‘welcome to our service of worship this morning’; or ‘please join us now as we worship our God together in song’.) Or would it be more helpful to avoid ‘worship’ as a primary category for understanding our church gatherings and/or singing, on the basis that the New Testament doesn’t command us to, and in fact hardly ever does so itself? How does the Bible direct us towards an answer on this, or for that matter any, contemporary issue?

Now, in thinking about this question we are about to traverse some deep and complicated waters, in which theologians and ethicists much smarter than me have been thrashing about for centuries. To name-check just three historically massive debates for those who are up on such things: we are in the same waters as the regulative-versus-normative principle discussion at the time of the Reformation; and the hermeneutical debate that has been raging for most of the past hundred years about whether and how ancient texts can speak to modern cultures; and the contemporary controversy within Christian ethics about the place of the Bible as a source of authority in ethical thought.

I have been swimming in these waters quite a lot over the past several years, but I don’t intend to take you with me on a deep academic dive. We will be sticking fairly close to the surface, and I apologise in advance for the various things I will no doubt miss out or treat simplistically in what follows. (For those who do wish to think deeper and further, I’ll mention some things to read below.)

I want to outline two good but inadequate approaches to ‘being biblical’ about our circumstances and decisions, and then suggest a third approach that is very useful, and that (unsurprisingly) has something to do with apprenticeship.

Focus on commands

The first common approach to applying the Bible to our lives is to focus on the Bible’s explicit commands. And this is of course a great and godly thing to do because, after all, to be a disciple (or apprentice!) of Jesus is to learn to keep all his commands (Matt 28:20). Not only are God’s commands as sweet as the honey comb, they are jolly useful in lots of circumstances, especially for people like us. Very often, we don’t have the need, the time or the ability for a complicated thought process about what to do. We need a short, sharp, simple word that simply says, ‘Be angry but do not sin’, ‘Don’t commit adultery’ or ’Flee from idols’.

But as useful as commands are, they have some inadequacies, especially if they are the sum total of our biblical thinking. The first problem is that we still have to figure out whether the command applies in this situation in front of me, and that is not always clear. ‘Flee from idols’ is pretty straightforward if you are faced with an actual statue in a pagan temple, but what if you’re spending too much time obsessing about golf (hard for some of you to imagine I know, but this is an issue that a ‘friend of mine’ struggles with). Is golf becoming an idol to be fled from? How would we know when it has acquired this status? Or is another command more applicable—like ‘do not love the world or things of the world’ or perhaps (more positively), ‘everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving’?

The commands themselves don’t help us with this. We still have some thinking and discernment in front of us, and on what basis are we to do this? What if you quote ‘flee from idols’ to me in my golf obsession, but I counter with ‘Whatever is noble and good and excellent, think about these things’? How can we avoid a proof-texting stalemate?

There’s another problem with commands on their own—and that is simply that not every situation is covered by a command specific enough to be useful. Our issue about church and worship is in this category. There is no specific scriptural command to describe our church gatherings as ‘worship services’, nor one forbidding it. In fact, there is no command to call our church services anything. We might conclude that we could therefore describe our church gatherings in any way that we like, but that also doesn’t seem right. If Pastor Jim welcomed the congregation on Sunday to ‘our full-tilt, foot-washing, fashion show of spiritual inspiration’, we might reasonably object that something about the nature and purpose of the gathering is not really being expressed. (Mind you, it would not take too much creativity to proof-text every single expression in Pastor Jim’s description if we wanted to.)

How we describe and frame our church gatherings would seem to be important, but there is no simple biblical command to help us out.

Focus on theology

Here’s where the second common approach comes in. It quite rightly recognizes that the Bible isn’t just commands—among other things, it is also full of theological truths and principles that are the basis for those commands. And so rather than just looking at the end point (the command), we can also soak up the Bible’s theology, its teaching about God and everything, its grand narrative about God’s purposes, and then bring that to bear on the issues in front of us. We can draw out various biblical doctrines and principles, organize them into some kind of coherent order or argument, and thus reason our way to a ‘biblical’ conclusion.