Missed Question From 6.20.21 Q&R

We received a question during our Sunday gathering this last week that came through the text line a little late but I wanted to address it:

Using this example of a domed flat earth description found in the Bible, is it wise to say there are things written in the bible that we have outgrown in our understanding? I think Christ does that very thing in the New Testament. Does this not suggest a God ordained trajectory for the church today as well? What other things written in the Bible, namely the New Testament, are we possibly out growing in our understanding?

Without being able to interact further with this questioner and ask for clarification, here are my thoughts. First off I want to say that there are different kinds of information in the Old Testament. There’s an assumed cosmology (like the expanse that we talked about), there are laws that pertain to the government of the nation of Israel specifically and there are words of prophecy spoken to Israel in their land and in captivity among other things. Just like anything in scripture, it’s difficult to map these things from another place, time and culture directly onto the church. I eat shrimp and pork because while I do believe a kosher diet teaches us something important about who God is, I don’t think that particular law is binding on the church today. I like the passage about how God knows the plans he has for me (Jeremiah 29:11) but I realize that this promise was meant to be fulfilled 70 years from when it was given during the time of Judah’s captivity in Babylon.

When it comes to passages about cosmology, I’m not sure “outgrown” is the best way to describe our position in 2021 looking back at ancient understandings of the cosmos. It might be a fine word, but it feels a little like that chronological snobbery that I talked about in the sermon. Ancient people are asking and answering different questions about the world than we are. They are using the best data they have and God is communicating the message he wants to give them using the data they have. “Outgrown” might be an appropriate way to characterize that - I’m not sure though.

When it comes to the New Testament we have other things to consider. We have to keep the ancient Israelite understanding of the world and also overlay the 1st century Greek understanding of the world in order to make sense of the New Testament. This is in some ways easier (because it’s closer to us) but it can also prove difficult.

Jesus does definitely change things for the people of God. The food laws are a great example of this.

He said to them, “Are you also as lacking in understanding? Don’t you realize that nothing going into a person from the outside can defile him? For it doesn’t go into his heart but into the stomach and is eliminated” (thus he declared all foods clean). And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of people’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immoralities, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, evil actions, deceit, self-indulgence, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a person.” - Mark 7:18-19

As we progress through the New Testament we see things like the inclusion of non-Jewish people into the people of God without circumcision and a change in understanding of Sabbath observance. With regard to Christians “outgrowing” things, I think a couple passages speak to that:

Is the law therefore contrary to God’s promises? Absolutely not! For if the law had been granted with the ability to give life, then righteousness would certainly be on the basis of the law. But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin’s power, so that the promise might be given on the basis of faith in Jesus Christ to those who believe. Before this faith came, we were confined under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith was revealed. The law, then, was our guardian until Christ, so that we could be justified by faith. But since that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for through faith you are all sons of God in Christ Jesus. - Galatians 3:21-25

In Galatians Paul says that the law is our “guardian” (or schoolmaster) until Christ. He talks about the Christian as no longer being a child because in Christ the promise has come:

Now I say that as long as the heir is a child, he differs in no way from a slave, though he is the owner of everything. Instead, he is under guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. In the same way we also, when we were children, were in slavery under the elements of the world. When the time came to completion, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!” So you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then God has made you an heir. - Galatians 4:1-7

In Galatians there is a false gospel going around that in order to be a Christian you have to keep the Jewish law and Paul has a very strong stance against that. So in that sense there are a lot of things about the practice of following Yahweh that was given to the Jewish people that have been fulfilled in Christ and we are no longer subject to.

You ask specifically though about what things in the New Testament we are outgrowing today. This is a more challenging question because some would argue that the early church “outgrowing” the Old covenant is a precedence for the modern church to “outgrow” some of the teachings of the early church.

There is possibly a similar case to the Old Testament’s expanse in the New Testament’s use of the word “heart.” The idea that the heart is the seat of the will and emotions was a widespread belief in the ancient world. The brain was not seen as very useful. We know now that the brain is the biological epicenter of our consciousness. The comparison is a little off though because we still frequently talk about the heart in ways that the New Testament does (most likely because of the influence of the New Testament on western culture).

Things get a little more difficult when we talk about “growing out” of some of the moral and ethical mandates in the New Testament. It is popular to point to the discontinuities between the Old and New Testaments as a rationale for abandoning some of the more unpopular teachings of Jesus and the Apostles because we have, in 2021, “outgrown” 1st century ideas about marriage, sexuality, gender and the like. The problem with this sort of reasoning is that we are given no authoritative reason for doing this. It’s not Jesus changing the way we interact with God, it’s us deciding as a culture that Jesus’ and Paul’s ideas don’t apply anymore. It’s an interesting way to get out of taking the commands of the New Testament seriously, but it is hard to make a solid case for why our current societal standards should be held in a higher position than that of the church that Jesus founded and that two thousand years later we have been adopted into.

One of the hard things about studying the Bible is that there are rarely easy answers. Each text has to be understood in the context that it was written in and with the purposes of the author in mind. Sometimes that seems simple and other times we struggle to get it right. As I continue to wrestle with this ancient library of books and let it put its weight on my life I find myself leaning more heavily on the things that seem strange and difficult to live out and less on how my culture tries to get me to understand and follow the scripture.