Multiple Christians with celebrity status have mentioned recently that they have either lost or are struggling with their faith. A couple of weeks agao, Joshua Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye in the 90s and pastor of Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland from 2004-2015 said he was no longer Christian. Most recently Marty Sampson, the former lead singer of Hillsong, has said that his faith is standing on shaky ground. Such high profile cases of losing faith or struggling with faith grab the attention of Christians and the reasons for such can be speculated upon.

I saw one person on Twitter, who I will not name, suggest it was due to the lack of theological depth. But such an answer sounds more to be like the intellectual pretensions than a solid answer and explanation. While the study of theology can contribute to solidifying faith, it an also run it around. This is not to mention that theology can readily become a source of projection upon God if we think it is our theology and ability to keep ourselves thinking right that keeps us secure in faith. At the end of the day, to explain the loss of faith is due to a lack of theological depth is to treat human reasoning as the condition of faith, rather than theology as the response of faith in God’s power and love.

Rather, I was to suggest a different way to look at the nature of unbelief from those who have had one point had faith. But it will need us to stop asking the implicit question “What did they do wrong?” as if people’s struggles with or loss of faith is solely determined by their actions and thinking. This is to embrace and individualist view of faith that blurs into methodological solipsism: a person’s faith or the lack thereof is solely the consequence of their actions and thinking. When analyzed up close, assuming that people did something wrong that lead them to lose faith is not just exhibit a bad implicit theology, but it also overlooks how human thinking is conditioned to our experiences and environment, much of which they have little direct control over.

This isn’t to embrace a fatalistic view of faith and the lack thereof, but it is only to not assume that people’s loss of faith is attributable to something that is wrong with them. Perhaps, there is something seriously wrong elsewhere, like people being misled about what God is like, people enduring tremendous suffering, etc. But the idea that unbelief automatically condemns one to eternal hell has lead us to place too much of an emphasis on people getting to belief, trying to control their thinking so they come to faith, manipulate them with false ideas to get them to believe, etc. As a consequence, we overlook other factors, including our other people’s contribution to a person’s struggle and/or loss of faith. The sermon to the Hebrews readily exemplifies how in the midst of people’s struggles, others are to encourage people in faith and support them in the midst of their struggles.

I am personally familiar with this. As a Christian who holds to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I have had to endure some storms where I seriously questioned my faith and some people who were more concerned with me getting it right rather than helping me became to me like Job’s friends: accusers who could not understand. In Job, we have a story that should be a reminder to all Christians that their response to the suffering can become a source of hurt and, ultimately, risks speaking falsely because they don’t understand what it is they are talking about.

So, allow me to approach an explanation of unbelief from a different direction. I want to explore the cognitive conditions that lead to the lack of faith. And I will take a much broader view of faith in this based upon a certain principle: while our faith in God is specifically conditioned to God’s Word and Spirit, the conditions that allow for any form of faith is  analyzable in general fashion. In other words, the explanation for when people do or do not believe in God is separate from the explanation of how people come to believe in God.

Here is what I posit: the necessary condition for faith is when our remembered experiences are consistent with our expectations. The corollary to this is that the necessary condition for unbelief is when our remembered experiences are dissonant with our expectations.

Allow me to use trust in marriage as an example. A person has a certain expectation of their spouse will not cheat. This expectation itself is not faith or trust, but it is a value. Now, if the person does not have a problem with persistent mistrust, then by a combination of experience the ways their spouse is honest with them in addition to the lack of any evidence of cheating going on, that person’s experience will match their valued expectations. They have not proven that their spouse has not cheated, but their experience is such that what they remember from their experiences, which is most often an implicit rather than explicit remembering.

But even then, one instance of cheating may not entirely evaporate trust. Say a person obtains evidence of their spouse cheating once. This would certainly be a blow to the relationship but does it automatically erode all trust forever? Not necessarily. If the cheating spouse takes responsibility and owns what they did, then a severely broken trust may be restored if the other spouse is willing to risk. In this case, the cheating partner takes responsibility and through that restores trust over time, thereby strengthening the faith that had been seriously weakened.

However, this example I present only focused on the first “variable,” remember experience. However, it tries the expectations as fixed. But sometimes, faith or the lack of faith is also the result of our expectations changing rather than our remember experiences.

For consistency sake, I will use a similar but subtly different example: two unmarried people who are not dating and there are different expectations about what relationship they have. In the ambiguity that often occurs prior to the initiation of a romantic relationship, people’s expectations are forming about the other person, but they do not necessarily form equally. The first person is slower to warm up and thinks they are friends but that they have an interest in the other, whereas the other person is head over heels in love and thinks they are basically in a romantic relationship. Because of these varying expectations, their communication and behavior towards each other can become rather crossed. For instance, the slow and more deliberate approach by the first may make the second person respond evasively or become avoidant. In the case that the first person, thinks the other person isn’t interested because of their avoidant and evasive behavior, they might then develop an interest in someone else. The second person might find out about this and think the first person has essentially cheated on them. At this point, we are left with a situation much like the marriage situation: both people have different expectations that are dissonant with their remembered experiences. This creates a lack of faith: in the first person, they don’t have faith the other person is interested in them. In the second person, they don’t have faith the other person is honest.

Often, these types of problems end up in conflict. Usually, it is because one person or the other does not respect the perspective of the other and refuses to listen to them. However, there are cases where communication can lead to the changing of expectations. Say the second person is actually willing to listen to the first person and the person says “I thought you weren’t interested.” If the second person is willing to believe that this is genuine and not some manipulation, then they might adjust their expectations, which means they would look at their remembered experiences differently. They would no longer think the news that the first person went out with someone else as evidence of cheating but as a person moving on because of a (mistaken) belief.

Now, analysis of remembered experiences and expectations and the way they can change can become endlessly complex as there are various factors that go into what we remember and what we expect. Further complicating the matter is that what we remember can change our expectations, and our expectations can change what we remember, while at the same time being different from each other. So, I don’t present these necessary conditions for faith and unbelief as intending to portray it as being simplistically reducible to two factors. It is rather presented as a lens that can help us to assess what is going on.

What does it tell us about the Christian faith in God? I want to suggest that when cautiously considered, the greater, although not, the sole cause for the struggles with faith is our expectations about God rather than our remembered experiences of God. Now, we see this theme throughout Scripture. For instance, in 2 Peter 3.9 explains that the apparent slowness of God is God’s allowance of an opportunity for people to repent. Whereas humans are inclined to expect God to hurry things up with His promises, God is operating in a way that brings other people into the fold. Whereas we can be rather inclined to have egocentric expectations about God doing what we want when we want it, God works differently than human expectations.

But, rather than just focusing on trying to get people to change their expectations, I want to additionally focus on the source of expectations that can lead us to unbelief. It is what Paul refers to the flesh and what later theologians like Augustine and Barth referred to as incurvatus in se: it is living life according to the expectations of our own embodied nature, isolating our thinking away from the presence of God. We should avoid reverting to some sort of methodological solipsism as if false expectations simply emerge from the errors of individual thinking. The inward thinking of the flesh is why we are unable on our to come to know God, but it doesn’t rule out the social elements that are responsible for expectations about God. The source of false expectations may come from other people, who acting from their flesh, propagate false expectations about God, either directly or indirectly.

One salient way this can happen is in the prosperity “gospel” and its multiple variations. Take, for instance, Matthew 17.19-20. One common way of reading Jesus’ answer to the disciple as to why they could not cast out the demon is as a chiding for the little faith, as if their faith wasn’t even to the level of the mustard seed. As a consequence, the parable Jesus gives gets interpreted as “if you just have enough faith, you can get what you seek and ask for.” This idea then gets spread with the expectation that God gives us what we ask for, especially in an immediate manner. But, many people deeply believe and trust something to come from God, and it doesn’t happen. If their expectation of God is that having enough faith will get them what they seek, then their faith may turn to unbelief the more they are let down.

But allow me to offer a radically different interpretation. Jesus is not connecting answered prayer with the “size” of faith. He is not chiding the disciples for not having even a little bit of faith at the size of the proverbial mustard seed. Rather, I want to suggest that Jesus is directing His disciples to understand the relationship between faith and power. The mustard seed is intended to be a description of the smallness of faith the disciples had, but the employment of seeds also has some agricultural implications operating behind it. Seeds are planted and then they grow. While the disciple’s faith was small, and it was the reason they could not cast out the demon, the point of the parable is to highlight that even a little faith is a sufficient starting point towards being able to cast our demons and move the proverbial mountain, but that the faith must, like a seed, be planted and grown. Rather than portraying faith as the cause of having such power, faith is the starting point that can allow one to grow to have that power that the disciples were seeking. Faith is the beginning of the journey, not the culmination of it. Then, to contextualize this within the rest of NT canon, in faith one can begin to discover the charismatic gifts that the Spirit has given the person and cultivate their using of them for the purposes of building up God’s Kingdom.

Now, I am not claiming this interpretation must be the right interpretation, though I do think it is the right one. Rather, imagine how this expectation changes how people relate to their remembered experiences. Rather than not interpreting their failed prayers as a sign that God is not real, does not love them, they don’t have enough faith, etc., etc., they would see it as part of the journey of discipleship. Their expectations of God change from God as the one who gives us the power to do what we want to the teacher who shows us how to powerfully act on behalf of God’s Kingdom. Remembering experiences that would be dissonant with the prosperity “gospel’s” portrayal of God is not dissonant with the expectation that God is the One who teaches. But thinking according to the flesh and the inward disposition does not respond well to the development across time.

For a more indirect example, people who see themselves as the protectors of orthodoxy, rather than God Himself, can propagate false expectations about God. Due to orthodoxy’s historical reliance on Hellenistic philosophy to express itself, it has an inclination to homogenizing God in such a way that there is no variability of God in any manner as if the God of the Bible must fit into the intellectual, cognitive forms of thinking diffused from Hellenistic philosophy for what the Scriptures testify about God to be true.¹ As a consequence, they regard God more like an object that they have scientific theories about. Then, when someone complains about not understanding where God is in the midst of something, they can heap judgment on that person for not seeing God, as if the person complaining automatically has something wrong with them.² What are they communicating about God in that moment? They are often implicitly communicating that God does not care about your pain and what happened, but only saying and believing the ‘right’ things.

What can happen then in such a hypothetical case? Sometimes, the figure in the position in Job may reject what the human protectors of orthodoxy try to foist upon him. But, in some cases, the protectors of orthodoxy implicitly “convert” the person to this type of thinking and form them into a more radicalized version of that thinking: God simply cares about saying and believing the right things, and not about who we are people. This can then launch that person into a never-ended quest to discover the truth because that’s what they expect God cares about and how he is known. Their faith in God is determined by the expectation that God is cognitively known in a clear, intellectual, analyzable manner, rather than known in the concrete embodiment God in Jesus Christ (and not simply in the abstract idea of incarnation) and the inspiration of the Spirit. But, if in their quest to find the absolute, theological truth to know God because that is their expectation, they find that God is not knowable in the way they expect, their faith can turn to unbelief. Their remembered experiences about their understanding of God is that of confusion, of mystery, of potentially endless skepticism if they discover their theological exploration is nothing but straw with no other expectation about God to replace that failed expectation.

What is the antidote to this false expectation? I would say to help them to grow their faith by changing their expectations from a God who is primarily known in a clear, propositional manner to a God who in Jesus Christ loves and serves through themselves following the leading of the Spirit to become as servants so that they can comprehend Christ’s servanthood, rather than the often implicit competitive attitude that can come with intellectual accomplishment if people’s seeking for achievement is rooted in the flesh. In that case, they will find, discover, and experience the God who serves, because they themselves understand and have that sort of expectation about God. Additionally, by adopting a servant attitude, they can be a servant to those who they deem to be weak in faith, to build them up, rather than act in such a manner to injure the “weak’s” conscience in the name of their “knowledge” much like Job’s friends risked doing.

My task here, in the end, is to offer an illustration of the principle about the way faith in God emerges from the relation of remembered experiences and expectations but is not intended a fuller, analytic description. I offer it as a way to reconceptualize the struggles that people have in faith in the hope that it can help us to let the Spirit direct us in our understanding of and the helping of people struggling with faith rather than addressing it from the perspective and interests of the flesh that often propagates false expectations of God, thereby risking reinforcing unbelief.

Critical theory, the ideological child of Karl Marx, the grandchild of Georg William Friedrich Hegel, is a major intellectual force in present-day politics, being one of the main driving forces behind modern progressive politics around matters of race, gender, sexuality, etc. What critical theory ultimately is a complex question to answer as it, unlike Marxism, is not defined by the ideas of one or a couple people, but rather it started more like a collaborative project between many intellectuals such as Mark Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and more recently Jürgen Habermas.

However, critical theory can be understood historically as a process of the resolution of cognitive dissonance between the hopes that Marxism promise and the failure of it is to accomplish what it said was assured in history. Marx thought his vision of socialism and the emerge of a stateless society was an inevitable development of capitalism. To risk oversimplification and to put in different categories than Marx did, capitalism was a liminal phase in the social transformation from the authoritarian feudal society that would eventually lead to a non-authoritarian society. With the gradual accumulation of capital leading to investment to increase profits rather than given to labor, eventually, the proletariat would rise up against the bourgeoisie and the revolution would lead to the emergence of a stateless society.

This didn’t happen, however, particularly in Western Europe. Marxism failed to predict and deliver what was promised, and so those entranced by its ideals began to try to rationally understand why Marxism was failing. Communist party members like George Lukács in Hungary and Karl Korsch in Germany began to question the orthodox Marxism and set in process a reformulation and new understanding of the ideas of Marxism ¹. While Lukács eventually recanted of his work under pressure, their and others work lead to the permanent creation of the Institute for Social Research at Geothe University in Frankfurt, which later becomes colloquially known as the Frankfurt School. It was here that people like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse met and collaboratively worked together. 

They ultimately found Marxism to have had weaknesses on multiple fronts, such as overemphasis on dialectical materialism at the cost of an understanding of subjectivity. In place of Marxism, they sought to bring the social sciences to bear upon understanding and changing society. However, at the core of their project was a similar vision to Marxism: that of liberation. However, even that changed. Marxism imagined the liberation of an authoritarian society to a stateless one. Critical theory is more concerned about the liberation of individuals. One implication of this is is that whereas Marxism was primarily a political and economic theory, critical theory is more concerned about the various aspects of personal and social life, hence it has been used to analyze and understand race, sexuality, and gender.

What I am going to suggest, however, is a criticism that is consistent capitalism that critical theory sought to criticize, but like the critical theorists criticism of Marxism leading to a view of liberation that is more personal than simply political and economic, I am seeking to understand the social foundations that both energized capitalism and lead to its ultimate dysfunction. It is this: human persons are primarily concerned about bettering their position in life and those closet in their social networks and they seek to position themselves in a way to gain the biggest advantage for the least disadvantage.

What the transition from feudalism to capitalism accomplished was a greater degree of freedom for individuals persons of the lower class to change their position than had previously been afforded to them. But by freedom, however, I do not mean the ability to determine the course of one’s life, but rather the freedom to redirect the course of one’s life. Early capitalism was still brutally oppressive, but there was less resistance to people’s attempt to change the course of their life than there had been previously. The lower class were still devalued, but at least the hierarchical control over their life had become more limited through the increasing recognition of personal rights. The emerge of liberalism allowed people to seek to define themselves, but they were never freed from the presence of social obligations and limitations but there were free, in a sense, to seek the modify their place in life and the limitations and obligations placed upon them.

What is known as classical liberalism had a particular power to it: it marshaled the natural human drive to personal betterment and allowed more people the opportunity to do such. While this freedom to redefine one’s position in one’s life was never universally offered, as various classes of people were neither really afforded the opportunity, such as women or ethnic minorities, or were given the resources necessary to take advantage of the opportunity, such that those living in long-term, systemic poverty, liberalism allowed for the transformation of society by allowing individual persons the opportunity to change their social standing.

However, this sense of liberty is a much more pragmatic understanding of liberty, rather than ideological. Freedom was not some idealized state that people were to reach, but rather it was something people were given and allowed to act based upon. Freedom was the condition of human action, not its consequence. As a result, freedom was moral imperative of a political society that was used to legitimate the potential to change one’s status, but it was not an ideological lens by which to understand society nor was it something to possess in any absolute or existential sense. That is why the United States, a society built on the concepts of liberty and freedom but not on its consistent application, only reluctantly and with struggle gave freedom from women and blacks and it is why libertarians are a rather small and relatively uninfluential political party. Freedom was never an overarching, moral ideology, but it was a moral concept with a pragmatic purpose: to allow people to change their standing in life.

This vision of freedom in classical liberalism and capitalism is different from freedom in Marxism and critical theory. While commentators such as Isaiah Berlin have tried to define positive and negative freedoms, I feel this is a much too abstract description of freedom. What I feel is fundamentally different is that classical liberalism does not free oneself from negative circumstances, but provides freedom to change one’s negative circumstances. Critical theory, by contrast, seeks to free people from negative circumstances. Put differently, the freedom of classical liberalism is about the possibility of creating change, whereas the freedom of Marxism and critical theory seeking some sort of guarantee, whether the historical inevitability of the revolution or the guarantee of rational institutions that govern life.

This begins to explain why I think Marxism failed and why critical theory will also eventually fall under its own weight. Part of what the critical theorists determined is that Marxism failed to bring about the promised and hope for change because of the failure to take subjectivity into account. Revolution happens when people decide to revolt; it is not simply some event that happens apart from people taking it upon themselves to see it out. But if you think it is an inevitable process of “fate,” you are disinclined to really take action yourself because you think it will inevitably occur. Thus, the critical theorists felt that the move towards liberation is only maintained and sustained through the ongoing impulse for systemic change and they sought to organize and educate people in such a way as to perpetually participate in the processes of change.

But herein lines the unsustainability of critical theory: human motivation does not naturally incline towards wide-spread change. While there are individuals exceptions to the rule, most people prefer no or slow change. Those who naturally comfortable with rapid and sweeping change are a rare lot. Rather, the desire for rapid and sweeping change is more of an adaptive position out of feelings of desperation, and so people must be stoked towards change through a sense of grievance and vulnerability. However, *most* forms of grievance by individual persons dissipate overtime in so far as their life circumstances allow them to adapt and better themselves otherwise. Wide-spread and persistent unrest occurs when people “collaborate” together as a social group to remember their grievances in such a way as they see their grievances still operating and existing in the present. That is to state that revolution is essentially motivated by a persistent grievance narrative reinforced by the telling of grievances.

This didn’t occur in the West in large part due to classical liberalism’s defusing of such desperation and unrest by providing the possibility for people to change their circumstances as individuals. That combined with the Christian virtue of ‘forgiveness’² allowed for the defusing of these social tensions. People’s freedom to try to change their personal circumstances was sufficient to defuse such revolutionary instincts among most people. And that classical liberal societies gradually, even if reluctantly, included more people into this freedom help to reduce the grievances.

As a consequence, the necessary conditions for the type of social change and transformation that critical theorists envision can only primarily develop within educational settings in a classically liberal society. It is in universities and other similar settings that people who have a natural, sustained motivation for a specific intellectual topic and passion congregate. Then, they take willing students who are relatively unformed in their thinking and helped them to see the world in a different way through readings, lectures, and various practices. While this defines higher education as a whole, it is in this setting that critical theory survives. A society that has otherwise immunized itself from long-term grievance narratives is vulnerable to the very institutions that are charged with challenging the way the society thinks and functions.

However, there is a real social limitation of being reliant upon university education. The traditional pedagogical methods of university education is a theory first education. That is to state that one is presented with a set of ideas and theories that are to explain a specific domain of inquiry and then after mastering the concepts, the students then begin to see how the theories apply to life situations and circumstances. The limitation of this is that critical theory requires mastery of the concepts to comprehend, but the ideas of critical theory are not readily apparent apart from the theoretical apparatus that undergirds it.

The result of this is that the impulse towards societal transformation as advocated for by critical theory is limited by its ability to educate people into its theory in the first place. In order for the transformation of society to occur that critical theorists and those they influence seek to inaugurate, it has to effectively escape the confines of the educational institution. That is to state, it must become popularized, much like Marxism become popularized and its popularizations served as catalysts for social revolutions. But Marxism had an intuitive feeling to it in drawing the battle lines in a simple way between the proletariat and bourgeoise, even if Marx’s own theory and analysis of capitalism was immensely more complex. In virtue of its highly critical, intellectual stance, critical theory can not be popularized in such a way as to readily understand its core principles. To try to popularize critical theory is to grievously distort it as its methods of social analysis are incredibly complex out of necessity in understanding subjectivity (a brief read Habermas reveals that readily).

By contrast, classical liberalism didn’t require people to truly understand freedom to transform society: it simply had to remove roadblocks to people’s natural inclination towards bettering their situation. Classical liberalism works with what is more generally true about human nature, whereas critical theory relies upon the nature of the intellectual elite. One can say that the way of thinking and living in classical liberalism can be learned in multiple ways. While one can come into it from a theoretical understanding of freedom to then have the practical understanding of seeking to better your life circumstances, it is much more easily learned by people being taught to act freely to better themselves.

Put differently, classical liberalism thrives due to its ability to appeal to what is more broadly true about people across the board, whereas critical theory thrives only within a bubble. In the West, it thrives in the bubble of higher education that allows for the development of a narrow range of highly intelligent people according to patterns of specific theories. I would compare critical theory more to a religious cult, with an insider language that only those initiated into it can readily comprehend. While religious cults typically do not target highly intelligent persons due to their ability to see through appearances and the rationalizations that occurs when the dogma fail, critical theory is the result of an incredibly complex process of cognitive dissonance (far more complex than what occurs in many religious cults) emerging from the failure of Marxism that it has an impressive set of rationalizations that can sustain even the most intelligent of people.

In presenting this, this is not intended as a criticism of many of the goals of critical theory, but rather the unsustainability of critical theory’s methodology and definition of freedom. The critique could extend further. For instance, the ever adaptive nature of human beings to resist attempts to be controlled in order to better their own life leads people to adapt to and resist the forms of social analysis that they deemed is used against their values and goals, thereby changing the very social landscape. In other words, the presentation of a social theory leads to a form of change and resistance to that social theory that makes the theory less reliably. While a meta-theory can take account for this type of change, one can not create reliable social theories that accurately predict and explain in the face of social and political resistance. But I chose to focus on the topic of human nature and learning to highlight its critical theories ultimately fragile, social standing.

This criticism is not coming from a classical liberal. I am not a classical liberal because I feel that this social and political project of the Enlightenment has grievously failed a wide range of the population. I considered myself to be a Christian that takes the vision of new creation of all people in a very serious way, and I find that classical liberalism and capitalism does not accomplish it. That said, I think classical liberalism is immensely more able to accomplish what it was set out to do in the Enlightenment than what Marxism was able to do and what critical theory will ever be able to accomplish.

The significance and meaning of forgiveness can be, somewhat ironically, a divisive topic. It gets no more divisive than when we talk about abuse victims and abuse. Should an abuse victim forgive their abuser even when the abuser is recalcitrant towards taking responsibility? Some would say yes, that is a necessary part of their healing and growth. Forgiveness is about what you do as the offended. Others would say no, that that forgiveness requires repentance. To forgive an abuser is to deny the pain and anger, not to mention some abusers expect forgiveness from their victims as part of their repertoire of manipulation to get away with the abuse.

Part of the reason for this disagreement about forgiveness is that the meaning of “forgiveness” isn’t necessarily precise and clear. Does it essentially mean regarding the past offense as if it didn’t happen, as proverbially summed up in the phrase “Forgive and forget?” Or, it is simply about forgoing vengeance, to not engage in an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth sort of vindictive behavior? Further complicating this is the purpose of forgiveness is not always agreed. Forgiveness is often portrayed with a therapeutic purpose. On the other hand, it can be responded that forgiveness is sacrificially about the other person, not one’s own well-being.

While addressing the different ideas of forgiveness is impossible to do in a blog post, and even impossible to do adequately in a full book, the different understandings of forgiveness can be looked at through two lenses: (1) how many parties are involved in the act of forgiveness and (2) what exactly does forgiveness entail? Regarding the number of parties in forgiveness,  the offended party forgives the party regardless of the action of the offending party. In two-party forgiveness, the offending party must respond appropriately (repentance, amends, etc.) for the offended party to forgive. Regarding the question of what forgiveness entails, it can be seen as forgetting the past and acting like it didn’t happen, as not taking vengeance, etc. Additionally added to this question is the nature of the relationship of the two parties: does the offended party allow the offending party the type of access and influence they had that wrongly used in the first place?

What I am offering here is an attempt to treat forgiveness through a different lens in seeing forgiveness as a teleological act that has a specific purpose in mind.

I want to suggest at the heart of forgiveness is the vision of shalom, of life being well-lived. But this shalom is not about a specific individual’s shalom, but the shalom of the whole. In that, I want to suggest that forgiveness is an act that frees the offending party by not purely defining them by their sin such that they can be free to live and act appropriately in a community defined by shalom. Forgiveness is an act of liberation that invites the offending party into a new way of action as part of a community of shalom.

However, allow me to clarify: I don’t take the liberation in forgiveness to be a freedom from consequence. Wrong actions, and especially evil actions, should be met with the appropriate response due to the loss of trust their actions have fostered. Disciplinary actions are a necessary consequence of such actions. However, forgiveness as an act of liberation allows for the possibility and space that the perpetrator can be different. As such, forgiveness does not seek to take disproportionate actions in response to wrong and evil acts that have been committed that would keep the wrong-doers metaphorically “locked up.” To use an example that isn’t controversial to illustrate, a manager who acted in a very irresponsible with the budget and money under their control would not be automatically blacklisted from such a position in the future elsewhere, although it may lead to the ending of their present employment with no possibility of rehire. Furthermore, forgiveness makes an appropriate space and path for the offending party to live and act differently. By appropriate I mean it does not either put the offended party into highly vulnerable situations nor does it put an onerous and burdensome sense of requirements and litmus tests upon the offending party that far outweighs the act done. For the hypothetical manager mentioned above, they would need to show they have taken the appropriate responsibility for their irresponsibility by getting the necessary training for handling money and then show their reliability in the future by working their way back up. They would not be given the same position immediately in the name of “forgiveness” nor would they be submitted to needless requirements, such as having to make amends with their previous employer.

In other words, forgiveness as an act of liberating the perpetrator allows the perpetrator to learn, grow, and live differently. This vision of forgiveness is an attempt to take the language of forgiveness in the New Testament seriously. The primary word used for forgiveness by Jesus in the Gospels is ἀφίημι, which is a word used for release and was regularly used in the context of the obligations of debt, whether literal or metaphorical debts. Then, in the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6.12, Jesus defines forgiveness as a releasing from one’s debts (ὀφείλημα). Then in the parable about forgiveness in the parable of the unforgiveness servant, Jesus again uses the language of debt and the imprisonment that a person in debt can experience to illustrate forgiveness.

What has happened in a lot of Protestant circles, however, is that we have grown to learn to define forgiveness as freedom from consequence rather than a freedom to be and experience something different. When prevailing concerns about God’s forgiveness is about whether one will go to eternal hell or not, the primary lens by which we have learned to see forgiveness is in terms of its consequence. As a result, we don’t readily recognize God’s forgiveness as our liberation so that we can be freed from the risk of such a judgment. It becomes easy then to transfer this understanding of forgiveness to the social, horizontal acts of forgiveness towards each other as freedom from consequence, rather than a freedom from being irredeemably locked away.

What has furthermore gotten lost is that forgiveness is not about a transfer from an all negative status to an all positive status. Protestant accounts of God’s forgiveness treat God’s love as regarding the repentant sinner as on the same spiritually footing as the long faithful saint. In fact, in Protestantism, it is often the case there can not even be a real distinction between the sinner and saint, but that we are, in the words of Luther “simul justus et peccator.” While the original intention of this was good and needed, it is has had the effect of flattening out our view of people without making distinctions based upon actual actions and practices rather than redirecting people to recognize the heart of the Gospel is the liberation of the sinner and recognizing the process of transformation that is concomitant with the appropriate response to liberation.

As a consequence, we don’t have an understanding of liminality, which is a state in which people are going through a process of change that is positive but has not yet reached its intended goal. For instance, I would say in 1 Corinthians 2, Paul does make a distinction between people who are saved and have faith in God’s power and then those people whose faith in God has grown to the love of God; those with faith are in a liminal phase of transition from the old way of thinking and living to a new way demonstrated in Christ and realized through the Spirit. The consequence of this loss of liminality is that we have a hard time recognizing the state of liminal transformation that forgiveness has the potential to initiate. Forgiveness is seen as immediately getting us to the freedom from consequence and just moving on past what happened, rather than forgiveness allowing us the space to grow and learn to be a new person and appropriately participate in a community of shalom under God’s rule.

To that end, forgiveness as an act of liberation is an act in which the perpetrator is invited into a new way of acting and living, as founded upon the person of Jesus Christ as both the exemplar par excellence of liberating forgiveness that comes from God and the exemplar par excellence for how God calls us to live in this world. But forgiveness is the initial, one-party invitation of the offending party into this shalom, it is not the culmination of shalom. The perpetrator is invited into and given the opportunity for a process of change and transformation that will involve them taking responsibility through repentance and confession, making the appropriate amends to the victims, progress through time to establish one’s trustworthiness where one broke trust, etc. Meanwhile, when that type of process is respectfully engaged in without being used as a form of manipulation and coercion by the perpetrator to try to involuntarily obligate and guilt their victim to a certain type of feeling or response towards them, it also allows the victim an easier path towards shalom through healing.

As a consequence, this view of forgiveness doesn’t define forgiveness along the lines of the interests of specific individuals, although it does preferentially take the interests of the victim at heart as an integral part of the process that forgiveness initiates and makes possible. In the short run, the process that forgiveness invites into takes the concerns of the victims into account, although in the long-run forgiveness is about the opportunity of the perpetrator. Forgiveness is a teleological act directed towards the realization of the shalom of the community that includes both the victim’s concerns for well-being and healing and the perpetrator’s possibility of learning how to live responsibility within a community of shalom and experiencing it afresh again. From the victim, they must allow the possibility for people to be different and accept when the invitation is not taken without vengeance, while not denying the wrong done or being obligated to fit their feelings and behaviors into some pattern that acts as if it didn’t happen. From the perpetrator, they are given a route to move forward, but they need to learn to accept the forgiveness that has offered, rather than think some other definition of “forgiveness” entitles them to anything more than the opportunity for liberation.

One of the joys of taking a day off from a research project and writing is that you sometimes get to explore a related topic that branches off, but has your curiosity piqued, but you don’t have to time to really address it. One area of interest that I have had, which I briefly expressed the other day, is the relationship of 1 Corinthians 10.1-13 and Exodus 23.20-23. In brief, I suggested the idea that Paul’s discourse implies a connection of Jesus to the ‘messenger’ (מַלְאָךְ) of the Lord who goes before the Israelites, but I didn’t have space to expand the idea in that specific post.

Before explaining the connection, I want to situate this within the setting of 1 Corinthians as a whole. In 1 Corinthians 1-4, Paul addresses the topic of wisdom; the concern for the Corinthians is that they are failing to comprehend how Gods teaches wisdom. They regarded wisdom to be taught much as they expected in the prevailing forms of Greco-Roman wisdom, in which different people reputed to be wise would obtain a large following (Paul’s near-contemporary Epictetus is an example of the celebrity that comes with being considered wise). However, this leads to social competitions between various people considered to be wise to determine who was right and wrong through the demonstration of their wisdom. The Corinthians had treated the various Christian teachers, apparently including even Jesus, as operating in competition with each other and failed to truly comprehend that it was God who was at work in them in the crucifixion of Christ and the giving of the Spirit and failed to understand the significance of this when it comes to the life of gatherings. In 1.30-2.16, Paul defines Jesus as the source of God’s wisdom and that the teachers collaboratively together, not competitively, have the mind of Christ in virtue of the diverse inspirations of the Spirit working together. While Paul primarily emphasizes God’s work through the Holy Spirit in 1 Cor. 2, what is also at stake is an understanding of who Jesus is. He is not merely a teacher of wisdom pitted against others teachers, but He is the source of God’s wisdom, echoing a familiar theme in Proverbs 8 and Second Temple Judaism of a hypostatized wisdom that was in involved in the creation and operation of the world.

What were the Corinthians primarily thinking about Jesus? It is difficult to pin down exactly what they were thinking because we only have Paul’s side with a few briefs hints. However, a few clues could point us in the right direction. Firstly, the philosophy of Stoicism was the prevailing philosophy of the day in circles of Roman power. One of the bigger themes that the Stoics taught about God is about the providence of God. There is a regular order and function of the world and cosmos, and Stoics like Seneca and Epictetus identified this order as “God” or “Zeus.” Occasionally, noteworthy and virtuous figures of wisdom would come around who exemplified some imitable trait. For instance, Epictetus in his Discourses 3.26.27-28 says the following:

Does any good man fear that he may run out of food? The blind don’t run out of food, nor do the crippled; so will a good man run out of it? A good soldier doesn’t fail to find someone to employ him and pay him his wages, nor does a good workman or a good cobbler; so will a good man fail to find anyone? Does God so neglect his own creatures, his servants, his witnesses, the only people he can make use of as an example (παραδείγμασιν) to the uneducated, to prove that he both exists and governs the universe wisely, and doesn’t neglect human affairs, and that nothing bad ever happens to a good person, either during his lifetime or after his death?

The idea is such that particular people show off the nature of God’s providence to the world. That the Corinthians are thinking about God’s providence is evident in Paul’s demonstration of their contradictory beliefs about Jesus’ resurrection and the general resurrection in 1 Cor. 15.12-19. In v. 19 he concludes his rebuttal of their contradictory beliefs by saying: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (NRSV) This verse here perhaps identifies what is happening with some of the Corinthians: some are thinking that Christ is a hope for the present life alone. While the connection isn’t directly in the text, so we there is no proof of this, it is plausible to suggest that the Corinthians’ believed Jesus to be an example of God’s own caring providence, similar to how Epictetus reasoned. Perhaps some Corinthians thought Jesus as a teacher who taught the wisdom about the way the world presently is, rather than one in whom God has demonstrated His world-changing wisdom in the resurrection. Christ did not simply teach some wisdom about God and the world, but in His very person, the events of His life, crucifixion, and resurrection have revealed the very nature of God’s wisdom to be a world-changing, world-shaking wisdom from God.

Now, this brings us to 1 Corinthians 10.1-13. Before getting into its relationship to Exodus 23, we can imagine one possible purpose for Paul in this discourse for the Corinthians in their hearing. If they have understood Christ as simply a teacher that made known God’s providence, then what is the harm of failing to obey? In the Stoic philosophical, wisdom was in part about aligning oneself to the way the world is ordered. But in 1 Corinthians 10, Paul portrays Jesus as actively involved in the life of Israel in the wilderness. This is no mere providence that failure to obey simply lead to some mild consequence based upon failing to be appropriately aligned to the order of things; Israel’s disobedience leads to God’s displeasure and action even as Christ was providing for them. This would serve as a warning to the Corinthians that even as they are experiencing the blessings of Christ through the Spirit, God could be displeased with their behavior.

What I want to first highlight here is that Paul does not portray Christ as the destroyer. He is Israel’s protector and provider, but as stated in 1 Cor. 10.9, Israel’s response to Christ (or the Lord depending on the manuscript) lead to the appearance of serpents. Paul doesn’t say that Christ sent the serpents, but only suggests there was a connection between the two. But if you take a close look at the passage Paul is referring to, Numbers 21.4-9, the only people being said to be spoken against is God and Moses (v. 5). While those of us who are confessional, orthodox Christians might be tempted to connect Jesus in 1 Cor. 10.9 to God, the Old Testament did not express a latent Trinitarian theology. What I want to suggest, however, is that Christ is identified by Paul as the one that joins God and Moses together; that is, a messenger who both expresses God’s will and guides Moses. To speak against both God and Moses, therefore, is to speak also against Christ.

This is where Exodus 23 comes in. The figure introduced is described in Hebrew as a מַלְאָךְ. If you were to peruse through the Old Testament, מַלְאָךְ would often be used to refer to figures that we ourselves would refer to as angels, such as the angel who comes to Abraham in Genesis 22.9-19. But מַלְאָךְ is not used exclusively for what we would refer to as angels. Numbers 20.14-16, for instance, uses the word to refer to a messenger sent by Moses and a messenger sent from God. The word here can be clearly used to refer to human messengers in addition to the “messenger” that God sent to protect Israel. In other words, מַלְאָךְ doesn’t have to mean angel.

The problem that has occurred with our reading of the Old Testament is what I would describe as an ontic assumption of semantic meaning: that is to state that the meaning of a word is determined by what it is used to reference. For instance, a cat refers to a figure that we know in our head as a “cat.” The ontic assumption of semantic meaning is a regular feature of Western philosophy where to know something is to know its substance/essence/nature. We know something by knowing what it is. When this way of thinking penetrates into language, we think “our language refers to what something is.” So, when we see the word מַלְאָךְ, we are tempted to think “angel.” But then, this type of reading deconstructs in Numbers 20.14-16. מַלְאָךְ isn’t an angel, but rather a messenger. מַלְאָךְ seems better defined as describing the role someone has taken rather than a description of their nature. The sense of the word מַלְאָךְ is not to describe an ontological class of beings, but rather the purpose these entities have in relationship to Moses and to God.

In other words, I would say Exodus 23.20-23 is not referring to an angel, but to an entity that serves the purpose of guiding and directing Israel. We see this explicitly stated of this messenger in 23.21: “Be attentive to him and listen to his voice; do not rebel against him.” This figure had the role of instructing Israel as he led Israel along the way. However, as the narrative develops, we don’t see this figure teaching Israel. It is Moses who teaches Israel.

I would suggest it is in this narrative silence that allows Paul sees Christ as guiding and leading Israel, including but not limited to leading them through Moses. Hence, he can consider Christ being tested when God sends the serpents. However, we also see him being the one who followed Israel (1 Cor. 10.4) just as the messenger of the Lord followed the camp of Israel (Exodus 14.19).¹ Furthermore, the messenger of the Lord in Exodus 23.20-23 is never spoken of as attacking people, but rather the Israelite’s response to the messenger will determine how God acts and responds to his enemies; likewise Paul does not describe Christ as destroying the Israelites. Finally, and for the cherry on the top, this messenger is said to have “[God’s] name in him.” (Exodus 23.21)

However, it needs to be clarified: if this is the case, this is not Paul reading Christ as appearing all throughout the Old Testament when there are various figures that are sent by God. Paul is not identifying Jesus with all messengers/angels in the Old Testament. To do so is to treat Paul’s reading of the Old Testament like a textbook where specific terms have technical meanings that are used the same way again and against. In a previous post when I mentioned this idea about Exodus 23.20-23 and 1 Corinthians 10.1-13 in brief, I suggested that there was an early heresy among early believers that reduced Jesus to an angel, which I take the letter to the Hebrews to be evidence of. Had the early Church made a connection between Jesus and the messenger in Exodus 23.20-23, those people influenced by a more Hellenistic way of reading might have interpreted the מַלְאָךְ (or ἄγγελος in the LXX) under the direct or indirect influence of Greek philosophy and saw it as a description of the figures nature rather than function. In that case, if Exodus 23.20-23 was an early passage used to connect Jesus to God, a Hellenistic influence might have made them think Jesus was angel, rather than Jesus was the one who God sent. Speculative as that is, what we an say with some confidence is that for Paul, he is identifying Jesus with God’s protective and redemptive purposes in Israel’s story. He is identifying Jesus acting in Israel’s narrative to help the Corinthians understand the role that Jesus should have among them, in addition to showing how God responses to those who disregards His messenger. He is not trying to do Old Testament ‘ontology,’ but rather elucidate the significance of the Old Testament narrative.

To conclude with a final thought, the conjunction of Paul’s understanding of Jesus as the wisdom of God and as the one who directed Israel highlights the nature of his high Christology. Paul does not simply identify Jesus with some figure connected to God in the Old Testament. Rather, it seems more plausible and simply to suggest that Paul identifies Jesus with God, and as a consequence, he then identifies Jesus with the messenger of the lord and with God’s wisdom. What this means, however, is that understanding Jesus in His role as Lord and the Son of God can not be reduced to what is known about those figures in the Old Testament, but that He is one who encompasses those literary references but is more than what those literary references originally referred to.

In recent months, I have become incredibly interested in the topic of Scriptural inspiration. It largely draws from studies in 1 Corinthians 2 and my growing conviction that 1 Cor. 2.6-16 is Paul describing the way that God’s wisdom emerges in the community, and not individual teachers and believers, in virtue of the Spirit’s diverse inspiration of various teachers and the mature to understand wisdom. While Paul’s account there is explicitly NOT an account of Scriptural inspiration, there is a certain idea that I found particularly compelling to consider for understanding Scriptural inspiration: that of collaborative inspiration of persons.

To understand what I mean by collaborative inspiration, it is first necessary to look at a similar concept of inspiration before I describe the account of collaborative inspiration. Thomas à Kempis wrote in his classic The Imitation of Christ that “TRUTH, not eloquence, is to be sought for in Holy Scripture. Each part of the Scripture is to be read with the same Spirit wherewith it was written.”¹ In this account of inspiration, we find something that differs from many standard accounts of Scriptural inspiration today. Many understandings of inspiration consider the Scriptural text itself as inspired, with the implication that anyone who reads the Scriptures can then possess the truth. While the author is inspired, the reader doesn’t have to be inspired themselves to possess knowledge of the truth. Instead, can come to know the truth in virtue of rightly interpreting the Scriptures, which among the more dedicated and reflective readers of the Bible may lead to the question of Biblical hermeneutics. However, Kempis’ account of inspiration treats the inspiration of the reader as a necessary condition for understanding, not just the author. While Kempis does not expand this idea further, one can try to provide a model for what can explain Kempis’ account, although we do not need to treat the extrapolated accounts of necessarily being authentic to Kempis.

One way to develop this account is to suggest that the Holy Spirit influences the Scriptural reader to direct their understanding of the words in the right way so as to understand what the inspired author wrote. That is to state that a person can understand the truth from the Scriptures because the Spirit provides what is missing in the mind of the interpreter to make sense of the words that are given. My problem with this account, however, is that it treats the Scriptures essentially as containing a secret knowledge that can not be rightly understood at all (or at least, usually won’t be rightly interpreted if one imagines the uninspired persons are simply ignorant but not being actively hindered from understanding it) unless a person is inspired in their comprehension. It isn’t actually reading the words that provide the ability to comprehend the Scripture. Reading is largely a superfluous activity, but the Spirit comes in to provide the right reading. This feels a bit too much of a “God-of-the-gaps” for human cognitive and hermeneutics for me to be comfortable with the idea.

Another account is to suggest that the inspiration of the Spirit leads the reader to understand the same content as the author, but the inspiration does not come in the act of reading, but it comes through other events prior to reading, such as in prayer, service, or even as per Kempis work, imitating Christ. In this case, the act of reading and interpreting the Scriptures is instrumental for a person to come to a knowledge of the truth, but it can only be done successfully by the Spirit’s inspiration of the person in other parts of their life. I consider this a stronger account than the first model for that reason. In addition, it corresponds to what I deem to be the cause of Spiritual comprehension by the mature in 1 Cor. 2.15: the ethical formation of people by their behaviors that are consistent with the leading of the Spirit rather than working against the Holy Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 3.1-4; 6.14-20).

Nevertheless, I think this account falls short for another reason. The problem is with the idea that the purpose of the Scriptures is to provided truth. To be clear, I am NOT rejecting the idea that Scriptures convey something we can call the truth. However, notwithstanding the thorny philosophical problems that are connected to defining what exactly truth is, is a more pragmatic concern: knowledge almost never is SIMPLY about possessing truth. Most forms of knowledge in day to day life can be considered to generally provide other epistemic goods in addition to the epistemic good of truth. For instance, the knowledge that a therapist possesses does not simply help them to accurately understand the thoughts and feelings of their clients; it is also instrumental in helping their clients to change from old patterns into new patterns. The professional knowledge of a therapist provides not just truth but also effective action.

For a more religious example, the Sermon on the Mount is not generally considered to provide a true account of Jesus’ ethics. To simply be able to know ethical truths about God’s will and speak about them isn’t the intention of the Sermon on the Mount. One can simply speak such truths while lacking it in actions, such as the wolf in sheep’s clothing which uses the expression of the truth to cloak their destructive behaviors. Jesus’ words of wisdom should also deliver a sense of moral virtue that is consistent with the truth. And, it seems that the way Jesus distinguishes himself from the common hermeneutical practices (5.17-48) and religious practices (6.1-5) of the Pharisees and hypocrites does more than simply say “This is what is true” but can actively direct the audience to a form of knowledge that directs them to be different in their religious and moral behaviors.

In other words, while the Scriptures can convey knowledge truth,² the Scriptures are normatively intended to provide more than just knowledge of the truth. It also provides knowledge that can direct people in wisdom, form people in virtue, provide comfort and direction in trying circumstances, etc. etc. Most evangelical accounts of inspiration tend to focus on the epistemic good of truth and overlook the rest.

This is where I can consider a collaborative inspiration fitting in: the inspiration of the Spirit provides the capacity for the interpretation of Scriptures to be direct towards the right epistemic goods, besides or in addition to truth. That is to state that an inspired interpreter is inspired to have the sort of knowledge from Scripture that delivers the epistemic goods that God purposes. An inspired interpreter does not simply reconstruct the thoughts of the inspired author, but rather uses what the author inspired for purposes that the author did not have directly in mind. In other words, the interpreters of Scripture are inspired in the usage and application of Scripture and knowledge that comes from Scripture.

Let me use Jesus’ teaching on divorce as an example. One can clearly see that Jesus teaches against divorce, describing divorce as causing of adultery (Matthew 5.31-32). However, in some very conservative, evangelical circles, they consider the Scriptures to provide an inspired knowledge of the truth, and they consider this form of knowledge to be in the form of as a universal moral rule that allows for no exception. If a woman is in an abusive marriage, they may be encouraged to remain in that marriage rather than getting out of it. For them, the Scriptures are inspired to provide truth, and then through their own ways of transforming the ethical truth into a universal moral rule, apply that knowledge is a way that supports marital abuse.

My account differs in that while the inspiration of the author makes the Scriptures reliable for coming to the truth, the interpreters are inspired to know how to use that knowledge in the appropriate ways that are consistent with God’s will and purposes. For instance, in 1 Cor. 7.10-11, Paul shows awareness of Jesus’ teaching about divorce. However, in 1 Cor. 7.12-16, Paul seems to allow an “exception” to Jesus’ teaching under conditions of an unbelieving spouse who leaves. What I would suggest, however, is that Paul isn’t making an exception, which assumes that Jesus’ ethical teaching on divorce should be understood as a universal moral precept. Rather, Paul considers the Spirit to be leading him to provide instruction about martial matters as he concludes his instructions on marriage in 1 Cor. 7 with the statement “I think that I too have the Spirit of God” in 7.40b. I take this to be Paul’s way of stating his authorization to present the teaching about marriage that he does from 7.12 to 7.40a: the Spirit has inspired him to provide ethical instructions regarding marriage, including providing freedom to the spouses of unbelievers that they are free if their spouse leaves. As Paul’s expression in 1 Cor. 7.12-16 has the knowledge of Jesus’ teaching in the immediate context, one can consider the Spirit to have inspired Paul in the application of Jesus’ teachings. In a similar, an inspired interpreter who recognizes God’s purposes for life could recognize that Jesus’ teaching on divorce should not be used in a way that compels such abuse for the sake of keeping a marriage together.

However, I want to clarify my point here. My model for understanding the inspiration of the interpreter by the Spirit is not that the Spirit simply provides a specific application of Scriptural knowledge. One can come to the conclusion that Jesus’ teachings on divorce should not apply to situations of abuse based on some other form of moral reasoning that doesn’t necessitate the inspiration of the Spirit. For instance, one can interpret Jesus’ norms against the background of a consequentialist ethic that considers the consequences of when and where one applies Jesus’s teaching on divorce, coming to the conclusion that it is wrong because it leads to an evil result in perpetuating abuse. Rather, the Spirit inspires the interpreter to recognize good and evil in a more expanded sense by teaching them to recognize and pursue God’s purposes. The Spirit inspires the interpreter of Scripture to comprehend the larger vision of God’s will that the Scriptures testify to, rather than just getting the application right in a specific circumstance or type of circumstance.

This vision of inspiration can apply to more than just ethical application, however. It can also provide a basis for biblical theology and theological exegesis. Understanding the meaning of a specific passage or even a specific book, which is the task of traditional exegesis, is different from connecting the interpretations of various parts of Scripture together to a coherent whole. On the assumption that God did inspire the various producers of the whole canon of Scripture for the Christian tradition and that this inspiration included true beliefs about God, then the diversity of portrayals of God throughout the Scripture can be considered to be able to be brought together into a coherent understanding. The account of collaborative inspiration would suggest that the authors of Scripture did not have to have the larger, coherent account in mind to communicate within the specific communicative situation, but that in virtue of God’s inspiration, their inspired communication can be regarded as consistent with that of another person’s inspired communication, even if the way to hold the accounts as consistent may not be easily or readily apparent. However, an inspired interpreter could have the ability to make sense of the whole that the original authors of Scripture did not. In so doing, their inspiration provides a form of truth and knowledge that is (a) entirely dependent upon the Scriptures and its interpretation but (b) is not reducible to the Scriptures and its interpretation.

However, once again, this account of inspiration does not state that the Spirit provides a theological account of the whole Scripture and knowledge of God. One might consider it possible that a person who is not inspired to come to an understanding of the Scriptures as a whole can still derive true beliefs about the Scripture. However, it is the Spirit who provides a deeper sense of understanding of God and God’s will that enables theological exegesis.

The distinction I am making between the getting the right ethical application of Scripture of a right theological interpretation and the Spirit who inspires people to understand of God and God’s will that determines the way they interpret the Scriptures is that the inspiration of the latter is reliable in a way that people in the former conditions can not be. Put differently, the uninspired interpreter may get the right application of theological understanding in virtue of some reason other than understanding God, which means that the rightness of their interpretations and applications are contingent upon how much their other reason corresponds to God.

For instance, let’s assume the doctrine of the Trinity is true and an uninspired reader, whether a believer or an unbeliever, and believes the New Testament is rightly understood through the lens of the Trinity. Their knowledge about the Trinity in the abstract sense will impact how they interpret the references to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. However, if the Spirit has inspired a person to understand God in a Trinitarian manner in a more concrete way that resembles God’s own self-knowledge, the way that they might interpret those same references will differ in virtue of their concrete rather that differs from the abstract form of knowledge of the Trinity. In this case, we can imagine that the inspired interpreter will be more reliable than the uninspired interpreter.

To conclude, the reason this account is a collaborative account is that the inspired interpreter is absolutely dependent upon the inspired communicators of Scripture. The Spirit does not provide them a form of knowledge or wisdom that makes them independent of the priests, prophets, apostles, witnesses who were inspired in their communication. They don’t get a God’s-eye view of the God and the world that allows them to judge the inspired communicators of Scripture and accept or dismiss them in virtue of having some criteria of truth to make such a differentiation. A person that God inspires in interpretation is always dependent upon God’s inspiration of other persons. Furthermore, a collaborative account recognizes that the inspired interpreter may bring something new to the table from God that can not be reduced to what the Scriptures say.

However, what is brought “new” isn’t necessarily some new, big idea that everyone needs to accept to be faithful to God part from situation and circumstance, but it is a newness that is for the specific range of situations and circumstances that God intends. While, hypothetically, God could provide a new revelation that all believers should accept, I would say from my own personal feeling and thinking that God’s inspiration is primarily focused on bringing something new not on a universal scale but to specific circumstances and needs. In other words, to be an inspired interpreter is not to have a wide, sweeping epistemic authority across various people that should be accepted, but that God is bringing about His will and purposes within a specific context or contexts through the Spirit’s inspiration of an interpreter.

Finally, this view of inspiration still allows for the role of interpretation of the Scripture through traditional hermeneutical principles and the possibility that they can be instrumental in getting at a right or true interpretation. The inspired interpreter isn’t necessarily getting the true knowledge as directly expressed in Scriptures in virtue of their inspiration, but rather the application of the Scripture as a different epistemic good or the theological comprehension of Scripture as a different type of truth than the form of truth expressed in Scripture. It does not rule out the role of education and learning in some sort of anti-intellectual aversion, but it does place a fence around the role that education can and does have in the interpretation of Scripture for the purposes of God’s Kingdom.