Shored Fragments

Exam marking season–oh joy!–intensifies a thought that I have had for a while. One of the repeated problems in theological debate is a particular form of caricature. I can think of published examples of this sort of caricature in theological criticism of historical Biblical scholarship; Evangelical criticisms of Barth; post-liberal criticisms of classical liberalism; liberal criticisms of Evangelicalism; proponents of divine passibility criticising classical theism; and lots more. It is endemic in student papers.

The common caricature is this: a position is attributed to an opponent that highlights the (supposed) errors of their position without pausing to recognise the strengths; as a result, what is criticised is a straw man, a malformed parody that is at best a grotesque semblance of anything anyone ever actually believed. I repeatedly find myself saying to students, ‘if Barth (or Schleiermacher, or C.F. Henry, or John Owen, or the Council of Trent, or …) really believed that, why did anyone ever take him seriously?’ It seems to me an important question: if my reconstruction or presentation of this or that position is so easy to dismiss, then I have probably not understood the position.

There are two forms of this that are perhaps particularly dangerous, because so easy to justify. Conservative critics sometimes feel no need to understand the attraction of liberal or revisionist positions because they assume that all that is not ‘orthodox’ (or what they understand to be ‘orthodox,’ which in my experience is rather too often a far more thorough departure from the historic Christian tradition than the thing they are criticising) is motivated by a caving in to ‘worldliness’. Those who reject penal substitutionary atonement (to take an endemic recent example) are not, on such a telling, motivated by a desire to be faithful to the Biblical witness (even if they have misunderstood it), or by a proper concern for Christian ethical living, but are simply caving in to cultural pressure…

Second, modern scholars seem to find it very easy to assume that ancient writers were stupid. Critics of classical theism blithely assert that the Fathers did not spot that Greek philosophy was a different religious tradition to Hebrew theism, and (when it comes to divine passibility), that they lacked our clearer grasp of what suffering means. The martyrs may have been wrong about all sorts of theological points, but I suspect that they were aware that their faith was counter-cultural, and I venture to suggest that they knew a little about the reality of suffering…

The story is told that, when he taught on Schleiermacher, Barth made it a rule that no-one was allowed to criticise in any way for the first term; until you have learnt just how attractive Schleiermacher’s theology is, you are not yet able to explain why he is wrong. Surely this is true of any theology: unless you feel the attraction, know why another generation of students was captivated, fascinated, by this theology, you have not yet understood it. and until you have understood it, you have no right and no ability to critique it.

Barth had longer than I do; but I lecture through a course entitled ‘Contemporary Theology and its challenges’, and I feel a duty–a duty that is moral and Christian, not just academic–to make the students feel the force of those challenges, before offering an account of some potential solutions. We get to the doctrine of God: an hour on Kant, and von Harnack (and Charles Hodge) following carefully the logic that says Trinitarian doctrine is either spurious speculation or (at best, with Schleiermacher) useless orthodoxy, with no practical implications. Feel it. Feel the problem. Then when we open up Barth and Rahner and Zizioulas, perhaps you will understand why people found them exciting. And then the divine perfections, and of course I want to defend impassibility, aseity, simplicity, immutability, but we’ll spend an hour on protest atheism–starting with Voltaire’s mockery of Pangloss, hearing voices echoing out of Auschwitz and Buchenwald; listening to Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion; suffering (those of a certain age will remember it’s pretty painful) Depeche Mode’s Blasphemous Rumours, even (’I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours, but I think that God’s got a sick sense of humour. And when I die, I expect to find him laughing.’). Then we move to Moltmann’s response to protest atheism, the crucified God who, alone, has a right to claim deity. I end reading Shillito’s Jesus of the Scars (’To our wounds, only God’s wounds can speak–and not a God has wounds, save Thou alone’)

Each year, at the end of that hour, I wonder whether Moltmann and Lewis and Fiddes and the rest are right, whether I need to re-write the lectures that claim to rescue divine impassibility. I wonder even whether Ivan Karamasov was right, whether the fact that one child has once cried in this universe means divine justice can no longer be believed in.

I think that if I didn’t feel these pulls, I would have no right, and no ability, to teach about divine perfection in the next class.

It seems to me that most people who claim to subscribe to the Reformed symbols today fail in both excess and defect.

There is an excess in that the symbols are elevated to some sort of timelessly normative standard which appears to rival Scripture. It is not difficult to find language of the symbols as ‘defining’ the Reformed faith. This is, bluntly, rubbish. Scripture alone defines faith for anyone who can hope to pretend to the title ‘Reformed’. Certain symbols may be welcomed insofar as they are judged to express the true teaching of Scripture. They are, to repeat myself, norma normata, not norma normans. This is not an abstruse or difficult distinction, but it is a vital, and routinely forgotten, one.

(An illustration might help: my university has various policies to which I am required to adhere, on such matters as health and safety of employees and students, a refusal to discriminate on ethnic or gender lines, &c. These policies exist largely as interpretations of certain legislative acts of the Westminster, Brussels, and Holyrood parliaments. If at any point the policy could be demonstrated to contradict the legislation, it would be the (legal) duty of any employee of the university to disregard the policy and to obey the legislation. The policies are thus rather precisely norma normata, subordinate to the norma normans which are the laws of Scotland, the United Kingdom, and the European Community. Just so, the symbols have real, but subordinate and potentially revocable, authority over those churches which have adopted them as helpful interpretations of Scripture.)

There is also a defect, in that no-one seems prepared simply to grant the symbols authority. This was the point of my previous post.

Finally, a perhaps interesting historical side-note: in the discussion over the Enns affair, everybody has been throwing around the term ‘The Westminster Confession’. As far as I can see, though, no-one has paused to specify which document they are referring to. Westminster Seminary California, according to its own website, does not hold to the 17th century Westminster Confession; it holds to the 1787 Philadelphia revision (it doesn’t tell you this; it just publishes the 1787 version under the heading ‘Westminster Confession’) the main WTS website links to an outside site which publishes the text that is usually referred to as ‘The Westminster Confession,’ a text that has no ecclesial validity at all that I can determine, in that it adopts parts (mainly the Scripture proofs) of the 1648 edition (the one edited at the request of the English parliament), whilst ignoring other parts of that edition (the Erastian ammendments of articles XX, XXIV, XXX and XXXI). The Scots parliament received the original edition in 1648; after Cromwell’s death, the English parliament chose in 1659 to accept the original articles XX and XXIV, but still refused XXX and XXXI. And so on.

Various other American Presbyterian groups hold to the 1799 revision, the Cumberland revision, the 1858 revision, &c. In most cases the differences relate to the role of the civil magistrate as governor and protector of the church; the Westminster standards teach unambiguously the unity of church and state (there are other changes: in some of the later American editions the pope is not identified as the antichrist; in others all who die in infancy are saved, rather than just ‘elect infants’).

There are a couple of small American denominations that hold to the original Westminster Standards, which are interesting case-studies in what it is to be confessional. The Reformed Presbyterian Church held to the original standards, and so maintained a principled political dissent, refusing to participate in the US political process, into the nineteenth century (they seem now to have weakened this witness). Other groups, believing (arguably rightly) that they have no right to edit the work of a synod, receive the confession as written, but then add riders to the effect that they have chosen to demur on certain points–in our Baptist language, the Lord has been pleased to grant more light and truth, and so the confession needs amending.

So what? Well, perhaps four comments. First, none of the revisions affect Article I, which is what the Enns affair is allegedly about, so all this confusion might not matter. But, second, the confusion is perhaps slightly worrying. Do WSC and WTS really hold to different confessions (1787 and 1647-ish)? If not, which one has been sufficiently sloppy on its website to publish the wrong confession? If WTS really holds to the confession it links to, how do its faculty and students deal with the unambiguous teaching of the unity of church and state? (The RPC was right, as far as I, admittedly an outsider both politically and ecclesially, can see: if you believe the 1647 Confession, participation in the American political process is necessarily anti-Christian.)

Third, this all illustrates why we actually need to study symbolics, rather than just shouting about being confessional. As a Baptist, of course, I regard the church/state teaching of 1647 as erroneous; but, bluntly, the 1787 revision, which was simply a writing in of current political realities to the confession to make it congenial to the nascent Republic, is hardly the right answer (that’s not the separation of church and state, it’s the subjection of church to state!). The edition of the Confession contained in the 1658 Savoy Declaration is a far happier document in theological terms in my judgement (unsurprisingly; its main author was John Owen). If we are going to claim to be confessional, we need to understand this history (it’s not hard work…), and our churches and institutions need to be prepared to evaluate the differing documents and choose between them (that is hard work…).

Fourth, and here I tread with trembling, because I am about to challenge the theological insight of Owen, I do wonder whether all these revisions to the magistracy articles are not incoherent. I have a suspicion that, if you analyse it closely enough, the soteriology, ecclesiology, and political theology of the Westminster Confession are mutually implicated. That is, the particular form of federal Calvinism, the particular Presbyterian polity, and the account of the role of the magistrate, are related outworkings of the same theological commitments. One of the lessons of the study of symbolics is that the good symbols have a deep inner coherence that demands respect; I suspect that you cannot change the political theology of the Westminster Standards without damaging or undermining their account of soteriology.

As I say, this is no more than a suspicion, but perhaps it is an interesting one…

I won’t name the liturgical resource, because it is a good one, a very good one, and does not deserve to be vilified for one slip, but I was glancing through it, and lighted upon the Pentecost service. ‘Consider,’ it invited us, ‘Jesus’ command in Acts 1:8…’Acts 1:8 reads: ἀλλὰ λήμψεσθε δύναμιν ἐπελθόντος τοῦ ἀγίου πνεύματος ἐφ ὑμᾶς καὶ ἔσεσθέ μάτυρες ἔν τε Ἰερουσαλὴμ καὶ [ἐν] πάση τῆ Ἰουδαία καὶ Σαμαρεία καὶ ἔως ἐσχάτου τῆς γῆς. (’But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be witnesses in Jerusalem,and in all Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’–my tr.)

Forgive the grammarian in me, but this is all in the indicative mood, not the imperative mood; there is no ‘command’. Jesus is here stating realities, not issuing instructions.

I suspect that the most common way of eviscerating the gospel in our churches is this: making indicatives imperatives. We turn promise into command; gospel into law. I know why we do it: anyone who has been a pastor does. We struggle with people who take the gospel for granted, and we want to illustrate to them the radical claims of Christ on their lives. I won’t even say that the instinct is wrong (although I will confess to giving in to it far too often and far too readily in my own ministry); but turning Biblical promises into demands is no way to deal with it. When Jesus says ‘you will…’ he means–you will. Not ‘you might’, or ‘you should’, or even ‘if you do x you will’, but ‘you will’. And so for the rest of Scripture.

And so Acts 1:8: the promise, to the eleven at least, and I suspect to all Christians (I take it that all who have come to Christ in penitence and faith, been baptized and received into the church have received the gift of the Spirit here promised), is that they will be witnesses. This is not an instruction that we should evangelise, but a promise that, somehow, at some level, in some way, despite so much of what we are and do, when people encounter us, they will see a glimpse of Jesus.

I wonder if we took this promise seriously as a promise, believed that Christian people will witness to Jesus regardless, whether our evangelistic strategies would look different?

More thoughts on eschatology…

I am fully convinced–and became so in pastoral ministry, performing funerals–that we cannot and should not speculate about the eternal fate of any particular person. God will judge, and (my other Spring Harvest soundbite) when we see God’s judgement we will be astonished by the depths of His mercy, and by the heights of His justice.

The NT offers many chillingly serious warnings about the reality of God’s eschatological severity (the main reason I find universalism too easy a way out), but will never speak of any named human person in hell. (In a parable, Lazarus is received into Abraham’s embrace, ‘a certain rich man’ is condemned to suffer; the most the New Testament will say of Judas is that he will ‘go to the place prepared for him’.) Those condemned to torment are classes of people–’the idolaters, the sexually immoral, …’–and of course any class can potentially turn out to be empty. If the NT will not speculate about the particular inhabitants of hell, nor should we.

At the trivial level, this is no more than the old ‘we never know what went on in someone’s heart in the minutes before death,’ which remains true as far as it goes. But I want to take it much further than this. Too many Evangelical accounts of personal eschatology are simply Pelagian: I make decisions, and God responds to them. This has to be wrong. If salvation always coincides with visible faith, then it is because God decides to save, and as a result grants faith (see Edwards’s sermon on justification by faith for some very close analysis of this), not because I decide to have faith and thereby force God to do something different. (Almost no-one ever held that salvation always coincides with visible faith, though; the 10-20% mortality rate amongst infants in pre-penicillin Europe & America saw to that.) What determines the outcome is not what goes on in my heart, but what goes on in God’s heart, and what God does to my heart.

All of which is to say that my hope of salvation for myself, or any other human being, is primarily based on what I know of God, not on what I believe to be true about me, or about them. If our level of eschatological questioning is ‘where’s grandma?’, this will not be a helpful perspective, but–as I want to keep saying–that is almost certainly not the right place to start.

(How, though, in pastoral ministry to answer it? Point to the gospel promises, of course; point to the passages of Scripture that speak of God’s desire that all may be saved; and then stand with Abraham in the face of the deadly serious threats of God’s severity and ask ‘will not the judge of all the earth do justly?’ - Abraham understood doing justly as showing an astonishing level of mercy.)

In a public conversation with Ian Coffey (at this conference), I hit upon a phrase, quite by accident, which I’ve been musing on since. A vital theme in Christian eschatology is an adequate account of ‘the lack of eschatological regret’. That is, it seems to me a necessary part of the experience of eternal life that there is nothing we–or indeed God–look[s] back on and thinks ‘I wish it had been different’.

One consequence of this, of some pastoral importance, is the suggestion that I will not regret God’s sovereign decisions concerning the final fate of my parents, wife, children, …

A universalist stance is acceptable on this canon, it seems to me (even if not on several others); the older Reformed orthodoxy which suggested (on the basis of a reading of Lk 16:19ff.) that the saints in heaven would see the sufferings of the damned, and rejoice at the display of the glory of God’s justice also makes sense in these terms (and is also unacceptable for various other reasons). Most of the recent ’soft conservative’ eschatologies just fail, however. Whether perdition is annihilation, or some form of conscious torment that is quietly ignored in heaven, unless I simply forget the relationships that have made me who I am on earth (and I don’t find Volf convincing on this point), I will still regret God’s decisions. And an eternity of regret is indistinguishable from hell, as far as I can see.

Ben, at Faith and Theology, has posted on the documents made public by Westminster Seminary that led to the suspension of Peter Enns, which has already generated a lot of discussion (Ben’s post and the ensuing discussion is here; the documents themselves can be found here).

I have not read Enns’s book; nor, I imagine, will I. (I am a devotee of Dr Johnson on such matters: ‘Whenever anyone publishes a new book, you should immediately go out and read an old one.’) I have, I confess, only glanced through the WTS statements. The discussion around the case, however, highlights something that has been of concern to me for a while: I fear that we no longer know how to be confessional.

I teach a course from time to time on ‘Christian Symbolics’. The fact that the title needs explanation is symptomatic (’symbols’ are creeds, confessions, catechisms and other ecclesially-authorised expressions of the faith). In that course I spend quite a lot of time discussing notions of authority, how symbols function as subordinate, but real, authorities (norma normata, as opposed to Scripture, which is the norma normans, in the classic scholastic formulation). I devoted a chapter of a book once to arguing that the real, and irreversible, authority of the ecumenical creeds could be established from a commitment to sola scriptura, and to exploring the particular authority of the confessions of a divided church. These seem to me to be important topics, that we need to understand better than we do.

What should we say of the Enns case? First, it seems to me that WTS cannot be criticised for being a confessional institution. It is open and honest about its stance, Enns and everyone else knows about it. Should confessional institutions exist? Seminaries exist to prepare ministers to serve particular church communities, and expecting staff and students to teach and act in accord with the basic decisions of those communities is surely reasonable. John Francke, who gave an interesting paper here yesterday, commented in passing that Princeton (the seminary, of course) has recently refused to admit a student on doctrinal grounds (s/he was non-Trinitarian).

Further, WTS has not attempted to re-write its doctrinal standards after the fact in order to exclude (a procedure which is not unknown in recent or ancient church history, and is despicable); it has not invoked shadowy unwritten standards. Enns has been accused of denying Article I of the Westminster Confession. Whether he did or not is a matter of judgement, but the charge is clear and meaningful.

But…

…glancing through the published material, my overwhelming sense is that the real problem is that WTS was not confessional enough, or at least not secure enough in its own confessional status. What was needed was a paragraph, at most two, saying ‘Peter Enns published the following statements which we judge to contradict such-and-such an article of the Westminster Confession of Faith,’ which could then have been argued over by interested parties. Instead, there are long explanations why Inspiration and Incarnation (Enn’s book, which led to the controversy) is a bad book, a dangerous book, wrong, unclear, &c., and even longer defences of the same points.

All these things are, of course, entirely beside the point. It is possible to write an astonishingly bad and dangerous book which is wholly in accord with the Westminster standards (or the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, or Baptist Faith and Message, or whatever); equally, had Enns’s book been universally hailed as the best thing ever written on the subject, it could still have contradicted the Confession. Being confessional means you have chosen not to argue about what is right or wrong in abstract, only about what is in conformity or not in conformity to your confessional basis.

When John McLeod Campbell was expelled from his ministry in Row by the General Assembly of the Kirk, it has always seemed to me that both sides were right: I have read (some of) McLeod Campbell’s Row sermons, and it seems clear that he was teaching that the atonement of Christ was universal in its effect: on this point, I think it is theologically necessary to think that he is right (I think limited/definite atonement doctrine can be rescued–indeed, I have a paper half-written making the attempt–but, for reasons I once explored in relation to Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of reprobation, I cannot accept that there is any portion of the human race for whom Christ’s atoning death is not a decisive event). Equally, and again having read the sermons, the Kirk was right to judge that his teaching contravened the Westminster Standards, and so was right to expel him. That’s what it means to be confessional.

Mark Driscoll seems to have been making quite a lot of capital recently with the claim that ‘ “God hates the sin, but loves the sinner” is not a Biblical claim–Gandhi said it, and he was on a different team to ours’ (variously phrased in different talks and publications, but this is the gist of it). The most charitable reconstruction of the logic would go something like this: ‘if Gandhi said it, it carries no authority for Christians, and so must be tested against Scripture; but various verses of Scripture (e.g. Ps. 5:5) speak of God hating the sinner; therefore the initial claim must be wrong.’

A moment’s research would have revealed to Driscoll that his claim is actually wrong. It struck me as implausible when I first read it (I’m no expert on Gandhi, but I’m not aware of his claiming privileged insight into God’s attitudes particularly often). What Gandhi actually said, according to Mohandas Gandhi’s 1929 biography, was that we should love the sinner whilst hating the sin, not that God did (an attitude, incidentally, commended rather earlier by St Augustine of Hippo, writing about the practice of discipline in a convent, which should always be applied cum dilectione hominum et odio vitorum Ep. 211).

What of God’s attitude? Driscoll makes his point in discussing the atonement, and actually raises a rather interesting question. Why does God not leave us in our sins? There are, at first sight, two recurrent answers in the Christian tradition. The first would be that God does in fact love the sinner in some meaningful way. This is Calvin’s answer: Habemus ergo omnes in nobis, quod Dei odio dignum sit…Verum quia Dominus quod suum est, in nobis perdere non vult, adhuc aliquid invenit quod pro sua benignitate amet. Utcunque enim peccatores vitio nostro simus, manemus tamen eius creaturae… (’For we all have that within us which is deserving of God’s hatred … But because the Lord wills not to lose that which is his within us, he still, from his own kindness, finds something to love. For however much we are sinners through our own fault, we also remain his creatures’ Inst. II.16.3; my translation).

The other view can be represented by St Anselm: multo magnis propter eandem inconvenientiam impossibile est, nullum hominem ad hoc provehi, ad quod factus est. (’It is much more the case, because of this same unfittingness, that it is impossible for no human being to be lifted up to the end for which s/he was made.’ CDH I.25) Salvation, here, is not a result of God’s love for the sinner, but of the ‘unfittingness’ of God not saving. I have explored this at some length in a published essay; I take Anselm’s point to be that God’s purposes in creating included the glorification of (some) human persons, and so, post-fall, for Him not to act to save would mean that human action (viz, sin) had frustrated God’s purposes, which is by supposition impossible.

In modern Reformed terms, does God act primarily out of love for His creatures, or out of concern for His own glory? I suspect that if the two positions are interrogated with an adequate account of divine simplicity in mind, there might be less difference between them than at first sight appears, but that would take a full paper to argue…

Of course, there is a sense in which Bultmann ought to be influential on all preaching, as one of the truly great exegetes of the NT text. Any preacher faced with a text in John who doesn’t reach for Bultmann’s commentary is at best ignorant, and more likely a fool. But that wasn’t really my point…

It strikes me that the best of Evangelical preaching (i.e., that which seriously engages with the text), at least of the sermons that I hear and read, is too influenced by form criticism. Even when a book is preached through sequentially, there is little attention paid, typically, to the overall narrative or logical flow of the book; instead, it is treated as a series of isolated pericopae, to be dealt with and mined for meaning one-by-one, too often with almost no sense that their arrangement within the book is of any consequence to the meaning.

So, from now on my big question for Evangelical preachers is, ‘How Bultmannian are you?’ I predict this will go down a storm.

At Spring Harvest I was sharing the ‘Radio 4′ sessions with Ann Holt of Bible Society every morning (they offer the teaching material in several formats, named after radio stations to give a flavour of the style; R4 is thoughtful and academic; ‘Radio 2′ mainstream and popular; ‘Edge FM’ deliberately alternative; and ‘Talk FM’ very interactive; it’s a nice way of dividing people up). I was also doing various lectures and discussion sessions on ‘heaven and hell’ in the afternoons and evenings, sharing with Steve Chalke and Russ Rook amongst others.

The theme was eschatology, ‘One Hope’. The teaching material stressed the ‘this worldly’ nature of Christian hope (looking for the resurrection of the body and the transformation of the Earth, rather than the immortality of the soul and our removal to heaven). Most people bought this quite quickly - the Bible and the Creed are clear enough on the matter, after all. And hearteningly few were of the opinion that anyone not carrying a pledge card from a Billy Graham crusade was immediately and necessarily condemned to everlasting torment.

Oddly, the question that arose, and obviously bothered people, was the ‘intermediate state’: what happens to us between death and final resurrection? In theological terms, it is an abstruse and rather irrelevant question, however, I quickly found some material Mike Higton and I prepared in a paper on ghosts we published a few years back, and gave a bit of input on this, but found myself wondering why it obviously concerned people. (My flippant response, before I spotted how much it was mattering to at least some, was ‘the destination is clear and certain; who cares if the route is slightly obscure in places?’)

Talking to folk, I think the reason for the interest was fundamentally pastoral: people want to know where Grandma is now. And that matters–it speaks to people of God’s love and care. A useful reminder of the need for theology to be responsible to the churches.

We are on the way back from two conferences, the Society for the Study of Theology in Durham and Spring Harvest in Minehead, of which more in another post. I wasn’t expecting my major book purchases from the two weeks to be new bibles–frankly, I’ve got several more than I use as it is…

We nevertheless came back with two more, just because they seemed to genuinely add something. The first was the first sight, at Spring Harvest, of the fruit of a project I’ve known about for a while, Bible Society’s Poverty and Justice Bible. Conceived in part as an antidote to the plethora of ‘Sanctified Students’ Daily Walk Bible with Exam Helps’ or ‘Working wives’ five minute holiness devotional Bible’, this is a Bible which highlights what the text is actually about, rather than what we’d like it to be about… Something like 3000 verses are highlighted as referring very directly to issues of poverty and justice, and there are 50 thoughtful bible studies in the centre pages. The translation used is BS’s own Contemporary English Version.

The other is The Jesus Storybook Bible, published by Zonderkidz (is there a viler-named publisher anywhere?!). It’s a children’s story Bible, with good re-tellings of various Biblical narratives (and other bits–it has a go at Isaiah, for instance), but with a very deliberate slant. The introduction says, in part, this:

…some people think the Bible is a book of rules … But the Bible isn’t mainly about you and what you should be doing. It’s about God and what he has done. Other people think the Bible is a book of heroes … but most of the people in the Bible aren’t heroes at all…

No, the Bible isn’t a book of rules, or a book or heroes. The Bible is most of all a Story. It’s an adventure story about a young Hero who comes from a far country to win back his lost treasure. It’s a love story about a brave Prince who leaves his palace, his throne - everything - to rescue the one he loves … There are lots of stories in the Bible, but all the stories are telling one Big Story. The Story of how God loves his children and comes to rescue them.

It takes the whole Bible to tell this Story. And at the center [yes, it's American...] of the Story, there is a baby. Every Story in the Bible whispers his name. He is like the missing piece in a puzzle - the piece that makes all the other pieces fit..

And so each story ends with a hint of how it is a part of the big story. The tower of Babel: ‘People didn’t need a staircase; they needed a Rescuer. Because the way back to heaven wasn’t a staircase; it was a Person. People could never reach up to Heaven, so Heaven would have to come down to them. And one day, it would.’ The birth of Isaac: ‘And one day God would send another baby, a baby promised to a girl who didn’t even have a husband. But this baby would bring laughter to the whole world. This baby would be everyone’s dream come true.’

Bibles for adults and children that suggest that the text is about Jesus, and about justice, instead of about pandering to our selfish desires and pathetic insecurities - this could be very, very dangerous…