Lisa Fields: Hello. Welcome to the Jew three Project podcast. I’m your host, Lisa Fields. I’m the founder of the Jew three Project.
Dr. Charlie Dates: Hello. My name is doctor Charlie Dates. I serve as the senior pastor of Chicago’s historic and iconic progressive Baptist church, and I wanna say what a delight it is for me to join you today, at the invitation of Lisa Fields and the Jude three Project to talk about preaching and culture today, and specifically, to ask and answer this question, is the Bible the problem in our preaching? Well, first of all, I think it’s important for me to maybe address what comes to mind right away, and that is why this question? What is it about our culture and in our world that even, say, presupposes that scripture is a problem? Well, the quick answer is that there is a suspicion that rather than the Bible being the actual word of God that gives us direction and insight about how to handle our problems, there are those who have a suspicion that the Bible itself is the source of our problems. We could look at this from a number of angles, racism being one of them. Why does God favor, create, and make of Abraham one nation, who we come to know as the Jewish people? What is the distinction between Jews and gentiles? Why are some people treated as if they are outside of the family of God and the network of God, even at the beginning and in the Old Testament? And some take that, and how they answer it, to establish a kind of protocol for racism, for an ethnocentrism, to put one ethnicity at the center and to relegate all the other submargins. So some say the Bible is the source of the problem for racism. Others say that the Bible is the source of problem for toxic patriarchy. Oh my goodness. Patriarchy is a significant discussion in our culture today because, we are wrestling with the plight of poor authority, not the fact that there is some authority, but poor authority. Actually, I could push it even further. When you look at ancient Israel calling the Lord king, for instance, in Jeremiah chapter eight round about verse 19, where is the Lord our God our king? They are using that in a kind of, poetic structure to say that the lord is king. They recognize him as a sovereign authority, and the reality is there are some in our culture who want no authority. They want to be their own authority, and the challenge with that is nobody gets to live in freedom and peace, abundance, or in goodwill without authority. I’ll give you an example. If, you pull up to the red octagonal sign at the end of the block, and it’s got four white letters on it that says STOP, and that STOP has been set there, and it means stop. But someone else reads that sign and says, well, that doesn’t apply to me. I make whatever rules I wanna make. I live however I wanna live. So I see a stop sign, and it means to me slow down, but keep going. And then there’s someone else who comes to the intersection and I I don’t even know that there should be a stop sign anywhere in our culture. We are free to make our own decisions to do what we wanna do. Nobody should be able to tell us when to start, when to stop, and so they recognize that stop sign, but they do nothing with it. They just keep going. If we got a culture like that, not only will accidents abound, but people will be injured and maimed in an ongoing fashion. It’s got a main stop to everybody in order for us to keep the roads safe, and some authority has to establish that, whereby all drivers, move along with it, or push a little further. It was Garrett A. Morgan who created the traffic, stop. Poignant black history note, Garrett A. Morgan was a black man who literally saved society by creating an automated, sign to tell people when to start and when to stop. Where would we be if everybody did whatever they wanted to do on the road, drove however they wanted to drive? And so you gotta answer the question early on when you think about the scripture as a source of authority, is authority a good thing? And in light of patriarchy or a sense of men exercising headship, leadership, and authority in difficult ways, the question of authority comes very clearly. I want to unpack some of these a little later, but I I want to say out the gate that the Bible does not in any way suggest that men are better than women or that men are superior to women, or that women are inferior to men in any way. No, we are co equal, co regent, made in the image and the likeness of God. God does not favor one upon the other. There are further things to explain there, but anybody who tells you that God made man superior to woman is not reading the scripture correctly, and that’s how we get not to patriarchy, but to a toxic patriarchy, a bad leadership and authoritative system. Somebody, by the way, some people, by the way, are going to have to exercise leadership and authority, and I think even when you look at the family at Ephesians five, I know I’m getting ahead of myself, you see mutual submission at work in the scriptures. That that is, if I’m a smart dude, I recognize that my wife is a very capable leader. And in fact, if I’m honest with you all on this tape, because you never know where these things end up, she’s a better leader in some areas than I am. And so if I’m wise about it, I let her do what God has created and gifted her to do. And if I love her well, she lets me serve and lead as God created me to serve and lead whatever God has created me to do, so already we’re seeing that it’s how we handle the scriptures, but some people argue that the scripture is the source source of our problems, like misogyny, like money, like slavery. I don’t have time to delve into all of these things, but I do want to say that the Bible never condoned American chattel slavery. So anybody who took the scriptures and said, slaves, obey your masters, as a principle, to elevate a principle to make enslaved persons, obey are misreading the scriptures for a number of reasons. That’s not what that means, and that was not the intent. So what is the scripture aiming for? That’s the question that I think you and I have to wrestle with. I preach the Bible every week. In fact, it is the content, the source of content for my sermon. I tend to think that my opinions as a human being are fleeting. They may be relevant. They may strike in the day and age, the era in which we live, but they will not be timeless. There is a timeless universal truth found in scripture, and I preach it every week, and at the same time, I know that I land at varying and differing points of emphasis and application than some other preachers do, and that becomes a greater question. How do you and I read the same text and land in different places? Well, we gotta answer the question, what exactly is the Bible aiming to do? And, oh, friends, that’s a question that if you answer it wrongly, will shave your system of interpretation. I wanna submit to you today that, want to I want to say that one more time. The Bible is aiming to bring order to the chaos that sin created. Now this is significant because the Bible is not necessarily trying to solve every problem. It is diagnosing our core problem from which all other problems stem, and it is giving early on in the Pentateuch the children of Israel a system, a way to live until greater solutions come and arrive. But the reality is, if you don’t and if you don’t believe this, you won’t be able to fully accept anything that I’m saying. Sin did a job on us. I’ll say that one more time. Sin did a job on us, There are a lot of people who define sin in different ways or don’t use sin at all. Sin, as a as a vocabulary word, as as a term to categorize things, has fallen on hard times in our culture. Some people don’t even use the word sin anymore. We use all kind of other descriptions. We we say, I have, an aberration of character, or I have an occasional slip of the tongue, or or I’ve got split personalities. I may spaz out, but that’s not really who I am. And we we try to come up with language to codify and explain away what is fundamentally broken about us, and that is that we are sinners. We are made in the image and likeness of God, but sin marred us, broke us, and now we see, as a result of our brokenness, we do not always seek God out. We do not always agree with God. We do not always treat one another as we ought to treat one another, and so this proposition that sin did a job on us is central to the argument for what scripture is aiming to do, and because sin did a job on us, sin also, according to the scriptures, did a job on creation. Oh, you gotta imagine with me, with the great poetic preachers of centuries ago, when they said that the rose, which was a beautiful stem without thorns, felt the effect of sand. It started to fight itself, and it eked out thorns. Or that willow, grand majestic tree, maybe hands and branches waving in the air. When sand hit, it fell over, and it went limp. Or the oceans that were nice and peaceful and calm started to roar and foam at the mouth, and lambs that used to lay down with lions in peace. Now lions to prey. Sin did a job on creation, but because humanity is affected by sin, now government is affected by sin, family is affected by sin. We see right at the beginning of the scripture the fallout of sin in a family, and you think your family is dysfunctional? You need to read the beginning pages of scripture to see just how dysfunctional these families were. Yo, grandma, get too much to drink at Thanksgiving and start telling family history and stories that you can’t believe, you ain’t the only one. Or if your uncle got another family somewhere else that nobody knew about, you ain’t the only one. Or if your cousins fight, and you gotta break them up because you’re afraid they’re gonna hurt each other. That’s that’s the story of the scripture, what sin did to us, because sin affected us. It marred our relationships, and it broke the family, and it broke government. Of course now, it has broken the way we handle money, the way we handle our ethnicity and our differences, the way that we handle policy and the marginalized and the poor. Listen, when God made the world, the reality is things were perfect. He gave us free will, and some people would say why. We don’t have to get into the great philosophical arguments around why, but he gave us free will within restriction. It’s kinda like the state of Illinois where I pastor in Chicago. The state of Illinois gives me a license. It’s the freedom to drive. That that’s what it is. It’s a permit to drive, but it does not give me freedom to ignore the rules of the road. There is a booklet that you gotta study and an exam you need to pass to say, you know what the rules of the road are. Just because you have freedom, you do not have permission to go rogue on the road, and so what the scriptures now do is the scripture comes in to establish order where sin brought chaos, and some of the law codes even of the Old Testament, they are not aiming to be perfect, to restore, the nation and people back to the Garden of Eden, as it were, in the first time. No. It’s a way more so to manage the fallout, the brokenness, and that’s where we see all kinds of rules and regulations for how to handle the poor. For people who get in debt, how do they get out of debt? For land ownership, for returning the land back to its original owners, for worshiping God and not worshiping other gods, for getting that kind of vertical relationship with God right so that we can get our horizontal relationship right with mankind. That’s that’s what the Old Testament law code is intended to do, and in many ways, parts of it are are certainly indicative of a prescription that God gives his people, but there are significant portions as well that are descriptive, that tell us this is the way it worked in that ancient culture, and we can extract principles from it. But but friends, if you think that the law code is ideal, if you read your Bible and you go, Oh man, God wanted, wanted, there to be people in debt, God wanted people to have to sell their property, God wanted families to be broken and women to be subjected to, the tyrannical notions of over sexualization. Then you’re reading the scripture wrong, that’s not the intent. This is a way out of a terrible, dark, and difficult circumstance. In case you don’t make it to the end of my presentation, let me give you something right now. The way out is the person and work of Jesus the Christ. There’s a thread that runs from Genesis to that barn in Bethlehem and to that cross of Calvary, where the power of sin itself is broken, and a new way to live emerges. So how is it? Let me answer this question. How is it that I preach the Bible every week and land in different places than others, and others say they preach the Bible every week and land in different places than than I do? I don’t wanna at all come across, give you the sentiment or feeling that I got it perfectly right. I’m not trying to tell you that. I do see in my own ministry and in others a trajectory toward a cleaner reading, proclamation, and application of scripture as time goes on, and that’s a gift of the Holy Spirit and maturity. But but what is it that causes us to land in different places? Some say, well, it’s the school you went to. I wanna tell you that’s a lie. We need to break that lie up right now. Some people say, oh I went to Yale or I went to Vanderbilt or I went to, Howard Divinity and others, well I went to DTS, I went to, Trinity, I went to Fuller or wherever, Southern, wherever you may go. The the school you go to should not determine the kind of preacher you become because you are made in the image and likeness of God, not the image and likeness of a professor or the image and likeness of a curriculum. What we have done is we’ve gone and I’ve I’ve been there before. You go, you sit in this in a classroom and you hear the instruction and the bin of that particular strand of education, and you own it, as everything yours needs to be. And sometimes people have left churches, their churches have sent them to a seminary, and they got to that seminary, and they started hearing stuff that they had never heard before, stuff that was never nurtured or condoned by the church community where they were from, and they came back to the church and looked down upon the church because the church did not, acquiesce or submit to what they learned in the academy, and that works both ways, either whether you are, what you call conservative or what you might call progressive. Preachers and preaching has never been shaped by the academy so much as it’s been shaped by the church, and the church has a robust conglomerate of people across the socioeconomic stratosphere, and of ethnicities, and of languages, tribes, different parts of the world, to round out that theology, not simply the people who establish the school that you go to. At some point in our American way, the academy has become more important than the church, and I wanna submit to you today that we need to shift that. The church needs to be more important than the academy. Now what church? Now that’s a whole another conversation, but I do wanna say that you and I, and I practice this, need to be accountable to a body of believers, of people who are committed to the personal work of Jesus Christ, who are filled with the Holy Spirit, who can affirm or deny the the message proclaimed based upon the truth as it has been once and for all delivered. So I wanna urge upon you that if you think that the scripture is the problem, or if you’ve heard that the scripture is the source of the problem, listen to, for instance, chocolate people like me, for African American people, listen to the theology of our ancestors in their own words. At Black History Month at Progressive, we have been preaching through the black sacred music spirituals, known as the spirituals, these songs like Did My Lord Deliver Daniel, or Free at Last, or There’s a Balm in Gilead, or I Want Jesus to Walk with Me, or Deep River, or King of Kings, Lord of Lords, you you name it. What you hear in this music is a robust affirmation of this essential tenets of scripture. These enslaved persons do not deny the person and work of Jesus Christ or his word, even when that word was wrongfully used to abuse them, misuse them, and enslave them. Doctor. David Daniels has, some profound research on things we’ve already known, like the fact that these enslaved persons who came from the shores of Africa to America, many of which were already believers. So the lie that we somehow got Christianity as a perk of the Transatlantic slave trade has been perpetuated without evidence. These are people who believed, many of them, before they came, and they evangelized one another. But but even when they are liberated, when the Emancipation Proclamation comes through and some get free, then later at Juneteenth, when some people in Texas find out that they are free, these enslaved persons had every reasonable opportunity to abandon, to throw off like a coat, the Christian faith. They did not. They they saw in Jesus a freedom, both here on Earth and from sin to go to heaven. They they saw in Jesus a power for abolition. In fact, you asked Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman and and many others, on why they fought for abolition. They anchor their arguments in the God of the Bible, and and so so it is not, as Frederick Douglass said, that the problem is one of Christianity of Christ or Christianity proper, but the problem is the Christianity of this land, and how this land has abdicated the authority of God, moved God out of the way and become its own authority and impose that kind of authority upon the scriptures. So I I say to you that when you listen to the theology of our ancestors in their own words, you see them taking that same Bible that was used against them and reading it clearer with a greater sense of purity. And the question becomes, then, what does the Bible mean? How did they ascertain meaning? And I wanna I wanna suggest to you that there is meaning in the text, that that meaning is discerned by uncovering what that passage meant to its original hearers and what the Holy Spirit intended through the pen of the person speaking, teaching, or recording. When when you and I come to that place, we stop reading the Bible like fundamentalists. Fundamentalist is a person who takes everything literal, essentially, in scripture. No. We read scripture sensitive to genre, and so people go, well, all their mistakes are discrepancies in the scripture. How how big was Goliath? One passage says he’s this tall. The other passage says he’s that tall. Well, I I wanna suggest to you that that finding the meaning of the text is ascertaining the point of the text, and the point of the text is that Goliath was a big dude. He he was he was from a big people. He was larger than large. Where the Bible does intend to levy specific directions and instructions, then you and I pay very close attention to that. But where the Bible is poetic and general and affirming or heightening tension or raising ideas or going against something that was said, then we read it within that genre of history or storytelling or theology or poetry or doctrine or church development or the end times. We we read no one comes to the book of Revelation and aims to read it literally and then thinks that they are reading it accurately. No. There are books or portions of the book of Revelation that are very much, meant to be encoded and then decoded, decoded, to draw figures and images and and to draw meaning from ideas, so because that original audience had to understand what John was saying without the government fully perceiving what John was saying, so we gotta break away from a kind of assumption that for the Bible to be authoritative, that it must be read like we’re fundamentalists. No. I think there’s a better way. I think there is an overarching theme, what what I call a redemptive historical narrative that drives the story line of scripture, and if you get off of the story line, then you’re liable to make the Bible say what you want it to say, and let me just be honest with you. There are people with conservative convictions and people with progressive convictions convictions these days that are making the Bible say what they want it to say, rather than letting the Bible speak for itself, so what is that redemptive historical narrative? What is that line that runs through that ark? You see it as early as Genesis. You see it in multiple ways where there is an animal that is slain whose skin covers the nakedness of Adam and Eve. You you see the faith exhibited in Abram and then Abraham and Sarah as his name is changed. You see it when Joseph saves his brothers, namely Judah in Genesis chapter 50 because there is a promised seed that is coming through Judah’s line. You see that the Bible bends its trajectory, chasing quickly a line, a particular line, particular line, through which the solution to all of our problems will come. The Bible is a book that points to Jesus, both past and and future. It is a book that says that God so loved us that He gave His one and only Son. It is a book where Jesus clarifies the mind of God by being the self revelation of God. It is a context that says God wants to be known, and here now is how God wants to be known, and it is to say that love is not without restriction and that love is not without penalty. Although love is free, It costs God everything. That’s the line, and then it is to say that that same Jesus who was nailed on a cross, gave up the ghost, who was buried in a tomb, and was raised again on the third day, is coming back, and he ain’t coming back for everybody. He’s coming back for church, for people who believe in him, and the scripture says, A church without spot or wrinkle, a bride, as it were, that he prepares and adorns. That’s the line that is beckoning your attention and mine. So the problem then, maybe is not the redemptive historical narrative or the line of scripture or even what the scripture is aiming to do. The problem might be the theological inferences and emphasis that we develop, the doctrinal components that we develop. I I do wanna tell you that truth is truth no matter who says it. Truth is truth no matter who says it. However, when truth is in the hands of an interpreter, truth can take on the color of that interpreter, and this is why we need one another in the fuller body of Christ, because doctrine and theology and the formulation of theology and the formulation of doctrine and the interrelationship between that theology and that doctrine and that application will lead to very different emphasis depending upon who’s doing it. We all have to check our biases when we come to scripture. That doesn’t mean we’re wrong. It just means we do theology in the context of community. We talk with other believers, and we talk to people who submit themselves to the authority of scripture, and when we do so, we can see more clearly over time where we are wrong and where we are right. If the American church had not submitted to the sin of the love of money, of ethnic superiority, if it had listened to history and to other Christians around the world, I want to submit grand revivals of the colonies, those who draw their grand revivals of the colonies, those who draw their, Christian heritage back to that space have to reckon with where their theological heroes got it wrong, and then they have to reckon with how those wrongs have spilled over into continuing injustices today, but instead, what we see is a defiance, is a theological arrogance that insists on superiority. I truth, in order to be, proclaimed truthfully, has to be sensitive to a few things. One is context. Another is the social milieu of scripture. Another are what does this word mean in this context? A kind of exegetical sufficiency that treats scripture respectfully. I want to explain a few of these, and then we’ll be done for our session. One is that the scripture happens in a context, in a geographical, historical, social context. That world has to be reconstructed as best we can to understand what is meant. For instance, when Jesus teaches his disciples to pray in Matthew chapter six or so, and he says, give us this day our daily bread. That word daily bread has been found on pottery. It was a word used by the poor, people who could not, buy bread that lasted for a long time. They needed to work every day to get enough money to buy bread for that day. This is a prayer of poor people. Give us this day our daily bread. Are y’all in here with me? Do you do you hear even the the the feel of the throb of Jesus’ heart for people who are poor and live on the margins, but do you also hear the kind of daily dependence that Jesus is arguing for, that you and I, regardless of economic status, regardless of social influence and position, we have a need to depend upon God every day? That’s what, that’s what context will give you. Context will help you break through all of the kind of assumptions and notions that you and I think are absolutely right. Word studies. There is something called semantic domain. What that means is that one word can have multiple meanings, but how that word is used in that context is describes the the meaning of that word for that verse. We got a lot of people who like to impose upon a passage different kinds of meanings. Friends, I wanna suggest to you that there are resources that will help you to understand what words meant, and I’m laughing because even you don’t like people to take your words and use them the wrong way. You don’t like for people to quote you in a way that you didn’t intend for it to be meant, so why would we do that with the scripture? Why would we do that with God? Why would we take His word and say, this is what God meant, when actually, that’s not what God meant? So in light of all of the historical exegetical data, we now live in a world that is still biblical, is just post, the writing of the gospels and even, the epistles. So we have to build a bridge from then to now, and I wanna suggest to you that because scripture is timeless in its telling of truth, there is a bridge from the then ness to the nowness, and the nowness seeks to understand what that text meant and to extract from it, to pull from it a principle, a principle that is universal and timeless, and argue that principle in today’s sociocultural milieu so we can we can take the message of the exclusivity of Jesus Christ. He says, I am the way, using the definite article, the truth and the life. We could feel what that meant in that Greco Roman world, and and now we can argue for it in our Western American society today. However it is, friends, you and I need to build a bridge, but the way that we pass the litmus test is that that principle we proclaim today has to resonate with the world within which or the subject matter within which it was originally proclaimed. Whenever truth or the church does not build that bridge correctly, or whenever people take truth and they bend it into a social or cultural movement, they squeeze it to fit their own agenda. Beware. Truth should always lead to the grounds of God’s self revelation. Truth should always make you and I love God more, be convicted and corrected by the spirit of God, and be conformed to the image of his son, Jesus the Christ, and in that regard, I wanna say that the scripture is actually liberating, and it actually affirms the image of God of all people. I don’t know, y’all, if we ever gonna solve this problem. I’m certainly not today in this moment thinking everybody who watches this is gonna agree with everything I said, but if I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer you with this word of expression that the Bible is actually liberating and affirming of the image of God in my word, or as a songwriter used to say it in song, if if I can help you see where you’re traveling right or wrong, then this session that I just sat here to record is not in vain. I hope today that you will, like me, come to know and love the God of the Bible, receive His word as authoritator, and view not God as wrong, but that we are often wrong, and ask God to search our hearts, try us, and know us, and when he finds things that are not like us, to remove it, to straighten it out. The Bible’s not the problem. We’ve been the problem. Let’s get back to a cleaner reading and preaching the scripture. God bless y’all. Talk to you later.