Living Dead Documents

It is a dangerous thing when the church determines to follow the world. We’re used to folks bemoaning that propensity, talking about our problem of worldliness. Chuck Swindoll once said “If you take a white glove and drop it in the mud, the mud doesn’t get all glovey.” In the same way, when we follow the world, we aren’t helping the world, we’re actually becoming worldly and dangerous.

But there’s an alternate perspective. There is an iron law of reality, that because we are salt and light, because we are the center of the story, at the end of the day, the world ends up following us. I’m particularly mindful of this during election season. Whoever is elected in November, the following January they’re going to put their hand on some book of some faith, and they’re going to hold up their right hand and make a solemn vow to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. And whatever act they do as their first act as president after that is likely going to violate the Constitution of the United States. We like to believe in a romantic kind of way that the highest law in our land is the Constitution. But it is a dead letter. No one follows it; no one cares about it. It is not even a wax nose being twisted and shaped into something unrecognizable. It’s just done.

How did that happen? The short answer to that is that we’ve developed a view of jurisprudence that looked at the Constitution and decided that it was a living document. That we should not be bound by the thoughts of the original author, writing for the original audience, but rather, we can have some wiggle room by looking at it in light of our day and our perspective, and justify it by calling it a living document. If we look a little deeper, we see that the propensity to call the Constitution a living document was actually born out of an earlier commitment by the Church to treat the Bible the same way.

We have lost any sense of constitutionalism in our country precisely because in the Church we have lost the idea that the Bible is a binding document on us, and that the only way to understand what it says is to seek out and understand what the original author sought to communicate to the original audience. We have a whole army of people who call themselves evangelicals, but who also call themselves egalitarian. To profess to be an evangelical, I would think, would in some part be an affirmation of the authority of Scripture, if not its inerrancy and infallibility. And yet we look at the Bible and see Paul saying things like “Women are not to exercise authority or to teach in the church”, or “Wives are to submit to their own husbands as unto the Lord” and they will bristle under this and will turn around, having affirmed their belief in the authority of Scripture and say “Well, that’s Paul. Paul is culturally conditioned. We are culturally conditioned. And so what we’re going to do is erase this, ignore this, and look at this as something that’s not binding on us anymore.”

In praise of liberal Christianity, which J Gresham Machen would argue is no Christianity at all, they at least have the courage to say “Paul in the Bible is wrong here. We don’t agree with Paul; we think the Bible errs here.” But the egalitarian evangelicals are trying to have their cake and eat it too. “We don’t want to be bound by what Paul said and what Paul meant, so we’re going to turn the Bible into a living document. We’re going to take those parts that go against the zeitgeist, against the spirit of the age, and we’re going to call them culturally bound statements that we’re not obligated to submit to. We’re going to rewrite our own perspective on the relationship between men and women, or even homosexual behavior.”

We’re people who are adrift. We’re adrift because we’ve cut off our moorings ourselves. We don’t want to be bound by a Constitution politically. We don’t want to be bound by the Bible in our churches. And what we end up with in both instances is the tyranny of the powerful. When we submit ourselves to God’s Word, what we find is liberty. When we cut ourselves off from God’s Word, we find tyranny, whether in the Church or in the world. I want in one sense, the Bible to be dead. Not without life, not without the power to change, but in the sense that it doesn’t change. The grass withers, and the flower fades, but the Word of our God endures forever.