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and is present in real space and time. The Bible is a collection of stories that teach us about what it looks like when God is at work through actual people. The Bible has the authority it does only because it contains stories about people interacting with the God who has all authority.
The point in the book of Acts isn’t the early church. The point is the God who is at work in and through the early church to change the world.35 When we take the Bible seriously, we are taking God seriously. We believe that the same God who was at work then is at work now. The same God in the same kinds of ways. The goal is not to be a “New Testament church.” That makes the New Testament church the authority. The authority is God who is acting in and through those people at that time and now these people at this time.
The point is to ask, what is God up to here, now?
What in the world is God doing today?
How should we respond?
How did they respond?
What can we learn from them that will help us now?
This is why binding and loosing is so exhilarating. You can only do it if you believe and see God at work now, here in this place. You are reacting to a God who is alive and well and working and saving and redeeming.
The Bible tells a story. A story that isn’t over. A story that is still being told. A story that we have a part to play in.
Creating and Recognizing
In order to bind and loose, we have to think about inspiration in terms of recognition as well as creation. Here’s what I mean: People sat down and wrote things on paper. Well, sometimes even that came a lot later. Much of the Bible was oral tradition that was circulating for years and years before someone wrote it down.
Picture a campfire thousands of years ago in what is Iraq today. A group of shepherds have gathered at the end of the day; the meal is over and the stories begin to flow, and a young girl says to her uncle, “Tell me again why the world is how it is.”
And her uncle responds: “In the beginning God created . . .”
Back to the writing part. The people who eventually wrote all of this down weren’t sitting there with their hand and the pen moving as if controlled by some outside force.
The writers of the Bible had agendas.
Luke said he wrote to give an orderly account of all that has gone down.
John said he wrote so we will believe in Jesus.
The writer of the book of Ruth had some strong opinions about Jews marrying Gentiles.
The writers obviously took what they were doing very seriously and had specific outcomes they wanted from their writings, but that doesn’t mean they woke up in the morning thinking, Today I’ll write a section of the Bible.
Now, apparently their writings were recognized as inspired soon after their creation. Peter mentions the writings of Paul in one of his letters: “[Paul] writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other scriptures, to their own destruction.”36
I love that phrase “hard to understand.” The Bible was difficult to grasp on the first pass for people who had written it.
But my point here is that Peter is referring to the writings of Paul in the same light as “the other scriptures.”
Already early in the life of the Jesus movement, certain letters and writings were beginning to distinguish themselves as being different, inspired, “from God” in ways that other religious writings weren’t. For the next several hundred years, there was a lot of discussion in the Christian community about which books were considered scripture and which books weren’t. But it wasn’t until the 300s that what we know as the sixty-six books of the Bible were actually agreed upon as “the Bible.”
This is part of the problem with continually insisting that one of the absolutes of the Christian faith must be a belief that “scripture alone” is our guide. It sounds nice, but it is not true.37 In reaction to abuses by the church, a group of believers during a time called the Reformation claimed that we only need the authority of the Bible. But the problem is that we got the Bible from the church voting on what the Bible even is. So when I affirm the Bible as God’s Word, in the same breath I have to affirm that when those people voted, God was somehow present, guiding them to do what they did. When people say that all we need is the Bible, it is simply not true.
In affirming the Bible as inspired, I have to affirm the Spirit who I believe was inspiring those people to choose those books.38
Were they binding and loosing the Bible itself?
At some point we have to have faith. Faith that God is capable of guiding people. Faith that God has not left us alone. Faith that the same Spirit who guided Paul and Peter and those people in a room in the 300s is still
with
us
today.
Guiding us, showing us, enlightening us.
Wrestling
Binding and loosing can only be done if communities are willing to wrestle. The ultimate display of our respect for the sacred words of God is that we are willing to wade in and struggle with the text—the good parts, the hard-to-understand parts, the parts we wish weren’t there.
The rabbis even say a specific blessing when they don’t understand a portion of the text. When it eludes them, when it makes no sense, they say a word of thanks to God because of the blessing that will be theirs someday. “Thank you, God, that at some point in the future, the lights are going to come on for me.”
The rabbis have a metaphor for this wrestling with the text: The story of Jacob wrestling the angel in Genesis 32. He struggles, and it is exhausting and tiring, and in the end his hip is injured. It hurts. And he walks away limping.
Because when you wrestle with the text, you walk away limping.
And some people have no limp, because they haven’t wrestled. But the ones limping have had an experience with the living God.
I think God does know what he’s doing with the Bible. But a better question is, do we know what we’re doing with the Bible?
And I say, yes, we are binding and loosing and wrestling and limping.
Because God has spoken.
I remember the first time I was truly in awe of God. I was caught up for the first time in my life in something so massive and loving and transcendent and . . . true. Something I was sure could be trusted. I specifically remember thinking the universe was safe, in spite of all the horrible, tragic things in the world. I remember being overwhelmed with the word true. Underneath it all life is somehow . . . good . . . and I was sixteen and at a U2 concert. The Joshua Tree tour. When they started with the song “Where the Streets Have No Name,” I thought I was going to spontaneously combust with joy. This was real. This mattered. Whatever it was, I wanted more.
I had never felt that way before.
I remember surfing Trestles—the legendary beach between Los Angeles and San Diego—for the first time. I paddled out on a gorgeous day, and as I sat there on my board, a couple hundred feet off shore, surrounded by blue and green and sunlight and quiet, a dolphin jumped in the water next to me. I thought my heart was never going to start beating again. Beauty can be crushing at times, can’t it?
I