The Bible Is At Least Adequate
An article and a Podcast and wishing you a happy Ash Wednesday
Happy AshValentine’s Day! I have already been to church once and am off to an appointment. Happily, though, my review of Scot McKnight’s The Bible Is Not Enough over at CRJ is out. Also, Melanie and I talked about it on the Postmodern Realities Podcast.
Here’s a taste of the article:
The Bible is Not Enough: Imagination and Making Peace in the Modern World is a brief, elegantly bound reflection on what New Testament scholar Scott McKnight calls a “peaceful imagination.”1 Triggered by the expression “humane war” discussed in Samuel Moyn’s book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021), McKnight claims that American Christian preferences for war betray a “poverty of imagination.”2 Castigating Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and every president since,3 McKnight explains that “violence runs deep in American culture. America at war is part of its identity. Critics of the Right diminish the significance of the Christian nationalist movement that shook the country on January 6, 2021. One dare not. A second arising could be in the offing. Violence shifts from one dimension of culture to another, from war to gun possession to ordinary citizens packing heat to more humane forms of the death penalty to police violence and to military torture.”4 McKnight would like to correct this identity, specifically by calling those who read his book to the work of “improvisation,” that is, to take the words of Scripture and of Jesus and live them out in “virtuous kingdom character.”5
The Bible Is Not Enough is divided into five chapters: Poverty of Imagination, Prophetic Imagination, Kingdom Imagination, Improvisational Imagination, and Peaceful Imagination. McKnight’s argument is built around answering the objection that a “peaceful imagination” is “‘pacifist,’ as if that was a weak or dirty word.” Not so, he says. “A peaceful imagination is active in nonviolent resistance.”6 Furthermore, “There is no need to apologize for the term pacifism or to defend the view that it is activist, nonviolent resistance. The so-called temple tantrum of Jesus proves a peaceful imagination can be improvised in nonviolent disruption. A peaceful imagination is social disruption” (emphasis in original).7
What Is Improvisation? The two most pressing questions for me when confronted with the title The Bible Is Not Enough are, first, not enough for what? And second, not enough for whom? McKnight is cagey on these two points. Rather than coming out and saying something like, ‘The Bible won’t help you become the peacemaker you long to be,’ or ‘The Bible is insufficient unto salvation,’ and then explaining how or why, McKnight dwells upon the word “improvisation.” The Bible is full of important information about the character of Jesus and “the law,” but you can’t follow it as if it were some kind of definitive rule by which Christians ought to govern their lives. Even Jesus, according to McKnight, “improvised” the law as He taught His disciples.8
Not being particularly musical, artistic, or initiated into the world of the theater, I tripped over the term “improvisation.” What was McKnight talking about? First, I looked up “improvise” in the dictionary…
Have a holy day! And for heaven’s sake, watch this.
Traditionally we have thought of Jesus as the fulfillment of the law and its authoritative interpreter. Based upon the description you offer, McKnight wants to describe him as the definitive model of improvisation. It seems a bizarre move to me. Every so often, a scholar of some repute comes along with a new hermeneutical key to understanding Scripture, one that is going to usher in a new era of understanding. But such endeavors rarely gain traction because, believe it or not, our forebears in the faith have provided us with reliable guidance.
Antinominianism renamed as improvisation?