Leonard Sweet’s AquaChurch – A Church without a Solid Foundation

According to Leonard Sweet, “God speaks to humans through the human. All divine revelation is culturally mediated. This means that the Bible must be metabolized through the passions and polemics of the culture in which it will be lived out” (AquaChurch, 56).

Okay, the Bible was certainly written by human agents, but those agents were inspired by the Holy Spirit. The Bible, therefore, speaks to humans through a Spirit-inspired human agency.

Sweet admits that the Bible is divine revelation, so how can that which is divine in nature be culturally mediated? By culturally mediated, Sweet most likely means that the meaning of Scripture is confined to the language and culture of the human author. If the meaning of Scripture is to be confined to the human author, then how is the meaning divine in nature? Even if the meaning is divine, it is somehow trapped in the temporal language and culture of the author and therefore confined to a particular time and place in history. In this way, God’s meaning revealed in His word becomes obscured and today we are only left to search out the meaning that remains contained and concealed within the author’s language and culture. In opposition to this, the Bible teaches that the meaning of Scripture arises from the Spirit (2 Tim 3:16; 1 Pet 1:21). Meaning, if it to be considered divine, must come from an entity outside of (not confined to) the material created world. As God, the Spirit is just such an entity.

Since Sweet locates meaning in the culture at large, he advocates a reader response method of determining the Bible’s meaning. With this approach, each community (and ultimately each individual) determines what the Bible means given the limitations of their own language and culture. Meaning, viewed this way, becomes less than divine. It simply is the best attempt of the reader(s) to ascertain the truth given the imposed limitations advocated by Sweet.

This understanding of biblical revelation leads many within the Emerging Church to advocate epistemic humility (see Tony Jones’ The Church is Flat). This humility (as it is falsely labeled) is based on a postmodern epistemology, i.e. truth can not be known with certainty.