I have had quite a few of the members of Mayflower come to me recently with questions about either Biblical passages or where to find a certain thing in the Bible. Some of you just want the info for your own use but others are trying to find ammunition for a confrontation with a neighbor or co-worker, someone who is challenging your views. And for those of you locked in such a struggle I have found that your battles are long and treacherous and don’t really bear much fruit. In fact, if I have the opportunity, I tend to advise people not to even bother. Not that our Biblical views aren’t important but rather that if you are engaging in a discussion about the Bible with someone whose entire structure is built upon the requirement that the Bible be the absolute word of God, infallible and absolutely true by any standard, then you really have no place to go. You can’t win…and beyond the winning thing, you can’t even be heard.
As we say here at Mayflower, I take the Bible seriously, not literally. But I realize more and more that this is not the case for almost everyone else one would encounter in this neck of the woods. Even the so-called “megachurch” model that is so wildly popular in these areas pushes a Biblical literalism that is completely synonymous with the most hardcore fundamentalist teaching. I am not in any way opposed to the Bible, Biblical literacy or the ample use of the Bible in one’s spiritual life. But just like I would be opposed to using a power saw to open a can of soup, I know that people need some instruction on how to read the Bible, for there are many obstacles in our way – weakness of textual sources, translation problems or downright errors and problems with linguistic metaphors and context when translating from a dead language through several others and finally arriving at English.
But the honest truth is that we live in an atmosphere where people think that memorizing Bible verses gets them some reservoir of truth in their heads, as if the truth were “hard-coded” into the actual words of the Bible, never mind that our translations leave much depth to the original meaning lost in a wooden rendition. Take, for example, one of the most commonly used pieces of scripture supposedly supporting the prominent role and inerrancy of the Bible – 2 Timothy 3:14-17. It reads like this in the NRSV translation:
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
That phrase “inspired by God” comes from the Greek word “theopneustos” which uses the roots for both “God” (theo) and “Spirit” (pneuma). Iin Greek it might be better rendered as “God-breathed” because that word pneuma has a great depth to it. It would evoke a sense of God as the creative force, as the one who breathed life into human beings at creation and spoke (breath-oriented creation) the world into being. To say “inspired by God” seems to fall a bit short of what the Greek wants to evoke. In either case, the meaning of the passage is not that the Bible is the actual word of God but that God is involved.
See, the real issue as far as I can tell is one of authority. Where do we get it? I’m influenced heavily in this entry by a book called “A Christianity Worth Believing” by Doug Pagitt. It’s a great book from the field of so-called “Emerging Christianity” which means, as far as I can tell, people who are wanting to recapture that sense of being followers of Jesus in the most radical and subversive ways they can, including rejecting old models and theologies of the historical church AND recovery of some previously discarded ones too. And Pagitt says this about our little topic for today:
“…this authority question is worth looking at, if only because it is such a hot button in Christian circles. So, here’s how I see it: The Bible gains its authority from God and the communities who grant it authority. Like many people, I believe in the Bible because I believe in God. But I know plenty of people who think that it ought to happen the other way around, that a person needs to believe the Bible in order to believe in God. So they’ll give a Bible to a non- Christian in the hope that by reading about God, that person will be enlightened. Certainly that can happen, but it seems kind of backward to me. I mean, what possible reason would someone have for believing this story if they didn’t already believe in God?”
I think that Pagitt is getting at my point, which is that the Bible is a reflection of people’s experiences of God – complete with the weakness, moral failures, limitations and self-serving interpretation of events that characterize human beings, then and now. It is the record of people’s encounters with God, and that pre-supposes having encounters with God…many of which, in our Biblical record, change the hearts and minds of those people having them.
One of my (and Pagitt’s) main issues is that it seems far too often that people use the Bible to confirm their already held beliefs. Whether that is the role of women in the church or homosexuality or even what day to worship on, the standard leanings on the Bible tend to confirm what I think that people already believe. And that’s problematic for me.
See the Gospel is not that kind of confirmation – almost never does it reinforce someone’s existing position…especially those of us who live every day on the “top of the heap”. In fact, most of the stories of Jesus have him tearing down people’s carefully constructed houses of belief and reversing their set in stone truths. I get nervous when reading the Bible doesn’t challenge me or confront my comfortable position. In fact, that old saying really is what I think that the Bible does – it comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.
The Bible only makes sense when it relates to our own lives. Trying to use it as a textbook or a word-for-word instruction manual is like using a hammer to paint a fence. The Bible is a tool that has certain uses and trying to make it God or even the Spirit doesn’t do anyone any good. It is only worthwhile when we live it, just as the writers of all of those stories did, and when we find in it not truth (at least in the way that we think of truth as verifiable and quantitative) but instead meaning, insight and the reinforcement of what really does need tending to – our trust in a God who is seeking to re-create the world with God’s breath and through God’s creation.
