When I was a child, my mother told me where babies came from. Her explanation lacked detail, but it was the truth, and it was all I could handle or understand at that age. The story went something like this: “A husband and wife lie down together and feel so much love for each other that they decide to have a baby. A seed is planted in the mother’s tummy, where the tiny egg is, and the egg starts to grow into a baby, until months later the baby comes out through an opening at the mother’s bottom. The husband plays a part in planting the seed.”
While that was all true, my childhood imagination augmented the process. If I had been asked to write an account of baby making, I would probably have described how the husband got out of the bed, got the packet of baby seeds that he had ordered from the baby store, placed one in his wife’s bellybutton, and watered it. By the way, I was aware of only one opening in a woman’s bottom.
I open with this story, because I think it is a good analogy of how God gave us His Word, which was recorded in the Bible. Nowadays, there are many children’s books on where babies come from, and those meant for small children are similar to my mother’s account. They are truthful, but they are what children that age can comprehend. I think of the Bible as a children’s book, because the ancient Israelites were babes in their understanding of God, and in many ways we still are. God’s detailed thoughts could never have been recorded precisely in words, at least not words that humans could understand. Instead, God gave us the Truth in a form that we could comprehend. Can you imagine God telling the writers of Genesis about the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe, and the scientific principles of natural selection and how He used these to create the world? (That is assuming that these were the processes God used, and I respect those who believe otherwise). The writers would be so confused that they either couldn’t write this down, or they would be bound to get it wrong!
Biblical Inerrancy is defined in several ways, but I think the most common definition, and the one I will use is this: Biblical Inerrancy is the belief that the Bible contains no errors at all, and even details about historical events occurred (or will occur, as in the apocalyptic writings), exactly as they are described. There is no human error. As a Christian who does not accept Biblical Inerrancy, I believe that the Bible is God’s Word (or “contains God’s Word” if you are more comfortable with that phrase), but it contains some human error, mainly in historical documentation and teachings that apply just to that culture.
The purpose of this essay is to help people understand my faith. I have found that many people do not. I am not writing to convince you that I am right or that you are wrong if you have a different belief about the Bible. You will hopefully agree to disagree with me, but as long as you understand me I am satisfied. One of the biggest misunderstandings of people like me is that I accept parts of the Bible that I like and discard parts that I dislike. I will address this issue later.
Inerrancy is not the predominant view of Christians in the U.S. Of course, many people argue that very few of those who call themselves “Christians” truly are, anyway. I wouldn’t disagree with this assertion, although I do not think that inerrancy is what determines who is a Christian and who is not. Gallup polls from 2005-2007 reveal that 31% of Americans believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God, but 41% agree with the statement “The Bible is the inspired word of God, but not everything in it should be taken literally.” Jeffrey Hadden, in a poll of 10,000 American clergy in 1987 found that in some denominations, 67-95% of clergy answered “No” to the statement “Do you believe that the Scriptures are the inspired and inerrant Word of God in faith, history, and secular matters?” These “liberal” denominations included Episcopalians (95% said no), Methodists (87% said no), and American Baptists (not to be confused with Southern Baptists. 67% said no). What this reveals is that those who see a belief in inerrancy as evidence of a strong faith would have to draw their boundaries pretty tight.
What we know about the Scriptures and history suggests that non-inerrancy is a reasonable point of view. I do not mean to argue that inerrancy is the only reasonable position, just that it is understandable in the light of what we know about history, science, and the Scriptures. First, there is nowhere in the Bible where the text says that written Scripture is the Word of God. There is no place where it says it is inerrant. Of course, we could not expect the Bible to say that about itself, because what we know as the Bible was not Canonized (compiled into one book that was considered authoritative) until several hundred years after the last Scriptures were written. When the Bible refers to the Word, it is referring to one of 3 things: 1) The Law, or the Torah (as in Psalm 119); 2) The direct communication of God to a person (as in Jeremiah 1:1 “The words of Jeremiah to whom the word of the Lord came), or 3) Jesus the Incarnate Word (as in John 1).
Another reason for doubting the inerrancy of Scripture is that a few Scriptural accounts are contradicted by all of the non-Biblical sources. For instance, Matthew declares that the birth of Jesus occurred during the reign of Herod the Great, who according to historical documents died in 4 BC. Luke says Jesus was born during a census ordered by Augustus at a time that Quirinius was governor of Syria. Quirinius was not governor of Syria during Herod’s kingship.
Some Scriptures contradict each other. In order to resolve this problem, believers in inerrancy sometimes go to acrobatic lengths to smooth them out, but the most logical conclusions about the inconsistencies is to simply accept that somebody got it wrong. For instance, Luke’s gospel says that the Holy Family returned to Nazareth immediately after Jesus underwent the ritual of purification in the Temple (which would have occurred when he was 40 days old. See Luke 2:39). Matthew, however, has the family still in Bethlehem when visited by the Wise Men, and from there fleeing to Egypt where they stayed until Herod died (4 BC).
Finally, a good reason for doubting inerrancy is the fact that what we call the Bible was not canonized until years after the New Testament was written. By this time, the “powers that be” in the Christian church had certainly developed some bias. We know that the Bible used by Jesus and the early apostles was the Septuagint, the Greek translation from the Hebrew and Aramaic of the OId Testament Scriptures. This included a number of books that are today commonly called the Apocrypha, books that are included in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but not considered scriptural by most Protestants. One could reasonably ask the question: Why could we not trust the Scriptures that were actually used by Jesus as authoritative? Well, some were definitely rejected and are not a part of the Scripture of most Christian churches. According to the website religioustolerance.org, one omission in the Protestant canon was influenced by a passage that implied that Purgatory existed (This passage actually simply referred to praying for the dead, which some Christian groups interpreted to mean the dead go to a place where they need prayer for purification in order to graduate to heaven). Bias of the early church doubtlessly influenced their selection of other writings. Richard Nicholson writes, “The Canon evolved obscurely over many centuries. Books were accepted by some and banned by others. Books accepted for centuries were rejected later.” (Nicholson quoted in an essay in religioustolerance.org). And definitely, by the time the church councils met and decided on what writings would be canonized, there was already a bias against Judaism that had crept into the Christian church.
My personal faith has evolved to the point that I accept the Bible as authoritative, and human errors in it are not essential to my faith. My suspicion that there were human errors in the Bible was confirmed when I took college courses in Old and New Testament. This was in a United Methodist college. Through this, though, I never lost my belief that there was something special about the Bible. Since my college years, my belief in the Bible has grown to the point where despite the problems and criticisms presented by moderate and liberal scholars, the Bible is not just a book. Although it contains some human error in minor areas, and although it was influenced somewhat by cultural bias, its story, commandments, and message are the Holy Word of God. Its words should be doubted only with fear and trembling. Allow me to explain.
This is my own testimony of how I came to trust the Bible, and it does not necessarily match that of others. Throughout the first fifty years of my life, I experienced a lot of rejection that really caused me to doubt my own worth. My parents never rejected me, but as I grew from adolescence, into young and later middle adulthood, I was rejected in very painful ways. I remember going “stag” to a high school dance, going from girl to girl (many of them would come without a date) asking for a dance, being turned down by each. I also remember going through rush in college where there were four fraternities on campus, and not one extended a “preferential” invitation to me. I had three careers, but despite my high intelligence, measured at 134 IQ by 2 separate tests when I was a young teen, and my high education (PhD), I never achieved an income level that I think that many of my peers with a college degree reached by the time they were in their thirties. My professors expressed doubts about me in graduate school, my students often barbequed me on student evaluations during my first career as sociology professor, my second career as computer programmer saw me fired twice, laid off once, and changing jobs once when I was afraid I was about to get laid off. Are you getting tired of my pity party? So am I. I could go on, but I mention the most blatant rejections only because I want you to understand why there was a force (Satan? Yes.) that compelled me to feel worthless.
Growing up in the home of a Methodist minister and therefore receiving a great deal of exposure to the Bible, I often went to it for comfort, just as I often went to my family for comfort (my parents and later my wife). As I grew more familiar with the Bible in college and after, I came to know it as the story of how God loved on a miserably failing humankind to the extent that He made them His own children, sons and daughters of the Creator of the universe (at least all of them who would receive this grace). How He loved on them to the extent that He rescued them from permanent spiritual death at tremendous, literally excruciating sacrifice of Himself. No other book in human history that I am aware of tells this story in any form. Do you see where this is leading? The Bible story of God’s rescue of me tells me that I AM worthy and significant, despite the way the world has treated me. Lest you write me off as a crybaby, I am well aware that the world has treated me a lot better than it has most of its inhabitants. And so, the Good News of Scripture is certainly good for not only myself but for many.
Many non-believers I have known question at this point why humankind needs a Savior, asserting that “sin” is just something that the insecure Israelites made up to account for their misfortunes. That we are inherently worthy, and a person like me just needs a counselor to tell me that I was wrong to feel worthless, and religious faith is optional. People today who call themselves Humanists sometimes ridicule Christians for believing that humankind is depraved except for the saving work of Jesus Christ. These people commonly believe that the human race is intrinsically intelligent, creative, and to be celebrated for all its glorious achievements. But to celebrate the human race without giving all the credit to a Savior God seems not only ludicrous but arrogant to me. Imagine that an unbiased intelligent being from another world took an objective look at the earth and its many forms of life. The only reasonable conclusion that he could draw would be that far from being the pinnacle of intelligent and creative life on the planet, humans are the most pitiful. Based on what we have done and still do to our natural environment and to each other, humans would be seen to be the very lowest form of life! Only there is one story that is told of how we were made the most valued form of life in the universe, not because of anything that we have done, but because of the unconditional love and mercy of the God who created us in order to fellowship with us. That story is the Bible. I became convinced that it is not only essential to believe Truth, but have a story that can be told of how that Truth has unfolded through history. As Bonhoeffer wrote, “The Christian religion stands and falls by its faith in divine revelation in history, a revelation that is real, tangible, visible—to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.” I became convinced that the story is true.
As I learned to see the Bible more and more as the true story of God’s pursuit and redemption of creation, I came to realize that the Bible is not a feel-good book, and the most powerful passages and accounts in the Scripture are not the ones we like and find easy to understand but the ones that cut like a sword! Indeed, Paul’s description of the Word of God (even if he meant something other than what we know as the Bible) as the Sword of the Spirit, is very poignant. Bonhoeffer, who taught me the difference between cheap and costly grace, wrote that Christians are so often guilty of sublimating, refining, and moralizing the Scripture to the extent that parts of it that should disturb us and pierce our comfortable theology are filed down. For instance, Bonhoeffer says we often see Jesus’ retelling of the story of Lazarus and the rich man (It was a retelling, because the story in a similar form was already a part of the local folklore) as a parable that simply urges us to be kind to the poor. That the only problem that the rich man had was his stingy heart, and Lazarus’ virtue was his willful humility. Wrong, says Bonhoeffer. The story was probably told to say something that should be very disturbing to us in America and Europe who are extremely wealthy. That in God’s kingdom the poor will be lifted up and the rich (Americans and Europeans, etc.) will be brought down. Now I don’t understand it, and I don’t like it, because I can never experience the worst poverty nor the leprosy that Lazarus suffered.
And what should I do with this material from the Bible that can be so disturbing, like a sword that pierces not only the heart of the adulterer, murderer, and thief, but my own very security itself? Bonhoeffer wrote “I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions and that to receive an answer from it, we only need to ask with persistence and a little courage. One cannot read the Bible as we read other books. One must be ready to really ask questions. Only in this way does it open itself up to us. Only when we wait expectantly before it for the ultimate answer does it give it to us.”
From this I have learned that I had better pay more attention and be slower to doubt or dismiss the Biblical passages that boldly run counter to the cultural groove, including the cultural groove of the time and place when it was written. Chances are, God meant those passages to be heeded. Perhaps some passages that applaud culture are true too, but these are much less dangerous to doubt or dismiss. When Paul wrote about the roles of men and women, how the wife should submit to the husband and the husband should be head of the wife, and both partners must submit to the Lord, there was Truth in that writing that slammed against the very grain of the cultural environment of those who read the letter. It was NOT the idea that men should have authority over women. No one in Hebrew culture, and certainly not in Greek or Roman culture, ever questioned that. There was no need for God or Paul to say it, if God saw that it was important for people to believe it. What was so radical about what Paul wrote? That men should love their wives as Christ loved the church! That was unheard of in the Greek/Roman influenced Mediterranean world Paul traveled. The ancient Greeks and Romans regarded women as property. And even the Jews found the attention and respect that Jesus showed women radical and deviant to their traditional way of thinking. I know that in many Christian marriages, submission of the wife to the loving authority of the husband is important to the couple. But do we, perhaps, put just a little too much importance in this? Consider this: “Hubby, love your sweetie as Christ loved the church.” You know what that means? It means a perfect love! Of course, no human other than Jesus Himself has loved anyone with a perfect love, but that is exactly what the passage says to strive for. And what did Christ do? The Bible says He gave His life for the church. In the worst way to die that one could imagine! Am I willing to do that for my wife? It is a question that is much more important that I ask myself than the question of whether my position in the family is one of authority over her.
I am often asked how I decide what things in the Bible are literally true and what things are human error. It isn’t easy. It would be very easy if it were a matter of discarding the parts of the Bible I am uncomfortable with and accepting the passages that I like. But then the Bible would be useless except as a book of comfort. It is extremely difficult, probably impossible, to determine exactly what Bible accounts are 100% true and which or not. Fortunately, I think there are some things where it doesn’t matter whether you know they are true. I think one can go through one’s entire life, living totally for God, not knowing, or being wrong about whether a flood once covered the entire globe. I believe that whatever human errors are in the Bible, they do not matter to me. There are many things in the Bible, though, that I consider important to be right about. When I struggle with whether they are literally true or not, if they are passages that I think might be essential to faith, I choose to err on the side of humility and say “I doubt that, but I’m only human and certainly not as smart as Almighty God.”
But why not, people ask me, believe that God gave us the Scripture, at least in its original form, as a pure, inerrant gift that one need not have any doubts about? Wouldn’t God give us something that we would and should never have to question? Why can’t I believe that? Because I bet you don’t believe it, either. Indeed, everyone, even the most conservative fundamentalist, has a way of making a decision about what things in the Bible are literally true and applicable to us, and which things are not. Consider levirate marriage, which the Torah instructs God’s people to practice, and is described in our Bible in Deuteronomy 25. Does anyone you know practice that? That means that if your son dies and widows his wife before he has given her a son, you and your family are responsible for providing her another husband. And that husband is ideally one of your other sons who is still living. This was the commandment that Jacob’s son Judah violated when his daughter-in-law Tamar was widowed without a son and Judah refused to give her his last son Shelah. Of course Tamar tricked her father-in-law into having sex and impregnating her. The resulting son Perez was an ancestor of Jesus, and without a doubt, the villain of the story was not the incestuous trickster Tamar but Judah, who violated the commandment of Levirate marriage. Of course, virtually all Christians today have decided that this teaching does not apply to them because today a widowed woman without a son is not destitute, as she would have been during the time of the early Hebrews. True. But don’t you see? There is a method at work in which one (even one considered a flaming fundamentalist) makes a decision about a passage of the Bible not applying to us today.
Obviously, my own way of deciding what passages of Scripture are literally true and applicable differs from the ways of some other people. So, you might be wondering, how do I go about deciding? Well, I tried to think of a formula, but I could not. All I can say is that we have two sources to help us.
The first is a large body of research, history, science, and biblical scholarship that helps us interpret the Bible. As we well know, Biblical scholars disagree. It is good to study a wide variety of perspectives.
The second is the Holy Spirit. I am not saying that the Holy Spirit makes it easy to understand the Bible. The Holy Spirit literally makes it possible. What do I mean? Allowing the Holy Spirit to guide me in understanding and discerning Truth in the Scriptures first requires humility (certainly not the arrogance and intellectualism that “liberals” are accused of), and listening and waiting for God. It sometimes requires waiting, saying to God that I do not understand something and will wait for His revealing, which may not come in this life. It sometimes requires giving the Scripture the benefit of the doubt, where I am not sure if what the Bible tells me to do or not to do is truly from God, but I’m going to obey it anyway out of a strong desire to honor God.
Does all of this sound easy? Of course it doesn’t! Perhaps it would be easy to just give in and take the view of Biblical inerrancy. Still, even viewing the Bible as inerrant, it is only through the Holy Spirit (at least in my view) that it is even possible to understand the Scriptures without a high probability of being misled. I must humble myself, pray, and submit. The Bible is not “just a book,” nor can it be described as “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” It is much more complex than that.
Let me close this essay with some words of Bonhoeffer that certainly define the way I want to regard the Scripture but often fail at. He wrote, “Either I determine the place where I will find God, or I let God determine the place where he wants to be found. If I am the one who gets to decide where God will be found, then I will always find a God there, a God who some way or other is the kind of God I am looking for, a God I like. But if God is the One who says where he will be found, then this will very likely be the place that at first does not at all fit my own nature and character, a place I probably will not like at all. This place is the cross of Jesus . . . . This is the way I now read the Bible. I ask of every passage, ‘What does God have to say to us here?’”
If I ask this question honestly and humbly, I will not be deceived by Biblical passages that I am tempted to doubt or dismiss.
No comments:
Post a Comment