Since I preached a Mother’s Day sermon this week, I decided to post the first installment of my sermon series on interpretation of Scripture.
Ellen thought that all she needed to know for the day was in the “promise box” she kept by her bedside. When there were tough times at work, a promise from the box kept her going. If she was facing a difficult decision, the promise box gave her hope and direction.Even when her husband, Jim, first got sick, Ellen knew God would heal him; a card from the promise box told her so.
Her faith never wavered even as Jim grew worse.When an ambulance took Jim to the hospital, Ellen paused long enough to call someone in her church’s prayer chain. She was still confident God would work a miracle. As she sat in the hospital chapel, she prayed and opened her Bible to the book of Exodus where she found these words in 15:26: “If you will diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord your God, and do that which is right in his eyes, give heed to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases upon you which I put upon the Egyptians; for I am the Lord, your healer.”This was her answer, she believed. God would heal Jim. He had said so right there in his Word… A few hours later, Jim died. Ellen was devastated. She believed God had failed her, and both the Bible and the promise box were full of lies. (From “I Believe Now Tell Me Why”, published by Nazarene Publishing House, pp. 31-32).
People down through the centuries have used the Bible for a myriad of things. Some have misused Scripture as an answer book for their personal troubles. But it has also inspired people to love more freely and openly, to give sacrificially, and to give up their lives and move halfway around the world to extol its virtues. It has led to the creation of organizations like the Salvation Army, which do an untold amount of good.
But it has also been used by groups like the KKK, the Nazis and general American society to justify racism, hatred, bigotry and murder. The Bible inspires people like Punkin Brown. Here’s a portion of a news story about Mr. Brown. “Punkin Brown stalks around the altar of the Old Rockhouse Holiness Church, his head bobbing, his voice a stream of guttural barks from the depths of his chest. He is ‘in the Word,’ and the congregation is clapping and shouting. Then, nonchalantly, he bends over and plucks a 3-foot yellow timber rattlesnake from a wooden box on the altar.
The rattler stiffens in a ‘V’ shape in Brown’s right hand as he hops across the stage like rocker Chuck Berry. He sets the snake on the altar and strokes its upstretched head. Members of the congregation cool themselves with funeral home paper fans as a guitar player picks out a blues riff.“They say it won’t bite,” the beefy 34-year-old evangelist shouts. “I seen that big copperhead in there bite, but I know one thing. That the Lord told me it was alright.”
But how can he say it’s alright when his 28-year-old wife, Melinda, the mother of five, died of a rattlesnake bite in a revival? How can he say it’s alright when, during the sermon we just discussed, Brown was bitten by the rattler he handled? Brown’s story ends this way: “Brown starts to fail. He walks in front of the altar, then back up and paces a little. He braces himself, his left hand on the pulpit, his right on Pastor Billy Summerford’s shoulder. His head is down and he swallows hard. Someone asks Brown if he wants a doctor. He shakes his head and points to the sky.“’Jeeeeesus, have your way, Jeeeeesus,” the congregation shouts in warbling voices. “Right now, God! Right now, Jesus,” the man in the striped shirt screams toward the ceiling. “Help my brother right now, I’ll glorify you, I’ll praise you for it.”
After about 10 minutes, the simple green and white church goes silent, except for some muffled sobs. The little girl in the video still smiles, uncomprehending. Brown is dead.”
How can Brown say that it’s alright? Because Brown is a Biblical literalist, and he’s read the longer ending of Mark, which says, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation. The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them: they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
How can one book, or, more precisely, sixty-six books bound together, inspire at the same time such dreadful things and such love and charity? Perhaps it isn’t the book at all, but our attitude toward the Bible that causes either goodness or hatefulness.For the next six weeks, we’re going to be talking about the way we should approach the Bible. We’ll talk about the Old Testament and the New Testament, Leviticus and Revelation. But today, I want to think about a way to approach the Bible in general.I want to offer up two alternatives: Inerrancy and Plenary Inspiration.
First, inerrancy. This is a position that has become more and more popular among very conservative Christians. This position says that God basically wrote the Bible himself. Some even say that God dictated to the author the very words to write, sometimes without the author even knowing what he was writing. Some inerrantists say that God revealed the message to the individual but allowed the writer to choose his own words and style and expression. Whichever of those a person believes, this position of inerrancy makes the human being who wrote the book in question just the mouthpiece for what God wanted to say. God alone is responsible for the content. Human beings can’t have been involved to any important degree because human beings are sinful.
Describing this position, the Nazarene Publishing House book “I Believe Now Tell Me Why” says, “A logical extension of this position is the idea of inerrancy – that the bible has no mistakes of any kind. As the argument goes, if God is responsible for all the content and even the very words of the Bible, then there can be no errors at all – not in theology, history, science, or any other area. In this view, whenever the Bible refers to any fact in any area, it must be totally accurate in all details.”That’s proven wrong easily enough. The pre-scientific view of the Bible thinks of our world as divided into three layers: the underworld, the surface of the earth and the heavens. The heavens were thought to hold back three chambers, one for rain, one for sleet and one for snow. God was thought by Bible authors to sit just above the blue sky, which, of course, was blue because of the water up there. We know now that that simply is not the way things work. The Old Testament assumes that leprosy is contagious, which we now know isn’t usually true. It is assumed in the New Testament that Jesus will return before the end of the lives of some of its authors, and our presence here this morning disproves that idea. If inerrancy or total dismissal of the Bible are the only options, if we have to say that God whispered to the authors every word to write and that none of those words is in any way mistaken or affected by culture, the knowledge we’ve gained would force us to dismiss Scripture entirely.
Thankfully, that isn’t the case. There is the position that is espoused officially by the Church of the Nazarene, called plenary inspiration. This position doesn’t give up inspiration. Not at all. It says that the Bible is indeed inspired by the Spirit. And plenary inspiration states that the Bible contains all things necessary for a relationship with the divine.
Where this position differs from inerrancy is that it allows that the human authors are the ones who wrote the text. When Paul wrote the letter to the Romans, he wasn’t sitting in a dark room, listening for God to whisper into his ear the next word to write. He was writing a letter to a church that existed around 50 A.D. And some of what Paul wrote is going to have a whole lot to do with his situation in history.
Plenary inspiration says to us, read the Bible. Take it seriously. But don’t take it alone. When you read something that seems odd to you, consider church tradition. What have people written about this passage? How has it traditionally been interpreted? And it encourages us to use our reason. What does human reason tell us about this scripture? As well, we’re encouraged to think about our own human experience. Do we know any Christians who have been bitten by snakes? Then the longer ending of Mark probably shouldn’t lead us to wrap rattlesnakes around our necks in worship. And aren’t you glad of that?
Our knowledge about our world is growing to an incredible degree. We used to think the earth was the center of the universe. Now, we know that all the planets in our system revolve around the sun. And not only that, but there are more galaxies than just ours out there. In fact, there are galaxies as far as telescopes can see, many of them revolving around a star something like our sun. Healthcare has taken giant leaps, we’ve discovered that epilepsy is indeed not demon possession as may have been thought in Bible times. And the ugly thing about inerrancy is that it says, I don’t care. I don’t care what science says, every single syllable in the Bible is historically, scientifically and otherwise right. So, if what I see through my telescope or microscope doesn’t agree with the Bible’s worldview, then science is wrong.
But plenary inspiration says, of course the Bible is affected by the worldview of its authors. But we don’t have to freeze our own thinking in time. What’s important is the guidance Scripture has for us in how to live our lives. And in that way, the Bible is a lamp unto our feet, and a light unto our paths.
Somewhere in this I would personally add that it is the message of the Gospel that makes the Bible ultimately important for Christians. We don’t read the thing to get good moral advice or scientific or historical facts.
I’m finding that many Christians have trouble agreeing on what exactly the Gospel message is. Substitutionary atonement? Jesus as moral exemplar? Christus Victor? Prophet, priest and king? On and on they go, of course.
I fall in the moral exemplar camp personally, as you know, so our different interpretations of Jesus’ significance will probably not allow us to agree on this one.
I am acutely aware that most people in the pews at my church fall into the substitutionary atonement camp, and I’ve struggled over the fact that I differ from them (though not all of them by any means). However, I have received comments basically saying a different view is appreciated. Honest exploration is never dangerous among open-minded people.
I agree with you that we don’t read the Bible for scientific or historical facts. But the morals of Jesus, which led him to challenge widely-held legalistic views and to have compassion on the ‘least of these,’ that’s big stuff for me.
Actually, I don’t think theories of atonement are all that important for defining the Gospel message. For example, I don’t think folks who believe substitutionary atonement and folks who believe Christus Victor need disagree on the essence of the Gospel – God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.
Great post again, AB. I must admit that I really struggle with this whole issue of the Bible and its authorship. For years, both growing up and in young adulthood, I was taught and fully believed the inerrancy of the Bible, the whole “all scripture is given by inspiration of God…” matter. Those who taught me claimed the inerrancy was the only way we could ever accept “The Word” as authoritative, and I almost still would have to agree. If it’s not “God-breathed”, then it would appear to me to be so much advice, and should be treated the same way I do any book off the “self-help” shelf at my local Barnes & Noble. What think ye?
That’s definitely the big issue. What do you do with scripture? We’re taught to come at it already believing it’s wholly, inerrantly inspired before we even actually read it. And there are people in Christian pews every Sunday extolling the virtues of the ‘inerrant’ Bible without ever having read the majority of it.
It’s the reading of books like Leviticus and Hebrews and Revelation, and parts of the Gospels and Romans, that’ll really give you trouble. For instance, Revelation is full of praise for God’s sense of revenge. What can we make of that? Did God really, at one time, demand that smart alec children be killed, that women could be thrown away as property, or raped in battle? Should we believe that homosexuals are damned, even as we have learned that sexual orientation is not a choice? Some say you have to accept that all Scripture is ‘inerrant’ and just accept the paradox. I don’t buy that.
There you go again. The bible is just another book. It has the same weight as a book by Danielle Steele or any other popular writer. The difference in the books comes through the eyes of the reader. One reads Danielle Steele’s books with a desire to let their minds wander through the pages of fiction. On reads the bible through the eyes of a person who is either inherently good or inherently bad determined to better their situation in this world. I don’t think anyone reading YOUR blogs would fall in the literal camp, do you? Those people were turned off by your verbage and views long ago. Those people reading your blogs are interested in finding or at least making sense of the truth. If a person were to read your blogs they would have a particularly different view of truth than a bible-thumping literal bible reader. It’s just another book. It isn’t holier than any other book I have on my shelf. It isn’t sacred. It isn’t the words of Christ. It is a book that for some has defined their very existence. Is that literal? You have quoted from the Nazarene people many times. What of their supposed theological connector – Mr. Wesley. Didn’t he, or isn’t he given credit for the phrase relating to biblical inerrancy – As far as the book points us to the golden shores of (I’ll leave the destination out because your blogs indicate the destination doesn’t exist) they are perfect.” Wouldn’t you want to substitute the word Heaven and rename that place morality? we don’t have to define morality the same way, nor define it all. However, there must be some guide, even in the UU movement, to point people to accepting the difference in people’s sexual orientation that you seem to be so enamored with. Shouldn’t there be something that points a person to making wise decisions? What is that for you? I am interested in knowing how you landed where you have without some sense of guide or directive from some sort of guidance. Did Buber have it right for you? We all have a moral oughtness…we ought to do this, or we ought to do this. Help me understand your point of view better than a person who was forced to where hot jeans that would rub your legs raw in the summer. Help me understand that where you are now is more than a response to what you were forced to encounter…and when did you realize that life is more than one man’s view of snakes, etc. as a means of whatever snakes are supposed to teach us about following Christ.
Anxiously awaiting your response.