Of course, some have studied it. They have read the Bible in-depth. But most times, those who did will be less forthcoming with telling me that they have found all the answers they have been looking for.
Sometimes, when I read the Bible, I have more questions than answers. Maybe, Psalm puts it best when describing my thoughts on some issues that still challenge me today. Some of these issues include His second coming, the Old Testament God of violence, homosexuality, Paul’s treatment of women, suffering and divine providence, slavery and the Bible’s inerrancy and infallibility.
Psalm 119 reads: “Your word is a lamp to guide my feet and a light for my path.”
I always see that scripture as offering understanding one step at a time, that is, the immediate next step after and no more, and definitely not a floodlight cast on the whole journey to full understanding.
I guess that is why Paul said that he only sees the glass half full this side of heaven, at least not until the perfect comes.
N.T. Wright said that the unexamined Bible is not worth reading and I agree with him.
Different people read it for different reasons. Some are genuine seekers of the truth. Others exploit the scriptures to further their dogmatic beliefs.
Their motive is important because through the lens of their own biasness, the scripture taken selectively (and out of context) has often been used as a means to their ends.
The history of the church from the time of the first stone laid to the time we have verses splashed on huge pixelated screens has made the Bible what they want it to be to serve their own agenda.
We have jumped from one doctrinal extreme to the other, from one denomination to another, from uncompromising poverty vows to compromising prosperity gospel, from self-flagellating Mosaic laws to self-indulging libertine grace, and from demanding that the Bible be taken as a science book explaining how the earth was created sometimes in 4004 BC to divining its scriptures for revelationary knowledge to wow the credulous crowd.
Bishop Yvette Flunder wrote: -
“We’ve taken 2,000 years to turn Jesus into someone very different than the person who got in the water with John for baptism. There’s the political stuff, there’s economic stuff, there’s church stuff. Jesus is even a plank on many political platforms. Jesus is the reason that we go to war, Jesus is the reason we oppose the immigrants, Jesus is even mad at Mickey Mouse or the Teletubbies. But there comes a point when we have to undress Jesus, we have to take all the stuff, all the crap that we’ve put on Jesus, all of these layers and layers of tradition and all of our different ideas and theologies and get back to the Jesus that stood in the water with John.”
So, let’s examine the Bible starting with 2 Timothy 3:16-17. We ought to be familiar with it.
“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, equip for every good work.”
While I don’t dispute on the teaching, reproofing, correction and training part towards righteousness and good works, I however have some reservation on how many have used this verse to support their claim that the Bible, that is, everything in it, every statement, every incident recorded and every paragraph written, is perfect, inerrant and infallible.
This is where the call of NT Wright to examine the Bible comes in hot and much needed. And the question we have to ask ourselves is this, have we turn the Bible into the fourth member of the Trinity?Isn’t that a form of bibliolatry?
And if in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word became flesh and lived among us bearing witness, is the Word that John was referring to the Bible in print or the living Christ?
One Hebrew scripture scholar Harrell Beck said: “The Bible is not the Word of God - but the Word of God is in the Bible.”
Some will view this statement as outrageous or blasphemous, but if you read the Bible, some aspects of it, you will realise that what is written, or the act done as recorded, just do not quite square with what Jesus as the Word enfleshed have taught, encouraged or lived for.
Ultimately, I take my cue from what He said in one encounter when a lawyer asked him, which is the greatest commandment in the law. Jesus replied: -
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind...And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
And if that is the timeless foundation upon which the whole Bible rests, then some parts of it seem to me to be the proverbial apples that fell far from the tree where love was hung.
Let’s start with the most controversial subject of all. The “apple“ that is homosexuality.
We know Jesus said nothing about it. He talked about sexual immorality, religious hypocrisy, the corruption of money, the heart of deceit and lies, and the crucifixion of self. But, Jesus was quiet about homosexuality and masturbation.
Of course, Jesus was quiet about other things too but that is not a backdoor to their implied permissiveness.
My point is not to debate about homosexuality here, for we don’t lack verses that condemn it. Many have however come forward to argue that those verses have to be seen in their proper context, both cultural and theological, where the prohibition was specifically aimed at gang rape, temple prostitution, idolatry and pederasty. Well, I am not going to argue with it here.
Yet, if you take those same-sex condemnations literally, it would have to mean the death penalty for the violators - no questions asked.
In fact, since we are on the inerrancy and infallibility of scriptures, some of the death penalties meted out in the law of Moses included persistent rebelliousness of a child (Deut 21:18-21), a child who curses his/her parent (Exodus 21:15 and 17), caught working on Sabbath (Exodus 35:2), adultery (Leviticus 20:10), fornication (Deut 22:13-21), and yes, homosexuality (Leviticus 20:13).
I know what you are thinking: “But mike, they are the old covenant. Jesus came to fulfill the law. We are no longer under the curse of the law. We are set free by his grace, love and mercy.”
You are right. I agree.
But unless you are an avowed follower of Marcionism, who considered the OT God as a jealous tribal god (“Demiurge”), that is, a lesser deity than the Heavenly Father of Jesus in the NT, you will be hard-pressed to keep those death penalties (from the OT) separate from the commandment of love and Jesus’ sacrifice at Calvary (from the NT).
This ain’t no cherry picking between the OT and NT. You pick up one end of the NT stick, you also pick up the other OT end. In other words, the God of the OT is deemed as the same as the God of the NT – they are one person.
And that is not all. Let’s talk about God’s wrath in the OT.
In Exodus 32:27, Moses said to the sons of Levi: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, “Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.” The sons of Levi did as Moses commanded, and about three thousand of the people fell on that day.””
So much for loving your neighbour right? And unless you accept that God does what He pleases and His sovereignty is unimpeachable, a command to massacre is just hard to swallow.
There are also other passages of the OT where David, Moses and Joshua were asked to kill in God’s name. I guess however you want to explain it, this apple (of divine-sanctioned genocide in the OT) fell rather miles away from the tree of life (from the NT).
Indeed, there are other parts of the Bible that mentioned strange sex acts of the chosen people and one even led to death. That’s poor Onan who spilled his semen in a levirate marriage against his will and ended up being slayed by God.
But, alas, I’ll skip that and talk about the one verse that has always troubled me. It is in Genesis 6.
In verse 11, it says that “the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence.” And the author of the next part seems to have read the mind of God when he wrote: “And the Lord was sorrythat he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieves him to his heart.” In some version, it reads: “(God’s) heart was filled with pain.” (And another version reads “the Lord regretted”).
I know I should not take that divine apology (or remorse) literally, but my point is that it appears to me that it was written from a human perspective, interpreted through a human understanding of and response to circumstances happening at that time, and in making that presupposition, I find it difficult to take everything stated in the Bible as an expression and measure of perfection and infallibility.
Theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote, “The Bible is an act of faithful imagination. It is not a package of certitudes. It is an act of imagination that invites our faithful imagination that makes it possible to live faithfully.” And excessive certitude runs the danger of replacing the earnest search for truth with settling for easy and convenient answers.
Put it another way, the Bible is not meant to answer all your questions with certainty. It is not a science book the same way your JC physics or chemistry text is. It is not as if one of the Ten Commandments contained this scientific hint: “Two intertwining strands encode the secret of life” (and if the Bible is inerrant as a science book, wouldn’t it get that right, or foresee that in advance?).
Last but not least, here’s how the Bible treats women.
In the eye of the law, a woman is worth half of what a man is worth. A menstruating woman is considered ceremonially unclean. They are deemed as chattels of their husband. And in Judges 19, there is a story of a man who gave away his virgin daughters away to be gang-raped in place of offering the male strangers who were guests in his house. There are more of these stories, but you get the drift about claims of Bible’s inerrancy.
After this short tour around the estate looking for strayed apples, I am again going back to the two commandments that all the law and the prophets hung upon.
If that is the perfect benchmark, that is, the timeless inerrant and infallible Word enfleshed that Jesus duly fulfilled via his life and death and resurrection, then those parts of the Bible I have mentioned above (eg. the death penalty, coitus-failed slaying, divine genocide, the divine apology, and the treatment of women, just to name a few), ought to give us discerning believers cause for some serious thought about what Professor Beck said, which I shall repeat here: “The Bible is not the Word of God - but the Word of God is in the Bible.”
I will leave that part of personal reflection to you. But, to aid you along, this comment by author and pastor Adam Hamilton may be helpful: -
“We often think of the Bible as a supernatural book whose authors were inspired in a way and to a degree that ordinary Christians are not inspired...Yet the biblical authors, with a handful of exceptions, do not claim extraordinary inspiration...Even apostles did not read the Bible from the perspective of “God (or the Bible) says it, I believe it, that settles it.” They are willing to debate how their Bible applied to new situations. They recognized that parts of the Bible needed to be reinterpreted. They concluded that some things which had been very important within Judaism did not express God’s timeless will for humanity. Whatever view of the inspiration of scripture they held, it allowed such conclusions.””
Let me end with a helpful metaphor offered by another theologian, Frederick Buechner. He illustrates how we can hold on to our belief notwithstanding that the Bible contains certain passages that make us cringe, even in disbelief.
He compared the Bible to a window. “He notes that when we look through a window, we don’t worship the window. We simply look through it to get a glimpse of the Divine on the other side. Just because there are smudges, swatted flies, and hairline cracks obstructing our view, we don’t throw the window out. We learn to distinguish between what is part of the window and what is beyond it...Although a flawed and imperfect window, it was fashioned by people of faith who have helped generations of seekers catch a glimpse of the mystery beyond.”
(David M. Felton and Jeff Procter-Murphy, “Living the Question - the Wisdom of Progressive Christianity”).
Postscript: -
Last night, my wife and I had a discussion about this topic:Is the Bible truly inerrant and infallible?
She asked me, have I thought for a moment to see the whole tapestry of the Word of God and not just the back of it?
You see, if you turn to examine the back of the tapestry, it is indeed ugly. The back is a mess. The different coloured threads crisscrossing each other with no apparent purpose, random chaos, but when you turn it around, the front reveals a full and complete picture. Without the mess behind, you can’t achieve the beauty in front.
What the back lacks in order, meaning and direction (like the many inexplicable parts of the Bible, esp. the OT), the front makes it up with order, meaning and direction (that is, all the seemingly chaotic events leading up to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus).
So, that kept me thinking of how the Bible can still be inerrant and infallible in the way a tapestry is beautiful and complete on one side, but messy on the other side. Yet, it is not the back that completes the tapestry but the front. The back is just a means to the end in front.
Ultimately, our redemption story is a messy story, as it narrates the fall, the blood sacrifices, the disobedience, the endless rebellion and the final atonement. We are still struggling with it, even today.
But all that doesn’t change the core message of the Bible, that is, it is about the Word that became flesh and lived among us, transforming us, towards hope and love. The mess is thus necessary to bring about order, the fall is a prelude to the Cross, and death to self is a journey to the eternal hope that awaits.
Maybe that is one way of looking at the inerrancy/infallibility of the Bible; not so much in the construction of it by fallible human agents, but its redemption objective that came to pass in a man who became the final sacrifice and won the ultimate victory.
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