Scripture

April 11, 2023

In our next exciting installment, we’ll explore the authority of scripture and how has collapsed for me. Sort of. I still find scripture compelling, and I’m trying to understand how to read it appropriately.

Scripture

In Reformed Christianity, Scripture is the single most important revelation of the nature and work of God, and if one takes sola scriptura seriously, it is the only true revelation of God.

All Evangelicals hold a high view of scripture, and I come from the Reformed tradition, which holds to Sola Scriptura—scripture trumps all other sources of revelation and truth. Most Reformed folks also hold to some form of inerrancy—the idea that scripture is without error, although that has been nuanced some:

• Scripture is without error in the autographs (original written form).
• Scripture is without error in all it affirms: this can exclude simple factual disagreements in different accounts and accounts of events which are descriptive rather than prescriptive.

However, I learned that an inerrant view of scripture was not the only way to view inspiration and one that didn’t hold up well. Scripture simply had too many contradictions on its face and was clearly told from many different perspectives. While I’ve had to reject inerrancy, I still believe scripture has a lot to teach us. I’m left, however, with more questions than answers.

• As discussed above, what is the nature of revelation, especially general revelation (natural theology) vs. special revelation (scripture)?
• I believe God exists, but how do we trust divine revelation—how do we know it really is from God? What does it mean for scripture to be inspired?
• If scripture is both inspired and a thoroughly human document¹, how do we read it? Certainly not as Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.
• How do we read from the perspective of the Biblical writers and their intended audiences? How do we avoid flattening scripture into a 21st century message to 21st century, white, middle-class Americans?
• How can we minimize confirmation bias and reading long held interpretations and cultural assumptions back into scripture? In other words, how do we read scripture again for the first time?
• What is objectivity? We are finite beings with finite perspectives—how do we take on the perspectives of others? Does a truly objective interpretation exist? Would it be helpful even if it did?

My faith rested on scripture and what I read there. We read scripture, recited scripture, interpreted scripture, studied the minutiae of scripture. Our carefully considered worldview was based on the truth of scripture. Every action we took was held up to the mirror of scripture.

There were hard passages, but we responded with nuance and respect for the primacy of the word of God. I was schooled, catechized, and steeped in scripture. When I hung out with the Baptists, I memorized scripture. Certainly there were questions, but we had we had well constructed answers, which revealed the depth and beauty of divine revelation in its pages.

For most of my life, my answers to those questions came from received tradition. I grew up believing in God—Christianity was the air I breathed, and belief effortlessly infused my mind. Scripture was the inspired word of God, which taught us all we needed to know for eternal life. It was something I did without conscious thought, even as I learned, and my beliefs became more mature and nuanced. All of that, however, rested on a foundation of trust in my teachers, regardless of whether that was their stated role.

I was taught that scripture—sola scriptura—was the highest form of revelation. We could use our reason to understand scripture, but its truth trumped all church tradition and presumed encounters with the divine. Popes could speak ex cathedra, and their word was infallible, but we were Reformed, and we would have none of that. The Bible was the inspired, infallible, inerrant word of God, and that was what we believed, the strong foundation on which we built our faith. All else was distraction, the wisdom of man, vainglorious striving.

What happened, then, when the witnesses I trusted behaved badly? Could my trust in scripture stand?

As I grew older and saw more clearly the social and political biases of the church in which I was raised, my beliefs grew more and more distant from those of my childhood. I believe that was a worthy maturation, and it enabled me to hold on to a form of those beliefs well into my 50s. I came to see pillars of my faith tradition, especially a penal substitutionary view of atonement, were not the only way to believe—there were historical options I had never been taught. I had never been exposed to whole strains of Christianity, like Orthodox, Catholic, and mainline Protestant positively and even taught they were heretical. As I read and met Christians from other traditions, I was impressed with their commitment and even piety. These were people I’d been taught were liberals and not true Christians, because they twisted scripture, or they didn’t believe Jesus was God. That, or they were legalists, they worshipped Mary, or they were even John’s whore of Babylon. The people I met didn’t fit these distorted stereotypes, and I had to question the wisdom of the people who had taught them to me.

As the poor behavior of my people became more and more pronounced, I had to question the foundations of their profession—was this actual faith, or was it tribal affinity? Were they trying to be like Jesus, or were they just being American conservatives? If character really didn’t matter, as it appeared, what did? Was their conservatism an outgrowth of their faith in God and a reflection of the character of Christ, or was their religious practice an outgrowth of their accustomed way of life and loyalty to the Republican Party?

I have to believe it’s a mix. My people sincerely wanted to be good, but they were blind to how much of their idea of good simply supported their way of life. Liberal ideas like redistributive justice disrupt their comfortable suburban lifestyles and challenge their enlightened sense of noblesse oblige. Are we really good when we give a tiny portion of our wealth to aid the poor or when we blame our problems on the moral decay of immigrants? How is that being like Jesus, who taught us to love the stranger and exalted hated half-breed foreigners as exemplars in his parables?

If I couldn’t trust those who had taught me that scripture was the literal word of God, how could I hold a belief so counterintuitive, so apparently fantastical—that a transcendent, omnipotent being had created all that exists?

Not only was my trust in scripture weakened by the abysmal witness of Evangelicals; reading outside my Evangelical bubble showed my much of what they had taught me was simplistic or just wrong. I learned that much of the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures was likely ahistorical—the children of Abraham weren’t a persecuted minority in Egypt who were bred as slaves but a neighboring Canaanite tribe which became large and difficult and were kicked out by the Egyptians, because they didn’t play well with others. While the gnostic gospels were obvious (albeit ancient) fabrications, core doctrines like the trinity still were unsettled (see eastern church), and none of the gospels were written by apostles. The documentary hypothesis was not liberal hooey but a good faith attempt to understand how the Books of Moses had come to be—oral traditions which had solidified over time into written texts, likely compiled during the Babylonian captivity. The NT had excellent textual integrity from the time it was first written down but was composed in a long process of compilation, borrowing, and revision to support the message each evangelist wanted to deliver. (Epistles?) Peter, Paul, and James had real theological differences and argued like cats on a hot summer night. Some canonical epistles were pseudepigraphical, and Paul wasn’t the author of Hebrews. It might have been Apollos—no one knows.

Slavery in Egypt, God’s miraculous salvation, the exodus, and the conquest of Canaan have been the core of Jewish identity and theology for millennia, but now they are revealed as a tribal oral tradition which told history from the perspective of a badly behaved playground bully? And the doctrine of the trinity was a compromise report by a committee? And the Eastern and Western churches still didn’t agree on the nature of the Holy Spirit²?

Scripture was sounding less like a holy book dictated by God and more like an unholy mess banged together in a long, difficult, painful process by very fallible, and sometimes distasteful, men, mostly. It was, in short, very human.

For Jews and Catholics (Wesleyans—Wesleyan quadrilateral), this is hardly news. They have long argued with scripture, and scriptural commentary in the various Targums and Mishnah have nearly the same weight as the inspired word itself. And what does inspiration mean anyway? Not settled. Not simple. Not inerrancy. Even inerrancy has been nuanced and stretched until it means very little, by people trying desperately to hold on to the word in the face of mountains of contrary evidence. This is what happens when evangelicals attempt to be intellectually honest.