I was raised in a very peculiar and literalist faith, Seventh Day Adventism. What I inherited in that upbringing was not only an adherence to the belief that the Bible was totally inerrant, but also a belief that if only you could read and interpret it the right way you could unlock God’s rules. For example, most SDAs hold to a 6,000-year-old Earth. They believe that Joshua literally commanded the sun to stand still in the sky. They believe in a literal Adam and Eve and teach against evolution, and further many are vegetarians because Adam and Eve could not have originally been created to kill animals. They believe in the worldwide flood of Noah. They believe that the sabbath day is Saturday and worshiping on any other day is the mark of the beast.
Given all of that and more, it’s shocking that any SDAs stay in the faith past the age of 25 or so. All those ideas are demonstrably false. I’m not going to tackle why today, but simply to say by way of introduction that insistence on biblical inerrancy can only lead to a loss of faith. It sets up false alternatives: either Bible is inerrant, or it is meaningless. Once you discover that the Bible is quite errant, well, all that’s left is leaving Christianity. This kind of faith is built on bibliolatry, not faith in Christ. When I became reconvinced that Christ was real, alive and very present in my life, I had to relearn what it meant to say the Bible is meaningful and authoritative to me. I had to separate inerrancy from my scriptural encounters while still respecting the work of inspiration and the Holy Spirit in and through scripture.
It turns out that many Christians don’t share this problem with me. Most mainline believers can approach scripture with much greater subtlety and distinction than a 13-year-old SDA. Certainly, scripture has always had a unique place in the heart of our faith and worship and continues to influence our lives today. Martin Luther shared the image of a cradle holding the baby Jesus as a metaphor for the Bible. The scriptures enfold and present Christ to us, but we don’t have to believe any one thing about the Bible. We don’t mistake the cradle for the infant, nor should we mistake the Bible for our real object of worship, the Christ. Scripture’s import is not in perfection or infallibility, but in its profound ability to reveal Christ, comfort, remind and inspire.
John 20:31
But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
I’m not going to argue here why I believe the Bible is quite errant and contradictory. I’ve written about it at length, and you are free to explore my archives. The Bible is a collection of writings from diverse and sometimes conflicting voices and perspectives. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. These conflicting voices do not diminish the Bible for us; these voices enrich our understanding of God. Even through this diversity, it becomes clear that God holds us in love and mercy and requires us to extend love and mercy to others. But God does not ask us to turn off our brains as we try to figure out what in what ways this ancient witness still speaks to us in our modern lives.
The Gospel has to be the norm.
Hans Küng
I’m going to try to answer a question I frequently get along the lines of, “if you don’t believe the Bible is inerrant, then why even bother?” I can only share where I’ve currently landed in this response, your results may vary.
Inspiration is Limited by Language and Culture
I want to start in a place that should be obvious, but again, as a teenager I never really thought about this. Even if God dictated the entire Bible word for word (and they most certainly did not), that dictation had to transpire using a certain cultural understanding and language. It would make no sense for God to dictate the Bible in a cultural and linguistic format that wouldn’t be intelligible until the year 5,492 CE. Likewise, the inspiration of the Bible had to be recorded in the culture and language of the day. Just as the language of 5,492 CE wouldn’t make sense to us today, the language of 500 BCE may not make a lot of sense, either. We’ve learned a lot in the meantime, like polygamy is bad for one, the Earth is round for another.
This becomes one of my core principles, that God inspired the biblical authors’ thoughts but allowed for cultural, linguistic and personal limitations such as a lack of knowledge of biology, physics and human psychology. Scripture is divinely guided yet contains human imperfections. Wherever we understand meaning and authority, it must come from some combination of divine inspiration and human authorship. The challenge is always to discern what elements are truly inspired, what elements continue, what elements are worthy of reinterpretation and what elements are simply a cultural residue that should be tossed away.
A Communion of Saints
One of my favorite ways to understand scripture is that it is a record of our faith ancestor’s struggle with God. They don’t always get it exactly right, but we struggle with them. I happen to also hold a lot of other writing from fellow Christians as dear as my Bible. My Bible is important to me, and I read it every day, but equally important are works by Hildegard, Barth and of course, The Cloud of Unknowing.
The very reason we even have a Bible, especially the New Testament, is because a community of believers got together and tried to agree on which writings were important to them. At least up to that time. I don’t think that the fact that the biblical canon was largely agreed upon 1,500 years ago means we should give up looking for new writings, new thinkers and new inspiration in today’s writings. If I built a library today, I would assume books would continue to be included through the discernment of the collections board or some other community of readers and scholars. The original authors of scripture never knew they were writing scripture. They thought they were writing a theologized history and some letters to churches. It was only later we decided these works were scripture and we continue to get to decide what they mean for us today.
One important way we do this is by gathering as Christians. In a typical mainline worship service, a lector reads between one and four texts from the Revised Common Lectionary which means that millions of Christians are pondering the same verses on the very same day. Your pastors preach on those texts and in so doing, provide new insightful and inspired interpretations. Your bible study groups meet, read and sometimes argue over what these passages have meant in the past and what they could mean today. We can meet today and struggle together with God and purpose, and the Bible and other great Christians in history allow us to take part in a conversation that extends over two millennia.
Thus, another core principle for me is that we get to decide together on new meanings using our evolved understandings, culture, language and discovery as we read in community. We work together to discern how the Holy Spirit is inspiring us today through scripture but also through new thinkers. The church community, guided by the Spirit, determines which texts are authoritative. Authority emerges from ongoing communal interpretation. Meaning and authority emerge from corporate reading.
Listening
In Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth emphasized that the Bible is only the Word of God in the sense that the Holy Spirit chooses to speak to us through it. There is nothing inherent in scripture that demands we see the Bible as God’s inerrant word; in fact, the Bible itself never makes such a claim. How could it make such a claim when the writers of the Bible didn’t even know they were writing scripture at the time, their writings became scripture much later through tradition.
Much as Luther compared the Bible to Jesus’ cradle, for Barth, the Bible is a very human document written in specific historical contexts with the purpose of witnessing God’s revelation, especially in Jesus Christ. The Bible is not some direct and unmediated Word of God in any permanent sense. Instead, the Bible becomes the Word of God when God chooses to speak through it and we as individuals encounter and respond to that divine presence.
As far as I’m concerned, it can be no other way. How can something written by humans thousands of years ago in a language we no longer understand, soaked in misinformation about science and human psychology, and using metaphors that aren’t present in our modern life be a permanent statement from God? Again, this is a feature not a bug. It allows us to take part in our history while reflecting the true freedom and dynamic nature of God’s interaction with humanity as we continue to grow, learn and evolve.
Our job is to listen for the voice of the Holy Spirit as we read. It is God’s Spirit that illuminates, not the words themselves. It is God who is truth, not the words themselves. Reading the Bible is a sacred and transformative experience, but only if we’re listening to what the Holy Spirit is saying today. We need to be receptive and not close off. Making assumptions about how scripture functions or about its role and infallibility is a form of closing off. Assuming the contradictory and error-ridden Bible is infallible is of course silly, but it also prevents the Bible from speaking to us today and functioning as the Word of God in our lives.
When we use the Bible as that sacramental thin place where we encounter the voice of the Holy Spirit, the Bible can continue to create meaning in the interaction between the text and the faithful. But doesn’t this mean that the text’s authority is then simply shaped by the reader’s context? Yes, and I hate to break it to you, but that’s always been true. No matter what you think is, “true,” of the Bible, it was shaped by context and interpretation, shaped by some form of Groupthink. You may just be blind to it, emphasizing the importance of listening anew.
Our Story
Since I’m a prolific writer, it won’t surprise you that the narrative is exceptionally important to my use of the Bible. I’m heavily influenced by Karl Barth, Walter Brueggemann and N.T. Wright, all of whom have differing views of how this narrative works, yet all support the narrative importance of scripture.
I love that there is a story that has come together from creation and finding fulfillment in Jesus’ work and mission and can be presented through ideas like identity, covenant and worship. However, let’s not be naïve and think that the earliest composers of scripture had this amazing metanarrative in mind. They certainly did not.
I like to think of how George Lucas continued to shape the Star Wars narrative through successive films and in so doing, changed the narrative of past films a little bit. This becomes somewhat painfully clear when watching episode four, Star Wars: A New Hope, which for the non-Jedi among you was the first one in 1977. Yeah, it was just called Star Wars back then because Lucas didn’t know he’d get to film more of them. Lucas didn’t know that Darth Vader was Luke’s father when he filmed that first one. But the later layer added depth and richness and an amazing metanarrative that has captivated fans and the culture at large ever since.
Likewise, the writers and editors of the Hebrew Scriptures had no idea about Jesus. But after the resurrection, Jesus’ followers scoured the scriptures to create a metanarrative that we know and love today. Is it true? I could be flippant and ask, “what do we mean by truth?” Instead, I will say, yes, it is true. It’s true for me in my life, it makes my life and all of world history make sense to me, and it continues to enrich my own purpose and meaning. It takes a radical Kierkegaardian leap to say this story has coherence, yet when I make that leap, my life also has coherence.
Brevard Childs, who himself was heavily influenced by Barth, taught a canonical approach to scripture. They way we read parts of the Bible should be in light of the finished canon. In this way, we don’t privilege the sources or oral tradition that precede the text, we read them as a whole narrative arc as received by the community. Some may see this as an attack on historical criticism of the Bible, but I take it as a both/and situation. You can do both, you can understand the historical sources but also understand that the Holy Spirit is speaking through the grander narrative of the canon as well.
Where I diverge is that I’m not certain where or why the canon takes shape. As I stated above, I think the writings of many Christians past the first century are valid as I discern the word of God. I’m also more interested in the greater narrative, a narrative that continues today in sequel form, than I am the specific shape of the existing canon.
This takes quite a leap to faith as well. I realize there isn’t historical data to support the grand narrative of scripture in this way. But for believers who are willing to take that leap with me, allow me to explain how think of Childs’ emphasis on the final form of scripture (and as always, you’re better off reading Childs yourself than taking my word for any of this):
Our canon came to us with the intent of our tradition and the guiding wisdom of the Holy Spirit as a theological collection. Now, Childs I believe also thinks the arrangement of books has importance to meaning and I’m simply more interested in the metanarrative. That’s the beauty of it all, we all see though our own lens. This intent connects us to the believing faith community and so the shape of the canon forms the shape of our faith not through single proof texts. Later writers reflected on and reinterpreted earlier ones, so it is important to understand these differences and echoes to gain a thematic view of the arc of the narrative.
Appreciating the metanarrative of the Bible allows us to take part in God’s amazing story. The authority and meaning come from the overarching narrative, and not from reading the Bible as a kind of systematic rule book. In fact, when you see the Bible in this way, pulling out some clobber passages about our LGBTQ+ siblings, or women’s’ roles in the world, or Sabbath days, or what clothing to wear seems exceptionally groundless and perhaps, delusional. Stories point in directions, characters grow, and plots develop. Allow that arc, shaped in love, service and empathy, to point you forward.
Jesus’ Ethical Model
This pointing forward means following Jesus’ ethics and teachings. If we leap into the belief that this narrative is coherent and tells God’s story, then the ultimate punchline to the story is, “love God, love neighbor.” This loving lens is how we should unlock all the Bible. Let’s face it, there are some terrible things written about God in the Bible.
Joshua 6:21 says, “Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.” Is that from God? I don’t think so, that is simply a warring and tribal people recording their history through their own lens that Jesus had to later correct. Genocide must always be wrong, so what is the Bible doing here? Also unsettling, the Bible fully supports slavery, polygamy, paying for brides, poor treatment of women and stoning children. If you don’t feel the ick while reading these passages, I don’t think you’re following Jesus’ call.
Jesus himself corrects scripture in places like Matthew 5:38-48. I think that is Jesus showing us the model for how we are to interpret the entire Bible through His lens of love God, love neighbor. We get meaning and authority from ethical guidance, not from the anciently unaware text itself, but from Christ’s moral vision.
A Common Language
Finally, the Bible gives us language to use with each other and understand each other. Of course, we don’t always agree on what some of these words mean, like salvation, sacrifice, redeemer, messiah, sin, even the form and function of the sacraments. But it does provide a liturgical and linguistic framework to shape our worship, practice and understanding. I’m a bit of a religious pluralist myself; I think God is present in revelation in many places outside of Christianity. But Christianity, like English, is my native tongue. Sure, I could take a history class in Spanish and probably get by, but I’ll learn faster and more solidly if I take the same class in English. The Bible and our ever-expanding community of faith is what provided that language and that is part of how I find meaning and authority inside of it. I would caution; this doesn’t mean we should also become disconnected or insulated from the wider culture. You should also learn to speak Spanish.
These are far from the only ways to read the Bible for meaning and authority. But they are helpful to me. I don’t place any of these above the others and I bounce around amongst these ideas as I need to. I’m only offering these to connect you back to your scripture once you’ve given up on the idea of inerrancy and literalism as the only way to derive meaning and authority from the Bible. I’m concerned that believers who are focused on inerrancy, and then later discover that the Bible is in fact quite errant, will dump their faith entirely. That’s not necessary. We worship Christ not the Bible, and the approaches above can help shore up your respect for Scripture while still moving forward with intelligence and compassion.
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