Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 21, 2007
Scripture:
Even somebody who knew nothing about Christianity or about this church who came in here, looked around, and sat through a worship service would pretty quickly get the impression that the Bible must be pretty important to us. After all, we have a lot of copies of it out where people can see them and pick them up and read them if they want. They’re in every pew. There are a bunch of them in the Fellowship Hall. There’s a big one on the lectern up front. And in the course of the worship service some people up front read some short bits out of it and some guy who’s dressed kinda funny spends what seems like too much time talking about one of those bits trying to explain what it means. All that is pretty obvious.Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
And indeed Bible is important to us. But what you won’t see is that questions about just what that the Bible is and about just how it is important to us are questions about Christians strongly disagree today. We disagree first of all over whether we must read all of the Bible, or at least all of the parts of the Bible that aren’t obviously or expressly not meant to be taken literally like the parables, literally or whether we may read it as myth or metaphor. Throughout history most Christians have read it literally, and most American Christians today insist that literally is the only way that the Bible may be read. Here at Monroe Congregational UCC on the other hand we have answered that question in favor of myth and metaphor with our slogan “we take the Bible seriously not literally.” One quick example: Most of us read the creation story of Genesis 1, the great epic of the six days of creation with which the Bible opens, as a great mythic poem about God as Creator, about the goodness of God’s creation, and about both women and men being created in God’s image and likeness as myth and not as literal history or science, as something that actually happened the way Genesis portrays it as happening, like Fundamentalist Christians insist on doing.
And we disagree over the origin of the Bible. Did it arise through divine inspiration? Or is it the product of fallible human authors who were writing their own experiences of God within their own cultural contexts with their own understandings of the world and their own cultural prejudices? It is an issue of immense importance. Throughout history most Christians have insisted, and most American Christians today insist, that God wrote the Bible or at least that God inspired the Bible in a way that insures that everything in it reflects divine truth. I don’t believe that, so let’s take a closer look and see what we can discover about the divine inspiration of the Bible.
The classical position on the divine inspiration of the Bible is stated in our reading from 2 Timothy. The author of the letter states: “All scripture is inspired by God.” 2 Timothy 3:16a. For most Christians throughout the history of the faith who have taken that position this passage ends the debate. The Bible is the book with all the answers, they say; and it says scripture is inspired by God. End of discussion, they say. For a great many people, the Bible itself proves that the Bible is inspired by God. Oh, really? There are at least two things wrong with that assertion on its face. They are both pretty obvious when you think about it. The first is that the “scripture” referred to here can only be the Old Testament. There was no New Testament when 2 Timothy was written, so the most the passage can mean is that the Old Testament is inspired by God. The people who use it to cut off criticism of their favorite Biblical proof texts, however, never limit it to the Old Testament. They apply it to the entire Bible. The second superficial problem with the contention that this passage proves the inspiration of the Bible is that it is an obvious logical fallacy to try to prove that a book is divinely inspired by pointing to something in the book that says it is. That argument will convince someone who already believes it and no one else. I have up here this little notebook with copies of some of my sermons. I could write in it “everything in this notebook is inspired by God.” Would that make it true? Of course not. Neither does 2 Timothy’s contention that all scripture is inspired by God make that assertion true just because it appears in scripture.
Yet these two superficial problems with the assertion of 2 Timothy 16 that all scripture is inspired by God don’t even begin to get at what is really wrong with that assertion. What is really wrong with it is has been revealed once again by an event this very weekend right here in our own Snohomish County. A group that claims to be Christian is meeting at the Lynnwood Convention Center. Its identifying characteristic, according to the Everett Herald, is that it is virulently, some say violently, anti-gay; and we can be sure that it claims justification for that hatred, that bigotry, in that very scripture that 2 Timothy assures us is inspired by God. We all know the Biblical texts. I won’t read them from this sacred pulpit. They have been used for centuries to justify not only discrimination but even murder in the name of God. Inspired by God? Not by my God. Not by any God I want to have anything to do with.
And it’s not just gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people the Bible has things to say about that can’t possibly have been inspired by the God I know and love in my life and in the life of the church I serve. Bishop John Shelby Spong, in his book The Sins of Scripture, has given us a litany of such texts. He calls them “texts of terror.” They have been used to justify despoiling the environment, denigrating and oppressing women, abusing children, and imposing Christianity by force on people of other faiths. And they have given rise to and justified perhaps the greatest of Christianity’s many sins, an anti-Semitism so virulent that it is responsible for the deaths of literally millions of innocent children of God. One such text of terror, Matthew 27:25, in which the Jewish mob that is demanding the crucifixion of Jesus from a reluctant Pontius Pilate screams “his blood be on us and on our children!” is an historical lie and has more blood on it than any other text in the Bible. It is not an exaggeration to say that it laid the foundation for the Holocaust. Inspired by God? Not by my God. Not by any God I want to have anything to do with. Not by the God I know and love.
What then are we to say? If the Bible contains such terrible texts, if it has such things that so clearly are not inspired by God but which so clearly are expressions of ancient cultural understandings and prejudices, should we just chuck the whole thing? Should we gather up all those pew bibles and have a big bon fire to get rid of all the terrible texts? Well, not so fast. That the Bible contains so many such things clearly indicates that the doctrine of divine inspiration of the Bible has to go, but that doesn’t mean that the Bible has to go. For one thing, for whatever faults it may have, the Bible is still our book. It is the church’s book. It is the book that the Christian church has used for over 1,500 years in its current form as the basis of its teaching and its corporate worship. The Christian church would hardly be the church without the Bible. It contains our foundational stories. It contains the story of the salvation history of Israel, the story of the Patriarchs and of the Exodus, of the Kingdom of David, the Babylonian Exile, and the Restoration. It contains the story of Jesus Christ, of his birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection. It contains the story of the birth of the Christian church through the acts and teachings of the Apostles.
It contains texts of terror to be sure, but it also contains wonderful, inspiring, life-giving and life-enhancing texts that teach us God’s ways. Without the Bible we wouldn’t have the prophets saying “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” Amos 5:24 Or “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Or “they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up arms against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.” Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3 We would not have the Psalmist saying “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Psalm 23:1 We would not hear Mary singing “My soul magnifies the Lord” or the angels proclaiming to the shepherds “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” Luke 2:10-11 We would not hear Jesus say “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” Matthew 5:9 We would not have the great confession of faith: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….And the Word became flesh and lived among us…..” John 1:1, 14 We would not have the angels saying to the women at the tomb “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen.” Luke 24:5 And we would not have the Apostle Paul proclaiming “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,” 2 Corinthians 5:19, and “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39. We would not have these and so many other foundational texts of our faith, texts that give us faith and hope, that teach us how to live and that make that life possible. No, getting rid of the Bible is not an option for us. It is our book. It teaches us. It inspires us. It contains much that is beautiful and true. We cannot do without it. We don’t want to do without it.
So what are we to say? The Bible isn’t divinely inspired. It contains much that isn’t true. It was written by ordinary people like us who were recording their experiences of God. Some of those experiences we must leave behind as not reflecting God’s truth. But many of those experiences resonate with our souls, with our own experiences of God. They touch our spirits and draw forth a response of love and peace, and sometimes a response of challenge, a call to be better than we are. When that happens we feel God’s presence in the Bible. Then we know that we have found something of God’s truth in its words. We know that it is connecting us with God and God with us. Then we know that it is doing holy work in us, that it is indeed the Holy Bible, and for that we can give God our heartfelt thanks and praise. Amen.