As Christians, we rightly place great importance on our sacred text, the Bible. However, in this post I’m going to argue that for many Christians, the Bible has actually become a stumbling block that prevents them from seeing God as He really is. And I’m going to suggest what I believe is a more respectful and authentic way to approach scripture and allow it to speak to us about God.
(I apologise in advance that this post is somewhat longer than I usually write. There’s just no way I can begin to do the subject justice with fewer words. I hope you don’t mind.)
To many Christians, the merest suggestion that we have elevated the Bible above its intended station will seem at best wrongheaded and at worst downright heretical. Yet I think this is exactly what we have very often done.
I’m tempted to say we have often made the Bible into the fourth person of the Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit and God the Holy Bible. But in fact, I think what we’ve often done is worse even than this: we’ve elevated the Bible above God Himself.
OK, let me try to explain. Perhaps the easiest way is with an illustration from scripture itself. Consider the following two passages:
Samuel also said to Saul, “The Lord sent me to anoint you king over His people, over Israel. Now therefore, heed the voice of the words of the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he ambushed him on the way when he came up from Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
(1 Samuel 15:1-3)
“But I say to you who hear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you. To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also. And from him who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who asks of you. And from him who takes away your goods do not ask them back. And just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise.
“But if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive back, what credit is that to you? For even sinners lend to sinners to receive as much back. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For He is kind to the unthankful and evil. Therefore be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful.”
(Luke 6:27-36)
These two texts illustrate one of the primary problems of biblical interpretation: how to reconcile the “monster God” who appears to crop up with reasonable regularity in the Old Testament with the compassionate and merciful God presented in the teachings of Jesus.
Or, to state the dilemma more baldly, what do we do with the glaring inconsistency between Jesus’ teaching and actions as God in the flesh and the violent thread that runs through the Old Testament in which the very same God allegedly instructs His people to mercilessly slaughter not only military enemies but also their wives, children and animals?
This is where how you read the Bible matters greatly. If you hold to the view that all of scripture is equally authoritative and “true” in a flat, literalist sense, you have a big problem answering this dilemma. In fact, you can generally only do so by performing mental gymnastics. The arguments usually revolve around definitions of divine wrath, divine justice being part of God’s love, sin needing to be judged and punished, etc. And if all of those arguments fail, you can always play the “God’s ways are higher than our ways” card to explain away the difficulty.
I believe the reason this problem arises is that we’ve mostly been taught to believe that the written word of God (the Bible) is coequal with the eternal living Word of God, the divine logos who was with God from the beginning (Jesus). And it’s made worse by the fact that our modern, enlightened minds are drawn to the black and white typeface of scripture much more than they are drawn to a deep, dare I say mystical encounter with the person of Jesus Christ.
Consider these words from Hebrews 1:1-4:
God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.
This passage acknowledges that earlier in human history, God spoke in various ways through the prophets. An important one of those ways was by divinely inspiring the prophets to document their understanding of God and His interactions with the world in written form. But – and this is the key – now He has spoken to us in a better way, namely through the person of His Son. In fact, as the text goes on to point out, it’s not just that Jesus is a better explanation of what God is like: He is the fullest possible explanation of what God is like, the express image of His person.
It seems to me that we have in this passage, stated in black and white as it were, the admission that man’s understanding of God up to the incarnation was incomplete. If everything revealed to and documented by the prophets had already been the complete revelation of what God is like, why would God have needed to speak further by sending His Son? The very reason God took on flesh was to remove any remaining doubt as to what God is like by bringing our understanding out of the realm of shadowy glimpses and into glorious, vibrant, full HD.
So, back to our dilemma of how to reconcile conflicting pictures of God.
Our guiding principle has most often been to seek to preserve the inerrancy of scripture, by which I mean to maintain the belief that all parts of scripture are objectively equally accurate. We come to the text, we find two conflicting pictures of God, and we say to ourselves, Well, these must obviously both be true, so there must be some mechanic I have to employ to explain how that can be so.
This, I contend, is the wrong way to approach scripture. To make scriptural inerrancy the inviolable principle when seeking to understand what God is like is to elevate scripture above Jesus – who, as we have just read, is the fullest possible revelation of what God is like. Ergo, our approach actually needs to be flipped around one hundred and eighty degrees: the only inviolable principle to which we must hold when interpreting scripture is that God is like Jesus.
Another way to put it is this: scripture must be made to serve and point to Jesus, never the other way around. In other words, if, in order to maintain some kind of idea of biblical infallibility, you have to give Jesus the potential to be an angry, bloodthirsty tyrant, you’re doing it wrong.
We might call this approach to the Bible a Jesus-shaped hermeneutic (which is just a fancy word to describe how we go about interpreting scripture). Even better would be to adopt a crucicentric hermeneutic, which is to say that our starting point in interpreting all of scripture is the belief that Jesus Christ on the cross is the clearest revelation of what God is like.
Now, one of the questions that inevitably arises is this: “How then are we to understand these violent depictions of God in the Old Testament? Are you suggesting that when the biblical author writes ‘The Lord says go and kill them all’, we are not to take that as truth?”
Well, yes and no.
My starting point is this: based on the revelation of God seen in Jesus Christ, and in particular in Jesus Christ upon the cross, does this look like something Jesus would say or do? If the answer is a clear no, as I believe is the case with our example text from 1 Samuel 15, then I have to accept that what is written in the text is not an objectively true word about what God is like. For me, Jesus trumps scripture, every time.
But what then do we do with these problematic texts? Are we saying they are a waste of space and should never have been included in the canon of scripture?
No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. Texts like this become useful and meaningful once we begin to realise that scripture is the unfolding story of man’s progressive understanding of what God is like. But as long as we stick to our view of the Bible as an encyclopaedia of assorted facts about God, these and other texts will remain deeply problematic, and we will continue to force Jesus to bow to our notions of scriptural inerrancy. In doing so, we make the Bible God and demote Jesus to being its servant.
A couple of final points.
First, I realise this is a huge subject and one that raises all kinds of questions that cannot be addressed in one already-too-long blog post. Don’t let the fact that it raises more questions put you off. Questions are our friends insofar as they fuel us on our quest to better understand Jesus.
Second, if this post seems absolutely radical to you, and you’ve never even thought of scripture as anything other than a set of equally authoritative texts, you might perhaps like to read my four-part series On understanding the Bible. Part 1 can be found here, and each part contains a link to the next.
[ Image: Michal ]
