Progressive Christian
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The Bible is Not the Word of God
16 COMMENTS
(HTTPS://WWW.PATHEOS.COM/BLOGS/FREELANCECHRISTIANITY/THE-BIBLE-IS-NOT-THE-WORD-OFGOD/#DISQUS_THREAD)
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Either the Bible is true or it isn’t, either it’s God’s inspired inerrant word
or it isn’t, you can’t have it both ways, you can’t pick and choose to fit with
whatever the latest fad or zeitgeist happens to be . . .
So claimed someone in a comment thread on a Patheos Progressive Christian
Facebook page post recently. One thing I’ll say for Bible literalists: they aren’t a
big fan of nuance. They like their truth to be . . . literal. Their world view is
Manichean to the core. This or that. Black or white. True or false. Good or evil.
No gray areas allowed.
This is the world I come from, and I find it difficult to just let it go when I see
such comments, especially when I learned from other commenters that this
particular commenter is a fundamentalist troll who loves to show up on
progressive Christian pages and tell everyone that they are going to hell. So, of
course I had to respond.
Me: The Bible is a book. A special one, but a book. Written by human beings, not
dictated by God.
Him: You’re free to believe that, to reject the nearly 30% of prophecy that is
STILL being played out today, but it does mean that you may not identify
as a Christian.
Me:It means nothing of the sort. Millions of Christians do not believe that the
Bible is the inerrant Word of God. What one believes about a book is not the
litmus test for membership in the club.
Him: In THIS CLUB, yes it is. Rejecting the inerrancy of scripture is
tantamount to rejecting the authority of God in your life, (A.K.A.
Christianity) because you wish to be your own God and live for yourself,
which is the very heart of so called progressivism (A.K.A SIN).
Me:It is sad to imagine a faith so narrow that it claims that God is confined
within the covers of a book. That God somehow is incapable of speaking directly
to contemporary human beings. That the Word of God is a book rather than a
Person. God is brought into the world through human beings, not ancient texts.
I could have done better. I could have used the book this fellow worships to make
my point as another participant in the conversation did succinctly:
John 1:1—In the beginning was the Word. John 1:14—And the Word was
made flesh and dwelt among us . . . The Bible isn’t the Word of God, but it
can lead us to the Word of God.
The Word is not a book, in other words. The Word is a Person.
Words have been a central focus of my life since my earliest memories. There
have been few times in my life when a book was not within arm’s reach. My
early years were full of apocryphal stories of how I learned to read. According to
my mother, I was reading by age three without anyone having taught me how to
do it. I was never without a book, and lined up my menagerie of stuffed animals
on the couch to read to them. I knew how to read before I could tell time or tie
my shoes—perhaps my parents should have provided me with instruction
manuals to read.
In Ali Smith’s Autumn, the elderly Daniel Gluck frequently asks Elizabeth, the
young woman next door who becomes his best friend, what she is reading. It
becomes clear that his question has to do with more than “what book are you
into right now?”
Always be reading something, he said. Even when we’re not physically
reading. How else will we read the world?
Daniel’s question reminds me of something I came across from Simone Weil as I
am reviewing some of her essays for a new course that I’ll be teaching in the fall:
There is a mystery in reading, a mystery which, if we contemplate it, may
well help us, not to explain, but to grab hold of other mysteries in human
life. . . The sky, the seas, the sun, the stars, human beings, everything that
surrounds us is something that we read.
Reading is more than deciphering words on a page. I was jerked up short a few
years ago when I read in a book by theologian Patrick Henry that “God died
because people forgot how to read.” Henry’s claim, as Simone Weil’s above,
incorporates a much broader understanding of “reading” than our traditional
Western conception, which considers reading to be an exclusively cognitive,
intellectual, and mental activity—precisely the sort of activity I’ve spent the
majority of my waking hours on this planet doing.
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So how is it that such a crucial, human defining activity as reading could be
forgotten, even to the point of emptying the divine of content? The problem is
not with reading per se—it’s that we’ve forgotten that reading is not just an
intellectual activity. God’s death is not due to a misuse of or over-reliance on the
activity of reading. It’s due to forgetting what true reading even is.
I had heard about “lectio divina,” sacred reading, before I went on sabbatical to a
Benedictine college campus with a large abbey on site a decade ago, but it had
not struck me as a particularly interesting concept. Just another skill to learn,
technique to master, perhaps—but really, I thought, if there’s one thing I know
how to do pretty well, its reading. After several weeks of daily prayer with the
abbey monks, it dawned on me that lectio divina isn’t about words and meaning
and retention at all.
I often found that I did not remember, even for the amount of time it took to
walk from the choir stalls to the front of the abbey and exit, which Psalms we
had read nor any of the content. Yet I had a sense that what we were doing was
far more important than reading a book, marking it with highlighter and pen in
my usual method, and perhaps memorizing a phrase or two for future reference
in class or conversation.
What was happening in the choir stalls was not a mind event, but a full body
experience bypassing my overdeveloped mind and seeping into all the other
parts of me that had been starved for years. My bodily rhythms, my intuitions,
my emotions, my spirit. The Psalms speak of God’s word all the time, but almost
never of thinking about God’s word.
It’s more like what Jeremiah reports: “Your words were found and I did eat
them, and your word was for me the joy and rejoicing of my heart.” Simone Weil
was channeling her internal Jeremiah when she wrote that “I only read what I
am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not
read, I eat.” And like a mother bird regurgitating food for the babies, an
important word or phrase would come into my consciousness later in the day,
one that I didn’t remember reading but which had seeped into my soul.
In our “real world” of immediacy, getting it done, making money and a living, is
there a place for what I began to absorb in a monastery abbey in the middle-ofnowhere Minnesota? Over the subsequent years I’ve seen small but important
evidence of change in how I converse with people, how I approach the day, and a
heightened and more immediate sense of when a layer is threatening to grow
back over my divine reading space.
Learning how to read differently is not just another technique; because it is a
new way of being, it is transferable to everything. I went on sabbatical expecting
to write about trying to sustain a life of faith when God at best is a silent partner
who never writes, calls, emails, texts or tweets. Now the divine is everywhere
and seems to have a lot to say. Reading the divine begins with believing that everything is sacramental, infused with the breath of God, with taking “the Word became flesh” very seriously. All of creation is a sacred text. What are you reading?
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Steve Kellerman • 3 months ago
In the age-old controversy about the authorship/authenticity of the Bible, I have always found it most confounding just how overlooked is this one simple fact: THE BIBLE IS JUST A BOOK!!! It is merely one of countless so-called scriptures (e.g. Torah, Koran, Bhagavad Gita, Book of Mormon, etc.) which claim to be a rendition of inerrant truth! In fact, THE TRUTH is much more stark: this Bible "book" is actually a composite/compilation of numerous stories, histories, myths, legends, poems, and philosophical musings that someone, somehow, sometime decided should constitute the "Inspired Word of God". WHO determined this? WHAT qualifies as "inspired"? HOW MANY other written accounts (i.e. apocrypha) were disallowed from the final published version? WHY should one accept any of these Bible writings as "gospel"? Bible literalists avoid these conundrums and even eschew the very notion that one might ask such questions! But these are certainly legitimate concerns. If you can't defend your belief with facts, it's only your belief! It just goes to prove what I have always said: people don't really seek truth...they merely look to confirm what they believe is truth! Or, better yet is this quote by Mark Twain: "Faith is believin' what you know ain't so."
Vance Morgan Mod
Steve Kellerman • 3 months ago
I agree with most/much of what you have written--thanks for sharing it. As a person who was raised in conservative, fundamentalist Protestant Christianity that virtually worshipped the Bible, I guarantee you that for such folks, the Bible is NOT "just a book." They view it as verbally inspired and literally inerrant. Your rational and logic observations and question have no effect on that belief.
Steve Kellerman
Vance Morgan • 3 months ago
Amen! I too was raised in conservative, fundamentalist Protestant Christianity. Every Sunday (not to mention every other day, since I attended a parochial K-8 school) I was indoctrinated with the message of an unquestionable, literal, and inerrant "Word of God" transcribed by "inspired men of faith". I was also constantly admonished to steer clear of the evil neo-theology of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr, et. al., so that I might remain pure in the "faith of our fathers". Believe me, I know ALL about belligerent "bibletians"! Fortunately, I made the "leap of NON-faith" to escape this vortex of cloistered, fearful, intransigence of Christian (nay, ALL religious) teachings.
I have travelled a long, lonely journey in the pursuit of ultimate truth. I don't profess to have any handle on what it is, but I CAN claim to reject what it isn't: all ideological religious conviction No one has a fucking clue of what is true! We all tend to believe what we have been taught and we are too scared to consider that we just might be wrong. I have argued and debated with many well-intentioned, but pathetically misinformed faith fanatics to no avail. It is very difficult, if not quite impossible to convince a true believer of cognitive dissonance; one must come to such a realization/idealization in one's own time and on one's own terms. You are right - my rational, logical argumentation is absolutely irrelevant, if not threatening, to a Christian absolutist. I have given up trying to even engage with zealots! Thanks for listening.
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Kobukvolbane • 3 months ago
I love reading the Bible. And I loved this essay. Thank you!
CGA • 3 months ago
I suppose this did answer my questions on your previous post. You're still fairly incoherent, and have made it much about yourself. God is great enough to preserve his word. Good luck.
JD CGA • 2 months ago
If god was so good at protecting his supposed word and he wouldn't had allowed people to hack it to pieces over the centuries.
No, the reality is the bible is an ancient collection of fragmented texts from ancient paranoid and highly superstitious warring tribal peoples filled with often bloody and violent tales of demons, deities and demigods. Until god appears in person with a renewed edition that's all it'll ever be; a collection of mythologies.
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Kyllein MacKellerann " • 3 months ago
The Bible: A compilation of campfire stories (Old testament) and hopeful apocrypha (New testament) first anthologized by Emperor Constantine in an effort to keep the Plebeians in their place... They were getting "Uppity" under the influence of "Heretical" Christian preachers who spoke of equality before God, mercy, and other Empire-damaging things.
Has been used as a principally political document off and on for nearly seventeen centuries, with occasional deviations into Social structure and other "Feel Good" things. Claimed to have Religious basis, but existing texts from the times represented in the document do not support this. Has some good ideas, some bad ideas, and some curious, possibly drug-induced apocraphic texts (John of Patmos). Useful for arguments, but that's about it.
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Julie Watkins • 3 months ago
Some years back, I was going on a long trip where internet would be iffy. I brought a pdf of Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, by Ernst Bloch, as something to read and think about. [written in German, translated into English] I picked the book because the title intrigued me.
Basically, Bloch was dividing the Bible into two classes of “author”: Jesus (who cared about the suffering of the poor) & the “Priests” (who cared about control).
It was something to watch Bloch’s confident cherry-picking: Here, those suffering were talking to Jesus & He heard. There, the priests were trying to get back in control of the situation and lessen expectations. It wasn’t textual scholarship that told him which was which (though scholarship & theology were useful), it seemed to be the spirit of Jesus in his heart which was doing the pointing, ... and which was which was obvious to Bloch.
Reading the book was both satisfying & frustrating (frustrating in a good way). The early part of the book, resonated much with me and it spoke to my yearnings for a better life for all, but by the end it wasn't as powerful and I wished the author was there so I could talk about it because I knew the whole of it was powerful for the author.
I’m putting this experience into a comment because I feel “cherry-picking” (“pick and choose”) isn’t necessarily a “fad” thing.
bill wald • 3 months ago
If the original text was the exact word of God, how could this truth be demonstrated to others? Pun intended. And we don't have any original texts.
A parallel question: If Jesus' mother had to be a virgin at his birth, then if Mary was not a sinner, then her mother must have been a virgin and all the way back to Eve. Was Eve a virgin when her first daughter was born?
If it was, Americans would still have the same the same problem with the text as we do with the text of our Constitution. There would be no agreement as to what the words and sentences meant.
If the experts and the disciples of modern experts were logical and honest, the first question should be, "Are the covenants accumulative or does the newer replace the older? Or are the newer covenants simply commentary on the older?
Can God have different plans for different parts of the world? If not, why not?
Vance Morgan Mod bill wald • 3 months ago
Thank you.
Mark Jeffrey • 3 months ago • edited
It always seems to me that the Literalists are simply yet another reincarnation of the Pharisees that Jesus had so much trouble with. They weren't all bad, and most sincerely thought they had it right, but they were missing so much of what God was trying to say by concentrating on the rules in their books, and trying to define them ever more precisely, to the point where all the Love was lost. I wish some of these folks could have a "Nicodemus encounter", much like John Wesley did.
Vance Morgan Mod Mark Jeffrey • 3 months ago
Thank you.
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Joseph Douglas • 3 months ago
The Bible contains the Word of God, but you have to know how to find it. Anything that contradicts Jesus Christ is not God’s Word.
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Vance Morgan Mod Joseph Douglas • 3 months ago
I completely agree with you. That's what I mean in the essay when I write that "the Word of God is a Person." You did read the essay, right?
Steve Bailey • 3 months ago
As James Warren points out, "we are Christians, not Bibletians". This has been a key issue for Christian faith and practice since the beginning of the 20th century with the rise of fundamentalism and originalism. The situation has caused deep pain and distress for literally millions of people who are judged and rejected with the support of gross misreadings of the Bible and the abject failure to read it with any sense of human or divine wisdom. Many 'Christians' have driven a wedge between the Bible and Jesus Christ as the Word of God. Much of American Christian leadership rejects contemporary Bible scholarship - a rich world of unfolding knowledge - for the sake of maintaining power over others. They grieve the Holy Spirit in doing so and hinder the mission of God in the world. We can only pray that their hurtful houses will crumble into dust as the Spirit of God prevails.
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Ryan Listerman
The author makes a great point; God’s word is so expansive and excellent no book could contain it. The author makes an error in reasoning that because we have incomplete knowledge of God, we can contradict the teaching of the Bible. We know that God’s nature is consistent, and the things we don't know about God wouldn't contradict the things we do know about the Lord.
Take, for example, being at sea and noticing an iceberg; we know that what is visible or known to us isn't the complete entity. Still, we also know the unseen expanse of the entity is consistent in its composition to the seen entity.
An iceberg is not the tip of a sea monster’s toenail.
Hebrews 13:8
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.
Malachi 3:6
“For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.
James 1:17
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
Numbers 23:19
God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?
· Reply · 12 h
Ryan Kärgel
"Literal", "inerrant", and "God's Word" are three different arguments. I don't believe any are true, but for varying reasons.
"Literal" is not true because the Bible is written using many genres, only a couple of which are ever used in the way we use historical documents.
"Inerrant" is not true because we have multiple versions of the text, with differing content. "The original text" people love to claim is inerrant is not extant, and we have no evidence there even is a point where "the original" reached a finalized state. Plus, the content in each version is contrasting because we have dozens of contributors with their own viewpoints.
"God's Word" is a misnomer because the Bible never claims that for itself, and in fact redirects the claim to Jesus.
The Bible is a beautiful anthology describing humanity's struggle with the supernatural. It is invaluable, and almost our our only source material for the teachings of and about Jesus. But literal, inerrant, and God's Word are the wrong labels, and are the wrong hills to die on.
