There's Nothing Wrong With The Bible

Have you ever sat down and read the Bible? Really read it? Not searching for some meaning or some devotional passage, but just pick it up and read the stories? It's incredible. It's more intriguing than any soap opera or dramatic series I’ve ever seen. It's got fantastic tales featuring heroes, villains, love, lust, betrayal, murder, and really strong faith in action. In fact, the word Action in the previous sentence should probably be spelled with a capital "A," because there's massive floods, rivers running with blood, plagues that kill thousands of people all at once, wars that consume entire regions, and sibling rivalries that end in murder (Cain/Abel) or betrayal (Joshua/Esau, Joseph/his brothers). The thread that holds the Bible together is its focus on a just God who generally gives you what you deserve in the Old Testament (Tanakh), or gives more than any of us have ever deserved in the New Testament. It spells out laws that are eternal and obvious (thou shalt not kill - Exodus 20), and also standards that are very hard for most of us to reach (when your neighbor strikes you on the left cheek, turn to him the right cheek also - Matt 5:38).

I've read the Bible in so many ways, with so many people, in so many Bible studies, in so many college courses, and in so many versions. I got to see a Chicago Field Museum exhibit about the Bible, which included a woman who was reassembling a 2000 year-old scroll from tiny, dried-up fragments of parchment. She wore a smock, white gloves and a face mask, and picked up the tiny little fragments with tweezers. I said, "Oh, WOW. I would LOVE that job." She had to know Biblical Aramaic, Biblical Hebrew, or coloquial ancient Greek well enough to be able to puzzle the fragile pieces together. I was in awe of what she must understand and know about the Bible, and I am always aware that if I spend my lifetime in the study of Biblical texts I would still have only scratched the surface of what is knowable.

So I'll make my foundational belief perfectly clear. THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH THE BIBLE.

What many Christians like myself find WRONG with the Bible is simply how Christians understand, or misunderstand, or intentionally manipulate and misconstrue the Bible in order to promote their own, non-Christian ideas. 

• Is slavery good or bad? According to the Bible, it is bad, and according to the Bible, it is good.
• Are men and women equal in the eyes of God? According to the Bible, they are equal, and according to the Bible, men are superior.
• Should we forgive and turn the other cheek when people harm us? According to the Bible, we should forgive and turn the other cheek. But the Bible also says we should kill those who harm us... or those who preach falsehoods... or those curse us... including a son who curses his parents, and if he curses his parents he should be stoned to death where everyone can see (Leviticus 20:9).

Many Christian evangelicals, who I define as those who see the Bible as the complete and inerrant word of God, place their faith in the Bible as the divinely inspired and infallible word of God. When times of trouble come, there's probably a passage that will provide comfort. When feeling confused the most sensible thing would be to turn to the Bible for wisdom and guidance. When joyful, a rousing Psalm is always a wonderful thing to add to a celebration. Turning to the Bible is a fine thing, and as I've said, THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH THE BIBLE.

But when the Bible supersedes God, that's when the Bible has become the idol, and God is being ignored. To an evangelical Christian, everything God could ever say to us has already been said. His every message to us exists within the pages of the Bible. Our understanding of the universe has evolved tremendously in the past 2000 years, but if the Bible says God made the earth over the course of six days then it was undeniably made in six literal days. Period. (Nevermind that our definition of a day is the 24 hours it takes for our earth to rotate on its axis to face the sun, but the sun itself wasn't made until "day" 4.) Evolution, therefore, is impossible. 

Let's imagine, for sake of argument, that God is really, really amazing. Let's also suppose that our infant-like comprehension of the cosmos is really, really, REALLY small compared to the being that created the cosmos. In fact, to bolster my argument I'll throw in just a handful of verses from my all-time favorite chapters in the Bible, which brilliantly convey the magnitude of our limitless ignorance. God's monologue can be found at the end of the book of Job. For those of you who aren't familiar with the story, Job is the most perfectly faithful of all men on earth. Consequently, Job is a prosperous, successful, well-loved man with many children. Satan, an angel who not surprisingly plays “devil’s advocate” in this story, wants to test Job's faith in God, arguing that Job is only faithful because he is a prosperous, successful, well-loved man with many children. God agrees to Satan's challenge of Job's faith, allowing Satan to do anything to Job but kill him. I picture the two placing bets and shaking hands. In the first chapter Job faces loss after loss, which leads him to be rebuked and judged as unfaithful and unworthy by his friends. The next several dozen chapters his friends tell him that God doesn't make mistakes, and God rewards the righteous, so Job’s sins must be unbelievably huge to have caused his entire family to be crushed by the collapse of the house and Job's body covered in boils. Job insists on his unswerving righteousness, grieves his horrible losses, and questions aloud why God would allow such hardship to visit a man as faithful and righteous as he. In the final chapters of the book God rebukes Job for challenging his judgement, in some of the most beautiful and poetic of all religious scriptures I've ever read (although a section in the Bhagavad Gita is a strong contender).

Job 38:
4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone,
7 when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

8 “Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb,
9 when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band,
10 and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors,
11 and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?

16 “Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?
17 Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?
18 Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this.

25 “Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain and a way for the thunderbolt,
26 to bring rain on a land where no man is, on the desert in which there is no man,
27 to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground sprout with grass?

….it goes on for another few chapters. It’s really worth a read.

If the infinite and limitless God described in Job would like to come back to us today, to clarify the cosmos issue with us, now that we have a far greater understanding of the physics of planetary movement etc, the evangelical Christian's response to God is basically saying, "Hey, God, shut up. If you have something to tell me you should have inspired the guys who wrote this book for you 2,000 years ago to write it down."

Couldn’t there be more for us to hear? Isn't it possible God has more to say to us? Is it fair of us to confine the limitless wisdom of a deity that could create the miraculous cosmos to such a small number of words? From the perspective of Biblical inerrancy the answer to that question is no. God has nothing more to tell us. 

God has said 25% fewer words to us over the past 2,000 years than are contained in the books of the Harry Potter series.

This approach to Christianity is Bible worship, not God worship. It is idolatry. Using the Bible as the only possible access point to God places a book on a pedestal where God should be. It effectively tells God to stop speaking. 

In addition to the relatively small number of words in the Bible, what if those words contradict one another? Genesis 1 shows us an omnipotent and omniscient God who commands the universe into existence in six days with "Let there be light" and other impressive commands that result in the miracle of creation; while Genesis 2 shows us a God who creates the universe in a totally different order, with no specific timetable, and then goes looking for Adam and Eve in the garden and he can't even find them until they call out to him from behind some bushes. Well? Did God make the first human beings, both male and female, on day 6, by simply commanding them into existence? Or did God form the first man from a clod of clay, then all the rest of creation, and finally female as the last of his creation? Is God omniscient and omnipotent? Or does he need to walk around the garden searching for the only two people in existence?

There are SO MANY contradictions in the pages of the Bible, all the way through. I use Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 as examples because those are the very first two chapters of the Bible! If our reading of the Bible begins with large contradictions in the first two chapters, we should not expect it to be inerrant, eternal, and definitive on any, let alone every issue we will ever confront.

Throughout Christian history the Bible has been used to defend all manner of social injustice, as well as to promote all manner of social justice. In recent months we have heard many people discuss the relevance of the Bible's from both sides of the Marriage Equality debate. Some use specific verses in the Bible to prove that God is against all gay relationships. Some would use different verses in the Bible to prove that God is NOT against all gay relationships. 

The BIGGEST problem, however, is the inconsistent outrage applied to specific issues based on Biblical authority. In Mark 10: 2-9, Jesus explicitly condemns divorce. The pronouns Jesus uses make it clear that it is HIS wife and HER husband. Herman Cain uses this passage to prove that Jesus was against same-sex marriage. But for some reason there is no corresponding outrage about the issue of divorce that is explicitly condemned by the passage! 

There's also a story about a mob of men demanding that they be allowed to gang rape the two strangers in Sodom and Gomorrah who found hospitality in Lot's house. Rather than subject the strangers to gang rape by the townspeople, Lot offers his two virgin daughters to the angry mob, hoping to satisfy their violent demands without jeopardizing the two strangers to whom he had offered his hospitality. We later find out that the two strangers are actually angels, and right before Lot pushes his daughters out of the house to be gang raped, the angels blind all of the men in the mob. Whew! That was a close one! This story is put forth as a universal condemnation of sodomy (a word that comes from this very story, as the residents of Sodom are called Sodomites). In this story sodomy would be male-on-male gang rape, but for modern social purposes it has been generalized to include all male/male sex. With stories like this one there are long debates about what the words meant in their original Hebrew or Greek, in context or out of context, in this translation version vs. that one. The violent rape of two men is not the same as two men who love each other entering a long-lasting relationship, and so on. But ALL of these arguments presume that the Bible needs to support one's personal viewpoint because the Bible is the ultimate authority. The deification of the Bible is in itself a fundamental error in one's effort to open one's mind and heart to what God is trying to tell us TODAY. There are MANY Christians who do NOT view the Bible as inerrant, and are therefore not bound by the need to defend ourselves with Biblical passages. We simply ask ourselves if what we are doing is consistent with an effort to be kind, compassionate, welcoming, humble, generous, and truthful. 

So, my dear Christian friend, before you click to "like" another commercial about how redefining marriage ruins children; before you say "Amen" to another sermon that praises straight relationships as righteous while claiming falsely that gay relationships are no different than polygamy, pedophilia and bestiality; before you share another story about a woman who "ached every day for a dad" instead of being raised by two moms; before you vote for a politician who claim that last week’s SCOTUS decision was the worst day in American history,…. please know that you are helping to foster misunderstanding, fear, anger, hostility, and violence towards many wonderful people. Some of those people are Christians who sat right next to you in church for decades, and only wish to live as equals in the eyes of our government, if not their church. Please show more compassion. In short, be more Christlike.