SUNDAY 6TH MARCH 2005 : Fourth Sunday in Lent
Five Foundations for a liberal / progressive Christian faith
4. The Bible
It used to be that divisions between Christians were along denominational lines. One of the great achievements of the twentieth century’s ecumenical movement was to remove many of the historic and often quite irrational barriers to communication between leaders and members of different denominations. Nowadays, divisions between Christians tend to be theological. We might worship in different denominations and order our church lives in different ways, but bonds of friendship and co-operation tend to cross denominational boundaries. Now, liberals, for instance, find themselves more at home with liberals from another denomination, than with conservative evangelicals of their own tradition. And conservative evangelicals experience the same phenomenon. Some curious cross-denominational alliances can emerge.
The divisions are theological, and at the heart the differences are deeply differing attitudes towards the Bible. In recent years, this has been particularly clear in the debate on human sexuality. On one hand there are those who argue vehemently that homosexuality is quite clearly condemned in the Bible, and so that is the end of the matter. The relevant passages are accepted unquestioningly as expressions of the mind of God, and so the church cannot deviate from that clearly expressed will. On the other hand are those who say you just cannot read the Bible like that. The relevant passages, they say (we say!) are coloured by their cultural setting and just do not address the matter of homosexuality as we understand it in the twenty-first century with all the benefits of insights from the human sciences. I can no more understand why conservative evangelicals do not see this than they can understand why I, and we, read the Bible in the way we do.
One of the greatest and saddest ironies in the debate comes when conservative evangelical women ministers argue, on biblical grounds, against the inclusion of homosexual people within church leadership. If the Bible is read as the revealed will of God, then clearly it is not God’s will that women have any place in church leadership. There are more passages that can be cited to keep women in a subordinate position than there are passages alleged to do the same thing for homosexuals. Somehow, these women have learned to read the Bible in one way when it comes to women in church leadership, and in another way when it comes to homosexuals.
In speaking about the Bible this morning in this series on foundations for a liberal or progressive Christian faith, I am essentially addressing something that is at the heart of the division between progressive Christians and conservative evangelical Christians. The way any Christian regards and reads the Bible will then be reflected in what they believe about humankind, God, and Jesus, the three areas I have already addressed. In one sense, I should have perhaps begun by speaking about the Bible.
I am also conscious that when I speak about the Bible this morning, some or much of what I say will not be new to some or many of you. I have already said some of it before, Rodger Smith probably said some of it the Sunday he suddenly had to stand in for me at the beginning of the year. And what I will say are conclusions many of you have already come to anyway, consciously or unconsciously. I also have to acknowledge that I draw heavily, as I believe did Rodger, on the most recent book from Marcus Borg, American biblical scholar, a fellow of the Jesus seminar, and to my mind one of the clearest contemporary writers on a credible and alive Christian faith. His book is entitled The Heart of Christianity, and its chapter on the Bible is entitled “The Bible, the heart of the tradition”.
There are four central points to be made as a starting place when considering the Bible. All are, I think, self-evident, but they are not often stated as bluntly as this.
First, the Bible is the product of two historical communities, ancient Israel and the early Christian movement.
Second, as such, the Bible is a human product, not a divine product. Essentially, the Bible is the response of those two ancient communities to their experience of God.
Third, as their response to God, the Bible tells us how they saw things. It tells us how they saw their life with God. It contains their stories about God’s involvement in their lives, their laws and ethical teachings, their prayers and praises, their wisdom about how to live, and their hopes and dreams. I have emphasized ‘they’ and ‘their’. The Bible is not God’s witness to God, it is the witness of those two ancient communities to God.
Fourth, therefore, as a human product, the Bible is not “absolute truth” or “God’s revealed truth”. Rather, the Bible is relative and culturally conditioned. That is, the words of any part of the Bible are related to the time and place where they originated. Similarly, “culturally conditioned” means that the Bible uses the language and concepts of the cultures in which it took shape. The Bible tells us how our spiritual ancestors at different times in long-past history saw things – not how God sees things.
When the Bible is approached with these understandings, a profound freedom emerges. We no longer find any clash between the Genesis creation stories and science, for instance. The laws of the Bible need not be understood as God’s law for all time, but as the laws and ethical teachings of those ancient communities. I would include the Ten Commandments in that understanding. The current furious debate in the United States over the Ten Commandments being displayed in public places like law courts is just bizarre and demonstrates a seriously weird society. It is trying to make of the Ten Commandments something they were never intended to be. Antony quotes me quite correctly at the end of his revisionist approach to the Ten Commandments in the latest newsletter.
This view of the Bible does not deny that the Bible is “inspired by God”. But it understands inspiration quite differently from the way it is usually understood. The fundamentalist understanding, followed to greater or lesser degrees by conservative evangelicals, is that every word of the Bible is inspired by God, and thus has the truth and authority of God behind it. For them, the Bible is a divine product. But it isn’t, it is a human product. The inspiration involved is found in the lives of the people who produced the Bible. It is not that the words are inspired by God, but rather that people were moved by their experience of God, and moved enough, “inspired” to record their experience and understanding.
And so we can call the Bible “holy” and we can speak of “sacred scripture”, not because of God’s involvement in the writings, but because over many, many centuries our spiritual ancestors found these writings to be inspired and inspirational and regarded them as the most important collection of writings that they knew. Therefore, we need to make three more statements about the Bible.
First, it is our foundation document. The Bible, quite simply, is the foundation on which Christianity is built. Take that foundation away, and Christianity will fall into ruins.
Second, the Bible’s stories and vision are there to shape our sense of who we are and of what our life with God is about. They are not the only resource for our formation as people of God, but the Bible’s stories and vision are our primary resource.
And third, the Bible is our “wisdom tradition”. In its most basic sense the term “wisdom tradition” concerns the two most central questions of life: What is real? And how shall we live?
So, we can say of the Bible that it is human in origin, and it is sacred in its status and function within the Christian community.
Sometimes, as a minister, I get asked really daft questions. One that falls into that category is when someone at a social function or whatever discovers I am a minister, and asks “Do you believe the Bible?”
I assume they are essentially asking if I believe in a seven-day creation, that there really was a flood and an ark, that there really was a giant called Goliath, that Jesus did walk on water and miraculously did produce a meal out of almost nothing for five thousand people. We’re all likely to be suspected of believing such things if we are recognised as Christians. Such is the bad press Christianity gets because of the loudness of evangelical conservatives.
We will never be able to explain to such people what we can at least explain and acknowledge to ourselves – that the language of the Bible is metaphorical.
The Bible contains both history and metaphor. Some of the
events it speaks about really happened, and the community
preserved the memory. But even when a text contains historical
memory, it is its more-than-literal meaning that matters most.
For example, the exile in Babylon in the sixth century BCE really
happened, but
the way the story is told gives it a more-than-historical
meaning. It became a metaphorical narrative of exile and return,
alienation and restoration, of loss of God and of discovering a
much greater God, all of them powerful images of the human
condition and its remedy.
In other cases there may be little or no historical factuality behind the stories. For example, the Genesis stories of creation, the Garden of Eden, the expulsion of Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, and the tower of Babel. These are purely metaphorical narratives. They are not reporting the early history of the earth and humankind; they are not history remembered. Yet, as metaphorical narratives they can be profoundly true, even though not literally factual. In our modern era we have overemphasized factuality, and so lost the value of metaphorical language. One of the great gifts of post-modernity is that we are beginning to realize the importance of metaphor, and sometimes the irrelevance of factuality. Metaphor can convey deep truth, sometimes more effectively than fact can convey.
Four quotes:
The German novelist Thomas Mann apparently defined a myth (a particular kind of metaphorical narrative) as “a story about the way things never were, but always are.” Is a myth true? Literally true, no; really true, yes.
A Swedish proverb: “Theology is poetry plus, not science minus.” When we talk theology, we talk more poetry than we do factual science. Biblical metaphor is poetry plus, not inferior to factual language as in science.
A Catholic priest reportedly once said in a sermon, “The Bible is true, and some of it happened.” The truth of the Bible is not dependent on its historical factuality.
And a story I have told before, one of Marcus Borg’s favourite stories, of a Native American storyteller as he begins to tell his tribe’s story of creation: “Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.”
Once we begin to grasp this point, the Bible as metaphor, and biblical text as metaphorical rather than as necessarily factual, then we can discover anew some of the deeply profound truths contained in the Bible. Freed from the need to be factual and able to be proved, we can allow cultural context, traditional interpretation, and our own interaction with the text, to open up seriously significant spiritual insights for us in our own lives, and for our church communities, today.
This, I believe, is the only way in which a liberal or progressive Christian can approach the Bible.
“Do you believe the Bible?” Marcus Borg has another analogy, one he borrows from Buddhism. The Bible, he says, is like a finger pointing to the moon. We are not asked to believe in the finger; rather, we invited to be illuminated and surprised and moved by that to which the finger points.