Some Fundamentals: The Bible

            When I was about eighteen I asked Mark Simone, king of all youth ministry, why some people I’d recently met seemed to hold the Bible in such high regard that it became a fourth member or the Trinity (I don’t know what that would be called, off the top of my head – Quadriny, maybe).  His top-of-the-head answer has helped to shape my understanding of the Bible ever since.

            “Yeah, but, you know, it’s a really important book.  Where else do you learn as much about Jesus?”

            He also once told a group of us something like, “You don’t have to believe all of the Bible to believe some of the Bible.”

            I don’t think he worded it so concisely, but that’s pretty deep for a youth minister, even if he is the king of all youth ministry.

            I might add that one need not believe much of the Bible to believe in Jesus and to be known by Jesus.

            I’m still puzzled by people who approach the Bible as though it were the very thoughts of God, captured for time and eternity in inky black (and redÀ).  I thought at eighteen that if a person thought about it and read even the little bit of scripture I had, they’d probably have to let the Trinity remain threef.

            One rainy seminary afternoon about seven years later, a few of us stretched out on couches between classes in the student lounge, drinking coffee and pontificating as seminarians are wont to do.  As our course steered toward the authority of scripture, one person said that just as Jesus was the incarnate Word of God, the Bible is also the incarnate Word of God.  Rich argument ensued.  I think several of us forgot to go to our next class.

            I thought this was an idiosyncratic bent on my classmate’s part, but subsequent reading revealed the same thoughts from lots of evangelicals and fundamentalists.  I was honestly surprised.  While I came to faith among people who loved and valued the Bible, I cannot remember anyone actually saying that Jesus and the scriptures were, in fact, synonymous.  Sure, there were those people I had asked Mark Simone, king of all youth ministry, about in my teens, but I really thought their thoughts were aberrations from orthodox evangelicalism.  The people who helped form my faith were too impressed with Jesus to ever make that mistake.  But, as I read, I found writers like Harold Lindsell, editor for a time of Christianity Today, a flagship evangelical publication, “There are two Words: the Word of God incarnate, Jesus Christ, and the Word of God written, the Bible . . .”  Never mind that the Bible itself doesn’t ever make such claims, nor that it opens doors these folks would never want to openJ, there it is.

            Words are symbols, metaphors to carry the world into our minds.  But the Word of God is different.  The words of God are, in some sense, the things themselves.   God speaks, and there is light.  The Word of God comes out in a still small voice and mountains tremble in the heart of the sea.  The Word of God, indeed, kills and the Word of God, indeed, makes alive; it breaks rocks into pieces«. 

So when we refer to the Bible as the Word of God, this is another thing altogether.  There are plenty of examples on the Bible of prophets saying, “The Word of the Lord came to me . . .” but there are also places where the Apostle Paul says, “It seems to us and to the Holy Spirit . . .”  Both are contained within the cover of the anthology we now call the Bible.   When God speaks, it is action.  When we speak, it is wish and speculation.  Both are found in the Bible.

It’s the anthological nature of the Bible that starts moving us toward the essence of the issue.  The Bible did not fall from the sky, marker ribbons all aflutter.  It was formed, evolved, really, over many hundreds of years.  When I first started contemplating that fact a long time ago, it seemed like that ought to bother me.  I ought to be threatened that the Bible, the Word of God, was really the product of naturalistic processes whose outcome could not be plotted before its completion, but whose trajectory now seems perfectly reasonable in hindsight.  It’s like tracking the domestication of corn from seedy grass to the superfood of continents.

What we have in the Bible is an interconnected (and terribly disconnected) set of stories, myths, poems, civil laws, admonitions, letters and ancient biographies that work together to form a fascinating whole.  It’s a lot like the whole science of emergence, where you have a collection of disparate parts like birds or ants or neurons, all working together to form a whole which is, in the words of the old cliché, greater than the sum of its parts. 

The power of the Bible is not arithmetic, it is exponential.

That means that the strength of the Bible doesn’t rest in surreal origins, nor in some specific authorship, but in the way God uses it to speak to people today.   Parts of the Bible are certainly supernatural in origin (even if they’re not magical) and parts are obviously written by specific people we might all recognize and value.  Believing that God uses the Bible to communicate with us and others liberates the Bible from the straightjacket of magic and lets God work however God wants to work. 

So various books of the Bible can have more than one author, be edited and corrected before they become God’s words for us.  At least, in the way I understand the Bible and its place in the faith.  For others, a particular author (usually the one names at the beginning or in the title imposed by tradition or guess, not by the text itself) along with a very specific set of words that have never changed or been changed is essential to preserve the actual intention of God.  But that simply isn’t the case, and even the witness of scripture bears that out.

           

For instance, when whoever it was who wrote or edited or redacted the gospel of John came to try to place Christ in the grand scheme of God, he or she or they decided that the best route was back to the Word of God, spoken into the world and remaking everything.  The anonymous and mysterious writer of the Letter to the Hebrews said that in the past God spoke through prophets in different ways, but now, in the final days, God spoke through God’s Son.  God has had many things to say, and God’s last Word is Jesus Christ.  Then, apparently using the memories of someone who was an eye witness to at least most of Jesus’ ministry, they constructed a theological piece for their community.

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À Tony Campolo, among others, started referring to himself as a “red letter Christian”, meaning he takes especially seriously the words of Jesus in the four canonical gospels.  I guess this might bother some people, those who would say that Leviticus 6:10 in as important as Matthew 5-7 {yeah, look them up; it’s worth it}.   More about a gospel worldview later in this chapter.

f Or even, God forbid, question the whole use of such language as Trinity as an imposition onto the text.  Just a thought, half-formed at best.

J Doors like: if God can be incarnate in two forms, why not more?  Think about it.  It would make a great comic book.  The second son of God . . . no, the dog of God, or the pencil of God, or the tuna can label of God, wanders the earth, bereft of anything or anyone to save, looking for something, anything to do.  Somewhere else I’ll talk about incarnation, likely in the parts concerning Jesus directly, but let me reiterate myself again for a second time: the incarnation was a divine gamble, a risk so wild that only a wild God could take it.

« Yeah, those are references to scripture.  Google the words and find the places.