Browsing Tag



living without inspiration: the Bible and Me
















Photo by Dwight Stone

the Bible and my house of cards

house of cards

I was in seventh grade when I read the book Things that are Different are Not the Same as part of my school curriculum, and that was when I was formally introduced to the “King James Only” argument, although I’d known for years that was the only version my family and my church used. Over the years, through high school and college, as I was instructed in bibliology, I was given a lot of arguments about the Bible in general, and not just the King James version.

Christian fundamentalism and its sister evangelicalism have something in common that is largely absent from other faith traditions: they tend to see the Bible almost as the ThirdFourth member of the Trinity. For example, I was taught that I should never set any other book on top of the Bible and never place it on the ground. It is holy, sacred, the Word of God. It is special– fundamentally and drastically different from every other book that has been or will ever be in existence. It was the basis of our faith, the only guaranteed Truth.

One of the main arguments for seeing the Bible this way was what I’ll call the “Harmonious Library Argument.”

According the Harmonious Library Argument, the Bible’s very existence is a miracle. It was written and compiled over thousands of years. It was written by men from different times, different cultures, different socioecnomic backgrounds, different professions. And yet, somehow, all of the books in the Bible are really just One Book– The Book. It promotes a single message, a single vision. It’s literally a miracle that so many men over so long a time span were able to write books and letters that agreed with each other so perfectly. It just isn’t possible for men to have achieved such a Harmonious Library on their own without divine intervention. That’s how we know the Bible is the Inspired, God-Breathed Word.

The Old Testament writers were writing about Jesus and the Atonement without knowing anything about him or even Roman crucifixion. Everything in the Law and the Prophets pointed toward Christ; the Temple, the sacrifices, the Patriarchs . . . They were telling stories about Jesus, foreshadowing him in Joseph and David and Adam. And those who wrote the Gospels and the epistles tell the story of Christ and explain his teachings with no discrepancies, with no theological disagreements.

That could not have happened without God.

Over the past couple of years, my views on the Bible have slowly shifted. When you start out believing that the Bible is completely flawless, with no discrepancy, contradiction, or error of any kind, and you start asking questions . . . it is a rude awakening. Suddenly the difference between “Judas hung himself” and “Judas fell headlong and burst open” don’t seem quite as simple and easily resolved. And the differences start building until either you completely change your definition of inerrancy or you throw the whole thing out, baby and bathwater.

I’ve settled into a more comfortable understanding of the Bible, one that admits to . . . well, reality. It was a book written by humans, and this is a good, good thing. God, I suppose, could have done what he has supposedly done before– he wrote the Ten Commandments and gave them to Moses already completed. He took his finger and wrote on the wall of a king’s palace. According to the Bible, there’s nothing stopping God from giving us a book already finished.

But, for whatever reason, he didn’t. And so, we have a book written by people. Blessedly fallen, so very human people. This is good because of the differences that creates. We don’t have our written religious tradition delivered to us by only one man. We have a variety of perspectives and beliefs and arguments. We have people like Peter and Paul writing letters while disagreeing with each other, sometimes so intensely it resulted in shouting matches. We have both Romans and James, Amos and Hosea. No one person got to control the destiny of Christianity or Judaism.

That’s where I still am, although my perspective is undergoing another shift.

I picked up Jesus, Interrupted by Bart Ehrman at a library book sale. I hadn’t read anything written by Ehrman before this, and the only thing I knew about him were things I’d read or heard from fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals. Those things mostly included things like “hates God” and “heretic.” Since I started moving in more progressive religious circles, though, I’d heard his name mentioned with respect, and I was curious.

It was . . . challenging to read. I have a lot of questions, and most of the margins have notes. I don’t think all of the arguments he makes are effective, and I got the feeling that he was occasionally leaving something out. However, he pointed some things out that made me do a double-take and think holy hell how did I never notice that wow that’s . . . so obvious.

The differences between various books in the New Testament are a little more significant than I’d previously thought, and I’m not entirely sure what to do about it now. It isn’t quite the paradigm-altering revelation I’ve experienced before, but now I have to ask some serious questions about the Gospels, especially when it comes to questions like what were the authors trying to argue? What did they believe about Jesus that they wanted other people to believe? I started asking those questions months ago, but not quite as seriously as I am now. Before, I asked those sorts of questions out of a literary curiosity. Now, I’m looking for whether or not Jesus in fact claimed to be God Himself on Earth.

My Harmonious Library understanding of the Bible– really, only a house of cards– has completely collapsed. It couldn’t bear up to an honest examination, and initially I thought I had to replace it with something else right away right now.

It took me a little while to realize that the only reason why I felt that way was that I was still stuck in the fundamentalist understanding of the Bible– as my only source of faith and practice. I simply couldn’t imagine being a Christian without a divinely-ordered Bible. Believing in the Bible as “inspired” was what made me a Christian, and this was as recently as last month. I think I’m starting to figure out that being a Christian has a lot more to do with my life and actions than it has to do with a book and what I believe about it.


the magic book

magic book
by Colgreyis

I’ve mentioned before that I’m currently neck-deep in a two-year theology program (“seminary for lay people” is how it’s described). Probably one of the most shattering ideas I encountered was in the Bibliology and Hermeneutics class, when the program’s teachers were talking about how many/most evangelicals approach the Bible: they treat it like a “magic book.”

At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what they meant, but as the course went on I realized that there was something stopping me from understanding it:  I thought of the Bible as a magic book. It was an embarrassing realization at first, because I have an MA in English!* I know how to read books! And once I started seeing the Bible as a library, and each book it contains as a whole book instead of something I could chop up into soundbites (seriously, the more I think about how I used to do that, the more and more it feels insane and ridiculous) … I started realizing that my understanding of the Bible being “inspired” or having “divine authorship” had twisted the Bible into something it can’t possibly be.

I’m not trying to say that there’s no possible way the Bible could be “God-breathed,” I’m just not entirely sure what that means. All I know is that being “God-breathed” doesn’t make the Bible immune to the sorts of problems that all other books have– especially books written thousands of years ago.

But, the most dominant way of interacting with the Bible in American culture is the evangelical way. There’s a huge breadth of ways on how to interact with the Bible, especially in the Mainline Protestant denominations, but, unfortunately, those aren’t the ways that most Americans seem to see. When they see Christians interacting with the Bible, they see, largely, people quoting individual verses and occasionally twisting those verses so far beyond their context that they take on a new life, new meaning, of their own. They see Christians walking around with signs that have individual verses slapped on them about drinking, or homosexuality, divorced from their books and the overall argument of their writer. They see us celebrating Tim Tebow and John 3:16. They see references and not their corresponding verses on our bumpers. They hear us casually sprinkle our conversation with half-remembered phrases.

During my Christmas vacation, I was hanging out with a few friends who are not particularly religious. One of them laughingly threw out a phrase that I found hilarious considering it was a Bible verse (“the time has come to set aside childish things”)– and when I laughed “nice Bible reference!” he just sort of  . . . stared.

“That’s from the Bible?”

It was my turn to stare, although I wasn’t starting at anyone in particular. I was just suddenly struck by the number of phrases and sayings that come from Scripture that are now American cliches … except no one has any idea where they come from. Considering the influence the Bible has had on American rhetoric, it’s not surprising that our language is littered with biblical phrasings, but it bothered me because I realized that this isn’t much different from how Christians treat the Bible even when they know they’re quoting from the Bible.

It’s continued to bother me– at times, it outright irks me– as I traverse the internet. I’m a loyal reader of a few non-theist and atheist blogs, and when I’m feeling brave enough to wade into the comment sections, I see this happen over and over again. A Christian and a non-theist/agnostic/atheist get into a debate, and they start throwing Bible verses at each other. Usually it’s the non-theist that starts quoting specific verses, and then the Christian responds with arguments so tired they practically whimper– and they usually have something to do with “you have to take those verses in context!” And it irks me because I feel sure that this earnest Christian probably rips verses out of context on a daily basis– they’re just not usually from Numbers 5.

After the Phil Robertson/A&E/Duck Dynasty debacle, I saw a meme pop up in my facebook feed:

phil robertson

And it just made me shake my head (even as I chuckled) because they’ve done exactly what Phil Robertson did in his original interview– took a verse out of context and even paraphrased it a bit. For starters, Leviticus 10:6 is specifically addressed to Aaron and his sons, Eleazar and Ithamar (and, possibly by extension the Levites), so this is one of those times when a commandment is definitely limited and not meant to be applied to all of humanity— or even the Jewish people, for that matter. But, Robertson was also ripping I Corinthians 6:9-10 out of context and divorcing it from any historical context (not that this is his fault, he was just parroting fundamentalist/evangelical interpretations). ἀρσενοκοίτης, literally meaning “man beds” is a complicated word with an interesting history, and forcing it to mean “homosexuality” when its most common historical meaning was the enslavement and purchase of temple prostitutes is… well, wrong.

But we (evangelicals) do this all of the time.

And we dare to get frustrated when someone on the internet starts doing the same thing to the Bible that we’ve been doing for a hundred years? We dare to become angry with those who learned how to treat the Bible from us and are shocked and dismayed when they are merely modeling how they’ve been shown the Bible is to be treated?

For the last hundred years or so fundamentalism and its daughter evangelicalism have fervently sought to have a “high view of Scripture,” to defend its status as inspired and inerrant. But, in discussing these concepts, one of the common results has been to see the Bible as inherently magical. It’s ceased being a book– it’s become a tool, a sword,  and many Christians have used it to “divide asunder” all sorts of things, including ourselves.

*(full disclosure: I still have to learn French in order to get the degree. I’m working on that.)


not every verse in the Bible is about you



If your religious experience was anything like mine, you might have had this verse memorized since the time you were about six years old. Verses like “And you know you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on the tablets of human hearts” were used to encourage fundamentalist and evangelical children to memorize as much Scripture as possible. You might have even gone to something like AWANAS, were you were rewarded with fake money and tiny plastic toys for every page of verses you could memorize.

The idea was that the more Scripture we had “written on our hearts,” the more easily we would be able to stand up to the wiles of the devil. After all, that’s how Jesus defeated the temptations he faced in the wilderness– he quoted Bible verses at Satan. It was all tied back to II Timothy 3:16– all Scripture is profitable. None of his words can return void. We couldn’t predict how these verses would protect us, or how we could eventually use them, but it was just a good idea to be prepared.

But, one of the results of this idea– that all Scripture is profitable– is that every single last verse in the Bible can be specifically applied to the circumstances of my life. I’ve owned Bibles that had lists of Bible verses for every occasion, divided up by category. I’ve heard preachers shout from the pulpit, over and over again, the words rumbling in the ceiling rafters, that “if my people who are called by my name shall humble themselves and pray…then I will hear from heaven, and forgive their sin, and heal their land,” and we never talked about how that verse shows up in the middle of II Chronicles and it might not apply to America becoming a theocracy. No, all Scripture is profitable.

Yesterday, Tamara left a comment highlighting this, and it’s what got me started thinking about this idea again:

I saw you speaking of two lies that get fed in too many faith circles here:

2) Every passage of Scripture has an easy application for the average person. (I don’t know why that stood out to me, but when you said the pastor made that passage about a crazy, abusive evil person to be about “problem people” it just made me shudder. Not every passage needs a quick and easy application.)

I’ve mentioned before that I’m in the middle of a two-year theology program. I’m almost finished with it, actually (although, I’m going to need your thoughts and prayers this Sunday, as we’re covering Egalitarianism in the lesson for our course on “Humanity & Sin,” and the video teachers have had “Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood by John Piper and Waye Grudem” up on the board all past seven lessons). The course has had its ups and downs (obviously), but if nothing else it’s given me to the tools to go do more research on my own. One of the classes was “Bibliology and Hermeneutics,” and  one of the things they emphasizes was how vitally important it is to keep context and genre in mind, and make sure that we’re not forcing something that isn’t about us to be about us.

One of the more frustrating examples, in my opinion, is the homeschool and “fundiegelical” (<–new favorite word) reference to “The Joshua Generation,” their word for millennials. Our parents were Aaron and Moses, leaving the “Egypt” of the God-forsaken public school, and now my generation– the first crop of adult homeschoolers– was supposed to go out and “take back America for Jesus.” It hasn’t worked out in quite the way they expected. But it was an idea that I grew up believing in– I was supposed to be like Joshua.

Except… Joshua was a violent warlord who conquered Palestine one bloody battle after another. Making his story of death and destruction some sort of noble narrative about getting involved in right-wing politics doesn’t quite fit.

But I see this happen pretty often in evangelicalism. We reduce many of the stories in the Old and New Testaments into metaphors and metanarratives that we’re supposed to somehow directly apply to our lives. And, in a way, that isn’t entirely wrong. Stories are there for us to learn from them. But the way it typically gets handled in evangelical contexts is to ignore where the story belongs, how the story is told, and to many times ignore why the story was recorded in the first place. We frequently bend and twist these Bible stories to fit into American evangelicalism and our political and religious ideals that have more to do with being Republican than they do with being a Christian.

I don’t think the Bible works that way, and forcing it to be all about us, “us” being conservative American evangelicals– I think it’s doing incredible damage to the value of Scripture and its ability to work in people’s lives in an organic way. When we insist that individual verses must have a specific application in a modern setting, that Romans 1 must be about LGBTQ people when Paul had absolutely zero examples of what gay and lesbian relationships look like today… we narrow the Bible. We limit it.


a good tree cannot bear bad fruit


A little while ago, I watched Matthew Vines deliver an hour-long message on all of the passages in the Bible typically use to condemn gay men and women. It was a beautiful message, and I highly encourage all of you to listen to it when you have the time. Hopefully it will be encouraging– and challenging. But, one of the things he said that’s really stuck with me is the way he talked about Matthew 7:15-20. I was practically raised on the Sermon on the Mount, so Matthew 7 is a passage I’ve heard before, many times. However, the way I’d grown up meant that there was only one possible understanding of what Jesus meant by “false prophets” and “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” A false prophet was many things, but it all essentially boiled down to someone who wasn’t a fundamentalist like we were. And they talked about good fruit and bad fruit, but they never really explained what it meant. I sort of made the connection between good fruit and the Fruits of the Spirit, but “fruit” usually meant “how many people you’ve convinced to pray the Sinner’s Prayer in front of you” . . . so, it was a bit of a tangle, for me.

However, Matthew Vines pointed out something, and it helped the light turn on for me. If the whole of the Law and the Prophets and Jesus’ ministry is Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself, then it stands to reason that the difference between good fruit and bad fruit is love. If an interpretation of a passage, if a doctrine that you hold to, does not encourage you to love your neighbor as yourself, then it’s not good fruit.

St. Augustine put it a bit better:


On Christian Doctrine

This seems like a really good starting place. Love.

And, as I’m working through how I think, what I believe, and how I work with the Bible, figuring out how it should be a part of my life, there’s a few things that I’m reaching for. Yesterday we had an amazing discussion about sola scriptura and how we handle Scripture (seriously, you guys, it was spectacular), and some of you articulated some of the things I’ve been mulling over. There’s one comment in particular I’d like to share, since InsanityRanch put it so well:

First, both Jews and Protestants have what you might call a “democratic” tradition of Bible reading. That is, the Bible is not the sole province of an educated elite. At least in theory (and largely in practice) everyone is supposed to study the Bible . . .

That said, there are some interesting differences as well . . . . [One being that] Jews read Bible with commentary. When I first started reading the Torah, I read it with Rashi (11th c. genius commentator on the Bible and Talmud.) The idea that the text of the Bible is free-standing is profoundly unJewish. There are layers and layers of commentary, so interwoven that it’s impossible to read a Bible passage without also thinking of the various strands of commentary on that verse. One has a sense of the different ways the verse has been read through a long history. Reading in this way makes the text seem very much less cut and dried, less susceptible to a single, simple interpretation.

As a consequence of reading with commentary, Jews have read in community, and the currency of community was questioning. Any interpretation offered for a verse tended to evoke a challenge, with one reader arguing according to R. So-and-so’s commentary and another reader arguing according to R. somebody else. This process made it hard to hold calcified interpretations of textual meanings… though of course, not impossible.

I think the idea of reading in community is paramount, and I think this is something that has been lost– or perhaps never present, I’m not sure– in evangelicalism and some Protestant environments. We gather together in church on Sunday, sometimes we do Bible studies or small groups together, but that’s about all we get in community, and it’s somehow separate from how we read Scripture. It seems that there’s been a strong emphasis in evangelicalism on “reading the Bible for yourself” that the result has been a highly Individualistic approach to Scripture. Somehow, though, instead of this resulting in what InsanityRanch described above, it seems that the Modernism so entrenched in evangelical philosophy results in us putting consensus above all other goals. There’s only one right way to interpret a passage. And, in America, with our individualism and exceptionalism and the fact that the evangelical church is so politicized, we wind up with that “one right way” usually feeding into a really harmful and dangerous status quo.

Being willing to embrace the possibility of not knowing when it comes to our Bibles is discomfiting. But, understanding that the Christian faith is not supposed to exist in isolation, but in community,I think could be a really strong first step.

All of this has somehow led me to re-evaluating a deeply ingrained belief that I’ve grown up with, a belief that seems to be synonymous with Protestantism and evangelicalism alike: that Scripture is the final authority, that Scripture alone is all we need to live our faith. And regardless of how the Reformers originally meant this (since Luther himself believed that some parts of Scripture don’t need to be listened to coughcough James)– what it has come to mean in evangelicalism could be encapsulated in the phrase “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

In the theology course I’m taking, they present a concept called the “Stage of Truth,” which some of you are probably familiar with. Some traditions present this similarly to the Wesleyen Quadrilateral, except the Stage of Truth is more prioritized and hierarchal than that. In Protestant and evangelical sola scriptura traditions, the Stage of Truth looks a bit like this:

stage of truth

Scripture, of course, is at the head since it is the final authority in a Christian’s life. But I’m looking at the other elements on this “stage,” and I’m wondering about a good tree cannot bear bad fruit and I’m looking around at the world around me, and I’m wondering if something like Experience or Emotion doesn’t belong closer to the front.

Because in my lived experience, I’ve felt the horror of Deuteronomy 22 being the final authority in my life. I’ve felt the full, brutal weight of the fact that Scripture doesn’t have bodily autonomy or individual agency well articulated in its pages, and I know what that does to a person. I’ve spent most of my adult life (what little there is of it) struggling under “biblical patriarchy” and having to fight with all of the voices screaming at me that being on my own is rebellion against my father. I’ve been depressed and been told that I must “take every thought captive” and that “perfect love casts out fear” and that I’m just not loving God enough, that’s why I’m sick.

And all of these ideas have come from having a “high view of Scripture,” and believing that what it said had complete authority over my entire life. That I had to force myself into alignment with the “clear teaching of Scripture” because it was the only authority I had. If the Bible had something to say about an idea, well, that was what I had to believe. That was the opinion I had.

I didn’t know that all of that was heavily predicated on interpretation, on the fundamentalism I was raised in, that it wasn’t the Bible but an interpretation of the Bible– but thinking like that was actively discouraged by everyone I knew. Pastors and evangelists and missionaries and Sunday school teachers and professors and Bible study leaders and speakers and teachers all telling me that This is what the Bible says This is what the Bible says and somehow they all sounded the same so I believed it.

And it wasn’t until that I understood that my life matters and my experiences matter and what I feel about people matters that I started re-examining what the Bible so clearly says. When I placed my Bible in tension with my life, and the people I care about, and what I can reason to be true, what so many before me have observed to be true, some things became a lot more simple. It wasn’t until I’d set aside my “high view of Scripture” that loving my neighbor really became possible.


Martin Luther might have made a huge mess

illuminated bible

 I wrote a post last week explaining how I’m not entirely sure what I think–and believe– about the Bible. I know that what I was taught as a teenager was egregiously wrong, especially since the veneration of the Holy Scriptures included the heresy of biblical docetism— or, taking the Bible as literally, as factually, as is possible. From my experiences in Independent Fundamental Baptist churches and attending a fundamentalist college, the words and the pages of the Bible are worshiped as an extension of God himself.

So I’m trying to back up from that and look at the Bible all over again, and I’m starting from scratch. I’m beginning with the things that I can solidly know about the Bible that are separate from its status as a divine book. It’s an ancient text, a library compiled over centuries, written by men (and possibly women) from all walks of life. They had a purpose, an underlying argument. They had motivations that they weren’t aware of. Their writing was colored by their perceptions– racism, patriarchy– and everything they recorded was influenced by their philosophy and epistemology. Those are things that are true of all books, of all writers. These are things that I’ve been trained to look for, to parse out, and I know how to handle them.

I haven’t really made any progress since my last post– all I have are more questions. But one thing that I’m seriously beginning to wonder about is the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura.

I’m not a Reformation scholar, but I think it’s safe to claim that one of the founding doctrines of the Reformation was sola scriptura. Luther believed that the Holy Roman Catholic Church had become corrupt and had been abusing its power; the solution for this was to give ordinary people access to the Bible. If they could read the Scriptures for themselves, they could see where and how the Church had been misrepresenting the truth to them– they could read about justification through faith alone for themselves. Luther– and other men like him– appealed to the authority of Scripture above the authority of the Church, or Tradition.

What I’m wondering about now is the connection between sola scriptura and the saying we hear bandied about quite a bit today: “the Bible clearly says.” Are ideas like biblical literalism, the “plain meaning of Scripture” and proof-texted verses the natural– perhaps inevitable– consequence of sola scriptura?

 Because, as I’ve been digging into what the Bible means to me, one of the things that’s becoming ever more clear is that trying to understand the Bible is difficult. You have to take into account Hebrew and Greek syntax, ancient customs from a culture wholly removed from modern-day America, literary forms of the ancient world, the importance of genre . . . and it goes on.

Take, for example, the Book of Ecclesiastes. It’s traditionally been attributed to Solomon, and it belongs in the “proverbial” genre. However, it has a narrative structure that is very common in other Near Eastern and Middle Eastern texts written in about the same period. The Man Who was Tired of Life, an ancient Egyptian story, has a strikingly similar narrative form: internal dialog. This story is about a man arguing with himself, trying to decide if he wants to commit suicide or if continuing to live is worth it. A straight, simple reading of Ecclesiastes is going to be confusing, because the book is filled with what, superficially, seem like contradictions and tensions. I’ve seen some creative attempts to interpret this book that had zero awareness of the internal dialog happening– and, if you’re not versed in narrative theory and can separate the two voices in the text (which is easy in some places, more difficult in others) you’re going to run into problems.

Many of the “straight-forward, plain meaning, the Bible clearly says” approaches I’ve seen to Ecclesiastes winds up with the preacher going on at length about how everything is vanity and life is miserable– when that is not really the purpose of Ecclesiastes at all.

When you give ordinary people the Bible– well-educated, hard working, conscionable people who love God– but don’t simultaneously give them any tools to understand the Bible as a library of books from ancient times, it seems like you’re always going to run into problems.

Say, for example, someone reads Genesis 19, where God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, but they don’t simultaneously read Ezekiel 16. You might wind up with a bunch of people believing that God sent fire and brimstone to destroy Sodom because the people there were gay– when Ezekiel 16 explicitly says that the people there were greedy and selfish, and they did not care for the poor. Or, even ignoring Ezekiel 16, and understanding that Genesis has a narrative structure just like every other book– and that the story of the angels visiting Lot is meant to be a parallel with the angels visiting Abraham. You place these two encounters side-by-side (which they are), and the story is completely transformed to be about how we treat strangers.

So what does this mean for the Church?

I’m worried about the rampant anti-intellectualism I hear from a lot of pulpits. You don’t need religion. You don’t need Tradition. You don’t need education. You don’t need 6 years of training in church history. You don’t need 6 years in biblical languages. You just need the Bible. As long as you read your Bible, you’ll be fine.

But I’ve been reading my Bible, and when I get to passages like Jesus saying “you’re going to eat my flesh and drink my blood” (John 6:56) and people responded with “this is a hard saying” (vs. 60), all I can think is no shit Jesus sounds like a crazy person. And, of course, we modern people go, “Oh, he was talking about Communion!” since that’s something we’ve had for 2,000 years and some of us eat and drink it every Sunday, but that didn’t exist then, and we get all pissy with the people who didn’t get it. “See, look at what Peter said! Jesus has the words of eternal life, where else are we supposed to go?” and I’m just gobsmacked because if I’d been there, all I would have been thinking is how it is an abomination to drink the blood of animals– and forget about cannibalism. And was he really talking about Communion? Was this a metaphor for the Passover Lamb? What does it meeaaaaan and I’m internally wailing because it’s a gigantic mess.

And this is me talking. I went to not one, but two, Bible colleges. I’m almost finished with a two-year theology program. I (almost) have an MA in English. I stumbled my way through Advanced Literary Criticism and Theory. And even with all of that, I barely understand the Bible. I certainly don’t understand it well enough to throw hand-picked verses into arguments. Looking back, proof-texting is singularly ridiculous. No one would say that C.S. Lewis believes that we should all go to  strip clubs because he said “You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act– that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage.” (96, Mere Christianity)– but that seems to be exactly what we do to the Bible. A lot.

I’m worried, because I see the Bible being used as a weapon almost everywhere I go. If it’s the only authority Christians are allowed to appeal to– if it’s above our lived experiences, if it’s above our religious heritage and tradition, if it’s above reason and empathy– if it it’s above all of that and then we approach it with our culture, our privileges, our biases, our politics, and don’t believe that it’s necessary to counter any of that . . . it scares me.


definitions and a history lesson, part three

















Inerrancy & Infallibility
















