Those of us who quote scripture to validate our position/belief generally emphasize the divine nature of scripture. It is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16). Every word was inspired by God. Our faith in God is expressed in our faith in the reliability of the Bible. For us, the Bible is the final word from God regarding any issue. For us, the Bible is inerrant and infallible. We read it literally (it means what it says and says what it means) and take it seriously. We treat every book of the Bible, every passage in the Bible with equal value. Anything less than this absolute faith in the Bible leads to substituting human wisdom for God's wisdom which only leads to destruction.
This way of reading the Bible overlooks the full nature of the Bible. It is both divine and human. God's word to us, God's self-revelation came through human beings. "Men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God" (2 Peter 1:21, NRSV). The Spirit did not override the humanity of those who spoke from God, i.e., dictate verbatim every word. The Spirit spoke into and through their humanity. Thus, God's word comes to us in and through human culture, languages, historical situations, world views, literature, and thinking. To get to God's word in scripture requires us to distinguish what is divine (God's truth that is eternal and unchanging) and what is human (the human aspects of those who spoke for God). That is, we have to interpret the Bible. Interpreting the Bible (and we all interpret it) involves this kind of discernment. A piece of peppermint candy illustrates the thought (my favorite, oft-used illustration of this truth). The divine truth that we desire is the candy. In order to get to it, we have to unwrap it from the plastic wrapper that is used to deliver it. The failure to do this kind of discerning work results in us chewing on the wrapper rather than tasting the sweetness of God's eternal truth. We treat a cultural, time-bound thought as though it were an eternal, timeless truth.
Recognizing the human dimension of the Bible leads us beyond giving every book and every passage the same degree of authority to speak for God (and, thus, confusing the wrapper with the candy). Many texts clearly reflect the nature and ways of God. They teach us of God's merciful and gracious character (Exodus 34:6-7; 1 John 4:8). They reveal that God relates to us out of grace and forgiveness. They help us know the ways of God and the ways of the Kingdom. (A bit of self-promotion: see my book A God-Shaped World: Exploring the Teachings of Jesus about the Kingdom of God and the Implications for the Church Today - Westbow, 2017. Available through Amazon.com.) Some texts reflect our fear-based human condition and how we treat one another when we live out of that nature. Other texts, by contrast, reflect more of the culture and historical period than they do the nature and ways of God. They help us know how the people of that time thought and what they did, but they do not reflect a developed understanding of the nature and ways of God (for example, the command to kill citizens of a defeated nation as a sacrifice to God, Joshua 8:1-2, 24-29). If we treat this cultural, time-bound thinking as God's eternal truth, we chew on the wrapper and miss God's eternal truth. We allow the cultural thinking of a previous era to shape our thinking and relating today instead of allowing the truth of God's nature and ways to shape our lives.
Those of us who place our faith in the total reliability of the Bible are uncomfortable with this recognition of the human dimension of the Bible. And yet we commonly practice the principle of distinguishing the cultural from the eternal, the human from the divine. We do not require women to wear a head covering in worship or when praying (1 Corinthians 11:6-7). We understand that requirement was a tradition in that time and culture. We do not have to follow it today. We enjoy bacon, pork ribs, and ham although eating the flesh of pigs was forbidden in Leviticus 11:7. We enjoy catfish but Leviticus 11:10, 12 prohibits it. Leviticus 19:27 instructs men regarding their haircut. Leviticus 19:28 prohibits tattoos. We don't follow either command. We don't kill a couple who commit adultery (Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22:22). We have moved beyond an eye for an eye retaliation (Leviticus 24:19-20) - well, not completely. I could go on but I am quoting the Bible to validate my point!
What I am saying is those of us who insist on the total reliability of every word in the Bible do not practice what we say we believe. We pick and choose. We use human wisdom to discern what is cultural from what is eternal truth, to discern what of the Bible is human and what is divine.
One other example of how we pick and choose. Leviticus 19:18 calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus tied this obscure verse from Leviticus with the Shema, the call to love God with all of our being, Deuteronomy 6:4-5. He said all the law was captured by these two commands to love: love God, love neighbor. That same chapter of Leviticus - chapter 19 - calls us to embrace the alien as a citizen and love the alien as ourselves (19:33-34). We quote one text and ignore the other. And in the UM LGBTQ+ controversy, those of us who insist on Biblical authority quoted from Leviticus to condemn homosexuality as incompatible with Biblical teaching. We quote one text and ignore the other.
All of this picking and choosing which texts to quote to validate our position (and people on both sides of every issue do it) raises the question: does the text we quote reflect the nature of God, the character of God, the ways of God, the life and teachings of Jesus?
More on that thought in another blog.
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