Tentpegs

As we continue to look at how to read scripture, we have to deal with the absolute inerrantists who believe that every single word of the Bible comes directly from the mouth of God and was received and recorded without error. The most rigorous proponent of this view that I know is the Dutch Reformed theologian, A. van de Beek. His book “Why? On Suffering, Guilt, and God” (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1990) is an almost brutal defense of scripture. What do I mean? Look at these quotes, taken entirely in context –

“The way of God does not answer to our norms of good and evil…God is a rough God, grim, and in our eyes even cruel…God is not one you can figure out. Majestically he goes his own way…Good and evil both come forth from his will.”  So complex (good/evil, merciful/cruel, etc.) is God, according to van der Beek, that the more you read scripture, the less you can know about God! “…the more one wants to let all of Scripture speak for itself…the more unclear the Bible becomes. The more we believe that the whole Word is revelation, the less we know who God is.”

I’ll let that sit there for a moment. Let it all sink in…

If we treat all of scripture as the absolute and literal words of God, to be read literally, and to be literally accurate in all of its ways we will end up eventually in van der Beek’s neighborhood. And we will have a very hard time explaining Jesus.

For Jesus doesn’t look like a warrior God – at least, during the incarnation. While he is painted as a warrior for a part of the Book of Revelation, that is not what we see when he was with us (so we should remember that that book only just made it into the canon and has consistently been a challenge to interpret).

Van der Beek knows the difficulty this places on us – he even says one could call his theology “theological nihilism” – he counters “we could perhaps restrict revelation to certain events in the world. We could restrict it to certain texts in Scripture. But then what is the criterion for our selection?”

And here my voice would be raised and I would respond the exact same way that John Wesley responded to that question: “Jesus!” He is the full and final revelation of God. Look at Hebrews 1 again and see that the writer could not be more plain: God has spoken to us in many ways but the final, best way is through the life and teaching of Jesus. Another Dutch theologian, Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, agrees with Wesley and states Wesley’s thought like this: “Love is the gospel message. Christian love, revealed by God in Christ…stands against any human theory of God’s nature and His way with man…love as it is revealed in Christ.”

The great thinker, G. K. Chesterton, said that the “furious opposites” (the discontinuity between the testaments) find their unity in Jesus, even though he seems so starkly different from the image of God shown to us in many OT passages. Chesterton said to pay attention to the way Jesus used the scriptures, interpreting them in the light of his own self-understanding. This infuriated the Pharisees, the literalists and inerrantists of his day, and the Sadducees, the theological liberals of the first century. He told the Pharisees that the OT scriptures testified of him (Jn. 5:39,46) and he told the men on the road to Emmaus that they needed to review those scriptures (Luke 24:26,27).

Jesus, therefore, accepted some OT scriptures as God’s words but he felt free to change other passages such as those dealing with divorce (Mark 10:4-9), laws concerning taking vengeance on those who have harmed you, your family, or your property, replacing them with calls to nonviolence (Matt. 5:38-41; cf Rom.12:21) and, of course, his “love your enemies” which is a stunning change from the genocide passages of Joshua and Numbers and Deuteronomy. He gave the woman caught in adultery grace and forgiveness in contravention to the Torah’s laws (Jn.8:1-11; cf Lev.20:10; Deut. 22:22). [I am aware that John 8:1-8 is not in our earliest manuscripts but since most Christians treat it as original or, at least, as an early Jesus story that was inserted to make the record more complete, I don’t mind referencing it here]

While Jesus did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets (Matt.5:17), it is plain that the way he came to fulfill it was different from what one might have expected. In fact, right after saying that in v.17 he says – six times! – “you have heard it said, but I say unto you” referencing scripture and then changing it. The phrase “I tell you” occurs 32 times in Matthew alone. William Greathouse says this represents “a unique aspect of Jesus’ own authoritative speech, affirming but relativizing the Law.” (“Wholeness in Christ: Toward a Biblical Theology of Holiness” Beacon Hill, 1998)

And in the early centuries of the church we see a sea change occurring in how they used the OT scripture. They no longer interpreted them via Moses but via Jesus. This was so offensive to the bulk of the conservative Jews that they killed Jesus and as many of his followers as they could. They said they were justified in doing so because Jesus spoke “words of blasphemy against Moses and against God.” (Acts 6:11) The early church, though, didn’t think the way they were handling the OT was blasphemy. They thought they were the ones who truly understood the OT because through it they saw Jesus. Jewish religious leaders to this day are scandalized by the way Jesus handled their scriptures. If you don’t believe that, get a copy of Biblical Archaeology Review and the Jerusalem Post and see the ads by rabbis offering courses proving from the OT that Jesus could not have been the Messiah.

But if we believe Jesus had the right to change the OT scriptures, add to and take from the law, and to define them/it in reference to himself, then we can agree with Wesley that “Jesus’ lordship extends over the entire cosmos from creation to consummation – and over the Hebrew scriptures as well. As the preexistent Son of God and now resurrected and glorified living Word, Jesus is the Word for those who bind themselves to him.” (C.S.Cowles, 2003)

A few words of thanks need to be said here: I am learning quite a bit from the commenters that have chimed in here. While they don’t all agree with me or with each other, they have all enriched this discussion and I think I’ve learned something from every one of them. I’ve learned enough that I am tempted to go back and change some things I wrote but… maybe it is more valuable to see me search for truth actively and make missteps along the way than it would be if you came to this blog and assumed I had everything down, understood, and settled. While that might feed my ego and reputation, it would not reflect reality and it might discourage those who continue to have questions.

I have tried not to go back and comment after each comment but I will do some of that later this weekend if I get time.

In related news, I have wondered if Tentpegs has run its course. There are still quite a few questions in at tentpegsquestion@yahoo.com but I started this series thinking it would run perhaps 20 to 50 questions and, well, it has gone well beyond that. I also fear that I might be causing one or two to stumble and that breaks my heart. I would rather stop this and pull the site down than to cause any person’s faith to weaken. I am in prayer about this and would ask you to be in prayer for me that I make the right decision. I would keep www.patrickmead.net up and intersperse religious discussions with the history and personal stuff I do over there.

There is no question that sin brings death. Several commenters have asked a variation of “if God didn’t order genocide, explain the punishment at the end of the world” or this or that war, plague, etc. It is a very different thing to say that a nation that refuses to let God have any place in it will fall – and that innocents will suffer – than it is to say that God wants pregnant women ripped open, children casually killed, etc. I see such a huge distance between the two but it is plain that some do not. As I have also said repeatedly here, I believe in hell and that it was prepared for the devil and his angels, not us. I believe in annihilationism and yet I hold out hope – with some scriptural warrant, in my opinion – for some version of universal salvation. I have documented why in Tentpegs on more than one occasion, the most recent being just over a year ago with a series of 6 blogs on the subject. So I do not see an equivalence between the genocide scriptures and the judgment at the end of the world. I realize I hold a position which is not universal among our tribe or among religious folk generally, but it seems to be a position which is rapidly gaining in favor as we study the language more carefully.

Others seem very troubled that I would mention discrepancies and issues in our text. I confess that I am troubled by their being troubled! We can deny that there are issues to confront, but that doesn’t make them go away. The purpose of this series was to move us from Bibleolatry to a profound love for Jesus and an overwhelming desire to follow him. So I will get back to that now.

When Jesus said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt.5:44) he could not have said a more shocking thing to the people gathered around him. Some had been trained by their scribes and knew that the genocide stories had synecdoche and hyperbole in them (as one commenter said, they were rather like a pre-game speech) but many were like James and John and the disciples – people who hadn’t heard that and who were known as “ignorant and unlearned men” because they hadn’t been taught how to divide the scripture. Rather, they had taken those stories and many others and made them – understandably so – into a form of nationalism overlaid with xenophobia. To hear that they were now to love those enemies and pray for them even when their enemies were actively harming them… well!

But Jesus added more to this command. He told us the “why” behind it. It was so that we could be “sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous…Be perfect [in love for enemies], therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt.5:45-48). God, we are told, is no respecter of persons. He doesn’t hate foreigners. While judgment can and does and always will fall on those who rebel and while that means that some collateral damage will occur (what a terrible way to describe the tragic loss of an innocent child’s life!), God doesn’t want to do that and does everything He can to avoid doing it. He loves us all – even the foreigners – with a boundless, unconditional, and self giving love. While God is a warrior, he is not a destroyer. He is more lover than fighter, if Jesus is to be believed. Satan was a murderer from the beginning (Jn.8:44) but Jesus came to bring us life (Jn.10:10).

Look at this contrast: Moses made no exception for children. They weren’t collateral damage, they were targets (Deut.7:2-16). The narrator of the Conquest made it clear that children were targets, too (Josh. 6:21; 10:40). Samuel’s command to King Saul specifically named women and children and infants as targets (1^st Sam.15:3).

And then we come to Jesus. He brought a child to the middle of the discussion and said that they were the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. He said “whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me.” To those who might harm a child he warned “It would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” While the narrators of the Canaanite Conquest spoke of destroying children, Jesus said “The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

If I continue this series, it will last only two or three more. Thank you for sharpening me, teaching me, and walking alongside me on this journey.

Jesus certainly believed that the scriptures (which, to him, would have meant what we call the Old Testament) were full of truths that the people of his day were not willing to face. As we saw in the last blog, it infuriated them when Jesus lifted up the Sidonian widow and when he left out verses that called for vengeance and judgment. They viewed such handling of the scripture as so dangerous that they were ready to kill him (Lk.4:28,29). He drew new wine out of old wineskins and then put it into new wineskins that would stand the test of time.

The apostles took quite a long time to understand this and understandably so! Their faith identity was based in being a part of a special people – the only people God liked, the only people whose lives mattered to Him. They believed that God wanted them to look down on all other nations, especially those like the Samaritans who’d been marked as especially abhorrent to Him. Jesus went out of his way to disabuse them of these long held, faith based, culturally entrenched views. We know about the Samaritan woman at the well – a woman who had been rejected even by other Samaritans – to whom Jesus first announced that he was the Messiah. That event would have been a thunderclap and earthquake to every Jew who heard about it. But lesser known are the events of Luke 9:51-56. Jesus and his followers were refused lodging in Samaria because they were Jews headed toward Jerusalem. James and John, the “Sons of Thunder” (Mark 3:17), wanted Jesus to call down fire on these awful Samaritan dogs.

Note: they were willing to burn a lot of people because a few had rejected them. They showed no consideration for the weak, children, and innocent who would also suffer. Had Jesus called down fire on Samaria, he would have also killed the woman at the well! She who became the first evangelist and those who heard her story and believed in Jesus – the first converts outside Judea – would have died. Jesus severely rebukes his apostles for even suggesting such a course of action. Sit and think about the ramifications of that for awhile. He tells them “You do not know what kind of spirit you are of, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them” (Luke 9:55). The “kind of spirit” that would exterminate a town was completely foreign to his character as the reflection of God; the express image of the Father. As the theologian C. S. Cowles says, “The vengeful spirit that dehumanizes, depersonalizes, and demonizes a whole town or city or nation of not of God. The God revealed in Jesus never has been and never will be party to genocide of any sort, for “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8).” Jesus reminds us through John that “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” (John 3:17)

Does this mean that God is an easy pushover, more of a grandfather in heaven than a father in heaven? By no means. It is still a “fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” As an example of this, let’s bring up a story that has been brought up to me via the comments and private emails – The Flood.

I will not spend any time here on the controversies among scientists, theologians, archaeologists and between the members of each group over whether there was a flood, how extensive it was, and if the Bible version is the original version of the story. I’m a scientist and I can see reasons to believe in a worldwide flood and if such a flood occurred, I would assume many cultures would have that story – and they do. Let’s go with the assumption that this was a real, worldwide flood and that all died except for those in the Ark. What will that mean to our picture of God as seen in Jesus? Is this an example of genocide equivalent to those in Numbers and Joshua? I would argue that it is very different. Since we are taking the story as written, we need to remember what the story tells us: the population of the world had not exploded and was relatively local in nature. If you remember, after the flood people began to fear that they were becoming spread out too much and built the Tower of Babel to stop that. Before the flood, the land was all in one place (science finds itself in broad agreement with that today) and population was relatively localized.

Noah is said to have preached for one hundred years. In other words, everyone would have heard about the warnings several times. The building of the Ark would have been a spectacle that everyone would have heard about even if they lived so far away that they had never seen it firsthand. It was only after a plea for people to repent, come to God (and the Ark), and be saved that judgment came on the people. If you look at the genocide passages in Numbers and Joshua, the targets of the sword were not loved by God, given no opportunity to repent, not asked to join Israel (and, in fact, were expressly prohibited from doing so even to the 10^th generation in the case of the Moabites), and received no century of warning… or any warning, as far as we can see.

When judgment comes, people will suffer and die. But God goes through every possible avenue to help people avoid such judgment, short of removing from them their free will; their right to ignore or disobey Him. Did innocents die? Yes, but as in Ezekiel 33, it was those who had ignored the warnings who were at fault, not God. God had provided warnings, a way out, and a long, loving call – of which were consciously refused.

In the New Testament, Paul uses the phrase “God gave them over” three times when talking about those who knew about God, had every chance, and decided to reject Him. God did not bring judgment on them as much as they brought it upon themselves (Romans 1). Their fate was a self chosen destiny. The destroyer of human life is not God, but sin and we have no one to blame for that but ourselves. Don’t believe it? Work with me for a moment and list those things that bring us the most pain. Most of us will not suffer through a tsunami or a lightning strike but we will suffer through our own stupidity, our own choices, and the stupidity and choices of others who exercise their free will in such a way as to bring painful consequences. Mennonite theologian C. Norman Kraus puts it this way: “God’s wrath is not retaliatory nor vindictive, but points to the objective, intrinsic consequences of sin in the created order as God’s judgment. The very concept of a rational creation implies an order of existence in which consequences are inherent in the actions themselves.”

In other words, if we are truly opposed to drinking and driving, why do bars have parking lots? If we know the dangers of obesity, why are fast food restaurants the most popular eating establishments in the neighborhood? If we know that exercise is critical to good health, why are we watching “The Voice” instead of walking? And yet, when a drunk driver hits us, when our heart struggles against our weight, and when our bones get stiff… we don’t blame ourselves or the drunk, we blame God.

And God’s response? Jesus. Look at how Jesus even treated Judas who he knew was about to betray him and who he knew had been stealing from the group. He sat at supper with him and even gave him something to eat – a profoundly meaningful act in the first century. And when he met him in the garden, knowing that Judas had brought a mob to kill him, Jesus still called him “friend” (Matt.26:50). Judas died violently, but by his own hand, not God’s. Jesus never used his power to harm, coerce, or overwhelm anyone. Isaiah told us this would happen when it spoke of the One to come saying “he will not shout or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out” (Isaiah 42:2,3). He calls not for holy warriors but for peacemakers (Matt.5:9).

When Peter used a sword to defend Jesus, Jesus rebuked him and healed the man who’d been wounded (Luke 22:51). And he was announced by “Peace on earth, good will toward men” and by the Spirit’s assertion that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Even sword wielding Peter would one day write “Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps… When they hurled their insults against him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly” (1Peter 2:21-23).

Nothing I’ve ever seen is as stark a contrast as the life of Jesus and his commission to us compared to the commission to wipe out villages and cultures in Canaan. As one commenter has pointed out, the teachers among the Jews have never believed that the genocide commands were to be taken literally and there is no historical record that the genocides took place. Still, nothing like those commands come from the mouth of Jesus and most of his followers in the first several centuries took his call to peace and love so seriously that they refused to enter military service or bear arms (even though that is beyond Jesus’ command, in my opinion. I am not a pacifist but I have profound respect toward those who are). Tertullian held that the love of enemies was “the principal precept” of Christianity and that “Christians would, like their Master, rather be killed than kill.” And yet, armed with nothing but love and a Story that resonated in their spirits, they conquered Rome without drawing a sword, getting involved in politics, or championing anything or anyone other than Jesus, the express image of God, the Prince of Peace.

More soon…

We will get back to the next part in this series in a day or two. I wanted to stop for a moment, ask everyone to catch their breath, and address some issues raised by commenters; those who put their comments after the post and those who emailed me. I will not make a habit of this because taking time to answer every comment in depth would mean we could never progress. Those who doubt this need to search their memories for the last time they saw a political activist change their mind during a televised argument with their rival. It seems that we find what works for us and we stick with it, finding ways to make it work regardless of any facts which might be tossed our way. Note the plural pronouns here: I am not immune from this very human tendency.

A few are very troubled so let me sincerely give you permission to step away from this series. You may even write me off as a man who has lost his way – and you might be right. Do not put your faith at risk if that is what will happen as you read here. I would hate for that to happen. This is a blog but it is also a journal of where I am on my journey. Most of my readers know that I began at the very far right of the Churches of Christ. I preached and lived and believed that doctrine until I was nearly 30. And I believed most of what would be called fundamentalist doctrine until 10 or 12 years ago when some cracks began to develop as I read and studied more and more.

I am a researcher. I read and study and sift what I find. That’s what I do. For those who don’t know me, allow me a few sentences to explain. I hold two doctorates in science and I am on staff at a few major universities. I teach medical stuff but I also read thousands of pages of research for them and tell them where there are points of convergence between this and that researcher or where someone has gone off into the weeds. I read 3-5 books a week and have since I was a child. And I remember what I read. I wish I had other gifts: oh, to be an athlete or a car mechanic! But… no.

So, when I deal with my atheist and agnostic colleagues or when I read scripture and see what Scot McKnight would call a blue parakeet, I start digging. I would be a fool to believe that I always get it right, but I always get somewhere and I am not afraid to share the journey. If that troubles you, please step away. There is no reason to go my direction or at my pace unless you find that something I am saying is helping you answer some nagging question and getting you closer to Jesus.

Now… I have been very impressed with comments made by Brandon and Danny. Read them. They make their point in a minimum of verbiage, show intelligence and kindness in equal measures, and it seems they’ve read books and taken classes in this subject. Very helpful. Let’s address a very concerns people have had so far.

An atheist who has commented – and I must say I have been impressed with his grace and honesty – has asked if genocide is any worse than God sending everyone who doesn’t pass His muster to an eternal torture pit. My response to him is: let not your heart be troubled. Search this blog’s posts for “hell” and “annihilationism” and see that I, like most early Church Fathers, Jewish rabbis, and theologians do not believe that the Bible teaches that hell is eternal in the sense that individuals will burn there forever and never die. I was taught that a person sent to hell would be in extreme pain and a trillion years later would still be there in pain, but that is based on an idea from Plato. I’ll refer you to those blogs. If you have trouble finding them or have further questions about this, please get back in touch. You are important to me.

It can be commendable to try to find a purpose in suffering and attribute it to God, but God makes it plain to Job and elsewhere that life is far more complex than that. He is not the only player in the universe. There are things out there and some of them don’t like us. Plus, we sabotage our own lives time after time… and then ask God why we are suffering. When someone says that God brought suffering and pain and death to communities in order to save them (or others) I have to turn and look and Jesus and say “one of these is not like the other.”

One commenter compares our root and branch genocide of Nazis with that of God and equates (roughly) the two as attempts to stomp out evil. But the two are not equivalent in any real sense. One is supposedly ordered by a God of love who shows no concern for the children and pregnant women. The other was ordered by humans against humans. And, besides, I would have opposed the bombing of Dresden – which is the only “root and branch” example I can find in that war. Other than that, it was armies facing armies and the Americans, as is their wont, waged it according to the Geneva Convention, the rules of war, and their own code of honor. The bombing of Dresden was different. It was a horrific firebombing of homes and neighborhoods in order to bring the horror of war to the people who had launched it against others. Yes, recent research has shown that the majority of Germans supported Hitler and his war so we can’t call them innocent, but I would have still opposed the bombing. Why? Because I can’t imagine Jesus doing it.

The commenter also said that Revelation is Joshua writ large but he said it with humility so I will respond with what I hope is an equal amount of humility. I disagree. Jesus goes to war against the enemies of his people but they are never portrayed as innocents or the ignorant. No, they are the devil and his angels and those high authorities (a term that usually indicates spiritual beings but can mean high rulers in government and religion). What Jesus does in Revelation is nothing like what Joshua claimed God wanted done in Canaan.

One commenter uses the seemingly odd and uncertain things in lives – specifically, a tornado – to explain how we cannot know the things of God. He answers his own objections, however, when he says that through this all, he knew his father was not “wrathful, vengeful, or hothead but would risk his own life for me.” I am sure he is correct. However, to make this an equivalent story and apply it to God, we would have to have the commenter’s father be responsible for the existence of tornadoes and for sending them against families. This man’s father would never do such a thing and Jesus reminds us that if we know how to love our children, how much more does God love us? Once again, we have to go to Jesus to get our answer about what God is really like and what He would really do.

And one commenter left me gobsmacked when he said that he doubted that Paul was referring to the Torah when he spoke of scripture in 2 Timothy. Oh my goodness! Other than a few books by Paul and, perhaps, the Book of Mark or its rumored source document, Quelle, there were no other books out there. I cannot find a theologian, archaeologist, or historian who would agree with this commenter, even those firm and dedicated inerrantists who signed the Chicago Statement. So I’ll just move on. I confess that I have a history of not being able to communicate with this fellow who I have no reason to believe is anything other than a good, sincere man. Perhaps Brandon or Danny can understand his point and address him.

For those who are terrified by the possibility that Moses or Joshua got this or that wrong, I would ask you to sit back and take a few breaths. Let me give you an illustration. We were running out of space at Rochester and we moved the praise team to the stage, having them stand. One family left, saying we might was well be Catholic. I tried to explain to them that there was still quite a lot of distance between our Church of Christ congregation and Catholicism but that one move was all it took. It was all or nothing and fears of a slippery slope made it seem to them as if we had already slid down it and off the ramp.

When we question the genocide accounts and bits or pieces of the Old Testament, we do not lose our scripture or our love of it. Because we have Jesus, we have a way of reading scripture that can give us the power of its stories and the meaning behind our history without getting hung up on this or that episode.

But how can we trust the Jesus story if we can’t believe everything is exactly as it seems in the Old Testament? Easily! The Jewish rabbis from long before Jesus to the present day treat their stories as stories – some factual, some maybe not, some edited into their current form during the Babylonian captivity as a way to give them an identity – but they are not thrown by the inconsistencies, they do not believe in the genocide stories (or they treat them as Brandon and Danny have done well in the comments), and they look for the moral and spiritual value in the gestalt – the whole story – rather than dwelling on each of its parts.

Jesus, in stark contrast to Daniel and Joshua, was a person who lived in a time when history was being written as it happened. There are HUGE amounts of evidence that Jesus lived, taught, died, and rose just as the writers of his time said he did. He is a historical reality – the greatest historical reality. On him and his life, all history and the universe itself is hinged. Everything turns on him. We will probably never know how to deal with the Exodus story that has millions of Jews in the desert for 40+ years… and yet they left not one artifact, not one inscription, not one sign of their passing. Does this bother me? No. I know what the story means and it is dear and important to me. I know that Jewish writers use numbers in a way that is foreign to us and that 40 years can mean 40 but it can also mean “a lot.” I know that the millions can be hyperbole or just the way a prescientific people acknowledged the whole of their people on the move.

But when it comes to Jesus, we have writings from his time, a body of radically changed people, and a testimony of the Spirit that shows us not only that he was and is real, but that he was and is who he said he was.

And HE is the Word of God. He is how God speaks to us (remember John 1 and Hebrews 1, please). Once God spoke through those prophets and, if we divide them correctly as Paul told Timothy, they can be “for our learning” to this day. But the Word is Jesus.

We will get back to our story of Jesus and Genocide in a day or two. For those who need to leave this series – peace. God’s grace follow you. Forgive me for troubling you. But, believe me, I have troubled myself, too! But I came back to see Jesus and that changed everything.

I am putting a new title and number on this even though we are continuing with our “how do we read our Bibles?” series.

The question we will be examining at the end of this series of blogs is “what is the Word of God?” If you answer “the Bible!” then you need to answer a further set of questions: is it inerrant? How do you deal with the inconsistencies in doctrine, numbers, names, and ideas? And how do you harmonize what you find in the genocide and slavery passages with the coming of Jesus, “the express image of God”?

We are a long way from dealing with that at this point, because we’ve not looked at much in the way of the discrepancies and issues with our text. We probably won’t have time to look at the confusing passages about whether there are many gods or one God (the Bible teaches both) or whether women are partners or property (ditto) and many, many more. I will, however, go ahead and give you my answer to the question I posed above – The Word of God is Jesus and the Bible is only the Word of God if it is read through the lens of the life and teaching of Jesus. Without him, it is a brutal and confusing text. With him, we are able to do what Paul told Timothy to do – divide the scripture correctly. Paul was speaking about the scripture of his day, the Torah. And it is there we need to go today and in the next few blogs.

And we start in a very, very dark place.

Jihad is not an invention of Muslims. We have seen it throughout history; waged by one set of believers against another. Most recently, we say it in Rwanda where pastors led machete wielding mobs into churches where they systematically and heartlessly hacked men, women, and children to death. The Seventh Day Adventist pastors Gerard and Ntakirutimana were begged in person and in writing to intervene but, instead, they joined the mob and led murderous rampages against their Tutsi brothers and sisters (who were also members of the Seventh Day Adventist Church). They sought them out, church by church, and killed them all.

If you are appalled by such behavior… good! If you can find a way to explain it all away as an act of God – even something God wanted to happen – I am not sure many of my readers would want anything to do with you and who could blame them? And yet, our Bibles have quite a few of these stories and they lay the blame for the slaughter at the feet of God who, the stories say, ordered the slaughter. Worse, the first descriptions we have in history of holy war in which all people in a region are to be slaughtered and considered “herem” (devoted to death as an act of worship to God) are found in the books of Moses and Joshua. Crusaders used these passages to justify their indiscriminate slaughter of Arabs, Jews, and believers in their path. The Catholic general, Arnaud, gave the command to slaughter a town that held Cathars, a breakaway sect of the day. When his officers asked him how they were to tell Cathars from Catholics, his reply was “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.” (Kill them all. The Lord will recognize His own.”) Orthodox Serbs used OT passages to justify the rape and slaughter of their Muslim neighbors just a few decades ago. Their religious leaders wrote books full of glowing approval of their actions and justified them by appeals to scripture.

Sickened yet? Some will say that what we find in Moses and Joshua is different from Rwanda, Serbia, and Rome. They say that the slaughter in scripture is only authorized when the wickedness of the city/tribe was complete (Deut. 9:4; 20:18). John Calvin put it this way: “God was pleased to purge the land of Canaan of the foul and loathsome defilements by which it had long been polluted” and refers to the “indiscriminate and promiscuous slaughter, making no distinction of age or sex, but including alike women and children, the aged and decrepit” and says that it “might seem an inhuman massacre had it not been executed by the command of God.”

So if God commands the slaughter of infants, we can assume it was a good and righteous thing to kill babies? Isn’t it interesting that when we enter the world of the New Testament, it is Herod who kills babies, not God, and we are expected to react in horror when we hear what he did? Before any leap to defend God here and say that God had righteous motives while Herod’s were selfish, prepare, then, to give us a possible scenario under which it was and is fine to kill babies. Are you pro-life? That would make your defense of the genocide passages that much more difficult.

John Wesley disagreed with Calvin in the strongest of terms. He wrote that attributing these words and commands to God was an outrage against His character and made him “more false, more cruel, and more unjust than the devil…God has taken the devil’s work out of his hands.” Walter Wink, a theologian, added “Against such an image of God the revolt of atheism is an act of pure religion.”

It is important to note here that Wesley was a dedicated and absolute believer in scripture… and yet he did not believe that God gave those commands. The standard charge against those of us who approach these scriptures today is that we must not believe in the Bible or we must not be in submission to God or we would just accept that this is all part of his ineffable will fails to account for all of the Jewish rabbis (the vast majority) of the years before and after Jesus and all of the Christian writers (such as Wesley) who looked at these scriptures and said this slaughter did not originate in the mind of God. C.S. Cowles says “To attribute genocidal violence to God poisons the well of all his other attributes.” And he is correct. Martin Luther wrestled with these passages and referred to them as “the dark side of God” but our response is that God has no dark side. He is, as seen in Jesus, light. Those who knew Jesus understood God this way, declaring “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” (1Jn.1:5) Paul told us that we no longer see God in dim mirrors and shadows but in the light of the life of Jesus (1 Cor. 13:12; 2 Cor. 3:18; 4:6). That changes the way we read scripture.

Jesus changes everything. When he arrived, the world was finally able to truly see God. They no longer wondered if God loved or hated the Moabites or if He loved and valued women or if He stomped about with fire and sword or with love. In Jesus, our questions were answered. “Jesus is not defined by God; rather God is defined by Jesus. Jesus is the lens through whom a full, balanced, and undistorted view of God’s loving heart and gracious purposes may be seen.” (Cowles)

Theologian Thomas Noble says it this way: “Theology is only truly theocentric if it is Christocentric…There is no knowledge of God except through the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, no knowledge of the Father except through the Son, so that our theology then must be Christonormative.”

In Jesus, we learn that God is not a violent God. Instead, Jesus is called the Prince of Peace and God is described as “not willing that any should perish.” Perhaps this is why early Christians eschewed warfare and violence, going so far as to say “violence is no attribute of God” (an anonymous writer to the early apostolic father, Diognetus). Jesus gave people a signal that they got, and we miss, when he stopped his sermon early in Luke 4:16-30. They wanted to kill him for it. What did he leave out? After reading about freeing captives and lifting up the fallen, Isaiah goes on to anticipate that God will do all that through a great time of violence, a “day of vengeance of our God.” (Isaiah 61:1-2) Jesus didn’t read that part.

His life shows us that this was not a mistake – it was intentional. He quoted scripture, but he recast it and wasn’t afraid to change it (“you have heard it said… but I say to you”) or to toss parts of it that were too restrictive (“Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for man.”). In Jesus, not only was the God of war and slaughtered disavowed, the pathway of blessing was opened so that “all peoples of the earth will be blessed” (Gen. 12:3).

Let me be clear: this is no Marcionite attack on the God of the Old Testament. I believe that the Creator, the One who lead the Israelites and kept them as a people until the birth of Jesus was and is Yahweh – God the Father. However, I also believe that His followers often got it wrong. And we still do. We say God commanded this or that when He did not. And the only corrective we have to adjust our doctrine, attitudes, or positions is the life and teaching of Jesus. We can see how Moses and Joshua got it wrong but we can also see how Peter’s bigotry got in his way or how Paul’s anger and lack of forgiveness got in his way (the John Mark saga).

Jesus pushes this revisioning on his people and, by extension, us in passages such as Luke 4:25-27 when he reminds the people that there were many widows in Israel but God chose a Baal worshiping Sidonian widow and gave her grace (see 1 Kings 17:22). In Jesus, we find a God who is not a respecter of gender, religion, or nationality. He especially warns us against violence against or neglect of widows and orphans.

Oh, and by the way, had the tribe of Asher done what God is said to have told them to do, there would have been no Sidonian widows. They are said to have been told by God to destroy all from Sidon. They were to kill the women and children and all things that drew breath. They failed. Some Sidonians lived, and it was to them that God came later and showed grace and it was they who would be mentioned by Jesus. Noah might have placed a curse upon the Sidonians through Canaan, but God did not.

More soon…

I was in a small group last night where the texts under consideration were Firs Samuel 15 and 30. In both, genocide takes place. In chapter 15, God is said to have ordered the slaughter of even the innocent non-combatants all the way down to women and infant children. In chapter 30, the same tribe comes against Israel and while it strikes down Israelite men, they do NOT kill the women or children but take them with them. Later, when the Israelites catch up with them, they find them unharmed. The group leader asked how it was possible that the Amalekites seemed to have better ethics than the Israelites when it came to war. The discussion was lively and somewhat predictable. You had many who decided to opt out but those who responded had some version of “Well, I don’t understand it but if God said to do it, it had to be the right thing to do.” I well remember struggling with how to answer the questions of my neighbors and co-workers when they asked how a God of love could order such slaughter.

And we are going to look at the Canaanite wars in some detail later, but for now I will leave you with two questions I asked the group (I was a guest and didn’t want to take over the group so I limited myself to these two): “Is Jesus the express image of God?” And then, if so, “Can you imagine Jesus giving that order?”

The problem we have with these texts is that many of us were raised – as I certainly was – with the “dictated to a stenographer” model of inspiration. Every single word, every jot and tittle, was spoken by the mouth of God and written by the scribe/prophet and that is how we got the Bible. I was told that the original autographs were completely without error of any kind… even though no one had seen them for 2000 years or more. I confess that that bothered me; how could we appeal to a standard that we assumed once existed but now did not? And the more manuscripts we find, the more we see that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to determine word for word what those original autographs said. The variation is significant and the questions remain open.

If you were raised in the same group I was, this is where the fear comes in. If your view is that the Bible is God’s Word, inerrant in all its ways, then any error you find makes you question the whole thing. And my email box gets at least two or three hits a week from people whose belief system crashed in just that way. They found one or more of the examples I will list below and they no longer knew how to trust their Bibles. As we go through this series, have patience. We will get to “how, then, do we trust our Bibles? How do we read scripture?” in time. First, we need to remind ourselves that there are issues with the Bible we have.

Before I was 14 years old I had read all of Foy E. Wallace’s books, both volumes of “Alleged Bible Contradictions Explained” by George Dehoff, all of Campbell’s debates and those by Tom Holland, and hundreds more of that ilk. Even then, it bothered me that at church I would hear “read it, believe it, and that’s it!” while Dehoff – and there was no man more conservative – had to go through gymnastics and leap to suppositions to erase the “alleged” contradiction. And he was not alone. It is common in those who signed the Chicago Statement. They end up writing what scripture did not say in order to make what it DID say seem without contradiction. Exhibit one: Peter and his denial of Jesus.

How many times will the cock crow before Peter denies Jesus? Mark 14:30 says that before the cock crows twice, Peter will have denied him three times. Matthew 26:34; Luke 22:34; and John 13:38 says he will deny Jesus three times before the cock crows (at all, not twice). Mark says it was at the second crowing that Peter realized what he had done (Mark 14:72) while Matthew, Luke, and John have that realization occurring at the first crowing. How do we harmonize these accounts? Lindsell in his “Battle for the Bible” always takes the inerrantist view so he explains these four accounts as partial views and then constructs a “full account” from reading them all… and that means he has Peter denying Christ six times; three times before the first crowing and three times after it but before the second. He says this removes the taint of contradiction from the accounts and says he has thereby proven “the honesty and accuracy of all four evangelists” when, in fact, he has done just the opposite. By saying Peter denied Jesus six times, he is saying that NONE of the Gospels got the story right. It required Lindsell’s reasoning to bring us the true story. Seriously? What about all those stories that only occur once or twice or three times? How are we sure they are accurate? He is silent on that issue.

If you read Galatians 3:1-12 you see that Paul thought Habakkuk 2:4 and Leviticus 18:5 disagreed with each other. Jesus taught in Matthew 19:3-9 that the law in Deuteronomy 24:1 needed to be amended by the facts of Genesis 1:27 and 2:24. They did not seem to have a need to harmonize away every discrepancy in the Bible. And there are a lot of them.

In 2 Samuel 10:18, David killed 700 Aramean chariot drivers but in First Chronicles 19:18, he killed 7000. Maybe it was a copyist error that was perpetuated in almost every manuscript we have or maybe it was hyperbole and the exact numbers didn’t matter but the fact remains… they aren’t the same number. In 2 Samuel 24:24, David bought the threshing floor for 50 shekels of silver but in 1^st Chronicles 21:25, the price is 600 shekels of gold – an amazingly large difference. The discrepancy is less when we turn to the plague numbers in Numbers 25:9 (24,000 dead) and 1^st Corinthians 10:8 (23,000) or when we look at the number of years Abraham’s descendants will be enslaved in Egypt (Genesis 15:13 says 400 while Exodus 12;41 says 430. Paul accepted the number in Genesis in Galatians 3:17).

Moving away from numbers, in 2 Samuel 24:1,2 it is God who provokes David to number Israel but 1^st Chronicles 21:1,2 says it was Satan. Again, this is often explained away as “God merely allowed Satan to do this” but that is writing more in the Bible than is actually there. We have historical discrepancies between scriptures on when Abraham’s father died (Acts 7:4 and Genesis 11:32; 12:4)( and the account of where Jacob was buried and who sold Abraham the burial site (Acts 7:15,16 and Genesis 50:13; 23:16-18; Josh. 24:32). I need to thank Paul Achtemeier for these scriptures which he includes in a much longer discussion in his excellent book “Inspiration and Authority.”

Or what about quotations? When writers in the New Testament quoted from the Old Testament, they often changed the words and meaning. Sometimes they quoted from the Hebrew Bible but they frequently used the Septuagint when there was something there they wanted that wasn’t in the Hebrew Bible. These differences are not minor. For example, the point being made in Hebrews 10:5-9 depends on the Septuagint reading of Psa. 40:6-8 which says “a body you have prepared for me” but the original reading in the Hebrew scriptures reads very differently, saying “You have given me an open ear.” Examples like this can be magnified dozens of time. They used whichever translation made their point… and I don’t think there is a touch of dishonesty here: I think that is the way they were used to reading scripture. And since they were also writing scripture… it must be all right to view scripture as something other than inerrant. They felt free to change the wording or emphasis or, in Paul’s case, the point being made by the ancient writers if it fit their sermon or situation better to change it.

You know what that means? It means Paul couldn’t have signed the Chicago Statement or, if he had, they would have kicked him off. Hmmm.

In the New Testament, we need to look at other examples of discrepancies before closing out this edition of the blog. In Mark 6:8,9 Jesus tells his newly appointed missionaries to take a staff and sandals. But in Matthew 10:9,10 he says NOT to take them. Did the cleansing of the temple take place during Jesus’ final days teaching in Jerusalem (Mark, Matthew, Luke) but John has it occurring at the beginning of his ministry. Some try to harmonize this by saying two cleansings occur but no Gospel says that. When you have to add to the Bible to defend it, you have gone too far. There are six accounts of miraculous feedings in the Gospels, but they do not agree with each other. Must we posit six different feedings, then, when no Gospel records more than two? (two in Mark and Matthew, only one in Luke and John). If you see no problem with saying there had to have been six feedings, you are demoting the disciples to idiots. C’mon, how many feedings were they involved in before they “got it”? Would they still have been doubt filled and then amazed at the feeding if they’d seen it four or five times before?

And we’ve only just started looking at this material… material that was never brought up when I was a boy in church. As I said, we will eventually get to a discussion on how to read our scripture but, for now, I think we need to admit that our Bibles were not written as historical or scientific documents. They often refer to history and science and they get quite a bit of it right (how much, we have no idea of knowing since our concept of history and science changes with each passing year. Declaring the Bible to be this or that percentage accurate based on what we know today is foolish when what we know is a moving target) but the writers of scripture were writing our story of finding God, walking with God, and learning who God is. That didn’t all happen overnight, but it happened and is still happening as we continue this narrative and play our parts in the story.

This blog is a little more technical than the other ones in this series. I am trying hard to make this accessible to the (very) casual reader. Those of you with advanced degrees in theology might want more nuance or history than I am supplying… and I agree with you! But those of us without your degrees need to look at this material, too, so be gracious and patient with us!

Is there only one way to read scripture? A look through the Yellow Pages (yes, some people still use the dead tree version) should disabuse anyone of the idea that reading the Bible is simple and that we can all agree on how to read it. However, in the church of my youth I was told that any honest reader could read the scripture and come up with the exact same conclusions we had on every point. And if they didn’t, we were told they weren’t reading the Bible, didn’t believe it, or were dishonest. Somehow we missed all the warnings about being judgmental, harsh, and divisive…

And yet, the people in my tribe were certainly being sincere in their statements and their beliefs. And I believe God honored them for that even when they considered themselves the only honest, accurate followers of Jesus on the planet. God’s grace, kindness, and patience are greater than our hubris.

The fact remains, however, that there were always several ways to read scripture… even by the writers of scripture. Paul took many passages from the Old Testament and applied them in new ways; ways that would have been a complete surprise to their authors. He evidently believed that something written long ago could have something new and different to say to his generation… and that concept has serious ramifications for the way we read HIS words in OUR generation.

I own the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. It is fascinating and frustrating to read how the earliest church leaders read scripture. Fascinating, for they read it allegorically – not literally – and frustrating because they took that to the max sometimes overly complicating a simple verse to make an elaborate tapestry of spiritual points. They were not alone in this. The Jewish thinkers of the day read their Torah allegorically as well. For example, Philo of Alexandria used the allegorical method of interpretation to explain the genocide in Canaan as a spiritual one, not a physical one. And that seems to have been the standard reading in North Africa and much of Asia.

The Song of Solomon was almost kicked out of the Bible because of its erotic content but it was saved by those who said it was really allegorical, not sexual. Paul used allegorical readings of Old Testament scriptures to explain his leaving Judaism and becoming a follower of Jesus (we will look at Paul at some detail later in this series). In the 2^nd century, Jewish leaders were even saying that the dietary laws in the OT were to be taken allegorically. For example, the Epistle of Barnabas said that the prohibition against eating pork was really a warning not to associate with swinish people, defined as those who only pray to God when they want something for themselves. Reading those laws – or most of the OT scripture – literally was, in their mind, a sign of being carnal and dull witted. Agree or disagree with them… the point is that a variety of ways of reading scripture already existed and were practiced in Paul’s time.

One man read the scripture literally and decided it meant that God didn’t write much of it. His name was Marcion. He felt that the blood soaked passages in the Old Testament could not be harmonized with the love of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, so he rejected the Old Testament. Interestingly, he was not treated as a heretic when he read those texts as the message of a morally fallen god. He was kicked out of the church when he abandoned the texts. In other words, he was free to read them any way he wanted to, but he was not free to NOT read them!

One of the most famous church fathers was Origen, an orthodox theologian and church leader in Alexandria. He insisted that the allegorical way of reading the texts was required, especially when you read the passages about Canaanite genocide. “As for the command given to the Jews to slay their enemies, it may be answered that anyone who looks carefully into the meaing of the passage will find that it is impossible to interpret it literally” (Cels.7:19). He goes further and says that if they were literal, they would never have been passed down as scripture to the Jews and then to the church (Hom.Ios.15:1). He taught that the only alternative to reading scripture allegorically was to discard it, as did Marcion (but he would never have approved of that).

Another orthodox theologian of that time, John Cassian, agreed. His writings closely parallel Origen’s.

The Cappadocian Father Gregory of Nyssa, one of the most important early church fathers (he codified the doctrine of the Trinity, for example) believed that you had to read the bloody bits of the Bible allegorically, too. He specifically mentioned the death of the firstborn during the plagues on Egypt as being symbolical or metaphorical, not literal. He said if it were literal, it would contradict God’s plan message to Ezekiel in 18:20 that sons were not guilty of the sins of their fathers. One of his most passionate sermons goes into great detail on this, arguing that to read the OT literally was to accuse God of being a monster (Mos.2:91). His summary – which is almost unfair to quote here since we haven’t gone through his long, serious steps in getting there – is that we should see that plague as a moral lesson teaching us “When through virtue one comes to grips with any evil, he must completely destroy the first beginnings of evil” (Mos.2:92).

Not all agreed with these church fathers, of course. Irenaeus, for one, believed that the texts should be read literally. When asked how one could justify the murders of women and children, supposedly ordered by God, his only response was that it was not appropriate to question God. He made no other argument nor did he spend much time in counter argument against Gregory or Origen. He had his position and stuck with it but he didn’t give us much to go on concerning how he arrived at it.

Inerrantists such as those who signed the Chicago Statement (minus, of course, those who have removed their signatures or been kicked off) like to go to Augustine to bolster their argument. Augustine once read scripture in the same way Origen and Gregory did but he became a literalist over time. However, he wasn’t a literalist in the sense that inerrantists today are. Augustine wrote a letter to Jerome that said he believed that the books in our Bible are “wholly free from error” but he was suspicious of all other books. Truth be told, I’m suspicious of non-canonical books as well but there is something else Augustine believed that makes him sound a lot more like a postmodern philosopher of today than a rigid inerrantist. He believed that there were a variety of truths to be found in scripture and that my truth might be different from your truth which might be different from his truth! In his Confessions (12.32.43) he wrote “So when one person says ‘He meant what I say,’ and another says ‘No, he meant what I say,’ I think it would be more pious to say, ‘Why not both, if both are true?’ And if someone should see in his words a third truth, or a fourth, or indeed any other truth, why not believe that Moses saw all these truths?”

He went on to suggest that there might have been truths in the text that the original writers weren’t aware of… but we can find them due to the presence of the Holy Spirit who slowly – in a timely fashion – revealed new truths from old texts.

And just when you think Augustine has surprised us enough, he goes further and says that all scripture must be viewed through love. All interpretations had to fit the fact that God is love and that we are called to love. He believed that the historical-grammatical reading of scripture (which the Chicago Statement and all inerrantists insist upon) was not the real meaning; the theological meaning of the text was.

Luther agreed with Augustine but people don’t catch that and so mistake his meaning when he speaks of taking the scripture literally. His view of “literal” means theological truth, not historical-grammatical truth. Still, he read the Bible literally enough to make him doubt that portions of it could have come from God. He was a fan of war if it spread the gospel so he didn’t question Joshua and Deuteronomy but he actively taught against the canonical status of Esther, Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation.

The point of this blog is not to convince you to read the Bible allegorically or literally. The point is, instead, to show you that the Bible has always been read in a variety of ways and to insist that the way you (or I) read it is the only way – God’s intended way, in other words – is hubris at best and sinful at worst.

Next time – scriptures which have to be explained away if we believe God dictated scripture word for word to automatons.

Those of us who spend a good portion of our lives with or around atheists and agnostics know a little secret: many of them know their Bibles quite well. And that’s their problem, for they see things in scripture which clash with their idea of morality. If you’ve read the books by the leading New Atheists (or, as Dawkins wants us to call them, the “Brights”) you know that they look at laws and events they see as sexist, racist, or genocidal found in the Old Testament (primarily, though they point out some in the New as well) and say that such “evil” and “immorality” cannot come from a God who is said to be love and truth.

There are answers to their accusations but before we can give them we have to have a good, hard, long look at our Book. How was it written? How was it inspired?

When I was a boy and up until I was in my late 20s I only heard one version of how we got our Bibles. I was told that every single word came directly from the mouth of God (via the Holy Spirit). There was no input from the human writers. They were merely stenographers for the Spirit. As an illustration of this my father and other ministers would bring up the story of Balaam’s donkey. “God didn’t just give that donkey an idea and let him express it in his own words” they would say. And they said that the exact same mechanism was involved in writing the Bibles – Jeremiah, Peter, Paul, and Amos all wrote down what they were told to write, word for word. Many of you still believe that.

But that is not what the Bible says, nor is it what the earliest Christians believed (nor is it what most Jewish rabbis have taught), and that belief causes a HUGE amount of trouble when we try to reconcile some passages with what we see and hear from Jesus, who is, remember, the express/exact image of God.

As I’ve wrestled with this over the years, I’ve read scores of books and scores of papers along with hundreds of blogs arguing every angle of the inspiration dilemma. Some of them have been enlightening and some have been disappointing. I recently spent good money on “Defending Inerrancy” by Geisler and Roach. I knew Geisler has been a leading proponent of inerrancy for decades and I wanted to know what he was saying today. He names those he believes do not hold to the Chicago statement on inerrancy (Clark Pinnock, Peter Enns, Kenton Sparks, Kevin Vanhoozer, Andrew McGowan, Stanley Grenz, Brian McLaren, Darrell Bock, Robert Webb and others) but he spends very little time answering any of their objections. In fact, the book usually dismisses them without evening an attempt to answer them. Instead, it sometimes says something like “these are just a rehash of long ago answered arguments against inerrancy” but doesn’t tell when and where they were answered.

That happens a lot in this discussion. A great amount of time is spent talking past each other on this subject. And fear enters in on all sides and that is never a good thing for it clouds our judgment and makes us retreat back into a crowd that agrees with us.

You might be surprised to find out about this, but the version of inspiration and inerrancy that I was taught (see 3^rd paragraph of this blog) was not at all the way scripture was read until the fundamentalist movement roared through America and some parts of Western Europe in the late 1800s and early to mid 1900s.

The Chicago Statement, though, agrees with the fundamentalist view and its signers aggressively promote it (or, as some have found out, they will be dropped from the list of signers and publicly named as false teachers). It says, in part, “Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individuals’ lives.” It goes on to state that the Bible’s words came directly from God and are, therefore, completely moral and without error in everything it affirms – historically, scientifically, and theologically.

As one of my brothers who was raised up and preached in the Restoration Movement (Thom Stark) says “…but the fact is that fundamentalism as it exists in the Western world today is a relatively new phenomena and there are many ways to be Christian, some of them much more ancient and developed. Because of the volume at which leading Evangelicals tend to speak, however, this fact is well disguised from the view of many.”

What other way is there to read scripture? There are many ways and each has its own scholars and proponents (and, of course, opponents). John Collins – no Ivy Tower liberal – says that the Bible are the words of God and God’s people long before there was a Bible. In other words, the book is a collection of writings that existed a long time before they were gathered into one place. And some of those writings seem to disagree with each other. As Collins says, “The Bible is an argument – with itself.” It is the searching of God for us and our searching for Him and some characters doing the searching get a bit lost from time to time.

You see Ezra and the writer of Deuteronomy who callously demand that families be broken up, wives and children sent away, and foreigners banned from the borders of Israel… but you also see Amos and the writer of Jonah as well as Ruth and Hosea show us that God loves the foreigner and sends His Spirit after them as well, often welcoming them into the assembly of Israel regardless of what Ezra and his ilk might say. This cannot be overstressed and it needs to be dealt with if we are going to read scripture honestly. In Ezra 10:2-11 he claimed that Yahweh demanded that men who loved their (foreign) wives divorce, stop caring for their children and, in fact, drive them away.

But… wait. Didn’t Moses himself marry a foreign woman (a Cushite or Ethiopian woman)? Wasn’t the Canaanite prostitute, Rahab, welcomed to integrate into Israel? David’s line included Ruth, a Moabite whom God led to Boaz, an Israelite. And it was through their line that kings came and, eventually, the Messiah Himself was born. And while some passages in Deuteronomy seem very xenophobic, chapter 20 verse 14 says that intermarriage is acceptable. And Numbers 31 has God ordering the men of Israel to take in 32,000 virgins from Midian and take them as wives – and these were women who were raised to worship Baal.

Ezra had the power to force these mass divorces because he had the backing of the Persian Empire. However, he claimed (and I have no doubt he believed) that he had the backing of God, himself. Other Jews of his time (see Ezra 10:15) opposed him but they, while they sounded more like God as heard through other Old Testament writers, did not have his political power and, so, lost.

Amos then came along and “condemned Israel for putting more stock in their genes than in their justice.” He told them that if they continued to ignore the poor and the need for social justice they were no different from any other nation. And God agrees in 9:7 saying they were no different from the Ethiopians. He goes on to mention other nations He had also delivered (“Philistines from Caphtor, the Arameans from Kir”); deliverance stories no less dramatic than Israel’s from Egypt and equally engineered by God. Jesus would tell the story of the Good Samaritan and openly speak with Samaritan and Syro-Phoenician women, thus aligning himself with Amos and the author of Jonah and against Ezra.

But how can this be, if every single word of Ezra came from the mouth of God? How can we have the Book of Jonah in the same Old Testament when it teaches a completely different view of God and His opinion of Gentiles? Jonah is a brilliant treatise against xenophobia. The pagans in that book are far more holy than God’s prophet whether they are found on the boat caught in the storm or within the city walls of Ninevah. Jonah was firmly in the camp of Ezra, Joshua, and Zerubbabel and God makes sure we know He is in the camp of Amos and Jesus.

How stark a difference exists between the two camps? In Deuteronomy 20:16-19 God is said to have zero regard for the lives of the Canaanites, ordering “You must kill them all!” (yes, including women and infant children) but God doesn’t want them to hurt any of the trees. Trees have more value to the Israelites than the lives of human beings… and they say that God said so. Read the Gospels and ask yourself how you can accept this as coming from God AND Jesus as the express image of God. I know that many people believe they can make just such a point and I have read their books. I would be a liar if I said they didn’t make many good, valid points. But I still think it requires a lot of gymnastics to say that the Bible has one, single message when you see such divisions in its writers.

Let me stress something here: I do not view these as contradictions in the standard sense of that term. I see these stories as evidence that it has always been necessary to “rightly divide the word” and prayerfully study to find the voice of God in the stories we find in Scripture.

This is why I am not surprised to find Job and the author of Ecclesiastes not only arguing against the standard wisdom of their day; they are also critical of some of God’s ways. It wasn’t just Jacob who had to wrestle God. Many of these authors did, too. And I’ve headed to the River Jabbok for another round of wrestling more times than I’d like to admit.

This is also why my faith is not rocked when it is hard to find any scholar who thinks Peter wrote Second Peter or when I see that the Book of Revelation almost didn’t make it into the canon or when it becomes obvious that the Books of Moses had some editing done long after he was dead. We are seeing the story of God – and us – unfold over time, in many different cultures, in many different situations. And we should expect exactly what we find in that unfolding story.

And I am not troubled to find morally and theologically disparate texts within our canon for I see disparate concepts of God and ethics in my own congregation and within the larger community of believers. I know we are still working out our salvation with fear and trembling, as we were told we should.

But I have Jesus to look at and listen to. He will help me know how to read scripture. We’ll get to that soon but, next time, we will look at what inerrancy means and whether the standard definition is the one we should cling to as we read these 66 books.

Some have had a hard time with the thesis of this series of blogs and I absolutely understand that. I once knew the formulae and proof texts of every argument and stance we had in my religious tribe. Allow me to brag a moment – I learned Hebrew at the same time I was learning English. I could carry on a fairly good conversation in Biblical Hebrew by my 5^th birthday. My father was a leading light in the right edge of our fellowship and he drilled (seriously – with drill cards, quizzes, etc.) every one of our arguments and traditions into me day after day. And I never, ever lost a debate. Ever.

But I never converted the person I debated. They left, dejected and defeated but not converted. I picked off some of their followers, but I never converted the person.

And I knew something was wrong. With my arguments and with me. The law was unable to make me a nice person. On the outside, I could generally fake it but I knew that, on the inside, I was broken. That drove me back to a deep study of scripture and life that hasn’t slowed down in nearly 30 years. Amazon loves me and my UPS man hates me… but the books keep coming.

One of the things that really bothered me when I went back to the scriptures to make sure I knew what I thought I knew was what the scripture left out. I am not talking about the childhood of Jesus, I’m talking about a New Testament version of Deuteronomy or Leviticus. We go from 613 laws about life and worship to just a few laws in the New Testament, most of them centered squarely on the word “love.” No wonder that we react against this by a search for laws and patterns; for in those, we find security. If we are saved by grace and told to live transformed lives as citizens of heaven, that is a bit too vague – we want assurance in something we can see and measure.

We want a golden calf.

When Aaron made the golden calf idol for the Israelites, he didn’t tell them that this was a new god. No, he told them that the calf represented the God who had delivered them from Egypt. But God will not tolerate being placed into a form or a box and Israel suffered mightily for exchanging the ineffable God for a manageable one.

And those who seek to save themselves and others by systems, patterns, and laws are building a golden calf. They want a salvation they can be sure of because of all the checked boxes on their list. Please note: these are good people with the best of intentions and they sincerely want to follow God here and all the way into heaven… but they are trying to put God into a form He did not authorize in any way.

For example: where is our Book of Worship? We argue endlessly about songs, clapping, instruments, raised or lowered hands, silence or interaction during the Communion, what form the Communion must take, how to organize the leadership, who can be an elder (one child? Divorced and remarried? Widowed? What age do they have to first attain?) and yet God gave us very, very little on this. We see what some people did in the first century, but only small glimpses. We grab all these singular phrases and combine them and then bind our interpretation of them on others when we have zero evidence that our form matches what really happened back then.

And we have no evidence that the way this or that group worshiped was the one and only way to please God. In fact, we see evidence to the contrary. When the apostles appealed to the elders in Jerusalem to set policy for the church worldwide (a passage I never heard preached on in my tribe while growing up for it destroyed our insistence on independent church organization), the elders refused to bind rules and patterns on others even when they followed those rules and patterns themselves.

Paul went out of his way to tell us that we could not be saved by law and that those who tried to be so saved would, instead, be lost. He told us that it was for freedom that Christ made us free. We have example after example of people knowing Jesus and being satisfied with that. Remember, the queen’s treasurer was baptized and went on his way rejoicing… without being schooled about what kind of singing or church organization God would recognize and what kinds would lead to destruction.

There is also no Book of Fellowship that goes into great detail on who is acceptable and who is not and to what degree of separation we can fellowship someone with whom we disagree. That would have been a helpful book, but I still think the Book of Worship would have been best.

How about a Book of Necessary Beliefs that told us what to think about the millennium, sex, the trinity, etc.?

Now, do a thought exercise with me. If God is absolutely wise – and He is – and if everything He says is wise – and it is – then when He doesn’t say something, we should pay close attention to that. And He has given us a book where His law changes, where “eternal” laws about the Sabbath, the Ark of the Covenant, etc. are changed by circumstance and by the direction the story takes… and then He doesn’t give us books like the ones we posited above. THAT must be wise. Don’t try to fill in the supposed deficiencies of God. Don’t write books on patterns and laws and rules that are much longer than the New Testament itself. It is unseemly at best, sinful at worst.

Some have commented after the first two blogs that there ARE laws! Of course there are. Saying that the Bible is a narrative is not the same as saying there are no laws. I would argue that there are far, far fewer laws than most people would be comfortable with but that’s beside the point. The point is that stories can have laws in them but law books don’t have stories. And stories invite us in to participate in and be to changed by the journey. Law books invite arguments – and if you don’t believe that you must have never attended a trial, needed to draw up a contract, or visited a law library.

So did Jesus intend to build an Argument Society or a Story that absorbs us and carries us along with it?

Another commenter thought I mentioned my spam filter and hate email in order to stifle debate. I can see his point but I think he doesn’t know my heart. Most of those who read this blog are my friends and have followed this for years and years. You can be frank with friends and not fear or feel defensive. However, if you read it as me trying to shut down debate, my apologies.

Next time – an example of an inviolable rule that God seems to have dropped long, long before the law changed in Jesus.