When demand that the Bible be taken literally in all respects, we are imposing our own standard on the Bible and insisting that it talk to us in that way.
Whether the Bible should be read and interpreted literally seems to be an open question in the 21st Century. Some Christians, and many people who criticize Christians, seem to think the Bible must be read in a literal, wooden fashion, and it must stand or fall based on what people say is “the literal interpretation” – the Bible is either literally true or literally false, and there is no third position.
So, let me put this out there – do we approach other literature that way?
Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, used to say there are two books of God: the book of Scripture (the word of God) and the book of nature (the work of God). He believed, as did many people who came before him and after him, that all truth is God’s truth. He believed that there is no contradiction at the end of the day between those two “books”. Any apparent discrepancy or conflict is in the interpretation of one or the other of those two sources of the revelation of God. There is no discrepancy or conflict at the level of the facts themselves; the only discrepancy or conflict is in our understanding of Scripture (theology) or nature (science).
Theology and science are, at best, interpretations of the data. Theology and science are not the facts, but interpretations of the facts. Scientists and theologians have disputes and disagreement among themselves and between the disciplines. We all have preconceived ideas on ultimate and intermediate issues, but following the evidence where it leads is the approach most surely to result in the most accurate understanding.
People who identify in both camps of science and theology promote the misconception that science and theology (or science and faith if you will) are incompatible. That is unfortunate, because there shouldn’t be any tension between the two. While science is the study of the natural world and theology is the study of the super-natural world (so to speak), the two should be in perfect harmony if, indeed, a Causal Agent (who we might call God ) exists who caused the universe to begin.
One of the most common skeptical positions in regard to the Bible is that we can’t trust it because it has changed over time. We don’t even have the original text anymore. We don’t have any of the manuscripts, and most of the manuscripts we do have are copies of copies that were produced centuries, sometimes many centuries, later.
The “telephone game” that children play has been used as an illustration of how easily things that are communicated get twisted and changed so that we can’t even tell what the original meaning was by the time the communication comes back to us after being repeated over and over from one person to the next. This illustration is applied to the Bible as proof that it can’t be trusted because it has been translated and copied over and over and over again. How do we even know what the original text said?!
These are serious contentions. An honest person cannot just brush these contentions aside, but it isn’t the end of the story.
Yes, faith is a foundation of Christian belief, but Christian faith is not a blind faith as some suppose. Christian faith means putting our trust in God, and not in ourselves, but Christian faith also does not insist or even ask us to throw out our minds in the process.
In fact, we are specifically instructed to love God not only with our hearts and strength, but with our minds!
As I have stated previously, doubt and skepticism are not sin according to the Bible. Thomas doubted, and he became known for his skepticism but he was a follower of Jesus. He was an original follower of Jesus, and he traveled with Jesus from the beginning of his public life to his death. He wasn’t just known for his doubt, however; he was also known for his faith!
Paul urged the Thessalonians to “test everything”, and hold on to what is good. The Bible urges us to have “honest skepticism”, which should not be confused with skepticism for the sake of skepticism. A person who is skeptical of everything, even the certainty of truth, should not even bother looking into anything because the exercise is pointless.
The quest for truth is pointless for the pure skeptic who is unwilling to commit to any truths. He already knows where he will end up! The contention that there is no objective truth is a self-defeating statement. The statement, itself, is offered as an objective truth, therefore it isn’t even true of itself!
But we digress. Whether the Bible can be trusted is the question, so let’s dive in.
Jesus doesn’t tackle the issue of racism or diversity directly, but He lived in a complicated time. He was Jewish, living in a tight-knit Jewish community, which was governed and ruled by foreigners, the Romans. The Jews had a history of living alongside foreigners and were at various times throughout that history governed by them against their will.
Many of the foreigners were very closely related, like the Samaritans, who were of Jewish descent, and the Canaanites before them. The northern kingdom (Israel) and southern kingdom (Judah) split and became foreigners to each other.
The Jews in Jesus’s day believed there were only two types of people: Jews and everyone else (Gentiles). They seemed to have forgotten that the very first words God spoke to Abraham, when He chose to bless Abraham and his progeny, was that God would make a blessing to all the nations. (Genesis 12:1-3) God didn’t choose them simply to bless them, but to bless all nations through them.
Jesus was that blessing. Jesus is traced back to Abraham. He is from the line of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is the root of Jesse’s seed, father of David. Jesus is the Promised One.
Jesus also claimed to be God in the flesh, so, how Jesus viewed others is the key to understanding what the Bible says about racism and diversity.
How many people have experienced reading the Bible, or trying to read the Bible, before “becoming a Christian”? I did.
I took a World Religion class as a freshman in college. In that class I read the Bible for the first time, and I have distinct memories of of some of my initial impressions.
I am not unintelligent. I was second in my law school class. I say that not to boast, but to make a point. Human intelligence is limited, and in particular, it is limited by our perspective. What I mean by that is that the human perspective is that of a finite being who lives a very, very short amount of time and, then, dies.
What can we really know of an infinite God?
On our own, given our limited perspective, on a very small planet, in a small solar system, in a vast universe, what can we understand of the Maker of it all?
In our 80 some years of life, if we are fortunate to live that long, what we can we really know and understand of the 13.7 billion years of the existence of the universe? Over the combined lifetimes of all the human beings that have lived on this planet, we have learned a great deal, but compared to what?
We have only to compare to ourselves – other people with limited perspectives in common!
If there be a God of this incredibly vast universe, this God would have to be greater still. He would have to be “other” than the universe to have created it. Things don’t create themselves. This material universe filled with matter and space and existing in time would have to have been created by a timeless, space-less, matter-less (immaterial) God who exists on a “plane” or realm or dimension other, outside of, and beyond the material world we live in.
The words and thoughts we have to define what that other existence might be like are wholly inadequate to describe it because it is completely unfamiliar to us. We can only describe it in terms of our experience that is bounded by time, space and matter.
Still, we have some sense of transcendent reality, something beyond us. Like prisoner who spent his whole life in a small cell, who sees the sunlight streaming in through the bars of the window above him, but has never seen the sun, we “know” that something lies “out there” beyond us.
So what does this have to do with reading the Bible?
I realized as I read the Bible for the first time in that World Religion class in college that, if God did exist, He would have to reveal Himself to us. We could not reason or research or experiment our way to knowledge of God. That would be like trying to find a painter in the canvass of a painting.
God would have to reveal Himself to us.
And, if God made us, He would know how to communicate Himself to us in a way that we could understand. I sensed this “possibility” as I read the Bible for the first time.
My backstory is that I tried to find the truth in everything I read. I tried to find God or what reality there might be in everything. From the Bhagavad-Gita to the Bible, I looked for evidence of truth and evidence for God – whatever “God” or truth might look like.
I am not going to recount my impressions of the various holy books of the major world religions that we studied in that class in this article. That isn’t the point of it. I have done a little bit of that elsewhere. Really the point of this article is my before and after experience with the Bible.
Navigating by Faith 