Storied Theology

The Bible is the word of God.

There, I said it.

The challenge, of course, is that when speaking of different theories about how to articulate what the Bible is, to say “the Bible is the word of God” is question-begging. Of course the Bible is the word of God, but what does that mean? Is it always? Does it become that? Is it fallibly God’s word or infallibly? Is it inerrant? I’ve started with the last question in post 1, post 2, and post 2b, and now I’m up to the point of exploring some of the ramifications for affirming that the sometimes mistaken, always deeply contextualized book we have is at the same time, and no less, the very word of God written.

What does it mean to say that scripture is the word of God?

Often, depending on what book we are talking about, this is an affirmation that a particular person or particular functionary is an authorized agent, someone who represents God’s word to the world.

In the garden narrative of Genesis 2, one way that humanity functions as God’s representatives is by being entrusted with God’s interpretation of God’s world–an interpretation the serpent questioned, which reinterpretation Adam and Eve accepted to their own destruction. Reembodying that role, Moses was to be heeded because he was authorized to speak for God–and so the books that came to be associated with him were accepted not because God was thought to have spoken every word, but because Moses was thought to be authorized to speak on God’s behalf.

Much of what we accept as canon, however, we accept on the much looser condition that it testifies to how the true God is at work among a particular people. That is, the reason we affirm the Spirit’s hand at work is not because we know it came from an authorized agent, but because it seems to be a faithful interpretation of the hand of God at work among God’s people. What does it mean to say that Judges through 2 Kings are inspired? These histories gain traction because of the particular history they tell (Israel’s), the God whom they confess to be behind it (YHWH), and how the stories interpret their interconnectedness.

To say that a book of the Bible is inspired is, as I see it, an after-the-fact assessment made by the community (Jewish and/or Christian) that God was indeed speaking here.

I think we need similarly broad categories for the New Testament. On the one hand, there is a sense that several of the NT writers’ writings are accepted because they filled the office of someone authorized to speak in God’s name. And so we affirm that what 2 Timothy and 1 Peter say about the role of the Spirit is true of them, as well, for the same reason that it would be true of the OT prophets.

But more generally, we must affirm that the church is the place where God is at work most directly through his Spirit, and so even those books whose authorship remains a mystery to us, or whose authorship ends up surprising us as mysterious when we didn’t first think so, can be accepted as canonical–part of the rule by which the church measures its faith and practice.

Affirming that the Bible is the word of God entails us, again and again, in the affirmation of the particular and not just the transcendent God. It entails us in the confession that the One True and Living God has bound Himself to one true and living story, and that therefore it is within this story that true interpretations of the work of this God are to be found.

The inscripturation and canonization processes then are not entirely distinct, because the reason the documents are created in the first place is because this particular people (Israel, the church) is where God is at work to redeem the world; therefore, when this same community selects documents to be its rule it is an action on a continuum rather than a discreet, new act that affirms where something categorically different has gone on before.

Yes, the Bible is the word of God. Yes, all scripture is inspired by God. And, this is so in surprising ways. God inspired a Bible that is reflective of not only God’s glory and not only human limitation but also human error. This does not make it less the word of God, but instead shows us what sorts of means God uses when God wishes to speak and act in the world–most often, means that are as full of the Spirit, of truth, of weakness, and of error as the church and its members.

Ok,  know I promised that this next time we’d finally get to the fact that the Bible is the word of God inspired for us and our salvation.

But even as I sent that last post to press, I was thinking that I did not do a good enough job exploring why this errant, deeply contextualized Bible is so important. I blog about this and teach from this angle in my classes not only because these two points are demonstrably true, but because they make us better readers of the Bible.

Moreover, affirming both that there are errors and that the Bible was written to speak, first of all, to people of another time and place provides us with a couple of key components for dealing with a number of otherwise troublesome issues and a posture from which to start developing a mature, twenty-first century Christian hermeneutic.

Thus, for example, when we read the Bible knowing that it was written from the perspective of a flat-earth, geo-centric universe, we can both understand the language and imagery better and recognize that we are not bound to affirm the same cosmology even if we choose to praise God with the same language.

But if we have a category for both errors and historical limitation, we are not bound to burn heliocentrists as word-of-God denying heretics. We can say, instead, that within the errant framework of the ancient view of the world the true God was truly praised as creator and sustainer of all things, a God who is praised by the fullness of the work of God’s hands.

The denial of biological evolution or the old age of the earth are modern-day battles that rage because we did not learn a large enough lesson from the Galileo fiasco. The point to be learned from our discovery that the earth is round and rotates around the sun is that we have misconceived of the Bible if we expect it to be free from errors of scientific fact and theory. God has spoken within and by means of the errant worldviews of the people to whom the word has come.

But then once we leave the question of the age of the earth and the like aside, we can return to the text of Genesis 1 or 2 or 3 and listen afresh for the ancient questions it was meant to answer: questions about God’s relationship to humanity; questions about humanity’s place in the world; questions about where Israel as God’s people fits into God’s plans for the world; questions about what a rightly ordered world looks like, about what a rightly ordered humanity in relationship with a loving God looks like.

Getting rid of inerrancy and the transhistorical nature of the Bible actually frees us from the shackles of other whole sets of questions that actually keep us at arms length from the religious claims of the texts.

One thing that happens once we can accept the fact that God inspired an errant Bible is that we no longer have to fight for God over the details, but can even listen through the errant details for the claim that God may be striving to stake on the lives of God’s people.

In practice, the defense of this or that historical detail is not only forcing us to wrestle with a question that the text did not pose for our edification, but keeping us from aligning ourselves with the first hearers of the text to understand how these claims would have sounded–and moving from there to the reimagining of our own lives as people to whom the same word comes as one freshly spoken among the community of God’s people.

Of course, this can go both ways. Finding historical errors can become its own distracting game. But more often, these serve to highlight the ways that God has chosen to speak, or that humans have conceptualized the way that the story should be understood. Put Kings next to Chronicles and you have one of a few options: (1) exert your whole life on an impossible quest of trying to harmonize unharmonious texts; (2) deny that the contradictions are real; or (3) use the discrepancies to get into the head of the Chronicler–who changed Kings on purpose in order to preach a different story from the history of Israel.

Relaxing about errors and context frees us for option 3, which takes us closer to hearing a particular message from a particular book for a particular people–and thereby moving to understand better both what the message was and what we might do with it.

Finally, there is an attendant imperative that goes along with much of this. Study much of the history of biblical texts and you’ll realize that they are often the end results of a process of telling and retelling and shaping and combining and writing afresh–all with the deep-seated conviction that these sacred texts must reach beyond the past and continue to speak today. The point I want to make, somewhat contra mundum, is that the humanness of scripture is one of the keys to understanding how it has spoken through the millenia and how it will continue to do so.

Once we recognize the freedom that the ancients felt with the text; better, once we realize the compulsion they felt to reread and rewrite the texts in light of their ever-new situations, we will start to recognize that we, too, have both a freedom and an obligation to reread the texts as words spoken to us.

First, as Christians, this means that no Old Testament text comes to us directly, but all are mediated through the climactic moment of the story in which Jesus inaugurated the reign of God through his life, death, and resurrection. And then there is the business of bringing the text into faithful conversation with the twenty-first century worldview–allowing it to both speak meaningfully to our time and to challenge us with where we may be blinded by our world.

But the point for today is that such up-dating is simply the logical conclusion of a recognition that the Bible was written up-to-date and rewritten numerous times over to keep it that way. Does holding onto the Bible as the word of God mean merely accepting the words that resulted from that process 2,000 years ago? Or does it also mean continuing the process that brought these books into being? To a certain extent we all act like the latter is true. I think we are right to do so, and that both the mistakes and the temporal embeddedness are our first clues as to why we are.

Last time, I spoke to why inerrancy is untenable. It is simply mistaken, first of all. That is not the kind of Bible we have. But perhaps more importantly, it also has the unique capacity to send us on wild goose chases, spend exorbitant amounts of energy trying to show that errors aren’t really errors, and drive us toward poor interpretive decisions.

Thus, not only is it not true, because it is not true it leads us to do things with scripture that scripture was not meant to do. I recognize that this is a theology of scripture “from below,” and that I haven’t brought God into the picture yet. We’re about to go there. But the first step in our 12-step recovery process is admitting we have a problem…

So what is the Bible if it isn’t the inerrant word of God?

Still the word of God. It is the word of God spoken to people at particular times and places and through which the same Spirit that inspired the first telling continues to speak to the church in later generations.

I know that this is once again starting off too distant, too limited for many of my readers. But the first thing that (most) scripture is is a word to them back then. Like sermons, the books of the Bible are apt words spoken for particular people in particular times and places that have long since passed.

The Corinthian correspondence is a direct word from God via the apostle Paul to the Corinthians in a way that it will never be for us. The psalms were sung in contexts that we no longer share.

I was struck afresh by this recently while listening to a new worship music CD someone sent us. It is direct scripture throughout. As one song joyfully intoned, “I have seen You in the sanctuary; beheld your power and your glory,” all I could think was, “No you haven’t!” For the people who wrote and/or originally sang that song, it had an entirely different meaning from the exact same words lodged in the mouths of the 21st century church.

The scriptures were an inspired response to, reflection on, and invitation to reenter the narrative of God for the people in the contexts to whom they first came.

What I never want us to give up on as we ascend to a more overarching, continuing divine hand behind the church’s Bible is that however transcendent the God who spoke these words, they are all deeply immanent and given into particular times and places. When we lose sight of this particularity is when we start claiming things for the Bible that makes our theological claims falsified by the Bible we actually hold in our hands.

Recognizing its particularity is not a denigration of the Bible as the word of God. It means that God actually cares to address the actual people that live on earth at a given time and place. It means that God must keep engaging the world if the world is going to be addressed by the word of God. It means that we serve the kind of God who is committed to persons and places and times, a God capable of and willing of condescension.

It means that the incarnation is not something passing strange, but the ultimate manifestation of the same kind of God we see reflected in other, lesser works of redemption and salvation–including the inspiration of holy words.

It also means Aristotle was more right than Plato, but that’s another debate for another day.

Next time, we continue our climb which began with errors, stepped up to inspired for a given time and place, and will finally reach its glorious soaring height with the Bible as an inspired book for the continuing faith and practice of the church.