The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]
[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]
[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]

So far in this series, I've taken what many hard-line evangelicals might see as a rather "liberal" approach to the Biblical text. I've pointed out that some parts of it - e.g. the creation narratives and the book of Job - don't appear to me to be intended as literal historical accounts. I've also suggested that even some of the parts that are written in a more "factual" style, may not be entirely and perfectly historically accurate.

For many who take such an analytical approach to the Bible, it often seems that the next logical progression is to doubt anything in it that smacks of the supernatural. In the modern western world we have little time for alleged phenomena that seem to defy scientific analysis and explanation. If it can't be explained scientifically then it can't really have happened - or at least, not quite the way it was recorded to have happened anyway.

In my view though, if you're going to try and strip out all the miracles from the Bible just because you find them hard to believe, then you might as well just go the whole hog and strip God out as well! Apart from the very existence of an omnipotent deity, the miraculous is right at the heart of the Christian faith, which includes two essential truths that are impossible to believe if you're not willing to believe in the supernatural:

1. That in some mystical way that no theologian ever seems to have completely got their head round, Jesus was "the Son of God" - i.e. He was God and came from God at one and the same time - He wasn't just an ordinary man.


2. That on the third day after He was crucified, Jesus miraculously rose again from the grave!

These truths are what make the Christian faith unique, and are at the heart of the power that it has to change people's lives and to turn this world upside down. These truths tell us:

1. That God is interested in us and our world.


2. That God is humble: He was happy to be treated as one of us, with no special airs or graces. In fact, more than that, He was willing to be mocked, ridiculed, persecuted and - ultimately - even tortured and executed by those He created.


3. That God cares - deeply and intensely - about His creation, hence His willingness to go through all of that in order to make a way for us to be reconciled to Him.


4. That death is not the final word. Jesus did something crazy - stupid even - He met violence and power with ... love and self-sacrifice! He taught His followers to love your neighbour and turn the other cheek and set the ultimate example in doing so Himself, and the result was ... death and defeat!! D'oh!!! But no! Just when they thought it was all over, on the third day Jesus appeared to His followers, risen from the dead, and a rag-tag bunch of defeated and disillusioned disciples were transformed into the most powerful evangelistic movement the world has ever seen: one which thrived under intense persecution as it followed Jesus' example, spread throughout the world, and 2,000 years later - in various forms (some more compromised than others!) - is still going strong today!

To deny the Resurrection or the Deity of Christ is to rip out the very heart of the Christian faith and to destroy the reason for the hope that we profess, and yet you can't believe in either of these things without also believing in the miraculous.

Apart from this, the miraculous was at the very heart of Jesus' life and ministry on earth. His miracles were often referred to as "signs", which is what they were; of who he was and what he had come to do. The miracles indicated that God and His kingdom - which Jesus, the "Messiah" had come to inaugurate - were breaking into the world in a real and tangible way; that God had literally come to dwell among His people. Some of the miracles were about healing and setting people free from physical and spiritual bondage. Others were about God's abundant and miraculous provision. Still others - seen only by Jesus' closest followers to whom He was ready to fully reveal Himself - spoke directly of His power and His Lordship, even over nature itself.

The myriad miracles in the gospels make up such a large, central and inseparable part of the accounts, that it isn't possible to strip them all out without emptying the gospels of most of their content, or radically altering the character, and massively reducing the potency of the Jesus who we Christians profess.

The miracles say that God is involved, God can be involved, and He's able to be involved in your life in a real and tangible way. And if you're willing to lift your eyes just a little higher - above what you think is possible and what you are able to explain, then you might just be surprised to discover that the God of miracles can still show Himself to you today...!

[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]
[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]
[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]

I've tried to make clear in my previous posts that I don't believe the Bible is inerrant, but I also do believe that it's extremely important to the Christian faith. Without it of course, there's a very good chance the Christian faith would not even exist.

I also don't believe that the Bible has the ultimate authority over our (Christian) lives. I believe that Christians are called to submit to God, not to a collection of ancient manuscripts! Having said that though, discerning God's will is often not straightforward and if we're serious about doing so then we need to take advantage of every means we can. This includes keeping our hearts open to God, being willing to hear things from Him that we don't like, listening to one another, and especially paying very close attention to those who have gone before. The four gospel books in the New Testament give us the best insight we have into the life and teachings of Jesus - the author and finisher of our faith - and the rest of the New Testament records the deeds and teachings of those who knew Jesus and/or carried his message in the early days. These people are more qualified than any of us to speak for him, and we have to take extremely seriously anything they have to say. In addition, Jesus himself and his early followers held the Old Testament in extremely high regard and understood Jesus' life and teachings in the context of, and as a fulfilment of, the story that it contains. As Jesus' followers then, we are compelled to do the same.

So as a believer in Jesus, I still feel it is necessary to hold a very high view of scripture, in spite of the caveats that I've just mentioned. This is not always straightforward though, and at times I have found it to be a considerable source of personal tension.

There's lots of great stuff in the Bible that I don't have any fundamental problems with - even though some of it is personally very challenging. The bits I particularly do have a problem with though, are the bits that seem to present God's character in an unpleasant light. For example, compare this:

God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
    - 1 John chapter 4 verse 16 - in the New Testament

with this:

When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace. If it agrees to make peace with you and opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall become your forced labor and shall serve you. However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. When the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword. Only the women and the children and the animals and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourself; and you shall use the spoil of your enemies which the Lord your God has given you.
    - Deutoronomy chapter 20 verses 10-14 - in the Old Testament

Where do you start with this passage? Forced labor!? Killing every man in the city!? Treating (now bereaved) women and children as your "booty"!? This sounds more like something I would expect to hear from ISIS than from "God is love"!

Well the "good news", first of all, is that these are instructions given to a particular group of people - the Israelites - under a particular set of circumstances in a particular place and time. These are not general instructions for Christians regarding how they ought to behave! Violent behaviour by believers towards others is not endorsed in the gospels or anywhere else in the New Testament. Instead, Jesus' teaching on violence generally involves phrases like "love your enememies", "pray for those who persecute you" and "turn the other cheek". (That's not to say that God doesn't occasionally come across as angry and vengeful, even in the New Testament, but perhaps that's a topic for another post!)

Christians today do not generally use passages like the one above as justification for killing people. This is not how Jesus operated and it's certainly not how his early followers operated either. But for me, that isn't the problem. The problem is - what do passages like this say about the God who I love and worship? And can I (or even should I?) love, trust, and worship a God like this? This has been a big problem for me. I have only ever experienced God as loving and compassionate. There are plenty of things in the world that are genuinely worth getting angry about and I have no doubt that God gets angry about some of them, but I still expect him to behave with wisdom and justice. I don't see very much of this in passages like the one above. If that passage really is telling the truth about God, then I don't know this God as well as I thought I did - and all of a sudden I feel a lot less sure if I really can trust Him or feel safe with Him!

I can understand why the Israelites might have behaved like this. I can see how for them, this might've been a normal way to do things - it probably was for most of the other nations around them at the time. I can see a lot in the Old Testament that is very positive and that seems to cut across many of the more negative cultural norms of the period. I can understand God patiently working with people who thought like this and behaved like this and gradually drawing them closer to Himself. I can understand God working through the cultural norms of the time in order to achieve a longer term objective that culminated in the life and teachings of Jesus and His self-giving death on the cross. I cannot understand though, God directly commanding the Israelites - or anybody - to do stuff like the above to anybody else!

God is God. He is in charge of life and death and He - and He alone - has the ultimate right to execute judgement on anyone. He is also the only one who is in a position to do so with perfect justice - being totally impartial and in complete possession of all the facts. But I can't understand - or accept - Him directly carrying out this kind of justice - if that's even what this is - through imperfect human agents. Those who try to defend passages like the above often point out some of the terrible and barbaric practices that many of the nations surrounding Israel were involved in at that time, implying that they were in fact only getting what they deserved. Even if this is true and God had simply decided that enough was enough, how could He use His own people - who He says He loves - to do such a terrible thing? Nobody can treat others in such an appalling fashion without having their own humanity deeply scarred by the experience!

I did notice one new thing about this passage when re-reading it yesterday, which is that it is Moses, rather than God Himself, who is giving the Israelites these instructions. This gives me a little hope that perhaps the passage reflects Moses' world view a little more than it does God's! There are other places though, where it is recorded that God Himself gave fairly similar instructions, albeit - inevitably - through one of His other mouth pieces. Moses himself is generally considered to be the greatest of the Jewish prophets who walked extremely closely with God, and seems to often be assumed to be speaking on God's behalf. Maybe though, that assumption doesn't always hold true? Maybe God left Moses quite a large amount of room to interpret what He wanted, within the parameters of what Moses considered to be normal at the time...?

I realise at this point though, that I am stretching the text in an attempt to interpret it in the way that I would like it to read. And so I am still left with a difficult problem - which is that the God of the Old Testament does not seem to me to consistently be a God of love. There is a lot of love in the Old Testament and much of it comes from God, but there is also too much there for my liking that looks very suspiciously like its opposite and as yet I am unable to fully reconcile this.

For myself, I am persuaded that God is a God of love. Ultimately, only love can make sense of the world and of life. If God is arbitrary and capricious, then where do all my high ideals come from? Why do I even have a concept of love and morality? If it's all some big cosmic joke, then it isn't very funny and ultimately God isn't laughing either - if that's the best He can do then it's no more satisfying for Him than for anyone else! If there is no God then it's all ultimately meaningless, and enlightened self-interest, rather than self-giving compassion, is the best of the available bad set of options! But if God is real and Jesus is His best representation, then - in spite of all the mess and the pain - life is ultimately good and is deeply, deeply worth suffering and sacrificing for!

So I still have a mismatch between the God I see revealed in Jesus and the God of the Old Testament. The best I can do is to suggest that the Old Testament authors recorded things according to their best understanding at the time, and that God worked in them and through them - just as He does with us - in spite of all of that. But that doesn't dot all of the i's, and it doesn't cross all of the t's, and it still seems to leave rather a lot of open questions...!

[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

The Bible and Me Part V - Job

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]
[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]
[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]

After concluding that the creation stories at the beginning of the Bible probably weren't meant to be taken entirely literally (see Part I and Part II of this series), the next bit of the Bible I started to wonder about (although not until some time later) was the book of Job (pronounced Joeb).

Job is the story of a man who has everything, but then loses it all - his possessions, his family and his health - almost overnight. He ends up sitting on an ash heap, covered in sores and scraping himself with bits of broken pottery. Job is portrayed as a good man: he is kind and generous and has always looked out for those who are less fortunate than himself. The book mostly consists of the dialog between Job and his friends as they try to make sense of what has happened to him - or more specifically, as his "friends" try to blame him for it and work out what he's done wrong to deserve it, while Job defends himself, protests his innocence and blames God for his condition. It's a wonderful book, which tries to address the perplexing question of why - if God is just - bad things still seem to happen, often arbitrarily, to good people.

From a historical point of view though, there were 2 things in particular that puzzled me about this book:

First of all, the first part of the story contains a couple of discussions which take place in heaven between God and Satan. I'd often wondered how these discussions had come to be recorded! Obviously there were no people in heaven to hear what had taken place, so the only alternative - if it was historically true - was that God must have directly revealed this conversation to somebody afterwards.

The second thing that puzzled me about this book was ... most of the rest of the book! Specifically - as I mentioned just now - the book consists almost entirely of the dialog between Job and his friends. It is poetic, philosophical, rich, deep, ... and very long! Somebody had to have had a very good memory to have written it all down perfectly afterwards! Not impossible of course - within reason anyway - but it did make me wonder...

Once I became curious enough about this to do a bit more research, I discovered something else about the book that I hadn't noticed before - notably that it contains no indication of when these events are meant to have taken place. It simply starts with "In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job". Now, Uz was a real place, so you could argue that it has some historical context, but apart from that it is starting to sound rather a lot like, "Once upon a time"! When you also consider the structure and content of the rest of the book - which as I've said is nearly all poetic dialog between Job and his friends - it actually starts to look (to my mind anyway) a lot more like the script for a play, then like a proper historical account.

Other than my own uneducated observations, I have no particular reason to believe that Job is meant to be a play - if people even wrote scripts for plays back then - but no particular reason to believe that its contents are entirely historical either, and the evidence I've just discussed seems to suggest the contrary (and a great many Biblical scholars seem to agree). Job belongs firmly within the "wisdom" tradition of the Old Testament, along with Psalms, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. It has obviously been very carefully constructed and has been written primarily for philosophical, rather than historical purposes. Whether or not Job was a real person, and to what extent the story reflects the actual events of his life, we will probably never know, but this is very much secondary to the main purpose of this book, which is to wrestle with the deep questions of life and meaning in what sometimes appears to be a very chaotic and uncaring world.

[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]
[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]
[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]

As I've discussed in my previous posts in this series, evangelical Christians tend to have a very high view of scripture, often including the idea that it is inerrant - i.e. free from even the tiniest mistake or untruth. This perspective was quite a big part of my evangelical upbringing, but it wasn't until some time later that I started to wonder where this belief had come from. The Bible doesn't make this claim about itself, and in any case it wouldn't be able to because - as I pointed out in my previous post - the Bible isn't a single book; it's a library of many different books, the full list of which wasn't agreed until a long time after they were written. The authors of most of them were not even aware that all of the others existed! So if the Bible doesn't teach inerrancy, then where does this belief come from? To answer that question, we need to go back about 500 years to the 16th century Protestant Reformation. Here is a very brief overview of those events:

At that time there was basically only one church - The Roman Catholic Church - in Western Europe, but it had become apparent to many of its members that in many ways it had become very corrupt. The reformers wanted to challenge this and to change the church from within, but the church basically decided that it didn't want to be de-corrupted, thankyou very much, so it kicked them all out. And so, the Protestant church was born! This took different forms in different parts of Europe and produced - among others - Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists and - for fairly strange and dubious personal/political reasons - the Church of England in the UK. Over the centuries, many more denominations have spun off from these original roots, including all of those that we would now generally bracket under the term "evangelical" (for a pretty good definition of the word "evangelical", see here).

Prior to the Reformation, authority/legitimacy in the church had basically derived from 3 sources: the Bible, church tradition (i.e. the accumulated wisdom/teachings of the church) and the church hierarchy, in particular the Pope, who the church believed was the spiritual successor to the apostle Peter (Peter was the first leading elder in the early church, who had been effectively entrusted with this responsibility by Jesus himself). But since the reformers had now been cut off from "the church", this left them with a bit of a problem: they could no longer appeal to the church hierarchy (which they didn't trust anyway), and some of the church's teachings seemed to have diverged a long way from, and in places to be very much at odds with, what the Bible taught. At least partly (and perhaps mostly) in reaction to this, the reformers developed the doctrine of "Sola Scriptura", which states that the Bible alone is the supreme authority in all matters of Christian doctrine and practice. This became one of the founding principles of the early reformation movement, from which all forms of evangelical Christianity are ultimately derived.

Sola Scriptura does not automatically imply inerrancy - the doctrine of inerrancy was developed and formalised at a much later date - but it's easy to see the appeal - perhaps even the necessity - of inerrancy, once the Bible has been elevated to such a lofty place. There are a couple of problems with this though:

Firstly - as I mentioned at the beginning of this post - the doctrine of inerrancy is itself extra-Biblical, and so fails the Sola Scriptura test! There are certainly passages in the Bible that refer to "scripture" (meaning The Old Testament or parts thereof, as the New Testament was not compiled until much later) in glowing terms, but no claims anywhere within the Bible itself that it or any of its constituent parts are completely error free.

Secondly though, and perhaps even more importantly, Sola Scriptura fails its own test! It is itself a doctrine about how the Bible should be used, which originates in church tradition (albeit Protestant, rather than Catholic), and is not found anywhere in the Bible!

To add to this, there is the problem of the Biblical canon - i.e. the accepted list of books that make up the Christian Bible. Based on my somewhat limited knowledge, there seem to me to have been some very sensible rational and historical reasons why some books have ended up being included and others excluded, but the fact remains that the canon has been chosen by the church! So the Biblical canon, which Protestants - and particularly evangelicals - seek to elevate above church tradition, is itself a product of that tradition! If you want to go a step further, it wouldn't be unreasonable to make the point that the entire contents of the Bible are themselves a part of Christian and Jewish tradition, to which those traditions have decided to assign a special significance! To further compound matters, there are 66 books in the Protestant Bible, 73 in the Catholic Bible, 76 in the Eastern Orthodox Bible, and 81 in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible - so all of those traditions have come to their own conclusions about which books "the Bible" ought to consist of! Martin Luther - who is widely acknowledged to have started the Protestant Reformation, and who was one of the leading proponents of Sola Scriptura - wanted to drop the book of Revelation from the list (but was unsuccessful in doing so) because he didn't believe it was inspired by God!

So if the doctrines of Sola Scriptura and Biblical inerrancy, and even - at least to an extent - the Bible itself, are no more than a product of historical circumstance and (varying) church tradition, where does all that leave us in our attitude towards the Bible? What principles should we apply when deciding how to use it and how much weight to give to it?

Well, first and foremost, Christians are followers of Christ. If we can't take Jesus' teaching seriously and at least try to do what he says, then we cannot in all honesty carry that label. The best approximation we have of his teaching is in the 4 gospel books which are contained in the New Testament. The rest of the New Testament consists mostly of the deeds and letters of his early followers as they both lived out Jesus' teaching, and further developed it in the light of his death and resurrection, under the power and influence of the Holy Spirit. Without them - and obviously without Jesus - there would be no Christian faith and no church, and their accomplishments - if we choose to take them seriously - are a powerful testimony to the Spirit of God at work in their lives. With all this in mind we cannot help but hold in very high regard the writings that they have left behind.

Secondly - as I mentioned in my previous post - both Jesus himself and his early followers held the Old Testament in extremely high regard, and interpreted Jesus' life and mission in the context of the over-arching story that it contains. In which case - as Jesus' followers - we are also compelled to do the same.

Thirdly, we could take some advice from one of the passages in the Bible that is often quoted in support of the doctrine of inerrancy. This is found in the New Testament book of 2 Timothy, which is a letter written by the apostle Paul to the early church leader of that name:

"... from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." - 2 Timothy 3:15-17

This is undoubtedly very good advice! Just in case we should be tempted to read too much into it though, there are a few things we should take note of: First of all, Paul says that scripture is "God-breathed", but he doesn't clarify what he means by this. He doesn't say it is God-dictated, and he doesn't say it is error free, but certainly we should expect to find and encounter God through its pages. Secondly, he is not trying to make a definitive doctrinal statement here; he is giving Timothy some practical advice about the importance and usefulness of scripture in his day to day life and ministry. Thirdly, when Paul says "All Scripture", he is referring to the Jewish scriptures which Christians now refer to as The Old Testament (since the New Testament didn't exist at this point), although given the comments I've already made about the New Testament it doesn't seem unreasonable to extend the principle. Fourthly, the Old Testament Paul is referring to is probably not quite the same one we have today. Paul and Timothy were from outside of Israel and would probably have been most familiar with the popular Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures known as the Septuagint (which the New Testament often quotes from). This contains several books which are not in the Protestant Bible, but are included in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. So if we're going to claim inerrancy on the basis of this passage, then we probably also need to claim it for several books that we've subsequently decided to leave out!

Finally, it was noted in a comment on my previous post that the Holy Spirit has a very important part to play in all of this. This is probably the most important, and perhaps the least tangible factor in properly understanding and applying scripture, and of course in knowing God and living out the Christian faith. In the end Christianity is about a relationship with God, made possible by Jesus, and facilitated by the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who leads us into truth and who teaches us - through scripture and in many other ways besides. But this is something that I do not think I can fully explain, and which I suspect can only fully make sense to those who have experienced the leading and prompting of the Holy Spirit for themselves.

[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]
[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]

One of the arguments often given by Christians - usually to other Christians - in favour of Biblical inerrancy (the idea that the Bible is perfectly accurate in every literal detail), goes something like this:

If you believe there are inaccuracies in the Bible, then you no longer have any way to reliably determine which bits of the Bible are true and which aren't. This means you can't really trust any of it, so maybe none of it is true and therefore your whole faith ends up collapsing. (I am obviously paraphrasing, and there are many versions of and approaches to this, but from my personal experience this more-or-less captures the general gist.)

This argument basically just boils down to scare tactics. It doesn't prove anything of course - it says nothing about whether or not the text is actually reliable - it just gives Christians a very strong reason for not asking too many questions about it! But is this really something Christians need to be worried about? I think there are a number of good responses to this:

First of all, if the Christian faith is basically true, then we have nothing to fear. And if we're really that worried that it might not be, then perhaps we already have a somewhat bigger problem...? We shouldn't be afraid of honest questions and honest answers. We should also be aware though, that our answers will never be perfect and are likely to mislead us at times. Being a Christian is about putting your trust in Someone who is much bigger than all your questions and all your attempts to answer them, and who will lead you gently into truth if you look to Him for guidance. To quote from the Bible itself, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding" (Proverbs 3 verse 5). But note that the author doesn't say, "don't use your understanding", he (probably male!) just says, "don't lean on it". Our intellects are God-given and can be useful and powerful tools, but they're not big enough to understand everything, we certainly can't depend on them absolutely, and they are likely to mislead us badly if we're proud enough to think we don't need God or have it all figured out!

Secondly, the nature and size of the problem is massively over-stated. For example, if we discovered an error in one of our history books, we wouldn't then suddenly decide to throw the whole book away, or conclude that none of the rest of it could be trusted! It might lead us to question other parts of the book and - depending on the nature of the error - to hold parts of it a bit more lightly, but we would probably have to encounter quite a few very serious errors before we would consider abandoning it altogether.

Thirdly, the Bible is not a single book! It is a whole library of different types of books, written by different people, over many hundreds, if not thousands of years. Part of the problem when trying to read these books sensibly, is figuring out - in each case - what type of book it is that we're dealing with. Some of these books are obviously meant to be taken literally, others are a bit less clear. There are letters, stories (historical or otherwise), books of poetry, books of prophecy, books of wisdom, and apocalyptic books. None of the Bible is really "history" in the straightforward sense of that word - all of it is written with an agenda. This isn't a bad thing and doesn't necessarily mean it can't be trusted, but it does affect the material it contains and how that material has been presented. The Biblical authors are not just presenting facts, they are telling stories in a way that is intended to make some kind of point. If that wasn't the case then it wouldn't have become the central textbook of the Christian faith!

Given the varied nature and history of the different books that make up the Bible, there is no reason to assume that every book is equally historically reliable. For example, we know quite a bit about the four gospel books in the New Testament. We have good reason to believe they were written within a few decades of the events they describe. We know the early church grew massively under intense persecution, both during and after this period, as a result of the message they contain. We know that those who lead the early movement and spread this message, including the authors of these books, put their lives on the line - and often lost their lives - in order to do so. These are all good reasons for accepting the basic truthfulness of their contents. We know a lot less about the Old Testament books though. Are they reliable historical accounts (at least the ones that present themselves in this way), or are they handed down stories that have been told and retold until the details have become confused? Do they even include fiction presented as fact in a deliberate attempt to deceive? We know that the authors of the New Testament, including Jesus himself - if the words attributed to him are to be believed - held the Old Testament in extremely high regard. We also know that Jesus and his followers understood his whole life and message in the context of - and as a fulfilment of - the bigger story of the Old Testament, which all those different books contribute to. So if we take Jesus seriously, then we have good reason to take the Old Testament seriously as well, but from a historical perspective we may not be able to lean on it quite as heavily as we do on the New.

I think perhaps the strongest appeal of the inerrancy theory - and hence why so many Christians are so wedded to it and so fearful of undermining it - is the claim to "certainty". If the Bible is the perfect and unadulterated words of God, then we have unparalleled access to truth. Nothing in those books can ever be contradicted, so we know exactly where we stand. We (meaning those of us who believe the Bible) have a monopoly on truth. We have a perfect yardstick against which to measure the beliefs and behaviour of ourselves and others. All we have to do is decipher it and we will have everything important that we need to know about life all figured out. In fact a great many of us seem to feel like we've already achieved this, since applying the Bible is (apparently!) simply a matter of believing and/or obeying the "literal meaning" of the text!

Generally speaking though, life is not like this - and even if the Bible were inerrant, understanding the Bible would not be like this either. There are many different English translations of the Bible which all differ slightly from one another over minor details, because it is not straightforward to translate from one language to another (in fact it's usually impossible to do so perfectly), especially as languages evolve and change all the time, and the languages it was written in are thousands of years old. Then there is the issue of culture and context. Spoken and written language is full of idioms and assumptions, and the Bible is no exception. If you're not completely familiar with the world view of the speaker, then you're not going to be able to fully and correctly understand everything they're trying to say. The authors of the Bible are from various long-dead cultures that were very different from ours, and which we now have only very limited access to. Then there's the fact that we have multiple copies of the source texts to work with, and they don't all perfectly agree with each other either! Deciphering which is (or is closest to) the "original" is a significant scholarly exercise, which is often dependent on educated guesswork.

So we are dependent on common sense, best guesses, and the expertise of others - as with so much of life! We cannot completely "know" everything, but we can live our lives on the basis of what we think we know and - in submission to the Holy Spirit and in co-operation with others - what seems to us to make the most sense. This is the kind of obedience I believe God wants from us - an obedience of the heart which pursues truth and attempts to live by it, rather than what might appear to be a more "perfect" kind of obedience, which can only be achieved by those who have perfect knowledge (which none of us do!).

[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

The Bible and Me Part II - Creation

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]

As I started to consider the idea that the Genesis creation account was a myth, I started to notice other things about the story that began to make a lot more sense. For example, God intially places Adam and Eve in a beautiful garden where all their needs are provided for, but as a result of Adam's sin, they are banished to the harsh world outside where he has to "work the ground from which he had been taken". But if the whole world was perfect, how come one bit was less perfect than the other? Had God been planning this "banishment" all along? Or does it make more sense to see the garden as a symbol of the goodness of a perfect relationship with God, which we are then excluded from when it all goes horribly wrong? Also, why is there a river flowing from Eden which separates out into four other major rivers? Rivers usually run into, not out of one another. Unless again, this is making some sort of symbolic point about the potency of this place - representing a perfect relationship with God - which is a source of the goodness of so much of the surrounding area. And where is the garden now, and what happened to the "cherubim" and "flaming sword" that God put there to guard the way back to the tree of life? There have been various speculations about its location, but it seems pretty clear that neither the tree of life, nor the sword, nor the cherubim have ever been found.

And what of the snake? Most Creationists seem to overlook this point, but if you're going to read the story literally, then read it literally! Adam and Eve were not tempted by the devil, they were tempted by a talking snake! And it is consistently referred to as "the snake" (my emphasis), so apparently there was only one of them - it didn't even have a mate! (This bit really does read like something from one of Aesop's fables!) And it seems like it must've had legs (although the text doesn't say so), or else God's subsequent curse - to "crawl on your belly" - wouldn't have counted for very much. Oh and also, as well as crawling on its belly, God told the snake it was going to "eat dust all the days of [its] life". But I don't know of too many snakes that do that...!

Or perhaps you could look at all this a different way...?: It is a common thread in Jewish and Christian literature and thought, that there are unseen and sometimes very powerful, non-human spiritual entities that play an important part in human life and history. The snake represents Satan - the adversary - who stands opposed to all of God's plans and purposes. Most Creationists accept at least this much anyway because even by their standards it makes more sense than the "literal" explanation given by the text for the snake's interference, which is simply that it was "the most clever of all the wild animals"! But when you begin to treat the whole story as more symbolic than literal, it suddenly begins to offer up other new layers of meaning. "Crawl on your belly" might not be much of a curse to a snake, but it is to a proud and powerful spiritual being - and it rings true! There are no depths to which the Adversary will not stoop. He has no honour - he abandoned all that when he decided to oppose God - hence the reason he is depicted as a snake in the first place. As for eating dust - snakes don't do that, but Satan does. There is no pleasure or fulfilment in a life devoted to destroying everything that is good and true. He is driven by jealousy and hatred and will never find satisfaction in anything he does. These are the kinds of important lessons that I think people are prone to miss, if and when they try to take the text too "literally".

There are actually two creation accounts in Genesis - a fact that is also easily missed when attempting to read this book as a straightforward historical narrative. The first account runs from the beginning of chapter 1, through to chapter 2 verse 2 (the chapter and verse divisions were added much later by Christian editors and unfortunately often bear little relation to the structure of the original text). The second account follows on from there. The distinction between the two can easily be seen by noting the different writing styles, the fact that the accounts overlap with one another chronologically, and the fact that they contradict each other in the detail (in the first account God creates plants on day 3 and mankind on day 6, but in the second account God creates Adam before any of the plants have appeared).

The second account (as just discussed) deals with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the story of the temptation, but the first is a beautiful chiastic poem describing the 6-day creation of the world. Chiastic poems represent the subject material in a symmetrical form, and are heavily used throughout the Old Testament. This may be done for effect, or to make a story easier to remember, or possibly both. This could be an indication that a story has been passed down orally for some time before being committed to paper.

The creation poem starts with 3 days of "separating" - the light from the dark, the water from the sky, and the land from the sea (and plants appear on the land). These are followed by 3 corresponding days of "filling" - the day and night are filled with the sun and the moon, the sea and sky are filled with fish and birds, the land is filled with animals and with man (who are given the plants for food). This is the reason for the rather strange order of events, in which light is created before the sun, which is its source! It really isn't necessary (or desirable!) to invoke strange cosmological arguments in order to try to interpret this in a "literal" fashion!

[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

I was brought up as an evangelical, Bible-believing Christian and the Bible has always been a central - indeed crucial - part of my faith. Without the Bible I would probably have a completely different view of God - if I even believed in God at all. Without the Bible I would probably have no idea who Jesus was and I wouldn't be calling myself a Christian. My faith is based on mine (and others') experience, as well as on the Bible, but without the Bible I would have no framework for that faith and would probably not have had the chance to encounter, or respond to God - or Jesus - in the way that I do today.

I was taught from a very young age that the Bible was "The Word of God". Although I didn't know the technical term at the time, I was also taught that it was essentially "inerrant" - i.e. because it was The Word of God, it contained no mistakes, factual inaccuracies or inconsistencies. It was to be believed unequivocally and without question. To disobey anything the Bible told me was to disobey God himself.

As I grew up it gradually became apparent that things were not quite this simple. There were some bits of the Bible for example - mostly in the Old Testament - that didn't apply to me. The old Levitical laws about things like not eating shellfish or not mixing together 2 types of fabric, applied only to those under the old Jewish Covenant and were not rules that I was expected to follow today. OK, so that made sense - so far so good!

I also started to notice that there were some events that were recorded in the Bible more than once, and that the accounts of these didn't always seem to match up. For example, there are some quite big differences in the way the story of Jesus' resurrection is recorded across the 4 different gospels. We did an exercise once in a church youth group that I belonged to, where we attempted to reconcile the 4 accounts by taking them all apart and putting them back together again in a way that made them all fit - in order to demonstrate the fact that they were actually compatible, just told from different angles with different bits missing. To my mind though, we had to work so hard in order to do this, that it was almost as though the accounts weren't really fully compatible with one another at all...

And then there was the whole question of creation and/or evolution. It was probably in my early teens that I first started to become aware of this potential dichotomy. At that time, a popular view on this (and fairly acceptable, in the Christian circles that I moved in) was that the "days" in the Genesis creation account could just as well refer to millions of years. This was justified on the basis that, "with the Lord, a day is like a thousand years" (the Bible, 2 Peter 3:8), and also on the fact that since there was no sun right at the beginning, then who could say how long a day was?! And the order of events in the Genesis creation account more-or-less corresponds to the scientific account anyway, so they're perfectly compatible! - except that when you get right down to it, it actually doesn't...

Then when I went to University I was introduced to a rather radical idea - and because it came from a visiting speaker at our Christian Union, who otherwise seemed to believe in and know the same God that I did, and because he was also quite a high up member of the London Bible College (I think he might've been the president, but I can't remember now), I was able to treat it with a little more credence than I might've done otherwise. The idea was this: What if the Genesis creation account is actually a myth? What if it isn't even intended to be treated as a literal account? What if it's just there to teach us stuff about God and about ourselves and about how we relate to Him and to the world? What if it isn't - and isn't meant to be - a scientifically accurate, historical account?

This idea made quite a lot of sense to me. After all, it seemed very unlikely that there was anyone actually there, that far back, who was able to write - and certainly no-one who was there before Adam and Eve to witness the first 5 days! If the Genesis creation account did come directly from God himself (the only other possibility!), then it had to have been somehow revealed to someone so they could write it down. But how would God explain something like that to someone who had none of the scientific knowledge that we have today? Surely the point of it wasn't to teach science in any case, it was to teach us about our relationship with God and with the world?

This was probably the first time I seriously entertained the idea that perhaps the Bible wasn't all meant to be taken entirely literally after all (apart from things like Jesus' parables, which were obviously just stories that he told in order to make a point).

[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]
[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

When I Survey...

Thirty years ago I thought I pretty much understood the purpose and significance of Jesus' death on the cross. I'm not sure I would have used words like "purpose" or "significance" at the time though - after all, I was only 11 years old!

I was brought up in an evangelical Christian home, and the standard explanation went something like this:

1. We have all sinned and sin needs to be punished.
2. But - God loves us and doesn't want to punish us.
3. So, God sent Jesus in our place - to take the punishment we deserved on the cross so that we could be forgiven.
4. If I accept what Jesus has done for me then my sins can be forgiven and after I die I can spend eternity with God in heaven.

There's lots of things that are good about this explanation, one or two things that aren't so good, some bits that people tend to struggle with, and quite a lot of stuff that I still don't fully understand.

One part that people do often seem to have trouble with is number 3. If I deserve to be punished, then how is it in any way fair or good for God to punish Jesus in my place? Personally however, I've never particularly had a problem with this - not because I see God as an angry tyrant who is happy to punish the innocent instead of the guilty, but because of the way I see Jesus. I see Jesus as God. I see Him and the Father as somehow one and yet separate at the same time. I can't fully explain this, but based on my experience, in my head and in my heart (and also in classical Christian theology) it somehow seems to fit. What Jesus did was a voluntary act, but it was also an act of self-sacrifice on God's own part! It was about Him laying Himself down on our behalf, not about Him punishing somebody else who didn't deserve it (and it was us who doled out the punishment here in any case...)

I think another valid question though, is why does wrongdoing even need to be punished in the first place? Why can't God just forgive us without either sacrificing Himself, or punishing someone else instead? After all, we forgive each other all the time without dishing out any punishment (at least, many of us do anyway...), so why can't God just do the same?

I still don't have a perfect answer to that question, but as an older Christian I have become aware that there are many different ways of appreciating what Jesus did on the cross - many analogies if you like - and they may not all be perfect in every way, but they do help to deepen our understanding of what was going on. I've also become more and more aware that there was a lot more going on at the cross than I first realised (and probably still a lot more that I'm not yet able to appreciate!) Jesus didn't just die to achieve a straightforward substitution of him for me, so that I could go to a better place when I died - what he did was a lot more profound and revolutionary than that!

I've recently been quite struck by Tom Wright's take on this in "How God Became King". At one point in this book, Wright draws the reader's attention to a story in chapter 10 of Mark's gospel, where James and John - two of Jesus' disciples - ask him, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory". Just to put this in context, his disciples believed at this point that Jesus was the "Messiah" - who was the subject of many Jewish prophecies - and presumably still had fairly traditional ideas about what this meant. They were expecting him to overthrow the Romans somehow and establish his own kingdom, and James and John were trying to make sure they got the best positions in the new order! Unsurprisingly this attempt wasn't particularly well received by the rest of the group! There then follows some teaching from Jesus about his somewhat unconventional approach to power, in which he emphasises the importance of servanthood in the kingdom which he is about to establish (and also of suffering, although in quite cryptic terms at this point). Jesus also informs James and John that, "to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared."

Later on in Mark chapter 15, after Jesus has been betrayed and condemned to die, the story continues:

And the soldiers led him away inside the palace (that is, the governor's headquarters), and they called together the whole battalion. And they clothed him in a purple cloak, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on him. And they began to salute Him, "Hail, King of the Jews!
...
And it was the third hour when they crucified him. And the inscription of the charge against him read, "The King of the Jews." And with him they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left. [my emphasis]

This then, is the new Kingdom which Jesus has set out to inaugurate! And these are the privileged positions which the two disciples had been clamouring for!

The double-irony of this story is that the Romans were mocking Jesus for having failed in his mission, but in doing so they were, without realising it, confirming the very success of what he had come to achieve! - this was the inauguration of his new Kingdom! This was to be a Kingdom based on love and self-sacrifice, not on power imposed on others, by force, against their will. This wasn't just the creation of a new Kingdom, it was the creation of a completely new type of Kingdom - one that would subvert all the other kingdoms of the world because it was based on entirely different principles!

Conventional logic says that this kind of Kingdom shouldn't work, but as well as challenging our understanding of power, this approach also challenges our understanding of God Himself. This is a God who comes to serve and to lay down His life, not a God who imposes His will imperiously from above. If this is what God is like, then this can work because He is the author of life and He has made all of us in His image. This is the message of the resurrection - that love wins, life triumphs over death and evil and oppression will not get the last word!

If the resurrection didn't happen then this is a nice story with a powerful message but you have to question whether it really has any lasting significance. But if it really did happen then the world is not the same way up as it appears to be. The poor and the merciful and the righteous really will be blessed and the meek really will inherit the earth - although if Jesus' example is anything to go by then getting there may not be an easy ride! The kingdoms of this world that rely on coercion and control are on their way out. A new world order has arrived and is already undermining and subverting them.

This is the Kingdom that Jesus came to establish and it is the Kingdom which I am a part of. I have to admit that I sometimes (OK, often!) struggle to get my head (and my heart) around its principles! It is a Kingdom that has often not been well represented by those who have claimed to be its ambassadors - either because it was too radical for them to fully take to heart or comprehend, or because they have had an entirely different, and much more this-current-worldly agenda! But it is a Kingdom that lives on in Jesus and in all those who (however much they fail) in honesty of heart try to follow him. And it is the Kingdom that will triumph in the end!

And this is the Messiah who I serve. A Messiah - and a God - full of grace. A God who has taken the worst that I can throw at Him and has responded with love and with forgiveness for all of my sins. A God who, in the end, has won and subverted (and is continuing to subvert) my heart!

Upside down God, turn my heart right-side up!

Upside down God, turn my life right-way up!

Amen!

Je Suis Charlie

The title of this post is not intended to imply my support for cartoons or images that some may find insulting or offensive.

As a Christian myself I'm fairly used to my faith being insulted and even to being insulted myself occasionally because of it, but it doesn't particularly bother me. I follow a persecuted saviour who commands me to "love my enemies" and most of the founders of my faith were persecuted for it, so to some extent at least I consider insults to be par for the course!

I personally don't really "get" why images of Muhammad are such a big deal for Muslims and I don't think that non-Muslims should be forced to adhere to the same standards. I also don't believe in offending people deliberately though, unless there is a good reason to do so.

None of this is a judgement on Charlie Hebdo or on their editor, Stephane Charbonnier, who was killed in today's attack - I don't know everything they published, I don't have an opinion regarding whether they should have done or not, and it doesn't make any difference - there can be no justification whatsoever for what has just taken place!

I want to say something to any Muslims who may be reading this. I know that many Muslims - probably the majority, at least in the west - will be as appalled as I am about what has just happened. I am sorry for your sake, as well as for those who were killed and their friends and relatives, because I know that some of you will almost certainly bear the backlash for something that you feel just as badly about as I do.

If you're one of those who doesn't feel like this though - if you're one of those that is pleased that your prophet has been "avenged" - will you please think again?!:

What kind of prophet needs to be avenged by violent deaths because someone pictured him in a cartoon? And what kind of God is so insecure and has such a brittle ego that he feels threatened by such a thing and needs puny human beings to "protect" his reputation in so brutal a fashion? And what kind of reputation do you think you're creating for this God anyway?

"Allahu Akbar" - "God is great"! He might be great, but is he good? And if he isn't good then why are you serving him? Are you really sure that you're serving the right God...? (and if he's so great then why does he need you to defend him anyway...?)

Hassan Chalghoumi - an imam of the Paris suburb of Drancy - has said of the attackers: "Their prophet is Satan. There is no connection between the Islamic faith and this minority."

If you're one of those who condones this attack, then please think again really hard about whether you're really following the right prophet, or the right God...!