The Bible is Wrong

I was inspired to write this post for several reasons. One reason is that most of the problems I face with people and my philosophy, or people and their rejection of God and the Bible, almost always stems from a misunderstanding of the inspiration of scripture and a poor interpretation of God's word.

Most conservative Christians have a very literal interpretation of scripture. They would even dare tell you that they do not interpret it at all, but simply let the Bible interpret itself. This is impossible, because it is impossible to read anything without interjecting your personal worldview into what you are reading. There is no such thing as an interpretation free of bias and personal thought. Liberals on the other hand will cherry pick what they like out of the Bible and disregard the rest, as was noted in Derek Flood's recent book "Disarming Scripture." As you can likely guess, both of these approaches to scriptures are completely wrong and will lead you into a misunderstanding of not only inspiration but God's character as well.

As I have pointed out many times throughout my writing, the writers of the Bible were human. This point cannot be stressed enough because so often it is forgotten as people read and interpret scripture. We have this human characteristic to idealize the past and even idolize it. Because we are 4,000 years removed from much of the history found in the Bible, we put it on a pedestal that no human work has the right to be placed on. The writers of the Bible were human. I know that most Christians would never dare say that any human was divinely infallible, that is boarder-line blasphemy. Yet all of a sudden when you transfer this knowledge to a reading of scripture, people abandon caution to the wind and place their entire faith in the hands of fallible humanity. Why is this? It is because of a misunderstanding of how inspiration works.

I'll bring this home with an example. I'll use Seventh-day Adventists as an example for this part because that is the faith I happen to belong to and was raised in. Many Adventists believe that Ellen White is absolutely infallible. They believe that God himself is the author of her books and every word that proceeded from her mouth is the express will of God, much as other faiths view the Bible. This leads many to believe things, such as the idea that pepper should never be used because it "excites the animal passions." Or that masturbation causes blindness, and many more medical inaccuracies. It isn't because Ellen White was weird, she simply wrote according to the medical knowledge of her day, which just so happened to be incorrect. Ellen White also changed dramatically in her writings after 1888. Why? It was Because Mrs. White's understanding of God changed drastically after 1888. The message of Righteousness by Faith preached by Jones and Wagner drastically affected her theology. She discovered an aspect of the character of God that she had never fully comprehended and without Jones and Wagner she would never have been able to write the Desire of Ages or Steps to Christ. Ellen White was human, just like everyone else, and she was influenced in her writing according to her own understanding of God and the cultural context in which she lived. It is that way with Bible writers as well. They are all human, they all understood God in their own way, and each of their understandings of God can teach us something about His character that we may never have contemplated otherwise.

As I wrote in a previous blog post, the beauty of the Bible is not found in the infallibility of its writers, but rather in its awesome portrayal of mans development of understanding. People are always talking about the difference between the old and the New Testament and their strikingly different perspectives on God's character. Several years ago I couldn’t understand people's concern with this. It did not seem to me like there was a huge difference between the two, after all there are some wonderful depictions of the love of God found in the Old Testament. Yet as I studied further, it became very clear that there is indeed a very distinct difference between the understanding found in the Old Testament and that found in the new. There is a very distinct progression seen with a common theme throughout the entire Bible. The theme is that God is different than all the other gods of other nations, and that He cares for His people. The details, however, are not always in keeping with an understanding of a God of Love and compassion, who seeks to woo the hearts of mankind and draw all nations to himself.

For instance, throughout the Minor Prophets you have men saying that God is pleased when His people bash infant’s heads against rocks, and murder women and children. You have commands for mass genocide that are attributed to God. David was a man of violence, which is also attributed to the fact that God was with him. Over and over again throughout scripture humans have been attributing to God what we would only be able to say was the work of the devil today. Why is this? Why would God allow such things, and why do the writers say it was actually God's command? The answer is very simple: humans wrote the Bible. Because of this, people have used the Bible in very terrible ways over the centuries. They have used it to justify Crusades that murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Catholics used the Bible to murder Protestants; Protestants used it to justify murdering Catholics; America used the Bible to justify slavery, and Adventists use the Bible to justify sexism. By their fruits you will know them; if your interpretation of the Bible leads you to believe such things, then you can be certain that your understanding of it is completely wrong.

The Bible is not a perfect document. It was never meant to be a perfect document. It has only become a perfect document as humanity has moved further and further away from the source of the original "inspiration." We cannot ignore the negative things found in the Bible as the liberals do, or accept it all as the revelation of God's character as the conservatives do. We must recognize these passages for what they are and seek to understand the perspective of the writer inside of their own cultural context. All scripture is profitable for instruction, but it may not be true that all scripture is an accurate depiction of God's character.

The Bible gives us an amazing glimpse into the lives of individuals as they struggled in search of truth over millennia. There is no other book in this entire world that gives us such a broad depiction of humanities struggle with truth. In fact, the only way I was able to arrive at the conclusions I have come to about the character of God is because I stood on the shoulders of the Giants that came before me as they fought to discover who God was. They did the groundbreaking research and I reap the benefits and the privilege of pulling that information into a coherent and valid philosophy on God. I use the entire Bible in my search to understand God, but some of it teaches me what God is not, rather than what God is. When faced with a hard passage of scripture, I do with it what I do with all written works of other humans. I ask myself the question, "Does this understanding of God's character reflect the character of a loving God found throughout scripture and confirmed in Jesus?" If it doesn't, I try to understand what led that writer to see God the way he did. I put the writing in cultural context and compare it to the general understandings of God at the time.

It is actually very interesting, because as you read the Bible, you find glimpses of Gods character all the way through, but you realize that the full character of God took 3,500 years to develop. It wasn't until John the Revelator wrote down his record of Jesus that we had a full and complete depiction of the truly awesome character of God. John is the one who first recognized that God IS love itself. He was the one who recognized that an abiding relationship is the key to a changed life. He comprehended better than anyone else the mercy and love of God. God has been seeking to lead humanity to this understanding of His character from the very beginning, but it has taken us a very long time to arrive at this understanding. In fact, even though we have the knowledge today, we still have not accepted the character of God that was so plainly revealed in Jesus. We get stuck on an Old Testament understanding of God. This does not mean that we should not use the Old Testament but that we must recognize that God has moved past the Old and New Testament and is moving forward to even more truth! God is constantly ahead of our time, drawing us toward the future. We are constantly playing catch up with God, and it has been that way from the very beginning.

In order to come to these conclusions and continue on to a more complete understanding of God's character, we must read the Bible like Jesus read it. Here again I am stealing ideas from Derek Flood. Jesus read the Bible very differently than the Scribes and Pharisees. Jesus read the Bible with the knowledge that man has misinterpreted and misconstrued the character of God. Jesus constantly confronted the literal interpretation of the Pharisees. Jesus taught love for enemies. He revealed that God desired the hearts of everyone, not just His "chosen" people. Jesus taught that hating your enemy was the same thing as murder. Jesus fought the idea that God desired his people to conquer, kill, murder and rape their enemies. Jesus taught a message of love and compassion that was contrary to much of what the Pharisees quoted from the Bible. Jesus did not pick and choose which scriptures to read but rather confronted it head on and reinterpreted it’s meaning and revealed how we as humans messed up our understanding of the character of God.

On The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus started with what the Jews previously had thought. Then he proceeded to reinterpret everything they had assumed about the Bible and its depictions of God. The word of God was never meant to be infallible; I state that again because it is very important to understand. In Jesus' day there were different camps that adhered to different scriptures. It was like some today who stand behind this person's theology or that person's theology. Consequently, today we have both types of scripture in one book, which makes it difficult to discern. Jesus pulled from each of their philosophies and revealed the character of His father through all scripture. He revealed both what God was not and what God was. Jesus' interpretation of the Bible was founded on the central theme of His ministry: that God is love and he desires all to be saved. Upon this philosophy, Jesus based all of his theology. Framed in this context it is easy to discern the truth found in scripture for those who are seeking it.

Jesus understood from where scripture came and to what purpose it was intended. The scriptures have gone through several phases over the thousands of years it has been under construction. It was first written down as a record of how God had led His people in the past. Much of it was written to comfort an enslaved people. It was basically a record that said "if God did this for us in the past, then certainly He has a future for us." Some of scripture were letters written to individual people or people groups, they were letters of instruction and encouragement, much as you would write a letter today. Some of scripture was written as personal journals, or songs of praise to God. Still other parts were prophetic depictions of the hopes and fears of God's people. The point is that the scriptures were never written because the writer thought that his writings were timeless and perfect. Paul would probably be horrified today to find that we make a claim of perfection on his writings. He was a fallible human being, how could we place on his shoulders a burden that only God can bear?

Besides having many different goals and purposes, the scriptures have also been used many different ways over the years. As mentioned they were used as simply a written record of God's dealings with His people. They were used to lead worship; they were used to construct faiths and philosophies. The Bible was assembled in its current form very recently, only in the past 600 years or so. There were many books that were hotly debated as to whether or not the church should accept them as scripture, such as the book of Jude in the New Testament and many others. The scriptures were diligently pored over to try and come up with a list of books that most accurately represented the Christian faith and were consistent with themselves. However, because the Bible was compiled by mere humanity, it is not an infallible document. In fact it wasn't until Martin Luther that we begin to view scripture as we do today.

Martin Luther took the scriptures and placed them on a pedestal that they had never occupied before. Never in the history of religion had the Bible been so firmly upheld as the absolute word of God and the soul foundation of our faith. Luther did not make a mistake in this; this understanding of scripture was absolutely necessary in order for truth to be carried forward. Christianity needed to understand that truth does not originate from the understanding of one man. For so long the church had placed its entire beliefs in the hands of the clergy. No individual had the ability to discern truth for him or herself. Luther placed the gospel in the hands of the individual and revolutionized our understanding of scripture, revelation, salvation and the relationship between the sinner and Christ. He brought grace within reach of the poor and the uneducated. You see an absolute understanding of scripture was the firm foundation Christianity needed in order to break free of the dark ages.

Every age had a different understanding of scripture and used it in many different ways, this was needed then but it may not be what is needed now. What was understood in Jesus' day was not the understanding that Luther needed in order to pull the church out of a doctrine of control and hate propagated by Christianity, but what Luther needed is not the same thing that we need today. We need a firm foundation on scripture but with a different understanding of what scripture is. We need scripture because like the Jews of old it points us toward how God has led His people in the past and where He intends to lead us in the future. Like Jesus pointed out, we need scripture because it points us toward a God of love and compassion for all people. Like Martin Luther we need the scriptures because it gives us a firm understanding that truth is available to the individual and is not a monopoly of priests and kings. We need all these understandings of scripture, prefaced with the knowledge that humanity was intimately involved in writing, committing to memory, translating and compiling the document we have now. There is just way too much humanity in that process for us to have a perfect document. However, in terms of its value to the furthering of truth and the knowledge of the character of God, the Bible has no equal.

So is the Bible wrong? The answer is two fold. Yes, it contains depictions of God that are not accurate and not in keeping with the knowledge of a loving God. But the Bible also contains the very principles that have led me to the knowledge that God is love. Without the Bible, it is unlikely I would have ever arrived at the conclusions about God that I have. So yes and no, the Bible can be wrong, but even in the concepts that are not entirely accurate, valuable information can be found about the tendencies of the human mind. Like I have said all the way through this post, the Bible is a record of mans progression toward truth, all of it is important for us to know and understand in order to construct an accurate philosophy that incorporates the knowledge gleaned throughout the ages. If we have this understanding of scripture rather than either the understanding of absolute conservatives and cherry picking liberals, we will arrive at a truth that far surpasses any philosophy on God ever constructed. If we have this view of scripture we will find what John found, that God is absolute love and His one desire is an abiding relationship with the individual.