This week’s sermon continues our fall series Wrestling with Doubt, Finding Faith, based on the book of the same name by Adam Hamilton, exploring some of the big questions of faith.
Today’s topic is The Good Book? Wrestling with the Bible. How can Scripture that is “God-Breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16) contain passages used to justify violence, exclusion, and even slavery? What does it means to claim the Bible as the “inspired Word of God and the authoritative source and norm of our proclamation, faith, and life” (that’s from our church constitution!)? Can we just reject the parts we don’t like? If we want to hold on to the good news of Jesus, do we have to accept everything in the Bible as literally, factually accurate?
Today’s Scripture readings are 2 Timothy 3:14-17, Psalm 119:103-108, and John 14:1-7. Once again, I quoted extensively from Hamilton’s book, Wrestling with Doubt, Finding Faith. Here’s the livestream from Living Hope and the sermon podcast audio from Christ the King.
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Listen again to the key verse Andy read from 2 Timothy: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”
With that in mind, a few other verses to share with you:
“When a slaveowner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment, for the slave is the owner’s property.” Exodus 21:20-21
“I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” That’s from 1 Timothy 2.
From Psalm 137, which never shows up in our lectionary: “O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”
Do we read this and say, “the word of the Lord, thanks be to God?” Really?
Last Sunday, we started this series on wrestling with doubt and finding faith by looking at the question, “Is there a God?” It’s a great sermon title, but you all knew where I was going to end up. We can’t be 100% certain in this life, but yes, we believe God exists.
This week is harder, I think. Starting with those particular verses is one of the greatest risks I’ve taken in a sermon, because it’s a lot easier to just ignore the hard parts of the Bible. And I don’t mean just the long boring genealogies, or the historically iffy bits like the number of Israelites who fled Egypt, or why there’s no world-wide flood in the geological record.
The parts I struggle with more are the Bible passages calling for violence in God’s name, or where Ezra 10 says all foreign wives should be sent away. Verses like Colossians 3:22, which says “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything.”
A few weeks ago, I actually had someone come up and ask me—in almost 10 years as a pastor, this is the first time anyone’s ever asked me this question—she told me she’s just decided to start reading the Bible and asked me where to start.
And as soon as she said she was starting to read the Bible, I blurted out, “That’s a dangerous thing to do.” I’m a Lutheran – I 100% believe we should all have access to the Bible in our own language and we should read it. Martin Luther translated the Bible into German so everyone could read it, not just the priests.
But at the same time, there are a lot of people who have rejected Christianity because they’ve read those parts of the Bible; they’ve seen how the Bible has been used by Christians to support slavery, oppress women, support holy wars, and reject science. I recently saw someone say, “People used to question if the Bible was true. Now they question if the Bible is good.” This sermon feels risky because it’s a lot easier to just ignore those parts and focus on the nice children’s Bible. Reading the Bible is dangerous!
And yet, we believe this book contains God’s word. So what do we do with it? How do we wrestle with the tough parts of Scripture without throwing away the whole thing, or picking and choosing just the bits we like?
We could go through each of the problematic verses in Scripture, but (even though it’s only about 5% that are really tough), it’d take a long time and I think it’s more helpful to look at the overall ways we try to faithfully interpret Scripture.
Let me offer a few principles I hold on to that help me keep reading the Bible and also keep being a Christian.
First, the Bible is not just one book; it’s a collection. The word Bible literally means “library.” It’s the same root word as “Bibliography.” There’s a bunch of different genres, from history to poetry to prophecy, legal codes and songs, letters, apocalypse, comedy, and even romance. We shouldn’t try to read it like it’s all one thing, all intended to be literal history. And it includes material written and edited by dozens of people, collected over around 1,300 years.
A second principle is, as Adam Hamilton says, “The biblical authors were very human. The Bible allows us to see their character and often their foibles on full display…the authors and editors of the Old and New Testaments wrote with a particular purpose or purposes in mind. They did not close their eyes as God moved their hands.”
There’s an idea out there called “inerrancy” that you’ll find in the belief statements of some mostly evangelical churches saying since the Bible is inspired by God, and God doesn’t make mistakes, “the Bible must be totally true and trustworthy in everything it says, and whatever it says is God’s word to us.”
Our church tradition doesn’t believe in the doctrine of inerrancy. We can take the Bible seriously, without insisting on taking every part literally. We believe the Bible is inspired by God, meaning God used the Biblical authors’ work.
The Bible contains the story of God’s action in the world, God’s love for the world, as understood by its authors, and their writing comes out of their unique life, their culture, their understanding of the world and of God.
When 1 Timothy says all Scripture is “inspired by God” the word inspired is literally “God-breathed.” Paul’s echoing the image of God breathing life into Adam at creation, and Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit into the disciples on Easter.
Adam Hamilton writes, “Note God’s breathing upon Adam and Jesus breathing upon the disciples did not make any of them infallible or inerrant. But it did bring them to life and empower them.”
That helps with some of Bible’s difficult passages, because it gives us the freedom to argue that perhaps when the Bible tells us God says to kill everyone in a village, or dash enemy’s infants against a rock, it reveals as much about the people writing and the violent culture they live in as it tells us about God.
Some of the stories in the Bible fit into genres of literature shared by the cultures around the people writing it. An early Mesopotamian poem called the Epic of Gilgamesh includes a worldwide flood. People looked at the sacrifices demanded by kings in their culture, and assumed God must be the same way. They use the language and imagery they’re familiar with.
Perhaps the most important Christian principle for reading the Bible is that we interpret Scripture through the lens of Jesus. We don’t worship the Bible; we worship God. Our goal is always to follow Jesus, and we believe Jesus “alone is the infallible and inerrant word of God.”
When Jesus was asked what the most important commandment was, he answered, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” And then he continued, “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)
Everything in Scripture, Jesus says, is about loving God and loving our neighbors. That’s the key by which we understand the Bible, how we understand God. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”
So as Christians, when you have a question about the right way to interpret the Bible, ask what shows love. What would Jesus do? What reflects the love of God revealed in Jesus, who gave his life out of love?
Adam Hamilton talks about the metaphor of a colander or sieve for how we treat the Bible, using Jesus as a filter, a lens. He says, “When we read something in scripture that is perplexing and we wonder how it could possibly reflect the will of God, we might read it in the light of what Jesus said and did…if it’s inconsistent with Jesus’s words and actions and doesn’t align with loving God and neighbor…there is room for us to ask further questions, dig a bit deeper, and wonder if the passage accurately reflects God’s character and timeless will or if it might be telling us more about the biblical author and how people thought about God and God’s will in the historical context in which the passage was written.”
Jesus interpreted Scripture all the time. One of his favorite lines was “You have heard that it was said…but I say to you.” He argued against the overly strict, literal readings of some of the religious leaders.
Reading and interpreting the Bible through the lens of Jesus helps us avoid the trap of making it say whatever we want it to. And as someone once said, “I can do all things through a verse taken out of context.”
I learned recently about an historical artifact at the Museum of the Bible called the “Slave Bible.” It was published in London in 1807 to help missionaries convert enslaved Africans. But they edited out “any parts of Scripture that referred to freedom and equality. Leaving these key themes out meant the editors included only 10 percent of the Old Testament and about 50 percent of the New Testament.” (quote from Zach Lambert’s excellent book, Better Ways to Read the Bible) That might be good for slaveholders, but it’s a terrible misuse of the Bible.
And people do that kind of thing all the time! Not to that extent, but look at how verses from Bible are pulled out of context to exclude people, to judge others, to score political points in culture wars. Or even just to stick on cheap junk to sell to well-intentioned Christians to make a buck!
No wonder people question if the Bible is good.
So if the Bible’s so easy to misuse, if it’s so dangerous, why do we bother reading it?
Well, the Bible matters because it points us to Jesus. Martin Luther called the Bible the “swaddling-clothes and the manger in which Christ lies.” God’s Word has become flesh and lived among us.
The Bible is where we find the stories of who God is. God has inspired the Biblical writers, used their stories, used their reflections and meditations about God, to speak to us.
And let’s be honest about the tough parts. There’s parts I wonder why God included, that I wish weren’t there. But we don’t get to make up our own Bible. If you want to, you can. I have a completely blank Bible right here – you can put whatever you want into it.
But the Bible is the Scripture God’s given us, God’s word written for us. And we’re invited to wrestle with it.
When we read them together, through the lens of Jesus, these 66 books contain the story—the drama—of God’s redemptive love for the world and God’s will for our lives. It’s a book of liberation and hope, showing us who God is and who we are.
Again, the words of Paul: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.”
I pray you read your Bible and encounter God’s life-giving grace in its stories.
Amen
Read part one of this sermon series: Is God Real? or continue to part three: Who’s In and Who’s Out?
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