I write this time to address some of the reasons given for considering the Bible to be nothing but a collection of stories people have told themselves about the world, themselves and God.  I speak of events deemed unbelievable to the unbeliever - such as Eve being made from Adam's rib, Jonah surviving for three days and three nights inside a whale or big fish, the sun standing still in the sky so the Israelites would be able to defeat their enemies, Jesus' raising of Lazarus or resurrecting himself and the like.  These events, violating one law of nature or another, are said to be beyond believing by a modern, thinking person, and thus call into question God's existence in general or his responsibility for the content of this collection of books.

I've come across objections to the truth of these accounts from two sorts of Bible critics - those who give them as some of the reasons they don't believe in God (or the God of the Bible), and those who claim to be Christians but not to believe the Bible to be a message from God.  My answer to both is the same, or at least similar.  To the self-proclaimed Christian I address the following:  As a Christian, or even as a Deist, you hold that God created the world and everything in it; is that not true?  Then how is it that you believe in the huge and unexplainable miracle of creation from nothing by divine fiat while at the same time raising objections about little stuff such as Jonah and Eve and Joshua's exploits or Jesus' physical resurrection from the dead?

For the person who finds these unexplainable events reasons not to believe in God, the question is similar.  Do you believe what science tells us about the origin of the universe - that some seventeen billion years ago or so, nothing exploded into something in a singular event that was itself uncaused?  If it is possible to believe that's how we and everything else came into being, isn't it a bit disingenuous to refuse to give credence to Biblical miracles not nearly so mind-blowing as that?

The title says it all.  It seems to me that both sorts of "unbelievers" are just as much believers as am I, for what's so difficult about a bit of this or that meddling with the way you've made a thing when you are the one who made it in the first place?  Even I create and recreate, change and polish the words I use in writing.  How much more fine-tuning and beginning again is involved in composing a poem or a symphony or a science experiment?  What we can do is a poor imitation of the creativity of our Creator, our freedom is but a copy of that of God, and our pride at what we can think and do ought to give us appreciation and a little bit of awe for the unlimited capabilities of the One who made us.  Or so it seems to me. 

And you?

In my last post I made an assertion regarding the uselessness for supporting a religious faith of a bible that is only a collection of stories told by many writers over the course of centuries.  While I explained that holding this view is what gives us the opportunity to make up our own rules for living and invent whatever rights we think we want, I didn't really go into the problem with such a bible as the basis for any worthwhile faith.  So here goes.

Actually, I'm not going to talk about just any old Bible.  This discussion is about the Christian Bible, consisting of 66 books, divided into 39 Old Testament books and 27 New Testament ones.  The Bible, then, is more like a small library containing all the information a person needs to have a relationship with that being who created everything that has been created, namely God.  In addition to Christianity, portions of this Bible for a partial basis for Judaism.  That would be the Tenach - what Christians call the Old Testament.  Furthermore, there are numerous other religions which rely more or less upon the Bible for background for and understanding of their own additional scriptures.  Some of the major ones are Islam, in which Jesus the son of Mary is named Issa, and Ishmael is the son of Abraham who is of real importance, not Isaac; Mormonism (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), in which Jesus' death outside Jerusalem was a mistake necessitating his coming again to the New World as recounted in the Book of Mormon; and Jehovah's Witnesses, whose New World Translation of the Bible takes certain liberties in translation to bolster its deviation from Christianity.

I mention these other significant faiths to underscore the point that hundreds of millions of people think of the Bible as more than a mere collection of stories written by lots of men long ago.  Of course, we could be wrong.  But I don't believe we are.  In its depiction of human nature, the Bible rings true.  Various other explanations for the way things are and people act do not do the job that the Bible does.  Freud?  Obsessed with sex.  Eastern monism?  Try picnicking on a freeway to see if the world of appearances is illusory.  And what of existentialism, naturalism, nihilism?  They are nothing but a slippery slope to hopelessness, to pessimism and despair.

Contrast these unrealistic worldviews with that of the Bible, where we find Jesus who came to serve his creation by laying down his life so that we might live.  In the Bible we encounter God the Son who did not consider himself so high and mighty that he was unwilling to join the human race but humbled himself, living as a servant to all he met.  It is his love that is the model for our own efforts to love as we have been loved, to do to others as we would have them do to us.  It is his service that inspires our own, giving back a portion of what we have been given, without compulsion other than our own internal sense of gratitude.

There are many other reasons to trust the Bible, including the thousands of ancient copies that we have discovered over the years, the quotations from it in a multitude of other languages such that scholars have said that if every Bible were to vanish from the earth tomorrow, it would be possible to reconstruct it with great precision from the early Christian writings which quoted heavily from it.  Still, though, the most important reason to believe that the Bible is a message from God is its truthfulness.  We are the sort of people the Bible says we are.  We are motivated by just the motivations it describes.  And we think and speak and act and seek to avoid consequences today just as people did in Bible times.  Why is that, do you think?  Because the Bible is a word from God - a word for a long ago time, and a word for today and for tomorrow.

What do you say?

I said in the first post that there are two points contained in the email from the ABC-TV person that set me to writing these observations.  The first was the clear expression of that view of the Bible as a collection of stories made up by many men centuries ago that rules it out as a basis for the Christian or any other faith.  This attitude, as I wrote, has led to the movements within and without the church to make up our own rules and currently to redefine marriage.  This outcome is inevitable when we have no word from God concerning how we are to live.  Remember that I don't agree with the ABC-TV person, though I thank him or her for such a clear statement of this all-too-common view of the Bible.

I have to say, though, that the reference to the Declaration of Independence as some sort of opposing authority to the Bible left me and a friend of mine scratching our head.  Here's why:  "All men are created equal" is the statement quoted.  And I fully endorse it.  But notice what is going on in that claim:  All men actually means all human beings - male and female, young and old and in between, and of any and all races and colors.  But the equality referenced is an equality of createdness, whatever that means.  And while we cannot exactly pin down what it does mean, a bit of looking around tells us what it doesn't mean.  Being created equal doesn't mean all having the same beauty, the same height, weight, eye or hair color, intelligence, drive, creativity, sense of humor, wealth, advantages, opportunities - well, you get the idea.  There's a huge list of what "created equal" doesn't mean, and that list may include exactly what the ABC-TV person thinks it does mean.  Here's what I mean.

When I remember the next line of the Declaration, the fog begins to lift:  ...and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights...  Wow!  Imagine that!  Having been created equal, we don't get to declare what our equal rights are, no matter how confused about this our friends at the UN appear to be.  It's the creator who decides, and determines, and endows those rights.  And we who view the Bible as a message from our Creator look to that same message for both rights and restrictions so endowed.  Perhaps our equality includes all equally being prohibited by that Creator certain activities that are not good for us.  Perhaps one of those prohibited activities is just what the ELCA is arguing about:  same-sex sexual activity.  It could be - I believe it definitely is - that we are all equally prohibited by God from same-sex sexual activity.  Everyone.  Equally.  Prohibited.

As I see it the Declaration of Independence is no refuge at all for those who want to live their own way and make their own rules.  It acknowledges our dependence upon the Creator and our subjection to his rules as clearly as does the Bible.  The emailer from ABC-TV does not help his case by appealing to the Declaration of Independence.  He merely underscores our dependence for both rights and restrictions on the Creator who made us.

What do you think?

As the ELCA [that's the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America] pumps out news releases reflecting support for the recommendations of the latest task force for changing the rules about sexual behavior - support from former presiding bishop Herb Chilstrom following a few weeks after the church council gave their endorsement - I have looked in vain for any dissenting view to be reported by the official ELCA news service.  There is, of course, dissent in the ELCA, and it's strong enough that the powers that be have sought to assure the change by changing the voting rules from 2/3 to a simple majority.  Given that dissent can't apparently be officially reported, here some is:

In 1987, I had the privilege  to be a delegate to the final national convention of the American Lutheran Church as it was negotiating the terms of merger with two other groups of  Lutherans.  There, what turned out in retrospect to be a very important debate over one word in the constitution of the then-aborning ELCA was lost.  The ALC, in describing the role of Scripture in the life of the church, had called it someting like the "sole source and norm for faith and life."  The proposal was to remove 'sole' from the description.  It doesn't change anything to leave out 'sole', it was said.  Still, I wondered, if it doesn't matter, why the insistence on removing the word?  They got their way.  And now I know why.

Fast forward to a recent email response by someone at ABC Television to a Christian's complaint about that network's regular practice of pushing homosexuality as normal, acceptable behavior, with reference to a particular sitcom.  Here's the response:  "How about getting your nose out of the Bible (which is ONLY a book of stories compiled by MANY different writers hundreds of years ago) and read the declaration of independence (which our nation is built on), where it says 'All Men are Created equal,' and try treating them that way for a change!"

This response contains two distinct and different points.  The first is the assertion that the Bible is ONLY a book of stories.  This assertion is more than the opinion of this one writer.  It is one of two basic beliefs about the Bible that together define as clear a Mason-Dixon line as any in American cultural life.  The lines are drawn in these terms:  The Bible is either a human document or a message from God

At the risk of explaining the obvious, we who believe that the Bible is a message from God - delivered through, to be sure, many different human authors over hundreds of years - take what the Bible says about a topic to be God's Word on the subject, whether we like what God says or not.  Those, on the other hand, who agree with the ABC employee that the Bible is only a book of stories, and not a message from God, have no difficulty discounting what the Bible says because it's just a collection of the opinions of men who lived a long time ago.  What comes as a surprise to many who hold the first view is that so many of our fellow church members hold the second.  Yet it is now becoming undeniable that it is so.

If God's message to us is that that sexual act that constitutes same-sex sexual activity (to lie with a man as with a woman, as Leviticus puts it) is an abomination to God, then our church can never declare it O.K.  If our church is on the verge of doing just that, then we cannot claim to be led by church council members or a former presiding bishop who consider the Bible to be a message from God.  If t he Bible is from God, then it is irrelevant how long ago it was written or how many different authors God used to bring his Word to us.  If the Bible is from God, the claim is silly that when the relevant words were written, people didn't know about sexual love between two men or two women.  It doesn't matter what people knew or believed then if God inspired the writing.  And if the Bible is not from God, what it says about this or anything else doesn't matter.  It's just a record of the opinions of people long dead.

As long as we ask the wrong question, we'll keep getting the wrong answer.  If the Bible is God's Word - a message from God - then same-sex sexual activity can never be approved by the ELCA or any other God-honoring church.  If it "...is ONLY a book of stories compiled by MANY different writers hundreds of years ago," as the ABC TV emailer said, then we have no clue how God wants us to live.  I disagree with the ABC guy, and in future posts I'll be discussing my reasons for disagreeing along with other relevant topics. 

What say you?