Biblical Self Defense

A Sermon by Donel McClellan
First Congregational United Church of Christ
Bellingham, Washington

At the beginning of each confirmation class it is my custom to have a pop quiz. I show the class a bottle of jelly beans and pass out a paper with two questions. 1) How many jellybeans do you think are in the jar? 2) What are three of your favorite songs?

Then we talk about the answers to these questions. Although the guesses on jellybeans may range all over the place, there is only one correct answer. We find that by counting the Jellybeans. The person with the closest estimate gets the beans. With the song selections, however, there is little agreement since tastes in music are so very personal.

Next we discuss whether confirmation is more like counting jellybeans of talking about favorite songs.

This morning I want to ask you. Is reading scripture more like counting jellybeans or discussing favorite music? In other words, is there a specific, discoverable meaning in each part of scripture or should we approach it more like a work of art to be savored and adopted?

Last Sunday a member told me that some colleagues at work were voting for president Bush because they believed that he would bring the Rapture. They asked what they could quote in the Bible to challenge these people.

This morning’s hot topic is an attempt to respond to such questions. What can a liberal Christian do when confronted by someone quoting scripture to support a vision of a faith with which one doesn’t agree?

My short answer is that when confronted with somebody with a literal interpretation of scripture there is nothing you can say in response to them. It is like discussing music with a jellybean counter. Because of different starting places there is little common ground for a discussion.

My longer answer is to encourage you to understand scripture in such a way that you are confident in using the Bible as a resource for your growing faith.

Lets begin with a brief discussion of authority. The Bible is a source of authority for all Christians, however it is not seen in the same way by different persuasions. More liberal Christians tend to affirm four sources of authority: Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience. The Methodist tradition calls these Wesley’s quadrilateral. When seeking direction, many of us begin with scripture, compare it with the church’s wisdom over the ages, sort out relevant items through our powers of reason and compare the result with our experience of the world.

In contrast, Roman Catholics locate authority primarily in Tradition—the teaching of the church. This has been made clear over the past few months as the prelates of the church are emphasizing the responsibility of individual Catholics to respect all the moral teachings of their church.

On the other hand, conservative Christians tend to locate authority in the Bible. They believe that the Bible, rightly interpreted is a direct communication from God to humankind. And, although conservatives hold that there is a single correct interpretation of scripture, many passages are still in dispute among different conservative groups.

Let me suggest several guidelines which we might use to read and interpret the Bible.

We begin with authority. In our scripture lesson we encountered John’s marvelous vision that the eternal Word of God existed from the beginning, and in Jesus Christ became one of us.

And when to comes to texts, we know that no interpretation of a text can ever be absolutized, for the only Absolute is neither the Bible not the Church but the living God.^{^[1]}

For me this means that Jesus is the Word of God and the Bible reveals that Word to us who study it. If you can sense the distinction, the Bible is not God’s Word but reveals God’s word, Jesus, to the church. The authority therefore does not lie in the words of the Bible, but in the gospel, the Good News which Jesus preached.

The Bible is my authority because I believe it is inspired and sacred scripture. But the inspiration is multiple and indirect and, at base, the Bible is a human document. The Bible is inspired because its authors were inspired. It’s translators were inspired. It’s readers are inspired. Inspiration does not stop with the text, but begins before the text was written and continues until the text is read. The authority of the Bible lies in this complex continuum of inspiration. This means that the authority will always be somewhat ambiguous. Therefore, readers of the Bible bring the history of tradition, their own rational powers, and the crucible of their experience to the task of interpreting the Bible.

That brings me to a second point. Reading the Bible is not easy. Whoever suggested that you simply need to read it for its plain sense and obey it, was misguided. The Bible was written over a hundreds of years by many different authors, priests and story tellers, poets and prophets, court historians and wisdom collectors. Each author wrote from the perspective of a particular time in history and wrote to people in a specific culture. Not everything that was written then is useful today. And to understand the meaning of the authors we need to know something of their times and cultures. Was the audience free or in captivity? Were the authors living in their own country or in exile? What political and military powers threatened the existence of the people?

This is just the beginning of the questions we might being with us to a Bible passage in order to understand it today. It is not easy to read the Bible and the authority of scripture is not always clear. So how shall we clarify this complex book.

That brings me to my third suggestion. We read the Bible as metaphor. In order to do this we have to overcome a cultural prejudice that holds that metaphor is less valid or true than fact. Once again we are back to the image of counting jellybeans or naming favorite songs. The Bible is frequently more like poetry or folk tales than an historical transcript.

Metaphor is not less than literal meaning but more than literal meaning. Many of the stories in the Bible really, literally happened. However, some stories were intended to be seen as metaphor: the creation story, Adam and Eve, Cain and Able, Noah and the great flood, the Tower of Babel, perhaps even Abraham and Sara are true although they may never have happened.

Thomas Mann defined a myth (a particular kind of metaphorical narrative) as “a story about the way things never were, but always are.” So, is a myth true? Literally true, no. Really true, yes.

A Catholic priest once said in a sermon, “The Bible is true, and some of it happened.” To make his point obvious: the truth of the Bible is not dependent on its historical factuality.

The same point is made by a Native American storyteller as he begins telling his tribe's story of creation: “Now I don't know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.”^{^[2]}

Some of us listen to Garrison Keillor and his stories of Lake Wobegon. We know that the town and lake are mythical, but the stories of the people of Lake Wobegon ring true because they are the stuff of our common human experience.

Likewise, the Bible is really true even if some parts of it did not literally happen as they are described. Over the centuries, the metaphorical reading of the Bible was the most common approach. It is only for the past 150 years or so that some Christians have considered the Bible to be literally inspired and therefore the absolute authority of faith and practice.

In response to such Christians we may say, we read the scripture differently as we are led by God’s Holy Spirit.

My fourth and final suggestion for those who want to defend their understanding of the Bible, is that there is a single criterion through which we may interpret scripture. Walter Bruggemann put it very simply.

Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said that the arc of history is bent toward justice. And the parallel statement I would like to make is that the arc of the Gospel is bent toward inclusiveness.^{^[3]}

Jesus overarching vision in the New Testament is a vision of inclusiveness. God is not God of the Jews only, or the Christians only. God is the loving parent of all people who loves each one with unsurpassing graciousness. The task of the followers of Jesus is to love on another with that kind of love, and to extend that love to everyone in the world.

You can use the Bible to support both sides of almost every issue. However, when the vision of inclusiveness is brought into the conversation, some biblical passages must be put aside.

William Sloane Coffin, wraps up this rubric in his usually terse and colorful language:

When everything biblical is not Christ-like, we Christians need to develop an interpretive theory of Scripture. I think the love of Jesus is indeed the plumb line by which everything is to be measured. And while laws may be more rigid, love is more demanding, for love insists on motivation and goes between, around, and way beyond all laws.^{^[4]}

$ We will recognize that the Word of God is not a book but a person, Jesus Christ.

$ We will understand that reading the Bible is hard work and our answers are generally somewhat inconclusive.

Finally, the Bible is the product of community and it is best read and interpreted in community. That is the primary function of the Christian church. With God’s guidance, we can discover the meaning and authority of scriptures for us in this time.

Now, if someone challenges you to a discussion about the Bible, take them on and learn from the experience.

[1]. Paul Hammer the Bible Seriously, “God is Still Speaking About Marriage Resource Collection”, , Taking The United Church of Christ, p. 15

[2]. Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering the Life of Faith, Harper San Francisco, 3003, p. 50-51

[3]. Walter Bruggemann, “God is Still Speaking About Marriage Resource Collection”, The United Church of Christ, p. 20

[4]. William Sloane Coffin, Credo, p. 159