It’s in the Bible
In the churches where I grew up, citing what the Bible said on some topic was regarded as a claim to ultimate authority. It was taken for granted that the Bible couldn’t be wrong about anything, and it was assumed that determining what the Bible taught was relatively unproblematic. People knew, of course, that other Christian groups had different interpretations of what the Bible said, but among the churches I attended there was great confidence that where these other groups taught something different from what we said, they were wrong. There was a phrase I often heard that characterized the dominant attitude: “God said it; I believe it; that settles it.” Of course, what God said was to be found in the Bible.
The implicit assumption of identifying what the Bible said with what God said was sometimes the thought that biblical texts could be read as if God had dictated them. Some who realized the implausibility of that way of thinking about the Bible suggested that God just shaped what was said to make sure that it was correct. But correct about what? Some claimed that the Bible couldn’t be wrong about anything. They reasoned that the Bible came from God and that whatever communication came from God must be totally accurate.
Is the Bible accurate when it makes scientific claims? To most serious interpreters, it seems pretty clear that writers of Hebrew Scripture were assuming the science of their time. In the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis the priestly writers describe the creator as making a dome to cover the earth. (Earlier translators used the term “firmament.”) Scholars who are familiar with ancient scientific pictures recognize that the account resembles others of the time in which the sky is like a huge domed stadium covering the flat earth. The dome is described as separating waters above the dome from waters under it. Later in Genesis openings or windows are made in the dome for water to come down. The account is understandable if we imagine that the writers are expressing their theological ideas in terms of the science of the time. But saying as much means that we shouldn’t look to biblical writings as a source for scientific knowledge. We should distinguish what God has to say on that topic with what a biblical writer says. The biblical writer can describe things in ways that people with a different scientific understanding have to think of as mistaken.
Is the Bible accurate with regard to its ethical teaching? It is not difficult to find within the Bible ethical teachings that strike most of us as profoundly wrong. For example, in Hebrew Scriptures there are multiple teachings about how slaves should be treated, but these teachings are embedded in writings that take for granted that slavery is a permissible practice. If we think of the writers as making presumptions characteristic of the time, they are understandable. And if we view the institution of slavery in the light of some biblical teachings that that come later, we can see the seeds for recognizing that this way of treating others is unacceptable. But to do so is to recognize that some ethical teachings that are in the Bible can’t simply be identified with what God says. They reflect cultural understandings of the time that we sometimes have reason to judge inadequate.
Is the Bible accurate with regard to all it says about God? Well, it includes some accounts of God as behaving in ways that seem reminiscent of human weaknesses. In Exodus 32, for example, God is described as losing his temper and needed to be reminded by Moses of things he should take into account to keep from acting rashly. There are places in the Bible where God orders the extermination of whole populations and is angry when not everyone is killed. We can say that God actually did all the things that in some cases strike us as inconsistent with later conclusions about God as perfect. But an alternative is to say that biblical writers are assuming ideas about God that were widespread at the time, but need correction in the light of fuller biblical revelation.
In my church after a scriptural text is read, we say: “We hear the voice of God through these words.” Implicit in this response is the idea that God’s words and the words of the text are not the same thing. God may speak to us through these texts, but in doing so God is using thought processes of people with a very limited understanding of what God seeks to reveal. If we think of God as communicating with us through them, it is not a simple process. We listen to what they say, but some of what they say will need to fit with things that we think we know from science or history or what we take to be well established by fuller biblical revelation.
As we use the Bible, we have to take into account the limitations of the messengers through which the message comes. We can hear the voice of God through them, but we also hear assumptions coming from their time and place that we can’t fully identify with the words of God. So, observing that something is “in the Bible” might be a first step, but it is not the last step to determining whether it’s something we should accept. Because the process is complex, our judgments about what God is saying are not infallible. But in the end what we need is not assurance that we always get it right. Some things we can be pretty sure of, such as God wanting us to love our neighbors. When we are not sure, we can often withhold judgment, and we can have the humility to change our judgments when we have good reason to think that they are defective.
