\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Why do Christians love the Bible?\u00a0 Since many millions of us read it fairly frequently, and hundreds of millions of us revere it as a communication from, or at least about, a benevolent God, what in it makes reasonably intelligent people take it seriously?\u00a0 These questions seem particularly acute when we recognize that many of the props that supported the Bible for some of its readers (belief in its scientific accuracy, for example) have been kicked out from under it.\u00a0 They also become pressing because many of the efforts to \u201csave\u201d the Bible only work by suppressing any sort of careful reading or questioning of it.\u00a0 Too often, Christians take refuge in sentimental, \u201cwhat does it mean to you?\u201d approaches that substitute a certain kind of approved experience or even emotional profile for any sort of activity that deserves the name of thinking.\u00a0 So, we should ask the question, again, is the Bible reliable?\u00a0 Why do we love it so?<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps we might begin with what the Bible is and is not.\u00a0 It is not a book of science.\u00a0 It says nothing about how species develop, the hydrology or geology of the earth, the size of the observable universe, or any number of other questions that we modern people are legitimately interested in.\u00a0 People who love the Bible are thus free to pursue scientific inquiry full on without worrying that they will somehow transgress a spiritual boundary.\u00a0 Since science is not the only way of understanding reality \u2013 and in many ways is a far less interesting and informative way than philosophy, history, or poetry \u2013 to say that the Bible is not a scientific work in no way denigrates it, anymore than saying that my child is not a supernova somehow makes her less interesting or important.\u00a0 Only the crudest sort of eighteenth-century reductionism (which often is still being played out in the popular media, oddly enough) could think of \u201cnon-scientific\u201d as a flaw.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Also, the Bible is not a blueprint for all human societies in every time and place.\u00a0 Although many of its readers attempt to read off its pages some sort of map for their lives either individually or collectively, it simply does not work this way, at least not in a simple, straightforward fashion.\u00a0 There is not always a straight line between a given biblical statement and a behavior or practice in the real world of believers.\u00a0 There never has been, and sensitive readers have always known that.\u00a0 Moving from Bible to behavior requires careful thought in the context of a community of faith.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What is the Bible, then?\u00a0\u00a0 A simple read-through would reveal a great many forms of literature, a multitude of ideas and commitment, and, in short, an extraordinary collection of human experiences and emotions.\u00a0 Page after page of soaring poetry in every mode of human life from ecstasy to horror and despair.\u00a0 Stories about kings and prophets, and of course Jesus of Nazareth and his marvelously self-deprecating disciples (who after all, gave us the stories of their own failures).\u00a0 Visions of redeemed worlds and cosmic struggles.\u00a0 All these things and more populate the pages of the Bible.\u00a0 Much of it is poetry to be relished for its imagery and its profound insight into human existence.\u00a0 Much else is narrative to be entered into with imagination and sympathy for the predicaments in which we find ourselves.\u00a0 The very earthiness of the Bible, its refusal to embrace churchy, sentimental (that word again!), washed-out views of reality makes it both challenging and endearing.\u00a0 It is still the inevitable book.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At this point, however, many modern readers may offer objections that seems to them serious (though I personally find them much less so than I used to).\u00a0 \u201cIf the Bible is just poetry or just story, then in what sense is it true?\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it just propaganda for somebody\u2019s beliefs somewhere, maybe even just a power play?\u201d\u00a0 One hears this sort of thing all the time, and it makes sense to try to respond to it in some way.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The first objection strikes me as the less serious.\u00a0 We might well ask a question or two in response.\u00a0 \u201cWhat do you mean by true?\u201d\u00a0 Surely you don\u2019t mean simply \u201cverifiable\u201d or \u201crepeatable\u201d in the way scientific experiments allegedly are.\u00a0 If you do, then you are simply begging the question: only things that are verifiable and accessible to all are true because only things that are verifiable and accessible are true.\u00a0 How do you know that the statement itself is true, since it can\u2019t be testable in any timeframe or circumstance that would be manageable?<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Take, for example, the lovely little line from the Song of Songs: \u201cLove is as strong as death.\u201d\u00a0 It comes near the end of the book after some of the most gorgeous passages in literature describing frustrated longing for one\u2019s lover.\u00a0 Is it true?\u00a0 If empirical verification is our only avenue to truth, then of course we are at sea, since we can\u2019t measure, much less compare, the strength of love or death.\u00a0 Their\u00a0 inevitability is our experience so far, but who can speak of the future, and who can say if \u201cstrength\u201d and \u201cinevitability\u201d are the same thing?\u00a0 Yet is it true?\u00a0 Certainly our experience seems to indicate reasons to believe that it might be, and we often act as though it is.\u00a0 I think we could multiply such examples a thousandfold, not only from the Bible, of course, but from all of human literature.\u00a0 There is simply no reason to reject the Bible on grounds of scientism, since the belief that only science provides truth is simply a prejudice, an unwarranted assumption that is self-contradictory on its face.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The second objection is thus more serious, in my view, and it is where most modern critics of the Bible land.\u00a0 The claim we often hear is that the Bible is simply immoral, that it advocates practices and beliefs that hurt real people and that it attributes to God attitudes and beliefs that in a human being would be considered reprehensible.\u00a0 This claim is so serious that many religious thinkers have felt a need to address it, going back more than two thousand years.\u00a0 That will be the subject of my next post….<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Why do Christians love the Bible?\u00a0 Since many millions of us read it fairly frequently, and hundreds of millions of us revere it as a communication from, or at least about, a benevolent God, what in it makes reasonably intelligent people take it seriously?\u00a0 These questions seem particularly acute when we recognize that many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3538,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n