We are obliged, therefore, to say that whoever speaks that which is foreign to religion is using many words, while he who speaks the words of truth, even should he go over the whole field and omit nothing, is always speaking the one word.
Origen
What follows is hardly original, and it probably isn't interesting. Yet, it needs to be repeated. It needs to be memorized. The Word of God is not the Bible. The Bible is the written, and edited, testimony to the Word of God, who the Bible itself declares quite clearly is Jesus Christ.
At the end of the day, we Christians need to read the Bible, as we do all things, in Jesus Christ (to paraphrase T. F. Torrance). Even as we disagree over trifles like liturgical practice, or a detail in our thinking on the sacraments, we need to be held fast by the reality that the Spirit that gives life to the words on the page (which are, as St. Paul noted, quite dead) is the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ.
Anything else isn't reading the Bible. Anything else is just crap. Anything that does not give life, that does not bear the fruits of the Spirit, that does not, in the end return our thoughts and our hearts and our lives to Jesus Christ isn't returning to that one word that defines all the other ones.
2 comments:
"The Word of God is not the Bible"
Amen to that!
This reminds me of a sermon a former pastor of mine preached on "The Priority of Scripture". He believes inerrancy is heresay and called it a "dead metaphor".
I've really never understood that doctrine, it's never made much sense to me.
The view of Scripture of free from human error because it is the Divine revealed Word of God is a recent declaration, made only in the past century and a quarter. It was developed, at least in its refined form, by Scripture scholars at Princeton Theological Seminary, as a a reaction to what used to be called "the higher criticism", historical criticism. Essentially, the view of inerrancy is that any critical method that questions the textual validity questions its truth-value.
The problem with this view is it distorts the idea of how Scripture operates as a witness to revelation. It does no damage to the testimony of the Bible to claim, as is obvious to any reader, that, just as a for instance, the first two chapters of Genesis contradict one another.
One data point fundamentalists point to is that, by drawing attention to errors in Scripture - one of my favorites is that the mathematical concept of pi is defined as the whole number 3, rather than the irrational number that it is, in Leviticus - aids the enemies of the Church. The response to this claim (usually put, "if we admit one error, then it calls in to question the whole thing") is simple enough for even a mildly educated person; to whit, "Sure, there are contradictions, errors, mistakes, etc. The Bible isn't about that kind of thing, anyway."
That is why centering reading on Christ - in many ways similar to the medieval practice in which Christ is read back in to the Hebrew Scriptures (although even someone like Martin Luther could take that too far, quoting "Jesus" even as he was actually quoting one of the prophets) - is a basic hermeneutical principal. Again, critics consider this circular; after all, how can we really "read" Christ if we have yet to encounter Christ before reading the text?
The absence of any understanding of grace is part of the problem with this question. Wesley's notion of "prevenient" grace, that grace which is operant even before we know there is such a thing, intervenes (like St. Paul's idea of the Spirit turning our mumbling prayer in to something God understands) and brings us the meaning and context (Jesus Christ) even as we encounter Christ in the text itself.
Inerrancy is a highly refined, rationalist approach to reading the Scriptures. It is also quite wrong. I wouldn't go so far as to call it heretical; heresy is the notion that "error" can separate us from God, presenting a danger to our salvation. I tend to view differences like this as just that; at the very least, I feel challenged by fundamentalism to familiarize myself with Scripture to the point that I can respond intelligently to the challenge they present. All the same, it does lead to the idolatry of Scripture, and treating the Christian Scriptures in much the way Islam treats the Holy Q'uran - the latter being the dictated, inerrant word of God (in this case, Mohammed was the human transcriptionist of the seemingly inexhaustible angel Gabriel). Irony abounds in this observation.
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