What I’m doing here

While I have my own biases and agendas like anyone else, one of my goals is to avoid promoting an overly narrow ideology or being stereotypically conservative or liberal on theological issues.

Two words, I hope, describe my approach to Scripture:

(1) Critical: In college, I badly wanted reassurance that every word in the Bible was literally true; I’m not looking for that anymore. Though I wish the case were different, close study of Scripture consistently suggests that it is written by humans with different ideas (some of them contradictory) about God and Christ.

(2) Committed: many people that I talk to are looking for excuses to discredit scripture so they can set aside the passages they don’t like; to my mind, that is no way to find the truth about God. The Bible has basically always been the church’s book throughout Christian history, and I am convinced that such consistency is due to God’s will.

Overall, I’m writing based on a sort of two-pronged paradox: On the one hand I'm making logical arguments, so I clearly affirm human reason; but I also deeply distrust the human mind. On the other hand, I affirm that Scripture is in some sense the Word of God, but I also understand it as, in other ways, a product of human thought.

Sometimes I think I’m foolish to hold to both of these commitments, but as the expression goes (though I think I’m slightly misusing it), the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I can’t entirely defend why I think this makes sense, but my experience of Scripture is that God speaks through it, and my experience of its depiction and interpretations of Jesus is that he is God Incarnate.

One of the beauties of this method of reading Scripture is that the different books of the Bible are allowed to have different opinions about who God is and what God does. This is disconcerting (or even devastating) to consider at first, but in the end I’ve found it to be both beautiful and exhiliarating. Mark makes some powerful and important claims about Jesus, and John makes others, many of which are quite different. The truth, presumably, is somewhere in the intersection.

Many, no doubt, will feel that this kind of interpretation (which, incidentally, is pretty common within critical biblical studies circles) denies the Truth of God’s word. I’ll respond by stating the conviction that ultimately guides all my interpretations: God can reveal Godself in whatever way God wants.

But this, again, cuts both ways. We are free to kick and scream that God should have given us a set of scriptures that are utterly consistent and accurate, or that God should have given us teachings better suited to the sensibilities of our modern liberal society. But it seems God is difficult to order about.

What we do have are one enormous mess of a world––largely of our own making––and a book of powerful stories and teachings which seem to me to reveal a God who is capable of lifting us above (and perhaps even correcting) the mess just mentioned.