Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost

The scripture today is 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17.

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

May we hear what the Spirit is saying to the church.

So this morning we are continuing our summer sermon series, taking a look at what the Bible actually says about a number of hotly contested subjects.

This morning we're taking a look at what the Bible really says about biblical literalism, infallibility, and inerrancy.

Now, one of the first rules for taking the Bible seriously means to not claim something about the Bible that the Bible does not claim about itself.

So let's begin by taking a look at today's scripture reading from 2 Timothy.

Beverly read this just a few minutes ago.

Now notice a couple of things in these Bible verses.

Okay, the verses claim that Scripture is inspired by God, but note that it does not say infallible.

Note that it does not say inerrant, and also note that it doesn't say that all scripture should be read literally.

In fact, if you were to do a search for the words inerrant or infallible in any modern English translation of the Bible, you wouldn't find them.

Because like the New Testament, when this verse was written, it wasn't even collected yet.

It wasn't a thing yet.

The New Testament as a collection did not exist.

So where did these ideas about infallibility and inerrancy, where do they come from?

What does it even mean to say that the Bible is inerrant or infallible?

Okay, first it means to say that the Bible is without any error whatsoever.

It's inerrant, no errors.

Now, this is a toughie.

This is a difficult one.

If you read the Bible closely, you will see there are times that there are discrepancies.

Look at the creation stories.

How many days the flood took place, whenever Noah was in the ark with two of each kind of animal or seven pairs?

Are they clean or unclean animal?

It gets difficult.

You have different sources sharing stories that get compiled together and they don't always match up.

There are some geographical errors.

There are some scientific errors.

But to claim that the Bible is infallible and inerrant would mean that in the original manuscripts of the Bible, which we don't have, we just have copies of copies.

But it would be a claim that says in the original manuscripts, the Bible is without any error whatsoever.

So that's like basically what it means.

And I'm guessing most of you are probably familiar with that approach.

You've probably heard about the Bible being inerrant and infallible.

You've probably come across that before.

Perhaps what is most surprising of all is that the idea of inerrancy and infallibility, it's a new idea.

It's not an ancient one.

As the biblical scholar Marcus Board points out, quote, the factual inerrancy of the Bible was just affirmed over three centuries ago.

The claim was a reaction to the Enlightenment.

I don't know about you, but I grew up being taught that this is how the Bible was always understood from the earliest days.

That it is inerrant, infallible, without error, and should always be read literally.

That's what I grew up believing.

That was what I associated with basically every vacation Bible school of my childhood.

So so how do we make sense of this kind of thing?

So the idea of the Bible being a modern conerrancy of the Bible being a modern concept is something that I was not familiar with until I went to seminary.

I just took it for granted that that's how the Bible had always been, you know, considered to be understood.

But whenever you think about it as a reaction against the Enlightenment, you begin to understand part of what's taking place.

And this is also the rise of what is now known as fundamentalism in the United States.

This emerges out of distinctly Protestant forms of Christianity, uh, especially in the United States.

So you have uh the Enlightenment, which is kind of like the advent of the age of reason, or you have scientific discovery.

So you have folks like Galileo, who challenges a lot of scientific understandings of the world.

Uh you you have people like Charles Darwin, who challenges a lot of ideas about how the world started.

You get concepts like evolution, you you have people arguing that the earth, brace for it, is not the center of the universe.

And and and so people are like, the church has always taught me that God created, and God created in this particular way, the earth is at the center of all that is.

Remember when we looked at the ancient cosmologies from um a couple of weeks ago?

How do I know what to trust as being true if the scientific community is telling me this, and yet the Bible says this, and church tradition has taught me this, how do I know what is true?

But you also have something else lurking that is part and parcel of American fundamentalism.

That's also um something that is a big part of the reason that ideas such as inerrancy and infallibility and I can't say the word infallibility very well when I say it uh like this many times at once.

I've already tried to run inerrant and infallible together twice, I think, in this sermon so far.

Um you have also the idea of a social order.

And the church and many Christians have felt very strongly at different times along uh the way of what that social order would look like.

And in fundamentalism, the social order has men at the top.

It is not egalitarian, it is not based on men and women being equal.

And there were also constructs such as race that emerged, you know, through this time.

And you have ideas that people want to say go back to God in the Bible, i.e., men should be the ones who have the most power and women should be subservient, or that one particular race, the white race, as a construct, let's be mindful of, as a construct, a modern construct, that race is superior to other races.

And so people would appeal to the Bible and they would say it's God's order.

And a lot of times they were really poor readings and poor interpretations of the Bible, but people, you know, they would make that argument, but they would say, it's not me making the argument, it's it's God making the argument.

See, it's in the Bible here.

And if the Bible says it, and if the Bible is without error, then it must be true.

So a lot of what we see in terms of the rise of inerrancy and infallibility is a reaction against the Enlightenment and the age of modernity, modernism.

Um, so just keep that in mind.

Um, but saying that the books of the Bible are without any error in any way would have come as a shock to the ancient listeners.

They would have been surprised to hear this.

They recognized that the writers of the Bible were offering various perspectives about a whole lot of different topics, especially what God is like and what God wants from human beings.

And the Bible invited them into this conversation that was unfolding.

For the ancients, it wasn't like the Bible ended the conversation, it was like the Bible invited the conversation to be part of the conversation.

For example, in Deuteronomy chapter 23, the author states that eunuchs and foreigners are banned from the house of the Lord.

Deuteronomy 23 · chapter mention

Whereas in Isaiah 56, we read that eunuchs and foreigners will have a special place in the assembly of the Lord, for as Isaiah says, God's house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.

So which is it?

Which is right, which is without error?

They say very different things.

Well, it's an interpretive act, right?

To say which is without error.

The ancients dealt with a lot of the same big questions that we deal with today.

We live in a country that scapegoats foreigners.

We live in a country that scapegoats folks who don't fit a gender binary.

We live in a country that is still asking these kinds of questions.

Who has place, who has belonging, who has value, who has worth.

The Bible is a collection of perspectives shared by authors over many generations that try to give expression to who they believe God is and what they believe God is calling us to be as people.

It is a conversation that we are invited to be part of, a conversation that still is unfolding.

But ancients would have been shocked to hear that the Bible just had a uniform view on all different topics.

Not at all.

Also, just keep in mind that the printing press allows us to have, oh, this is a really big Bible.

Sorry, camera people, I didn't plan to move so quickly.

Like, I'm gonna pick, I you could like do some weightlifting with this Bible.

So this is a collection of all the books in the Bible.

Product of the printing press, which is pretty great, pretty handy.

Uh, you can, well now you know we got the tech to have them in our pocket.

Um, but it's a modern invention to have all of the books collected as one.

There used to be a bunch of different books, uh, ancient world scrolls, uh, and so you have a lot of different um under there's a lot of different understanding that they these are different people expressing different views about a number of different things.

And that was just accepted.

Well, what does the Deuteronomist have to say about this?

What does Isaiah have to say about this?

Let's listen and try to be part of that conversation.

Conversations we're invited to be part of today.

Now, similarly, the ancients would have been shocked to hear that all of the stories should be taken literally.

For example, when ancient rabbis taught about Jonah and the whale or Jonah and the big fish, they would often focus on its symbolic and figurative meaning.

They wouldn't reduce the question to whether or not a human being can survive in the belly of a whale for three days and three nights.

They would ask, what is going on in this text?

So you have Jonah, and in this story, God tells Jonah to go speak to the Ninevehes.

And Jonah decides to run away as quickly as he can.

Because the Nineveh, bad company.

Uh, this is a representation of the Assyrian Empire, and the Assyrians at this time were known for using all kinds of torturous methods against those who opposed them.

It was brutal, it was violent.

And so when God says, Hey, Jonah, go tell the Nineveh to stop what they're doing, Jonah knows what his fate's gonna be.

So he runs as far as he possibly can to get away from this.

And he and he hops on a boat and he's sailing away.

And and lo and behold, there's a storm, and then people are like, Why is this storm?

Why are we why are we being like punished for this?

And and they're like, uh, they draw straws and they figure out it's Jonah.

Uh Jonah draws the short straw, and Jonah gets thrown overboard.

It's one of my favorite stories to share, so I apologize for sharing it a lot.

Uh, but then you find um uh that the whale or the big fish swallows up Jonah and spits Jonah out on to the Assyrian Empire's capital of Nineveh.

And Jonah goes, calls the people out, and lo and behold, the people actually change.

They stop their torturous ways as the story goes.

Rabbis would tell this story not to try to get people to believe things that are really difficult to believe from a scientific perspective, but to say that yes, sometimes God is gonna ask us to do, sometimes the spirit of love is gonna ask us to do something that is risky, that we may not want to do, that we may pay a price for, but God will take care of you, God will see you through it, and lo and behold, people might even change.

And in a day and age in which it feels like people may never change, this is a story we need to tell.

People can change.

The ancient Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, not named after me, also several others who are early Christian uh scholars, theorists, pastors, origin, Saint John Chrysostom, they recommended interpreting the stories allegorically.

Even Saint Paul himself, within the Bible itself, interpreted the stories allegorically.

This is a screenshot of the book of Galatians, chapter four, beginning at verse 21.

Now, the subtitles, those are editions by later translators, the verse numbers and the chapter numbers, those are all editions that were not in the original text.

But as the translators have put in here, this little subsection, it is literally subtitled The Allegory of Hagar and Sarah.

Saint Paul, who wrote the most books of anyone else that are included in the Bible, Saint Paul himself, in the context of the Bible, did not interpret literally, but interpreted it allegorically.

These are not like modern liberal progressives trying to throw some modern idea onto ancient text.

These were ancient ways of interpreting, and the idea of inerrancy and infallibility and reading the Bible literally all of the time, that is what is modern.

To take the Bible seriously means to not always take it literally.

Because if you do always take it literally, it means you're not always taking it seriously, because there are parts of the Bible that were never intended to be taken literally.

So if you're gonna take the Bible seriously, it means sometimes it should be not taken literally.

Also, just like a brief reminder in the context of the New Testament, whenever we hear about the Word of God, does that point to the collection of books known as the Bible or the New Testament?

And the answer to this question is from the Gospel of John, the prologue of John, in which John says that the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

The word is a living person, an embodiment of Jesus Christ.

The word becomes flesh and dwells among us.

Jesus shows us what God is like and what being full of God is like.

And the scriptures and the Christian traditions, they try to point us toward God.

They try to point us toward Jesus.

But the living word that shows us what God is like and what being full of God is like is reserved for Christ, not for words on a page.

The words on the page try to point to the Christ, to the living word, to the fullness of God's embodiment on earth.

And we must never confuse the two.

Okay, so we are at that point where I realize we are doing a whole summer sermon series in which each sermon could be its own series.

So I'm gonna have to fast forward through some information.

We need, like when you're watching a podcast, just like hit the little rabbit, and I'll talk faster and we'll get through this a little quicker.

So let's fast forward to the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, for whom Lutherans are named.

He's been perhaps the most influential theologian of the last 500 years.

In Marcus Borg's book, Speaking Christian, he summarizes Martin Luther's position this way.

He says, quote, Luther and the other reformers did not affirm inerrancy or literalism.

And by the way, if you haven't noticed, part of what I'm trying to tell you is that this is an ancient way of understanding it is very deeply rooted in orthodoxy, not modern liberal progressivism.

And I'm gonna pick up on where this takes us today and the way that the Bible continues to be a valuable tool and a source of inspiration.

But first, I'm just trying to make as strongly as I can make it as clear as I can that this is not a modern way of understanding the Bible, it's an ancient way of understanding the Bible, also one deeply rooted in the tradition.

That's why I'm going to folks like Origen, so I'm going to folks like St.

John Chrysostom, so I'm going to folks like Martin Luther.

So Luther and the other reformers did not affirm inerrancy or literalism.

Luther thought that both James and Revelation, two books in the New Testament, Luther thought should be thrown out of the New Testament.

Now, to state the obvious, you cannot think, you could, you want, you should throw two books of the Bible out and also think of the Bible as the inerrant revelation of God.

Luther had issues with James and with the book of Revelation.

And nor was Luther a literalist.

Consider his interpretation of Adam and Eve in the garden.

In Genesis chapter 3, we read that after Adam and Eve had eaten of the forbidden fruit, they heard the sound of God walking in the garden, and they were afraid.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

Luther commented that God obviously never walked in the garden.

Something else must be meant.

And his interpretation, symbolically, allegorically, is that Adam and Eve heard the sound of wind in nature, which formerly to them seemed benign, but now that they had eaten the forbidden fruit, they had fallen as the story is interpreted.

They had now found out that the wind is something they should be afraid of.

So this is Luther reading the book of Genesis, not literally scientifically, but symbolically allegorically.

As the pastor Aaron Van Voorhe summarizes, it surprises a lot of modern Christians to learn that an allegorical reading was the most common reading for the church scholars in the early Middle Ages.

They read the text layered with symbolic meaning rather than literal history, spiritual meaning.

Myth and metaphor were not seen as antithetical to spiritual truth, but the very medium by which spiritual truth was conveyed.

Modernists would have us believe an allegorical reading was never orthodoxy, and their churches always read the Bible the way they have, but that is simply not true.

It's simply not true.

Okay, I'd like to offer a little transition here.

I'd like to draw on a quote from one of my very favorite preachers of all time, Fred Craddock.

Happens to be a pastor or was a pastor in the Disciples of Christ, the denomination in which Brentwood is affiliated.

Taught years ago at the seminary that Emily and I attended, a Phillips Theological Seminary.

He taught before we were there.

He has a quote that I love.

He says, The role of the preacher is to put the Bible into the hands of the people, not to take it away.

Now, Craddock was well aware of the history of interpretation and what it meant to take the Bible seriously, but not always literally.

He knew that sometimes taking the Bible seriously meant not taking it literally.

He wasn't naive.

He knew about the history of interpretation, the kinds of things I've shared with you today.

But he also worried, and this is a worry that I carry with me a lot, he worried that people would think that understanding the Bible sometimes symbolically, figuratively, allegorically, he worried that people would think that diminished the value of the Bible.

If you don't believe the Bible is infallible or inerrant at all times, the concern that Craddock and others have shared, along with myself, is that it makes people feel like they're losing the value of the Bible.

But Craddock and others want to emphasize that when we are able to understand the Bible on its own terms and not on the terms we place on it, we get so much more out of it.

So the role is not to take the Bible out of the hands of the people, but to put it into the hands of the people.

And I'm just going to tell you some really quick examples because I'm already out of time.

Mark chapter 5.

Mark 5 · chapter mention

You have a demon.

Jesus goes and he exercises this demon.

What was this demon's name?

Legion.

What does legion mean?

It's a reference to Roman soldiers who are occupying the area in and around Jerusalem, Galilee.

The demon symbolizes oppression.

God sets people free from those occupying oppressive forces.

One I wanted to include, we're running out of time.

Walking on water.

You get this beautiful story about Jesus walking on water.

And Peter, Peter wants to walk on water.

Sorry, camera people.

Peter wants to walk on water.

He wants to reach out to his Savior, but he goes out to walk toward Jesus and he starts to fall, starts to sink.

Jesus reaches out, grabs him, lifts him up.

This is a story of our lives.

We want to be like the Christ.

Or we want things to go well for us, and sometimes it feels like we're sinking.

We're falling and the waters are going to overwhelm us and we're going to drown.

But Jesus reaches out to us and picks us up and gets us through.

These are stories of our lives.

In Mark chapter 8 and in Mark chapter 10, this is a bracket of Jesus entering Jerusalem.

Mark 8 · chapter mention Mark 10 · chapter mention

When Jesus enters Jerusalem, he's going to speak truth to power, like Jonah to the Ninevites.

Jesus is going to speak truth to power no matter the cost.

As Jesus makes this journey toward Jerusalem, it begins in Mark chapter 8 with a blind person being healed, receiving their sight.

Mark 8 · chapter mention

And in Mark chapter 10, right before Jesus enters Jerusalem, there's another story about a blind person healed by Jesus who receives their sight.

Mark 10 · chapter mention

Beautiful stories of healing.

And Mark is also wanting to tell us that if we too will have the courage to follow Jesus all the way to the cross, to follow him to Jerusalem, to speak truth to power, we also will have our sight restored.

We will be able to see clearly.

These stories are rich and powerful.

Reading them symbolically or figuratively doesn't diminish their value.

It increases it, it adds it, it puts the Bible back into our hands.

Lastly, Revelation chapter 13.

Revelation 13 · chapter mention

This is where you hear about the mark of the beast, the number 666.

This is a reference, if you calculate it, based on the way that the Hebrew people would write numbers and translate their value numerically.

It's a reference to Caesar Nero, the emperor, who oppresses and exploits.

Reading Revelation literally or figuratively, sorry, literally, we miss out on a lot of the figurative meaning.

If we read it figuratively, the meaning is opened up to us.

It's an indictment on the ways of empire, on the ways of Roman Empire.

And we are invited to see another way through the lens of Jesus.

The biblical scholar John Dominic Cross and has one of my favorite quotes.

He summarizes all this by saying, My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

And I want to close with one of my very favorite images from the novelist who is also a Presbyterian pastor, even though he never pastored a church, named Frederick Beekner.

He says, if you look at a window, if you look at a window, you see fly specks, dust, the crack where Junior's frisbee hit.

But if you look through the window, you see the world beyond.

Thanks be to God.