A Complicated Friendship

The other day I went out for coffee with a friend. My friend is the type of person that has been with me through some dark times. He often says just the right words to comfort, challenge, and make me feel loved and valued. There is wisdom in his words. He's an old soul who is vibrant, poetic, witty, and imaginative. It's a relationship unlike any other. I sometimes feel drawn into a strange and beautiful world when he speaks.

But this conversation was different. When discussing the events of history, he started making comments that shocked and even angered me: "Slaves were, after all, the property of their masters, and they should obey them with happiness..." And "It was a shame that particular genocide wasn't successful..." His suggestion of justice for rape victims? "They should marry their rapists and never be allowed to divorce. And furthermore, how can you be sure it was rape unless she screamed for help?" When I started to protest and inform him of introductory human psychology and trauma, he looked at me as if the concepts were entirely new. And strangely enough, when I began to criticize him about anything, certain people in the coffee shop gave me judgmental looks.

But he started to speak to me about talking animals. He didn't know what a star was. He made me feel anxious about his female friends. He advocated the death penalty for homosexuality. He chastised me for touching my wife while she was on her period. He shamed me by morally equating sexual desire with sin. How could I not say anything back to him?

I left our coffee date with a pit in my stomach. What happened to the friend I once loved so dearly? How could I ever turn to him for advice or comfort ever again?

My friend, of course, is the Christian Bible. My relationship with the Bible is complicated and is only made worse by the demand of what is known as biblical inerrancy. In other words, for some Christians, I can only take the Bible seriously if I believe in biblical inerrancy. This belief claims the Bible is without error in any possible way. It must be historically, scientifically, morally, literarily, and grammatically perfect. It goes beyond teaching us correct theology and reigns supreme on every topic it engages in.

But as we dig deep into the words of an inerrant Bible, many of us feel forced to adopt beliefs that we would otherwise reject for various reasons. We would adamantly critique these types of beliefs if we found them in other religious texts. The abovementioned issues are concepts directly from the Old and New Testaments. I am not taking them out of their immediate context. At best, many texts have enough ambiguity to give credence to untrue, harmful, or downright evil beliefs. The justification of slavery with the Bible should have been the end of this discussion.

Sadly, some reply that "those" bible believing Christians were not "true" Christians. Of course, this is simply a no true Scotsman fallacy. We don't own the label of the Christian faith, and it's a cop-out to pretend people who use the Bible to harm people aren't Christians. Regardless, while many Christians claim to believe in an inerrant Bible, their moral codes stand in contrast to specific ethical principles of the Bible. Some have attempted to divide biblical laws into moral, ceremonial, and judicial laws. However, this does nothing to solve the problem and ignores their inevitable overlap. Pick a topic and pick a category. Slavery is morally defective and judicially cruel and certainly cannot fall under ceremonial law. And we cannot suddenly become moral relativists when it suits us. Slavery was wrong the moment it was enacted. It is immoral for every society at every time. Slavery is wrong, and parts of the Bible are wrong about slavery. Even if you use theological categories of liberation, redemption, or another biblical idea contrasting slavery, you still correct one part of the Bible with the other.

At some point, the Bible becomes the problem if we force it to be something it is not. And biblical inerrancy does just that. It takes something that is a human witness to a divine event and equates human experience with the event itself. Alternatively, perhaps God inspired scripture to be an ever-evolving rule of faith that would crescendo with the death and resurrection of Christ and was not intended as some moral handbook for humanity. And besides, does not the moral law exist within, as Christian theologians are fond of saying? Sadly, society can do just fine morally without scripture, and often, I reluctantly admit, tends to do better.

Well-intentioned or not, this rigid framework has caused significant harm within the church and society. Doubt that and talk to the many people harmed by certain biblical teachings (divorcees, those in abusive relationships, sexual minorities, etc.), not to mention previous generations who were injured by the social enactment of specific biblical principles. I have noted slavery, but we also can think of the execution of those who supposedly practiced witchcraft, even though witchcraft, as imagined by the biblical and premodern world, does not exist. According to Deuteronomy 18:10-11, such practices are equated with child sacrifice. And although we can consider the nuance of this passage, there was enough ambiguity in the passage to inspire the horrors of witch trials. Some religious people still take these verses literally and crusade even against the magic of Disney, despite the lack of evidence that anyone is creating ice castles in the mountains, let alone accurately predicting the future, casting spells, or consulting the dead.

Why do we defend such a problematic view of Scripture? The scriptural genesis of this belief comes from one verse in 2 Timothy: "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." The context of this verse comes just before it: "But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus."

Logically, biblical inerrancy requires only one verse to establish the truth. Nonetheless, everyone knows the dangers of this belief in practice. Many Christians, including conservative Christians, have shied away from establishing broad sweeping doctrines based on one verse. Determining a text's meaning becomes problematic when we only have a small sample size of words to analyze. For example, what are we to make of "God-breathed?" Does something God-breathed automatically ensure inerrancy? The concept is used once elsewhere in Genesis 2:7: "Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." Oddly enough, this God-breathed process does not spare humanity from error! So what is going on? Could it be simply a matter of describing that which gives life and equips the human person for a life of faith and worship? Could God's breath be his desire for humanity to discover God's salvation?

Building a sweeping doctrine on one verse is unwise. Using one verse to justify an entire posture of biblical interpretation is dangerous. We are not standing on the holy ground but the shaky ground. When scripture is equated with the words of the Christian God - not a witness to the Word, one must reject God if those inherent words are inconsistent with themselves on any criteria. According to biblical inerrancy, the Bible might as well be a member of the Trinity. And sadly, one must only find one problem of any kind within this version of the Bible to leave the entire text and God behind - biblical inerrancy leaves us no other option.

This was a terrible play by Christian fundamentalism and later evangelicalism. Not the least of which because it might torpedo personal intellectual honesty among its ranks. And those who remain within this system often ignore biblical contradictions to validate their belief in an inerrant bible. Or insist there is always an answer for any contradiction, even if it means pulling one out of thin air.

For example, in Mark 5:21-24, a man named Jairus comes to Jesus to tell him his daughter is near death. Jesus is distracted by an ill woman, whom he subsequently heals. During this time, a servant of Jairus comes and tells Jesus the girl has died. But in Matthew 9:18-26, however, Jairus tells Jesus immediately that his daughter has died.

Of course, like many of us, you can see this contradiction as trivial. The emphasis is on the fact that Jesus is the healer of the sick. Most of us can read the two stories side by side without concern. But the fact remains that this is unequivocally a contradiction in words. Either Jairus' daughter had died, or she hadn't. One can devise a solution or retreat to the often-stated position that only the original manuscripts are inerrant to protect biblical inerrancy. The former tends to be unbelievable, and the latter ironically renders the entire position moot.

But some internal issues are less trivial. Take gender, for example. Large numbers of Christians are baptizing concepts of gender from the Bible. They see 'biblical' gender expression and roles in the church as direct, clear-as-day directives from God. And since the Bible contains no contradictions, the biblical tension surrounding gender is dissolved into a clear and straightforward proposition. For example, since the author of First Timothy does not permit a woman to teach, have authority, or speak, we must do likewise. Of course, this proposition conveniently subverts that in his letters elsewhere, Paul says different things about gender. The early church recognized women as prophets. Some women taught, had authority and were anything but quiet. Not to mention that the gospel itself was first heralded by women. That contradiction should cause us to question universalizing propositions regarding women in the church.

But to admit that is to undermine the entire biblical inerrancy enterprise. And so, one must surreptitiously collapse one teaching into the other and explain away what one considers the odd one out, which often happens to be the information one does not like. Instead of allowing the whole of scripture to inform belief-thus accepting nuance, historical locality, tension, and humility-one's cultural ideology dictates what is "objectively" true, often with invented explanations and mental gymnastics.

This brings us full circle to the fundamental problem of inerrancy claims: the limitation of human language. For example, gender is our word. It exists in a human-created system and refers to human-created concepts. It has no specific biblical origin. The biblical writers did not create "male and female" ex nihilo. They wrote those words within a language system. And if you believe that the Bible is inspired, as I do, you must automatically accept the rules of its medium. 'Biblical' gender is Hebrew gender, ancient near eastern gender, Greek gender, and first-century Greco-Roman gender. We have the luxury of seeing concepts of gender reflected in different languages in different cultures. And the Bible, written over a long time, reflects diverse human beliefs from seeing women as property to seeing them as the original mouthpieces of God's good news. I simply cannot grasp why we resist the idea that God's people refined and challenged the beliefs of their ancestors or that the church was never meant to represent first-century values for all time. Is the Bible alive or not?

And is the Bible really the place we want to ground our morality? If you're reading the Bible to discover a clear teaching on anything from marriage to murder, you can find whatever you want. And yet the Bible reads like a book that attempts to use the limited method of language to perhaps describe something beyond the containment of language in the first place. But what else would we expect from a theological book? Proponents of biblical inerrancy ask us to shield our eyes from the Bible's propositional diversity and ignore the rules on which it exists. But carefully reading the Bible makes that expectation virtually impossible.

If I save one of my most essential friendships (and that is what I'm trying to do whether you believe it or not), I will have to start seeing it for what it is. Challenging biblical inerrancy was my first step into loving the weird world of the Bible.

And that is something worth keeping. I am not invited into a pristinely uncomplicated world when I read the Bible. I encounter humanity's false conceptions of God, snapshots of humanity discovering who they were created to be, and genuine human encounters with something beautiful and living. But most of all, I encountered the God of peace who became human to embrace a chaotic humanity.

And that's a friendship worth keeping.