(5) “The Bible is clear” is another way of saying “I am right.”
“I can’t imagine that the God of the universe is limited to our ideas of God. I can’t imagine that God doesn’t reveal God’s self in countless ways outside the symbol system of Christianity. In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.” — Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix
Perhaps the biggest objection I have to “the Bible is clear” is what that mindset does to the human ego. If we operate under the presumption that we can simply read the Bible — without simultaneously interpretting it through the lens of our unique perspective (colored by age, sex, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status, education, family of origin, religious background, etc) —then inevitably, we will believe that our understanding of the text is the understanding of the text, the one and only proper way to comprehend the words on the page. We will view our theology as correct, and alternatives as incorrect. Our ego will be fat and happy.
This phenomenon is particularly troubling because it happens to people gradually and apart from their intention (that’s how it happened to me). I don’t know any Christians in real life (I’ve seen some on Twitter) who approach the Bible with the blatant attitude that they have nothing to learn and they’ve got God all figured out. I know lots of pastors, and despite their formal theological education, even they would never voice such an opinion.
But…if we are really, really honest…in the deepest part of ourselves that we don’t really show other people, we’d have to admit that, generally, yes: we do think we’ve got the right answers, we’ve cracked the divine code, and, well, people who think differently are simply wrong. We’ll be nice to them, love them and stuff, but quietly consider them misinformed. Because just READ it, it’s right there!
We come by this thinking innocently enough. If you are a Protestant, and especially an evangelical, then you were taught to think this way by your parents or your pastors or your college ministry or whatever. You learned this somewhere. You were taught that the Bible is clear, it means what it says. “I read it, and it means what my brain says it means” (or, alternatively, what my pastor’s brain says it means. Or what Tim Keller’s brain says it means, etc). The end.
“Protestants tend to focus on having better arguments than the next person—after all, claiming to be more right about God is how it all got started, a legacy that is downloaded from the Reformation onto all Protestant offspring. Protestantism allows me to stay in the Comfortable Place—my head; a refuge, a rock, an ever-present help in time of trouble. In fact, Protestantism positively encourages me to stay put in the fantasy world of my brain. From there I control my life, my surroundings, the universe—God himself. Which is ironic, since Jesus has a few things to say about letting go of control, dying in fact, so that you can gain true life.” – Peter Enns
We delude ourselves thinking we can know the mind of God, that we can read Scripture objectively, that by our own intellect we can bypass silly little hiccups like filtered interpretation. Influenced by the Enlightenment, we tend to think we are capable of such awesome tasks, and consequently we make ourselves much more significant that we actually are. To advocate a “plain reading of Scripture” is to forget that we are each just one measly believer out of the billions of Christians who have grappled with these words over millennia. When we arrogantly say “the Bible is clear,” we fail to respect that the global Church, spanning thousands of denominations, societies, theologians, and scholars of every stripe, has been seeking truth for generations upon generations, long before we were born, and will continue to do so long after we are dust.
“My interpretation can only be as inerrant as I am, and that’s good to keep in mind.” — Rachel Held Evans
Are we inerrant? Don’t Christians widely believe that humans are not only flawed, not only limited, but broken and sinful? Doesn’t sinfulness include, umm, not being God and therefore not being able to grasp the fullness of God? To that end, might angrily claiming “the Bible is clear!” be itself sinful behavior?
There is no such thing as a plain reading of Scripture because the readers are extremely complex and utterly finite (yes, the theological gatekeepers too). There is no such thing as a plain or objective reading of anything – book, newspaper, magazine, Instagram story, article, text message, this blog post, cartoon, tweet, or banner in the sky. All information that we consume is filtered through our unique personal viewpoint, informed by a dozen different factors. Sure, we can research diligently, seek out quality sources, diversify our reading list, challenge our confirmation biases – we absolutely should do all those things, and frequently. But homo sapiens will never escape subjectivity.
Objectivity is God’s alone.
This is a good thing.
We have a Bible that is just as messy as humans are, with page after page of complicated people bumbling through their uneven faith — what a gift it is to find such solidarity in Scripture! What a treasure to be reminded that we are small and God is big! What a grace to have our ego defeated that our soul might breathe! What a relief to proclaim from rooftops, “I DON’T KNOW and isn’t it glorious!”
The Bible is opaque. It’s not internally consistent, it doesn’t present a unified position on social issues, it doesn’t tell us conclusively what God is like, no one behaves like the Bible is clear regardless of what they profess, and believing the Bible is clear will inflate your ego, not make you more like Christ, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped (Philippians 2:6).
Father, forgive us. We have sinned. We have made the Bible into a golden calf. We have done violence using our Bibles as a holy sword. We have inserted it into the Trinity. But, like all idols, the Bible is not wholly divine, it is not God. Thank you for the fascinating, diverse, profound, mysterious, upsetting, beautiful Bible. Your Word is an invaluable teacher, comfort, guide, and friend. But it is not You. Reshape our egos that we might be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Help us remember that Jesus, not Scripture, is your final Word. Amen.
For additional reading:
- Honor Your Head, Don’t Live in It by Peter Enns
- How Evangelicals Became Over-Committed to the Bible and What can be Done about It by J.P. Moreland
- The Bible Isn’t Perfect and It Says So Itself by Zack Hunt
“I am deeply distressed by what I can only call in our Christian culture the idolatry of the Scriptures. For many Christians, the Bible is not a pointer to God but God himself. In a word – bibliolatry. God cannot be confined to a leather-bound book. I develop a nasty rash around people who speak as if mere scrutiny of its pages will reveal precisely how God thinks and precisely what God wants. The four Gospels are the key to knowing Jesus. But conversely, Jesus is the key to knowing the meaning of the gospel – and of the Bible as a whole. Instead of remaining content with the bare letter, we should pass on to the more profound mysteries that are available only through intimate and heartfelt knowledge of Jesus.” -– Brennan Manning, The Signature of Jesus, 1996, p. 174-175
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2 Comments
Oh my goodness Halley. This is marvelous. Can’t wait to share.
Thank you, Sandy!
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