Authority of The Bible

This is the first of two week two discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

What is your understanding about the authority of the Bible? How do you respond to those close to you who have a very different understanding? What role does the Bible play in your life?

This line from chapter 2 of Brown completely changed my thinking on the authority of the Bible:

The Bible is the progressive Christian’s authority because in our engagement with it we are authored as Christians.  (p. 25)

 This really speaks to me because it allows us to embrace the Bible, faults and all, without having to specifically address and explain away those faults, except on our own time as it supports us to do so. It also leaves room for acknowledging in our lives the very real ways the Bible may have harmed us or been used as a tool for  harm. I regularly refer people to Mandy Rice's Queerituality and the lesson that "You can’t just unthink religious harm. You have to live your way beyond it." and I think this way of looking at the authority of the Bible supports following her research that focusing on gotcha verses is unlikely to improve your spirituality. And as Robin Perry (writing as MacDonald) says in the Evangelical Universalist "Virtually all the key Christian beliefs have some texts that run against them." (p 37), so pretty much whatever you believe, someone can find a gotcha verse if you let things devolve to proof texting. The Bible is the instruction book and history book of our faith. It isn't always clear and it's often contradictory (I would say on purpose, to remind us that we need to always take things in context.) The idea of our engagement with the Bible authoring us as Christians makes more obvious the role of the Holy Spirit in our reading. It also gives us agency, we can choose our level of interaction with the Bible at any given time.

How I deal with people who have a different understanding of the Bible than I do varies depending on the situation. Just because I don't find an understanding compelling doesn't mean that it isn't valid and I try to keep that in mind. I've noticed that in many of the situation where I meet people with a different viewpoint than I have, they aren't actually interested in having discussions about the Bible, they want to give Bible polemics and I just don't participate. (Although I wouldn't rule out chanting over some of the hateful polemicists who show up as "street preachers" on the University campus and at events.) In the church groups I moderate online, people who only want to give polemics and not have discussions or only discuss ideas with the intent of convincing others and are not open to the possibility of learning something themselves are referred to other places (usually a Facebook blog post sharing group started by some people in my denomination) and then heavily moderated and eventually blocked from posting at all if they continue to treat the group as their audience not their conversation partners. If I want to read the Bible in community, we don't necessarily have to agree on how we see the Bible to read together, share verses we found meaningful, and attempt to help each other with confusing passages. We don't have to agree to help each other pick up references to other books and stories or to act as accountability partners for actually reading. If people are trying to discuss but get stuck on only discussing gotcha verses, I usually point to Rice or Perry (depending on the person and the topic). If people are trying to discuss but get too stuck on literalism or inerrancy, I like to get them talking about "swords into plowshares" and "plowshares into swords". I have noticed that in spending more time talking with people with a more literalist viewpoint than I have, I have become more willing to assume something might be literal rather than metaphorical than I was before. 

My life tends to be better when it includes regular Bible study, though I am not always regular about it. I'm not sure if that is something innate to the Bible or because it implies a routine of some sort. There is also something compelling about wrestling with a text that so many others have and are wrestling with. I also think it is our best source of knowledge about Jesus and his words and actions. Aside from the supernatural and miraculous aspects of Jesus's life and deeds, I think learning and following his example is a really good way to be a better human both alone and in community. I think you might be able to argue that the rest of the Bible could be replaced with tradition and the Holy Spirit (although we would lose so much, including the rich well of knowledge from the Old Testament to Jesus references) and we could still have something valuable that is recognizable as Christianity, but I think those stories are crucial.