Personal Observations on Bible Study 101

Personal Observations on Bible Study 101



Chad



For me the dual approaches of looking at The Bible from both a Faith perspective and a Historical Scholar perspective work to complement one another.



Instead of looking at The Bible as a monolithic entity sent by God (ala The Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey), I think of it as a huge photo mosaic, with each pixel (tile) of the mosaic consisting a tiny individual photo, each taken by a different photographer at a different time with different artistic talents, agendas, and intended audiences. Individual photos may have faded or color shifted, or may have been erroneously added to the photo mosaic, and indeed, huge segments of the photo mosaic seem to be missing. But if you step way back and look at the photo mosaic as a whole there is a “Faith Truth” that may be obscured by the individual photos.



In addition, I do not think the individual Gospels present a “Factual Truth” as we understand it today. Even if the authors were contemporaneous eyewitnesses to Jesus life and resurrection, we would expect some variation, some contradictions in what they saw. What each saw would be colored by his pre-existing beliefs and his cultural sensibilities. How each described what he saw would be colored by the pre-existing beliefs and cultural sensibilities of his intended audience, and may be misinterpreted by us today with an entirely different set of cultural sensibilities. And the Gospels were written (in Greek) decades later describing events and quoting dialogue that originally was spoken in Aramaic. And some of the quotes (Jesus said:) occurred when there were no eyewitnesses to record what Jesus said verbatim, so somebody must have been putting plausible words into Jesus’ mouth. (Did Julius Caesar really say “Et Tu, Brute?)



But looking at these discrepancies from a “Historical Scholar” perspective, it is easy to understand how they occurred. So, while I do not accept “Factual Truth” (or “Historical Truth”) of each individual biblical passage, I do accept “Faith Truth” (or “Myth Truth,” as you put it) of the message of The Bible as a whole. This seems to put me at odds with many other Christians who believe in the inerrant infallibility of each word in The Bible. These other Christians include not only Fundamentalists, or Evangelicals, but evidently some other Lutherans as well (see Letter to the Editor in this months Lutheran Magazine) and may include some members of Abiding Savior as well. Sure they have as much right to their beliefs as I do, but many of them presume to speak for all Christians, to set an agenda for all of us based on their interpretation of The Bible, and to be intolerant of those who differ from them in any way. (I wonder if Jesus today would give The Parable of The Good Fundamentalist!)



So my issue is “How to we “Progressive Christians” cope with “Fundamentalist Christians” when they try to bully us into accepting their beliefs? Do we absent ourselves from them? Ignore them? Confront them? Perhaps this would be a good item for discussion in “Bible Study 101,” or in “Adult Discussion, or perhaps a good topic for a sermon one Sunday? (Or perhaps this is a topic that would get you banished to an Indian reservation in Montana?)



So, anyway, ball’s in your court. What do you think?



Dave The Heretic