This is not a new challenge for the church but one we must still work through. This post has been a good start. Kudos to you… herr Todd.

http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2009/04/beginnings-4-rjs.html#more

Don’t worry, I haven’t taken anything personally. Either I am an extraordinarily poor communicator or you’ve managed to misconstrue nearly every single thing I’ve said. Given the exchange thus far, I doubt any further “clarification” on my part would be helpful.

Best to you and yours. And thanks, Todd, for starting the discussion–I really do think it’s an important one.

I look forward to that man!

The Anchor sounds pretty good right now.

First round on me.

–cb

Well I can’t tell you what you are or aren’t.

I didn’t say Todd was misguided nor did I say he was being inappropriate. I was stating it is misguided to speak of the Bible purely in terms of Historical or Scientific fact. Todd stated in an earlier comment that he was not strictly speaking of the Bible this way. I wasn’t referring specifically to him, I was referring to people who talk of the Bible in the “either/or” category.

“Either the Bible is completely historical or totally literal or it isn’t.”

This mindset is misguided.

I went on to explain how the bible is a mix-tape of genres and, when read as each is, and was, intended, each book and letter can be taken as completely factual, true, and inspired.

It’s true your words confused me about what faith you consider yourself. The way you worded what you said sounded like many of my other-than-christian friends.

Forgive me for my lack of consideration for your honesty.

I definitely don’t offer much slack for “honesty”.

Honesty is not a virtue as far as I can tell.

So many people in our culture have placed honesty and authenticity at the helm even when people are authentically honest about some really bad, or blatantly wrong, things.

We always say, “Well at least I’m being honest.”

When did that start mattering?

What happened to Truth overriding one’s “honest” feelings to the contrary?

What happened to right and good being more significant than someone’s honestly wrong perceptions and authentically bad lives?

Our culture doesn’t seem to mind if someone is wrong in every way as long as they are “true to themselves”.

I disagree.

Strongly.

It’s true we are all wrong about many things, but that doesn’t, therefore, make it right to be wrong. Just because we are all wrong to a degree (large or small) doesn’t mean the things which we are wrong about are not important or are incidental.

We are a disabled people. We are disabled by our own selfishness. The Scriptures were not written so everyone could have their own, little Bible, and do their own personal thing with God… you know, being true to themselves and all. Wrong.

The Christian faith is a community and a family. We don’t seek truth on our own terms, time, or truth. We seek it together. And when one of us is wrong, we are not patted on the back for being authentic or honest, we are corrected and challenged to think again.

The point here is that a lot of people get mixed up in these discussions and start questioning so many things because something they read doesn’t align with their personal experience. This is backwards.

In the Christian faith, God does not conform to our experience, we conform our experience to God. When the Scriptures and our experience don’t align, we don’t question the Scriptures, we question our experience.

Emily

Being Anglican you have a really good community and support base in your life. If people in your church who have done the study and the prayer and the work, challenge your thinking or say you are way off base with something you believe, listen to them. You don’t have to change anything, but listen up. No one is dismissing you as a person, or a woman, or a child of God who is full of worth and value.

Don’t take it so personally all the time.

It’s not about you.

My “tone” is not about you. I’m not attacking you or telling you what you are.

I don’t even know you.

I’m challenging your thinking for the sake of everyone, including myself. I appreciate you doing the same to me.

–cb

“Something is either a fact or isn’t. There cannot be a degree of factual. Something is either factual the way it is told or it is erroneous and exists as factual in some other way; something is either completely factual or it is erroneous. Even if an event or account is erroneous in only 1 part of 100, it is still erroneous.”

We will talk over beer about this. Soon, I hope. I will try to explain why you are wrong, and you will try to do the same thing to me.

I’m Anglican, by the way (as mentioned above), not Buddhist or Unitarian. Do you believe Unitarians are Christians? Because I feel as though–intentionally or not–you are basically telling me I’m not a Christian. It’s quite possible that I’m being overly sensitive, because your words remind me so much of many of my childhood teachers and pastors.

But your tone does bother me. In your first comment you said you thought Todd’s original blog post was misguided and inappropriate. How could it be misguided to honestly relate what is happening in one’s own spiritual life? Todd isn’t issuing a decree, or telling us he’s figured it all out–and neither am I. I am well aware that I am wrong about oh so many things: I’m a broken vessel, a blind man, a seeker wandering around aimlessly in the desert. But I spent so many years checking my spiritual pulse against what I was “supposed” to be thinking and feeling, to the detriment of my own development. Now I’m just reading, seeking, messing up, working to understand, being prideful, thinking, failing … and trying to be honest about all of it. I appreciate people who are doing the same, whether or not we agree about specifics.

Thank you for your reply.

It’s good to read some clarification, though I don’t feel very clarified.

I guess I can only refer you back to my initial response to you.

The factual accuracy IS important.

I’m confused. At what point in time did God’s unique interventions in human history become incidental?

I guess I’m not exactly sure what you are meditating on and gleaning from books that are so raw, gross and dirty, and real without gleaning these very things? The beauty of our God is in these incidental details.

Again, my Buddhist and Unitarian friends would be right there with ya…trying to glean some life lesson and 5 steps to more holistic, peaceful, Zen living.

Who needs those details about God commanding people to walk around for 3 years butt-naked to get a message across? Who needs the details of God speaking through a donkey to get someone’s attention? Who wants to bother with incidental things like a man throwing himself overboard a ship and being eaten alive by sea life, only to be regurgitated before going carrying out God’s mission?

I can’t even fathom how God moving 2 million people out of slavery, overthrowing oppressive governments, and building a nation could be of least importance.

No offense Emily, but I guess I just don’t know what the hell you’re gleaning from the Scriptures apart from the raw facts of how God strangely and uniquely engages our world and interacts with people.
And, again, your position begs the question: Where do incidentals stop and significant facts begin? What facts about Jesus are important? Are any? How do you decide?

The beauty and significance of our faith is in these details. Trust me, there is nothing more beautiful or amazing or insightful you could possibly be enlightened to than what is already there, under your nose.

cb

I will definitely come back to this later, but I wanted to quickly clarify (I hope) my “who cares?” refrain.

I believe what it says in 2 Timothy 3:16: that “All scripture is God-breathed, and useful for teaching, correcting, rebuking and training in righteousness, so that the man [and woman!] of God may be equipped for every good work.” I do honor and respect the Bible as the word of God.

My “who cares?” attitude is reserved specifically for questions of factual accuracy. It’s a way I check myself when I feel as though I’m wasting too much brain space on a question that I find incidental. Is it worth arguing about whether or not Jonah was actually swallowed by a fish when I could be meditating on the message behind the story? I may be coming at this from entirely the wrong way, I realize, but as I get older I find I have a deeper understanding of some of the stories and parables that I’ve been hearing my entire life. There are layers and layers of meaning in so many of the stories and metaphoric language of the Bible–on this I’m sure we agree. When I look at it that way, the factual accuracy of some of the stories seems like the least important thing.

Side note: I often think of Philippians 2:5 and subsequent verses, which a wise teacher required that I memorize 15-odd years ago: that my attitude should be like Christ, “who did not consider equality with God something to be grasped.” I was taught that discounting the historical accuracy of the Bible was tantamount to elevating oneself, trying to be God. But I know I’m not God and I don’t want to act as a substitute. I try to come to the Bible, and to discussions like this one, with humility. I feel as though my “who cares?” attitude (as clarified above) actually honors God, because it’s about striving to understand what he’s trying to tell me.

I think I see what you are getting at: Why all the arguing amongst the Christian family? Let’s just be like Jesus.

However, I can’t help but wonder what your faith is based upon if you meet the Scriptures with a, “Who Cares?!”

I know a few people who look at the life of Jesus and say,
“Did he really heal the sick and make the blind to see? Who cares?!
“Did he really feed the multitudes? Who cares?!
“Did he really die on the cross? Who cares?!
“Did he really rise from the dead? Who cares?!”

People care, and I care, because if these things didn’t happen, then it is a sham. Paul says it like, “If Christ is not raised from the dead we are to be pitied among all people”.

You may say you believe in the resurrection, but don’t care that much about anything else; maybe the resurrection is where you draw the line. But in the midst of all your carelessness, it’s arbitrary. Why trust this and nothing else?

I have some Buddhist friends who actually speak very similarly to you in your comments. They very much want to “walk as Christ walked”. I don’t know you. You very well may be Buddhist or Unitarian at which I urge you to look deeper into the life of the Jesus you wish to follow and see how little he cared for living “Christ-like” and how strongly he wanted to rescue humanity from ourselves and bring glory to the one and only God — and this is his desire for us.

If you consider yourself a Christian, I urge you not to so flippantly discard the great stories of our God intervening in human history. This is what makes our God unique among other gods. The stories you shrug off with, “Who cares?!” are the stories that give life and vibrancy and hope to the people of God. They are the stories of Jesus’ ancestors, and the stories he embraced as he grew up a Rabbi.

Those stories are the prequel to God’s ultimate intervention in human history through Jesus. The stories show us our God who did not come to us only once through Jesus, but had been coming among us forever before Jesus and will continue to do so forever after.

Without these stories I would be with you:

Who Cares?!

However, I would not be able to, like you, embrace a life without stories,

No, for me, without stories, I would have no life to embrace.

–cb

We are interchanging words that cannot necessarily be interchanged: fact, truth, literal, inspired, etc.

These words all mean significantly different things. They are not synonyms.

I think, Todd, you may be using some of your words improperly.

When you mention the creation account in Genesis 1, you say you don’t know if the story is “absolutely factual”.

1. Something is either a fact or isn’t. There cannot be a degree of factual. Something is either factual the way it is told or it is erroneous and exists as factual in some other way; something is either completely factual or it is erroneous. Even if an event or account is erroneous in only 1 part of 100, it is still erroneous.

One could (and probably wants to) make the point that parts of a story can be facts without the whole story being taken as fact. Take this blog for example. Someone could tell the story of Todd’s Blog titled, “The thing about truth” and go on to say there were 11 comments before this one, each comment being posted by a human being at a point in history. The story goes on to say that the author saw what he had wrote and it was very good. The narrator could then say the body of the blog post was written in 6 seconds.

What do we do with this account? Is it fact or fiction?

Fiction.

This story is not factual because it errs in 1 part of 10, or 35, or 1,000,000. The story up to the final sentence may have indeed been 100% fact, but because of the false information in the final sentence, the whole account ceases to be fact.

Todd, you may say, “But I don’t believe the whole story is false; I believe there were people there and animals and plants and stars and the sun and moon and that God was behind all of it”

but…

But that’s not what the story says. The story does not end with events taking place and people being there and God being responsible for it. No, the story says all of the above took place a certain way and in a certain framework of time. That’s the story. The story is a cohesive whole, and to conclude a part of it is “not absolutely factual” — or, in other words, False — is to conclude the story itself is false.

This is, invariably, the predicament you are in when the words you choose to use are Fact, Literal, Truth, etc.

A second problem is with what people do with certain words after they are said or written.

When you use the words Fact, Literal, Truth, etc., people run all kinds of directions with those.

The conversation quickly becomes one about Historical and Scientific Fact, Mathematically True, or Biologically and Physically Literal.

I think a lot of trouble in this post comes from the broad stoke painted about the Bible maybe not being absolutely factual. And then you made a comparison between Scripture and The Chronicles of Narnia which would chap a lot of asses among people who think you are saying Scripture and Mythical Fantasy stories are essentially the same thing.

However, many people would certainly agree with that comparison and would actually hold The Chronicles of Narnia in higher regard than the Bible.

Either way, I think it was misguided to discuss the Scriptures in this way.

First, the words are so misleading. What do you mean by Fact? Truth? Literal? Inspired? Again, people take these words and run in a thousand different directions. It’s inappropriate to paint such broad, linguistic strokes.

Second, the “whole” Bible cannot be discussed as a “whole”. This is a major problem we face nowadays by having the “whole” bible as a single “book”. The Bible is not one “whole”, it is actually a compilation of 66 parts… the important thing to understand with this is that there are multiple genres within the Bible.

The Bible is not a compilation of History books only.

Take the book of Luke, for example. Luke begins his work by clearly stating he is writing a piece of History that can be trusted and relied upon.

The Song of Songs? Not a History book. It’s a book of poetry. Do we take Song of Songs literally like we do Luke’s Gospel? No, not in the same way. Could you imagine Solomon getting so pumped about a woman with breasts like fawns and a neck like a tower?

But does that mean Song of Songs is not Factual? Reliable? Credible? Literal? In all the ways Solomon was trying to be, he can be taken as fully all of these.

Songs of Songs is not less Factual because it is less Historical or Scientific. It is just as factual and should be treated and trusted as such.

The same goes for Genesis 1, Revelation 22 and everything in-between. Each of us has to understand the Bible for what it is. It’s a mix-tape. It’s not all history, it’s not all poetry, and it’s not all prophecy. But it is completely accurate and reliable as it stands and for what each book, letter, and author was trying to communicate.

We all — me, most of the time — need to be more careful with how we use our words, especially such strong words as Fact and Truth, among others. I think we could also all benefit from doing more research on the Scriptures we all love so much. Our 21st Century, Middle-Class, English take these books needs to be strongly scrutinized and communicated gently and with humility.

The thing about truth is… well, His name is Jesus and none of us are him.

–cb

P.S. A good place to begin studying is Genesis 1 and 2. A deeper look reveals something beautiful about Moses. He was no historian, but he was a song writer.