January 15, 2006
"Why the Bible?
By The Reverend Joanna M. Adams
Morningside Presbyterian Church, Atlanta
Why the Bible?
The Reverend Joanna Adams
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Atlanta, Georgia
January 15, 2006
Why the Bible?
The Reverend Joanna Adams
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Atlanta, Georgia
January 15, 2006
Today, we continue our winter series of sermons on six of the central affirmations of Protestantism, the Christian tradition in which the Presbyterian Church finds its home. Last Sunday, the subject was grace; next week we will explore the meaning of the phrase The Sovereignty of God. Today, I want to talk about the Bible: what the Bible is and what it is not, how it is used and abused, why some find it to be a lamp unto their feet and a guiding light for their lives, and others find it to be irrelevant, arbitrary, and filled with judgment.
I doubt that there is a book in existence that is talked about more and read less than the Bible. A poll conducted by the Barna Research Group discovered that 38% of those who were sampled, and a thousand or more were sampled, 38% thought that both the Old and the New Testaments were written in the decade after Jesus’ death. 10% believed that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. (1) A great many people simply have never read the Bible. They talk about it. They put it on the bed stand by their bed. They assume they know its contents. They might even put it under their pillow thinking they might absorb some wisdom and knowledge while they sleep. Others actually read it, but they take the approach similar to that of W.C. Fields who was found by his physician on his deathbed reading the Bible. “What are you doing?” the doctor asked W.C. Fields.
Fields answered, “I’m looking for loopholes.”
Some look for loopholes. Others sift through the Bible looking for verses that justify their prejudices and reinforce their assumptions about how the world ought to be run.
In the interest of full disclosure, let me say it now. In spite of the misuse and abuse of the scriptures across the centuries by religious institutions and by individuals, I love the Bible. I find it uniquely possessed of the power to reveal the nature of God, a power that genuinely can transform the human imagination. (2) It is the power of the Spirit of the Living God. For thirty years, I have spent a significant portion of my time and energy listening each week to Biblical texts and trying to help other people listen and respond to them in ways that strengthen their Christian discipleship. I have lived within the world of the Bible most of my life. When I was a child, I went to Sunday School every Sunday, not by choice always, but by golly, we went. I heard Bible stories. I learned Bible verses. I learned a new one every week, but I was always very envious of Cecil Brown, a boy in my class who was wildly more popular than I was and who got away with saying “Jesus wept” every single Sunday.
The long and short of it is that the more I have lived inside the story the Bible tells, the more I have come to believe that the real world is the world of which the Bible speaks, a reality where lost sheep are found by the good shepherd, where justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream, where the good Samaritan stops to help a stranger, the earth is filled with the goodness of God, and tears and crying and pain are no more because the former things have passed away.
One text at a time, one Sunday at a time, over a long period of time, my imagination has been reshaped by the possibilities put forth in the Scripture. (3) It is perhaps the most important thing I can tell you about my life. I cannot prove any of the claims of Scripture, and neither can anyone else, but as I live them and as my community and I are guided by those claims, I find hope for our broken world and larger possibilities for myself.
Okay, so what is the Bible? It really isn’t a book. It is a collection of sixty-six writings composed over the course of more than 900 years. That’s a very long period of time. Counting back 900 years from today would land us in the year 1106. “Protestantism asserts that these sixty-six writings of the Bible are to be the source and standard for the church’s life until the end of time.” The great cry of the Reformation was “sola scriptura,” scripture alone as the source and test of faith. (4) This was in stark opposition to the Catholic tradition, which maintained that the tradition of the Catholic Church had authority equal to that of Scripture. The question of authority was one of the major breaking points between Protestants and Catholics.
It had taken three centuries after Jesus’ death for Christendom to decide which books would constitute the New Testament. Finally, twenty-seven writings were settled upon and they, along with the Jewish Scriptures, came to make up the Christian canon. The word “canon” means “yardstick” or “norm,’’ which is a way of saying that the canon is to serve as the norm or the yardstick for the faith. (5)
The Protestant faith, if it is anything, is a Biblical faith. The translation of the books of the Bible from Latin into the language of common parlance was one of the significant turning points in the history of Christianity. Making the Bible available to the common person is rightly attributed to the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, a doctrine which we will explore week after next.
The Bible: it varies widely in style and content. It reflects different historical contexts and cultural assumptions. The Bible does not question slavery, for example. The Bible assumes that women are secondary in status to men. The Bible knows nothing of quantum physics. It never imagined the possibility of human cloning. The Bible assumes a spatial, three story universe with heaven up here, hell down there, and the earth somewhere in between. You will note that the Catholic Church has just declared that there is no such thing as limbo, so you don’t have to worry about that. There are a lot of things to worry about: the level of your cholesterol, things like that, but no more worries about limbo. If you have Catholic genes still lingering around in your psyche, relax.
So, you Protestants, you sophisticated, post-Enlightenment citizens of the twenty-first century, why should you pay attention to the Bible? Why the Bible? I would offer a least a couple of reasons why the Bible remains central to our lives and to our community of faith. The most important one is that the subject of the Bible is God and God’s relationship with God’s people. Peter Gomes puts it this way: Unlike anything else, the Bible is “the record of holy encounters between people and the Almighty, encounters that have been decisive and compelling and that have been preserved from generation to generation because they remind each succeeding generation of the presence of God in our lives and where to search for God when God seems far, far away.” (6)
The Presbyterian Book of Order puts it this way: We “accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy spirit, the unique, authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the church universal and God’s Word to us. “(G-14.0205-.0207b)
Martin Luther used a beautiful phrase to illustrate the meaning of the Scriptures and its relation to Christ. “The Scriptures,” he wrote, “are the manger in which the Christ child comes to us.” We don’t worship the manger. We worship the Christ who is held in the manger.
I have made a point of the different approach to the Scripture by the Catholic tradition, but I also want to make the counterpoint that not only Protestants have a high regard for the Scriptures. Two of my most important teachers were a young Catholic couple who volunteered at the night shelter at the church where I was serving in the early 1980s. Over time, they came to know one of our guests very well. His name was Randy. Randy had had pneumonia twice that winter and was constantly engaged in a battle with alcoholism. When Randy got sick the fourth time, my young friends took Randy to their house to live with them and their two little children. It seemed very risky to my. “Why are you doing that?” I asked them one day.
Katie answered, “We think Jesus really meant it when he said ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’” There you have it: the power of the Word
to transform and to move us, as human beings, to higher ground. The Word that was Christ. The Word to whom the Scriptures and the preaching of the Scriptures bear witness, through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Word that came among us full of grace and truth. We don’t live in Bible times. We cannot go to the well at the center the village and see Jesus sitting there and hear him speak. How do we know him? We know him through the community that gathers in his Spirit and that is shaped by his Word, testified to in Scripture.
Our Reformed Protestant tradition has guidelines for the interpretation of Scripture:
1. Scripture is to be interpreted by and empowered by the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Read the Bible and trust God to do what God will with your encounter with the Word.
2. Scripture is to be interpreted in the light of other Scriptures with openness to the whole Word of God and not just a particular part.
It has been amazing to me how the church has become fixated on some of the laws in Leviticus and has set its policies in recent years around those particular passages rather than hearing the whole Word of God.
3. Scripture is to be interpreted in the light of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and what Christ did in the world.
4. It is to be interpreted with love for all people. That is called the Rule of Love.
5. It is to be interpreted in light of the way it has been interpreted. This is called the Rule of Faith.
6. It is to be interpreted in terms of its historical context and in light of the living God who is still at work in our time and place.
7. And above all else, for Reformed Protestants, the Scripture is to be interpreted with our understanding of our human fallibility.
To be Reformed means to be always being reformed by the Word of God. For example, The Presbyterian Church since its founding had said that women could not speak from the pulpit. And then fifty years ago, the Holy Spirit enlightened the mind of the Presbyterian Church as the church studied the Scriptures. The church began to see the ancient words in a new light, and we now know what we didn’t know before, that “God calls women and men to all ministries of the church.” (7) To be a Protestant, a Reformed Protestant, is to always stand under the correcting, illuminating power of God who can show us something we have not seen before.
Isn’t it a shame that so many in our day take the life-giving, grace-filled Word of God and use it as a weapon to fight with, use it as an iron gate to exclude others, use it for the purposes of meanness instead of in the service of love? I simply can’t stand it when the Church does that. Why? Because I have heard since I was a child about the shepherd who, though only one sheep was missing, couldn’t rest until he had gone and searched for the one that was lost and picked him up, and when he found him, carried him home. I have it deep in my heart that Jesus was like that shepherd. I believe him when he says, “Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden. There is a place for you in my kingdom.”
I have a problem, though. I’ve read about the grace. I have also seen the sin and self-righteousness of the human creature that is revealed over and over again in the pages of Scripture. I believe that one of the main reasons we dismiss the Bible is not because it is out of date, but because it describes far too accurately where we are and where we went wrong and how we, too, need to change. (8) The Bible exposes us as flawed human creatures. We are there celebrating the power of God to part the Red Sea, but we are there also when the Children of Israel melt their jewelry in the pot and create the golden calf. We are there at the foot of the cross, but we are also there with Peter when he says, “Me? I never knew him.”(9)
That, blessedly, is not the end of the story. The Bible exposes us as we are, but it also shines a light on the path to a new day.
Protestants do not believe in the Bible. We believe in the God who is revealed in the Bible. We do not believe every word of the Bibl, and we do not need to take every word literally. If we did, we would never get a haircut, or eat shrimp, or wear a necklace. If we did take the Bible literally, we would have to agree with Pat Robertson. What we must do as Protestants is take the Bible seriously, trusting that within its covers lie a beauty, a mystery, a truth that are not of this world but have the power to transform this world into nothing less than the kingdom of God.
Tomorrow, we honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Whatever else can be said about the great 20th century Protestant Reformer who was King, the most important thing that must be said about him is that he was a man whose vision was shaped entirely by the word of God. He lived under the authority of Scripture. No one would deny the impact of the philosophy of Gandhi on Martin Luther King, but before Gandhi came Amos and Isaiah and Micah. Many in King’s day read the Bible as a document that reinforced the status quo, the separation of races. But King read it as a mandate for change.
As it is written in I Corinthians 15, “the trumpet shall sound…and we shall be changed.” (10) And in Romans 12: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may discern what is the will of God.”
The trouble with King was that he believed the Bible. He lived out of its vision of justice and mercy, reconciliation and redemption. Would that we would see his like again. Would that we ourselves might hear the voice of God calling to us from the pages of Scripture and that we might say, as do the prophets in every age, “Here I am. Send me.”
Imagine what kind of world we would have if every person who claimed to be a Bible-believing Christian started acting like a Bible-believing Christian. Use your imagination, and may the power of God and the witness of the Holy Scriptures show us a higher and better way.
(1) The Christian Century, February 1-8, 1995, p.105.
(2) Walter Bruggemann, “Transforming the Imagination,” Books and Religion, Spring, 1992.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Robert McAfee Brown, The Spirit of Protestantism, Oxford University Press, 1965, reprinted by Viking Press, p.67.
(5) Ibid., p.68.
(6) Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book, William Morrow and Company, 1996.
(7) The Brief Statement of Faith
(8) Brown, p. 79.
(9)Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 11
(10) Gomes, p.60.
Why the Bible? The Reverend Joanna Adams Morningside Presbyterian Church Atlanta, Georgia January 15, 2006
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Why the Bible?
The Reverend Joanna Adams
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Atlanta, Georgia
January 15, 2006
Today, we continue our winter series of sermons on six of the central affirmations of Protestantism, the Christian tradition in which the Presbyterian Church finds its home. Last Sunday, the subject was grace; next week we will explore the meaning of the phrase The Sovereignty of God. Today, I want to talk about the Bible: what the Bible is and what it is not, how it is used and abused, why some find it to be a lamp unto their feet and a guiding light for their lives, and others find it to be irrelevant, arbitrary, and filled with judgment.
I doubt that there is a book in existence that is talked about more and read less than the Bible. A poll conducted by the Barna Research Group discovered that 38% of those who were sampled, and a thousand or more were sampled, 38% thought that both the Old and the New Testaments were written in the decade after Jesus’ death. 10% believed that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. (1) A great many people simply have never read the Bible. They talk about it. They put it on the bed stand by their bed. They assume they know its contents. They might even put it under their pillow thinking they might absorb some wisdom and knowledge while they sleep. Others actually read it, but they take the approach similar to that of W.C. Fields who was found by his physician on his deathbed reading the Bible. “What are you doing?” the doctor asked W.C. Fields.
Fields answered, “I’m looking for loopholes.”
Some look for loopholes. Others sift through the Bible looking for verses that justify their prejudices and reinforce their assumptions about how the world ought to be run.
In the interest of full disclosure, let me say it now. In spite of the misuse and abuse of the scriptures across the centuries by religious institutions and by individuals, I love the Bible. I find it uniquely possessed of the power to reveal the nature of God, a power that genuinely can transform the human imagination. (2) It is the power of the Spirit of the Living God. For thirty years, I have spent a significant portion of my time and energy listening each week to Biblical texts and trying to help other people listen and respond to them in ways that strengthen their Christian discipleship. I have lived within the world of the Bible most of my life. When I was a child, I went to Sunday School every Sunday, not by choice always, but by golly, we went. I heard Bible stories. I learned Bible verses. I learned a new one every week, but I was always very envious of Cecil Brown, a boy in my class who was wildly more popular than I was and who got away with saying “Jesus wept” every single Sunday.
The long and short of it is that the more I have lived inside the story the Bible tells, the more I have come to believe that the real world is the world of which the Bible speaks, a reality where lost sheep are found by the good shepherd, where justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream, where the good Samaritan stops to help a stranger, the earth is filled with the goodness of God, and tears and crying and pain are no more because the former things have passed away.
One text at a time, one Sunday at a time, over a long period of time, my imagination has been reshaped by the possibilities put forth in the Scripture. (3) It is perhaps the most important thing I can tell you about my life. I cannot prove any of the claims of Scripture, and neither can anyone else, but as I live them and as my community and I are guided by those claims, I find hope for our broken world and larger possibilities for myself.
Okay, so what is the Bible? It really isn’t a book. It is a collection of sixty-six writings composed over the course of more than 900 years. That’s a very long period of time. Counting back 900 years from today would land us in the year 1106. “Protestantism asserts that these sixty-six writings of the Bible are to be the source and standard for the church’s life until the end of time.” The great cry of the Reformation was “sola scriptura,” scripture alone as the source and test of faith. (4) This was in stark opposition to the Catholic tradition, which maintained that the tradition of the Catholic Church had authority equal to that of Scripture. The question of authority was one of the major breaking points between Protestants and Catholics.
It had taken three centuries after Jesus’ death for Christendom to decide which books would constitute the New Testament. Finally, twenty-seven writings were settled upon and they, along with the Jewish Scriptures, came to make up the Christian canon. The word “canon” means “yardstick” or “norm,’’ which is a way of saying that the canon is to serve as the norm or the yardstick for the faith. (5)
The Protestant faith, if it is anything, is a Biblical faith. The translation of the books of the Bible from Latin into the language of common parlance was one of the significant turning points in the history of Christianity. Making the Bible available to the common person is rightly attributed to the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, a doctrine which we will explore week after next.
The Bible: it varies widely in style and content. It reflects different historical contexts and cultural assumptions. The Bible does not question slavery, for example. The Bible assumes that women are secondary in status to men. The Bible knows nothing of quantum physics. It never imagined the possibility of human cloning. The Bible assumes a spatial, three story universe with heaven up here, hell down there, and the earth somewhere in between. You will note that the Catholic Church has just declared that there is no such thing as limbo, so you don’t have to worry about that. There are a lot of things to worry about: the level of your cholesterol, things like that, but no more worries about limbo. If you have Catholic genes still lingering around in your psyche, relax.
So, you Protestants, you sophisticated, post-Enlightenment citizens of the twenty-first century, why should you pay attention to the Bible? Why the Bible? I would offer a least a couple of reasons why the Bible remains central to our lives and to our community of faith. The most important one is that the subject of the Bible is God and God’s relationship with God’s people. Peter Gomes puts it this way: Unlike anything else, the Bible is “the record of holy encounters between people and the Almighty, encounters that have been decisive and compelling and that have been preserved from generation to generation because they remind each succeeding generation of the presence of God in our lives and where to search for God when God seems far, far away.” (6)
The Presbyterian Book of Order puts it this way: We “accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy spirit, the unique, authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the church universal and God’s Word to us. “(G-14.0205-.0207b)
Martin Luther used a beautiful phrase to illustrate the meaning of the Scriptures and its relation to Christ. “The Scriptures,” he wrote, “are the manger in which the Christ child comes to us.” We don’t worship the manger. We worship the Christ who is held in the manger.
I have made a point of the different approach to the Scripture by the Catholic tradition, but I also want to make the counterpoint that not only Protestants have a high regard for the Scriptures. Two of my most important teachers were a young Catholic couple who volunteered at the night shelter at the church where I was serving in the early 1980s. Over time, they came to know one of our guests very well. His name was Randy. Randy had had pneumonia twice that winter and was constantly engaged in a battle with alcoholism. When Randy got sick the fourth time, my young friends took Randy to their house to live with them and their two little children. It seemed very risky to my. “Why are you doing that?” I asked them one day.
Katie answered, “We think Jesus really meant it when he said ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’” There you have it: the power of the Word
to transform and to move us, as human beings, to higher ground. The Word that was Christ. The Word to whom the Scriptures and the preaching of the Scriptures bear witness, through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Word that came among us full of grace and truth. We don’t live in Bible times. We cannot go to the well at the center the village and see Jesus sitting there and hear him speak. How do we know him? We know him through the community that gathers in his Spirit and that is shaped by his Word, testified to in Scripture.
Our Reformed Protestant tradition has guidelines for the interpretation of Scripture:
1. Scripture is to be interpreted by and empowered by the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Read the Bible and trust God to do what God will with your encounter with the Word.
2. Scripture is to be interpreted in the light of other Scriptures with openness to the whole Word of God and not just a particular part.
It has been amazing to me how the church has become fixated on some of the laws in Leviticus and has set its policies in recent years around those particular passages rather than hearing the whole Word of God.
3. Scripture is to be interpreted in the light of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and what Christ did in the world.
4. It is to be interpreted with love for all people. That is called the Rule of Love.
5. It is to be interpreted in light of the way it has been interpreted. This is called the Rule of Faith.
6. It is to be interpreted in terms of its historical context and in light of the living God who is still at work in our time and place.
7. And above all else, for Reformed Protestants, the Scripture is to be interpreted with our understanding of our human fallibility.
To be Reformed means to be always being reformed by the Word of God. For example, The Presbyterian Church since its founding had said that women could not speak from the pulpit. And then fifty years ago, the Holy Spirit enlightened the mind of the Presbyterian Church as the church studied the Scriptures. The church began to see the ancient words in a new light, and we now know what we didn’t know before, that “God calls women and men to all ministries of the church.” (7) To be a Protestant, a Reformed Protestant, is to always stand under the correcting, illuminating power of God who can show us something we have not seen before.
Isn’t it a shame that so many in our day take the life-giving, grace-filled Word of God and use it as a weapon to fight with, use it as an iron gate to exclude others, use it for the purposes of meanness instead of in the service of love? I simply can’t stand it when the Church does that. Why? Because I have heard since I was a child about the shepherd who, though only one sheep was missing, couldn’t rest until he had gone and searched for the one that was lost and picked him up, and when he found him, carried him home. I have it deep in my heart that Jesus was like that shepherd. I believe him when he says, “Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden. There is a place for you in my kingdom.”
I have a problem, though. I’ve read about the grace. I have also seen the sin and self-righteousness of the human creature that is revealed over and over again in the pages of Scripture. I believe that one of the main reasons we dismiss the Bible is not because it is out of date, but because it describes far too accurately where we are and where we went wrong and how we, too, need to change. (8) The Bible exposes us as flawed human creatures. We are there celebrating the power of God to part the Red Sea, but we are there also when the Children of Israel melt their jewelry in the pot and create the golden calf. We are there at the foot of the cross, but we are also there with Peter when he says, “Me? I never knew him.”(9)
That, blessedly, is not the end of the story. The Bible exposes us as we are, but it also shines a light on the path to a new day.
Protestants do not believe in the Bible. We believe in the God who is revealed in the Bible. We do not believe every word of the Bibl, and we do not need to take every word literally. If we did, we would never get a haircut, or eat shrimp, or wear a necklace. If we did take the Bible literally, we would have to agree with Pat Robertson. What we must do as Protestants is take the Bible seriously, trusting that within its covers lie a beauty, a mystery, a truth that are not of this world but have the power to transform this world into nothing less than the kingdom of God.
Tomorrow, we honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Whatever else can be said about the great 20th century Protestant Reformer who was King, the most important thing that must be said about him is that he was a man whose vision was shaped entirely by the word of God. He lived under the authority of Scripture. No one would deny the impact of the philosophy of Gandhi on Martin Luther King, but before Gandhi came Amos and Isaiah and Micah. Many in King’s day read the Bible as a document that reinforced the status quo, the separation of races. But King read it as a mandate for change.
As it is written in I Corinthians 15, “the trumpet shall sound…and we shall be changed.” (10) And in Romans 12: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may discern what is the will of God.”
The trouble with King was that he believed the Bible. He lived out of its vision of justice and mercy, reconciliation and redemption. Would that we would see his like again. Would that we ourselves might hear the voice of God calling to us from the pages of Scripture and that we might say, as do the prophets in every age, “Here I am. Send me.”
Imagine what kind of world we would have if every person who claimed to be a Bible-believing Christian started acting like a Bible-believing Christian. Use your imagination, and may the power of God and the witness of the Holy Scriptures show us a higher and better way.
(1) The Christian Century, February 1-8, 1995, p.105.
(2) Walter Bruggemann, “Transforming the Imagination,” Books and Religion, Spring, 1992.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Robert McAfee Brown, The Spirit of Protestantism, Oxford University Press, 1965, reprinted by Viking Press, p.67.
(5) Ibid., p.68.
(6) Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book, William Morrow and Company, 1996.
(7) The Brief Statement of Faith
(8) Brown, p. 79.
(9)Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 11
(10) Gomes, p.60.
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