Truth, the Bible, and biblicism

Recently, I was involved in a dialogue on Facebook, the topic of which was a state voter referendum on a particularly polarizing social issue.

The state, the issue, and the people contributing to the dialogue are not the point of this post, so I'll leave them all nameless.  What caught my attention was the use of the Bible in the dialogue, to either affirm or refute an argument.  Several people in the conversation, myself included, referred to the Bible in one way or another, but the way we used it was quite different.

There is an approach to using the Bible, which I will refer to as biblicism, which ascribes to the Bible properties that I believe are excessive as well as internally inconsistent.  I will be over-simplifying the argument, no doubt, but only in an effort to keep this post concise.  A fuller (and excellent) treatment can be found here, and I will leave to the reader any further exploration of it.

No doubt you have heard people describe the Bible in terms like this: "I believe the Bible to be the divinely inspired Word of God, inerrant in the original manuscripts, and our only rule of faith and practice.  Because the Bible is the Word of God, it is by definition absolute truth.  And since God also made us, the Bible serves as the owner's manual and rule book for life, and can be profitably read as authoritative on all aspects of life."  Well... there's a lot in that statement, more than I can tackle here, so I will confine my comments to the ideas that the Bible is: 1) God's exhaustive revelation, 2) uniformly authoritative, and can be 3) comprehensively applied to life.  I think it is none of those things in total, and all of those things in part.

God's revelation it is, exhaustive it is not.  A quick read of the Synoptic gospels vs that of St. John certainly points out that the four gospel writers focused on different events in the life of Jesus.  None of them cover all the same things, nor all in the same way.  And if the life of Jesus isn't God's revelation to humankind, I don't know what is.  But, the Bible account of Jesus is incomplete.  St. John himself says that there were all kinds of other things that Jesus said and did than those which were written down in the Bible, but he only wrote those that were needed for us to believe.  (Jn. 21:25).  Jesus said and did more than was written down about him, and no doubt the same is true of the patriarchs, the kings, and the prophets. Those other things were transmitted to those who were around at the time, and preserved after that in oral tradition.  So, is the Bible exhaustive?  No.  Necessary and sufficient for salvation?  Yeah.

The Bible is authoritative, just not uniformly so.  You wouldn't hold Ecclesiastes to have the same level of authority over life and practice as you would Paul's epistles.  You wouldn't read the story of King Saul as being authoritative in the same way you would read the story of Jesus crucifixion and resurrection.  You wouldn't put Revelation on the same level of authority as Leviticus.  Poetry and historical narrative are not to be read in the same way.  Even within the same book and author, you don't necessarily give every passage the same authoritative weight.  When St. Paul tells the Corinthians how women should dress and behave in church, it carries a different kind of authority than when he is describing his sufferings on his mission trips, or when he is speaking about how to practice spiritual gifts or share in the Lord's Supper.  No one reasonably expects to give every single passage from Genesis to Revelation identical authoritative weight.  We use judgment (sometimes informed and sometimes not, but judgment nonetheless), to determine a passage's authoritativeness for our present circumstances today.  I mean, who among us has obeyed Jesus' command to "sell all you possess and give it to the poor."  (Mark 10:21)  I sure haven't.  You haven't, either.  Do Jesus' commands have authority?  Sure... but we would agree that they are not equally so.

You can apply the Bible to life selectively, not comprehensively.  Quick!  What does the Bible teach on the morality of 1) genetic engineering of plants, 2) funding manned space missions to the moon or Mars,  3) gastric bypass surgery for weight loss, or 4) hydro-fracking for shale oils & natural gas? 

NOTHING!

None of these issues existed at the time the Bible was written.  There is no reasonable expectation that the Bible would give explicit direction on these matters.  Now, of course, we can deduce some things that might possibly apply to those topics based on general principles, but... to do that we must infer, and to infer we must interpret.  And when we interpret, we leave straightaway the category of ABSOLUTE truth, for the truth then becomes relative to our interpretation of the Bible, and to what we infer from it about God's implied direction on a topic.  Truth becomes relative insofar as it depends on my interpretation.  No longer then can our rallying cry be "sola scriptura!" but instead it must be "sola (my interpretation of) scriptura!".  This calls for great humility in offering our opinions, for although God is not fallible, we certainly are.

As to the Bible being God's little rule book, our instruction manual for life, all I can say is - no owner's manual I've ever read has said things like "Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless!" (Eccl. 1:2),  "Your two breasts are like twins, fawns of a gazelle." (Song 4:5), "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"(Ps. 22:1, Mt. 27:46), and "They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company." (Acts 15:39)  What kind of instruction manual is that?

The Bible is simply far more complex and layered (and fraught with opportunities for differences in interpretation), than biblicists make it out to be.  As such, it should not be cavalierly appealed to, to settle an argument, as if it were simply a matter of looking it up, or "biblically Google-ing it", because the answer will be obvious.  It's far more complicated than that.

(and by the way, God is, too.)