Dumbing down the Christian life.

October 8, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

This is part 2 of a topic I introduced yesterday, in response to a comment received this week. 

Dumbing Down the Christian Life

It is truly amazing, in reading the Lutheran confessional documents or the writings of Luther, to see the wide array of ancient church “Fathers” cited, and the breadth of biblical ideas discussed.  All of these ancestors in the faith knew the Bible intimately.  They engaged its complex ideas and grandest messages.  They taught themselves the ancient languages in which it was written, and they constantly improved the available text by studying and comparing every known manuscript, and seeking to note and pass on every variation of word and meaning, every nuance that otherwise might be lost through carelessness.

Luther was so convinced of the necessity of the Bible to the faith of the believers that he single-handedly translated its nearly 1,200 chapters into German, and in so doing took inventive strides to craft his own language so that it could express the depth of the biblical word and experience.

With tenacity and faithfulness, as the centuries passed, Christian scholars and leaders made sense of the biblical word by measuring their own spiritual experience against it, weighing their own moral and ethical questions by its scale.  They developed a relationship with the sacred texts so profound that it added to the Bible’s sacredness.

But it is dismaying to see the current wave of Christian energy in our own time doing the opposite.  Too many Christians—preachers and believers alike—engage the Bible with the flimsiest of tools and dig only in its shallows.  Profound theological ideas are being supplanted with sound bytes and bumper sticker theology.

As this dangerous pattern develops, it is becoming clearer that the unwavering zeal which heaps up reverence for the Bible contributes to a dumbness with which its complexity and profundity are reduced to simplistic questions, for which there are pat answers.  Most obviously, an appeal to the idea of “verbal inspiration” actually contributes to the treatment of the Bible as if it were a flip-and-point “manual” for life with the answers printed in the back.

This comes about as human intelligence itself has been subtracted form the entire equation.  “Verbal inspiration”—the view that the Holy Spirit dictated the Bible to its human authors, word for word—makes of those writers imbecilic word processors, as if the presence of God in their own experience, their lives, their struggles in faith, their pilgrimages in life, even their personal encounter with Jesus, played no part whatever in what they wrote down.

It may seen grossly unfair to characterize and criticize this view, since so many Christians today apparently take great comfort in “verbal inspiration.”  But in truth, such piety is their unwitting attempt to “dumb down” the original authors of the Biblical texts to the level of bumper sticker believers today.  As if they, too, do not need to bring their intellect, experience, struggles or pilgrimages to the Scripture, to make sense of the word and make sense of their faith.  Instead they merely “look up” the answers like automatons which the ancient writers, with equal inanimacy, “put down.”

Christians dare not put their trust in current insights or theological statements above their trust in the promises of the Gospel.  The Bible must never be reduced to an “answer book” any more than it should be reduced to a refuge, talisman, shibboleth or weapon.  To fall into any of these abuses is to weaken the Christian faith by reliance upon pat answers, human certainty, and doctrinal or constitutional statements. All of these are not the Gospel of Jesus Christ but the product of human endeavor.

There is more truth contained in a simple confession of faith in Jesus Christ and in the promises of the Gospel than in an absolute confidence in the Bible. The Gospel is complete and unchangeable, but the process of engaging, understanding and interpreting the Bible is an ongoing contribution to the whole Christian faith over two millennia—always incomplete. Our conviction that the Bible is God’s gift is not diminished by the admission that our understanding of it is imperfect and provisional.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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