The Holy Bible: true but irrelevant?

January 21, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

I’ve been giving thought to my comments a few days back about the young man who burst into our Bible Study to condemn us for being tolerant of homosexuals. Was I “too rough on him” because he was “rough” on us? I couldn’t really respond to his rants that night, because he continued to praise Jesus and lecture us at high speed. So I saved my response for this blog.

It may be that all Christians will never reconcile about this thorny controversy involving human sexuality. But I don’t think it’s the sexuality issues which divide us, but our very approach to faith and grace, to the Word, to how God communicates with us, and to spiritual authority.

I am reminded that long before anything about homosexuality hit the church’s radar in the 1970s (after the Stonewall rebellion of June 1969), fundamentalist Christians were already in sharp disagreement with the “mainstream” about many issues of faith and authority.

Fundamentalism is at heart a rebellion against human and church authority and a persistent if not obsessive pursuit of absolute truth. Even saying that prompts me to sigh for them. Good luck on the absolute truth part, people. You may declare (by human authority) that every word of the Bible is the same as the Word of God, and that it is all true—without error even in matters of astronomy and mathematics, completely divine and without human content—but that does not make truth any more accessible or any easier to be absolute about.

The Bible contains a lot of stuff which may be true but may also be completely irrelevant to our lives today and our spiritual questions today. People who want the Bible to be an absolutist’s Answer Book must struggle to make sense of its contents. They try to find an answer to every question, no matter how forced, and they must be inventive to find a contemporary context for which the Bible has “answers.”

For example: Is there any accessible, eternally-valid, good counsel in the story of Ezra, who proclaimed that God was judging the nation because its men had married foreign women, and that it was God’s will that all these families be broken up–that the foreign women and their children simply be expelled from Israel [Ezra 9:1–10:44]?

I am not making this up. It’s not said in just one verse—it takes two chapters for this to unfold. And although it is in the Holy Bible, no one today except a white supremacist would try to use it to provide relational or sexual guidance.  Ezra’s view of God’s will was to keep the Jewish blood lines pure and to get rid of foreign, pagan idolatrous religions which were influencing Israel and diluting its pure worship of God. For anyone except the Jewish people to attempt to use this stuff to apply to other lands, other centuries and other ethnic groups, or to tout ethnic purity in any way, is a misapplication of the biblical word.

Then there’s the problem that in the New Testament Jesus forbids divorce as being against the will of our Creator [Matthew 19:3–9; Mark 10:1–12] and puts the divorced parties into the sin of adultery.

It might even be fun (okay, a little devious) to challenge the fundamentalist man who burst in last week to condemn us for our tolerance. He himself is of mixed ethnicity, so I wonder how he takes the Book of Ezra.

Well, what is our approach to faith and grace, to the Word of God, and to spiritual authority?

I looked back at some things I posted on my theological site:

The mission of this site is a small part of the mission of Jesus given to his disciples: to go and to teach. It claims no authority other than the Gospel of Jesus Christ: the Good News that God our Creator has accepted us and redeemed us, through the death of Jesus, and not by our own deeds, merits or intentions.

God’s love is as unconditional as it is everlasting. And it is linked to the certain knowledge that Jesus poured out his Spirit to his followers and thereby detached the Word, the power and the mission of truth and light from authority tied to human institutions. Institutions such as the church can and do share in this Spirit, but they cannot control it.

There’s the thorny part, laid open:  if church authority or even biblical authority, literally applied, cannot control the work of the Spirit, then how do we know—when we disagree—who is right? The one who loudly praises Jesus with every breath?  The one who can quote the most scripture from memory?  Or the one who patiently restrains one’s anger and meditates about the deeper things as if they matter.  What matters in my reflection on the matters of the spirit is two-fold. I believe we and all Christians should be grieved by and ashamed of our disunity—our tendency to “part company” with one another when there are thorny issues on which we do not easily come to agreement.  But at the same time, I cannot accept strident fundamentalism which claims the authority of the Bible to condemn others and to reject our faithful/different reading of the holy texts.  We are all under Christ’s orders to remain one body, one people, so we are impelled to listen and speak, to give and take so that the Holy Spirit’s gifts may enlighten us all.

Is this too abstract, or too naive, to suppose that dialogue between opposing views must continue? As it stands, a favorite technique of fundamentalists is to stir up uncertainty and doubt in the minds of people that the more open, flexible or tolerant views about faith and grace they were taught are wrong.  To me, this is exploiting people’s fears, not giving people the tools and power to live out the Word through meaningful discipleship.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Note: The subject of Christian unity was treated in Sunday’s sermon January 27, 2007.  Download PDF file here: ricsermon2008.pdf.

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