Book Review: A Generous Orthodoxy Part 13 of ??
Biblical - (on purpose)
In this chapter (which I'll make into two blog entries), McLaren explains how he values the Bible highly, in a way that he hopes the Bible itself says to, despite his non-acceptance of the common Evangelical idea of inerrancy. This is perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book for me since I came to the conclusion about six months ago that I could no longer believe a fairly strict doctrine of Biblical inerrancy (the last straw for me involved a reading of a chronologically ordered edition of the Bible, where the format served to highlight some difficulties in reconciling parallel passages).
The common Evangelical view of Biblical inerrancy leads modern, Western people to expect the same types of answers from the Bible as they expect from a phone book, encyclopedia, or legal constitution. McLaren writes that this view comes more from rationalistic philosophy than it does from the Bible itself, and that it is not the best way to read the Bible.
McLaren spends some time addressing the most common Biblical passage that people refer to when discussing how to view the Bible, 2 Timothy 3:16+17. The passage says the scripture is God-breathed. McLaren notes that God's breath is associated with "creativity and life-giving vitality" (as seen in the creation of the world and of humanity in Genesis). As there is a difference between a corpse and a living body there is likewise a difference between words and words "vitalized with God's breath." This upholds the dual divine/human origins of scripture, maintaining the importance of God's inspiration and of historical context.
McLaren writes that instead of using ideas not found in the Bible to refer to it, such as inerrant, literal, and objective, etc., a useful doctrinal statement would say something like, "the purpose of Scripture is to equip God's people for good works." This is an idea straight from 2 Timothy 3:16+17. Scripture then is to be used to equip people to do good works, and not to threaten others or as a "shortcut to being know-it-alls who believe that the bible gives all the answers." This view of Scripture can also be seen in Psalms 119.
Another point that McLaren makes is that it is dangerous to call the Bible the "Word of God," because that phrase is used in the Bible to describe Jesus, and not Scripture.
posted by Freethinker at 7:20:00 AM
3 Comments:
Hmm, maybe that Christmas gift last year did you more harm than good??
I have a very high view of scripture, but I agree that we should read the Bible more like literature and not read it like we read the phone book (where we expect every single detail to be objectively accurate--and I've known phone books that were incorrect, too). I believe that scripture is God-breathed, but I also believe that God allowed the human authors quite a bit of themselves to go into the writings, even to the point that a couple of the minor objective details were incorrect. It is like listening to two different friends independently report about an incident they both were involved in--they both pretty much tell the same story, but it won't be identical. I think God allowed a certain amount of that kind of thing to be included in the canon.
I do not believe, as I perhaps did when I was younger, that those little discrepencies make the Bible any less valid, true, or meaningful than if it did read like a phone book.
BTW, just teasing about that first comment.
I think I agree.
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