That Bible Thing

“This reveals something I wish every Christian knew, and I say this as a deeply committed Christian myself: sometimes the Bible is wrong. It not only tells us about the wisdom and insights and experiences of our spiritual ancestors, but also contains their limited vision, their acceptance of things like slavery and the subordination of women. That’s not uniform, of course. There are also texts that proclaim the equality of men and women and forbid a Christian from having a Christian slave and so forth, but it’s all there, including mistaken notions about how the second coming will be soon.

We would escape a whole bunch of problems if only we all knew that and weren’t alarmed by it. The whole Genesis versus evolution controversy. For me, it’s not that the first chapters of Genesis are wrong, but they’re not meant to be taken literally. So, also the issue of whether women are supposed to be subordinate to men. That issue disappears if people are willing to say, “sometimes the Bible is wrong.”

So also with the texts that are quoted in opposition to same-sex behavior. Those passages, and there aren’t many, tell us what some of our spiritual ancestors thought and clearly they were wrong about that. So many conflicts in the church could be either resolved or handled in a very different way if only we didn’t have this uncritical reverence for the Bible.”

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Marcus Borg (via affcath)

(Source: religiondispatches.org, via 2ndhalfoflife)

I am of the view that anything we love is something we should be critical of when that criticism is necessary.  We discipline our children because we love them and we want them to be good people.  We speak out against our government because we love our country and want it to be a good country.  We speak out against the injustice in the Bible because we love our faith and want it to be a healthy, loving religion for everyone.

I sometimes feel like there is this dichotomy of fundamentalists and liberals.  It goes both ways and I acknowledge myself trying to distance myself from the hurtful things that religious conservatives do, but I see the same thing happening on the other side.  Progressives aren’t “real” Christians, we are DISREGARDING and CHERRY PICKING and justifying our sinfulness via Biblical criticism… even though I think that Biblical literalists are doing exactly the same thing.

So here’s today’s reminder that biblical literalism is a modern development, that I love the Bible and my faith just as much as my brothers and sisters who are part of the “religious right” and that I think I am doing it right just as much as they do.

I am critical of the Bible not because I want to justify my own worldviews but because I have a deep desire to get close to the real meanings and truths present within it and those truths are often times obscured by literalist interpretations and by human biases inserted into the text by its authors and translators.