Saying the Bible is Just Plain Wrong

Saying the Bible is Just Plain Wrong October 6, 2015

Ruin ChurchYesterday I posted a sermon, Seeking a Life of Meaning, and was delighted to receive a serious comment. I say delighted because the tone opened a respectful dialogue rather than some comments I’ve received that deal only in angry rhetoric. Anyway, the commenter, Carl, raises a good point, one I often discuss with my wife.

I often say that preaching is a conversation, the same conversation that formed the text of scripture. It is still going on today. When I preach it is the next word in that conversation; I expect a word back. I got one so I thought I’d continue the dialogue here.

First to bring the rest of you up to speed, Carl said, “Perhaps churches are emptying because, unlike a universe which is constantly expanding, Christianity is in the throes of an agonal state, tethered to reference points, principally the Bible, while points of ‘Encounter’ have moved on. Paul male, apostle male, Christ Jesus male, God (understood for convenience only) male. Of its time, but a subliminal message is being conveyed already that has NOTHING constructive to do with our time, unless we seek to examine and bravely reject the sources which perpetuate male dominance over women. Just a thought…wishing you well.”

First let me say that I completely agree; there is absolutely nothing constructive about the assumptions of male dominance built into the texts of the Bible. It’s more than the subliminal messages too. Late in the Ephesian letter on which I’m preaching, the author explicitly supports male dominance. And it’s not just masculine references to God that are the problem. It goes deeper than that. There is a lot of work to be done before sexist attitudes and structures are rooted out of our worldview.

It seems to me that our culture is just now taking baby steps towards integrating a quite different understanding of the role, and especially the value, of women and the feminine generally. But baby steps is all we see. Like many of my colleagues I’ve worked to excise masculine language about God and humanity generally, from public worship. We had some success in our “liberal” church. There’s no more “He,” no more “mankind,” but my goodness, when we tried to remove the word “Lord” from worship, you’d have thought I’d suggested getting rid of prayer altogether. So yes it seems clear enough; the church does tether itself to reference points that have moved on.

In the face of that, what’s to be done? Many, many people have answered that question by tossing their Bibles and leaving the church.  I guess they figure, “What is the point of belonging to an institution that refuses to develop and grow, or does so, but so slowly it does not lead society, but follows?” They’d be right, the pace of the debate concerning same sex marriage for instance, is lumbering along at about that of the larger culture. But worse than that, we have failed to offer our culture a compelling narrative, a framework of meaning that makes sense within a modern worldview, one that lights up the heart and animates a creative impulse within so electric it draws all things together in perfect harmony. I’m talking about something worth dying for. That’s when we’ll see people really start to live.

Carl is surely right when he says it will require us to bravely reject the sources of injustice embedded within the texts of the Bible. That task is apparently so immense it has moved many to set the book aside. But my trouble is, I wouldn’t begin to know how I’d go about offering a compelling framework of meaning without the Bible.

It was interesting to me that Carl used the word “tether” because it is the very word I use to describe my relationship to the Biblical texts. It’s as though they ground me, for it is within them I’ve come to meet what Whitehead called the “gentle persuasion of love.” It’s within those very texts that I’m challenged to recognize the love intelligence of the universe not acting upon me so much as being expressed through me.

It’s in conversation with these texts that people have wrestled out what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, offering their own failures to reveal the shadow within each of us. It is these texts that undermine the very failings inherent to them. We don’t get “God’s word” from the words on the page; it’s not a magic thing. No we, like the authors themselves, engage Spirit in conversation, coming with an open heart and a desire to know the God defined by that curious, complex, poorly defined word, “love.”

So yes, I’m going to take up the challenge set before me. I will (bravely or not), reject the sources of injustice in the text. When we get to Ephesians 5:22, I’ll say that Paul was flat out wrong and then I’ll work to wrestle the word of God out of it from there. But this is not a solo enterprise. The texts were written for the collective. It is the collective that must rise.

I know I’m not very realistic, at least I’ve been told that many times before, but we live in such deeply troubled times without any coherent vision or common purpose. Nevertheless I will not be discouraged, (at least not tonight),  for scripture challenges me to look for that new moment, God’s creative word “spoken” at a time when all else is silent. I’ve got this sense of an evolutionary urgency around this, and I’m catching a vision of the creative feminine on the rise just as human society once again or still “groans in travail,” awaiting the power of resurrection to gather on the horizon.

Anyway, I get all this from an engagement with the text. I’m really hoping we don’t give up on it.

Gerace and peace,

Rev. Sam Alexander

www.gracecomesfirst.net


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