The quote from Gregory C. Jenks comes from an article on the Progressive Christianity website, written back in 2011, “Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally.” Click through to read it.
Neither the Bible nor God is well served by any tactics that seek to protect the Bible from scrutiny.
We must, therefore, resist any temptation to treat our sacred texts differently than the way we treat other people’s sacred texts. Legend and self-serving fiction are to be found in the Bible just as surely as they are in the sacred traditions of other communities. Ancient texts, and indeed all written texts, are ambiguous preparations for an act of communication that will necessarily be driven and controlled by the reader (rather than the author). This dynamic needs to be embraced, not ignored. It cannot be obscured by an appeal to divine inspiration.
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