{"id":40793,"date":"2017-06-16T06:01:05","date_gmt":"2017-06-16T10:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=40793"},"modified":"2017-06-12T22:41:24","modified_gmt":"2017-06-13T02:41:24","slug":"ecclesiastes-just-sayin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2017\/06\/ecclesiastes-just-sayin.html","title":{"rendered":"Ecclesiastes, Just Sayin’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Ecclesiastes<\/p>\n

Steve Wiggins<\/a> shared the above meme featuring a quote from the Bible, an image, and the addition of \u201cJust Sayin\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

What other verses from the Bible deserve similar treatment? Please share the ideas in comments, with or without the images that you created to turn your ideas into memes. If you come up with good ones, I might create them and share them (or share the ones you create).<\/p>\n

Steve\u2019s post<\/a> is worth reading, not just for the picture. Here\u2019s an excerpt:<\/p>\n

My white-shirted friends will surely object. I\u2019m taking verses out of context\u2014prooftexting, it\u2019s called. But, my evangelical friends, you say Scripture is the word of God. Fully inspired and inerrant, is it not? How can you dismiss the wise, wonderful, woeful book of Ecclesiastes? The world is a complex place. Those who seek office as public servants should at least be able to distinguish the servant from the master. They lay their hand upon the Bible to take a sacred oath of office. Beneath that withered hand lies the book of Ecclesiastes, forsaken among its more cheerful siblings. Do not forget Ecclesiastes. It is the book that best makes sense of our day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Click through to read more<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He is definitely right that Ecclesiastes doesn\u2019t get the attention or the respect it deserves. That is understandable \u2013 much of what it says is simply at odds with the conventional piety of our time. Denying the afterlife, advising people not to be excessively righteous nor excessively wicked, and calling cherished ideas into question are not what most religious readers expect to find within the Bible.<\/p>\n

And yet what does it say about a religious tradition if it can insist on the inspired character of the Bible in its entirety, from cover to cover, and yet has no place for, and has no idea what to do with, one of its components?<\/p>\n

The same can be said about Leviticus and a range of other books and passages. And so this illustrates a crucial point to remember when engaging in conversations with so-called biblical inerrantists. Don\u2019t let them claim a high ground that they don\u2019t in fact occupy. Don\u2019t grant that they take the Bible literally, or view it all as inerrant. If Ecclesiastes 9:2-6 is not inerrant in what it says, without having to bend over backwards to try to change its meaning, then one is simply not a biblical inerrantist<\/a>. At best, one is an inerrantist about those texts which meet with one\u2019s approval.<\/p>\n

Which of course, means that in practice such people believe in the inerrancy of their own opinions rather than the Bible<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ecclesiastes really is so very important, and we should be grateful that it is in the Bible\u2026<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Wiggins shared the above meme featuring a quote from the Bible, an image, and the addition of \u201cJust Sayin\u2019.\u201d What other verses from the Bible deserve similar treatment? Please share the ideas in comments, with or without the images that you created to turn your ideas into memes. If you come up with good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":40918,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,75],"tags":[2795,2946,14306,9305,14761],"class_list":["post-40793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ecclesiastes","category-politics","tag-donald-trump","tag-ecclesiastes","tag-politician","tag-politics","tag-unwise"],"yoast_head":"\nEcclesiastes, Just Sayin'<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Steve Wiggins shared the above meme featuring a quote from the Bible, an image, and the addition of "Just Sayin'." 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