What business do I have describing as “inerrant” and “infallible” a text that presumes a flat and stationary earth, takes slavery for granted, and presupposes patriarchal norms like polygamy? (RHE)
Inerrant: incapable of being wrong.
Infallible: incapable of making mistakes or being wrong.
Inspired: The process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative
"Inspired" is my second read of Rachel Held Evans. I shared a blog post on her other book "Faith Unravelled" back in February. I admitted that I cried when I wrote the post, because I didn't want it to end. Well... books end, and, in this case, so do people. Great authors like Rachel Held Evans write books and in those books... they leave a great legacy. This is one such book.
This isn't the first book that I have read that has challenged the "inerrant" and "infallible" labels that some Christian denominations have put on their Scriptures. It is however the first book that has a hope of inviting me back into a space where I just may want to read the Bible again, instead of it scaring me off for good.
Pete Enns, gives this endorsement of this book
“Rachel Held Evans models a spiritual journey that many are yearning to take: growing into adult readers of the Bible without feeling as though they are leaving the faith of their youth in the process. With her characteristic honesty and warmth, Rachel gives many the language and permission they desperately need to leave behind their guilt and fear, and to read the Bible anew with the joyful anticipation the sacred book deserves.”
—Peter Enns, author of The Bible Tells Me So
I don't know if it was my parents, the boarding school I attended for Grades 10-12; the bible school I attended after high school; or years of church and multiple denominations that enforced in me that the Bible was "inerrant" and "infallible"... but somehow I came away with the belief that everything in that book happened the way it was written. I never questioned any of it in my early years, and was never invited to question it until now. I just believed it.
If the Bible of my childhood functioned primarily as a storybook, then the Bible of my adolescence functioned as a handbook, useful because it told me what to do. I turned to it whenever I had a question about friendships, dating, school, body image, friendship, or any number of adolescent concerns, and it never failed to provide me with a sense of security and direction.
But their assurances, however sincerely intended, proved empty when, as a young adult, I started asking those questions for myself. Positions I’d been told were clearly “biblical”—young earth creationism, restrictions on women’s roles in the home and church, the certainty of hell for all nonbelievers—grew muddier in the midst of lived experience, and the more time I spent seeking clarity from Scripture, the more problems I uncovered. (RHE)
Kudos on Rachel for diving into her doubts at such a young age. I think with me, my aversion to confrontation had me ignoring the bumps in the Bible more than asking questions about it's inconsistencies.
Looking back, I may have shook my head at a few things, but not until my fifties, did I dare believe that the book of Job was a great stage play and Genesis was a beautiful story written by some Hebrew refugees in Babylon, hundreds of years later, trying to figure out where they came from. But even with my discoveries... I am still plagued with a denominational culture that has this as their doctrinal statement.
"Our Association accepts all the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments as a whole and in all the their parts as the divinely inspired, revealed, and inerrant Word of God, and joyfully submits to this as the only infallible authority in all matters of life and faith." ( from an unnamed denominational website outlining their beliefs)
(Even if the "Association" that is accepting of that creed, I will be a little gracious and won't hold every attendee to it's rigid claim." )
How can you have "inerrant", "infallible" and "inspired" all in the same sentence and it be true? I listed the definitions of all three words at the beginning of the post. If this was Sesame Street, I would be singing. "One of these things is not like the other." Are historical facts and authentic records inspired? Do documented facts need inspiration? I am going out on a limb and saying "NO!".
I am a poet and a story writer. I have often claimed inspiration for my literary works. Inspiration is about creativity. Poetry and stories are not infallible or inerrant... but they can be inspired.
We’ve been instructed to reject any trace of poetry, myth, hyperbole, or symbolism even when those literary forms are virtually shouting at us from the page via talking snakes and enchanted trees. (RHE)
It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does. (RHE)
I am closer to to being okay with the messiness of the Bible narrative, but still wondering how much is accurate. What do I trust as actual history? So Adam and Eve, Jonah and Job are characters in a story... if that's the case, what about Jesus?
I guess I am still a work in progress... much like Rachel Held Evans. There weren't that many conclusions to her struggles in this book, but there were stories. Her love for story radiates through this book. Maybe I can find myself again in the pages of the Book... because if I remember well, it was the stories that I liked so much. The stories of Jesus are still compelling to me.
I tell people... Jesus makes sense. I don't know for a inerrant or infallible fact that he was who they say he was, that he did what he did, or that those red words are what he said. The more I read, the more I investigate and the more insights I uncover in my search, the more doubts I have. But the story is good. And maybe that is inspiring enough for me.
Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world—all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. (RHE)
That's the Jesus I want to know!
Rachel credits a lot of people on her journey of discovery. I am now grateful to add her to my list of "cover artists" that have made the music special for me.
My journey back to loving the Bible, like most journeys of faith, is a meandering and ongoing one, a story still in draft. And like all pilgrims, I am indebted to those who have gone before me, those saints of holy curiosity whose lives of faithful questioning taught me not to fear my doubts, but to embrace and learn from them. (RHE)
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