EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is written by David Lose. I don't necessarily subscribe to anything he has to say, but the way he makes you think. Read the original HERE.

Cards on the table: 1) I read the Bible -- not as much as I should, I'm sure, but still pretty regularly. Moreover, I get paid to talk about the Bible with folks all across the country and have written a popular book to help people read the Bible with more confidence and enjoyment. So, you could say, I'm a pretty big fan of the good book. 2) I was a little shocked to discover that three in ten Americans read the Bible literally. That is, about a third of the American populace takes everything the Bible says at face value, reading as they would a history or science textbook. 3) I don't read the Bible this way, and can't imagine doing so. Here are four reasons why:


1) Nowhere does the Bible claim to be inerrant.

That's right. At no place in its more than 30,000 verses does the Bible claim that it is factually accurate in terms of history, science, geography and all other matters (the technical definition of inerrancy). "Inerrant" itself is not a word found in the Bible or even known to Christian theologians for most of history. Rather, the word was coined in the middle of the 19th century as a defensive counter measure to the increased popularity of reading the Bible as one would other historical documents and the discovery of manifold internal inconsistencies and external inaccuracies.

The signature verse most literalists point to is 2 Timothy 3:16: "All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness." But one can confess that Scripture is inspired by God without resorting to claims that it contains no factual errors. We normally use the language of inspiration in just this way, describing a painting, a performance of Chopin, or even a good lecture as inspired. What binds the various and sundry texts found in the Bible together may be precisely that they are all inspired by the authors' experience of the living God. There is no hint that the authors of the Bible imagined that what they were writing was somehow supernaturally guaranteed to be factually accurate. Rather, biblical authors wrote in order to be persuasive, hoping that by reading their witness you would come to believe as they did (see John 20:30-31).

2) Reading the Bible literally distorts its witness.

In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus drives the moneychangers out of the Jerusalem Temple in the days immediately preceding his crucifixion. In the Gospel of John, he does this near the beginning of his ministry, two years before his death. Similarly, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the day Jesus is crucified is named as the Passover, while in John it is the Day of Preparation; that is, the day before Passover. Inconsistencies like this are part of what undermines claims to inerrancy of not just the gospels but also many other books in the Bible.

But if the primary intention of the biblical authors was not to record history -- in the post-Enlightenment sense we take for granted today -- but instead to confess faith, then these differences are not troubling inconsistencies to be reconciled but rather helpful clues to understanding the confession of the author. So rather than ask who got it right, we might instead wonder why John describes these events differently than the other Evangelists. As it turns out, both of these examples stem from John's theological claim that Jesus is the new Passover lamb. For this reason, once he begins his ministry there is no need for Temple sacrifice, and he is crucified on the same day -- indeed, at the exact hour -- at which the Passover lambs were sacrificed on the Day of Preparation.

You can attempt to reconcile these and other discrepancies in the biblical witness, of course, and literalists have published books almost as long as the Bible attempting to do just that. In the case of the different timeframes for the cleansing of the Temple, for instance, one might suggest that Jesus did this twice, once at the beginning of his ministry and then again, for good measure, two years later. But far from "rescuing" the gospels, such an effort distorts their distinct confession of faith by rendering an account of Jesus' life that none of the canonical accounts offers.

3) Most Christians across history have not read the Bible literally.

We tend to think of anything that is labeled "conservative" as being older and more traditional. Oddly enough, however, the doctrine of inerrancy that literalists aim to conserve is only about a century and a half old. Not only did many of the Christian Church's brightest theologians not subscribe to anything like inerrancy, many adamantly opposed such a notion. For instance, St. Augustine -- rarely described as a liberal -- lived for many years at the margins of the church. An impediment to his conversation was precisely the notion that Christians took literally stories like that of Jonah spending three days in the belly of a whale. It was not until Ambrose, bishop of Milan, introduced Augustine to allegorical interpretation -- that is, that stories can point metaphorically to spiritual realities rather than historical facts -- that Augustine could contemplate taking the Bible (and those who read it!) seriously.

The point isn't that pre-modern Christians approached the Bible with the same historically conscious skepticism of the Bible's factual and scientific veracity that modern interpreters possess. Earlier Christians -- along with almost everyone else who lived prior to the advent of modernity -- simply didn't imagine that for something to be true it had to be factually accurate, a concern only advanced after the Enlightenment. Hence, four gospels that diverged at different points, far from troubling earlier Christians, was instead seen as a faithful and fitting recognition that God's truth as revealed in Jesus was too large to be contained by only one perspective. Flattening the biblical witness to conform to a reductionist understanding of truth only limits the power of Scripture. As Karl Barth, arguably the twentieth century's greatest theologian, once said, "I take the Bible too seriously to read it literally."

4) Reading the Bible literally undermines a chief confession of the Bible about God.

Read the Bible even for a little while and you'll soon realize that most of the major characters are, shall we say, less than ideal. Abraham passes his wife off as his sister -- twice! -- in order to save his skin. Moses is a murderer. David sleeps around. Peter denies Jesus three times. Whatever their accomplishments, most of the "heroes of the faith" are complicated persons with feet of clay. And that's the point: the God of the Bible regularly uses ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things.

Why, then, treat the Bible itself differently? Rather than imagine that the Bible was also written by ordinary, fallible people, inerrantists have made the Bible an other-wordly, supernatural document that runs contrary to the biblical affirmation that God chooses ordinary vessels -- "jars of clay," the Apostle Paul calls them -- to bear an extraordinary message. In fact, literalists unwittingly ascribe to the Bible the status of being "fully human and fully divine" that is normally reserved only for Jesus.

So why, then, would so many people read the Bible literally? Perhaps that's the subject for another post. For now, I'd be interested in your experience with the Bible and sense of its nature and authority.

Some Ethical Insight from Frank Viola

I found this blogpost by Frank Viola today and agree with him wholeheartedly. It is such an important piece of advice, especially for Christian bloggers, that I share it in this library of my own.




A few weeks ago someone posted a vicious comment on this blog which personally attacked a friend of mine who is engaged in serving the Lord. It wasn’t approved, of course. The person who posted the comment claims to be a Christian. I responded to the person privately with an opening question:

“How long have you known [my friend’s name] personally, how well do you know him, when was the last time you spent time in his presence, and what did he say when you shared these things with him face-to-face over coffee?”

I then went on to defend my friend.

The words of Martin Luther King, Jr. are very dear to me: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

When Bill O’Reilly interviewed President Obama earlier this year, he asked him this question: “Does it disturb you that so many people hate you?” Obama answered: “You know, the truth is that the people—and I’m sure previous presidents would say the same thing, whether it was Bush or Clinton or Reagan or anybody  . . .  the people who dislike you don’t know you.” “But they hate you,” O’Reilly probed. “The folks who hate you, they don’t know you. What they hate is whatever fun-house mirror image of you that’s out there, and they don’t know you,” Obama said. “And so, you don’t take it personally.” Whether you support Mr. Obama or not, his words contain searing insight. And they are worthy to be remembered.

Here are some related thoughts to keep in mind. This is especially for those of you who have put your hand to the plow of God’s work . . . or you plan to someday:

• People write things on the Internet that they would never dare say to any human being in person.
• If you love and serve God, some people are going to hate you . . . no matter what you say or do. Sometimes it will be because of jealousy. Sometimes it will be for some other fleshly reason. Accept it, and don’t try to please everyone. Be faithful to your Lord. His opinion is what matters most. If you are walking with Jesus Christ, those who know you well will love and support you. Accept all opposition as coming from the hand of God. Satan may mean it for bad, but God means it for good. Romans 8:28 is still valid.
• Historically, Christians have suffered the edge of the sword at the hands of their fellow Christians far more than by the hands of non-Christians.
• Remember the words of Aristotle: “There is only one way to avoid criticism: Do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”
• When someone thinks the worst of you and judges the motives of your heart, they are virtually always reading what’s in their own hearts back into yours. They are unwittingly exposing what’s inside of them (Matt. 7:1-5). (The person who wrote the vicious comment about my friend was imputing evil motives to his heart. Whenever a person does this, they are playing God. We have not so learned Jesus Christ. “Love thinks no evil,” Paul said, but always believes the best of others. “Unto the pure all things are pure, but unto the defiled, nothing is pure.”)
• Most of all, keep in mind the words of your Lord: “Beware when all men speak well of you” . . . “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you."

[EDITORIAL NOTE: This article originally appeared on the BBC's website and can be read HERE. This story actually chronicles a sad and troublesome development in western Christianity.]

Dutch rethink Christianity for a doubtful world

By Robert Pigott Religious affairs correspondent, Amsterdam

The Rev Klaas Hendrikse can offer his congregation little hope of life after death, and he's not the sort of man to sugar the pill.

The Exodus Church is part of the mainstream Dutch Protestan Church

An imposing figure in black robes and white clerical collar, Mr Hendrikse presides over the Sunday service at the Exodus Church in Gorinchem, central Holland.
It is part of the mainstream Dutch Protestant Church, and the service is conventional enough, with hymns, readings from the Bible, and the Lord's Prayer. But the message from Mr Hendrikse's sermon seems bleak - "Make the most of life on earth, because it will probably be the only one you get".
"Personally I have no talent for believing in life after death," Mr Hendrikse says. "No, for me our life, our task, is before death."
Nor does Klaas Hendrikse believe that God exists at all as a supernatural thing.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

God is not a being at all... it's a word for experience, or human experience”

Rev Klass Hendrikse

"When it happens, it happens down to earth, between you and me, between people, that's where it can happen. God is not a being at all... it's a word for experience, or human experience."

Mr Hendrikse describes the Bible's account of Jesus's life as a mythological story about a man who may never have existed, even if it is a valuable source of wisdom about how to lead a good life.
His book Believing in a Non-Existent God led to calls from more traditionalist Christians for him to be removed. However, a special church meeting decided his views were too widely shared among church thinkers for him to be singled out.
A study by the Free University of Amsterdam found that one-in-six clergy in the Dutch Protestant Church was either agnostic or atheist.

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Klaas Hendrikse: "You don't have to believe that Jesus was physically resurrected"

The Rev Kirsten Slattenaar, Exodus Church's regular priest, also rejects the idea - widely considered central to Christianity - that Jesus was divine as well as human.
"I think 'Son of God' is a kind of title," she says. "I don't think he was a god or a half god. I think he was a man, but he was a special man because he was very good in living from out of love, from out of the spirit of God he found inside himself."
Mrs Slattenaar acknowledges that she's changing what the Church has said, but, she insists, not the "real meaning of Christianity".
She says that there "is not only one answer" and complains that "a lot of traditional beliefs are outside people and have grown into rigid things that you can't touch any more".
Bini Von Reingarden, who's been going to Exodus Church for 20 years, is among lay people attracted to such free thinking.

Some believe that traditional Christianity has too restrictive a notion of the nature of God

"I think it's very liberating. [Klaas Hendrikse] is using the Bible in a metaphorical way so I can bring it to my own way of thinking, my own way of doing."
Wim De Jong says, "Here you can believe what you want to think for yourself, what you really feel and believe is true."
Churches in Amsterdam were hoping to attract such people with a recent open evening.
At the Old Church "in the hottest part of the red light district", the attractions included "speed-dating".
As skimpily dressed girls began to appear in red-lit windows in the streets outside, visitors to the church moved from table to table to discuss love with a succession of strangers.
Professor Hijme Stoeffels of the Free University in Amsterdam says it is in such concepts as love that people base their diffuse ideas of religion.
"In our society it's called 'somethingism'," he says. "There must be 'something' between heaven and earth, but to call it 'God', and even 'a personal God', for the majority of Dutch is a bridge too far.
"Christian churches are in a market situation. They can offer their ideas to a majority of the population which is interested in spirituality or some kind of religion."
To compete in this market of ideas, some Christian groups seem ready virtually to reinvent Christianity.
They want the Netherlands to be a laboratory for Christianity, experimenting with radical new ways of understanding the faith.

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Churchgoer: "For me the service is very freeing"

Stroom ("Stream") West is the experiment devised by one church to reach out to the young people.
In an Amsterdam theatre young people contemplate the concept of eternity by spacing out a heap of rice grains individually across the floor.
"The difference from other churches is that we are… experimenting with the contents of the gospel," says Rikko Voorberg, who helps to run Stroom West. "Traditionally we bring a beautiful story and ask people to sit down listen and get convinced. This is the other way around."
Stroom focuses on people's personal search for God, not on the church's traditional black-and-white answers.
Rikko believes traditional Christianity places God in too restricted a box.
He believes that in a post-modern society that no longer has the same belief in certainty, there is an urgent need to "take God out of the box".
"The Church has to be alert to what is going on in society," he says. "It has to change to stay Christian. You can't preach heaven in the same way today as you did 2,000 years ago, and we have to think again what it is. We can use the same words and say something totally different."

Staphorst, in the Dutch Bible belt, has a by-law against swearing

When I asked Rikko whether he believed Jesus was the son of God he looked uncomfortable.
"That's a very tough question. I'm not sure what it means," he says.
"People have very strict ideas about what it means. Some ideas I might agree with, some ideas I don't."
Such equivocation is anathema in Holland's Bible Belt, among the large number of people who live according to strict Christian orthodoxy.
In the quiet town of Staphorst about a quarter of the population attends the conservative Dutch Reformed Church every Sunday.
The town even has a by-law against swearing.
Its deputy mayor, Sytse de Jong, accuses progressive groups of trying to change Christianity to fit current social norms.
"When we get people into the Church by throwing Jesus Christ out of the Church, then we lose the core of Christianity. Then we are not reforming the institutions and attitudes but the core of our message."
But many churches are keen to work with anyone who believes in "something".
They believe that only through adaptation can their religion survive.
The young people at Stroom West write on plates the names of those things that prevent earth from being heaven - cancer, war, hunger - and destroy them symbolically.
The new Christianity is already developing its own ritual.