The Bible: Absolute or Conceptual... or can both be faithful?

First off, I should probably begin by saying this will be nowhere near comprehensive. For a comprehensive reading on the topic of the Bible start with reading the actual thing (crazy, I know) and then move on to everything that has been written about it in the last 2000 years. That should tide you through lunchtime.

The astounding thing I suppose is that Christians still haven't got this whole Bible thing figured out, or at the very least we absolutely do not agree on it. Take this tweet:

Now, let me begin by saying I love that Rachel Held Evans retweeted this without comment. She just put it out there for us to decide. Evans has been in the news lately because of a piece she did for CNN on "Why millenials are leaving the church." Check out the article. It was good, if not exactly earth-shattering. What has been more interesting has been the response: Mainline Protestants hypocritically tooting their horns at the evangelical exodus from the church, others who have engaged Evans' speculation thoughtfully and on point, and then things like the above from within evangelical circles calling out Evans for being unbiblical--or something to that effect.


At first this seems like a strange response. After all, Evans really didn't talk much about the Bible. But I guess for some that is exactly the point. Within some Christian circles the Bible holds a different kind of sway than others. Some traditions, like Methodism with its famous Wesleyan quadrilateral, holds scripture alongside experience, reason and tradition as means of interpreting the Christian's response to any number of questions raised in daily life. Others hold firm to the Bible as the end-all be-all. I remember a non-Christian friend once telling me that being a pastor seems like such a limiting job because all I do is "study one book for my whole life." Rightly or wrongly, that is the way the faith of many Christians functions.

Alright, now I feel like I can at least begin to approach the meat of this. Let me re-post the tweet again to keep it in our minds:

I don't know who Josh Craddock is. Frankly, it doesn't matter. What matters is his insistence that there are groups of people--followers of Evans--who do not understand the Bible. That's a rather bold claim. It suggests that there is only one way to read the Bible and Mr. Craddock has it all figured out. I really doubt this is the case, but Craddock's tweet is a good screenshot of the absolutist understanding of scripture. Interestingly, conservative Christians and atheists both understand this as the primary way of addressing scripture. Both find the Bible to be a one-way means of communication by which God instills in us the one and only way to be Christian.

To read the Bible in an absolutist way is at first very straightforward. You take the scripture as it is. When the Bible says, "Do not kill" you do not kill. When the Bible says, "Jesus is Lord" then Jesus is Lord. Simple enough. This is lived out in the mantra, "The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it." So, in the case of Craddock's tweet he sees a person in Evans who is just as concerned with trends and studies and scriptural ideas, particularly concerning LGBT issues, and he immediately assumes that this is a poor understanding of scripture.

Here's the thing that mainline Protestants need to remember before they jump all over this one: He may be right.

I realize that's a crazy thing for me to say, because (it will be pretty obvious in a minute) I agree far more with Evans than with Craddock on this, but those of us from the so-called "liberal" side of the church need to remember that there is no divine mandate on how to read scripture that is easily available to us. It may very well be that "The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it" is as good a credo in this modern-world as any. We run a serious risk of being even more dismissive than our absolutist brothers and sisters when we suggest that their reading of scripture is naive or bigoted or worse. Just as Craddock targets not Evans herself but the people who like her, we run the serious risk of dismissing millions of brothers and sisters in Christ because of our implicit (and probably often wrong) idea of what and how they believe.

OK, rant over. Now let's get back to the other way of reading scripture, because there is another way and it is not Bible-lite as some have suggested. What Evans is doing in her CNN piece is taking the concepts of the Bible and trying to piece together in the world in which we now live. This is VERY challenging, because A) the Bible was not written in 2013, and B) it is difficult to discern what is timeless truth and what is temporal necessity from sacred writings. But all Christians believe, whether they want to admit it or not, that there is some of both in our sacred scripture. It is timelessly true that stealing and murdering are against God's will--we see the truth in that, even if something inside of us doesn't always want to obey--but other concerns were necessary for specific people at a specific point in time and we're not so sure about them today. For example: Is it a sin to eat pork?


This comes into play in Evans article because she writes things like this: "...young adults perceive evangelical Christianity to be too political, too exclusive, old-fashioned, unconcerned with social justice and hostile to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people."

If I were a biblical absolutist red flags would be going off in my head: "Warning! Warning! Loose biblical interpretation alert!" But that's because absolutism digs in its heals. It's a tough way to be a Christian because the margins are always being pushed out further from the center. It's a difficult time to believe so narrowly because there are so many ideas that run counter to that narrow path. Either the world is going to hell... or absolutism doesn't give us the certainty we wish it would.

This is important when it comes to what Evans has written because the politics, exclusivity, old-fashioned-ness, unconcern for social justice and hostility to LGBT individuals can ALL be justified by scripture. Every one of those positions can be. In fact, scripture holds so many positions that the opposite (what Evans was calling for) is also a possibility. This is where a conceptual approach to scripture is more versatile, even if it is more challenging and prone to human error. A conceptual approach to scripture takes what Jesus said and did, what Paul said and did, what the Old Testament prophets said and did, what Moses said and did, and all the history that lies in-between, and then tries to hold all of those things together in such a way that we have an example for how to live our lives in this day and age. This is a tough way to be a Christian but tell me it's not faithful. Tell me it's not faithful to see Jesus' example in visiting the woman at the well or telling the story of the Good Samaritan and than applying that to those who are outcasts and marginalized in our society, while all the while holding in tension what Jesus says about divorce and what Paul says about same-sex ethics. Tell that that's not a challenge but also a helluva opportunity to bring the Bible to life today.

Evans suggests in her piece that what matters finally is Jesus--not the written word of God but the actual Word incarnate. So, the questions of politics, exclusivity and social issues like homosexuality are so entirely secondary to what we are doing so as to become almost insignificant. This is a conceptual idea because absolutism cannot let any iota of scripture go. All of it is critical to the sanctity of the whole. I can see the appeal in this, especially in a time when many Christians have terribly relativistic takes on the other end of the spectrum. I once had a friend of mine who is a mainline pastor say that he believed the Old Testament was a kind of moral guide, filled with fairy tales and little more. If that were the alternative I think I would be an absolutist, too.

But it's not. Evans demonstrates a way to hold both the clear meaning of scripture and the concepts that Jesus demonstrates together in one messy idea of how to reform the church. It's an idea with which I resonate--not because the mainline traditions have it right and not because the evangelical traditions are naive but because she is offering words to a reality that I have already experienced as true. It's entirely possible that my experience doesn't matter compared to the absolute word of God as given to us in the Bible, but to live my life as if experience does not matter seems a strange response to the life that God has given me.