One of the most common statements made by Evangelicals is this: The Bible Says . . . Evangelicals believe the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God, meant to be read and interpreted literally. It means what it says and says what it means. If these claims are true, why do Evangelicals have such varied beliefs, even on the basics such as salvation, baptism, membership, and communion? How do we determine which sect is right? If the destiny of our eternal soul rests on us believing the right things, shouldn’t Christians speak with one mind on the core doctrines of Christianity?
The confusion of beliefs is a sign that Christianity is a human construct. The Bible doesn’t say anything. It is a book of words that must be read, interpreted, and explained. When I say, “The Bible Says . . .” it should be understood that I’m speaking from my past theological training, experiences, and interpretations. In other words, the Bible says what Bruce says it does. This is true for EVERY Christian. If there’s one thing I have learned about the Bible, it is this: It can be used to prove almost anything. Put a Calvinist, Arminian, Campbellite, Independent Baptist, Apostolic, Charismatic, Pentecostal, and Episcopalian in a room and ask them fifty theological questions. What will you get? Countless interpretations and explanations, each believing they are right. They all can’t be right, so how do we determine which sect/church preaches the True Christianity?
Sadly, many Evangelicals believe that their understanding of the Bible = God says. How can they possibly know this? They will authoritatively claim that the words of the Bible are God’s words, and when they speak the words of the Good Book, they are speaking God’s words. That’s why I have had countless Christians tell me when I object to something they said, “God said it, I didn’t.” Oh, the arrogance behind such a claim. I know of no way that someone can infallibly know that what they are reading or saying is the words of God. Humans wrote the Bible, and for 2,000 years now, Christians have been interpreting and reinterpreting the Bible. Every generation of believers shapes, molds, and interprets the Bible based on their personal opinions, beliefs, and worldviews. Even with intractable sects such as the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church movement, beliefs and practices change over time. How they define “old-fashioned” is very different today from what it was sixty years ago. As an IFB teen in the 1960s and 1970s, my pastors declared that “Godly” men didn’t have facial hair or long hair. Today, it is common to see IFB men with beards and long hair. The same goes for dress standards. Women wearing pants was verboten years ago. Today, it is not uncommon to see Baptist women wearing slacks.
Change is inevitable, even among groups who think that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. A few years back, my partner’s IFB uncle, Jim Dennis, died after pastoring the Newark Baptist Temple for fifty years. Polly’s parents attended the church for decades. Polly’s mom told me that she was proud of the fact that Jim believed the same things he did when he died as he did when he was a young preacher. In her mind, Jim was a pillar of sound doctrine and practice; a man who was steadfast in his beliefs and behavior. This, of course. was patently untrue. I can point to numerous beliefs and practices that Jim changed his mind about over the years.
I would argue that changing our beliefs is essential to personal growth. If my life story is anything, it is a testimony to the power and importance of change. As a Christian, my beliefs changed a lot. When I came to a new or different understanding of the Bible, I was unafraid to share it. This, of course, led to me being called a liberal or an apostate. All I knew to do was to honestly align my life with my changed beliefs. And I don’t live differently today. How about you? Have your beliefs and practices changed over the years? Do you have Christian friends who pride themselves on not changing their beliefs? Please share your experiences in the comment section.
Let me conclude this post with a short video by Dr. Dan McClellan on the subject, “No, the Bible Doesn’t Say So.”
Dan has a new book coming out, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) about Scripture’s Most Controversial Subjects. Dan does an awesome job tackling many of the claims Evangelicals make about the Bible.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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You are absolutely right when you say that the bible must be interpreted, and interpretation is a very personal thing. The trouble is people don’t distinguish reading and interpretation. When one reads a book of any kind reading the words is only part of the process, and there is so much else going on. To begin with, what was the author trying to convey? I remember studying
Shakespeare at school, and it was never easy trying to comprehend what characters were saying, and that’s with a much more recent text than the books of the bible, originally in English (okay, somewhat dated but understandable), and not subject to vast translations and alterations over the centuries.
It’s now absolutely untrue even to say “the bible says”. All that means is that my version of the bible that I read and interpret, and which has been translated from long lost originals, and incidentally translated several times over, revised and rewritten, reinterpreted, contains the words which I now relate to you. Once related the person receiving the words is required to interpret them, and that may be differently to the speaker.
Geoff—What you say about reading and interpretation is probably the most important and valuable thing I learned from my studies of literature and history. To cite an even more recent example: Scholars of the US Constitution don’t agree on whar the document means. And we have at least some insight into what its authors meant via their other writings and what contemporaries said and wrote about them. There is comparatively little such evidence for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and none for Jesus.
Thank you Bruce. To further, comment on Geofft’s and Lisbeth’s posts, is it not true that every IBF pastor, in fact every christian that quotes: “The Bible Says” is by human nature, no matter how much study, or indoctrination, subject to their own interpretation of what indeed “the bible says”, with their own spin and motivation?
As I have continued my personal research, including participation on this site, on watching “Myth Vision”, watching Professor Ehrman, and reviewing information from various other sources, it has become clear, to me, that the christian rabbit hole is deep, exceedingly so.
One thing it is not, is a document (name your christian source material), independently verifiable, nor agreed upon. It does not meet secular academic standards for verification, vis a vie archeology or by archived texts. What I have come to understand (thank you Bruce) is, the gospels themselves do not even agree with each other! (And that barely scratches the surface – hello Mesopotamia!)
In fact there are so many presumptive sources, cultural attributes, even languages, associated with it, rendering it an almost impossible tangle of webs, that only the most brilliant and dedicated scholars come close to figuring out, much less your average, Rabbi on a stake loving, 21st century IBF christian cultest, sitting in the pews, proclaiming “the bible says”.
A course called “Canons of Construction” in law school was about interpreting legal writings. With relatively recent writers like the founding fathers who authored the Constitution, interpreting what they intended is an ongoing challenge. It’s a science of sorts, an art, and a perpetual power struggle to prevail. If interpreting relatively modern language like The Constitution is a challenge, texts hundreds and thousands of years old, after numerous translations, seems beyond hope of objective construction. The words true and truth applied to necessarily subjective interpretations seems inappropriate. One’s belief is one’s truth, even though objectively inaccurate.
Not long ago I was listening to a radio preacher who opened his sermon on bible prophecy (or a similar topic) by saying that there were 4 or 5 different theories about the meaning of the text he was covering in his sermon. He then said he would focus on one that, to him, seemed the most plausible, but that all had validity.
I was impressed. Imagine an evangelical radio based preacher, very conservative, taking this approach.
But it didn’t last. As he got into his sermon, he spoke as if what he was presenting was unquestionable fact, and by implication, everything else was wrong. If you didn’t hear his opening, you would assume (rightly so) that he thought he was 100% correct. Within 10 minutes he was so far down the path of being right that it made you wonder why he even mentioned other theories existed. Apparently his blinders are so huge that he can only see the answer he knows… er.. believes to be correct. Apparently the Holy Spirit gave him insight that it didn’t give to other preachers with published theories.
I’ve mentioned before that I can remember my father, the preacher, not agreeing with other ministers – even those in his own denomination. I remember sitting in church with him, listening to a preacher make a point, and then my dad would get that look that says “hmmmm”, take out his bible and start referencing scripture. You could see the gears turning and I usually knew what he was thinking and what he would reference. (you get that skill after living 24/7 with a preacher). It was so predictable that when I heard a statement from a minister which I knew didn’t fit with my fathers belief, I would try to guess what scripture references my father would search out. And of course, on the way home after the service, we would get a theological response on the points that did not fit my fathers theological understanding.
What’s fascinating is that 10 different people reading the sane text can interpret said text in 10 different ways (more, if some of the people have brains like mine that tend to examine topics from multiple angles). Each person views a text through that person’s lens, the sum total of their cultural, social, and historical experiences. My lens is quite different from the lens of my mother-in-law, for example. We were raised in different decades, in different parts of the US, in different sects of religious education, different levels of education, with vastly different expectations for what is acceptable for a woman to be/do in life. Her understanding on what is expected of people in life has changed dramatically over the years. She “had to” get married at age 22 because she got pregnant by her boyfriend, and that’s what good Catholic girls in the late 1960s did. She’s having a hard time understanding that only one of her adult grandchildren has gotten married (her granddaughter who married a trans man), and none of the other adult grandchildren ages 20-27 has marriage anywhere on their radar, and some of them have declared they do not want to have kids. She’s complaining that she’s not close to being a great-grandmother yet, and we keep telling her (a) it’s none of her business, (b) educated young people have different goals,and (c) leave them alone. Additionally, we remind her that her own marriage ended in divorce, as the marriages of her youngest son and the 3 marriages of her oldest son, so leave people alone.
Anyway, I went off on a tangent, but I think it illustrates how each person’s views (and interpretations) are shaped by their own experiences.