I attended Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan from 1976-1979. Midwestern is a diehard Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) institution. Established in 1954, Midwestern requires its professors to rigidly hold to IFB/Evangelical beliefs. Not doing so leads to firing for professors and expulsion for students. No one was permitted to deviate from the “faith once delivered to the saints” — as interpreted by Chancellor Tom Malone and the college’s administration.
These presuppositions guided every professor’s teaching:
The Bible is the very words of God.
The Bible is inspired — breathed out by God.
The Bible is inerrant — without error.
The Bible is infallible — true in all that it says,
The Bible is meant, with few exceptions, to be read and interpreted literally.
The Holy Spirit teaches us what particular verses of the Bible mean.
The Bible has no errors, mistakes, or contractions.
The Bible is internally consistent (univocality).
Further, Midwestern had particular beliefs about soteriology, eschatology, ecclesiology, and pneumatology. Only the King James Bible was used in the classroom, and only Erasmus’ text was used in Greek class. Hebrew was not taught at Midwestern. Opposing viewpoints were rarely brought up, other than to tell students, “We don’t believe that here.” Not one class was spent addressing Calvinism or any other eschatological system except dispensationalism, premillennialism, and pretribulationalism. Indoctrination, not knowledge, was always the goal.
My college education was rudimentary, at best. My real education came in my study, as I spent 20,000 hours reading and studying the Bible. I quickly learned that my professors had misled me. I suspect many of them didn’t know any better, having been raised in similar IFB surroundings as I.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
How do Evangelicals read and interpret the Bible? By Bible, I mean the sixty-six books of the Protestant Christian Bible. Before Evangelicals read one syllable of the Bible, they agree to the following presuppositions:
The Bible is the very words of God.
The Bible is inspired — breathed out by God.
The Bible is inerrant — without error.
The Bible is infallible — true in all that it says,
The Bible is meant, with few exceptions, to be read and interpreted literally.
The Holy Spirit teaches us what particular verses of the Bible mean.
The Bible has no errors, mistakes, or contractions.
The Bible is internally consistent (univocality).
All of the presuppositions above are faith claims. Either you believe them, or you don’t. Of course, these claims are little more than special pleading. Evangelicals don’t read any other text or book this way except the Bible. Imagine taking this same approach with an auto repair manual or a biology textbook.
Books are meant to provide us with knowledge. We read because we want to know. When Evangelicals read the Bible, they want knowledge too, but that knowledge is conditioned by the claims made above. As a result, this leads to wild, rationally indefensible interpretations of the Bible and demands for conformity of belief.
I have no doubt some of my Evangelical critics will object to this post, saying that the “natural man understands not the things of God” or unbelievers, lacking the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, cannot rightly read, interpret, or understand the Bible. In their minds, the moment I deconverted, God did a Men in Black-like mind wipe on me, and all the knowledge I had about the Biblical text was gone. This, of course, is absurd.
Anyone can understand the Bible if they are willing to read it and use widely available tools to interpret the text properly. Contrary to what Evangelicals say, the Bible is NOT so simple that a child can understand it. The Bible is a complex text written in several languages by numerous authors over many centuries. An inability to read the underlying Hebrew and Greek manuscripts hinders the ability to determine what the Bible actually says. There are tools that can be used to ameliorate this problem, but even here, Evangelical-produced tools can and do operate from the presuppositions above. Instead of letting the chips fall where they may, these tools dishonestly present the Bible as a unified text, consistent in all that it says. This is patently untrue, as any non-Evangelical Biblical scholar will tell you.
Every reading of the Bible should start with the data. Instead of letting the two creation accounts in Genesis 1-3 speak for themselves, Evangelicals try to make the conflicting accounts “fit.” This is called harmonization. There are lots of such contradictions in the Bible, yet Evangelicals will deny this, coming up with all sorts of novel explanations to turn away claims that the Bible is not infallible and inerrant. The Bible, in Evangelical minds, can’t be errant and fallible. If it is, that means their God, who wrote the Bible, is errant and fallible too.
Faith prevents Evangelicals from seeing the Bible for what it is: a fallible, errant text written by fallible, errant men. Does the Bible have value? Sure. Can the Bible provide wisdom and direction? Yes. Can the Bible lead people to God? Absolutely. These things can be true without the Bible being a supernatural text written by a supernatural God.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
It is common to hear Evangelicals say that they are “Bible believers” — that they read the Bible and believe and accept what it says without personal interpretation. Appealing to 2 Peter 1:20,21:
Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
Evangelicals believe the Bible is inspired, inerrant, and infallible. Written by God himself, the Bible doesn’t need interpretation, just obedience on the part of the Christian. Years ago, an Evangelical man and his family visited the church I was pastoring in West Unity. After the service, the man engaged me in a theological discussion. I suggested the titles of several books I thought would be helpful. He quickly replied, “All I need is the Bible.” He was a man of one book — ironically, an English translation that required translators to interpret the meanings of Hebrew and Greek texts. This man wrongly thought that the Bible was the very words of God; and that reading the Bible was the same as God directly speaking to him.
All written words require interpretation. It is absurd to suggest otherwise. The moment we read a written text, we are interpreting what it says and means — be it the Bible or texts written by Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, or Bruce Gerencser — to name a few. I am certainly not in the class of these authors, but I know understanding my writing requires interpretation on the part of readers. Whether these interpretations align with what I meant to say is a whole other story. People can and do interpret my words in a variety of ways, often leading to conclusions that bear no resemblance to my intent.
The moment you read the first word, sentence, and paragraph of this post, you began the process of interpreting my writing. How could it be otherwise? Should we treat the Bible differently? It is, fundamentally, a collection of written texts, each requiring interpretation on our part hopefully to understand what it means. I say hopefully for this reason: Christianity is 2,000 years old. Every sect, preacher, and parishioner interprets the Bible for themselves. So much for no “private interpretation.” Put a hundred Christians in a room, ask them what a particular Bible verse or passage of Scripture means, and you will end up with a plethora of answers. There is no such singular thing as Christianity or the Bible only having one meaning. Christians can’t even agree on what the Bible says about salvation, baptism, communion, church government, the law of God, or end times. Hopelessly fractured and divided, Christians fight internecine wars over the teachings of the Bible. What are the criteria for determining who is right? Drum roll, please . . . personal (private) interpretation.
The moment any of us read a written text, we are interpreting said text. It is impossible to read a text without interpreting it. Behind every text are the personal experiences and beliefs of its author. People who best understand my writing are those who know and appreciate my backstory. They understand the lenses through which I view life.
Evangelicals argue that the Bible is different from all other books; and that it is of supernatural origin. Thus we can just believe what it says — no interpretation needed. However, the people reading the Bible are quite human — fallible, frail, and ignorant. We require interpretation to understand anything in life. Polly and I have been married for forty-five years. Both of us speak and write words to each other. Understanding these words requires us to process them through our interpretive grid. Otherwise, we might misunderstand what each of us actually means.
These things seem obvious to me, yet millions of Evangelicals disagree. In their minds, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it for me.” However, unknown men wrote the Bible. The original texts no longer exist. All we have are copies of copies of copies and translations of translations of translations. Scribes, and later translators, determined what the Bible said, and not the Evangelical God. These historical facts are without dispute. Yet, Evangelicals ignore these facts, choosing instead to ignorantly (and naively) believe that the Bible is somehow, someway, different from the 160,000,000 books written since the invention of the printing press. Every year, over 2,000,000 books at added to humanity’s library. (How Many Books Exist in the World?)
I will leave it to readers to “interpret” this article. While I am Bruce Almighty, I make no claim of supernatural origin. This blog is the writing of “one man with a story to share.” How you understand my words is up to you.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
