Hi, Nicholas
Great topic!
First the historical stuff (and please keep in mind I’ve learned all of this from others and may have gotten some of it wrong. I am very much prepared to be corrected. Please don’t take any of the things I say as the holy writ of an experienced scholar. I’m just one more person (like you) who has struggled with the understanding of scripture that we, as laypersons, have been taught. I always assumed that the perfection of the Bible was a basic tenet of the faith. It’s not, really.
This started with learning how to hear from God for myself. If you look through scripture, it’s jam-packed with people hearing God’s voice (not audible in most cases, but still hearing Him.) When I, at very long last, discovered how simple it was to do this, it made me wonder. Most of the things I wrote down that I received from Him were difficult to dispute with, but some of the things, looking back on them, I wondered whether I’d heard correctly. I think that in most cases (except where I tried to get Him to tell me about future events 
which He doesn’t do all that often), I did hear what He was able to say to me, considering that He had to send the message through a given value of “me getting in the way.” I had to wonder whether the original authors of the scriptures had the same problem on occasion, and whether or not God really kept that stuff from getting into that which we call His word.
First off, calling it HIS word is often a bit of a stretch. It’s filled with people talking ABOUT Him and about their own history. Only in the prophecies do we have words directly attributed to God. Even then, guess how the prophets GOT that? Probably the same way I do. Given they were unquestionably wiser and closer to God than I am, I still think there’s space there for occasionally seeing things through their own filters. Plus we have things like Jesus saying: “Moses gave you that law because of the hardness of your hearts, but it was not so from the beginning.” I had always wondered about that. Why would Jesus say MOSES gave them that law? I thought it was God. Moses talks like it was God, but maybe that’s just Moses acting on his delegated authority. Other than the prophetic bits, we have the diatribes of Job’s questionable friends. I’ve heard many sermons based on something one or another of Job’s friends had to say, despite the fact that Job’s friends (save the last to speak) were rebuked by none other than God Himself for the things they said. I used to agonize over that psalm where the writer says basically, “Blessed is he who smashes YOUR babies brains out on a rock.” Why would this bother me? OBVIOUSLY these are the words of a man who has seen horrible things and is feeling a very human emotional response (which I might also feel, if not proclaim in poetical form). But I could not see it this way because I’d been indoctrinated with the idea that every word in the Bible fell straight from the lips of the God of gods.
People were inspired to write ABOUT God. It doesn’t follow (nor does the scripture claim) that God dictated and they wrote down whatever He said. (That would be called plenary inspiration, btw).
If you’ve ever read the OT in chronological order, you’ve probably noticed that God seems to become kinder as the years flow by. Or maybe the people’s perception of God matured. He stopped being (to them) an angry warrior god whose primary concern was that his tribe superseded all the other tribes and began to become the King of kings and the Lord of lords who cared for all. We see some of this in the stories about Abraham, but it falls off from there, dipping to a low as the people tell Moses, “No, YOU go and talk to Him. Tell us what He wants, and we’ll do it, but don’t let Him talk to us again lest we die.” Even Moses seems to give us a god who visits the sins of the parents on the children. (I think, after quite a lot of study, that this should probably have been translated that God deals with the sins of the parents in their children for generations–which is a mercy AND a judgment rather than being vindictive–as it does sound.) Later we see one of the prophets (can’t remember which) saying for God, “The soul that sinneth it shall die,” in the context that God does in fact NOT punish the children for their parents’ sins.
To sum up thus far: The Bible contains many words which the Bible itself attributes to other sources than God: human beings, evil spirits, the devil. The conception of God seems to evolve and mature as the writings become later in time, or at least, later on in the story.
Now here’s another one that shocked me. Historians (and we’re including dedicated followers of Christ who have devoted their lives to these studies), tell us that the Pentateuch was in all probability edited together toward the end of the Babylonian Captivity, probably by Ezra with help from Jeremiah. The first time I heard this, I doubted it, naturally. Still, the more I heard it and looked at the evidence and the sort of people who were putting forth that evidence, the more I wondered whether most pastors haven’t in fact been taught this, come to believe it, and are inhibited from sharing it with their congregations for the obvious reasons that the people would never listen long enough or in an unbiased enough way to see their point and fairly evaluate the possibility of it being true. I won’t go into the history of it. If you Google something like “How was the Pentateuch written” or “History of the Bible/Pentateuch,” you should find some good articles to consider.
I also have learned that many Jewish Rabbis believe the Pentateuch to be the SYMBOLIC history (and not the literal history) of Israel. Bit of an eye-opener, that. Again, do a search and see what you think.
By Reformation era exegesis, I mean that the whole Sola Scriptura thing seems to me to require that any person can read the translated scriptures and come to a simple and consistent understanding of what they say. CLEARLY (if only evidenced by the multiplicity of denominations we have in the Protestant church), this is NOT playing out as expected. The RCC was wrong in denying parishioners the Bible in their own language. Laypeople should DEFINITELY read the scriptures. That said, allthough I think the RCC had its own reasons for doing this, not all of them noble, they had a point. A simple face-value reading of the scriptures has led to many misunderstandings, not least of which would be our many views of end-times prophecies. I think there are a lot of considerations in understanding scripture:
1.) Translation. Many translations are based on much older translations which were made in a time that biblical scholarship was not as advanced as it is today. Translating a “dead” language is not easy. Many words had to be guessed at; many others were later found not to mean what we thought they meant. Sometimes idioms were literally translated, leaving us all scratching our heads. In more recent times, many of these words and idioms are better understood (due to continued discovery of and more sophisticated examination of ancient documents both religious and secular). Like the Rosetta Stone, these additional documents help us to interpret themselves and other ancient documents (such as the scriptures) with a much greater degree of faithfulness to the original language and intent.
2.) Cultural relevancy: We have a tendency to assume the scriptures were written directly TO us. I agree they were written (or at least preserved) FOR us and others, but it’s painfully obvious they were not written TO us. They were written with their original audiences firmly in mind. The writers could never have conceived of a world such as that in which we live. We would be as bafflingly foreign to them as they certainly are to us. How many women today (aside from a few Appalachian fundamentalists) believe it is shameful to get their hair cut? Not so many years ago though, we did, and even today long hair is often seen as somehow more virtuous in women and less virtuous in men. Yet this is a feature of the culture of Paul’s day, and was never the point. The point was respecting one another’s needs. For a woman to uncover her hair at the time was as much as to disavow her relationship with her husband or father–to, as it were, spit in his eye. It was shameful for a woman to have her hair shorn because this is what was done to women believed to be sexually promiscuous. There are a lot of these sorts of things in the Bible. We should expect this, since it is a collection of ancient documents directed to cultures very strange and foreign to us.
3.) The Canon : Why are certain books considered canonical and others not? From what I’ve read, the church found certain books helpful and so they were included in the canon. The Eastern Orthodox have a different canon from the modern Protestant church. Coptic Christians have a different canon. Other smaller groups do, too. The Roman Catholic Church (RCC) also has its own canon. Martin Luther almost succeeded in removing the letter of James and the Revelation from the Protestant canon, yet we hold those books sacred today. What if he’d succeeded? If he hadn’t kicked out the books of the apocrypha, would we be quoting them here? Martin Luther was just a man, yet he had this much influence. The men who assembled the canon were also just men. And why close the canon just then? Were none of the writings of the early fathers worthy of inclusion? Don’t we still hear from God today? What’s so sacred about the canonical council and the determination of the (Roman) church to include this and exclude that? Couldn’t they have gotten it wrong? A real eye-opener for me was watching the election of the last Pope and hearing all the discussion of how this man or that was considered (not least being that perhaps it was his turn, or his country’s turn, or his ethnicity’s turn, etc.) It was a bunch of elderly men VOTING. NOTHING was said of them even praying about it. (Though I hope they did–surely they did.)
Ultimately, the Bible doesn’t seem to me to be the sacrosanct whole I’ve always been taught it is. Jesus told the Pharisees, “Ye search the scriptures for in them ye think ye have everlasting life, yet ye will not come to Me that I may give you life.” The scriptures are there for one primary purpose. NOT “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth,” NOT a user’s manual for life, NOT some law we’re supposed to try to follow. The scriptures point us to Jesus. If a given scripture doesn’t seem to paint an accurate picture of HIM, I assume I’m missing something–some cultural nuance, some mistranslation, some context I’m not seeing, some overall picture not yet available to me, some human opinion ABOUT God rather than an accurate picture in itself. It’s even possible (in Cindy’s world) that the writer just plain got it wrong because his filters were too strong to let in the pure light of God.
All in all, I think the Hebrews were remarkable people; able to depict themselves warts and all, for everyone to read about. Their tribal meanness, their failure to be a light to the nations, their inhumanity to one another and to strangers, their unfaithfulness to God; it’s all there in unflinching technicolor. We’re all like this; most of us refuse to admit it. The Old Testament is their story and they, to their credit, do not paper over their own moral inadequacies. The Old Testament shows us their evolving and maturing understanding of God most high. JESUS and no one else is the culmination of this. HE is the perfect image of God to the people of the earth. The whole build-up peaks in the revelation of Christ. “If you have seen ME, you have seen the Father.”
Please don’t feel you need to respond with all of your objections at once, Nicholas. I fully expect you to have some, and if you don’t list them all together, it will be easier to discuss them. I’m going to tag [tag]Paidion[/tag] in on this, since I think he’s likely to have some helpful things to say. He and I often disagree, but he’s a very wise senior brother in Christ and I think he could contribute a lot to the conversation, if he has the time.
Blessings, Cindy
