Disciples and Scripture
Stephen Terry
Commentary for the January 4, 2014
Sabbath School Lesson
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is
useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so
that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” 2
Timothy 3:16-17, NIV
The Bible as
a library of sixty-six sacred texts is unique to Christianity. It is why
Muslims refer to Christians as the “people of the book.” To be sure, many of
those books are also held as sacred by the Jewish faith. We usually call that
portion of the Bible, the Old Testament. It is the Scriptures referred to by
Jesus and the Apostles. This is because the New Testament had not been compiled
in their day. Sometimes, because of our reverence for this sacred text, we may
feel that it has always been around. We may be tempted to think that God walked
around with a copy of the Bible, or at least the Old Testament, under His arm
even before the creation of the Earth. But this would not be true.
If we use
the Bible’s own internal time line as a reference, we would discover that for a
significant portion of Earth’s history, there was no Bible. While some may
favor a later date, even if we go with a conservative evangelical perspective, we
would still discover that the first books of what we call the Old Testament
were probably not written until mid to late second millennium, BC. This is the
approximate time of the Exodus from Egypt recounted in the book of Exodus.
Conservative Christians believe that much of this book was written by Moses,
the leader of the Exodus, which would mean that it and the other books
attributed to Moses, called the Pentateuch, could not have been written
earlier.
Even under
Archbishop Ussher’s relatively short chronology for the age of the Earth,[i]
this would mean that perhaps a few thousand years passed with no Bible. At
least no one has recovered a text representing what Christians might recognize
as biblical in nature. There are many texts that are earlier and parallel some
elements of the early Bible stories. Some feel that these represent an earlier
written tradition that the Bible relied on for its stories of Creation and
worldwide flooding. While sequence does not prove causality, it is
understandable why these speculations take place.
The Bible
tells us that no human being witnessed Creation week. Yet, several ante
biblical accounts, as well as the book of Genesis in the Bible, allude to
creative events that brought about our world and the existence of mankind. This
would seem to admit of only two possibilities. Either the creation accounts
were made up as an attempt to bring ordered understanding to the cosmos, or
someone who actually witnessed the event passed on the information to mankind.
Of course, most Christians favor the latter explanation. This also appears to
be the position of the Bible writers as they make reference many times to oral
communication between certain individuals capable of direct communion with the
divine.[ii]
However, we
might ask, “If the information was passed directly from God to man, how come
there are so many different accounts?” There may be several reasons for this.
For instance, God may have only been able to communicate to men and women in
terms they could relate to based on their experience and culture. Since these
things are not fixed but variable, what was understood by different people in
different circumstances might be expected to differ and perhaps conflict in
various details.[iii] An
example of this might be found in the introduction of horses to North America
by the Spanish. Native Americans, who
had no other frame of reference, referred to the animals as big dogs or god
dogs.[iv]
Those cultures which understood that dogs and horses are distinct creatures
might not properly understand the reference to such dogs as meaning horses.
Yet, in the context of Native culture it made perfect sense.
When we add
to this the understanding that within our cultures, we are also each unique in
our individual perspectives, we begin to see yet another reason for diversity
in the various accounts of early narratives regarding creation and flooding.
These unique individual perspectives are why we have four gospels presenting
different aspects of the life of Christ. Even in the Synoptic Gospels of
Matthew, Mark, and Luke there are smaller narratives within the overall
accounts that are different due to omissions or to alternate wording. This is
understandable and entirely human as we all continually make judgments about
what is going on around us as to what details are relevant and what are not.
This does not mean that what we relegate to irrelevancy is not important to
someone, only that it is not important to us at that time and place.
When several
people witness an automobile accident, statements given to the police tend to
differ for the same reason of what the witness considered relevant. They all
saw the same thing, but they interpreted what was important and what was not.
Filtering out what each considered was unimportant, either consciously or subconsciously,
resulted in different accounts. This is not necessarily a bad thing as in the
multiplicity of witnesses a more complete picture can be discovered. Perhaps the
real problem comes when there is a dearth of witnesses and the picture becomes
less balanced.
In any
event, the Bible is the compilation of the accounts of many individuals about
the character of deity and man’s relationship to such. We do find the
differences we might expect from such a compilation. For instance, the reason
for the Fourth Commandment is different between Exodus[v]
and Deuteronomy.[vi] Does
this mean one is wrong and the other right? Possibly, but maybe both are right
and simply written from different perspectives. However, if a reader believes that
God dictated word-for-word what is in the text then such texts becomes
problematic due to their inconsistency. Perhaps such reasoning, far from
venerating Scripture, does violence to its intent.
When we
realize the nature of the Bible, we can begin to understand that cherry-picking
proof texts to create dogmatic expressions of faith without regard to cultural
and individual perspectives can create a very shaky “house of cards” susceptible
to collapse when those perspectives eventually become known. Of course, one can
always “bury their head in the sand” and ignore those perspectives that
conflict with one’s own preferred perspective. This seems to be a popular activity
in some Christian circles.
Some
Christians prefer certain translations of Scripture because those versions have
proof texts worded in such a way that they “hammer home” certain doctrines that tend
to soften or even disappear under other the wording from other translations.
They may even assert that the preferred translation is “godly” and other
translations are not. This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the Bible
in general and inspiration in particular. While this may create a comfortable
buffer zone between the believer and the world, it may not allow for the growth
necessary for Christian maturity. The Christian who is never wrong, has no reason
to mature. While the Christian who makes mistakes discovers the path to wisdom is
often achieved by those errors.
The role of
Scripture may be simply to provide a context, a safe frame, where we can make
those errors and grow. Jesus never taught that we should hide ourselves in our
churches, avoiding all the evil influences of the world around us. He even sent
his own disciples out as sheep among wolves.[vii]
He apparently understood that it would not be good to keep the sheep
perpetually penned up in the fold. Eventually, they needed to go to the meadow
and the brook for grazing and drinking if they were to be healthy, thriving
sheep. In the same way, perhaps we need to be out in the world and less insular
because it will make us healthier spiritually. It could be that a central
purpose of the Bible is to encourage us to do just that.
Many of us
have heard the aphorism that the Dead Sea is dead because it only takes in
water but does not release any.[viii]
The intent of this saying is to remind us that if we stay holed up in our
churches, we too will become dead spiritually. By attempting to preserve the
purity of our experience, we may actually be sounding its death knell. Perhaps
the Holy Spirit of the Bible is more likely to be found in a soup kitchen than
in a self-focused church afraid to venture forth in service.
Maybe
discipleship is less about being concerned with guarding the sanctity of one’s
church or one’s experience and more about getting “down and dirty” with the wounded
person who disagrees with our theology but who is spread out in the dirt beside
the road.[ix]
Jesus was not bothered by the alternative theology of the Samaritans. From His
example, contained in the Bible, He demonstrated that while a person may have a
different perspective than ours, we are all children of the same God. If we are
His disciples, perhaps we will see the need to follow that example.
