Interpreting the Bible

I’m including in this post the text from this week’s sermon as something of a kick-off to talking about how as people of faith we can find the Word of God in the words of scripture, that is, how we can go about hearing God speak to us through the Bible.

Let me ask you? Is the story of the flood true? Is the story of the rainbow true? Or, as Clarence Darrow famously asked William Jennings Bryan, Is the story of Jonah and the whale true?
You may recall that in the famous Scopes trial, or monkey trial, of 1925, Darrow and Bryan brought the nation to rapt attention as they sparred on such questions. Even now in our time the main outlines of their debate continues. In our era terms such as creation science have been coined by fundamentalists to say that the truth found in the Bible is just as good, actually better, than the truth found in science. On the other hand, many scientists, and many people of faith, too, sneer at fundamentalists and suggest that they believe in fairy tales.
Now, most of you know that I am not a fundamentalist. I do not believe that the story of creation happened just the way it says in the Bible. I don’t believe that Joshua made the sun stand still. I don’t believe that God caused a flood to wipe out humankind, except for Noah’s family and the ark full of animals. That is, I do not believe that these are historical accounts. I don’t spend my days hoping they will find the remains of Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat.
But I am more than a little sympathetic with the fundamentalists. By the end of the nineteenth century the tools of science had fallen upon the Bible and dissected it, pulled it apart, matched it up with other scientific evidence and essentially concluded that the Bible was just about useless as a place to find facts. Many Biblical scholars and archaeologists had come to the firm conclusion that the Bible was put together by several different writers. It was a combination of myths and poetry and some pretty unreliable history, even when it was trying to be historical. By their lights, to believe the Bible you had to check your mind as soon as you opened the cover. This, by the way, continues to be how I and most other preachers in the mainline churches have been educated for more than a century.
I am sympathetic with the fundamentalists because the Bible is important, and the alternative of modern Biblical studies in itself is an unsatisfying answer to the question of Biblical truth. Year after year, Sunday after Sunday you and I come to this building. We read the scripture. We study the scripture. We see films on the scripture. We meditate on the scripture. We hear sermon after sermon on the scripture. And we do it all as if the scripture has truth that we can understand and that it is meaningful for our lives. That is, not unlike the fundamentalists we act as though the Bible were true with one side of our mouths, even while, it would appear, we acknowledge with the other side of our mouths that it really isn’t true. If that were where we have to leave it, we might as well pack up and go home.
Don’t get me wrong. I find most fundamentalist readings of the Bible even more unsatisfying, and in many cases quite damaging. But I do want Genesis to be true, even if I know that the creation story and the flood aren’t good history.
Is there an escape from the impasse? Must we choose to between the two alternatives: check our brains or chuck the Bible?
It might be helpful to say again how we got in this mess. Biblical studies something over a hundred years ago fell in love with science and the scientific method. You couldn’t really blame them. The hard sciences and even the social sciences laughed at the Bible. They believed evidence, and they scoffed at those who believed fairy tales. So, the Biblical scholars set out to prove that they could be just as good scientists as those other guys, and, indeed, they did just that. They dissected the Bible with literary and linguistic analysis. They matched its accounts with the Biblical record. In the end, they had to conclude, well, yea, the Bible really isn’t true, but at least we have a legitimate field of study. Thus was born modern Biblical studies. Well, the backlash was to be expected. Those who valued the Bible would not sit still. But look at the move the fundamentalists made. They decided to fight fire with fire. They said, our science is better than your science. They had to accept only one premise. The premise they accepted: God had inspired every word of the Bible just as it was received. Once they made that move they could say, then, that everything was factually true and more certain than any other scientific theory.
Let’s set aside for a moment the premise they had to believe about the inspiration of the text. The more important thing is that the fundamentalists accepted the terms of the Biblical scholars. Once they accepted that the Bible’s truth was to be discovered in science and fact, the battle was over. Both sides accepted that the only voice in which the Bible spoke, the only truth it revealed, or at least the truth that mattered was essentially scientific and factual. Both sides were in this sense left with a hollow shell. For now receded from the fore the most ultimate of questions, What does the Bible say about our relationship with God? How might we discover that relationship in the Bible? And what does it imply for how we are to live our lives? These are not primarily questions of facts. Sure, both sides tried to develop strategies to say something meaningful about these questions. But in the end, their love affair with science left the church’s old spouse, theology, once known as the queen of the sciences, the liberal and conservative church’s love affair with science left the old queen, theology, out in the cold.
However, you will be glad to know, not all is lost. We can do what I hope we have been doing all these years together. We can accept, we can even find incredibly interesting and helpful, the insights of Biblical scholarship. But we can also restore the queen to her rightful place and focus our inquiry onto our relationship with God.
So, let’s do it. As Christians we read the Bible in the light of Christ. As Christians we read the whole Bible, the Old and the New Testaments from the light of Christ. Now, I mean that theologically. I don’t mean that you can snatch verses from Isaiah and say that they are factual predictions of Jesus’ birth. That gets us right back where we are trying to get away from, using the Bible as a fact book. But theologically, we as Christians look to the whole Bible in the light of Christ. And we look to the Bible with the purpose of hearing the word of God, or as Karl Barth might have put it, we look to hear the Word of God in the words of the Bible.
As a sidebar, this claim about looking at the whole Bible through Christian eyes isn’t some form of Christian supercessionism. It’s not a claim that the Old Testament is a Christian document and therefore Christianity supersedes Judaism. For a Jew, the Bible is read in its own light for the word of God. That is, as a theological document the Tanak, roughly what Jews call what we call the Old Testament, is read by Jews on its own terms, and in it they find God’s message in their own fashion. There may be overlaps, to be sure, but the main point is that these two are not competing with one another for truth. God is quite capable of revealing truth in far more ways than we will ever grasp. The idea that there must be one truth better than all other truths is a disastrous distraction from the real point of religious faith.
So, as Christians we read the Bible in the light of Christ. The total meaning of that sentence has filled books for centuries, so you’ll be glad to know that we won’t cover the whole topic this morning. But one thing that reading the Bible in the light of Christ means is that according to the Christian story we live in a broken, some would say fallen, world. Nonetheless, the story goes, God so loves us that through Christ we are promised to be delivered from our brokenness. We can look to the Bible to learn more about what that simply stated idea may mean for us.
Let’s take a look at our story this morning. God, you will recall, looked down on the earth and what did God see? God saw that the earth was filled with violence. God actually regretted that he had made the earth. In God’s eyes creation was ruined. God flew into a fury.
In his fury God caused a flood to come and obliterate all living things, except for Noah’s family and the animals that were on the ark. We joined this story in today’s reading just after the waters of the flood have receded. The remnant from the ark is about to start over again.
Again God looks down on the situation. And something interesting happens. God doesn’t say, “Okay, do it right this time, or I’ll flood you out again.” In fact, God looks down with what could only be called regret. God says, Whenever I make it rain, I’m going to put a rainbow in the sky. I’m going to put a rainbow in the sky to remind myself not to wipe everything out again. If I get really furious, the rainbow will remind me to think twice before I open the flood gates, In fact, I promise that never, ever will that happen again.
If we were locked into the scientific discussion we would need to talk about whether the story is historically accurate. Did the flood happen? When? And so on. Not very interesting questions, really. If we were defending the literal meaning of the text, we would even need defend the exact story line. We would need to say that God was in fact furious, but then God in fact changed his mind. It is a story, then, about God punishing the world and then trying to control his temper, or something like that.
But let’s read the story in the light of Christ with an added dose of recognition that the story was told by humans who were trying to get a handle on who God was. So they tell a story in which God looks down and sees that creation is a mess, completely full of violence. The Biblical writers could look around them and see that their own world was a lot like that. We as Bible readers can look around and see that our world is a lot like that, too. Our world is broken, and a hallmark of that brokenness is the violence with which we treat one another. It seems to be a persistent state, doesn’t it?
So the story teller tells a story of God looking down and seeing this situation. And what does God do? God gets furious and violent. The story teller, and why should this surprise us, tells a story of God who acts very much like we do. God makes creation. Humans make a mess of it. God wants to wipe them out. So basic is the impulse to violence that the story teller not only describes the world as a violent place, but also describes God’s legitimate response as an act of violence against it. The story teller tells a story of God who acts very like us.
But then the story teller senses something different about God. In a charming tale, the story teller says that God was sorry that he lost his temper. However, the story teller says, God is also concerned that he’ll lose his temper again. So God constructs a memory mechanism. If God decides to wipe out the world with a flood again, as soon as it starts raining, a rainbow will appear, and God will be reminded of his promise not to obliterate the world again.
Now we could get all caught up in questions like why God can’t control his temper, or why he needed a rainbow to remind him. We could even speculate about whether God was just saying that he wouldn’t use a flood anymore, but that didn’t rule out that God might use fire or some other catastrophic means to obliterate our fallen world some time in the future. And all of these would miss the theological point.
For what the story teller was catching a glimpse of, from our Christian perspective of reading the text, is the loving mercy of God that runs counter to every natural impulse. The story teller constructs a God who, like him, meets violence with violence, but the story teller is more significantly telling a story of God who breaks free from the cycle of violence, a God who repents of violence, a God who promises never to destroy us again. In short, the story teller has encountered a revelation about a loving God who hates violence but chooses not to meet violence with violence. What a fantastic story we have. The story teller has told a story about human beings, who are naturally violent. And yet, against every evidence the story teller sees in the world’s ways, he catches a glimpse that God is telling him that he can’t treat violence with violence. The rainbow in the sky becomes the reminder for the story teller, for human beings, not so much for God, as a reminder for us to refrain from meeting violence with violence. In our terms, the story teller encountered the reality of Christ, who gives us other reminders, too, like the Sermon on the Mount and any number of other admonitions to forego our harm to one another, and yet who, even when our violence is turned against him, does not turn it back on us, turn his back on us.
Suddenly we have a powerful theological story about God who grieves at our violence. A God who calls us to transform this tendency within us. A God who shows us the way by refusing to meet violence with violence. A God who loves us so deeply and holds so little against us, that when we encounter him fully, we are, in spite of ourselves, made new and our old, deeply ingrained tendencies are spoken against by a rainbow in the sky. This is a story that science cannot tell. It is a story that truth claims cannot capture. It is an old, old story, told by a story teller who had caught a glimpse of God, an old, old story that arcs across the aeons to touch our deepest longings for God.
Thanks be to God. Amen.