Progressive Christianity: The Bible

I love the Bible.

There. I said it.

I do. After 36 years of hearing the Bible preached in church, youth camps, conferences, revivals, on the radio and on podcasts, after a year of Bible school and 4 years of a seminary degree, after reading it cover to cover multiple times, and after nearly a decade of deconstructing what I believe about the Bible and sometimes losing faith in it entirely, I still love it.

I start with this statement for two reasons:

First, I believe that in order to find a faith worth having, the faith of Jesus and the prophets and the apostles, in order to dismantle all of the baggage that comes from centuries of traditions and assumptions and presuppositions that have grown up around systems and people of Christian faith, we have to start with the Bible. How we read the Bible matters. The basic assumptions we bring to the Bible matter. This is why on nearly every church website that has a statement of faith, you will find the doctrine of inerrancy and/or inspiration of the Bible featured prominently, usually at or very close to the top of the page, above even the divinity of Jesus or the saving death of Jesus on the Cross- curious, since there is nothing in the early Christian creeds about the Bible, nothing at all, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Second, without a doubt, the single most common criticism leveled at progressive Christians by their evangelical and fundamentalist counterparts is some form of, we don’t believe the Bible, that we’ve rejected the Bible, or that we are twisting the Bible.

I believe this accusation to be entirely inaccurate, willfully ignorant of both church history and liberal theology, and usually disingenuous.

The truth is, I know many progressive Christians who have a complicated relationship with the Bible, especially the conquest narratives and the writings of St. Paul. I also know many progressive Christians, many of them preachers and teachers, myself included, that have come full circle on the Bible, and now find beauty and deep wisdom in some of those same texts. I would imagine, no matter who you are or how conservative your view of Scripture is, that you’ve struggled a bit with some of these passages- the story of Noah’s Ark, perhaps, when God ostensibly drowns the whole world to start over, including children and most of the animals. Or perhaps you’ve been troubled by the command given by God to Joshua to destroy entire cities in their conquest of Canaan after deliverance from Egypt- again, explicitly including women, children, and animals. Perhaps you don’t understand why God would test Abraham’s faith by commanding him to offer his own son as a sacrifice.

I would suggest to you that taking issue with some of these passages is not a sign of doubt, but of your humanity, and that in fact, these troubling stories are a signal, an invitation to us to dig deeper and not simply gloss over them.

Scholars and students of the Bible, from rabbis to theologians to pastors, have for centuries debated the implications of these passages, and if you are a student of the Bible on any level, you are likely aware of some of these perspectives, so I won’t rehash them here. What I will do is break down the basic approach of the doctrine of inerrancy, how it differs from the doctrine of inspiration, and why I believe it is dangerous and needs to be dismantled if we are to read the Bible in a healthy way, a way that leads to transformation, wisdom, and increased holiness.

You may not believe me, but those three are the faithful goal of every Christian I know in how their engagement of Scripture, whether they are conservative, liberal, progressive, or anywhere in between. I preach regularly as a pulpit supply pastor for several churches where I live in upstate New York, and my goal both as I study and preach the Scripture is to help myself and my listeners be transformed more into the image of Christ, discover wisdom for living, and live their daily lives in ways that are more and more faithful to the kingdom of God. In that, at least, I think Christians of nearly every stripe are united.

So how does progressive Christianity engage the Bible differently, and why does it matter?

First, I would say that progressive Christianity seeks to engage the Bible in a more Jewish and a more Catholic way. Let me explain what I mean by these two terms.

Jewish thought generally (“Jewish thought” famously agrees on almost nothing!) takes the approach to Scripture that it is like a multi-faceted gem, a disco ball of sorts, where every time the reader “turns” the text, a new depth of beauty is discovered. In other words, there is no one way or “right way” to engage a text of Scripture. This flies in the face of the doctrine of inerrancy, which tends to emphasize one particular perspective on any given passage of Scripture, usually the one that is the most “literal” or “originalist,” though even hard-core inerrantists usually have some exceptions to this rule.

To me, approaching Scripture with a more Rabbinic/Jewish mindset is beautiful for two reasons: Jesus and all the apostles and prophets were Jews, so it reflects more how they would have read and written the Scriptures, and to me, this “gem-turning” paradigm honors Scripture far more than inerrancy, allowing the Bible to be a truly living, Spirit-breathed, in-spired (God-breathed), collection of texts. Inerrancy, I believe, cheapens the value of Scripture and reduces it to a lowest common denominator sort of reading of the Bible. Inerrancy, moreover, is a doctrine not found in the Bible itself, but has to be built using a variety of proof-texts that have to be forced into a Western lens of history and theology to make them support an inerrancy view. Inerrancy is almost always code for “we believe that the Bible is literally accurate in matters of ethics, history, and science,” which inevitably leads to theology that twists itself into ethical pretzels defending God’s apparent endorsement of slavery and genocide in the Old Testament, has resulted in a quite literally heretical denial of the doctrine of the Trinity in order to ground subordination of women in the Imago Dei, and created an entire cottage industry promoting the pseudo-science of Young Earth, 6-Day Creationism.

To read the Bible from a Jewish perspective is also to read the Bible “from the bottom.” Jews have always been an oppressed people, and their Scriptures reflect that. To read the Bible well is to read it as a marginalized person, to read it as the slave, as the exilee, as the refugee, as the prisoner of war, as the besieged- because this is almost entirely the individuals and communities that wrote the Bible. It is nearly impossible for White American Christians to read the Bible rightly by default, because we simply do not identify at a fundamental level with an oppressed community for whom their Scriptures were among their only means of cultural survival. We have to do the work of “getting down,” of seeing the dragons and beasts of the apocalypses not from a detached vantage point, but from the underbelly. Conquest narratives, for instance, look much different indeed when they are seen through the perspective of a slave revolt than of a colonial project.

By Catholic thought, I don’t mean Roman Catholicism as the denominational entity. What I mean by this is the original, unified Christian movement that unified around the basic contours of One Good God incarnating into the world of flesh and blood to suffer and die for the sins of the world. Long before the Scholastic thinkers, the Franciscans, the Jesuits, the Protestant Reformation, the Wesleyan revivals, the Great Awakenings, the Restorationist movement, the Pentecostal movement, or any other reform movement, the catholic “universal” faith had an ethos of large tree, growing deep and wide through the centuries. Early Christian writers like Justin Martyr engaged their world by connecting Christianity to Greek philosophy. Early leaders like Origen, St. Augustine, Chrysostom, and Basil the Great had divergent views on what in Scripture was meant to be taken “literally”- Augustine, for instance, the great Doctor of the Church and forerunner of the Protestant Reformation, taught that taking the 6-day creation story in Genesis literally was foolhardy and made Christians look bad. I don’t agree with Augustine on much these days, but I think he was right about that.

The Protestant Reformation, for all the good it brought us, swung the pendulum to an anti-Catholic degree as to be unhealthy. Luther and Calvin would likely never have said it in so many words, but the implications of the Reformation- particularly Sola Scriptura- “Scripture alone”- implied that it was possible for a 16th-century (or 21st-century) Christian to go back to “just the Bible” and interpret a sacred text written centuries or millennia before without bias, without bringing their own assumptions and lenses and faith traditions to the table with them. This just isn’t possible- it wasn’t even possible in the times of the apostles! Jude and 2 Peter both warn against teachers who twist or misunderstand the Scriptures and the writings of other leaders like Paul, Peter even going so far as say that Paul doesn’t help himself by being so wordy and obtuse in his letters (my paraphrase).

So to recap, progressive Christianity reads the Bible in a more Jewish way, meaning that we want to mine the Bible for all its worth, that we reject the idea that there is only one “right” way to read the Bible, and that we believe it honors not only the writers of Scripture but also the Holy Spirit to allow the text to speak in new ways that perhaps we had not seen before- perhaps even to undermine or overturn ways we had previously read the same text.

Progressive Christianity also reads the Bible in a more catholic way, which is to say we attempt to read it in community. Not just the local community of faith we are in, but also in communion with the “church catholic” throughout all time. We are not islands- not as individuals, congregations, or denominations. We carry with us assumptions that our forbears made in their interpretations of the Bible, whether we even realize it or not. We read the Bible in community with the Black Church tradition, with Catholic and Orthodox traditions, alongside the perspectives of people who lived in very different times from our own, from Egyptian monastic thinkers in the 300s to European medieval reformers in the 1100s to American freedom fighters in the 1800s. That doesn’t mean we agree with every perspective- on the contrary, we certainly do not- but we allow the perspectives of other communities- particularly marginalized communities- to inform and color how we read the Bible. We intentionally center voices that have historically been decentered, especially Black, Native, Asian, Latino, Jewish, Arab, Disabled, Female, and Queer voices.

To read the Bible in a catholic way is also to recognize that the Bible was not written in a vacuum. It did not fall from the sky fully formed in the King James Version. The Bible was formed- it was birthed- and it was birthed out of community. The Bible was written in the same way that theological thought has come to be throughout the centuries- through a long process of conversation, of dialog, of disagreement- some of which we see playing out on the pages of Scripture itself!- of adapting to different cultural situations and societal norms.

Kings and Chronicles, for instance, were written and compiled by different communities at different times- one before the Babylonian exile and one after- with very different theological agendas for what they wanted their readers to understand. The contradictions in Kings and Chronicles make a lot more sense with that in mind. They bring a richness of understanding of the post-exilic Jewish community that was flowering with most of what we now call the Old Testament, that was forming the basis for the Judaism that produced Jesus himself.

Mark, Matthew, Luke and John can be seen similarly. Mark was written probably right smack dab in the middle of the Jewish-Roman War, in the worst catastrophe to ever happen to the Jewish people until the Holocaust. Matthew and Luke were written in the aftermath, and John was written after the “divorce” between Judaism and the fledgling Christian movement was complete. As such, the four “evangelists” tell very different stories about Jesus. Some of their stories contradict each other, and that makes sense. We don’t need to force the Bible to agree with itself on every point. The Bible is more beautiful and deep when it doesn’t! The inconsistencies themselves lead us to a more faithful engagement with God, the world, and one another.

I hope this first chapter is a springboard for you to understand how we’ve come to some of our other conclusions about Christian faith and practice. Our committment to you is that we will be as transparent as we can.

To quote my favorite songwriter of all time, the tortured Jewish poet Leonard Cohen, “I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool ya.”