The Sound of Good News, a sermon series ... Good Christians don’t have to take literally everything in the Bible

1870 Tower Bell, First Presbyterian Church Edwardsville The Gospel of Luke 14:1, 7-14; Paul's Second Letter to Timothy 3:14-17When you are trying to learn another language, idioms are a common source of confusion. This week, in the middle of a German lesson, I felt very confused to hear the words, “Ich drücke dir die Daumen,” which means, “I squeeze for you the thumbs!”  It turns out that when a German says “I squeeze for you the thumbs,” it’s like an American saying, “I’m crossing my fingers for you.”  It’s a way of expressing best wishes or good luck.“Idiom” sounds like a strange and rare concept, but you and I use idioms every day. “We can’t make ends meet” doesn’t mean that we can’t force two objects to touch, but rather that there isn’t enough money for our needs. “The children got out of hand” doesn’t mean that someone let them out of grasp, but rather that they became unruly and out of control. “He’s not pulling his weight” doesn’t mean that he can’t do a chin-up, but rather that he’s not making a contribution equal to that of his peers.One dictionary defines idiom as “a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words.” That’s  like saying the whole is more than the sum of its parts. An idiom can conjure up a powerfully expressive image, but its meaning is not easy to grasp for those who are interpreting the words literally.When I listen to pastors of other traditions interpret the Bible, I sometimes wonder,    “Why is it that people who use idioms in ordinary daily speech, and rich images in other forms of speaking and writing, ask us to forget about that knowledge when it comes to reading the Bible?”From the perspective of many Presbyterian-Reformed scholars, we might begin to answer that question by saying that the reasons are rooted in a reaction to the Enlightenment. More than 200 years ago, scientists and philosophers began to place greater value on the power of reason and less on the power of faith. Then, as the theory of evolution gained greater credibility, part of the Christian Church reacted by promoting a literal interpretation of the Bible’s creation narratives. These sacred stories were written in an age when truth-telling took place in the form of folktale. But in a time of fear, they were forced into service as natural-science narrative.As modern archaeology began to paint a different picture of the places and times of which the Bible speaks, part of the Christian Church reacted by vouching for the detailed accuracy of the Bible’s version, though the writers were never trained to write dispassionately without bias according to modern models of scientific inquiry. You can picture the tension at the heart of this conflict with the pendulum I often use while teaching classes: as some began to swing in the direction that contends the Bible is a merely human document, others swung in the opposite direction, arguing that the Bible is purely divine.Ironically, many who defend the Bible against modern science adopt the persona of a scientist to make their case. Long ago, I read several books in this style. I just couldn’t be convinced that literal interpretation adequately explained the Bible stories I had been taught and grown to love as a child. It’s not that I can’t believe SOME parts of the Bible are literally true in the sense that a newspaper article is literally true. For example, there are the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Though they are carefully crafted for each author’s audience, I still believe they are reliable witnesses to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But in many other parts, the Bible seems so much richer than can be comprehended by reading it like a "how-to" manual or a cookbook of religious recipes. In it you will find myth -- meaning sacred tales that attempt to answer timeless questions and explain human experience -- history, poetry, songs, prophecy, gospel, letters of various kinds, apocalypse, and more.If you want to read the entire Bible literally, then there are a lot of problems, not the least of which is what to think or do after you read something like our Hebrew Testament lesson (Psalm 137). If you read it literally, you might imagine that God condoned the murder of an enemy’s children in the past, and, therefore, might condone similar brutality today. But, if we step back from the text, recognizing its historical context, and its literary form, then we can better appreciate it as a lament in which a songwriter pours out raw emotion on behalf of a people oppressed and enslaved.Martin Thielen has compiled a helpful list to highlight the problems of literal interpretation.^[1]If everything in the Bible should be taken literally as God's word, then …

• The earth is flat, and was created six thousand years ago in six twenty-four-hour days.
• Wearing blended fabrics (like cotton-polyester) enrages God, and eating shellfish is an abomination.
• Women are to be silent and wear veils in church.
• Sassy Teenagers are to be executed.
• Women are the property of men, and both polygamy and slavery are approved by God.
• God’s preferred system of government is monarchy, and all regimes, even highly oppressive ones, are established by God.
• God approves of genocide, and commands people to practice it.

As time passed, and these ideas began to seem more human than divine, anxiety drove some in the literal-interpretation camp to develop a doctrine known as “inerrancy.” One form of inerrancy posits that scripture in its original writing could not contain any human error, because the authors were so possessed by the Holy Spirit that it was as if God moved the pen.  But, as Martin Thielen helpfully points out, the Bible itself seems to contradict this theory.  Look at the opening of the Gospel of Luke (Luke 1:1-4). Luke’s language doesn’t seem to be that of someone who fell into a trance during which the spirit moved the pen. We presume Luke was prayerful and devout, but nowhere does he suggest that his ability to decide, reason, and compose was overcome. Making use of human skills for divine purposes,

• he investigated,
• he decided,
• he wrote.

Years ago, the Office of Theology and Worship of our Presbyterian denomination published a bar chart intended to show the diversity of opinion that exists about biblical inspiration and interpretation.^[2]At one extreme position, only four-percent of Presbyterians said that the Bible is merely a record of the moral and religious experiences of the Hebrews and Christians. At the other extreme, only fourteen-percent said that the writing of the Bible has been so controlled by the Holy Spirit that it is without error in all it teaches in matters of science and history, as well as in theology. The overwhelming majority of Presbyterians were somewhere in between, believing that in the Bible there is some combination of divine and human elements. Therefore, interpretation often is necessary to separate the one from the other. The passage of scripture most often cited by those of this moderate position is from Paul’s second letter to Timothy, in which he instructs his young disciple in the value of scripture as “inspired by God and … useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” which is something different than the more recent claim that the Bible is without error.If you are harboring a sense of inferiority or guilt that has been placed upon you by someone who said or implied that you must accept their particular literal reading of scripture as God's word, then hear the good news. Part of the wonderful freedom of our Presbyterian-Reformed-Christian heritage is the understanding that biblical interpretation is much larger than two small-minded choices. We are confined neither to the little box of Fundamentalism that reads every sentence in the Bible like it’s a self-help “how-to” guide, nor to the little box of atheism, that reads every sentence in the Bible like it’s Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes.In this church, we don’t take the Bible literally in every part. Instead, we take the Bible so seriously that we recognize the sixty-six books of the Bible communicate God’s word through a rich variety of literary forms. We take the Bible so seriously that we exercise sensitivity to the historical context and literary genres of the authors to whom God was revealed. In this church, we take the Bible so seriously that we believe that it is not a static textbook of recipes or formulas, but a living document through which God speaks to us in fresh and relevant ways as we open ourselves to the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. In this church, we don’t always take the Bible literally; instead, we take the Bible seriously!NOTES[1]Martin Thielen, What’s The Least I Can Believe And Still Be A Christian?: A Guide To What Matters Most, Louisville, WJK Press, 2011, pp. 46-47.[2]Bar Graph, “Presbyterians and the Bible,” derived from a 1981 piece appearing in the “Presbyterian Panel,” and contained in “Selected Documents of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assemblies (1956-1998), Louisville: Office of Theology and Worship, Congregational Ministries Division PC(USA), p. 24.