9: Authority Problems
The church will continue to be even more irrelevant when it quotes letters from 2,000 years ago as their best defense.
I could predict with fairly certain accuracy what I would be feeling as I walked into class on any given day. I would pull into the parking lot, rehearse my arguments, step out of my car, and give myself a pep talk. My inner monologue went something like this: Okay, Childers. Be strong. Speak the truth. You know what he’s teaching is wrong, and you’ve thought and prayed all week to come up with your points. You’ve got this. Don’t back down. And with fired-up confidence, I would walk into the classroom, see my classmates, and instantly (cue Debbie Downer music) back down. Every last flame of fortitude would be snuffed out when my inner monologue, which had been incredibly helpful just moments before, would suddenly punk out on me and start sniveling, Oh, just look at all their faces. They are so loving and nice. They are just trying to figure things out. He’s just trying to figure things out. Stop being so judgmental. You’re probably the one who’s wrong.
Then within minutes I would realize that whatever answer I’d come up with for the questions from last week’s class were irrelevant anyway, because everyone had moved on to the shiny new skeptical controversy du jour.
At some point it finally hit me: For the pastor and my classmates, the questions mattered more than the answers. It didn’t really seem like anyone was interested in researching facts or reaching conclusions. They seemed way more excited about landing on the next question—and the more controversial, the better. Because I am a truth-driven person, this was like my own personal custom-crafted hell.
Usually I felt as if I were on an emotional teeter-totter during class, but in one of the last sessions I attended, I was feeling a bit stronger. I knew I wouldn’t stay in it much longer, and I was feeling feisty. The progressive pastor asked the group a question about the Bible: “Do you think these writers were actually inspired by God, or were they just writing the best they knew how?”
Recalling my conversation with him about whether Scripture was inspired by God, I stopped him. “Wait a minute. You told me yourself that you believe the Bible is divinely inspired. Can you explain what you’re asking?” (One life lesson I learned in this class is that some questions are really just answers masquerading as questions.)
His eyes became like dinner plates, and he went silent. Looking down at the top of the white folding table where he was seated, he remained silent as others made a few passing comments. After a couple of moments, he looked up and said, “A few minutes ago I asked a question . . . and I want to clarify. When I say that the Bible is ‘divinely inspired,’ I mean that it’s inspired on the same level as something written by A. W. Tozer or C. S. Lewis . . . or perhaps one of my sermons on Sunday. It’s inspired, but maybe not in the way that word is typically used.”
I could not believe what I was hearing. He knew exactly what I’d been asking when I inquired about his views on inspiration months before. He had redefined the word (without letting me know) and given me the answer he thought I wanted to hear. But I hadn’t wanted to hear a particular answer. I’d wanted the truth.
How Do Progressives View the Bible?
Make no mistake, just like historic Christians, progressives find Scripture compelling. The difference is that, rather than viewing it as the authoritative Word from God to people, they see the Bible as an antiquated library of books that we can examine like ancient relics. In their view, the Bible is our spiritual ancestors’ best attempts to understand God in their own cultures, using whatever knowledge they had at the time. Because humans now have a higher and wiser view of God, progressives believe we can now read the Bible the way it is meant to be read—not as the authoritative word of God, but as our predecessors’ spiritual travel journal.
Biblical scholar and progressive thought leader Peter Enns writes extensively from this viewpoint. In his book The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It, Enns talks about how he became serious about the Bible after graduating from a Christian college and feeling humiliated after witnessing a debate between two friends: a “smart atheist” and a “smart Christian.” Realizing that he hadn’t intellectually thought through this “Jesus thing,”[1] Enns defines this debate as a turning point. He went on to read the entire Bible several times, along with books on theology, church history, and philosophy. After earning a seminary degree in Old Testament studies, he went on to Harvard, where he received a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Enns is no Bible ignoramus.
After reading modern liberal scholarship and becoming persuaded that he just couldn’t make the Bible behave anymore, he reached a final turning point during a lecture given by a Jewish rabbi. The professor was trying to make sense of the scene in the desert when Moses struck the rock and water gushed out. This happened twice, forty years apart during the Israelites’ trek in the wilderness, leading the careful reader to wonder how they got water in between the two rock-striking incidents. The rabbi explained that some ancient Jewish scholars came up with the idea that the rock must have simply followed the Israelites around the wilderness like some kind of “movable drinking fountain.”[2] For Enns, that sounded a little out there, but he wasn’t that bothered by it because it reflected Jewish rather than Christian thought—until the rabbi had the class turn to 1 Corinthians 10:4, where the apostle Paul seemed to be in agreement.
Enns writes,
In 1 Corinthians 10:4, the apostle Paul mentions—as if it’s no big deal and everyone’s on board—this very same idea of a rock following the Israelites around in the desert supplying water. He writes, “For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.” And not only was there a rock in the desert tagging along with Moses, but the rock, Paul says, was Jesus. . . .
I felt like I was watching my whole view of the Bible collapse like a house of cards—there one minute, familiar and looking stable, and then gone the next minute with a good stiff wind.[3]
Now that the rabbi had ventured into Enns’s own backyard (the New Testament), his view of the Bible was left deeply shaken. Enns was troubled by the fact that, when commenting on an Old Testament passage, Paul didn’t appear to be following the grammatical-historical rule of biblical interpretation he’d learned in seminary. If Paul was inspired by God to write Scripture, why would he go “off script” and incorporate a strange Jewish legend into his commentary?
But Enns doesn’t mention the sentence that directly precedes the one he quotes: “All ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink” (1 Corinthians 10:3-4). Spiritual drink. Paul isn’t saying that a physical rock followed the Israelites around but rather that the rock symbolized Jesus . . . and gave them spiritual food and water.
Nonetheless, Enns describes this as “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”[4] He concluded that, rather than speaking for God, the words the biblical writers wrote about God’s nature, actions, and decrees may have been just their own sincere opinions based on the world in which they lived. As a celebrated scholar in the progressive movement and someone Rachel Held Evans described as a “mentor,”[5] Enns’s influence on progressive thought about the Bible cannot be overstated.
Limited
Pete Enns writes that “the Bible—from back to front—is the story of God told from the limited point of view of real people living at a certain place and time.” His approach to reading the Bible can best be summed up in his own words:
The Bible is an ancient book and we shouldn’t be surprised to see it act like one. So seeing God portrayed as a violent, tribal warrior is not how God is but how he was understood to be by the ancient Israelites communing with God in their time and place.[6]
Progressive Christian pioneer Brian McLaren puts it like this:
Human beings can’t do better than their very best at any given moment to communicate about God as they understand God, and . . . Scripture faithfully reveals the evolution of our ancestors’ best attempts to communicate their successive best understandings of God. As human capacity grows to conceive of a higher and wiser view of God, each new vision is faithfully preserved in Scripture like fossils in layers of sediment.[7]
Progressive pastor and theologian Brian Zahnd writes,
The Old Testament is the inspired telling of the story of Israel coming to know their God. It’s a process. God doesn’t evolve, but Israel’s understanding of God obviously does. . . . It seems obvious that we should accept that as Israel was in the process of receiving the revelation of Yahweh, some unavoidable assumptions were made. One of the assumptions was that Yahweh shared the violent attributes of other deities worshiped in the ancient Near East. These assumptions were inevitable, but they were wrong.[8]
Franciscan friar and progressive favorite Richard Rohr writes,
The Jewish Scriptures, which are full of anecdotes of destiny, failure, sin, and grace, offer almost no self-evident philosophical or theological conclusions that are always true. . . . We even have four, often conflicting versions of the life of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There is not one clear theology of God, Jesus, or history presented, despite our attempt to pretend there is.[9]
According to progressive wisdom, the prophets Christians have always believed were speaking for God weren’t really speaking for him. They were simply doing their best to communicate what they believed about God in the times and places in which they lived. So you know when God tells Moses to drive the Canaanites out of the Promised Land, destroy them, smash their altars, and burn their idols (Deuteronomy 7:1-6)? According to progressive interpretations, that wasn’t necessarily God. That was probably just Moses speaking what he thought God was saying. Remember that time when God told Ezekiel to lie on his side for 430 days (Ezekiel 4:4-8)? Probably not God. When God supposedly told Isaiah to walk around naked and barefoot for three years (Isaiah 20:1-6)? That was probably just what Isaiah thought God wanted him to do.
But reading the Bible this way brings up a whole slew of questions. If the prophets got God’s word wrong . . . how can we know which parts of the Bible are actually his Word? If the prophets got God’s word wrong, at best they were ignorant—at worst they were liars and frauds. It doesn’t take a biblical scholar to recognize how this way of thinking irredeemably undermines the concepts of biblical inspiration and authority. It doesn’t take a trained theologian to see how this puts the Bible under the authority of the reader rather than the reader standing under the authority of God’s Word.
Subjective
In Rob Bell’s book What Is the Bible? How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel about Everything, Bell devotes an entire chapter to the issue of biblical authority. He argues that when Christians talk about “authority,” they are really just assigning it to someone who has told them what the Bible says and means. In other words, we aren’t really giving authority to the Bible but to its interpreters. He writes,
They were taught by their pastor or parents or authority figures to submit to the authority of the Bible, but that’s impossible to do without submitting first to whoever is deciding what the Bible is even saying. . . . The problem, of course, is that the folks who talk the most about the authority of the Bible also seem to talk the most about things like objective and absolute truth, truth that exists independent of relational realities.[10]
He’s right about one thing: People who believe in biblical authority do emphasize absolute truth—truth that exists independent of relational realities. Remember bacon? (I guess I’m one of those “folks.”) Our perception of how bacon will impact our bodies might be affected by what experts (and some nonexperts) tell us about it, but the truth will bear out in actual reality—despite what we may earnestly believe or not believe. The goal should be to correct wrong perceptions and beliefs that may have been passed down by others. In the same way, a good student of the Bible will seek to understand what the Bible is saying and to interpret it properly, even if it goes against their “relational realities.”
On the one hand, Rob Bell has a point. Even the most conservative Christian is conceding to a certain “relational reality” in believing in the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures. We have a long church history of generally agreed-upon beliefs about the Bible, and as someone who is trying to get to the bottom of historic Christianity, I agree those beliefs bear some weight. Although believers have argued about interpretations like crazy throughout church history, one thing has always been agreed upon by historic Christians: The Bible—the whole Bible—is God’s Word, inspired by God and authoritative for our lives. We believe this because of good philosophy, logic, and arguments that demonstrate it to be the case. But there’s also a relational reality that can’t be ignored or downplayed: the historic witness.
As I first considered Bell’s argument, I thought, But wait a minute! Isn’t Bell’s view also shaped by relational realities? In other words, aren’t he and the other progressive voices quoted in this chapter all influenced by different voices in culture when they redefine what the Bible is and how much authority it holds for their lives?
A perfect example of the undermining of the concept of biblical inspiration and authority comes from progressive Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz-Weber’s book Shameless: A Sexual Reformation. Bolz-Weber argues that the view of sexuality and gender Christians have held for two thousand years needs a serious overhaul. She believes that teaching young people to wait to have sex until they are married can be harmful and repress their sexual flourishing. Along with affirming same-sex relationships, gender nonconformity, abortion, and even moderate pornography consumption, Bolz-Weber isn’t just suggesting that we make a few amendments to our Christian sexual ethic. She writes, “I’m saying let’s burn it the f*** down and start over.”[11]
Her book isn’t primarily about the Bible, but in order to teach this new view of sexuality, she has to redefine biblical authority and how the Bible is to be read and interpreted. Bolz-Weber tells the story of one of her parishioners, a lesbian, who claims to have found sexual healing at a Lakota sweat lodge retreat. Standing in front of the firepit, the woman tore eight pages out of her Bible—the ones that directly address homosexuality. One by one she threw them into the flames, setting herself free from their edicts and from the rigid church environment in which she grew up. Then she tore out the four Gospels, clutched them to her heart, and heaved the rest of her Bible into the fire. Bolz-Weber explains:
There are those who will say that it is “dangerous” to think we can decide for ourselves what is sacred in the Bible and what is not. I reject this idea, and here’s why. The Gospels are the canon within the canon. . . . The point of gravity is the story of Jesus, the Gospel. The closer a text of the Bible is to that story or to the heart of that story’s message, the more authority it has. The farther away it is, the less its authority.[12]
This statement reveals that Bolz-Weber does not believe the entire Bible is equally authoritative or inspired. If certain parts are more “sacred” than others, this leaves the reader in the position of deciding which parts to obey and which parts to throw out.
Richard Rohr states it even more plainly when he explains what he calls the “Jesus hermeneutic”:
Just interpret Scripture the way that Jesus did! He ignores, denies, or openly opposes his own Scriptures whenever they are imperialistic, punitive, exclusionary, or tribal.[13]
As you’ll soon discover, I disagree that Jesus ever ignored or opposed the Scripture. Furthermore, if we treat Scripture this way, we effectively make the reader the authoritative standard for what is true. With a Bible remade in our own image, we are no longer obeying God; instead we’re following our own thoughts, feelings, and preferences.
So I suppose the question is this: Which relational reality will we appeal to when deciding our view? Our own darkened hearts following the culture around us? Or should we take a cue from those who lived closest to Jesus—or maybe take a cue from Jesus himself?
What Was Jesus’ View of Scripture?
When I first heard of these new (to me at least) ways of reading and understanding the Bible, Rob Bell would have been right on the money about me. I believed Scripture was authoritative because that’s what I was told to believe. It’s what I was taught at my private Christian schools, my evangelical churches, and by my Bible-believing parents. These were the relationships that shaped my reality. But when I began to study these issues for myself, it wasn’t enough to feel confident that the Bible sitting in my lap was the same thing that was originally written . . . or even that the writers told the truth. Even if both of those questions passed the test (and I hope the last two chapters have demonstrated that they have), I needed to answer the burning question, Is the Bible the Word of God?
When I asked myself this, I realized there is no way to scientifically prove that the Bible is God’s Word. Even if God himself appeared in the sky and declared, “The Bible is my Word!” there would still be skeptics who would explain it away. Also, 1 Corinthians 2:14 tells us that “people who aren’t spiritual can’t receive these truths from God’s Spirit” (NLT). If that’s true, then we should expect many people to deny that the Bible is God’s Word. So where did this leave me? Is this belief nothing but a blind leap of faith, or just some kind of feeling I have in my heart? I suggest that it’s not, and here’s why.
If the Bible is reliable both in text and in eyewitness testimony, then I have good reason to trust what it says about Jesus. I have good reason to believe that what it records Jesus saying and teaching is accurate. And according to the four Gospels, Jesus has quite a bit to say about Scripture. In the famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught that rather than coming to abolish the Law and the Prophets, he came to fulfill them (Matthew 5:17). The Jewish “Law and the Prophets” contain the same books as what we call the Old Testament. Later in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives a fairly unpleasant rebuke of the Pharisees, whom he called a brood of vipers. After predicting that they would persecute, scourge, and even kill some of the prophets Jesus would send, he pronounces this judgment:
That on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.
Although the Jewish Law and the Prophets contain the same books as our Old Testament, they are placed in a different order. In the Jewish Scriptures, Abel was killed in the first book, Genesis, and Zechariah was killed in the last, Chronicles. So in sealing the fate of the Pharisees, Jesus was also affirming the entire Old Testament as Scripture.
Authoritative
When I was in my early twenties, I tried to fast for seven whole days. Seven. Days. Day one was a piece of cake (without the cake, of course). But after feeling light-headed on day two, I reasoned that if I turned it into a “liquid fast,” it would still count. So I drank some carrot juice. By day three my resolve had become about as fluid as the juice, so I added some protein powder. By day four, I was practically putting entire meals into the blender so they would qualify as “liquid.” My seven-day fast was a big fat fail.
I can’t imagine what it was like for Jesus to spend forty days in the dusty and rocky desert, the only other soul he might meet being a criminal or a hungry beast. By the time the devil showed up, Jesus hadn’t eaten for forty days, and he was hungry. “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread,” the enemy taunted. The devil knew Jesus was the Son of God. In fact, Colossians 1:16 tells us that all things were made by him and for him. Imagine the irony of a created being saying to his Creator, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.”
As the Creator of the universe, Jesus could have called a legion of angels to his side to banish the devil. He could have simply waved his hand and sent the devil flying. But this is not how Jesus chose to fight. Jesus fought using the authority of the Scriptures. Quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, Jesus said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” The devil tempted him two more times, and each time Jesus began his answer by saying, “It is written . . .”
What blows my mind about this dialogue is that the devil quoted Scripture back to Jesus! After taking Jesus to the top of the Temple in Jerusalem, the devil suggested he jump. “It is written,” Satan said, quoting from Psalm 91, “‘he will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” Imagine that. The devil quoted the Scripture correctly but twisted its meaning. This wasn’t just a battle over what was written; it was a battle over interpretation. But Jesus wasn’t having it. Rather than engage in a lengthy debate about hermeneutics, Jesus replied, “It is written,” once again. Bible scholar Andrew Wilson comments on this passage:
He [Jesus] has the resources of heaven available, yet he fights by using the authority of the Scriptures. . . . His position is unequivocal: “You’re trying to tempt me, but the Scriptures have spoken. That’s the end of the conversation.”[14]
Inspired
One day Jesus was teaching a large crowd in the Temple courts where some Pharisees were gathered. In a brilliant exchange, Jesus appealed to the inspiration of Scripture to help them understand that the Messiah is more than just a descendant of David. He said, “How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, called him [the Messiah] ‘Lord’?”[15] This is where we get our very definition of divine inspiration—from Jesus himself.
The historic understanding of the word inspiration as it applies to Scripture is that God literally “breathed out” his Word through humans. We certainly see their personalities, cultures, and writing styles reflected (they weren’t human typewriters), but God used them as vehicles to put his words on the page. Thus, it wasn’t the writers themselves who were inspired, but the words they wrote in the Bible. Second Timothy 3:16-17 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” The phrase “breathed out by God” comes from one single Greek word that suggests Scripture is the very breath of God himself. Dr. Michael Kruger writes, “This suggests the absolute highest authority for Scripture, the authority of the divine voice.”[16]
As Kruger points out, the authority and inspiration of Scripture are closely connected. Whenever Jesus said, “It is written,” he wasn’t appealing just to authority but also to inspiration. In his book Christ and the Bible, theologian and Bible scholar John Wenham wrote, “It is . . . clear that Jesus understood ‘It is written’ to be equivalent to ‘God says.’”[17] In fact, Jesus and his apostles quote the Old Testament by using the phrase “it is written” (or its equivalent) dozens of times in the New Testament. In other words, what God says, goes. If the Bible is God’s inspired Word, which Jesus surely seemed to believe, it has the authority to correct our thinking and behavior—and not the other way around.
The Word of God
But we don’t have to rely on statements like “it is written” and “speaking by the Spirit” to discern what Jesus thought the Scripture was. Over and over again, he stated explicitly that it is the very word of God. When the Pharisees were trying to trip him up in Matthew 15, he answered by referencing several commands from Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, saying, “For God commanded . . .” (Matthew 15:4). Notice he didn’t say, “The Scripture commands” or “Our Holy book says” or “Your scribes wrote.” No. It was, “God commanded.” Later in Matthew 22:31, he quoted Exodus 3:6, saying, “Have you not read what was said to you by God . . .” (emphasis mine). In Mark 7:8-13, he criticized the Pharisees for leaving “the commandment of God” and adding their own traditions to Scripture. He told them that they “void the word of God by [their] tradition” (emphasis mine).
It’s clear that Jesus didn’t see Scripture as simply a human cultural product—he saw it as the inspired and authoritative Word of God.
But what about the books in the New Testament? Of course, when Jesus was quoting Scripture, the New Testament hadn’t been written yet. But Jesus made two powerful statements to his disciples when they were gathered together just before his crucifixion:
These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.
And:
I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.
With these statements, Jesus was predicting and promising that the Holy Spirit would speak through his apostles to give the final revelation of God to humans—our New Testament. From the time the Gospels and the letters of Paul were written, Christians recognized them to be Scripture, carrying the same authority and divine inspiration as the Old Testament.[18]
Class Notes
“I just don’t understand why so many Christians worship the Bible. It’s like they think it’s the third member of the Trinity or something. Sounds like bibliolatry to me,” someone quipped in class one day.
I was so confused. Do people really think that if you believe the Bible is authoritative, you must be worshiping it? I raised my index finger to signal I had something to say. “If we believe the Bible is God’s Word, doing what it says it isn’t bibliolatry. It’s called obedience,” I said. “I mean . . . the Bible didn’t die on the cross for my sins. Jesus did. But the Bible is where I get my information about Jesus. They go hand in hand.”
I had the hardest time understanding why people would equate a belief in biblical authority with idol worship. It wasn’t until years later that I began to figure out that, not only did progressives buy into the misconception that Christians worship the Bible, they criticized those Christians they believed approached the Bible as a rule book. Pete Enns seems to suggest that Christians tend to check their brains at the door when reading the Bible, by accepting it as a “seamless, smooth, problem-free, legal brief.”[19] I have never personally met a Christian who would describe it this way, nor have I come across any scholarly books that characterize Scripture in such simplistic terms. On the contrary, I have come across multiple thousands of written pages that dig deep into the weeds of subjects like coherence, Bible difficulties, and common misconceptions, such as viewing the Bible in its entirety as a legal brief.
Even so, Brian McLaren calls this the “constitutional approach.”[20] He says,
Like lawyers, we look for precedents in past cases of interpretation, sometimes favoring older interpretations as precedents, sometimes asserting newer ones have rendered the old ones obsolete. We seek to distinguish “spirit” from “letter” and argue the “framers’ intent,” seldom questioning whether the passage in question was actually intended by the original authors and editors to be a universal, eternally binding law.[21]
He argues that reading the Bible this way makes it possible to justify just about anything. To prove his point, he asks the question, “How should we treat our enemies?” and directs the reader’s attention to some New Testament verses that say we should love our enemies, do good to them, and never seek revenge. Next he points to some Old Testament verses that he suggests tell us to joyfully dash our enemies’ infants against rocks, hate them, and utterly destroy them. So which is it?
He presents several different methods Christian scholars have used to deal with this tension. Without offering any references to back up his claims, he writes,
Some say “first mention” is primary. Others say that last mention trumps first mention. Some say the Old Testament is valid unless the New Testament overturns the Old Testament. Others say, no, it’s a new Testament, so it doesn’t depend on the old, but replaces it. Some say the Bible permits whatever it doesn’t forbid, and others say it forbids whatever it doesn’t permit. Some say, “Interpret Scripture with Scripture,” but they never quite make it clear which Scripture trumps the other.[22]
I spent years reading scholars of all types and never encountered even one who suggested any of these proposed solutions (at least in the same way McLaren implies). These may be common interpretive mistakes made by otherwise well-meaning Christians, but I don’t think you’ll find an accredited seminary today that would teach hermeneutics this way. It’s true that scholars encourage Bible readers to allow Scripture to interpret Scripture, but that doesn’t mean you decide which one “trumps the other.”
In fact, what was taught repetitiously (even annoyingly so) in every seminary class I audited was that we must approach the Bible with good grammar by recognizing cultural idioms, figures of speech, and genre. We also learned to recognize descriptive versus prescriptive passages. In other words, the Bible doesn’t approve of everything it records, and not everything it records is a command for everyone to follow. To learn the difference, we look at who wrote the book, whom they wrote it to, and how the original audience understood it in order to ultimately figure out what the author intended to communicate.
For example, when McLaren takes a broad sweep at how the Bible tells us to behave toward our enemies, he leaves out the fact that God commanded Israel to “utterly destroy” the Canaanites under very special circumstances. Israel was God’s chosen people, and they had a unique covenant with him that no one else had. God handed down certain laws and rituals, including various sacrifices offered in the Tabernacle and later the Temple, as well as ceremonial laws, purity laws, dress codes, and dietary laws, that pertained only to them. Also, the old covenant was understood to be temporary. It was never meant to be binding on all people through all time. Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36 look forward to a new covenant that would replace the old one. So his command to “utterly destroy” the Canaanites was a one-time deal. If there is still any confusion, God made very clear why he commanded them to do that. Moses records: “It is because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is driving them out before you” (Deuteronomy 9:4). Clearly, this was a specific act of judgment on an evil nation and not a universal command about how to treat our enemies.
We All Must Decide
G. K. Chesterton wrote, “I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”[23] After enduring four long months in my discussion group, I knew I needed to make a decision. Do I just keep my mind hanging open like a garbage bin for endless questions and skeptical attacks—or do I shut it on something solid? It was time to shut it again—on real answers. I had more than enough questions to research, claims to disprove or verify, and opinions to sort through. And by now, my faith was all but shipwrecked.
The very last class I attended was one in which our spouses were invited, so my husband joined me. The subject: homosexuality. Around this time, there weren’t many self-proclaimed evangelicals who affirmed same-sex relationships, but the discussions were beginning to happen all over the country in church classrooms and online community forums. As our discussion ensued, some confessed that they’d had a change of heart.
“It was the Holy Spirit,” announced one woman as the reason for her switch from the historic Christian view of sexuality to a more progressive one.
“I made some gay friends,” reported another.
At one point, the pastor said, “Well, it’s clear to me that the Bible condemns homosexuality . . . so each and every one of you need to decide—how much authority does this book hold in your life?”
Make no mistake . . . this was no question. This was a bold denial of biblical authority. And I was done. It wasn’t just because of the pastor’s view of homosexuality. It wasn’t even because of his view of the Virgin Birth or the historicity of the Old Testament. If we weren’t going to rely on the Scriptures to determine our views on everything from salvation to sexuality, we had no common ground.
He was right about something though. In years past, it was assumed that if you called yourself a Christian, you believed in biblical authority. But now as progressive Christianity infiltrates and infects the true church, we all must decide: How much authority does this book hold in our lives? To inform our view of the Bible, we can choose to follow the whims of a godless culture or we can choose to follow Jesus.
I choose Jesus.