Is the Bible Authoritative? Part One
Is It All or Nothing?
Like many of you, I suspect, the Bible has played a central role in my life. My earliest memories are biblical. It was common to hear Scripture read/recited, and not just at church. I memorized passages in Sunday School to get rewards—the longer the passage the bigger the prize. I even played with toys based on Bible characters and stories. Did anyone else recreate a very PG version of the Samson and Delilah story, or recreate the crucifixion of Jesus with action figures?
The Bible loomed large in my life during my formative years, and it still does. Perhaps even more so today than in the past. I have given my life to learning about, studying, and teaching the Bible. It’s not just a profession, it’s a passion. The ways in which Scripture has been warped and weaponized to harm others has further deepened my sense of urgency to help people read and interpret the Bible better. I also love taking the insights and discoveries of biblical scholarship and translating them into accessible language so that everyday Christians and congregations can engage with them more deeply.
Some of that work is creating content online that addresses doctrines and interpretations that I have come to believe distort and misunderstand what Scripture is and means. As you might imagine that work of reframing, reinterpreting, and reimagining what the Bible is and how it is understood inevitably elicits a lot of questions and even some very strong responses. One such question, or maybe even accusation, revolves around the idea of biblical authority. Specifically, some commenters will ask, “Do you believe the Bible is authoritative?” Or, in the form of accusation, “It’s clear that you don’t believe in the authority of Scripture!”
What does that mean, “the authority of Scripture?” From where does the Bible get its authority? That’s what I want to explore here, because I don’t think there are only two options available in response to the authority question.
For many Christians to say the Bible is authoritative means at least the following (and these are ideas and statements that I would have affirmed twenty-five years ago):
Scripture is the full and final authority on all matters of faith and practice.
Scripture, because God is the ultimate author, is inerrant and infallible, without error and incapable of being wrong.
That being the case, everything Scripture teaches is authoritative because it is “God’s Word.” Christians are called to submit to all of Scripture, not just the parts they find appealing.
When Scripture conflicts with other authorities—such as church tradition, personal experience, culture, science, or human reason—Scripture has the last word.
Scripture contains everything necessary for knowing God, salvation, and faithful Christian living. It doesn’t answer every possible question (e.g., how to perform heart surgery or build a computer), but it is sufficient for its intended purpose.
Essentially, the idea of the “authority of Scripture” from this perspective means that Scripture decides for us. It tells us what to think, how to behave, what to embrace, and what to reject. It doesn’t matter how our understanding has changed or evolved since these texts were written; what matters is what the words, inspired or dictated (depending on who you’re talking to) by God, say.
I’m sure it is clear that I reject that claim of biblical authority, for several reasons. Let me briefly share two of them.
First, the Bible is not inerrant. Sometimes it gets things wrong: historically, geographically, scientifically, you get the picture. It just does. Readers who hold to inerrancy have to do untold gymnastics to make it all line up and say the same thing, which is why stretching before reading the Bible will help you not pull a muscle.
Here’s the thing, though; I don’t think a Bible with errors is a problem. Rather than reflecting some objectively Divine perspective, the Bible offers us glimpses into our spiritual ancestors and how they learned, grew, and changed their minds on their journeys with God. We get to see them, warts and all, as they tried to do exactly what we are doing today in our own time: Seeking to know God and be transformed by that relationship.
While I reject inerrancy, I don’t tend to call those incongruencies we find in Scripture “contradictions,” because that assumes the Bible should be inerrant. I like to call them conversations, because that’s what they really are. In the Bible, over time, we find authors in conversation with one another, and we become part of that process as readers and interpreters. For example, the Book of Ruth is a direct, parabolic response to the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah. Those reforms were about keeping the community separate from outsiders, while the story of Ruth warns that doing that could have disastrous consequences.1
Calling those disagreements “contradictions” is playing by the rules of inerrancy, and it ultimately causes us to miss how complex, interesting, and challenging Scripture really is.
Second, even if you allow for the idea of inerrancy, the Bible still must be interpreted. No one, not me, you, our pastors or our grandparents can talk about what the Bible means without engaging in the act of interpretation. When we discern meaning and seek to apply it, we are firmly in the realm of interpretation. Another word for that is opinion. No matter how much we want to say, “I’m not giving you my opinion, I’m just telling you what the Bible says,” that just isn’t reality. To put it more succinctly, the Bible doesn’t SAY anything. The Bible READS, and we make it say the moment we begin to speak of meaning.
Since this is the case, the argument being made for the authority of Scripture is really not about the authority of Scripture as much as it is about someone’s interpretation of Scripture being their authority. It’s not the text itself, it’s their understanding of the text that guides them. And, to be sure, that fact doesn’t make us disingenuous or deceptive by default. Objectivity, after all, is not available to subjective creatures. What is disingenuous and deceptive is claiming the opposite—that we are just presenting the objective facts, the unvarnished truth. We don’t tell anything as it is, as much as we tell it as we are and how we see it.
The question all of this raises for me is this:
Is Scriptural authority an all or nothing proposition?2
Does rejecting this specific idea of Scriptural authority mean that the only other option is setting the Bible aside, seeing it as a bunch of Iron Age myths and superstitions? If the Bible isn’t inerrant and infallible, does that mean it’s useless and not worth our time? If God isn’t the author, can the Bible still be called “inspired”? Can one reject the ideas about authority presented above and STILL see Scripture as having an authority of some kind?
We’ll explore that in next week’s post!
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I write about this more in my book Context: Putting Scripture in Its Place.
Anyone else have All or Nothing by O-Town stuck in your head, now?