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THE BIBLE
A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan
University Public Worship
Stanford Memorial Church
July 13, 2008
“My soul is consumed with longing for your ordinances at all times,” says the Psalmist in
today’s reading from the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible.i “Even though princes sit plotting
against me, your servant will meditate on your statutes.” “Happy are those who keep his [God’s]
decrees.” “How can young people keep their way pure? By guarding it according to your
word.”
Where do we find out about God’s ordinances, and statutes and decrees? The Bible, of
course. The psalmist is likely referring in particular to the Torah, the law books of Moses, the
first five books of the Bible where the ordinances and statutes and decrees are collected. Of
course, as scholars have pointed out, Jews of this time would also have looked to their teachers
in the oral tradition, to a broadly-shared understanding of cosmic or natural law, and to
unmediated personal experiences of the Spirit of God working in their own lives.ii But for Jews
and Christians throughout history, the Bible has been central to their spiritual lives, their
understanding of morality, and their way of being in the world. This is especially true for
Protestant Christians, because Jews have also turned significantly to the Talmud, authoritative
rabbinic commentaries, and Roman Catholics have been deeply influenced by the teaching
tradition of their church, from priests and bishops up to the Pope. The great Protestant rallying
cry, though, has been sola scriptura (“only scripture” or “scripture alone”), to emphasize the
centrality of the Bible in the Christian life.iii
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Today I’m preaching the last of my four-part sermon series on “Christian Fundamentals
for Liberals.” I’m discussing the Bible, and there’s no doubt that for theological liberals and
conservatives alike, the Bible is absolutely fundamental to Christianity. Virtually every week we
here in Memorial Church, like most Christian churches around the world, read from the
lectionary, which presents Bible passages from throughout the canon of the Old and New
Testaments on a three-year cycle. Then we preach on those passages. For as an eminent Bible
scholar at the Virginia Theological Seminary has proclaimed, “Reading the Bible in corporate
worship is the most universal and probably the least contested of Christian liturgical customs.”iv
Liberal scholar Marcus Borg puts it this way: “Christianity is centered in the Bible… It is
the foundation upon with Christianity is built, without which the structure would fall into ruins.”v
Conservative scholar N.T. Wright likewise explains that ”The Bible is nonnegotiable. It’s a
vital, central element in Christian faith and life. You can’t do without it, even though too many
Christians have forgotten what to do with it.”vi
What indeed should we do with it? Gallup Polls over the last decade have found three
very different views of the Bible among Americans. Around 30% of adults say that “the Bible is
the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.” On the other end of the
spectrum, around 20% of Americans agree with the statement that “the Bible is an ancient book
of fables, legends, history, and moral (72) precepts recorded by men.” In the middle are 50%
who say, “the Bible is the inspired word of God, but not everything in it should be taken literally,
word for word.”vii
In a book published by the conservative InterVarsity Press entitled The Divided Church:
Moving Liberals and Conservatives from Diatribe to Dialogue, the co-authors interviewed
church leaders across the theological spectrum, finding that it was their view of Scripture that
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most essentially divided them. A prominent evangelical college president stated that, “This is
our most basic polarization,” and a liberal denominational executive agreed, after trying to
engage in dialogue: “I felt the thing that divided us most basically…was our view of the Bible.”
Trying to elucidate the difference as clearly as possible, a West Coast evangelical pastor pointed
out that “The distinction would be between those who see the Bible as divinely initiated
revelation and those who see the Bible as a reflection of humankind’s quest after God through
the years.”viii
Liberal scholar Marcus Borg writes that seeing the Bible as a divine product coming from
God leads either to claims of biblical infallibility or inerrancy or, in a softer form, that the Spirit
of God guided writers of scripture so as to prevent them from making any serious errors in
matters relating to our salvation, although there may be premodern science and archaic laws
mixed in. The conservative view of the Bible emphasizes a literal-factual interpretation of
what’s written in the Bible, although softer forms are willing to grant that not all of the biblical
stories are to be understood in a literal-factual way.ix “For example, the six days of creation
might be understood metaphorically, perhaps as geological epochs; and the story of Jonah
spending three days in the belly of a big fish may be a parable rather than factual history,” but …
the really important events in the Bible for salvation, like the virgin birth of Jesus and his
resurrection after death, happened more or less as they are described. Also, since this literalfactual approach “tells us what God wants us to believe and how God wants us to
live…considering the teachings of the Bible as anything other than absolute [conservatives feel]
leads to a “cafeteria” way of being Christian, in which we ‘pick and choose’ the beliefs and
ethical teachings we like.”x
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By contrast, liberals take an historical and metaphorical approach. Historically speaking,
the Bible was not written for us in the twenty-first century, but for two communities two
thousand years ago and well before: ancient Israel (the Old Testament) and the early Christian
community (the New Testament). Liberals, though, are more concerned with the metaphorical
meaning of Bible stories than with their historical factuality. For example, we don’t assume that
the stories of Jesus’ birth and resurrection are reporting on a scientifically provable virgin birth
and a photographable resuscitation of a dead body. Instead of asking whether these events
actually happened this way, we ask, “What do these stories say to us? What meanings do they
have for us?”xi For example the metaphorical meaning of the virgin birth – that is, Jesus being
conceived by the Spirit of God rather than having a human male involved -- could simply be that
Jesus should be seen as particularly close to God. He’s a trustworthy person in that sense to
follow as one’s spiritual Master. Likewise, the metaphorical meaning of the resurrection could
be that “Jesus is a figure of the present and not just of the past. He continued to be experienced
by his first followers after his death and continues to be experienced to this day… In short, Jesus
lives.”xii (53)
Marcus Borg was involved in a public dialogue with a conservative scholar about
whether the resurrection was a physical resuscitation of a dead body. The conservative closed
his case for the literal and factual truth of the Easter Day stories by saying: “In addition to all
these historical arguments for being confident that Jesus rose physically and bodily from the
dead, there is one more reason I know these stories are true – and that’s because I walk with
Jesus every day.” Borg responded: “I accept completely the truth of your statement that you
walk with Jesus every day. Now, if I were to follow you around with a camera, would there be a
time during the day when I could get a picture of the two of you?” Borg continued, “Of course,
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that’s silly. But my point is, I think your statement is really true, even though I don’t for a
moment imagine that it’s literally true.”xiii
That’s not to deny that there’s a lot in the Bible that’s historically factual. But usually
when a text preserves history, it’s the metaphorical meaning of the events that matter most. The
exile of many Jews from Jerusalem to Babylon around 500 B.C. really happened, but the story is
told primarily for its metaphorical power of exile and return, which happens rather regularly the
Old Testament. There are other stories, though, like the creation account in Genesis, the Garden
of Eden, and the expulsion of Adam and Eve, which are purely metaphorical. That doesn’t mean
they aren’t true, though, in the sense of giving us powerful imagery for thinking about the
spiritual side of humans, since we’re said to be created in God’s image, thinking about our sinful
side since we eat of many forbidden apples, and thinking about our suffering because of our
sinfulness.
A Catholic priest once said, “The Bible is true, and some of it happened.” A Native
American storyteller made the same point as he began telling his tribe’s story of creation: ‘Now
I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” Marcus Borg’s
audiences get this point immediately when he asks them how many listen to “The News from
Lake Wobegon” on Garrison Keillor’s radio show, Prairie Home Companion. Usually about
half have heard the show. Then Borg asks them, “Are these true stories?” As Borg explains:
“They get the point immediately. We all know that Keillor is making them up, and yet we hear
truth in these stories. We find them not only entertaining, humorous, and often moving, but
often recognize ourselves and people we know in them.”xiv
Unfortunately, conservatives and liberals can become very suspicious of each other over
Biblical interpretation, even hostile. Conservatives think liberals are radically reducing
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Christianity. For if the Bible isn’t a product of God, how can it be authoritative? If the virgin
birth and the bodily resurrection aren’t historical facts, how can Jesus be divine? From a liberal
perspective, though, the conservative view of the Bible seems anti-intellectual, non-scientific and
illogical. xv
It’s been my hope throughout this sermon series, though, to find ways to build bridges
between conservatives and liberals so that the church can become the one body of Christ that the
Apostle Paul said it was meant to be.xvi One possibility is to ask what conservatives and liberals
might be able to teach each other about the Bible. The co-authors of the InterVarsity book on the
“divided church” have some suggestions. Peggy Shriver notes that her fellow liberals often lack
a true passion for the beauty and power of the Bible. She says that “The approach of the liberal
has a complexity that make reading the Word less a comfort than an effort to grasp its meaning.
The evangelical, who is by no means 'simple' in reading scripture, leaps more readily to quoting
the Bible, savoring its message, and making unequivocal application. Perhaps we liberals
sometimes make it too difficult!" Richard Hutcheson proposes that his fellow conservatives
listen carefully to the “liberal insistence that Scripture is always interpreted by human beings and
that God alone has absolute truth…The most treasured contribution of that [liberal] tradition is
its openness to and respect for differing viewpoints, including differing interpretations of
Scripture.” Hutcheson also thanks liberals for their emphasis “on human rationality and on the
necessity for religious scholarship,” pointing out that “a wide-ranging evangelical scholarship is
a relatively recent development.”xvii
The conservative biblical scholar N.T. Wright points out that a lot of confusion can arise
over the claim that the Bible is “inspired.” But liberals might say that a sunset seems inspired in
the sense that it looks a lot more glorious than the rest of the day. Can’t liberals see that the
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Bible carries a special quality that sets it apart from mundane writings, just as they might say a
particular piece of music or dance might be called “inspired.”? On the other hand, Wright is
concerned about claims at the other end of the theological spectrum, where some seem to assume
that the Bible was “inspired” as “an act of pure ‘supernatural’ intervention, bypassing the minds
of the [biblical] writers altogether.” This would assume that God either dictated the Bible word
by word or was “‘zapping’ the writers with some kind of long-range linguistic thunderbolt.”xviii
Many who react against calling the Bible “inspired” are reacting to this kind of understanding.
“Who can blame them?” Wright remarks. It would be better, he thinks, to see the writers,
compilers and editors of scripture, with all their individuality and foibles, as somehow caught up
in their relation to God, and presumably to their religious community, so that they can effectively
produce spirit-filled writing that touches other people.xix
Wright also points out that the word “literal” – as in “the literal word of God” is often,
ironically, used metaphorically. When somebody with a bad sunburn says, “My arms were
literally on fire after sitting there all afternoon” or someone at work says “My boss is literally an
Adolf Hitler” or “The phone has literally not stopped ringing all day,” that person really means
their arms are metaphorically on fire, their boss is kind of like a dictator, and it seems as if the
phone hasn’t stopped ringing, though of course it has.xx So, what do we mean when we read our
Bibles to say Jesus “literally” rose from the dead? Even Wright, a conservative who thinks the
resurrection means that Jesus’ body was “transformed into a new mode of physicality” agrees
that there are also metaphorical elements at work here, and he doesn’t think the Bible is speaking
of a resuscitated corpse.xxi
This conservative scholar also asserts that both literalists and the metaphorically-minded
can agree that there are some parts of the Bible that are meant to be interpreted literally. When
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the Book of Daniel tells us that the Babylonians besieged and captured Jerusalem, it means, quite
literally, that they besieged and captured Jerusalem.xxii But when Egypt is described a “broken
reed of a staff, which will pierce the hand of anyone who leans on it,” in Second Kings,xxiii surely
all readers, conservatives and liberals alike, must know this is to be taken metaphorically. The
parables of Jesus are another example of obvious metaphors in the Bible. Wright says he has
never met anyone who would claim that the story of the prodigal son actually happened.xxiv
More obvious would be today’s parable in our gospel reading from Matthew.xxv Jesus explains
that a sower had some of his seeds fall on a path and birds ate them. Other seeds met other fates,
depending on where they fell. Surely no one would think this description was meant literally.
Jesus makes that even clearer by providing an explanation of his metaphor. It refers to different
kinds of people and what will happen to them, depending on how they receive Jesus’ good news
of the coming of the kingdom of God.
Perhaps the place that liberals and conservatives should most easily come together in our
understanding of the Bible is in seeing it as presenting the master story in which we need to live
as Christians: following in the footsteps of a master, Christ, who brought a radical new message
of how to live lovingly in this world as harbingers of the coming kingdom of God. We are to be
the people who will judge not, lest we be judged;xxvi who will love even our enemies;xxvii who
will turn the other cheek when attacked;xxviii who will care for the hungry, the stranger, the sick,
the imprisoned, as if they are Christ themselves in need.xxix We are the people who will join
together around the same table of communion, sharing bread and wine, whether we are saints or
sinners.xxx As Wright puts it, the Bible is best understood not as a list of do’s and don’ts, but as
“a story – a grand, epic narrative.” To speak of the “authority of the Bible” is to refer to “the
authority of a love story in which we are invited to take part.” As Wright explains rather
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elegantly, the authority of the Bible is like the authority of “a novel in which, though the scene is
set, the plot well developed, and the ending planned and in sight, there is still some way to go,
and we are invited to become living, participating, intelligent, and decision-making characters
within the story as it moves toward its destination.”
May Christians of all kinds come to recognize and celebrate Christian diversity within the
one church universal. May be learn from each other, rather than excoriating each other on how
we read the Bible and try to live it out in our lives. Of course, there are some approaches to the
Bible that must be condemned in the strongest way, as when it is used to legitimate hatred and
violence by groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the White Aryan Nation.xxxi But for well-meaning
Christian conservatives and liberals alike, we must recognize that we share at least these four
fundamentals in common: the reality of God, the importance of Jesus as a human being who was
also filled with the Spirit of God, the sustaining power of a community called the church –
gathered to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, and the centrality of the Bible to teach us about God,
Jesus and the church. And with that I end my series on “Christian Fundamentals for Liberals.”
May all of our lives continue to nourished by deep sources of faith, hope and love,xxxii now and
always.
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NOTES
i
Psalm 119: 105-112
The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), Vol. IV, p. 1167.
iii
The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), p. 1011.
iv
Reginald H. Fuller, Preaching the Lectionary (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press,
1984, p. ix.
v
Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1989), pp. 43, 47.
vi
N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006),
p. 173.
vii
From an average of Gallup polls in 2005-2007 as reported by Frank Newport, “One-Third of
Americans believe the Bible is Literally True” (Gallup, Inc.: 2008),
http://www.gallup.com/poll/27682/OneThird-Americans-Believe-Bible-Literally-True.aspx
viii
Richard G. Hutcheson, Jr. and Peggy Shriver, The Divided Church: Moving Liberals and
Conservatives from Diatribe to Dialogue (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1999),
p. 67.
ix
Borg, Heart of Christianity, pp. 7-8.
x
Borg, Heart of Christianity, p. 9.
xi
Borg, Heart of Christianity, p. 13.
xii
Borg, Heart of Christianity, pp. 53-54.
xiii
Borg, Heart of Christianity, p. 55.
xiv
Borg, Heart of Christianity, p. 51.
xv
Borg, Heart of Christianity, pp. 15-16.
xvi
For example, see I Corinthians 12: 12-30.
xvii
Hutcheson and Shriver, Divided Church, pp. 37, 39, 41.
xviii
Wright, Simply Christian, pp. 180-181.
xix
Wright, Simply Christian, p. 181.
xx
Wright, Simply Christian, p. 191.
xxi
N.T. Wright, “The Transforming Reality of the Bodily Resurrection” in Marcus J. Borg and
N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), pp. 114-115,
120, 124.
xxii
Daniel 1: 1-2.
xxiii
2 Kings 18: 21.
xxiv
Wright, Simply Christian, p. 193.
ii
xxv
Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23.
Matthew 7:1.
xxvii
Matthew 5: 43-48.
xxviii
Matthew 5: 38-39.
xxix
Matthew 25: 31-46.
xxx
Matthew 11: 19.
xxvi
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xxxi
xxxii
Borg, Heart of Christianity, p. 16.
I Corinthians 13: 13.
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