Who Wrote the Bible?

Rev. Joan Pell Sierra Pines United Methodist Church Sermon: 4/10/16 Series: Making Sense of the Bible Scripture: 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 Who Wrote the Bib...
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Rev. Joan Pell Sierra Pines United Methodist Church Sermon: 4/10/16 Series: Making Sense of the Bible Scripture: 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

Who Wrote the Bible? NOTE: This sermon is mainly a summary of the ideas in the book by Adam Hamilton called Making Sense of the Bible.

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as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, 15and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: 2proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. 3For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, 4and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. 5As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully. Perhaps you used to sing this song as a child? The B-I-B-L-E, that’s the book for me, I stand alone on the word of God, the B-I-B-L-E. What is The Bible? The word Bible comes from the Greek word ta biblia which literally means ‘the books’. Or maybe you’ve heard it said that it’s an acronym for Basic Instructions before Leaving Earth. Only it doesn’t seem very basic to me. Theologian Marcus Borg says, Conflict about the Bible is the single most divisive issue among Christians in North America today. And because of the importance of Christianity in the culture of the United States, conflict about the Bible is also central to what have been called the culture wars. On one side of the divide are fundamentalist and many conservative-evangelical Christians. On the other side are moderate to liberal Christians mostly in mainline denominations. Separating the two groups are two very

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different ways of answering three foundational questions about the Bible, about its origin, its authority, and its interpretation.1 And that is what we are going to be talking about in this series. Based on book by Rev, Adam Hamilton,2 we’ll start with some foundational questions and then look at science, violence, moral values, and what to do when we encounter challenging passages. My hope is that if we peel back the layers and think about how we understand what the Bible is, and what it is not, that we will have some more ways of talking to each other, and especially to our children, grandchildren and their friends. I have to confess that I get irritated when I meet people who say with some superiority in their voice: “I go to a ‘Bible-based’ church. We believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.” Their implication seems to be that I do not go to a Bible-believing church or that I am not a Christian in their eyes. My reply varies according to the circumstances but I often reply confidently: “Well, I go to a Bible-based church too. Scripture’s authority is foundational for us. And United Methodists also believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.” And they usually look at me with shocked or puzzled look on their face and I have the opening for a deeper conversation. The difference comes in what we each mean by those words “The Inspired Word of God” and what authority we assign to the scriptures. If the Bible is “inspired by God” literally translated “God-breathed” does it mean that God dictated every single word, guiding the author to write exactly what God intended, and that it is free from human error and infallible? Or does “inspired by God” mean that the Bible is God’s self-disclosure not dictated directly by God but written by authors who were themselves inspired by God, with the Holy Spirit enabling them to discern how God was acting in nature, in history and in the ordinary affairs of human life? A church that today calls itself ‘Bible-based’ normally means that it understands the Bible as being dictated by God, and that it is infallible, without error, and the words apply literally for all time. As United Methodists, scripture’s authority is foundational to us, but we understand it to have been produced by communities of faith who had experienced God’s interaction with them in vivid ways. Something undeniably real had happened to them and now they wanted to tell everyone the news. Not all their testimony was uniform or rendered in the same way. The diversity of their testimony is a sort of proof that the events they were trying to relate were so mind-boggling and boundary-breaking that they were 1

Marcus Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. 2001, Chapter 1. Adam Hamilton, Making Sense of Scripture: Rediscovering the Power of Scripture Today (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2016). 2

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difficult to put into speech. In our encounters with scripture we believe that we hear the voice, see the ways, and receive the guidance of the living God. So the question we are looking at today is Did God write the Bible? Or in what way is the Bible inspired? In our reading today, Paul said to Timothy: All scripture is inspired by God. The Greek word for inspired can also be translated as God-breathed. We are inspired by scripture. The words of scripture move, provoke, rouse, stimulate, and influence us. Certainly scripture inspires us in that it illumines and confusion gives way to new light or ‘ah ha’ moments. Scripture has the inspirational power to awaken us to new possibilities. But it is not just about how we are inspired, but in what sense God inspired the words, and that they are the message of God. So what does Paul mean when he tells us All scripture is inspired by God? First, what does “all scripture” refer to? Paul did not have all the scriptures that we have today. The New Testament is made up of many of the letters that Paul himself wrote. For Paul, scripture was the scrolls that were considered authoritative by the Jews and the early Christians. And did he mean every word of scripture or just the big ideas and key message? It’s not clear! When I preach, I feel inspired as I study and write the sermon. I don’t feel that God dictated it to me, but I do feel a strong compulsion to say certain things, and sometimes wonder where a particular thought came into my head. I would never claim that every word was chosen by God, but I pray the overarching message in some way communicates something about God’s heart and will for us. Perhaps this is what Paul meant by inspiration? Second, what does Paul mean by the word inspire when he says All scripture is inspired by God? The word inspiration in the English language is not the same word as composition or dictation. The Greek word that Paul uses theopneustos which is translated today as ‘inspired by God’ appears nowhere else in the Bible, nor as far as we know in the Greek language until after that time. It looks like Paul made the word up. Broken apart, theo means God and pneo means to breathe out or blow. So we might say: God-breathed, God-exhaled, God-Spirited.

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All scripture is God-breathed. We don’t know exactly what Paul meant. It could be a parallel with the Genesis story. God forms man, God breathes into him. He becomes a living being. Authors write scriptures. God breathes on them. The words come to life. Many of the prophets words from the Old Testament had a meaning before the time of Christ, and were then imbibed with a new meaning after Jesus’ death when the early Christians read them through the lens of Jesus’ life. Christians suddenly heard something that others had not heard before. Did God breathe new meaning into otherwise static written words? Take a look at these pictures. 3 The same Greek word as Paul used theopneustos, God-breathed, was not an exclusive word that just applied to scripture. The church fathers in the first 400 years of the Christian faith used it to describe their own writings. Paul said he was led by the spirit, not that he was in a heightened state. Luke 1:1-3 says: Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, 3 I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you. None of the NT writers, except John writing Revelation claimed an extraordinary inspiration beyond that of the Holy Spirit. What differentiates their writing from ours is that they were closest to the events described. They are the founding fathers of our faith, just like Jefferson’s words will always have a greater authority that today’s leaders. To say that God-breathed means God-dictated is to give a definition that Paul himself did not give. To say that God influenced the choice of every word and every idea so that the words were literally the words of God down to the exact word order is known as verbal, plenary inspiration. It is NOT taught in the Bible, it is not the essential meaning of the word Paul used, nor is it in the creeds of the early church. Verbal, plenary inspiration emerged in the 19th Century in the Enlightenment period as a way to respond to those who were critically studying the Bible and questioning everything in it. If inspiration mean that God chose all the words, and God is allknowing and without error, so the Bible must be too and so it is 3

Sharon Warner, Unlocking the Message of the Bible: Guide to Biblical Interpretation (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2008), 47-49.

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above question. And so you’ve no doubt heard people saying about the Bible: God says it, I believe it, that settles it. The accepted view in the United Methodist Church is that inspiration is not dictation, but is divine influence both on the writer and the readers. It gives us permission to ask questions of the Biblical text and to recognize that some things taught may not represent God’s character and will for us today and perhaps never accurately captured it. Scripture is inspired and it inspires, and as Paul says is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. And it reflects at times the limitations, biases and assumptions of its human authors. So how is the Bible the “Word of God”? We also describe Jesus as the “word of God”. When God wanted to speak definitively, God sent Jesus rather than giving dictation and Jesus did not write a book! In the Bible, the phrase “the word of God” is a message from God disclosed by angels, the heart of an individual, dreams and visions, preaching and teaching, or a whisper. In a sense, the Bible is the authorized biography of God not an autobiography. The biblical authors experienced God and had a relationship with God, and the later ones were closer to Jesus’ time than any contemporary writer, but they were not God’s self so it is not an autobiography. And so we should expect the author’s cultural, historical, and theological assumptions presuppositions and biases to come through in their writings. God influenced them and inspired them, but they were not infallible. To say the Bible is inerrant and infallible is to say that it is without error and absolutely trustworthy. It has no mistakes. It is totally true. Anything which appears opposed to truth must mean the manuscript is at fault or the translator has not caught the correct meaning. Where the Bible is inconsistent with history, archaeology or science, those who subscribe to verbal, plenary inspiration typically say history, archaeology or science is wrong OR there’s a logical explanation for the inconsistency OR we don’t have all the facts. There are times when the Biblical authors express things in one place that seem to contradict what we learn about God’s character and will somewhere else. There are statements that require further interpretation to make sense. For those of us who not subscribe to the inerrant and infallible viewpoint then these are things we rightly question. And we will say more about them in the upcoming weeks. But if you work from the foundation that Christianity is true because the Bible is infallible, inerrant, totally true and trustworthy, I imagine it feels like a house of cards that can easily come down. Find one contradiction and the entire Christian faith comes 5

into question. So it generates fear in folk’s hearts if you try to suggest some things might not be true. And it is this God-dictated, never wrong, always true approach to the Bible that I believe is turning our youth and young adults away from Christianity and the church. They’ve been brought up in a scientific world, they can see the contradictions, and they need to be able to wrestle with difficult questions raised by thoughtful Christians. So, even if you take the more literal approach, to talk to the younger generation, you have to understand where they are coming from. Most United Methodists approach the Bible with a deep appreciation for its history and the way God has spoken and continues to speak through it recognizing the Bible’s humanity and its divine inspiration. We read the Bible, listen for God to speak through it, seek to be shaped by its words and seek to follow its commands. We believe that the human authors were inspired but not dictated to as they wrote it, and so it is a human product that we need to wrestle with to fully understand which means that we do not always come to the same conclusions as those who subscribe to verbal, plenary inspiration (God-dictated) and inerrancy and infallibility (never wrong and always trustworthy). Let’s not accept the quick, easy answers, but wrestle together to understand God’s revelation for us today. Thanks be to God. Amen. Let us pray. O God of love, your inspired word is a lamp for our feet and a light for a path. May the Bible become for us a living breathing word in our lives. Open our eyes to the ways that we misuse scripture. Open our hearts to the testimony of those who think differently to ourselves. Open our minds to the work of today’s Biblical scholars and theologians through the ages. May we not accept the quick, easy answers, but wrestle together to understand your revelation for us today, and as we do so transform our lives so that we demonstrate your love in all our actions. In the Spirit of Jesus, we pray. Amen. Resources Hamilton, Adam. Making Sense of Scripture: Rediscovering the Power of Scripture Today. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2016. (Especially Chapters 1, 14-18).

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