What The Bible Is & What It's Not

Surprisingly (to me at least), many Christians exalt the Bible above its true nature. Some will claim it is inerrant; some will claim it is perfect; some will even claim it has co-equality with God. In holding these views they often believe their devotion to scripture is giving them a superior understanding. I think they have it backwards - in treating the Bible in this way they are missing out on some of the things that can be distilled from the power of scripture. That is to say, ironically, in this situation, more is less.

 

We'll save why they think as they do for another time, but suffice to say, I think there is only one reasonable way to view the Bible - that although the Bible is 'God-breathed' it is nevertheless an object of creation, not to be treated as perfect or inerrant, and certainly not to be worshipped or given primacy over, or equality with, God.

Looking at what the Bible is for a contemporary person, this leads us naturally to two questions:

1) Does the Bible contain enough content that, by itself, makes it sufficient for understanding one's sin and the need for salvation? In other words, can one find the path to Christianity with the Bible alone?

2) Does the Bible contain the maximum written content that can most comprehensively explicate the Christian faith?

The answer to the first question seems to be an unequivocal yes (see 2 Timothy 3:16, for example). That is to say, the Bible is sufficient to lead someone to understand the Christian faith and the need to act upon that understanding. But to the second question, the answer is clearly no - otherwise no conversations, commentary, Christian literature or personal prose would add anything to the process of Christian thinking, learning and understanding.

Clearly practicalities dictate that everything can't be contained in one book, and also that cultures change, minds evolve, perspectives alter, and values are augmented. Thus I think the best way to see the Bible is as a blueprint that contains all the necessary content for understanding one's sin and the need for salvation (and how to act upon that understanding), but also as a driving force that underpins and enriches all the other things necessary for our journey (conversations, commentary, Christian literature, personal prose, and so on). It is the point at which the eternal and the temporal interlock through the Incarnation, where, along with the Holy Spirit, scripture is the surrounding power that conveys this interlocking.

So the Bible is not maximally informative, nor can it ever be written at the optimum time in any one period in history - as it would inevitably be constrained by the limitations of the people that conveyed it at the time. Hence it seems to me that to make a sub-universe out of the Bible, and call it 'perfect' or 'flawless' or 'inerrant', is to miss the true power of it. To do so is rather like saying that a recipe is literally delicious or that it can literally feed the homeless. No, it only shows its power when seen as a created artefact that, as St Paul says, is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. In exalting it any higher one ends up limiting it by failing to invest in it enough of the human ingredients that bring to bear the flavour and nourishment that the recipe is constructed to produce.

The Bible works under the principle that 'less is more', in that potentially additional phrases would diminish the quality of scripture (see Revelation 22:18). But we are also told that it works under the principle that the removal of any part of it would also diminish scripture (see Revelation 22:19)*. So there is clear scriptural indication that the books of the Bible that we have amount to an optimum vehicle for our Christian development. But on top of this, we find that the majority of our Christian journey primes us to seek, learn, develop and grow under the maxim that 'more is more'. That is to say, our full personal development in Christ is inextricably linked to our being able to try to maximise our love, grace, kindness, wisdom, fruitful knowledge, humility, and overall spiritual excellence - consistent with what the book of Philippians describes, ‘imitating Christ’ and ‘pressing on towards the goal to which God has called us’.

Given the foregoing, it’s clear that the Bible is only going to be a constituent part of that - at least when juxtaposed alongside all the other extra-Biblical resources we have such as other people, other writings, and the rich variety of daily experiences, on top of the mobilisation of knowledge, imagination and culturally nuanced psychology that enable us to tap into the scriptural power of meaning in the first place.

Because of this - and what I'm going to say next often shocks people - it is actually not difficult to conceive of at least the possibility that such a thing as the best of all possible Christian handbooks (for whichever post-Biblical generation, or maybe even for any generation) would look like something different to the Bible if it were ever written. But once we see scripture for what it really is - a created object subjected (like Christ Himself) to the grumblings of earthly life and the flawed nature of human beings, scripture can more easily be seen as an optimal vehicle for learning about our salvation, but yet at the same time only an element of the contents of a full life for each of us on our Christian walk with God. 

Whenever the Bible was created, and whichever era it spanned, it would inevitably be constrained by the limitations of the people that conveyed it at the time - which rather does show that the only way to get the most out of scripture is to use it as the map for our journey.

My wife and I recently went on holiday to the North of England and saw some of the most beautiful lakes, mountains and waterfalls in Britain. It was truly wonderful to see so much of God's natural world left unsullied by human interference - but we still required a map to find our way around the different places. The reason the map works is because it is a representation of the territory we wished to explore. With the Bible we find we have a map, but of a different kind - because in analogical terms, if the Bible is the map, the territory we are trying to explore more of is God Himself. To make a god (small 'g') out of the Bible is rather like confusing a map of The Lake District with the real experience of those beautiful lakes, mountains and waterfalls.  It's a temptation that should be resisted.

 

* I think it's true that John was certainly speaking specifically about Revelation here - but I think our forefathers were guided by the Spirit to set it as an application to the whole of scripture (there are echoes of it in Deuteronomy 4:2 for example). Jesus echoes some of this too with His warnings about false teachings.

Is Christianity Testable?

Is Christianity testable? Yes and no. Certainly no in the sense that perceived miracles are sporadic and unforeseeable - but yes in the sense that one's own personal journey is constantly being examined in light of experience. You see, to the outside observer there is a hiatus between the first and third person perceiver, which conflicts with the practice of evidential scrutiny. To the person building the decked successions of experiences, religious belief is a construction of personal narratives and logical examinations with a hard-thought medley of post-hoc experiences to arrive at a set of beliefs and views that sit on a well-balanced fulcrum between our theories and our experiences.

Proclaiming that religious belief is irrational is useless without a simple demarcation as to what constitutes rational and what constitutes irrational - and you'll always find this part lacking. Even the most ardent religious sceptic can't fail to concede that religious faith, while not as accessible as science, amounts to a personal narrative that assimilates much of the same kind of material available to the atheist into his explanatory endeavours. It's no use simply to say that rationality means assenting to empirical evidence, because the relationship between empiricism, theory and narrative involves further explanatory strategies, which themselves tap into issues of metaphysics and ontology, as well as emotional assessments of reality that amount to a whole worldview.  

Patterns that one believes to be God-inspired are always going to be sparse compared with the wide fabric of empiricism available to us - but the human propensity for narration and investment of meaning in those patterns ensures that, as long as one doesn't over-cook one's theorisations, one needn't be constricted only by views and beliefs that can withstand scientific scrutiny. The experiences of Christians that make them Christians are not often experiences that are going to be demonstrable or evidential to non-Christians. I've a long history of examples where atheists have been infuriated by this - but infuriation or not, it happens to be true, which means there will always be an exploratory hiatus for those that can't appreciate this.

Christianity - A Trick Of The Mind?

Some people claim that Christianity is merely a psychological trick that our imagination plays upon us - and sometimes it does look as if it is a replacement or substitute for the real contentment we have failed to achieve on earth. At times it seems so very likely that our rejection of the atheistic world is only the disappointed cat's attempt to convince itself that there is no mouse in the hole.

 

To many, the theory that Christianity is simply a replacement has a great deal of plausibility. Faced with this proposition, the first thing I would do is try to analyse the realities for which things are replacements - for in doing so I'd find the proposition needs to be questioned a lot further. Here are three illustrations that will show what I mean.

When I was in my early teens I knew two rogues who secretly drank their stepfather’s alcohol. Their stepfather had a fridge full of cans of lager which he would drink on a daily basis, and he had one or two bottles of whisky in his cabinet which he would usually keep for visitors or special occasions. The two boys liked lager very much more than they liked whisky. But every now and then there would come a day when their stepfather had let his supply of lager get so low that the boys thought the theft of even one or two of the cans would inevitably be detected. 

On such days, they would drink the whisky instead, and the eldest would say to the youngest, ‘We will have to put up with whisky today’, and the youngest would reply, ‘Well I suppose whisky is better than nothing’. This is a true story, and one that provides a very good example of the value to be attached to anyone’s first reckless ideas about a reality and a replacement. To these boys whisky was simply an inferior replacement for lager. And, of course, the boys at that stage were quite right about their own feelings; but they would have become foolishly wrong if they had therefore inferred that whisky, in its own nature, was merely some kind of makeshift lager. On that question their own innocent childish experience offered them no evidence; they had to learn the answer by being told differently, or else wait until they were older and mature enough to appreciate both lager and whisky.

Here is another example. When I was growing up I never went to see live music; I would listen to all the music I liked on tape, vinyl and (later) compact disc. I had become so used to the songs recorded in the studio that when I did eventually go to see some of these artists live I was disappointed with them because they did not produce the same sound that they did when played through my hi-fi. The live music lacked the polish I had come to expect. I felt that the live music was not ‘The real thing’. This is an even better example than the first, because recorded sound is precisely a replication, and live music is the real original thing. But given all that I was used to at the time, the reality appeared to be a replacement and the replacement a reality. 

And finally, during a mayonnaise drought at my local supermarket in my teenage years, I had to use salad cream instead for about a week. Now at first I would have been reluctant to call it an inferior replacement because initially I was enjoying something different to mayonnaise. But as soon as the stocks were replenished and I had mayonnaise back on my plate I never wanted to see salad cream again. This is different from the previous examples because here I started knowing, which, in fact, was the replacement. The mere immediate taste of salad cream did not confirm that it was a replacement as such, because at first it seemed just as nice as the mayonnaise. It was only after a period of time that the salad cream revealed itself to my senses as inferior to mayonnaise.

Just about every department of life furnishes us with examples of how the reality and the replacement can deceive. To the philanderer, faithful love appears at best a mere bread and water replacement for that exciting and tumultuous world of infidelity that has become the main source of thrills. The young ears that are delighted with manufactured pop music are often deaf to the exploratory delights of The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd. And great literature can seem at first, to inexperienced taste, a pale refection of the superficial or trashy pieces of fiction which it prefers. 

The upshot is, cursory impressions are often of little use at all in deciding which of two experiences is a replacement or second best. At a certain level all those sensations which we could expect to find accompanying the real satisfaction of a fundamental need will accompany the replacement, and vice versa. The key is in finding out which is which.

If those two rogues I mentioned earlier had really wanted to find out whether their view of whisky and lager were correct, there were various things they might have done. They might have asked a grown up who would have told them that whisky was actually regarded as the greater luxury of the two, and thus had their mistake corrected by authority. Or they might have found out by their own investigation - that is by asking a shopkeeper which of the two were more expensive, and having found out that whisky was more expensive than lager, they could have inferred that whisky could not be a mere replacement for lager. Finally they might have practiced obedience, and waited until they were old enough to drink - in which case they would have drawn their own conclusions from an adult experience of the two drinks. 

With these illustrations I am simply trying to put the whole problem of psychological trickery the right way round; to make it clear that the substance or value given to experiences depends on the increased widening of our perceptive tools to try to capture all the realities those experiences may inhabit. Believe in God and you will still have troubling moments when it seems that this material world is the only reality. On the other hand, disbelieve in Him and you will still face hours of serious, deep contemplation when this life seems to shout at you that it is not all there is.

People who have become Christian are people who've found out that what at first seemed like an ersatz replacement to the real truth is, in fact, the real Truth with a capital "T". They are in some way analogous to people who've discovered The Beatles and Bob Dylan after ditching manufactured pop; or who've discovered Charlotte Bronte and Fyodor Dostoyevsky after ditching Mills & Boon; or who've discovered the delights of faithful love with a beloved after ditching the life of being a cad. It's true that those examples are subjective, whereas Christianity's Truth is objective - but subjective experiences are so often compelling precisely because they are signposts to Christianity's Truth.

How Can People Like Hitler Be Saved?

There is one often-cited question by unbelievers which gets to the heart of what's so perplexing about Christian grace: "How can wicked people like Hitler ever be saved?" Christians are usually not so perplexed, because their faith is based on two fundamental truths that contain the answer to this question:

1) As much as we like to think otherwise, we humans are all capable of the most wretched sins, and we are all equal in the extent to which we fall short of the glory of God, which makes all of us as much in need of grace as Hitler.

2) Anyone who recognises their sins and Christ as their saviour is saved, because salvation is not based on our moral deeds, it is a free gift given because of God's love and grace on the cross.

Not only is it the case that salvation is gift-based not merit-based, it's also the case that even some of God's greatest spokespeople had notoriously tarnished pasts. Take three of the most famous - Moses, David and St Paul: Moses killed an Egyptian to defend a Hebrew; David, after sleeping with Uriah's wife Bathsheba, gave military instruction that he knew would cause the execution of Uriah, freeing up him to marry Bathsheba; and St Paul (when he was Saul, before his conversion) persecuted Christians to their death.

If some of the Bible's most roguish characters can be not just saved, but be chosen as key exponents of the Divine truths, then it's unsurprising that there's an ease with which all repentant sinners can be forgiven and have salvation, even people generally perceived to be the worst in human history.

What I Think Is Really Behind The Intellectual Objections To Christianity

I've wanted to write this for a while, and today seems like as good a time as any to get the words down. What I want to speak about is a particular kind of rejection of Christianity - the so-called intellectual one. Now, of course, there are many other reasons why people aren't Christians - apathy, unawareness, emotional pain, subscription to other faiths, and being too busy to give it the time it warrants (to name a few) - but they are not my principal concern here.

My principal concern is the view that Christianity suffers defeat when face to face with what some atheists like to call 'free-thinking' - by which they mean some kind of rational, intelligent scepticism that sets them apart from those 'dumb' enough to believe in God. They'll happily tell us they are too smart and enlightened to believe in God, but yet every one of them almost certainly knows (or knows of) dozens of intelligent and thoughtful theists that evidently have considered their Christian faith very deeply and profoundly.

Why, then, the brash confidence in atheism? The real reason, I think, is a twofold truth - but it is a painful one, and one to which many over-confident unbelievers will scarcely give much acknowledgement. The first part is to do with pride and the second part is to do with courage. You see, we humans are proud creatures - and although we try to suppress it, we cannot help but be seduced by admiration, praise and prestige.

Religion-bashing is a peculiar phenomenon - in the first case it is either thoroughly justified (in the case of criticising religious fundamentalism), and in which case, a proprietary duty not just of unbelievers but of believers too. Or in the second case it is thoroughly lacking in depth and profundity (in the case of the facile arguments and brazen posturing we see too often in social media).

The thing about the second case of religion-bashing I'm talking about is that it's the one that most enchants the ego, because it is of a lowest common denominator discourse that attracts hoards of impressionable people or people damaged by their bad religious background (sometimes, of course, the damage adds to the impressionability). People who are scarred by church-shaped wounds will easily find comfort and sometimes even hero-worship in figures like Richard Dawkins and (the sadly deceased) Christopher Hitchens if they appear to offer an intellectual emancipation from some of the religious nonsense and cruelty by which they were once beset. And, of course, from the vantage point of the emancipator, the continual prestige and praise cannot fail to seduce and enchant, as well as often proving to be financially rewarding and career enhancing too.

Now if there's one thing that Christianity does to the unbeliever and believer alike, it proceeds to shatter any such illusions we may have about self, about impressing other humans, and about courting status and prestige. Don't misunderstand, the Christian faith has no discouragement towards conferring praise or admiration on individuals who do good and noble things - it just frames goodness in its wider context of God's love for His creation, and His grace bestowed upon creation.

Or to put it another way, if there is one irritating thing about God (or even considerations of God) from the atheist's perspective, it is that He cares not one jot for our attempts to monger status and lionisation from other people. He couldn't give two hoots about our ego-stroking or the ways we court prestige - He sees right through it all, into the real self, and He knows, as do we deep down, that such grasping is really out of weakness, not strength. For although we enjoy the transitory moments when we are admired and praised, we know all too well how much they mask the real drawbacks and limitations of being human.

Now we begin to see why courage is the second part of the resistance - for it is only being courageous that enables us to face our weaknesses and limitations. As such, it takes tremendous courage to make concessions to a worldview based on the abnegation of ego, and to properly face up to our human limitations and weaknesses.