God Does Not Lie

I guess she took exception to my article last week.  She was respectful, but her message on my answering machine can be summed up in these words, “God does not lie.”  I take it that she thought I was suggesting otherwise.  She must have misunderstood me.  What I had actually written was that our understanding of the Bible is not made clear by authoritative pronouncements but by respectful dialogue.  In a local church that means a Wednesday evening Bible study is more enlightening the more people feel free to express their own interpretations.  And interpretation of scripture that takes place ecumenically is probably more wholesome and closer to the truth than any one denomination can claim on its own.  In other words, the church together arrives at Biblical truth much better than any one of us does alone.

Still, the Bible does speak to individuals.  It was through my own reading of the Bible that I became convinced of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, the Word that became flesh.  Yet, I was helped along in my understanding of Jesus by other books I read, along with conversations with my father.  The Bible gained clarity as I listened to the opinions of others.

Opinions vary, for sure.  And there is no end to the varieties of Biblical interpretation on the World Wide Web.  Sometimes I grieve how much error there is floating around in cyberspace.  Of course, error is in the eye of the beholder.  By and large I agree with the Pope who is reported to have said that the internet is a gift from God.

While there are differences of opinion on how to interpret the Bible I am amazed at the amount of consensus there is regarding its basic message.  For all the extremes on either end of the interpretative spectrum most Christians agree on the essentials – God loves the creation enough to send us Jesus Christ to show us the way of salvation and continues abiding with us through God’s Spirit.  John 3:16 comes to mind.  I am also reminded of something my father said to me when my faith was in its infancy, “It’s not the parts of the Bible that I don’t understand that bother me; it’s the parts that I do understand.”

For all our difficulty in interpretation, the Bible is nevertheless clear enough for us to know when we are missing the mark (“Turn the other cheek.”).  And clear enough to give comfort to the troubled mind (“The Lord is my shepherd . . .”).

Fred Craddock is a famous preacher who taught preaching at the Candler School of Theology for many years.  He tells the story of coming into his office to discover his granddaughter with his Bible in her hands, holding it upside down and singing, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

She may have had the Bible upside down.  But she had it right.

My caller last week was right.  God does not lie.

Is the Bible Clear?

            Byron was a Presbyterian, working on his Ph. D. in Old Testament, and it was from him that I first learned about the “perspicuity of scripture.”   Simply put, this notion is an argument for the clarity of the Bible, that anyone can pick it up and glean the scripture’s essential meaning.  This notion is illustrated by the anecdotal stories of persons who pick up Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms and who, upon reading, experience life-changing conversions.

But if the Bible is so clear, then why do we study it so endlessly; parsing sentences in Hebrew; doing word studies seeking the Aramaic phrasing behind the Greek; piecing together ancient manuscripts to infer the social or cultural context of the times in which they were written in the hopes of gaining greater insight into the meaning of each text.

If the Bible is so clear, why do churches send young preachers to seminary to sharpen their exegetical skills, or to graduate schools to write novel-length theses on a single word’s meaning?  Well did the writer of Ecclesiastes understand this phenomenon when he wrote, “of the making of many books there is no end (12:12).” 

John concludes his Gospel with these words:  “there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written (21:25).”  There has been nothing else so thoroughly studied as the Bible, and while the world has contained all the books written so far, we are continually pushing those limits.

I am often suspicious when I hear someone begin a sentence with the phrase, “The Bible is clear . . . ,” because what often follows is a proposition stated as cold, hard truth, but about which there are undoubtedly various opinions.  The phrase, “the Bible is clear,” is often used as a way of cutting off any contrary, or dissenting opinion.  This tendency is captured in the well-worn argument that many of us have heard:  “God said it.  I believe it.  That settles it.”

Actually, that settles nothing.  When one closes off all discussion, or disallows any argument, then one has failed to grasp the very essence of the Bible as literature.  What we often fail to realize is that the Bible is often in a dialogue, or even an argument, with itself.  As a simple illustration:

Proverbs 26:4 ---“Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.”  And this is followed immediately by a contrary opinion,

Proverbs 26:5 --- “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.”

Perhaps the Bible is clear in its essence.  But the history of Biblical study has shown us that such clarity comes only through constant conversation and dialogue.  How much more we might learn if we precede our interpretations not with, “the Bible is clear,” but “this is what I hear God saying in this text; what do you hear?”