Experiencing The Truth In The Bible

When I first learned to sing "Jesus Loves Me," in a circle on the floor of my first grade Sunday School room, it was over the distractions of being poked, prodded, and tickled by buddies on both sides. They received my retaliatory gestures in the same impish spirit with which I delivered them, and somehow we all managed to keep our dis-graceful behaviors out of the view of a struggling teacher who deserved better from us. I think I have become a better person than the snotty kid I was then, but I still have trouble getting into that song. Believing things about Jesus simply because "the Bible tells me so" cuts as little ice with me now as it did then.

In fairness, I should confess that seminary almost cured me of my oppositional/defiant disorder in matters scriptural. In those days, the very strangeness of the Bible was what was supposed to capture our attention and imagination, and drive us to our knees in repentance over a too casual acceptance of modernity. If I hadn't had to deal with lots of Fundamentalists in my summer jobs as a youth minister, I might have bought the whole neo-orthodox program, lock, stock, and canon. But their idea of Jesus' love, like the idea I had been toying with in seminary, was just that: an idea more than an experience, and an idea pushed because a Book told us to.

During one of those summers, another sweetly pious song began getting to me in ways I never would have expected. Remember the one about walking and talking with Jesus in the garden, alone? And its grandiose closing words, to the effect that Jesus and the singer have something going between them that "none other has ever known"? If you want to know the truth, this is a really awful song. Dew still on the roses, the Master's voice so sweet that the birds stopped singing? As my church kids were fond of saying, gag me with a spoon. And yet, the song's closing tone is just right, with a voice of "woe" urging us out of the garden and into a suffering world. Its theology transcends its imagery. We know that Jesus loves us not just because the Bible tells us so; we know it because he tells us so. How he does it is a great mystery; that he does it is not.

The Bible is a stand alone source and norm for faith only for people unwilling to acknowledge the crucial difference between its many human words and the Word of God that struggles to break through them. Going for the Bible like Wyatt Earp went for his gun is a tactic only for people unwilling to acknowledge that its words deserve the attention they do because they speak from and to the depths human experience understandingly and compassionately. From the standpoint of having to experience its truth for ourselves in the midst of ever-changing circumstances, values, and hopes, the Bible is less a test for orthodoxy and more an invitation to fellowship. It is less about rapping things up in our heads than it is about warming things up in our hearts, less about securing peoples' loyalty and more about serving their needs. For the third millennium, it must be much less about conquest, and much more about reconciliation.

A lot of faithful people continue to find a perspective like this one discomforting, no matter what their own sacred scriptures may be. As the world-renowned religious historian Wilfred Cantwell Smith kept reminding us, there are fundamentalists everywhere nowadays, and (in my words) they are all working overtime to insulate what they believe to be timeless truths from the vicissitudes of new experiences, questions, and expectations. They seem especially put off by the very notion that has otherwise made so much sense in the Christian community ever since the time of the Apostle Paul: their treasures, too, have to be kept in earthen vessels.

Maybe not in as many vessels as there are individuals on the planet; the idea of Jesus having to take a walk with each and every one of us in order to get God's message across is just a little too weird even for me. Communities as well as individuals generate experiences --- of desire and fulfillment, fear and hope, sadness and joy --- and I for one cherish his presence in the midst of fellow believers as much as in my alone times. But however he shows up, it is in the showing up that what the Bible tries to say about him, not always successfully, gains its truthfulness.

A Bible Illumined By Tradition

One of the hardest things about running a reform movement is keeping all the reformers on the same page. The Protestant Reformation was and is a good illustration of this daunting reality. Maybe if Luther had counted to eleven instead of ten before he nailed his ninety-five theses to that Wittenberg church, and knocked on its door with only a Top Ten list, he might have gotten more Catholics to listen and not just react. More importantly, he might have discouraged other Protest-ants from jumping into the resulting fray prematurely. But jump they did, and we have been living with the not so happy consequences ever since.

One of the most remarkable of these unhappy consequences was the fracturing of the Christian community over what may still be the single most important outcry of Protestantism everywhere: scripture only. Or in more familiar lingo, The BIBLE says… (and you'd better believe it, all of it, or else.) As the demons trembled before the living Lord, Medieval Catholicism was supposed to quake before the unadorned Scriptures, and abandon all pretensions to be the sole mediator of salvation to an ignorant, sinful humanity dependent upon priests, relics, and rituals to avoid eternal damnation. Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Amen.

But Medieval Catholicism did not turn tail at the onslaught of its biblicist despisers. It just brought up heavier artillery, pounding the Christian world with tighter and tighter wound traditions and a higher and higher elevated Pontiff. Even worse, the very Protestant Reformers who thought and still think that they can nuke the Papacy, not to mention earthly powers and other churches, at will with "The Book" hold very different ideas among themselves about what this book does and does not do in the service of the Christian life.

Take, for example, one classic Protestant statement about the Bible, in the 6th of the 39 Articles of Religion of the Church of England (1553): "The Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man (sic) that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite and necessary to salvation." On the face of it, this affirmation seems to say it all about faith and the Bible. Our dependence is upon the Bible, period, not upon priestly devised traditions such as selling indulgences and saying masses for the dead.

As long as the gored ox in discussions about biblical authority remains the Catholic Church, the Sixth Article of Religion is abundantly clear in its implication: justify beliefs and practices by direct appeal to the Bible, or forget about them. Unfortunately, the application of this Article turns out to be more complicated than this. The reason is that its originators had more than one set of disputants in mind. Along with the Catholics, there were all those Anabaptist types, with their much quirkier ideas about both the Bible and the ("true") church. Thomas Munzer and Hans Denck thought that faith depended more upon some kind of inner, mystical light than it did upon the Scriptures at all. Balthasar Hubmaier went the other way and promoted the Bible as the exclusive law of a church that he believed should be willing to repudiate the authority of earthly powers altogether.

Whether divinely inspired or merely a stroke of genius, the image of the Bible as "containing" essential truths was just what mainstream Protestantism needed in the sixteenth century and needs even more in our own. It is just the thing for expressing the primacy of the Scriptures over more extreme positions which hold either that Christians must be people of one and only one book, or that Christians need no book at all in order to get right with God. And it is just the thing for calling people to keep on searching the Scriptures diligently for the essential truths in them, instead of treating "The" Bible as a rule-book that makes further inquiry unnecessary.

If there are truths essential to salvation contained in the Bible alongside other truths with a different status altogether --- for example, that women should have no authority over men in the church --- then there will always be a lot of work ahead when discerning God's Word in all of the Scriptures' very human words is at stake. At its best, "tradition" represents the process of getting about just such work. And the books of the Bible themselves contain some of the earliest examples we have of what the work looks like in concrete situations. "The Bible says…"? Well, maybe, and then again maybe not. Can we talk?