Another 3:16 To Ponder

It still catches my eye when football fans evangelize from the stands by holding up placards that read JOHN 3:16! This was my favorite of all the Bible verses I had to memorize growing up. It contained just about everything that my nowhere near Christian mind could then manage to comprehend of the Christian message. At least, the first half of the verse did. The idea that God came to earth out of love captured my imagination so completely that I never paid much attention to its accompanying reminder of what awaits those who do not believe that he did. By way of reminder, they will all "perish." It made no sense to me then, and it makes no sense to me now, to conjoin a threat of everlasting punishment with a proclamation about a God of Love. So, my John 3:16 has had to remain 3:16a, and not 3:16b.

There is another chapter three, verse sixteen passage in the Bible that I also had to learn once upon a time, this one from Second Timothy. It was and still is the conversation-stopper of all conversation-stoppers about the attitude that Christians are supposed to take toward the Bible. In the much favored rendering of the King James Bible, 2 Timothy 3:16 reads this way: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness…" It takes the next verse to complete the sentence, but this is the part that has created so much trouble in the church. To the generations following Timothy’s, right down to our own, it clearly implies that the Bible, alone among all the world's other books, was written by God. All of the Bible --- every last book, chapter, and verse in it from Genesis to Revelation, and not just our favorite parts of it --- was given by God to make us perfect in his sight. The reference to inspired scripture in 2 Timothy 3:16, then, is to that book on our coffee tables and in our church pews as the one and only book that anyone is ever to look to for answers about anything truly important in life.

But whoever wrote and first received 2 Timothy (both are subjects of considerable debate among New Testament scholars today) could not possibly have meant by the KJV’s "All scripture" what preachers and Sunday School teachers kept insisting they meant, the Old and New Testaments as a whole. In the first place, many of the books included in what would only much later become the latter --- at least three of the four Gospels, the letters attributed to Peter and John, the books of Hebrews and Revelation --- were not even written yet. And secondly, the Jewish community had not yet made up its mind about its own Bible; thus, there was no Christian Old Testament around either. What, then, does "All" (better: "every") scripture mean in 2 Timothy? Almost certainly, the reference is to the "sacred writings" known to the letter's recipients from childhood (3:15), that is, most or all of the books that by the end of the century would become the Jewish canon, and only those books.

It is hard to believe, however, that the author of 2 Timothy would have rested the early church's ability to discern truth from error solely on Jewish writings. He must have had Christian materials available to him as well: surely at least some of the genuine letters of Paul, perhaps a collection or two of Jesus' sayings, and most probably a coherent narrative --- or narratives --- of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, to name just a few. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, he chose not to group these materials under his category of "inspired scripture." Later on, they would come to be so designated, but not here. These considerations make 2 Timothy 3:16 irritatingly complicated. It is still unclear just where for him the church's most "profitable" writings were to be found among those that were beginning to circulate under distinctively Christian auspices.

The fact of the matter is that the early church was far less locked in than we are to the notion of a single, normative body of scriptures within which and within which alone God reveals Godself. And so, dropping the Bible on a podium or desk with a loud and dramatic flourish, as if it were a weapon designed to strike fear in the hearts of all doubters and dissenters, exhibits only a seriously deformed faith. Turning its pages slowly, deliberatively, and searchingly is better. Particularly if in the process we remain open to God’s speaking to us in unanticipated ways through unexpected passages.