An Opinion Piece

It is Better to be Blind, Than to See Things from One Point of View  (Chinese Proverb)

    This is for most fundamentalist Christians, especially evangelical Christians, and most Protestants in the U.S. … who believe that the Bible is the divine word of truth, and that it can/does function as an authority for all Christian faith and practice, and who want to support a coherent position that justifies and defends that belief.

    What follows IS NOT an attack on any Christian faith, any faith-based authority, or the Bible itself. It is, rather, a critical questioning of certain aspects of one specific account of biblical authority that reason and evidence show is impossible to defend and/or employ with integrity … Biblicism, the LITERAL reading of and usage of the Bible. My goal is NOT to detract from the reliability, plausibility, or authority of any Christian faith or from the scriptures … but to persuade people that one particular theory of Christian reliability, plausibility, or authority is inadequate to the task.

  I contend that what characterizes the thinking and practice of most of American evangelicalism, indeed most American Protestants, is not wrong but impossible, even taken on its own terms. It does not work as it is proposed and cannot function in a coherent way. Those who believe in their particular faith need to be selective in their choosing or using any particular text from the Bible, they also need to contort, somewhat, other pieces of scripture and in the end they violate the Bible’s intention.

   I DO NOT mean to downplay the very important role that the Bible does, and must, play in the daily lives of Christians and their separate churches. And … I AM NOT a theological Liberal. Those people are extremely naïve and are espousing, in most cases, unfortunate and objectionable social and political expressions.

    Actual practices of Bible reading and interpretation in various churches tell us a great deal about the adequacy of our theories about biblical texts. In many various churches throughout our country, well-meaning and educated men (and women) in their best efforts to understand the Bible say and teach many different things about very significant ideas and beliefs. Charles Hodge, who taught theology at Princeton in the 1800’s said “… if the scriptures be a plain book, and the Spirit performs the functions of a teacher to all the children of God, it follows inevitably that they all must agree in all essential matters in their interpretation of the Bible. …” [Bold type is mine]

   Do you think that the Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and all the many types of Baptists (and many other denominations) agree on any/many important matters of faith? I have belonged to many of these denominations over my lifetime … as well as being Catholic and Ba’Hai. They are all so far apart on so many aspects of Christianity as to make you think that they are reading different books. Having studied the Bible myself over lo these many years … I do not claim to be an educated man or a Biblical scholar … I know that there are many sections of the Bible that NO ONE is going to live by no matter how dedicated a Christian they are. There are parts of the Book that are strange, and parts that seem to contradict other parts, and other parts that modern Christians try to explain away as cultural mores in that time and place … although no guidelines exist to tell when that argument is to be used, or not used.

    In my lengthy studying … I remember the many debates about the teachings of John Calvin, Jacobus Arminius, Huldrych Zwingli, Martin Luther and the Anabaptists. All were Protestant reformers, all were against the Catholic Church and yet they were so far apart on many ideas, some very critical, as to what the Bible says and doesn’t say. In the United States alone there are 62 (that I know of) separate Baptist groups/denominations alone, about 15 different Calvinist churches (Presbyterian derivations). You have Methodists, Episcopalian (Anglican Protestants, although in 1979 … I think … they voted to remove Protestant from their official name). Well … you can see what I am driving at.

   All of these separate theologies read the same book and come to very different conclusions. So Hodge was wrong! The Scriptures “be not” a plain book that can be understood by all. In point of fact … it seems to be a confusing set of books that can very easily be misunderstood by many/most.

  This is NOT because of the book, which is thought to be God’s thoughts inspired in and written down by men.

   Men not only wrote all the texts which we call the Bible, they also translated them from Hebrew to Aramaic to Greek to English, et al. A good book to read (that describes the dangers inherent in this, but also describes how words from one language do not always translate the exact meanings in the other language) is “The Bible in Translation” by Bruce M. Metzger. It will widen your view about the problems involved.

   Man also decided which texts were to be included in “The Bible” and which would be excluded. There are many which for many reasons were excluded. Politics, self-serving ideas among the priests, bishops et al. Some of these books are called apocrypha,  which means “things put away” or “things hidden” and comes from the Greek through the Latin. Chief among these in my mind is “The Protevangelion”, which is ascribed to James … brother of Jesus and Chief Apostle and First Bishop of the Christians in Jerusalem. I say chief, because it is referred to / and was being used in the years after the Resurrection in many churches throughout the areas around Israel.

   In the Council of Nicea … many learned men tried to come to a conclusion as to agreement on basic articles of faith. The First Council of Nicaea was a council of Christian bishops convened in Nicaea in Bithynia by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in AD 325. This first ecumenical council was the first effort to attain consensus in the church through an assembly representing all of Christendom, although previous councils, including the first Church council, the Council of Jerusalem, had met before to settle matters of dispute. Its main accomplishments were settlement of the Christological issue of the nature of the Son of God and his relationship to God the Father, the construction of the first part of the Creed of Nicaea, establishing uniform observance of the date of Easter, and promulgation of early canon law.

   There is no record of any discussion of the biblical canon at the council. The development of the biblical canon took centuries, and was nearly complete (with exceptions known as the Antilegomena, written texts whose authenticity or value is disputed) by the time the Muratorian fragment was written.

   In 331 Constantine commissioned fifty Bibles for the Church of Constantinople, but little else is known (in fact, it is not even certain whether his request was for fifty copies of the entire Old and New Testaments, only the New Testament, or merely the Gospels), but some scholars believe that this request provided motivation for canon lists. In Jerome's Prologue to Judith he claims that the Book of Judith was "found by the Nicene Council to have been counted among the number of the Sacred Scriptures", which suggests that the Nicene Council did discuss what documents would number among the sacred scriptures.

   The main source of the idea that the Bible was created at the Council of Nicea seems to be Voltaire, who popularized a story that the canon was determined by placing all the competing books on an altar during the Council and then keeping the ones that didn't fall off. The original source of this story is the Vetus Synodicon, a pseudo-historical account of early Church councils from AD 887.

   The Council of Nicea is a subject that many volumes have been written about. I do not mean to dismiss it so quickly in this article, but if I gave it … and many other subjects coverage in this short op-ed, it would become a book (at least).

   What the major gist of this piece is, is that Biblicism … which I talked about at the beginning … is only one way to read the Bible. I (among others) do not think that we should look to the Bible for word-for-word meanings. The Bible, according to Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965), witnesses to God’s presence at times when he seems absent. Exegesis should never stand still, since the Bible represents an ongoing dialogue between God and humanity. The study of the Bible must lead to a transformed lifestyle. When we open the Bible, we must be ready to be fundamentally changed by what we hear/read. The rabbis called scripture a migra, “a calling out”. It is a summons that does not allow readers to abstract themselves from the problems of the world but allows them to stand fast and listen to the undercurrents of events. Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), believed that readers must respond to the migra in the same way that the prophets did, crying:  “Hinneni”  … “here I am” - all ready, all soul … to the reality at hand. Reading the Bible is an introspective process, we cannot respond to it the same way that people in earlier generations did. The text must be appropriated and interiorized in patient and disciplined study and translated into our daily actions. Exegesis could/should help us to retrieve the idea of a sacred text. For example … Many of the Christians who oppose Darwinism today are Calvinists, but Calvin insisted that the Bible was not a scientific document and that those who wanted to learn about astronomy or cosmology should look elsewhere.

   The Protestant Reformation  (which started when Martin Luther hung the famous Ninety Five Theses in Wittenberg in 1517) made sola scriptura (scripture alone) one of its most important principals. However, Luther learned from Erasmus some translation errors/problems. One of which was that mentanoia, which the Vulgate had translated as “do penance” actually meant “a turning around” of the Christian’s entire being … thus reflecting that ‘confession’ was something you didn’t have to do, or actually shouldn’t do. The Bible has been translated from many forms into many languages by many people and groups. There have been many times when the words were translated but the meanings were skewed. I have seen/see that often in the southwest when it comes to translating words instead of ideas from Spanish to English. Man has taken the inspired Word of God and changed it in slight but very meaningful ways over the centuries, but it remains the inspired Word of God. We should remember that fact.

   I agree with the famous Rabbi Dov Ber who said that the way to read the Bible/Tanakh is “ … not to feel conscious of oneself at all. Be like the listening ear that hears the world of sound speaking, but not speak itself. the exegete must make of himself a vessel for the divine presence. The Bible must act upon him as though he were its instrument …”!  I think that the reader should stand before the Bible like Moses stood before the burning bush … listening intently, and preparing for a revelation that will force him to lay aside any former preconceptions that he had. The Bible IS NOT a book of science, nor of literature, nor of philosophy … but of salvation. The object of our faith IS NOT the church, nor even the scriptures, nor even our experience of Jesus. It is Christ himself who is the object of our faith. The Bible’s internal unity and harmony derives from the central purpose in divine revelation of telling us about Jesus Christ. It prepares us for the coming of Christ.

   The Bible IS NOT a self-help book. There are many book titles on shelves in the library and bookstore that claim to tell you how to start a Christian business, make money the Christian Way, how to learn Christian dating, et cetera ad infinitum. That is all from authors/experts trying to use this verse or that to prove a point (so they can make money). That is NOT what the Bible is about, or what it is for.

   The Old Testament recounts the history of the Jewish people, [the Jewish Tanakh contains three books: The Torah, which means The Law, the Neviim which means The Prophets, and the Kethuvim which are The Writings.] For us as Christians, all of these lead us to the Coming of Jesus, his death and his resurrection. The Bible only comes alive when it is read in light of the cross of Christ. As Jesus says in Luke 24:44-48, “ these are the words I told you when I was with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms”. Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, “this is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerisalem. You are witnesses of these things”.

Reverend W. A. ‘Antonio’ Rigney Tucson, Az. 2016

 For those of you who would like to study further and do your own exegesis. Besides approaching the Bible from a new perspective, there are many books out there … Dewey Decimal code 200. If you go to the library … or Google and Wikipedia are close at hand. I would also suggest Biblehub.com, a site that gives you side by side readings in different versions of the Bible, as it is an interesting tool.

I also suggest reading as much as possible of the following: (a longer list would take many pages, but these are a great starting point)

John Calvin/Jehan Cauvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion and Google info on his ideas

Martin Luther: google info on his thoughts, ideas, teachings

Baruch Spinoza/Benedict de Spinoza: Ethics

Charles Hodge: read for his Calvinist idea

Wilfred Cantwell Smith: What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach.

C.S. Lewis: any and all of his writings on Apologetics

Joseph Lienhard: The Bible, the Church, and Authority: The Canon of the Christian Bible in History and Theology (1995)

Peter Enns: Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

for discussion on the writers of the Pentateuch, see -

Jean Astruc (1684-1766)

Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752-1827)

Johann Severin Vater (1771-1826)

Wilhelm DeWette (1780-1849)

Hermann Hupfeld (1796-1866)

Karl Heinrich Graf (1815-1869).