Part 2 of 4 on the Reliability of the Old and New Testament

In part one I sketched out how we as followers of Jesus have struggled to receive God’s Word amid the challenges of our day. And it is not just us in the twenty-first century.

At the root of this situation is the question of the reliability of the Old and New Testaments. By reliability, people typically mean:

·      Its accuracy about the history, the people, the events.

·      An understanding of just how and who wrote the various books.

In Jesus’ day, they trusted a book that was then 2,000 years old. Their Bible, Jesus’ Bible, was the Old Testament. When we read in 2 Timothy 3:15-17, “…all Scripture is breathed out by God…” we are reading about the Old Testament. And let’s not forget, the Old Testament itself over and over reminded God’s people to follow His Law.

THREE POINTS AS WE BEGIN

1.    Please don’t dismiss those who have gone before us as not as smart and sophisticated as we are today. Pause and consider the monumental achievements they accomplished without the modern conveniences we have. Those who have gone before were amazingly creative and determined. They were not gullible or ignorant.

2.    Please, instead, either chose to accept or reject the Scriptures based on the logic of our day, taking into account how those who’ve gone before us wrestled with the same questions.

3.    Please don’t chop it up. It is not yours to chop. Many doubt the reliability of the Old Testament while simultaneously believing some limited list of things about Jesus and New Testament. In total, because of the issue of reliability, many treat it like the school cafeteria—walk down the line and pick and choose what looks good on any given day.

With this little preamble, let’s turn to the Church.

The Church, and its theologians, has for centuries joined in this quest of understanding the Bible. There is a segment of this endeavor that is typically labeled “biblical criticism”. Underlying this approach is the belief that we, as humans, if we put our mind to it, can better understand the Scriptures if we, for example, understood more of what life was like when the text was originally written. Sounds reasonable because it is—within limits.

Some of the earliest works (circa the late 1600’s) assume a position something akin to, “We, humans, will judge if what is written is true or not.”

That, I submit, is to move from a position of “understanding” to a position where we place ourselves above God.

The methods to evaluate the written text look at our Holy Words in a myriad of ways:

·      Wondering if the events described really took place. Archeology has played a major role for this avenue. Yet here, what creeps in is the thought that unless I can dig it up and find, then I don’t have to believe it happened.

·      Wondering about the people and the culture of those days long ago. The idea is that if we can understand them, then we can understand what the text might really mean. This approach is helpful for cryptic texts. Yet here, when an attitude of “critique” is being applied, there is a casualty. People resist and reject texts when they are plain and direct.  

·      Wondering about the language, the words and phrases used. If we could just link the use of phrases in the Bible to other writings, then we could better determine the meaning of the phrases. Yet, at times, in this method the question of whether we can believe what is written sneaks in. Consider some of the amazing dreams and visions that are recorded. Further, this method drifts into seeking to date when the texts were really written, again using an outside text as the authority (as if it is somehow a better standard) and calling into question if you can trust that all of the text is from the claimed author, or if it was added to over the years. (One example is the Book of Daniel, it has been attacked for years.)

·      Wondering about the original “form” of the story. Here the reality that for a period of time the stories were passed on in oral form, make some wonder if they were exaggerated over and over. People again have moved from wanting to understand, to the question of believing God’s Word.

·      Wondering about the literary style. Clearly there is poetry, prose, history, legal argument and more in the Scripture, but does that lessen its force upon us?

·      Wondering about how some books “got in” the Bible, and others did not. Here perhaps we want to make our own list.

·      People question what is recorded about Jesus in the New Testament and have been on a quest to find the true, historical Jesus.

·      The list goes on and on.

Certainly, there are parts of the Old (and New) Testament that challenge the modern and post-modern mind.

Certainly, it seems natural for us to turn to the professionals, those trained theologians, for the answers.

Certainly, each reader brings their own views to the text as they read it.

And, quite frankly, I can understand how many of these paths of inquiry seem completely “reasonable”. Afterall God has given us brains, right?

Yet what has happened is that we have in many respects allowed these theologians, both professional and arm-chair, to sit in judgment of God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God Jesus called Father—and that we understand as Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

It is this repositioning of the human above God that has led to an endpoint that is disastrous.

Plain texts, such as John 14:6, “Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father, except through me” are rejected.

At the beginning of this essay I wrote, “At the root of this situation is the question of the reliability of the Old and New Testaments. By reliability, people typically mean:

·      Its accuracy about the history, the people, the events.

·      An understanding of just how and who wrote the various books.

Yet that is not where we, IN THE CHURCH, have ended up. We have ended up sitting in judgment of God.

Quietly, insidiously, doubt in God and God’s ways has been introduced. This method, like the snake in the garden asks, “Did God really say…”

The sad irony with this situation is that those leading churches, with Bibles on their pulpits and in their pews, may or may not, believe the Bible.

In the next post, I want to take some time to look more generally at the effect of these models on us, the “untrained” folks sitting under the teaching of the Church.