Biblical Authority

This isn't a topic that I find terribly helpful, as we tend to get really polarized over it. Still, it's a bit central to the debate at hand, so I'll make my statement and move on.

Several years ago, an ordained friend told me about a Bible study she led. They were reading through some of the Old Testament stories, post-Egypt, where the Israelites are heading to the Promised Land and leaving something of a bloody trail behind them. They were wiping out tribes of peoples as they marched. Someone in the study group had not read those passages before and was disturbed that God had commanded the Israelites to destroy whole peoples. My friend answered, in our trained, historical-critical way, that history is written by the winners and where the winners can claim God's favor, all the better, but my friend didn't believe God told anyone to commit genocide.

Someone else in the study said, "But it says so right here in the Bible. God told them to do it!" It became apparent that the second student had less trouble with a genocidal god than with a scriopture open to discussion and interpretation.

Let's say that again. The second student was better able to worship a genocidal god than deal with a Bible that may not be 100% accurate.

At what point does the Bible then supplant God as the object of worship? At what point are we willing to do horrendous things, justify them by horrendous things in the Bible, and then walk away because "God said to"? Unfortunately, history is full of answers to these questions. In the end, I don't believe most cases have anything, really, to do with God, the Bible, or religion at all, but our own grabs for power or wealth. But I digress, if only a little.

What if, instead of approaching the Bible as some magical book with unwavering authority, we were to approach it as a set of books, written by our ancestors in faith, but open to conversation, open to, even, disagreement? What if we, in our modern times, claimed the authority of our own baptisms as equal to the baptisms of St. Paul or any of the New Testament writers? What if we really believed that the Holy Spirit was still active and still moving us today, still giving visions of how wide is God's grace and mercy, how many people truly are welcome into the Reign of God?

The Bible is a wonderful book. It's also a foreign book in every sense of the word. It was written in languages that no one speaks anymore. It was written in cultures that had vastly different ideas about medicine and technology and science. Yes, some of the knowledge remains accurate, but no one today believes that all the genetic material of new life is contained in a man's "seed" and that a woman is merely the "ground" in which he plants it---and that she is either fertile or barren soil. No one believes that there is a dome above us, holding back waters except when it rains. To get to any useful information from the Bible, we need to be aware of their lives, how they thought, how they experienced the world---much of it so differently than we experience.

The Bible is a wonderful book. It is to be approached with the reverence as afforded to our forebears. At the same time, our forebears are sometimes wrong. Or they had bad information on which to form their conclusions. We'll be wrong, later generations will see we had incomplete information on which we form our conclusions.

So I propose we set aside the Bible sometimes and practice some discernment from our relationshiops, from our own life in the Spirit, leaning not completely on what has gone before, but taking responsibility for our lives in our time and place.

In regard to GLBT folk, this, I honestly believe, means opening up the church to full inclusion and participation. In our time and place, it seems irresponsible to exclude them. It seems exclusion at this point is to deny the movement of the Spirit in GLBT lives.

It is to choose a genocidal god over the God who is always doing a new thing.