Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
The Bible is Not the Word of God. Unless . . .

The Bible is Not the Word of God. Unless . . .

Last updated on: July 18, 2019 at 2:26 pm by Vance Morgan

The Bible is Not the Word of God. Unless . . . 2019-07-18T14:26:04-04:00 Vance Morgan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to some old friends, as well as family whom I seldom see, about my blog. Several of these friends and family read my blog occasionally; what they were particularly interested in is what kind of feedback I get on what I write. Between my blog site itself, Facebook, Twitter, and email I have been getting far more comments this calendar year than I was accustomed to in my first seven years of blogging. I get many wonderfully supportive comments and insights, which I greatly appreciate.

I also get a lot of pushback, primarily from the extremes of the faith/nonfaith spectrum. On that spectrum, truth be told, I am closer to atheism than I am to conservative Christianity. Atheists have told me that I’m so close to an atheistic humanism that I might as well just scrap the God nonsense and dive into the deep end. My explanations as to why I don’t do that produce exchanges that are sometimes pointed, always interesting, and that usually end on friendly terms.

It’s a different story with the conservative element, most of whom are of the evangelical, fundamentalist Christian persuasion—the kind of Christianity I was raised in. In the past week, self-professed Christians have accused me of being a “servant of Satan” and have called one of my posts “demonically inspired garbage.” Several have assumed that I am headed straight to hell for my willingness to understand and live out my faith differently than they do. When I, as best I can, respond civilly to such critics, trying to gently let them know that their boilerplate certainty is going to have zero effect on me, I tend to generate a great deal of frustration, anger, certainty, dogmatism, and flat out nastiness in my conversation partners (who occasionally remember to end their tirades with “the Lord bless you”). Frequently, my conservative commenters suggest that I will be immediately straightened out if I just “read the Bible. It’s the Word of God” Sigh.

I shouldn’t be annoyed by this, because my readers have no way of knowing from one blog post just how steeped in the Bible I have been for my whole life. I come from the very evangelical, fundamentalist Protestant world that the majority of my conservative critics inhabit. I learned that when the Bible is referred to as the “Word of God,” it means that every word of it is literally true. Before the time I hit double digits in age, I was pretty sure that didn’t make sense; my Sunday School questions about how everything in this book could be true when it contradicts itself regularly were greeted first with “just believe it,” then with an invitation to leave the Sunday School room.

Part of being a young person in my Baptist church was memorizing Bible verses. From the time I was six years old, I spent twelve to fifteen weeks per year memorizing verses, then reciting them to my “hearer” (who was usually my aunt) on Sunday. At age six, I memorized four verses per week. By the time I was in high school, I was memorizing passages as long as fifteen verses. All of the young folk did this; we earned various prizes throughout the process, capped with a week at Bible camp in the summer (I despised Bible Memory Association Camp, which went by the name “Miracle Camp”).

My brother did it, my cousins did it, my church friends did it, the girl to whom I would be married for eleven years in the future did it. I don’t remember anyone particularly complaining about this forced memorization; neither do I recall that anyone enjoyed it. It was simply a rite of passage—one that left hundreds of Bible texts in my memory files by the time I went to college. And by the way, I also read the Bible through each year from cover to cover, following a “Through the Bible In a Year” pamphlet provided by the church at the beginning of the new year, from when I was around 10 until I graduated from high school.

It truly wasn’t until I was in my early thirties and entered the college classroom as a newly-minted professor for the first time that I began to realize just how deeply the Bible had shaped me. I had stopped believing that the book is the literal “Word of God” years before, but its stories, lessons, quirks, contradictions, rants, genealogies, wild and crazy prophecies, and moralizing were part of my DNA. I’m a philosophy professor, not a theologian or religious studies scholar, so I wasn’t using the Bible to preach, proselytize, or convict. I was using it to illustrate the best and worst that human beings can be, the various ways that different cultures over time have sought to understand and describe what is greater than us and our relationship to it. I still do this—there are few classes during which I don’t pull something out of my memory banks from the Bible that is relevant to whatever is on the table for discussion.

When advising incoming freshmen to my college concerning how to best prepare for the large interdisciplinary humanities program that is the centerpiece of our required core curriculum, a program required of all freshmen and sophomores, I always say the same thing. “Know your Greek mythology, and know your Bible. Not as the ‘Word of God’ to be handled reverentially with kid gloves, but as arguably the most influential book in the Western tradition. You will not be able to understand the literature of the West if you don’t know the Bible well.”

Away from my professional life as a teacher, my relationship to the Bible is a challenging one to describe. It is not my moral touchstone or guide in the way that many persons of faith might describe it. It certainly isn’t my go-to source for answers to tough questions. My relationship with the Bible is more like my relationship with the weather—it’s both as familiar as the air that I breathe and as unpredictable as the wind. It truly is part of me, not always in ways that I appreciate. I frequently am asked, particularly by readers of this blog, whether I believe that the Bible is “the Word of God.” I used to answer “that depends on what you mean by ‘Word’ and ‘God,’” which didn’t turn out to be a very effective response. Now I tell a story.

One Sunday evening almost forty years ago, I heard a Baptist minister, a family friend and the godfather of my firstborn son, say something shocking from the pulpit. He lifted his well-worn Bible above his head with his right arm and said in a loud voice: “This is not the Word of God!” Gasps filled the sanctuary, followed by an uncomfortable silence. After a dramatic pause of several moments, he continued. “This is just ink on paper between leather covers. This is just a book. This becomes the Word of God when the Holy Spirit makes it so to each of us individually.”

My son’s godfather was right. The divine word changes and grows in each of us, often in apparent conflict with what we thought was already fixed and settled. When temptations arise to find security and safety in inflexible interpretations of scripture, it is worth taking the words of Paul to the church at Corinth to heart: “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”

Previous Post

July 15, 2019

You are a racist if . . .

Next Post

July 18, 2019 I am a white person. Does that make me a racist?

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abortion Advent AI Angels Artificial intelligence atheism attention baptism Baptists beauty belief Benedictines Bible bicycling Big Bird books Bovina Camaldoli hermitage Canada Catholicism cats certainty change Christianity Christmas Collegeville Covid-19 creativity Development of Western Civilization dogs doubt Easter Enneagram Epiphany Episcopal ethics Eucharist evil extroverts Facebook faith family fear flowers forgiveness freedom friends God goodness grace happiness heaven hell history Holy Spirit Holy Week hope human nature humility humor idolatry incarnation introverts irreverence Islam Jeanne Jesus Joe Biden joy Judaism justice Kamala Harris knowledge Lent listen literature liturgy love Marsue Memorial Day miracles movies music mystery mythology NPR Old Testament optimism paradox peace Penguins philosophy piano podcast politics power prayer Protestantism Providence College Religion Rhode Island sabbatical sacrament science seeing silence Simone Weil Socrates soul sports St. John's College stories suffering tattoo teaching technology television theology thinking time tolerance transcendence travel trees trust truth Uncategorized Vermont wisdom wonder writing

Select a Month May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz