"Do I Have to Believe in the Bible?" Acts 8: 26-40; Galatians 3: 23-29

This is a continuation of the series I began the week before the Bicentennial that will address a few topics in the category of "What Presbyterians Believe."  Let me begin by assuring everyone that Presbyterians do believe in the Bible and that we believe in the authority of Scripture.  But, what that means for Presbyterians (and, of course, I can't speak for all Presbyterians) is different, I suspect, than what it means for some other Christian traditions.

A few thoughts or snippets I have run across in my reflections on this topic.

1.  We cannot pick and choose which parts of the Bible we like or don't like. We're stuck, or challenged, or glorified by all the Bible.

       a.  “If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.”  St. Augustine

      b.  “All Christians are bowdlerizers.  When we come to something we cannot or will not accept, we skip over it, hoping to find something we are happy to hold on to in the next chapter, the next verse, the next page, the next Evangelist”  Reading Jesus:  A  Writer's Encounter with the Gospels, Mary Gordon, (xvii)

      c.  Part of our task is to invite the different biblical texts to interpret each other.  "He [Tom Boomershine, the founder of the Network of Bible Storytellers] said he was becoming more and more convinced that we can't tell stories in isolation – especially violent stories.  So we can't tell about David killing Goliath (I Samuel 17), he said, without also telling the story of God not allowing David to build the temple because he was a violent man (1 Kings 5).” Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road,  Brian McLaren (194)

2.  The Reformed traditions maintains that the truth of Scripture is discovered when it reveals God's liberating truth to us (see Faith Seeking Understanding, by Daniel Migliore, particularly his chapter on the authority of Scripture, pp. 40-55).

     a.  Wright tells a legend about “Karl Barth.  On being asked by a woman whether the serpent in Genesis actually spoke, he replied, 'Madam, it doesn't matter whether the serpent spoke.  What matters is what the serpent said.'” Simply Christian, N. T. Wright (184).

3.  According to Tom Long there was an occasion a few years ago when a biblical scholar was explaining Mark 1 to a group of teenagers. This scholar told the teens that when Jesus was baptized, the skies did not just open up, as some older translations said, but in the original Greek of Mark 1:10 we are told the skies ripped open, split in an almost violent way. This was very dramatic and forceful. "Get the point?" the scholar asked the group. "When Jesus was baptized, the heavens that separate us from God were ripped open so that now we can get to God. Because of Jesus we have access to God--we can get close to him."

But there was one young man sitting in the front row, arms crossed, making a fairly obvious display of his disinterest. Yet suddenly he perked up and said, "That ain't what it means." “What?" the Bible scholar said, startled. "I said that ain't what that means," the teenager repeated. "It means that the heavens were ripped open so that now God can get at US anytime he wants. Now nobody's safe!"

4.  “What I noticed at Grace-Calvary is the same thing I notice whenever people aim to solve their conflicts with one another by turning to the Bible:  defending the dried ink marks on the page becomes more vital than defending the neighbor.  As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.  In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, ‘People of the Book risk putting the book above people.’” (106) Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church

5.  A guy I referee with asked me if Presbyterians believed in the Bible?  I responded yes, but then I thought about it and clarified with, "By the way you ask the question, I would guess that you might not think we Presbyterians believe in the Bible."

6.  The Acts story points out the need we have for someone to help us interpret the text.

7 The Acts story connects the interpretation of Scripture with the sacrament of baptism.

Any thoughts or stories about your Bible reading?  How often do you read the Bible?  When do you read the Bible?