On My Decision to Withdraw

On My Decision to Remain As Your Pastor

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

April 30, 2017

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

As I think you all know by now, I have withdrawn my resignation as your pastor, and the Admin Board has accepted that withdrawal on behalf of the church. This morning I want to explain to you how I came to that decision and what it means to me. What it means to you is not for me to say, but I suspect, or maybe I just hope, that it means a lot.

You all know that back in February I submitted my resignation as your pastor. That resignation was initially to become effective on March 10; but I offered to extend the termination date to the end of May, and the Admin Board agreed to that modification. The Board (or at least most of the people on it) tried to talk me out of resigning. When I asked what the sense of the congregation was they said they’d find out. So they personally interviewed 30 of you and gave me the results of those interviews at the Admin Board meeting on April 10. I did a great deal of wrestling with whether or not to withdraw my resignation and remain as your pastor after I got those results. They showed that some of you have reservations about me and my work with you, but despite those reservations there was a clear consensus in those results, indeed a nearly if not quite unanimous expression, that you don’t want me to leave. I highly appreciate that consensus, and it has played a major role in the decision I have made to withdraw my resignation. I have however always been aware that the decision whether or not to withdraw the resignation was mine to make, not yours. I, after all, was the one who made the decision to resign in the first place. So why have I decided to stay as your pastor? I think there are several reasons that I want to explain to you.

First of all, why did I submit a resignation in the first place? I did it because I was aware, and am aware, that we are not a perfect match as pastor and parish. I used a cliché to explain my perception when I gave the Admin Board my letter of resignation. I said I was tired of trying to fit my square peg into your round hole. There are some ways in which we just don’t fit, or at least I thought there were. I’ll just mention here a few of the big differences between me and at least some of you for purposes of clarity. I am more liberal/progressive than many of you are both politically and theologically. I think Christianity is more about how we are called to live this life than about what we have to do to assure our salvation in the next. Not all of you see the faith that way. I think that Jesus is much more a revelation of the love of God for all of creation and for each and every person in it than he was a sacrifice to pay the price of human sin. Again, some of you do not see the matter that way. I do not think that God wrote the Bible. I think perfectly fallible men did. That idea is new and troubling to at least some of you. There is a lot more that I could say about our differences, but I’ll let it go at that for now.

Let me instead specify some of the things I think we have in common. We are all people of faith. We all accept the reality of God. We may not all understand God in the same way, but none of us is an atheist or a secular humanist. We all accept that there is a spiritual side to reality that we can, at least to some extent, know and participate in. We all accept that God is the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of all that is. We are all Christians. We may understand Jesus Christ and his saving work differently, but we all confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. We may understand the Bible differently, but we all accept the Bible as at least the foundational book of our faith without which Christianity is simply impossible. I think we all believe that God calls the church and all people to live lives of caring, generosity, and concern for people in need and to live lives committed to justice and to peace. We all believe, I think, that God is a God of love, compassion, and forgiveness. We all believe, I think, that the fullest revelation of the nature and will of God that we have or can have is Jesus. That is a lot that we have in common, and what we have in common is foundational for our faith and our life together. It gives us a foundation to grow on.

So why have I decided to withdraw my resignation? I have decided to withdraw it first of all because I love and like all of you. You are good folk. You are kind, caring, Christian people. You do good work both as a church and in your individual lives. My significant disagreements with some of you around significant theological issues don’t change the reality that you are good people. I like being with you. I like serving you. I like working with you as we discern together where the Holy Spirit is calling us in these days, or at least I do when our theological differences don’t get in the way; and most of the time they don’t.

Yet of course I have always felt that way about you, so what has changed since I submitted my resignation nearly three months ago that has led me to withdraw it now? After all, something significant must have changed if I have changed my decision about resigning, assuming at least that the resignation wasn’t a mistake in the first place. I think what has changed is that both you and I have done a lot of discernment around my call since then. Things that were in the dark have been brought into the light. Differences between us have been put on the table and discussed. The interviews that the Admin Board did with so many of you produced what is by far the best review of my work as a pastor that I have ever had in all of my years of ministry. It produced lists of what you think are my strengths and what are areas in which you have questions or concerns that I find very helpful. Most of all those interviews produced, as I said, a broad consensus that you don’t want me to leave. I understand you better than I did. Whether or not you understand me better I frankly do not know, and that is for you not me to say.

Beyond that, in the time since I submitted my resignation I have sensed that at least some of you are curious about some new ways of understanding the faith and are open to learning about them even if you don’t accept all of them. My primary evidence for that claim is the way a good group of you has responded to the book The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg that we have been discussing on Sunday mornings. Borg gives a good introduction to some ways of thinking about the faith that, as he says, are emerging and that have been emerging in American Christianity for a long time but with which a great many Christians remain unfamiliar. I agree with most of what he says is emerging and think what is emerging is a good and necessary thing. I have done my own small part to contribute to what is emerging. I am encouraged that at least some of you are willing to listen to a voice that is new to you, whether it be Borg’s or mine. I have more hope today than I did three months ago that together we can find new ways of being faithful Christians together in this troubled time in which we live.

When, before they talked to all of you, the Admin Board asked me what they should say if they were asked about what my position was, I said you can tell them “I have heard your concerns, I take them seriously, and I will continue to preach the Gospel.” That is still my position, or maybe better it is still my conviction and commitment. I do take the concerns I have heard from you seriously. I will not ignore them, but here is something you must know about me. I am convinced that God does not call people like me to preach only what the people of a particular church want to hear. Jesus certainly didn’t preach only what the people of his time thought they wanted to hear. He preached what he knew to be God’s truth. I know full well that I am no Jesus. Far from it. I am as fallible a human being as anyone else. But I have responded to what I have perceived to be a call from the Holy Spirit to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ as best I can. My discernment of that call has been affirmed through rigorous seminary education and the ordination processes of the United Church of Christ. I am called to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ as best I can understand it, as best I can articulate it. I must and will continue to do that. I can modify my tone, or at least sometimes I can. I can take care in how I express myself. What I cannot and will not do is abandon what I am convinced is the truth of the Gospel. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is spiritual, but it is also social, economic, and political. The Gospel of Jesus Christ consoles and uplifts, but it also challenges. It calls us to new ways of thinking and new ways of living, not to earn salvation but in response to God’s grace. The preacher’s call is to bring all of the Gospel to his or her people, the consoling, uplifting parts to be sure, but the challenging parts too. In nearly everything Jesus said and did he turned the beliefs and expectations of his world, and of ours, on their heads. We are not true to the Gospel or to our Lord and Savior if we do not do the same. That is a core conviction of mine, and I will not abandon it.

So with all of that being said, I have withdrawn my resignation as your pastor. We do not have to agree on everything for me to be your pastor. I can respect the differences between us, and I hope you can too. We have work to do together. We have a vital small church to enliven, inspire, and, if it is the will of the Holy Spirit, to grow. We have the Good News of Jesus Christ to live and to proclaim. I have recommitted myself to doing that with you. Will you recommit to doing it with me? I pray that you will. God willing, we have a future together. May it be so. Amen.

In Memoriam: Rev. Dr. Dennis Hughes

In Memoriam

Rev. Dr. Dennis Hughes

The Rev. Dr. Dennis Hughes died of pancreatic cancer on Easter morning, April 16, 2017. Dennis was one of the finest men and surely the finest pastor I have ever known. He was a scholar. He was a saint of the church. The world is a lesser place for him no longer being in it. I will not be able to attend Dennis’ memorial service because I have an unavoidable work conflict at its scheduled time on May 20, 2017. So I want here to recount my memories of Dennis and give some idea of what he meant to me on my journey from law to professional ministry.

I met Dennis in 1993. I was a practicing attorney at the time and a member of the Interim Minister Search Committee of Richmond Beach Congregational Church, UCC, in Shoreline, Washington, USA. Dennis applied for our interim position. He was one of two candidates I remember interviewing, or maybe we interviewed three. I was immediately impressed. Dennis had gravitas, but also seemed to be a really nice guy. We knew he was a Presbyterian not a member of the UCC, which made his application to be our interim minister seem a bit odd. He was between calls in the PCUSA, the denomination in which he was ordained, and was looking for work I guess. After we had talked to him for a while I asked him one last question. I knew that the Presbyterians in the Seattle area were notoriously conservative. They still are, but Richmond Beach UCC was not. So I said: We are an Open and Affirming church. What is your position on that issue? He said: “I’m open to and affirming of that.” Indeed we learned over our time with him that he was. We offered him the position, and he accepted.

During most of Dennis’ year and a half or so of interim ministry at RBCC I was the Moderator of that congregation, so I got to work with Dennis a bit more closely that I otherwise would have. We got to know each other fairly well. There was one thing Dennis never got used to serving a UCC as opposed to a PCUSA church. As Moderator I presided at the meetings of the Church Council. In a PCUSA church the pastor presides at the meetings of the Session, a Presbyterian church’s equivalent of our Church Council. Dennis told me he never got used to not presiding at those meetings. Still, he worked well with us. I came to admire and respect him all the more over our time together at RBCC.

During his time with us Dennis offered several sessions in which he introduced us to the psychology of Carl Jung. Dennis had practiced some as a Jungian analyst in addition to his work as a Presbyterian pastor. I knew nothing of Jungian psychology at the time, but I found it absolutely captivating as Dennis introduced us to it. It is psychology that, among other virtues, is so much more open to religious experience than Freudian psychology is. In 1994 I was just beginning to burn out on law and enter into a time of depression that eventually led to my leaving law and going into pastoral ministry. At some point in our time together at RBCC Dennis gave me the business card of another Jungian analyst he knew, the Rev. Kimbrough Besheer, an Episcopal priest and graduate of the Carl Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. I put the card in my wallet and gave it no more thought. For reasons I still don’t quite understand but for which I am most grateful, three years later, in 1997, I pulled it out and called Kimbrough. I made my first appointment with him. In February of the this year we passed our twentieth anniversary of my seeing Kimbrough at least once a month. Seeing Kimbrough professionally is a major part of my self-care in ministry. Kimbrough knew before I did that I was done with law and was moving to something else in my professional life. He helped me see that all the reasons I had for not making a change, while on some level true, just didn’t matter. I never would have made that connection with Kimbrough without Dennis.

I remember a few things Dennis told me about ministry while we were at RBCC. He told me “there is no non-dangerous theology.” He told me that “bad theology kills people.” He was absolutely right about both of those things. There is no non-dangerous theology because bad theology warps souls and even kills bodies by making people violent. Good theology is dangerous because it turns the world on its head. It changes how we see everything in life. Dennis was a very deep thinker. He had a Ph.D. in pastoral theology from the University of Notre Dame, and the advanced work he had done in that field showed in how he thought and how he approached pastoral ministry.

I kept in touch with Dennis some over the years after he left RBCC. In September, 1997, I entered the M.Div. program of the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies of the School of Theology and Ministry at Seattle University. Dennis was pastor of Northminster Presbyterian Church in the Ballard district of Seattle by then, and he was one of the advisors of the Presbyterian students at IETS. He had become something of a mentor and advisor to me as I entered seminary and prepared for professional ministry. I saw him fairly regularly in those years. During the 1999-2000 academic year I served as a pastoral intern under Dennis at Northminster. Mostly what I learned from Dennis that year was liturgy. Although Dennis’ Ph.D. was in pastoral ministry not liturgy, he became one of the leading voices of the liturgy reform movement in the Presbyterian Church and beyond. He served for a time as Associate for Worship at the national offices of the PCUSA. My experience with Dennis made me what I have called a “high church Congregationalist.”

I remember one conversation with Dennis in particular from that year. I was a member of University Congregational United Church of Christ near the University of Washington in Seattle while I was in seminary, having left the Richmond Beach church over a disagreement that I later came to understand had more to do with me than with the church. On the same big block just north of the campus are located the church buildings of both University Congregational UCC and University Presbyterian Church, PCUSA. In the early 1990s University Congregational called the Rev. David Schull and the Rev. Peter Ilgenfritz to job-share a pastoral position with the church. David and Peter were at that time a committed gay couple. When University Congregational called them to be part of its pastoral staff the lead pastor at University Presbyterian announced that University Congregational was no longer a Christian church. Never mind that David and Peter are two of the best men, best pastors, and best preachers I have ever met. I said to Dennis once that I found it odd that University Congregational and University Presbyterian are next door neighbors and that they belong to denominations that have a strong cooperative agreement with each other but that those two local churches have nothing to do with each other. Dennis said “that’s because they believe in different Gods.” He didn’t elaborate, but he didn’t have. One of those churches believes in a God of grace and love, the other believes in a God of rules and judgment. Dennis was a Presbyterian, but his God was the God of University Congregational not the God of University Presbyterian, the largest PCUSA church in Seattle.

I graduated from IETS with my M. Div. in December, 2000. Shortly thereafter my wife Francie, with whom I had been together since 1972 and who was the mother of my two children, was diagnosed with terminal metastatic breast cancer. I sought pastoral support from the pastors of my church, University Congregational. Francie had not been attending church for a while, and I asked Dennis if he would in effect be her chaplain through her terminal illness. He agreed. Dennis spoke at my ordination in the UCC on June 9, 2002. Later that year, on the night Francie died, July 31, 2002, I called Dennis. He came to our home, which was quite some distance from his, to be with my son, my daughter, and me as we wept and grieved. Several weeks later Dennis crafted and led Francie’s memorial service at Northminster. His presence as pastor, colleague, and friend in those horrible days didn’t make the grief go away, but it sure helped.

A few years later, in late 2006, I wrote my first book on a theological subject, the book Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium. I thought the book was good and important, but I didn’t have much confidence that I was right about that. I’d never written anything like it before, and my Ph.D. is in Russian history not theology. I gave a copy of the manuscript to Dennis and waited to see if he would respond to it. It took him a few months to do it, but on July 31, 2007, the fifth anniversary of Francie’s death, he called me and reminded me of that sad anniversary. He’d read the manuscript of Liberating Christianity, which has not yet been accepted anywhere for publication. Frankly, he blew me away. I recorded his remarks in my journal. I wrote: “[Dennis] was almost embarrassingly complimentary about [the book]. He called it important not only for educated but [for] theologically uninformed laypersons but for pastors who, he says, are searching for language.” He said I had carefully worked out such language in my book. He said it was thoughtfully written. I wrote “YES! Dennis loves my book….Halleluiah! That book that seems so good and so important to me really is good and important!” Dennis’ affirmation of that book meant the world to me. I would get other affirmations of it from other highly respected people in the worlds of the church and of academic theology, but Dennis’ was the first. He made a tremendous difference to me that day.

I lost contact with Dennis in recent years, something that I regret. Earlier this year he sent me an email and told me of his illness. He said he’d call me so we could get together, but he never did. I suppose he had a lot of people to see and that perhaps his illness was progressing faster than he had hoped. I haven’t seen him for some time, but I will miss knowing he’s there. Dennis was one of the more important people in my life. He was a teacher, a mentor, a colleague, and a friend. He was one of the wisest men I have ever known. He did Reformed liturgy better than anyone else I have ever known. He was a minister of progressive vision who worked in a denomination much of which did not and does not share that vision. He knew that God loves all people, not just the people of whom some judgmental church approves. He loved being a church pastor, and sometimes he found that work as difficult as we all do. Once during my time with him as an intern at Northminster he told me he was getting so tired of burying his friends. He was thoroughly professional in his work, but he was also a loving man who cared deeply about the people he served. He felt their joys and their pains, and he grieved their deaths.

Now he has gone to join those who have passed. His suffering from cancer is over. I thank God that Dennis was part of my life. I am a better person and a better pastor for having known him and worked with him. So thank you Dennis, and rest in peace. Men like you do not pass this way often. I am so pleased that for a while you passed my way in life. I will never forget you.

On Biblical Criticism and Biblical Authority

On Biblical Criticism and Biblical Authority

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

April, 2017

Recently the members of the Admin Board of the church I serve as pastor spoke with all of the church's people about me, my ministry among them, and my pending resignation, currently set to become effective at the end of May. They reported to me what people said, and I am in the process of discerning whether or not to withdraw my resignation. In particular, the Board passed on to me some things that people told them were strengths that I have and also concerns or questions some of them have about me and my ministry. I am not going to respond to all of those things that they said were questions or concerns. I find some of those comments to be valid and, frankly, some of them to be misunderstandings or things I just disagree with. Two of them, however, are I think so foundational for my faith and my ministry that I need to explain my convictions concerning them more fully and clearly than perhaps I have done in the past. The notes the Board gave me say that someone, or perhaps more than one person, wants more “consideration in biblical criticism” and said that I “question the Bible’s authority.” Biblical criticism and biblical authority are of course issues of great importance to any Christians. For a fuller exposition of my views on biblical criticism and biblical authority read Part One, Approaching the Bible, of my book Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians. Read especially Stops 1 and 11 of that first Part of the book. Here I will give a somewhat condensed overview of some of the issues in that book and my view of the Bible and it’s authority. At the end of this piece I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs from that book. I know that my views on this foundational Christian issue differ in some significant ways from the views some of the people of the church hold. Nonetheless, my views are solidly grounded in the best contemporary biblical scholarship. I have come to those views through years of studying the Bible, preaching from it, and writing about it. The question of biblical authority is so foundational for any Christian faith that if my church and I are to continue our life together as pastor and parish, people need to know where I stand and must be fully willing to have me as their pastor knowing that I view the Bible differently than at least some of them do. So here, in relative brevity, are my views on the nature of the Bible, of biblical criticism, and of the Bible’s authority for us Christians.

The Bible is of course vitally important to us Christians, but why is that so? The Bible is of central importance for Christianity because it is our book unlike any other book is our book. It contains the foundational stories of our faith. It is the book to which Christians have looked for many, many centuries for information about God and about Jesus, for moral teaching, for comfort and consolation, and (unfortunately to a lesser extent) for challenge. It is the book without which Christianity could not exist because it is the only book that gives us those foundational stories and information. Christianity is inconceivable without it. I rarely if ever preach on anything other than passages from the Bible. The Bible can be and sometimes is inspiring. Christians have found connection with God through it for a very long time. It is the one book we cannot do without.

All that being said and truly meant, there are significant questions around what the Bible actually is, where it came from, and how it is authoritative (or not) for Christian people. Here is what I understand to be the traditional answers to those questions. Those answers surely are what at least some of you believe about the Bible. It is, after all, what the church universal has taught for a very long time. This view of the Bible says that the Bible has authority because of its source, because of where it came from or even who its author is. Christians traditionally believe that the Bible has authority because it comes more or less directly from God. Most Christians view the Bible as something more than human. Yes, they say, it has human authors; but those authors were working directly under the inspiration of God the Holy Spirit. The Bible, most Christians believe, is divinely inspired in the inception of everything in it.

Belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible comes in two basic forms. Along with Marcus Borg I have called those two forms the hard and soft versions of divine inspiration. The hard version of divine inspiration of the Bible holds, in effect, that God wrote the Bible. Yes, God had human scribes who wrote down what God inspired them to write down. Yet in this view, because the words of the Bible come directly from God, when we say the Bible is the word of God we mean essentially that the Bible is the words of God. The hard view of divine inspiration of the Bible is essentially the same as the orthodox Muslim view of the Koran. The words are God’s. God gave them to humans (or in the case of the Koran to one human) to write down and pass on to the people. Because in this view God wrote the Bible, the Bible has and can have nothing in it that is not literally true; and it can contain no contradictions.

The soft view of divine inspiration of the Bible also asserts that the Bible has authority because it comes from God, although in this view it comes somewhat less directly from God than the hard view insists that it does. The soft view of divine inspiration says that the human authors of the Bible’s various parts worked under divine inspiration; but they were human, and because they were human some error found its way into the texts that they wrote. For this view, the things in the Bible that are accurate come from God, the things in the Bible that are inaccurate come from the book’s human authors. Thus for the soft view the Bible does contain some errors and some contradictions, something the hard view must and does deny. I do not accept either version of belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible. I believe it to be a fully human creation. I am convinced that both versions of divine inspiration present insurmountable problems that make accepting either of them impossible.

I’ll start with the hard version. Like I said, the hard version of divine inspiration of the Bible must believe that there are no errors and no contradictions in the Bible. Yet the Bible is undeniably full of assertions that are not correct, and it is full of contradictions. I’ll give just a few examples. Did God create the world in seven days as in Genesis 1 or in one day as in Genesis 2? Did God tell Noah to take one pair of every kind of animal into the ark as at Genesis 6:19, or did God tell Noah to take one pair of every unclean animal into the ark but to take seven pairs of every clean animal into the ark as at Genesis 7:2? It can’t be both. There must be some explanation of this contradiction, and that explanation can’t be divine inspiration. The book of Joshua says that Joshua stopped the movement of the sun across the sky so that he would have a longer day to fight his enemies. We know that’s impossible even though the author of the book of Joshua didn’t. The sun doesn’t move across the sky as it appears to, rather the earth rotates on its axis giving the impression that the sun moves across the sky. If the earth were suddenly to stop rotating inertia would cause everything on it to go flying off into outer space. So no, Joshua did not stop the sun from moving across the sky. Some human author, and not God, said that he did. Did God really tell King Saul to kill every living thing, men, women, children, and animals, among the Amalekites, then take the kingship of Israel away from him when he didn’t do it? The God I know and love would never do that. It just didn’t happen the way the Bible says it did. Does God reward righteousness with material blessings and punish unrighteousness with curses in this life as Deuteronomy insists? Or does suffering happen even to righteous people as it does in Job? It can’t be both. There are contradictions in the New Testament too. Were the circumstances of Jesus’ birth so remarkable that any Gospel must begin with them, as in Matthew and Luke, or were those circumstances so ordinary and unremarkable as not to be worth mentioning, as in Mark and every other New Testament book except Matthew and Luke? Was Jesus born in a house where Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem as in Matthew? Or was he born in a stable in Bethlehem where Mary and Joseph did not live but to which they had traveled as in Luke? It can’t be both. On the cross did Jesus say “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” as in Mark? Or did he say “It is finished” as in John? Those two different accounts of Jesus’ last words present radically different visions of who Jesus is and what he is about, but they’re both in the New Testament. Both visions may be important and express Christological truth, but the words are clearly different. These things in the Bible along with a great many others make belief in the hard version of divine inspiration simply impossible for me to accept. I do not accept it, and I never have.

What about the soft version of belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible? For that version it is easy to ascribe what appear to us to be errors and contradictions to the human authors of the Bible not to God. The soft version of divine inspiration, however, presents this insurmountable problem: If some things in the Bible are true and come from God, and other things in the Bible are false and come from humans, we must have some criterion for distinguishing between the true, divine statements and the false, human ones. How do we know what is true and comes from God and what is false and comes from a human author? It is easy to come up with criteria for making that distinction. For example, anything that is scientifically impossible, like Joshua making the sun stand still in the sky, must come from a human author, one who lived in a pre-scientific world and did not know the scientific truths that we know.

That’s one’s pretty easy, but what about more profound things about which we must make a decision, things like the nature of God and what God wants from God’s people? There are lots of criteria we could adopt for making that distinction. We could adopt the criterion of love. Anything in the Bible that speaks of God’s love for creation is divinely inspired and comes from God, and anything that speaks of hatred and condemnation of God’s people is human error. Or we could adopt the criterion of the law. Anything that is consistent with Torah law is divinely inspired and comes from God, while anything that contradicts Torah law is human error. Some Jewish people apply that criterion to their understanding of the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament. We could use the criterion of judgment when discerning the nature of God. Anything in the Bible that depicts God as a God of judgment and punishment is divinely inspired and anything that contradicts that understanding of God is human error. Or we could flip that one around and say that anything in the Bible that speaks of God as a God of grace and forgiveness is divinely inspired and anything that contradicts that understanding is human error. Or we could adopt a criterion of works righteousness. Under this criterion anything in the Bible that says we are saved by what we do or what we believe is divinely inspired, and anything that contradicts that notion is human error. Or we could flip that one around and say that anything in the Bible that speaks of salvation through God’s unmerited grace is divinely inspired and anything that contradicts that notion is human error. All of these standards and a great many others could be used as criteria for deciding what in the Bible is divinely inspired and what is human error. It’s easy to find Bible verses to support all of them.

Because under the soft view of biblical inspiration we must adopt some criterion for making the distinction between divine truth and human error, the question arises of how we are to determine which criterion to use. Which criterion out of all the possibilities the Bible gives us is the correct one? There simply is no answer to that question beyond personal preference. We may experience some parts of the Bible as divinely inspired, and many Christians do; but our personal experience of divine inspiration cannot be projected onto the Bible as establishing some kind of objective divine inspiration. There simply is no objective standard for choosing a criterion for distinguishing between divine truth and human error in the Bible. Because there is no such criterion for making that distinction, the soft version of biblical inspiration is no more acceptable to me than is the hard version. I do not accept it any more than I accept the hard version of divine inspiration.

My approach to the Bible is in the first place (though not in the only place) scholarly and critical. I am not only a seminary trained pastor. I am a professionally trained historian, albeit not in biblical studies. Having scholarly training myself, I cannot and will not reject or ignore the findings of modern biblical scholarship. So let me give a brief explanation of what modern biblical scholarship is. That study is “critical,” and the first thing to understand about “critical” here is that “critical” doesn’t necessarily mean “being critical of” in the sense of disliking or finding to be wanting in some respect. Rather, it means approaching the texts of the Bible with all of the analytical skills and methods available to us. It means beginning with the proposition that before it is anything else the Bible is a collection of ancient documents. It means approaching the Bible first of all with the mind rather than the heart. It means asking all of the important questions that arise about any ancient text as well as those that the biblical texts themselves present to us. It means approaching the Bible with no a priori assumptions about what it is or what it says. It gives the biblical texts no status different from the status of any ancient text. It does not assume that the Bible is divinely inspired or that it is in any way exempt from critical scholarly study because of something about its origin or for any other reason.

Modern biblical criticism in this sense is an immensely complex field of study. It is complex in large part because of the antiquity of the biblical texts and because those texts are themselves quite complex. Critical study of the Bible begins with the biblical texts as we have them, but even determining what those texts actually are is a complicated matter. We all read the Bible in translation. Biblical scholars may use the same translations the rest of us use; but they also want to know just what ancient manuscripts of the various biblical texts exist, and they want to know what the original language of those manuscripts, primarily ancient Hebrew and a language called koine Greek, actually says. So biblical criticism starts with a study of ancient languages and of the most ancient copies of the texts that still exist. That study reveals, among other things, that there are significant linguistic issues in reading the texts in their original language, especially with the Hebrew texts of the Christian Old Testament. Any decent English translation of those texts will include translators notes that either give alternative translations or that say that the meaning of the Hebrew is uncertain. Biblical Hebrew had been a dead language for over two thousand years before modern Israel resurrected Hebrew as a spoken language, so it is not surprising that there are words and expressions the meaning of which has been lost. Biblical criticism discovers that truth and lives with it even if typical churchgoers want a certainty about the texts that the scholarship cannot provide. It also turns out that no original manuscripts of any of the biblical texts exist. The oldest ones we have date from at least a few centuries after the texts contained in them were originally written. Biblical criticism says that the best we can do is live with those manuscripts which, old as they may be, are not as old as the texts in question.

Biblical criticism then wants to know what the texts themselves tell us about themselves. When were they written? Who wrote them? Why did someone write them at all? Biblical scholars read the texts very, very closely and carefully. They make (or at least they should make) no assumptions about what is in them or what they say. They notice a great many things about the texts. They note the language used and note when it changes within a text. They note changes in theological perspective within a text or between texts. They look for what historical events that historians can discover from other sources are mentioned or reflected in the texts. No respectable scholar will overlook or ignore anything in a biblical text just because it does not fit with some preconceived idea of what a text says. Scholars love digging into apparent contradictions within a biblical text to try to discover why a particular contradiction is in the text in the first place. They use what they find to try to reconstruct the editorial history of a text, and some of the biblical texts have very complex editorial histories indeed.

Biblical scholars know that all of the texts of the Bible were written a very long time ago in cultures very different from ours. So critical study of the Bible extends beyond the Bible itself to a study of the worlds in and for which the biblical texts were written. Scholars ask question like: What were the significant historical events of the world that produced a text? What were the cultural assumptions of that world? How did the people of that world understand the universe, human nature, and a great many other things? If those things are different from how the modern world sees the same things (and they are), what do those differences mean for how we are to understand a biblical text? Scholars want to know the social, economic, and political issues of the world that produced a biblical text and how those issues are treated in the text. All of this information informs how we are to understand and use any ancient text including the texts of the Bible.

It is of course easy enough to read the Bible with none of the knowledge about it that modern biblical criticism has produced. That’s how most Christians have read it throughout Christian history, but here’s the thing. Once you know some of what modern biblical criticism has discovered about the biblical texts it’s impossible to ignore it. Once you know, for example, that the ancient world conveyed profound truth less by writing essays about it than by telling stories that point to it, you can’t read most of the Bible’s stories as though what they were doing was merely reporting facts. Once you know that the book of Genesis is a relatively late editing together of several more ancient sources you can’t read Genesis without thinking about how the book was created and why the editor of the book as we have it did what he did with those sources. Once you know that Mark is the oldest of the four Gospels and that the authors of both Matthew and Luke used it as one of their sources, who want to know how Matthew and Luke used Mark, what they did to Mark’s accounts, and what other sources they may have had. Once you know that we don’t know who wrote any of the Gospels you struggle with naming their authors Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because you know that those names were attached to those Gospels only long after the Gospels were written. Once you know that history in the ancient world wasn’t done like history is in the modern world, that is, it was done in large part for reasons other than to report factual truth, you can’t read the book of Acts or any other book of the Bible as though it were merely a recitation of historical fact. Once you know that all of the Gospels were written several decades at least after the death of Jesus you can’t help but want to know what those later accounts did with the story of Jesus and why they did it.

Most church people don’t know much about the results of modern biblical criticism, but all of those results are readily available to anyone who bothers to look into them. We can pretend that that information doesn’t exist, but when we do we deny the gift of intellect with which God has created us. I do not and will not ignore what I know of the results of critical study of the Bible. I can be gentle about challenging people’s long-held beliefs about the Bible; but I cannot and will not echo those beliefs when I know them to have been supplanted by good biblical criticism, nor will I keep silent about things that I have learned about the Bible.

So what then is the Bible? It is a magnificent collection of ancient texts by human authors that speak of those authors’ experiences of God and their understandings of who God is and what God wants. Those ancient texts have authority for us not because they come in some way from God but because our Christian tradition decided long ago that these texts and no others are foundational for our faith. Our tradition says these are the texts that are appropriate for use in worship, personal devotion, and study. Our tradition says these texts are foundational for our faith. It does not say, or at least it does not need to say, that these texts come from God in some way different from how any other texts were written. It does not say, or at least it does not need to say, either that there are no errors in these texts or that they contain no contradictions. It says these are our texts. It does not have to say that they are infallible nor that their authority arises from some origin in God that they supposedly have. They are our texts because we have decided that they are our texts and because they have proven their value in the faith and lives of countless people over countless generations.

So how then are we to understand and use the Bible? For me (and for many people today) the Bible is a human product. It is a product of human history. It was written by human beings who lived in particular historical and cultural circumstances. They had particular mindsets and understandings of the nature of reality and of human beings that were determined by their culture just as ours are determined by our culture. They wrote of their experiences of God. They wrote using the literary and cultural norms of their times, norms that were quite different from ours. They expressed their experience of God. They conveyed their beliefs about God to us. Yet the fact that we have made their writings part of the Bible, part of our sacred scripture, does not in itself make them true. Because we have made their writings part of our sacred scripture we must take them seriously. We must not dismiss or contradict them lightly, but neither must we accept them as true simply because they are in the Bible. Our call is not simply to repeat them as if the mere fact that they are in the Bible makes them true. It doesn’t. Our call is to understand them, to discern what is true in them for us, and to live into those truths.

So let me close by giving you the last two paragraphs of Stop 11 of Liberating the Bible, a stop with the title “Inspired?” I think they express my take on the Bible rather well. Don’t worry about my use of the word myth. I mean by it only a story about God and God’s relationship to creation. In Liberating the Bible I wrote:

So in the final analysis what is the Bible? It is a collection of ancient writings that originated not with God but with human beings living in specific historical-cultural-linguistic worlds. Those human beings (unfortunately all of the men as far as we know) wrote of their understandings of God, their experiences of God’s will for them and for all creation. Some of what they wrote still functions as true myth for us. Some of what they wrote speaks powerfully of God to us, and some of it doesn’t. That some of it doesn’t isn’t surprising, nor is it a cause for concern. The people who wrote the various parts of the Bible lived in a world very different from ours. They were pre-modern people, we are post-modern people; and that makes a huge difference. They were pre-scientific people, we are children of the scientific revolution; and that makes a huge difference too. The more surprising thing is that these ancient writings still so often speak mythic truth to us, not that some of these writings don’t.

So let me suggest one more thing about the Bible and what it is for us as we end this first Part of our tour. Let me suggest that you think of the Bible as invitation. The Bible doesn’t dictate truth to us. Rather, the ancient authors say here are the experiences and understandings of some of your ancient forbears in the faith. Generation after generation of faithful Jewish and Christian people have found meaning, hope, comfort, and challenge in these pages. So come on in. Learn what we have to say. Do the difficult work of really understanding our ancient texts on their own terms. Then do your own discernment. We did ours, now you do yours. We hope that what you read here will light your path to God, but we cannot relieve you of your duty to discern God’s truth for you and your world. We don’t all say the same thing. We didn’t all understand God the same way. We didn’t understand the universe and human nature the way you do. But come on in. Learn from us. There is great wisdom here. Learn from us, but don’t just parrot back what we had to say. We invite you not to rote responses and easy answers. We invite you to the hard but sacred work of study and discernment. May God be with you in that work. Amen.