My Criterion

 

My Criterion

March 15, 2025

I have written several times in various books, some self-published and some yet to be self-published, about the nearly universal belief among Christians that the Bible is somehow divinely inspired. I have said, and I believe, that that belief comes in two forms. With Marcus Borg, from whom I take the terms, I have written of a hard form and a soft form of that belief. The hard form of that belief says that God dictated the Bible to human scribes, who wrote God’s dictation down without error. That notion is simply absurd because it is to easy to disprove. The Bible is full of factual impossibilities and significant contradictions that God would ever have made if God had written the Bible. The hard form of belief in a divine inspiration of the Bible is easy to demolish, and I’ll spend no more time on it here.

The soft form of belief in a divine inspiration of the Bible doesn’t say that God dictated the words of the Bible exactly. Instead, it says that the men (sadly, they were all men) who wrote the different biblical books wrote under the divine inspiration of God the Holy Spirit. The Bible’s numerous authors were divinely inspired, but they were also fallible humans. Therefore, they made mistakes. They put both divinely inspired truth and human falsehood into their writings. Christians who accept this version of divine inspiration must, therefore, distinguish between what in the Bible is divine truth and what is human error. I have often critiqued and discarded the soft version of divine biblical inspiration by saying that both a person’s choices of what is divine truth and what is human falsehood, and any criteria a person might formulate for making that distinction, are purely individualistic. The person’s choices may feel good and sound right to the individual making the distinction, but they will have no persuasive power for anyone who makes different choices or who makes no choice at all.

Recently, as I was proofing what I had written quite some time ago in an as yet unpublished book of mine, it occurred to me: Sorenson, you make those distinctions too. You say that the Bible is a purely human product, which, frankly, it quite obviously is. However, you find both divine truth and human falsehood in it the same way adherents of the soft version of divine inspiration of the Bible do. I asked myself: Have I ever admitted that truth to myself before? Have I ever admitted it in writing before? I think the answer to those two questions is no, you  haven’t. Not directly. Not in so many words. As I thought about the issue, however, I began to see that I have in fact written of how I make that distinction several times. I want here to consider just how I do in fact make that distinction and express it more directly than I have before.

I get to my criterion for making the distinction between what is divine truth in the Bible and what is not by beginning with a question: What do we need to learn from or of God? Do we need to learn the world’s ways of being and of doing things? To we need to learn violence, injustice, oppression, radical individualism, consumerism, social hierarchy, the dominance of the rich over the poor, authoritative governmental or religious structures, hatred, racism, sexism, homophobia, life lived under the criteria of earning and reward, living by judgment and condemnation, or any of the other ways the world has of living? No, we don’t. We learn and live by all of those things quite on our own. Many of us may, and in fact do, project many of these things onto God, but they are all human ways of being not divine ways of being. Projecting human ways onto God and seeing God as just humanity writ large are classic, nearly universal mistakes Christians have always made and still make today. God is just way too big to operate the way we humans so often do.

So what do we need God for? We need to learn that most of the ways of the world in which we live and which we have to a considerable extent internalized are false. We need to learn that God’s ways are radically different from the world’s ways. We need to learn how destructive the world’s ways so often are. We need to learn ways that make life better for everyone especially for the poor, marginalized, and disregarded among us to be sure but actually better for everyone. We know instinctively that violence is bad. We need to learn that ultimate reality, that is, God, is radically nonviolent and calls us to be nonviolent too. We need to learn that political, social, and economic oppression of some by others actually degrades life not only for those who are oppressed but for those who do the oppressing. We need to learn that we all need God in our lives if we are to make it through this life with a minimum of psychological and spiritual trauma. We need to see, in short, that there are better ways to live than the ways by which most people live today and most people have always lived. We need to learn that fullness of life comes from living God’s ways as best we can.

The Bible is a purely human document, but it contains both mere echoes of the world’s ways of being and at least hints at much better ways of being, at God’s ways of being. The great Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan explains this dynamic this way. He says that in the Bible we see expressions of God’s ways that turn the ways of the world upside down and then see the Bible falling back into endorsement of the destructive ways of the world. I’ll use violence as a good example. Jesus taught and lived nonviolence. He didn’t want us to accept evil, Matthew 5:39 apparently to the contrary notwithstanding; but he wanted us to resist it creatively, assertively, but always nonviolently. Then we go from Matthew’s Jesus to the Jesus of Revelation. There Jesus is about nothing but violence. He unleashed massive violence on the world. The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount and the Jesus of Revelation are essentially polar opposites. We all know that violence is the world’s way. I mean, just look at the world today, and just look at human history. It is a history of war after war after war. It is a history condemned by the violence of some people against other people throughout time. In the Bible we see passages that ascribe violence to God. We also see passages that have God reject violence in radical terms.

Which of those views of violence to we need to learn? Certainly not the ways of violence. We’ve got those down cold. We need to learn nonviolence. We need to learn nonviolence precisely because violence to ends and degrades the lives of people all over the world. The Bible, with all of its violence, also gives us the command of nonviolence. Which is divine, violence or nonviolence? The answer is nonviolence. Nonviolence is the answer precisely because it turns the way of the world on its head. Precisely because it calls us to a different and very much better way of living.

We see the same thing in what the New Testament says about women. In Galatians Paul says that in Christ there is no longer male and female. Galatians 3:27-28. Obviously Paul didn’t mean that the biological forms and reproductive roles of women and men have disappeared. He meant that in Christ women and men are radically equal. He spoke that truth in a culture that was androcentric, paternalistic, and misogynistic. He expressed a truth that turned his world on its head. Then, in a significantly later New Testament text, we read: “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” 1 Timothy 2:12, a text that says it is by Paul but that clearly is not by Paul. We have here the expression of a truth that we know is merely worldly because it just echoes the way of the world. Real truth is divine because it turns the ways of the world upside down for the purpose of equating equality, for the purpose of improving the lives of real people. We see in 1 Timothy the expression of a supposed truth that we know is worldly and false because it merely echoes the ways of the world in which it was written, ways that harm the lives of real people.  

So what is my criterion for deciding what is divine truth and what is worldly falsehood in the Bible? It is to ask: Does something in the Bible merely echo the ways of the world that we don’t need to learn and that harm real people, or does it express a counter-worldly truth that we need to learn because it makes human life better? If the former, it is worldly falsehood. If the latter, it is divine truth. Put another way, my criterion for what is true in the Bible is: Does something the Bible says improve human life, or does it just express human life and harm human life? Human life is my standard. Real, lived human life as real flesh and blood people live it. You, dear reader, can accept that standard or reject it, but I challenge you to find a better one. This is the best I can do, and I don’t think it’s bad at all.