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Why This Christian Doesn’t Need a Perfect Bible

Either the Bible is true or it isn’t.

Chances are if you’ve spent any time in church or engaged in religious debate with a Christian, you’ve encountered this sentence in one form or another. It’s the premise that the Bible is an all-or-nothing proposition; either inerrant and without blemish—or useless. This idea often surfaces during some moment of theological dissonance and succeeds in immediately pushing people to opposite poles, demanding that they go all-in with a flawless, mistake-free text, or be dismissed as hard-hearted heretics.

I understand why so many Christians desire a perfect Bible. Life is frightening and unpredictable and painful. We so want the simplicity and certainty that kind of Bible would provide. If we believe that there exists somewhere a massive transcript of Divine dictation; “God’s Clear Answer Book”, then life becomes apparently simple: When in doubt, just read the Bible.

Our ability to make a decision or to have peace or to navigate the world as “proper Christians”, all becomes contingent upon us “properly understanding” the supposed clear, irreducible truth of God’s Word. And since no two of us can agree completely on what that truth is or means, this makes such a task largely subjective. Regardless of our best intentions, we all end up making the Scriptures yield to our biases and agendas; clinging tightly to those parts which reinforce our beliefs, discarding those which prove problematic. Some passages we decide are literal directives, while others a product of their cultural context, demanding nuance. This is equally true of the most Progressive and Conservative believers despite the latter’s claims otherwise.

I’ve long ago given up the need for a Bible without error or blemish. I believe the Scriptures to be the work of the hands of a faithful, earnest, striving Humanity seeking to understand, know, and honor God in the place and time in which they lived and documented life. The writers and believers then (just as in these days), bring that flawed humanness to their endeavors no matter how greatly seeking to avoid it. And yet then as now, we can read and hear their words, and find truth and life within them in spite of and because of it. The writings don’t need to be inerrant or devoid of the preferences and personalities of their authors to powerfully illuminate God for us. They were the writer’s truths, and that is enough, because we can find ourselves in that same story.

For example, our Christian tradition recognizes the words of the Apostle Paul, a missionary pastor as sacred canon, comprising much of the New Testament. We are asked to believe that his words are all fully “God’s words”, yet nowhere in Paul’s writings does he claim that God is commandeering his faculties; that he is at all ceasing to be fully Paul as he writes. Further, in his letter to the Church in Rome, Paul offers that the “same Spirit” that raised Jesus from the dead is at work within those who believe. If this is true then, we are given the same Spirit-stuff that Paul was given. We cannot accurately determine a hierarchy in the way that God is revealed in God’s people, so deciding that Paul is somehow more Spirit filled than say Billy Graham or C.S. Lewis or Teresa of Avila or your pastor or even you—seems an impossible and worthless task.

The Rabbis of Biblical times (of which Jesus was one), made it their life’s calling, debating and examining the text and applying it to life. It was not for them, the downloading of the same precise information, but the act of seeking deeper revelation of God in community, using the Scriptures as a place to gather. We should not be afraid to do the same.

Everything is saturated with the presence of the Divine. In this way, everything and everyone contains some truth of the reality of God. The only way that the Bible could be completely true, is the same way anything or anyone could be: because it has a single true source.

We don’t require perfection in any other experience of creation, and yet we still are able to recognize a perfect God reflected in all of it:

The most brilliant diamond is still flawed,
the most vivid sunset still contains impurities,
the most moving piece of music still carrying an imprecise note,
the most compassionate person still marred by selfishness.

None of these things are without blemish but they still testify beautifully. They still do their perfect work of awakening us to something greater.

The Bible is a sprawling library of sixty-six books, created by dozens of writers over thousands of years, made of every type of literature created in a myriad of cultural contexts. The hundreds of thousands of words comprising these books do not need to be inerrant to be edifying or encouraging or inspiring or to speak to us. They do not need to be inerrant to expose some of the infinite facets of the Divine. They do not need to be perfect to help to know and seek after a very perfect God.

If we can acknowledge these things about the Bible, we will resist making an idol of it, we will be less likely to wield it like a weapon against those we disagree with, and we will have greater humility as we read it, holding our own interpretation loosely. We will invariably be more open to the Spirit moving as it pleases.

Something wonderful happened when I stopped needing the Bible to be perfect: I could love it again. Rather than agonizing over some elusive needle-in-a-haystack truth in every world, I could open it up and read it as the adventure of my flawed but faithful ancestors; earlier chapters of a story I am now living in. I stopped needing it to be God, and allowed it simply to help me on my journey toward God.

I believe this God alone to be true. Everything else in this world is somewhat less true—even the Bible.

I’m a Christian and I’m okay with that.

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