Session 2: Questions Two and Three

The Second Question: The Authority Question

How should the Bible be understood? As McLaren says: “There will be no new kind of Christian faith without a new approach to the Bible, because we’ve gotten ourselves into a mess with the Bible.” One reason is from any type of fundamentalism, that requires the Bible to be treated as a book (science book?) dictated by God.

[Even today, there is a creation museum in Kentucky whose purpose is to visually show dinosaurs and humans co-existing and to prove that the earth is only 6,000 years old; and the Governor is saying he will contribute state funds toward building an ark. And there is the government official who quoted Genesis as the reason he doesn’t believe in global warming].

McLaren cites many horror stories about depressed people whose pastors would only allow prayer and fasting (and exorcism) as cures; many of whom committed suicide. Nor does he allow it as an ethical rule book; it has no mention of so many of our modern ethical questions whose answers start becoming only “a litmus test for political affiliation.”

Moreover, “proof texts” were selected from the bible to “justify unjustifiable positions,” such as racism , support for torture, the death penalty for homosexuality and parental rebellion, as a reason for pre-emptive war and an explanation for natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. The Bible has too often been used, affirms McLaren, as an excuse for an “us-versus-them” mentality. “…there is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God says.”

His big example is a short history of slavery and how the Bible was used to justify it. Although he feels many denominations and religious people have gone through a process of freeing the Bible from recommending anti-Semitism, apartheid, anti-feminism, etc., he calls for a “new, more mature and responsible approach to the Bible.” This is not for purposes of “moral relativism” or lowering of ethical standards, but for the purpose of raising those standards so we no longer harm human beings and dishonor God.

8: From Legal Constitution to Community Library

We need, he claims, to stop reading the Bible as if it were the Constitution and to stop treating it as if it were a legal document with precedents of interpretation set over the years. “At every turn, we approach the biblical text as if it were an annotated code instead of what it is actually is: a portable library of poems, prophecies, stories, fables, parables, letters, sage sayings, quarrels, and so on.”

An example of the way we use the Bible can be shown by asking the question of how we should treat our enemies. McLaren cites different approaches from Jesus in Matthew, and Paul, and the Psalm (“dash their infants against a rock…” 137:9).

Treating the Bible as a legal document means, for one thing, that you have to be learned to interpret it, the interpreters are often insiders whose salary and/or social status depends on their interpretation. And there are no checks to that interpretation (if you object, you could be excommunicated).

But the biblical authors were “writing for their own times, to address specific problems and questions of their day.” We have to remember that when the OT writers wrote, there WAS no Bible, and the Gospels were written decades after Jesus lived. And we have to remember that the canon was only gathered in its present form CENTURIES later.

McLaren wants to remind us that the Bible is the “library of a culture and a community.” As a library it’s a carefully selected “group of ancient documents of paramount importance for people who want to understand and belong to the community of people who seek God...and Jesus.” Culture is messy; it’s not coherent and logical. It grapples over and over with questions it considers of prime importance. McLaren asks a really interesting question: “Are the rich dependent on the well-being of the poor?” or vice-versa. These are healthy discussions. The questions are important. The answers will vary. And so they do, in the Bible. The differences are a sign of vitality.

But what to do with the label “inspiration?” McLaren feels conservatives use it as a synonym for “inspired constitution” or “authoritative constitution.” But he is okay with calling it an authoritative Library because it doesn’t imply “enforceable agreements.” He retains the belief that God breathes life into the bible and through it into communities and into people. The bible guides communities like no other texts can. The Bible has a unique place among all the words that brilliant and inspired people have written. But that doesn’t make it a constitution!

McLaren wants us to read the Bible as “an inspired library.” “This inspired library preserves, presents, and inspires an ongoing vigorous conversation with and about God, a living and vital civil argument into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed.” It’s meant to be heard and discussed and responded to. To the people whose deep-seated beliefs or their jobs depend on their seeing the bible as a constitution, McLaren doesn’t demand that they change, but only that they be careful in the way they use the bible. He also wants them to try to understand that just as they can’t stop regarding the Bible as a Constitution, so McLaren and many others can no longer read it that way and “are on a quest to find other ways to cherish, understand and follow the Bible.” (1500-09)

He realizes that this will be heresy for many, because it is NOT the main way of teaching in seminaries and is NOT the implicit approach of many denominations and it is NOT what we hear on religious radio and TV. He wants us to jettison our fears about the “thought police” and continue our conversation with God!

9: Revelation through Conversation

McLaren has been called Lucifer, heretic, dim-witted, ignorant, arrogant and deceiver. But he is grateful that he is not being made subject to decapitation, hanging, or burning at the stake and disembowelment.

McLaren gives the example of the book of Job to explain seeing the Bible in a non-constitutional way, and not as “God’s official position as to why there is evil and suffering in the world.” Job is “an inspired portrayal of human beings struggling and arguing over the realities of suffering and evil.” After Job’s friends say all the “right, pious things,” in a concluding chapter GOD makes a speech. He does NOT vindicate the pious friends, but vindicates Job instead, indicating that most of the book is false and nonsense [including the friends’ quoting from Deuteronomy—‘Do good and good will always happen to you…’]. McLaren asks which part the constitutional devotees are saying is inspired.

McLaren says Job gives us a way out of reading the Bible this way. “Revelation occurs,” he says, “not in the words and statements of individuals, but in the conversation among individuals and God.” In other words, it occurs and emerges through the whole story. In short, the bible text gives us tools for discovery, breaking open, encountering meaning and God. Therefore, he concludes: “…if we enter the text together and feel the flow of its arguments, get stuck in its points of tension, and struggle with its unfolding plot in all its twists and turns, God’s revelation can happen to us.” (1583-92)

The Bible was never meant to end conversations and solve every conceivable problem. If so, “it has failed miserably” (1601-11). ..’If, instead, it was inspired and intended to stimulate conversation, to keep people thinking and talking and arguing and seeking, across continents and centuries, it has succeeded and is succeeding in a truly remarkable way” (ibid.). At the end of Job, when God finally speaks, He does Not answer the problem of evil, but instead peppers Job with lots of questions. They end up being a rebuke in the face of the unknown. And this is a great revelation in itself.

McLaren wonders if God’s Word is really sneaking up on us, transforming and disarming us—“rather than arming us with ‘truths’ to use like weapons to savage other human beings” (1619-29). We become, like Job, reduced “to a posture of wonder…and smallness in the face of the unknown.”

Then McLaren asks if OUR voices are meant to be a part of the conversation. Just as Job doesn’t accept and let himself be silenced by his friends' quotes from Deuteronomy, so maybe we are meant to enter into the conversation.

What McLaren calls a possibly ‘terrifying question’ arising from the book of Job is the “God-character” in the story. Is this really God or the writer’s best idea of God? McLaren prefers to see the book of Job as a “theological opera,” NOT an historical event. To say the text is inspired, according to McLaren, “is to say that people can encounter God—the real God—in a story full of characters named job, Eliphaz, Bildad, the Satan, and even God.” God reveals himself through stories like this. Our belief in the Holy Spirit, the creative Spirit in Genesis, holds that He works through these stories and these characters and this text to evoke understanding and to draw us into the conversation.

THE THIRD QUESTION: THE God Question

10: Is God Violent?

Even though McLaren feels many biblical problems were solved when he could differentiate between a “Theos” who would send mostly everyone into eternal conscious torment, and a God of compassion and love; and when he could see the Bible as an inspired library instead of a constitution, he still found problems with the God depicted in that library. There are still violent, cruel “un-Christlike” images (like the God who sent the flood to destroy everyone but Noah’s family; the God who smites enemies and directs the Israelites to conquer and occupy weaker enemies). Even so this God is not as horrible as theos.

He looks at God again in the light of his answers to the first two questions and finds that people’s understandings about God changed and evolved over time, and God initiated this evolution. Moses, for example, gets a fuller idea of God than had been given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob . In Hosea, “the Lord says that a time is coming when Israel will no long refer to its creator as ‘master,’ but instead as ‘husband’ (2:16)” (1720-29).

In the N.T., Jesus tells his followers that there will be a time when they stop considering themselves servants and starting thinking of themselves as friends (Jn.15:12-17). The Spirit, He says, will guide them to this new understanding “as they are able to bear it” (Jn. 16:12-15). And then Paul in Galatians (3:23-26) talks about an “age where they walk free in the Spirit.”

McLaren has come up with five “specific lines of evolution in the biblical writers’ understanding of God:”

1. The understanding of God’s uniqueness. The bible starts with the concept of God as supreme among the many Gods. But then it evolves into the idea of only one God being real and alive, relegating the others to fictions, superstitions or exceptions.

2. The understanding of God’s ethics. First the bible shows Him as concerned primarily with rituals, ceremonial fidelity, holidays, dietary and cleanliness codes. These were vigorously promoted by the priests, who strove for purity in worship and “technical perfection in the fulfillment of religion regulations.” But then the prophets helped show God’s concern for social justice, for the plight of the poor and the systemic flaws that kept them in poverty.

3. The understanding of God’s universality. First, God seems to favor one tribe, but then it becomes clear that he loves all people and being called the chosen people doesn’t give you favoritism and exclusive blessing, but responsibility to be a channel of his blessings.

4. The understanding of God’s agency. Sometimes God seems to act magically, swooping into the affairs of the universe from afar. In fact, there are two views. Ecclesiastes makes God distant or absent to a chaotic world; Matthew makes God ”hyper-present, to the “Point of controlling nearly everything.” But finally there grows a mature, “highly nuanced and delicately balanced” view. God is at work in, along with, and through events, but can’t be “rendered indistinguishable from the events themselves, nor is God deterministically controlling the universe as if it were a puppet or a machine” (1753-62). Even in the midst of evil, God guides people to do good.. Romans: “In all things, God works for good” and see Gen. 50:20 for his working out the evil perpetrated by Joseph’s brothers.

5. The understanding of God’s character. Sometimes God is portrayed as violent, vindictive, given to favoritism and not caring about human life. But slowly this image evolves to one of a compassionate, gentle, fair to all, forgiving rather than retaliatory. He is no longer capricious, but “loves justice, kindness, reconciliation, and peace.” (1762-71).

This progression in understanding is very difficult for fundamentalist approaches and religions. God is exclusive, retaliatory, loving those in the in-group and even hating those who are not in His group. He is deterministic and moves events, often in punishment and torture. Some fundamentalists don’t want God to act this way and resolve not to act this way themselves. Those who see the logic of these understandings are afraid to publicly espouse them because they will be called a “heretic” or a “liberal;” they may be ostracized and excluded from their beloved community of faith. There are gate-keepers in each sect who ensure this purity of interpretation.

McLaren acknowledges that these harsh passages are in the Bible, but he is affirming that “human beings can’t do better than their very best at any given moment to communicate about God as they understand God,” and scripture tries to communicate their best understandings. He gives an analogy with second graders who are taught that you can’t subtract a larger number from a smaller number, but then in sixth grade have a lesson on negative numbers. This doesn’t mean that the second grade text was lying or that the 6th grade writers were doubting the absolute truth of an earlier text. “The author of the 2nd grade text told the truth that was appropriate for second-graders.”

And so he argues: “What if those who live in the second-grade world of polytheism need to learn about one God as superior to others before they can handle the idea of one God as uniquely real?...What if, then, God must first be seen as the God of our tribe and then only later as the God of all tribes?” Etc. on 1807-16. “What if God’s agency in the world is mysterious and complex, reflecting God’s desire to have a world that is truly free yet truly relational?”

What if we need to see God one way in order to evolve to a more mature understanding of him, just as we do with our own parents? (E.g. God as violently committed to justice before we can see him as nonviolently yet passionately committed?). And of course our understanding is continuing to develop. We haven’t arrived yet! We are like a school of learners that includes all levels of growing and learning together. So some faith communities are “good for some of us even though they would not challenge others of us, because we have already learned the lessons they are ready to teach. Other faith communities are over our head...” This has implications for how we deal with other denominations and religions.

Concerning violence, McLaren suggests this hypothesis: “…if the human beings who produced those passages were violent in their own development, they would naturally see God through the lens of their experience. The fact that those disturbing descriptions are found in the bible doesn’t mean that we are stuck with them, any more than we are stuck with ‘You cannot subtract a larger number from a smaller number, just because that statement still exists in our second-grade textbook. [The bible] is like the library of math texts that shows the history of the development of mathematical reasoning among human beings” (1834-43).

McLaren then launches into a time machine analogy from a people far into the future who can’t understand how we could be believers and still believe in just wars, in eating meat, and in using fossil fuels even though they are so destructive of our planet. He wonders if this analogy helps us “look at violence, patriarchy, religious supremacy, and other disturbing characteristics of some biblical passages in a new light?” (1861-68).

11. From a Violent Tribal God to a Christlike God
Although McLaren acknowledges how difficult it must be for someone who has a constitutional view of the Bible to be at all comfortable with these changing images of God, he says that the less mature images might be a step UP from the more immature ones they were replacing.

For example, he cites the Noah and the Flood story as an example of a story often read for its saving message, but which is also a message that under certain conditions, genocide might be OK (he calls it “playing the genocide card,” and cites it as happening from Gen. 7 to Dt. 7, from American colonization to the Holocaust to Rwanda to Darfur. He states that a God who permits genocide cannot be worthy of worship or even respect. “How can you ask your children—or non-church colleagues and neighbors—to honor a deity so uncreative, over-reactive, and utterly capricious regarding life?”

He reminds us that the Flood didn’t even work: Noah gets drunk, his sons are up to mischief and soon the human race is right back to violence and crime. That Genocide doesn’t solve anything might be the learning. McLaren compares the Flood story to the Gilgamesh epic. He notes the theological progress in the Genesis story: Yahweh (Elohim?) is moved with justice and mercy. And maybe the Gilgamesh story is a step up from the myth it was replacing as the way of explaining some facets of human existence.

Then he compares the Noah story to the Moses story, the little child saved from drowning in an ark of reeds. The image of God has developed! And he cites Jesus’ healing the Canaanite woman in Mt. 15 after which he feeds 4,000 Gentiles, overturning what happened in Dt. 7 with Joshua’s No Mercy instructions. Following Jesus, we now “heal, feed and serve the other…instead of rejecting the ‘gentile dog,’ we allow ourselves to listen and be ‘converted’ by the other, seeing the other’s humanity and great faith” (1913-22).

“This approach helps us see the biblical library as the record of a series of trade-ups, people courageously letting go of the state-of-the-art understanding of God when an even better understanding begins to emerge.” McLaren calls this an “evolutionary approach." Maybe this is why the Jews will not tolerate an image of God that freezes our understanding of Him. And we do the same thing with printing and our sermons and songs: conceptual idolatry.

For those afraid of this process which they fear will allow an “anything goes” attitude toward conceptualizing God and reading Scripture, McLaren offers another procedure that requires, first, reading the Scriptures in a narrative way, arranging the biblical stories in more or less chronological fashion, and then choosing a new view of God that is consistent with the whole narrative but further along in its maturity (chronology?).

He adds to this trajectory, the visions of the desired future given by the biblical prophets. Then he adds a “sun” at the end, which represents Jesus, “whose light shines through the whole story,…alpha to omega” (1947-55). He concludes “..we can only discern God’s character in a mature way from the vantage point of the end of the story, seen in the light of the story of Jesus” (ibid). He quotes the Quaker scholar Elton Trueblood as saying that the divinity of Christ “does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.”

Jesus explodes the predetermined concepts of God. “..the experience of God in Jesus requires a brand new definition of understanding of God” (1955-64). This is “the best single reason to be identified as a believer in Jesus,” and we can offer this gift to people of all faiths. Jesus is the touchstone for Old Testament images of God: the ones that are most like Jesus are the more mature ones. And so “..for Christians, the Bible’s highest value is in revealing Jesus, who gives us the highest, deepest, and most mature view of the character of the living God.”

McLaren sees Jesus as the “hinge of the biblical story, the spine or backbone of the narrative..” He wants us to “look through the Bible to look at Jesus, and you will see the character of God shining radiant and full.”