Faith that Trips

The pastor's sermon was very good.  It was about the apostles. Among the apostles, he talked about Judas, the betrayer. His teaching about Judas was sensitive and thoughtful. But it was, in part, false.

Maybe he thought his hearers would lose faith if he spoke the truth. Maybe he feared they would lose their loyalty to him if he spoke factually.

Or maybe he could not choose between truths. Maybe he could not choose between saying the Bible is true and saying what the Bible says. So he tried to finesse the point, but failed.

1. Different reports of Judas’s death.

Because the pastor said, "We all know how Judas died." Er, no. Based on the Bible, we don’t know how Judas died. Because the Bible gives two different reports of Judas’s death. In Matthew chapter 27, Judas regrets delivering up Jesus. He takes his blood money back to the temple, he throws it into the temple, and the he leaves and hangs himself. The priests collect the blood money and buy a field. The field becomes known as the Field of Blood.

But Acts chapter 1 gives a different report. With the silver he earned by delivering up Jesus, Judas buys the field himself. Then he pitches forward in that field, and he bursts open, and his intestines spill out. Acts agrees with Matthew that the field became known as the Field of Blood.

Here’s the point. We don’t know how Judas died. If we believe Acts, we can’t believe Matthew. If we believe Matthew, we can’t believe Acts. The pastor did not choose between Acts and Matthew, nor did he state both reports. He made as if there were no differences about the death of Judas in different books of the Bible.

2. Different versions of creation.

 The Bible seems unworried about telling different stories. The Bible’s first differing stories come early, in its first two chapters.

You can ask yourself: which came first, animals or persons? If you say persons, you disagree with Genesis chapter 1. There, both are created on the sixth day, but animals first. But if you say animals came first, you disagree with Genesis chapter 2. Because there, God creates man first, then livestock, the beasts of the field, and the birds of the air. These turn out to be not-good-enough helpers for man, so God creates woman.

3. Different versions of how David met King Saul.

If you still think that the Bible is seamless, read 1 Samuel 16:14-23. Then read 1 Samuel 17. These are different reports about how David met King Saul. 1Samual 16 says that David was a grown man, a good fighter, and he came to Saul to play his harp to sooth Saul’s demon-provoked spirit. 1 Samuel 17 has David too young to accompany his older brothers to war. But when he brings food to his brothers, he kills Goliath. This brings him to Saul’s attention.

4. The Bible’s makers intended to record these different stories.

What do these different stories mean? Were the makers of the Bible unaware of these differences? Certainly not. I am unshakably sure that scripture’s makers knew exactly what was in it.

They could have made the Bible seamless. They could have kept out Genesis chapter 1 or 2; 1 Samuel chapter 16 or 17; and parts of Matthew chapter 27 or parts of Acts chapter 1. But they chose to keep everything in.

I even think that they were content to have in the first two chapters of Genesis two stories that did not mesh. It sent a signal. It made clear at the beginning that the reader should not take every Biblical word literally. It made less likely that readers would impose upon scripture a literalism that its makers did not share.

As to the David stories, it is interesting that the makers of the Bible put the version with David as a man and a fighter before the version with David as a youth. It’s as if the makers wanted to make clear that they included two distinct traditions about the first meeting between David and Saul. The Bible's makers could have first told the story of David the youth, and then the story of David the man; then, it would be easier to read one as a continuation of the other. But the Bible’s makers did not do that.

5. A blessing that the makers could not have foreseen.

There is no reason to treat these different versions like a spouse’s petty-theft conviction that we don’t want anybody to know about. The differences among parts of the Bible are an aid to faith. The conflicts in Genesis and in other books have become important in ways that the Bible’s makers could not have known about in the times that the books of the Bible were made.

Theirs was an age without science as we know it. The Hebrew Bible was written thousands of years before scientists could peer billions of years back in time and trillions of miles into space. It was written thousands of years before geologists studied Earth’s strata to learn how ancient is our world. It was written long before palaeontologists studied fossils.

The Hebrew Bible was written long before our forebears knew that the earth was round and suspended in a void, against the Genesis description of earth separating the waters above and the waters below. It was written long before Galileo discovered that Earth circled the Sun, against the witness of Psalms, Chronicles, and Ecclesiastes.

But Genesis makes the Bible’s lack of accord with science alright. We don’t have to choose between science and the Bible. Because in its first two chapters, the Bible itself makes it clear that it is not a literal description of creation. It does this with unworried contradiction. Before there was science, the authors of Genesis, 1 Samuel, and Matthew/Acts wrote as if to sooth the mind troubled by knowing science and reading scripture.

5. True but not literal.

None of this make scripture less true.

As to Genesis, putting science at the beginning of the Bible would serve neither God nor us. Because an account of the Big Bang theory and natural selection would tell us nothing of the truth that the first chapters of Genesis really are about. This is the truth they tell: that God was immediate to, intimate with, and in control of the creation of the universe and everything in it.

It would not lead to salvation to know that the universe began with a colossal explosion. Nor that genetic mutations over time produced more advanced creatures. Nor that the earth is round instead of flat with waters above and waters below it. Nor that the Earth circles the Sun. These do not help a person get to heaven (but they do not hinder, either). So there was no reason to put these in a book that is really all about God, persons, and salvation.

But to know that God is the beginning of all that there is is useful for salvation. This is especially true if that knowledge is joined with awe.

So Genesis is true, even if it is not literal. And the Bible’s makers had no problem with making clear that it was not literal. This does not take away from its truth.

The truth beneath the two David stories or the two Judas’s-death stories is unclear to me. But that’s the Bible for you. Its basic message is so simple that a young child can grasp it. But you can plumb the Bible from youth to old age, and you will never find the bottom of it.

6. The comfort of literalism is certainty.

Now, to get back to the pastor. He is a man I respect. His sermons make me think. He knows more than I do.

But he encourages his hearers to read the Bible literally, and they encourage him. His hearers applaud when he says things like, "We are not Calvinists; we are Biblicists." His hearers approve when he says, "I don’t want to know what John Calvin says. I want to know what the Bible says." (Note to pastor: John Calvin interpreted the Bible.)

And, of course, his literalism caused him to slip around the fact that Judas dies differently in Matthew than in Acts.

Literalism is attractive because literalism is certain. I have argued before that certainty is valued in America in our time. The security of our lives cocoons many of us, leading to a sense of certainty about the world, and, by extension, about other things. (See below, "Certainty and Uncertainty.") So, in a way, certainty is not a choice we make but a choice that our culture has made for us.

People won’t shake off certainty for no reason. Nobody wants to shake off certainty until it discomforts more than it comforts. I believe that people find so much comfort in certainty that, to hold onto it, they will tightly clasp what they must know is impossible. The church I go to really does believe in the Bible, and I have no doubt that many members read it carefully and often. Many of them have read the passages that I talked about here. But their looking is colored by certainty, so they do not see obvious contradictions.

7. The problem with literalism.

If literalism is a path to salvation, I should not argue against it.

But I do. For one thing, even though I take it less literally than many, I think the Bible is fundamental to guiding people to salvation. And the better people know it, the better it guides them. Literalism is wrong, so it may lead people off-path. If you read something in a way that it was not meant to be read, you might miss something that you might learn if you read it right.

If we read Genesis as a natural history of creation, we might miss its message of God’s immediacy to, intimacy with, and control over creation; not to mention unnumbered other truths that the first two chapters of Genesis hold.

If we think the Bible is always simple and always literal, we don’t understand how deep and rich the Bible is. Then we might to approach it solely by the power of our minds. We are less likely to approach it humbly, prayerfully, and dependently. We need to depend upon God, prayer, and humility, not only the power of our minds, to plumb the Bible.

Also, literalism can harm the weak-in-faith. Based on literal reading of scripture, early missionaries to China calculated for Chinese rulers the date of the creation of the Earth. They were not believable, because Chinese dynastic records predated the supposed date of creation. Likewise, when we tout Biblical literalism, we become a rock of stumbling for people who believe in science.

It can harm the weak-in-faith in other ways. We want believers to read scripture. But their faith might be harmed if they read Genesis, Samuel, Chronicles, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Matthew/Acts and nobody can explain the differences between the passages, or the differences between the Word and the known world.

Biblical literalism should have been officially buried in 1992, when the Catholic Church apologized to Galileo. I regret that it lives on, because it harms.

8. Shedding certainty.

The Bible was not beaten, scourged, and nailed to a cross to die for all and to rise. The Bible points to God, but it is not God.

We should not read into it a literalism that its makers did not share. Instead, we should see it for what it is: simple but rich, straight but complex, all true but not necessarily all literal. We should be ready to read it for a lifetime, but also ready to know that, at the end of our lives, it still will have mysteries. The mystery should provoke us to make more earnest study and to hope in immortal joy with the one who can make clear all that now we see through a glass darkly.