Biblical Authority?

Most Christian groups claim the Bible as our ultimate authority for understanding God and his will for our lives.  But we don’t always act that way.  I’m not speaking about the fact that studying the Bible is more like a good idea than actual practice for many of us.  That’s true, unfortunately, and for decades pundits have bemoaned the decline of Biblical literacy in our churches.  There is another, subtler issue at work in the way we study the Bible, when we actually take the time to crack it open and read it.

Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer compared the way we read the Bible, or any other book, to how we play a game.  You have to play a game by its rules, or you just won’t get the point of the game.  For example, you can’t tackle someone during a basketball game, and roll a six in Monopoly and move five spaces.  In the same way, when you read the Bible you need to enter its world, so to speak, to get at its meaning.

That’s harder to do than it sounds.  We often come to the Bible with our own ideas, values, and priorities, to find out how it answers our questions.  But if the Bible truly is an authority for us, we ought to go one step further and allow the Bible to teach us what really matters.  The questions and issues that we think are so important may not really matter for the way that the Bible describes life and faith.

For example, many people wonder if we will recognize our loved ones in heaven.  We miss them terribly and hope to be reunited with them.  The Bible, however, is frustratingly vague about this issue.  Apparently that’s not a big deal in heaven, no matter how important it seems to us here on earth.

Many churches consider homosexuality to be a foundational issue upon which Christians must take a stand.  Congregations have left denominations over this issue, and many churches include it on the “What We Believe” page of their website.  However, this topic is barely footnote in Scripture, only mentioned a handful of times.  If the Bible truly is our guide, why would we get bent out of shape over something that it treats so trivially?  And why do we blithely ignore other concerns that the Bible discusses often and in great detail, such as economic justice for the poor and observing the Sabbath?

Such fascination with arcane trivia in the Bible jumps into overdrive when it comes to questions about Christ’s return.  “End-times” topics such as the mark of the beast, the rapture, and millennialism arise from brief, and my opinion often misunderstood, allusions in Scripture.  They are certainly not the central themes in the Bible’s description of our future hope.

I’ve even heard people say that the key to understanding all of Scripture can be found in an obscure verse in Genesis that describes how the “sons of God” had children with the “daughters of humans” and gave birth to the Nephilim.  God did not give us Scripture as a puzzle or mystery to solve.  His desire is for us to submit ourselves to the Bible’s own priorities and values, and reflect on how we can live them out in our lives and in our world.