A reader of my book, I'm Right and You're Wrong: Why we disagree about the Bible and what to do about it, submitted some of the remarks that are especially meaningful to him. I'd like to share them with you.
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No, the world is not set up with us in mind. The child’s
whine that “It’s not fair!” is our first recognition of this reality.
Pluralism encourages understanding and celebrating
differences rather than anathematizing them as in the past.
None of us is born with perfect vision; we all suffer from
worldview myopia, and unlike physical eyesight, there is no corrective lens
that can make us comprehend the world perfectly.
Regardless of the theological positions held, they mostly
spring from one or more of the areas expressed in the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: scripture, tradition, experience, and reason. How one finally interprets
the Bible is determined by which of the four is most emphasized.
Experience, for Wesley, was the verification of biblical
teaching in the lives of believers.
Among liberals was the belief that God is love. That is to
say, that love is not simply an attribute of God’s nature, but that the essence
of God’s being is love. This love means that God is primarily immanent, close
to the creation, rather than transcendent and remote. This produced a belief in
universalism, that God would not condemn anyone to a literal hell. A God who is
love would not, therefore, condemn all at birth (Original Sin), either. But it
is the idea of progress, that “every day, in every way, the world is getting
better and better,” that typifies liberal Christianity through the 19th
century. There was great optimism that a truly Christian society could be
created. Prosperity was at its highest, the Theory of Evolution was seen as
progressive and continuous improvement, the world was largely at peace, nature
was being subdued, medical advances were ending many diseases with the promise
of ending many more, and humanity was on the way to perfectibility. Sin, it
seemed, was no longer a useful description of the human predicament.
Fundamentalists often fall prey to the notion that, “Since I
derived this meaning straight from the Bible, it is equal in force to the Bible
itself.”
Liberalism, they argue, lost contact with the heart of the
Christian story in an effort to accommodate Modernism. It defined Christianity
in such a way that it became undifferentiated from a social movement, and
transitioned from a religion into a philosophy of religion.
The Progressive corrective is to reclaim the heart of the
biblical story as our story (admittedly reinterpreted), ground our theology in
the incarnation of God in Jesus, and return the church to be servants of the
world. It also sees the Bible and tradition as authoritative voices that must
be listened to critically, while understanding that both are human products,
full of wisdom as well as fraught with danger. The foundational belief that the
incarnation holds the interpretive clue to understanding ourselves, our world,
and God, leads many Progressives to Process Theology.
So our disagreements are less about what the Bible means
than with the various milieus from which they spring. Since there is no such
thing as a certifiably perfect milieu, we should welcome another’s
interpretation as a necessary contribution to the whole. The foregoing chapters
are intended to make this clear. Given this reality, we are better able to
address one another as an equal rather than as an “other.”
“When in Doubt, Shout!: Paradoxical Influences of Doubt on
Proselytizing.” [Note 3] Disagreeing can be either a learning experience for one or
both, or another way of missing the point of loving one’s neighbor as one’s
self. As Henry Neufeld put it, “You are never more God-like than when you open
your heart’s door to another person. The more different they are, the more
God-like that action is.” Neufeld’s understanding of God makes possible
such an outcome. Another view of God, much less grace-full, might wish for a
more violent outcome, as for those who want gays and lesbians executed in the
name of their God. Once again, what we take to the Bible informs what we take
out of the Bible.
Not getting the Bible right in some of its particulars is
hardly on the level of not getting our lives right. It seems that some in
Matthew 25 got their lives right without knowing the particulars of why.
The best that we can do is choose wisely among the options
and live with humility in the presence of others. Another way putting this is
that we listen to what to us sounds like the voice of God and subordinate all
other voices to it. We may as well, because that’s what we do anyway. Now it’s
official!
Yes, the Holy Spirit is our teacher, but we can easily slip
into the error of believing that anything we think we understand is a direct
imparting from the Spirit.
Follow the Golden Rule. Don’t allow differences of outcomes
to come between you and another created in the image of God. Always bear in
mind that you are not the one another is called to please.
Martin Buber taught us the difference between treating a
person as a human being (a Thou—one like yourself) or an object (an It—a thing
to be used). If our purpose in biblical discussion is to win someone
over, we no longer treat our conversationalist as a person, but as a thing to
dominate. If, on the other hand, our objective is to discover something valuable
and give our conversation partner an opportunity to teach us, we and our
partner are one, or I/ Thou.
We learn not to appear scholarly, or erudite, or to win
arguments, but to follow Jesus as a faithful disciple. That’s the difference
between being right and righteous. It’s also the point of why we study the
Bible in the first place.