Liberal Christianity

Lesson 2: The Role of Scripture in Spiritual Practice

Suggested Reading: Marcus J. Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. Chapters 1-3.

Note: My own intention is that of the entire Borg book as a companion to this second lesson. Although Borg’s concepts will appear in future lessons, the primary purpose of including this text in our course is for this lesson.

What role does/should scripture play in the practice of religion? Can we be spiritual and religious in the absence of a Bible? Do spirituality and a life of personal moral practice require a “book” or set of rules by which to live?

Although most of us have been programmed to assume that religion in general and Christian religion in particular cannot exist without a supporting scripture, such is not the case.

Prior to the invention of the printing press religion as an integral part of the pattern of living was much more a function of word-of-mouth wisdom accumulated by a culture over the time of its existence. One might make the case that a more commonly shared and practiced set of harmonious beliefs flourished better in the absence of written precepts and rules.

Spiritual information shared verbally as opposed to written form meant that the information was shared experientially between individuals. One could further make the case that scripture is then a product of a culture’s experiential relationship with its god – a record of how the culture has come to interpret and create a consensual understanding of who God is and how God is experienced.

How Did the Bible Get It's Content

SECTION ONE Borg speaks of two viewpoints about who wrote the Bible. Literal fundamentalists tend to believe the Bible to be an inerrant and infallible collection of declarations of God to man. In DeMille’s film, The Ten Commandments, Moses watches in astonishment as a lightning like “finger of God” writes the commandments in Hebrew words on stone tablets.

Exercises

1. Is that how you believe the Bible came to be? Answer either (a ) or (b) below:

a. If so, describe the process for how subsequent Bible books not attributed to Moses were written. For example, how did God dictate His words to Isaiah, Jeremiah and the others?

b. If not, describe what it would take in terms of understanding the Bible’s origin in a way that makes the Bible sacred scripture.

2. Christian Liberals tend more to see the Bible as containing expressions of early Christians’ interpretation of their experience with God. Borg references the “Finger Pointing at the Moon” and an anecdote in which one of his students expressed the thought that if the Bible is a lens through which we see God then some people believe that the most important thing is to believe in the lens.

a. What is the concept being portrayed with these examples?

3. Part of the acceptance of the Bible as literal and inerrant is an inheritance from what common folks in the Middle Ages were taught by the Catholic priests. This was prior to the printing press when the Bible became more available to those who wanted to read it for themselves. Until the Bible became more available, the priesthood used the Bible as leverage, presenting it as literally true and inerrant and then citing passages from it to invoke fear, shame and guilt.

For those who had no Bible to read for themselves, the behavior of a self-serving priesthood to maintain control by such leverage was a primary tool of dominance. "God says in the Bible that such and such, so you'd better do what I say."

Those early pre-printing-press religious writers are known to have edited and altered what ultimately came to be the New Testament as we have it today. In some instances even today, the strongest fundamentalist literalists have little to say about this process of redaction that resulted in a scripture that contains only what those early Catholic scholars wanted us to know - doctrines and stories that supported Catholic theology and doctrine.

The formal canonizing (declaring sacred) of the recollected words and actions of Jesus and the letters of Paul and other writers did not occur until approximately 300 years after Jesus. That canonization is what became the Bible.

a. What do you think the criteria were at that time for including of writings into what became The New Testament?

b. We know that Constantine placed severe restrictions on who and what Jesus was and would become in formal Roman Catholic Christian doctrine. What concerns and priorities of the Roman Emperor and other civil authorities do you think had - if any - impact on what those earliest Catholic Christians included in The New Testament?

1  2  3  4  5