I was a student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the mid-1980s as the Southern Baptist Convention had its war over the inerrancy of the Bible. People at the school who knew me, generally thought of me as someone who had friends, and talked with people on both sides. I tried hard to do that, even though I saw clearly that what the conservatives were doing was wrong. I think it was wrong academically and also wrong morally.
The current president of the seminary, R. Albert Mohler, was a student when I was there, and was on the moderate side of things. He became a conservative when he saw that as his path to the seminary presidency. I do not trust Al or have any respect for him whatsoever. I think he sold his soul. As one of our classmates said about him in a documentary, "Al Mohler is not a fundamentalist. Al Mohler is an opportunist."
The seminary went through a profound and dramatic change, and not for the better. I am retiring from teaching philosophy of religion and ethics at a community college in just about three weeks. I remember my supervisor came to me one time with a transcript for a potential adjunct faculty member and said, "See, this guy went to the same school you did. What do you think?" I said, "No, he did not go to the same school I did. Same name, same campus, but a vastly different school."
In 1985, when I transferred to the seminary after leaving Earlham School of Religion, a Quaker Seminary in Indiana, my mentor, D. Elton Trueblood told me he thought I was going to perhaps the best seminary in the world. I make a joke of this fact, I grew up Baptist, went to a Quaker seminary, transferred to a Baptist seminary, and became a Quaker pastor. The seminary, after I was there, went from being a world-class theological seminary to being a third-rate indoctrination mill. I do not think it is any better now than Luther Rice Seminary. I told my supervisor, when he showed me the file of the potential adjunct I mentioned above, that when I was there, the seminary was like Yale or Harvard, and now it is like Liberty University. It makes me grieve.
I grew up with a belief in biblical inerrancy, and part of the reason I took a year and a half off, and then transferred seminaries, is because learning to read scripture and interpret it, and realizing it is not inerrant, precipitated a real crisis of faith for me. It was without doubt the darkest and most painful time of my life. But I needed to go through this in order to see how flimsy my own faith was, and what I needed to do about it. It was one of the best things which ever happened to me.
When the topic of Scripture comes up in my Philosophy of Religion class, I do not permit Scripture quoting, at all, in student written work, because I realize that just because something is in the Bible, that does not insure its truth or accuracy. In fact we know there are historical inaccuracies in the Bible. One cannot get past the second page of the Bible without realizing this, as we see in this chart:
Now this was painful for me to realize. It called my entire faith into question, which is part of why, for any of my readers who may have known me at Earlham School of Religion, I left. It took me many months to figure out that I had placed my faith in a book, in a written word, instead of Christ, the Word of God. A faith based on a book is a house of cards. Pastors and teachers and churches have done a disservice to congregants by presenting this kind of faith. It is like the song we made fun of this kind of faith with, on the other side of this experience. "My hope is built on nothing less than Scofield's notes and Moody Press." That is sad but true, it is the kind of faith I grew up with, and it does not withhold intellectual scrutiny well. So churches set many of their youth up for disillusionment and that is lamentable.
Like I said, I don't even permit Scripture quotes when I teach Philosophy of Religion, because instead of looking at the philosophical arguments for God's existence, we could get into a spitting contest about whose verse trumps whose. Does my passage from the Book of Mormon trump your Old Testament quote? That cannot be answered philosophically because if you have book A which claims to be the Word of God, to the exclusion of other books, and book B, which makes the same claim, there is no intellectually credible way to adjudicate that dispute. The only way it can be done is by presupposing one's own view is right. I think presuppositional apologetics is a moral and intellectual disaster. That might be a future topic for this blog. But saying something is true because the Bible says so is like this:
People often ask me why I am so passionate about this? There are two reasons.
First, I do not want to contribute to people needlessly hanging on to a false idea of what the Bible is, longer than they need to. I love the Bible as much as anyone I know, and have spent as much time in it as anyone I know. I began reading Scripture intensively in 1974, and basically have not missed a day of Bible reading since, except maybe 2 or 3 days where I was really sick. I figure I am closing in on 18,000 days of Bible reading. But it was so freeing to get past what I had been taught so that I could see/hear what God was saying, with more comprehension. I wish that for others.
Second, I think this is a moral issue. I do not think the Bible only has historical inaccuracies, but moral ones too. I think there are times when they thought they knew what God was saying to them, I mean the biblical authors, but just like us, sometimes they got it right and sometimes they got it wrong. I think Jesus saw this clearly. In the Sermon on the Mount he says over and over, "You have heard that it was said...but now I say to you..." He knew much of what they thought God had revealed to them did not reflect the heart of God, and he had to set the record straight. I was taught in my fundamentalist, literalist upbringing that the Sermon on the Mount did not apply to Christians, it only applied to Jews who would live in Israel in a future millennium. Well, there is no millennium, and this way of handling the Sermon on the Mount amounts to giving people a pass to be unloving.
I do not think God ever commanded anyone to kill anyone. I do not think God ever wanted anyone plundered. I do not think God ever intended women to be subordinate to men in anything. I do not think God ever forced anyone to do anything against their will. I do not think God ever approved of the awful treatment all through history LGBTQ+ people have received. I think God made some of us that way, just like God made some of us with blue or brown eyes. I do not think God ever favored one nation above another. None of these are consistent with God being a God of love.
When I was a Quaker pastor in Iowa, in 1998, I interviewed with a group of United Methodist district superintendents about becoming a Methodist pastor. One of the superintendents, an impeccably dressed, handsome, dignified African-American man, took me to the story of Noah's sons and asked me what I thought about people using Genesis to justify the way his people had been treated--did the "curse of Ham" justify racism? I told him, first of all, I do not take that Genesis story literally. Secondly, St. Paul says Jesus, in his death, delivered us from the curse of the law--I think Jesus came to deliver us from all curses. He told me he liked my answer.
Biblical literalism leads straight to moral injustices like racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, nationalism, ableism. All of these and more have been "justified" with the selective use of Scripture by people who do not know how to handle Scripture. The founder of the Quakers, George Fox, tells a story of preaching somewhere and the church members were so upset at his message they took a huge pulpit Bible and hit him in the face with it until he bled. People still hit each other over the head with the Bible. Giving some people the Bible to weaponize is as dangerous as giving a toddler a hand grenade with the pin pulled.
People who put their faith in a book, instead of the one who the book is supposed to point us to, end up with a poor knowledge of both the book and the Word.
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