Bible Questions
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Recently, I found myself in conversation with some people I did not know, nor did they know anything about me. They seemed to be kind and genuinely lovely people and began to speak of a time when they had visited a reproduction of Noah’s Ark and the Creation Museum. One turned to me and said, “You do know that men and the dinosaurs were on the earth at the same time—that’s why Noah had small dinosaurs on the ark.”
I sat there quietly, keeping my face a careful blank. I knew that to disagree could easily lead to a very uncomfortable and confrontational time, and this was neither the time nor place for that.
Later, when describing this time to a trusted friend, I said, “If I had disclosed my true thoughts, I am more than sure that these sweet people would be convinced that I am heading to hell and would likely have no problem telling me that.”
Sadly, they would not be the first ones. Many times, people (primarily men) have told me that if I didn’t repent and believe the way they believe, I would indeed be sent by God to the place of eternal conscious torment.
And so, my question: What do I have to believe and still be considered a Christian and thus, in that world, escape hell?
I fell in love with the Bible when I was 20 years old and have spent more than 50 years working to understand it. Out of respect for its God-breathed status, I spent years mastering biblical Hebrew and Greek, earning two advanced degrees in addition to the grounding in Anthropology from Rice University.
Yes, the Bible is true, but the more I know the truth, the less I know
I have learned this: the more I know, the less I know. My confident assurance when I was 20 that I had all the answers about God has slowly matured to healthy self-questioning about our abilities to fully understand a series of writings written in an entirely different time with radically different understandings of how the world works.
The Bible overflows with wondrous words, with stories of an uncivilized group of unruly, uneducated former slaves fighting for their freedom and seeking to create a society based on religious beliefs radically different from those around them.
Their stories offer glimpses of how those wandering tribes, later settled people, sought to make sense of their world. Readers may observe how they justified violence, cruelty to outsiders, and unbelievable mistreatment of women.
The beauty of the Psalms teaches us how to pray, to offer thanksgiving, and to find sorrow over our sins.
The prophetic writings, both in the Hebrew and Greek portions, call us out for favoring the rich while further oppressing the poor. Those writings, along with the Gospels, display for us the heart of God for the excluded, for the foreigner, for the sick and infirm. They show us what real forgiveness looks like, why grace is so difficult, and the power of self-sacrificing love to heal the world.
The Epistles display just how complicated it is to live fully as Jesus-followers and prepare us for the challenges ahead.
The Wisdom writings offer solid grounding for making good moral decisions.
The Bible is true, but it is not necessarily historically accurate
I believe the Bible is true. But that doesn't mean it is historical in the sense that it records verifiable historical events, nor does the truth of the Holy Scriptures make those words reliable scientific textbooks.
When we impose a 21st-century, white, US-centric, primarily male-generated mindset upon the Holy Scriptures, we do violence to the texts. Such an imposition shows a distinct lack of respect for the Bible.
The current emphasis on "inerrancy" or a "literal" interpretation of those holy words would leave the original writers scratching their heads in dismay.
The world was not created in six days, 6000 years ago, but the mysteries of our world show that it was created good by a good God.
Whales don't swallow people, but many of us know the dark night of the soul and the profound heart change that accompanies those painful times.
The story of Noah, one of the most troubling depictions of God in the entire Bible, shows how sin always destroys. We may learn from it that decisions to abandon goodness and light will inevitably and indelibly taint our souls and bring the world down. But it is not a nice children’s story.
We all get to choose how we will handle the Bible. We can ignore it, cherry-pick it, manipulate it to hurt others or to justify our prejudices, or let it be what it is with an acute awareness that we see through a mirror dimly.
Translator bias is all over the Bible
What many read and say is "inspired" and "inerrant" has a massive distance from the original writings, none of which exist today. We have only copies of copies—and these copies were done by hand, subject to much human error.
Every punctuation mark and paragraph break is an editorial choice, added later. Chapter and verse numbers, also added much later, interrupt the flow of thought, making it difficult to capture the original intent.
Chapter headings, inserted in many translations, are nowhere to be found in the authenticated manuscripts. The uninspired translators added them.
If you think that my passionate pursuit to read, to study, to understand the Scriptures as the writers intended and as the original hearers would have understood them is problematic and disqualifying to my eternal home in heaven, so be it.
But I suggest that an insistence that the Bible be distorted to read as though it were written to 21st-century readers does not honor those sacred words. Instead, it proclaims that we are too lazy to do the hard work necessary to handle the word of God rightly.
Christy Thomas
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Author and columnist, the Rev. Dr. Christy Thomas is a retired clergy member of the former North Texas Annual Conference, now Horizon Texas, of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished with permission from her Substack blog, "Pondering Life, Old Age, and a Crazy World."