Musings on the Daily Lectionary

My theological tradition, like many that came out of the Protestant Reformation, holds the Bible in very high regard. Its authority is above all others, and the Church's practices and beliefs are to be critiqued and reformed through the witness of Scripture. Not surprisingly, most of the big debates in my Presbyterian denomination are about what the Bible says, or more precisely, what it means.

Now some folks claim simply to take the Bible literally. But, contrary to the bumper sticker, that is virtually impossible to do. And so most everyone who takes the Bible seriously has some means for distilling meaning out of it. Some say that some parts trump other parts, as in New Testament trumping Old. Some simply choose to ignore parts that trouble them, or are at odds with what they hold dear. John Calvin, when he was wrestling with the Bible's ban on charging interest on loans, spoke of discerning an intent in the Law. He argued that the ban on interest was to keep the poor from being entrapped by the wealthy in the manner of the old "company store" that sold goods on credit and then trapped employees in a debt. But if loans with interest were instead used to help build factories that employed the poor, i.e. if a good was done via this interest, then the biblical ban need not be enforced.

Being theological descendants of Calvin, my denomination has wrestled with Scripture over the years, seeking to discern its intent. On occasions, we've had to revise what we thought we'd discerned. At various times in history we said that the Bible supported the institution of slavery and prohibited women from being pastors. Now we say the opposite, and both these cases serve as a reminder that discerning God's will is not always as easy or simply as we'd like.

Today's reading from Colossians is one of those that I am tempted to ignore. "Wives, be subject to your husbands... Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything." Most Christians that I know are appalled at modern manifestations of slavery. Many campaign to end it. So how do we deal with a Bible passage that seems to approve of slavery?

I believe that mature Christian faith must embrace two things which are often in tension. We must recognize that we cannot adequately know God and God's will for us on our own. We need God's self revelation. We need the Bible to point us to the God we cannot know by our own devices. But at the same time, we cannot mistake the Bible for God. It is a witness to God. It points us to God as no other witness can do. Yet it is a large and complex witness filtered through the cultural assumptions and expectations of those who wrote and compiled it. And we must always acknowledge the difficulty and effort involved in discerning what God says to us through this witness.

May God's Spirit guide all of us as we seek to know God better, and know God's will better, through the Bible.

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