slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
The Lord is good to all,
and his compassion is over all that he has made...
The Lord watches over all who love him,
but all the wicked he will destroy. Psalm 145:8-9, 20
The last of these verses from Psalm 145 seems incompatible with some of those preceding it. Can God be good and compassionate to all and still destroy some? One of these must be wrong. But apparently that was not a problem for the psalmist who penned these verses.
I sometimes wonder if we modern people can ever fully appreciate the Bible, a suspicion I apply equally to the staunchest fundamentalist and the freest thinking liberal. Reading biblical texts less literally, liberals often think themselves able to embrace the text in ways unavailable to fundamentalists who insist on some literal meaning of the text. There may be some truth to this, but both liberals and conservatives are very much products of the modern, Enlightenment, scientific age.
All of share similar perspectives on notions of truth and veracity. While some fundamentalists might seem to be anti-science, the very notion that the Bible meant to provide a scientific or historic account of the cosmos' creation does not exist prior to the modern era. Science, logic, and rationality are the primary vehicles of truth in the modern world, and fundamentalists seek to make the Bible conform to those vehicles, thus requiring the texts to be accurate from a scientific standpoint.
More liberal Christians have charted a different course with regards to the truth of the Bible. But speaking more symbolically of truth does not free one of modern constraints. The God uncovered in the text still needs to abide by modern notions of rationality and logic. This entails deciding some texts are historical and others aren't; some texts should be read as actual events and others as symbolic interpretations that aren't true historically. Which is which gets measured against what we "know" to be true. And so thinks that "can't possibly have happened" are deemed metaphors, and the only miracle when Jesus feeds the multitudes is the miracle of sharing Jesus inspires the crowds to perform.
It seems to me that while we use very different approaches, both liberal and conservatives struggle to shoe-horn the biblical texts into the modern world. If some fundamentalists' insistence on the literal, historic and scientific truth of the text sometimes makes them look comical, some liberals' insistence that the text reveals some generic truth about the nature of divinity and spirituality - never mind the messy particularity of the text - looks less comical only to those who subscribe to such a view.
Good ole, pre-modern John Calvin sure knew what he was talking about when he said that we humans are remarkably productive factories for turning out idols. We keep insisting that god conform to our understandings, assumptions, and perceptions of truth. Whether liberal, conservative, or anywhere in between, I wonder if it wouldn't be incredibly helpful to wrestle with the notion that the Bible is a different sort of book that we think it to be.
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