"The Common Sense Version of the Bible"

By Dr. Mickey Anders

South Elkhorn Christian Church

Lexington, Kentucky

May 10, 2009

Text: 2 Peter 1:20-21  "First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God."

Two old friends met one day after many years. One attended college, and now was very successful. The other never had much ambition and had never attended college.

The college graduate asked his friend, "How has everything been going with you?"

The man with little ambition replied, "Well, I have had a run of good fortune.  One day I opened the Bible at random, and dropped my finger on a word, and the word was 'oil.'  So, I invested in oil, and boy, did the oil wells gush. I made a ton of money in oil.  Then another day I dropped my finger on another word in the Bible and it was 'gold.'  So, I invested in gold, and the price of gold went through the roof!  Now, I've got more money than I know what to do with. "

The college graduate was so impressed that he rushed to his hotel, grabbed a Gideon Bible, flipped it open, and dropped his finger on a page. He opened his eyes, and his finger rested on the words, "Chapter Eleven." 

How we handle the Bible makes a difference!  In the hands of some people the Bible can be a dangerous book.  Wrong interpretations have cursed many generations.  Well-meaning people used the Bible to defend slavery, to reinforce racism, to support Germany's Nazi regime, to oppose Galileo, and to prop up the witch trials of Salem.  Make no mistake about it; there are right interpretations of the Bible and wrong ones.  How we handle the Bible does make a difference!

We all approach the Bible according to our abilities and training, and those change over time.  The psychologists will tell us that the mental abilities of humans change with maturity.  Children will understand a story one way, teenagers another, and adults still another way.  Children do not have the ability to think abstractly.  They have difficulty understanding metaphors and general principles.  They have difficulty reading between the lines or understanding the deeper meanings.  Children approach the Bible the same way.  They love the stories, but they see them as flat.  It is difficult for them to draw conclusions from them or even to apply the broader principles to life.    I want to suggest that their attitude can be described as "pre-critical." 

When children reach their teenage years, their brains develop so that they can understand the deeper meanings of things.  Now they can understand similarities and comparisons.  They can read the deeper meanings.  They begin to analyze stories and apply critical thinking to them.  They have learned in school about scientific principles, and they want to know if something is scientifically possible or not.  They will ask if the things they have been told are true or not.  Does the tooth fairy really exist?

They do the same with their faith.  They will ask if the things they have been told are true or not.  Older teenagers will typically begin to question authority.  At some point, they may reject parts or all of what they have been taught.  I think it is a process of making it their own.  One should not live life based on other people's ideas and convictions.  They have to be assimilated.  I want to suggest that this stage can be described as "critical," as in "critical thinking."

As adults mature, they sometimes move to another stage.  In this stage, they become less concerned about whether a story actually happened or not. They are more concerned with the point.  They appreciate the value of non-fiction and fiction.  At this stage, the adult may even appreciate poetry more than prose.  They may like the factual stories reported in the newspaper, but they may enjoy the editorial pages even more.  I want to suggest that this stage can be described as "post-critical."

These developmental stages are often seen in the attitudes people have toward the Bible.  At the pre-critical stage, the stories are just taken at face value and without questions.  The Bible is what it is; says what it means, and means what it says.  If the Bible says that Jonah was swallowed by a big fish, and three days later was spit out on land, then that is exactly what happened.  They never question the miracles of God. 

In one church I served, there was an 81-year-old lady who represented this stage better than anyone I ever met.  She never questioned the Bible.  She never wondered whether a miracle happened or not.  She never struggled with the Bible because she never saw an inconsistency or a problem.  The Bible said it; she accepted it.

Other people will look at that story of Jonah with a critical eye. Some begin to wonder about the science behind the story.  They know that spending three days in the digestive tract of a large fish would mean certain death.  They know sharks certainly eat people, but nobody could survive being eaten by a shark.  Why didn't Jonah drown when he was dragged under the water?  They can't see how Jonah survived.  They calculate the odds of something like this happening, and they begin to wonder if the story is factual.  Suddenly they are disturbed about their conclusions.  Is someone deceiving them?  If the story didn't happen as told, then why believe anything found in the Bible?  Sometimes such critical thinking leads people to reject the faith altogether. 

Others use similar critical thinking to defend the factuality of the Bible at all costs.  They use, or misuse, science to prove that digestive fluids would not necessarily kill a person in three days.  They measure the insides of large fish to prove it could happen.  For them, science must be rallied to prove the veracity of the Bible.  And if science indeed cannot prove the miracle, then they attack science itself.  They will show that scientists have been wrong about the impact of digestive fluids.  All scientists do not agree on the subject.  In fact, there are scientists who support the possibility than a man could survive three days in the belly of a fish.  Their faith in the Bible depends on proving that this event actually happened.

But there are others who are at a post-critical stage.  At one point they also questioned the factuality of the story.  They know that scientifically it is unlikely that Jonah would survive three days in the digestive tract of a fish.  They also know that God has miraculous powers and could make a man survive a month in the belly of a fish if desired.  But these people realize that the point of the story has nothing to do with whether Jonah was swallowed by a fish or not.  The story was not told in order to prove God's power to do the miraculous. The story was told in order to enforce the idea of a forgiving and gracious God who was kind to the people of Ninevah because they repented of their sins and turned to God.  They even see themselves in the actions of Jonah who sat under a bush and pouted when God didn't punish the people of Ninevah as he had proclaimed.  These people have moved to a "post-critical" position where the factuality of the story has little to do with its meaning.  They are not willing to fight over whether it happened or not because they have understood the story's broader purpose.

I see in these three developmental stages a profound parallel to the history of Biblical interpretation.  Before the age of Enlightenment and the rise of the scientific method, nobody argued about whether the miracles happened or not.  It was just not an issue.  The stories were what they were, and their factuality was never doubted or considered.  Whatever the Bible said was simply accepted without question.  It was a pre-critical time.

The founders of the Disciples movement lived primarily in the pre-critical period.  Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell argued against the traditions and opinions of men.  They felt that layer upon layer of human interpretation, creedal statements and denominational arguments had made it difficult for men and women to see the plain meaning of the Bible.  But they did not struggle with the arguments about factuality of the stories.

They both argued for a common sense approach to the Bible.  Barton Stone once said, "Jesus Christ.. is our only law-giver. His laws are simple, plain and easy to be understood" (Address 1551).

Our founders believed that a simple, plain reading of the Bible by the common person using common sense would lead to a clear and uniform understanding of the Bible.  Using such a method, everyone would discover the constitution of the New Testament Church, and all would disavow denominations and party spirits, and unite in one glorious Church.   Unfortunately, the task did not prove to be a simple as they had suggested.

And part of the reason was the rise of critical thought.  After the rise of science, people began to examine the Bible with different, more critical, eyes.  Shortly after our founders lived, there arose a new understanding of the Bible.  Beginning in Germany and soon spreading to the whole world, the movement came to be known by the phrase, "higher critical method."  In this new approach, the Bible would be studied like any other book and analyzed historically and scientifically. 

Using higher criticism, such scholars concluded that Moses did not write the Pentateuch; that Ezra did not write Ezra, Chronicles or Nehemiah; Jeremiah did not write the books of Kings or the Lamentations; David only wrote a few of the Psalms; Solomon did not write the Song of Solomon or Ecclesiastes and only a few Proverbs; and Isaiah did not write half of the book of Isaiah.  A commitment to modern science called into question the scientific validity of many of the miracles in the Bible.  Some saw science as an ally; others saw it as an enemy.  Christians became consumed with proving or disproving the factuality of the Bible. 

Suddenly the pre-critical view of the Bible was called into question.  Some concluded that the Bible is full of errors and therefore could not be trusted at all.  Some did and do give up the faith because they have examined the Bible scientifically and concluded that it has little merit. 

Others staunchly defended the Bible against higher criticism by condemning any who believed in it.  They resorted to archaeology and science itself to defend the historical accuracy and scientific veracity of the Bible.  They insisted that the Bible was infallible and inerrant, and they set out to prove it with a vengeance.

Seminaries wrangled over this issue.  Even Lexington Theological Seminary, then known as the College of the Bible, had a major conflict over this issue in the early 1900s.  Denominations split.  In fact, this controversy lies at the heart of our own movement's division in to three parts.  Scholars, preachers, and laity alike chose sides and were willing to fight to the end to defend their views of the Bible.

Beginning seminary students were often shocked to learn about First and Second Isaiah when they had only ever studied Isaiah in Sunday School.  But by the time they were graduated, they had become thoroughly familiar with and accepting of the conclusions of Higher Criticism.  Most however had no clue how to communicate such complex and potentially controversial ideas to the people in the pew.  So there arose a gap between the understandings of the seminary-trained pastors and the people in the pew.

But recently, some Christians have decided not to fight that battle.  They have moved to the post-critical stage.  Some believe that science and faith ask entirely different questions.  Science may ask, "How?"  But faith asks, "By whom?  And for whom? Why?" - questions that science could not possibly answer.

In this approach, one can learn the methods and conclusions of higher criticism and still cling to the simple message of the Bible.  These people concluded that it didn't really matter whether Moses wrote all of the first five books of the Bible.  In fact, they realized that it was helpful to see that the stories of several authors were woven together into one unified whole.  They saw the conclusions of higher criticism as helpful to a better understanding of the Bible rather than a threat to it.

They realized that it didn't matter if 2 Corinthians was really a compilation of several of Paul's letters to Corinth.  It didn't matter that the death of Judas was described in two different manners in different books of the Bible.  It didn't matter if Paul did not really write the Pastoral Epistles.  It didn't matter if Luke included much of Mark in his Gospel and edited it intentionally, adding other stories, and weaving into a gospel with a very different slant on Jesus.   The conclusions of higher criticism helped to understand how the Bible came to be, and often gave a deeper understanding of what was there, but they did not really affect the simple, common sense meaning of the Bible.

I believe the folks in this post-critical stage can once again reclaim from our founders the common sense version of the Bible.  We need to understand what the scholars say about the Bible, but almost always their conclusions do not affect the point of the text.  We should not put our heads in the sand and ignore the findings of the scholars.  We don't have to argue with their findings.  We don't have to rally science to try to disprove them.  Our faith  operates at a different level than that.  Faith helps us to find the meaning of the text, not the science of it.  Once again, there are those of us who can commend the plain meaning of the Bible.  We sense a deep value in the common sense approach of Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell.