If the Bible Has Mistakes and Contradictions, How Do I Know What to Believe?

Here are the questions from Banned Questions about the Bible that are mentioned in the discussion:

• Can I be a Christian if I don’t believe the Bible is perfect, handed down directly from God to humanity without error? [p. 2-8]
• If I don’t believe every word of the Bible is literally true, how do I know what to consider in context and what to set aside? [p. 101-105]

There are several ways to jump into this question. Before we go to the responses in Banned Questions…, let’s consider the argument that it could be our interpretation or perspective that has mistakes or contradictions rather than the Bible. Dave Retherford mentioned a couple of folks who might argue for this in his comments to our previous question: Lee Strobel, who has written a number of books on the case for Christ/God/faith, and Timothy Keller, an author and pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City (see the comments in How Do Inerrancies, Mistakes, and Contradictions Co-exist in the Bible?). 

In a sermon Dave referenced, Timothy Keller suggests three things to consider when you come across a passage in the Bible that troubles you:

1. The passage doesn’t teach what you think it teaches.
2. You are misunderstanding what the Bible is teaching because of your own cultural blinders.
3. You are viewing the Biblical text with an unexamined superiority of your culture. If the Bible is the word from God and not from the culture in which it was written, then won’t it, at some time or another, offend every culture?

Keller contends that not only is it necessary to see the Bible as the all-authoritative word of God, but that the only way to read the Bible is to submit to it in order to have a personal relationship with God. There are some – and I’m not saying Keller falls into this camp – who take this a step further and insist that their particular interpretation of the Bible is authoritative and any questioning of that interpretation is denying God. I think they’re trying to shift the veil of “authoritative” from God to themselves and their particular interpretation of the Bible, but that’s a whole other discussion we’ll jump into next week. 

Can you wrestle with passages in the Bible without undermining its authority or threatening your relationship with God? If you have trouble with a particular passage, does faith come in brushing aside your questions and accepting the text as is or in laying out your questions and trusting that God will respond? Is every word or passage in the Bible literally true or are there passages that were never meant to be taken literally? 

Can you take the Bible – not to mention your faith and calling as a disciple of Christ – seriously if you don’t believe every word of the Bible is literally true? While some argue, “No, you can’t”, others would agree with Rebecca Bowman Woods’ comment:

“Reading the Bible critically – acknowledging your questions about the text – doesn’t mean you’re criticizing God. After all, God gave us the gift of intellect and the capacity to learn. Would God expect us to put these aside when approaching the Bible?” [p. 103]

In bringing our questions out into the open, we may find that we are indeed wrestling with dueling interpretations rather than with God. We may find that we need to refocus our interpretation more in line with God. Or we may find that we’re joining in a debate that has spanned time and cultures and we are drawn into the larger community of interpreters of the Bible. 

The danger in not accepting every passage in the Bible as true and authoritative is that we can fall into the trap of picking and choosing what we feel comfortable with or what we want to use to justify what we already believe or are doing. Of course, the same argument also applies to those who interpret the Bible literally because I haven’t encountered anyone who is successfully following every passage in the Bible literally.

How do we know what passages in the Bible need to be considered literally or in context and what passages have lesser weight? Gary Peluso-Verdend recommends having a “circle of interpreters” to help us wrestle with the Bible [p. 101]. I’ve certainly benefited from having a group of people at Grace willing to share thoughts and questions. 

Nadia Bolz-Weber sees Christ as the central message of the Bible and the lens through which we should read the Bible. Jose Morales adds the Exodus to the Bible's core message. Bolz-Weber writes that “the parts of the Bible that do not hold up against the gospel simply do not have the same authority.” [p. 102]

Whether “inspired by God” means that God dictated scripture without error or that God allowed humanity to enter into the scripture, we shouldn’t discount the inspiration of God in our encounters those passages today. God was active in the lives of those who related or wrote down the accounts of the Bible. That experience of God was very real in their lives. It can be just as real when we’re reading those accounts today. Joshua Toulouse writes:

“God is also inspiring those of us who hear or read scripture today. With this understanding, God is kept alive in scripture, in that scripture can speak to us in new ways and on different levels now as opposed to when it was written.” [p. 6]

That's a lot of questions to chew on. Do you think it’s possible to take the Bible seriously without accepting every passage as the literal truth? What passages do you wrestle with most? How do you go about interpreting the Bible? Who or what is in your circle of interpreters?

I look forward to the conversation in the comments below!