Scripture vs the Word of God

I've been thinking lately about what scripture is, and how its role in my life has changed over the past few years. I came across a passage about Jesus' twelve disciples in another book I'm reading (I'll get to it in a minute) that made me realize that my personal view of what scripture is is probably not unique, and there are likely plenty of other people out there that see it the same way I do. So I'm going to try to put this into words and maybe it will be a useful new perspective to someone out there.

First of all, the word "scripture" comes with a whole lot of baggage. Just read some of Daymon Smith's work, about how a thing can become its label in people's perception until what it actually is becomes largely irrelevant, and you will go cross-eyed trying to sort out labels from reality. When we call something "scripture", we generally mean it is the "word of God", which implies a particular degree of truthfulness, as well as an obligation on the part of its believers to honor its teachings in certain ways.


But is our "scripture" actually the word of God? (Note: I don't want to start a discussion on the authorship of the Bible; I am just taking the Bible's own words at face value.) If the Bible was actually God's words, then at the very least, it would be written from the point of view of God, written in the first person as dictated to men. Instead, almost all of the Bible is clearly the words of men - and I say that because either the author of each book claims his own words, as in Jeremiah 1:1 or 1 Corinthians 1:1, or the words purported to be from God are written in the third person, as in Joshua 1:1 or for example, all the words of Jesus in the New Testament as reported by his disciples, or the text is either general history or philosophy that could have been spoken or written by almost anyone. In my mind, the topic worth discussing is not whether the Bible is the actual word of God, because it itself doesn't even claim to be, but to what extent the Bible - as written by men - represents the mind and will of God. That is a question worth asking and investigating.

We Christians have a tendency to assume that just because something is written in our canon of Scripture, it is truthful, accurate, useful, etc., and therefore we have a responsibility to obey, honor, preach, etc. However, most of us also accept the tenet that all men are fallible. Certainly the Bible documents lots of mistakes made by prophets and religious leaders (Moses, Balaam, Peter, to name a few). Isn't that why Jesus was crucified? Mormons have a harder time because they believe the Book of Mormon is somehow even "more true" than the Bible, but what about King Benjamin teaching his people to force their children to keep the commandments, or Captain Moroni executing his political opponents?

Which brings me to what I read yesterday, from A Course in Miracles:

The message of the crucifixion is perfectly clear: 'Teach only love, for that is what you are.' If you interpret the crucifixion in any other way, you are using it as a weapon for assault rather than as the call for peace for which it was intended. The Apostles often misunderstood it, and for the same reason that anyone misunderstands it. Their own imperfect love made them vulnerable to projection, and out of their own fear they spoke of the 'wrath of God' as his retaliatory weapon. Nor could they speak of the crucifixion entirely without anger, because their sense of guilt had made them angry. These are some of the examples of upside-down thinking in the New Testament, although its gospel is really only the message of love.

This is when I realized that I am not alone in how I read the scriptures. I still love them, but I understand them differently than I used to. If someone else can read the New Testament and understand that it is not the direct, unfiltered words Jesus spoke, but someone's edited account of what they witnessed Jesus say and do, filtered through their own understanding of what Jesus meant by it.

It's not even that you have to take the scriptures with a grain of salt; it's that you have to recognize them as men's attempts to document their spiritual journeys, and you have to consider the result of each journey in order to get any use out of the narrator's preaching about how to go about it. The context affects the meaning and application of every story.

Here's a simpler explanation: suppose you want to lose a lot of weight and so you are reading a book on weight loss that contains the stories, techniques, and advice of several people who claimed to have lost weight. Would you accept all the information in the book at face value without discrimination? If you got to the end of the book, and then learned that some of the contributors had lost only 10 pounds overall, while others had lost 100+ pounds, would that not affect how you perceived the information in the book? Wouldn't you prioritize the information differently? Maybe you would even reread the sections written by the less successful people and file that information away as techniques to avoid in your own weight loss journey.

The same goes for the spiritual writings contained in the scriptures. Personally, I think that by adding this layer of understanding makes the scriptures more useful to my own spiritual journey, not less so.

(On a side note, A Course in Miracles is an amazing book - I hope to write more about it later. It seems hardly fair that I just pulled out one random segment to share today that doesn't even contain much useful insight, when there is so much else to think about in the book. I'll have to come back to it later!)