The trouble with Bible-Believers
The Trouble with Bible Believers...is that they don't....
The trouble with 'Bible believers' is that they don't. When people call themselves bible believers they far too often mean
A) a simplistic literalism, as though the gospels etc had a factual inerrancy far exceeding that we would give to any other written document [despite the obvious contradictions and discrepancies]--,
This is often combined with
B) adherence to a naive collage of biblical stories which takes little account of the different purposes or intentions of the source texts, and which often assumes extra biblical data, e.g. Jesus born in a STABLE?,
This usually results in C)
adherence to a theological/ethical standard called 'biblical' or 'evangelical' which must be adhered to, but which exists apart form and essentially superior to (in authority) the actual text of the bible. Somewhere the adherent has understood that this standard is biblical and has graced it with authority above what the bible actually says. The bible is then read, and quoted and interpreted to support this standard, to provide existential security.
This theological position is enslaved to rationalism. It is bound to equate 'truth' with literal historical happenings and reporting. Antagonistic to science, especially evolutionary theory, it is more rationalistic than many scientists.
True bible believers should act on the bible's implication. They would see the midrashic nature of the text. How it seeks to show He was greater than Moses. How the experience of God is the thing, not the historical detail. The story is trying to engender the experience, not to record biographical historical event.
We are so poor. We do not know God. So very little of our theological is of experience. 'Credo' means for us to believe in historical facts and certainties. This was not Credo in the beginning. Credo means-
I follow.
I give my life to.
I seek to find, I trust, I act on- perhaps in God's grace I will find.
Credo is about in-extinguishable hope and longing. It is something never satisfied by the Oh so cheap grace of verifiable facts which have so little content about the profundity of life. Credo faith seeks after that which is glimpsed, and sometimes more hoped for than glimpsed. Faith does not know, in the end. it believes by following. And sometimes it feels amid the sorrow that there is more than we now see.
The Bible and what I have found of life say to me, that people have met God. A Moses met 'I AM.' Jesus is presented as the way to that meeting. He is an incarnation of the same 'I AM'. I meet that God. The scripture points us to that experience. It critiques our experience. It challenges our poverty.
