04-11-24

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
April 11, 2024
I am really excited for Dr. Warren Carter’s visit to Cypress Creek Christian Church this weekend. His time with us all started with a conversation I had with Terry Ewing, a staff member at Phillips Theological Seminary and longtime friend. We were having lunch, and I echoed a frustration I heard from many within our church family, specifically how one talks about scripture in an honest and thoughtful way when confronted by those who say things like, “I just believe in the Bible.” I believe churches like Cypress Creek have not always provided tools to their people for the purpose of articulating and engaging conversation on the topic of scripture, especially a life-giving approach to scripture that doesn’t necessarily take it literally.

In 2nd Timothy 3:16-17, we read:

Every scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for showing mistakes, for correcting, and for training character, so that the person who belongs to God can be equipped to do everything that is good.

​The word that often grabs people’s attention is the word 'inspired', as it has been interpreted to mean all kinds of things, but mostly a very strongly held literal approach to scripture. The word we translate as “inspired by God” is θεόπνευστος in the Greek, a word that the author probably coined as it does not appear in other Greek literature before this use. The two words you find in that one Greek word are: theo (God) and pnéō (breath out). In the second word, you might see the prefix of the word pneumonia. What I think is important is that the word was never intended to bring about what we would describe as Fundamentalism, which was born in the 19th century. This is where we get the notion of inerrancy (the Bible having no errors) and thus should be read literally, believing that every word was given by God.

But at the time 2 Timothy was written, the only Bible that existed were the Jewish scriptures, or what we might refer to as the Old Testament. Within those texts, we find two specific passages where God’s breath gave life—Genesis 2, where God breathed into the nostril of the Adam (the first person), and in Ezekiel 37, where we find God’s breath bringing the valley of dry bones to life. 

I tend to believe that 2nd Timothy was never intended to create some sort of restrictive system of understanding scripture, but to suggest that the stories of faith have the capacity to shape and equip us for the good work to which we have been called. There is life found in scripture, and I would even go as far as saying that the demands of Fundamentalism, including inerrancy, have sucked the life-giving power out of Scripture, leaving them brittle and lifeless. 

The stories of the faithful, specifically those who walked alongside Jesus and those who tried to implement his message of love, mercy, and kindness, both successfully and not so successfully, offer us a starting place for prayerful exploration, discussion, and life-giving inspiration for our own work of seeking to Put Love First (alongside mercy and kindness). From poetry to parables, from history to hyperbole, from wisdom to the whimsical, the Bible's life-giving power is unleashed when we detach it from a rather recent construct called inerrancy, a construct that has sadly constricted scripture.

This is all to say that I look forward to Dr. Carter’s visit and his ability to provide us with more tools for how we understand and speak about the Bible.

I love the words of scripture, and I love your Living Word, O God. Allow my life to be a joyful dance in which I explore and engage scripture for the purpose of growing in my knowledge of your love and my capacity to share love. Amen.