Letter to a progressive Christian: Why you need to believe in an infallible Bible
Imagine a young man meets a woman on a dating website. He sees her picture and is infatuated, but upon meeting her things don’t go well. She says she doesn’t like baseball, but the man does, so he insists that she does too. She says she prefers nights in, but the man is convinced that she actually wants to go bowling, his favorite hobby. In short, the man won’t listen to her, but is emphatic that he loves her. What’s wrong with this scenario? There are a couple problems here and one is that the man isn’t in love with who the woman really is. He’s in love with a figment of his imagination. He’s picturing her, but with all of his own tastes projected onto her. He doesn’t want her; he wants a woman made in his own image which means that he’s actually just in love with himself.
In a relationship, this is not only unloving (as the man refuses to listen to the woman and rejects who she really is), but delusional. In the Bible when someone does this with God it’s called idolatry, but idolatry is not something that happened only in a bygone era. You can easily do this today by rejecting the parts of the Bible that you don’t like, or believing God is one way simply because you want him to be so. If God does things, speaks, and commands what you don’t like, then this can be negated by claiming those parts of the Bible aren’t inspired or ignoring them altogether. How many people today claim to be Christians, yet reject what the Bible says about sexuality, marriage, and headship with the assertion, “That was just Paul.” Or how many refuse to acknowledge that God actually commanded Israel to destroy all the people living in Canaan, and was just in his command, instead believing that Israel chose to commit genocide and later put words into God’s mouth in scripture to justify their actions?
If you do this with these, or any other parts of scripture that don’t sit well with modern readers, what you end up with is a god who only acts in the ways you want him to act, who speaks in the ways you want him to speak, and whose ethical commands match your own ethics. Hard parts of scripture never have to be wrestled with in a way that makes you study more or challenge your preconceived notions. Instead, chunks of scripture can easily be dismissed as uninspired. Your “faith” never calls you to believe differently, or even to seriously repent of lifestyle choices, because you already have a god who now approves of everything you believe and do.
Yet what you’ve done is to re-make God in your own image. You aren’t in love with God as he has declared himself to be, but like the delusional and unloving man, you love only a figment of your imagination, one that looks just like you. This is why what you believe cannot seriously be called faith. Faith requires you to look to and trust in someone other than yourself. In short, you’re an idolator. Church father Augustine stated it well when he said, “If you believe what you like in the gospel and reject what you don’t, it’s not the gospel you believe in but yourself.”
It should be noted that this is not a modern phenomenon. This was and remains the heart of idolatry, which is as old as sin. People didn’t want God for who he really is. They may have wanted some of his benefits (material blessings, eternal salvation), but they didn’t want a God who would actually challenge them or expect them to live one way and not another. They wanted to be their own gods who decided for themselves how to live. We can read examples in the Old Testament people of God, such as in the book of Jeremiah. In Jeremiah’s day the people liked to cry “The temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.” They thought that because they alone, out of all the nations on the Earth, had the LORD’s temple that judgment would never befall them. They were right in one respect. God hadn’t covenanted with other nations. They alone knew God and the right way of worship. They alone had God’s word and promises. They had the covenant signs. They were uniquely blessed in ways that no other nation was.
But they wrongly believed that their covenant status as God’s chosen people didn’t include covenant obligations for how they should live. They liked what they read in scripture about God’s blessings & salvation and completely ignored the parts of scripture with ethical commands. They wanted God to be like a buffet, where they could have all the mercy they want and just pass by his holiness.
If one rejects the inspiration of scripture, but still wants to claim to be a Christian, now you’re left with an epistemological dilemma. How can you possibly know what parts of the Bible are inspired and to be believed and obeyed, and which parts can be dismissed? Every solution will be to place yourself or other people over and in the place of God. You may read a hard passage and think, “Surely Jesus wouldn’t have said this,” but where does this intuition come from, other than your own heart wanting to judge the Jesus of the Bible on the basis of what you’d like to think that he’s like? How can you know what Jesus is like if you don’t have an infallible Bible? You’re back to deciding for yourself when and how Jesus speaks and left with a deity made in your own image. You get to be the arbiter who decides what God is like.
In 2 Peter 1:20-21 we read, “knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” 2 Peter was written in response to false teachers who denied the second coming of Christ, which was then used to justify licentious living (e.g. If there is no 2nd coming, then there is no judgment day. If there is no judgment day, why not indulge in sin?) It could not be denied that the Bible says a lot about “judgment day” and the “Day of the LORD.” It seems that the false teachers were getting around this by claiming, “That’s just their own interpretation. Maybe these prophets had some experience of a dream or vision, but then they just went and wrote down what they thought it meant” This 2,000-year-old objection is remarkably similar to how people today dismiss New Testament ethics with, “That was just Paul’s opinion.”
We should ask the question, what was Jesus’ view of scripture? This is important because to be a Christian is to be a disciple of Christ. His views on any number of topics (Jesus’ view of marriage, salvation, heaven & hell, etc.) must be our view. Jesus’ view of scripture must be our view of scripture. If we believe Jesus is wrong, then at whatever point we depart, we’re no longer his disciples, that is, Christians.
In Matthew 19 Jesus was asked a question concerning his view on divorce. We read, “And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?"
He answered, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:3-6).
In his answer Jesus directs the Pharisees back to scripture and he quotes to them Genesis 2. This first demonstrates Jesus’ view that the creation design of Genesis 2 is normative for us today and ought to be our ethical standard. If we would be his disciples, then we must also hold to Jesus’ belief that marriage is between one man and one woman.
Second, it’s notable that what Jesus quotes in verse 5, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” didn’t come from the mouth of God. In Genesis 2 it’s not prefaced with, “And God said.” It’s from the pen of Moses giving his own interpretation and ethical application of the creation account. Yet when Jesus quotes it, he attributes the words to God. “Have you not read that he who created them said?” Jesus’ view of the Bible is not that this was merely Moses’ opinion, but that what Moses wrote should be considered the word of God.
This is why Peter writes what he does. His view is Jesus’ view of the Bible, that it doesn’t contain the fallible opinions of men that can be dismissed, but that it’s God’s authoritative word. If you would be a follower of Christ, then that needs to be your view of the Bible too. You can’t say “I’m a Christian, but I have a different view of the Bible.” To be a Christian means you follow Christ, including his views, his doctrines, his ethics, and his calling on your life. That’s why Peter writes, “knowing this first of all.” When engaging with what is right and wrong, what we are called to believe, and how we are called to live, we have to begin with the foundation that scripture is the authoritative word of God.
Paul writes to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 14:37-38, “If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. 38 If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized.” Why does Paul say that if you’re spiritual (that is, if you have the Holy Spirit) then you should recognize Paul’s writings as Christ’s? Because Jesus said “My sheep hear my voice.” True prophets don’t give their own interpretation. Apostles didn’t give their opinions. They spoke the words of Christ and those who belong to Christ recognize it as his words.
So what does true love of God require? Even though there are parts of the Bible that are hard and ethics that run counter to our culture, love requires us to take God at his word, which begins by accepting whom he has declared himself to be. Acknowledging God as God then means that we must agree with whatever he declares to be right and reject whatever he says is wrong. It’s only when we love God for who he is, and not who we want him to be, that we actually love God.
James Norris is the Pastor of New Hope Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Abbeville, SC.
