What do a prominent TV evangelist and an outspoken atheistic scientist have in common? I’m going to guess that very few of you would answer: Their understanding of the Bible.
Let me explain: Back in 2010, Haiti suffered a severe earthquake. Homes and infrastructure were devastated and approximately 160,000 people died, making it, as of 2022, the deadliest natural disaster of the century for a single country That quake led to long term challenges due to the poverty and political instability of the nation as well as subsequent natural disasters; as late as 2017 some 2.5 million people were still in need of humanitarian aid.
Shortly after the earthquake, American televangelist Pat Robertson claimed that the quake had been divine punishment: God’s vengeance on the people of Haiti for making “a pact with the devil.” He was referring to the practice of voodoo.
Many prominent Christians quickly, and, I believe, rightly condemned Robertson’s statements. Among other things, they pointed to the many passages of scripture that describe God’s compassion and Jesus’ teachings that we should not interpret suffering as punishment from God.
But a surprising voice rose to defend Robertson: biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins wrote, “Loathsome as Robertson’s views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition. … It is the obnoxious Pat Robertson who is the true Christian here.” Dawkins pointed to the stories of the Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and suggested that Robertson took his Bible seriously while the pastors and theologians who criticized him were ignoring the plain, obvious message of their own scriptures.
You see, both Robertson and Dawkins believe the Bible must be literally true or it cannot be true at all. Dawkins, believing there is no God and seeing places where the Bible is not historically or scientifically accurate, thus sees the Bible as a collection of useless, archaic superstition and fiction. Robertson, believing there is a God who is revealed in Jesus, thus feels the Bible must be true in every detail. Both men believe that if the Bible is not historically or scientifically accurate, if it is not literally factual, it cannot be true and Christianity cannot be true.
But the Bible is not a history or science book and truth is far deeper than historical or scientific fact. Our reading from 2 Timothy contains, in verse 16, the famous statement that “all scripture is inspired by God,” more literally, “all scripture is God-breathed.” This is often taken as proof of the infallibility of scripture, evidence that scripture is literally true, and completely trustworthy because God dictated the words that appear on the page. But that’s not what this passage says.
First, the Greek of verse 16 can be translated in three equally probable and equally justifiable ways. Tom Long summarizes these as follows:
“Is the saying, ‘all Scripture is inspired and is useful’, or is he saying ‘taken as a whole, Scripture is inspired’ (thus placing the emphasis on the core truth of Scripture rather than specific texts, sentences, and words), or is he saying, ‘every Scripture that is inspired is useful ”.
Long leans toward the third possibility as the most likely intended reading because the letter was clearly written in part to respond to false teachers who were leading the congregation astray and must surely have had written documents which they referred to as “scripture” but which departed from the Gospel as presented by Paul.
From the perspective of contemporary 21st century interpretation, I believe that the emphasis of the second reading on the core truths of Scripture is the most useful reading for guiding our interpretive efforts. In Pauline terms, this approach puts the emphasis on the “spirit” rather than the “letter” of the text.
Second, it is not clear what books the author and his original audience considered to be Scripture. The early church largely used the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament, which includes several books not recognized by Jews as having scriptural status. Today, Catholic and some Orthodox Bibles follow the list and order of books in the Septuagint, while Protestant Bibles reflect Martin Luther’s decision to include only those books recognized by Jews.
Further, the New Testament had not yet been canonized when 1 and 2 Timothy were written. Even where we can be sure of authorship, we do not know the exact dates of the writing of any of the NT texts. The authentic letters of Paul were written in mid-first century; the Gospels and other books were written later with a few perhaps being penned as late as 110 to 120. Most NT texts were written to specific congregations or groups of congregations and so would have been first read there before being gradually disseminated to other churches in other regions. Over time a consensus developed as to the authority of certain early Christian writings. Some books, like Hebrews and Revelation, were in dispute deep into the second century, while others—like the four Gospels and the letters of Paul—gained wide acceptance much earlier.
The Muratorian Fragment, also known as the Muratorian Canon, dates from the late 2nd century and gives us a glimpse of the progress of this process. It lists four Gospels (Luke and John are specifically mentioned, but the names of the first two Gospels are missing due to damage to the document), Acts, 13 letters of Paul, two Letters of John and Revelation as scripture. But it also includes the Wisdom of Soloman and lists the Apocalypse of Peter as accepted by some by not by others. It does not even mention Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, and one of the Letters of John (it’s not clear which one). The earliest document we possess which mentions exactly the 27 book canon of the New Testament which we know today, with no exclusions or additions, is an Easter Letter written Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, in the year 367.
Thus, it is not at all clear which books the author of 2 Timothy refers to when he speaks of “scripture.”
This brings us to the most important point: what the author actually says about Scripture. His focus is not on origin or definition, but on the purpose of Scripture.
Notice what follows those famous words: 16All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
Lewis Donelson notes that being equipped to do God’s work is a major theme of the author of 2 Timothy. Thus, our reading is not espousing a particular doctrine or theory of the inspiration of Scripture. Instead, its arguing for the use of scripture as a tool to teach the faith and shape how Christians live. To underscore this point, Tom Long offers a contemporary restatement of verse 16: “Since we all know that the holy writings are the gift of God’s Spirit, don’t neglect to use them to inform, shape and correct your own faith and the faith of the church.”
So, inspiration is not about historical accuracy—though the Bible does cover historical events; inspiration is about transforming us to be proficient in every good work.
The Bible is not meant to impart to us a set of demonstrably true facts—though it certainly contains facts; the Bible is meant to shape us into God’s people.
To say the Bible is inspired does not mean it is a textbook telling us exactly what we must believe; it is inspired because in its pages, through its stories, we encounter the living God.
Inspiration means scripture is trustworthy not because the exact right words are on the page, but because God’s Holy Spirit speaks through those words that are on the page.
We say scripture is inspired because it reshapes our view of the world, it helps us think God’s thoughts and do God’s deeds. Remember that the Greek which is normally translated as “inspired,” literally means “God-breathed.” This points us back to Genesis 2.7, where God breathes life into Adam, animating the body God had formed from the dust of the ground. Thus, to say that scripture is God-breathed, that it is inspired, is to say that it gives life—“the life that is truly life;” the life which 1 Timothy tells us is marked by doing good, by being rich in good works, being generous and ready to share this is the abundant life of which Jesus speaks, the life which begins in this world as we do justice and show mercy to one another and walk humbly with God and which continues in the life eternal that we receive through Christ. Through scripture, the Holy Spirit inspires and equips us to live this life: giving us repentant and grateful hearts with which to love God with all that we have and all that we are, and with which to love ourselves rightly and our neighbors passionately and sacrificially.
You see, inspiration is not just something that happened once in the distant past when God, according to some literalist understandings, gave the authors exactly the right words . No, inspiration is the continuous work of the Holy Spirit to guide, teach, correct and train believers. Inspiration happened when the authors first wrote; it happened in the process of editing that gave many books the form we know today; it happened in the process of assembling the books together into the collection we know today as the Bible. And inspiration happens every time the word is read, every time it is studied, every time it is preached, every time it is discussed in a class or between friends.
Inspiration has been happening in this way for thousands of years: the Bible is authoritative, trustworthy, and useful because for thousands of years God’s people have heard God speaking through it. The Bible is the instrument, the mouthpiece, through which the Word of God, which became flesh in Jesus, is heard. Inspiration is an ongoing activity of the Holy Spirit that causes scripture to speak to us where we are in life and transforms us more and more into the likeness of Jesus. “Long ago God spoke” and God is still speaking to us and working in us, among us and through us today.
Let me offer two stories of how God speaks through the scriptures to teach us and shapes us throughout our lives. Jürgen Moltmann was born in 1926 and raised in a secular German home with little exposure to religion. Like almost all the youth his age, he was in the Hitler youth and was called up to serve in the army. He saw the horrors of combat. He was captured and became a prisoner of war. In the camp he almost lost the will to live. Then, when confronted for the first time with evidence of the Holocaust, his patriotic feelings for the “holy Fatherland” died. He struggled with despair, shame and the boredom of an interminable captivity.
One day an army chaplain distributed Bibles. He took one, though he would have preferred a few cigarettes. Because he had little else to do, young Moltmann began reading that Bible in the evenings. He started from the beginning, from Genesis chapter one, and read straight through, but with little comprehension of what he read. Then he read Psalm 39; in German, it described the suffering and meaninglessness of the psalmist’s life:
I am dumb and must eat up my suffering within myself.
My life is as nothing before thee.
Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry.
Hold not though thy peace at my tears,
For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.
That, wrote Moltmann in his autobiography, was an echo from my own soul, and it called that soul to God. I didn’t experience sudden illumination, but I came back to those words every evening. Then I read Mark’s Gospel as a whole and came to the story of the passion; when I heard Jesus’ death cry, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” I felt growing within me the conviction: this is someone who understands you completely, who is with you in your cry to God and has felt that same forsakenness you are living now. I began to understand the assailed, forsaken Christ because I knew that he understood me. The divine brother in need, the companion on the way, who goes with you through this “valley of the shadow of death”, the fellow-sufferer who carries you, with your suffering. I summoned up the courage to live again, and I was slowly but surely seized by a great hope ….
Jürgen Moltmann’s life was transformed, slowly but surely, by his encounter with God through the scriptures. This was just the beginning of an entirely new and unexpected path in life. When Moltmann died last year, he was probably the best known and almost certainly the most influential Protestant theologian of the last 50 years.
But what about when that path of life comes to an end?
Peter Holmes tells of a young pastor up in Montreal. She went to visit a woman who was suffering a terrible disease. Death was imminent and she was very agitated when the pastor arrived. Sitting down by the bed, the pastor held her hand and began to read words of comfort from the Psalms: “The Lord is my light…” (27.1), but she didn’t finish because the patient suddenly chimed in, “…and my salvation. Whom shall I fear?” And so it went: the pastor would began a verse and the dying woman would finish it, reciting from memory. Over and over. By the time the last scripture had been completed, the woman had settled down “like a baby at the mother’s breast.” And that’s exactly what she was: a child of God nourished by the words of scripture, words that gave her strength and hope in “the valley of the shadow of death,” words that reminded her of the truth of God’s steadfast love from which nothing could separate her, words that assured her, just as they assured Moltmann, that Jesus, God’s love in the flesh, is the “Divine brother in distress, who [understands and] takes [us] with him on his way to resurrection.”
That is why scripture is so central to our faith. That is why it is worth reading, hearing, studying, memorizing, meditating upon and puzzling over. Scripture shapes us to be more like Jesus; scripture corrects us and instructs us; scripture guides us into new paths; scripture comforts us and feeds us—because scripture brings us into contact with, into communication and communion with the God who has never stopped speaking and who will never stop loving. May God’s word be written upon our hearts and upon our minds that we may know God and may be transformed to become more fully the people of God.