By Shekinah:
In May 2012, after years of intense study of the Bible, we left behind our Bibles and Bible study books.
In the Bible we found the code to a life of freedom from slavery in the commercial society, walking with God as sovereign pilgrims, yet we have come to realize that continuing to focus on the Bible for our spiritual growth, as we used to do, would hamper us now more than it would help.
Since we had started to put to practice the drop-out/activist message of Jesus about seven years earlier, we had begun to recognize that there are many errors in Christian teaching which we had not previously seen during our lives as Christian missionaries; one of the major errors is the elevation of the Bible into an unrealistic state of infallibility.
The Bible is a historic document. The writings contained therein originated in a time period stretching over roughly 1500 years. The over 40 individual writers were all linked to faith in Yahweh as the creator of the universe.
In the third century the leadership of the then still young Christian religion saw the need to decide which of the by then plentiful writings in circulation concerning Jesus of Nazareth were of enough integrity to be presented as authorized Christian scripture.
And so after years of study and back and forth discussion eventually the canon of what is since then called the New Testament was decided upon. (The canon of what is called the Old Testament came about in the first century AD.)
The correspondence between the four accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus that made it into the Bible is high. The several contradictions concerning mostly practical details regarding some of the historic events surrounding the life and death of Jesus in these four accounts show the human aspect involved in writing and at the same time show that they were not just copied one from the other, but were independent individual records of the history of Jesus of Nazareth.
In the writings of the Apostle Paul, which were written during his life as evangelist over a time period of over 20 years we can see a development in Paul’s understanding. For example his attitude toward women evidently changed for the better over the years. He was an outstandingly courageous road man, who did have significant things to say, but clearly he was very human.
I have read some of the apocryphal writings that did not make it into the Bible, and I would agree that at least the ones that I personally read did not merit to be recommended for lack of either authenticity or lack of integrity on the part of the writers.
Because of the early Christians' desire to tell many people about Jesus and to spread his teachings, the writings concerning Jesus Christ had been copied by hand many times and were also translated into other languages at a very early stage of the Christian era. For this reason there are hundreds of portions of such writings of distinct origin dating back as far as the first few centuries A.D. preserved in historic archives, and many are on display in museums in numerous cities and nations. These fragments complement and confirm one another, making it difficult to uphold the theory of some Bible critics that the Bible was falsified beyond recognition. They rather show that the original documents were hand-copied by people who had the best intention of preserving their original content.
At the same time these above facts also make it difficult to uphold the claim that the Bible is the undisputable word of God, received without any human interference.
Jesus himself updated that which was seen as the written word and law of God. He was not afraid to challenge the status quo and introduce needed changes. The religious leadership of his day saw their authority threatened by his teachings and eventually caused him to be killed.
Jesus himself never wrote anything, and I think, one of the reasons for that may have been that he did not want written records to be worshipped. He rather wanted those who had known and loved him to follow in his example of becoming a channel for the spirit of God the way he had been and thus become the living message.
Referring to written records can be helpful, but they need to be treated as what they are - human records, to be seen in the context of the time in which they were written. In other words, the readers are responsible for themselves to judge what they read.
I have come to understand that in saying that a collection of evidently imperfect writings is “The Word of God” (which I did for 28 years as a missionary) I was being rather bigoted.
If we cannot declare a book as "The Word of God", what then is the word of God? The Greek word translated “word” also means expression. I like to interchange the two. It helps me to shed the bias linked to the term “word of God”. To me the "expression of God" is love, justice, fairness, goodness, gentleness expressed in a person’s practical life.
If we can draw inspiration to manifest these qualities from written records then the reading has served a good purpose. Yet it will always be our personal voluntary decision to live it that will make written words an alive expression of God.
God showed us, that he/she wants his/her word to be for communication rather than for instruction coming down from the top.
Communication of genuine love in all of its forms by human beings is the most important expression of God.
What I think about the Bible