It's so hard to believe that a little over a year ago now I was in the second week of the best summer of my life. In fact, just a few weeks ago on June 2, I couldn't believe that a year ago that day I was on a plane from Chicago, IL to Manchester, NH to start an amazing adventure without a clue of what to expect. The fact that I'd meet the best friend I've ever had and my boyfriend along with meeting 50 other awesome, amazing people who I'm so blessed to call my friends and siblings in Christ was nowhere in my mindset heading into project. I never dreamed of having that type of experience...I never dreamed that a year later I would be traveling through the Great Plains storm chasing either! Wow, what will it be next June 2? It was a few days before that anniversary that I wrote this in my journal...something that God started to show me as I sat in a van driving through the middle of nowhere:
5/30/09
It's always been an issue for people finding it hard to believe that what is in the Bible is true. This is [mainly] because people wrote the Bible (physically). The thing is, don't people physically do every kind of reporting [there is] on this earth? Don't we trust doctors to be truthful and honest in giving us reports about what's wrong with us physically? Don't we trust psychologists to tell us what's wrong with us mentally? Why can't we, then, trust the people who have talked face-to-face with Jesus to tell us what's wrong with us spiritually? Isn't that also an important aspect of our health? Actually, since we all agree that everyone dies at some point, thus leaving us without a body and mind, wouldn't our spiritual health be most important to preserve and to make better?
My point is this, we trust people every day to share with us their expertise, experiences, knowledge, and advice. Why does that stop with spirituality? Yes, man in general is faulty and imperfect...so is this planet! Doing mathematical models and physical tests, we realize that real-world phenomena does not precisely follow the physical and mathematical principles that govern this planet. If it did, we wouldn't have to run so many experiments and have to calculate error into our findings. Just ask a physicist, a biologist, a doctor, a meteorologist, a chemist, you name it!
Is it because of our experiences with faultiness and imperfection that we can't understand a perfect God? Is this maybe why we refuse Biblical Scripture to be true, because we have an imperfect perception of a perfect God?
God came down to this earth in the form of a humble man. Why? He wanted to reach us on our level. He wanted to be like us so that He could reach us in the best way possible. When you talk to a child, do you talk to them as if they were another adult or a child?
Maybe, just maybe, God chose people to relay His amazing message in one book because He knew what He was doing. Just saying. God knows that we think in imperfect methodology because that's all we know. We've never experienced any perfect thing apart from Him and we can't even experience that without Him "dumming" it down for us. Am I saying Biblical Scripture is imperfect, heck no!
I fully do believe Biblical Scripture is the God-breathed, people-penmanship of God's exact Word. Do people who have autobiographies written normally physically write the work for themselves? No. They speak and it's written. Secretaries do this all the time. Does this mean that there will be a few mistakes in the writing the person does? Sure, sometimes. That's why the person dictating the letter, book, whatever re-reads it afterwards and edits the work.
Now think about it, if God is the One dictating this book, would He not make sure that what's in it is 100% correct? Remember, He's the only perfection ever existing!
As far as "creating" the Bible that we know today, I think the reasoning is simple as to how books were chosen and books were left out. Theologians and other experts who studied ancient texts, geography, geology, and all that knew what was in correlation with God's ways and customs and what wasn't. They're experts who studied the validity of each book in terms of credibility. Don't we normally trust experts?
Now I'm just saying that I don't think this is a valid claim to disagree with the Bible by saying it's because people wrote it. The fact that it's written by over 40 men in a span of about 1500 years in three different languages makes me believe in its credibility all the more. The fact that there are no known contradictions in the original texts and the fact that these men did not see each other's work when writing their own makes me believe in its credibility all the more. The fact that Jesus fulfilled over 360 prophesies from Scripture dating over a thousand years before his birth makes me believe in its credibility all the more. The fact that archaeological findings, well-known and trusted historians, and Josephus' writings continuously agree with the Gospels makes me believe in its credibility all the more.
You can say what you want about men writing the Bible but I challenge you to gather over 40 men from all around, 3 different languages, over 1500 years and tell them to write about their God and their experiences of Him and this so-called Messiah. Let me know what happens.
I think this is a fair and reasonable justification to believe in the Bible as the definitive Word of God. There are a couple of talking points that I came up with while going through this:
ReplyDelete1) The thing about expert opinions is that they dynamically change everyday, and with a proposed theory comes evidence and testing to back up claims. The problem with equating this to the expert opinion on spirituality (namely, the Bible in this context) is that the only expert is God. Now, this should not be a problem because hey, God is probably the best expert you can find! However, with experts in other fields you can take their advice or leave it. With God being the expert, if you leave it, you can't really "consult" another opinion. And there is no real testing to hypothesis and claims because religion is fundamentally faith based. Sure there are many ideas in the Bible that we have correlated or equated with the world today, but the roots of the messages in the Bible...like the beginning of the Universe...the word is out on that.
2) It is interesting that you equate the Bible to an AUTObiography, rather than a biography. With an autobiography, I have always thought that this meant the definitive story of a person (or whatever, God works too). A biography is one "perspective" of a person's life, which the person usually allows to be written and helps guide them when needed. I feel like the four Gospals are more biographies of Jesus than an Autobiography. A person can request their life story be told, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is word-for-word going to be the same story he may have wanted to hear. Of course the great thing about the Gospals (and what makes them credible to 99% of scholars) is that they are pretty agreeable within the books. As for the rest of the Bible, though, you may wonder how much of it is God's actual word or the word of people who wanted to capture God in every way possible. And there isn't much wrong with it being the latter...except that being an epic tale about God, the details may want to be spiced up. The message of the stories may be great and may be what God intended (more likely than not), but what ACTUALLY happened is debatable. Another thing is that while God is a personal God with Jesus, He can be pretty impersonal when looking at the infinite perspective that He has. You do want to think that God would want the Bible to be 100% correct, but with so many different "motivations" God could have for an action, it would be impossible to finitely capture what God was after in some cases. Don't know if that made sense....
Anyway, this is a great post and you certainly hit home at the end there with the bit about 360 prophecies being fulfilled. Pretty convincing to me!
Wow, this is great Kristin! I love your point about people seeking medical and mental health, yet when it comes to spirituality, something eternal, it is so often overlooked or disregarded. You have some other really great points in here too, stuff that really makes you stop and think. Great job, keep it up! :)
ReplyDeleteLove,
The Best. (friend).
aka LinsyElibith
Tarun, I agree to your first statement about no person being an expert on spirituality, I will give you that. If you think about it though, are there truly any real experts in anything? I mean, yeah, there's people who are very brilliant in their fields and who have studied a tremendous amount in those areas and who have even made amazing discoveries and what not. However, I don't think anyone can truly say that they know every thing there is to know about any certain thing...that's just impossible really. That's why we keep studying, discovering, and hypothesizing...although I agree again that in this context of God and spirituality it is different from other fields because it's, well, a whole new playing field in a way.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the autobiography thing, it's not a perfect analogy because, well, those don't really exist when trying to describe God and/or His awesomeness because, like I said before, we have an imperfect perception and worldview. Although, what I was getting at with an autobiography instead of using a biography illustraion is this. An autobiography is a person's story told by that person. Scripture as a whole, as described if taken as God's true Word, is told by the author and first-hand person of that story--God. What I was saying was that even a person who "writes" their autobiography usually doesn't PHYSICALLY write it because a lot of times the person who's story it is isn't the best writer or what not. In this case, God wanted to use the best medium in which to get this story across so He used people. If you're trying to get a story across so that it will relate to Iranians, it would probably be best to have an Iranian write it in order to best relate to his or her people.
I do agree that in a more specific sense, the Gospels are more of a type of biography for the reasons you gave--the fact that they are each an account of a different "perspective" on the story. They're all talking about the same story but they all give sides of that story based on what the author experienced and remembered, etc.
With that said, I just want to emphasize the autobiographical concept. The autobiography means that it was written by God but wasn't PHYSICALLY done so by Him. He spoke, or however He did it, and the person wrote it for Him--like a secretary does with her boss in a dictation.
Also, thanks best. friend. LinsyElibith!