Biblical Literalism

Last Sunday when Edith and Gunder were getting ready for Church, Edith kept trying to find a dress for Gunder to wear. Emily told her that Gunder is a boy and cannot wear a dress especially to Church. Edith got a funny look on her face and said, "Well why does Daddy get to wear a dress?" Edith had a literal interpretation of vestments.

The word literal is one of our cultures most abhorred words, especially when it refers to the Bible. Our culture loves to heap scorn and ridicule on Christians who try to literally interpret the Bible. In fact, one the biggest objections to Christianity is the Bible. You can read these objections every Easter and Christmas in opinion section of the News Press. These opinions suggest that the Bible cannot be authoritative and certainly not understood literally because it is historically inaccurate and culturally regressive and oppressive. Is the Bible accurate and truthful? Can it be authoritative? These questions are not just asked by non-Christians, for this is the very question splitting the Anglican Church today.

Most questions concerning the authority and understanding of the Bible begin with stories such as the creation story in Genesis 1 or the story of Jonah being swallowed by a fish. I would like to by pass that entire discussion for one very important reason: In Luke 24, Jesus appears, after his resurrection, to two disciples walking on a road to the town of Emmaus and explains to these disciples how all Scripture points to him. The intent and purpose of Scripture is to reveal Jesus Christ. That means there are two ways to understand the Bible: we can understand the Bible to be about us or we can understand the Bible to be about Jesus. Therefore, the most important thing for Christians to do is to establish the historical accuracy and truth of the Gospels for if the Gospels are accurate and truthful about Jesus for if we can trust the Gospels we can trust what they say Jesus thought about the accuracy and authority of the rest of Scripture.

So are the Gospels historically accurate? Yes, and Tim Keller in The Reason for God, suggests three reasons: The gospels are written too early to be legends, the content is too counterproductive for the gospels to be legends, and the literary form is too detailed to be legends.¹

The Gospels are written too early to be legends. All the canonical Gospels were written between forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus that is between 70 to 90 ad. While the Gospels were circulating the Roman Empire, eyewitnesses, both Christian and anti-Christian, were still alive. If the Gospels had been altered or fictionalized from actual history, any common Jewish bystander or high Roman official could have corrected and challenged the church. Furthermore, all the Gospel writers and St. Paul mention personal eyewitness by name so that those who their letters could go and ask them for verification. As Tim Keller said:

For a highly altered, fictionalized account of an event to take hold in the public imagination it is necessary that the eyewitnesses (and their children and grandchildren) all be long dead. They must be off the scene so they cannot contradict or debunk the embellishments and falsehoods of the story. The gospels were written far too soon for this to occur.²

The Gospels are historically reliable because they were written too early to be mythological legends.

Second, the content of the gospels is far too counterproductive for the gospels to be legends. Most people on the streets of America and Europe will say that the Gospels were written, "by leaders of the early church to promote their policies, consolidate their power, and build their movement."³ However, any cursory reading of the Gospels contradicts this view for three reasons. First, one would expect the Gospel writers to have Jesus take sides in problems of the church. But we don't find this, the great controversies in the Church that we read about in Acts and Paul's letters are not mentioned by Jesus in the Gospels. You would not invent a Jesus who is silent on current problems. Second, why would any Church leader make up the story of the Crucifixion, as St. Paul said, the Cross is a stumbling block for Jew and offensive to Greeks. You wouldn't make up a story about your religious hero being publicly executed. Furthermore, you would not make up a resurrection story and have woman be the eyewitnesses. A woman's testimony was not admissible in any court of law, so why would you make up a story with inadmissible witnesses? Finally, if you were making up a story to consolidate your power, you would not make up a story in which the disciples, the leaders of the church, were dim-witted, failing cowards. Why, if you were the Bishop of Rome, would you make up a story about Peter denying Jesus, not just once, but three times? You wouldn't. The one plausible reason explaining the stories in the Gospels are that they are historically true and actually happened.

Third, the literary form of the gospels is too detailed to be legend. C.S. Lewis said:

I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know none of them are like this. Of this [gospel] text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage...or else, some unknown [ancient] writer... without known predecessors or successors suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novelistic, realistic narrative...⁴

Lewis concludes, "The reader who doesn't see this simply has not learned how to read." The Gospels are completely different from both Ancient mythology and Ancient fiction. They are too realistic and descriptive. For example, in John 21 the disciple caught 153 fish, why mention they caught 153 unless it happened or in John 8 Jesus draws on the ground while being asked a question, why tell us Jesus doodled on the ground when we aren't told what he doodled and why?

The three popular arguments against historicity of the Gospel turn out to be a sieve that cannot hold truth. The Gospels are historically accurate and true, therefore we can trust what they say about Jesus. This means we can trust what Jesus says about Scripture and throughout the Gospels Jesus uses Scripture as the authoritative and true Word of God. Throughout his life, Jesus drew upon Scripture to strengthen his personal relationship with God. That means that an authoritative Bible, that we must submit too wither we like it or not, is not an enemy to a personal relationship with God, but a prerequisite.⁵

Sometime in the 1980's Guidepost had a story about a man who was a devote non-Christian. This man and his wife were flying in their small plane when they crashed sending this man into a coma. A few days later, this man awoke from his coma in the hospital a Christian. While in his coma, the man said he could remember only six things, a circle of small red chairs and 5 bible verses. When this man was a child, he went to a Vacation Bible School for five days and sat in small red chairs memorizing a new Bible verse each day. These verses were the popular verses from the New Testament that proclaim the Gospel, verses such as John 3:16. We are no different than this man, we, at some time or another, have all been in a coma of disbelief and the tool that God uses more often than not to awake us is the Bible. Or consider Brother Yun, who in his greatest times of despair while being tortured in prison took comfort and found God's presence through singing Scripture. In his divine wisdom, God has ordained that our relationship with him be sustained through the words of the Bible and our relationship is best sustained when we submit ourselves to the Bible's authority.

Finally, consider the man sick with the palsy from our Gospel lesson this morning. Every sermon I have heard on this passage (Matthew 9:1-8) suggests that we should identify with the friends who brought the sick man to Jesus and go forth and do great deeds for Christ. However, I think Matthew wants us to identify ourselves with the sick man who was unable to get to Jesus on his own. We are like that sick man, for we are unable to find Jesus on our own, we need help and the friend who brings us into the healing and forgiving presence of Jesus, more often than not, is the Bible. The Bible is historically accurate and true and if we digest it we will find our relationship with God sustained and nourished, but if we reject it our spiritually with slowly wither away.