Loving God by Distorting His Word

May 6th, 2007 |

Author: Jeff

There is a shocking and ironic thing that happens as we read and interpret the Bible sometimes. We are zealous for God and for His truth and we feel the need to get involved and defend what we KNOW to be the Word of God. We have already done our homework or if we haven’t done it ourselves we know someone who has who fills the pulpit at our church on Sunday or who we listen to on the radio every day in the car. We have come to the conclusions that there are certain things that MUST be believed in order to be considered orthodox or in order to be an Evangelical Christian. We have also come to believe that the world is filled with those who are ministers of “The Enemy” and who want nothing more than to undermine these important doctrines which our faith is comprised of. We must be vigilant! We must be strong! We must not be seduced by the wiles of the devil that would have us not trust the text or take God at his Word.

And so it is, in light of these views that we come to the Bible so often. Not always maybe, but often. We do not expect to find something in the text that is at variance with orthodoxy. Of course, why would we? We already KNOW what the Bible says and now it is only a matter of seeing for ourself where God actually says what we already believe. Then comes the difficulty. That neighbor of ours, that coworker who sees us reading our Bible at lunch time or that pesky brother in law who has this sadistic desire to always play the devil’s advocate. They don’t believe the truth as we know it and for some reason they want to talk about it. They ask us what we believe about this or that doctrine of the Bible. They point out “apparent contradictions” that they learned in their freshman college class on world religions that was taught by that liberal professor who wanted nothing more than to see unsuspecting Christians loose their faith. They think they have all the answers. They don’t understand the commitment of faith that we have made or how we can believe these things. They are blinded by their sins just as Paul said.

But are we sure that what they are saying does not have merit? Is it possible that our understanding of orthodoxy is driven by an agenda to see my own personal position furthured? Could I be possibly fighting against God’s word itself in an effort to defend and protect it? How is this possible? I am not trying to distort God’s word like so many others out there who come to it with a bias of liberal theology… or am I? Am I interested in the truth, the truth of God, so much that I would admit that I am wrong on my most cherished beliefs? Is it in any way possible that I love the Bible so much that I have become like the Pharisees who missed the Son of God because they were so committed to their own theological positions? The Pharisees were corrected by Jesus, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me”. They missed the forest through the trees because they were so commited to what they believed it was supposed to look like when the messiah came to them. And they were the conservatives of the day!

Now is the time for reexamining those things that we have been committed to all of these years. The link below is of an article by a man named Robert Price and it deals with how Protestants interpret the Bible. It can be a little technical and if you are not familiar with theological language but if you read the whole thing and be honest about your assessment of what he is saying, I think that you will have to agree that he is making some incredibly strong points that the Protestant Church needs to hear. We have been so concerned about keeping the interpretation of the Bible pure that we have overlooked some very obvious things about how we are interpreting the Bible. If God is at all like we think he is, He is interested in us being honest about reality and about the truth. If we cannot say that our scholarship has been based in truth, then what good is it?

Go to this link–> Protestant Hermeneutical Axiomatics: A Deconstruction by Robert M. Price

For another similar article that is much shorter and less technical, check out the following link:

The Psychology of Biblicism by Robert Price

Jeff