The Bible? Really?

Several years ago, when I took up the pastorate of a Korean church in Seoul, I came across a closet filled with tattered, sometimes missing covers, and otherwise very sad-looking musty Bibles. To rid the damp office of the decades-old mold, which was both a nuisance and a health hazard, I proceeded to pack the old Bibles into trash bags (this was before recycling had become a widespread practice). A church lady who helped with the cleaning saw what I was doing and vociferously protested. “You can’t throw the Bible in the trash,” she said. “That book is holy; it contains God’s words.”

A recent conversation with a friend followed a similar line of thinking. My friend, though raised in a Christian family, only received baptism and committed to Christ a couple of years ago, in her mid-50s. Over lunch, we were discussing various matters, when inevitably an issue of faith was raised, and my response shocked her. My response differed from her understanding of the nature of the Bible. She asked me, “Steve, don’t you believe the words of the Bible are God-breathed?” When I said no, she was even more distressed. She repeated the text from 2 Timothy 3:16, which declares “all Scripture is God-breathed.”

And that brings us to the crux of the problem. Most Christians, including many pastors and the Bible schools where they were trained, seemingly have no clue about how the Bible came to be, or they outright ignore its origins. Christians have been taught not to question the Bible, and to question neither their pastor nor their pastor’s interpretations of passages in the book.

When some Christians claim that the Bible is the “infallible and inerrant” word of God, they are whitewashing the history of how the book came to be. The Bible did not one day drop out of the sky, leather-bound, with the words of Jesus in red ink print.

The content of the Bible as we know it today is nothing more or less than an anthology of stories, poems, letters, musings, historical documents and legal texts that were written, rewritten and argued over by church councils hundreds of years after Jesus is believed to have lived.

The contents of the Bible vary across the Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, and even more so when we consider the Coptic, Ethiopian and other denominations. Further, none of those councils, redactors or translators had any “original” documents to work with. They dealt with copies of copies, translations of translations, each time losing more of the original’s meaning and intent. Contents were altered or adjusted, and many writings were tossed out by some but included by others. In fact, the contents of the book were carefully curated to support an empire that had not adopted Christianity as its power base.

It is simply impossible to claim the book is without error or fallibility — especially when one considers how the Bible and the Christian church (in its various institutions) have justified the ruthless conquest of so-called nonbelievers, forcing baptism at sword point, or not only condoning but engaging in slavery. The Bible and the church have become tools of empire, maintaining power through an increasingly complex hierarchy of rules and rulers. The credibility of the Bible as a valuable book to society and the value of the Christian church itself is questionable, unless these and other major issues are addressed.

God did not write the Bible, and the book does not contain verbal quotes from the Divine. The Bible is a book written by men (mostly), expressing their thoughts and understandings, and often justifying their behavior or exerting power over others. This view is more in line with how the book came to be assembled over millennia from different languages, cultures and dozens of writers. This view compels us to move from two millennia of weaponizing the book to viewing it as a sacred text, serving as a mirror for each believer to read, reflect and find their own responses to both the good and the bad contained within.

The argument that the Bible is true because it says so is the kind of circular logic that suggests plugging a power strip into itself will create electricity. We must understand the Bible for what it is: an edited book, with content written by people from diverse backgrounds who lived in various places and times, and within vastly different cultures, languages and political landscapes. Each of them was trying to make sense of their circumstances and trying to find and give hope to a people who had no escape from the trials and tribulations of their daily lives. The Bible is a book expressing humankind’s deep-seated longing for liberation. Christians can best serve the world as Christ’s disciples by using the book in this way.

Rev. Steven L. Shields, FRAS (slshields@gmail.com) has lived in Korea for many years, beginning in the 1970s. A Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, he is also a lifelong member of the Royal Asiatic Society Korea, of which he was a director, vice president and president. He was a copy editor of The Korea Times in 1977. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect The Korea Times’ editorial stance.