But what of biblical truth? There are those who believe the bible is the word of God, texts written by authors inspired by the divine. Thus theology, doctrine and dogma are determined by belief in God given scripture within a spectrum of interpretation ranging from rigid, literal, conservative understanding of words to fluid, symbolic, liberal conceptual approaches. Underpinning all is a belief that the words of scripture are authoritative, not of human origin but of an omniscient, transcendent, metaphysical, anthropomorphic God: statements not to be the subject of rejection by humans but capable of varied interpretation. Implausible? You be the judge.
Some contra opinions:
'The Christian story does not drop from heaven fully written. It grew and developed over a period of forty-two to seventy years. This is not what most Christians have been taught to think, but it is factual. Christianity has always been an evolving story. It was never, even in the New Testament, a finished story.'
JOHN SHELBY SPONG
'I let go of the notion that the Bible is a divine product. I learned that it is a human cultural product, the product of two ancient communities, biblical Israel and early Christianity. As such, it contained their understandings and affirmations, statements not coming directly or somewhat directly from God.....I realised that whatever "divine revelation" and the "inspiration of the Bible" meant (if they meant anything), they did not mean that the Bible was a divine product with divine authority.'
MARCUS J BORG
'Properly understood the Bible is a potential ally to the progressive Christian passion for transformation of ourselves and the world. It is our great heritage. Along with Jesus, to whom it is subordinate, it is our greatest treasure.'
MARCUS J BORG
'My point is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are not smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.'
JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN
'The Bible is based upon the construct of theism and anthropomorphism as its primary literary vehicle for expressing the reality of "God." Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities.
The ultimate authority of one's life is not the Bible. The highest truth is not confined between the covers of a book. It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside oneself. One's ultimate authority is the voice of truth within one's own innermost being.'
JIM PALMER
'The danger that a mythology understood too literally, and as taught by the Church, will suddenly be repudiated lock, stock and barrel is today greater than ever. Is it not time that the Christian mythology, instead of being wiped out, was understood symbolically?'
CARL JUNG
I am firmly in the latter camp, much influenced by postmodernism and ideas developed by Jacques Derrida.
So, my opinion is that 'biblical truth' is an oxymoron. At this juncture may I prevail upon you to turn to post 502 and the words of Colin Coward. They are an antidote to fundamentalist, conservative evangelical theology, a breath of fresh air to counter stultifying narrow bible based theology, doctrine and dogma that loses sight of the concepts of inclusive love and care for all humanity as ascribed to Jesus by the authors of the synoptic gospels: concepts of humans, therefore subjective, not to be cloaked with the veneer of objective God given authority. It is the dynamic of the concepts that matters, not the precise meaning of the words in ancient texts of human origin. As Spong said Christianity is an 'evolving story', not a set of texts fixed in time.
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