"Because the Bible says" is not good enough.

This week my New Testament Professor made a point I could not go by without sharing and expanding on. We were talking about the Gospel of Matthew and shared how interesting he found the narrative of Jesus' temptation. He pointed out that the Satan character in the narrative tempts Jesus using scripture and Jesus responds with other scripture. To say the Bible says one thing is entirely incorrect because the fact is that the bible says a lot of things and they often contradict themselves.

That being the case why do people continue to say I believe x simply because the Bible says? The answer is that we don't want to take responsibility for our own beliefs. Any reading of the bible necessarily is an interpretation because the Bible does not have one single monolithic theology or viewpoint, on top of that not only is the reader interpreting but if you are not reading in the original language you are at the mercy of the interpretation of the interpreter. And even if you do speak Greek and Hebrew the texts that exist are a compilation of ancient manuscripts which have textual variants within them so even in the original language you are at the mercy of the interpretation of textual critics.

I'm not saying that the scripture is not important, because I think the scripture is incredibly important but what I'm saying is that we can not use the scripture as a shield that relieves us from responsibility for our actions and beliefs. If our answer is that we believe something only because the bible says, I don't think we are taking our belief or the bible seriously. We are also dangerously relieving ourselves from the responsibility of the implications and ends that such beliefs bring about. Much evil has and continues to be justified in this way.

We must take responsibility for ourselves. We must examine our believes using our experience, reason and in conversation with what the tradition has said (this does not necessarily mean agreeing with the tradition but at least taking it into account). If our faith is not examined, thought about, and wrestled with it is no faith at all. And I believe that the authority of scripture only comes when we wrestle with it and struggle with it. We must be a part of the scripture making process.

I hope not to stand behind bible and use it as a shield. I hope to have an examined, thinking faith. I hope that when I fail in these things than I can recognize it.