St. Paul was Just Some Guy so He's Not Always Right

In this post, I’d like to argue that it’s not very meaningful to say that the Bible is “the word of God,” and that Christians should stop treating the books of the Bible as having fundamentally higher status than other writings. 

Within Christianity, the Bible is seen as being a consistent source of truth that should guide what we believe and how we behave. Biblical verses are often used as justification for certain beliefs or moral proscriptions, and within Christian circles it’s seen as far more robust to back up your argument with a quote from St. Paul than with a quote from C.S. Lewis.

Now maybe St. Paul does know more about morality, and is more in touch with what God wants than C.S. Lewis. But the comparison isn’t often even made in discussions about God’s teaching, because what St. Paul wrote is in the Bible. And the Bible is assumed to have authority of its own.

My basic problem with treating the Bible as something “special” in terms of how much weight we give to what is written in it goes as follows:

1. Stuff written by human beings have the chance to be wrong, or not relevant to my life

2. The different books of the Bible were written by human beings

3. Therefore, the books of the Bible have a chance to be wrong, or not relevant to my life

I want to be very clear that I think people ought to trust the Bible less, not trust God less. If God absolutely said something, then we should absolutely listen. But the main problem with how the Bible is often used, is that it’s not acknowledged that it was written by people. And people are often wrong.

You can make arguments that God used people when writing the Bible, that the Biblical authors were divinely inspired and that everything they wrote is in some sense true, if not literally true. But those lines of thinking don’t hold water. Even if you grant that God did divinely inspire some authors to write things that are incontrovertibly true (a dubious claim in my view), how do we have all the divinely inspired writings, and only the divinely inspired writings, collected in the Bible?

The disparate writings that are included in modern versions of the Bible were writings that the early Christians thought were important. I don’t know of any good argument to show that these writings have been marked with special approval by God (if you have such an argument, please let me know). Tradition is what gives them their power, and that’s okay! Even without placing the Bible on an epistemological pedestal, the writings collected in the Bible are still valuable  as sources of wisdom, historical facts, and instructive stories. But there are other sources of wisdom, historical facts, and instructive stories, and the assumption should not be that if you learn two things, one from the Bible and one from somewhere else, then the Bible is correct.

Christianity does not need the Bible to be the inarguable source of truth in order to make sense as a faith. And requiring the Bible to be something it is not leads to closed-mindedness. If you believe that the writings in the Bible are incontrovertibly true, relevant to your life, and self-consistent, then you are locked into reading the Bible a certain way, and into learning about the world a certain way. 

Having an a priori belief that an anthology of what we think people wrote 1800-3000 years ago contain indisputable truth does not put you in a good starting place towards learning about the biggest mysteries of life. If you want to learn more about God — or even if you don’t — approach the world with an open mind. He can speak to you from anywhere. Seek the truth and you will find it.