Is The Bible “Old–Fashioned”?
I was reading a chapter of a book the other day in which the author (a conservative evangelical biblical scholar) was responding to an implied accusation that the Bible was “out of date,” and hence to be disregarded concerning what it said on matters about which the (unnamed) archetypal accusers felt differently. Understandably, the author sought to defend the Bible, basing that defence primarily on the grounds that since what the Bible said was “inspired” by God (per 2 Timothy 3:16), and since God is timeless (not timebound in an era), then the Bible as “the Word of God” cannot by definition be out-of-date.
As a quick soundbite, that response may sound fairly convincing (albeit it does take rather a lot for granted as to what “divine inspiration” does to the text and how it does it).
But let’s examine that a bit more closely, not least because a question implied by the captioned question is a more controversial one. If the Bible is “old-fashioned,” does this mean that God is “old-fashioned” as well? Does the answer to whether “the Word of God” is “old-fashioned” inexorably lead us to an identical conclusion concerning God himself?
Dictionaries define “old-fashioned” as “belonging to, or typical of, a time in the past,” “characteristic of a past era,” “having the conservative behaviour, ways, ideas, or tastes of earlier times,” or simply, “outmoded.”
Thinkers in the Western world have been claiming that belief in God is “out of date”—a relic of a pre-scientific (superstitious) ancient worldview—ever since the Enlightenment. Not that science has disproved the existence of God in any evidentiary sense, of course, but it has certainly challenged previously taken-for-granted Christian assumptions concerning the Bible’s authoritative status on scientific matters (such as the view it presents concerning cosmology, biology, meteorology, and the like).
Many (perhaps the majority of) Christians now accept that the Bible never intended to be asserting scientific truths in the first place. It was only prior generations’ misreading of the Bible’s intentions that led to those misplaced assumptions. That said, some Christians still want to try to find some measure of correspondence if and where they can between the Bible and modern science—for example, the world being created in “six days” being a simplified way of speaking of “six periods of time." Unfortunately, that particular effort to harmonise the Bible with modern science doesn’t reach the start line. For example, in Genesis 1, “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light . . . and God separated the light from the darkness . . . and there was evening and there was morning . . .” This happened on the first day of creation. However, the sun and the moon were not created until the fourth day. How come? Because the ancients did not realise the connection between the sun and moon and light and darkness. God worked within the writers’ contemporary understandings of scientific matters because he had no reason to want to override them.
Genesis is not answering modern scientific “how?” questions—either directly or through dropping little hints corresponding to twenty-first-century science. It is answering timeless theological “who?” and “why?” questions. Its focus is on truths concerning the divine-human relationship—who God is and who we are, in relation to him and to each other. Its focus is not on truths concerning science.
So why did people ever think that it was? Before modernity (the “age of science”), no one knew any differently, so in an era of Christian hegemony what the biblical writers believed was taken for granted (it was at least as good as any other view, if not also a religiously required view—for example, Copernicus’ heliocentrism was condemned as heresy not only by the Catholic Church but also the Reformers).
For some Christians, there is an unwillingness to let go of claiming the timeless factual accuracy of the Bible in every possible respect, as a “must be” characteristic of the text. This unwillingness comes from a feature of the nature of the Bible that conservative evangelicals claim as its “inerrancy.” If you can’t think of a Bible verse that describes the Bible using that word, you’re not wrong. Conservative evangelicals infer that from the Bible being “inspired by God” (per 2 Timothy 3:16)—a mysterious phrase which is the only thing the Bible says about its own nature. Most evangelical doctrinal belief statements affirm something along those lines (some being more nuanced and thoughtful than others).
By way of example, the Vineyard Churches’ statement says: “We believe that the Holy Spirit inspired the human authors of Holy Scripture so that the Bible is without error in the original manuscripts. We receive the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments as our final, absolute authority, the only infallible rule of faith and practice.”
“Rule” here has the sense of “measuring [ourselves] against it” rather than “rules” per se. It reflects the meaning underlying “canon.” This is good. Less good is its failure to (a) nuance the Old and New Testaments’ different ways of reflecting that “rule” and (b) acknowledge the inevitability of interpretation (because in practice, the authority of the Bible means the interpretations—or the interpreters—of the Bible that we take to be authoritative). As the London School of Theology’s more nuanced version says, “We acknowledge the need for the Scriptures to be rightly interpreted under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and using the gifts of understanding and scholarship that God has given to his people.” Only when the Bible is being read and applied well is the Bible speaking with authority.
The “original manuscripts,” meanwhile, are (I’m afraid) a complete misnomer, since—as all biblical scholars know—not only do we have no such originals (only copies of copies of copies) but most of the Bible’s content did not come about via such a thing as an “original manuscript” at a single point in time as this phrase implies. And even if we did have one (Paul’s letters, for example, could, in theory at least, have had one such original), it would self-evidently not “inerrantly” reflect modern science any more than the copies of copies of copies do.
Adding to the potential for confusion in what faithful evangelicals are supposed to believe, we can’t help noticing that the phrase “without error” in such statements of faith is typically not qualified as limited to beliefs about the nature of God, humanity’s relationship to God, and living in God-pleasing ways. No wonder, then, that many assume they are supposed to be defending the Bible’s inerrancy on everything—scientific matters included.
One reason for not clarifying these fairly obvious problems is probably because evangelicalism sees “keeping it simple” as a strong virtue. And to a point that’s not wrong. But it becomes a problem when sincere evangelicals feel they must defend the Bible in ways that it’s not asking to be defended, and, as a result, their friends and family do, indeed, conclude that both they and their beliefs are “old-fashioned.” Keeping things simple only works so long as the audience is simple.
So is the Bible “old-fashioned”? Yes, and no. It’s old-fashioned in the sense that the events it narrates and the characters in those events were part of the ancient world of 2,000-plus years ago. Everything the Bible narrates took place in a very different context and spoke into that context in the first instance. The question—one that must be wisely decided on a case-by-case basis—is how does what it was saying then relate to now? How do we distinguish timeless from timebound?
To get that right we must first know what it was saying at the time; and, just as importantly (this is often overlooked), why it was saying it. We cannot simply bypass those questions and “copy and paste” verses from then to now claiming them as “the Bible says.”
The answer to whether what the Bible says is “out of date” depends on what it is we’re talking about. To take an easy example, most Christians realise that at least some (if not all) of the Old Testament commandments are not directly applicable to them as gentile believers today. They may not always know why—or which ones, exactly (it will depend on what they’ve been told)—but they realise that the idea of all of them being “inerrant” and “authoritative” for Christian life today is nonsensical.
I haven’t simply picked a self-serving exception here. The principles of good biblical interpretation apply more broadly than just sifting the Old Testament commandments. These principles can be summed up as asking ourselves some very simple questions (answerable with the help of some good up-to-date scholarly resources):
What did this text mean—what was it “saying,” then—from the perspective of the original author and audience? What was it about at the time? How would they have “heard” it?
Why was the biblical writer saying what he said? What was the issue, concern, or “teaching” at the time? What was it addressing? And
How does the context of that text—its literary genre; where the events were taking place; who the audience was; their hopes and fears and so on—help us with those questions?
Only once we’ve established the answers, as best we’re able, can we form a view of what that text may mean for us today—what it may be “saying” to us, and how it applies to us. Which might be:
Exactly the same—it’s a timeless text, conveying a timeless truth that’s the same yesterday, today and forever. Nothing in it is timebound.
Something similar, following the same (or an analogous) underlying value or principle, albeit that the form it takes (in application) would not be identical now to then. Or, more controversially,
Nothing at all. It was speaking in a timebound way (speaking a timebound truth) into that particular context. It’s a part of Scripture that is there for us, to learn from, but is not directed to us.
What we must not do is take an answer to one of their questions, then, and treat it as if it’s an answer to one of our questions, today; unless we can be completely sure that the questions in both contexts are identical.
I don’t for one moment believe that God is old-fashioned. He can relate to, and “speak the language” of, every era. He sees the good—and hence he can build something of kingdom value—in every era. But that doesn’t mean that Christians necessarily can. I’d say most of us are not that good at it. And I don’t simply mean because we quote Bible verses from translations that use old-fashioned language (though that doesn’t help). I mean we are locked into arguing for modern (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) ways of thinking when the world around us increasingly reflects postmodern (twenty-first-century) ways of thinking.
Evangelicals tend to be both socially conservative and what we might call “biblically” conservative; where one ends and the other begins is not always obvious, since they are intertwined. All forms of conservatism are by nature slow to change since they tend to value the past over the present and future. Conservatism values tradition (as secure) over innovation (as risky). That’s not intrinsically bad, however. Tradition needs to have a seat at the table whenever something theological is being discussed. Where things go awry is when we make it head of the table and grant it an automatic right of veto.
It is too easy to confuse modernity’s ways of thinking with a “biblical” way of thinking and concurrently equate postmodernity’s ways of thinking with a hostile “spirit of the age” that needs to be resisted. This binary is way too simplistic, but it’s what fuels the current evangelical “culture wars.”
Everything would not be all right if only “revival” could return us to the way things were in the 1950s—if the sexual revolution and feminism had never happened and homosexuality had stayed in the closet.
We need to thoughtfully engage with the ways people think today. I’m not saying those ways are all good. But I am saying that not everything was good in the 1950s either (more “biblical” or more “Christian”); nor in the twentieth century before that; or in the nineteenth century before that. The same is true of the biblical era—that was no unqualified “golden age” either. From a Christian perspective, every age has its strengths and weaknesses in how it thinks and why it thinks it—the good reasons and the not-so-good reasons. Often it’s a reaction to past wrongs, and where this is the case we should recognise that and acknowledge the need for change (for example with sexism and racism). Sometimes there may be a pendulum-swing overreaction involved, but it’s one with which we should empathise.
In any event, we need to engage “Christianly” and thoughtfully with postmodern thinking and not just react against the fact that it isn’t modernity’s way of thinking.