Hilton Head Island, SC – September 25, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Jeremiah 1:1-10; John 1:1-14
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. – John 1:14 (RSV)
In both the Old and the New Testaments, the Bible frequently uses the term “the word of God” to describe what is written therein, and usually the word “word” is printed in lower case. But in the widely-known opening chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus is referred to as “the Word of God,” with “Word” capitalized. Our opening hymn, O Word of God incarnate, carries that meaning in its opening phrase. Later in the first stanza, however, it alludes to the Bible as the word of God: “We praise thee for the radiance/ That from the hallowed page/ A lantern to our footsteps,/ Shines on from age to age.”
Some of the kosher laws in the Torah make sense, such as the prohibition against eating shellfish. In biblical times and in a hot climate and with no refrigeration, eating shrimp, lobster, or clams might cause food poisoning. Did God tell the Hebrews not to eat shellfish, or did the experience of generations tell them that, and somebody decided to include it among the biblical laws? The Torah said they should never boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. That does seem somehow strangely inhumane, but did God tell them that, or did they just deduce it, and therefore wrote it into the biblical lawbook as a distinctly peculiar religious requirement?
The Book of Joshua says that God told the sun to stop moving in the valley of Aijalon (which would really mean that the earth stopped moving) until Joshua and the Hebrews defeated the Amalekites in a bloody battle. If the earth stopped rotating, even for just a few hours, it could throw the whole universe out of whack. Was it the word of God that was what should happen? Did it happen? When Joshua and his army conquered Jericho, God told Joshua to kill all the inhabitants: men, women, and children. Was that truly “the word of God?”
What does it mean to say that the Bible is the word of God? Does it mean that everything in the Bible is what God told somebody to write down, or did they write it down, and then , years or centuries later, they decided it was holy scripture and it all was approved to go into the Bible? Are Christians obligated to accept everything in the Bible literally to be God’s word?
The first chapter of the Prophecy of Jeremiah says that God called Jeremiah to be a prophet, and Jeremiah quotes (presumably) the actual words of God: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (Jer. 1:5). If God actually spoke those words so that Jeremiah heard Him speaking in proper late sixth-century BCE Hebrew, then Jeremiah was one of the most disrespectful auditors of the divine voice who ever lived. Without a pause or even a blush, Jeremiah told God, “:Ah, Lord God! I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth” (Jer. 1:6). Whereupon God gave Jeremiah holy Ned, or perhaps holy Jeremiah. “Do not say, ‘I am only a youth’; for to all to whom I send you you shall go, and whatever I command you you shall speak” (Jer. 1:1:7). In other words, said God (but Jeremiah did not include this in what he wrote), “Don’t mess with me, buster. If I call you, consider yourself called, and don’t give me any grief. I have more than enough grief as it is.”
Did God audibly communicate with anybody three or four thousand years ago? Does He audibly communicate with anyone today? Does “the word of God” need literally to be communicated the way Jeremiah and most of the other prophets said it was communicated --- in quotation marks, no less?
Christian fundamentalism originated in the nineteenth century. Until then no one in any denomination or Christian tradition insisted that every word of the Bible was infallible and inerrant, and that it all had to be accepted as historical fact.
Many preachers quote Psalm 19, verse 14 before their sermon: “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, our strength, and our redeemer.” In nearly sixty years I never once said that before delivering a sermon. Are sermons the word of God? If so, are they as much the word of God as the Bible? Probably some preachers think so, but it seems highly unlikely that is true. Furthermore, some sermons, even of the same preacher, are surely more “the word of God” than others, just as some parts of the Bible are more unanimously perceived to be God’s word than other parts. For example, the Song of Solomon is beautiful religious poetry to some people, and it is scandalous quasi-pornography to others.
The Encyclopedia of Religious Quotations has almost ten full pages of quotes about the Bible from a great variety of people. Most of them are lay people, but some were ordained clergy or theologians. Victor Hugo wrote, “England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England. That is a “thoughty” thought. Thomas Huxley was a famous (or infamous) atheist, depending on one’s point of view. He said, “The dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the Popes.” By implication, we might conclude from that statement that it is the conviction of individuals which enables the Bible to become the word of God. Such conviction is not self-evident to everyone, because not everyone believes it. In truth, many people do not believe it. John Wesley said, “I am a Bible-bigot. I follow it in all things, great and small.” Might the founder of Methodism have overstated his position just a bit?
I doubt that many of us would describe ourselves as Bible-bigots, but we follow many things that the Bible says, and we reject other things. Currently, it is odd that many of the people most opposed to migrants are conservative Christians who pride themselves on doing whatever the Bible says to do. In many places in both the Testaments, but especially in the Old Testament, people were instructed by God to pay special attention to “the stranger in your midst.” In that context, the word “stranger” means “migrant.” The Hebrews were to extend warm hospitality to the refugees of other nations who had fled to Israel. God said they were to do that because the Israelites themselves had been refugees in Egypt, and they were enslaved and heavily mistreated there. Some state governors who claim to be dedicated Christians seem happy to ship migrants to sanctuary states as a very visible signal of their displeasure that migrants have come into their own states, or that migrants are coming into the sacred precincts of the USA at all.
What all this suggests is that the Bible is the word of God to most Jews and Christians in most respects, but not in all respects. Another way to say that is to declare that those parts of the Bible which most clearly appeal to us become the word of God when they move us to take what we assume are appropriate, God-directed actions, putting into practice what the Bible teaches. But not everyone agrees on every “jot and tittle” written in the Bible, to quote a quaint phrase of Jesus.
The Bible as the word of God is a malleable concept, depending on who is doing the scriptural massaging. That is an unsettling truth, but it is true. The Bible is the word of God only to those for whom it is the word of God. The Bible would never be the word of God to Thomas Huxley or Richard Dawkins or Madelyn Murray Ohair, but to one degree or another it is God’s word to countless Christians, from the most conservative to the most liberal.
But what about Jim Jones or David Koresh, who formed the Jonestown and the Branch Davidian communities? Did they see the Bible as the word of God? And if they did, then why were the rest of us so appalled when they encouraged their followers to die en masse? Did God direct them to allow everyone to perish in order to display the depth of their loyalty to their leaders? Or what about Joseph Smith? He accepted the Bible as the word of God, but he also wrote the Book of Mormon. To many of his followers, the Book of Mormon is more important than the Bible. Is the Book of Mormon God’s word?
Of necessity, the Bible is a very acculturated collection of religious writings. It made sense, and still makes sense, primarily when it is understood in the context of the culture and times in which it was written. We call Jesus “Jesus Christ.” Christos (from Greek) is the same as Mesheach (Messiah) from Hebrew, and it means “The Anointed One,” the royal son. Had Jesus gone to India, Tibet, or China and he was somehow able to speak to Asians in their own languages as he preached what he preached to the Jews of Roman Palestine in the first century, it would have been impossible for him to be understood, especially if he had only three years in which to say it. Christianity had to adapt itself to South and East Asian culture, and it didn’t accomplish that until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has not yet come close to making a successful adaptation. But Christianity took root in Europe and then in the Americas because it entered and conquered and eventually enveloped those cultures. There was never an attempt by anyone to try to evangelize using every idea in the Bible, because some of those ideas clearly were and are inimical to nearly everyone who is confronted with them.
Is the Bible the word of God? Yes. Is all of it the word of God? No, at least to most Christians. Furthermore, We are still confronted with everything in the Bible, simply because it is there. It is ludicrous to affirm everything in it, because some of it is historically and intellectually unacceptable. No one can thrust everything in the Bible onto us; instead, we are individually left with trying to decide for ourselves what makes sense and what doesn’t.
That idea is anathema to fundamentalist Christians. They would declare that if not everything is valid, then nothing is valid. We must either accept all of it or none of it, they say. In reality, however, all of us, including fundamentalists, pick and choose what we want to believe. Literalist Christians do not follow the laws of kosher, and Orthodox Jews are not pleased to be surrounded by strangers in their midst, especially if their daughters or sons marry any of the strangers. It is absurd even to suggest that every word in the Bible is the literal word of God. Ultimately the Bible is the word of God because of two historical religious conclaves. One was Jewish and the other was Christian, and normative Judaism and normative Christianity accepted what they decreed. Ever since we have had two “Testaments,” one of 39 books for the Jews, and the other of 27 books for the Christians. The Christians accept all 66 books as “canonical,” meaning officially approved, and the Jews accept only the 39 books as canonical.
The first century CE was a period in which Greek philosophers were particularly captivated by the Greek word logos. Logos means the word “word.” As used by the Greek philosophers, however, it specifically meant “the Word of God,” with a capital-W. The Logos was believed to be the creative power of God. Greek sages taught that the universe was made by God’s Logos. In the creation story in Genesis, God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. The Word made light happen. God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear” --- and it was so. The word of God (and this usage doesn’t mean “the Bible”) is what causes the existence of everything that exists.
Whoever wrote the Fourth Gospel was very familiar with Greek thinking and Greek philosophy. He wrote his Gospel to appeal especially to Greeks. He began his Gospel with a completely new meaning for the term, “the Word of God.” He wrote, “In the beginning God was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He” (not the ordinary meaning of the word “Word”) “He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1-3).
Of all four Gospel writers, John had the highest Christology. The prologue (from Greek: “before-word”) seeks to establish Jesus not only as the Son of God, but as God’s sole creative force in the world. John’s words succeed in authenticating that notion to many Christians, but not to all, and not to me. In my view, God is His own creative force, and He doesn’t need Jesus for that purpose. But the Bible is like that; some parts of it are convincing to some people, and not so to other people. It has ever been thus.
I have never sung our last hymn, although I have sung its tune to other words. I chose it because some of you may have disagreed with much of what I said here, and I thought this hymn might assuage your distress with a text much more to your liking. The Bible appeals to many people for many reasons, and the words of Bernard Barton, of whom I was unable to find any information, may appeal to you as a better illustration of your understanding of “the word of God.” If so, all’s well that ends well.
So we end a sermon punctuated by many questions with yet another question: Is the Bible the word of God? Yes, but not every word in it is His “word.” In fact, not a single word of it is the audible word of God, because God speaks to us primarily through other people and through our own minds, and not directly or audibly. Nevertheless, the Bible is as close to the actual word of God as anyone will ever get. Or at least that’s what I believe. What do you believe?