Confusing the subject with the author

I’m not sure why I feel compelled to set fingers to keypad in offering a new BLOG on a subject that you may find as mind-numbing and aggravating as this one. Perhaps my pent-up feelings of perplexity have just gotten the best of me, so fed-up have I become in hearing the incessant sabre-rattling associated with dictators and unhinged radicals that now routinely comes from our own White House and Pentagon. It is hard to escape the daily assault on reason and civility that emanates from what was once the most-respected and measured political office in the land, if not the entire world. So we either grimace and bear it or slip into that most sorry of rationalizations in saying, “this too will pass.” If only what was passing was on the order of a kidney stone or bout of intestinal discomfort. With three more years of MAGA (“make America gag again”) I wonder how this once great nation will ride out the current order, or what we will have become should we manage to do so.

My ire over recent declarations of just war and holy war from our commander-in-chief and his minister of war is most stirred by what I find to be a naive and dishonest use of that book which the Christian, Islamic and Jewish world hold as sacred. And I say this as someone who has studied, taught and preached from and about the canon of our western spirituality for more decades than I can count on one hand. But as anyone who has taken even the most cursory dive into the history of the Bible fully knows, verses can be cited to prove and justify almost anything.* So I shouldn’t be surprised when it is quoted in or out of context to legitimize almost anything in the service of the social or political cause du jour.

When we peel away the veneer of popular scripture-dropping (my own variant of name-dropping but uttered with the same self-serving intention to garner credibility from those for whom quoting scripture is believed to confer sacred authority), we realize that whoever engages in such textual eisegesis is doing little more than preaching to their respective choirs. To fundamentalists who draw a line of salvation around their particular brand of biblical inerrancy, the text in its entirety (especially those places that resonate with their own cultural and political outlooks) is authored by a God who can neither err nor deceive. When they speak of the “Word of God” they really mean God’s specific “words,” that somehow miraculously survived the touch of thousands of years of scribal copyists, conciliar judgments and doctrinal embellishments. Add the ever changing nuances of meaning now available to us thanks to a host of translations that appeal to our modern psychological, emotional and spiritual preferences, and one can reasonably conclude that God’s apparent schizophrenia lies not within the Creator but in the minds of the Deity’s often discordant beholders.

To those on the opposite end of the hermeneutical (interpretive) spectrum, the Bible remains a faithful but flawed record of men and women reaching up to God in voicing their beliefs, their fears, their hopes, and their most ardent spiritual yearnings. When more liberally-inclined worshipers join their voices in response to the liturgical call, “the Word of God for the People of God”, they do so believing that God has someone spoken in and around and through the earthen vessels of prophets and evangelists to somehow make real God’s presence in their hearing, even if not in the verbatim transmission of the biblical “Word made text.” I believe the attitudes of both kinds of Bible resorters and exhorters are sincere. Yet few of them, whether calling themselves Catholic, Protestant, Unitarian, or Bible-believing Christians is as honest or helpful as they might be to themselves or to a world living in this time of such in-your-face polarization and mistrust.

For some time it has seemed to me that across the spectrum of those who turn to the Bible for Divine answers, no lack of sacred texts can be found that support any of their viewpoints. And when cut and and pasted from one biblical book to another or translated from the world-is-flat landscape of the Bible to the fly-to-the-moon and back age in which we now live, these scriptural texts can easily and convincingly be added to a sermon, a devotional guide, a best-selling book or a political speech to justify and legitimize almost any point of view. I suspect it is our conviction that God is with “us” that drives us to this book in order to find those verses that will lend an aura of Divine authority—proof if you will—to sanctify and legitimize whatever it is we want to promote and proclaim.

So it is no surprise that across the land Christians preach from the same Bible to justify all manner if incompatible viewpoints. From the same Bible we can be convinced of the righteousness of killing and holy warfare as well as the sacred imperatives to be peace-makers. From the holiest of scriptures we can argue for gender and sexual liberty as well as for normative heterosexuality and even chastity. In all of our bibles we can find cause to champion religious inclusivism as well as sectarian segregation. And what gives racial and ethnic discrimination as well as universalism more righteous justification than biblical writ? Of all our lofty declarations about this most influential of all books, this Word of God we call the Bible, none can erase the legacy of how it has been used and manipulated by people of the most opposite and adverse persuasions. For leaders of our own great country to do so confirms what a contributor to the good book wryly concluded eons ago: “there is nothing new under the sun.” **

My primary problem with this misappropriation of the Bible is that it is both naive and dishonest. There is a naïveté in our presumption that we can know the mind and will of the creative and sustaining force of a universe whose dimensions we are just beginning to measure and whose mysteries we are far from fully understanding. Yet we assume, via slogans like the one above and from the recitation of those sacred scripts that form our personal canon, that we can and do know the mind of the Almighty, the Ground of All Being, the One whose very name the biblical writers forbade us to either pronounce or invoke. Instead of joining the psalmist who regarded God’s word as an illuminating guide helping us walk across life’s often hazardous and shadowy paths, we too often take it to be a summons from high for which we must choose to do or die rather than to reason why. It is my observation that, in doing so, we confuse the subject of the Bible—which really is people like us whom we now claim as our spiritual ancestors—with a heavenly author whose identity we choose to know primarily through the words of these very same people. While we confidently affirm that the Bible is the word of God, we rarely accept the fact that these scriptural words, this anthology of faith testimonies, has human fingerprints all over it. Are our Bibles holy because they are an inerrant transcript of God’s very speech, or because they preserve a witness of the sincere—and often flawed—faith of those seeking to know and serve God long before we came life?

If there is truth to the saying that we get out of life what we put into it, then its application to how we look upon the Bible might be rendered this way: we tend to see in the scriptures what we are already looking for or expect our eyes and minds to recognize. If we are convinced that the Bible was dictated by God over centuries of time to a faithful group of scribes, kings, priests and prophets, then that dictation would, by necessity, yield a text which is accurate and correct in every letter, word and punctuation stroke. For Jewish and Christian fundamentalists this is both the starting and finishing point of their understanding when they turn to God’s word to find answers and direction in navigating through the wilderness of today’s cultural, political and moral landscape. While I would never suspect nor accuse our current political leaders of being fundamentalists (or even being very observant of religious teachings and personal habits), it is hard not to recognize how readily they invoke the Bible in defending their actions. In doing so, they stand at the head of a long tradition of American politicians who have made ready use of God-speech in comforting and assuring their constituents that God has been part of their decision-making.

But not all people of faith see in the Bible a God-dictated rule of faith and practice. Instead they favor the idea of “inspiration” behind sacred literature, that lofty yet very human description of what happens to people when they feel caught up by something bigger than their normal existence, something that pulls them into an experience of reality that transcends their everyday rationality. What we value and envy in the hands of great painters, sculptors, and musicians may be the very same loftiness of sight, producing for our wonder and enjoyment masterpieces of artistic creativity. Could it be that within the many books and verses of the Bible we can recognize the inspiration of those who sought and believed they found some connection to God? Could it be that their inspired words, like great works of art, can move us to be drawn along with them into realms of spiritual depth thr0ugh which we may encounter God in our own experiences of living? Could it be that all of us, should we be so open and accepting of the possibility that this transcendent Other may yet be real in our lives and in our world, find in the Bible glimpses of truth that can inspire and direct us as so many before our time were inspired and directed? I not only think so, I lift my voice upon waking each day in the hope that I may become aware of and awakened to that unknown presence upon which so much that we judge to be true and beautiful is conceived.

On this never-before-lived day in April, 2026, we will once again be caught up in the machinations of world leaders acting on behalf of their nations and their reputations. I’m quite certain that their best laid plans will provoke both applause and disgust, and their efforts will yield both happiness and hardship to those who will be most affected by their decisions. I won’t be surprised if they invoke God along the way, a reminder to all of us of the hubris and dishonesty that resonates whenever any of us claims to be walking in step with the Creator of all that was, is or ever will be. But lest we become too blinded by our own spiritual anointment as God’s true and faithful servants, we should hear once again the words of perhaps the most sagacious of all our country’s presidents:

“My concern is not whether God is on our side. My greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”***

What a wake-up call it is, and one we most need to hear, to truly realize that we may not be made in God’s image nearly as much as we have made God in ours. Lincoln’s voice may have been stilled by an assassin’s bullet some 161 years before our time. His words, however, can never be silenced among people of good will who love what is true and good more than they crave allegiance to their own ideologies and reputations.

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* Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice may have said it most succinctly: “The devil can cite scripture for his purposes.

** Ecclesiastes 1:9.

***I’m not sure when or even if Lincoln said this, only that it resonates with what we know of his non-conventional but deeply spiritual attitude towards God.