Truth
Can Christianity be a Rational Faith?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 20 August 2006
Insanity is Back!
Must Christianity be childish or even insane? Has it got to be full of miracles and supernatural entities to be believed. In other words, has it got to be unbelievable to be believed?
500 years ago, Protestants objected to the excess of the Roman Church, and not just its wealth and corruption, but also its tenets. Much of Catholicism, they said, was not Christian. It had been adopted by the early Church when many of its believers had converted from Paganism and were still influenced by Pagan ways of thinking. So, if it was expedient to make the birth of Christ the same as the birth of the Sun God, then they did without a qualm because it was what people were used to. The same with supernatural birth—Pagan gods procreated with human women, but rarely in the orthodox way. Then there was the Trinity—the New Testament has no mention of the Trinity per se, as The Encyclopedia Britannica has confirmed, and at best mentions only that God acts in different ways—sometimes as an almighty being, and sometimes in the guise of the Holy Ghost or even a divine man. Then there was the question of images—classical Pagans had wonderful artists and sculptures but the Jewish God’s commandments seemed to forbid image making. Then there was the question of intercession and whether the Blessed Virgin could act as an intermediary between those who sought supplication before God and the Supreme Being Himself, and saints were similarly questioned in that role—an almighty being needs no intermediaries. And when it came to reading the Holy Word of God in the Holy Book, Protestants saw no reason why anyone should not read God’s word directly, and the Holy Spirit would ensure correct interpretation, rather than Catholic priests.
People died in protest against the Catholic view on these matters, the view that had prevailed for over a millennium with the threat of torture and a painful death for anyone who thought otherwise—those called heretics. Protestantism prevailed where other heresies had failed, after myriads of people died in the wars and oppression that accompanied this schism in the Church.
Now, insanity is back—the same sort of insanity that dominated Christianity for a thousand years. People are told, once again, what the scriptures mean, and often it is not what they say. Or so say the ministers and pastors of the modern US Protestant sects that have adopted fundamentalism and evangelicalism. The bible is inerrant, but it does not say what the words say. It is only inerrant when the pastors explain how it is. Otherwise it quite often seems to be errant! And what do we find? The Protestant flocks believe what their scheming and money grubbing pastors say, and actually send them millions of dollars in revenue to force their view on to the rest of humanity. The Roman Church is suddenly born again.
The Council of Nicaea in 325 AD declared by majority vote the doctrine that the Son is “of the same substance (Greek, homoousios) as the Father”, though it had nothing specific to say about the Holy Spirit. One trouble was that the Church had stolen as its own the Jewish scriptures, though Marcion wanted to drop them because the Jews, having repeatedly revolted against Rome, gave Christians a bad name as trouble makers, like modern day Moslem terrorists. The Jewish scriptures repeated over and over again that God was one. Believers were not to question the bishops, and soon they were not to read the bible for themselves, the bishops spoonfeeding the congregations with just what they needed, and not enough to cause puzzlement. If anyone did confess to puzzlement, they were reassured that the Devil put such thoughts in their heads but faith would cure all such afflictions. Good Christians had to have faith, and everything would be hunky-dory—for the bishops and the pastors, that is. Faith rapidly became the fourth and most important but least acknowledged part of the “Holy Quartinary”. People now can read the bible for themselves, if they want to have faith, but few do. Though Protestant Christians died for the right to print bibles in their own native tongues, modern Protestants will not read what they see without a pastor telling them what it means, just as the medieval Catholic priesthood did. Christianity has become the religion of the ruthless and the stupid.
Must it be so? That was the question posed, and there are sincere Christians who do not think it must. Michael Servetus opposed the oppressive shackles that the dictator of Geneva, John Calvin, forced on to his people instead of the Roman shackles, and Calvin has millions of followers still, whereas Servetus was burnt to death by him, and is forgotten by most Protestants. Yet there are Protestants who are closer to Servetus, even if there are none that actually follow his teachings. Servetus was incensed that Calvin, the supposed strict anti-Catholic and fervent Protestant, advocated what was an obvious Catholic invention, datable precisely to the Council of Nicea called by a Pagan emperor—the Trinity. Can anyone be considered a Protestant at all while retaining the notion of God being three persons?
Reason and Unitarianism
Unitarians do not support the Trinity. It is why they are Unitarians. A fundamental tenet of the Unitarian belief is that God is one person, not three, but they do not just believe God is one. They conclude He is One by reason. Unitarians claim to be reasonable Christians because they do not think God wants to gratuitously defy the laws of nature that he has imposed. God could not have intended Nature or His Holy Word to seem irrational. Did God mean Christians to be deceitful when he inspired the words of the author of 1 Peter?
Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you.1 Peter 3:15
A reason is not just a belief. As Jabez T Sunderland put it in A Rational Faith (1876), Christians must accept “the necessity of always interpreting religion in the light of reason”, and therefore “the application of the scientific method to religion”. This must be anathema for the looney sects sprouting in redneck Republican America, such as the creationists, fundamentalists, IDers, These-Louts-for-Jesus, and Those-Louts-for-Jesus. But when people let themselves be led by demagogues, and abandon reason, that is the outcome—insane and plainly ungodly behaviour by people who just do not get it.
Yet it seems so sensible to be reasonable. What is interesting is that despite the force of dogma even some Catholics are not ashamed of using reason. John Henry Newman ended up a Cardinal but admits to using reason in his move from the Church of England to Catholicism when he began to have his doubts about the Anglican Church.
I had to make up my mind for myself, and others could not help me. I determined to be guided, not by my imagination, but by my reason.
His reason led him to reject Protestatism and to cleave to Catholicism. Other Catholics have used their reason to move in the opposite direction, and some of both halves of the schism have used their reason to leave Christianity behind all together. The point is that they have a brain, given to them in their belief by God, who must expect them to use it. Intelligent Christians do, and go wherever reason leads them. Unintelligent ones refuse to use it on the grounds that reason might challenge their faith! They must think using their brains is the work of the Devil not God.
It is more reasonable to believe God is One than that God is Three, if for no other reason than that He says so. So does God in the form of the Son, Christ, whom Christians are supposed to revere particularly. Jesus himself says plainly in the bible (John 14:28) that “my Father is greater than I”. Why would Christian believers think that an aspect of God would want to lie about this, and would they want to worship a god who was a liar if he did? If the Father is greater than the son, does it need spelling out that the two are therefore not co-equal? Mark 13:32 takes the argument further in reporting that Jesus had said concerning the date of the Judgement:
But concerning that day and the hour, no one knows, not the angels, those in Heaven, nor the Son, except the Father.
Jesus, the Son, freely acknowledges that he does not have the same knowledge as God, the Father, and so cannot be equal with Him. In Gethsemane, Jesus waited patiently. He thought something would happen. It is certain that he expected the Mount of Olives to split open and a host from heaven to arrive to cleanse the earth of wickedness—but he was wrong. He was waiting for this heavenly host of angels to inaugurate the End of the World, but they never came. He was not omniscient as God is meant to be. John has the same information, telling us that Christ said:
I can of mine own self do nothing. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me.John 5:30
The Son and the Father have two distinct wills, but Christ subsumes his will to his father’s. They are therefore not equal. God is superior to the Son, and the Son himself has no doubt about it.
So God does not say He is Three, whatever interpretations sly and slimy ministers will put on certain passages, and nor does His Son. God is capable of saying He is Three plainly enough, if it is true. He never has. Accepting it is being reasonable. Why should God want you to be unreasonable and come to some other conclusion? Plenty of people believe in more than one God, Hindus are polytheistic, Greeks had twelve Olympians, Sandinavians had twelve also, others have threes too, Persians had a good god and a bad god, but the Jewish scriptures do not mention any Trinity—they insist on the unity of God. To deny it is to be irrational but to accept what is obvious, and written plainly in what Christians claim is God’s book, is rational. Not to see what is plain is to live in wilful darkness. Unreason is darkness and reason is the light. Are Christians to believe that the bible is deliberately obscure, deliberately dark in its lack of reason? Is God the god of light or not?
Jesus—Man or God?
Another problem that the concept of the Trinitarian God presents is that of Jesus being co-eternal with God. It relates to the other doctrine of the Church that Christ was fully man and fully God with neither detracting from the fullness of the other. Such matters are the impossibilities that Christians have to swallow before they are allowed to have breakfast. A God is indeed, in the normal definition, immortal and so has an eternal life, but a human being has a definite beginning and a definite end to its life. We can agree in our imaginations that an eternal God could use a human being as a conduit to try out human life, and so could somehow squeeze himself into the human body when it was conceived or born. But the human being could not possibly thereby be fully human. Such a human is partly a God. If the human being is fully human and so was conceived and came into life at a certain point in time, then it did not exist before then, and that is one of the features of normal life that makes it human. It could not have a god in it without losing its essential humanity.
Naturally, Christians call up a reserve of faith and ignore the conundrum. But the fact remains that a God disguised, however it might be done, as a human being is not, and cannot be, a human being and so cannot suffer as a human being would suffer nailed to a cross. If the Son has the fullness of a human nature, then it cannot have been present with God at the creation, or any other time before the mother’s cell was fertilized, even if it was fertilised by a ray of light entering her ear. By this act or some other mystery, God begat his Son. That was when the Son made its entry on to the human stage.
Since Christ was a man, and we are told in some detail about parts of his life in the New Testament, his substance must have been the same substance as the rest of humanity, namely flesh and blood. We are told his flesh was torn, and his blood spilled when he was crucified. All is believable, for such is the way of flesh when mistreated. Christ then died, as men who are tortured often do. Death means that life ceases in the substance that constitutes the body, but God the Father, who is allegedly of the same substance as the Son, did not die. Human substance cannot withstand death, yet the substance of the Son did, Christians say, yet the Church tells us that the Son was wholly human.
It might be that the substance we observe, the flesh and blood of human beings is not their true substance. The true substance of matter, according to believers, is incorruptible, and it is only sin that causes it to corrupt. The raising up of the dead Jesus was to stand for the triumph of good over evil. The good man only seems to die, then is raised up in his body, but in an incorruptible one. The true substance of God and man has to be this hypothetical incorruptible flesh. We might be persuaded that it is so, but an intelligent God, that has given us brains to help us to evade tricksters and rogues pretending to be supernatural agents of God, must know that one badly recorded case cannot persuade us, and from His own exhortations in the Jewish scriptures, particularly Isaiah, nor should it. Moreover, when Jesus died on the cross, as reported in Luke, his spirit left him:
And crying with a loud voice, Jesus said, Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit. And saying this, He gave up the ghost.Luke 23:46
It says that Jesus had a ghost to leave him when he died, and which presumably returned when no one was looking. Are we to assume that this ghost was the Holy Ghost? The Holy Ghost is the ghost that Jesus and God share in the Trinity. Or was it a different ghost that Jesus had because he was in fullness a man as well as being in fullness a god, in which case the Holy Ghost had no role in all this until it was required to hustle the released ghost back into Jesus’s substance to revivify him. It really is rather too tortuous to appreciate, but it seems unnecessary that an Almighty has to multiply entities the way it does. If gods and angels are spiritual creatures then it seems superfluous that they should have a ghost. The Holy Ghost, among other things, is supposed to look after the accuracy of the sacred records, but here we have to consider that the author of Luke (and Mark too) is using a mere turn of phrase, so the guardian of the Holy Books is being slack as it often proves to be. God ought to sack it. Anyway, the simplicity of the event ought to require nothing more than the Christ, who had been unconscious as a god, woke up back to his godness. Christian complexities make it seem more absurd than it need be.
So, if Jesus was not a person of the Trinitarian God, then what was he? Is it possible that he was a man? Christians believe an ordinary man can be endowed with the grace of God, known by them as the Holy Spirit, so Jesus could have been an extraordinary man, particularly blessed by the the Holy Spirit—but still a man! This ties in with God being One, but also being almighty, and able to apportion His blessings as He chooses. In other words, it is reasonable. That Jesus was a man specially blessed by God is a reasonable idea. One has to trust that God is indeed almighty, but thereafter no additional supernatural beings need be invented. William of Ockham said that Christians ought not to multiply entities, and this reasonable way of thinking about God and the son does not.
Even considering Jesus as being an angel or some sort of demi-god is being polytheistic, and demeans the power of the One God. Of course, it might be simply a question of semantics, because a man, merely a man, when endowed with a superfluity of the grace of God, might seem so like a demi-god as to be one. That is where the irrational believers go wrong, thus distancing themselves from God, and placing themselves in error. Jesus remained a man even though he was such a remarkable one people believed he was another god.
If he was a demi-god, then Jesus was in the same category as the demi-gods of the Pagan religions. If Jesus did miracles to show gratuitously that he was a god, then he was in the same category as Pagan miracle workers. If Jesus is literally to be considered the son of a god, then he is again in the same category as the many sons of gods in the literature of ancient and mythical religions. Now you might believe that Jesus differs from these others, but that belief has to be reasonable, and so all the other instances have to be shown to be false so that the case of Jesus alone can be believed alone. Otherwise, Jesus has to be taken as yet another instance of the other cases. Either they are all true, including the case of Jesus, or they are all false, including his case. Merely to pick Jesus as being true arbitrarily is unreasonable, however sincere you might be in your belief. No such problem arises in accepting that Jesus was an exceptional man, blessed by God.
Unitarians refuse to begin with a belief in Jesus however irrational it might be, or seem. Many Christians take just that view. They just believe, but any such belief is a self-constructed belief. That is shown by it being reasonable to them! It does not seem reasonable to any objective observer. Unitarians reject any such belief as not one that God could have encouraged. For Him to have done so is to accept that God encourages irrationality in a world that He has otherwise made appear rational to us. The proper principle is that…
…religion and reason must in all things go hand in hand, and that the scientific method must be applied to religion the same as to anything else.Jabez T Sunderland, A Rational Faith
So, if the New Testament and the Jewish scriptures are described in verifiable history, as Christians and Jews claim, then they must be subject to the principle expounded by the Unitarians. Why should God invite us to accept the Jesus of history and the Moses of history then refuse to allow history to confirm them? Is it reasonable to identify God’s love with lies, or even a perverse refusal to verify what He wants us to believe? It is not.
Original Sin and Unquestioning Faith
The Catholic teaches that we are all of us born with the sin of Adam within us. All of us are automatically sinners—people are “by nature corrupt, depraved, incapable of doing anything pleasing to heaven”. Is that what we should expect of a loving God, of a reasonable God who has made us in his own image? It allows little room for improvement, yet many human beings, including Christians can show noble behaviour. If the person is a Christian, it might be thought to be through the grace of God, but what if it is someone who is not a Christian? What if it is someone who had never heard of Christ. The New Testament seems to be harsh on this, that only through Christ can people reach God, but is that reasonable? Men and women who do not know Christ can be found “doing kind, loving, beautiful, noble deeds—just such deeds as Jesus always commended, just such deeds as we call Christian when we see them done by professing Christian people” (J T Sunderland).
It does not seem right or proper for Christians to nevertheless say that these people have not benefited from God’s grace, and it begins to look perverse to say that they have not done when many professing Christians live lives that show no visible signs of benefiting from the basics of God’s grace in important respects. If Christianity is the name used for those who have been blessed by God, then many people who make no profession of Christianity are thus blessed, even so. That seems reasonable and Christian, if Christianity is indeed practical goodness. Unfortunately, many of the aggressive US sects seem to think there is nothing practical about Christianity at all, but that is distinctly unreasonable.
It is all very well to claim that faith alone saves, but that is absurd, because faith alone is practically useless, and God cannot have meant it that those who make no practical effort to act in a consistent manner to others that would show the benefit of His grace could have His blessing. Most Christians accept this when they say that such-and-such could not have been a Christian because he was so wicked—like Hitler, despite his Catholic upbringing. Hitler, no doubt, thought his faith was sufficient, and many of the people who declare Hitler to have been wicked will think they are faithful Christians. They are admitting that they have to show they are Christians by practical deeds.
It is not in the least reasonable for God to save people who sincerely think they have faith but do not show it even in elementary ways. When the Christian sees someone acting in a way that Christians could emulate then what basis do they have for denying that these people have God’s grace despite themselves? The inverse is true of those who act in ignoble ways while professing Christianity. S Paul thought Christians should be willing to judge each other but not non-Christians. Again it implies that deeds were a criterion of Christian behaviour. The Unitarian thinks true Christianity, not original sin, is native in man, and that is the more generous and more reasonable way of thinking because it addresses reality. To say we are “dead in sin, wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body”, “made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil” contradicts Jesus and his own role model, as well as the world as we see it.
Is the Bible Perfect?
Unitarians sensibly oppose the notion that the bible is inerrant. To say it is inerrant is to make it perfect even though it exists in an imperfect world. That is not in the least reasonable. If the bible is not inerrant, then all of it is not of the same value. If it has errors in it, then some parts of it are wrong, and if that is the case, as it has been produced by fallible men in an imperfect world, then it is the utmost folly to imagine it could possibly be perfect. Its very nature, a compilation of books of different authors and editors, assembled at different times and with different accuracy shows it cannot be a perfect or inerrant book. If Christians believe in God, then why cannot they believe that God has arranged for the bible to be like this because no book on earth could be perfect, and a book like the bible honestly shows it.
A book like the Quran can claim to be perfect, but it is no more made in heaven than the bible, and so is still imperfect, even if the archangel Gabriel was responsible for its transmission. Unless Mohammed is himself perfect, his hearing of the angel cannot be assumed to have been perfect, and so the Quran is also, by the criterion of reason, imperfect. Both books, examined on the criteria of reason and science fail. Are we to assume by this that God is a liar, either in His book, or in Nature? It is not reasonable for a Christian to imagine that God is a liar in either sphere, but it is reasonable to imagine that the world and its inhabitants, and their self-produced books, thoughts, beliefs and sciences, are imperfect. People cannot gamble everything on any of them, like in shares in a gold-mine, nor try…
…to declare that everything we find is alike gold, but to admit freely, as honest, candid investigation compels us to, that some of what we find is stone, and some earth, and some the quartz that holds the gold, while some is gold itself, precious and indestructible.
The Unitarians hold this view even about the bible. To imagine that the bible is infallible in every word means wantonly ignoring what our brains, our experience, and our reason tells us. Since Christians take it that their very existence is by the grace of God, it is insulting Him to then believe that He will deliberately lie in natural matters, His own revelation to us through words, and any revelation He might make by intuition. We must accept that we are never certain of anything, even our beliefs, and that is why, no doubt, Jesus taught repeatedly that the Christian had to be humble, and those who were not were to be the last in the queue for the kingdom of God.
The Brain in Revelation
If God is omnipotent, why should He wish to reveal Himself to His creation only sporadically? Unitarians have the sensible idea that He actually does it all the time. He does it all the time to mankind through Nature, and He does it all the time to people through their total experience of life. That includes inspired books, and books that might not be considered particularly inspired. God will reveal Himself in more than one way. It is not to disparage the bible, but simply to put it in a context that helps stop the bible itself from being idolized. Inspiration…
…is a perpetual, ever-living thing, belonging to all times and all peoples.
By the same token, people can help others, and they do not have to be priests or pastors to help someone spiritually. Salvation is not like holy water to be splashed here and there. It comes from the person. The perfection of Jesus does not help anyone else to be saved, if they themselves choose wickedness.
Every man is accountable for himself, and his guilt cannot be transferred to another.
God made people with brains, wanting them to think, and can hardly be pleased if, having done so, Christians go about saying that God does not want them to think but instead to have a faith which denies reason. Why then did He give us a brain at all?
No religion can possibly be true that does not stand the test of investigation, and whose divineness does not become all the more apparent by the pouring on it of all the light we can get. Science we believe to be as much the friend of true religion, as it is the enemy of false religion or superstition. Reason we believe to be of God, and not of the devil.
The Unitarian sees that without reason, religion must decline into superstition, and it can be seen happening before our eyes in the US. Paul said a Christian principle must be “proving all things, and holding fast that which is good”. True religion must be reasonable, and the scientific method should be applied as much to religion as to anything else. True religion only shows itself more clearly true the more thoroughly it is examined. These are Unitarian principles. No wonder it has been rejected by the bulk of insane maniacs calling themselve Christians today.
All or Nothing At All
It is tempting, in considering fundamentalist Christian claims that the bible is infallible, to take the view that, if it is not infallible, then it is fallible and therefore useless. If no one knows in what ways it is fallible, then it is indeed useless, but those curious people, the rational Christians like the Unitarians, reject this idea, based as it is on a false dichotomy, though one accepted by Protestant Christians for a long time. Rarely are they who present the dichotomy scholarly Christians, for scholars, even Christian ones, often try to be reasonable. Not so the fundamentalist pastor, or even proselytizing layman, who think God will look favourably upon them if they take extreme views, so long as they favour their own impression of Christian orthodoxy. For them, any mistake in the bible invalidates Christianity, and to guard against any such possibility they declare the bible to be absolutely true. The bible has become like the law of Moses was to the biblical Pharisees—a fetish, defined as something subject to unreasoning and ignorant devotion. Young people are taught by their ignorant ministers that the bible has to be inerrant, and to deny it is to deny Christian faith, and so they perpetuate the error, slipping a regular contribution of dollars to the minister in gratitude.
The Christian fundamentalist has to abandon all judgement, obliterate all discernment by accepting the limited choice offered by the crooked Christian ministry. The choice is not just black or white, or even a grey shade in between but is a gradation from one or more poles to others. Your computer screen is not just on or off. It has a brightness control and a contrast control, not to mention colour balance and so on. Why should Christian belief in the bible be just on or off? It is a fallible human work which has had many authors and editors, and so is of varying quality. That is common sense. It is stupidity to pretend or even imagine that it is entirely right or entirely wrong, but the fundamentalist is easily persuaded into stupidity by those grasping, control freaks called their ministers. We have a brain to allow us to discern and to discriminate, and nothing ought to be more important to the Christian than making sure that tricksters have not led them to abandoning their brains on the grounds that it is the Devil’s invention. If God made us, then he made us as a thinking animal like Himself. We should think.
Views of Nineteenth Century Authorities
Jabez T Sunderland cited several authorities of his day, in support of the Unitarian interpretation of God’s message, mostly now forgotten but nevertheless clever men whose words are worth remembering still in this context:
No course is so wise, safe, and really loyal to the Bible as that which admits, without hesitation, the possibility of historical errors in the sacred writings, and then proceeds without disturbance of faith and in the spirit of fairness to determine to what extent such errors actually exist.Professor Ladd of Yale
Great harm has been done by the indiscriminate defence of crude biblical statements and ideas, historical inaccuracies, discrepancies, and imperfect scientific and ethical ideas.Professor C H Toy of Harvard
The limitations of human language and the disabilities of human infirmity were not miraculously removed from those who were chosen as the channels of divine revelation.Archdeacon Farrar of the Church of England
Inspiration properly belongs to persons, not to books. The authors of the different works contained in the collection called the Bible—of most of whom we know little or nothing, sometimes not even the name—were men of various intelligence and endowments. Possessing unequal gifts, their productions are of unequal value. As infallibility belongs to God alone, none of them was infallible in what he said or wrote. Each wrote according to his light and the purpose he had in view. Contradictions, inconsistencies, errors both intellectual and moral, are observable in their writings.Biblical scholar, Dr Samuel Davidson
Our sacred books are not superhuman but human works, natural and not extra-natural in their origin; for most part by no means certainly the productions of the authors to whom they have been assigned traditionally, and very certainly of considerably later date than that thus assigned to many of them; the historical works, assuredly, as they now stand, the result of several hands and many re-editings; all of them manifesting the limitations of ordinary literature in their reasonings, their historical references, and their interpretation of earlier sacred writings.Dr R Heber Newton of New York
So far as I can see, there are errors in the scriptures that no one has been able to explain away… If such errors destroy the authority of the Bible, it is already destroyed for historians. Men cannot shut their eyes to truth and fact. But on what authority do these theologians drive men from the Bible by this theory of inerrancy? The Bible itself nowhere makes this claim… It is a ghost of modern evangelicalism to frighten children.Professor Briggs
Fundamentalists accuse these devout Christians of being the slaves of the Devil, failing to see from their proximity to it who the real slaves of the Devil are. Only God is perfect. Humans have to try to achieve it, but Christians think that only Christ has. None of the authors of the bible, therefore, were perfect, despite the inspiration they had, and so their efforts cannot have been perfect. Even to think it is to have been captured by Satan into a false believe with very unChristian results such as intolerance, bitterness and vengeance.
Ernest Renan, author of a famous Life of Jesus, was a student priest who discovered in his reading of the bible that it was “no more exempt than any other ancient book, from contradictions, inadvertencies, and errors”. What was soon decried by Christian Luddites as “The Higher Criticism”, the Devil at work again, was simply facing the evidence of the bible honestly, and finding that it is a human book not a divine one, despite its divine inspiration. The inspiration might have been perfect, but what emerged in the imperfect world could only be imperfect unless, Christians will accept, it had been introduced into the world directly by God. That as not the case of the biblical books! Yet they do have within them the core beliefs that Christians consider their own. Why should they either reject it all or accept it all? Unitarians consider such extremes with no shades between as unreasonable. Renan felt he could not accept the Church’s interpretation of the bible and left it, while remaining a Christian, to pursue biblical understanding without the constraints of compulsory interpreters.
Sunderland told the story of Bishop Colonso, a biblical inerrantist who was translating the bible for the Zulus. A simple native questioned the story of the Flood, forcing Colonso to reconsider it.
My heart answered in the words of the prophet, “Shall a man speak lies in the name of the Lord?” I dared not do so. My own knowledge of some branches of science, of geology in particular, had been much increased since I left England; and I now knew for certain, on geological grounds, a fact of which I had only had misgivings before, namely, that a universal deluge, such as the Bible manifestly speaks of, could not possibly have taken place in the way described in the book of Genesis, not to mention other difficulties which the story contains… Knowing this, I felt that I dared not, as a servant of the God of truth, urge my brother man to believe, as a historical narrative, that which I did not myself believe, and which I knew to be untrue.
Fundamentalists oblige believers to accept the scientific truth of the Flood or to discard the bible as false. Fundamentalists expect God to have obliged a man to write down, as inerrant truth, facts about the world that he could not possibly have known. Even if it were true, the man himself must have thought he was writing a tall story. The point is that he had no way of knowing that the story he wrote about the Flood was true, and neither have we. Rather the opposite. All the science we have shows it was not true. So the inspired author of the story really was writing the tall story he imagined he was, and not the gospel truth that modern fundamentalists say he was. Surely the story is simply emphasising that God made the world and He can destroy it, but can save those who deserve to be saved. For Christians the story expresses a truth without being itself historically true! Colonso realized it, and learnt something from it. The explanation rejected by Catholicism but which ought to be accepted by Protestants is that humanity has a spark of God within them called the soul, and it is God’s total influence on the soul that leads to salvation, not mankind’s total uncritical belief in an ancient and faulty tome. That is an influence, but not the exclusive one. The Christian should believe that God is greater than any bible.
The Claim of Biblical Infallibility
How did the doctrine of biblical infallibility arise? The bible does not make any such claim, rather the opposite, asking the believer to prove all things, casting out the evil and retaining the good. The people in the bible are living in the imperfect world and are themselves manifestly imperfect. Even Moses is not allowed to see the Promised Land. David is far from good, and even Jesus could show human foibles—he was, after all, human. And Jesus asks us ourselves to judge what is right. Why then should we believe some fundamentalist minister who says we cannot judge for ourselves, so must accept what the hairbrained, power-mad preacher tells us?
The mad mullahs of fundamentalist Christianity have several arguments for biblical infallibility. They say that Revelation does not permit anything to be added or removed from the bible, with a curse the punishment for so doing. Of course, no God of love would possibly have imposed such a curse without setting Himself apart from the love and forgiveness that he supposedly advocates. Not that most Christians are ever distrubed by any such considerations. They happily accept that God can be considered as forgiving and vengeful at the same time. It must be another of the impossibilities that make God what He is to believers. Yet Jesus was clear:
Love your enemies, bless, and curse not.
Curses are a product of a bygone, cruel and unforgiving age, not of Christianity, or so say those peculiar people that think Christian principles ought to be put into practice, the Unitarians and their like. Cursing is devilish. A good God offers blessings, and His worst curse is for His blessings to be withheld.
Besides this, Revelation, though much loved by the type of Christian that thinks weirdness and incomprehension are criteria of divinity, is actually a part of the bible by the skin of its teeth, so to say. Church synods often rejected it, leading Protestants, like Luther and Zwingler, did the same, and Calvin thought it was incomprehensible, yet it is still in the canon. It ought to warn Christians not to take it too seriously. If God had any great regard for this peculiar, and probably pre-Christian, composition, He could have had it accepted more positively. More positive, indeed, is the fact that the bible is a library of different compositions and the reference in Revelation to alterations and additions means to the dubious book Revelation itself, and not to the whole library of books that constitute the bible. Revelation existed as a book before the assembly of books called the bible was put together, and then the passage could only have meant the book Revelation alone, in which the passage actually stands. So fundamentalists who take this passage to affirm the inerrancy of the bible are being their usual arbitrary and mischievous selves—aiming to fool the gullible.
Of course, the authors of the bible, according to 2 Peter, were inspired by the Holy Ghost, and that too is taken as proof that the bible is infallible. It is not a convincing argument because inspiration cannot imply infallibility. Christ told his disciples that the words would come to them when they spoke, and the words that emerge are considered inspired by the Holy Ghost, but they are not accepted as being infallible for that reason, though many modern Christians seem to think they are incapable of telling a lie. An inspired composition is still done by fallible humans. What emerges by divine inspiration cannot be assumed to be perfect in an imperfect world.
Moreover, Christians ought to take notice of the history of the work they unquestioningly now accept as infallible. These different compositions came together slowly, and not equally. Just as in the case of Revelation, there is a need to consider what earlier Christians at times closer to their composition thought of epistles like 2 Peter. No one had ever heard of it until the third century, and few were willing to accept it as genuine for another two hundred years. Only when it too, though a late pious fake, began to look ancient, did Christians start to accept it on its own basis. Here in 2 Peter and Revelation are two of the more doubtful Christian books.
It is 2 Timothy 3:16 that fundamentalists take to be the most secure proof from the bible that it announces itself as inerrant, yet it really says little more than 2 Peter. It is a declaration of the inspired nature of the biblical books.
All scripture is inspired by God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for teaching righteousness.
2 Timothy again is not an epistle that scholars can identify with Paul the apostle, despite its own claims. More importantly, the passage in the Greek seems not to have been properly translated. It does not say that all scripture is inspired by God. How can all scripture be inspired by God? Scripture is simply writing. What it says is that scripture inspired by God is profitable for the purposes listed. It is specifying that whatever is inspired by God is profitable. So, it is not saying that any scripture is profitable for those purposes, but whatever God inspires is. It cannot prove that the scripture compiled together in the bible is indeed inspired by God. Human beings have compiled the works together, and, as already noted, not all of them have been readily accepted as being inspired. If they were not considered particularly inspired in earlier times, they are no more inspired now from having been kept together with inspired books for many centuries. That is something that some Christians cannot seem to grasp. The various biblical writings are not getting inspired from having been collected together in the bible. They were collected together because someone thought they were inspired, but in some cases not everyone agreed! The Catholic bible has in it books that the Protestants reject. Who is right? Protestants say they are and Catholics say they are. What does God say?
Counter to the Claim of Inerrancy…
Some notable Christians have stood out against the crowd of those who take the bible to be divine, and so perfect, just by being called the bible. Indeed the New Testament itself declares that the Jewish scriptures or the Old Testament is not inerrant because the whole point of Christianity is to correct the falsehoods that have accumulated about it! Paul the apostle, the greatest saint of the church, says in the Christian bible itself that the law of Moses, also still in the Christian bible is not true. Jabez Sunderland writes:
Even the “Ten Commandments” of Moses, which we should regard as sacred if any part of the Old Testament is, he calls “the ministration of death written and engraven on stones”, which is superseded by the law of Christ, written “not on tables of stone, but on fleshly tables of the heart”.
S Paul obviously did not regard the Old Testament as infallible, and if Paul did not, then how can anyone pretend that Christ did? The teachings of Jesus such as the Sermon on the Mount and his teaching on divorce, as examples, seem deliberately to defy the Jewish scriptures. How then could Jesus have thought the scriptures were inerrant. His very point is taken by Christians to have been to correct false scripture. The attitude of the church to scripture remained the same until some Protestants began to think the bible itself was God. The Catholic Church always taught that doctrine could not just be read directly but had to be interpreted by “divines”—doctors of theology. And, frankly, the supposed infallibility of the fundamentalist bible only comes about in the hands of fundamentalist ministers by them making complex interpretations of some passages in the light of others in an absurd sophistry that forces a confused inerrancy in place by jiggery-pokery. The honest, Unitarians will say, Christian, truth is that infallibility of the bible is an illusion. Nothing in this imperfect world can be perfect.
The Jewish scriptures were written in Hebrew, an astonishingly impoverished language for God to have chosen for His infallible revelation. Written Hebrew had no vowels, so in recording words, there was no way of showing the vowel sounds. It meant that the language was particularly suitable for puns, because the puns were inevitable, but if puns were inevitable, how is a language able to convey inerrant ideas? It simply can not! Moreover, the bible words that have come to us are translated from Hebrew or from Greek, having been passed on by hand copying. Even before the translators begin, the originals are often obscure even to native speakers. What the devout Protestant reads and takes to be infallible is actually the best that the translators can make of the original. But different translators reach different conclusions. Which of them is right? Fundamentalists might prefer the King James version, but it is their own preference and has no more divine authority than any other.
Simply to read the way the bible has come together ought to persuade anyone capable of thinking that the bible could not be inerrant. If God wanted to give us an inerrant bible, doubtless He could have done so, if all things are possible for Him, but if that is so, He has obviously chosen not to do it. The plain reason is that He has given us a brain, and He expects us to use it, but Protestant ministers do not!
Christians object when critics laugh at their beliefs, but, if the bible is infallible, then serpents and asses could talk and a man could survive with little discomfort inside the belly of a giant fish for three days. Why would God expect us to believe that such stories actually happened rather than that they are illustrations of some moral message? There is no good reason but a very bad one—certain men want us to believe some utterly unbelievable passages in the bible, and they achieve their aim by the claim of infallibility. The bible contains historical inaccuracies, that are not rendered historical truths by their affirmation as true by those who refuse to accept them, and nor are the blatant contradictions resolved by tortuous reasoning.
Was it God or the Devil that tempted David to count the people? Are we seriously meant to believe that two million people left Egypt with Moses, together with large numbers of animals, only a few generations after they entered the country as a few herders and their families? Or that a tiny country the size of Wales could field an army of 800,000 men and could lose half a million of them? The bible exaggerates the importance of Israel and Judah. It deliberately plays to the gallery, flattering its audience as part of its aim of getting them to obey the law. Are we to believe that a wish for innocent babes to be dashed against rocks, or even for them to be homeless vagabonds, or for the sins of fathers to be visited upon unborn generations, or that slavery is all right as long as they are the sons and daughters of foreigners, or that foreigners can be sold tainted meat are the inerrant values of the Christian God of love? If Christ abrogated the law of Moses, then many of these ancient rules simply cannot apply any more, so why do these fundamentalists still want to apply them as if they did? And it is not merely legal aspects of the Jewish scriptures but the narrative parts too. Can a Christian accept that the God of love really told Joshua to murder innocent women and children, and even made the sun stand still for a day? If these have to be accepted as infallible truth, then God is condemned as the evil trickster. He must be the Devil Himself! Do any Christians want to believe that? Some evidently do!
Rational Christianity
Sunderland was appealing to Christians over a hundred years ago not to accept the nonsense put over by wicked Protestant ministers determined to control an army of morons. He asked “thoughtful and honest people everywhere, to rise above all this strange unwisdom, this folly of speech, this intemperance of claim, and begin treating the Bible with the same honesty, candor and intelligence with which they treat other books”. Naturally most US Protestant Christians did not. They actually like the vengeful old time God. They prefer Him to the namby-pamby Christian one. They want their God to be Rambo in the sky with missiles. They want to shut off their minds from the truth, and they will do it by calling lies truth and truth lies. It automatically leads to the neocon world of Bush and Blair. It becomes the religion of sociopaths.
Unitarians say the bible is not infallible but it is nevertheless, with all its faults, a great book. It is not a science book and not a history book, but it is a compilation of ancient wisdom, much of which remains valid, not all of it by any means, but Christian revelation makes clearer what is valid and what is metaphor or allegory or even simply erroneous ancient ideas that Christianity has outdated. After all, it is 2000 years old, and until God restores heavenly perfection to the world by eliminating corruption, time changes things. So it is in the real world but not in the fantasy world of fundamentalist ministers who claim to know what God has never revealed. Unitarians think that, like the human soul, the bible has divinity in it, but it is up to each one who wants to accept Christianity to verify the detail against Christian revelation and teaching as formulated originally by Jesus and evolved thereafter by God’s revelation through human experience and Nature. What is made by humans suffers from human weakness even if the guiding spirit is the Holy One. Revelation is a learning process, not a once and for all happening. It did not end with Christ, rather Christ showed as a man what humanity can be. God did not make humanity mindless. That is the Devil’s ploy, applied through the agency of supposed ministers who are out for themselves, for their own aggrandizement.
The honest and intelligent Christian, Sunderland says, must “accept the facts, whatever they are, denying nothing and suppressing nothing that is true”, and, if they are surprised by biblical imperfections, thay must recognize that the bible is a human revelation in that God has chosen to use human beings as his medium of revelation, and with that method comes imperfection, because of human imperfection. A literature that is the truthful product of human endeavour, notwithstanding the divine inspiration of it, “must contain views of Nature that are unscientific, records of events wanting sometimes in historical accuracy, morals low as well as high, and views of God unworthy as well as worthy”.
Thus we are no longer surprised or troubled by the imperfections we find in the Bible. We see that it would not be truthful if it did not contain just such imperfections.J T Sunderland
The Jewish scriptures are part of the bible to illustrate how God’s plan has evolved through history, not to perpetuate as moral law what God was trying to supersede by sending His Son. “They came from a half-civilized age and people”. The earlier God was believed and expected to be vengeful and partisan. Some people still think He is, and pray for Him to provide retribution, like an Old Testament psalmist, but contrary to the teachings of God’s own son. So Christianity has discarded that whole concept, and the Christian is sinking into the slough of wickedness to try to revive it. The Christians must use their brains. They must use them to discriminate between the good and the evil, even when it appears in the bible. To imagine the bible is entirely correct is to fossilize ancient error. That cannot have been God’s intention. To be offered a false choice of all or nothing forces believers to have to accept all, because to be a believer stops rejection of the bible. But that then brings the Christian into error in having to accept as coming with God’s recommendation even that which He meant as examples of what is undesirable for us and unacceptable to Him.
Moreover, it makes Christians hypocritical, having to accept what they cannot, but having to pretend to, lest they be accused of lack of faith. It makes them into robots or zombies, unwilling to think because they are taught that all the thinking has been done for them. It makes them bigoted because all the arguments have already been answered. And, of course, the most sensible ones of all, will accept that to believe the unbelievable is absurd and cannot have been God’s intention, and so will reject the teaching of the Devil’s ministers and turn away from Christianity. Those unable to do it, but who believe themselves to be honest and intelligent, have one recourse. They can be rational Christians.
