21 Pentecost 07 Proper 24

A young priest was being questioned by the search committee. The chairman asked, “Son, do you know the Bible?”

The young priest replied, “Yes, sir! I REALLY know the Bible.”

The chairman asked, “What part of the Bible do you know best?

The young priest replied, “Sir, I know the New Testament best?”

The chairman asked the priest to tell the committee something about the New Testament. In fact, the chairman said, suddenly quite inspired, “Why don’t you tell us the story about the prodigal son?”

“All right,” the priest said. “There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus who went to Jericho by night. And he fell upon stony ground and the thorns choked him half to death.

“The next morning Solomon and his wife, Gomorrah, came by and they took him down to the ark so that Moses could care for him. But as he was going through the eastern gate toward the ark, his hair was caught in a limb, and he hung there for forty days and forty nights. Afterward he was hungry and the ravens came and fed him. The next day three wise men came and carried him down to the boat dock where he caught a ship to Nineveh. When he got there he saw Delilah sitting on a wall.

“And Nicodemus said, ‘Throw her down off the wall!” And the wise men said, ‘How many times shall we throw her down? Seven times seven?’ And Nicodemus replied, ‘Nay, but seventy times seven.’ And they threw her down 490 times. She burst asunder in their midst, and they picked up 12 baskets of fragments. My question is, whose wife will she be in the resurrection?”

The chairman said to the other committee members, “Friends, I think we ought to call him to be our rector; He’s awfully young, but he sure knows his Bible.”

Many Episcopalians, if we were to be honest, really don’t know their Bibles very well. At times there is a pride in that lack of knowledge because it shows that we are not “fundamentalists.” What often happens is that many in the Episcopal Church not only don’t know their Bible’s very well, they don’t really know how to interpret the Bible. Some think that it is impossible to know for sure what the Bible teaches.

Often we have heard from so-called “scholars” that the Bible is really just a book written by men and is not much different from a good novel. Others say that there are parts of the Bible that are the word of God, but not others.

The result of this is that the minds of Episcopalians have been thrown into confusion related to the Bible and how it applies to today’s world. Contrast that with the view of the Early Church related to the sacred writings.

“All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man and woman of God may be completely equipped for every good work.” We heard these words in our second lesson today.

The earliest Christians revered the word of God. Most had no desire to change the Word of God, or to make it say what it was never intended to say. There were some who did try to come up with a “new interpretation of Scripture.” They began to gain quite a following. Finally, the Church had to affirm what the Christian faith teaches and what the Scriptures teach related to God, the Church, salvation, and the life to come. We have their statement in the form of the Nicene Creed.

Many liberal theologians in our day are seeking to dismiss much of what the Bible teaches and change the very words of Scripture.

In the 1988 film Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman’s character is based on a real-life autistic man named Kim Peek. Peek had total recall of more than 9,000 books. When he attended a performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, he stood up near the end and loudly ordered, “You’ve got to stop it, stop it, stop it!” The actor had skipped the second to the last verse of the play. Caught in his mistake, the actor apologized, saying, “The verses are so much alike, I didn’t think it would matter.”

Peek responded, “It mattered to William Shakespeare, and it should matter to you.” May I suggest the same is true about the Bible—the words of Scripture mattered to Jesus and the Apostles, so they should matter to us.

Often those of us who hold to the fundamental doctrines and morals of the Bible are looked down on as ignorant, misguided, unloving, unchristian people who are intolerant of the views of others.

There is today what I would call a liberal tolerance that is perhaps the primary challenge to the Christian worldview current in North American popular culture. It is one worldview that many Christians have bought into as well. Proponents of this viewpoint argue that it is intolerant and inconsistent with the principles of a free and open society for Christians (and others) to claim that their moral and religious perspective is correct and ought to be embraced by all citizens. Liberal tolerance is not what it appears to be, however. It is a partisan philosophical perspective with its own set of dogmas. It assumes, for instance, a relativistic view of moral and religious knowledge. This assumption has shaped the way many people think about issues such as homosexuality, abortion rights, and religious truth claims, leading them to believe that a liberally tolerant posture concerning these issues is the correct one and that it ought to be reflected in our laws and customs. But this posture is dogmatic, intolerant, and coercive, for it asserts that there is only one correct view on these issues, and if one does not comply with it, one will face public ridicule, demagogic tactics, and perhaps legal reprisals. There is talk for example of making a law to make any speech against homosexuality into a crime. This is already happening in parts of Scandinavia. Liberal Tolerance is neither liberal nor tolerant.

Liberal tolerance is grounded in relativism, the view that no one point of view on moral and religious knowledge is objectively correct for every person in every time and place. This notion, as understood and embraced in popular culture, feeds on the fact of pluralism, the reality of a plurality of different and contrary opinions on religious and moral matters. Against this backdrop, many in our culture conclude that one cannot say that one’s view on religious and moral matters is better than anyone else’s view. They assert that it is a mistake to claim that one’s religious beliefs are exclusively correct and that believers in other faiths, no matter how sincere or devoted, hold false beliefs. Thus, religious inclusivism is the correct position to hold.

The proponent of liberal tolerance, it turns out, is not the celebrant of diversity he portrays himself to be. Perhaps another example, one from popular culture, might help us understand this better. In 1997, in her acceptance speech for an Emmy for co-writing the “coming out” episode of Ellen, Ellen DeGeneres said, “I accept this on behalf of all people, and the teen-agers out there especially, who think there is something wrong with them because they are gay. There’s nothing wrong with you. Don’t ever let anybody make you feel ashamed of who you are.”

There were many who, after hearing or reading Ellen’s speech, applauded her for her liberal sensibilities, concluding that the actress is an open and tolerant person who is merely interested in helping young people better understand their own sexuality. If you think this way, you are mistaken. Ellen’s speech is an example of what I call “passive-aggressive tyranny.” The trick is to sound “passive” and accepting of “diversity” while at the same time putting forth an aggressively partisan agenda and implying that those who disagree are not only stupid but also harmful. In order to understand this point, imagine if a conservative Christian Emmy-award winner had said, “I accept this on behalf of all people, and the teen-agers out there especially, who think there is something wrong with them because they believe that human beings are made for a purpose and that purpose includes the building of community with its foundation being heterosexual monogamy. There’s nothing wrong with you. Don’t ever let anybody, especially television script writers, make you feel ashamed because of what you believe is true about reality.” Clearly this would imply that those who affirm liberal views on sexuality are wrong. An award winner who made this speech would be denounced as narrow, bigoted, and intolerant. That person could expect never again to work in Hollywood.

Ironically, Ellen’s Emmy speech does the same to those with whom she disagrees. By encouraging people to believe there is nothing wrong with their homosexuality, she is saying there is something wrong with those (i.e., Christians and other social conservatives) who don’t agree with this prescription. This condemnation is evident in the script of the show for which Ellen won an Emmy. In that famous “coming out” episode, the writers presumed that one is either bigoted or ignorant if one thinks Ellen’s homosexuality is deviant and that such a one is incapable of having a thoughtful, carefully wrought case against homosexuality. Such arrogance is astounding. It presumes not only that Ellen’s detractors are wrong but also that they are stupid, irrational, and evil and should not even be allowed to make their case. They are, in a word, diseased, suffering from that made-up ailment, “homophobia.”

Author John MacArthur stated on one occasion, “Liberal tolerance is a sham. Although portrayed by its advocates as an open, tolerant, and neutral perspective, it is a dogma whose proponents tolerate no rivals. Those of us who are concerned with presenting and defending our faith in a post-Christian culture must be aware of this sort of challenge, one that masquerades as open, tolerant, and liberating, but in reality is dogmatic, partisan, and coercive.”

Although the Christian worldview is marginalized in our culture and considered dangerous by some, we cannot lose our confidence. After all, this is God’s universe, and He has made human beings in His image. We must be confident that when we unpack these undeniable notions that are “written on our hearts,” those who unreflectively and unthinkingly dismiss our case really do know the truth as well (Rom. 2:15). But this must be balanced with the knowledge that the human heart is incredibly wicked (Jer. 17:9). This tension will remain as long as we attempt to defend our faith in a culture hostile to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus of Nazareth.

Our Epistle today said that all Scripture is inspired. What does inspiration mean? When we say that the Bible is inspired, what do we mean? What are we talking about? Our word inspired comes from a Latin root that means to "breath in, to inspire." Unfortunately, that doesn't convey the true meaning of the Greek term used in Scripture. Actually the concept of "breathing in" is not found in 2 Timothy 3:16, where it says, "All Scripture is inspired by God." It's not the word for breathing in. That translation has unfortunately misled some folks, and they have assumed that men wrote a lot of words and God breathed into them some kind of power; some kind of divine life--that's not it. When it says, "All Scripture is inspired," the word "inspire" is theopneustos (GR.). It is actually a word that said "God-breathed." It is God breathing it out, not God breathing into it. Literally the verse says, "All Scripture is God-breathed." It is the breath of God, not the words of men into which God puffed some divine life. It is God's breath. It is God speaking. Inspiration does not mean that the Bible has somehow been blown on by God and given some supernatural quality. It means that the words of the Bible are the words of God Himself, out of his own mouth.

Every word of Scripture breathed out by God.

In liberal theology or neo-orthodox theology, which is liberal in the sense that it denies the inspiration of Scripture: they want to deny. They start from the denial point. Liberal -theology and neo-orthodox theology came out of "The Enlightenment," when man began to worship his own mind, believing that he was the ultimate judge of all truth, being enamored with his intellectual capability. Man said, "I go to the Bible, I find all kinds of things that are not reasonable, rational, logical. All the supernatural and miraculous things that I can't comprehend, I eliminate." So he starts eliminating all of that. So immediately he, of course, denies the inspiration of Scripture. It isn't the Word of God, it's the word of men; it has to be changed because there is some foolishness in here.

So, modern theology then reduces the Bible to just the best efforts of men. Well, once it is reduced to the best efforts of men then you can have continuing revelation. Right? Because men can continue to make those kinds of efforts. So modern theology wants to allow for continued inspiration. Continued, updated, Word from the Lord in some sort of mystical, personal way. It is the best of men writing about their religious experiences, and perhaps even prompted somehow by God to write down their own thoughts and ideas.

If the Canon of Scripture is still opened, and God is still giving prophecies, and psalms, and words of wisdom, and words of knowledge, then we ought to be seeking to compile all that stuff, and we ought to be most interested in studying the more recent revelations because they're the ones that speak most directly to our times.

The Church has always believed that God’s final revelation is found in Jesus Christ and His Word, the Bible. There is much evidence to back this up. But the reality is that there are those who don’t really want to believe in the faith that was once delivered to all the saints.

Paul wrote about this when he said in our second lesson today, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound doctrine or teaching.” This implies that there is sound teaching or doctrine. Where would we find this sound teaching and doctrine? The answer: In the Bible and the interpretation of the Bible by the Early Church Fathers.

Paul continues, “but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.”

How about you? Would you seek to view Scripture as Jesus and the Apostles did? As the inspired God-breathed Word of God and as that which has authority over one’s life?

Does that mean we have to all believe the same things related to the Christian Faith? I would suggest that when it comes to things that are not clearly spelled out in the Bible, then we don’t; however, I believe that we would do best to follow the ancient saying that states, “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty and in all things charity or love.” May I also suggest to you that tolerance when it comes to personal relationships is a virtue, but tolerance when it comes to truth is a travesty?

Will you, as St. Paul said in last weeks Epistle, “Do you best to present yourself to God as one approved, RIGHTLY HANDLING THE WORD OF TRUTH?”