Struggling with Scripture

I got this Bible when I was a kid, back in Peoria, for graduating from the fourth grade Sunday School class. It has been with me pretty much ever since. From reading the Bible, more than anywhere else, I have come to know Jesus, my Lord and Savior. If I did not know Jesus, I can’t imagine that my life would make much sense, or that I would have had the hope to sustain me in times of darkness. So you need to know that I do not come to you to talk about the Bible as a neutral, objective scholar, but as someone who finds himself on bad days clinging like a drowning person to this book.

Some people would therefore think that I’ve come to the wrong place. If I really wanted to talk to Bible-believing Christians, they would argue, then I should have gone somewhere else–to the Southern Baptists, maybe, or at least the more conservative Presbyterians. In her new book, The Word: Imagining the Gospel in Modern America, Ann Monroe writes, “For conservatives, the Bible is in charge….For [liberals], the Bible is whatever the reader makes of it: not a source of truth, but a taking-off place in the search for truth beyond it.” Frame the issue that way, and I find myself wanting to be a conservative. Yet it’s a common enough view: Rank people along a line with fundamentalists at one end, as the people who take the Bible really, really seriously, and then those who take it really seriously, those who take it seriously, those who accept it most of the time, sometimes, once in a while, not at all–with most of us in this room somewhere near the end of the line.

My problem is that none of the places on that continuum as usually defined feels like home to me. I’m hoping and expecting that many of you don’t find such a classification quite does you justice either. I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as a fundamentalist, yet I don’t think I’m somehow less committed to the Bible on that account. How can that be? I guess my explanation would be the thesis I want to present to you today, namely, that taking the Bible most seriously means struggling to understand its meaning as well as affirming its truth...