A few years back, a popular pastor said something a bit controversial – something along the lines of, “We must tether the faith of this and the next generation to the resurrection rather than the inspiration, infallibility, and the authority of the Bible.” You might recognize some of this if you’ve read here before. I’ve long insisted that the resurrection is indeed the key to the Christian faith, so I can sympathize with the pastor’s words…to a point.
The statement itself is controversial in this: without an inspired, infallible, and authoritative Bible, you really have no reliable means to determine whether the resurrection he claims to be the lynchpin of the Christian faith even happened. While there are texts which allude to the resurrection outside of the Bible, they are not claimed as inspired canon, nor are they entirely accepted as reliable.
Still, I can see too what the pastor may have been getting at. He was saying (like me – and Paul for that matter), “Hey. The resurrection is the deal. Without it, you have no Christianity.” We don’t worship the Bible – we worship a resurrected Christ. Again – true. But still, without the Bible, we wouldn’t even know this resurrected Christ; and without a wholly reliable Bible, even what we do know of his resurrection could be discounted as “one of those parts that isn’t entirely true” (which is the case in some circles).
But from what I’ve listened to of the pastor’s lecture, he seems to be going in the wrong direction. He’s making his statement in the context that “opponents of Christianity wrap up all of the [alleged] faults of the Bible and use them to attack the Christian faith…and this is a bad thing, so we shouldn’t put our faith in the Bible or we’ll have no choice but to believe the attacks.”
The problem here, of course, is that he’s assuming that the attacks are legitimate – that the Bible really is so irrefutably filled with error that the only way we can stay true to our faith is to abandon it in favor of a focus on the resurrection. This leads me to ask yet again – if we are to believe the Bible is indefensible as a truthful document, how can we defend the resurrection of which it tells us?
As I read some of the points of debate, I saw a reply from someone who agreed with the pastor. To those who were saying “you can’t have the church without the Bible,” he replied, “Until you run into the fact that the church existed BEFORE scripture was ever written down. So biblical inerrancy flies straight out the window. That’s a new philosophy that’s only been around for 150 years, give or take. Sola Scriptura – 500 years but no one agrees on what”
An interesting statement for sure, and, while I question not just his initial assertion, I’m especially leery of those who give us “the numbers.” Here’s what usually happens in these cases – the Church long works under the belief that a particular thing is true. Then a group of “new thinkers” comes along to challenge those beliefs. When this happens, the Church finds the need to go back and defend something that has actually always been believed. So we get things like “this has only been around 150 years.” But why would people of the early church have sacrificed so much for something that they could basically take or leave as they wished?
And there’s more. Peter himself equates Paul’s writings to scripture…which, by the way, did exist at the founding of the church in the form of the Old Testament – the Old Testament in which Jesus himself believed unreservedly and from which he quoted heavily (speaking to what he thought of its reliability).
But it wasn’t just the Old Testament. There was a period when eyewitnesses to Jesus (who, as was common at the time, understood the importance of maintaining an oral tradition) were still alive, and a part of the ministry for some of those was to faithfully record the events and words of Jesus’s life. So we find that in fact, there never was a time through the founding of the Church when the Old Testament, eyewitnesses, and finally, the testimonies of those eyewitnesses written down did not exist.
In the end, the claim that the church existed before the scriptures were written down, while technically true (only to a certain extent – in that they weren’t written, not in that they didn’t exist) is, at best, misleading and wrongheaded. While the New Testament had not yet been written, most of it was already existent through eyewitness testimony. Furthermore, the fact that some of it was not already written down at the founding of the Church does not negate its reliability thereafter. As the Church grew – and especially as Paul and other missionaries carried the message to others in lands distant from Jerusalem – the need for something to be written and shared among the churches became necessary. Again – this does not mean that the things written as to the conduct of the Christian life are now invalid and unreliable.
In the end, I see the pastor’s view to an extent – the Christian faith does rely upon the resurrection and I’ve said it here (more than once) already. But to undermine the very source of our knowledge of that event takes away the resurrection’s teeth and makes it just another nice story we can believe or not.
15 Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. 16 He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
1 Peter 3:15-16
Disclaimer: I’m an amateur theologian at best. These are just general thoughts that may meet with refinement over time. Comment and critique is always welcome.