When Scripture Eclipses the Message
The Bible reveals God. It is not God.
One of my closest friends is the pastor of a very large church. For years he invited me to preach there once a year. Every time I came, he told me the same thing. He could not believe I attended the seminary I attended. He was convinced that most seminaries are very good at one thing: turning people away from Jesus. He was not alone. In a lot of circles, the seminary has a nickname. People call it the cemetery. It is where preachers go to die.
I understand why he said it. The seminary has done tremendous damage to the faith of a lot of people. I have watched it happen. A person walks in loving God and walks out unsure of what they believe. Some lose their faith entirely. That is real, and it should be taken seriously.
But I want to tell you why it happens. And I want to tell you how it can be avoided. Because what almost killed my faith is the same thing that saved it.
Most of the trouble starts with what people think the seminary is. When folks decide to go, they usually go out of love. They love God. They want to serve the church. They think the school exists to make them stronger in their faith. When I taught first semester students at one of my alma maters, I warned them about this on the first day. I told them the seminary is not there to strengthen your faith in God. That can happen. It happened to me. But it is not the point. The seminary is an academic institution. Even at the most evangelical schools, scholarship comes first. There are a few unaccredited schools that do not care much about that. But an accredited seminary cares about curricula, libraries, credentials, and rigor. You are there to study.
You also need to enter with a healthy sense of what your faith actually is. The seminary answers questions most of us never knew existed. It starts with a hard one. How did the Bible become the Bible? Most churches never touch it. Those of us who grew up in church know what the Bible says. We do not know how it came to say it. We know the stories. We skip the hard parts. We accept the whole thing as the word of God and leave it there.
As a child I never once thought about how the text was carried. I never thought about oral transmission. I never thought about translation from the original languages, or the canon, or how you take an ancient principle and apply it to a life in this century. So my first Old Testament class undid me, in the best way. My professor explained that writing was rare in the ancient world. The stories in the Bible were passed down by mouth, across many generations, long before anyone wrote a single word. That was one of the most liberating hours of my life.
I had been reading Genesis as if someone sat in the corner at creation and took the minutes. So I was offended by anyone who questioned whether God made the world in seven twenty-four hour days. I was raised in a tradition that taught something harder still. If you did not believe the way our denomination believed, you were not going to heaven. Even as a boy that gave me two problems. The Bible says heaven holds a number of people no one can count. Our little movement could be counted without much trouble. Those two things did not fit. My second problem was closer to home. Our teaching meant my grandmother would not make it in. And my grandmother was the finest Christian I have ever known. If grandma was not getting into heaven, then nobody was.
Here is what I finally understood. I had put my faith in the Bible instead of the God of the Bible. I was raised in what you could fairly call bibliolatry. I had made the book an idol. I loved it in the place where I was supposed to love the One it points to.
This is how so many Christians can know the contents of the Bible and still miss the truth about Jesus. The Bible is a written text. A written text hands you facts. And the main fact is that there exists this written text. But the truth the Bible carries sits underneath the facts, and you do not reach it by reciting verses. The writers set down their accounts. We can check those accounts by literary and historical study. The deeper truth takes real work. The violence in the Hebrew Bible, the gory stories, the hard commands in the New Testament, all of it asks something of the reader. It asks us to slow down and inquire. It refuses the easy answer.
The easy answer has a slogan. “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” That sentence sounds like faith. It has been the cover for some of the worst things done by Christian hands. Men held up a Bible and defended slavery with it. They found chapter and verse for the auction block and the whip. They found verse to abuse and silence women and to bless segregation. People have justified conquest and lynching and every kind of cruelty by pointing at the page and saying the page told them to. That is not reverence for the Bible. That is the misuse of it. When you worship the book instead of the God of the book, the book becomes a weapon. A movement that will not ask how a text came to be, or who it was written to, or what it meant before it meant anything to us, can make scripture say almost anything. Scoundrels have always known this. It is the oldest trick there is.
So how do you keep from it? You do not have to go to seminary. Most of you will not, and you do not need to. But there are three things you can carry.
Start with the first one. Put your faith in God before you put it in the book. The Bible reveals God. It is not God. Love the One it shows you, and let the text serve that relationship instead of standing in for it. When God is the object of your worship, the Bible can do its proper work. When the Bible is the object of your worship, you are already lost, and you will not know it.
Then, learn to read. You can practice this at your own kitchen table with your own Bible. Before you ask what a verse means to you, ask a few older questions: How did this text come to be? Who wrote it? Who were they writing to, and what were those people facing? What did it mean to them before it ever meant anything to you? Those questions are not an attack on scripture. They are how you honor it. They are the difference between hearing what the text says and hearing what God is saying through it.
And value the ones who are trained to help you. This is why the church needs seminary-trained pastors and teachers, and why a congregation should not be afraid of them. The nickname is wrong. The seminary did not kill my faith. It buried the small faith I brought in, the faith in a book, and it raised up a larger faith in the God the book reveals. A pastor who has done that work can walk you through the violent chapter and the hard command without handing you the slogan. That is a gift to a congregation. Fear of it has cost the church dearly.
I think of my grandmother again. She never took an Old Testament class. She never read a word about canonization. But she was never confused about the object of her worship. She loved the Lord, and the Bible was her means to Him, never her substitute for Him. She had the thing seminary spent years trying to give me. My rigorous training finally caught me up to a woman who prayed on her knees every night of her life. I am fortunate that it did.