Taking the Bible and Truth Seriously

This past week I found myself doing two odd things. One would be odd to other people (or at least some of them) and one was odd to me. On the first count, I found myself reading and quoting the Bible right and left. This may not seem an odd thing for a seminarian to do, but remember, I'm an Anglican seminarian, an Episcopalian seminarian. We are frequently accused of not taking the Bible seriously. Folks outside our religion accuse us of this, as do other Anglicans from time to time. But the truth is, for a group suspected of not taking the Bible seriously I found myself reaching for my Bible on my iPhone (best app I've bought yet), where I can easily look up chapter and verse. I did this on average every 10 minutes as I wrote papers, read interpretive studies and moved slowly through my training. I will agree that we don't read this document in exactly the same way as everyone else who does, but let me tell you, from a seminarian's viewpoint we take it tremendously seriously. I've now had to read Leviticus front to back, the whole thing, not just a law or two, three times. You try that sometime.

The other odd thing I did was use that document to argue that there might, in fact, be some absolute Truths out there in the world. The anthropologist in me shuddered a bit as I did that. The whole focus of my anthropological training was to emphasize the contingent and culturally conditioned nature of most truths. Anthropology generally stresses “relativism;” that it is hard to judge a viewpoint without understanding, relatively, where it comes from, without understanding its cultural context. Now, back in Anthropology school, we danced up to the limits of this way of thinking. We did agree that some things – violence against women, children, etc. - might be bad under any cultural system, but we didn't go much farther than that. We never settled how to make those decisions. It's tough if you want to emphasize analysis rather than judgement. Well, if you are in the Truth-with-a-Capital-T business as I am now you don't get to dance away from those questions. Some Anglicans in other countries, in countries that now accuse we Episcopalians of not taking the Bible seriously, have tried to use the Bible to encourage women to stay with abusive spouses. I found myself arguing that, no, the document doesn't say that and that in fact it commands us to protect the most vulnerable among us. Furthermore, I argued that this was, in fact, God's message to us, perhaps one of the central tenants of that message. I found myself making Truth claims, something I'm haven't done much of before.

I have not yet found a completely satisfying approach to Truth that honors both my conviction that there is Truth in the world and my understanding that all of us approach it in culturally conditioned manners. I do still feel that our grasp of the Truth, whether we get it from our culture, or the Bible, or some other text, sacred or otherwise, is always tenuous, approximate. We have to take the tools we've been given, by those who have gone before, by our culture and others, to do our best to find our way. We also can't dance away from the Truth, it has real impacts on real lives for real people. We may need to do it humbly, reaching for that Bible every ten minutes, reading it, re-reading it, and thinking about what it says in light of our lives and the words of others. The advantage of a sacred text is that it gives a starting point for all those who hold the text sacred, it is a gift that can form a common beginning and reference for our endless human arguments. The Bible is not the only sacred text in the world, and while I will be happy to swear that it contains “all things necessary for salvation” (asked of all Episcopal priests), I don't necessarily feel that it somehow has a lock on all the Truth out there, or if it does that we are yet capable of seeing it. But it is a start. And we take it seriously.