Infallibility, innerancy, insatiable curiosity.

Remember Rudyard Kipling's elephant's child with the insatiable curiosity who was always getting spanked for asking too many questions down by the banks of the great grey green Limpopo River? And he finally got his nose pulled long? Yeah that guy. Is it just me or is that what church is like? This somehow came to mind when looking for a witty title line for this blog. Hm. Karla recently went before session to be grilled on theological issues and one of the things they asked was whether she thought the Bible was inerrant or infallible. After years in the church, in a Christian home, in college, in seminary, I think I've figured it out: who freaking cares? Does the Bible work? Does it communicate truth in the sense of "applicable truths that practically change your life and relationships?" Well, then. Good. If not, if it's being used or has been used for brow beating, self-righteousness, and you have negative associations with it or parts of it, it might be good to take a Bible fast for a while, let the old weeds die, then reapproach it freshly later, maybe in a new context or with a fresh community of thoughtful, critically thinking, open people. It seems like meaning is created out of a dynamic between reader and text. Any engagement with the Bible sets up a relationship between reader and text. This might sound horribly post-modern and all, but it seems like the Bible doesn't "just say" anything. Context and interpretation, where we stand in relationship to the text affect its meaning. I'm sure I'm copping this off some well known writer or other I've forgotten about, but it seems fairly self evident. Of course the question becomes "well, then, it is just open to any old interpretation?" Well, if we stay in the purely categorical, abstract, Euclidean, logical, left-brained, rational, reason-based arena, where everything only exists as defined, where the rules are arrived at through argument, logic, and linear thought, then maybe so. But we live in a real world, governed by natural laws. We have experiences, delights, moments of suffering, and we measure our experience by the Bible and measure the Bible by our experience in a reciprocal dialectic. To say the Bible is infallible or inerrant or whatever is to concede somehow that the Bible's meaning is fixed and that it is our job to align ourselves with that fixed, unchanging, perfect truth. Acquired wisdom is a valuable thing, it helps us become mature, healthy individuals, but treating the Bible as a fixed quantity or perfect rulebook is not the only way to deep wisdom.