People love to say, “My authority is the Bible.”
Hate to break it to you: it’s not.
Your authority is what your pastor, your denomination, your favorite author, and that one sermon series told you the Bible means. Let’s not pretend you cracked open ancient texts in Hebrew and Greek and emerged with pure, bias-free divine download.
You inherited an interpretation. Then you called it “truth.”
Big difference.
Because here’s the uncomfortable reality nobody wants to admit: there is no single, clean, uncontested thing called “Biblical Christianity.” Never has been.
Christians have disagreed—loudly and often—about pretty much everything. Who Jesus was, what he meant, how salvation works, what the cross did, who’s in, who’s out… it’s been a theological food fight for 2,000 years.
And yet somehow, every group ends up convinced they’re the ones who finally got it right.
Convenient.
What you see in the Bible isn’t just “what’s there.” It’s what you’ve been trained to see.
Your conclusions are filtered through a whole cocktail of influences:
Your assumptions about what the Bible is—divine dictation or human wrestling match.
Whether you read it like a history book or a poem.
Which verses you were told matter most—and which ones to politely ignore.
What you think the authors were doing in the first place.
The theological box you’re trying to keep everything inside of.
How much Greek and Hebrew you actually understand (or pretend to).
All the books, sermons, and hot takes you’ve already absorbed.
Whether you trust logic, experience, or your gut.
How much contradiction you’re willing to live with without losing sleep.
How open you are to changing your mind (or how allergic you are to it).
Whether your current beliefs are comforting enough to protect at all costs.
How much time you’re willing to spend actually digging versus just repeating.
How tightly you cling to your tribe’s version of the truth.
And the big one—your entire life experience shaping what you think God is like.
But sure… “the Bible says.”
Here’s the plot twist:
People don’t read the Bible.
They read themselves into the Bible.
And then defend it like God personally endorsed their interpretation.
Now, when people leave religion, they often swing hard the other way and start trashing the Bible like it’s the villain in the story.
But let’s be honest—that’s a bit lazy too.
It’s not the Bible’s fault you were handed a rigid, literalist, fear-based framework and told, “This is the only way to see it.” That’s not the only way people have ever read these texts—it’s just the loudest one in certain circles.
Outside the fundamentalist bubble, people have been reading the Bible as poetry, protest literature, myth, metaphor, wisdom, and spiritual reflection for a long, long time.
So maybe the problem isn’t the book.
Maybe it’s the certainty.
Maybe it’s the arrogance of thinking your version is ‘the’ version.
Maybe it’s outsourcing your thinking to “experts” and calling it faith.
So here’s a radical idea:
Ask questions.
Think critically.
Hold your conclusions loosely.
And for the love of honesty, stop pretending your interpretation dropped straight from heaven untouched by human hands.
Because it didn’t.
And deep down—you know it.
https://jimpalmerblog.wordpress.com/about/
ReplyDeleteMr Palmer has, entirely unconsciously himself, clung to the frontier theology of protestant American primitivism. Especially in its anti-intellectual ethical project (“just love like Jesus”).
ReplyDeleteAnd because this cosmically subjective epithet was an attempt to keep bound White unity for the sake Manifest Destiny to gain a continent from one seas to the other, the primitivist ecclesiological project (“just do what the first church - the New Testament church did”) and the experiential project (yearning for and so often coercively manufacturing instances of mystical rapture)… we’re both necessarily available to interpretation. Interpretation, however, which could never come from the historical experience of the church nor from its intellectual servants.
As if the Holy Spirit, playing hop-scotch, took off from the leather backend of the Bible and landing on a little house in the prairie.
Mr Palmer is seriously, egregiously fooling himself.
The church has not been in a 2000 year food fight. It has always defended a belief in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ against those who want to make it a revelation about their own, sectarian and segregationist disagree with the people they can’t stand. For 2000 years they all look alike. Many so obviously zealous for the laws, laws that only serve their elevation over others. Many, obvious too, zealously unconscious of their need to feel righteous by their trumpeting “rejection” of elevation, by virtue of their identification within the already elevated.
The must loving theology of the church, over 2000 years, has ever been to seek the love of Christ in spiritual relationship, worship in spirit and truth which is only found in universal community, and bind wounds and serve all varieties of hunger.
The resistance to such a life takes all kinds of forms in Whiteness. Between rage or fetishized subjective self satisfaction as reaction to rage. Either extremes involve the Will of refusal and resignation.
https://janeaddams.ramapo.edu/2018/03/26/jane-addams-and-christian-primitivism-by-dr-kyle-crews/#:~:text=Some%20Americans%20have%20enshrined%20first,history%2C%20culture%2C%20and%20tradition.
ReplyDeleteFeodor:
ReplyDeleteMr Palmer has, entirely unconsciously himself, clung to the frontier theology of protestant American primitivism. Especially in its anti-intellectual ethical project
I disagree with this suggestion. I see nothing anti-intellectual about this.
I think the suggestion: "every group ends up convinced they’re the ones who finally got it right." is a good one, observable in the real world.
I think the point: "They read themselves into the Bible.
And then defend it like God personally endorsed their interpretation." is right on and observable and reasonably problematic.
This, to me, is precisely an intellectualist conclusion:
"Ask questions.
Think critically.
Hold your conclusions loosely.
And for the love of honesty, stop pretending your interpretation dropped straight from heaven untouched by human hands."
Although I would like to see "hold your conclusions loosely" clarified. I suspect he's just talking about intellectual and spiritual humility.
I don't see an endorsement of Christian primitivism here.
Ultimately, I disagree with many of your conclusions/suggestions here.
"... it’s been a theological food fight for 2,000 years."
ReplyDeleteThis is the epitome of anti-intellectual American protestant agrarian primitivism. It's a trite, snarky, immature, reactionary refusal to think. And if we were to hear from Mr Palmer, everything he could compose about the concepts of his christian faith are the result of the long life of the church presided over by the Spirit in imperfect proclamation of a loose, baggy, ever developing doctrinal recognition that different cultures in different places at different times have added or deepened what was missing, as well as shedding what was fallible. And nowhere more thoroughly or more commitment than spiritual theologians. Mr Palmer cannot utter a thought without it being an unconsciously absorbed or consciously unattributed passage of introduction and reflection by a christian community of the past.
And this anti bon mot of his goes for all the rest. We hate, as Americans living between the coasts, not having the generational capacity to generate systematic/spiritual wealth. When we do give birth to one, they end up elsewhere in order to be heard in their own lifetime.
It's a trite, snarky, immature, reactionary refusal to think.
ReplyDeleteI find it perhaps trite and immature (perhaps), snarky, for sure, but absolutely not a refusal to think. Just the opposite. Indeed, I think it is a deliberately provocative reminder TO think, and not merely accept this tradition or that tradition.
But you can certainly ask him if this was his intent to encourage NOT thinking. I have to believe you're mistaken on this one, good sir.
It's Palmer who is the arrogant one, choosing to believe that preachers are imposing upon the congregation that which is not true, or that members of the congregation are merely sheep unable or unwilling to think for themselves.
ReplyDeleteEvery preacher/congregation believes they've "got it right". Some do. Some don't.
Marshal:
ReplyDeleteIt's Palmer who is the arrogant one, choosing to believe that preachers are imposing upon the congregation that which is not true
Do you have any support for this nonsense claim? That Palmer is CHOOSING to believe (as if he knows better and chooses wrongly) to impose on congregations wrong stuff? Or do you concede that it's more likely that it's simply a matter that Palmer genuinely disagrees with traditional religionists and is saying so, and saying so, confidently? Just as traditionalists ALSO state their positions confidently.
Indeed, some do, and some don't. Palmer and I believe that many of the traditionalists are promoting many central points of their traditions that are simply wrong and contrary to the clear teachings of Jesus.
The distinction is that we can point to the reality of an absence of a doctrine of PSA or "total depravity of humanity" or a vengeful god or of hell, etc, in Jesus' teachings, where as the traditionalists have learned to read these human theories INTO Jesus' words, when they simply aren't there. Objectively speaking.
Dan, the thought of Marshal thinking for himself is exactly the stupendous failure of American agrarian protestantism: when you kill off all the 2000 years of spiritual inheritance gifted to the body of Christ by the Holy Spirit, you end up with gross relativism where helicopter engineers think they are the equal of Bernard of Clairvaux or Catherine of Siena or Teilhard de Chardin.
ReplyDeleteThe fundamental heresy, and idiocy, of protestantism is that the Holy Spirit did a Rip Van Winkle between the Book of Revelation and the16th century. When exactly the third person of the living God woke up is a hermetic debate on doctrine - aka, trying to do theology from scripture alone while believing that there existed no conceptual worldview difference between 60 AD and 600 AD, and so, of course, no long journey of the Christian faith continuously working out salvation epoch after epoch after epoch.
From this house built on sand, an imminently rocketing proliferation of partisan, sectarian, segregationist - even murderous - array of fragmenting, regional, single interest driven methodological confessions were written. None disagreeing about everything and yet none agreeing enough to live within peace.
Ultimately, what was born *inland* on this colonized continent from two handfuls of protestant confessions largely loyal to Old World divisions, was now utterly stagnant loyalty or wiping the slate clean in a belief that a man (only a man) and a bible somewhere in the Appalachian plateau could simply incarnate the New Testament church born in 1st century Aramaic Judaism, swaddled in Hellenistic diaspora and matured in the Greek speaking eastern Roman Empire. Either way, what may or may not have been the Holy Spirit's post nap guidance of the most recent two centuries of New World ecclesial life had all intellectual inheritance bled out of it.
In the light of American protestantism away from the East coast in the 1800s the last two thousand years of faith seeking understanding was seen as a food fight.
Jaroslav Pelikan's epithet, "tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living," makes the orthodox claim that faith seeking understanding never arrives but is the necessary work for all of us in order to grow in love. Loving God is knowing God. Knowing God is loving God. God is too big for an individual alone to know or love. Such attempts are patterned after agrarian primitivism. God is too big to be known or loved by a community that itself stands alone from the world. Such attempts are patterned after radical protestantism.
Tradition is the inheritance of the Saints given to the living body of Christ for revivifying relationship with the Triune God in absolute and perfect communion. Revivifying is exactly how faith was transferred from Jews to Hellenized Jews to Greek and Lain Gentiles. Peter was shocked, his traveling posse of Jerusalem Jewish Christians were shocked, and the entire Jerusalem contingent of Apostles, elders, including Jesus' own brother, disciples who walked with Jesus and those who never saw him, were shocked that God had opened the gospel promises to Gentiles. But the Holy Spirit convinced them to get over it, and to move on by fashioning new language that borrowed from Stoic philosophy and early Platonic philosophy, eventually from powerful Neo-Platonic concepts, in order to convey the revelation of God and God's redemptive and salvific graces to the whole world of their time.
Ever since, the best of human learning has been adopted and mined to keep human beings deepening and enlarging their commitment to love up from the phenomenology of the effect of subatomic particle and out to the furthest reaches of the known universe from which the billions of years past is still light when it comes to our home.