By Luke Smith
“Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.”
These and other beloved passages I learned as a child in Royal Ambassadors. The centrality of Scripture for the life of the congregation was central to my experience.
The conservative take-over in the Southern Baptist Convention left me and many others feeling like our home had been taken. Battles couched in language of the authority of Scripture were in our view really over interpretation of Scripture.
Now I find my bearings once again swirling, but this time from a different direction. Repeatedly I hear young ministers, and even distinguished elder statesmen, dismiss the centrality of Scripture for negotiating our shared conviction about moral issues. The dismissal is usually some variation upon the theme you can make the Bible say anything.
Most people who hear this argument even without any formal training intuitively feel something missing. This is because there is something missing. It is commonly called the straw-man fallacy. This identifies an argument where one attacks a less defensible argument than the one actually being proposed.
In short because people have misread the Bible (justifying human trafficking) then the Bible as authority cannot be trusted. The real question is not whether people have misused the Word of God. The question is can this Word be trusted.
I am concerned the discussion over the upcoming sexuality conference doesn’t reveal a difference over interpretations of disputed passages as much as it reveals a different conviction with regards to the inspiration and authority of Scripture. Has God the Spirit inspired these words for the people of God? Or are these words simply a compilation of writings of a few loosely connected but disparate Jewish splinter groups from the first century?
When our young leaders are poorly trained to understand and interpret Scripture our congregations will inevitably be vulnerable to theological confusion.