Chapter Ten: "Because the Bible Tells Me So"

Megachurch Mentality and the Abuse of Biblical Authority (Part One)

Most people could suggest that ‘a leopard never changes its spots’ to denote that certain people will not change, without any idea that they have just quoted Jeremiah 13:23. Many say of their unpretentious and straight forward friend that he’s the ‘salt of the earth’ without ever knowing that Jesus used the phrase in his most celebrated recorded sermon (Matt. 5:13).

You might describe the self-willed scapegoat as one who has ‘fallen on his sword’ without any knowledge that King Saul and his armour-bearer are said to have done so literally in 1 Samuel 31:4-5. As John Barton said, “The Bible has become part of the shared intellectual culture of the west”. It is a key component of global history, jurisprudence, ethics, art and that is all, of course, before we come to theology and philosophy. It contains beautiful poetry, wise counsel and dazzling visions; it also relates tales of military slaughters, cruel, dysfunctional dynasties and a gratuitous depiction of gang r*pe (the horrifically sordid story in Judges 19). The Bible has been used to inspire and to condemn, to enslave and to liberate. In the hands of different masters, it has acted as both sword and shield. It is without question the most widely read and yet the most endlessly controversial collection of literature in all of human history. It wields substantial authority, yet how one perceives of that authority and the assumptions upon which that authority is then set to practical use require continual deconstruction, for reasons that should scarcely need spelling out. For the present purposes, however, it is quite important that we do attempt to spell them out.

I have personal experience of people who have felt thoroughly oppressed by things they were instructed to do, positions they were challenged to take and perceptions of the world they were challenged to embrace, because someone in Christian leadership insisted that such stances were enshrined in scripture and thus necessary for the pursuit of Christian discipleship. I am reminded of a brief interaction with one woman who now physically cannot bring herself to read the Bible because it brings back horrible memories, not only of things done to her, but things she felt ‘biblically compelled’ to do to other people, which retrospectively only make her feel a sense of shame and disgust. In doing certain things, including things which ran roughshod over her own conscience, she was in her own mind just ‘obeying the Bible’. The corollary of this, of course, is that to obey the Bible is to obey God Himself; to disobey the Bible, and that would include disobeying any given leader’s interpretation of a ‘biblical’ command, was to have contempt for God and His word. Needless to say, the wealth of problems inherent in such scenarios are multifaceted and complex. For anyone in the midst of a deconstruction journey, the Bible will almost without exception factors centrally in any debate. With none of the authors of the biblical text available for comment, we have only their writings and what we can glean through other disciplines about what gave rise to these writings. If insufficient attention and sensitivity is given to this latter exercise all manner of destructive, abusive and manipulative outcomes might result. Consider the following cautionary tale.

Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles were two spiritualists trying in their own way to make sense of the world. They both had very difficult upbringings - indeed, depending on which version of their biography you read, it is believed that Nettles was Applewhite’s nurse during one stay in a psychiatric hospital. They co-founded a quasi-religious group which became known as Heaven's Gate. They managed to convince a group of other truth seekers that they were the two witnesses named in Revelation 11:3: ³ And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth. Continuing the prophetic declaration, they believed they were to become public heralds who were eventually killed by the beast coming up from the pit, only to be resurrected after three-and-a-half days and be taken up on clouds to the heavens. Applewhite and Nettles, who were known by the code names Do and Ti, further persuaded devotees that they could also enter the spiritual realms having shed their earthly bodies. In so doing they would leave the terrestrial realm and enter The Evolutionary Level Above Human (TELAH). Knowledge of the imminent appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet became proof positive of when this was going to happen. The comet was allegedly dragging behind it some kind of craft that would take their spirits to TELAH. After a former member of the group was tipped off by current followers, authorities made a gruesome discovery. They entered the group’s communal home in Rancho Santa Fe, California on March 26, 1997, and found the decaying remains of 39 individuals – the entire membership of the group at the time. Days earlier, they had ingested applesauce or pudding laced with barbiturates and a shot of vodka, and they had submitted to suffocation from plastic bags placed over their heads. All were identically dressed in black shirts, trousers and “Nike” training shoes, and had purple shrouds placed across their faces. The group, whose website is bizarrely still active, were avid followers of science fiction and were allegedly obsessed with both Star Trek and The X-Files. How, we wonder, did a group of reasonably middle class (and a few quite wealthy) spiritualists end their own lives in pursuit of a higher level of existence? Whilst the answers are no doubt multifaceted and complex, they listened to the voice of Marshall Applewhite (Bonnie nettles had died of cancer in 1985), who identified himself as a very significant spiritual and religious agent - because the Bible told him so.

This is, to be sure, a bizarre, chilling and quite extreme example of the motif which we will unpack in this and the next couple of chapters, and I compose these chapters with a deep sense of nervousness and trepidation. The Bible is an extremely important text as I suggested earlier, and people place unimaginable value on the ideas that emerge from it (indeed I include myself amongst this number). Any attempt to analyse the Bible or suggest how it should be read is not just an issue of theology or hermeneutics; it is often a deeply personal enterprise which cuts to the very heart of people's identity and their sense of religious purpose.

Just a few short days ago as I write this article, a senior editor at Christianity Today, Daniel Silliman, had to issue an apology (April 22^nd, 2025) for an article he wrote and published the Monday before Easter titled: “Was Jesus Crucified with Nails?” In it he suggested that Jesus hands and feet were simply tied with rope and that stories about the nails were later additions. As far as the details of his exposition are concerned, I happen to think that Silliman was wrong, but that is not the issue I wish to bring to mind. Rather it was the nature of his apology which in part read, “My article implicitly called into question the inerrancy of Scripture. In my eagerness to explore the historical context of Christ’s death, I missed that, and I’m sorry”. Again, I don't wish to needlessly splice the details of this particular case - as far as I am aware, Christianity Today as an institution holds to the ethos of biblical inerrancy, so at that level if at none other the editor was probably correct to apologise. However, it does raise question about some of our sacred cows when it comes to our understanding of the biblical text. Is it in some way to denigrate or undermine the significance and importance of the Bible if we do not hold to biblical inerrancy?

This is something I will explore later; for now, the concern I wish to raise is that there are some Christian thinkers who would claim that anyone who does not affirm biblical inerrancy does not take the Bible seriously. Indeed, to assume that the Bible is inerrant for many such thinkers is to treat it as “the word of God”; as such, to deny biblical inerrancy is to question the Bible’s status as God's word. Is this reasonable?

I remember a personal example when working in Christian ministry during a staff meeting where a minister had just taught a lesson based on the book of Esther. The book of Esther is an immensely powerful narrative full of humour, irony, feminism and intrigue. I suggested to a fellow minister that Esther might contain some fictional embellishments. Before long I was approached by another minister altogether (not the individual I had just spoken to) who asked me if I really did not believe that Esther was “true”? Another then approached me and asked if I was having doubts about God's word. It was at that moment that I realised how church staff in my denomination comprehended the nature of the biblical text and learned quickly to keep my ideas to myself!

All this is to say that “taking the Bible seriously” is a paradigm that needs thorough deconstruction. “The Bible says” is one of the most abused introductory frameworks within Christian vernacular. Is there anything that the Bible says. There are things that preachers and teachers say based on the Bible. There are things written by the authors of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. However, the Bible - the library of 66 books which God has given through his Holy Spirit to His people – is, in a literary sense, a complex set of documents whose production and eventual emergence as one coherent source is something that requires at least some minimal unpacking if it is going to be used in ways that achieve the purposes of God.

When, for example the Apostle Paul was writing his letter to the house churches in Galatia, he had no sense whatsoever that he was writing “the Bible”. He was sending out a communication to a community that he planted, to challenge some rogue teaching that had entered the communities after his departure aimed at encouraging non-Jews to embrace Jewish cultic practice. As far as Paul was concerned, if these non-Jews embraced this rogue teaching, it would be a denial of the efficacy of God's grace demonstrated in the death and resurrection of the Messiah, and those taken in would quite literally cut themselves off from Messiah (Gal. 5:4). That his letter would be lined up against a bunch of his other letters, letters written by other members of the Apostolic community, some stories about the ministry of Jesus and the growth of the earliest believing communities and dazzling apocalyptic text and called the New Testament could never have occurred to a believing Jew like Paul. That this would then be connected to the 24 books we know as the Old Testament (in the Hebrew Canon the minor prophets are one book and there is no division between Kings, Samuel and Chronicles - hence 24 and not 39) and called the Bible was again nowhere on Paul's radar - or the radars of any other New Testament authors. This must be considered in any ways that we choose to comprehend the biblical text.

I do not subscribe to biblical inerrancy, but it is certainly not a hill I am prepared to die on. If at the end of everything the Lord tells me that I was wrong and that all along the biblical text absolutely was inerrant, it would not make one iota of difference to the way I embrace Jesus or live out my commitment to him. What I find disturbing about some inerrantists, is that the view often leads them to think that this depiction of biblical perfection goes hand in hand with a kind of diehard authoritarianism invested in those who lead in believing communities, and whether consciously or not, the consequence can be an inflexible sense of what people must do in order to be in obedience to God. The Bible then becomes a mechanism by which leaders get Christians to do things; to not do these things in the way that is commanded by those in leadership is not just to question leadership but to question God Himself.

Now let me be absolutely clear; it is not the case that this attitude necessarily emerges from the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Rather it is the often inflexible and fundamentalist attitude that accompanies both the notion of biblical inerrancy and religious authoritarianism which can feed each other in very unhealthy fashion. It is not the case that those who do not hold to biblical inerrancy will necessarily be flimsy about divine commands or soft on sin (although you can imagine these charges being levelled). In recent years some of the most shocking abuses in church spaces have been committed by those who subscribe to biblical inerrancy, so we should not be quick to draw too many hasty conclusions about how inerrantists and non-inerrantists practice their faith. However, I do want to explore in these reflections the possible ramifications of how we view the Bible and what we think the purpose of the Bible is for how we lead in Christian community, treat one another and think through doctrine.

It is certainly not my intention to create a generic atmosphere of suspicion within believing community. One only has to think about how the Bible is used within quasi-Christian sectarianism, like Heaven's Gate, to know that it can be a dangerously powerful tool in the absence of consistent reflection on its meaning, purpose and objectives. I will close these introductory musings with three examples of the kind of reflection I am talking about:

1. The Bible is the product and not the origin of Christian faith.

2. The Bible never refers to itself as the “word of God”.

3. Inerrancy is a constructed position and not the plain reading of the text.

Firstly, the Quran describes Jews, Christians and Muslims as Ahl al-Kitāb - that is, the “people of the book”. This designation is certainly true of Muslims because the revelation to Muhammad in the 7th century marked the beginning of the religious and political system we now know as Islam. It is partly true of Jews, because the Lawgiving had a specifically constitutionalising effect on Israel - of course, one could argue that Israel, understood as Jacob and his progeny, were God's elect before the Lawgiving. However, it is utterly untrue of the early Jesus movement (at least in the plainest sense of the term). Whilst one could argue that the Jesus movement emerged from the book if the book is Israel’s scriptures, it is difficult to maintain because for disciples of Jesus the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament constitute the “book”. The 27 books we know now as the New Testament (highly unlikely to be what the Quranic author had in mind) were not ratified until the middle of the 4th century in the festal letter of Saint Athanasius (although the individual documents were considered authoritative at a much earlier period of the tradition). The earliest Jesus movement was not a people of the book, but the people of the person, Jesus the Messiah, God's final servant in whom was the zenith of all God's reconciliatory plans. The New Testament emerged because people believed in Jesus - they did not believe in Jesus because of the New Testament. The Bible must always be understood as the product of Christ faith and not the origin of it. This should make us very cautious about how we employ the scriptures today; they are a record of our faith tradition, which nourishes and nurtures our own faith and allows us to experience and tell the story of our relationship with God through his Messiah. When the earliest non-Jewish believers embraced the faith, they did so because they heard the experiences of those who believed and experienced a heart change - they did not in the sense we might understand, “study the scriptures”. This is why Luke can speak of those who “came to believe by grace”, who were incredibly excited listening to Apollos prove that Jesus was the Messiah using the Jewish scriptures (Acts 18:27).

Secondly, I often refer to the Bible as God's Word and I think this is a perfectly reasonable designation as long as we understand what we mean when we say it. After all, no biblical author refers to the written text of scripture as God's word - phrases like the word of God or the word of the Lord generally refer to the oral proclamation. However, within the Johannine tradition, Jesus is the word of God (John 1:1; Revelation 19:13), which, of course, has all sorts of important ramifications. Where I suggest caution, is in attempts to say what kind of literature the Bible must be on the basis that we call it the “word of God”. Indeed, many who argue for a hard biblical inerrancy, do so quite precisely because of the assumptions read into the phrase. How can God's word contain error or tension? To allow this would almost be like saying God Himself were in some way confused or in error, would it not? I would argue a hard NO, but this is something we will need to unravel more fully later. For now, it suffices to say that phrases like God's word should not be invested with baggage which comes from our own heads in support of ideas which make us feel comfortable. If our God wanted a neatly bound and perfectly inerrant Bible to fall out of the sky the day after the resurrection, He could have orchestrated that easily. Instead, he chose to use dozens of authors, with different backgrounds and experiences, over the course of a millennium, in different places and contexts with different objectives and rhetorical goals to furnish us with His word - and it is no less reliable a guide because of it.

Finally, and pending a fuller discussion later, there are obvious tensions in our sacred text. The marked differences between the synoptic gospels and John; the Paul of Luke compared to the Paul of the letters; the death of Judas; the details surrounding Jesus’ birth; etc. etc. etc.! Needless to say, this is merely the tip of a sprawling iceberg; Christian apologists the world over, devote hours to reconciling these differences. Often the differences are easy to reconcile; there are times, however, when they are very difficult to reconcile and other times, they are plain impossible to reconcile. My concern is twofold; initially, only the presumption of inerrancy leads us to feel the need to harmonise these differences in the first place. Secondly, what if the tensions are purposeful, and not there to be flattened out so they all agree with each other? Why, by way of example, does Matthew have a habit of doubling things (a donkey and a colt in the triumphal entry in Matt. 21:2 - not found in Mark or Luke; two Gerasene demoniacs compared to Mark’s one and two blind men being healed instead of the one Bartimaeus in Mark – Matt. 9:27-31 compared to Mark 10:46-52)? Is it something to do with Matthew’s interest in togetherness in discipleship? Is it to accentuate Jesus’ power over nature? Indeed, how do we even know that Matthew has doubled rather than Mark having halved (this is usually because people assume Mark is the earlier document)??!! None of this is to say that inerrancy is necessarily untrue – rather, it says that inerrancy requires defence. Non-inerrant readings are free to ask the more exploratory questions about what these authors might have been doing when adapting various stories for their own objectives - rather than asking how we can make their stories say the same thing - whether that was their intention or not.

Concluding Musings

This was a difficult chapter to write. The Bible is not just literature; it has divine impetus, global impact and very deep-rooted personal significance to many. I have devoted my professional life to the study of the biblical writings, so I certainly do not need anyone to chapter and verse me (pun intended) on its importance as a sacred text. There may well be ideas contained in this reflection which readers may not have previously considered, or which may sound offensive to those with a very different position to my own and I do not doubt that I have questioned things some may consider it improper for me to question. None of these notions are new to me, and though I set out to offend no one, I cannot overestimate the importance of the challenges that I am raising. The bottom line is simply this: how people, especially those in Christian leadership, view and employ the Bible has enormous ramifications for how we build community, how we treat one another, how we appropriate our self-identity as believers and how we both discuss and navigate theology and doctrine. These are not merely intellectual or emotional musings - they are in a very direct sense about how we live. Listen to this simple but dreadful example.

In Genesis 9: 25, the patriarch Noah placed a curse on his grandson Canaan. This was almost certainly written to support the later view that Israel and Canaan were once separate, but the latter destined to be ruled by the former. The curse, however, had a strangely chequered history in western thought, where it moved not into the curse upon Canaan, but rather on Noah's son Ham. Since Genesis 10 describes Ham as the ancestor of African peoples, a number of European theorists developed the belief that Africans were cursed to become perpetual slaves to “their brothers” - that is, to the rest of humanity. The so-called Curse of Ham became an important plank in how western slave traders gave religious legitimation to the enslavement and trade of African peoples. In other words, biblical authority was employed by western “Christians” to justify centuries of dehumanization. Of these, Frederick Douglass rightly affirmed:

I hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of the land. . . . I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. . . . I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which everywhere surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master [Frederick Douglass, Life of an American Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 118-119].

How did the church sit idle to the plight of enslaved Africans - because the Bible told them so.

I acknowledge that this is a particularly nefarious and ghastly example of the abuse of biblical authority, but the pattern is the same as any form of controlling, manipulative or abusive behaviour which finds justification in the biblical text. These discussions matter; they matter for those on deconstruction journeys who have allowed warped caricatures of the message of Jesus to unfairly colour their outlook. They matter for all those who have had their voices muted by coercive leadership administrations for whom control trumps compassion. They matter for all those who have asked honest questions about their sincere confusions and doubts about the Bible, only to be accused of lacking conviction, being worldly or having a rebellious spirit. They matter because in the midst of mega-church mentality, there are often agendas quite at odds with the goals and objectives of Jesus. They matter because the Bible has the power to do great good and great harm. They matter because before anyone attempts to justify an action, which can have serious ramifications for someone's life, with the phrase, “because the Bible says”, we had better be very sure what we mean.