Sermons at St. John’s Presbyterian Church

Scripture is God Breathed. What Does That Mean

Transcribed from the sermon preached October 17, 2010
 

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Luke 18:1-8, II Timothy 3:14 – 4:5

All scripture is God Breathed. I remember being invited to a Bible study by one of my “Bible believing” friends in college, and this was one of the passages, which, for him, proved the infallibility of scripture. God had breathed the words out onto the page. But I don’t know about you, but I have always been a bit skeptical of self-promotion. Don’t Muslims make similar claims about the Quran? A quick look on the web I found a site called,

The way to the truth. It starts

THE QURAN IS THE WORD OF GOD AND AN UNDENIABLE PROOF FOR MUHAMMAD’S PROPHETHOOD. The Quran is completely different from all the other books in the world.” Claiming that the Quran was written by god, the web site says

“. The Quran openly declares:

You (O Muhammad) was not a reader of any Scripture before it, nor did you write (such a Scripture) with your right hand, for then those who follow falsehood might (have a right) to doubt it.” (al-Ankabut, 29.48) http://www.thewaytotruth.org/theholyquran/wordofgod.html

Mohammad was not literate so apparently God wrote it for him.

Followers of Hitler called Mein Kampf “Our infallible guiding star”. Upon raising such points, I have actually heard the reply, “Yeh, but our bible really is infallible.”

Even though II Timothy 3:16 is one of the passages used by folks to claim the Bible is infallible, it is really quite a jump from God breathed to infallible. I mention it because you might have a nervous reaction and be tempted to turn off your listening ears, since this passage is so often used to shut down thought and debate.

What my friends and I didn’t realize as freshmen in college was that these letters to Timothy were not a part of scripture when they were written. And if Paul was in fact the author, much of what we call the New Testament wasn’t even written yet. We can assume the author is speaking of the Torah, and perhaps the psalms and prophets, but they aren’t all bound together into one book so we know exactly what scriptures he is talking about. And since the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a significant revision and reinterpretation of the scriptures, clearly for our author of Timothy, the idea that scripture is God-breathed doesn’t mean God has finished breathing.

Breathing implies movement and life, and as Christians we would claim, it implies incarnation; that by God’s grace through the Word who is Christ God’s breath moves in and through fallible human beings. In our particular context, in our far less than perfect mind and heart, we are to open ourselves that the breath of God may guide us in our study, writing and living.

Some scholars consider Timothy to have been written by someone later than Paul. Clare Drury writes in the Oxford commentary that the organization of the church under officers such as bishops and deacons is well advanced and mirrors the situation found in late first-century and early second century Christian writings…”and some of Paul’s themes of grace and covenant and release from the law are not as prominent. Also the “immediacy of eschatological expectation that lay behind much of Paul’s teaching has gone. Judgment and the future appearance of Christ are still expected, but it is the ordered life of the community which is the focal point…The letters can be seen as documents written in and for a community which wanted to hold fast to what they considered true Pauline teaching in the face of persecution or opposition from different kinds of Christian teachers.” It may be that someone was calling upon the notoriety of Paul to address a Church that looked like it would be around a while, or it is possible Paul changed his perspective, and perhaps a few opinions, even dictated the message to someone who wrote a bit different than him.

We think that Paul is killed just before the death of Nero in 68. And whether Paul is our author or it is someone later emulating Paul, Nero, an emperor of Rome, would represent a prime example of the life others would be tempted to emulate and abuse. Nero killed his mother and a couple of wives, slept with pretty much whomever he wanted, killed those who didn’t like it, and after Rome caught fire, Christians were blamed and persecuted throughout the empire. Among other methods, they were burned like lamps at night and fed to wild beasts. So Chapter 3 of II Timothy begins, “There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient of their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God – having a form of Godliness but denying its power. . Always learning,” he says, “but never able to acknowledge the truth. Have nothing to do with them.” I guess we can assume that such slime bags and their teachings would not be God breathed or inspired.

So Paul is lifted up as the good antithesis to these slime bags, a role model: He has been persecuted twice but continued in faith, patience, love, and endurance. “Anyone who lives a life in Christ will be persecuted,” he says, “while evil men will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.

“But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it. The ladies of the house, tough and not easily deceived, had taught him scripture from infancy, and it is this scripture which makes Timothy wise to receive the message of salvation through Christ. So here is where our line of question comes in: All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. To question, discern and live righteousness, this is the God breathed purpose of scripture and the task for which it is to be employed. Why? so that the man of God may be equipped for every good work. It is quite beside the point to argue or worry, for instance, whether scripture is scientific. It is to help in faith, patience, love and endurance, to help in understanding the wisdom and grace of Christ, to train in righteousness, and equip for good work.

Given that our author is writing long before our Bible is canonized and then added and subtracted from to reach us in its current form, and given that Jesus and Paul reinterpret and add to the scripture they held dear, and other authors added still more to Jesus and Paul to address current issues in their context, we are to honor scripture not as if it is a lifeless idol that is stuck unchanged, but as the living testimony of Christ, the Word, whose way leads to love, righteousness, good work, and eternal life.

But we socially active Christians who have allergic reactions to calls for unquestioned allegiance to petrified words which pit one ignorant and arrogant group against another, should beware of the temptation to consider the written Word found in scripture and teaching secondary to what the Church does. Lamen Sanneh professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School writes, “

“If the church is wrong in what it teaches, then it cannot instruct in what it does. And if its actions contradict its words, then the church has failed in both heaven and earth. Christianity may be easier said than done, but it is not done unless it is said.

“This vital connection between word and life,” and the tenaciousness of prayer which Jesus teaches in this morning’s Gospel parable, “is evident in the story of a man suffering from a fatal motor neuron disease, called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He had read an article by a secular journalist, Michael Ignatieff, who criticized those who suffer from terminal illness and refuse to accept death without a struggle.

“According to Ignatieff, such patients are proof that modern people "lack a category of fate and a language for accepting it." They are victims of "the unrelenting language of American uplift" in contrast to the "European virtues of irony and stoicism."

I don’t know about you, but it helped me to do a quick Wikipedia review of Stoicism: Beginning in the 3^rd century BCE, “Stoics were concerned with the active relationship between cosmic determinism and human freedom and the belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will that is in accord with nature…They thought that the best indication of an individual's philosophy was not what a person said but how he behaved.” And from the New World Encyclopedia I found this stoic quote from Epictetus: "When I see a man in a state of anxiety,” I say, “What can this man want? If he did not want something which is not in his power, how could he still be anxious?" http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Stoicism#Influence_on_Christianity

In other words, if you are a powerless widow you should not expect justice; if you were sick and dying, you should just accept the fact and not bother hoping or praying to the God who made you this way. In fact, your acceptance showed more virtue (stoicism) than the words of prayer, and you could be happy despite your fate. Now I suspect there is quite a bit of similarity and influence, not just opposition between stoicism and Christianity, but for the purpose of our story, Sanneh is arguing that words of prayer to the Word which is Christ feeds the strength of action in the material world. The Hope of the Word shapes the material, indeed altars the material.

“Ignatieff and the hospitalized man who read his article met at the care center in British Columbia, and conversed by means of a computer terminal and a printer and tube next to the patient’s mouth. The patient blew a Morse code signal into the tube, which then generated letters on the computer screen.

“The patient’s strong religious faith irked the journalist, who rebuked him for not throwing in the towel. The patient explained that he knew the difference between "giving up and letting go," and that even people in his apparently hopeless situation could make that choice. Stoicism, he said, catching something of Zeno’s original despair, is not much of a motivator. As a stoic, he said, he would have caved in long before. Instead, he said, "I face each day with a prayer." The journalist protested: "I can’t pray, won’t pray, to someone who makes [you] suffer like this."

“Ignatieff departed, less impressed with the spirit that sustained the patient than by the precious words he flashed on the computer screen. Ignatieff later wrote, "He has become the word man, the one who taps out messages from deep inside the dark well of illness. I think: we are the word" (the Observer, June 18, 1989) Ignatieff did not understand,” writes Sanneh, “that it is because the "dark well of illness" is ablaze with the word that was with God at the beginning that words in general are of great account. For it is "in thy light that we are bathed with light" (Ps. 36:9)

“Ignatieff correctly points out that most people have exchanged Christian hope and encouragement for an austere and disenchanted stoicism. However, stoicism has a knockout boomerang effect: it elevates matter only to despair of it. It is, more than Ignatieff suspects, just as true that "the spirit lives by the word" as that the spirit lives in the word and the word dwells with us. The church transmits the word of life and hope in doing as in teaching.”

“Our enemy is not fear or anxiety, concludes Sanneh, though they perturb and distract, but doubt and despair, for they deny and enslave. And so we must heed the apostle’s words and in everything give thanks to God.” (Sanneh, Lamen. The Spirit in Sound Doctrine. Christian Century October 8, 1989, p. 930.)

This lesson to pray like a nagging widow before the judge until God relents is a strange message coming from a man who prayed all night in the garden, take this cup from me, yet who found himself on the cross nevertheless. And this from the one we call Son of God. Maybe Luke as well as Paul wants his community to remain patient, as the Kingdom seems delayed, assuming that when it does come, God will find faithful. This is further emphasis on the tenacious yet humble theme so evident in the Gospel of Luke. Yet all the evidence points to a Jesus who is tenacious in prayer and the embodiment of Logos or the Word eternal, the embodied reason, which gave birth to the natural world and the Word revealed in the words of scripture. And so we come each Sunday morning, in season (when it is relatively easy) and out of season (when it is unfashionable), to sing, read, study and listen by and for this Word, and we are challenged, convinced, rebuked to do, to repent from sin, to be the living Word, to endure suffering with hope and patience, to seek justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.