Sermon from July 11, 2004

Dan Brown has written a best seller called The Da Vinci Code. More than four million people have found it a good read. Congratulations to him! Unlike other best sellers, this novel touches on issues close to the heart of Christian faith and actually contradicts the central beliefs of the Christian faith.

The tricky thing about novels is that authors don’t have to give reasons for and answer objections to their conclusions. They speak through their characters. That is a very powerful way of communicating ideas, because when someone tells you a story, it doesn’t feel like they are slipping ideas, sometimes radical ideas, into your mind. You defenses are down, and even if only for a moment, you find yourself half agreeing with an idea that you would be arguing with in a lecture or conversation.

One core value of Christian faith that takes a hit in the novel is the authority of the 27 writings that make up the New Testament. For example, one of the characters in the book says that the Emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to recognize and protect Christianity, rewrote Christian history as a way of consolidating political and ecclesiastical power. Here is what the character said.

“To rewrite the history books, Constantine knew he would need a bold stroke. . . . Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.” (Brown, 234).

If you are part of our Sunday night study that begins tonight, you’ll learn why most historians do not agree. But you can see why it might influence someone who knew nothing about Christian history. Pastor Mark and I would like to address such issues in two ways. First, as I said, we will tackle specific issues in the Sunday night academy study that begins tonight.

Second, we want to use Sunday sermons to set forth in a positive way what most Christians, everywhere, for the past 2,000 years have believed. Mark will speak to the issue of the person of Christ. I will speak to the issue of the authority of the Bible.

I get to go first, and I will take three Sundays to lay out for you the doctrine of the authority of the Bible. Mark and I relish doing this, not to make Dan Brown look bad or even to discourage people from reading his novel, but because the novel offers an excellent occasion for the Church to revisit and sharpen its understanding of God and its confidence in the Bible. So, let’s get started with the durability of the Bible.

The Adaptability of Scripture
You may have noticed that I have not called Brown’s novel a great novel. Is it a best seller? Yes. Does it keep people turning to the next page? Yes. Might you want to take it to the beach? Yes. Is it great? Too soon to say. Is it a classic? Too soon to say. What makes a book great? What makes its appeal endure beyond a publisher’s hype and it present popularity? C. S. Lewis said one time, “A work of art has to be seen in many different lights and to test itself against many different kinds of capacity and experience before its finds its level.” (C. S. Lewis, Arthurian Torso, “Conclusions,” 371). There are standards by which a book’s worth can be measured, but its worth will become apparent only over time, usually long stretches of time.

For example, among English language classics, people still read Shakespeare, Dickens and Steinbeck. If people are still reading The Da Vinci Code 70 and 150 and 450 years from now, people will call it a great book. They will point to the fact that people under vastly different circumstances have found the book worth reading in spite of the passage of time. That of course is exactly what has been true of the Bible.

When you take into account the radically different human circumstances in which the Bible has found a home, it makes sense to think there is something about the Bible that transcends culture and the passing of time. I don’t know what a primitive tribesman in the Andes would make of anything Dickens wrote, but I know that many a primitive tribesman listens with delight to the Gospel of Mark. Why? Let me offer you several more criteria for the Bible’s enduring power.

The Wisdom of Scripture
It gives people wisdom for living. “We wish, after reading it to understand things in general, or at least some things, better than we did before.” (Lewis, “Conclusions,” 374). You can get the idea, if you think about another medium altogether – the movies. If you’ve ever come out of a movie, quoting a memorable line over and over, it’s because that line helped you to see the world differently.

As a teenage boy, I saw James Dean in East of Eden. I couldn’t tell you to save my life the plot of that movie. But James Dean’s character captured and expressed perfectly the emotions I was experiencing as a 14 or 15-year-old boy. I felt affirmed as a human being. My emotions were okay. I saw my mysterious, adolescent emotions depicted larger than life on that screen, and I can still feel its power, even though today I recognize serious deficiencies in my understanding of what I experienced as a boy.

Millions of people have had the same experience from reading the Bible. You will hear people quote from memory short sentences from the Bible that have taken an inexorable hold on their mind, imagination and will.

What you meant for evil, God meant for good, Genesis 50:20. The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want, Psalm 23:1. I will life up my eyes unto the hills. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth, Psalm 121:1-2. Do to others what you would have them do to you, Matthew 7:12. “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men,” Mark 1:17. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain, Philippians 1:21. Even so, come Lord Jesus, Revelation 22:20.

Some of you have asked me why I have memorized the Gospel of Mark. Part of the answer goes back to my early twenties. I read the famous story of Jesus’ stilling the storm at sea at a time when I sometimes felt I was holding on to sanity by my fingernails. I can still remember the first time I articulated what it was about Jesus and the storm that strengthened me to hold on.

It hit me like a thunderclap one day that if He had to be on open waters in a violent storm, then Jesus had the right people around him. Andrew, Peter, James and John were fisherman. They knew boats. They knew storms. They had experience. They knew what to do with boats in storms. So, it was disturbing, when they went aft to wake Jesus with the terrifying words, “Don’t you care if we perish.” The experts had lost control; not a good place to be.

The Lord awoke, rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace, be still.” And it was all over, and they were all safe. And that summer day, years ago, it hit me, and I have never gotten over it. The disciples were in charge of the boat, but Christ was in charge of the sea. That was my life-saver then, and it has given me strength and comfort in many other circumstances down the decades of my life.

Whether in movies, books, theater or Holy Scripture, we hear lines spoken, emotions expressed, and scenes lived out that are charged with meaning. We may be the only one present to have heard it, but we will never again be quite the same. But we’ll never experience the Bible that way if we don’t read it. In Matthew 21:42 Jesus said to the theologians and best-read men of His day, “Have you never read . . . the Scriptures?” Six times in the Gospel of Matthew He asks that question.

If you don’t know where to start, start somewhere in the New Testament or in the Psalms. Start reading until something takes you by the soul and won’t let go. The Bible’s ability to survive the centuries can be traced to its power to seize people and never let them go. It is the sign of its inherent authority.

The Hard to Understand
Now there is a remarkable point here that we might miss. The Bible has found large and receptive audiences over many hundreds of years in many, different cultures. People continually find wisdom in its stories and teachings. This happens in spite of very real obscurities in the Bible.

“Obviously by far the greatest danger of extinction which threatens” any book “will come from its obscurity,” especially the obscurity of “Unshared Background.” (Lewis, “Conclusions,” 371, 373). The other day in my car I was listening to someone read scripture from the King James Version of the Bible. Several times in this one passage the apostle’s writings were translated by the English expression “the bowels of Jesus Christ.”

A listener, who knew nothing about the Bible, might hear that and find a reference to Jesus’ anatomy curious enough to make him want to find out more about it. But for the life of me I don’t think we would have the slightest idea what those words meant in the English we speak today.

That is an obscurity in the translation, and modern translations have done a good job of rendering the Bible in English most of us can easily understand. But there are other obscurities that good translations do not remedy, e.g., Psalm 89:9-10.

You rule over the surging sea;
when its waves mount up, you still them.
You crushed Rahab like one of the slain.

Unless someone comes to our aid, the reference to Rahab is not going to make any sense. If I told you it was a poetic image used in the Hebrew doctrine of creation, you might politely inquire after my health. Then, there are the daunting family trees in the Old Testament that can run on for pages, where many an effort to read through the Bible have come to end. There are places in the Gospels and the letters of the New Testament that I have puzzled over for years without resolution. And what shall we say about the Book of Revelation?

These obscurities are undeniable, yet millions of people are undeterred by them from finding in this amazing book wisdom and beauty and salvation. When someone says to me, “I don’t read the Bible because I don’t understand it,” I am not persuaded. Very simple people have found it accessible and helpful and life-changing. “The world of the” Bible “is a strong, strange, and consistent world. If the” Bible “is rejected you will reject it because you find that world repellent.” (Lewis, “Conclusions, 382”). But that is a very different kettle of fish than the Bible’s difficulties.

Looking in from the Outside
Finally, the Bible has power with readers because of its unique point of view. C. S. Lewis put it this way: “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. . . . None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.” (Lewis, God in the Dock, “On the Reading of Old Books,” 202).

Just because the Bible is not modern, it gives us a place to stand, so to speak, outside the biases of our own age. If the bumper sticker in front of you says, “He who has the most toys in the end wins,” the Bible will say, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” Mark 8:36. If the spirit of the age preaches, “If it feels good, do it,” the Bible will say, You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body, 1 Corinthians 6:19-20.

In an age that sees liberty as the freedom to do anything you can get away with the Bible says with admirable restraint, You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather serve one another in love, Galatians 5:13.

The ability to get even an inch outside our own skin and see ourselves and our world from a different point of view is a rare gift. The Bible gives us that vantage point, and in no small measure that is why the Church has survived the collapse of every past civilization of which it has been a part. It marches to a different drumbeat. Can you hear it? Can you keep in step with the Spirit?

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
You who are sensitive to such things will have noticed that I have not offered a formal doctrine of scripture. What I have tried to do is to help you understand why the Church needs such a doctrine. The durability and wisdom of the Bible and its power to give us a vantage point outside our sometimes suffocating place in time are realities millions of us Christians have experienced. Our first-hand experience verifies the power of the Bible. But where does the power come from? That requires an explanation.

We are not the first people to feel that need. Next week, we will look inside the New Testament itself and discover that the apostles of the Church felt that same need and offered an explanation for it. Christians, building on that explanation, have elaborated a doctrine of scripture. We’ll take a closer look next Sunday.

In the meantime, what’s holding you back from experiencing the reality behind the doctrine? Pick up your Bible and begin to read it. If you come across something that seems difficult or unintelligible, skip it. Move on until God Himself encounters you in His Holy Word. Make it your aim to understand, as well as you can, what the writer is trying to say. You’ll find yourself there and a new way to look at your world. Blunt, pious James put it this way: The man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it – he will be blessed in what he does, James 1:25.