A professional mechanic friend walked into my garage and noticed my collection of Chilton Auto Repair books—one for every make I have ever owned. After eyeing them he quipped with a smile, “There is only enough in those books to be dangerous.” As I read Adam Hamilton’s Making Sense of the Bible: Rediscovering the Power of Scripture Today, my friend’s jibe came to mind. The book contains everything from an overview of the Bible to a debate over the nature of Scripture to what the Bible says about tattoos. Hamilton has covered too much ground too superficially to be of much help, which is why this book will be most dangerous to those trying to make sense of the Bible.
But shallow coverage is not the worst problem the book faces. Hamilton, senior pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, seems to be making two differing claims. First, the Bible is important and valuable because, Hamilton writes, “when I open its pages, I hear God speaking to me” (3). The statement gives the impression that Hamilton believes Scripture carries the imprimatur of God because, after all, God is the one speaking in its pages.
However, this assertion is followed by another. Though Hamilton doesn’t tell us how he knows, he posits that God wants us to wrestle with what the Bible says, since “there are statements on its pages that I don’t believe capture the character and will of God” (3). This is not a one-time slip of the pen, nor is Hamilton simply talking about those places where Scripture records the evil acts of human beings. Instead, he has in mind biblical statements that, for example, condemn homosexual practice. In fact, in the chapter titled “Homosexuality and the Bible” he four times reiterates the claim that some of the Bible is simply “out of sync with God’s will as we understand it today” (271).
But such an allegation raises an obvious question. What’s a Christian to do in light of these biblical statements that Hamilton claims don’t reflect the will and character of God? He contends that believers and unbelievers alike are to “set aside those things that may not reflect the timeless will of God” (279). In other words, we are to decide which statements are really of God and which are not, and then set the latter aside.
Making Sense of the Bible: Rediscovering the Power of Scripture Today
Adam Hamilton
Making Sense of the Bible: Rediscovering the Power of Scripture Today
Adam Hamilton
Hamilton rightly feels the weight of what he is suggesting and so declares we must resist the temptation to rid ourselves of those things in Scripture that would be convenient for us to set aside. But this point raises a rather important question: How do we make this determination? How do we settle on which statements do or do not reflect the timeless will of God? Which statements are we setting aside because it is culturally or politically convenient to do so?
For Hamilton, the answer is easy: we must listen to Jesus, “the definitive, unmitigated Word of God” (146). He goes on to write, “Jesus is the only Word from God that does not come to us through the minds, the ears, and the hearts of fallible human authors”—while also admitting in an endnote that our primary knowledge about Jesus is from the Bible (146). Nevertheless, according to Hamilton, Jesus as the Word of God is the standard by which all other words from God are to be judged. These other words include words of a theologian, a devotional book, a moving novel, a variety of music, and, of course, the Bible itself. “These are all means by which God speaks to us,” Hamilton claims, and these all stand under the word of God, Jesus Christ (147). Jesus judges these other words to be consistent or not consistent with God’s will and character.
But if Jesus is the infallible word of God who “does not come to us through the minds, the ears, and the hearts of fallible human authors,” then how can we come to know and understand his judgment concerning these other words from God? For Hamilton, the answer is inspiration. Despite writing an entire chapter on the nature of inspiration, though, Hamilton offers guidance that is vague at best. Arguing at one time that inspiration is something like the inner compulsion felt by a poet or painter, Hamilton remarks that preachers writing their sermons are inspired in the same way the biblical authors were inspired (132–133). Still at other points, inspiration seems to have something to do with the reader of Scripture. For example, he contends, “Ultimately this understanding of inspiration . . . involves reading and interpreting scripture with the help of the tradition of the faith, the experience of the Spirit, and the use of our human reason” (142–143). Thus, for Hamilton, Jesus as the infallible standard for all other words from God (including the Bible) is accessed by tradition, experience, and reason.
Do you see what’s he’s done? Hamilton has equated human reason and experience ensconced in the tradition of the church with Jesus, the infallible word who stands over all other words from God. It is little wonder Hamilton feels justified in determining which parts of Scripture are consistent with the will and character of God and which are not.