When the unchangeable Word needs to be changed. . .

Yvette Flunder, the Senior Pastor of the City of Refuge UCC over in Oakland and the Presiding Bishop of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, has said out loud what many others only say privately.  The unchangeable and unchanging Word of God needs changing.  When she talked to the folks at the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy, she was telling a liberal, progressive, and militant crowd exactly what they wanted to hear and, surprisingly, many other so called Christians probably agree.

"I’m about to say something a bit naughty, a bit dangerous, actually. I reckon we’re due for a Third Testament. Why? Because the Bible, as it stands, has become a bit of a nightmare, hasn’t it?

You’ve got bits in there like, ‘Slaves, do what your masters tell you like you’re doing it for the Big Man upstairs.’ It’s right there in the ink! Or, ‘Ladies, put a sock in it during church, and if you’ve got a question, wait ’til you get home to ask your husband.’

Now, look at me—I’m a believer! I’m all in! I wake up, I’m chatting with the Divine, the Divine is chatting back, we’re having a lovely time. But I am absolutely fed up to the back teeth with the way these ancient scripts paint God as some sort of vitriolic, narrow-minded headmaster.

People wag their fingers and say, ‘But Yvette, it’s in the Book!’ And I say, fine, let’s rip the page out then! And they gasp, ‘You can’t do that, it’s the Word of God!’ And I say, no, darling. It’s words about God. There’s a massive difference, isn’t there? Is it the literal Word of the Infinite Creator? No. It’s just not.”

The problem is that the old ways of trying to undo what Scripture says are not keeping up with the advance of liberal propaganda and so the only solution left is to do just that -- rip pages out of the old Bible that you object to an write in a new section promoting what you affirm.  This is not simply a rejection of the Scriptures but of the whole idea of Biblical revelation and of the central premise of those Scriptures, namely that it speaks with the unchanging and unchangeable voice of God.

God's Word has become merely a suggestion to us instead of the definitive Word and it has become more and more an unwelcome and rejected suggestion.  While this is surely true of morality and ethics, it is no less true of the story of the Scriptures that is Christ promised, incarnate, suffering, dying, rising, ascending, and coming again.  I wish I could say that this was an isolated opinion from someone on the political as well as religious left.  The truth is that this is the way many Christians of all stripes treat the Scriptures.  God gets a say but it is not the definitive one and when it does not accord with our own values and intentions, then it is His say that ends up changing and not ours.  Christianity overall but especially liberal and progressive Christianity has become a ship without an anchor, adrift upon the seas of change in which the wind in the sails is not God's work for our redemption but our own happiness, satisfaction, pleasure, and self-identity.

There was a time when the optimum question in Bible study is What do you think it says or means?  Now that question has been transformed into the real question that foments doubt and discord -- Do you agree with what it says or means?  There is no truth without our consent and there is no authoritative voice from God except the one whose voice fulfills our purpose and lives in submission to our own wills and desires.  This is no novelty invented by the 21st century but merely the current version of the question raised in Eden:  is that what God really said [meant]?