This year, right on schedule, comes an article in Newsweek by Kurt Eichenwald, entitled “The Bible, So Misunderstood It’s a Sin.” Please feel free to read it. Without it, much of what follows will make no sense. Though I make no guarantees that what follows makes that much sense even if you do read the Newsweek article.

As is often the case, the article lumps together all believers as homophobic, illiterate, bible-thumping, totalitarian, hate-filled hypocrites. It makes very little distinction between the members of Westboro Baptist Church with their pre-literate scrawls of “God Hates Fags” on protest signs and those educated and committed physicians who willingly risk their own lives to go to western Africa to treat people suffering from Ebola—simply because they believe they were called to do so. Despite his disclaimer, “This examination is not an attack on the Bible or Christianity,” the article could just as well have been entitled, Conspiracy of Fools, to borrow the name from one of Mr. Eichenwald’s more successful books.

After reading his advice and becoming thoroughly enlightened, hypocritical fool that I am, I have decided to repent. Here are nine things, yea ten, I will have to add to my New Year’s Resolutions.

2. I will no longer read the book of 2 Peter, even though I find it odd that Mr. Eichenwald would simultaneously laud the supposed “almost universally shared” condemnation of the book as a forgery while he would clearly agree with its description of the importance of ferreting out false teachers—something he is trying to do here. I also have an uneasy feeling he would not be disappointed if God chose to mete out the same punishment mentioned in 2 Peter—floods, earthquakes, fire and brimstone— for modern false teachers, i.e. believing Evangelicals. In fact, 2 Peter 3:17, “Be on guard so that you will not be carried away by the errors of these wicked people…” sounds like it could have been written by Mr. Eichenwald himself.

4. I am henceforth going to cease the recitation of either the Nicene, Apostle’s or the interminable Athanasian Creed since, according to “reliable” history they were all written by … politicians. (Visible shudder.)

5. I will no longer trust anything that is handwritten even though that could cause me some serious confusion at the grocery store.

7. I will burn my autographed copies of books by Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee. I will also burn my copy of “Going Rogue” by Sarah Palin, though not without some regret. It turns out she writes pretty well, with little trace of the syntactical travesties that sometimes occur when she speaks. I say that with no animus toward the former governor as I am equally prone to syntactical misadventure in both speech and prose. I imagine there is no need to burn my copy Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope.

8. Since “there is only one verse in Romans about homosexuality and eight verses condemning those who criticize the government” (apparently a statistically significant threshold) I will immediately start a petition calling for a constitutional convention to repeal the Bill of Rights for everyone except homosexuals.

9. I will only read the Bible in Aramaic because that is the language Jesus spoke. The fact that I don’t know Aramaic shouldn’t matter; an awful lot of Catholics didn’t really understand the language of the Mass until after Vatican II.

10. Instead of simply picking and choosing those parts I am comfortable with, I’m going to throw out all of my Bibles since I don’t have the time or the training to sort out the truth from the pseudepigrapha—that’s the word Bart Ehrman suggests is the believing community’s euphemism for lies, redactions, forgeries and mistakes. Now that may put me at some disadvantage in understanding God’s will for my life, but perhaps I shouldn’t be concerned with that anyway. It is extraordinarily difficult to believe in a deity who would entrust his instructions and messages to so many arrogant, scheming, adulterous, murderous, thieving and lying reprobates. Then again, that might not be all that different from my current Bible study group, the members of which I regularly depend on to help me hear, interpret and understand the words of God.

He doesn’t get everything wrong. It is a good thing, as he puts it, “find[ing] out which parts of the Bible were not in the earliest Greek manuscripts, which are the bad translations, and what one book says in comparison to another.” And as he says, loving one’s neighbor is a good place to start, although he did kind of jump right over the first part of that verse. You know, the part about loving God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.

Mr. Eichenwald might have a more balanced view of these issues if he did not rely almost exclusively on the work—useful as it is— of Bart Ehrman, himself the author of one of Newsweek’s Christmas-time “hit pieces” on Christianity (Dec. 17, 2012).  Perhaps he could have consulted with scholars who are not, like Ehrman, self-professed agnostics. I have little doubt that William Lane Craig would have given him a few minutes of his time. (If you have a few minutes you might want to look at Craig’s rebuttal of Ehrman’s approach in general. Or maybe Mr. Eichenwald could have contacted N.T. Wright, who while refusing to call himself an inerrantist (for plenty of good reasons) still manages to take the Bible “utterly seriously” while avoiding the problem of “throwing out the baby Jesus with the bath water.” (Apologies to Ricky Bobby, the Official Theologian of NASCAR.) Try Wright’s book, Scripture and the Authority of God.  Seriously, with a name like N.T. Wright, how could he ever be wrong about anything, at least in the New Testament?

God did, in fact, entrust his words to sinful, fallen and prone-to-error human beings. He still does, because he doesn’t have much choice. If it were necessary that only totally trustworthy, error-free humans should write Scripture, Jesus, as the only person in history qualified for the job, would have spent his entire life writing stuff down in order to correct the record of the Old Testament authors and to give us a trustworthy and authoritative version the rest of us could use after his ascension. Yet we have no record (trustworthy or otherwise) that Jesus ever wrote anything. Drawing a line in the sand as he confronted the Pharisees over the woman caught in adultery doesn’t count as writing, drawing perhaps, but not writing. And besides, if we are to believe Eichenwald and Ehrman, that episode never happened.

So why didn’t Jesus write down what he wanted us to retain as Holy Writ? Surely he could have saved a lot of bickering, heated arguments with your favorite college sophomore around the holiday dinner table, and even—as the article properly notes—bloodshed over “correct” doctrine. Instead, just as with the words of God in the Old Testament, he left it to humans to record—imperfect humans who, at best, may be deeply committed to veracity and truth-telling but can still make or perpetuate inadvertent mistakes. At worst, they may intentionally change the record to accommodate ideological, political or doctrinal agendas. I suspect all of that is possible. In fact, I expect all of that is probable.

Fortunately for the much-maligned officials on the field, we now have instant replay that slows things down to the about the speed of Keanu Reeves dodging bullets in The Matrix. Usually that settles the question, but often it just reinforces the problem of perspectives. Typically, technology seems to help, but it is no guarantee. The replay cameras have to be placed at exactly the right spot at the right time. Sometimes they’re in the right place, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes the cameraman is preoccupied with a cheerleader instead of the play on the field. Sometimes there is something in the way of the camera that obscures even its non-blinking perspective.

But when it comes to the Word of God we don’t have instant replay. While theologians and historians can make a persuasive case that their perspectives should carry equal, or even greater, weight than that of football officials, the rest of us are not so sure. Especially when the historians and theologians—throw in a few pastors, teachers, evangelists, street preachers, Jehovah’s Witnesses on your front porch and freshly-scrubbed Mormon boys on their bicycles—are so often in conflict with one another. Even when those guys speak the same language, they don’t speak the same language—a result, I believe, of God’s judgement on humanity for the Tower of Babel.

How do we sort this out? Are we just stuck with the heat of billions of opinions about the meaning of Scripture? Isn’t that one of the causes of wars, Crusades, Inquisitions, divorces and church-splits? Isn’t that the definition of relativism? Isn’t that what we see throughout the Old Testament, when, just to set the stage, the writer will throw in a verse like, “… every man did what was right in his own eyes.”? (Deuteronomy 12:8; Judges 21:25; Judges 17:7; Proverbs 21:2; Proverbs 12:15. We could go on.) But that is what the verse means, right? “Eyes” is a metaphor for individual perspective. Each person lives by their own perspective and the Bible is not suggesting that it’s a good thing for everyone to do what is right in their own eyes.

The responsibility for the clarity of God’s revelation is his, not mine. I believe I have a duty to diligent and serious-minded examination of Scripture—at least to the extent that I am capable of being dutiful, diligent or serious, for that matter. It was his choice to deliver his word through sinful human beings and I think there is a reason for that.

I’ve always been intrigued by a verse in 2 Peter. Apologies to Mr. Eichenwald for bringing up that purported forgery. 2 Peter 1:18 says,”Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of one’s own interpretation.” No less a qualified Biblical commentator than Albert Barnes wrote in 1834, “The expression here used [The Greek for private interpretation is ἰδίας ἐπιλύσεως idias epiluseōs, in case you’re interested. I just like seeing the Greek letterforms.] has given rise to as great a diversity of interpretation, and to as much discussion, as perhaps any phrase in the New Testament; and at the present time there is no general agreement among expositors as to its meaning.” To be fair, this is about a particular class of prophecy and not necessarily about how we ought to read Scripture as a whole, but I still find it wonderfully ironic that a verse that argues against private interpretation is among the most privately interpreted verses in the entire Canon.

So what’s so bad about private interpretation? Not that much maybe, except—in my humble, individual, and certainly not binding on anyone else, opinion—I don’t think that is where God intends for us to learn the full meaning of his words.

Instead, God wants us in community. Scruton suggests that “we regard the experience of community as a preparation for the experience of God, and the experience of God as revelation granted in response to it.” (Face of God. p.157) Certainly there are those of us, perhaps all of us, who have had an experience of God while alone. Sometimes he breaks through and touches our heart and mind with his presence when there is no one else around. Just you and Jesus. But the Apostle Paul, no stranger to the supernatural himself, cautions us not to be fooled by those who go on an on about their visions as they may not be “connected to Christ, the head of the body.” (Colossians 2:19) Connection to the body, and thereby Christ really matters.

Our real knowledge of the word of God is only partially built on what we discern alone. What we learn on our own must be confirmed by others, which is why I go to church, read a lot and have met once a week for almost twenty years with the merry little band of sinners I may have insulted in resolution #10 above. They, as part of the Body of Christ, have the words of life. Those words must be verified as we “compare notes”. We read. We study. We share and take the Scriptures apart together and pray for the grace to receive from it the true Word of God. We pray for wisdom and discernment and we do so with humility. Yogi was right. It ain’t the heat. We recognize the limitations of our individual perspectives. We welcome each other’s insights. We welcome the commentators, Twitter theologians, popular writers and the scholarly researchers, including those who call themselves agnostic or even atheist. We are not afraid of those with whom we disagree. We disagree with each other. Often. We know that in that process which takes place in community, our little group’s study of the Bible is breaking bread together. And we recall who is called both the Living Word and the Bread of Life; the one who calls us to do everything in “remembrance of Him”. And we remember 1 Corinthians 13:2 “…if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing.”

Just like the question of whether the football breaks the invisible plane of the goal line, there is an objective reality to the Word of God. But it’s not the book, it’s the person we encounter through it. I am not denying plenary inspiration; inerrancy; form, textual, source or redaction criticism; Marxist or feminist hermeneutics; God’s breath or any of those other valuable schema we use and abuse to convince ourselves we’re right and someone else is wrong and ought, at the very least, to be denied admittance to our church—if not heaven itself. And I am not denying the value of the writings of Mr. Eichenwald and the research of Dr. Ehrman. Both would be wholeheartedly welcome in our Wednesday morning Bible study group. But the bottom line for me is that without the person of Christ, the Bible is little more than an artifact of history, interesting in the way that Homer, or Plato, or Shakespeare might be, but little more.