Is Christianity Bigger than the Bible?

One recent attendee at an event asked about how to maintain their faith when there is so much disagreement surrounding different Biblical texts.

Nov 22, 2024

My favorite thing about live events? Responding to people’s questions. Because as often happens, a person’s particular question has a way of illuminating universal questions that we are all asking. This ongoing series, “Audience Questions,” is my way of responding to real questions that have come up in the past. These articles are free for all, however if you’d like to submit a question, that’s only for Paid Subscribers.

The following question got asked by an audience member when I was in Iowa doing a presentation of “Not an Oxymoron: Why LGBTQ Affirming Christianity Makes Sense.” I didn’t get a chance to respond to questions that evening, so I’m gonna answer some of them here on Perspective Shift.

AUDIENCE QUESTION

How is Christianity bigger and more than just the Bible? How does a person maintain faith when there is room for legitimate disagreement with Biblical texts?

MY RESPONSE

I love this question for many reasons, one of which is it shows right off the bat that the person asking this question has clearly undergone some immense shifts if their spirituality, a topic that really juices my jam. And then getting to engage with the connection between Christianity and the Bible is a cherry on the top… of the aforementioned jam.

That was weird… anyway,

Let’s discuss it, shall we?

Aliens, the Bible, and Christianity

Maybe we can start here.

Imagine if aliens visited earth tomorrow and they met with various Christians and attended a variety of churches. It’s fair to assume that they would walk away from that experience concluding that the Bible and Christianity are inextricably linked. They’d likely (and reasonably) infer that being a Christian means you have a Bible (perhaps several), and that you probably even read it. We would not blame them in the least if they reported back to their superiors that Christianity is a direct result of the Bible.

But take those same aliens, put them in a time machine, have them go back to the year, oh I don’t know, 50 AD? Even 150 or 250 AD? And the planetary visitor’s takeaway from Christianity would be vastly different.

For starters, many scholars have made the (compelling) case that there wasn’t just “Christianity” in the first few centuries, there were Christianties, meaning more than one. (I’m reminded of when I learned that although nowadays we only have one species of human—homo sapiens—hundreds of thousands of years ago, before us homo sapiens won the day, there were multiple species of humans walking the earth.)

Within these competing iterations of Christianity there existed different ideas about things such as who Jesus was, in what ways he was Divine, which letters and stories should be considered Scripture, and so on. It wasn’t until 300+ years after Jesus that the Bible was fully canonized (meaning the complete list was finalized for which books made it and which didn’t). So an alien during those years would’ve had a very inconsistent picture of which communities were influenced by which holy texts, and so on. But more to the point there would not have a been an immediate or obvious straight line from “Bible” to “Christianity” like there is today.

Now let’s imagine the aliens jump back in their machine and travel to somewhere in Europe during the 1400’s, just before the invention of the Gutenberg Press, the thing that allowed for books to be mass produced. Prior to this, full copies of the Bible were rare. There might only be one copy in a given town, kept at the local church, and only the priest would’ve known how to read it. So anytime between 350 and 1440, if our aliens visit lots of Christians around the world, statistically very few of them would have a Bible. During that millennium, a person’s connection to, understanding of, and practicing of Christianity was based not so much on the Bible per se, as it was on the collective rites and rituals of the familial and communal life.

My point here is this: What we think of today as this super tight, hook and ladder connection between Christianity and the Bible is a relatively new phenomenon in the larger history of the church. Now I’m not suggesting that the Bible played no role, or was unimportant in Christianity during previous eras, but I am trying to get us to acknowledge that most Christians throughout history have existed within an expression of their faith and religion that didn’t directly involve or require the Bible.

Therefore, to the original question, Christianity is “bigger and more” than the Bible insofar as:

its origins predate the Bible;
its spread occurred not just independently of what we now think of as “the Bible” but it happened with multiple iterations of the Bible informing different communities; and
the religion of Christianity clearly is more than the Bible because the majority of Christians who’ve ever lived have never owned, read, or studied one

Again, let me stress, I am not saying the Bible was not a part of the development of Christianity. Certainly Christian theology developed over time largely due to continual efforts to read, interpret, understand, and apply the Bible. But I am saying that our perception that the Bible is central to Christianity, or is the most important part of Christianity, is a relatively modern idea.

With that in mind, I often give people permission to relax a little bit in terms of how tightly we can sometimes clench to our Bibles. The fact that you even have one to clinch is historically miraculous. Most Christians have managed to follow in the way of Jesus, and practice the religion that grew up around his teachings, without ever having access to or intimate knowledge of a Bible.

After all, Jesus is the Word of God, not the Bible.

How to maintain faith in light of interpretive discrepancies

And then, to the second half of the question, how can we maintain faith when there are legitimate disagreements about the Bible, I’ll say this: it’s probably easier than you think.

Based on how this question is worded I’m going to assume that the asker comes from a tradition in which the Bible was held as the most important thing. Maybe this was explicitly taught to them or maybe it was just implied, but I gather that their long-standing assumption is something like, “to have a good and strong faith one must read, study, know, and believe the Bible.” (Which, remember, is a modern phenomenon).

To make matters worse, many Christian denominations and perspectives today also hold fast to the notion that not only is there one right way to interpret and understand Scripture, but (surprise surprise) it also happens to be the way they interpret and understand it.

When you grow up in those kinds of environments and are taught by parents or pastors or teachers that there is one right way to interpret the Bible (and lucky for you they know how to do it), it’s not hard to then imagine how destabilizing it can feel years down the road should you get confronted with the vast and diverse landscape of thoughts on the Bible. As the questioner put it, “legitimate disagreements about the Bible” are myriad.

I’m no expert in the art world but I do get the sense that people who study art, who dive into the world of various artists and mediums, probably don’t get as bent out of shape when another person has a different impression on what this or that painting “means,” or what such-and-such artist intended with their sculpture. Sure, people have their opinions and convictions, and they might argue them with great fervor, but at the end of the day I doubt they lose much sleep over the fact that other dilettantes disagree.

So then, how might someone hold on to their faith in the face of so much disagreement over what the Bible says and what it means? You could start by retraining your mind to think of the Bible more like a library of letters and poems and stories, which inherently will inspire different takeaways throughout history and across cultures. When understood this way, disagreements become part of the process of engaging with Scripture. It’s only when we think of the Bible as a textbook that we freak out if we turn to the back, where the solutions reside, and see multiple answers to the questions in chapter 13.

And then, from there, I think a person’s faith can actually begin to deepen. Because if the goal is just to memorize Bible verses, or get trained in one particular interpretive framework of the Bible, then one risk is that our faith becomes not much more than a mental exercise. We just get good at the Bible like we get good at Sudoku or Wordle. But when you start to see that faith is not so much the things that you believe, but rather it’s the way that you live and move through the world, well now things start to get interesting.

Look, I know many of us were told that the Bible is this perfect, inerrant document written by the very anthropomorphic hand of God. And we believed that the quality of our faith correlated with how well we knew our Bibles.

But when Jesus was asked what the greatest of all the laws were, he responded by saying “Love.” Love God, love your neighbor, love yourself.

So may you do your best to simply let go of the illusion that there is one right way to read, understand, interpret, and apply the Bible.

And may you see the various interpretations and disagreements as a beautiful indicator of how alive the sacred text is, moving in and through people in all sorts of profound ways.

And may you trust that your invitation from God is that you would become someone defined first and foremost by the love you have in your heart and the love you show the world.

Those are my thoughts, anyway.

See/Hear this Response on YouTube

As I answer questions from the audience, in addition to sharing them here via Perspective Shift I’ll also be filming them for YouTube (and IG and FB and TT and X).

If that’s more your jam, here ya go!

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