One of my favorite movies is a 15-year-old film called ‘Saved.’ It’s a favorite largely because it’s a hilarious parody of an evangelical Christian high school that accomplishes what a good satire should in that it so closely portrays the school I attended that it leaves me both slightly uncomfortable and falling over in stitches because it is incredibly hilarious. 

The movie begins when Mary, a devout Christian and part of the in-group of girls at her evangelical school, learns that her picture-perfect dreamboat of a boyfriend, Dean, is gay. She believes that God tells her to quote ‘save’ him from what she was taught was a sinful lifestyle by sleeping with him, which she believes is all it should take to turn him straight. Not surprisingly, her plan doesn’t work, but Mary does become pregnant. For a while, no one seems to notice because it is so far from what anyone would expect in their context, but Mary knows and begins to question much of what she has been taught. She struggles with her faith and the exclusionary nature of her community. Several of her friends and teachers try to help rescue her from her doubt and questions. In one poignant scene, the other girls of the exclusive popular club she had been part of chase her down to do an exorcism of the demon they believe must be causing her to question her faith. As she is running away from them, one girl throws a Bible and hits her with it. Mary, somewhat stunned, slows down, turns around, picks up the Bible, and says slowly and emotionally, “This is not a weapon.”

This scene has always stayed in my mind, and I’ve thought of it frequently when I see and hear Scripture used in our culture because it is so often used as a weapon. Scripture is used to defend a position or to attack someone’s beliefs, worldview, or lifestyle. It’s frequently used by people on any side of an issue. This isn’t anything new – after all, Scripture was used by people defending the right to enslave people and was used by those advocating to abolish the institution of slavery. It seems that as long as people have had religious texts, they are used to defend and attack the opinions and beliefs of people, even when those very beliefs are diametrically opposed. This weaponization of Scripture is part of the reason it is such an inflammatory topic in our society. Because it has been used to hurt many people in the deepest parts of their souls and beings, Scripture can be a source of only painful memories for some. 

And yet, this same Bible is also a source of balm and solace for others, perhaps the oldest and most used source of strength and hope in Western civilization. Even in our deeply secular society, we hear the twenty-third psalm echoing in times of death and pain. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me…” The familiar words of the first letter to the Corinthians are read as an ode at a wedding. “Love is patient, love is kind…” And we have even written into our legal code “Good Samaritan laws” after the famous kind traveler in Jesus’ parable.

The enigmatic nature of Scripture is something that I have long felt and still struggle with. Of the many unique aspects of being brought up in an evangelical Christian culture, Scripture is perhaps one of the most conflicting. I am profoundly grateful for the depth of knowledge that I was taught and the commitment to learning, knowing, and engaging with the Bible that was essential among the communities I grew up in. At the same time, I came to struggle deeply with the way I was taught to interpret it, which generally left few options, and the refusal to acknowledge the tensions embedded within this beautiful, scandalous text.

I am so grateful also for my time in seminary, when a new place and new people opened new possibilities for me in my relationship with Scripture. I remember being in one of my first classes on the Hebrew Scriptures. One of my professors was the first female professor at Princeton Seminary; she had been teaching for decades and studying the Hebrew Scriptures even longer. As she and her colleague acknowledged that there were tensions in the text, such as the genocide of multiple peoples that seemed to be condoned by God, in the contradictions that existed between different authors and books, I remember feeling as though I could finally breathe because people were acknowledging the things I had struggled with for years. 

And yet, I had always been told, especially when I decided to attend Princeton, that people who would say such things would lead me away from faith, that they did not know God. And I found this to be completely and utterly untrue. Instead, I saw another thing I had been taught – that Scripture is powerful and living and that studying it and learning from it changes us. What I saw was that these professors who had dedicated their lives to studying Scriptures as honestly as they could were changed by their encounter with this living, breathing, powerful text. They were able to struggle with it and be changed by it. And I was inspired by them.

All of this struggle, both my own and our culture’s, over how to understand Scripture and how it fits into our lives is nothing new. Today’s passage from the letter to Timothy was one writer’s thoughts on this topic, and has become a common quote for people to defend their view of Scripture.

Our passage tells us “All scripture is inspired by God…” Just this phrase has been debated over for ages. This makes sense because the writer didn’t make it easy to understand what he meant. In fact, he most likely made up a new word to try to describe what he was saying because this word isn’t found anywhere else in the Greek of the time. It seems to be a compound word meaning ‘God-breathed’. Some translations like the NIV just use that word, but most like the NRSV that we read from, use ‘inspired’ because it comes from the root word meaning breath. In any case, it still leaves lots of room to be understood. 

Growing up, I was taught that this meant that something special happened when the writers of what we now consider Scripture were writing these texts, and that God made it so that every word was perfectly correct, exactly as God intended. God didn’t exactly move the hands of the writers, but certainly they got the message exact, word-for word, with absolutely no errors, or inerrant.

But today, that is not how I understand this passage. And while letting go of that understanding may be scary, because Scripture for many is one of those solid things they can trust, I have found a different understanding to be more hopeful.

One of the struggles with this understanding is that the writer certainly was not speaking of Scripture as the Bible that we know now. After all, he was writing a letter that would become part of that book and doesn’t seem to be referring to his own writing. All of what we now know as the New Testament was still in the process of being written. Some of the letters predate this one, but the Gospels would have been in formation along with other parts too – and it is unlikely that the writer could possibly have read all the parts being written across the Roman empire. 

While the Hebrew Scriptures, what we commonly call our Old Testament, would have been written by this point, they certainly were not canonized, or officially decided to be Scripture by Jews, much less Christians, who were still being formed as a separate community. 

The Torah, the first five books of our Scriptures, was recognized by then but the other books would have been among many writings that would have been turned to for wisdom, and they would not have been bound in one large book anyway. 

Determining the books that are now part of the Bible took centuries, and the canon that we now know as the Bible was not officially decided on until the mid 1500s at the Council of Trent. So for about 3/4 of the time that Christians have read this passage, we did not have one solid determination of what ‘Scripture’ exactly it was talking about. I think that is incredibly important to understand where our debates, which seem so important now, fit in the larger story of the followers of Jesus. But that does not mean that this passage doesn’t still have plenty to say to us today. This passage helps us understand how God works in our world – how God was working back then and how God is working now. 

As most artists will tell you, inspiration never means that they are supernaturally controlled, but rather that inspiration comes from the discipline of showing up – from painting day after day, from callouses built up on musical instruments, from sitting at a keyboard and writing when they have no words. 

And I have to believe the same is true of the Biblical authors. They did not know they were writing what would become part of the Bible; they were simply trying to record how God was working in and around them and share what they learned on that journey so that others could follow God as well. 

And to me, that is why I find hope in Scripture.Is it all factually, historically correct in our modern understanding? No, but it was never meant to be. However, it is true. It tells the truth about who God is and who we are as humans because it tells the stories of the people of God through the ages, what they learned about how they were made and how God spoke to them then. In her book, Inspired, which I would encourage you to read to learn more about all of this, Rachel Held Evans quotes G.K. Chesterton saying,“Fairy tales are more than true—not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”I think this is true of Scriptures as well—they teach us the truth of the deepest realities in our world as others who came before us learned them.

But also, here is what I could never say growing up: sometimes they got it wrong. And that doesn’t mean that God wasn’t working among them. That gives me so much more hope because it lets me believe that God might possibly be working among me, among us. God worked among broken people, drawing them forward, helping them to gradually understand more and more of who God was and who they were called to be in this world, and we get to continue that journey. 

God is among us, still breathing into us, still inspiring us. God didn’t stop speaking through people the moment the last letter of this book was written. God has continued speaking and is speaking through us now. God is still breathing into us as we read this Scripture, as we dig into it to continue to walk this road with him – and it is an essential part of understanding who God is and who we are as the people of God, one of the greatest sources of knowledge that we have for growing in this relationship.

But it is a relationship, a relationship with a living being that we are invited into. And I believe this is what is most important to remember when we talk about the Word of God – our relationship, any certainty we have is based not on Scripture itself, but on the God who is revealed in it. 

And that is a huge difference. Because this God is longing to know us, longing to draw us further and further into the life for which we were created. And our job, like artists show us, is to continue to show up. We are to show up by wrestling with this Scripture, by continuing to tangle with it when it doesn’t make sense, when we don’t like what it seems to be saying, when we can’t understand what on earth God might be trying to teach us. 

And we are to show up like those who came before us to continue to express what God is doing in our lives. We must speak and write and make music and paint and draw and do whatever creative work that our bodies are capable of so that those around us and those who come after us can also know this God who is still breathing through us.

Like our Gospel passage tells us, this journey of faith is a long haul in which we must not lose heart, in which we can never give up. We must be persistent – in prayer, in Scripture, in gathering together, and in sharing this good news which we have come to know – that God has been among us always and is still among us still.

May you know God through the inspired words of those who have gone before us; may God inspire you as you learn and grow. 

May God give you the endurance and encouragement you need to walk this path of faith. 

May God give you the strength to show up, when it’s good, when it’s hard, on beautiful days and on terrible ones, in the best years and in the worst years, in the moments when God seems viscerally present and when absence is all you know. 

May you know that wherever you are, whoever you are, whatever you go through on this journey, that God is with you, that God is among is, and that God created you to join the work of healing our world.