I was reading some of Ben Witherington’s response to Ehrman’s latest book. There’s a huge amount of complaint against the Bible that it is somehow offensive and wrong that Christians imagine this book to be authoritative and seek to use it to serve as a guide. There’s always a lot of energy spent on proving that there can be no such thing as God speaking to us through a book. It seems to me that critics are spending their energy poorly. They don’t really have a practical problem with a book being authoritative and special, they really just don’t like a lot of what’s in it.

Everyone has their own little list of books that they imagine to be “inspired” in one way or another. They might object that they don’t imagine these books are “inspired” in the same way a Christian regards that word, but I’m not so sure. Every Christian I’ve ever known with the highest regard for Scriptural inspiration does implicit editing and prioritizing regarding what they find most gripping in the Bible and what they pursue with highest vigor. They might not consciously say “oh, I don’t like that”, that would cause too much doctrinal dissonance. They just turn to a portion they like better and leave the bits they aren’t as attached to.

Secularists that scoff at Christian devotion to this ancient library use their own texts in ways very similar to Christian texts. They appeal to authors and works and imagine that reality is expressed and exposed vividly in these works more so than in others. They have reasons of their own for imagining that the words that appeal to them are special and marvelous.

One difference seems to be that the secular approach stumbles and staggers as a narrative. What Christians do when they devote themselves to the study of this library is enter into a dialogue with many others who have devoted themselves to the same process. There are definitely huge variations of how they interpret, understand and apply what they read, but there is a line that is traveling through time. This of course isn’t unique to Christianity, but it I think exposes a certain poverty of narrative for secularists. We are all subject to the prison of the here and the now but these religious disciplines afford temporary furloughs to commune with a wider variety of times, places and individuals. Secularists are of course free to make their own forays and to develop their own avocations surrounding persons and areas of interest, but it doesn’t have the same sort of constancy or grip on their lives nor is it done withing a context of a broad contemporary community.

It also seems to me that our tradition’s assertion of organic inspiration also stands up well to critique. Notions of dictation involved with the Koran or the book of Mormon always strike me as at odds with general revelation. The Christian God is a pretty stealthy character. Apart from some brief flair-ups in the desert journey from Egypt to Canaan, and some vivid apocalyptic visions God pretty continually uses the cosmic furniture of matter to talk, relate, reveal and move. This gets epitomized in the incarnation, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone. Imagining the library creating a three thousand year narrative community came to be through a fully historical, wandering process seems part of the same whole. It didn’t fall from the sky. Champions of accounting for nature through biological processes should feel quite at home with this idea. Critiquing the contents of the library by pointing out the very human processes of its