In public speaking, Dr. Edmerson had us turn in our Bibles to 2 Peter 1:20, and he told us, "So now you see, we have to know the scriptures and know what they really say." I wanted to quote some Brian McLaren, but didn't, because 99% of the class would consider me a blind heretic. C.C.U. is steeped in modernity (and the following is an eclectic of quotes from the AMAZING book, A New Kind of Christian):

No model—no matter how resplendent with biblical quotations—can claim to be the ultimate Christian worldview, because very model is at the heart limited by the limitations of the contemporary human mind, not to mention the current taste of culture. Every denomination has its own grid of interpretation through which it bases its beliefs. Every denomination, too, has members who claim no one is as faithful to God as they. Everyone claims it and sees the falsehood in the other beliefs. Some people, when saying they are arguing for the Bible’s complete authority, are actually arguing about the authority of their own interpretive grid of the Bible. Those who are doing this usually can’t see it, and those who oppose them are often labeled fools or troublemakers.

Some denominations will claim that they have the infallible text of God as their backbone, so therefore they say their interpretation is infallible. The text of God is infallible, but our interpretations are not. So the authoritative text is never what he or she says about the Bible or even what I understand the Bible to say but rather what God means the Bible to say. The real authority does not reside in the text itself, or in the ink on paper, which is always open to misinterpretation—sometimes, history tells us, horrific and dangerous misinterpretation. Instead, the real authority lies in God, who is there behind the text or beyond it or above it. In other words, the authority is not in what we say about the text but what God says the text says. After all, the way we view and read and interpret the Bible is through the lens we get from our culture.

So someone may say, “Well, my interpretation is God’s interpretation." But our interpretations reveal to us less about God or the Bible than they do about ourselves. They reveal what we want to defend, what we want to attack, what we want to ignore, what we’re unwilling to question. There have been many interpretations in the past that have been toted as authoritative, such as conservatives 150 years ago using scripture to defend slavery. Today, we see these people as being dead wrong. Isn’t it possible that in 150 years we’ll be seen as being ‘dead wrong’ in many things we say? Is this to say that Christians 150 years ago were false Christians, or we’re false Christians, or that Christians 150 years from now will be false? No, not at all. From all these viewpoints and interpretations the heart of the matter is still the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

One thing that both modern liberals and conservatives have in common is that they read the Bible in very modern ways. Modern conservatives treat the Bible as if it were a modern book. They’re used to reading modern history texts and modern encyclopedias and modern science articles and modern legal codes, and so they assume the Bible will yield its resources if they approach it like one of these texts. But none of these categories existed when the Bible was written. Sure, there is history, but not with all of the modern trimmings like a concern for factual accuracy, corroborating evidence, or absolute objectivity.