Bruce’s Thoughts

About a month ago, I started attending a Bible study group that meets on Wednesday afternoons in an unused conference room in Lincoln Laboratory. I’m not sure what I was expecting exactly, but I was certainly looking forward to some discussion of that insightful, confounding, and complex book that is the Christian Bible.

I mean no disrespect to other participants in the group when I say that it doesn’t live up to my hopes in even the smallest degree. They’re all smart, energetic people who clearly care deeply about the Bible as he revealed word of God. I’m the last person in the world to throw rocks at them or their beliefs.

But my approach to the Bible is conditioned by my Physicist’s brain: any and every part is open to inspection, examimation, comparison, and interpretation. I don’t expect that I’ll always agree with others, but I do expect to be able to talk with them on a deep level about what we’re reading. Unfortunately, the rest of the folks in the group don’t seem to share my approach: they seem to take the passage on face value and to ask fairly simple questions about its meaning. Here’s an example from my last week: Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, verse 12 [abbreviated]:

^“1Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. ²Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. ³Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

⁴In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. ⁵And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons:
“My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline,
and do not lose heart when he rebukes you,
⁶because the Lord disciplines those he loves,
and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son.”

⁷Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? ⁸If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. ⁹Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! ¹⁰Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. ¹¹No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it…”

I arrived at the meeting burning with some important questions. Chief among them was: “From time to time, I had to ‘discipline’ my son when he was growing up, but the discipline was always related to and proportional to the transgression. What, then, can we say to the cancer patient dying by inches: ‘Be glad, because God sent this agony and death to discipline you.’? How can we answer her question, ‘What have I ever done to deserve this, and how is death a discipline?’”

Unfortunately, the questions to be considered were published along with the verse to study, and were on the level of, “Who were the ‘witnesses’ Paul talks about in verse 1?” When I tried (respectfully) to introduce my own question which (I think) challenges Paul on a deeper level, it wasn’t received very kindly. As I remember, the answer was approximately, “Not all suffering is discipline - some is punishment, some is testing, and some we’re not meant to understand - now let’s move on.”

The most charitable interpretation I can make of this event is that the discussion leader had just thirty minutes to get through his list of questions, and we could have spent several hours on mine. If so, that’s fine - but I would rather have been put off honestly.

But if people didn’t want to discuss my topic because it didn’t fit their own conceptions, then I just don’t get this attitude - it seems to me that challenging questions are the most valuable of all, because taking them seriously and answering them deepens faith in ways that coping with shallow questions never can.

And I remain convinced that every verse of the Bible, or the Holy Q’ran, or the Baghavad Gita, or the sayings of the Buddha, or the revelations of the angel Moroni, or the words of L. Ron Hubbard (especially the last) should be open to challenge, comparison, and debate. If our holy texts can’t stand up to honest challenge, how can we put our faith in them?