By Rev. Henry Sun
Special to the Herald

I wonder how many of you know who Bart Ehrman is.  He and I share three things in common. First, we’re both men. Second, we both read Greek. And third, we both attended Wheaton College and eventually pursued a doctorate in Biblical studies, me in Old Testament and he in New Testament.
Professor Ehrman, James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is the reason why I decided to write this column.
When Ehrman was in graduate school, he wrote a paper on the problem of Mark 2:26 which says – wrongly – that David entered the temple while Abiathar was high priest.  He did some tortuous grammatical study trying to show that what the text plainly said in error was not what it was saying at all.  And when he got his paper back, his teacher had only one comment:  “Couldn’t Mark have just been wrong?”
That comment changed the path of Professor Ehrman’s life, so much so that he later abandoned the Christian faith of his youth, because – like me – he was educated in a tradition that ties the truthfulness of the Christian faith to an absolute standard of Scriptural perfection.  Consequently, the slightest error, be it a jot or a tittle, is enough to invalidate the Christian gospel, and once invalidated, faith eventually gives way to nothing.
If only there were some third way between the Scylla of fundamentalism and the Charybdis of unbelief!
That’s the reason I’m writing this column.
On the one hand, a naive fundamentalism that assumes the perfect truthfulness of every word of Scripture, whether that word is geographical, historical, or scientific, is no longer a viable option for those seek to honor God with all our mind.  Whether the issue is a mistaken historical memory (e.g., Mark 2:26 or 1 Corinthians 10:8), a mistaken quotation from the Old Testament (Mark 1:2-3), or the inability to harmonize biblical testimony with archaeological data (e.g., Jericho and Ai), it has become increasingly difficult – impossible, in my view – to square the notion of Scripture’s perfect truthfulness with actual empirical data.
On the other hand, if accepting the reality of Scripture’s imperfections leads to the conclusion that Scripture is just another ancient book that makes for interesting reading but not for transforming lives, then why bother with faith at all?  Who needs the wisdom of the ancients when we moderns already have a corner on the truth?
A recent episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” titled “Personal Jesus” puts it this way:  April (a doctor) tells David (her patient) that the Bible is full of stories and metaphors and things not meant to be taken literally, but meant to be followed “within reason.”  “People don’t go chopping babies in half!,” she exclaims in exasperation.  But David responds with a poignant question:  “If that’s true, and the word of God is just stories, what’s the point of anything?”
What indeed.  My whole adult life has focussed on trying to find an answer to David’s question, to find some middle ground between the two extremes of fundamentalism or faithlessness, two extremes which have grown more distant, more entrenched, and more ideologically polarized in my lifetime. Why?  Because my soul aches for meaning, for clarity, and for purpose, to be something other and something more than a speck of cosmic dust, a blip in the eternity of time.
And so this column is my attempt to share what I have learned and how I have grown to navigate these two extremes:  How can we honor both the transformative message of Scripture along with its imperfections?  Be traditional without becoming Pharisaical?  Be relevant to a modern world without being bound to an ancient worldview?
I hope that some of you will find these columns interesting and thought-provoking.  I will read all your comments and questions and will try to answer as many of them as I can, but for a more extended and more personal conversation, please email me at henrysun.fpc@gmail.com.

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