First Church is a mid-sized progressive United Methodist Church located in the bustling downtown of Birmingham, AL. Led by pastors Kevin Thomas, Jonathan Goss, Katie Gilbert, and Rea Green, their website’s stated missional priorities include:
Practicing Hospitality, Embodying Diversity, Doing Justice, Encouraging Authenticity, Creating an Inclusive Community, Embracing Tough Questions.
Evidently, sound and faithful preaching are not among them.
During a recent sermon, associate pastor Katie Gilbert excoriated the authority and inerrancy of the bible, insisting, “We love you, Bible, just not like that’ while detailing how it is full of errors, mistakes, falsehoods, and contradictions. She says in part:
Over the years, we have worked to make sure that we aren’t worshiping the Bible or putting the Bible on a pedestal over and above the teachings and example of Jesus.
…The Bible is full of contradictions, and that’s to be expected from a text that was written by a variety of different authors, living at different historical periods of time, writing for different reasons, and in different languages and genres of text.
There’s simply no way to reconcile all of these differences to find one coherent literal and linear progression throughout our text. Even beyond those contradictions within the text, we have to consider those historical inaccuracies as well.
…I like to think of [stories in the bible] as the stories that I grew up on, Aesop’s fables. These tales weren’t factual accounts of our world, but they were a part of an ancient oral tradition, some dating all the way back to the Egyptians, and they were passed down over time, eventually written down by the Greeks and the Romans.And Aesop’s fables were intended to teach a truth or land a moral of the story. You might recall stories like Tortoise and the Hare… or The Boy Who Cries Wolf,…these stories were written to share not facts, but truth, and something similar is at play when we consider the biblical authors.
