"God works to influence, persuade, and teach people to move away from their misunderstanding to a better concept of who God is… but that can take time." -Gabriel Gordon
This week, I sit down with author, Gabriel Gordon. Gabriel's new book, God Speaks, tackles the topic of Biblical inspiration or in laymen's terms, how can the Bible be the word of God if humans wrote it.
Gordon's work Thomas Jay Oord's theology of Essential Kenosis and revealing how it provides a better theological basis for developing a doctrine of Biblical Inspiration. Tom Oord was on the show months back - check it out here. In God Speaks, Gordon is trying to Bible away from people, correcting many assumptions, and then wants to give the Bible back to read and experienced. Too often, do Christians assume the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God, but they tend to ignore the multitude of human fingerprints all over it. There's this fear that putting humanity back in the Bible will somehow diminish it, but it's quite the opposite. When we cease to hold up the Bible as an idol and see it for what it is, then we can embrace it in a new, healthy, and God-honoring way.
In God Speaks, Gordon presses the idea that if God cannot control free creatures, then how did the biblical authors interact with God's revelation to produce the biblical text?Join us today for a lively, theological, and eye-opening look into why we should hold and read scripture in a new way. Though it may seem scary, it's quite freeing to see the difference between God and scripture. There is God. There is scripture. They are not the same and that leads us to embrace the humanity of the Bible as we seek to faithfully wrestle and live out scripture.
In the Bible, people experienced God through revelation or inspiration and then wrote it down with human hands, understandings, and biases... and that's okay! It doesn't diminish God. In the end, how we choose to hold and interact with scripture says much more about us and our views of God than it does about God or the Bible. It's far time we engage with scripture in human terms as it was meant to be.
Buy Gabriel's book, God Speaks: A Participatory Theology of Biblical Inspiration on Amazon
Gabriel Gordon is also one of the co-founders of The Misfits Theology Club and podcast.
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