"But what about the moderates?"

[xpastor]

If the Bible is "inspired" or "metaphoric", then we must have some means of discerning which parts are divine and which parts are human in origin.

I'm really not sure that's the case at all.

Why do we need to know, for example, whether someone called Moses actually lead the Jewish nation out of Egyptian slavery? It doesn't affect at all my actions, or my decision to follow Jesus. It makes a crucial part of the meta-narrative, but that works whether or not it is wholly, partly, or not at all true. The historicity is irrelevant. ...

Because of my personal history I find the question of biblical authority quite interesting. IMO it inevitably leads to an irreconcileable dilemma.

When I became a Christian as a young undergraduate, I was originally quite liberal, but I moved in a conservative direction and here is why.

Back then in the 1960s Situation Ethics was a much debated topic. In particular I remember one example a writer gave. Some noble crusading liberal politician is worn down by his struggle, but his batteries are recharged to fight the good fight by shagging his assistant. So obviously cheating on his wife was Ethically Right. I thought then—and still do—that this little story was incredibly bathetic.

It started me thinking along the lines that there must be a Rule of Faith and Life, and where would it be found if not in the Bible? I have since come to think of this as the conservative critique of liberal Christianity, and I still think that it holds water as a piece of formal logic.

Of course I was woefully ignorant of the unsavoury parts of the Bible. I stuck to the warm and fuzzy texts cited by the apologists along with the simple straightforward morality. As I have confessed many times, for years when I read the Bible, especially the Old Testament, I read it with my mind on cruise control, speed reading the words but not digesting the content (except for the warm and fuzzy parts). The truth is that all the ritual, dietary laws and wars in the OT are desperately boring, so it's hard to pay attention to the meaning.

Eventually I became a minister around age 40. Terrible mistake, but it didn't last very long. It slowed down my Bible reading. I often tried to stumble through a text in the original Greek or Hebrew.

I began to see how laughably primitive the ritual was. The priest is to smear the blood of the sacrifice on his right ear lobe, his right thumb and his right big toe. And there are the mistaken scientific assumptions: Joshua commands the sun to stand still although it is the earth that moves. Far more chilling, it became obvious that the God of the Old Testament was a genocidal maniac. In dozens of passages God exhorts the Israelites to slay all of their enemies, men and women, children and infants.

And that is the liberal critique of conservative Christianity, which is certainly valid. To summarize, the religious views of the Bible are too primitive and barbaric, the world-picture is too contradictory of modern science, and above all else the morality is so evil, that it cannot in any way be considered a source for a Rule of Faith and Life.

A word about historiciyy. It is the view of modern critical scholars that few, if any, of the genocides narrated in the Bible actually happened. Rather they were patriotic lies concocted by the authors of the OT writing centuries after the supposed events. Of course that doesn't let Yahweh off the hook. He is represented as ordering genocides.

I think if Christians honestly examine the facts they will find that their moral intuitions trace back not to their religion and the Bible but rather to the Enlightenment of the 18th century, which did so much to civilize the Christian God and his followers.