“The Problem of the Priest” in Reading the Bible and Theology

“The Problem of the Priest” in Reading the Bible and Theology

May 2022

By AFBR

Recently, I have been watching several agnostic/atheist Youtube channels and have found a number of strong, thoughtful, and fair hosts who look at the bible, Christianity, religious traditions, and Judeo-Christian (and sometimes Muslim) theology with keen eyes and patient, if sometimes ironic, understanding. One that stands out for me is the Genetically Modified Skeptic (GMS), with its host, Drew McCoy.

Because I grew up going to Christian schools from kindergarten through seminary, it is seldom that at critique of Christianity is posed that I have not heard of or thought about. Many times, I am reminded of a criticism and/or see it in a new way, but almost never surprised. Yet in a recent viewing of one of GMS’s videos, I came across a (very obvious, it would seem) question I had not seriously thought of before, and this critique ties in with another idea I’ve been talking about for years. It was refreshing and challenging to link the two.

The question GMS proposed was simply this: If you accept the bible as God’s word, why would a perfect God choose to communicate via so flawed and ambiguous a medium – i.e., a literary text? The scripture is not perfect and certainly a product of the human imagination, and, to the atheist, this question may be academic at best. But from the point of view of those who believe the bible is the revealed Word of God, this question would seem pressing. A work of literature – but here I should write genres or types, for the bible is made up of poems, teachings, sayings, narratives, histories, legends, myths, speeches, and others – is always open to interpretation from multiple points of view. Even if one grants that the Holy Spirit will guide the true believer to the truths of scripture, many sincere people of faith who claim the same Holy Spirit working in them often come to different and contradictory conclusions about what the bible means.

Which brings me to another, related idea I’ve had for years. This concept I call the Problem of the Priest.

Even if there was a perfect book of Truth, with a capital ‘T’ – an ultimate book of God’s word, the Holy Bible – and even if there was a perfect Writer of that Book, i.e., God – we’d still have the problem of human imperfection to deal with. Now, I don’t accept the premise here, that there is a perfect Truth, but let’s do for the sake of argument.

Our mental and emotional and reasonable faculties, according the most Christian theology, are fallen, imperfect, in need of redemption. So, how do we bridge the gap between the Perfect Truth and the flawed receiver of that Truth? As stated above, the Holy Spirit (one of the ‘priests’ we could rely on here) is of little use if believers can’t determine – aside from a leap of faith – that the same HS is guiding them in their stance on, say, abortion, as is guiding those who take an opposite view. That leap of faith is all they’ve got. But aside from a strong emotional feeling that hardly counts as proof, it’s difficult to parse how they’d know they were rightly interpreting God’s Truth.

Who are the other priests – those who promise to guide us in knowing God’s Word and Truth? Well, anyone who mediates between the bible and the believer. A Catholic priest, a parish pastor, a mentor, a TV evangelist, a mother, a father, an older brother, another textual commentary written by imperfect souls; all of these count. But as we granted that our faculties of understanding are fallen, there is no perfect medium to transmit the Perfection of the Holy God.

Which gets us back to the Genetically Modified Skeptic’s insight on the slipperiness of a literary text and the suspicion of why an all-powerful God would transmit His so important messages in so sloppy a manner. Anyone who’s been in a literary studies or film or drama class knows that multiple and often contrasting interpretations abide whenever a text is studied. And these myriad and sometimes conflicting understandings bring a joy and challenge to our knowledge of these works. If we don’t assume any of these texts are perfect revelations of some hidden Truth, we have fun with them. If we seek only one, unimpeachable message from them, we are left struggling to justify our conclusions on thin ice.