God's Pen

One of the major criticisms of the Bible today is that it was written by men...and not by the men that we think wrote it. There is a large collection of so-called scholars who will tell you that Isaiah was written by three different authors, that Paul didn't write all the letters that we attribute to him, and on and on and on to make you rethink how you read your Bible. To these scholars, these questions of authorship are a problem.

A big problem. 

They've even developed an entire field around it, which they call a science, but it's not really a science. The idea of "historical-textual criticism" is actually just academia's attempt to make the reference point for the Bible men and not God. In other words, they start with the premise that the Bible is a book written by men and therefore, it should be interpreted by culture and by men and that we should always be looking through our human lens at it to discover that, in fact, men have created God in their own image and not the other way around. 

Honestly, it's boring and exhausting and far from the attempt they claim it is to be "faithful" to the text. 

Faithfulness to the text is taking God at His Word. And for the truly faithful - for those who believe the God of the Bible - it's actually not that big of a stretch and not that big of a problem to understand that yes, God did in fact use men to write the Bible. 

The prophet Isaiah tells us plainly: God uses an ordinary pen. (8:1)

God has always used an ordinary pen. God has always told His story through humans. And how could He do any differently? 

God's story is a story of love. And love requires an object of affection. For God, that object of affection is us. His relational nature requires relating to us, through us, with us. From the very beginning, we are the thing that made God's "good" creation "very good." Made in His image, there's something about us that reveals something about Him. 

Using us, then, to write His story helps us connect to who He is. It helps us to see more of the God who created us, when we see His image reflected through the pages of the sacred text in our own broken, messed-up, complicated, finite ways. We understand God better when we understand Him through our language, but He sneaks just enough of His language in that He changes our vocabulary and teaches us a new way to talk. 

Tell me: how am I supposed to know that God loves me, that God's nature is love, if David, the murderer, Thomas, the doubter, Peter, the audacious, Jeremiah, the tortured, Jonah, the bitter, and so many others do not tell me how God loved them? How am I supposed to understand God's story in me if they have not shared, in their own experience, God's story in them? 

It doesn't bother me if Isaiah was written by the prophet or by three other guys pretending to be him or by some mixture of both. I don't care if Paul actually wrote all the letters that we think he did. I don't care if "in the beginning" were the first words written or if they came thousands of years later after the exile. Those things only matter to so-called "scholars" who think they know more than thousands of generations of faith have passed down to us. 

For the faithful, we know that God has always used an ordinary pen...and that finding that pen isn't the true quest of our faith. The true quest of our faith is finding the God who writes with it, the God who writes with us, the God who has something to say through our lives because He's the God who has always revealed Himself with, through, and to human beings made in His image.