Another post that I came across at random, this time from Ever Looking Upwards, who asks, “Are you a fan of the ‘patchwork’ Gospel??” She asserts:
If you don’t consider scripture to be the inerrant Word of God (and thus above the words of anyone on this earth including the Pope!), and you feel that it’s been changed over the years by the multiple translations and rewritings etc, so you figure you can’t accept it as it’s provided, but would still call yourself a Christian, then you are also a fan of the “patchwork” Gospel, whether you realise it or not.
And this is a problem why, exactly?
First things first. There are mistakes in the multitude of transcriptions and translations of scripture; this isn’t news. Bart Ehrman, in the excellent Misquoting Jesus, explains the whys and wherefores of scriptural error, and what that means to Christians; not least of all, it means that we cannot take the Bible as the literal, inerrant word of God. Even assuming that there was, at some point, an “original” from which the multitude of copies were made, that original is long since gone. All we have are copies of error-ridden copies of… well, you get the picture. This isn’t to say that God makes mistakes (although, speaking for myself, I’d be more comfortable with a god that did, from time to time), but rather that the human beings who’ve tried to put that inspiration into words have fallen short every now and again.
Second, who decides who’s a Christian, and by what criteria? It seems to me that less time needs to be spent on policing Christianity (or Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or whatever) than with actually practicing it. That definition, and its accompanying practice, has given us a tremendous variety of Christianities, from Cathar to Coptic to Pentecostal and all points in between, some of whose adherents would barely recognize each other as Christians. The fact that there are so many ways in which to approach God can make for a lively dialogue and a stronger practice; to close ourselves off to that possibility is to isolate ourselves and our souls.
There’s a further problem. The traditional biblical injunction against idolatry (that whole “graven images” thing) is traditionally taken to mean that one ought not to take a signifier for the thing itself; while you might hang a crucifix over your bed, display a velvet Jesus in your foyer, or have a St. Christopher medal on your dashboard, these things are merely a call to mindfulness, and a reminder to walk the walk. They’re not meant as a substitute for practice. We shouldn’t approach scripture–whether yours is the Bible, the Qu’ran, or the collected works of Mark Twain–as an end in and of itself. We should not, in short, make idols of our ideas; if you’re going to be on guard against idolatry, that’s as good a place to start as any. Anyone can rail against a handful of saints and statuary, or whoever’s sitting in Rome at any given time, but the bigger challenge by far, if you’re going to go about smashing idols, is to be willing to let go of the ideas you hold most dear.