Summary: "All scripture is inspired by God." My grandfather clearly believed this. One look at his Bible, which as the first grandson--and a preacher to boot--I have inherited, tells how he felt about it: tattered, worn, underlined, marginalia, prayer requests jammed between the pages. My first day of seminary, Fr. Roland Murphy unluckily for me, picked me out of sixty students and asked, "Is the Bible inspired?" I squeaked a nearly inaudible, "Yes?" "Why?" he roared firmly. Clueless, I resorted to humor, "Well, I find that very often the Bible agrees with what I think." A woman next to me, not grasping my cleverness, shot back with, "No! I think the Bible is inspired at precisely those points where it disagrees with what I think." The class oohed and ahhed--and then my roommate bailed me out by saying: "Yeah? Like those passages that say women shouldn't speak in church?" "All scripture is inspired by God." We do not think of the Bible the way Muslims think of the Qur'an--as dictated directly by God. The Bible has that awful, lovely human element. God inspired the thing, guided those who were writing--but they were human, they did their best. Inevitably they made booboos. Historical mistakes are interesting, aren't they? People say, "Oh, that invalidates the Bible." But is this really the case? Years ago I threw a birthday party for my dad's 70th birthday and people came. Then over the dinner my dad said, "Why did you go to all this trouble this year?" I said, "Well, dad, you're 70." He said, "I'm 69." Now you could say, "Oh, that invalidates your relationship; you had the date wrong." But I think it's endearing that there was a mistake. I like it that the Bible is kind of messy because that means there is room for me. The families that are described in the Bible are a mess, kookily dysfunctional. I like that. There's room for me in there; there's room for all of us in there.
