Ambiguity in the Bible

1 Jun 2025 • From our Priest-in-Charge

‘It was the third of June, another sleepy dusty Delta day…’

‘Ode to Billie Joe’ by Bobbie Gentry is one of the few country songs I can sing from beginning to end in the shower.  I love a song that tells a story, and this one does so hauntingly: a desperately sad story which leaves more questions unanswered than truths revealed. As a family sits around the dinner table chatting and gossiping, our narrator, the daughter in the family, slides unnoticed into a state of shock and grief at the nonchalantly delivered news that Billie Joe has died. For 58 years, people have mused and debated the lyrics’ various allusions and dangling threads. Was it left deliberately ambiguous?  I imagine so.

For a lot longer than that, people have mused and debated the meaning of almost every part of the Bible.  Some people have staked their reputations, careers, even their lives, on the premise that their interpretation of a section, a sentence or a word is the right one.  Such arguments have been used by many different groups to determine whether somebody is ‘in’ or ‘out’, saved or damned, loved or despised by God.  So perhaps we should ask the same question: was the Bible left deliberately ambiguous?

The Christian Bible has been through many stages to get to the thing you read today.  Initially passed on by the tradition of storytelling.  It was then written down across centuries by many authors, then translated and compiled a few hundred years later by a bunch of chaps who argued passionately about what was deserving of inclusion.  Eventually translated into almost every language in the world, in English alone there have been over 900 differing translations.  Preachers, authors and theologians impart their interpretations.  And then you read a passage and what it says to you might differ entirely from what it says to your neighbour.  At every single stage, there has been nothing like universal agreement of what constitutes Biblical Truth.

I used to think I had to have all the answers, a lens through which everything I experienced could be viewed and made sense of, but nowadays I seek to live well within the ambiguity, reading with an open prayerful heart.  Jesus speaks love: I despair when the Bible is used to diminish or exclude.  If it isn’t inspiring dynamic love, its meaning and credibility is lost.  Ambiguous? Definitely.  Full of rich wisdom and truth? Yup.  Worth pondering? Absolutely!

Rev Angie x