The Bible As Victim

One of the first victims in this culture war is the Bible and it is abused by both sides. The left sees the Bible as a troublesome obstacle that keeps normally sane, well-meaning people mired in bronze age bigotry. The right sees it as cabinet of divine bromides the damned blindly and stupidly refuse to avail themselves of.

In my opinion the written word of God like the incarnate one will suffer every manner of human religious and irreligious abuse only to persist in mystifying, annoying, plaguing, enlightening and enduring our mistreatment of it. The Bible was born out of culture wars greater than this one.

Poor Stewards of the Word

I find greater fault among Christians in maligning the Bible than I find among the unbelieving world. Christians are supposed to steward this word but in the heat of trying to score easy points and condemn the ungodly we throw the Bible at others in ways we don’t apply it to ourselves. This hypocrisy is seldom lost on informed outsiders but our zeal consumes us and as is the case with many zealots we make ourselves stupid.

The Christian church has from the beginning understood that this written revelation of God demands much of those who wish to benefit from it. Christians are to study it, meditate upon it, memorize it, live within it and embrace it as the lexicon of our communal vocabulary. This was modelled for us by Jesus, John, Peter and Paul and rehearsed by church fathers and theologians like Augustine and Calvin. It is our canon. We believe that it is, Old and New Testament the inspired word of God for teaching, correction, edification and communal norms. As the church we go to Scripture first and it becomes the primary vehicle by which we objectively process the Spirit’s work in our midst today.

Simplistic Proof-texting is a Sword You Will Live and Die By

The Bible and the history of the church demands that we do better than proof-texting. The Christian habit of publicly applying individual verses to complex issues has taught cynics, skeptics and opponents to do the same. When people say foolish things like “the Bible teaches men to treat wives like property” and “the Bible promotes bigotry, hate, slavery and polygamy, let me show you the verses” they have learned this from us. By proof-texting we can easily “prove” that Jesus wanted people to hate one another, to hate this world, and to cut off hands and gouge out eyes and that it is OK to dismiss the plea of foreign women based on ethnicity and gender. These are “the clear teachings of scripture”. You who know your Bible will know what I’m talking about, yet Christians will immediately object that such an approach gets Jesus wrong and violates the analogy of faith. This is not the only way we can violate Scripture but in the battlegrounds of Twitter, Facebook, and on the floor of church assemblies it is the most common. We must do better.

The Courage to Engage Scripture

I’m writing this as a longer conversation to engage the question of same-sex marriage and the church. This is obviously a major debate of our time and more recently occasioned by a sister church, City Church of San Francisco changing a policy. In my first word on the matter I promised to follow up with more specifics.

I noted that it is usually the culture warriors who jump in first. Their approach on both sides is generally one of bullying through mockery, scorn and intimidation. Culture warriors usually seek to win the day with rhetorical tools more at home in the realm of politics than the realm of pastoral care. We wish to secure our base, mobilize our allies with the most incendiary rhetoric that promotes feeling before thinking and reacting rather than responding on love and care.

My appeal was that we talk together. This means that we speak our minds, interpret the Scriptures with care together as we love one another. This will mean that we take positions, make assertions, present arguments. It also means that we listen to each other, weigh the opinions of others, and create a safe space to explore ideas that may feel scary or offensive. When a debate is already polarized both sides must embrace this posture.

As I’ll note later one of the things that deeply impacts all of our conversations is the assumption of “progress”. This is a deep cultural value that I believe is open to examination, criticism and skepticism. If some on the left wish religious people to consider openness and even skepticism with respect to their embrace of ancient, sacred writings, they should in good faith also be willing to consider some of their own values, like the assumption of cultural progress through time to similarly be subject to debate and skepticism.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself, but it is this kind of spirit and space we need to create if we are going to speak and listen.

Blog posts should be short (something I’m not always good at) and there are other demands on my time so I’ll close this one here. I look forward to hearing from my friends.