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Time.com

The Myth of Christian Moral Guidance

The title of that Time piece was of course click-bate for me. The author goes on to make a point that should be obvious to most of us.

Before the election, for instance, Pope Francis repeatedly denounced the building of walls as un-Christian. “Dear brothers and sisters—all walls fall,” he cautioned in November , echoing his blunt statement about wall-building from February 2016: “This is not the gospel.” Yet on the morning of Trump’s inauguration, in stark contrast to the pope, Pastor Robert Jeffress praised the building of walls as sanctioned by the Bible. “[The] first step of rebuilding the nation was the building of a great wall,” Jeffress said , referring to the prophet Nehemiah’s work building a wall around Jerusalem. “You see, God is not against building walls!”

Violence and walls aren’t the only issues that divide the faithful. Christian leaders and laity have been split by every fundamental ethical question: abortion, torture, divorce, the rights of both slaves and the LGBTQ community, women’s suffrage. And of course, the same is true of every religion: Just as there are Christianities, not Christianity, so too there are Buddhisms, Judaisms, Hinduisms and Islams, and the inexorable march of history will produce countless others.

This of course breeds skepticism about the power of religion to shape behavior. If religious people can’t agree on what is good then what good is religion?

A lot of attention then gets turned to a holy book, in the case of Christianity the Bible. The hope is that reading the book a certain way will dispel the conflict and usually bring your religious opponent to heal according to your reading of it. This proves similarly frustrating.

Part of our difficulty is that we tend to look upon the religious/ethical landscape of the USA through the lens of the secular media. Because not all reporters have much experience with religion and because the media has an economic incentive to be inflammatory they usually create straw-men alignments

This arrangement like all stereotypes has a certain amount of validity but if you look too closely you’ll immediately see problems. One of the most glaring is that it ignores what is by far the nation’s largest Christian denomination, the Roman Catholic church which is pro-life, pro-refugee, against the Trump wall and has a long and complex tradition of Bible reading and interpretation.

How good can the stereotype be if it doesn’t even hold for the largest denomination in the country?

All of this in some ways makes the point for the article I began with. What is the point of referring to the Bible when the Bible doesn’t seem to produce the kind of agreement we assume it should.

Christian Smith, a sociologist who teaches at Notre Dame makes this point in his book The Bible Made Impossible.

My line of reasoning in this book will run as follows. First, I will argue that most biblicist claims are rendered moot by a more fundamental problem (which few biblicists ever acknowledge) that undermines all the supposed achievements of biblicism: the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism. Even among presumably well-intentioned readers—including many evangelical biblicists—the Bible, after their very best efforts to understand it, says and teaches very different things about most significant topics. My suggestion is that it becomes beside the point to assert a text to be solely authoritative or inerrant, for instance, when, lo and behold, it gives rise to a host of many divergent teachings on important matters. Authority implies and requires definitive instruction, direction, or guidance. As the nineteenth-century Princeton Seminary theologian Charles Hodge stated, “If the Scriptures be a plain book, and the Spirit performs the functions of a teacher to all the children of God, it follows inevitably that they must agree in all essential matters in their interpretation of the Bible.”[6] But definitive instruction, direction, or guidance is precisely what pervasive interpretive pluralism precludes.

Smith, Christian. Bible Made Impossible, The: Moving from Biblicism to a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (Kindle Locations 108-116). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The Mouth of God doesn’t resolve the problem Continue reading →