God said it, that settles it?
When presented with any new idea, particularly in the fields of theology, ethics, church practice or morality, in my experience many evangelical Christians will respond with a cry of "But the Bible says...". I say this as a recovering evangelical, having used this approach many times myself.There's even a mantra that used to be popular in more fundamentalist circles which goes "God said it, I believe it, that settles it".
The trouble is that this is, quite frankly, trite and facile. Sorry if I'm causing offence.
A complex Bible
The Bible can be used to make almost any point you wish
Unfortunately by its very nature the Bible, like statistics, can be used to make almost any point you wish. It can be (and has been) used in support of both slavery and its abolition, of both chauvinism and feminism, of racist apartheid and the civil rights movement, of capitalism and communism. This doesn't mean that there isn't a truth to be reached and that we should just give up. What it does mean is that we can't just find a bunch of verses that seem to agree with our position and say "But the Bible says". For what the Bible says on any subject is invariably varied, nuanced, complex and contextual, requiring careful (and prayerful) interpretation. The Bible is not a simple divine textbook from which neat answers can be read for all given situations that will arise. Neither is it a fixed stone tablet from which universally applicable and eternally valid truths, commands or divine promises can be mined to order.
Sadly for those who crave certainty there is no holy grail of once-for-all, one-size-fits-all truth that can be applied directly to any and every time and circumstance.
For this reason "what does the Bible say?" is not to my mind a particularly useful question. Far better to ask "what does the Bible mean when it says that?" and "what is the Holy Spirit speaking to us today through these words?"
Avoiding pitfalls
we need to be open to engaging with opposing viewpoints
Of course, there are dangers in this approach as well. We can quite easily persuade ourselves that the Bible means pretty much anything we want it to, even when it appears to be saying the exact opposite. We need safeguards against our own inevitable prejudices and blind spots, and it seems to me the best ones are humility, openness and prayer. We need to be open to the Spirit, open to our being wrong and needing to rethink, and open to engaging with other and opposing viewpoints in humility and charity. We need to discover what our own blind spots and preconceptions are so that we can learn to counter them. And we need to read each biblical passage as far as possible in its historical, literary and theological context, in light of the whole Bible, and with reference to what other Christians through the ages have understood by the passage. Only then can we hope to be as free as possible from personal prejudice, partisan polemic and pointless proof-texting.
No comments:
Post a Comment