Over in the Finding God at Work podcast, we’re going through a series called Gentle Witnesses: Sharing the Good News at Work in a Way that Actually Makes Sense.
Toward the beginning of the series, I dedicated several episodes to the importance of listening well to coworkers’ stories and questions. Often, listening matters more than speaking or trying to provide answers. One of the best gifts we can give to a friend is a space to be seen and heard without being judged.
At the same time, if our friends see that Christian faith is an important part of our lives, they may become genuinely curious about how we’ve made sense of the difficult questions of faith. Faith is, after all, a struggle. It is not without its challenges and pains, its niggling intellectual quandaries and existential pitfalls. To place one’s faith in Jesus is to embrace a life with certain perennial difficulties.
One such difficulty is how to approach the Bible. How can we make sense of this strange and wonderful library of ancient texts? Those of us committed to the way of Jesus reverence the Bible as sacred Scripture. We have experienced the joy of finding God in the text, feeling it come alive as the Spirit applies its words and images to our hearts. We know the comfort of finding our bearings within its grand narrative of redemption. We take heart as we see our own failures and hopes reflected in its unvarnished portraits of sinners and saints alike. We are moved by the power and beauty of its poetry and prophecy, instructed by its wisdom, and guided by its moral authority.
Yet we are also familiar with the many thorny challenges that the Bible poses. From its cultural and historical complexity—including the many passages that strike contemporary ears as ethically problematic—to its sheer heft, the Bible is not easily reckoned with. Interpretive controversies abound. We know, or at least know of, spiritual leaders who have abused the language of Scripture for their own oppressive purposes. And if we’re honest with ourselves, sometimes even the most devout believer finds one passage or another boring, annoying, cumbersome, or even disturbing.
When we happen upon such a passage, we are tempted to resolve the tension quickly: by ignoring the text, legitimizing its apparent offense, or delegitimizing it. (I’ll unpack each of these terms below.) But when we take the easy out, we short-circuit the Bible’s work on our minds and hearts. Not only that, we also short-change ourselves as evangelists. When we work through our own concerns about the Bible with intellectual integrity and emotional honesty, we will be better equipped to serve our friends when such passages raise questions for them on their journey toward faith. We can do this work with a posture of reverence—receiving the Bible as God’s Word written, with both our mind and our heart, both charitably and faithfully.
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Weighing Your Options
Among the committed Christians I know, the thornier parts of the Bible are rarely a cause of crisis, but are often a source of unanswered questions. This is, at least, the state of affairs for me. There are a number of passages that trouble me, but my experience of life with Jesus has been compelling enough to “outweigh” them. To give one example: I cannot explain to my own satisfaction how to understand the divinely-mandated, violent conquest of the Canaanites by the Israelites, as narrated in the book of Joshua. At first blush, it seems out of sync with the clear teaching of Scripture as a whole that God loves all human beings made in his image and desires the flourishing of the nations.
I have some ideas about how to understand this part of the narrative in a way that honors the loving and just character of God, but I also have some doubts about those ideas. Even so, my confidence in Jesus, and indeed in the Bible, remains strong. I am not quite sure what to teach about how the sword of Joshua reveals the character of God. But I trust that the cross of Jesus reveals it most fully.
For many Christians like me, it is possible to hold onto faith even amidst the tension of unresolved interpretive dilemmas. We say, “The Jesus I know is good and I have compelling reasons to believe in him, despite my questions about this specific text.”
But for our skeptical or seeking friends and coworkers, the situation is different. For them, a “problem passage” may form an insurmountable blockade to faith. They say, “My questions about this text lead me to wonder if Jesus can be good or if believing in him is compatible with intellectual integrity.” The perceived problems of the text “outweigh” the attractiveness of faith.
Pressing In
And of course, for us, such questions aren’t a crisis until they are. “Deconstruction” is having a cultural moment, and we would do well to pay attention. Any number of life circumstances, church experiences, or broader cultural movements can cause a follower of Jesus to reconsider their spiritual assumptions. We may discover that questions which used to simmer have come to a boil. Among my post-Christian friends, the same problems that appear to deny some people entry to the kingdom of God in the first place have often served as exit ramps for them.
All the more reason to press into difficult passages sooner rather than later! If we make a habit of dodging tough questions now, we won’t be much help to friends who are wondering if they could, in good faith, say “yes” to Jesus. We also won’t be much help to our future selves in a moment of crisis.
Some Christians might hesitate to dig into the more “problematic” aspects of Scripture, for fear they will somehow damage their own faith. Will tugging on a loose thread lead the whole experience of faith to unravel? Faithful disciples may understandably be wary of tangling with doubt or criticism in ways that undermine their sense of security.
But my experience—one that many other Christians testify to—has been that when I bring my own questions to the Bible with intellectual honesty and emotional openness, my faith comes out stronger for it. Hopefully, I come out looking a smidge more like Jesus, too, by virtue of having let the Bible really work on me, with the questions I really have.
Ignoring the Text
This is perhaps the simplest and most common way of neutralizing our sense of tension about a Bible passage: We simply ignore the passage! We don’t read it in the first place, or if we do read it, we quickly move on without meaningfully reflecting on it or giving our questions permission to rise to the surface.
This tendency to simply avoid certain texts can be seen in some church lectionaries. Historically, the lectionary of the liturgical churches was a way to present the whole witness of Scripture to the whole people of God over the course of some period of time, often a year or more. For example, the Book of Common Prayer includes a rotation of readings for both Sunday services and weekday Morning and Evening Prayer. But in the 1979 edition, you will occasionally find a verse or section marked with parentheses, which can be omitted from the Scripture readings.
Sometimes it is clear that the intention of marking off passages this way is to offer a shorter selection of Scripture as an option, which is reasonable by my lights. But at times it appears a motive other than time-savings may be at play. For example, in the 1979 Daily Office Lectionary for Year One, the Gospel reading for the Friday in the week of the Sunday closest to May 25 looks like this:
Luke 16:10-17(18)
Why would a single verse be placed in parentheses? This seems to be an odd choice if length is the only consideration. Here’s what the verse says:
“Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Luke 16:18 NIV).
This text is a “hard saying” of Jesus (John 6:60 ESV). Throughout the centuries, Christians who have known difficult marriages or the heartbreak of divorce have grappled with how to rightly understand it and obey it. As faithful disciples, we will neither use this verse as a cudgel of condemnation against those who have been through divorce, nor fail to receive it as part of Jesus’ teaching that must authoritatively guide our decisions about singleness, marriage, and divorce.
But we cannot receive a teaching that we have never heard. Grappling with the Bible faithfully starts with reading it—even the parts we wish we could skip.
Legitimizing the Offense of the Text
If ignoring the text keeps it from challenging us, legitimizing the text, in contrast, runs roughshod over us—specifically, over our capacity for moral intuition. (To get technical, the legitimizing is not of the text itself, but of the apparent moral affront of the text; more below.) If there is a conflict between the apparent moral assumptions of the text at hand and our own moral intuition, then the text must prevail over our flawed and sinful hearts and minds, or so the thinking goes. These moral assumptions are legitimized by some rational appeal, counterintuitive though it may be.
Intuition is a sense of immediate knowledge rather than the kind that results from rational reflection. For example, we possess strong moral intuitions about the goodness of caring for and protecting children, and the evil of harming or abusing them. We simply know without hesitation or the need for extended reasoning that intentionally targeting children for harm is wrong.
As such, when we come across a passage like Deuteronomy 2, we are startled. Moses writes:
When Sihon and all his army came out to meet us in battle at Jahaz, the Lord our God delivered him over to us and we struck him down, together with his sons and his whole army. At that time we took all his towns and completely destroyed them—men, women and children. We left no survivors.
(Deuteronomy 2:32-34 NIV)
Like the conquest of the Canaanites narrated in Joshua, this passage at first seems to be all bad news. How could a good God command the slaughter of children?
I suggest that such passages are exactly the kind we should be grappling with, using all the appropriate resources we have of cultural, historical, and literary context, and situating this story in the greater narrative arc of Scripture that centers on Jesus’ death and resurrection. My aim here is not to carry out such grappling for this specific passage, but rather to talk about how to go about it. Or rather, how not to go about it.
I wish it didn’t have to be said, but as we grapple, we have no reason to abandon our intuition that targeting children for harm and death is wrong. In contrast, those who would legitimize the text take its apparent moral affront and seek to establish its legitimacy, and the illegitimacy of any moral intuition that contradicts it, no matter how strong or basic that intuition is to our moral imagination. To put it crudely, the legitimizer asks, “How does it turn out that harming and killing children was okay here?” (For example, the argument of Nicholas K. Meriwether in this article falls along these lines.)
The supreme problem with this approach is that it maligns the character of God himself. The emphatic conclusion of the Bible when viewed as a whole—and the testimony of the saints throughout the centuries—is that God is good. If he’s not, we’re in trouble, and the Good News isn’t particularly good either. If he is, then the story of the Bible is the best news ever shared. So, if we take one passage and use it to redefine “good” as something unrecognizable, we dishonor the steadfast, incontrovertible goodness of God.
Now, here’s the thing: Our moral intuitions are flawed. They do need correction. Just because we hold that something is good in an intuitive manner does not mean it is so. When the Apostle Paul writes that “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16 NIV), he implies that we will have some ideas or intuitions that need rebuking and correcting.
At the same time, Scripture implies that at least some aspects of our moral intuition are God-given (see Romans 2:14-15). There are some moral intuitions which are legitimate and that are confirmed, rather than corrected, by Scripture as a whole. If we accept that some intuitions are worth honoring, then our feeling of obligation to protect children and condemn harming them must be among them. Working through the conundrums of Scripture reverently does not require us to sabotage our God-given sense of right and wrong.
Delegitimizing the Text
The inverse of legitimizing the apparent moral affront of the text over and against our moral intuitions is to delegitimize the text: To condemn the text itself as an untrustworthy account of God’s character because of its apparent moral affront.
A thoughtful scholar who (by my lights, wrongly) adopts the delegitimizing perspective is Pete Enns. Regarding the conquest of Canaan, he wonders whether God was really behind it at all:
One also might wonder why holy war (which is a rather sanitizing way of putting it) was necessary at all to the God of creation. Was gaining a plot of land that important? Were the Canaanites really deserving of death more than anyone else in the ancient world?
A far simpler and less problematic explanation is that these are stories that the ancient Israelites told which reflects their genuine but ancient faith in God within the conceptual parameters of their historical context. These stories were recorded as we read them at a much later time in Israel’s monarchy, or later, to enhance Israel’s national narrative.
In other words, these texts are not given to us to help us see the character of God and his work in history. Instead, they reflect the flawed understanding and motivations of their human authors. The way God is “revealed” here is not the way he really is.
For disciples of Jesus, the problem with approaching the Bible this way is fairly obvious: It renders vast stretches of the Bible untrustworthy even regarding their chief subject, the character and work of God. If we have to parse out which passages reveal God and which passages don’t, the ones that don’t turn out to be not-so-useful “for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,” contra Paul’s claim in 2 Timothy 3:16. Furthermore, whatever method we devise for doing this parsing, the passages that we keep are likely to be those most compatible with our own cultural biases.
God’s Word Written
So, what’s the alternative? If we resist the temptation to resolve uncomfortable tensions by ignoring, legitimizing, or delegitimizing Scripture, how can we approach it instead?
This question is best answered by considering both what the Bible is, and what the Bible is for.
To cite another Anglican example, Article 20 of the 39 Articles of Religion states the following about the relationship between the Church and Scripture: “it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.”
The qualifier of “written” reflects a sound theological insight. Properly speaking, “God’s Word” is not limited to the Bible. Whenever God speaks, that is his word. When “the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision,” he heard it (Genesis 15:1). When the prophets proclaimed, “Hear the word of the Lord,” they were speaking out loud, often well before any writing happened. The Bible also uses the phrase “the word of God” to describe both the proclamation of Jesus (e.g. Luke 5:1) and of the Apostles and their companions (e.g. Acts 4:31). Uniquely, Jesus himself is “the Word of God” (Revelation 19:13 NIV).
It is this sense of the word of God—his voice going forth into the world via the voice of the prophets, the apostles, and supremely of Jesus himself—that animates the whole plot of the Bible. The word of God brings creation into being (Genesis 1:3); it “uproot[s] and tear[s] down” kingdoms and nations, but also “build[s] and . . . plant[s]” (Jeremiah 1:10 NIV); it “strikes with flashes of lightning” and “shakes the desert” and “twists the oaks and strips the forests bare” (Psalm 29:7-9 NIV); it imparts life and makes those who receive it fruitful (Luke 8:1-15); it triumphs over the accuser (Revelation 12:10-11); it heals the sick, raises the dead, and drives out demons (Matthew 10:8).
It is within this context of his “living and active” word (Hebrews 4:12 ESV) that God saw fit to inspire human beings to put down words in writing that can also truly be called “the word of God.” Like the words of the prophets and apostles when they were first spoken, the words of the Bible are human words. Yet they are full of God’s life, his animating power, and are effective for his purpose.
What is that purpose? What is the Bible for? Well, it stands to reason it is for all of the same things that the word of God spoken is for—all those works of power and judgment and life. But in a very specific way, the Bible is for us. All parts of it are “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17 NIV). In order to be useful in this way, the Bible as a whole, and its constituent parts, must be a faithful account of God’s character and action in the world.
Reading with Mind and Heart, Charitably and Faithfully
This means that the alternative to ignoring, legitimizing, or delegitimizing any part of Scripture is to receive it with our mind and our heart, charitably and faithfully. It is only by a response of love and faith that we can grapple with the Bible with both intellectual integrity and emotional honesty.
To read the Bible charitably is to read it with love—principally, love for God. When we read a text charitably, that means we do not immediately assume the worst about it. We give it a fair hearing. We consider its purpose and the way that purpose is accomplished. We allow the text to work as a whole, with its various parts informing each other, rather than playing them off against each other (as Article 20 has already forewarned us from doing).
When we read the Bible charitably, that means when we come to a startling or even disturbing passage, we do not leap to conclusions about the character of God as though the text comes to us in isolation. Instead, we extend to God, as it were, the benefit of the doubt. We do not leave God to the side as an abstraction, but rather engage him in our reading. We tell God as we read a challenging passage, “In this part of the text, you sure seem unloving, but let me see how it fits into the whole.” We allow the experience of reading to fit into the bigger context not just of the Bible, but also of how God has revealed his love to us in our lives. It would be unfair—uncharitable—to God to do otherwise.
Of course, this does not mean that we somehow turn our brains off, shrug, and say, “Well, God must still be good despite this passage, though I don’t know how.” That is tantamount to ignoring the text. Instead, we press into our questions with the resources and time that are available to us, seeking a deeper understanding of the text and how it reveals God’s character. This pressing in is an act of faith, since it requires us to hold out for some purchase on the meaning of the passage which at first appears elusive. It requires not the mental gymnastics of facile or pat explanations, but the persistence of holding competing ideas in tension until we break through to a resolution that is solid and intellectually robust.
I do not claim to have assailed every “problematic” passage of Scripture with such faithfulness. Really, I have only invested the time and energy such intellectual work requires in a small number, and usually when they were assigned for a class! But here we can lean on each other. There are teachers whose vocation is to work through these passages at a depth not possible for all of us, and we can reap the fruit of their efforts by judiciously reading their work. (For the particular issues we’ve briefly touched on in this post, I recommend the efforts of Tim Mackie and Paul Copan.) What’s more, time is on our side. We have our whole lives to work through the Bible; who knows when a new insight may dawn on us?
To grapple with Scripture in this manner is, in purely human terms, beyond us. But we do not operate in purely human terms. The classic Christian doctrine of illumination teaches that the Holy Spirit must shine upon the heart and mind of the reader in order for the text to be received and do its full work. Love is first and foremost God’s love for us, a love that inhabits us and allows us to inhabit Scripture with both charity and faith while dealing with it in complete honesty. In his care, we need not fear controversy or thorny questions.
When we refuse easy solutions that do violence to the text, or to the vision of God’s character that is revealed in the Bible as a whole and supremely in Jesus, it becomes possible to read from within the experience of love and faith. We read in order to receive God’s love and in order to love God. We hold on in faith to the word of God written, even when we do not yet see the way it all fits together.
In that faith, we keep reading. We keep telling the story to our children, and to our friends who are looking for the way of life. We keep studying. We keep tracing the lines that connect each part of the story to Jesus, that show forth both his just judgment and his unfathomable mercy. We wait, patiently, as God teaches us.
When we come to the text of the Bible as disciples of Jesus, in the community of his people, we will receive what we need from it. We will not be led astray. We will not only see, but also experience—and find ourselves ready to share—the goodness of God.
Reflect and Practice
Take a moment to consider your own mind and heart.
What were your earliest encounters with the Bible?
How would you describe your relationship with the Bible today?
What passages from the Bible have troubled you?
Do you ever find yourself falling into ignoring, legitimizing, or delegitimizing the text?
When have you experienced love and faith while reading the Bible?
What do you think of the idea of being “charitable” toward God as you read?
What do you want from the Bible?
If a coworker asked you over lunch how you make sense of the divinely-mandated violence in the Bible, how would you respond?
If a coworker asked you why the Bible matters to you, how would you respond?
How is the Bible working on you?
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash.
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