Our Swiss-cheese Bibles

Scot McKnight has a piece up on the Leadership section of CT’s website about (and linking to) the hermeneutics quiz devised by BuildingChurchLeaders.com. I don’t actually find the quiz all that interesting, though I think they did a good job putting it together—the quiz informed me that I’m conservative, but moderately so, which wasn’t exactly news to me—but I thought Dr. McKnight’s comments were.

For some reason of late, I have become fascinated with the portions of the Bible we don’t tend to read, passages like the story of Jephthah. Or how God was on the verge of killing Moses for not circumcising his son, and his wife stepped in, did what needed to be done, and tossed the foreskin at Moses’ feet, and God let him alone. I’m curious why one of my friends dismisses the Friday-evening-to-Saturday-evening Sabbath observance as “not for us today” but insists that capital punishment can’t be dismissed because it’s in the Old Testament.I have become fascinated with what goes on in our heads and our minds and our traditions (and the latter is far more significant than many of us recognize) in making decisions like this.What decisions? Which passages not to read as normative. The passages we tend not to read at all.If we’re all subject to selective perception, at least to some degree, it’s important to recognize what we tend to miss or gloss over, especially if we’re church leaders.

He goes on to credit the quiz with helping us do this, which I don’t really think it does, to any significant degree; but I certainly agree that this is something we need to address, because it leads to us missing and misunderstanding what God wants to say to us. It gives us a truncated gospel—one which, funnily enough, usually tends to be truncated neatly to fit our comfort zones.There are, I think, several reasons for this. In churches that use the lectionary, a lot of this is done for you, as the folks who put the lectionary readings together did a nice job of trimming around all the troublesome spots. We do it ourselves, because dealing with those spots takes work—we can’t just toss out the pat answers we’ve all learned, we have to wrestle with the text and put thought and effort into it. What’s more, dealing with those sorts of passages carries an emotional cost, as we come face to face with the fact that we don’t worship a nice, comfortable god who wants us to live nice, comfortable lives. In some cases, as Jared Wilson points out, the Scriptures tell us things we just flat-out don’t want to hear; it’s no shock that we tend to avoid those passages if at all possible.And so we end up with Swiss-cheese Bibles, with great voids in them, and we take our nice neat slices with their nice neat holes in them, and we end up with a much less messy and much less discomfiting faith as a consequence; but then, it seems to me, we end up with a faith much less able to deal with the messy and discomfiting parts of life—they go sailing right through the holes. We need to make the effort to fill in the holes, to consider what parts of the Bible we’re avoiding, and why, and take them head-on; we need to open ourselves up to listen to, and proclaim, the whole counsel of God.

Posted in Church and ministry, Scripture, Uncategorized.

3 Comments

  1. I took the quiz and got an 82 – pretty progressive. Unsurprising. For about 1/3 of the questions, my answer definitely wasn’t represented in the list of responses, but that’s also sort of to be expected in something like this. The quiz-maker will write their assumptions into the quiz, not mine. Some of them were pretty odd though. Maybe I’m just off the charts.

  2. Off the charts? No, I don’t think so; it’s the inevitable result of trying to compress the variety of approaches on some of these questions into a single spectrum. (There was at least one question on which I wanted to mark all three of the main answers.) As I said, what they were trying to do, they did pretty well, but I still didn’t think it was all that interesting; it seems to me that entire approach really isn’t all that useful. (Something multivalent, like the better personality and counseling inventories out there, might be more productive, but I don’t know.)

  3. I have a bone to pick with McKnight in that I think there is a great difference between Friday-to-Saturday night Sabbath observance and capital punishment; a difference that has nothing to do with “selective perception”. Capital punishment was instituted as part of God’s covenant with Noah, and is, in my humble estimation, a statement of a basic principle of justice in God’s fallen creation–i.e., take a life and your life is forfeit. When the Sabbath is celebrated was always less important than that it was celebrated; hence such corrective statements of Jesus as “The Sabbath for man and not man for the Sabbath”.

    I agree with you, Rob, and with McKnight to an extent, that there are passages of Scripture we tend to avoid, both in our reading, and in the case of pastors, in our preaching. I once started a list of the “Top 10 Sermons That Could Get Me Fired”, and it had scripture passages like Isaiah 30.22:
    Then you will defile your silver-covered idols and your gold-plated images. You will scatter them like filthy rags; you will say to them, “Away with you!”

    Or Elisha and the bear-mauling incident…

    Or the eating human dung thing…

    The issue of what is taken as “normative” is an important one, and worthy of more ink (virtual in many cases) being spilled.

    Wayne

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