

My new friend sat across the coffee shop table from me and within a few minutes of our introduction, cut right to the chase: “So if you don’t believe the Bible can be objectively read or that it isn’t absolute Truth—where does your authority come from?”

“Lots of places.” I responded quite matter-of-factly.

I could tell by his gobsmacked countenance that this was not a reply he deemed sane, sensible, or morally acceptable coming from a professed Christian and pastor. He was looking and hoping for the Sunday School response from me; the one he and I had both grown up learning, believing, and reciting; the one all decent, card-carrying Christians are expected to brandish: that the Bible and the Bible alone, was my moral compass.

This simply isn’t my experience and I’m certain that I’m not alone in this.

I went on the share with my friend, that yes my morality is certainly shaped in part by the Bible. I’ve read, studied, prayed through, and preached from it for most of my life, and its influence and impact are undeniable, but it doesn’t encompass the totality of my moral code. That code is a rich, complicated mosaic composed of a billion different influences: the people who raised me, my faith tradition, my personality and intellect, writers and thinkers I’ve read, the experiences I’ve had, the place and time in which I exist, the laws of the land, the communities of faith I’ve lived within, my personal reflection, and my prayerful searching—the sum total of which will not match another human being who has ever walked the planet. It is this way with each of us.

When someone asks you to build an ethical structure solely from the Bible, they are asking you to operate within a potentially self-contradicting system—if you use all of it.

For example, on the subject of war: do I determine that my moral code comes from Moses’ mountaintop dictation listing murder as one of the most grievous of sins, or can I claim such violence to be justified if I view my country’s war cause as righteous? Do I shape my morality around Jesus’ words revealing that in reality the peacemakers are the ones most in God’s image, or do I allow myself wiggle room so I can harken back to a less-benevolent version of God’s people in the Old Testament where the swords were flying fast and furious? Can I defend carpet bombing a middle east village using the Scriptures, even if I have to ignore the lion’s share of Christ’s life and message within them to do so? Many Christians do. (It turns out we all pick and choose from Scripture’s morality menu, even if we claim otherwise.)

Does the Bible provide a uniform, irrefutable, clarified ethic on when and where violence is acceptable and when it is forbidden? Of course it doesn’t, which means it cannot itself be a compass, it can at best be a helpful traveling companion; one navigational tool among many.

Our personal morality is not fixed, despite our best intentions. It shifts and stretches as we live and move through time and gain new understanding, and this happens within and outside of the pages of the Bible. It simply does. There is nothing evil in this, as everything belongs to God.

At some point you’ve certainly seen and encountered someone doing something you yourself found decidedly immoral, even though they claimed faith and used the same Bible you read as justification. (Same compass, different True North.) Likewise you’ve run across people living beautiful, compassionate, unquestionable moral lives without Biblical knowledge or faith at all.

If the Bible was as clear and absolute a model for morality as many believers contend, then every Christian who ever read it would come away with an identical worldview and personal life expression of that worldview.

That’s not how this works.

I reminded my new friend that he had broken from what many Christians deem an orthodox hermeneutic in one very specific area of his life, and that in the eyes of the faithful who disagree with him, he was veering from the Bible’s authority, he had lost his moral compass. This divergence I reminded him, may in reality have been the result of a more accurate understanding of the original passages on the subject, or maybe it was the fact that what he had seen and experienced and discovered, had created a lens that in some way was not purely Biblical, yet completely moral.

I think if we’re honest, most of us who claim Christianity can admit that while the Bible is an important piece of our moral system, in a very practical and quite healthy way, it does not and cannot contain it.

Would making moral decisions be a whole lot easier if we could just open the Bible by topic, get our clear answer and go? Quite.

However the Bible, as complex and sprawling and enigmatic as it is does not allow this, and so we are left to use the totality of our lives and minds and studies and relationships and experiences and prayers to shape our understanding of the way we are to live and be in the world.

There really is no other and no better way.

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