3.1 You're Seeing Things
1. While I was in seminary, I once had a conversation with my mother about some topic or another. I was saying things like, "Wesleyans think the Bible says this, while Baptists think the Bible says that."
At some point, I could tell that the way I was talking about the subject bothered her. She suddenly exclaimed, "We just read the Bible and do what it says!" In other words, our group -- Wesleyans -- just read the Bible and do what it says. Other groups -- like Baptists -- don't. By implication, they read the Bible and either don't believe it or don't keep it.
I always smile when I remember that conversation. My mother was totally unaware of all the assumptions she had absorbed over the years from her childhood to her sixties. She had no idea that she had grown up with Wesleyan glasses that colored the way she read the Bible.
These are some of the greatest insights of my studies of the Bible -- realizing what actually happens when we read the Bible.
For one thing, most Christians probably don't read their Bibles very much. And if they do, they do not read it on a very deep level. They see what they already think in the words.
2. Here's how it works. We often don't realize how much of "us" is in what we see in the world. We start out naively thinking, "What I see is what I get." We don't realize how much cooking our head is doing as we interpret the world.
You might say we all have "dictionaries" in our heads. Someone says something. We use our dictionaries to interpret what they said. I was basically telling my mother that, because we had grown up in the Wesleyan Church, we brought a Wesleyan "dictionary" to the Bible and, voila, the Bible taught Wesleyan truths and ethics.
To be blunt, a lot of Christians see things in the Bible without even reading it. When I taught a survey course on the New Testament, I had students take a position on a biblical issue in their final paper. The amazing thing was that some of those papers didn't cite a single verse in the Bible.
It got to where I had to warn them. Your paper needs to engage the Bible. I would tell them about papers I had received about abortion that didn't quote a single Bible verse. Those papers often had good statistics in them but, as Bible papers, they were hard to grade because they often didn't mention the Bible. They were Christian papers but not Bible papers.
The bottom line is that what people often call "standing up for the Bible" is really standing up for their Christian beliefs. And these beliefs are usually a mixture of Bible with their Christian subculture and their Christian traditions. They have been taught that something is Christian or biblical.
Maybe it is. Or maybe it isn't exactly. Or maybe it isn't at all.
3. Beyond what we think verses in the Bible mean, there is also the question of which ones we think are "clear" and which ones we think are "unclear." This usually means which ones we find important and which ones we -- intentionally or unintentionally -- ignore or downplay.
I was talking to a high school student recently who goes to a church with some interesting beliefs. For example, they celebrate Passover but not Easter. I asked the young man if they believed in the resurrection of Jesus. He said they did. He thought his pastor might have preached on it sometime in a previous year.
Now I understand that someone might think that Easter itself is based in something pagan, but the resurrection? The resurrection is the very heart of the Christian faith. Without the resurrection, there is no Christianity, Paul said. I have no problem with someone celebrating Passover -- many Christians do. But it seemed really odd to me not to celebrate Jesus' resurrection every year -- at least at some point even if not when others celebrate Easter.
It's a reminder that our Christian subcultures not only have their own interpretations of individual verses but that we connect those verses to each other in different ways. Knowingly or unknowingly, we prioritize some and subordinate others.
Take the question of whether women should be ministers. Those opposed take 1 Timothy 2:12 and read all the other verses of the Bible through that lens. "See, it's obvious," they say. Others look at all the women who minister in the New Testament -- Priscilla, Phoebe, Junia -- and look at passages like Acts 2:17 and Galatians 3:28. They see 1 Timothy 2 as the ambiguous passage, with all the other passages -- about Deborah, about Huldah -- as the clearer ones.
So there are disagreements over what individual verses mean, and there are disagreements on how to connect all the different verses to each other. The result is LOTS of different ways people see the overall meaning of the biblical texts. There are thousands upon thousands of Christian groups and individuals who all believe in the Bible -- and believe a lot of different things.
You can't dismiss all the people who disagree with you as unspiritual or rebellious. This flexibility of the biblical texts themselves is why throughout history Christians have come up with a lot of different beliefs and practices.
4. The final piece that drives all the differences are the differences between biblical times and our times. Most Christians don't apply the verse about not boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk (Exod. 23:19). To be sure, most of us don't have baby goats. But for reasons we probably don't know, we have this "common sense" that these verses addressed a time and situation much different from ours.
The command possibly engaged a pagan religious practice. Nobody really knows for sure. (People often act confident about things that are uncertain like this one. We just don't have enough evidence to be sure.)
In Judaism, this verse is applied by not eating meat and dairy in the same meal, which is certainly not what the verse was originally about. I was in Old City Jerusalem in the early 2000s and a couple were there who wanted to eat together. He wanted a gyros (lamb meat), and she wanted pizza. But when he came into the pizza restaurant, he was immediately shooed away. You can't have meat in a dairy place.
It's an example of the principle that "doing what they did" isn't always "doing what they did." We could stop eating cheeseburgers, but it wouldn't have the same meaning as the practice 3000 years ago.
All Christian groups pretty much do this. If a verse seems genuinely strange to us, we find ways to explain that we are keeping it without necessarily keeping it. Most Christians don't worry about wearing clothing of mixed thread (Lev. 19:19) or not trimming the edges of their beard (Lev. 19:27).
It often is not that we are being rebellious or that we don't care. It's that in one way or another, we have an intuitive and often subconscious sense that the verse doesn't fit.
And sometimes we're right. 1 Corinthians talks about women wearing head coverings in worship when they prophesy. But the situation in Corinth 2000 years ago was quite different from today. We generally don't meet in house churches. We don't usually prophesy at random in church. And there isn't as much sexual tension being around people of the opposite sex in a house.
So if we don't wear veils or prayer bonnets, it's not that we are disobeying the Bible. It's that the specific practice in view doesn't play out the same in our contexts. We intuitively and collectively know this, so most churches do not practice head coverings, although some do. Those that do probably aren't really "doing" what this practice originally "did" because the meaning is different in our world.
5. At the same time, many Christians today feel perfectly fine about ignoring teachings that don't fit with their view of the world but that actually are very relevant to today. What does the Bible teach about caring for the poor or the dangers of wealth? What does the Bible teach about loving your enemy or respecting the immigrant?
While there are culture-specific dimensions to these biblical teachings (there alway are), they stand more on the level of principle rather than specific practice. The practice of not sowing your field with different kinds of seeds (Deut. 22:9) seems very specific to ancient Israel. But the practice of loving your enemy is a core value of Christ.
Yet some evangelicals today would seem be more concerned to keep the first kind of command while dismissing the second as some form of "toxic empathy." Indeed, it seems like the teachings of Jesus himself are some of the easiest for contemporary evangelicals to dismiss as "liberal" values.
And while this is sometimes done by calling it the influence of "culture" on Christianity, it is actually the influence of a certain kind of Christian subculture on evangelicalism. We are not talking about a minor mixture of hay here. We are talking about values that contradict the teachings of Jesus himself. In other words, they put the very foundation in danger (1 Cor. 3:11).
When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he said it was the love of God and neighbor (Matt. 22:36-40). All the commandments of God are covered by these (Rom. 13:9-10). Clearly, these are the center.
So why is it that so much of evangelicalism feels perfectly fine ignoring them?
_______________________1. What is Evangelicalism?
1.1 Revivals of the 1700s and 1800s
1.2 The "New" Evangelicalism
1.3 The Poltical Takeover
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