What to Do When the Bible is Just Wrong

What to Do When the Bible is Just Wrong

Sometimes the Bible is just wrong. I know that conservative Christians would say that statement is just wrong, but then “conservative Christian” is an oxymoron, so never mind. That statement is not wrong. I’ve know for a long time that sometimes the Bible is just wrong. I’ve written a three volume work on the Bible in which I acknowledge that many things in it are wrong and talk about why that is and how we are to respond to the Bible being wrong. I was reminded  of that truth again as I read the Revised Common Lectionary’s Daily Lectionary for September 7, 2020. The readings for that day are full of things that are just wrong. They include at least the following.

Psalm 121 says that God will keep you from all harm. Life shows that this claim is just wrong. No matter how strong a person’s faith is, God won’t protect her from all harm in this life. No one is safe from harm in this life. Or at least no one is safe from physical harm. Faith in God may protect us from spiritual or psychic harm, but that’s not what Psalm 121 means. It’s not what some very conservative Christians believe. Life shows that when Psalm 121 says God will protect the faithful from harm it is just wrong.

Exodus 12:14-28 instructs Jews to answer their children’s question about the Passover by saying it commemorates the day the Lord passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when he struck down the Egyptians. The reference is to the tenth plague of Egypt when the Israelite god Yahweh supposedly killed the firstborn male child of every Egyptian family in an attempt to terrorize the Egyptians into letting the Israelites go. Never mind that several times earlier in the story of the plagues of Egypt Yahweh has hardened pharaoh’s heart so that he won’t let the people go, never mind that pharaoh letting the people go was precisely what Yahweh supposedly wanted.

I know of course that the story of the Exodus is the foundational story of the great Jewish faith, and I mean no disrespect to God’s Jewish people here. Still, the story of the Exodus just gets God wrong in significant respects. It’s right that God wants liberation for the Jews and for all people. In that story however Yahweh, later understood to be the one true universal creator God of all people but here seen primarily as Israel’s war god, inflicts calamity after calamity on the Egyptians. He goes so far as to kill the firstborn son of every Egyptian family. He hardens pharaoh’s heart just so he can keep inflicting calamities on innocent Egyptians. That just isn’t who God is or ever was. God is and always was the God of the Egyptians as well as the Israelites whether either of those people knew it or not. The God we know as love would never do to anyone what Exodus says Yahweh did to the Egyptians.

The Yahweh of the Exodus story is a most primitive God. He cares more about showing off by harming the Egyptians than he does about caring for either his Egyptian or his Israelite people. The only way he knows who’s Israelite and who isn’t is by having the Israelites put lamb’s blood on the doorposts of their houses so he won’t kill their firstborn sons along with the firstborn sons of the Egyptians. In the story of the Exodus, except for the bit about God desiring freedom for people, the Bible just gets God wrong.

Then in the Revised Common Lectionary’s for that date there’s 1 Peter 2:11-17. It tells Christians to submit themselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority. Those authorities are just there, the text says, to punish those who do wrong and commend those who do right. 1 Peter is as wrong about that as Romans is when it says much the same thing at Romans 13:1-7, a part of Romans almost certainly not written by Paul. Had the Christian martyrs the Romans fed to the lions done anything wrong? In the eyes of the Roman government perhaps, but not in the eyes of the Christians or of God. Had Paul done wrong every time the Roman authorities locked him up in prison? Again, in the eyes of the Roman authorities perhaps, but certainly not in the eyes of Christians. He was preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ as we understood it. In God’s eyes he did nothing wrong, but the Roman authorities punished him anyway. Of course 1 Peter was written long before the twentieth century, but was Hitler put in charge of Germany only to punish those who did wrong and commend those who did right? Was Stalin put in charge of the Soviet Union for that reason? Was Donald Trump made President of the United States to do the same thing, just punish those who do wrong and commend those who do right? Of course not. 1 Peter is just wrong here. So there is no denying that sometimes the Bible is just wrong. It gets God wrong. Of course it also gets God right. 1 John 4:8 is right when it says God is love, or at least it’s right if we understand that God defines love not love defines God. The Bible get is right lots of times. The problem is it gets it wrong lots of times too.

Whatever else the Bible may be it is first all the foundational book of the Christian faith. Of the Jewish faith too, or at least what Christians call the Old Testament (in its Protestant version) is that. What are we to make of the fact that we can’t deny that sometimes the Bible gets it wrong? What are we to do when we see the Bible saying something that is just plain wrong? One thing we could do, and one thing a lot of Christians do or at least try to do, is say that it’s not the Bible that’s wrong but us. We can expend immense amounts of spiritual and psychic energy trying to make ourselves believe that what we think is wrong isn’t wrong because it’s in the Bible. Therefore it can’t be wrong. I trust that it is obvious that that is not what I do when I read the Bible saying something that’s obviously wrong. Making ourselves believe that what’s wrong in the Bible actually isn’t wrong requires us to deny our experience and often our own convictions of who God is. I’m not willing to do that. A lot of Christians (and Jews) aren’t willing to do that either.

So what other options do we have? We have the option of staying with our own belief that something in the Bible is just plain wrong. Faith after all does not require us to reject our God-given intellectual capacities. Faith does not require us to ignore our own life experience. As Christians we have to take everything in the Bible seriously. We must consider everything in the Bible conscientiously and prayerfully. It is after all the book that our faith simply cannot do without. We don’t however have to take everything in the Bible as true.

Rejecting anything in the Bible as untrue of course raises a serious question. Just what is the Bible anyway? Some Christians will tell you that it’s God’s word, never mind that the Bible says that Jesus is God’s Word not that the Bible is. These people insist, and I suppose we can assume, that if the Bible comes from God nothing in it could possibly be false. So we have a choice. We can accept everything in the Bible as true, or we can understand that the Bible does not come from God. We can’t accept that everything in it is true. Even people who insist that they believe everything in the Bible is true probably really don’t. So the conclusion is clear: The Bible doesn’t come from God. It is a wholly human product. It has to be a human product simply because there is so much in it that is clearly false.

Of course there’s also a lot in it that is profoundly true, which raises a perplexing question. How do you distinguish the true from the false? Perhaps sadly there is no simple, foolproof answer to that question. The only answer is you have to work at it. You have to do the work of discernment. You have to understand the time of a passage’s creation. You have to understand why it is in the Bible in the first place. If it’s in the Bible somebody at some time thought it was true or at least thought that it was worth preserving. Why would they think that? Did they understand God differently than you do? Did they understand the nature of truth differently than you do? Did they understand the nature and purpose of writing differently than you do? Did they understand the nature of the cosmos differently than we do? Did they understand human nature differently than we do? All of those differences and more besides can explain why something’s in the Bible that strikes us as simply false.

Beyond that, we people of faith have an obligation to determine what our standard of truth is. Your standard isn’t necessarily the same as anyone else’s, but you’ve probably got one whether you’re aware of it or not. If you’re not, examine why you think something in the Bible is false, assuming of course that you do. If you don’t think anything in the Bible is false examine what you have to do to convince yourself that everything in it is true. For us Christians the standard of true and false is Jesus, but the Bible gives us more than one understanding of Jesus, so saying my standard is Jesus is the beginning of an answer to the question of standards, but it isn’t the end of it. Once we know what our standard of truth and falsity in the Bible is we can do the discernment of deciding if something we read in the Bible is true or false.

Don’t ever say I told you it was easy. It’s not easy. As I say in my book Liberating the Bible the Bible does not call us to easy answers and rote responses. The work of discernment is not easy, but it is necessary and unavoidable. Everyone discerns whether what they read in the Bible is true or false, it’s just that not everyone admits to doing it. Not everyone can articulate their standard for distinguishing truth from falsehood. I hope that you do and can. If not, you’ve got work to do. So get on with it, OK?