On the Misuse of the Bible

 

On the Misuse of the Bible

October 30, 2020

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

This morning I saw online a picture of a woman sitting in the driver’s seat of a pickup truck holding a Bible. The caption to the picture said something like “Politician says pandemic may or may not be happening.” In other words, she’s a moron. A while back our Idiot-in-Chief had police clear out protesters near the White House so he could walk to a nearby church to have his picture taken in front of it holding a Bible, apparently upside down. The church is of course closed because of that pandemic that may or may not be happening, so there was no risk of Individual-1 being exposed to an actual Christian worship service. One of the primary characteristics of American religion today is that the Christian Bible gets misused over and over again in support of politics and politicians it simply would never support. Christians who call themselves “Bible-believing” use the Bible to justify hatred and oppression, things it simply cannot legitimately be used to support. They bash gays with it. They oppress women with it. They used to justify slavery with it. They divert people’s attention with it from injustice and environmental destruction here on earth and in this life to some hope for an imagined future paradise either in heaven or on earth after the Second Coming of Christ. None of these things is legitimate, but conservatives masquerading as true Christians  have so distorted the public understanding of the Bible that it is far from obvious to most Americans that these things are indeed a misuse of Christianity’s sacred texts. Those of us who know what the Bible as a whole is really about must speak up and speak out against this unjustifiable misuse of our holy scripture.

If the Bible isn’t about hatred and oppression (and it isn’t), what is it about? I wish that question were easier to answer than it is. The Bible is an extremely complex book. All of it comes from ancient cultures very different from ours. Its different parts were written over the span of nearly one thousand years. It expresses more understandings of God than most of us can possibly keep track of. There are passages in it that at least appear to give divine sanction to hatred, violence, homophobia, and the subordination of women to men. Conservatives use those verses all the time to justify their cultural hatreds and prejudices. We cannot deny any of those truths. Yet the only way you can make the Bible stand for any of those things is to pull specific biblical verses out of context and read them as saying something that the Bible as a whole simply does not say.

So what does the Bible as a whole say? The rabbis say that everything in the Hebrew Bible (the Protestant Old Testament and included in the Catholic Old Testament) is about love. They say if you read something in it and can’t make it be about love you’re still got work to do. The New Testament says quite directly “God is love.” 1 John 4:8. There is a saying that runs through the Old Testament almost like a mantra: “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” See for example Psalm 145:8. The “steadfast love” of which that saying speaks translates the Hebrew word hesed and refers to God’s steadfast faithfulness to God’s covenant with Israel. God’s steady, unfailing love expressed as faithfulness to God’s covenant commitments is perhaps the central theme of the Old Testament. Sometimes that hesed is expressed as punishment of Israel’s violations of the covenant, but God never violates that covenant Godself. Even when inflicting punishment on them God loves the Hebrew people. It is a love on which they can always rely.

In the New Testament Jesus gives us the Great Commandment. It appears in three of the four canonical Gospels, but Matthew’s version of it is especially telling. When an expert in the Torah law asks Jesus which of the law’s commandments is the greatest Jesus answers:

 

‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:37-40.

 

The two parts of the Great Commandment are in single quotes here because they are both quotations from Hebrew scripture. The commandment of love of God quotes Deuteronomy 6:5. The commandment of love of neighbor quotes Leviticus 19:18.

The reference here to “the law and the prophets” refers to the two of the three major parts of the Hebrew Bible (the law, the prophets, and the writings) that were already canonical in the Judaism of the first century CE. If all of scripture “hangs” on the law of love then all of scripture must in some way be about love. There are parts of the Bible that don’t sound much like love. Go kill every living thing among the Amalekites as the Bible says God told King Saul to do, 1 Samuel 15:3, sure doesn’t sound much like love. If we can somehow interpret it to be about love, and I can’t, then fine. If we can’t we must simply reject it as not being a true word for us in the Bible. If it affirms love as what God wants from us it is consistent with the Bible’s larger message. If it doesn’t, it isn’t.

Both the scriptures that are common to Judaism and Christianity and the scripture that is exclusively Christian make the love their central focus. In both the Old Testament and the New love is everything. All the rest is commentary. So let’s be done with right-wing politicians using the Bible to justify policies that the Bible absolutely does not justify. Holding it up as some sort of symbol is meaningless in any event. Using it as a cover for anti-biblical politics is worse. Don’t let them fool you. The Bible is about love. Period. Any use of it for anything else is a misuse that we must reject and condemn.