Examples of How to Read the Bible

 

Examples of How to Read the Bible

December 27, 2021

 

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.

 

Have you ever had the experience of reading a passage in the Bible and saying, “I don’t think so!”? I have. I have that experience all the time. Sometimes the passage is something I can’t and never will accept, something in which I am able to find no truth at all. God supposedly telling Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites is one of those. See 1 Samuel 15:1-3. God never told anyone any such thing, Leviticus calling for death as the penalty for all sorts of transgressions of the law is another. See Leviticus, Chapter 20. God does not desire and certainly does not demand the death of anyone, Matthew saying repeatedly that God will cast sinners into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth is one from the New Testament. See for example Matthew 8:12 and 13:42. God is love, and love never has and never will do any such thing, But sometimes Bible passages are a lot more complicated than being either only right or only wrong. I came across one of those recently when a daily lectionary I use had me read 1 John 5:1-12. Those verses include lines that at first reading seem to me to be just wrong. Especially when I read 1 John 5:3-5 and 1 John 5:12 I thought just No! But then I discerned possible meanings in them are aren’t wrong at all. Let me explain.

1 John 5:3-5 reads:

 

For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who it is who conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

 

When I first read those lines earlier today I thought, are you kidding me? Faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God has conquered the world? I sure don’t think so! I mean, yes, Christianity is the largest religion in the world. If you count all of the multitude of varieties of Christianity there are in the world, several thousand of them in fact, there are more than two billion Christians. That means, however, that there is something like five billion people w aren’t any kind of Christian, and I won’t even attempt to analyze the extent to which all of those two billion people who say they are Christians really are Christian in any meaningful sense.

More Importantly, if faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God really conquered the world, that conquered world would run according to true Christian principles, wouldn’t it? Those principles include nonviolence and true care for the world’s poor, vulnerable, and marginalized people. They include discerning what it is that leaves so many people poor, vulnerable, and marginalized, then working to change those things. Does the world really operate according to those principles? Well, some of it does but certainly not all of it. The world is and always has been awash in the blood of people who are victims of violence from personal assault to all the way to outright warfare. Oppression of the poor, vulnerable, or marginalized people pervades the earth from the way society and church marginalize women to human sex trafficking and slavery. Back in his day St. Paul drew a sharp distinction between the ways of God, which he usually called the ways of spirit, and the ways of the world. Two thousand years later that distinction still holds. Christian faith has conquered the world? I sure don’t think so, not in the sense of the statement I’ve addressed here.

Then I remembered how Jesus thought we should conquer the world. We see that teaching in the story of Jesus exorcizing the demon named Legion at Mark 5:1-13. In that story, which I think we should consider to be a parable even though it doesn’t say it is a parable, Jesus exorcizes a demon named Legion, who turns out actually to be something like two thousand demons all possessing one unfortunate man. The demon was named Legion, but when the first audience for that story heard the word legion they would immediately have thought of the Roman army that occupied their homelands. See, a legion was a basic organizational unit of the Roman army, something roughly like a division in today’s army. To Jesus audience legion meant the power of Rome. We learn that this possessed man’s problem wasn’t that Rome was out there, though it most certainly was. His real problem was that Rome was in here. His real problem was that he had internalized Rome. He had internalized the violent, oppressive ways of the world. Those ways gave him great physical strength, but they also drove him mad. He regained his right mind when Jesus exorcized the ways of the world out of him.

In a very real sense the possessed man of this story conquered the world, and he did it through Jesus Christ. That, it seems to me, is the proper way to understand 1 John’s statement that faith in Jesus Christ conquers the world. Our faith in God in and through Jesus can lead us to overcome the world with its ways of violence and oppression, and God is always there to help us do it. We can’t really help but to have internalized many of those worldly ways. I’ll use nonviolence as an example. I have found that the hardest aspect of Jesus’ teachings to convince people today to accept is precisely nonviolence. The world has so convinced us that violence is necessary at least for defensive purposes if not for offensive ones and that violence is therefore at times morally acceptable. Jesus said no to all violence. God says no to all violence. The divine commitment to nonviolence so clashes with the world’s belief in the necessity and moral acceptability of violence that most of us find it had to accept the teaching of divine nonviolence. Yet if we will truly understand and cling to Jesus Christ we can even overcome the world’s grossly erroneous belief that violence solves problems. With God’s help our Christian faith really can conquer the world. Perhaps not the world out there. Definitely the world in here.

Then there’s 1 John 5:12. That verse reads, “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” At first reading that verse sounds far too Christian exclusivist to be acceptable. Perhaps in the first century CE when 1 John was written the tiny, utterly powerless Christian community could say Christianity is the only way without much harm. Today we cannot. We simply can no longer deny that people of faiths other than Christianity, and even some people of no faith at all, lead full, constructive lives. People of other faiths have a meaningful, positive relationship with God through their non-Christian faiths. It makes no sense to say that God condemns those good people simply because they are not Christian. It makes no sense for us to say that God, whom we confess to be Creator of all that is and to be infinite love, would create the vast diversity of humanity and of human faiths, then say that only one of those faith is true and valid—and it’s the is the one that just happens to be ours.

Now, we Christians know that our Christian faith, our having the Son as 1 John puts it, can indeed lead us to life, to the fullness of live that God wants for each and every person. Many of us have experienced how our Christian faith has enriched our lives. That those who have Son have at least possible access to the fullness of life is certainly true. That’s not the part of 1 John 5:12 that gives me trouble. The part that gives me trouble is the phrase “whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” Taken literally that statement just isn’t true. If “whoever does not have the Son” means what it appears to mean, namely, everyone who is not Christian, then we must reject this part of 1 John 5 as false and unacceptably Christian exclusivist.

So is there a way to understand this verse that is neither false nor Christian exclusivist? I think there may be. Verse 12 of 1 John 5 deals with having “life.” By “life” the verse surely means more than being biologically alive. It surely means having the fullness of life. It means life lived in healthy relationship with God, beloved other people, and God’s good earth. It means a constructive life lived making life better for those you know and those you don’t know who most need care and justice. That’s life, the kind of life God wants for each one of us.

We Christians know that living our life with Jesus Christ can lead us to that fullness of life. If we’re observant and honest, however, if our minds are not closed by religious ideology, we will see that a great many people who are not Christians have that kind of life too. Many of those people live that kind of life with a healthy relationship with God not through Jesus Christ but through the beliefs, teachings, and rituals of one of the world’s other great faith traditions. Is it too much of a stretch to say that those good people “have the Son” in a meaningful way though they are not Christians and do not live their lives of faith with and through him? If it is too much of stretch, then I must reject the contention of 1 John 5:12 that those who do not have the Son do not have life. But if we can understand “have the Son” to mean not specifically to be Christian but to live in health relationship with God through whatever faith in which we find that relationship then I can say yes, this statement is correct. Consider this if you will. To us the Son is the Second Person of the Trinity. As such the Son is simply, or really not so simply, God. Surely God is at work in the lives of all good people on earth. To us the Son is God. To others the Lord, or Allah, or some other name for God is God. Under that name whatever it may be God is at work in the lives of God’s people. So anyone who has God really in a sense has the Son whether they call God the Son or not. With this understanding I can and do say yes to 1 John 5:12.

So I need to remind myself, and I remind you, not to dismiss a Bible verse just because at first we don’t see anything of value in it. Bible verses can and usually do have more than one meaning. Sometimes one meaning that actually is there is one I cannot accept. Sometimes at least if I will spend more time with the verse I’ll find another meaning in it that does speak truth to me and to God’s world. It is at the very least worth making the effort to see if a verse has such another meaning. So when you read a Bible verse that you cannot accept don’t give up on that verse right away. Consider it. Pray over it. Maybe even seek out some scholarly commentary about it or discuss it with other people of faith. If you will do that you may just find the verse meaningful for you and for God’s world.