Nothing is Biblical
Reflections on American Christianity
Hello all! I apologize for the nearly 10 month hiatus of this blog. I have been busy finishing up course work in my PhD program! Only 3 comprehensive exams, a language requirement to fulfill, and a dissertation to go. The title of this blog is provocative, admittedly intentionally so. But this concept of what or what does not count as “biblical” is a major theological part of what I see going on in American Christianity as evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics in America respond to the current administration of the 47th President of the United States.
These thoughts were prompted a post that I came across on Facebook written by Tim Whitaker, the founder and Creative Director of The New Evangelicals, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, “committed to creating a better path forward at the intersection of faith, politics, and culture” (thenewevangelicals.com). To run the risk of being reductive, it is a group of individuals with an evangelical theology that hold liberal social and economic views. The post reads as follows:
“Sometimes at night I lay awake in bed staring at the ceiling wondering how American Christianity has brought such horrors and dehumanization to its neighbors. I don’t know how you read the red letters and come away with kidnap immigrants, arrest unhoused people and how the knee to a man who was best friends with a pedophile. I just don’t get it.”
The emphasis here is my own because it points to the main critical current of this post. The red letters, in case any reader doesn’t know, refer to the practice that many Bible publishers have of making the words attributed to Jesus found in the Bible written in red letters. The implication by Mr. Whitaker being that if the self-professed evangelical Christians read the red letters of Jesus in the Bible, they would not support the policies of the current administration regarding the terror it is pouring upon immigrants here in the United States.
I am sympathetic to Mr. Whitaker’s musings above. I too have often wondered, like many millenials who were raised going to church during the height of the modern evangelical movement of the 1990s and 2000s how many individuals who told us things like “God is love,” “For God so loved the world…” and spoke so passionately about how God and Jesus loves us and every single person on earth could so easily follow a man who called immigrants rapists and murders, paid off a porn star to hide his unfaithfulness, mocked a disabled reporter, and much much more.
There seems to be a disconnect and I completely agree. This is not an attack piece on Mr. Whitaker. I find if fascinating, however, that his proposed solution is to read the Bible and focus on the words of Jesus. In a real sense, it is a very Protestant solution. Since Martin Luther spearheaded the Protestant Reformation in 1517 which caused many Western European Christians to break from the Catholic church over liturgical and ecclesial practices that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and others considered unbiblical. The mantra of Protestantism for centuries has been that Christian faith and practice should only look to the Bible for answers.
Through years of studying Christianity and now other religious traditions, I have come to the conclusion that this framing doesn’t work because the biblical text does not say any one thing on any one issue, and neither does Jesus himself for that matter. Followers of The New Evangelicals will fervently quote Jesus in Matthew 25:34-36 in the parable of the sheep and the goats, “Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”
However, that is not the only thing that Jesus is recorded as having said. In the very same gospel of Matthew in 10:34-37, Jesus says “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword.
For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law,
and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”
Another personal favorite of mine from the Old Testament in Proverbs reads in 26:4-5, “Do not answer fools according to their folly, lest you be a fool yourself. Answer fools according to their folly, lest they be wise in their own eyes.” So, which is it? What is the “bibical” perspective here: does one answer the fool or not? Does Jesus call Christians to welcome or to divide? The answer in my mind is ultimately neither because the Bible is not a dictionary. It is not even one book, it is an anthology of collected, translated, and edited media from many generations thousands of years ago. Reading it and other religious texts are not safe. I have often heard in pulpits and in conversations with Christians “I’m not saying this, God is through the Bible” when defending their views on, say, LGBTQ individuals.
“The Bible tells me so” is ultimately a defense mechanism created out of fear of owning what one has chosen to do with the text. It is a radical denial of agency regarding one’s religious views because there is fear about being wrong. But if we can know beyond the shadow of a doubt that our concepts, attitudes, and behaviors are biblical and therefore correct, do we have faith? To read any text is an act of faith. Faith in the sense I am talking about is not hoping for something not seen, but of not knowing and doing so anyways.
Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard writes what he calls the knight of faith in his Fear and Trembling “The tragic hero relinquishes himself in order to express the universal; the knight of faith relinquishes the universal in order to become the single individual” (76). Kierkegaard continues that “The knight of faith has simply and solely himself, and therein lies the dreadfulness. . . the knight of faith, on the other hand, is the paradox; he is the single individual, simply and solely the single individual without any connections and complications” (78-79). Faith is not the emptying of yourself into some kind of universal like the concept of the “biblical” it is choosing to live as an individual and to boldly make choices where others are fearful of doing so without any guarantees that your decisions will produce good outcomes. Kierkegaard is also said to warn leap of faith, yes, but only after reflection. We all must do the best that we can and not hide behind any kind of abstract, universal principle. What this means for American Christianity in the current moment is anyone’s guess, but perhaps honesty is good starting point.
Note: Quotations from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling come from Howard and Edna Kong’s translation in Volume 6 of Kierkegaard’s Writings published by Princeton University Press in 1983.