The Bible is An Inefficient Moral Guide<\/strong><\/p>\nThe first clue that the Bible isn\u2019t really meant to be a guide for right and wrong is how inefficient it is as being one. <\/p>\n
Most of the Bible isn\u2019t actually about right or wrong behavior at all, but about God making a people of God\u2019s own, the Israelites. <\/h2>\n
Now, if you grew up in the Church, it\u2019s likely you heard dozens of sermons that tried to treat every story like a moral fable:\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we need to be brave like David.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that is why we need to have integrity like Joseph.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe three points I want to share with you this morning from the story of Joshua are:<\/p>\n
1. To Be Successful, Focus on Obedience, Not Success\u00a0<\/p>\n
2. God\u2019s Blessings Are So You Can Be a Blessing to Others\u00a0<\/p>\n
3. When Life Gets Tough, the Tough Turn to God*<\/p>\n
So, over the past few hundred years, we\u2019ve gotten really good at squeezing the Bible into this framework. But, for me at least over the past few years, I am recognizing how ill-fitted the Bible is to that kind of interpretation. It takes a lot of work to get from Joshua to the three points listed above. <\/p>\n
If the Bible is supposed to be a moral guide, why does it take so much work to get to the point? <\/h2>\n
And why are there so many points? The Bible could probably learn a thing or two from Aesop\u2019s Fables or Marcus Aurelius\u2019 Meditations. As one scholar says, the Bible is \u201ctoo untidy, too sprawling, and too boisterous to be tamed by neat systems of thought.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Bible DOES seem to provide an awful lot of moral instruction<\/strong><\/p>\nSo, the Bible\u2019s narratives aren\u2019t really good material for telling us right from wrong since there\u2019s just too much irrelevant stuff in there for that purpose. Which should, again, cause us to wonder if maybe the point isn\u2019t to tell us right from wrong but to tell a story about the divine founding of a people. ON THE OTHER HAND<\/em>, the Bible does have an awful lot of moral instruction in it. I mean, read Proverbs, the later Prophets, Ecclesiastes, Job, Psalms, the laws of Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and much of Jesus\u2019 and Paul\u2019s teaching. It really seems like certain books or narratives are trying to tell the people of God how to live their life. So maybe parts of the Bible are <\/em>meant to tell people who to live their life.<\/p>\nThe Bible seems to provide some really bad moral instruction sometimes<\/strong><\/p>\nBut then, ON THE OTHER <\/em>HAND (we\u2019re onto our third hand if you\u2019re counting) we really have a problem. Because when is the Bible simply describing something and when is it prescribing something? And even if it\u2019s prescribing something, what part is culturally situated (and therefore no longer relevant for us) and which part is universally applicable (and therefore very relevant for us)? That is, when is it \u201cjust part of the story\u201d and when is it \u201ctelling us something about moral instruction for God\u2019s people\u201d? The instructions in the Torah are a great example.<\/p>\nSome might say the modern court system is biblical because the Bible says \u201cWhen people have a dispute, they are to take it to court and the judges will decide the case, acquitting the innocent and condemning the guilty.\u201d (Deut 25:1) That could be telling us something about the right way to handle disputes. Good moral instruction. I like it. Let\u2019s look though at Deut 25:2-3a<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the guilty person deserves to be beaten, the judge shall make them lie down and have them flogged in his presence with the number of lashes the crime deserves, but the judge must not impose more than forty lashes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yikes. I don\u2019t like that. These are back-to-back verses. The Bible seems to make no distinction between them. So, why are these verses in the Bible? Are they there to shower us with universal, for-all-time ethical pronouncements (that we have to wade through various genres to discover)? That leads to some very uncomfortable conclusions, like: stoning children for disrespect (Deut 21:18-21) and cutting off women\u2019s hands for coming to their husband\u2019s aid (Deut 25:11-12).<\/p>\n
Some more conservative scholars will argue they have found a clear distinction: the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament are no longer relevant for us but the moral laws are. The problem of course is that this distinction is foreign to the Bible. They don\u2019t make that distinction. It\u2019s not like there\u2019s a list of ceremonial laws followed by a list of moral laws. That\u2019s another thing we have put on the text so that we can enforce the moral rules we like and dismiss the ones we don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
For example, Leviticus 18 has a list of unlawful sexual practices to avoid so that Israel doesn\u2019t defile themselves or the land. In that same list, without any marker for distinction, is both a prohibition against period sex and a man having sex with another man. For some reason, there are 3,874 articles on why the one about same-sex sex is an important one to follow for the very survival of our faith but very few on why the one about period sex is important.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Maybe Just Stick with Jesus?<\/strong><\/p>\nI have just probably oversimplified a whole field of study and I don\u2019t have an answer to any of these questions I have been asking. I\u2019m into philosophy. We don\u2019t really ever answer questions. We just learn how to ask better and better ones so people think we are smarter than we really are. But, if my reading is correct, I don\u2019t think other folks have a lot of great answers either. Not that I\u2019ve found anyway (feel free to send me free books if they address this to your satisfaction. Not just titles. I literally want you to buy me the book and mail it to me. Thank you.)<\/p>\n
Some have tried to just bypass the whole thing and said: let\u2019s just stick with Jesus. If Jesus says to do something, let\u2019s take it seriously. But otherwise, we\u2019ll just let it go.<\/p>\n
I think this is a helpful step. Lots of things are cleared up if we go this route. However, it ignores a few key things to think about. One, Jesus was Jewish and followed many of the same instructions that others did. Two, Jesus said a few problematic things too. You know, things like \u201clet the dead bury their own dead\u201d (Matt 8:22), if you get remarried after a divorce you are committing adultery (Matt 5:27-32), hating your parents, spouse, siblings, and kids is necessary to be a Jesus follower (Luke 14:26), sell all your belongings (Matt 19).\u00a0<\/p>\n
So I\u2019m not sure just sticking with Jesus is the answer to how the Bible connects to our morality. It certainly is central but perhaps there are a few missing pieces.<\/p>\n
Seek That Jesus-Shaped Wisdom & Ditch Rules<\/strong><\/p>\nWhat I think is missing in this recipe is wisdom<\/em>. I would argue that thinking in categories of absolute right and wrong isn\u2019t that helpful. There are very few absolute moral guidelines and they come pretty intuitively to us: don\u2019t kill people, don\u2019t be an asshole, tell the truth. Hopefully, we don\u2019t need 66 ancient books of stories to help us get those. But if we are trying to glean some wisdom from an ancient people who are trying to follow God, from Jesus Himself, and from some of His closest followers, then the Bible can be helpful (all of it, not just the Jesus parts). Jesus Himself seems to advocate this when he says that Sabbath is for people, not the other way around. The instructions are there to wrestle with, trying to figure out what still makes sense and what doesn\u2019t, what to keep, what to modify, and what to do away with as moral instruction.<\/p>\nJust as Richard Rohr says, I think we almost always lead with experience first. And wisdom is the art and science of experience. The Bible can be a wonderful moral aid on the journey. But when we use it as a rulebook, we often end up betraying our own moral compass since rules are often a way to control while wisdom is the path to freedom.<\/p>\n
But what do I know? I\u2019m still full of questions, fumbling along the way here.\u00a0<\/p>\n
*I just made up this sermon in my head. Apparently, you can take the pastor out of moralistic sermon-writing but I guess you can\u2019t take the moralistic sermon-writing out of the pastor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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