Why Scripture Should be Scary: A Fragment

The Bible is not a very politically-correct book. There’s a lot of stuff in there that would get it an R rating, maybe even NC-17. There’s murder, rape, incest, genocide, torture, all kinds of horrible things. And here’s the scary thing: some of those things are done in God’s name. And some of them are done under God’s orders. The story of how the Levites were originally consecrated to the priesthood is a good example. When Moses came down from Sinai and found the Israelites worshiping the golden calf, he called all loyal Hebrews to join him--only the Levites responded. He then ordered them to arm themselves and kill all of the people who were worshiping the calf. When the slaughter was over, Moses told them, "Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the LORD, each one at the cost of a son or a brother, and so have brought blessing on yourselves this day" (Ex. 32:29 NRSV). So here’s the question: how do we deal with this? Genocide—especially in the name of religion—is considered to be the supreme evil in contemporary culture. Our social experience of World War II, Communist Russia and China, Yugoslavia, and so many others, has taught us that this is the ultimate manifestation of evil on earth. How do we deal with the fact that the Bible depicts God ordering his people to commit these very acts?

Now, we could get into the theological discussion of whether these instances of violence and death are different from the ones we’ve experienced in the twentieth century, whether the direct involvement of God changes the moral implications, etc. But I don’t want to focus on the ethics so much as the way we read the Bible.  As for me personally, I do not believe in the doctrine of inerrancy, but this is not because I believe there are errors in the Bible—it’s because I believe that the term “inerrancy” is too limited to describe the way in which God inspires the Bible. To say that the Bible is inerrant is to say that we know exactly how God inspired the Bible, and exactly what that means. That being said, I believe that every word in the Bible is there by the will of God, and every word has a meaning. How do I, then, make sense of these passages where God’s own revelation seems to show him to be a genocidal monster?

This topic came up in the readings for one of my theology classes last semester, and the author makes a fairly compelling argument about what we should do with such passages:

That we have the treasure of the gospel in clay jars (2 Cor. 4:7) is as true of Scripture as it is of all subsequent Christian witness based on Scripture. Hence not everything found in the Bible is to be taken as a direct word of God to us. Some texts of the Bible may stand in utmost tension with the revelation of the character and purpose of God as identified by the grand narrative of Scripture…. Today it is essential that a Christian doctrine of revelation distinguish clearly between Scripture’s witness to the personal self-disclosure of God definitively in Jesus Christ and the historical contingencies and ambiguities of this witness. (Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, 40-1)

Now, let us set aside the question of whether it is right to call a book an “introduction” which deals so heavy-handedly with contentious theological topics. Let us, instead, deal only with the argument, which seems reasonable (for anyone who doesn’t view strict inerrancy as the only proper view of the Bible). Basically, Migliore is saying that there are certain passages of the Bible which are “out of tune,” so to speak, with the overall message of God—for instance, when an otherwise-loving God orders his people to massacre every man, woman and child in an enemy village (1 Sam. 15:3), or when Paul tells slaves to obey their masters (Eph. 6:5), or tells women to be silent in the church (1 Tim. 2:12), all examples used by Migliore. He suggests that we allow the overall message of Scripture outweigh the discordant elements, that we recognize that there is a human element involved which will, in places, corrupt the message. By the grace of God, however, the true image of God shines through the human corruption.

This approach seems reasonable, it really does. Being that I am not an inerrantist, I am tempted to accept this argument as an explanation of those passages. However, if we take a closer look at Migliore’s argument, we find that it is not so easy to accept—at least, not if we want the Bible to be anything more than a rubber-stamp for our own social morals. See, Migliore wants us to distinguish between the overall message of the Scripture and the corrupted elements. He says that we must separate the authentic witness of Scripture from “the historical contingencies and ambiguities of this witness.” Now, we could challenge him on this point by asking whether this makes it possible for a person without a degree in history or theology to truly understand Scripture. We could ask whether, in Migliore’s view, anyone truly knew the God of Scripture before the modern study of history and the modern ethical codes were developed. Were 10^th-century Christians unable to see the true God because they weren’t aware of the “historical contingencies” involved? All of the horrible things that have happened in the history of the Church—the persecutions, the wars, the complicity in “crimes against humanity” (a theologically potent term, in my opinion, since it has come to replace “crimes against God”)—all of these horrible things, did they happen because the Christians involved had the misfortune of living in a time before the academics told us who God really is? I said we “could” challenge Migliore on this because we will not actually do so—again, I am focused here on how we deal with the Bible. The points needed to be mentioned, but now that they have I will return to the subject at hand.

Here is my question, in regard to the “grand narrative of Scripture”: who gets to decide what the “grand narrative of Scripture" is? More specifically, who decided that the grand narrative of Scripture excludes the possibility that God allows, or even orders, pain and suffering to happen? I suspect that Migliore is working, to a certain degree, with the classic (and very old) assumption that the god of the Old Testament is stern and harsh, while Jesus Christ is loving and merciful. This is a mischaracterization of the Bible. The god of the Old Testament shows mercy—in fact, the narrative of the Old Testament is about mercy (in my opinion). It’s hard to see sometimes because we read it through our own moral standards, but the message of the Old Testament, if taken on its own terms, is that God showed mercy to his people, punishing them less than they deserved, preserving them, and restoring them. Likewise, the Jesus of the New Testament is not all cuddly and soft. He speaks of judgment constantly, of the people who will be thrown into the darkness where there is gnashing of teeth. Who is to say which part is really God, the judgment or the mercy? Who has the authority to say, “this is the true narrative of Scripture”—essentially, “this is the true nature of God"?

I wrote in my previous post about the fact that our own images of God and of goodness are never totally accurate—they are limited images of something our minds cannot grasp. I also wrote about how sometimes our images of God and goodness clash with the events of reality. Here, Migliore’s images of God and goodness are clashing with the events of Scripture. What Migliore is doing, although I highly doubt he sees it this way, is putting his own images of God and goodness above the words of Scripture. He has a firm idea of what it means to say “God is good,” and any part of Scripture which conflicts with that view must be the result of human corruption. He has, in essence, subjected the authority of Scripture to his own authority to dictate the terms of God’s goodness. The irony, of course, is that he gives himself this authority based on the “the historical contingencies and ambiguities of this witness,” and he ignores the fact that his interpretation has its own historical contingencies which are no more legitimate just because they are more modern.

Even if we believe that the Bible is full of human errors, the very moment we give ourselves the ability to say what is from God and what is from man we give ourselves the ability to dictate who God is. If we are to give the Bible any real authority over our lives and over our images of God and goodness, we must submit to the whole book, with faith that God will help us know how to treat each passage. This is why the Bible is, and should be, a terrifying book: because it should always have the ability to show us a god we don’t want to see. It should always be able to challenge our most basic assumptions about who God is, how he acts, and what he wants from us. If the Bible doesn’t scare us in that way—if it doesn’t have the capacity to break our hearts and shake our foundations—then it has no real power at all. We want to believe in the Disney Jesus—the white guy in the bleached robe with the shampooed hair, the well-trimmed bear, and the little child on each knee. But the Bible tells us that Jesus was as much God when he drove out the money-changers with a whip as he was when he allowed the little children to come to him.  He was as much God when he hung dying on the cross as when he stood transfigured on the mountain. He was as much God when he condemned divorce, lust, wealth, and any number of other things we have come to accept in our churches, as he was when he defended the prostitute from her accusers.

The danger we face when we read the Bible is that we bring non-negotiables to the table. We come to the Bible unable and unwilling to accept a god who would command the massacre of entire villages. We come to the Bible unable and unwilling to accept a god who would expect slaves to obey their masters or women to remain silent in church. We refuse to accept a god who was serious when he condemned divorce, when he told us that the rich must give up their wealth to enter the kingdom, when he said that we must be ready to forsake everything we cling to in this life and follow him. These are terms we cannot accept, so we chalk them up to human error or divine hyperbole or cultural context. We neuter the Bible so that it has no power to tell us anything we don’t want to hear. We take God’s work and we make it ours. If we want God to speak through Scripture, we must allow it to do so with His voice rather than ours. If we want to see God in the Bible, we must be open to seeing a god who is greater than we could ever imagine, and not always in ways we like.  Now, I'm not saying that we should accept all of these passages in a straight-forward way. We shouldn't just assume that God was endorsing genocide, slavery, or patriarchy. What I'm saying is that a responsible reading of scripture will not simply treat these passages as human errors just because they violate our modern sensibilities. We should be open to the possibility that they still have something to say to us, even if that thought scares us. Again I return to the theme from my last point: submission. The key to dealing with difficult texts in the Bible, in my humble opinion of course, is submission to God, to the true source of goodness, the only one who truly knows what it is to say, “God is good.”