Thinking is disheartening. Anger, injustice, traumas, poverty, biases, racism, pride, sexism, blind beliefs, lies, violence, broken friendships, abuse, failures, all subvert joy and optimism. And we haven’t mentioned cancer.
Full
disclosure--I am a liberal Christian. Broadly speaking, I believe in
traditional Biblical teachings on God, the fall, the Israelites, praise and
prayer, Jesus, his death and resurrection, sin and salvation, a second coming, heaven
and hell. But I don’t believe a human being exists five seconds after
conception. And recently, I was floored when the US Supreme Court ruled that proof of innocence was not sufficient to halt an execution.
For a while,
I believed if Christians of good faith from different traditions came together, with honest hearts and rigorous intellect, the rest of us could count on them to reach a minimum consensus on essential issues: “how then shall we live?” Or at the very least, “what
must we do to be saved?”
But a young
Evangelical pastor and a Catholic professor, among others, have disabused me of
that notion. They seemed so very reasonable at
first, almost loving. Ted Cruz they were not!
So I
watched, daring to hope for strong arguments. None came.
The pastor
went after “progressive Christians,” comparing them to “parasites.” He tried,
he really tried to say he was debunking “progressive Christianity” and not
“progressive politics.” Then he used Barack Obama as the face of unacceptable
religion. You know, Pastor Barack Obama. He derided him for preferring the
Sermon on the Mount to the book of Romans, for “using one part of the Bible to refute another.”
Such Christians can be called that only with “quotation marks.” And as if on
cue, the pastor added Evangelicals like him suffer much hostility for their
faith; they are victims of today’s American culture. I am tempted to conclude he took the same rhetoric course as Prince Harry.
The
professor, for her part, decried the “woke” movement, warning it grew from
socialist roots. As if that was enough. As if there was an 11th
amendment: “thou shall reject all socialist tenets.” She also accused the
“wokists” (that is a word, right?) of minimizing fathers. The “they-don’t-believe-in-fathers” line was new to me. But that of course is a strategy—attacking an issue through its
worst expressions, however rare.
So, most
unfortunately, there is no broad Biblical consensus that I trust for essential life or spiritual issues (marriage and divorce, money,
politics, abortion, nationalism, miracles, women as pastors, etc.).
Who exactly will make it to heaven?
Only those who are predestined, who accept Jesus as
their personal savior and have a personal relationship with him, who are
transformed through water baptism and the Holy Spirit? Those who love the Lord with all
their heart, mind, and soul, who love their neighbors as themselves, whose lives reflect Paulinian morality? Those who have
faith, who love justice and mercy, who pursue righteousness, who are
holy and have a pure heart?
Is it a
combination of those conditions, and if so, which ones? Is there a hierarchy?
A few years
ago, I was struck by the importance of forgiveness: “forgive us our sins as we forgive
those who sin against us.” That passage and some others indicate God will
not forgive those who don’t forgive their fellow human beings. Can we get to
heaven if we don't forgive?
More answers would come, I suspect, with more knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, history and anthropology, Church fathers and traditions ...
But for now, I remain at square zero. The Bible is bigger than I can grasp, and I trust no scholars, seminary professors, or independent researchers to teach me its essential truths. They, like me, come to Scriptures with their own biases. And sadly, our religion serves our prejudices.
So yes, I
pick and choose the Biblical principles to follow. I grant the highest priority
to Jesus’ teachings, then everyone else: the OT prophets, poets, leaders, storytellers;
NT writers Paul, James, Timothy, etc.
As a result, I am guided by three principles. First, the unassailable characteristics of God. He
is holy; He is eternal; He is love; He is glorious; He keeps his word; He does not change; He is omnipotent and
omniscient; He is jealous; He is obsessed with "the least of these"; He is good; He loves justice AND mercy. He must also love
beauty: He made the earth and a whole lot of people quite beautiful. Second, his
son Jesus brought not just the initial but the complete salvation message to us when he lived on earth. So if he didn’t talk about an issue,
it’s non-essential. Third, I am a 90-percenter. That I believe
something does not make it good or even accurate. I could be wrong.
This is sure
to make the “all of Scripture crowd” see red. They will declare such an
approach anathema, since the whole Bible is “God-breathed and inerrant.”
To that, my answer
is stupidly simple: you do it too--a most unsatisfactory response. We
should not decide what is acceptable by what others do. So let me try anew: I
do this for I must. We all have to, lest we twist ourselves into varied
“interpretations.”
One need not
be a Biblical scholar to see the myriad of Protestant denominations are but a
result of “picking and choosing.” For that matter, the pastor and the professor
discussed above would vehemently disagree with each other regarding what the
Bible says about Mary.
I grew up in
a church that insisted women cover their heads during services. My late mother went
further and refused to wear pants until her death. Pants were for men and therefore forbidden. Neither she nor my dad wore
wedding rings though they were married for more than 50 years. God bless them!
How many proponents of the “whole Bible” approach have divorced and remarried?
How many require women to cover their heads in church?
This is not a matter of ‘anything goes.’ It would be good to recall the Bible is an anthology, not a single book. A Shakespeare scholar may not agree that Hamlet is his greatest work, but he would not be taken seriously if he chose The Merry Wives of Windsor. And neither would anyone who pretends all the plays are of equal weight.
God, the Supreme Being, could have produced a Bible without any contradictions, real or apparent or cultural or political or linguistic. He did not. Maybe he wanted to tell us, “stay humble; you know less than you think.”
We should meditate on that.
