Because the Bible is probably the most important book ever, but it sometimes seems that the only people who care about it are rival gangs of fundamentalists, Christian and atheist, determined to beat it into the shape of their own prejudices.
We want to rescue the Bible from their rival takeover bids. We want to take it out of the hands of people who hit you over the head with it.
It doesn’t have to be a textbook of infallible information and unbreakable laws to be God’s book. And it doesn’t have to be one big pile of lies and atrocity just because it has its dodgy bits.
We want to remind non-Christians that Christians can see the flaws of their own faith as well as others can. And we want to remind Christians too.
Let’s have a bit of balance, shall we?
I don’t agree with the idea that there are some parts of the Bible that we’d be better off chopping out, but it is very interesting to see what parts of the Bible people object to. A lot of the nominations are rather unsurprising, but they do show up the issues that people in our culture and society have with the Bible, for example:
- Violence in the Old Testament, e.g. “Kill both man and woman, child and infant…”, 1 Samuel 15:3
- Weird laws in the Old Testament, e.g. “You shall not cut the hair or clip the beard”, Leviticus 19:27
- Exclusivism, e.g. “I am the way, the truth and the life…”, John 14:6
- Eternal punishment, e.g. “Depart from me into the eternal fire…”, Matthew 25:41
- The role of women, e.g. “I do not permit a woman to teach…”, 1 Timothy 2:12, and “Wives, submit to your husbands…”, Ephesians 5:22
- Homosexuality, e.g. “Men were inflamed with lust for one another…”, Romans 1:27
- Slavery, e.g. “Slaves, submit to your masters”, 1 Peter 2:18
And so on… A lot of the verses nominated do raise thorny issues of interpretation or morality or both. A lot of them, people just don’t like what they have to say because they teach us things that we find uncomfortable, such as God’s judgement on sin. The problem people have with some of the verses is not with the verses in themselves, but the way people have used and abused them.
We’re increasingly seeing not just the truth of the Bible challenged, but its goodness too, with many atheists and sceptics objecting to the Bible on moral grounds. These are questions that we need to take seriously and respond to thoughtfully. It would make an interesting sermon series to take the top 10 most controversial verses in the Bible and go through them, looking at what the Bible really says on those topics.
Sadly, people are often more willing to accuse than to listen. Marcus Honeysett recently looked at the question of warfare in the Old Testament, specifically “what about the Amalekites?“, who God commanded the Israelites to wipe out. It’s a tricky subject, and unfortunately some people, rather than engaging with what he said, have been accusing him of defending genocide. But while some people use these issues polemically, these accusations only have power because they resonate with people’s real questions and concerns.
