The Bible We Wish We Had And The Hermeneutic Of Denial

Peter Enns has spoken of differentiating between the Bible we wish we had, and the Bible we actually do have. We might expect that if God were to write a book for us, it ought to contain perfect, unchanging, absolute truth which is plainly understandable. That is the way we think the Bible ought to be, similar to how we assume that if God is good and powerful then the world ought to be a place where there was no suffering or injustice.

But there is a big difference between the way we wish the world was, and the way we wish the Bible was, and the way they actually are. As Enns writes in The Bible Tells Me So, 

"This kind of Bible— the Bible we have— just doesn’t work well as a point-by-point exhaustive and timelessly binding list of instructions about God and the life of faith... When we try to squish the Bible’s diverse voices into one voice, we are no longer reading the Bible we have— we are distorting it and cutting ourselves off from what it has to offer us."

Nowhere is this more true than in how conservative Evangelicals approach the issue of homosexuality. The assumption is that we can take what the Bible has to say about homosexuality, and trust that this can be taken as a timeless and binding view that we must uphold and defend, regardless of what science and life tell us, regardless of what our conscience tells us, regardless of what others tell us first hand. We are "safe" to discount others, discount our own moral conscience, discount what we find in our lives, and instead trust in the Bible here.

This was exactly the hermeneutical approach taken by conservative Christians in their defending of the perpetuation of institutionalized slavery in the United States. However, rather than finding a better way to approach Scripture based on understanding the mistakes of our past, conservatives continue to use this same approach of unquestioning obedience. 

To do this, they need to deny that there ever was a problem with how their Christian forefathers used that same approach to the Bible to justify slavery. For example, Tim Keller makes the claim that, "there was never any consensus or even a majority of churches that thought slavery and segregation were supported by the Bible.” The implication is that supporting slavery was always a minority view in the church. As I have pointed out before, that is simply not true. The reality is, the church has a long history of endorsing slavery based on the authority of the Bible, including the New Testament, which says that Christians can own slaves.

Others have argued that because slavery in ancient Rome was not based on race that this somehow makes it okay. This of course ignores the fact that slavery has always been characterized by dehumanizing violence, including rape. There is simply no way to paint slavery of any time as morally acceptable. Not the slavery of the Old Testament, not the slavery of Rome, and not the slavery endorsed by the church for centuries and centuries.

In his book Every Good Endeavor, Keller writes that, "Many critics of Christianity simply assume that the Bible wrongly endorsed slavery and that therefore it may be wrong about other things it teaches. Actually, biblical theology destroyed the coercive heart of the institution of slavery within the Christian community and finally led Christians to abolish the inevitably oppression-prone institution itself."

What Keller does not say is that the way of reading the Bible so that it leads to the abolition of slavery is a categorically different approach than the one he takes in regards to homosexuality. If we read the Bible as a timeless and eternal guide for God's morals, then we must conclude that either God wants slavery or that the Bible is wrong and cannot be trusted. That's one way, and it is a dead end.

In contrast, we have the way of reading the Bible that does lead to the abolition slavery. This involves learning to read the Bible on a trajectory, accepting that the Bible does not always provide us with timeless eternal truths that we must unquestioningly perpetuate and defend, but instead requires that we question and grow and develop -- moving in some cases beyond where the Bible is stuck in the morally wrong assumptions of the religious and political culture of the time. 

What we find is not a timeless and eternal blueprint, but a view that is on the one hand limited by the blinders of the surrounding culture, and at the same time giving us clues of how we need to grow beyond that, towards transforming our world to more and more take on the values of Jesus' politics and economy where, as Paul says, "There is division of slave or free... for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal 3:28).

If we want to read the Bible like that in regards to slavery, then we need to do the same in regards to homosexuality. Now, of course just because the Bible is wrong in endorsing slavery does not automatically mean that it is wrong in condemning homosexuality. However, it does necessarily follow that we cannot simply claim in regards to homosexuality that "this is what the Bible plainly teaches" and defend that. We need to instead look at the evidence in our lives and world, and learn how to morally discern what is good in connection with life and reality.

However, the predominate "party-line talking points" approach of conservative Evangelical leaders today (such as Keller, Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today Magazine, and so on) in regards to homosexuality is to not do that at all. Their strategy in the culture war is to instead utterly ignore everything but what "the Bible clearly teaches." This approach is an exact mirror of how Christians in the past defended slavery in the United States.

Conservative Christians like Keller continue to make the same mistake today with the issue of homosexuality that their forefathers made in the past with slavery. Nothing has changed in how the Bible is approached. Nothing is learned from the past. Instead we have a hermeneutic of denial -- denying the reality of the past and the harm it caused, and denying the harm that same approach of unquestioning obedience continues to cause today.

It seems clear to me that the priority is not on caring for the oppressed and the marginalized, but rather defending the way we wish the Bible was. Conservative evangelicals wish the Bible were a book they could unquestioningly look to for timeless and absolute moral guidelines, and have so based their faith on that assumption that to question it is to question the very inspiration of Scripture and with it the very foundation of their faith.

That's why they so vigorously defend it, they feel threatened. It's understandable that people who feel threatened become blind to how they are hurting others. It's understandable, but it's not okay. In focusing on defending their system of the Bible they wish they had, the focus is placed on defending that fictional view, at the expense of hurting the very people Jesus said we should especially care for.