One of the greatest stumbling blocks for non-religious people who are considering Jesus is their perception that the Bible is backward – especially on the issues they care deeply about. To many people, the Bible is backward on women’s rights, gay rights, slavery, and climate change. So what are we supposed to do when we encounter something in Scripture that is deplorable, disagreeable, or seemingly irreconcilable with a loving God?
Adam Hamilton, who leads the largest United Methodist congregation in the United States and has written several books that deal with this very question. In recent years, Hamilton has been very open about his struggle to accept parts of the Bible – especially the sections containing violence and certain sexual prohibitions – as God-ordained. Instead of reading Scripture in its gritty context, trusting the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and acknowledging that God is well within His rights to employ violence and to exact justice in pursuit of His greater plan to redeem creation, Hamilton has resorted to explaining away the hard-to-read parts of Scripture as if they never really belonged in the Bible at all.
One of the workarounds Hamilton suggests is to categorize biblical passages into three broad categories – which he calls buckets. As we encounter difficult scriptures, we (and/or our church leadership) get to decide which passages go in which bucket.
Bucket #1: The Keeper Bucket
Scriptures that express God’s heart, character and timeless will for us go in the first bucket. According to Hamilton, most of the Bible belongs here, and an example of a first-bucket passage would be, “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'”
Bucket #2: The Old School Bucket
Scriptures that expressed God’s will in a particular time, but not anymore. Hamilton suggests that most of the Old Testament laws belong in this bucket, since the early Christians decided in Acts 15 that followers of Jesus were no longer required to follow the letter of God’s law.
Bucket #3: The Throw-Away Bucket
Scriptures that never fully expressed the heart, character or will of God. Hamilton claims that some of the punishments prescribed in the Old Testament Law are too harsh to ever have been handed down by God. He also believes that the commands God gave Joshua to destroy entire cities of people, leaving no survivors, could not have been the will of a good and loving God, so they go in the throw-away bucket.
While I can appreciate Hamilton’s passion to engage non-religious people in conversation about the Bible, this approach to biblical interpretation is dangerous and deeply flawed. To suggest that only the passages that we deem acceptable should be considered the Word of God, while giving Bible readers a license to discard the unpleasant scriptures is the height of white liberal privilege. If we filled the third bucket with every Bible story in which God called for or allowed the deaths of innocent people, we’d lose a lot more than a few battle scenes from the Book of Joshua.
The Flood and the Ark?
The Exodus from Egypt?
The Babylonian Exile?
In fact, using Hamilton’s own logic, one could argue that a loving God could not have allowed His own son to die on the cross for our sins.
Hamilton is not the first person to suggest disposing of certain parts of Scripture; throughout history, many others have tried to customize the Bible according to their own subjective wants. In the second century, a wealthy Roman merchant named Marcion fell in love with Jesus, but he grew to despise Yahweh in the Old Testament. So Marcion decided that Yahweh was not the God who sent Jesus, and when Jesus spoke of his Father, he was referring to a higher God than Yahweh. So Marcion and his rich Roman buddies started their own sect within early Christianity by eliminating two-thirds of the Bible.
At the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, white slaveowners wanted to subdue their slaves with religion, but they were also afraid of the liberating power of Scripture. So before giving Bibles to their slaves, they removed all the parts that could be used as a rallying cry for freedom. Because the Bible is so anti-slavery, they were forced to remove around sixty percent of the scriptures. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were said to have employed similar tactics with Native Americans.
To bolster his case for the subjective dismantling of certain scriptures, Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor, quotes the Anglican Church’s Articles of Religion:
“Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be through requisite or necessary to salvation.”
Hamilton is quick to point out that the Articles of Religion “started with God, not scripture,” and that this statement “avoids trying to define inspiration…makes no claim that the Bible is without inconsistency or error,” and that it was adopted by the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. Curiously, Hamilton fails to give his readers the complete picture of Wesley’s understanding of the Bible’s clarity and authority, which could be summarized in Wesley’s own words:
“If there be any mistakes in the Bible there may as well be a thousand. If there be one falsehood in that book, it did not come from the God of truth.”
Or in this shorter, more entertaining quip:
“My ground is the Bible. Yea, I am a Bible-bigot. I follow it in all things, both great and small.”
To read the Bible properly is to humbly seek God’s heart on every page. As counter-cultural as this might sound, whenever my feelings on an issue are at odds with something the Bible says, I pray that my heart and mind would stay open to the Spirit of God, that He might give me wisdom to construct my priorities on the foundation of God’s word, rather than building my version of the Bible on the foundation of my priorities.
When approaching the Bible, we must be willing to ask the most uncomfortable questions. Questions like, “What if the Bible isn’t backward on the issues? What if I am?”
In so many ways, the Bible truly is backward when compared to “normal” secular culture. The world around us mostly says that wealthy, famous, and powerful people matter more than everyday peasants do, but the Bible says, “God does not show favoritism.”
The story of your God dying, naked and humiliated, on a Roman cross is as backward as it gets, so it would seem it’s a story that Christians would be eager to forget. But in the years following Jesus’s death, Christian leaders like Paul constantly championed the cross. “We preach Christ crucified,” Paul wrote, “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”
To religious men like Paul, part of what made the cross such a scandal was the Bible itself. Deuteronomy 21:23 says that “Anyone who hangs on a tree is under God’s curse.” So if the Bible is true, then Jesus was cursed. That is the reason why Paul preached “Christ crucified,” which literally means “Cursed Savior” or “Damned Messiah.”
What kind of God allows Himself to be cursed? What kind of God could ever be damned?
Only Jesus. Only the God who is love. This God may seem backward to us, but I’ve learned that it’s usually me who is backward. When you’re facing the wrong way, everyone and everything that’s facing the right way will seem backward to you.
Although Jesus was totally righteous, he chose to carry our unrighteousness. Although he was innocent, he gladly took the cross so the whole world can know that he took our sin and shame to the grave with him. And now, every curse is broken. Every fear is gone. And because he rose in glory, so will we. So when it comes to choosing my opinions about the issues or God’s eternal Truth, I choose the latter.
