For well over a decade now, I’ve noticed a change in the character and power of Christians’ doubts. Questions have centered on deeply personal experience, rather than doctrine. Their view of Jesus was also deeply personalized. Of course, our relationship with Jesus is personal, but they measured Christianity by how they perceived their own life and, in fact, the state of the world around them. Naturally, they looked to the Bible to find answers, but their expectations and assumptions about Scripture raised more questions.
Of course, struggling with Jesus’ words is an ancient problem. After a grumbling crowd walked away when Jesus told them they must eat his flesh and drink his blood or else they’d have nothing to do with him, he asked his disciples if they were going to leave, too. Peter famously answered, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life (John 6:68).” That reply, however, posed its own set of problems for the new questioners I’ve met with and many aren’t responding well. Some estimate that thirty million Americans will leave the faith over the next thirty years. In classic form, Peter shows us the way we should respond; but emulating his resolute—if not always self-aware—faith has always been hard. I want to explore together how our cultural moment makes staying with Jesus so challenging for many of our friends and family members.
My non-Christian Seattle friends don’t really care what the Bible says. The struggling believers I’ve met with still do, but a lot of the Bible doesn’t feel safe to them. But instead of rejecting the Bible outright, increasing numbers of churchgoers are looking for a third choice. They aren’t asking, “Why do we have to believe the Bible?” They’re asking, “Do we have to believe the Bible says that?” The Bible matters to them, but don’t mistake them for Bereans diligently studying God’s word and submitting themselves to its teaching (Acts 17:10–15). They’re drawn to teachers who promise to liberate the Bible from its regressive past. Such teachers aren’t hard to find. Plenty of trendy authors, speakers, even pastors are ready to help us discover more psychologically resonant interpretations that resolve our tensions, make us feel safer, and promise to be more palatable to our non-Christian friends.
This is an attractive promise: offering to make those hard passages safe and acceptable which too often have felt like glitches in the gospel’s otherwise user-friendly app. A closer look, however—a Berean commitment to the truth—betrays a tragic irony. Making the Bible safe actually makes it more dangerous.
The Dangerous Safety of Freedom and Authenticity
Insight #1: The problem with being your own master is that it makes you your own slave.
Personal freedom and authenticity are at the core of modern anthropology and foundational to how our culture defines individual happiness. But they conceal a devastating paradox. By making liberated authenticity our prime directive, we become cold, hard determinists. Personal creeds like “I was born this way” or “I’ve always felt this way” not only insist that society conform to our self-understanding. They demand that we conform, too.
That approach to ourselves and others sounds loving and is socially pragmatic in many ways. But as a meta-value it’s a Trojan Horse filled with existential determinism. To be authentic, the individual must conform to her most compelling desires. If “desire” sounds dismissive, the same forced conformity applies if “authenticity” demands that we embrace our deepest sense of who we are. True self-determination, however, must include the inner agency to resist or change one’s sense of self.
Advocates of our absolute autonomy would argue that the fight to change is a valid personal choice. But the intellectual and emotional momentum of their anthropology has no real place for such a thing. Why, after all, would I struggle to change, and into what, and for whom? If there’s no higher order to align with than my sense of myself (which is fluid over years and certainly decades), then all that’s left is existential self-flagellation. If I struggle, therefore, I must be enslaved to the social forces I’ve internalized. The only answer that autonomy offers is, “obey yourself,” but that makes you both master and slave.
The truly free individual stands above, or at least next to, their inclinations and evaluates them. The truly free don’t simply accept their desires or sense of self because they experience them deeply. Evaluating and affirming or denying one’s core desires can be invigorating or exhausting, but it’s essential to true personhood. It’s also at the heart of the Christian life, which demands daily self-denial. The modern view of the authentic person allows for self-regulation on the edges, but issues of sexual orientation and gender are to be obeyed, not governed. That’s not freedom and it’s certainly not Christianity.
The famous words of Psalm 139 that assure us that God knows us intimately have brought comfort to billions. But they also teach that God knows us better than we know ourselves. God tells us who we are, as the psalm’s ending plea recognizes. That’s why Jesus called us to die to ourselves if we would live. The most reflective, self-aware, and well-adjusted among us don’t really know who we are until God reveals us to ourselves. The irony of freedom and authenticity is that self-definition is a fool’s errand that leads to slavery.
The Dangerous Safety of Cultural Liberation
Insight #2: Those who find the socio-cultural speck in other generations’ eyes must see the log in their own.
Some today make much of liberating the Bible from the blindness, or worse, of past generations. They seem to assume, however, that we ourselves hover over our own cultural moment immune to its influence. Is it any surprise that such teachers discover a biblical ethic of personal (especially sexual) liberty that went unnoticed for 3,000 years?
To state the obvious, everyone has always been an individual; but our contemporary vision of the human person is new. No age in history has separated the self from family, social mores, civic authority, or even our own bodies the way we have. Since time before memory, these rich, embodied connections have had defining—or at least compelling—influence over who we are and what we do. That paradigm shouldn’t be idealized, but modern secular culture is the first in history to amputate the individual from the innate authority of every external claim. It’s entirely predictable, therefore, that teachers saturated in today’s culture feel like God can’t possibly be concerned about people’s private lives the way we once imagined he was. For all the scandalous pleasures rampant in the ancient Greco-Roman world, it’s worth asking if we, not they, live in the most sexualized age in human history. Sex has always been one of the most compelling human instincts, but our culture’s sexual autonomy has taken lust to new heights—or rather depths. There are now middle-schools that think it prudent to introduce sex toys to twelve-year-olds. Those tweens are likely to join the 87% of men and 28.5% of women who view porn weekly (according to statista.com). No culture has ever had such private, widespread access to perversity.
Naturally the result is a dissolution of sexual boundaries. Pointing women to Paul’s exhortation to dress modestly in 1 Timothy 2:9 can evoke accusations of sexism. But as British journalist Louise Perry argues in her book, “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution,” sexual liberation has not served women well. Perry is not a Christian, but she might appreciate Paul’s stern instruction to abstain from sexual immorality in 1 Thessalonians 4 because it harms others.
“Why should I believe the Bible says that?” is asked and answered in this “culturally liberated” context. In this day and age, God must want each of us to flourish according to our liberated experience of ourselves.
Our culture’s nexus of individualism and sexual freedom is foundational to the delusion that for millennia the church got Christian orthodoxy and morality tragically wrong. Puritanical lamentations like these make our secular neighbors roll their eyes, but many evangelicals are ready to roll right along with them. It’s popular in the church to lament the purity culture of the ‘90s (as if an age that celebrates the things ours does is a fair judge of purity’s value). But the call to sexual holiness has ancient roots in church history because it has undeniable roots in the church’s Bible, which tells us that the sexual immorality practiced by the world shouldn’t be named among God’s people (Ephesians 5:2). I won’t catalogue the entertainment industry’s contributions, but it’s worth noting that we live in the most entertainment saturated culture in history and churchgoers’ viewing habits aren’t that different than their neighbors’.
The Dangerous Safety of False Humility
Insight #3: The claim to discover interpretations the Church missed for thousands of years is not humble and its motivation is not complex.
Once the story of the Church’s misguided and unloving traditional ethical vision is accepted, the contemporary Bible reader is tempted to discover a problematic complexity in the meaning of passages we all once thought were straightforward. We begin to see new layers and ambivalence in the texts that make us wonder about the assumptions held by our pre-scientific, pre-therapeutic forebears.
All words have shades of meaning and no passage exists in a cultural or linguistic bubble. That’s standard exegetical wisdom. But while words have variations of meaning, they aren’t shapeshifters. Clever and supposedly sensitive interpretations can’t undermine or problematize (for example) Paul’s infamously frank rejection of homosexual practice in Romans 1:26–27. And while cultural and historic context should always inform the text, it must never speak over the text. Beth Allison Barr confuses that relationship throughout The Making of Biblical Womanhood. She would disagree, but this quote is telling: “Because I am a historian, I know there is more to Paul’s letters than what his words reveal (p. 56).” History is a good servant of exegesis, but a bad master. The biblical authors and their writings, after all, belong to the same history; these authors surely understood more about their setting than most of those who, 2,000 years later, have a vested interest in explaining away their unsafe words.
Now, don’t misunderstand me: students of the Bible must maintain epistemological humility. Some Bible passages are difficult and need to be interpreted openhandedly. The problem is that the meaning of most passages isn’t ambiguous. Many passages become complex only once we want them to be. God’s command to Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil seemed straightforward until the serpent “problematized” it. His tactics are still successful.
Humility is a virtue; but it’s also a two-way street. Humility accepts that we don’t understand everything, yes. But false humility assumes that our limited understanding is somehow kinder or better informed or more enlightened than God’s revealed word. Biblical humility takes “every thought captive to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). Humility is foremost humble about its own understanding (Prov. 3:5). True humility knows that we don’t “live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4, ESV). Christians are called to accept what God says even when it isn’t psychologically resonant or socially acceptable to the world or even to the believer.
The Dangerous Safety of Exegetical Repentance
Insight #3: The Bible doesn’t repent. We do.
Once it becomes axiomatic that the Church, as the dominant institution of its era, used its hegemony to build a moral framework based on a pre-scientific view of humanity and a bigoted view of non-traditional lifestyles, the only loving response is to confess and repent; but should we repent by re-interpreting the Bible?
Before we examine that, we should acknowledge that the Church has hurt people who face deeply tender and personal struggles. God takes that seriously and calls us to undo the damage we’ve done. We must repent personally and reform the practices of the churches under our care. Many are doing that.
We can do more, but we need to remember that the Bible doesn’t need to repent. We need to repent, and Christians repent by conforming to Scripture, not making Scripture conform to us. Repenting by exegesis responds to the Church’s real, exaggerated, or imagined failures by a novel interpretive algorithm:
First, acknowledge that people have been hurt by the Church’s use of Scripture.
Secondly, admit that hurting people is not loving.
Third, realize that previous generations were blinded by pre-scientific ignorance, cultural bias, or just plain meanness.
Finally, repent by reinterpreting the most hurtful passages in ways that don’t cause pain.
As intended, this path leads to new discoveries about passages that seemed clear, if unpleasant, since ages past. The problems with this approach flow chiefly from a misguided view of the individual’s struggle with sin and Scripture.
Obviously, self-righteous Christians can wound people, but frankly much of the Bible doesn’t need the help. Scripture is full of awkward, offensive, and disturbing passages. And passages that don’t strike our personal issues are difficult explain to our non-Christian neighbors. But awkward or not, Scripture speaks of sin with troublesome specificity.
It’s hard enough to read difficult passages in our personal Bible study. It’s even more difficult when a pastor points them out. When they do, it’s as likely as not that the encounter will become part of the story of the Church’s hurtful use of Scripture. Of course, some pastors are too harsh, but most aren’t— not by a long shot. What’s more, the list of people who like being called to repent is very, very short.
Frankly, most of us are immune to those calls anyway. But Christians in some ages expected their pastor to encourage, exhort, and admonish them for their sin. They may have done it poorly, but it was their job. It’s still that way for some sins like racism, thank God. But racism enjoys a status few other transgressions have. In our effort to make the Bible safe, we created a new class of formerly sinful sins that we now know aren’t sins at all.
The Dangers of a Safe Bible That Isn’t Also Good
True cultural ignorance, simplistic arrogance, and social subjection are all bad things, of course, and a good Church should create a safe place (properly understood) even for grumbling, wavering people. But making every doctrine palatable—much less safe—is impossible when their source is a book like ours. The Bible is full of comforts, but it also pierces “to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account (Heb. 4:12-13, ESV).”
The Bible isn’t safe the way we naturally think of safety. In the end, by which I mean the very end, trying to make the Bible safe is itself dangerous. God’s not loving because we found a way to make him seem loving. God is love and every single thing he says is loving because he is. To borrow from C. S. Lewis, God is good—but who said anything about safe? So too, God’s Word is good, but it’s not safe.
Footnotes
