Phrases and sayings without context are dangerous tools in the hands of those who are more concerned with promoting an agenda than investigating and understanding the truth. Facebook has become the fertile spawning grounds for the dissemination of such content. Under the auspices of sounding wise, individuals parlay foolishness in the form of disconnected quotes to advance the propaganda of their cause. Unfortunately the Bible is often the source of such malpractice and self proclaimed evangelical Christians are far too often the ignorant practitioners.
I do not regard myself to be a Bible scholar in the strictest sense, but I do consider myself to be a student of scripture. As our primary source (for Christians) of understanding our God and our Lord Jesus Christ, I place an extremely high value on scripture and believe it is incumbent upon every Christian to be diligent students of the Bible in order to understand the truth inherent within. But, there is a vast difference between being a student of Scripture for the sake of understanding truth, and merely being a casual reader of Scripture, or a Sunday listener to Scripture, or an occasional podcast or sermon consumer of what someone else says about Scripture for the sake of hearing what we want to hear. Studying Scripture is more than reading random passages that pop up in someone’s news feed as the inspiration for the day and it is more than reading an abbreviated commentary of an isolated verse in the Daily Bread.
Far too many Christian believe they have an understanding of the truth of the Bible because they have read parts of it, and have listened semi-intently to sermons that tickle their ears on Sunday mornings. There are too many who read selective passages from scripture with preconceived notion of what ought to be and translate their bits and pieces to fit their own narrative. They hold dearly to those passages to defend their world view, never minding that their world view did not exist when the passage was originally written. Making matters worse, they proudly and boldly flaunt their ignorance of original context and meaning by misrepresenting their chosen Scripture on clothing, home decor, memes and Facebook feeds. By doing so they are showing themselves to be Bible manipulators rather than Biblical disciples. To say I am frustrated by the increasing presence of such nonsense would be a tremendous understatement.
I have grown incredibly weary of those who are more interested in twisting scripture to fit their own agenda, than they are in working diligently to understand its truth. I am disillusioned by the masses of intellectually lazy who force Bible passages to succumb to their warped version of faith and boldly proclaim it to the masses, pulling some into their own fantasy world and pushing the very ones who most need to hear the truth of gospel, farther away. I am even more disturbed that such nonsense has been tolerated, even modeled and promoted by those who occupy pulpits and positions of leadership in the church at both a local and national level.
It seems that in an age of excessive access to the Bible, we have become complacent in our reverence for its truth. We are so conditioned by our culture to oversimplify questions and answers, to oversimplify truth, that we have lost an ability to search, to dig, to study, to do the hard work of understanding difficult answers to complex questions. We have become conditioned to believe that everything is simple. God’s solution to the political debate of the day is just a matter of finding the right verse that will look good on a background of the American flag. Defending my position by pulling scripture out of context has become more important than understanding context and original meaning first and applying it, with thoughtful integrity, to my situation 2000+ years later.
Understanding the truth of scripture requires work. It requires careful listening to the Holy Spirit. It requires intellectual honesty. It requires an openness that your presuppositions might be wrong. It requires the humility to admit that God’s perspective may conflict with our own. It requires a willingness to change my mind and reorient my position based on what is true by God’s standards rather than what I wish to be true by my own standards. It requires a belief that understanding truth, and God himself, is not always easy or simple.
There will always be haters who isolate passages in attempts to discredit the Bible, the Christian faith and even God himself. I expect that. They don’t believe the Bible to hold any value anyway, so there is no compulsion to treat it with respect. I get that.
What I don’t understand, is how the very people who claim to hold scripture in such high regard, as the very Word of God, can at the same time, treat it with such disrespect. Whether we want to admit it or not, each time we read scripture through the lens of nationalistic pride, the values of western culture, or our own wants and desires, we dishonor scripture. When we make up our mind first, then find a Biblical passage to defend it, we treat the Bible with egregious disrespect. When we claim a single verse as a personal promise from God, without understanding what comes before or after, and without any attempt to understand the original intent, or how it fits in the larger narrative of the entire Bible, we hold the whole truth of that passage to be unimportant and irrelevant and deem our own understanding to be greater than God’s.
That is a dangerous place be, but it is where we are as a Christian community. It is who we have become. And we should should be very afraid. Our disrespect for God’s truth should have us trembling with fear. Unfortunately, we have become so blind to our disrespect that we can’t even see it. Our own pride shelters us from the fear that we should feel and emboldens us in our nonsense.
May God awaken us to our ignorance, and renew in us a desire for what is right and true.
No comments:
Post a Comment