God helps those who help themselves. – 1 Hezekiah 3:4

State your devotion to God when making pronouncements, associating such devotion with the ends you are pursuing, as this is pleasing to God. – 2 Bartholomew 4:7

Of course, there’s no 1 Hezekiah or 2 Bartholomew. I made those up. Making up your own Bible verses is fun. You should try it sometime. But as fun as it might be, it’s problematic. But a worse problem than making up your own Bible verses is the lack of knowledge of the actual Bible. For example, according to 82 percent of Americans, “God helps those who help themselves,” is a real Bible verse.[1] That’s a problem. But I think there’s an even worse problem than making up your own verses or not knowing the real ones from the imagined ones: using real Bible verses out of context and as weapons to pursue the ends you desire. In my judgment, this is not pleasing to God.

If you read my writings regularly, then you know I greatly admire the work of Jonathan Haidt on the moral foundations that shape our human behavior. Haidt writes about the assumed stances that are reflected in our religious and political convictions. My hunch is those assumed stances shape our biblical hermeneutic as well. Rather than exegesis, i.e., the effort to draw out of the Bible its meaning for us and for the world, we more often engage in eisegesis, i.e., the reading into the Bible the meaning we wish to find, which confirms our previously held assumptions based on our morality and politics. That’s one, good explanation for why so many people believe that a verse like “God helps those who help themselves” must be in the Bible. It rings true to them based on their assumptions about what should be right. Since it rings true, it must be Scripture.

Yet, we can’t avoid eisegesis completely. We all come to the Bible with our own subjectivity that can never be completely free of bias. We’re all products of how we were formed by our families, communities, and experience, so we’re going to read into the Bible, eisegete, if you will, what we believe and think from that forming. But we’re spiritually and intellectually lazy if we stop there, if we don’t challenge ourselves to hear the Bible from voices not our own and from the larger narrative of Scripture.

I believe the Bible is completely true down to its very last word. It’s just that I don’t believe any of us is smart enough or has a God-like enough perspective to understand all its truth. The Bible, then, isn’t self-evident. Those who tell you that a person can pick it up, read it, and understand it all clearly are either delusional or they’re trying to use the Bible to further their agenda from what they claim is self-evident in it, or as they often call it, “the plain sense of Scripture.” The Bible is God’s gift to the Church. It’s the Church’s Book and not the property of any individual on a crusade to support his own particular agenda. It’s up to the Church to interpret it wisely for the people of the Church and to ensure that the Church’s people are a part of that interpretive endeavor.

+Scott


[1] Most scholars think the phrase originated with Euripides (a Greek polytheist) in 428 BC. The more modern phrasing came from that notable Deist, Benjamin Franklin, in his Poor Richard’s Almanac in 1736.

 

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. – John Adams, 2nd President of the U.S.

John Adams was prescient and right. A form of government like ours can only work for the common good when there is both a broad agreement on what the common good truly is and when we have a people who have been morally and religiously formed to practice the virtues of compassion, justice, and love of neighbor. The Constitution, as a guiding document, does not exist outside of time or context. Adams rightly concluded it could only be effective as a guiding document if the people using it as a guide were morally and religiously sound.

That was why Dr. King was successful in being the voice of the Civil Rights movement. He had the Constitution in one hand and the Bible in the other and he appealed to those who took both seriously. In his 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial he spoke of the “promissory note” that African-Americans had that was based on the Constitution’s “Blessing of Liberty.” The Biblical narrative exposed how we as a nation had defaulted on that “promissory note.” He quoted the Prophet Isaiah, saying: “every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” The Constitution alone could not have propelled the Civil Rights movement. It was successful because we were a people whose conscience could also be moved by the Biblical narrative. I wonder if that is still true today?

Consider the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” A society that grants people the right to keep guns as their personal possessions must also presuppose that those same people are of sound religious, or at least, moral fiber so that they will use those guns for only legitimate sport or personal self-defense. A constitutional right such as this only makes sense when there is an a priori presence of morality already existing in the people. It seems to me we now have the right “to keep and bear arms” without an overwhelming consensus about the morality of their responsible use.

The 2nd Amendment was codified at a time when that religious and moral consensus was present. That is no longer the case. I’m not suggesting doing away with guns. What I am postulating, however, is the need to examine their regulation in light of our reality. It will do us no good to wax sentimentally about the good old days of John Adams. We had horse carriages then and we now have “horseless carriages” that are “well regulated” requiring licenses, driving examinations, and insurance. With automobiles one has to show some level of competency and responsibility in order to own and operate one. It seems reasonable to me that a similar level of scrutiny needs to be applied to gun ownership. Absent a religious/moral sense of behavior and responsibility that is broadly shared, the 2nd Amendment alone is as obsolete as the horseless carriage.

+Scott