The eCrozier

“God only helps those who help themselves.” – 2 Hezekiah 3:16

I realize there’s no 2 Hezekiah. I’ve occasionally joked around with others, seeking to find some shaky justification for my actions, by quoting 2 Hezekiah and then making up a verse to support what I already wanted to do. I’m not alone. There’s a not-so-proud history in the Church of concocting biblical justification for the actions we take. Rarely do we actually compose false books of the Bible to do so, but the consequence is just the same. This is simply another way of accomplishing the age-old task of finding a way to “baptize” what we already want to do.

For example, Jesus throughout the Gospels speaks consistently and commandingly about forgiveness and his disciples need to practice it. In Matthew 6:15, Jesus says: “If you do not forgive people their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” And it’s not just this one verse. The entire Gospel of Jesus reinforces this theme of forgiveness. So, this isn’t just one obscure verse, but a message that recurs again and again. Yet, for many what they prefer to read in the Bible is this: “Forgive no one. Those who wrong you are wrong. By forgiving them, you excuse the wrong, and only encourage them.”

In the 2^nd Century, Marcion of Sinope took the Bible and a pair of scissors and cut out the parts of the Bible that didn’t conform to his understanding of Christianity. He excised the entire Old Testament and certain parts of the New Testament, which seemed to him in agreement with the Old Testament. In case you were wondering, he was told to leave the Church. On our worst days, we’re all closet Marcionites.

And therein lies the hermeneutical problem. Cherry-picking verses is never a good idea. The Bible is a whole story and in its entirety it tells a coherent and intelligible story of the human condition and God’s remedy of that condition in and through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. When any of us extracts verses out of context or ignores the parts of the Bible that challenge us, then we are practicing a dubious hermeneutic, one that often leads to self-justification and, eventually, to self-delusion.

The hermeneutical question then is not what we want the biblical story to say to us, but rather what it actually, in its entire narrative, says. Of course, this requires us as a Church to engage in a communal interpretation of that narrative. Not surprisingly, we don’t always agree what the Bible is saying to us. I find the work of the Swiss theologian, Ulrich Luz, helpful here. He writes about the history of interpretation and how we should continually incorporate that tradition into our current interpretive understanding of the Bible. This cumulative approach welcomes the past in our interpretation today so we might avoid hermeneutical laziness or willful ignorance.

None of this is an exact science. We’re always struggling to discern what the biblical witness says. That’s why we need one another for, contrary to 2 Hezekiah, God does NOT only help those who help themselves.

+Scott