Bible bashing

I typed 'Bible basher' into Google and the Urban Dictionary gave me these definitions:

A Bible Basher is someone who constantly goes around forcing the word of the bible on everyone else, and claims that everything BUT the Bible is evil.

A religious person who is obsessively you could say, and insanely into his or her religion. They tend to 'bash on' about their religion and try to feed it to you. No disrespect to their religious beliefs, but knowing a bible basher can sometimes get sticky. They tend to be very protective over their religion, and know nearly everything about it. They will argue the point, and during times of bashing, can become quite violent.

A bible basher is one who lives their life by the bible, and tries to force the bible upon all they meet.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bible+basher

Wow! I'm guessing all these people have had a pretty negative experience with Christians. Faced with this definition, who wants to be a 'Bible basher'?

Well in this post I want to try to explain why the Bible is so important to me (and therefore why so much of my blog is based on the Bible), and also try to explain how I have no intention of bludgeoning people in an insensitive and emotionally detached manner, but I do want to confront people with the truth that the Bible claims has relevance for their life as much as mine.

The Bible is a unique book. It's made up of many different types of literature, written by different people at different times in history. It makes astonishing claims about who we are, why we are here, who God is, and how we can know Him. Many people look at the world around and think 'There must be a God behind all this'. But it's only in the Bible that we find out exactly who this God is. I believe this because, having read the Bible over and over since my childhood, I have never found a book like it which holds together so well, considering it was written under so many different circumstances as I mentioned above.

I love reading. I studied English at university and read many books by the same author (Dickens and Eliot being my favourites). What has always interested me is the way that a writer's ideas change over time. Even when you find ten books written by the same author, they will not always be consistent in ideology and morality or politics. And yet, despite the fact that so many different individuals contributed to the Bible, there is a striking coherence and unity throughout the various books. The main idea is that God is real, He made everything and wants to know us. Over the centuries that the Bible texts cover, there is a recurring cycle of people turning away from God to 'do their own thing' and live life the way they want to. God is never happy with that. He keeps on calling people to follow Him and go his way. But man's disobedience has separated him from God, so God sent Jesus, His Son, to come into the world and die on the cross to be punished for the sins of the world. He raised Jesus to life and calls people everywhere to follow Him and believe that their sins can be forgiven through Jesus.

All the Bible books in some way contribute to this message. They could be establishing the fundamental disobedience of humanity, as seen in Genesis. They could be calling men back to follow God, as seen in the prophets such as Isaiah. They could be predicting the coming of Jesus, such as the prophet Micah. They could be telling the story of Jesus' life, like the gospel of Matthew. All of the books in the Bible provide a piece to the puzzle. Together, they give a wholistic picture of who God is and how we can know Him.

So really, you have to read the Bible through and through before you judge it. So many people have said to me that the Bible is not trustworthy, that it's full of contradictions. But many of these people have not read it thoroughly. Perhaps their knowledge is based on taking some words out of context. The Bible is not always easy to understand, but I have found that the more I study it, the more it makes sense. It really does fit with what I see around me: people suffering with broken lives, desperate for meaning, but unable to find that meaning in human relationships, money and status. I see a world that needs Jesus. I can testify to how He has changed my life, and the lives of many others too.

Ultimately, I follow the Bible because Jesus did. Jesus is the most impressive person that ever existed, to me. He had an astounding impact on history and on the lives of those who met Him. And He identified the scriptures as the indestructible and authoritative word of God. He upheld the Bible at every turn, as an authority about God (Mt 21:42, Mt 22:29), as true promises which will always be fulfilled (Mt 26:54), as never becoming void (Jn 10:35, Mt 5:18). He saw the Bible as coming from God, revealing the truth and being utterly reliable. His life was based on scripture, and His life was amazing. Therefore I decided to follow Jesus, and so I am trying to base my life on scripture too.

The writer of Hebrews suggests that the word of God is 'living and active', 'Sharper than any double-edged sword... it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart' (Heb 4:12). I have always found this to be true. Paul writes in 2 Timothy 3:15-17 that scripture is 'God-breathed', and it certainly speaks with authority that seems to be more than human; divine. The Bible says many things which are difficult for us to accept -such as the existence of hell and the reality of God's judgement, which I have been blogging about recently- and I don't know why any human would make such terrifying stuff up! The Bible is full of genuine insight that makes sense with reality and does indeed judge the heart of anyone who reads it- again in a way that no human finds comfortable. Of course, humans physically wrote the Bible, but they were 'carried along by the Holy Spirit' (2 Peter 1:21), and it is God's words rather than the words of mere mortals.

The thing is, it's difficult to say that the Bible is only partially true and worship God. Surely you don't want to be friends with a liar? God has to be 'the true God' (Jer 10:10) or He is a false god. The Bible has to be truth, or lies. I don't think you can have it both ways.

The post-modern attitude towards texts and textual analysis is that there is no absolute truth and every reader brings something different to a text. For example, a Marxist will read Dickens and take away a Marxist message. English degrees are a lot about this! But I don't think you can approach the Bible as the same as any other text and just 'get something' from it. Either something is true, or it is false. If the Bible is true, it's worth building your life on it. If it's false, there is no point bothering.

And it follows that if the Bible is true, it is universally true. That means it's not just 'true for me'. It applies to everyone. That is why my blog is based on the Bible, and why I try to respond to people's questions, to the books I read, thinking about what the Bible says. I am sorry if it comes across as emotionally detached Bible-bashing! But in my view, what I personally say has very little value for the world. What God says does! That's why I look to Him for answers, rather than my own thinking.

Of course, I apply my thinking to the Bible. God doesn't ask us to switch our brains off when we open His word. But I think the tendency in our culture to come to the Bible with our own ideas of what is right and wrong, and judging its 'truth' on how it fits into our current worldview, is a fundamentally flawed concept. If it is the words of God, a God who is eternal and all-knowing and all-seeing, how can we possibly deem it our place to judge it against our standards? That would be like me handing my dissertation on George Eliot to a five year old who had just learned to read. My dissertation is nothing special, but I don't think the kid would have a chance of understanding it!

I don't want to bash the Bible, in both senses of the phrase. I don't want to crush people with it, but I don't want to under-value it and over-value my words and thoughts. I want people to know the truth, and I think the Bible contains better answers than my befuddled brain.

'The Reader' reviewed

Yesterday I took some students to a public-speaking competition in London. There was a lot of waiting around... But I managed to get through Bernhard Schlink's 'The Reader' AND do my marking, which was quite satisfying!

'The Reader' has recently been made into a film with Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet- I wanted to read the book before seeing the film because my friends recommended it. It is a very compelling read- all about how the protagonist struggles to come to terms with the fact that his past lover was an SS guard in Nazi Germany.

The book raises so many interesting questions. For example, Michael says 'I was guilty of having loved a criminal', but what he is really saying is that somehow his generation is implicated and involved in the Holocaust. He struggles to reconcile Hanna's crimes with the person he once knew, and it raises the issue, as the reading-group questions in the back articulate: 'How can we explain why ordinary people commit atrocities without resorting to calling them monsters?'

The Bible has an answer to this: it teaches that we often try to measure up ourselves against others in order to justify ourselves and pat ourselves on the back for our superior morality. Actually that is fruitless, because our righteousness is filthy rags to God (Isa 64:6). Instead of creating an 'us' and 'them' scenario where the murderers and rapists are on one side of the fence, ourselves on the other, we should accept that every single one of us is capable of 'atrocities' if placed in the right (or wrong) time or place. We should acknowledge that often our thoughts are atrocious, even if our deeds are respectable. And it is our sinfulness that sent Jesus to the cross, so that we could be forgiven.

Our human sense of justice -our desire to see Nazi war criminals pay for their deeds- is a gift from God. He will hold everyone accountable for the wrongs they have done- against other people but also against Him. If you're trusting in Jesus, be glad and look forward to the day when there will be no more injustice and no more suffering. If you're not trusting in Jesus, don't be too quick to call down the wrath of God upon the 'sinners' of our society. Get your rags replaced with the riches of Jesus Christ!

Are non-believers accountable to God? A response

Recently I received this extended comment on my post 'Being Good Part 2':

Someone who isn't a Christian will not 'struggle' with sin. They'll just do it, without caring what God thinks.

Does this in some ways mean that they are not to blame for this sin, and thus can incur God's forgiveness, as it is not a struggle, since they in effect have nothing to struggle against?

I am having many, many problems with "No-one comes to the Father except through Me" at the moment, and I think this is related.

This, to me, implies that knowledge and acceptance of Jesus is a prerequisite to salvation. This brings up the problem, however, of those who do not 'know' (I find know very limiting in English!- it's the French distinction that I need!) Jesus being necessarily 'damned', although for want of a better word, as I understand that this should not be passive, but active, as in someways damning is done to oneself with God. In my mind there are three groups of people that this affects: those pre-incarnation; those who, because of remoteness have no access; and those who are not exposed in the correct way to the Gospel (I think Gandhi is the best example, being turned away from a church). for the first group, I can see that this is filled by an "implicit" belief in Jesus through faith. The second and third groups, however, seem to be excluded from Salvation because of the exactness of this passage - "no-one".

I cannot reconcile this with my faith!

Hope you can convince me otherwise!

Loads of good questions raised here! And I think they are indeed closely related.

Are non-Christians to blame for their sin? Are they held responsible? Are people who don't know about Jesus damned?


The book of Romans is a good place to turn to here. Romans 1 argues that all men are accountable for their rejection of God: 'For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities- His eternal power and divine nature- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.' (v20) Paul argues that 'Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin' (Romans 3:9)- the Jews, because they had God's law and knew what was right and wrong and yet failed to obey; the Gentiles, because God's glory is evident through creation and they 'suppressed the truth by their wickedness' (Romans 1:18). Quoting Psalm 5, Paul writes 'There is no-one righteous, not even one' (Romans 3:10). And because God is holy and just He cannot tolerate sin. He must punish it because it would go against His nature to ignore it.


But God has made a way for us to be seen as righteous in His sight, through sending Jesus. With Jesus' sacrificial death on the cross, if we trust in Him, we can come before God and God will see Christ's perfection, not our sin. This is what Paul means when he says 'all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in His blood. He did this to demonstrate His justice, because in His forbearance He had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished- He did it to demonstrate His justice at the present time, so as to be just and the One who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.' (Romans 3:23-26)


Now there are still people out there who have never heard the good news about what Jesus has done. God will judge them and I cannot say what He will say to them. I do know that He is perfectly just, more just than our puny human souls can fathom or imagine. Jesus says that 'And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.' (Matthew 24:14) This means that God will wait until all people groups have been reached with the gospel before the Final Judgement. It also says that 'The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance' (2 Peter 3:9). The reason Jesus hasn't yet returned is because God wants more people to be saved. So we can safely trust that God is not rejoicing in the fact that people don't know the gospel. He desires more people to come to believe in Him. That is why it is so important for Christians to tell others about the good news of Jesus, and support mission work overseas too.


But on the 'pre-Incarnation' point, Jesus Himself made it clear that His death paid for sins past, present and future. He spoke of Abraham as alive, rebuking the Sadduccees' dismissal of the idea of resurrection of the dead. (Matthew 22:32) The only way Abraham could be with God was through Jesus' redemption for him on the cross. The writer of Hebrews also talks about the great people of faith in the Old Testament. They were saved because of their faith that God would justify them... which would happen on the cross in the future.


I hope that helps slightly. Keep seeking and you will find! Although perhaps sometimes we should not simply seek answers to our questions, but a peace of trusting that God knows what's best and accepting that sometimes we don't understand everything. Thank you for your comments!