Biblically Balanced

The scriptures referred to are Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16.

While America produces some of the best situation comedies, only the British seem to manage to create satirical sitcoms that are actually funny. One of my favorites was a series called Red Dwarf. The creators of the show seem to have taken a page from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and realized that science fiction is the perfect genre for satire. Thus politics, social customs, sex and, of course, religion are all fair game. In Red Dwarf, when spaceship maintenance man Dave Lister refuses to turn over his unquarantined pregnant cat, he is punished by being put into time stasis until the ship returns to earth. When the ship's computer finally releases Lister he finds that the crew has all been reduced to dust. They were killed by a radiation leak and so the computer kept him in stasis until the radiation levels were safe—a process that took millions of years! The only other living being on the ship is a humanoid that evolved from his cat's kittens. They were protected from the radiation by the ship's bulkheads where Lister had hid his pet. When Lister asks where the other cat people are, he is told that they wiped each other out in a religious war. It turns out that Lister's plan to retire to the island of Fiji and sell hot dogs and donuts, which he whispered into his cat's ear, got seriously twisted over 2 million years. Lister became their god and Fiji became the paradise Fushal. The cause of the war was a dispute over the color of the paper hats to be worn at the hot dog and donut stands: red vs. blue. Lister hears this sad tale and pronounces it pointless—the hats were supposed to be green.

To keep Lister, the last human, sane the ship is able to create one hologram of a dead crew member. Unfortunately it chooses Arnold Rimmer, who was an irritating person when alive. Later we find out that this officious, neurotic little tyrant was raised as a Seventh Day Hoppist. A misprint in their Bible said that the 3 great virtues were faith, hop and charity but the greatest of these was hop. So they hopped all day on Sundays. The only way to survive Sunday dinners was to wear a raincoat and asbestos underwear!

The basic technique of satire is to take some often small absurdities and magnify them or carry them to their logical conclusion. Thus a satire might show the animal rights organization Peta succeed in getting people to stop eating animals and then have to work on the more difficult problem of getting animals to stop eating each other. Things are so crazy that the internet has come up with a principle called Poe's Law which states that real news is now so absurd it is hard to distinguish from satire. And yet before the internet I remember how a church spokesman seemed oblivious to the obvious irony of what he said. Pope John Paul II was speaking with some dissident American Catholic women. This very educated man somehow thought it was logical to tell them they couldn't become priests because God's purpose for women was to become mothers. The problem was he was speaking to a group of nuns! Talk about a Catch 22!

Because the key to satire is the exaggeration of one trait to the point where the behavior it motivates becomes unbalanced, it is easy to satirize extremism and hard to satirize moderation. Unfortunately, even without trying to be satirical, most depictions of religion in the media tend to focus on its fringes. Religious people in TV and movies are either irrational fanatics, hypocrites or saints. Most religious people are not any of these three but that makes them uninteresting both to writers of fiction and to journalists. It doesn't help that a lot of fanatics, hypocrites and journalists don't know their Bible.

I went to church when I was very young and then my family stopped going until I was nearly a teen. So when I read the Bible for the first time, I didn't have a lot of denominational or theological preconceptions. I also discovered writer C.S. Lewis who became a Christian after being an atheist for a few decades. Lewis took the Bible seriously but didn't leave his brain behind at the church door. He read the New Testament in the original Greek and was able to distinguish between what the Bible actually said and what people thought it said. He acknowledged too the difference between what the Bible says and his interpretation of what it says. I also remember how Francis Schaffer said that what the Bible says about God is true but cannot possibly be exhaustive. God is too big. My professors at Wheaton College were not afraid to say, “I don't know” when faced with some seemingly insoluble theological problem. They would then sketch out the various approaches to the problem that were taken by other Christian thinkers, both past and present, so we had enough information to make a rational decision.

Well-informed Christians don't see faith and reason as necessarily in conflict. In fact the 2 overlap to a significant degree. And reason is not a position on any issue. It is merely a tool which can be used to examine any position, even a religious one. The problem is not that Biblical Christianity is unreasonable. The problem is that people aren't always reasonable.

Most problems in Christian belief and practice are due to overemphasizing one or a few aspects of it to the point of imbalance. The problem with fundamentalists is not that they strongly believe the Bible; the problem is they don't differentiate between the trivial, the important and the essential. And they aren't really fundamentalists because they don't stick to just the fundamentals. They are, as one expert puts it, “extreme superficialists.” Fundamentalists read the Bible (or in Islam, the Quran) without regard for the long history of interpretation and its many schools. They act as if everything is laid out plainly. But not all of it is. Some parts need a knowledge of the original language, the cultural background, and the history that led to its writing to understand it better.

More than that, superficialists go to scripture with some unexamined assumptions about what they will find. This means that they overlook or ignore verses that contradict those assumptions. If you think being righteous only means staying personally pure, you have not paid attention to the more than 800 verses about how the righteous help the poor, the sick, the disabled, widows, children without fathers and immigrants. Superficialists also tend to gloss over fine distinctions and qualifiers or explain them away. They mentally edit scripture to say precisely what they expected it to say—or more dangerously, what they want it to say.

The solution is not to emulate the superficialists by overemphasizing the bits of it you like and ignoring the parts they like. Nor is the solution to abandon the Bible as some people have suggested. The solution is to be biblically balanced. While the Bible contains 66 books, 1189 chapters and over 31,000 verses, there is an amazing unity on the major doctrines. But there is an undeniable diversity in some details. The Bible has to be read as a whole and its passages interpreted in the light of other passages. For instance, Romans 13:1 says to obey the government but Acts 5:29 says we must obey God rather than men. How can we do both? Obviously they are speaking to different situations: Paul is writing before Nero started persecuting Christians; Peter is responding to the temple authorities telling the apostles not to preach about Jesus. We must think about which situations call for which actions and when. While the fact that not all verses are “one-size-fits-all” can be dismaying if you have a simplistic view of the Bible, it's actually what we should expect from a God who made an extraordinarily complex but nevertheless cohesive creation.

There's a Buddhist parable of some blind monks encountering an elephant for the first time. The one who grabs its tail says that the elephant is like a rope. The one feeling its ear says the elephant is like a big leaf. The monk feeling its side says the elephant is like a wall. The one touching its leg says the elephant is like a tree. The monk being probed by its trunk says the elephant is like a snake. The one with his hand on its tusk says the elephant is like a spear. Usually folks conclude that they are all wrong. But in fact they are all right—about the particular part of the elephant they are touching. It's unwise to throw out some or all of their observations. But if another monk, standing back, was to put their observations together, along with their relative positions, he'd have a rough idea of what an elephant is like. For that matter, the longer they spend exploring the elephant and the more of him they encounter, the more fully they'd understand what it was like. In this case, superficialists would be resistant to acknowledging that there is more to the elephant than what they have encountered. They would be reluctant to readjust their ideas about him. And by extrapolating on the one or two features they know well, any individual monk would construct a lopsided one-dimensional version of an elephant.

We don't need a lopsided one-dimensional God, either. You get a lopsided God when you emphasize his holiness at the expense of his ability to forgive. You get a lopsided God when you emphasize his love at the expense of his call for all to repent. You get a lopsided God when you emphasize his displeasure at one category of sins, like sexual sins, at the expense of other sins he also condemns, like social injustice. You get a lopsided God whenever you cherry pick what parts of the Bible you pay attention to.

In today's passage from Ephesians Paul says, “We must no longer be infants, tossed about by every wave and blown around by every wind of teaching, in the manipulations of men, in craftiness for the purpose of deceitful scheming.” (my translation) Paul is seriously mixing his metaphors but what he is getting at is clear. Children initially construct a very simple idea of how the world works. Maturity consists of accurately revising this superficial understanding of reality in order to be able to navigate the world and survive. Paul then switches to language suggesting a rudderless ship being tossed by a storm.

Finally Paul switches the image to that of swindlers. The Greek word I translated “manipulations” actually refers to a game with loaded dice. Paul recognizes that people not grounded in Christian truth are likely to become prey to unscrupulous people. Like those who end up in cults where the leaders violate clear Biblical laws against adultery, dishonesty, coveting money and resorting to violence rather than turning the other cheek. I've never understood how anyone steeped in the Bible could ignore these red flags. But then a key way to manipulate people is misdirection: highlight what you want them to see so that they don't notice what you're really doing. That's one reason why it's easier to manipulate extremists and superficialists. Their focus has already been narrowed to one or two things. Keep it that way and they won't notice what's being smuggled into their faith behind their backs. It's like putting blinders on horses. It keeps them from seeing that they are not transporting treasure but just hauling a load of garbage.

But if scripture is so vast, how do we achieve a balanced view of it? What is its fulcrum, its balancing point? Jesus Christ. By centering on him, we keep from falling into one kind of error or its opposite. He is both just and merciful. No one in the Bible mentions hell more often nor speaks of forgiveness as frequently as Jesus does. He holds us to a high standard for both personal morality and social morality. Jesus protected a woman caught in adultery from being condemned and stoned as prescribed in the Old Testament and yet he told her to “sin no more.” (John 8:2-11) He condemned divorce in the strongest of terms and yet offered eternal life to a woman with 5 ex-husbands and a current live-in lover. (John 4:1-42) He drove the money changers out of the temple using a whip and yet told Peter to put up his sword when the authorities came to crucify him. (John 2:13-16; Matthew 26:51-53) He is fully God and fully human. In Jesus we see both what God is like and what we can become.

Small wonder that when the church summarized the teachings of the Bible in the form of creeds, Jesus is at the center of them. Paul seems to formulate a proto-creed in the early part of our passage. “[There is] one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is over all and through all and in all.” Here, too, Jesus is at the center. The one body is the body of Christ, Paul's favorite phrase for the church. (1 Corinthians 12:27) The one Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, sent as an encourager when Jesus went to the Father. (Romans 8:9; Philippians 1:19) The one hope is the hope of resurrection, which comes with the high calling to live up to the good news of the risen Jesus. (1 Peter 1:3-4) He is the one Lord, of course. The one baptism is the baptism into his death and resurrection in which our old sinful life dies and is buried and we are raised to new life in union with Jesus. (Romans 6:3-4) The one God and Father of all is the Father whose nature is revealed in the Son. And the oneness that keeps being referred to is the oneness we find in Christ, who has put to death all enmity on the cross and reconciles us all in him. (Ephesians 2:14-16)

Jesus, the living Word of God, is at the heart of the written Word of God. To diminish one is to diminish the other. It is to chisel away at the foundation of the church. Every building needs a strong foundation if it is to stand, just as its upper floors need to give a little to withstand the winds. Again there has to be a balancing of the principles to make the whole thing work. But Jesus is very clear about what happens if your foundation shifts. The house falls. (Matthew 7:24-27)

The foundation of God's house is the whole Word of God, perfectly balanced on the incarnate, crucified and risen Jesus, God's Son, anointed as our prophet, priest and king. He speaks through it, all of it, even the bits we don't like. Just as God did not abhor the virgin's womb or hesitate to become flesh to reveal himself, so he did not disdain to speak through the humans who wrote the Bible—mixed metaphors, bad grammar, cultural thought forms and all. Because the paradox is that both God's living Word and his written Word are inextricably human and divine. Jesus was a 1^st century Jew as well as the cosmic Christ. The Bible is both an ancient Near Eastern book as well as the timeless Word of God. When we try to separate which parts are which, so we can discard some of them, we are guilty of a kind of Gnostic spirituality. The Gnostics tried to separate the physical and the spiritual, looking down on the concrete and revering the ethereal. But God created both. And we humans are, as C.S. Lewis put it, amphibians, able to live in both the physical world and the spiritual. We are mammals and yet we are made in the image of God. When we try to reduce the reality of God or Jesus or the message of the Bible to just one thing, either spiritual concerns alone or earthly ones only, we become caricatures of Christians, fiercely fighting over the trivial things like the color of hats, or hopping around precariously on one leg. As absurd as that is, people do it because that is easier than maintaining a firm and balanced stand on the not always simple, yet always true Word of God.

First preached on July 30, 2006. It has been updated and revised.