Spiritual Hiccups - Literalism, Relativism, and Being Nice

Today's gospel reading is an easy text with which to attack biblical literalism.  Jesus' disciples harvest grain (albeit a tiny amount), and then they do a quick threshing operation to separate wheat from chaff.  Both actions appear to be violations of working on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees call them on it.  Jesus' primary defense is not all that compelling.  "Don't you remember that David broke the rules, too?"  Clearly this business of following biblical rules is complicated, and requires interpretation.

But as easy as it is to dismiss biblical literalism, we mainline Christians often fall into a kind of relativism that reduces the faith to something along the lines of "Believe in God and be nice."  Nothing terribly wrong with either of these, but neither is there anything terribly significant.  It's a little hard to imagine the risen Jesus commissioning his followers, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations by teaching them to be nice."

The problem with biblical literalism is that it tends to substitute a text, or some portion of a text ,for the living, dynamic God.  And it presumes that a relationship with this God can somehow be reduced to a one-size-fits-all set of instructions. 

But if relationship with God is too complicated for an easy, neat, fit-every-situation set of instructions, that does not reduce the remaining choices to "Be nice."  Consider the task of living in relationship with a spouse.  There might not be an absolute set of rules that fit every situation, but long term, committed relationships require agreed upon standards of behavior if the relationship is to survive. 

I come out of a stream of the Christian faith that has not tended toward literalism, and I personally find it overly simplistic, intellectually dishonest, and ultimately deadening to mature faith.  But literalism is not the threat to my stream of Christianity.  Thinking that following Jesus involves little more than believing a few things and "being nice" is.

Click here to learn more about the Daily Lectionary.