Spiritual Hiccups - The Bible Tells Me So

We had a funeral at our church yesterday with a visitation and reception afterward.  The funeral was for a much beloved member and so there was a large crowd with many church members and many  friends from outside the church.  As I was talking to people at the reception, I struck up a conversation with a fellow who said he was Roman Catholic and asked for a my thoughts on the differences between Presbyterians and Catholics.

I mentioned that we handled Mary a bit differently and then said that we elevated Scripture over Tradition.  The Bible trumps our way of doing things, and if we come to see a practice as being at odds with Scripture, we change the practice.  For example, over time we came to see the prohibition on ordaining women as un-biblical.  We thought that the overall witness of the Bible was that God can and does call women and men to all roles in the Church, and so we changed our ordination practices.

My conversation came back to me this morning as I read today's lectionary passages.  Psalm 15 spoke of God welcoming those "who do not slander with their tongue, and do no evil to their friends, nor take up a reproach against their neighbors."  I thought of the recent talk about civility in American politics and wondered about all of us Protestants who take the Bible so seriously but who nonetheless slander with our tongues those with whom we disagree.

Then I read the passage from Ephesians and found myself even more troubled.  "But fornication and impurity of any kind, or greed, must not  even be mentioned among you, as is proper among saints. Entirely  out of place is obscene, silly, and vulgar talk; but instead, let  there be thanksgiving.  Be sure of this, that no fornicator or impure person, or one who is greedy (that is, an idolater), has any  inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God."  What troubled me is they way we Christians selectively emphasize what these verses condemn. 

Some Christians seem focused almost entirely on issues of personal purity, while others worry much more about problems of greed.  As a more "progressive" Christian, I find myself in the camp that often pushes issues of social justice and loving one's neighbor.  And people on both sides often point our fingers at each other and accuse them of perverting or distorting the faith.  It seems that Christians of all stripes are quite practices at selectively doing what the Bible says.


Now I do not for a second minimize the difficulty of interpreting Scripture and determining just what it looks like to live as the Bible tells me to live.  On many issues there are contradictory Scripture passages that require us to make judgments about the witness of the Bible as a whole.  But this process, as well as becoming mature in our faith, requires us becoming aware of the filters we use to weed out parts of Scripture we do not like.  Without doing this, we elevate our likes and preferences to a position of ultimate authority.  This not only is a classic definition of idolatry, but it makes it easy to demonize those whose likes and preferences are at odds with ours.

Perhaps this is why humility has traditionally been considered a Christian virtue, even if it seems to have fallen out of favor in our culture.

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