Let’s Be Honest About Protestants and the Bible
There are some things I just don’t know. Perhaps pro-lifers are correct, and at the moment I was conceived in my mother Patty’s fallopian tubes, I became an abject sinner — a zygote who deserved only conscious, eternal torment by Satan. That would explain all the later masturbation also the later taste for Led Zeppelin — which is clearly the music of Satan. And perhaps the world really is only 6,000 years old. For all I know, it’s only six minutes old, and I came into existence right then with built-in memories- — and also all this built-in credit card debt.
But here’s something I do know: when Protestants defend positions such as those by saying they come from the Bible, they are almost always speaking from a place of delusion or, when some leaders are speaking, cynical deception. You would be making a mistake to assume the Protestant you’re talking with is acting in good faith. If you assume you are talking with a reasonable person, it will hamper your ability to truly understand the person — and to love them, which would be the ideal goal. Sure, we’re all a little crazy, but I’m talking only about Protestants here because Biblical craziness is almost inevitable for Protestants specifically, given Protestant theology and history.
To understand the present, let’s first step back and look at some history. It’s now the 1500s. Christianity is already 1,500 years old; it’s a major world religion. Some guys in northern Europe decide to form a new sect, or branch, of Christianity that will treat the Bible a bit differently than it has been treated by other Christians around the world until then. Instead of being “a really important thing,” they decide to elevate the Bible to being “the most important thing.”
We’re talking really smart, ruthlessly logical guys here — lawyers, for example. Naturally, these men immediately set out to write a summary of the essential teachings of the Bible. With such a summary, everyone will finally know the essential teachings of the Bible. They will bring all the centuries of strife and confusion between Christians to an end. To their surprise, they discover they can’t agree; it turned out that interpreting the Bible isn’t as easy as they had expected.
The Protestant leaders try to solve their disagreements about what the Bible teaches using an obvious approach: they put other Protestants who disagree with them to death. A famous Protestant leader named Zwingli has no objections to the torture and execution of several Protestants because they disagree with him about baptism. A French lawyer named Calvin gets a guy burned at the stake for disagreeing with him about baptism and the Trinity.
These executions gradually grow into full-scale wars, not just with Roman Catholics, as we’re usually taught, but also with other Protestants. By the end of the Thirty Years’ War, so many men, women and children have died in Europe that the continent as a whole starts to move away from taking Christianity too seriously. This trend away from Christianity in Europe eventually develops into the Enlightenment and continues to this day.
So what did Protestants do when the initial hope of writing a summary of what the Bible teaches failed? Well, they went with an “Emperor’s New Clothes” approach. According to Protestant theology, the important teachings of the Bible are completely clear (the perspicuity of scripture) and if it’s not clear to you personally, it’s because you personally are going to hell. This is the theological foundation of Protestantism.
With this theological foundation, you can’t think, you can’t ask questions, and you can’t disagree with anyone at church because doing so pretty much proves you are not actually a Christian. This foundation makes it almost inevitable that when Protestants try to talk publicly about the Bible, what comes out of their mouths is illogical gibberish. They are trying to walk the line between saying (1) I have a high view of the Bible and saying (2) I have, at the same time, long ago given up any hope of actually learning from the Bible by studying it myself.
You might conclude from my view of church history that I’m a Roman Catholic. In fact, I’m not and never have been. When I was a teenager in the early 1970s, I read the Jesus part of the New Testament (that is, the gospels) and I made a decision to follow Jesus. I then walked in the door of the Baptist church near my house and said, “What do I do now that I’m saved?”
I picked a Baptist church because the personal commitment I’d made to God included taking the Bible very seriously and I’d been told that Baptists were serious about the Bible. I have spent the 52 years since then in various conservative Christian churches, slowly realizing the church itself works against open and honest study of the Bible. The more we treat the Bible like some kind of magical, symbolic object the more difficult it becomes to actually try to read it.
So. Back to you. A Protestant has just made a claim you’re not sure you agree with and insists the claim is true because it’s in the Bible. You realize you don’t know everything in the Bible yourself. And, it’s important to you to respect the religious convictions of others to some degree. You instinctively assume this person is acting in good faith even though you don’t necessarily agree with the claim. What I’m trying to explain here is that there is an alternative explanation that may be more likely: the person is simply deluded or deceived.
Let me give you a glimpse into what actually goes on in a typical conservative Christian church. Yes, we have group Bible studies, but they are almost always explicitly targeted at Christians with little or no previous knowledge of the Bible. That’s the demographic the church is designed for — and encourages. It’s sometimes even explicitly stated in Bible study material that participants are not to introduce ideas from other parts of the Bible. That rule helps create a safe place for people who know nothing about other parts of the Bible anyway, the kind of people we want. It also helps because we want to avoid openly exposing anything like differing views. This is especially true when we don’t have the personnel to put someone in charge of the Bible study we can trust; that is, someone who can announce the “correct” answer immediately and suppress genuine questions or discussion.
In church services, the same few Bible passages are recycled over and over, year after year. Even the slightest deviation from these few, familiar passages is usually preceded by a warning that sometimes verges on apology. The point is, people can attend church for decades and never receive any exposure at all to large portions of the Bible. In fact, we’re taught that much of the Bible doesn’t really apply to us — although exactly which parts is never clearly defined and seems to change from day to day. For example, it is strongly implied that the teachings of Jesus don’t really apply to us because, since His resurrection, we are to follow Paul. All the social commentary of the Old Testament prophets is completely invisible in church.
It’s the pastor’s job to know the Bible and tell us what’s in it. It’s our job to believe whatever he says, no matter how illogical or inconsistent. We learn to keep our thinking very compartmentalized.
When a Protestant tells you their position lines up with the Bible, don’t assume you are hearing a deeply-held religious conviction. Don’t assume they have personally worked out a coherent theological position. Don’t assume that your own lack of familiarity with the Bible will make further discussion difficult for you. Instead, be open to the possibility that you are hearing from a person who has been given years of training in illogical thinking, a person whose words are basically feel-good nonsense.
Focus on the person. Listen to what they say and ask how their various statements fit together with each other. You don’t have to find contradictions between what they say and other parts of the Bible you may not know about. If you notice contradictions between the various things they say directly to you, you can gently ask about those.
If you do know something about the Bible yourself, look for consistency in what you are hearing. Do they apply Bible teachings to their own life the same way they apply Bible teachings to the lives of others? How do they decide which commands in the Bible should be enforced with government penalties and which commands can be completely ignored by everyone?
My main point is this: when talking to a Protestant, be aware that an inability to handle, or even comprehend, differences of opinion is hard-wired into Protestant theology. It’s reinforced by church attendance, along with a surprising lack of exposure to much of the actual Bible. When a Protestant appeals to the Bible they are probably appealing to it as a symbol with content they’ve been told about, not anything they’ve studied for themselves.
This is what we all need to be honest about, whether speaking as a Protestant or speaking to a Protestant: what you get immediately when you ask a Protestant about the Bible may be the best they have to give; it would be insensitive, futile, and frustrating to push for more.
