The problem of consistency in reading the Bible.

Another issue I had with my own reading of the Bible was the issue of consistency. I began to think about many of the texts with which I and many of my friends had difficulty. These ranged from proscriptions against same gender sex to clothing taboos, and from prohibited food to assorted barbaric punishments, to name a few. There were also the texts about slaughtering enemies which seemed to be the direct command of God - a problem I will look at later. The thing was (and still is) that I knew of virtually no-one who accepted the entire stock of Scripture at face value. Whilst many acknowledged the various taboos and restrictions, nobody observed them in their entirety. Everyone drew and still draws a line somewhere. Speak to the most hard line fundamentalist Christian you know, and ask them about restrictions concerning the wearing of mixed fibres in one garment of clothing for instance, and they will give you some spin about these rules having been set aside by the New Testament teaching or some complex argument about how this is no longer a relevant consideration when it comes to honouring God. But if we need some complex and rather specious argument to overrule scripture itself, then we are floundering. We are also not helping people who read this stuff and don't know our big clever reasons for rendering certain bits of the Bible void.

 I came to see that the lines people draw are not necessarily logical or consistent, but depend on many things, including the profile of the outlawed behaviour in society and how easily it can be identified. So openly gay behaviour is easy to target and prohibit and judge. Pride or gluttony isn't so easy to call out, and so the very evangelical and fundamentalist churches tend to let the practitioners off with having to listen to a strong sermon about it without actually naming names or disciplining them. That is nothing short of hypocritical if in the same church you won't let openly practising gay people hold office or volunteer. Needless to say, whilst from fairly early on in my own ministry I saw this, I didn't know what to do about it and I still had my own somewhat arbitrary lines in the sand, one of which was for a long time being convinced that practising homosexuality was wrong. The argument ran that whilst I didn't hate or dislike gay people, Scripture said that gay sex was wrong, so that was that. But was it? Is it? You see the problem? If Scripture says that a whole load of other things which I am completely ignoring are wrong, doesn't that make me one big hypocrite? Where do I go to take refuge from my own inconsistency? 

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