As the Psalmist says (Psalm 137:9), "Happy is he who seizes your babes and dashes them against a rock." And in the Gospels we read, (Luke 10:37b), "Jesus said to him, 'Go and do as he did.'"
Now, this exercise actually "proves" nothing of the sort, except that one can pretty much "prove" anything if one grabs a verse here and a verse there from the Bible, puts them together, and insists they say whatever we want them to say. As someone who has been subjected to the practice of having Bible verses thrown at him, I can say that it is infuriating (to say the least) to try and wriggle around this kind of nonsense. How does one respond, how can one respond? The real response seems so tepid, so weak-kneed and namby-pamby that it might actually be easier to give in and say, "You know what? Your reading of the Bible is far superior to my own."
Except, of course, I refuse to do that. How can I? While I freely admit that there are as many ways to read the Bible as there are people who do actually read it, and that no reading is necessarily normative (unless an individual or church accepts it as such). All I can do is explain that I find the practice of tossing around Bible verses like candy at a Fourth of July parade to be a gross misuse of Scripture. As I showed above, one can use the practice to "prove" anything one wants, which, of course, only shows that one has actually "proved" nothing except one's felicity with scanning a Concordance.
While I think it's kind of fun to do what I did above (it really rankles some people who think they have a monopoly on the Bible to have it shown how truly insipid they are), a much more mature approach when confronted by those who use it to "prove" this or that or the other thing is simply to deny the legitimacy of the method. Reading the Bible is the beginning of one's journey of faith. One starts there, never wandering far from that starting line, of course, and always wrestling Jacob-like with the angels (and demons) who reside within its pages. If one never gets further than the Bible, if one assumes there is nothing in the two-thousand-year history of the Church to teach us, or the five-hundred year history of Protestantism, or however far one wishes to reach back; if one believes that some confession or tradition is illegitimate (as I do of fundamentalism; I admit it freely, but only because, after repeated exposure to it, I find it wanting of any modicum of grace, love, peace, humility, gentleness or pretty much any other fruit of the Spirit; I am speaking more here of fundies who dismiss liberalism, Roman Catholicism, my own Arminian heritage [they tend to be Calvinist], pretty much any tradition other than their own) and refuses to engage it; if one denies the reality within which they live for the pages of a book they cannot even read in its own original tongue (I am speaking here of fundies who deny the veracity of science, history, or pretty much anything else that might "contradict" scripture); if these and other conditions not names apply, then one is not so much seeking to live out a Christian life as defending a dead ideology. Fundamentalism is not so much a stance of faith, but rather the fearful reaction of those for whom life and world have grown far too complicated. For me, faith is open to life, living, breathing, brave yet humble, willing to admit error while not surrendering the prerogatives of the faith. For fundies, it is a stance of constant vigilance against the threats of reality to their little enclave. The only weapon at their disposal is the Bible, from which they think to fashion the weapons to fight off the ever-encroaching world.
When their own weapon is turned on them, however, watch out. This doesn't prove I know nothing about reading the Bible. It only proves that a literal reading of Scripture, and using such a reading to "defend" a position one has taken is intellectually nonsensical.
Virtual Tin Cup
