How to Save Christianity and Maybe America Too - Part 2a
Mike Johnson's Bible
Let’s dare to consider whether we believe this document is both complete and sufficient. Atheists, of course, want to go further upstream and pedants will want to get to “what does ‘God Breathed’ mean?”. I’m happy to stipulate that we’re dealing with a two thousand year old message from God.
But is the Bible the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything?
It not only seems like heresy to answer “no” to that question, it probably is officially heresy - you’ve got to break some eggs to make an omelette. Even the behaviour of Christians within the church suggests they don’t believe it’s a complete guide to modern living.. The Library of Congress has about 200,000 books on Christianity in its catalogue, some of them are no doubt strictly historical, but a trip to your local Kroch & Brentano’s will tell you that there are plenty of details about modern life that fail to have made the final cut at the Synod of Hippo in 393. If nothing can be added to the original text, then the purpose of sitting through a sermon on a Sunday completely escapes me.
One could say, and I will, that it’s the slipperiest of slopes to attempt to align a 2000 year old tradition to some kind of modern standard. But one need look no further than the Evangelicals’ near-total departure from Jesus’ message to see we’ve reached a point where Christendom has nothing left to lose. And why not go big or go home here? Author and public intellectual Jim Palmer claims:
In my view, each of the traditional Christian doctrines related to [a] person’s suffering are false, including:
original sin - the state of sinfulness that all humans are believed to inherit due to the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden
total depravity - human nature is thoroughly corrupt and no person is incapable of any good on their own
curses and blessings - one must curry favor with God through obedience and holiness to be eligible for divine benevolence
Hell - the divine punishment of eternal conscious torment for all those who do not accept the proper salvation formula
substitutionary atonement - the execution of Jesus acted as a substitute for humanity, bearing the punishment for sin that humans deserved
Palmer goes on to say that “a person could find significance in Jesus and not believe in any of those teachings”. But merely recognising the ‘significance’ of Jesus is not exactly the raison d’être of Christianity so all due criticism should be applied to these notions, but they are radical enough to force us to think again about what we believe and on whose authority we believe it. Christians have been misled to such extremes because our faith is often shallow—and not truly our own and then so easily influenced by people who are not experts on God but rather on making money and attracting attention.
What Palmer is recognising is that the items he mentions, and there are more, are simply not explained in the Bible. You can’t go to the Bible to learn about the Trinity, nor can you find a cogent explanation within it for how, in a world created by entirely by God, the death and resurrection of Jesus fixed a problem - these have to be imputed, inferred, explained, defined and detailed by extra-biblical texts.
So we have buffoons like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson uttering:
“Someone asked me today in the media, ‘What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’”
This brazenly violates the Third Commandment, not to take the Lord’s name in vain, as well as being an offensive virtue signalling and a damn lie. It boggles the mind how contemptible is this claim.
It’s contemptible because it is so obvious and demonstrable that he has instead projected a shameful, bigoted, and dare I say evil “worldview” onto the Bible. And the Bible turns the other cheek to it as he and others of his ilk extract now defunct and frankly ambiguous ancient terms and customs to spread evil across the land.
It’s notable that Speaker Johnson did not claim that Jesus was the main influence on his ideation. Because the follow-up questions would be wickedly hard to diffuse. But Johnson is a cunning man with a knack for clever use of language, and his claim to a ‘Biblical’ view means nothing, not one of us can discern exactly what it means or, put another way, each of us interprets it in their own way. This is not the basis for a rigorous or mature understanding of the divine.
When I was growing up, my mother’s favoured translation of the Bible was by J.B. Phillips. This version includes only the New Testament and features verse-less prose, that is, it is written in modern (for the time) English and is meant to flow, easing its readability at the expense of technical interpretations of Greek idioms and complex syntax. Eugene Peterson’s translation, called The Message, followed a similar approach. There are other examples.
None of these readability-centric versions of the Bible are considered useful for scholarly study as they stray too far from the idiomatic origins of the text. But their continuity makes it much harder for readers, pastors, and congressmen to cherry-pick sentences and phrases that they can twist into nonsense. In the next section we’ll talk about why this is important.