Words from God?

In his Second Inaugural Speech, Abraham Lincoln famously said,

“Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other.”

People do tend to make the Bible say whatever they want it to say. They do the same thing with the internet or the New York Times. This does not mean necessarily that the internet or the Times or the Bible is hopelessly ambiguous. But it does mean that we have to be careful when we read anything, especially a revered text like the Bible, to let it speak for itself.

Following the murder of Charlie Kirk, Vice President Vance expressed his grief and outrage by urging his hearers to “put on the full armor of God” (alluding to Ephesians 6:11) in their response. I think Mr. Vance ran the risk of misreading, and therefore misusing, the Bible on that occasion. First, he gave the impression that to be opposed to Charlie Kirk’s movement is to be on the wrong side of God. Second, he offered no clarification on the types of armor that that passage enjoins us to put on (Ephesians lists, among other items, “the breastplate of righteousness”, “the shield of faith”, and “the shoes of the gospel of peace”). Mr. Vance left us inferring, given the political nature of his remarks, that the weapons God urges us to take up are political and economic.

I tell this story not to pick on the Vice President, but to show how easy it is, especially when we are deeply upset about something, to use a sacred text for our own purposes when we should rather allow it to shape us.

The problem I am describing carries great significance for me. I am a pastor, committed to the notion that God communicates to us through the Bible and to the task of making what God has to say there clear and intelligible. But I am also a human being, subject to my own self-serving agendas and my own limits.

In working my way through this problem, I have settled on what I will call “hopeful modesty.”

Let me explain.

I am hopeful, despite the reality of Bible twisting, because of my confidence that God loves us too much to leave us in the dark.

If God has gone to all the trouble, I tell myself, of becoming a fellow traveler in order to rescue us from ourselves at great cost to himself, then certainly he will make the effort to communicate clearly. That communication will not be about everything (about, say, how to build an airplane, or form a government, or write a poem), but it will be about what he has done to put things right and what we can do in response.

Yes, we are limited and corrupt, but God is not constrained by our limits and corruption. He is powerful (and loving) enough to get through to us, despite us, certainly about the things he knows we need to know.

But I must also be modest, because there is always more to God than I can take in—more sometimes than I want to take in.

When, for example, I call God “Father,” I have good reason to believe that I am speaking truly, for he has invited us in Scripture to call him by that name (this is the hopeful part). But (here is the modesty) when I use that name, I am not speaking exhaustively about him, even in his role as a father, because my notion of fathering is limited to what I know from my own story and culture, and is further limited by the sad fact that some fathers are terrible.

My hopeful modesty looks like this in practice. I keep coming with confidence to the Bible, trusting God to meet me there. But as I do this, I hold humbly to the discoveries I make there about God and his ways with us. I am always in learning mode, always eager to listen for fresh insights—from experience, from things I read, and especially from those believers whose stories are different from mine.