Of what real, practical use is Christianity and the Bible?
This question arose a little while ago at a small group I attend. A very good friend expressed the view that the Bible isn’t really a practical book, and by extension that Christianity isn’t a particularly practical religion.
Now my friend is one of the most practical people I know. (Hello Dan if you’re reading this!) He used to fix planes and now runs his own small business. He’s a man of science and sound sense. So when he suggests that the Bible or Christianity isn’t entirely practical, it’s a point worth pondering – because he really is practical. And I think he has a point.
A practical Bible?
What actual, practical use is the Bible? It’s a fairly mixed bag. The Old Testament is very practical if you want comprehensive instructions for building a tabernacle (though you can probably get a flat-pack one from Ikea now). It’s also got some very practical instructions for 15th-century BC religious desert nomads – including some handy household tips for getting rid of mildew by sacrificing pigeons.
Perhaps more usefully for us, the book of Proverbs offers some sound practical wisdom for everyday life – admittedly alongside slightly less helpful advice on beating your children.
More broadly, the Bible of course also has a lot of generally sound guidelines and principles for life – the 10 commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, Paul’s ethical teaching and so forth (though most of these need a fair bit of re-contextualising and interpreting to be truly helpful for our situations now).
But the Bible plainly isn’t a ‘practical’ book in any usual sense. It’s not a DIY manual, nor does it offer a lot of help with fixing your car or installing computer parts. It doesn’t help you choose the best mortgage, pension plan or insurance deal – well, besides offering ethical advice against dodgy investments and usury. And given that the most recent parts were written nearly 2000 years ago in a pre-industrial agrarian society, it’s clearly not going to offer direct practical guidance on many aspects of modern life.
Not that any of this stops a certain kind of well-meaning but misguided Christians from producing books on the Biblical Diet, or Biblical DIY, or whatever. And of course many people do try to use the Bible as a practical manual for all aspects of living, but I think this misses its real purpose.
A wicked book?
Of course some would say that the Bible is so full of abhorrent teachings that it’s of no use whatsoever except as bonfire kindling. It’s racist, sexist, homophobic and violent, the horrible ravings of a homicidal maniac.
Suffice it to say here that I too struggle with many elements in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, but I don’t think that it’s an evil book. It has certainly been (mis)used by many for evil, but unfortunately that’s a danger that goes with the territory – all ‘scriptures’ and manifestos can be abused. It’s our responsibility to make sure we don’t abuse it. And as part of this we do need to be pretty careful in how we read and apply it – we clearly can’t just assume that something that may have been appropriate for desert nomads in 1500BC is equally applicable to us now.
It’s about relationship
Where I believe the Bible really comes into its own is in revealing and addressing the human heart and human relationships – with each other, with ourselves, and with God. For by and large these things haven’t changed and don’t change. It’s what another friend from the same small group calls ‘Bible in a nutshell’ – i.e. that it’s all about relationship. (Hello Phil if you’re reading this!)
The world is unrecognisably different from how it was just 100 years ago, let alone 2000. The practical challenges of life have changed beyond recognition. But people themselves are not all that different, deep down. We’re still made of the same stuff and subject to the same weaknesses and flaws – rage, envy, prejudice, greed, lust, pride, selfishness and so forth. We still have the same deep needs to be loved, to be significant, to be forgiven, to belong. We still experience loss and loneliness, bereavement and grief, joy, suffering, jealousy, hope, longing.
And it’s these shared human experiences, these flaws and needs and feelings common to all of us, to which the Bible continues to speak so powerfully and relevantly.
It’s about Christ
Okay, the Bible isn’t just useful for teaching us about ourselves. To state the utterly obvious, it’s also uniquely able to point us to Christ and so show us something of God, of what he’s like, what he does and wants and asks of us. Without the Bible we’d clearly have very little clear idea of Christ’s life and teachings and character. In that sense it’s of immense and unparalleled importance, regardless of whether or not it’s of ‘practical’ use.
Nonetheless, the Bible isn’t enough in itself. It tells us many vital things about God but it does not (cannot) tell us everything, for God is beyond words and description and ultimately beyond comprehension. It shows us something of God but it does not (cannot) contain him.
As Jesus put it, ‘You diligently search the Scriptures because you believe that in them you have life; yet these same Scriptures point to me’. The primary purpose of the Bible is not to point to itself but to point to Christ, who alone is the true and living and eternal Word of God. Jesus, not the Bible, is the one in whom we have life and redemption.
So the Bible is not the destination but the signpost – yet as such it is still certainly of great use to us.
An impossible religion?
Nonetheless, if we’re honest a lot of the teaching in the Bible seems wildly impractical, even implausible – loving enemies, laying down your life for others, loving the seemingly unlovable, forgiving those who’ve done you terrible harm. And that’s just for starters, and leaving aside all the really weird supernatural stuff about spiritual gifts, healing the sick, speaking in tongues and so on.
So is Christianity really a practical religion – or one that’s even at all possible to follow? Perhaps it depends what you mean by ‘practical’ and ‘possible’. It’s certainly not easy. As G.K. Chesterton famously said: ‘Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried’.
It seems to me that in large part Christianity is impossible; yet ‘what is impossible with humans is possible with God’. We can’t do or be all the things that Jesus sets before us, not by a long chalk. But by God’s grace and with God’s help we can make a start.
Next time then – of what actual, practical use is Christianity?
The Evangelical Liberal 
Did you ever pursue publication of your blog posts, Harvey?
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Greetings Terry! You know me – procrastinator par excellence. So no, I haven’t. I would like to of course, but then I think ‘naah, what do I know?’ And I’m never too sure who to approach or where to get started. Though I seem to remember you did send me a link…
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Evan, I always enjoy your posts; they are insightful and well written.
I agree with you that we cannot look to the Bible as an practical or authoritative source of life applications. I remember the popularity of books on biblical finances and on biblical (Nouthetic) counseling in the 1970 and 80s. This is not what the Bible is about.
In my opinion, the New Testament tells us of the coming of Jesus who brought us the good news of the loving Father, who taught us to love the Father, ourselves, and each other in an authentic way, and told us of a future time of eternal peace and reconciliation. To me, this is practical.
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Wow, I hadn’t come across Nouthetic counselling, but looking it up it sounds deeply scary!
I agree with you that Jesus’ teaching is practical – just in a rather different sense to what we often mean by that word. I think it’s practical because it’s based on reality, it works, and it centres on our everyday lives and how we relate to each other and ourselves. So it’s not airy-fairy or pie in the sky but deeply down to earth. Yet I think that all too often we over-spiritualise it into something that’s quite far from what Jesus really represented.
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Yes, I agree that Jesus’ teaching is practical in a different sense than what we mean when we speak of the Bible as a practical handbook of life.
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Whatever we believe, or accept, regarding its origins, the Bible is the means that God has chosen to reveal the truth regarding His son Jesus to succeeding generations. From a number of previous posts, it is clear that those of us who have read it through the eyes of the Holy Spirit have evolved in what we have received from it, having moved from an initial point of believing that the Bible was the true Word of God into a more mature state, in which we can see more of the character of God, although we no longer accept the inerrancy of the content.
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Thanks Chas. I think I’m in broad agreement with you! For me the Bible is not the end point but the start point. The Bible tells me enough of God and Jesus to start me seeking, but it’s in Christ that I find the reality that the Bible points to.
Of course that’s not the whole story – there’s much more to the Bible and I’m never going to reach a point in this life when I don’t need it to some extent. But like a good parent, I think the Bible exists to do itself out of a job. When we finally see God face to face, we won’t need the written Bible any longer.
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When we can hear God well enough, and do whatever He asks us to do, we will no longer need any written word at all.
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Harvey, thanks for the thought-provoking post. You and the commenters have well-described the “practical-or-not” issue. A focus on the revelation of God in Jesus I agree is the main “achievement” (not a great word here, but best I can think of at the moment) of the Bible. But even that is far from simple and straightforward. The Gospels, as the rest of the Bible, are unmistakably human, literary creations. Far, far from the direct “report of eyewitnesses” as to just what Jesus said and did.
I’ve spent many thousands of hours (literally, now at age 64) studying the Bible and theology overall, with much of that focused on the Gospels/Acts in the last decade or so. These books clearly show the hard intellectual and social work of creative, “inspired” people seeking to interpret the very remarkable “person and work” (I say in a non-orthodox way) of a man removed from them both geographically and by a generation or more… striving to re-order their religious world, both as Jews and Gentiles (or Jews with varying attitudes toward Gentiles) in a rapidly-changing world that had just been turned upside-down by a horrendous war of four years ending in the destruction of not only Israel’s structure/place of worship but its entire social-economic set of structures (thus, “rabbinic” Judaism and the OT canon emerging soon after 70 C.E.).
Again… these highly creative narratives, based only generally on real events and on one another, represent their way of understanding and ordering their personal and community lives and understanding what God intended to do via a messiah and the Utopian hopes he represented, in a seriously topsy-turvy world…. Thus the quite varied picture and interpretation of Jesus we see in the different Gospels when we carefully read them individually and comparatively. So we don’t even have a real hope of seeing “the historical Jesus” very dependably, in specific terms (as the 3 or so phases of the “search” for at least a couple centuries has shown). But the essence and impact of Jesus I do still trust comes through. Also the concept that Jesus, with all the human variation involved in memories of him, still does bring through a relatively agreed-upon picture of God’s higher way of living to which he/she calls us. Whether or not it is right to call this “salvation” I will leave to other theologians, at least for now.
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Most of what was written about Jesus in the New Testament depended on the assumption that he was the Messiah, but even the NT contradicts itself on this. What difference would it make if we assumed instead that he was not the Messiah?
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Chas, that is indeed an interesting question. To me, his status as Messiah is not particularly significant… mainly just for putting him in the religious and interpretive context in which he moved. Most Christians fail to realize (have inadequate education) that there was not a single, clear picture in Jesus’ time of just who/what the Messiah would be. If you have interest (or anyone does) in a readable but VERY thought-through study of Jesus in Messiah role and his own self-understanding in this regard, I highly recommend a largely overlooked classic: “The Kingdom of God in Primitive Christianity” by Albert Schweitzer, published posthumously in about 1968 (in English), written in 1951. He, you may know, gained fame a half-century earlier in effectively wrapping up the initial “Quest of the Historical Jesus” in a book by that title. Then he spent much of his life in other writing and building, running a clinic-become-hospital in a remote jungle part of Africa… Somebody who elegantly not only spoke about, but truly followed The Way of Jesus. (I’ve reviewed it in some depth on my blog.)
Have you happened to have read it? Or anyone else done so?
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I have not read it personally, but there seem to be two very different interpretations of the Messiah: one, which is the Jewish interpretation, shows a conquering king who had to be of the exclusively male line descent from David, while the other is based on the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 52/53. From reading Isaiah carefully, this seems to show how a prophet would expect to be treated in Judah/Israel. Clearly, if the first interpretation was accepted then Jesus could, by definition, being the Son of God, not be the Messiah, who had to be the son of a man. Accepting the Suffering Servant interpretation appears to be the main basis for the claim that Jesus was crucified.
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Very interesting discussion and I wish I had time to engage with it properly!
I tend to take a middle position between Schweitzer and the conservative reading of the gospels as historically accurate. For me, N.T. Wright’s writings have been some of the most helpful in understanding Jesus and Paul in their original Jewish contexts, though Wright is more conservative than me in his approach to scripture.
I don’t see any inherent tension between Jesus being ‘Messiah’ and ‘Son of God’, any more than I see an inherent tension between his humanity and divinity. I do think that conservative Christians have tended towards overly-simplistic and one-dimensional understandings of both those terms though.
My understanding is that the Messiah was the one chosen by God as his representative; the one who would usher in God’s kingdom, bringing shalom, deliverance, restoration to his oppressed or exiled peoples. I think that Jesus completely fulfilled this, but in deeper and more far-reaching ways than his contemporaries expected or understood.
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I haven’t read much of Wright, but enough to get a flavor and decent sense of how he approaches the Bible and some of his specific interpretations and overall theology (basically orthodox, but not drawing it from Scripture in the same way most Evangelicals do, in which he is more realistic about the nature of the biblical lit.). I think his approach and many of the conclusions are helpful in relation to the “systematics” built up within orthodox lines of theology (whether RC, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, etc.). And I realize that many, esp. younger Evangelicals, have been so helped in terms of dealing with their cognitive dissonance.
So, on that level I like Wright, while I often don’t agree with him. I see him as having personally “moved” (relative to the conserv. side of his institutional roots as an Anglican) but not so far that people still largely orthodox won’t pay close attention and learn from him. I believe people like him are pivotal, in more sense than one.
As to Jesus as Messiah, I sure don’t claim any finality, certainty of grasping exactly what God was doing, for example in relation to “God’s” chosen people. (I accept they may have been “chosen”, but not in the sense they conceived nor that most Christians now conceive of that… particularly in terms of privileged position among nations and of unique reception of “special revelation”, e.g.). Still, my Process way of seeing things allows that God made a “decisive” (term of at least Griffin among Process thinkers) revelation of Godself in the human Jesus, and of “The Way” to live within God’s purpose. The latter is, thankfully, the ground I continue to share with many of my more traditionalist brothers and sisters (a “category” in which I place all humans)… I see no need, however, for orthodox formulations such as “fully human, fully divine”, that being an unnecessary and linguistically nonsensical expression… as are others equivalent to it, either linguistically or logically… generally both.
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As a non-scholar, I tend to take a slightly agnostic approach to most of these issues. For everyday purposes I’m broadly happy to treat a lot of the gospel material as though it’s roughly authentic and accurate, but at the same time I don’t see the need to defend its inerrancy. And I’m well aware of plenty of discrepancies and inaccuracies, and they don’t worry me any longer (they used to in my more evangelical days).
I like the idea of the decisive revelation of Godself in the human Jesus…
Re ‘fully human, fully divine’, I personally do find that useful precisely because it’s a paradox. For me, reality is generally too complex and counter-intuitive to be expressed in any other way than paradox, poetry and personal experience. Logic and language are useful but fall short…
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Having given this topic more thought, having taken into account the posts up to the present, I feel that the most important accomplishment of the NT is to show us what we now universally accept to be the true nature of God, as a gentle, caring and loving Being, rather than a capricious, vengeful and hateful God, as sometimes portrayed in the OT. Presumably God let the OT be believed to be His word, because the Jewish people had accepted the concept of one God as an all-powerful and exclusive Being, although this concept was limited by their experience of the shortcomings of man. Therefore they sometimes erroneously attributed human qualities to God.
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Hi Chas, that’s an interesting point and I agree to an extent, though I’m not sure that the distinction between the OT and NT is always quite so clear-cut. This feels like the basis for a whole other post! 🙂
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When involved in something intensely practical today, it suddenly occurred to me that, overall, the Bible lacks authenticity, which gives us a greater insight into its authorship. By lacking authenticity, I mean that it lacks the detailed observation that tells us the author had either been present at the incident described, or had even any experience of such surroundings. The first example that came to mind was Jesus being led into the desert by the Holy Spirit. There is no description of the desert that we would expect in any true account of it: the searing heat, a description of the vegetation (or lack of it), the imperative to find water every day, and the great silence, with sound almost absent. Another example is the failure to describe the hubbub in the city of Jerusalem, and particularly the absence of anyone heckling Jesus when he spoke. From our own experience, it is hard to imagine that there would not be someone who thought that he knew better, and was prepared to give voice to it. An exception to this is pattern would be Paul, who gives us sufficient detail for to believe that he had been a Roman soldier, who had persecuted Christians before he underwent some sort of conversion to Christianity. However, he is the one who can be seen to have been active in trying to control people into his way of thinking, through intellectual intimidation and condemnation.
The lack of experience of the desert points to someone who had spent his whole life in a protected environment, such as a priest. Anyone who had travelled significantly in Palestine would have had at least some experience of the desert. (This brings to mind our present problem in the UK, where many of our members of parliament go straight from reading politics at a university into a role as a researcher for a member of parliament, before being given a safe seat to enable them to become themselves a member of parliament, without ever having had a real job at all).
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I take your point but I don’t fully agree on this one. I’m not a biblical scholar but my understanding is that the gospels are written broadly within the literary tradition and conventions of ancient biographies, and as such wouldn’t be expected to contain the level of descriptive detail that we would expect today. Indeed, I believe it was primarily fictional accounts in the ancient world that contained this kind of detail – e.g. works like The Iliad and Odyssey. It’s only in comparatively recent times that we’ve started to expect such descriptions as a mark of authenticity.
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What authority do these ‘literary traditions and conventions’ have?
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Depends what you mean. 🙂 I got the information from a lecture by a Professor of New Testament Studies at King’s College, London. He was comparing the gospels to contemporaneous biographies of historical figures, such as Alexander the Great (if I recall correctly). His main point was that they were similar in form and structure and would have been understood within that genre. However, the gospels do generally contain considerably more detailed recounting of individual events and speech than many other comparable contemporary works.
Whether he’s right or not, I couldn’t say for sure – I’m not a biblical scholar. But as a student of literature I can verify that the level of descriptive detail you’re looking for is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Either way though, corroborative detail doesn’t really prove anything – a good author can make it up, and a poor eyewitness reporter can leave it out.
My view of the gospels is that they are broadly based on eyewitness and contemporary accounts, but have also gone through a process of theological interpretation – and are also subject to the literary forms/conventions of the day. So I certainly don’t regard them as inerrant in every detail, but nor do I reject them as false or fictional.
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You said: “My view of the gospels is that they are broadly based on eyewitness and contemporary accounts, but have also gone through a process of theological interpretation – and are also subject to the literary forms/conventions of the day. So I certainly don’t regard them as inerrant in every detail, but nor do I reject them as false or fictional.”
This is my view as well.
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The authority of any written work, or anything told to us by others, is the authority that we give to it. I remember my Dad, a simple country man, once saying that the so-called curse of the pointing the bone, used by the aboriginal people of Australia, only worked because the victim believed that it would. He/she therefore gave up and allowed themselves to die. To me, that makes sense, so it has the authority of the truth for me. We therefore limit, or promote, ourselves through what we accept/believe. My now believing that all of the Bible is actually the work of man does not stop me from enjoying what we know as the ‘fruits of the Holy Spirit,’ nor does it prevent me from seeing that it was necessary for me to accept it all before, as that was right for me at that stage of my Spiritual development.
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I certainly agree to an extent! It’s essentially the placebo effect – by believing in something we can give it power that it might not otherwise have.
However, I think there’s more to both authority and power than this. Electricity has power to kill me whether or not I believe in it, and the laws of physics work whether or not I accept their authority.
Now I don’t put either the Bible or biblical scholarship in quite the same category as the laws of physics. Nonetheless I do think that the Bible has a degree of inherent authority in proportion to its authenticity (which we can debate!). And I think that any scholarship has inherent authority to the extent that it’s based on good research, evidence and reason.
So while I no longer see the Bible as the fully-inerrant, fully-inspired Word of God, I do still see it as to some extent (and in some sense) God-breathed and God-authorised. That doesn’t ever mean we have to take it literally or at face value, or do everything it says. But it means it’s well worth wrestling with, and contains much truth even if that truth is poetic and paradoxical rather than scientific or historical.
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Wouldn’t it be inerrant if it was God breathed or God-authorised?
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Hi Chas, well, I think we have to be careful about our terms, and avoid absolutes and black-and-whites as far as possible. So I’m careful to say that I think Scripture is only God-breathed and authorised in a certain sense and to a certain extent. What that sense is may take a little longer to define – I will be posting at some length about this in due course so it might have to wait till then.
But no, I don’t think that God-breathed or God-authorised necessarily implies inerrant. Humans can also in a sense claim to be God-breathed on the basis of Genesis 2:7, but that clearly doesn’t make us perfect! It’s more that God chooses to breathe his life into and through a natural vessel which can never itself be complete or perfect, but can nonetheless be a container for his spirit.
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I’d have placed this under your reply to Chas, just below, but that wasn’t available. Anyway, as to ways to view and treat our canonical Scripture, I will suggest a crude categorization into 4 “groups” (many won’t fit neatly into any of them, but for analysis sake):
1) Unique, “unchallengeable” authority via exclusive, “special” revelation
2) “Special” revelation in a qualified sense with other “revelations” considered similarly
3) Simply a condensation, compilation of developing human conceptions of truth, with a qualified human authority
4) No particular authority – entirely human and of “primitive” thinking now transcended (“secular humanism” or “pure naturalism” view)
Now, let’s apply this to the many discussions of biblical authority, historical accuracy and such, beyond just here on this thread: People from group 1 are prone to try to convince people or counter arguments from all 3 other groups, but their major enemy is group 4, because this is seen as the bottom of a “slippery slope” (binary or dualistic thinking).
Conversely, group 4 folks (generally atheists) are mostly reacting to group 1… seeing them as the main threat to rationalism, evolutionary theory, etc. In my view, this entire interchange, both directions, is seriously boring and a waste of time…. Hardly anybody gets swayed by either groups’ arguments.
The important and interesting discussions take place mostly between positions 2 and 3, in my view, as they are here. I’ve already labeled group 4… Group 1 would be mainly historical orthodoxy and Evangelicalism. Group 2 is basically Process theology and related “Progressive Christian” views. Group 3 is “old line” liberalism and its carry-over for some contemporary liberal Christians.
After long being in group 1 and flirting quite a while with #3 without ever “buying” it, I’m solidly in group 2 and presume I’ll remain there, with continuing nuances in my position over time. Process theology provides, to me, the best foundation, philosophically and biblically, on which to base a serious but not literal or exclusivistic reading of Scripture. And this comes particularly into play with the Gospels and understanding the historical and theological Jesus… NOT a simple subject.
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Correction: In my browser at least, the reply I refer to appears higher up, the one of June 17, 1:33 p.m. stated as I see it, tho that’s not correct in my Pac. time zone, nor for EDT.
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Thanks Howard – that’s a useful broad categorisation. I’ve moved from group 1, which I was never fully comfortable with, into a broadly #2 position, though I think I actually sit somewhere in between the two camps. I do also have some sympathy with aspects of #3 but I couldn’t accept it wholesale.
I agree with you that groups 1 and 4 tend to set themselves up in opposition to each other, resulting in an on-going, endless and fruitless battle between the two positions. Ironically in many ways they depend on each other for survival, while trying to destroy each other.
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In regard to group 2, doesn’t the revelation come through the Holy Spirit interpreting the words for us, rather than from the words themselves?
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Re group 2, yes, I tend to the view that the Holy Spirit interprets the words of the Bible to us and it’s primarily in this sense that it’s ‘God-breathed’. In other words, he breathes life into it now, and may bring out fresh meanings with each new reading. That doesn’t totally preclude that he had some hand in its original inspiration/revelation though – though never of course mere dictation.
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To Chas and The Evan. Lib.,
As to the Holy Spirit interpreting the words…. That has long been part of probably all of orthodoxy, certainly since the Reformation. For Protestants, it was applied more to the individual and less to the Church. And as a “neo-orthodox” Reformed theologian, the highly influential Barth emphasized a form of this a lot: that the Bible BECOMES the Word of God as preached/heard via the H.S. This and other aspects of his approach were a bit too esoteric or mystical (tho he eschewed “mysticism”) for most, and neo-orthodoxy is little followed (at least directly) today. If one wants a fresh angle on a lot of things, Barth is fascinating reading. But do it selectively if you’re unfamiliar, or you’ll likely bog down in the detail of his vast knowledge/research (plus complex Germanic style).
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Thanks – I’ve been meaning to read Barth for some time, but I’m always a bit daunted by the prospect! I’d come across his idea of the Bible becoming the Word of God as the Holy Spirit interprets it to us, and it’s one I’ve found helpful.
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Reading his sermons is lighter, easier reading, though not as nuanced, as you’d tend to guess. A famous one is “The Strange New World Within the Bible” or something like this… I think another is about the “Yes and No of God”. Also, his political/theological warnings early on about Hitler are interesting reading (I forget the title)…. He was a principal writer of the Barmen Declaration, seeking to get the German Lutherans and others to take a stand against Hitler…. the better known Bonhoeffer was influenced a lot by Barth. Alas, lesser minds and hearts than theirs (plus several others) held sway over most and both Catholics and Protestants were co-opted by Hitler’s phoniness. (One of Barth’s relevant expressions is one which American… and other… traditional Christians should follow more: do theology with a newspaper [or modern equivalent] in one hand and a Bible in the other.)
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