I wanted to ask an honest question. It’s partly a loaded question, but partly a recognition that my experience isn’t universal. If you’re a Christian who likes to talk about “submitting to the Bible’s authority” and “obeying what the Bible teaches,” what is the last time that you made a life decision based directly on something you read in the Bible? I’m not talking about the decision to put something on your facebook status or share a meme that sounds “biblical,” but an actual life decision that altered your behavior.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but I suspect that many conservatives like the idea of obedience and submitting to authority, but that they don’t actually flip open the Bible as a reference manual when they’re trying to make life decisions. It’s similar to the way that many progressives like the idea of “social justice.” If you wanted to ask me a gotcha question, you could ask me when was the last time I actually engaged in an act of social justice as opposed to just sharing a meme or posting a facebook status. Honestly, in my day to day life, there aren’t too many opportunities to take real, substantive action for social justice. I’d like to hope when I’m presented with actual decisions, I choose the just option instead of the easiest or cheapest, but I’m not sure I have the best track record in that regard.
Here’s the thing for me with the Bible. I read it every day on an iPhone app that gives me a daily lectionary selection of one Old Testament passage, one psalm, one gospel, and one New Testament epistle. Very little of what I encounter in my scripture reading consists in explicit, direct commands to do concrete things in my daily life that I would otherwise avoid doing. Most of what I come across is poetry or narrative that inspires me indirectly to seek the kingdom of God and cultivate the heart of Jesus.
So it seems really odd to talk about being “obedient” to the Bible, because the Bible doesn’t really issue me direct commands the way that God gave direct commands to Abraham or Moses. Now the Holy Spirit tells me to do things through my encounter with scripture, but the invitations and inspirations I’m given are rarely if ever articulated in the explicit, plain meaning of the text. This kind of claim is infuriating to the conservatives who say that the Bible is “perfectly clear.” It may be perfectly clear when you’re mining it for prooftexts to support your ideology, but when you’re reading it to learn how to live as a faithful Christian disciple, it’s a lot more murky.
I’ve read too much of the Bible to see it as a step by step instruction manual. It proclaims amazingly sublime truths that must be discovered and refined intuitively through prayerful searching. When you grasp these truths experientially and mystically, God changes your heart and you naturally behave the way that the Spirit leads you. Which is different than “obeying commands” like a computer executing lines of programming code. It’s not a rationalistic, behavioristic process. That’s exactly the approach to moral living that Paul spends most of Galatians and Romans demolishing. In my experience, coming into sync with the Holy Spirit has been a mysterious movement of grace. My spiritual growth has not been a product of deliberative moral decisions so much as directing my hunger toward God and constantly begging him to guide me.
But that’s just been my experience. If you have an example of a way in which a specific Bible verse caused you to alter a life decision, then it’s reasonable for you to say that you “obey” the Bible. Please share these examples so I can learn from them.
The Rev. Morgan Guyton
The Rev. Morgan Guyton serves as director of the NOLA Wesley Foundation, the United Methodist campus ministry for Tulane and Loyola universities in New Orleans, La. He blogs at Mercy Not Sacrifice on Patheos, from which this post is reprinted with the author's permission.