It doesn’t quite work like that
Biblicism. It's a word that historian David Bebbington uses to sum up evangelical conviction that the Bible is a book that is neither locked in the past nor limited to the confines of private spirituality. Biblicism points to the conviction that the Scriptures speak to present, public issues. Historically, the different streams of evangelicalism have all shared this conviction. As an evangelical Anglican, I happen to believe that too.
This does not mean, however, that any believer—evangelical or otherwise—can move simply and directly from biblical command to advocating for this or that public policy.
Perhaps you've seen the meme floating around the internet picturing a man's bicep with the prohibition against male homosexual acts from the book of Leviticus tattooed on it. One of the kinder captions says something like this: "Tattoo: $350.00. Not knowing that Leviticus also bans tattoos: priceless."
The meme, of course, wants to push a particular conclusion at us: if we are not willing to apply all the bible equally, we should not apply it at all. And since the first option is simply not credible, the second is inevitable.
While I'm not sure about that conclusion, the meme does have a point. Far too often, Christians of all stripes are very selective about what parts of the Bible speak directly to what contemporary problems. To many people of other faiths and none, it looks like we ransack the Bible to support policy positions that we affirm for other reasons altogether and ignore the Bible when it disagrees with us.
So what do we do with the commands of Leviticus then? Here are four options. We can say, as some contemporary Christian voices do, that Leviticus is completely relegated to the past and is simply no longer binding. We can do the opposite also; there are Christians who advocate for a return to a theocracy in which most Old Testament laws are in full force (including, for example, the death penalty for disobedient children).
Or, third, we can try—as Christians have done for centuries—to distinguish between the ceremonial laws that have been taken up by Christ and are therefore no longer binding and the moral laws that remain in force. Or, fourth, we can look, even in the most obscure legal passages, for general principles which transcend the cultural limitations in which those passages were written.
The first option, it seems to me, is a dead end for it ends up negating the Old Testament (or at least significant chunks of it) as Scripture. Frankly, I am very surprised when I hear otherwise very traditional Christians say "Well, that just doesn't apply anymore," far too easily. The Scriptures of Israel are the Church's Scriptures, too. That means that they still speak. It is a question of how, not whether.
The second position, while admirable for its clarity, is, ironically, not biblical. Already in the New Testament (Acts 15), the Early Church is beginning to discern that the inclusion of Gentiles in the covenant through the saving work of Christ takes up Israel's Scriptures and, in some way, reorients them. Or rather, Christ Himself forces a re-reading of those Scriptures to discern their meaning. To assert otherwise—to say that they simply reflect the eternal mind of God on all things moral and cultural—is to treat the Old Testament in a way that the New Testament does not and therefore negates the Old Testament as Scripture. This is as much a dead end as the first option.
The third looks straightforward but in actual practice is very difficult. Where does one draw the line between ceremonial and moral laws? There is no obvious demarcation in the Scriptures themselves. Rather, what we call ceremonial and moral are often strung together within the larger, and more biblical, category of "cleanliness." What does cleanliness mean today? Are we merely justifying as we cherry-pick our own favourite biblical passages and ignore other ones?
Finally, the last option suffers from cultural pride. It seems to forget that those "general principles" which transcend all times and places, principles which are obvious to us may well look to be as culturally conditioned to future generations as the Levitical prohibitions do to us, today.
So what are we to do? I'll try to tackle that in my next column.
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