The Bible is a Hard Book

Several weeks ago after Wednesday night prayer meeting and choir practice, I went home, sat on the couch, and turned on the television. I watched the end of the show The West Wing. I do not normally watch this show. I do not know the characters or the plot, but this particular episode caught my attention. One of the characters in this show was a senator with presidential hopes. In the news it came out that, he was not a person of faith. A plot in the show was the political question of whether an atheist could be elected president. At the end of the show, the senator and the president were sitting alone, and the president asked the senator why he did not believe. The senator responded that someone had given him a Bible...and he read it. In his response, he did not cite the usual concerns, at least what I expected. It was not that miracles were too difficult to believe. He did not mention any conflict between science and religion. He said that he did not believe that a loving God would condemn people for the things he found in the Bible. He did not believe a good God would call for the execution of children who did not obey their parents (see the Ten Commandments). He did not believe a good God would make it a law that a man who raped a woman had to marry her. He did not believe that a good God would command people to go to war and kill every living thing. Anyone who reads the Bible will find passages, books that are very difficult to understand. I am taking a class at Southeastern, where the professor observed that “liberals” like to say a passage is difficult when what they mean is they do not like what it has to say. The students in the class chuckled and gave a small hurrah for the importance of the bastion of faithfulness to THE BIBLE. Often times the difficulties popularly discussed about the Bible tend to focus on the first chapters of Genesis, or in the miracles, or of course, the “apparent” prohibition of women in leadership, but I think the concerns expressed by this fictional television character are a more difficult question. The Bible is to my view a record of God's work in history. The fundamentalist demand Genesis chapter one to be interpreted in a narrow sense. By demanding uniformity with some controversial issues they create for themselves an illusion that the Bible is without difficulty. God said it, I believe it, that settles it. When people have this attitude I wonder how much of the Bible they read.