In an October 2023 interview, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said, “I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said people are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun? I said, Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview, that’s what I believe.”
I’m not trying to single out Mike Johnson here, because plenty of others have advocated for similar approaches, but I must point out:
Consider the issue of immigration, one of the current flashpoints in American political debate. How is reading the Bible supposed to tell us what Mike Johnson thinks? The Bible doesn’t say what our asylum requirements should be, how many refugees we should accept, or what to do about childhood arrivals. In fact, it doesn’t give us any policies at all. It does have verses: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk 12:31). “He made every nation of the human race to inhabit the entire earth, determining their set times and the fixed limits of the places where they would live” (Acts 17:26). “The foreigner who resides with you must be to you like a native citizen among you; so you must love him as yourself” (Lev. 19:34). “If someone does not provide for his own, especially his own family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8). “The king will answer them, ‘I tell you the truth, just as you did it for one of the least of these brothers or sisters of mine, you did it for me’” (Mt. 25:40). “God is not characterized by disorder but by peace” (1 Cor 14:33). “‘Which of these three do you think became a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?… Go and do the same” (Lk. 10:36-37). From verses, you can get principles. But verses and principles aren’t policies. Determining what we – or Mike Johnson – should think about the issue of immigration in 21st century America is, as they say in academia, left as an exercise for the reader.
Protestant Christians affirm the clarity, or perspicuity, of Scripture: the belief that, as the Westminster Confession of Faith puts it, “those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.” We believe in sola scriptura: that “only Scripture, because it is God’s inspired Word, is our inerrant, sufficient, and final authority for the church” (Matthew Barrett, God’s Word Alone, p 23). Martin Luther believed that ordinary laypeople could and should read and interpret Scripture for themselves, without any special training: “a simple layman armed with Scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without it.” 1 The Bible affirms its own clarity: “Your word is a lamp to walk by and a light to illumine my path” (Ps. 119:105).
However, just because Scripture is clear enough doesn’t mean that it’s clear about everything. Saying it’s sufficient doesn’t mean that it tells us all that we might wish to know. Puritan theologian John Owen said that, “In the divine Scriptures, there are shallows and there are deeps; shallows where the lamb may wade, and deeps where the elephant may swim.” 2 Peter 3:16 says that parts of the Bible are “hard to understand” and warns that “the ignorant and unstable” may “twist [Scripture] to their own destruction.”
And, wow, Scripture sure gets twisted. Perhaps the most troubling piece I’ve read this year is Aella’s “The Joy is Not Optional.” The author describes growing up in a household with a narcissistic, abusive father and enabling mother who, under the influence of an authoritarian Christian homeschooling curriculum, abused her and crushed her will. One of many, many examples:
Once, when I was eight years old, I’d done something wrong that warranted a spanking. My dad commanded me ‘come here.’ I hesitated, building up my willpower, before complying. He spanked me and let me go as I sobbed. He then said “You hesitated. That’s disobedience - come here to get another one.”
At this point I was in a lot of pain, and the effort it took to voluntarily subject myself to another one was now way more. It took me a few moments before I could force myself to approach again. He spanked me again, let me go, and as I sobbed, he told me again that I had hesitated, that this was disobedience, and that it warranted another.
By this point I was in even more pain, and it took even greater effort to overcome my body’s desire to flee or fight. And so again, there was a few second delay. And so he did it again.
He did again eleven times. And when he told me the twelfth time to approach, something in me completely broke. It didn’t matter that my body was now in overwhelming agony - possibly the greatest pain I’ve experienced in my life - the only way to make it stop was to abandon my will entirely, to become a mindless obedience creature that would walk straight into the fire instantly when commanded. So I did, he spanked me one last time, and then he stopped.
I remember this particular instance well because he reminded me of it a lot, whenever he was unhappy with me. He’d say the phrase “twelve times” as a warning - like “you have a spirit of rebellion. If you don’t shape up, things will get bad around here. Remember - twelve times.” He was proud of it.
If you’re looking for Scripture to justify this, you can find it. “Honor your father and your mother, that you may live a long time in the land the Lord your God is giving to you” (Ex. 20:12). “The one who spares his rod hates his child, but the one who loves his child is diligent in disciplining him” (Prov. 13:24). “Look, I was guilty of sin from birth, a sinner the moment my mother conceived me” (Ps 51:5). “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is pleasing in the Lord” (Col. 3:20). “If a person has a stubborn, rebellious son who pays no attention to his father or mother, and they discipline him to no avail… then all the men of his city must stone him to death. In this way you will purge wickedness from among you, and all Israel will hear about it and be afraid” (Deut. 21:18,21).
Or consider the sordid history of race relations in the US: the Bible has been used to justify everything from the South’s chattel slavery (Eph. 6:5) to the Jim Crow era’s legalized discrimination (Gen. 9:25) to modern philosophies of segregation (Deut 7:3). Philip Yancey describes his childhood church:
The pastor taught that the Hebrew word Ham meant “burnt black,” making Noah’s son Ham the father of Negro races, and that in a curse Noah had consigned him to life as a lowly servant (Genesis 9). That is when I heard my pastor explain why black people make such good waiters and household servants. He acted out their moves on the platform, pretending to balance a tray of food above his head, and we all laughed at his antics. “The colored waiter is good at that job because that’s the job God destined him for in the curse of Ham,” he said…
Around that same time, Mississippi’s Baptist Record published an article arguing that God meant for whites to rule over blacks because “a race whose mentality averages on borderline idiocy” is obviously “bereft of any divine blessing.” If anyone questioned such racist doctrine, pastors pulled out the trump card of miscegenation, or mixing of races, which some speculated was the sin that had prompted God to destroy the world in Noah’s day. A single question, “Do you want your daughter bringing home a black boyfriend?” silenced all arguments about race. (Soul Survivor, p. 22-23)
The Bible has been used to justify spiritual abuse (Ps. 105:15), genocide (1 Sam 15:3), the Crusades (Ps. 79:1-4), holy war (Ps. 116:15, Rom. 13:4), and sexism. It’s been used to counsel abused women to stay with their husbands. The perspicuity of Scripture does not, it seems, include being clear enough to prevent these sins. Each of these people picked a Bible off their self and read it, yet they each arrived at places that most of us would condemn. How did the lamp of God’s Word illuminate these paths?
The Pharisees bother me. Not because they were legalists – the legalism does bother me, but they were not the first nor the last to turn their religion into a set of rules, and we understand in theory how to avoid legalism. But what bothers me – the question that haunts me, that I don’t feel like I have a good answer to – is, how could the most religious people of Jesus’ day miss him?
You study the scriptures thoroughly because you think in them you possess eternal life, and it is these same scriptures that testify about me, but you are not willing to come to me so that you may have life. (Jn. 5:39-40)
The Pharisees were religiously devout and morally rigorous. They were passionate about serving God themselves and about bringing their fellow people alongside them to follow God. They had memorized all or most of the Bible that they had. Yet they failed to recognize God when he stood before them in the flesh, close enough to smell.
This haunts me because, how can I know that I’m not doing the same, that we’re not doing the same? How can we ensure that we don’t end up like Aella’s parents, or Philip Yancey’s faithful Sunday morning church attendees, or the Pharisees, or the Crusaders? “Go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it” doesn’t cut it – if it did, we wouldn’t see such abuses recur throughout history.
We’ve talked in the past about Biblical wisdom – not an intellectual mastery of a topic, but skill at living, the ability to effectively navigate your whole self through the manifold and sometimes contradictory challenges of life. I’m becoming convinced that what’s true of the Biblical virtue of wisdom and the genre of wisdom literature in the Bible is true of the Bible as a whole. The intended use of God’s Word is not to pick it off the shelf and read it and know what to think about specific issues. Instead, it’s given so that we can be spiritually formed into disciples of Jesus. As John Mark Comer says, we
learn to read Scripture as apprentices of Jesus, not just for information, but also for formation. It will require us to rewire our brains so they can deeply attune to God’s speaking voice as we read. And it will require us to make immersing our minds and hearts in Scripture a practice, a daily discipline of love (The Scripture Practice, p. 3).
By immersing our minds and hearts into Scripture and by letting Scripture soak into our innermost being, we can over time be shaped into people who are more Christlike – who avoid falling prey to exploitation or holy war or legalism or oppression or a thousand other abuses and deformations, not because we read the right verses that tells us “No,” but because through the Scriptures we know Christ, and through Christ we see that such actions are not compatible with his love and character and example. Because God’s Word reveals the Word, because all Scripture points to him (Lk 24:27), we interpret Scripture in light of him, seeking understandings and applications that reflect his self-sacrificial love.
This is neither foolproof nor automatic. We will all no doubt still make mistakes and misinterpretations and be covered by God’s grace. And there are no doubt still times when the simplest solution is to pick up a Bible off the shelf and read it to find out what to think about an issue. The living and active Word of God can still do its work this way. But this isn’t the goal. A child may learn to do math on their fingers or sound out words phonetically, but only as an aid toward internalizing the skills of mathematics and reading, as a step in being formed into the kind of person who can by nature read and calculate.
Let’s press on toward being formed by God’s Word into the likeness of his Son.
Footnotes
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As quoted in Wikipedia; see also articles on On the Bondage of the Will and gymnobiblism. ↩