“I’m watching over them for harm and not for good.” – Jeremiah 44:27
The Bible is full of inspirational nuggets, that we just love! We get a verse of the day from our favorite Bible app. Our instagram and Facebook accounts show inspiring quotes from the Bible with beautiful nature or abstract colors behind them. But when you really dig in and read huge chunks of the Bible, the reality is, for every inspirational nugget, there seems to be five more warnings and curses. It’s not really a super-friendly, positive-vibes only kind of book. Christians talk a lot about grace, God’s free gift, but it seems like most of the biblical story is wrapped up in conditions with severe consequences. So why is the teenager’s favorite life verse Jeremiah 29:11 and not Jeremiah 44:27?
The answer is simple: we’re a bunch of cherry-pickers. Cherry-picking is the idea that someone picks and chooses the parts that best suit their pre-existing assumptions while ignoring the whole of the text.
Christians are famous for accusing each other of cherry-picking the Bible. Progressives accuse Traditionalists of cherry-picking anti-gay scripture while ignoring all the surrounding passages that would indite them for eating shellfish or over-eating. Traditionalists accuse Progressives of cherry-picking only the frou-frou no-consequences God and ignoring the biblical realities of judgment and wrath. Yet all of us who call ourselves Christian remain enamored with this divisive book. We just can’t get away from the Bible. Through all our vastly different interpretations, we still believe the Bible is “the source of all that is “necessary” and “sufficient” unto salvation (Articles of Religion) and “is to be received through the Holy Spirit as the true rule and guide for faith and practice” (Confession of Faith)” (Book of Discipline). On the one hand, cherry-picking seems highly irresponsible. If all of this is God’s Word, shouldn’t Nahum carry the same weight as Luke? On the other hand, we only accuse people of cherry-picking when they come to different conclusions than ours, when they emphasize different verses than we do. If we’re all a bunch of cherry-pickers, is there perhaps a most faithful way to pick?
The Most Famous Cherry Pickers
Okay, so there’s some pretty historic precedents for cherry-picking in the Christian faith. I mean, you can’t get more famous that Jesus and Paul. They were working with the same Old Testament we’re working with, right? (Well, no, but more on that later). Luke 4 is famous because it’s seen as Jesus’ mission statement, his declaration of fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah 61:1-2.
The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,[a]
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
and the day of vengeance of our God (emphasis mine).
Isn’t it interesting that Jesus has the whole scroll of Isaiah before him, and chooses to stop reading without mentioning “The day of vengeance of our God”? And isn’t it interesting that instead of comparing himself to Elijah bringing death and judgment on the prophets of Baal, Jesus compared himself to Elijah’s being sent to a Gentile widow, and to Elisha healing a Gentile enemy?
And then we read Paul in Romans 15:7-9 (his summary of the point of the whole book of Romans), and we see that he would utterly fail his Intro to Old Testament class for cherry-picking verses out of context. For example, Paul quotes a tiny portion of Deuteronomy 32, saying, “Rejoice you Gentiles, with his people.” This and several other OT verses are strung together here for Paul to prove that God’s plan all along was to fully include the Gentiles in the covenant blessing of a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Hooray Gentiles! (That’s you and me, unless your one of my Jewish readers). But when you read Deuteronomy 32 in context, Moses is singing a song about Israel entering the Promised Land: God’s judgment is coming upon the godless Gentiles of Canaan and their children will be slaughtered before their eyes. The actual context of the Gentiles rejoicing is this verse that comes right before it: “I will make my arrows drunk with blood, while my sword devours flesh: the blood of the slain and the captives, the heads of the enemy leaders.” The Gentiles victims are commanded by the invading army that they should rejoice because God is judging them, sentencing them to a compassionless and violent slaughter. I wonder why Paul left that part out? Honestly, how did he even see anything remotely positive for the Gentiles in this little nugget of a text?
John Wesley, You Bleeding Heart Liberal, You!
The founder of Methodism himself was very concerned with Calvinist leanings that emphasized God’s sovereign right to predestine some to salvation, and the vast majority to damnation (often called “double predestination.”). In his sermon “Free Grace,” Wesley countered that double predestination “is grounded on such an interpretation of some texts…as flatly contradicts all the other texts, and indeed the whole scope and tenor of Scripture” (¶20). As scholar Andrew Thompson explains, “What he is pointing out here is that an isolated text (such as Romans 8:29) cannot be read in such a way to overturn the vast number of texts that affirm the steadfast love of God. Individual passages in the Bible must be read with respect to both the scope (meaning the breadth from Genesis to Revelation) and the tenor (meaning the enduring tone throughout) of the whole.”
For Wesley, while it was true that scripture elevates and respects God’s ultimate sovereignty, this is never at the expense of that sovereignty being expressed through the lens of God’s love. While Calvinists would argue that it IS loving for God to blindly predestine the masses to hell, because God alone really knows what love means, Wesleyans argue that this belief runs counter to both the human experience of love, and the overall tenor of Scripture. If you ask me, the Calvinists should win here, because an honest reading of the overall tenor of Scripture is that God is very angry and vengeful, and that humans who don’t wallow in miserable adoration before God will receive a just and grisly punishment. Where does John Wesley get the gall to say the whole tenor of Scripture reveals God’s love? Is he reading the same bible?
Well, Wesley had a different starting place than the Calvinists. For Wesley, all of Scripture was to be interpreted through the lens of 1 John 4:19, “We love because God first loved us.” Wesley called this verse “the sum of the whole gospel,” and referred to the book of 1 John as “the compendium of all the Holy Scriptures.” It is a conscious choice to assert that this verse, and this particular book, best captures the heart of God and the purpose of humanity. It is a choice based on reason, tradition and experience, in other words, it is well informed. But at the end of the day, it’s still a choice. The Scripture itself makes no claims that God’s sovereignty must be understood through God’s love. And so you’ve got Calvinist Christians and you’ve got Wesleyan Christians.
Wesley firmly believed that the scriptures contain everything necessary for salvation. His greatest emphasis was that faith in Christ leads to holiness of heart and life, in other words, a real transformation to love God and neighbor. Yes, he believed that this was biblically based, but it was his discernment and choice that elevated this belief as the key commitment to understanding the rest of Scripture.
So. We’ve got Jesus, Paul, and John Wesley serving up some cherry-picking realness. I would argue that they are showing a faithful way for Christians to approach the Holy Book. Because the Bible is NOT plain and simple. It’s NOT clear as day. It’s NOT black and white. It’s chock full of diversity, contradictory themes, and ancient tribalistic ideas that many of us consider appalling and immoral today. Everyone has to practice discernment when we read the Bible. Everyone interprets Scripture through the lens of some previously held belief. So why not learn from how Jesus and Paul do that? We’re all reading as if looking “in a mirror dimly,” (1 Cor. 13:12), so why not approach the Bible with the humility to accept that some interpretations can do real harm in the world, and some interpretations can be truly life-giving. May we be wise enough to notice the difference, and humble enough to adjust our own lenses when we see we are the ones doing harm.