The Bible: With power comes responsibility

The day after being fired as the head coach of the Chicago Bears, NFL legend Mike Ditka held a news conference that lasted less than six minutes.

“Scripture tells you that all things shall pass,” a choked-up Ditka said after leading his team to only five wins during the previous season. “This, too, shall pass.”

It is a lovely sentiment, but it is not in the Bible. Just like “God works in mysterious ways” (it’s William Cowper), “Robbing Peter to pay Paul,” (Wycliffe’s Select English Works) or “No man is an island,” (John Donne), these quotes are often attributed to Scripture, but are not found there.

These are pretty innocuous aphorisms, even though not biblical. But there are other statements attributed to Scripture that are problematic.

“God won’t give us more than we can bear,” is a misquote of 1 Cor 10:13. It seems like an encouraging thing to tell people that God won’t give us more than we can bear, but you know... sometimes maybe people are going through more tragedy and pain than they are able to handle. I think of the horrific things that happen to people because of the sin of others or sickness, etc., and I just wouldn’t be able to tell them that they should be able to handle it, or that if they were weaker, things would be better.

Doesn’t make sense.

It also blames God – as if God has made these things happen to us.

What is really taught is that God will not allow us to be tempted without giving us a way to escape sinning. It is totally different.

“God helps those who help themselves.”

Not in the Bible.

This saying comes to us by way of Sidney Algernon (1622-1683) in his “Discourses on Government.” And was then quoted by Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanac in 1757. We do people, and God, a disservice when we pretend that it is of God.

Scripture is God’s word to us, and we tend to make it our word to each other…folks take sayings they like, and figure they must be in the Bible…if I think it’s true, then it must be true, and God must think it’s true and have put it in the Bible.

“People prefer knowing biblical passages that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs,” Rabbi Rami Shapiro says.

Most people who profess a deep love of the Bible have never actually read the entire book to understand the fullness of its teaching. I once met a professor who had to persuade a student in his university level Bible class that the saying “this dog won’t hunt” doesn’t appear in the Book of Proverbs.

“They have memorized parts of texts that they can string together to prove the biblical basis for whatever it is they believe in,” Shapiro says, “but they ignore the vast majority of the text.”

I call it “proof text bingo” where we can toss verses at each other to prove a point, but it is our point we are trying to prove, rather than seeking to understand the fullness of the teaching of Scripture.

Whenever people talk with fondness about the early Church, and question “why can’t we be just like they were,” I know they really know nothing about the early Church, which struggled with who’s in and who’s out from the very beginning. From the split from the Jewish community to the struggle between Jewish background and Gentile background Christians, it was tense all along… and ever after. Western history might have been different if more faithful and loving decisions had been made long years ago.

So perhaps it is up to us to be responsible with how we use the Bible. We can learn not just to cherry-pick verses that agree with us, or to quote “Scripture” that really isn’t there. We can learn to read for understanding, to be changed, rather than to seek to change others.

This story was originally published May 11, 2016 at 3:32 PM with the headline "The Bible: With power comes responsibility."