Don’t Amputate the Bible
The practice of being selective about which Bible passages will speak to your life has sometimes been described as the buffet approach. You take a big serving of this food you love and the food you hate you leave behind. I’d suggest it could better be described as amputation. You’re violently removing something from a body of writing intended to remain intact.
In Oxford’s Bodleian Library there’s a classic example of this. They have a Bible version on display from 1807. It was published in England and meant for black slaves. However, it conveniently removed that large part of Exodus referring to, well, the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. That was a rather significant amputation with an obviously racist motivation behind it.
At the Smithsonian National Museum of American History there’s another notable example. They have the personal Bible of Thomas Jefferson on display — you can explore it online here. He literally cut and pasted bits and pieces out of the four New Testament Gospels that he found personally inspiring. These excerpts appear in four parallel columns of Greek, Latin, French, and English. Completed in 1820, Jefferson composed it for himself, entitling it, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Remember that Jefferson wasn’t a Christian – he denied such cardinal doctrines as the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and biblical supernaturalism. His amputated “Bible” served his apostate religious views.
I doubt anyone reading this would be tempted to “amputate” the Bible in those sorts of literal ways. However, it is easy to mentally chop off Bible passages which we find too confronting. If we’re committed to living a certain way and the Bible challenges us on that, we may pretend that those passages have never existed in the Bible. Or if certain parts of Scripture don’t feel comfortable to us (like the imprecatory psalms or places speaking of divine wrath and judgment), we avoid them. What we’re doing is functionally no different than Thomas Jefferson or those British racists.
Reformed Christians love to rally under the banner of sola Scriptura – the Bible alone is our ultimate authority for doctrine and ethics. That’s wonderful. However, we need to be equally committed to tota Scriptura. The entire Bible is meant to be our ultimate authority. Because it comes from God, you have no right to amputate it. Because it comes from God, you’re expected to give attention to all of it. That includes the uncomfortable or challenging parts. Most importantly of all, as disciples of Christ, we remember how he never performed any amputations on God’s Word. Our Master kept it all together, both in his heart and in his life. Tota Scriptura was his way and it’s to be our way too. So, no more amputations!
