Does your Bible offend you?

The story of the Kuduk Bible translation has been nagging at my mind this week. According to reports, this translation so offended the people of the Indian province of Jharkhand that people were rioting in the streets, debating it hotly in the political assembly and the local Bible Society quickly responded by apologizing and removing the Bibles from circulation. As a Bible translator, I can only look on with a mixture of envy and regret. First, envy that a translation could make such a splash. How often do translations come out in other parts of the world and scarcely cause a ripple? And second, regret that the Bible Society would pull the offending books so quickly. But at the same time, I expect that a Bible society walks a fine line in a region like Jharkhand where a tiny minority of Christians live in a delicate balance with a majority Hindu and Islamic population.

This brings up for me what is a very troubling question: Why doesn’t my Bible offend me? The carnage and ethnic hatred portrayed in the Old Testament is not much different from the ongoing scenes of centuries old ethnic hatreds in Georgia. So why do I revere the story in The Book but despise the situation in the news? And the tacit approval of slavery in the New Testament is not so much different from the passivity of the vast majority of professing Christians in the face of the genocidal abortion of this century. Why am I not offended?

Far more offensive is, or I should say ought to be, the plain teaching of Jesus Christ which somehow we have managed to spiritualize into insignificance. The materialism and worldliness of American churches ought to shock us. It ought to cause us to run from our prosperity-soaked self-help sessions shouting Ichabod!, “the glory of the Lord has departed.” Our failure to either be offended by the Gospel or to align our lives with it has put us in a particularly weak bargaining position with the world. This was highlighted for me during the recent spate of online debates about homosexuality. Advocates of gay rights in the church ask very rightly why they should be asked to give up their lifestyle choices when straight Christians have not denied themselves anything. Rates of premarital sex and divorce are not appreciably different within the church when compared to the world at large. Our materialism as Western Christians is the aspiration and model of prosperity theology throughout Africa. Yet we want gays to renounce their lifestyles while we justify our own.

So perhaps we need to look at the Bible again and seek to understand its pacification in our time. Have we tamed and spiritualized the Message to the point where it is as sharp as a two-edged wet noodle? Should our activism directed at the world instead be turned inward so that judgment might begin in the family of God? Should our seeker-centrism be transformed into seeking the lost and visiting orphans and widows in their distress?

I hope I haven’t offended anyone…

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Comments (5)

Yeah, it offends me at times. Of course, I can't read back my culture and societal values into the text, but I still get angry reading Joshua and Judges. The slavery issue doesn't bother me as much, because there was almost nothing the church could have done in the face of slavery back then, and ultimately it was the church who brought an end to it. That's very different from the abortion situation where the church makes up the majority of the culture, and most Christians don't seem to care, simply letting the system go on.

My Chinese friends, especially new believers, see the commands and teachings of Jesus as offensive to our culture and want to keep it that way. They know something we forgot years and years ago in the West...if we try to tame Jesus' words, and allow the culture to define how we interpret them (this is so prevalent in the west...hermeneutical gymnastics are so prevalent by even scholars trying to curb the text to the culture), then they will lose their power.
we were discussing this very issue not long ago. The thing is, the teaching of Christ is so offensive, so counter-cultural, we ougth to be bothered by it. And instead, what do we do? We water it down and reinterpret it until it becomes "safe." We create "exception rules" that are not biblical, but that suit our own desire (like for example "turn the other cheek" and self-defense). We are no longer shocked nor offended by the message. Even Jesus' disciples were offended and bothered by the words of the Master. Turn off your familiarity and read the words of Christ afresh. Be offended when he tells you to bless and pray for those who hate you. Then, let the weight of the gospel hit home. And turn to Christ, the only one who can cause us to obey his commands. (No, I don't have it all figured out - I'm preaching to myself in this...)
Your questions certainly resonate with me as I delve into what exactly the Gospel is compared to what we have made it - soft, personal, impotent. Tom Wright's teachings have revealed how it have probably been received in 1st century Palestine and how "repent and believe the Gospel" would not have meant, as it does today, "feel sorry for your personal sins and get Jesus as your personal saviour" but rather "give up your agenda and understand that God's Kingdom has broken into the world" or, for Jews, "Messiah was here, God is doing some amazing things...".

Appropos offensive Bibles - our Bible IS offensive to most people and certainly to modern secularists. Firstly the world was much more bloody in those days and we are not used to seeing suffering except on CNN. The point is Sin is ugly and we are doing ourselves no favours to paint over it or keep it away from our suburbs. I think it was John Piper who said we need to see more beheadings to start really understanding what it means to suffer. Sounds crazy but his point is we're "sittin' too pretty" to understand our predicament.

God seems to not be queasy but rather employs blood and violence as kind of "megaphone to rouse a deaf world" to borrow from Lewis.
As in politics, most people who cite the Bible do so after combing Scripture for neat little verses which support their own personal view of what is right. I, of course, do this myself. Its only human. Ranger does this, by implication, in talking about slavery and abortion. Hermeneutical gymnastics can get out of hand, but it is essential to read the Bible in the context of the cultures to which the various books were first given, and verses in the context of chapters, or we will naturally read it into our own culture, and get much of it wrong. Slavery is never respectful of the dignity of each individual, but it was a very different status in 800 BC in Asia than in 1850 AD in North America. Individual liberty was, generally, not a priority in any culture at that time, although the Jewish faith did first introduce a personal relationship with the deity, as distinct from a communal one. A good question is why the same Bible says it is OK to enslave the people of other nations, but not your own, but in another place, says you shall let the servant who has escaped from his master live freely among you, because you were slaves in Egypt. A friend of a friend I met some years ago, known in his own circles as "the gay Christian" (graduate of Bob Jones University no less), offered a very Biblical argument that Christians who eat shellfish and lobster should not complain that he violates another Levitical rule. And for those who love to quote the final chapter of Proverbs about the woman "more precious than rubies" -- take note that this woman has independent discretion to spend family finances, is expected to be knowledgeable in buying and selling real estate, and, far from supporting the family, her husband seems to have nothing to do all day but sit in the gate with the elders, accepting praise for what a good provider his wife is.

The Bible can be a guide to individual choices, but it is not a very good weapon to hit each other over the head with. Accordingly, it doesn't do very well as a basis to "change our culture" unless individuals change their own lives first. Those who have attempted wholesale reform of entire cultures on a supposedly Biblical basis have foundered in almost exactly the same manner that communist experiments did: e.g., Calvin's secular dictatorship in Geneva, Savonarola in Florence, David Koresh in Waco, Texas...
I heard a joke once which kind of makes this real. There were a group of women doing a bible study and they came to the part where Lotts' daughters got him drunk and had sexual relations with him so they could become pregnant. After the discussion one woman closed her bible and smiled. Another woman asked why she was smileing and she said. This is a Methodist bible and I'm Catholic and we don't have this in our bible. So even if the bible is translated from Chinese to English or visa versa, people will in some way be offended if they don't understand. That's where we come in, in that we develope bible study classes with friends and family to better understand what is in the bible. Oh, my wife has this bible and everything in it is sweet. I call it the sweet bible, but it does clarify some things we look at while studying. In God's Grace John

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