Is the Bible Ever Wrong?

When God pulled the Israelites aside after the exodus from Egypt, the Lord elected to consecrate them in holiness. Seeking to give the Israelites clear guidelines on how to live, eat, marry and establish relationships with one another, God handed over a set of laws by which the Israelites were supposed to live.

The Bible says these laws were handed from God to Moses. In that respect the laws communicated in Leviticus are literal commands from God on how everyone should live. There is only one problem. Some of these laws are now judged to be impractical and outdated, rendered obsolete by advances in culture and medicine.

That is not to say the laws communicated in books such as Leviticus were originally useless or without purpose. For instance, many of the directives in Leviticus (such as Leviticus 15, which discusses bodily discharges) actually made medical sense at the time as preventative measures related to communicable diseases. But there is no escaping the fact that most of the Christian and Jewish world now chooses to abide by some of the rules in Leviticus while conveniently ignoring others.

There is some advice we should probably not have dispensed with so easily. Leviticus 19:9 seems to be speaking to modern agricultural and social practices when it says, "When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges or your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyards a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the Lord your God."

That verse contains both ecological and economic wisdom. Meanwhile, Leviticus 25: 14-43 issues guidance to the Israelites on how to manage land and treat their countrymen.

But then we come to Leviticus 25:44, which reads, "Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves."

This is a watershed moment for the Bible that puts modern day believers in a difficult theological position. The world now largely agrees that placing human beings into bonded slavery is wrong. The United States entered a specific amendment to the Constitution banning slavery. If slavery is today considered wrong and immoral, are we to consider the possibility that the Bible is wrong?

We are faced with some simple choices. We can continue to interpret the Bible literally in this and every instance. But that would make it impossible for us to call slavery wrong.

We can interpret the Bible metaphorically, which allows us to view slavery as a symbol for servitude.

Or, we can take the middle ground, which is to accept that this passage in Leviticus and others like it in the Bible are to be interpreted contextually. That is, we can view passages like these in the context of a culture that accepted slavery as a normal course of human conduct. But that does not mean we should follow their example.

To do anything other than interpret the Leviticus passage on slavery contextually is to insinuate that the Bible has been proven wrong by modern society. Rather than try to prove that the Bible is flat out wrong on certain issues, let us move forward with the understanding that the Bible must be interpreted contextually or risk undermining its overall message.

Because here's the difficult truth. If you were to insist that the Bible be taken literally on every issue, you must accept that it would be okay if modern day Israel took you into slavery. If you believe that, I hope that you enjoy working in unpaid bondage building settlements in Palestinian territory, because that is the sort of work to which slaves were put in biblical times. Slaves have throughout history been used to advance economic and political agendas.

But before we get too far afield on the subject of slavery alone, let us proceed with the very real fact that the Bible must be taken contextually in other ways as well. This is not some argument in favor of relativism. The Bible contains many absolute truths about love, life and eternal salvation. But ignoring the reality of slavery and then claiming that everything else in the Bible is infallible is simply living a lie, a scriptural hypocrisy.

The ardent believer simply must find a way to make sense of the Bible contextually or face the cold fact of calling the Bible a liar. To that effect there are a number of issues in the Bible that deserve consideration as contextual thought products from a different time in history.

Homosexuality is one of those issues. Homosexuality is categorized as a sin at several points in the Bible. It is significant to note that homosexuality is only contextually indicted in the famous story about Sodom and Gomorrah. The term "sodomy" pertaining to homosexual (anal) sex is derived from the story in which a servant of the Lord named Lot protects a pair of male visitors from the interests of a sexually ravenous society. But Sodom was not only a homosexually promiscuous society. If we read into the text at all it is clear the whole culture of Sodom was up for grabs. God hated the general vice of that place as much as he hated the specifics. Yet the case of Sodom has been used to create prejudice against homosexuals. That is a blind and contextual prejudice. It is time to remove the biblical stigma about homosexuality just as we have elected not to own slaves. Both were products of a culture that frankly devalued human life and did not respect the rights and natural integrity of the individual.

We must also regard the idea that the Bible is to be taken literally on the subject of creation as a contextual prejudice. Jesus counseled against such literal nonsense in his indictment of religious priests taking scripture as literal law. If the example of Jesus is good enough for us, we should follow it. No more contextually narrow-minded creationism for true believers. Not allowed.

If you do not want to turn the Bible into a book of lies, then you must understand that the Bible is a book of truths only when we take into account that cultures and societies do evolve and change. That means it is acceptable to analyze the contextual knowledge and possibly prejudices of ignorance (patriarchal, sexual, medical and scientific) to which authors of the Bible were obviously prone before we pursue claims of absolute truth. Anything less is a sin of selective piety.