In his sermon this past Sunday at Pasadena Covenant Church, Leslie Allen made an observation that American culture doesn’t like fear and the Church has assimilated to this view. Thus, we make God the personification of niceness. We dismiss whole sections of the Bible because they deal with the reality of fear in our lives in ways that do not comfort us.

The statement that we avoid parts of the Bible got me thinking about what I tend to avoid in the Bible and I realized I’m a pretty reactionary reader. Largely, I react against interpretations I used to hold but don’t hold now, heated debates I don’t want to enter, or different camps with whom I disagree who have made these texts central to their identities. Our Bible study is going through Genesis and this week we read Genesis 19, or the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. We let the story amaze us with its richness and sadness. We realized many of the arguments and counterarguments we hear regarding the text do not do justice to the narrative. But before Sunday night, I would have easily said that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was a text I would rather avoid—I called it a landmine—because of the way I have heard some preachers use it in a, well, hellfire and brimstone manner.

What other texts do I avoid? I’ve avoided Genesis 1-2 because I’m tired of the creationism/evolution debate. I’ve abdicated Revelation to the Left Behind and Hal Lindsey eschatologies. I read The Late, Great Planet Earth in high school and believed its interpretation of Scripture and history for a few months, but I now reject it. I skip over parts of 1 Corinthians because of the claims some charismatic brothers and sisters have staked. I grow nervous when I hear people preaching on giving and tithing or divine blessing because of the crap (and I do mean crap) coming from the prosperity gospel preachers.

Look at the Bible I’m left with if I follow this reactionary reading program. The TTRV (Tyler’s Truncated Reactionary Version) says little about God’s creative activities, interaction with unjust societies, expectations of what we are to do with our resources and money, how the Holy Spirit empowers the Church, how God cares and blesses, or that there is an ultimate purpose to history.

I would love to be able to take an appreciative approach to many of the interpretations of Scripture that make me bristle. Most days I say why bother and then go read the texts that haven’t been tainted for me. Some days I feel like proclaiming as Bono does at the opening of “Helter Skelter” on the album Rattle and Hum, “This song Charles Manson stole from The Beatles; we’re stealing it back.”

The belief that we have mastered certain texts so that we think there is nothing new to learn from them, is perhaps just as harmful, but that is for another post.