Imagine you got
to launch your own church and – clever marketer that you are – you realized you
needed to differentiate your new denomination by basing a prominent doctrine on
a single Bible verse. Which verse would
you choose?
Don’t scoff. We all know it happens. Plenty of denominations both within and at
the fringes of Christianity have whipped up doctrines based on less. If you’re a sect-watcher like me, you’re
probably already thinking about the Latter-Day-Saint practice of baptism for the
dead, a ritual based on one small, enigmatic declaration in 1 Corinthians 15:29.
Those silly Mormons, someone may think, basing so much on so little. But the Mormons aren’t alone. This month I’m stepping back from my usual linguistics deep dives to make a quick survey of some one-shot dogmas, practices, and beliefs that have sprung from single verses of scripture. It’ll get a little episodic, but it’s a quick read.
ONE
VERSE: BAPTISM IN THE NAME OF THE TRINITY
Nearly every
Christian denomination, large or small, baptizes believers “in the name of the
Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
This practice is mentioned only once in the entirety of Scripture, a
single verse (Matthew 28:19) out of the nearly eight thousand verses in our New
Testament. Elsewhere (Acts 2:38), believers
aren’t told to baptize in the name of the full Trinity. The apostle Peter teaches that believers are
to be baptized “in the name of Jesus,” and two Bible chapters later it’s
declared that there is “no other name under heaven” by which we can be saved. That latter combination of verses is recognized
by the Oneness Movement as having more weight than the Matthew 28 declaration
of baptism in the names of the Trinity.
To my mind, the
two directives aren’t mutually exclusive.
To baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit does, in fact, include
baptizing in the name of Jesus. The fact
remains, however, that the formula for our most common approach to baptism
appears once, and only once, in all of the New Testament. It is, in short, a doctrinal practice based
on a single verse.
ONE
VERSE: TATTOOS
On a less weighty
note: On the back of my left shoulder, I have a tiny tattoo of a koi fish. Honest, I got it long before I ever read the
book of Leviticus, in which a single verse prohibits the marking of one’s body
with tattoos:
“Do not cut your bodies
for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves.” (Lev. 19:28)
While it’s tough
to find a single denomination that bans tattooing outright, it’s pretty easy to
bounce around the Web enjoying essays by individual Christians who condemn
tattoos based on (1) this verse and (2) their sense of personal outrage. On the other hand, it’s just as common to
find rationales from Christians who justify tattoos by explaining the
cultural context of that prohibition in Leviticus. Least common was one little image gem I found
online: Gorgeously rendered script on skin, elegantly announcing the citation “Leviticus
19:28” as a tattoo. Inky irony in
action.
Whatever you
conclude about the literal reading or the cultural considerations behind that
verse, it’s probably good to keep in mind that the same chapter of Leviticus
also bans:
- Failing to pay an employee on the same day they’ve done work for you
- Trimming your beard (hey, I never trim mine)
- Wearing mixed fabrics (check your poly-cotton blend socks right now!)
- Sitting down when an elder is in the same room as you
ONE
VERSE: THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
I should probably
point out that the term “Immaculate Conception” is often confused with the idea
of Jesus’ virgin birth. This dogma isn’t
about Jesus’ conception. It’s the idea
that Mary His mother was conceived without the stain of original sin. It’s a fully Roman Catholic dogma based on a
vague one-liner in scripture.
The Catholic
justification for this belief is a single word in the angel Gabriel’s greeting
to Mary in Luke 1:24. The angel calls her kecharitōmenē, “one filled with charis,
grace.” Because she was already filled
with grace, the Catholic reasoning goes, then she herself must have been
created by a special act of God without the burden of original sin, thereby
becoming a worthy vessel to bear the messiah.
It’s not a
particularly compelling rationale, especially considering Mary herself immediately
rejoices and calls God her savior (saved from what, if she were already created
sinless?) Historically, Catholics weren’t
universally keen on it, either. Thomas Aquinas,
most prominent of all Catholic theologians, found the idea unworthy of the
faith. Dominican priests accepted it
wholeheartedly, but Franciscans fought against the idea. (Franciscans were pretty peaceful, so I’m using
the word “fought” loosely here. They probably
just arched their eyebrows and tsk-ed audibly.)
The matter was
settled for Catholics in 1854 when Pope Pius IX declared the matter to be a
dogma of the church.
ONE
VERSE: THE 144,000
Revelation is one
of the most symbolic books of the Bible.
That doesn’t stop people from taking parts of it literally when it suits
their doctrines or eschatology. Thus, the
one hundred and forty-four thousand “sealed servants of God” in chapter 7 of
the Revelation became a favorite of new catastrophist sects of Christianity.
- Seventh Day Adventist founders felt it was the number of Adventists selected by God to be saved in the end times … until their own numbers surpassed 144,000.
- Mormons had a similar take and abandoned it for the same reason, upgrading the 144,000 to “high priests” who would forever minister to the eternal gospel.
- Jehovah’s Witnesses, however, managed to hang on to the number as a literal part of their eschatology by making the ethnicity of the “sealed” believers non-literal – 144,000 non-Jewish believers from throughout history who are anointed and get to go to heaven bodily for eternity, while the rest of the believing population remains on Earth in an eternal paradise overseen by heaven.
Contemporary
evangelicals don’t do much better with their literal interpretation of this single
verse. Those with a Futurist bent toward
interpreting John’s Revelation tend to see it as a literal number of actual
Jews being saved during the horrors of an end-times tribulation, this belief thanks
to the influence of the Gospel According to Left Behind. Their focus on the Jewish ethnicity of the “sealed” believers
is slightly more literal than that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. However, the literalism falls apart when you
realize that Revelation 7 calculates the sealed as literally having 12,000 representatives
from each of the twelves tribes of Israel … ten of which no longer even existed
when the Revelation was written.
Should we maybe
start appreciating a symbolic book as being, you know, symbolic?
ONE
VERSE: SMOKING
“Do you not know that
your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, that is from God? You are not your own.”
You can certainly
argue that this verse applies to avoiding smoking as a way of shunning the “immorality”
mentioned in the previous verse (18) so that you can “glorify God with your
body” as pointed out in the verse that follows (20). But if the verse applies to avoiding smoking,
wouldn’t it equally apply to avoiding saturated fats? Wouldn’t we also need to have doctrinal
prohibitions against processed sugars in our sodas? Shouldn’t our church doctrines also require
believers to use seatbelts at all times?
Shouldn’t our credos include statements about honoring our bodies as
temples by requiring followers to get all recommended vaccines, especially
during pandemics? If smoking is unholy
treatment of our bodily temples, aren’t all those other areas as well?
ONE
VERSE: GAMBLING
There was a United
Methodist Church up the road from my childhood home that had dozens of pamphlets
in its foyer explaining why gambling was the worst of sins since humans ate
fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Okay,
I exaggerate. One thing I noticed,
though, was the recurrence of a single verse justifying United Methodist loathing of
games of chance:
“For the love of money
is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed
from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.” (1 Timothy 6:10)
The United
Methodist Book of Resolutions devotes numerous
paragraphs to the evils of gambling, calling it a “menace to personal and
social morality” and citing the verse above as the main, direct scriptural
condemnation of all iterations of gambling and profit by chance.
I won’t pick on
Methodists. Some of my best friends are
Methodists. But I do wonder how they
feel about risk-sensitive investments in 401(k) and 403(b) retirement accounts. And aren’t hedge fund investments a form of
gambling, betting a company will fail for one’s own profit? In fact, I wonder how they feel about all
capital gains under the aegis of capitalism – profit accrued when money earns
money, rather than income being earned by actual work. How do they feel about how low taxes are on
capital gains versus how high they are for income earned through real work? And how do they
feel about any fellow Methodists who work at banks and for credit card companies,
where profits are earned through forbidden interest rates, aka “usury”
(Leviticus 25:36-37)?
Sometimes a
single Bible verse can lead you down a long, long path.
ONE
VERSE: THE CLOSING OF THE CANON
This one might arch
your eyebrows as high as the Franciscans arched theirs over Mary’s immaculate
conception. Modern Christians tend to
cite one verse repeatedly to indicate nothing else can be added to the Bible:
“I warn everyone who
hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will
add to that person the plagues described in this book. If anyone takes away from the words of the
book of this prophecy, God will take away that person’s share in the tree of
life” (Revelation 22:18-19)
Church after
church and Christian after Christian have wielded this verse as evidence that
the Bible is now closed and no new information can be added to the revealed canon
of scripture. This interpretation might
have more weight if the verses above weren’t a reiteration of Deuteronomy 4:2,
likewise prohibiting further adding to or subtracting from the writings and
thus (according to the Sadducees of Jesus’ day) closing the canon some three
thousand years earlier.
When read
closely, the words in the verse above are clearly referring to the book John of
Patmos is writing, what we now call the Revelation. It isn’t referring to the whole Bible. In
John’s day, there was no “whole Bible” compilation and there wouldn’t be for
several more centuries.
That leaves us
(by which I mean Protestants who embrace the Bible rather than human traditions
as the source of our beliefs) with a ponderous issue: If the Bible doesn’t
declare a closing of the canon prohibiting any more additions, then on what do
we base our faith that the canon is closed?
Is our faith in the traditions of men … in this case, specifically in
the traditions of Catholic Councils in the 300s? Is it founded on the authority of the
Catholic named St. Augustine of Hippo, who oversaw those councils that decreed
the canon?
Is the closing of
the canon an extrabiblical tradition?
IN CONCLUSION
I purposely included
in these examples some single-verse beliefs that I do accept and others that I
don’t. It was a useful exercise for
me. It made me ask, “Why do I so quickly
condemn some ideas, yet so quickly accept other ideas when the evidence is just
as scripturally scant?”
I can’t answer that
question. I can just share that I ask it,
ponder it, and pray.
But on a lighter
note, I will answer the question I asked at the top of this blog
post! If I were going to forge a new
doctrine for a new denomination based on a single Bible verse, I’ve decided I’ll
go with Deuteronomy 23:13, which commands that each of us always carry a
shovel, so that if we have to relieve ourselves out in the wild, we can dig a
hole to cover it up.
That won’t make my
congregation any holier. But carrying around those shovels will
certainly teach us that basing high-impact doctrines on single Bible verses
might lead to some pretty strange places.
Maranatha,
YoYo Rez / Cosmic Parx
No comments:
Post a Comment