Living From Jefferson’s Bible

If you know much about Thomas Jefferson (beyond the fact that he was instrumental in the crafting of the Declaration of Independence and later became the third President of the United States), you’re probably aware that he is well-known for his unorthodox religious ideas.¹

Among other things, Jefferson’s worldview was heavily influenced by Enlightenment thought, and caused him to dismiss the miraculous elements of Christianity as unbelievable. Corresponding to his beliefs, Jefferson created his own version of the New Testament, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Using a razor, Jefferson literally cut out the parts of the Gospels that he didn’t like (things such as the incarnation, miracles, divinity, and resurrection of Jesus) and created a new book that was more palatable for him.

Christians today who claim to live according to the teachings of the Bible find this to be absurd—obviously you can’t just pick and choose which biblical teachings you wish to follow. After all, at the point when you start dismissing certain teachings because you don’t like them, you’ve basically ceased to follow the teachings of Scripture altogether and have turned yourself into the ultimate source of authority.

And yet…

For all of our insistence that we live based on the teachings of Scripture, if you look at the lives of Christians from a broad perspective, I would suggest that we, too, are guilty of creating our own versions of what the Bible says. We might not physically cut out passages with razorblades, but we practically do the same thing by ignoring certain teachings and living our lives in clear violation of others.

Probably there are many such teachings that we could use to illustrate the point, but just limiting ourselves to the words of Jesus, we can easily find several examples:

(1) Jesus’ Teachings on Divorce—

Statistics show that up to half of first marriages end in divorce, and subsequent marriages are even more likely to fail.² Furthermore, religious belief doesn’t seem to have a great impact on these statistics, as conservative evangelical Christians are only marginally less likely to get divorced than non-believers.³ How do those statistics mesh with the teachings of Jesus?

At one point in His ministry, Jesus was asked if it was lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all. He responded by saying that, “Anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.”⁴

In our current climate of widespread divorce for a variety of reasons, this isn’t a passage that is talked about too often, and when it is discussed, it’s often explained away—I recently heard an intelligent, well-educated Christian minister argue that perhaps Jesus wasn’t limiting “unfaithfulness” to sexual immorality, but was also including “emotional unfaithfulness” as a legitimate reason for divorce. Although I am no expert on 1st century Jewish life, the idea of “emotional unfaithfulness” is a modern Western concept that is completely foreign to the New Testament text. In the context of Matthew 19.4-6, where Jesus talks about man and wife joining together to form one flesh, it is an explicit sexual reference. The unfaithfulness that He mentions in v. 9 (or “immorality” in the NASB) is clearly sexual unfaithfulness—Jesus is saying that the only legitimate reason for divorce is once spouse cheating on the other sexually.

This is undoubtedly a hard teaching for us to accept (as it was for Jesus’ original audience—see v. 10)—but does that give us license to ignore it?

(2) Love Your Enemies—

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has a good deal to say about how we should respond to people when they mistreat us, and how we should feel about our enemies in general.⁵ Maybe we struggle to identify “enemies” in our everyday lives, but once again, this is a teaching of Jesus that we often neglect.

For example, I hear lots of public prayers on behalf of “our servicemen and women overseas” but I rarely (if ever) hear prayers for the individuals that those men and women are fighting against.

Certainly I have no problem with praying for US military personnel, but shouldn’t we pray for the other side as well? Regardless of how we feel about militant terrorists (and let me assure you, I’m not filled with warm feelings for them), isn’t this exactly the sort of thing Jesus was talking about?

(3) Treasure in Heaven—

Also in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus urged His audience to focus on building up spiritual wealth rather than the accumulation of earthly treasure.⁶ And this was not an uncommon topic—Jesus spoke about money a lot, and surely His teachings have implications for us, people who claim to follow Jesus who also live in the wealthiest society in the wealthiest time in history.

And what do those teachings say? Over and over again, they are consistent: spending our lives chasing after and accumulating possessions is foolish and wrong, greed is a sin, and we should use what we have to bless others.

I’m not denying the importance of good stewardship and providing for our families, but when multitudes of people around the world are dying due to starvation, contaminated water, and preventable diseases, how big of a house, how many cars, or how much money in the bank do we accumulate before stewardship becomes idolatry?


I could go on, but if you’re the average Christian, I’ve probably already stepped on your toes by now (I know I’ve stepped on my own).

I think living according to the teachings of Scripture is a noble pursuit, and for the Christian, is a necessary one. But by all means, let’s not get so wrapped up in talking about following God’s Word that we neglect actually doing it.

• • •

¹ Jefferson is often described as a Deist, but this might be an oversimplification of his religious views. Regardless, he was certainly influenced by deist thinking.
² http://www.divorcestatistics.org/
³ http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/15-familykids/42-new-marriage-and-divorce-statistics-released
⁴ Matthew 19.1-12.
⁵ Matthew 5.38-47.
⁶ Matthew 6.19-34.

Observation #12

It’s often said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions—I’ve always thought it would make more sense if the road to hell was paved with blazing fire bricks (or something along those lines).

New Church Website

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working on a new church website in my free time. It’s taken quite a while because my free time has been somewhat limited, but finally, it’s up.

There’s still a bit of content to add, and not all of the features are functional yet, but it’s a start. I like it more than the older version.

The Problem of Pain

I just finished reading C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, and rather than wait six months to write about a book like I normally do, I thought I’d go ahead and post some brief thoughts.

Compared to some of his other works (Narnia, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters), The Problem of Pain really wasn’t my favorite—parts of it are somewhat hard to follow, there’s a semi-weird chapter on animals, to an extent, he seems to undermine the doctrine of the Fall, and he also suggests a Christology that is lower than I am comfortable with.

Nevertheless, it’s still C.S. Lewis, which means that there is a lot of good stuff in The Problem of Pain. Below are some quotations that I particularly enjoyed…

Free will necessitates suffering:

“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”

(Lewis, p. 25)

On what we wish God was like:

“What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see the young people enjoying themselves’, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all’.”

(p. 31)

One of the more famous C.S. Lewis quotes that I had heard and like before but never knew where it came from is found in The Problem of Pain:

“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”

(p. 46)

Lewis suggests and then explains what he calls “the humility of God”:

“…It is a poor thing to strike out colors to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up ‘our own’ when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is ‘nothing better’ now to be had…It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts.”

(pp. 95-96)

Is it suffering of good people the hardest thing to explain? For Lewis, the answer is “no”:

“The sacrifice of Christ is repeated, or re-echoed, among His followers in very varying degrees, from the cruellest martyrdom down to a self-submission of intention whose outward signs have nothing to distinguish them from the ordinary fruits of temperance and ‘sweet reasonableness’. The causes of this distribution I do not know; but from our present point of view it ought to be clear that the real problem is not why some humble, pious, believing people suffer, but why some do not.”

(p. 104)

On the Christian’s submission of his own will:

“Christian renunciation does not mean stoic ‘Apathy’, but a readiness to prefer God to inferior ends which are in themselves lawful. Hence the Perfect Man brought to Gethsemane a will, and a strong will, to escape suffering and death if such escape were compatible with the Father’s will, combined with a perfect readiness for obedience if it were not.”

(p. 113)

An allusion to the “least of these” passage in Matthew 25 and the ethical implications of following Jesus:

“In the fullest parabolic picture which He gave of the Judgement, Our Lord seems to reduce all virtue to active beneficence: and though it would be misleading to take that one picture in isolation from the Gospel as a whole, it is sufficient to place beyond doubt the basic principles of the social ethics of Christianity.”

(p. 114)

And in reference to the flak that Christians often take for their hope of heaven (I love this quote):

“We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about ‘pie in the sky’, and of being told that we are trying to ‘escape’ from the duty of making a happy world here and now into dreams of a happy world elsewhere. But either there is ‘pie in the sky’ or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is woven into its whole fabric.”

(p. 149)

Of course, there are other good parts to the book, but the excerpts above at least give a taste of the book’s contents.