The Bible and the Ballot

Using Scripture in Political Decisions

Tremper Longman

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780802877345
• eBook ISBN: 9781467458580
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

How to read the Bible on matters of public policy

Christians affirm the Bible as our standard of faith and practice. We turn to it to hear God's voice. But what relevance does the Bible have for the contentious public policy issues we face today? Although the Bible does not always speak explicitly to modern issues, it does give us guiding principles as we think about how we might vote or act as political figures ourselves. 

The Bible and the Ballot demonstrates the proper use of Scripture in contemporary political discussions. Christians regularly invoke the Bible to support their positions on many controversial political topics—gay marriage, poverty, war, religious liberty, immigration, the environment, taxes, etc.—and this book will help facilitate those conversations. Tremper Longman provides a hermeneutical approach to using the Bible in this manner, then proceeds topic by topic, citing important Scriptures to be taken into consideration in each case and offering an evangelical interpretation. 

Longman is careful to suggest levels of confidence in interpretation and acknowledges that often there are a range of possible applications. Each chapter includes questions to provoke further thought in individuals' minds or for group discussion. 

The Bible and the Ballot is a ready guide to understanding the Bible on issues that American Christians face today as we live within a pluralistic society. 

PART 1

The Bible and Public Policy

1

Key Questions
for Reading the Bible

Why should Christians care what the Bible says about issues or principles connected to public policy? In a word, Christians recognize the Bible as canon, which means that this collection of books occupies a privileged place in the development of our thinking about God, ourselves, and our world (doctrine), and our attitudes and behavior (praxis). When the church recognizes the Bible as canon, it acknowledges its authority in our lives as the word of God.

While all Christians throughout history and across the globe acknowledge that the Bible has a special place as canon in the life of the church, some differences lie particularly in two areas: the nature of its authority and also its scope.

We begin with brief comments about its scope. All Christians affirm the Old and New Testament books that constitute the entirety of the Protestant canon. Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians do not remove any of these books, but they do include some from the period between the Old Testament and New Testament books. These books are called the Apocrypha (Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians disagree on the contents of the Apocrypha). For the purposes of this book, it is not necessary to adjudicate this issue since the inclusion of the Apocrypha would not affect our development of principles for public policy. That said, as a Protestant myself and writing primarily for a Protestant audience, I will appeal only to the books in the so-called narrow canon of the Protestant church.¹

Protestants particularly in the Reformed school of thought speak of sola scriptura to assert that the Bible and the Bible alone is the ultimate source of authority for the development of binding doctrine and practice. Many Christians, including Reformed, acknowledge the role of tradition, reason, and experience as well. Albert C. Outler spoke of the Wesleyan or Methodist Quadrilateral (Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience) based on the writings of John Wesley, the eighteenth-century founder of the Wesleyan movement. While today some speak as if these are equal or near equal carriers of divine revelation, that was not Wesley’s point. For him, Scripture remains the ultimate authority, with the result that true tradition, right reason, and experience rightly understood will not conflict with or contradict the clear teaching of Scripture. As Outler puts it, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral “preserves the primacy of Scripture, it profits from the wisdom of tradition, it accepts the disciplines of critical reason, and its stress on the human experience of grace gives it existential force.”²

The church acknowledges Scripture as canon because it recognizes it as the word of God. We hear the voice of God in its pages. Since God speaks in Scripture, it is true in all that it teaches. God does not lie or mislead. Among Protestant evangelicals, this assertion is often called the inerrancy of Scripture, though the same assertion is often made by referring to the Bible as infallible. Some believe that its utter truthfulness refers only to its theological and ethical teaching, and others would include historical assertions. While the present author’s view is that the Bible is true in all that it teaches (including historical assertions), this book will focus on the theological and ethical teachings of Scripture as they bear on issues of public policy.

However, it is one thing to say that Scripture is true and a different thing to say that our interpretations are true. This realization is important because we have no access to the meaning of Scripture other than through the process of interpretation. This point should not lead to despair or the idea that everyone can interpret the Bible in whatever way he or she desires, but it should lead to humility and also care and self-awareness when we interpret Scripture. In addition, we should be mindful of what is clear and what is unclear in Scripture (see below, pp. 20–23).

We thus must be conscious of our interpretive method, realizing that everyone depends on some method, even those who just pick up their Bible and start to read. In the first place, since the Bible is written in Hebrew and Greek, with a bit of Aramaic, most people must read it in a contemporary translation. As any translator will tell you, to translate the Bible involves innumerable interpretive decisions. Thus, those who read the Bible in English are reading an already interpreted Bible. But more interpretation is to be done after that, and we need to be aware of our interpretive method particularly as we deal with issues as important as those related to public policy.

For that reason, we begin with a short description of the method that governs the interpretation and use of biblical texts in the rest of the book. We will first identify the goal of interpretation and then discuss the strategy to achieve that goal.

The Goal of Interpretation: The Locus of Meaning

Understanding the goal of interpretation certainly begins by identifying where the meaning of the biblical text should be located. To be fair, in our present, postmodern age, our attempt to ask whether there is a determinate meaning in a text or in life has been thrown into question. While this book is not the place to engage in a full analysis of the claims of postmodern criticism of biblical interpretation, our following discussion will show that, while we don’t accept the idea that the goal of discovering the meaning of the text is ill-fated from the start, it is not as straightforward or certain as once thought.³ In other words, postmodern critique of the act of interpretation does not undermine the possibility of reaching an adequate and defensible understanding of the biblical text. The postmodern critique, however, appropriately breeds humility in interpretation, but not despair and skepticism.

With that background, we begin by simply describing the act of literary communication. An author writes a text to readers.

Author—Text—Reader

As interpreters, we are readers of the text written by an author. Thus, we begin with the statement that the goal of the interpreter is to understand the message of the author. It seems simple enough, but on closer examination, interpreting the Bible today is more complex.

Who Is the Author?

When we read a biblical text—Genesis or Hebrews, for example—who are the authors, and how do we access their meaning? These questions lead to several different observations.

First, questions of authorship are often debated among biblical scholars. Did Moses write Genesis, as traditional scholarship has asserted? If so, did he use sources concerning matters that happened in his past, and were there later additions or changes to the text after his life? Or was Genesis written long after Moses died, perhaps as late as the Babylonian exile? In the case of Hebrews, there is absolutely no consensus on who wrote that New Testament letter.

In short, many biblical books are anonymous or of debated authorship. Does that matter to our goal of biblical interpretation? Further, many biblical books, probably most, were not written by a single person at one time, but by a number of authorial hands over longer or shorter periods of time.⁴

We would argue that these questions of authorship do not matter to the question of interpretation, because we have no independent access to the authors who wrote the biblical texts, since they are all long dead.⁵ We are able to hear the author’s message only through the text that he wrote, so interpreters focus on the text itself. As we interpret, we make a hypothesis about the author’s meaning based on what he wrote.⁶

Before moving on to a consideration of the text in the act of literary communication, we must add a further complication to our understanding of the author of the biblical text. So far, we have focused on human authorship of biblical texts, and that is as far as some will go. But many believe, as stated above, that the Bible is the word of God. If that is the case, then God is the ultimate author of the biblical text.

The biblical authors themselves often reveal that they knew they were speaking and writing on behalf of God. Peter expresses this idea as a general principle for all of Scripture when he says, “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:20–21). Paul affirms this same understanding in his letter to Timothy: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16–17).

But then what is the relationship of the divine and human authorship of Scripture, and how does that affect our understanding that the message of the author of Scripture is the goal of our interpretation? Again, there is much debate about this question, but as we see New Testament authors interpreting the Old Testament in ways that almost certainly would have surprised the latter’s authors, we have to admit that the divine author’s intention is not completely coterminous with the human authors’ conscious intentions. That said, neither does it contradict it. Upon study, the best conclusion is that the New Testament authors’ use of the Old Testament exposes the fact that texts can have a deeper meaning (sensus plenior) than that discerned by a study of the human authors’ intentions. Still, we can discern that deeper meaning only when the inspired New Testament author brings it out. For us today, we should restrict ourselves to what we believe the human author intended and assume that that message is also the one that the divine author wants us to hear.

What Is the Text?

We have already admitted that the text itself is more complicated than we might think at first. Most biblical books have a history of composition that stretches over a period of time. One scholarly impulse is to study the text in order to reconstruct that history of composition, with an interest to recover the original core of the biblical book, sometimes with the sense that the original is the most authentic. But another impulse, which aligns with the church’s affirmation of canon, is that it is the final form of the book, no matter the history of composition, that is important. Thus, God may have used more than one contributor to produce the final form of the book, but it is the final form that is what is canonical, which is a good thing since the project to discover the original form is fraught with speculation.

As an example, we might consider the book of Job. There are many competing theories about the composition of the book of Job, which is an anonymous and undated literary text as we have it. That the story of Job is set in an early time tells us nothing about when the book was written. But there are theories about what might constitute the original text, which was later expanded by additions. One theory, for instance, is that the Elihu speech (chs. 32–37) was a later addition, since Elihu is not introduced before he makes his appearance in 32:1 and no one responds to him after he speaks. Perhaps so, but what is the object of our interpretation in the final form of the book that includes the Elihu speech? That is the form of the book of Job that the church has recognized as canonical.⁷

The goal of our interpretation is to hear the message of the divine/human author. We move toward our goal by our interaction with the text. Thus, we must learn the literary conventions employed at that time in order to read the text correctly (see chapter 2 below on key interpretive principles).

Who Is the Reader?

An author writes a text to communicate a message to readers. While we are readers of the biblical book, we first need to realize that we are not the original audience of these biblical books. Every biblical book addresses an ancient audience with their needs and questions. In other words, biblical books were not written to us, and we need to keep that in mind when we are reading them, or else we will too quickly apply the message to our situation without taking into account the possibility of discontinuity between the ancient audience and our present situation.

Take New Testament letters like Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and so on. Paul wrote these letters to churches in the cities (Rome and Corinth) and province (Galatia) that give these books their name. They are the intended audience to whom the author is consciously writing, and he addresses concerns that they have. What is obvious in these letters is true for every book, even though we might not know the exact audience of all the books of the Bible.

The important point as we study the Bible is that we are not the first or intended readers. Such recognition is particularly important as we read the Bible in reference to twenty-first-century public policy. We are not going to find specific texts that take us to specific policies concerning immigration, gun control, or abortion. That acknowledged, we will find principles that are relevant to our development of positions on such public policies. In other word...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Bible and Public Policy
• Part 2: Biblical Principles For Controversial Issues
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture References