Does the Bible Endorse Sin?

 

Jephthah's daughter

Something puzzles me. 

In a recent column, friend Xerxes claims that the Bible endorses child sacrifice, because in it Jephthah sacrifices his daughter; it endorses incest because Lot has sex with his daughters; and it endorses prostitution because Tamar prostitutes herself.

To be fair to Jephthah and Lot, as the Bible tells it, they do these things unintentionally. An unintended action is not sinful.

But the broader point is that, because the Bible reports a thing happened, does not imply that the Bible endorses it. The Bible says that Adam and Eve ate the apple; does that mean they should have? The Bible reports that Herod killed the innocents. Does that mean he should have? It reports that the Romans crucified Christ. Does that mean it endorses the crucifixion of Christ?

When I called him on this, Xerxes did not make the argument; but perhaps in his own mind he was making a distinction between those the Bible presents as protagonists and those it presents as antagonists. If so, the Bible also endorses murder; both David and Moses murder people. Adam was the Bible’s first protagonist, the first patriarch, and he was hardly without sin.

To lengthen the list of sinning protagonists would be tiresome; the Bible does not represent anyone but perhaps Enoch as without sin. That’s what cheap novels do. The Bible is not a cheap novel. That is the ugly world of plaster saints.

Xerxes’s defence, rather, was that to claim the Bible was simply reporting, was reading the Bible just as one would a newspaper. And this amounted to a denial of the special sacredness of the Bible.

For the life of me, I cannot see his point. I imagine that, in his mind, there is some radical distinction between “truth” and “Truth.” I can see none. But then too, I can see no distinction between soul and consciousness, and many seem to want to make the soul something mysterious.

I suspect that any hard line between truth and Truth is an attempt to claim a license to lie. Any attempt to make a distinction between soul and consciousness is an attempt to deny the reality of the soul.