The Bible Says… Trick or Treat!

My lovely wife and I took the boys trick or treating tonight and practiced socialism with a side dish of sweet tooth satiation and warding of the evil spirits of death. Or as a certain somewhat cranky Baptist with a fantastic sense of sarcasm has said, Halloween "promotes begging, vagrancy, vandalism, and destruction of property.  It’s the only ‘holiday’ celebrated that encourages deception and lauds evil". Despite the warning, my 3 1/2 year old went as a slice of cheese (actually two slices), and my 1 1/2 year old went as a mouse…get it? I fixed my wife and I Mexican coffees and it was good! They are plum tuckered out and sleeping soundly now. Bliss.

Anyway, one of the "treats" was a Bible tract. Tracts always give the strangest theology. If I had no sense of the Christian language game, I would think it was just an odd little tale about how bad we all are and how some guy saved us from all our badness. It follows the typical formula for being saved. And as always it's a piece of cake! Why wouldn't I want to do it – it's so easy after all. "All you need to do is tell God that you know you are a sinner, believe that Jesus dies for you on the Cross, and trust Him to be your Saviour and Lord." And that's how you get to heaven – done!

Another strange thing is the use of analogies that make the point harder to understand. Like this one: "You see, our sin makes us dirty like a pair of shoes that have waled through the mud. And just like we can't walk through our own house with muddy shoes, we can't get into Heaven, which is God's house, with our sin". So it's all about getting to Heaven and how you, the individual, can get there! So we are all dirty and just need those three little steps to guarantee our spot in eternity…nice.

Of course the publisher follows in tow with their maximalist understanding of the Bible:

"We believe that the Bible is the verbally inspired Word of God, absolutely authoritative and infallible."

and

"We believe in the fall and total depravity of man, making new birth necessary for reconciliation to God."

and

"We believe in the bodily resurrection (or changing, if living) of the saved at the rapture to be forever with the Lord in the glory and blessedness of heaven, and the bodily resurrection of the unsaved about 1,000 years later into everlasting, conscious torment and punishment in hell."

Which all goes to say that the publishers should read their Bible a bit closer to realize that there is no "Rapture" and that there is no reference to a "total" depravity. Depravity, yes. Total – that was a doctrinal necessity for the Synod of Dort – not something all that Scriptural. They need to get off the LaHaye train in order to take the Bible seriously.

Finally, the use of the phrase "The Bible says…" has always puzzled me. For them, of course, the term means the literal words of God in the same way that Muslims belive the Qu'ran was transmitted to Mohammed. Yeah, that's nowhere even implied in the Bible either. Believing in a verbal inspiration is idolatrous. All I can say to these folks is that they should take the Bible seriously enough to study it and to stop confusing and/or scaring our kids into a specific form of salvation which seems to say that you don't have to work it out. But how could they say that since that actually is rather clear in the Bible?

I am looking forward to the documentary Hell House in the picture above about Christian "Hell houses" that use fear and graphic images of the results of "sin" to scare kids into confessing before God at the end. Same idea, a more "mature" method of filling up their coffers with souls.

Related posts:

1. gold and a personal jesus for christmas