No Christians, The Bible Isn't Clear on Very Much

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

A social media critic recently prefaced his rebuttal of one of my pieces on sexuality with a declaration, one I've heard about a billion times, give or take a few hundred thousand:

"The Bible clearly says..."

He said it (as so many Christians do) matter-of-factly, definitively, and without a trace of suspicion that he could possibly be wrong.

And yet he is wrong.

The Bible doesn't clearly say very much and we who claim the Christian faith need to be able to admit this, especially when encountering moments of disagreement on what we believe it says. Regardless of the topic at hand, there is probably less clarity than the person suggesting it would have us believe:

For example, is the Bible clear on violence?

We see Jesus condemning it and then we see God both commanding it and prohibiting it. Turns out the Bible clearly sometimes says violence is abhorrent to God and sometimes God fully authorizes it, which leaves us to determine when and how violence is redemptive. We get to determine its clarity, and that clarity usually mirrors our biases, preferences, and phobias—and the verses we choose to justify them.

Is the Bible clear on marriage being between one man and one woman?

Many of the Patriarchs had concubines and multiple wives, and yet they were the presented exemplary pillars of God's people, with such realities rarely presented as deficiencies. King Solomon had 700 wives and yet God does not get angry at the number of wives but the fact that they are not from among the Israelites. So when did God finally "make it clear" what marriage was and wasn't? Is there one catch-all verse that decides that matter and overrides all the other verses?

Is the Bible clear on the existence of a literal hell where bad people go to suffer eternally?