Using the Right Hammer
There are different ways to use your Bible, and not all of them right, says Ed Dickerson. But that’s not the fault of the Book.
Psychologist Carl Rogers once said, “When your only tool is a hammer, all the world looks like a nail.” And, maybe it’s just me, but it seems I’m running into more and more “hammer people” all the time. Such people are possessed with an enthusiasm of some sort—their “hammer”—and they want you to pound away at all your problems with it.
For example, there are “fitness freaks.” Tell them you feel blue and they tell you to go jogging; when you express discouragement, they tell you to lift weights; admit you’re tired, and they prescribe push-ups. All this without asking whether your fatigue comes from too little rest or too much physical exertion. They’re not bad people—they’ve just surrendered every other tool in their life-skills toolbox, and latched onto the exercise hammer.
Then there are the pantry police. My late mother went through several phases of this. At one time, carrot juice became her cure-all, her dietary hammer to pound on every disease. Getting a cold? Drink some carrot juice. Feeling fatigued? Carrot juice. Got anaemia? Drink carrot juice.
The late Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, who won the prize for chemistry, prescribed vitamin C for nearly everything. I’ve no doubt that exercise, carrot juice and vitamin C together provide many benefits, and may even be good for nearly everything that ails you, but when confronted with a broken leg or a gunshot wound, I’d be more interested in splints, scalpels and sutures. Exercise only aggravates a fracture. Vitamin C may help in many ways, but a gunshot wound requires surgery.
Pointing out that exercise or vitamin C (or a hammer, for that matter) may not be useful in a given situation doesn’t detract from the fact that they may be very useful in other situations. As a general matter, exercise provides many benefits to life and health. Vitamin C protects the body against many ailments. But just because someone discovers a useful hammer every life situation doesn’t turn into a nail.
For example, 18th-century British sailors led a strenuous life, and prescribing more exercise for them would have had no positive effects on the disease of scurvy. Yet a small amount of vitamin C, found in lime juice, cured it entirely. In the right situation, exercise, vitamin C, and hammers can produce seemingly miraculous results. Indeed, it’s their very effectiveness that inspires enthusiasm, and their wide range of benefits that encourage us to prescribe them for virtually everything.
Hammers, after all, have been around for thousands of years precisely because they are so useful. Driving nails, tapping boards or stones into position, driving chisels in wood or stone, are all useful chores that hammers perform. It’s only when we start applying them to tasks for which they are ill-suited that problems come. Driving a nail with a hammer works well. Driving a screw far less well. Reshaping glass with a hammer only destroys the glass, and an old proverb cautions us against using a hammer to kill a fly on our friend’s nose.
This overuse or misuse of otherwise useful tools becomes more difficult when we address more complex issues. Like how to live a good and happy life.
One of the most useful lifestyle hammers, over the past 2000 years, has been the Bible. Like the other hammers mentioned here, the Bible provides much useful guidance for life. Also, like the other hammers mentioned, it has sometimes been misused. Probably the most famous case involves the scientist Galileo.
Galileo, following Copernicus, taught that the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the other way around. Church authorities hammered Galileo with certain biblical passages that seemed to conflict with Galileo’s view. For example, when Joshua commanded the sun to stand still (see Joshua 10:12-14), some thought that indicated it was the sun that moved, rather than the earth.
The story where this episode occurs, however, concerns a battle. Joshua wanted more daylight to pursue his enemies. He didn’t care whether the earth revolved around the sun, or whether they both did figure-of-eights through the galactic centre. He would have considered it puzzling had God replied with a lecture on celestial mechanics!
Galileo understood this well, remarking that the Bible “tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” His opponents attempted to use the Bible as a hammer to silence him when they should have used a telescope to verify or refute his observations.
Because the Bible has been misused, its opponents argue against using it all. They like to point to supposed errors and mistakes to invalidate it. That’s like saying because my hammer doesn’t work very well at removing screws, I shouldn’t use it for anything.
In defence of the Book, supporters of the Bible have rushed to turn it into a universal tool. Some claim, for example, that the Bible contains no errors of any sort—scientific, historic or any other kind. The Bible itself makes no such claims. The Bible writers weren’t interested in genetics, electronics, celestial mechanics, geology, quantum theory—or a whole list of other topics. Using the Bible to “settle” such questions is another attempt by some to turn the Bible into a universal hammer, and to turn everything else into their nail.
So, is the Bible true? Asking if the Bible is true is like asking if your car is true, or if your refrigerator is true. My car shows some rust, the seatcovers have worn and the body bears evidence of traffic mishaps. Since it no longer matches the factory specifications, it cannot be considered absolutely “true.” Not that I care. None of that matters when I need to go somewhere. What I want to know is, “When I need it, will it be reliable?” “Will it take me where I need to go?”
Will this car do my job? Will it fill my kitchen cupboards with food or give me medical care? Of course not. But if I use it (as per the manufacturer’s instructions), it will get me to work, to the supermarket and to the doctor’s surgery. I rely on my car for transportation, but I have to put fuel in it and drive it to the locations where the things I need can be acquired.
For me, the Bible resembles my car. Is it absolutely true, historically and scientifically? Possibly not, although the more we discover, the more confident we can be.
But I find, again and again, I can rely on it for guidance in my life. It helps me make sense of life, informs my decisions, and brings me comfort in times of stress. What it does for me, it does very well.
| This is an extract from March 2005
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