Things People Think are Biblical, but Really Aren’t: The Real Message of the Bible is to be Nice

 

Ministers pretty much all have a common experience. We are at a wedding reception and are seated next to someone’s Great Uncle Waldo from Nebraska. Great Uncle Waldo is enjoying the fact that there is an open bar at the wedding reception and mildly freaked out that he’s stuck being seated next to the minister. The minister is looking at his or her watch, hoping that time passes quickly so he or she can leave before Great Uncle Waldo musters up the courage to talk. After four or five drinks, Great Uncle Waldo decides it’s time to have a conversation.

He puts his arm around the minister’s shoulder and exhales. The member of the clergy offers thanks that this particular clergy person had quit smoking and didn’t have an open flame in proximity to Great Uncle Waldo’s breath because the alcohol content near an open flame would immolate both of them.

Great Uncle Waldo then says, “I’m not really a church going person and I can’t say I know much about the Bible, but the whole secret is to be nice to one another.”

For most clergy this would be revelation.

Clergy in mainline Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church have pretty comparable educations. After four years of college 3-4 years of graduate level seminary are taken. The Master’s of Divinity degree required to become ordained is usually a 75-90 credit degree whereas many Master’s degree programs are usually between 30-40 credit hours. (Interesting side note is that most mega-churches do not have seminary educated clergy and do not require the M.Div. degree. Further comments shall be restrained.)

In any case, most clergy are well-educated individuals and have a working knowledge of the history of Christianity, systematic theology, Christian ethics, Scripture, as well as extensive field education. Most have listened to countless sermons preached by scholars and have read extensively. Most have libraries filled with resources and can articulate and explain often very difficult and obscure passages of Scripture. There is one thing clergy to not learn in this extensive education and one thing all the scholars who have taught us also seemed to have missed.

Never have any of us heard in all that education that the whole secret of Christianity is to be nice to one another. Either Great Uncle Waldo has been given divine revelation and should be put immediately on the preaching circuit or…

Here’s the bad news. Great Uncle Waldo is wrong. The central theme of the Bible isn’t about being nice. If you actually read the Bible, Jesus wasn’t always nice. He was loving, but loving isn’t always being nice. Sometimes confrontation is more loving than being nice. If you read the letters of St. Paul, St. Paul was not always nice. Again, sometimes confrontation is more loving than being nice.

Does this suggest that we ought to be mean to one another? No. Does this mean that we shouldn’t be nice to each other?

Actually, for the most part, being nice to one another is a good thing. I like to think that I am a pretty nice person and I like nice people. To be honest, the world would be a better place if people were nicer to one another. I say this, of course, in terms of that niceness being genuine and not phony.

Having said all of this, being nice is not a Biblical theme. The Biblical message is about truth and love and sometimes truth requires bitter medicine. It doesn’t require meanness, but it requires directness and sometimes the directness is painful.

Alas, Great Uncle Waldo is wrong. It may be nice when people are nice, but it’s not Biblical.