Taking Scissors to the Bible

It isn’t often a boy of 12 gets to visit his hero’s house, but that is where we were headed and I couldn’t wait to get there. I distinctly remember crossing the Tennessee line into Virginia and immediately feeling at home. Strange, since this was the farthest from home that I had ever been. Rolling hills, rows of corn and fields full of yellow tobacco lead us to Charlottesville, and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Sitting high on a ridge in Albemarle County, it is the only U.S. home recognized by the United Nations as a World Heritage Site. Originally begun around 1770, the home we know today was completed in 1809, the year Jefferson retired from the Presidency. 

Walking the grounds of this 5,000 acre plantation, one cannot miss Jefferson’s love of nature and order. Yet, it is within the house that the visitor gets a glimpse into the enlightened, rational mind of Thomas Jefferson. The entrance hall contains artifacts from Lewis and Clark’s expedition, as well as a home-made clock by Jefferson himself. Moving into the parlor one see’s portraits of ‘the three greatest men ever to live’, according to Jefferson: John Locke, Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon. Turning left into his private bedchamber you immediately see a crimson covered bed, open on both sides, joining Jefferson’s private bedroom with his more public office. On the joinery side table in the cabinet room sat Jefferson’s Bible. Walking over to it I noticed that in several places, this Bible had holes in it, as if someone had literally cut out passage after passage of scripture. Seeing my rather inquisitive gaze, our tour guide came over and to me and said, “Notice how Mr. Jefferson cut out portions of his Bible that he did not believe in? He went through each of the four Gospels and removed not only mentions of miraculous events, but also those sayings of Jesus that he believed were falsely attributed to him.” Not stopping there, Jefferson then cut and pasted a new version of the gospels entitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Of scripture, Jefferson says:

“The whole history of these books (the Gospels) is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it…In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.”

My boyhood hero died that day. My naïve understanding of our Founding Fathers, as well as my naïve view of human nature, did not take into account this sort of worldview.

Jefferson, like a few intellectuals of his day, was a Deist. He believed in God, but not the God of scripture. His god created a rational world and then left the world to her own devices. This twisted version of Newtonian physics implies that god set the universe in motion and then left it to run by its own natural laws, never thinking to interfere or intercede within the space time universe. Jefferson’s god is a rational, intelligent and orderly being, but just not too terribly personal. The best analogy for the deistic god is a divine clockmaker. He creates the clock, puts the time piece together, winds her up, sets her in motion and then returns many years later to find the clock in complete disrepair, having stopped telling time several years earlier. This theory has several theological implications, not least of which reducing Jesus from role of savior to that of a good moral teacher. Secondarily, is the complete domestication of God and Gospel. We want a “reasonable Christianity” that conforms to our intellectual formation and desires, not a Christianity that places our entire intellectual formation and desires under a new and critical light. Reason alone isn’t enough to explain and understand a God that intervenes and intercedes on our behalf. As Lesslie Newbigin writes:

“It is obvious that the story of the empty tomb cannot be fitted into our contemporary worldview, or indeed into any worldview except one of which it is the starting point. That is, indeed, the whole point. What happened on that day is, according to the Christian tradition, only to be understood by analogy with what happened on the day the cosmos came into being. It is a boundary event, at the point where the laws of physics cease to apply. It is the beginning of a new creation-as mysterious to human reason as the creation itself. But, and this is the whole point, accepted in faith it becomes the starting point for a wholly new way of understanding our human experience, a way which-in the long run-makes more sense of human experience as a whole than does the reigning plausibility structure.”

Deism’s philosophical break from Christianity is another marker on the road toward secular modernism. Our shared journey has taken us from Abbot Suger to Botticelli and now to Jefferson. Along the way, humanity continues to place the created over and above his creator. This descent of God and the heralded dawn of modernity foretold an age of progress, reason and peace. The 20th century gave us something altogether different. Like Jefferson, we either want to mold God into our image, or get rid of him altogether.