There are around 31,000 verses in the Bible. Conservative, evangelical Christians are known for a doctrine of faith that all of Scripture is the inspired Word of God. However, more progressive followers of the religion are happy to discount or explain away any and all verses that they don’t particularly like. And the Religious Left have at least a handful they particularly could do without.
Cutting out or ignoring verses of the Word of God is not a new practice. In Jeremiah 36, King Jehoikam has verses of Jeremiah’s prophecies cut out of a scroll and burned. If a passage made him angry, he didn’t want it cramping his style. Eventually Jehoikam realized he just wanted the whole scroll torched.
One of America’s founding fathers had a similar experience. In 1803, sitting in the President’s house, Thomas Jefferson cut out of his Bible only the parts of Jesus’ teaching he liked and made himself a new book called The Philosophy of Jesus. Jefferson would eventually lose that book and redid the practice of creating a Bible he liked in 1819, this time calling it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. He cut out all teachings he didn’t like and any thing that had to do with the supernatural. He created a Bible of his own liking, so he could follow a God of his own creation the way he wanted to.
One commentator wrote:
“He decided that the rules of the club to which he wished to belong were not the rules he wanted to play by. So instead of changing clubs, he changed the rule book by literally cutting and pasting together only the sections that he found relevant to his interpretation.” – Percival Everett
Today, members of the Christian Left have carried on in the spirit of Jehoiakim and Jefferson. However, the tactics have changed. Thanks to very liberal forms of biblical criticism that has only been around a century or so, people feel they can reject Scripture without cutting out verses or leaving the Christian religion. This new form of cut and paste is usually seen one of two ways. The liberal Christian either denies a particularly annoying text in the Bible is fully inspired or they just claim it is being misunderstood.
The Religious Left loves to quote Scripture that they (incorrectly) argue backs up a more socialist form of government. Those passages are considered inerrant and irrefutable proof text that Jesus was a precursor to Karl Marx. But of course, some passages sound less like Marx and more like Sarah Palin. Those are the ones dreaded or explained away by the Left. And NRB offers up to you the top 5 most ignored or hated Bible passages of the religious Left.
