We all want something to serve as our moral compass in life. For Christians, that moral compass is ultimately God, but how do we know what it means to follow him? Do we look to the Bible, the Holy Spirit, or perhaps to a spiritual mentor? For many modern Protestants, the answer may sound obvious: we look to the Bible as our moral compass.
But that statement is more complicated than we may think.
What Do We Mean When We Say the Bible Is Our Moral Compass?
Before going further, we must establish what we mean by the Bible. The word itself means “book,” but we use it to refer to the 66 canonical books of Christian Scripture. These books have been kept across time because they are divinely inspired. As 2 Timothy 3:16-17 puts it, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
Throughout the biblical period, prophets (and occasionally national leaders such as King David) were directed to write divinely inspired books. The Israelites collected and maintained the growing collection of Scripture. Different religious groups (such as the Pharisees and Sadducees in Jesus’ day) argued about which books mattered most. However, everyone prioritized the Torah, the first five books we see today in the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).
When the early church was established, it taught members with the Scriptures they had available, adding books the apostles or their associates wrote (the four gospels, letters to particular churches). There was a shifting process over the next few centuries as churches removed books that claimed to be written by the apostles (like the forged Gospel of Thomas) from their teaching material. Then church councils established authoritative lists of which books were considered Scripture. During the Protestant Reformation, books that many churches had considered inspired (like the book of Tobit) were deemed helpful but not sacred, so Protestant churches stopped treating them as Scripture.
This means that the shape of the Bible expanded and shifted until fairly recently (the 1600s). That being said, Christians have historically always agreed that the 66 books we read today are crucial. Opinions vary about a few other books, but Christianity’s view of what books matter has never changed.
All this history gives us a clear idea of what the Bible is. It also helps us understand something curious about how the Bible describes itself.
Can We Really Use the Bible Alone as Our Moral Compass?
When most of us think about the Bible, we think of a digital or physical collection of all 66 Scriptural books that we can read ourselves any time. Therefore, we might think of using the Bible as our moral compass as reading a manual. We open the book, we find what looks like the right instructions, we follow them exactly.
However, the Bible depicts studying Scripture as a more complicated process. The four gospels feature many scenes in which Jesus debates with the Pharisees and other religious leaders about what Scripture says about the Messiah; evidently, it is possible to misinterpret Scripture. Later, when apostles like Peter are called to preach to non-Jewish people and not to worry anymore about following every Old Testament command (circumcision, eating kosher food, specific cleaning rituals), the church has to reconsider what Scripture’s core moral teachings are.
In other words, the Bible affirms we need to know its contents for moral instruction. However, it does not depict the Bible as a book where we can read any passage without considering the context. There are moral teachings (like not committing adultery or murder) that still matter in the new covenant that Jesus brought as the Messiah. There are other instructions (like Deuteronomy 22:9-11 commanding not to wear mixed fabric) that people do not need to follow under the new covenant. Knowing which moral teachings still matter and which ones are not included in the new covenant is a matter of interpretation, considering context to find the full story.
Interpretation requires we have something that ancient people took for granted but that we may forget.
How Did Ancient People Use the Bible As a Moral Compass?
Treating the Bible like an instruction manual may seem obvious to us, but would not make any sense to the people who wrote it. For one thing, the shape of the Bible was changing as new books were written, and those books could not be shared with everyone immediately.
For another, the average ancient person did not have access to books. Each book of the Bible was written by hand, copied by hand, and stored in (hopefully) safe places, such as the Qumran caves where the Dead Sea scrolls were found. As historian Robert Bartlett discusses in his book History in Flames, copying scrolls was time-consuming and expensive, followed by more time and money to transport those copies to recipients. Even then, only a few (perhaps less than 10 percent of the ancient Roman population) could read those copies. Most ancient people did not learn to read unless they came from rich families or entered specialized trades that required reading and writing. It was not until the last couple of centuries that advanced printing and growing literacy enabled anyone and everyone to buy and read a Bible.
These limitations mean that while many studied Scripture, most studied it through other people—teachers who hopefully taught memorization skills. In Jesus’ time, young Jewish men who wanted to become rabbis had to memorize all of the Torah and pass tests before an older teacher accepted them as students. Someone like the apostle Paul, originally a Pharisee (a group known for meticulously following and teaching Scripture), would have learned Scripture by studying “in the footsteps of a rabbi.” People who could not pursue being rabbis (women like Mary and Martha, tradesmen like Peter or James) learned Scriptures as best they could from their local synagogue or relatives.
Therefore, when the biblical authors talk about looking to Scripture for moral guidance, they imagine studying Scripture as a communal activity. They could not imagine a world where someone could have a personal copy of the complete Scriptures… and then try to learn Scripture’s ideas on their own. Whether it is Malachi giving exiled Israelites a message from God or Paul exhorting the Corinthians to return to Scripture’s clear teaching about sexual boundaries, every biblical author wrote to a community of people relying on each other to learn what Scripture says. The biblical authors believed in using the Bible as a moral compass. But they saw studying the Bible as a communal process, not something people could do alone.
This fact has big consequences for how we read the Bible today.
How Do We Interpret the Bible So It Becomes Our Moral Compass?
If the original audience understood studying Scripture as something we do with help from other people, then our vision must change.
Yes, the Bible is our most explicit record of what God says and no message from God will ever defy its ideas. Therefore, we seek to study Scripture. Verses like 2 Peter 1:19–21 remind us that Scripture is God’s word created by the Holy Spirit guiding the writers. Passages like Acts 11:7 praise people who check what Scripture says to verify that what the apostles said about Jesus being the Messiah fit how the Old Testament described the Messiah. Throughout his letters, Paul appeals to Scripture to support his teachings.
Since many moral commandments require some interpretation, we must approach the Bible with discernment. We have to ensure we are reading it correctly. Nowhere in the Bible do the authors suggest that we can do this on our own. We need help from outside sources to understand the Bible.
What Tools Help Us Treat the Bible as Our Moral Compass?
There are several major sources that theologians have identified as key to helping us interpret Scripture.
First, we listen to God himself. In John 15:26-27, Jesus says he will send the Holy Spirit to guide people. However, passages like 1 John 4:1-6 also warn about the dangers of presenting a “message from God” without checking that the message aligns with Scripture. So, we listen to the Holy Spirit as we study the Bible, and listen to the Bible to make sure we hear the Holy Spirit correctly.
Second, we listen to other Christians. The Bible talks many times about participating in the church, the community of believers. Readers of all ages and marital statuses are advised to belong to a church, where we can find fellowship and advice. In the process, we can find people to encourage us to study the Bible, show us study tools, and offer insights from their experiences interpreting the Bible.
Third, we listen to the past. Passages like Hebrews 11:17-31 highlight the value of knowing how earlier generations of people followed God. By looking at how the biblical patriarchs, church fathers, and more recent Christian leaders lived, we can see patterns in how they interpreted the Bible. Gaining a sense of the historic faith helps us see if our understanding of the Bible’s moral instructions is going off the beaten path.
Fourth, we listen to our minds. We know that God’s ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8-9), but also that God does not change (Numbers 23:19). We can use reason to consider how the Bible’s ideas fit together, and what practices clearly fit outside the Bible’s vision of moral living.
The Bible provides us with moral instruction. However, none of the biblical authors imagined a world where we sit alone with our private copy of Scripture and teach ourselves how to interpret it and practice its ideas. It is only as we wisely seek to follow the Bible’s commands to listen to the Holy Spirit, to participate in the church, to understand the faith heritage we inherited, that we can accurately study and follow the Bible’s ideas.
Photo Credit: ©iStock/Getty Image Plus/Vlad Yushinov
