Baseball Rules and Bible Study

Over the last few years I’ve tried to learn a great deal about baseball, because I have a stepson who is a professional pitcher. It has taken me some time to learn, because I didn’t grow up with baseball, and there are quite a number of subtleties. When I first started watching, for example, I thought that the one big thing about pitching was strikeouts, and I assumed that all pitches would be aimed for the strike zone. Over time I’ve learned about many other options. The rules seem simple, but they give rise to a huge number of options.

A while back I found a quiz on difficult calls an umpire might face. I recall being quite pleased with myself as a relative nephyte, to be able to get 50% of those calls right. You see there are the basic rules, then there are more detailed rules, and then you have to deal with all of the various options that players have while playing within the rules. The rules tell me that if a ball passes over any part of the plate at the appropriate height range, it’s a strike. It’s also a strike if the batter swings and misses, or for the first two strikes if it’s a foul ball. That doesn’t tell the pitcher what kind of a pitch to throw on a full count, however. For that one needs to know one’s own abilities, the batter, the abilities of the catcher, and the current state of the game.

What does all of this have to do with the Bible?

Well, I’m always looking for metaphors to illustrate the way in which we use the Bible. We regularly use approaches such as just what the Bible says, or as I regularly hear, we try to treat the Bible as a type of boy scout manual. The “boy scout manual” metaphor is usually presented with an intense air of piety. Well, to paraphrase the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Bible is almost, but not quite totally unlike a boy scout manual. They are both printed, with words on paper, but other than that, they’re not too similar.

For example, Galatians 6:5 tells us each to bear our own burdens, but Galatians 6:2 has just told us to bear one another’s burdens. Which is it? I suspect most would say, “both” and they would be right in my view. There are times when one needs to be reminded to carry one’s own weight, and others to be reminded to help one another. Similarly one might compare Proverbs 26:4-5. I normally like a toolbox metaphor. No matter how good a hammer one extracts from a toolbox, it will not make a good saw. Similarly, if you take a verse that applies to one set of circumstances and use it under different circumstances, you can use a truth in the wrong way.

Let’s say that there is someone in your church who is constantly helping others, well beyond his or her own strength. If you then encounter that person needing help, and quoted Galatians 6:5 to them, it would be a misplaced truth. They are not in need of the advice to carry their own weight. Rather, they need someone to help carry their burdens. Quoting Galatians 6:2 to a person who is a slacker could result in them becoming more dependent on others. This is in no sense a fault of the text. Both texts are true, they just apply in different ways at different times.

This s a major way in which the Bible differs from any type of instruction manual. An instruction manual tries to anticipate your various situations and give you specific steps to use in dealing with them. The Bible, on the other hand, provides principles and situations as they applied to some other time and place. You have to apply them to your own situation.

And this brings me back to the baseball rules. In one sense the baseball rules provide a good metaphor for Bible reading. There are basic rules, such as the sermon on the mount and the ten commandments. Those set boundaries, much like the placement of the bases, foul lines, and so forth in baseball. There are many additional principles applied to specific situations throughout the Bible that help us start to learn about the sutleties.

But no amount of reading of the rules, even the most subtle ones, can make one into a baseball player. After several years, while I’ve learned a number of the rules, even a few more subtle ones, it hasn’t turned me into a baseball player. Besides the physical skills, there’s something else that goes into it–experience, both one’s own experiences and those of others. And the Bible contains a bunch of those experiences as well in the large amounts of history and just plain story that it contains.

As we learn to understand and apply these principles we need to take responsibility for those choices. The Bible didn’t tell me to get up this morning and do some Bible reading, but it did help me to learn the value of spending time with God. The Bible won’t tell me which candidates to vote for today, but it does teach me about life, righteousness, and good judgment.

One last thing. As I mentioned in a previous post, we need to take responsibility for our application of scripture. It’s not “just what the Bible says,” it’s what you’ve done with it in your life.

Solid food is for the mature, for those who through practice have exercised their understanding to distinguish good and evil. — Hebrews 5:14