Is the Bible dangerous?

Can a book be dangerous? Can it carry Covid-19 on its pages? Can it provide fuel to start a forest fire? Can you hit someone over the head with it?

The Bible may be dangerous in these ways – it’s certainly a big book if you use it to bash someone on the head – but that’s probably not the way most people think of it as a dangerous book. In one way, it’s more like The Communist Manifesto. That’s a dangerous book. It tells us that a spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism. And that through class struggle, we can have a revolution, and freedom. Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

In return, on the other side, Animal Farm by George Orwell is also a dangerous book. Animal Farm was such a biting satire – or exposé – on what life was like under actual Communism, that it was banned as a dangerous and subversive book in the Stalinist USSR.

Is the Bible dangerous, like The Communist Manifesto or Animal Farm? Is it a threat? According to the charity, Open Doors, the Bible is considered very dangerous in some places. In North Korea, for example, even having a Bible can get you arrested or killed. An American was detained for five months there, simply for leaving a Bible in a restaurant in the hope that a North Korean might find it and read it. It was as if he had left something explosive in that restaurant. And in a sense, he had.

It’s all about sin

Is it because the Bible contains pornographic material, so that, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Ulysses, it should face the censor? Is it dangerous to minors to read Song of Songs or those obscene chapters of Ezekiel? Or is it – much more likely – that the Bible says some things about sin which Western cultures like ours now consider to be offensive and ‘hateful’?

If we believe what the Bible says about sexuality, for example, it’s not very comfortable in Western society right now. Secular atheists in the public square, who don’t believe in God and don’t want to be in His kingdom, will still be massively offended if we say (with the apostle Paul) that those who practice homosexuality will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:10). You can feel how uncomfortable that is today, if you pause and say that line aloud: those who practice homosexuality will not inherit the kingdom of God. That’s a dangerous thing to say. I can testify to this myself. Just recently I was told on Twitter by angry people that I deserve abuse,

violence and death. Why? Because I am, apparently, a ‘hatemonger’ and a ‘homophobe’. Because I believe what the Bible and the Church of England officially teach about sex and marriage. Just my presence leading a national service online (in which I actually mentioned none of those controversial things) was enough to bring out these vitriolic threats. The police logged it as a hate incident against me, ‘motivated by my religion’ they said. One Tweeter has an ‘enhanced marker’ on his police file now because of it.

It’s always been that way

I’m certainly not alone in facing threats simply for being an evangelical now. It’s dangerous if you believe or preach the Bible, because it puts us at odds with our surrounding culture in any number of ways that may prompt bad reactions. That’s what happened in the book of Acts too: remember the account of the riots that happened when Paul said in Ephesus that ‘gods made with hands are not really gods’? Have you read the history of the early church, and how it was persecuted for hundreds of years because it was at odds with the ancient world, with its brutal systems of governance and ethics and its supposedly tolerant intolerance? Have we forgotten what happened to Jesus Himself, when He lived the perfect life and confronted the powers that be?

Every one who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. If you follow this book, it will be dangerous for you.

But it’s far more dangerous not to, in the light of eternity.