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The allegations against President Clinton have unsettled many American Christians. He holds a position we honor and uphold in prayer; and he professes to be a Christian. But the trial by mass media—all the talk of moral impropriety and criminality—has led many to believe he betrays the very values and office for which we pray.

We Christians should be accustomed to leaders whose private behavior and public words and actions appear to be at odds. We've been dealing with them for a long time now.

We want our leaders to be above reproach. We project our fantasies onto them, and soon they loom larger than life. David is our premier biblical instance. Michelangelo sculpted in marble what many Jews and Christians have carved in their imaginations—a flawless David, the spirited human body in perfection. But the biblical text does not give us a flawless David. Putting people on pedestals is a way of not having to deal with who they really are (and who the God working in them really is).

The biblical narrator insists on telling us everything bad about David: he married many women, kept a harem of concubines, was an indifferent father, and capped his moral dossier ingloriously with adultery and murder. The narrator refuses to idealize or glamorize him to show that God's sovereignty works through just such a mixed bag of human failure and sin.

We Christians should be well trained through our Bible reading to see how God's sovereignty is worked out through the lives of frail, willful, disobedient—sometimes repentant and sometimes not—men and women who are created to live to God's glory. That is what keeps us reading this story over and over again and finding it "good news."

In the moral maelstrom of our age, people ask, "How do we keep our moral equilibrium with a story like this in the middle of our Bibles?" and the answer is this: "By keeping it in the middle of our Bibles."

In an age of diminishing respect for life, accelerating violence on all fronts, and widespread moral mayhem, we accept the seemingly unembarrassed inclusion of David as part of the salvation story. What then happens is that we give our glamorizing, celebrity-glossed concepts of leadership a thorough biblical chastening. Our flawed ideas of leadership need chastening quite as much as our flawed leaders.

The Bible is not a story of moral uplift. We would much prefer Abraham without his self-serving lies, Jacob open and above board, Moses without his impulsive anger, Samson without his Philistine whore, Samuel with a better track record in child-raising, Solomon without all those women, and Peter without his cussing. There is a long history in the church of pious readings of the Bible that overlook or suppress behaviors in our honored ancestors that don't match our best ethical norms.

But there is no hint of that in the narrative itself. This is unlaundered history: unholy men and women with whom God works to fashion his holy work in history. They turn out to be no better nor worse than the people with whom he works still, the very ones we meet in daily newspapers and on television screens, and whom we face in the mirror each morning.

The age of the Bible was not a moral golden age that we are now trying to reproduce; it is rather a presentation of the conditions and people that God in Christ uses to work salvation. The biblical story, from beginning to end, is told in the terms of the social, cultural, political, and ethical world as it is, not as it should be.

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June 15 1998, Vol. 42, No. 7