One Chaplain's Definition of “Harm”

I know what you're thinking. "Do no harm" sounds like it could mean anything. And you're right — if I don't tell you what I mean by harm, then anyone can fill in their own definition and use it against whoever they want. "Being gay does harm." Done. Framework dismantled.

In other words, if I don’t define “harm,” I could just point at whatever my opponent is doing, and say “look! That’s harm!”

So let me share a definition of harm. Not from a theology book. From a hospital.

In the hospital, you learn something about life that changes how you see everything else. You learn that in a clean, nourishing, safe environment, life tends toward certain things. Wounds tend to heal. Muscles tend to relax when the situation relaxes. Hearts tend to hear each other when the room is quiet enough.

You don't make a wound heal. You can't force it. But you can stop making it worse. You can clean the environment. You can remove the thing that's preventing healing. You can let the body do what bodies do when they're given half a chance.

That's what I mean by harm: the thing that's preventing the healing.

And that's what I mean by "do no harm":

first, stop making a messy situation worse.

When I call something harmful, I'm not issuing a political verdict. I'm not condemning something for being conservative or liberal, queer or straight. I'm watching for the thing that keeps reopening the wound — the interpretation, the practice, the posture that prevents healing in a room where healing is trying to happen.

And when I advocate for a life-giving reading of Scripture, I'm not forcing an outcome. I'm doing the second thing you learn in the hospital: trust that life's tendency toward healing will cause hearts to hear each other, if you can just stop introducing new damage long enough for it to happen.

This isn't a claim about the mechanisms or definitions of harm as an abstract category. It's a claim about how to relate to a wound in progress.

Now — let me be honest about what I know this sounds like, and why it's not that.

This is not a reduction of Scripture to an ethics manual. That is probably the most understandable concern, and I want to take it seriously. An ethically rigorous approach to the Bible is not the same thing as treating the Bible as ethics. A surgeon approaches an operation ethically. That doesn't make the human body an ethics textbook. The Bible is wild, contradictory, ancient, sacred, and strange. "Do no harm" is not a claim about what Scripture is. It's a discipline for how I handle it — the way gloves are not a claim about what a wound is.

This does not reduce God to human thought-patterns. I want to be careful here, because this critique sometimes functions as a trump card: "God is beyond your categories, therefore your categories don't apply, therefore anything goes." That's not theology. That's a conversation-stopper dressed up as reverence. Yes, God is wild. The text is wild. The tradition is wild. I am not trying to domesticate any of it. I am trying to stop people from bleeding out while we argue about how wild God is. The wildness of God is not an excuse to abandon the wounded. If anything, a God who is truly beyond our control is a God we should handle with more care, not less.

This does not enable violence by looking away from hard texts. The method doesn't skip difficult passages. It doesn't pretend the conquest narratives aren't there, or that Paul didn't write what Paul wrote. It reads those texts more carefully, not less — asking what they meant in their context, how they've been used since, and what happens to real people when we apply them without thinking. Ignoring violent texts enables violence. But so does reading them at face value and handing them to someone as a weapon. The method sits with the discomfort rather than resolving it prematurely in either direction.

This does not apply rigor selectively. If the method only showed up when it was convenient for my conclusions, it wouldn't be a method — it would be a rhetoric strategy. The framework has to work on texts I like, too. It has to be willing to say "this progressive reading is sloppy" with the same discipline it says "this conservative reading causes harm." If it can't do that, it's not scholarship. It's advocacy wearing a lab coat. I'm building a tool, not a verdict. The tool has to be trustworthy in anyone's hands, or it's not worth building.

This is not an Enlightenment lens pretending to be ancient. Yes, "do no harm" has a modern sound. And yes, there's a real danger in importing eighteenth-century pastoral sensibilities onto texts that predate them by millennia. I take that seriously. But the method doesn't claim that ancient authors shared my ethical framework. It claims that I have an ethical responsibility when I pick up their texts and use them on living people. The ancient world didn't have my categories. But I have their texts in my hands right now, and the question is what I do with them today — not whether the original authors would approve of my caution. The anachronism isn't in reading carefully. The anachronism is in pretending we can handle ancient texts without accounting for the power we wield when we interpret them.

I don't determine the outcomes of my Bible studies beforehand. I start with curiosity — "What is God revealing through this passage?" — and then I read the passage, then commentaries, and then offer one of many possible interpretations. But I did make one decision beforehand: I only share harm-reducing Bible studies on this blog. That's not a filter on what the text is allowed to say. It's a filter on what I'm willing to hand someone without context, care, and accountability.

And finally —

it's always Scripture at the foundation.

It’s not even a balance of Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience. It’s always Scripture first and last, held in Tradition, explored through Reason, encountered through Experience.

A wildly elusive, weird, beautiful body of Scripture that has been weaponized and cherished and misunderstood and clung to for thousands of years. "Do no harm" is just one method, from somebody who is a little tired of seeing people die over nothing.

Hope Hilton, MDiv