[Mb-hair] Does the Bible Tell Me So?

[fotoblue at flash.net]

Thank you, Michael!
 That's a VERY interesting article!

Dagmar


Original Message:
-----------------
From:  michael at intrafi.com
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 18:40:30 -0500
To: mb-hair at islandlists.com
Subject: [Mb-hair] Does the Bible Tell Me So?




Does the Bible Tell Me So?

How Americans Misread the Good Book 

by Ann Monroe

November/December 1997 Issue

     
      Plus: Faith Healing Hoax. 
      America is in the grip of a biblical frenzy. Books claiming to
contain divine instructions fill 
bookstore shelves (one popular set is actually called the God's Little
Instruction Book series). 
Athletes, who used to just play ball while fundamentalists in the crowd
held up signs pointing 
television viewers to John 3:16, are now shouting biblical slogans
themselves. Boxer Evander 
Holyfield even credited Jesus Christ with his world heavyweight victory.
Forty-two percent of 
Americans believe the Bible is the literal word of God, up almost 5 percent
since 1987. 
      Some of this Bible-thumping gets a bit goofy. A former country music
promoter is building an 
amusement park, God's Wonderful World, featuring a visit to hell complete
with blasts of heated air 
from below. And some of it's scary, because religious fundamentalists are
not just preaching their 
version of biblical values, they're beating the rest of the country over
the head with them. Ending 
welfare, praying in public schools, teaching creationism, eliminating
"special treatment" for gays—
the whole gamut of politically conservative rallying cries comes wrapped in
a biblical halo: It's God's 
will, and here's the big black book to prove it. 
      Mainstream religious folk have tried to fight back. Organizations
such as the National Council of 
Churches and the National Council of Jewish Women attack conservative
policies. But whatever the 
political success of these organizations (lately, it's been depressingly
low), on the biblical front 
they've lost the battle. Americans may love the Bible or loathe it. But for
the most part, they read it the 
same way (when they read it at all): as the manifesto of a God who has a
lot of laws and a definite 
inclination to punish those who don't follow them. 
      Even nonbelievers see it that way. Take New Yorker John Hart, who
joined a church Bible study 
in part to understand the enemy. "One of the big problems is this sense of
moral certitude," he says. 
"There is a God, and God makes rules, and this is what happens when the
rules don't get obeyed." 
      Fundamentalists argue smugly that liberals are losers when it comes
to the Bible because 
they're just plain wrong. But there's an eclectic mix of scholars and
writers who don't buy that 
explanation. Liberals have lost the biblical battle, these scholars say,
because, even while they 
reject conservative interpretations of the Bible, they've been unable to
shake free of conservative 
assumptions about the Bible. 
      Americans—and not just conservatives—are by nature fundamentalists,
says Bruce Bawer, a 
poet, literary critic, and author of the forthcoming book Stealing Jesus:
How Fundamentalism 
Betrays Christianity. "Anything that's not useful is without meaning," he
says. "The whole country 
was settled by people who had to be very pragmatic. When we read the Bible,
if a statement has a 
noun and a verb, we want to believe it's literally true and use it in some
way." 
      That makes the Bible a prickly document. Most of the stories in the
Bible—God's creation of the 
world in six days, Moses' bringing the Israelites out of Egypt by parting
the Red Sea, and of course 
all of Jesus' miracles—are, to a scientific worldview, highly improbable.
And a lot of what God is 
described as doing, from demanding that Abraham sacrifice his only son to
striking a pair of early 
Christians dead because they wanted to hang on to some of their own
property, seems downright 
nasty. 
      With so much in the Bible to be disliked or discounted, there seems
to be little left for liberals to 
do but engage in the same kind of moral prescriptiveness the religious
right has made so 
unattractive. "Fundamentalists buy into truth as factuality, but Christian
liberals have also tended to 
accept the idea that factuality and truthfulness are the same," says author
and biblical scholar 
Marcus Borg. "The mainline Protestant tendency is to ask what we can pluck
from the fire, and 
extract these rather banal ethical teachings." 
      The result is a war of "proof-texts." Conservatives "prove" they're
right by quoting one biblical 
passage, and liberals "prove" they're not by quoting another back at them.
Take welfare. "Anyone 
unwilling to work should not eat," thunders the apostle Paul in 2
Thessalonians 3:10. "Give to 
everyone who begs from you," says Jesus in Matthew 5:42. 
      And in a war of competing texts, religious conservatives will always
be able to make the clearer, 
and louder, case. Seeking refuge from modern science and a contemporary
moral view that allows 
for abortion, premarital sex, and homosexuality, they find in the Bible
facts and rules that give them 
comfort. Religious liberals have a much more difficult time of it. Faced
with an ancient text like the 
Bible, they feel stuck with either taking it literally and hating it, or
wrestling some usefulness out of it 
by contextualization and extrapolation. 
      On the vexed subject of homosexuality, for example, conservatives
have it easy: Every sentence 
on the subject in the Bible (all four or five of them) disapproves. On the
other hand, seminary 
professor William Countryman makes a convincing—and thoroughly
biblical—case that the 
teachings of Jesus make homosexuality an irrelevant issue. But it takes him
a whole book, Dirt, 
Greed, and Sex, to do it. In the sound-bite competition that is today's
political debate, it's not too hard 
to figure out who wins. 
      In the end, "proof-texting" says a lot more about us than it does
about the Bible. "We get our 
behavioral codes from our communities," says Countryman, and then we go to
the Bible to prove 
them. Used that way, the Bible is as malleable as those inkblots in a
Rorschach test. {publish-page-
break} 
     There is another way to read the bible, however, a way that is both
ancient and modern, a way 
that has nothing to do with facts, rules, and proof-texting. It's the way
of story and conversation, of 
imagination and engagement. Mostly lost in American mainline churches, it
is the way of reading 
that has inspired many of the great progressive social movements. When
Martin Luther King Jr. said 
he had been to the mountain, he was not using the Bible to prove that
segregation was wrong. He 
was appropriating its story. As God, through Moses, had led his people out
of captivity and taken 
Moses onto the mountain to show him the promised land they were to enter,
so King, too, had been 
shown the promised land into which his followers were being led. 
      "When I was a child," says Verna Dozier, a popular and respected
Bible instructor in Washington, 
D.C., "the only two books we had were the Bible and Mother Goose, and my
mother would read 
them both to us. That was my blessing. I learned the Bible as a story, and
I never had it chopped up 
into little verses until I went to school." 
      When the integrity of biblical stories is kept intact, rather than
being chopped up into sound bites 
as both evangelizers and mainstream preachers tend to do, it's easier to
grasp that biblical truth is 
much less about facts than about relationships—both within the text and
between the reader and the 
Scripture. "If I can get people to think of themselves as being in a
relationship with Scripture," says 
Roger Ferlo, a former Yale English professor who is now an Episcopal priest
and author of Opening 
the Bible, "then there is a chance they can recognize a relationship with
God when they meet one." 
      To read this way is to follow the example of the Bible, which is
itself a conversation. After all, it's 
not a single book, with a single point of view. It's a collection of books
(24 to 73 of them, depending 
on which version—Jewish, Protestant, or Roman Catholic—you're reading),
written and rewritten 
over a thousand-year period by a wildly diverse collection of writers.
Modern biblical scholars have 
traced multiple layers of authorship within the Good Book as writer after
writer reshaped the material 
at hand to reflect new perspectives. 
      A case in point is the story in 1 Samuel of the beginning of Israel's
monarchy. The earliest stories 
of the rise of the monarchy were written as tributes to David, Israel's
great king. But after David, the 
monarchy fell on evil days, and later writers reshaped those stories to
reflect their misgivings and 
apprehensions. The result is an almost schizophrenic God who anoints a king
in one breath and, in 
the next, rails against the Israelites for wanting one. 
      The biggest such reinterpretation came when Christian writers laid
claim to the Hebrew 
Scriptures. Known to the Jewish community as Tanakh, an acronym for the
Hebrew names of the 
Scriptures' three sections, these writings became, in the Christian Bible,
simply an Old Testament, or 
precursor, to the Christian writers' New Testament. The early Christians
didn't rewrite the Hebrew 
Scriptures, but they reimagined them, finding them filled with allusions to
Christ—predictions that 
would have seemed as bizarre to those books' original authors as they do to
modern Jews. 
      But biblical writers do more than reinterpret each other; they also
just plain argue with each 
other. The Book of Job is a scathing attack on the simplistic
God-rewards-the-righteous theology of 
much of Psalms and Proverbs; at one point, in fact, Job quotes Psalm 8,
turning it on its head in 
bitter parody. The Bible, in other words, is an open book, not a closed
system. 
      Such an approach to the bible does not mean, however, that
contemporary readers can interpret 
the Bible any old way they like. "The word 'interpretation' gives the wrong
impression," argues 
Stanley Hauerwas, author of Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible
>From Captivity to America. 
Fundamentalists, who pride themselves on going straight to the source,
wrongly disregard the 
centuries of reading that have gone before them, he adds. 
      "Now that the Bible is open for everyone to read, the danger is that
people will decouple from the 
traditional interpretations in their own communities," agrees Burton
Visotzky, whose study groups on 
Genesis inspired a Bill Moyers TV series on the book. Visotzky, a professor
at the Jewish 
Theological Seminary, specializes in midrash, the great Jewish
Bible-reading tradition of the first 
through sixth centuries. Just to look at a page of midrash is to know that
you are in the midst of a 
conversation. Down the center of the page runs a narrow line of Scripture,
the margins packed with 
rabbis' comments on both the text and each other's comments on the text. 
      One of Visotzky's favorite episodes is Abraham's visit to Egypt, a
detour from the promised land. 
Afraid the pharaoh would kill him to steal his gorgeous wife, Sarah,
Abraham pretended she was his 
sister; the pharaoh then took her. "There was a great deal of umbrage among
the rabbis at the moral 
ambiguity of that," says Visotzky, grinning. One rabbi imagined Abraham
trying to bring Sarah into 
Egypt in a crate, so no one would see her beauty, but being foiled at
customs. Another imagined him 
auctioning her off. 
      For centuries, Christians followed the example of their Jewish
forebears and vigorously debated 
the Bible. St. Jerome, who translated the Bible from Hebrew into the Latin
Vulgate, even studied with 
rabbis. "The debate in the Middle Ages between the Dominicans and
Franciscans over whether 
Jesus' disciples owned possessions makes our current controversies look
trivial," Hauerwas says. 
"Their arguments were about what the Bible was about. Our arguments are
about what the Bible is, 
since we don't think it tells us about the way things are." 
      Over time, the Bible increasingly came to be set in stone (at least
for Christians). And the past 
century of complex and often arcane scholarship—intended to open the book
up again—has scared 
people off as often as it has brought them to it. "[People] believe they
don't understand the Bible and 
can't understand it, that it takes scholarly and very brilliant people,"
Dozier says. 
      As a result, biblical scholarship and biblical belief are pretty far
apart. Phyllis Tickle, editor at 
large of Publishers Weekly and author of God Talk in America, quotes a
recent poll showing that 
while 51 percent of Americans believe Jesus existed (as he almost certainly
did), almost as many 
(47 percent) believe the virgin birth is a factual account (as it almost
certainly is not). "The fruits of 
scholarship," she says dryly, "have not filtered down." 
      Now, though, even some academics are beginning to feel like
Humpty-Dumpty: They've taken 
the Bible apart and don't know how to put it together again. In the
seminary, says Borg, students 
preparing for the clergy "experience a taking apart of their natural
literalism, but they're given very 
little help in the reconstruction of Scripture, in the positive task of
saying, What does it mean?" 
      A small narrativist school of academics, battling a long-standing
academic suspicion of anything 
that ventures beyond rigorous textual criticism, is trying out literary and
imaginative approaches to 
Scripture, latching onto the idea that the Bible is a conversation modern
readers ought to join. 
      So, if this handful of scholars and pastors is right that the Bible
is a conversation, how do we join 
it? By allowing the Bible to be what it is, and not what we want it to be,
argues Sharon Ringe, a 
professor of the New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary and an
adjunct professor at Latin 
American Biblical University in Costa Rica. "This is the document of a
community struggling—as we 
struggle—to understand what it means to be in a relationship. We're
privileged to read over [the 
writers'] shoulders as they try to know what life with God is about.
Sometimes they get it right, and 
sometimes they mess up badly, just as we do. But we have to take them
seriously enough to grant 
them their own claims." 
      This radical notion—that the Bible not only isn't factual, it's not
always right, either—may be 
frightening to many religious Christians, but it's what lets readers and
participants join this ancient 
and ongoing conversation. We do not have to buy everything the Bible says.
We just have to listen 
to it and to each other. "It's an extraordinarily difficult thing to
actually hear someone else," Visotzky 
says. "Most of the time we're pretending to be listening when what we're
really hearing is 
confirmation or denial of ourselves. But if we're really listening, there
is no 'I,' or if there is an 'I,' there 
is a 'thou' too, and something alien is worth considering because it's
alien. It takes courage, skill, 
and safety." 
      Such conversations are taking hold. At New York City's Church of St.
Luke in the Fields, rector 
Roger Ferlo leads about 30 people, not all parishioners or even Christians,
in a weekly Bible study. 
Over and over, he urges the participants to bracket their assumptions about
what the text says and 
see it fresh. 
      "The writer has a strategy—an agenda that is often very shrewd and
sometimes deceptive—that 
you're being invited to participate in," Ferlo says. "Being fooled is part
of the contract and part of the 
pleasure. [Poet Samuel Taylor] Coleridge called it willful suspension of
disbelief. But if people think 
the Bible is all about belief, they have a hard time with that. I'm asking
them for a willing suspension, 
not of disbelief, but of belief. That's a hard thing in a religious
setting." 
      The group is getting there. "The Bible is like an accordion now to me
when I read it," says Marion 
Lane, a regular participant. "There's an opening up between the words on
the page, leaving space 
for the Holy Ghost and also for human intellect. In my early education, the
hand of God was 
supposed to be writing this down. Now I find there were other emotions,
other needs involved, and 
there's room for me to have my own feelings and understand other people's
feelings." 
      The group studied the Book of Job recently, prompted by writer and
group member Janet 
Malcolm. Job is profound poetry framed by an ancient and primitive folktale
about a good man 
whom God allows to be tormented to test his faith. Surrounded by friends
who insist he must have 
done something to deserve his misery, Job proclaims his righteousness and
demands an 
accounting from God. Then God speaks, a voice out of a whirlwind, in
majestic poetry that seems, on 
the surface, utterly irrelevant. "Where were you," God demands of Job,
"when I planned the earth? 
Tell me, if you are so wise.... Were you there...when I wrapped the ocean
in clouds and swaddled 
the sea in shadows?" 
      Stephen Mitchell, the poet and scholar whose translation of Job the
group used, makes note of 
the book's complexity. "You have Job and his friends, God and Job, and then
God and the poet in 
another kind of conversation—and all of these are in play," he says. "If
you approach the text as the 
'truth,' you can't possibly get to a deeper place of intimacy with it. With
only one pole, there's no 
place to go. 
      "Conversation," he adds, "is one of the deepest and subtlest ways of
play and growth and 
intimacy, and it's a bipolar experience." 
      The group's conversation about the voice from the whirlwind was
impassioned. God's refusal to 
provide answers infuriated some. To others, the passage revealed the God
who can be 
encountered but never grasped. 
      "What if God appeared out of a whirlwind," asks group member John
Merz, "and told us, 'You're 
all fighting over this book, and you think you're going to control me—but
where were you when I did 
all these things?'" 
      Malcolm, who says she is not a religious person, was amazed by the
passage. "All those great 
verses about nature, about rain falling and nobody knowing about it, were
very, very powerful," she 
says. "It told us: This is what happens, in nature and to people." 
      To read the Bible as a conversation is to read it as a question, not
an answer, a starting point, not 
a final declaration. It's not easy; it takes energy to suspend our own
assumptions and welcome 
surprise. 
      But it also offers a way out of the dead end of sound-bite debate
into genuine dialogue. "What 
makes the Bible come alive," says Ferlo, "is acceptance of the possibility
of edges, and not a fear of 
them." To a political arena paralyzed by that fear, maybe the Bible
actually does have something to 
say. 
      Ann Monroe is a Mother Jones contributing writer. Her story on the
Christian Coalition's effort to 
attract African Americans appeared in the May/June issue. 



     
@1997 The Foundation for National Progress

Read the article online:

     http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1997/11/monroe.html
     
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