The Sins of Scripture (3 page)

When the excitement of Christmas Day was over that year, I placed my treasured new gift on the table beside my bed and began that night a regular practice of reading it, day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year. That was more than sixty years ago. There have been few days in my life since that Christmas that I have not intentionally and intensely read and studied these words. I suppose I have worked through this sacred text from cover to cover some twenty to twenty-five times. Some individual books, like the four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and Genesis, I have read many more times than that. Because I loved this book so much and because I read it so carefully, I could not fail to notice its gory passages that did not jibe with what I had been told about either God or religion. I met in its pages things that were disturbing, malevolent and evil. That was how the dark side of the Bible first began to dawn on my consciousness.

Looking back, I believe now that these insights would have come to me even sooner had I not been what the Bible seems to regard as a privileged person. I do not refer to my social or economic status, which was modest to say the least, but to the fact that I was white, male, heterosexual and Christian. The Bible affirmed, or so I was taught, the value in each of these privileged designations. It was clearly preferable to be white than to be a person of color; male, in whom the image of God was clear, rather than female; heterosexual and therefore “normal” rather than homosexual and therefore “abnormal”; and Christian, which was, of course, the only true religion. I grew up secure in each of these definitions.

I hope these brief autobiographical comments will make it clear that I do not come to this biblical interpretive task as an enemy of Christianity. I am a Christian, a deeply committed, believing Christian. I am not even a disillusioned former Christian, as some of my biblical scholar friends now identify themselves. I recognize that the Christian faith has traditionally claimed that its beliefs and practices are based on and supported by the Bible. I understand the centrality of this book. I write as one whose entire professional life has been lived in the service of that Christian church with which I am still joyfully identified. I was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church at age twenty-four and elected one of its bishops at age forty-four. I am a person who organized my priestly vocation after the analogy of a seminary professor, by interpreting my ordained role to be that of a teacher and the church primarily as a teaching center. The textbook that I taught my congregations Sunday after Sunday and year after year was the Bible. At diocesan centers, first across the South and later across the nation, I led conferences on the Bible. In parishes where I was the rector I initiated adult Bible classes for an hour prior to the Sunday worship service each week. The content I presented each Sunday using a lecture format would not have been dissimilar from that found in any seminary or theological college. I believed that my parishioners could learn everything that I had been taught. I regarded those classes as my highest priority and prepared for them more rigorously than I prepared for anything else I did. If the people in my congregation did not want to drink from the fountain that I was offering, there were plenty of other churches available from which they could choose. I never believed in tailoring the class to the security level of its members by hedging the truth. My aim was to challenge people with the insights of the scholars and to make contemporary biblical thinking available to them.

I would normally spend an entire year on a single book of the Bible, choosing a commentary to guide my thinking from among the world’s great biblical scholars. I would work on that book of the Bible and that commentary week after week until both became part of what I know and who I am.
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It was my ambition to work through the entire Bible with my congregations in the course of my ministry. I did not plan to skip even Obadiah or Nahum and figured I could complete this study in the years of my priestly career.

My election as a bishop tempered that ambition but did not diminish my zest for teaching. Like my great mentor John A. T. Robinson in England, I interpreted the office of bishop as a teaching and writing office. The result of this commitment was that I both know and love the Bible deeply. I also recognize where its warts are.

I know what parts of it have been used to undergird prejudices and to mask violence. I have discovered that there is a strange ability among believers not to see the negative side of their religious symbols. It did not take a genius to realize that human conflicts the world over always seemed to have a religious component. Slowly I was also forced to acknowledge that every great battle that I had joined both as a priest and as a bishop, to call the church into being what I believed the church had to be, was ultimately a battle against the way the Bible had been used throughout history. It was out of the Bible that pious and devout people drew the definitions they sought to impose on powerless people and to justify the oppression that those powerful religious voices seemed eager to impose. It was strange and uncomfortable to come to the awareness that the people who quoted this book most often were opposed to the justice issues that I found so compelling. At first I convinced myself that the problem was not in the Bible itself, but in the way the Bible was used. That, however, was a defensive and ultimately dishonest response. I had to come to the place where I recognized that the Bible itself was often the enemy. Time after time, the Bible, I discovered, condemned itself with its own words.

This was certainly true in the battle to overcome the racism and segregation that so deeply affected my childhood church in North Carolina. Quotations from the Bible were frequently employed in the racist battle to maintain segregation in which I, as a white person, was judged to be of greater worth than a black person. Quotations from the Bible were also the chief source of that very patriarchal prejudice by which I, as a male, profited and through which women were diminished.

The Bible was clearly the enemy when I began to address the way that Christians had treated the Jews throughout Christian history. My church had filled me with a deep-seated but Bible-based religious bigotry. I breathed it inside my congregation’s life. Whenever the gospels said “the Jews,” there was no escaping the fact that something evil was meant. This evil was acted out in the Western world again and again, culminating in the Holocaust, but not ending with it. I have dealt with the defacement of synagogues even in the twenty-first century. Religious bigotry is certainly still present in the rhetoric of certain preachers, such as the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention who said on national television not only in my presence but in the presence of his Jewish interviewer, Larry King: “God almighty does not hear the prayers of a Jew.”
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Later other forms of this same religious bigotry filled the pronouncements of popular American televangelists when they talked about both Jews and Muslims and certainly when they talked about their other favorite victims, the homosexuals of the world. Much as I wanted to think otherwise, I had to conclude that the Bible is not always good. Sometimes the Bible is quite overtly evil. Sometimes its texts are terrible. It was not a comfortable insight, but it grew into being a crusade to lift the Bible above its own destructiveness and to force the Christian church to face its own terrifying history that so often has been justified by quotations from “the scriptures.”

As the twenty-first century dawned, the citizens of the United States had to face for the first time the reality of international terror which came at us in killing fury from a religious tradition different from our own. The only positive thing about the evil of terrorism was that it forced Christians to face the same kind of religious bigotry and hostility that we had long acted out with clear consciences toward others. That was a new learning for citizens in the dominant nations of the Christian West. So terrorism created for me a new imperative, indeed a compelling vocation. I had to deal with the destructive and terrifying side of my own religion. I had to face openly and admit honestly those things about which most Christians are neither knowledgeable nor aware. I had to document the evil that Christians have so frequently rendered to others in the name of our religion, including the way we have justified violence with biblical quotations. No, we Christians are not the only violators. But Christians have been major players in the realm of violence, and that must not be denied. There is plenty of guilt to go around. It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different in looks, language, habit and religion. Violence is almost always the result of such prejudice.

Is it not a fact that Osama bin Laden invoked God when he directed his hijacked suicide airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001?

But is it also not a fact that President George W. Bush invoked God when he unleashed his missiles and bombers on the people of Iraq?

Palestinians have likewise invoked God when they have strapped dynamite to their waists and boarded a crowded bus or entered a public restaurant in Israel to destroy themselves and anyone else who happened to be near.

The Jews in Israel have invoked God as they sent their tanks into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to knock down houses that were thought to provide shelter to their enemies, believing this to be the appropriate and righteous response to the terror that victimized them.

Catholics and Protestants have both invoked God as they killed each other in Ireland, the last gasp of a dying fury that spawned a thirty-year religious war and in 1588 propelled the Spanish Armada to a watery grave as it sought to win back Protestant England for the Vatican.

Religious evil gets even more complicated and even more uncompromisingly destructive as we press our gaze into very sensitive areas. Priests in our day still invoke God when they violate and abuse the little children who have been entrusted to their care. The church taught its people that these priests were to be respected as their spiritual fathers, so abuse was not only morally wrong, it was a violation of trust. It gets worse still. The superiors of these priests—the bishops, the archbishops and the cardinals—also invoked God when they acted to cover up these violent crimes and protect the victimizers and ultimately themselves and the church rather than the victims.

Other worldwide religious leaders, including both the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury, invoked God when each allowed the homophobic prejudices of some parts of the Christian world to be honored while homosexual people were violated again and again for the “sin” of being who they are. Both placed the unity of the church above truth. It has not been a pretty picture.

The source for the invoking of God in each of these instances was the sacred scriptures of the person speaking. For Christian victimizers it has regularly been the Bible. That is why it is the Bible that I seek now to explore. I believe the Bible must be preserved, but not the Bible that people have used to enhance the pain and evil present in human history.

Exploring these areas has not always been a comfortable journey for me and I am well aware that many of my conclusions will not be comfortable for those who think of themselves as “simple believers.” Many of them will become quite threatened, even angry. That is why it is essential for my readers to be aware that I am doing this as a Christian, as a believer. That will surely be apparent before my readers complete these pages. My pledge is only that I will seek the truth openly. Duplicity has lived for far too long inside the leadership of the Christian church for me to be content to allow it to continue unchallenged.

P
erhaps the strangest claim ever made for any written document in history is that its words are or somehow contain the “Word of God.” Such an assertion assumes that God is a very humanlike being who has the ability to speak to a particular people in a language that they understand and that God is intimately invested in the minutiae of human life. Yet without any apparent embarrassment such claims have been made throughout Western history for what we call the holy scriptures of the Christian church. Similar claims have also been made for the sacred writings of other religious traditions, but Christians have never taken these “pagan” claims seriously. Somehow the claims coming from non-Christian sources are just too obviously absurd. One does not have to travel far, however, to hear the Christian version of this claim stated with liturgical precision.

“This is the Word of the Lord.” That is the phrase that mainline Christian churches most frequently use following a reading from the Bible in the Sunday liturgy. The congregation responds dutifully with the words “Thanks be to God.” In the more unstructured or evangelical Christian churches, the phrase might be a little more flowery, but its claim is no less clear. Many times I have heard some variation on these words after the Bible has been read in these places of worship: “May God add his blessing to this reading from his Word.” The use of these masculine pronouns for God has never been a large concern in evangelical circles.

“I do believe the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God and to contain all things necessary to salvation.” That is the vow, called the Oath of Conformity, that is required of every candidate for ordination in my Episcopal/Anglican Church. I have recited that vow three times: once when I was ordained a deacon, then when I was ordained a priest and finally when I was ordained a bishop. Having graduated from one of my own church’s accredited theological seminaries, where I was well trained in a critical approach to the Bible, it did not occur to me to see any conflict between that oath and my education. To call the Bible the “Word of God” is so commonplace in the tradition that it rolls off our tongues by rote with little thought as to what it means. However, when a debate begins in the church over some major social issue, the ultimate authority quoted most regularly is a biblical text. The assumption of these Bible quoters is that the Bible is in fact invested with the authority of God.

I suspect that we still call the Bible the “Word of God” because everyone reserves to himself or herself the right to interpret what that claim means. When some Christians say of the Bible, “This is the Word of God,” they mean quite literally that they believe this book was written or dictated by God and is therefore inerrant. That is the popular point of view asserted by America’s well-known television evangelists. One wonders, however, upon hearing that claim whether these people have ever read the entire biblical text! Others, attempting to find a more moderate position which will allow a bit more interpretive space, suggest that to call the Bible the “Word of God” simply means that God inspired the Bible’s human authors. It is still God’s word, but some room is created to allow for human error in the sacred text. At least people holding this position give evidence of the fact that they know enough about the biblical text not to want to ascribe it all to God!

Others, who are still bound, albeit even more loosely, to the traditional claim that the scriptures contain or reveal the “Word of God” suggest that what this phrase really means is that people in every generation continue to hear the “Word of God” through the reading of these ancient and time-bound texts. This position is frequently adopted by those who are moving toward the edges of institutional Christian life. It is as if they sense that without an authoritative Bible undergirding their faith, there is little or nothing holding it up. The struggle to secure the authority of the Bible is therefore an enormously important issue.

The content of this debate turns on exactly what is meant by the verb “to be,” with its various forms of “is” and “are.” The verb “to be” is the basic building block in every human language. “I do believe the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament
to be
the Word of God.” “This
is
the word of the Lord.” Are not those fairly specific claims? We might argue that the verb “to be” is more complex than we imagined. One remembers with some amusement from the vantage point of history a former president of the United States, under political pressure for his indiscreet private behavior, defending himself by suggesting that there are various meanings to the word “is.”
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Is the word “is” or the verb “to be” that imprecise? Literalists do not think so.

Historically the evidence is clear that the verb “to be” has been employed in church circles for centuries to give authority to the Bible. Nor is there any doubt that these claims for the Bible have also shaped traditional Christianity for its entire history. I now, however, want to open this debate to new possibilities by asking a few simple but very direct questions: Was this claim for the Bible to be the “Word of God,” no matter how it is interpreted, ever appropriate for this volume which contains sixty-six books (or even more if you count the Apocrypha) that were written over a period of perhaps twelve hundred years? Can such a claim stand even the barest scrutiny? Is Christianity so shaped by this strange claim as to be unable to extricate itself from its biblical moorings and still be recognizable? Is this claim not the primary source from which evil has flowed so freely from the Christian church throughout Christian history? Has not this definition been the very thing that has produced the religious mentality that has perfumed prejudice, violated people literally by the millions and created an idol out of the scriptures that even in our somewhat enlightened generation is still allowed in some circles to masquerade as if it were the final inerrant authority? It is quite clear to me that it is the assumption that the Bible is in any sense the “Word of God” that has given rise to what I have called in the title of this book “the sins of scripture.” By “the sins of scripture” I mean those terrible texts that have been quoted throughout Christian history to justify behavior that is today universally recognized as evil.

To face this reality is essential for my integrity as a Christian, but it is not easy. My religious critics say to me that there can be no Christianity apart from the authority of the scriptures. They hear my attack on this way of viewing the Bible as an attack on Christianity itself. I want to say in response that the claim that the scriptures are either divinely inspired or are the “Word of God” in any literal sense has been so destructive that I no longer want to be part of that kind of Christianity! I do not understand how anyone can saddle God with the assumptions that are made by the biblical authors, warped as they are both by their lack of knowledge and by the tribal and sexist prejudices of that ancient time. Do we honor God when we assume that the primitive consciousness found on the pages of scripture, even when it is attributed to God, is somehow righteous? Do we really want to worship a God who plays favorites, who chooses one people to be God’s people to the neglect of all the others? When we portray the God of the Bible as hating everyone that the chosen people hate, is God well served? Will our modern consciousness allow us to view with favor a God who could manipulate the weather in order to send the great flood that drowned all human lives save for Noah’s family because human life had become so evil God needed to destroy it? Can we imagine human parents relating to their wayward offspring in this manner? Can we really worship the God found in the Bible who sent the angel of death across the land of Egypt to murder the firstborn males in every Egyptian household in order to facilitate the release of the chosen people? Can the Bible still be of God when it portrays Joshua as stopping the sun in the sky for the sole purpose of allowing him the time to slaughter more of his enemies, the Amorites (Josh. 10:12–15)? Can the Bible be the “Word of God” when it has Samuel order King Saul in the name of God to “Go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (1 Sam. 15:3)? Is it the “Word of God” when the Psalmist writes about the Babylonians who have conquered Judah: “Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks” (Ps. 137:8–9)? These are but a few of the questions I want the Bible quoters to answer. Is Christianity somehow irrevocably linked to this mentality because of our continuing claims for the Bible?

One can easily descend from these serious questions to those that are a bit more frothy, frivolous and fun. Many of these biblical assertions have floated across the Internet in a variety of versions, making good reading for a biblically illiterate nation. According to the Bible, one of these Internet offerings noted, it is permissible to sell one’s daughter into slavery (Exod. 21:7). It is of interest that sons as candidates for slavery are never mentioned. One may possess slaves, says the Bible, but only if they come from neighboring countries (Lev. 25:44). One wonders, as an American, if that makes both Canadians and Mexicans eligible!

The execution squads would have to work overtime to keep up with the number of texts from the Bible that call for the death penalty. Violating the Sabbath (Exod. 35:2), cursing (Lev. 24:13–14) and blaspheming (Lev. 24:16) are among them. Such judgments would fall most heavily on athletic locker rooms used in preparation for Saturday or Sunday football games! But of course no one should be playing football anyway, for Leviticus also prohibits touching anything made of pigskin (Lev. 11:7–8)! Perhaps this great American fall sport should be played with rubber gloves! Even stubborn and rebellious children are at risk of capital punishment, according to the Bible. If children do not obey their parents, if they overeat or drink too much, they are to be stoned at the gates of the city (Deut. 21:18–21). That is a bit stricter than even right-wing biblical moralists and ideologues care to go. Yet if one wishes to search the scriptures sufficiently, this rather bizarre list of texts can be expanded almost endlessly.

The case against the Bible, however, does not stop at the end of clever lists. It is quite easy to demonstrate that the Bible is simply wrong in some of its assumptions. It is hard to maintain the claim of inerrancy in the face of biblical statements that are obviously incorrect. The “Word of God” is not infrequently simply wrong.

Moses did not write the Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Moses had been dead for three hundred years before the first verse of the Torah achieved written form. Those books reflect multiple strands of material that were put together over a period of at least five hundred years. One of those Torah books, Deuteronomy, even provides us with the account of Moses’ death and burial (chapter 34). Is it not a rather remarkable author who can record in his writing that particular moment in his own life? Yet Jesus himself makes the traditional claim for Mosaic authorship of the Torah in multiple places in the gospel record (see Mark 1:44; Matt. 8:4, 19:7, 8, 22:24; Luke 5:14, 20:28, 24:27). It is also a working hypothesis in parts of the Old Testament.

David did not write the Psalms. Scholars locate the writings of most of the Psalms during the period of Jewish history called the Babylonian Exile, which started with the fall of Jerusalem in 596 BCE and lasted in some of its forms until the mid-400s. That would be between four and six hundred years after the death of King David. Yet, once again in the gospels, the Davidic authorship of the Psalms is asserted by Jesus (see Mark 12:36–37; Matt. 22:43–45 and Luke 20:42–44). Such a claim made today on a final exam, even at the seminary where I was trained, would result in a failing grade. Jesus, or those who thought they were quoting Jesus, was simply wrong about that.

The case for the Bible possessing the authority of being the “Word of God,” or at the very least having been divinely inspired, gets even murkier when the biblical claim is made that epilepsy and mental illness are both caused by demon possession, or that profound deafness, what we once referred to pejoratively as being “deaf and dumb,” is caused by the devil tying the tongue of the victim. Can the “Word of God” be bound to levels of knowledge that were transcended centuries ago? Yet once again in a variety of biblical passages Jesus is portrayed as making these specific claims (see Mark 1:23–26, 9:14–18; Matt. 9:13 and Luke 9:38–42).

The fact that we know today that the earth is not the center of the universe, with heaven above the sky, renders the worldview of the biblical writers seriously inaccurate. Was God ill-informed or did God choose not to reveal such truth to the authors of the biblical books? Yet an earth-centered, three-tiered universe underlies such biblical stories as the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11), manna falling from heaven (Exod. 16:4ff.), the wise men following the star of Bethlehem (Matt. 2) and even the cosmic ascension of Jesus (Luke 24; Acts 1).

The Bible tells us that the Israelites wandered nomadically in the wilderness between Egypt and the Promised Land for forty years, guided by the magic signs of a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, which connected them with the God who lived just above the sky (Exod. 13, 16:35).

The Bible makes assumptions that most of us who live in a post-Newtonian world of “natural law” could never make. Special people in the Bible were said to have had their lives marked by signs of divine favor. Elijah and Elisha, for example, both had miracle stories connected to their lives in the developing traditions. These miracles included the ability to expand the food supply (1 Kings 12:8–16, 17:8–16); the ability to enable an iron axe-head to float on the river (2 Kings 6:5) and even the experience of raising the dead (1 Kings 17:17–24 and 2 Kings 4:8–37).

When we come to the Jesus story, a literal reading will reveal either unbelievable miracles or a land of make-believe. Like all great mythical heroes, Jesus was said to have had a supernatural birth. He was conceived without benefit of a male agent (Matt. 1:18–25 and Luke 1:26–38). It was a bit more spectacular than the birth of John the Baptist, who was simply conceived when his father was elderly and his mother was postmenopausal (Luke 1:5–25). Before these two boys were born, we are told, their relative importance was announced when the fetus of John the Baptist, while still in the womb, leaped to salute the fetus of Jesus (Luke 1:41–44). Surely no one would seriously argue that this story was literal history! The birth of Jesus gets more spectacular yet. It is announced to the world by a star that illumined the heavens. The star was said to have had the power to wander through the sky so slowly that it could guide wise men from the East first to the palace of Herod and second to a house in Bethlehem where Jesus could be found (Matt. 2:1–12). Next Luke tells us that on the night of his birth angels split the night sky, behind which they were presumed to live, in order to sing to hillside shepherds. The angels must have sung in Aramaic, for that was the only language the shepherds understood (Luke 2:8–14)!