by Sophie Grace Chappell, Professor of Philosophy at The Open University. Her two most recent books are Songs For Winter Rain, a poetry collection, and Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience.
Hebrews 4.12: Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
Here are 5 bits from the Bible:
In childbirth the woman will have pain (Genesis 3.16)
Male and female created he them (Genesis 1.27)
God hates shrimp (Leviticus 11.9-12)
Homosexuality is an abomination (Leviticus 18.22)
The she-bears (2 Kings 2)
Evangelicals sometimes call the Bible “God’s instruction manual for life” or similar. This struck me as odd even when I was an evangelical myself (from about 1980 to about 1990), because on the face of it the Bible is nothing like an instruction manual. Rather, it’s a library of all kinds of different books: love poetry, hymns of praise, history books, origin myths and foundation tales, allegorical poems, philosophical reflections, proverbs, political tracts, forewarnings of judgement and apocalypse, shaggy-dog stories, and then the Gospels and the Epistles and Acts are each of them something different again. And in this library of books we see all sorts of things going on: shady dealings with goats in Genesis 29, religious genocide in Joshua 1 and 1 Samuel 15, rape and incest and murder in lots of places, hunger-strikes and dirty protests in Ezekiel, political debate in the books of Samuel, shipwrecks and trials and what we now call evangelism in Acts, straight theology in Hebrews and Romans, very strange eschatology in Revelation… and lots and lots of other things too.
But here’s the thing: there is no obvious non-supernatural sense in which any of the writers of the books of the Bible thought that they were addressing us. When Paul wrote his letter to the Romans his intended audience was, well, the Romans—the Christian church in Rome in maybe 60 AD. When James wrote his Epistle he was addressing church communities of that time, communities that he’d lived in or visited, or had some pastoral responsibility for. The authors of Kings and Samuel and Chronicles thought they were writing the history of Israel, for the people of Israel in their own time. The author of Genesis, from where we get the lines about childbirth and about “male and female created he them”, were writing a foundation myth the point of which is to explain that things are the way they are because God made them that way. The authors of Leviticus, who give us the passages about shrimp and about homosexuality, were laying down a code of behaviour for a nomadic tribe which later (after the eye-wateringly violent conquest of the land of Israel by war, mass murder, religious persecution, and ethnic cleansing) settled down as a pastoral people.
So even the bits of the Bible which are most like instruction manuals were not, in any non-supernatural sense, written as instruction manuals for us. (I don’t by the way have any problem at all with the notion of the supernatural. Not at all, unless it counts as a problem that I don’t think any “naturalist” yet has ever given a remotely plausible account of what “the natural” is.) Exodus tells us that the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Law were given by God, via Moses, to the people of Israel in the wilderness in maybe 1000 BC. Matthew tells us that the Sermon on the Mount was teaching given by Jesus in maybe 27 AD to his twelve disciples and other followers at the time. In Romans and Corinthians and Ephesians we can see the moral and religious and spiritual teaching that Paul gave to those churches then, in maybe 55 or 60 AD. But none of it is, directly and immediately, directed at us.
So how do we know when the Bible is stating a divine command that applies to us here and now?
If some of the observations about the foundation of our world are to be taken as not just parts of the narrative, but also instructions for us, like the bits in Genesis about women having to suffer in childbirth and about humans being made both male and female, then how do we know which of these observations give us rules, and which don’t?
And how do they give us rules? Is the fact that women suffer in childbirth something to preserve, as in nineteenth-century resistance to using new forms of pain relief? Or to remove, or mitigate? Is “male and female created he them” something that tells us that there are no transgender people? Or that there shouldn’t be? Or that everyone has a bit of male and a bit of female in them? Rebracket it and see how it looks then!
It is not for nothing that our Hebrews text calls Scripture two-edged.
Or take Leviticus: if some rules apply now (e.g. be merciful to the widow and the stranger), but other rules don’t (e.g. the ideas that menstruating women are unclean or that God hates shrimp), then how do we know which rules apply and which don’t?
If some of the examples of behaviour that the Bible gives us are examples to imitate (e.g. David repenting of his murder and adultery when Nathan challenges him), and other are not (e.g. Solomon taking a thousand wives), then how do we know which examples we are commanded to follow and which we are not?
And this is where we come to the last of my five bits, the she-bears. Because some evangelicals apparently think that Elisha’s action in using supernatural powers to massacre dozens of young people for mocking him sets an example that we should at any rate admire—maybe even imitate, if we can. And I couldn’t disagree more strongly about that if I tried.
It’s not all right for spiritual leaders who, like Elisha, have been entrusted with prophetic powers by God, to use those powers to massacre 42 (or however many; it’s a suspiciously numerological number) troublesome youngsters. It’s REALLY not all right. To suggest that it is, is to endorse millennia of pointless and tragic religious murderousness, from the allegedly divinely-sanctioned religious genocide of Joshua 1, to the actions of the IDF against the Palestinians.
If we want to talk about “taking scripture literally”, well—there is nothing in 2 Kings 2 that forces a preacher to read it as an endorsement of Elisha’s violence against the troublesome youth of Bethel. It could be read as “God gave Elisha this power as successor to Elijah—and the first thing he did with that God-given spiritual power, tragically, was abuse it—just as the Apostles did when they were confronted by Ananias and Sapphira.”
I don’t want religion/ faith (especially not my own religion/ faith, Christianity) to be what it so often has been, a way of normalising and institutionalising and even ritualising individual or church or state violence. (We do the ethnic cleansing, then we get together and sing some happy-clappy worship songs, and then we feel okay about those nasty scenes we witnessed this morning in the killing fields.)
That is the norm for homo sapiens: that we use religion to sanitise and legitimate what is ABSOLUTELY NOT okay, what actually cries out to heaven for vengeance. But for my part, I don’t want the Christian church to be like that. I want Christians to do what Jesus did, and renounce the whole awful cycle of human violence and human self-hypnotism that it’s okay to be like this. In which cycle, religion plays a prominent and deeply ugly part. Because it isn’t okay, it really really isn’t, and we have to stand against it, even if that means we end up on the Cross.
To be clear, I don’t think this “How can we tell when Scripture is giving us a command?” question is unanswerable.
My answer is this: I think that the church today has to trust itself to be what it is, the continuation of the very same story that the Bible tells, the story of a people whom God is calling to be like his son Jesus. Since we by God’s grace are part of that same story, we have the same right to disagree with the Biblical authors as we have to disagree with each other in the church today. If someone in the Bible sets an example or issues a command that our best and most careful moral reflection tells us is just wrong, then we are free to disagree with it. After all, “We have the Holy Spirit too”. God is at work in us today just as he was at work in the people who wrote the scriptures. What they say is always for us to reflect on, and we can often learn from it too: the Bible can and does change our moral viewpoint, and improve it. But sometimes—Joshua 1’s apparent presentation of religious genocide as God’s will—it is not just that we are right to disagree; it would be abominable not to disagree.
Now it’s not just me saying this. I actually think that this is what everybody does, even evangelicals. Martin Luther does this. Calvin does this. But I think conservative evangelicals typically have a false self-understanding. They claim to be “simply obeying just what it says in the Scriptures”. My point is that they do no such thing. Nobody could, because there is no such thing as “just what it says in the Scriptures”. Nor is it a matter, as I’ve heard some say, of “letting the Scriptures interpret themselves”; they don’t, we have to apply our understanding and our powers of interpretation to them.
So forget about “taking the Bible literally”. Think instead about taking the Bible seriously, and reading it reverently and attentively and intelligently. The first step in that is to look closely at what kind of text we’re actually dealing with in reading any book of the Bible. In almost every case, what we are dealing with is not an instruction manual. And even when it is, the instruction manual was not originally written for us.
That doesn’t mean we can’t get instruction from the Bible. Of course we can. But we get it not by literalism, but by serious and careful thought and reflection.
Above all, perhaps, it means this: we have to try and read the scriptures with Jesus, to read them as he reads them. So with the she-bears, we could point out the contrast between Elisha (and the Apostles in their treatment of Ananias and Sapphira) on the one side, and Jesus on the other: how in the whole of his prophetic career the sole casualties were one fig tree, some money changers’ tables, maybe a herd of pigs, and Jesus himself. Jesus was an extremely radical and an extremely unorthodox reader of the scriptures: witness his constant clashes with the Pharisees, “today this scripture is fulfilled in your sight”, “the stone that the builders rejected…”, and many other points where he presents a completely subversive reading of a well-known text.
And in fact there is a place in the Bible where Jesus gives us an example which he seems to have intended to be set alongside Elisha’s example, and to demonstrate how it is possible to respond to mockery or criticism of what you take to be your prophetic role completely differently from how Elisha responds. The passage I’m thinking of here is Luke 9.51-56:
And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elijah did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them. And they went to another village.
Martin Luther famously said that “We go to Scripture as the wise men went to the manger: to find Jesus in it.” I think that’s right. I think it’s also right that we can go to Scripture in Jesus’ company: and try to learn to read it, and to act on it—or against it—as Jesus did.
(based on a sermon preached at All Souls’ Church Invergowrie)
Any thoughts?