Does It Belong In The Bible?

Richard Dawkins , author of the bestselling book, The God Delusion, is no fan of God or religion. Unsurprisingly, he is not particularly fond of the Bible either. In The God Delusion, he writes:

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But, unfortunately, it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living. Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it.

Someone who has read and, I believe, understood it as well is another bestselling author, Jonathan Kirsch . In his fascinating book, The Harlot By The Side Of The Road, he retells a number of bible stories in a way that makes the sparse, cryptic tales come alive. His criterion for which stories to retell, however, turns out to be those that reveal a less than sympathetic view of the actions of God and the Bible. This is not a book that many Christian ministers and Jewish rabbis would recommend to their flocks!

In one story Kirsch retells the tale of Lot offering hospitality to strangers (perhaps angels) that he brings in off of the street. His offer of hospitality includes defending the strangers from being molested by a crowd by inviting the crowd to, instead, do with his daughters what they please. The story moves on to YAWAH, the God of forgiveness and compassion, committing genocide by destroying two entire towns save for the family of Lot . Lot ’s wife, of course, pays with her life for the disobedient act of turning around (perhaps, to see if her third daughter had escaped the holocaust). For this act of disobedience she is turned into a pillar of salt. This story, you may recall, continues with Lot’s daughters tricking Lot into committing incest because there were no suitors nearby, since God had killed them all off. Another, less well know story, also retold by Kirsch, is the fascinating story of Jephthah and his daughter found in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Judges.

Now Jephthah was a mighty man of valor, and he was the son of a harlot; and Gilead begot Jephthah. And Gilead ’s wife bore him sons; and when his wife’s sons grew up they drove Jephthah out. and said unto him: “thou shalt not inherit our father’s house; for thou art the son of another woman.” Then Jephthah fled from his brethren and dwelt in the land of Tob .

The story continues with Jephthah siring a daughter (her name is not given) and finding work as a mercenary soldier. When the “children of Ammon made war with Israel ” the elders of Gilead approached Jephthah and asked him to lead them in their fight. After some coaxing he finally agrees when they promise to make him their general and leader over all of Gilead , including the brothers who had cheated him out of his inheritance. Before going into battle Jephthah prayed and promised God that, should he be successful, he would sacrifice whatever first comes from his house to greet him when he returns. He was indeed successful and when he returned the first thing that greeted him was his beloved daughter. So naturally, he prepared to make of her a burnt offering, since he had vowed that he would sacrifice the first thing coming out of his house. His dutiful daughter did not complain but asked only for two months to “bewail her virginity” with her friends in the woods. Jephthah granted her this request but at the end of the two months he did indeed kill her and made a burnt offering of her. What stories!

These are only the first of a number of biblical stories that Kirsch relates. For those who consider the Bible the literal WORD OF GOD, these stories require some pretty complex interpretation. We can’t help but ask, whether such stories belong in the Bible. Should not these and other stories like them be completely removed from the Bible? Should we not censor those parts of the Bible that do not portray noble, moral values, examples of “righteousness” and “devotion”, values that we wish to teach our children? Should we have a “V chip” for the Bible?

A recent email from another Interim Minister told of the religious education committee at her church insisting that there be no Bible lessons and no Bible stories.

Whenever I publicize a sermon title that indicates that some aspect of the Bible will be the subject someone invariably asks why bother with the Bible.

Richard Dawkins asks:

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it? The following offences merit the death penalty, according to Leviticus 20: cursing your parents; committing adultery; . . . homosexuality; . . . bestiality (and, to add injury to insult, the unfortunate beast is to be killed too). You also get executed, of course, for working on the Sabbath: the point is made again and again throughout the Old Testament. In Numbers 15, the children of Israel found a man in the wilderness gathering sticks on the forbidden day. They arrested him and then asked God what to do with him. As it turned out, God was in no mood for half measures that day. 'And the Lord said unto Moses , The man shall surely be put to death: all the congregation shall stone him . . . And all the congregation . . . stoned him with stones, and he died. Did this harmless gatherer of firewood have a wife and children to grieve for him? Did he whimper with fear as the first stones flew? and scream with pain as the fusillade crashed into his head? What shocks me today about such stories is not that they really happened. They probably didn't. What makes my jaw drop, is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh - and, even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us.

Thomas Jefferson was rumored to be a Freethinker and an atheist. In a letter to his nephew he confided that he considered himself a Unitarian even though he never left the Episcopal church. He was scandalously rumored to have fathered children by a slave woman, Sally Hemmings . (This rumor, it turns out, was probably true.) What no one knew, however, until after his death, was what was in the small drawer next to his bed. When the contents of his house was inventoried by his executors a very curious book was discovered. It is now known as the Jefferson Bible.

Jefferson ’s Bible contained the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Lord’s prayer. Jefferson wanted a Bible that would contain only the actual, inspirational words of Jesus . He wished to purge the Bible of all of the miracles of Jesus . Jefferson neatly cut out of a Bible the parables and lessons that he believed were probably actually taught by Jesus and pasted them together in a book of blank pages to form his personal version of the Bible. The rest of the Bible he discarded. He never revealed this book’s existence to anyone, at least that we know of. Liberals who do not discard the Bible entirely like RE committee often follow Jefferson’s lead and use what seems authentic, or at least, sensible to us today, and discard the rest.

For this reason, most Biblical scholarship today is being conducted, not by the prestigious German and other European universities and American Ivy League colleges that plowed those fields in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but, rather, by Fundamentalist colleges, Catholic colleges and those with a conservative perspective like Brigham Young University.

“So what!”, I hear you say, “Who cares?!”

Let us step back a little and look at what the Bible really is, not what they tell us it is. For over a century biblical scholars and anthropologists have investigated every facet of the Bible. The have recognized that it is not, really, a book at all. The Bible is a collection, or, perhaps, better, a library of ancient writings. There is genuine history; some of the Hebrew authors were interested in chronicling the important events in the reigns of the kings of Israel . There are some ancient codes of conduct and the earliest attempts at laws, as well as understandings of how to live a more moral, and committed life. There are songs and poems of celebration and devotion and commitment. There are myths and legends; myths and legends were the pre-scientific, pre-literate way of remembering and making sense of the world. They are history PLUS. They don’t attempt to report all historical information, only what seems important for human beings in order to understand the mysteries of their world. God, of course, was an important way of explaining what otherwise could not be explained in the millennia before the advent of science. The Hebrews and early Christians weren’t alone in this. Homer and Virgil did it for their cultures. Ancient stories of India and China and those of Native Americans did the same. And, binding all of this together, there are interpretations and perspectives and advice about what this all means.

The Bible was not written all at one time. It is, as I said, a collection. It is a library that was collected for, perhaps, a couple of thousand years. In successive editing or “redacting” some things were revised and some things discarded. Some thoughts, ideas and stories underwent significant changes over that period of time. Not everything that was written in the ancient world of the middle east was preserved in the Bible; anthropologists have discovered a number of other ancient texts. What was collected and preserved in the Bible, however, were only those documents that successive generations of editors, believed would strengthen the community and keep it holy.

I hear you say again, “Interesting, but so what?” “Why should we care?”

One reason that we should care is that the Bible is a foundation document of our culture. It is, and has been since its first publication, the best selling book of all time, every year. It was the first printed book. It is the book possessed by more people than any other. It was the only book that a great majority of Americans owned before the last century. Before the late nineteenth century it was common for many people in America to learn to read by reading the Bible. Even today more people know the story of Job, the story of Noah and the story of Jonah than any other story in our culture. Sure Romeo and Juliet is well known, but not as well known as the story of the Good Samaritan or the story of Joseph . Without knowledge of basic biblical references one cannot fully understand many literary allusions or political or religious positions that permeate our culture.

Many common phrases clearly come from the Bible: “East of Eden ”, “Be fruitful and multiply”, “Adam’s Rib”, “The fleshpots of Egypt ”, “The patience of Job”, and “Prodigal Son”. But did you know that these also come from the Bible: “The fat of the land”, “stranger in a strange land”, “the apple of his eye”, “how are the mighty fallen” and “a man after his own heart?” I have a list that is three pages long of additional words and phrases that we use every day that are derived directly from the Bible. To be an informed citizen of western culture one needs to, at least, know and understand common biblical references. Equally, or, perhaps, more important is that the collection of history, stories, poetry, moral codes and wisdom that make up the Bible has something to say to us today. The story of Job is a classic tale that is forever new and fresh and powerful. Just a few years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote the best seller “Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People?” Is this not the same question that Job asks? It is a human question that will not go away.

John Buehrens , former President of the UUA, relates a story told to him by UU theologian and social ethicist James Luther Adams :

Adams told of spending an evening with the great psychologist Erich Fromm, the author of The Art of Loving. Fromm had been saying he wasn’t “religious”. “Erich,” said Adams ,” you say you are a ‘humanist.’ But tell me: what really makes you tick? After a long silence, Fromm replied, “You are right. It’s the spirit of the Hebrew prophets in me that gives me my sense of direction. Their cry for justice, their abhorrence of idols, their fidelity to a God who is beyond all image, yet who works and calls us in human history to real equality, community, and personhood. That’s what makes me tick.”

“But,” you may be thinking, “what about the terrible things that human beings have done and continue to do to each other based on biblical so called moral imperatives? Doesn’t the Bible glorify war and condemn those who are of a different tribe or worship other gods? Are not more wars fought over religion than for any other reason? Did not the Bible require us to keep Terri Schiavo alive? Does not the Bible prevent us from funding stem cell research? Does not the Bible require us to condemn same sex marriage? Does not the Bible insist that those who have not made Jesus their personal savior are condemned to eternal damnation? Does not the Bible insist that it is the obligation of all good Christians to convert everyone else? “

There is, at times, the perception among liberals that the Bible is only a negative influence on us today, one that the modern civilized world would be better off without.

This might become true, if we were to continue to let them get away with it! The Bible is diverse, obscure, contradictory andcan lend itself to many different interpretations. One can find in the Bible support for any position, good or bad, tolerant or intolerant, selfish or generous.

Even Martin Luther had to argue with part of the Bible. Luther , who was the first to translate the entire Bible into German so that it would be available to all, not just the clergy, found in the Bible a direct contradiction to the major plank of his theology. Luther had broken with Rome for many reasons but none more central than his objection to the selling of “Indulgences”. He insisted that it is “faith alone, not works” that is essential for salvation. Yet there was a biblical stumbling block for this theological assertion. It was very clear to Luther when he translated the book of James . He couldn’t get around James chapter 2, verses 14 through 17:

But what does it profit, my brethren, if a man says that he has faith but not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without feeding them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works is dead.

Interestingly, this did not change Luther ’s insistence that works were unimportant. He simply disparaged the Book of James, by referring to it as the “straw epistle”.

Unfortunately, liberal religionists have left the field to those who interpret the Bible so that, like Luther , it fits their theology. The conservatives are not incorrect when they provide biblical citations that support their intolerant positions. They are simply using the Bible to prove what they already believe rather than being informed by and challenged by it. For, the Bible continually rails against idolatries of all kinds. The Prophets were not so much fortune tellers as a national conscience, warning when idolatries blinded people to what was most important.

Jonathan Kirsch wrote:

Today, fundamentalists of all three Bible-based religions claim to find in the Holy Scriptures a divine excuse for repression and much worse. They cite chapter and verse, literally, to condemn abortion, divorce, and homosexuality; they claim to find in the Bible divine justification to take and keep some of the most hotly disputed territory on earth; they feel empowered by the Almighty to pronounce death sentences on those whose words and thoughts offend them. Yet if we look deeply into the Bible, we will discover that men and women, clans and tribes, peoples and nations – despite their differences of race and faith – manage to tolerate each other, to share the earth with each other, and to encounter each other in peaceful and loving ways. It's a liberating experience to discover what the Bible really says . . .

In any such diverse collection we should not be surprised that there are ideas and sentences and images that contradict one another. We should not be surprised that we can find racism and prejudice as well as powerful noble thoughts. Any collection containing as diverse a group of authors and modes of expression would surely contain, at least in some places, all of the emotions, beauty and nobility and idealism, as well as pettiness prejudice that is natural to our species. Would it have been possible for the Bible, written by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals over thousands of years, to be any less uneven? If we continue to allow the Fundamentalists to interpret what the Bible says and who authored it, we will continue to be saddled with their understanding of the Bible, with those passages that reinforce and verify their prejudices and bigotry being the only passages quoted in the public forums. We would be allowing them to continue to reduce this rich collection of literature and wisdom to a ragged dime novel that is not worth the paper it is printed on. How unfortunate. What a loss. To us!

If we relegate the Bible to the dust bin, we will have tossed away the very foundational documents of our Western Civilization.

The same idolatries and selfishness that existed in Jerusalem and Babylon , Galilee and Corinth are with us still today.

Amos warned: “Hear this, you who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor to the land of ruin, saying ‘When will the new moon be over that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath that we may offer wheat for sale, that we may make the bushel small, and the shekel great, and deal deceitfully with false balances, that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell the refuse of the wheat?’” (Am. 8:4-6)

Isaiah insisted that we: “cease to do evil; learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.” (Is. 1:16-17)

Hosea cautioned that:– having sown the wind “they shall inherit the whirlwind” (Hos. 8:7)

These are warnings that our culture, too, needs to take seriously. The sayings and parables of Jesus are no less fresh and radical today than when he spoke them two thousand years ago. Prohibitions against murder, theft, false witness, adultery, and covetousness are no less important today than in the time of Moses .

Understanding where many UUs are coming from, John Buehrens wrote that: A humanist need not be one who denies the human need for transcendence or that unimaginable, “subversive” God who upsets all our tribal idolatries. One can be biblically grounded and yet find that the authority of the Bible lies not in some supernatural claim to special revelation, but in the human experience of being so subverted, and turned toward “real equality, community, and personhood.”

So, how come the Fundamentalists seem to be preaching so much hate and intolerance supported by the Bible? The reason is not that they misread the Bible, though many certainly do. It is not that they take the words out of context, though, again, some certainly do. It is not that they ignore the historic setting of biblical passages. They often place the words in historical context. No, the problem lies in their using the Bible, not as a resource and a reference and as a source of inspiration and wisdom, but as a proof-text, a way of verifying and proving their own perspective of absolute morality. They search long and hard for the one phrase or sentence in over 2,000 pages that supports what they already believe. The Bible is a Rorschach test. What you seek you can find. The Bible belongs not only to the Fundamentalists to cherry pick as they wish but to all of us, if we take the time to discover the richness that is in it and find in itthat which reflects and verifies our ideas and ideals.

But more importantly, the Bible warns us, challenges us and demands humility of us.

Thus sayth the Lord: ‘Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches. But let him who glories, glory in this: that he understands and knows Me – that I am the Lord who practices kindness, justice and righteousness on earth; for in these I delight,’ says the Lord.

(Jer. 9:23-24)