Fighting with the Bible: Why Scripture Divides Us and How It Can Bring Us Together
144
Fighting with the Bible: Why Scripture Divides Us and How It Can Bring Us Together
144Paperback
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Overview
Like Christians today, the communities and individuals who wrote the biblical texts often strongly disagree with each other. Ruth and Ezra, Isaiah and Ezekiel, Micah and Joel, Deuteronomy and Daniel, Mark and John. What would they say to each other? Do they have anything in common? Each of these voices is firmly committed to his or her specific view of "the truth," whether it reflects a particular place or community, a prophet, a style of worship, or an "understanding" of who is in and who is out.
The author guides us in considering how we can do justice to this welter of disparate voices. What can the Bible teach us about living together? How can we use it as a powerful resource for understanding and for moving beyond conflict?
A study guide and template for creating safe spaces for conversation about the tough issues in which the bible may be dividing your community is found at the end of the book.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781596270589 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2007 |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Fighting with the Bible
Why Scripture Divides Us and How It Can Bring Us Together
By Donn Morgan
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2007 Donn MorganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59627-058-9
CHAPTER 1
A House or a Home?
Do you remember any of those animated films where, when the humans are gone for the night and the house is quiet, the toys, the clocks, and other inanimate objects come to life and start talking to one another, start exploring the house, happy that with human beings out of the way they can be in relationship with one another, with the whole house at their beck and call? The Bible is a bit like this.
Imagine, if you will, a house containing all the communities that produced the biblical books. Some of these communities were deeply involved in prayer (the writers of the Psalms and Lamentations), in worship, and in meditation, both individually and with one another. Some of these communities lifted up great stories with lots of interesting characters: David, Jesus, Jacob, Moses, Joseph, Ruth, Esther, and so many others abound in the pages of the Bible, and in the preserved memories of these communities. Then there are the communities that preserve and lift up the sayings of those who have had prophetic roles—Jeremiah, Isaiah, Jesus, Paul, to name but a few. Sometimes we find these sayings in books of oracles, or in collections of letters or prayers, or in the gospels. Wherever we find them, most of the biblical communities refer to and are shaped by the foundational stories of our faith, remembering Abraham or Jesus or Moses or David or Solomon or Peter, or others who speak of past revelation and present commitments.
Finally, after a long period of time, we have a complete book, a biblical house, filled with many different testimonies to the power and pertinence of God for their lives. The house as we see it now is nicely arranged and ordered, with some communities of witness given the larger rooms, some medium-sized, and some very small. Those arrangements change, moreover, as generations of caretakers come and go and the outside world changes around them. Some generations want and need prophetic vision and guidance; they are drawn to Jeremiah, to Isaiah, and to some of the sayings of Jesus. Others need the stability of communal values and visions found in legal materials and the stories of establishing the cult they find in Exodus, Ezekiel, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and many of the Pauline writings.
And now the house is quiet, and the biblical communities are alone. What will they say to each other? Will they even recognize one another? What stories and values do they share? What distinctive contributions do they bring to living in that biblical house together?
Now imagine again a similar house containing the communities of the church, with all of their differences and all of their shared commitments, similarly ordered and arranged—with those arrangements changing even more frequently, perhaps, than in the biblical house. Like the biblical house, there are many differences of history, culture, concepts of God, geography, politics. Where can and does it end? What do these folks share? How will they understand the particularity and difference within their communities, which both unite and divide?
In one sense we live today in both of these houses, and we need to create the opportunity to explore our own faith and our relationship with others within these premises. Dialogue will be essential. Asking questions of why and how the biblical communities of the Psalms and Job and Paul are related to our communities today, and how we will live together and have communion with one another—all of these are the stuff of dialogue in those houses.
Imagine now that these two houses are, or could be, one. Imagine that the many communities of the Bible have as much desire and need to speak to us as we do to them. If we choose to listen to those communities, eventually, in our conversation, in our earnest agreements and disagreements, in our puzzlement and pleasant surprises, we all just might begin to explore the question of who and what brought us all together. And whether the house is dark and we have it all to ourselves, or whether it is open to the whole world with all its hustle and bustle, we might just learn more from one another about God. In so doing, the house we have shared with seeming strangers becomes a home where real conversation can occur.
DIFFERENCE IN THE BIBLE: A SKETCH
Difference permeates the Bible. Not only do all the biblical communities and books of the Bible differ, different points of view occur, even in the same book. Consider, for example, these three proverbs:
Those who are greedy for unjust gain make trouble for their households, but those who hate bribes will live. (Proverbs 15:27)
A bribe is like a magic stone in the eyes of those who give it; wherever they turn they prosper. (Proverbs 17:8)
The wicked accept a concealed bribe to pervert the ways of justice. (Proverbs 17:23)
Here it seems clear that the communities that produced these proverbs had some very different (and contradictory) opinions about bribes. We can find similar differences in legal collections, in the prayers of the psalmists, in the stories about Moses, David, and Jesus, and in the prophetic books. It seems that the biblical witness is anything but uniform, anything but homogenous.
There are many reasons for differences and contradictions in the Bible. Time and history are certainly two of these because the writings that make up the Bible were composed in a period stretching well over a thousand years, conservatively estimated from the end of the second millennium BCE to the beginning of the first millennium CE. In this time period many different cultures with both local and international power struggles play an important role in the world of biblical communities. The biblical writings were composed both inside and outside Israel and at times when Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans were in control. This formative period also witnesses to the development and evolution of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages with both Semitic and Indo-European roots.
On the other hand, many of the reasons for difference in the Bible stem from the particular characteristics of the small but distinctive land of Israel and the peculiar experiences of the people who live there. So, for example, the topography of Israel makes transportation difficult and forces one to follow certain well-worn routes to get from top to bottom or side to side of a very small territory. This encourages regionalization and smaller social structures, such as the ancient Israelite tribes—each one of them with their own independent and different traditions. Even when the larger social organizations of Israel and Judah develop, the different traditions of the original tribes often live on in law, liturgy, and story. (Think of the many stories of patriarchs and tribes preserved in Genesis and Judges.) Finally, the rough-hewn character of the land, surrounded by the sea on the east, mountains in the north, and desert in the west and south, creates polarities between the settled and the unsettled, between those who roam from one established area to another and those who put down roots in one place. All of this contributes to the diversity we find in the Bible.
The Bible has many different ways to talk about God—and about human beings. Consider, for example, the kind of relationship we have with God. Most would agree that this relationship depends upon obligation and faithfulness. But whose obligation?
He brought him outside and said, "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your descendants be." (Genesis 15:5)
God said to Abraham, "As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations.... Every male among you shall be circumcised." (Genesis 17:9–10)
In the first of these covenant texts, God is the one who promises much. All Abraham needs to do is to live faithfully into that promise, given freely by God with no strings. God is the covenant partner who is bound by a promise. In the second covenant text, however, we find particular stipulations. Abraham's obligations are much more specific in this covenant. These biblical pictures of God as a promise-giver with no strings and as one who exacts much in terms of specific obligations are quite different. They both contribute to our contemporary understanding of who God is and what a relationship with God entails.
Biblical attitudes toward fundamental social structures like the monarchy also diverge dramatically. In 1 Samuel, after hearing the elders of Israel's demand for a king, God says to Samuel, "They have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them" (1 Samuel 8:7). Here is a tradition that is anti-monarchical. This community is hostile to kingship because it wants to reserve the role of king for God. Yet the second book of Samuel preserves a very different tradition. God speaks to King David through the prophet Nathan:
When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body; and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. (2 Samuel 7:12–13)
Here is a very positive picture of the monarchy and its role, establishing a particular king and his family over Israel in perpetuity. We may account for these differences in terms of particular traditions and particular places, but that does not explain why they were finally kept together in one authoritative book or what we are to do with them today. But far from creating confusion and a lack of clarity for the people of ancient Israel, these theological and social biblical differences ultimately contributed to a unity in diversity stronger than any one single perspective on God and the people could ever have produced.
FROM DIFFERENCE TO COMMUNION
Thus by its very nature the Bible seems to command us to move from the comfort and safety of our own particular perspectives to a place where, through dialogue with the other, we embrace theological and social diversity. Such a move promises transformation, taking us to a place where we can celebrate difference and achieve communion.
There are a few roadblocks in our way. Instead seeing the Bible as a repository of important resources for addressing contemporary social and theological questions together, we often use the different voices and perspectives of the Bible to fight with one another, to divide, to attack, to put down. Will we, for example, use the statements of Paul about sexual behavior in Romans to exclude homosexuals from full membership and participation in the church? Will we honor other statements of Paul in Galatians by building communities free of the boundaries and distinctions our society and our church have often imposed? Whether in a pulpit, a legislative session, a courtroom, a family home, or a classroom, we often use the Bible to justify and authorize very different opinions about critical issues of our day. In discussing the pros and cons of slavery, social justice, mission, reform, retrenchment, war, or peace—in all of these the Bible provides normative visions and values. So the Bible has been and can be either an instrument of separation or of communion.
Sometimes theological and social debates within the church are explained and justified by appealing to our own cultural and regional differences: north and south, east and west, black and white. At the same time, as we have already seen, the Bible itself also contains an incredible number of differences about God, social organization, and appropriate behavior in community. Somehow these dissimilar voices were bound into one body of scripture, put into one house to enrich one another and to create a home for the whole family of God, indeed the whole world. In living into the church's often stated goal of moving from difference to communion, we can learn much from understanding how this actually happened in the Bible.
The question I want to raise is this: how can the Bible become for us both a model and a guide for dealing with difference in our communities? In order to do this we will need to understand how disagreement and difference became diversity in the Bible, and how it found a home. That is the story of scripture and the process that created it, a process that is mandated for all in the church to continue. It is dialogue between text and community, interchange between old words and new experiences.
To engage in such a dialogue is in a very real sense to fight with the Bible! Rather than using the Bible as a weapon, or as ammunition in a war with the other, this fight is a struggle with the biblical tradition itself to understand and learn what God would have us do this day. Through it I hope we will find both clearer direction for our churches and an increased ability to live with others who are engaged in the same struggle but who come out at different places—just like the communities represented in the Bible.
Biblical Precedents
The post-exilic period, which lasted from the late sixth century BCE to the second century of the common era, was a critical time in the history of the people of Israel, with many parallels to our present day. After many centuries of independence, the kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians, as had been announced by the eighth-century prophets. The people of Israel were dispersed throughout the Assyrian empire. A little over one century later, in 586 BCE, the kingdom of Judah fell to the Babylonians. Jerusalem was captured and destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, and many of its inhabitants, especially artisans and others with special skills, were exiled to Babylon. A significant number remained in the land of Judah, however. The years that followed the defeat, destruction, and exile of the kingdom of Judah were times of uncertainty and unrest, of questioning and constructing identities, of conflict and powerlessness, of dreams of restoration and promise. Explanations for defeat and exile ranged from the sin of Israel and Judah in turning away from God to simply being at the wrong place at the wrong time. A chasm deepened between the hopes of those in exile and of those left in the land of Israel, with several groups proposing many different identities and missions for the people, with little or no consensus. Thus post-exilic Israel was in many ways a house divided.
The post-exilic period was also a time when the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible began to be shaped. The two first sections of the Hebrew Bible, Torah and the Prophets, epitomized the character of Judaism at that time. Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) contained foundational stories and laws for the community, wherever it was to be found. The Prophets contained both the history of the people up to the conquest of Israel and Judah as well as a collection of prophetic sayings and writings stretching from the time of the eighth-century Israelite monarchy into the fifth century and perhaps later. Yes, the people of Israel lived in their land, but it was not under their control. Yes, they had leaders, but they no longer had a king or a state. Torah provided them with the stories that affirmed their status and role as the people of God and proclaimed the terms of their covenant with God. All of this gave them an identity and a way to live faithfully into an uncertain future. The Hebrew prophets, like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, called the people back to the traditional promises and stipulations of Torah while at the same time promising new revelations of God to the people:
A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. (Ezekiel 36:26–27)
Here the prophet Ezekiel announces that God must and will do something dramatically new. Only action on God's part will allow faithful obedience, finally, to the statutes and ordinances found in Torah.
Thus the hopes of the people in the post-exilic period reflected a tension between the already and the not-yet, between reliance upon normative traditions of the past ("statutes and ordinances") and the restoration and salvation and deliverance that God promises for the future. Such a structure contains within it an abiding tension between all our carefully developed plans and hopes and "the new" that God gracefully and unexpectedly gives us in the future—which often upsets those same plans and hopes!
This post-exilic tension also characterizes the contemporary church. We are caught between the seeming clarity and certainty of our past (scripture and tradition) and the ever-changing and uncertain challenges and opportunities given to us daily. It was the genius of post-exilic Israel to keep in its scriptures this tension between the old and the new, between the already-experienced and the yet-to-be-known. From that time forward every biblical community would live in this tension; as we will see, often their biggest problems came from efforts to erase it.
The post-exilic period is important for another reason, however. It was also the time when biblical diversity became normative for the people. In answering the question of how to live in a world filled with the tension between the old and the new, ancient Israel shaped scripture in a way that permanently reflected this tension and contained many ways to try to resolve it. The Writings, the third section of the Hebrew Bible, contain many different ways to deal with the old and the new. It is an eclectic collection of stories (Ruth and Esther), prayers, songs, and poetry (Psalms, Lamentations, and the Song of Songs), history (Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah), wisdom (Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes), and visionary material (Daniel). None of this material contained all the truth; all of it represented ways to move toward truth in a world filled with uncertainty and division. There was no one way to be God's people, no one way to interpret scripture, no one perspective on God, no one definitive story—but many ways, many perspectives, and many stories.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fighting with the Bible by Donn Morgan. Copyright © 2007 Donn Morgan. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
What People are Saying About This
"The dean of Church Divinity School of the Pacific presents examples of difference and division in the Bible and helps readers to discover how the Bible can help us to understand current divisions in the church. Particularly effective is the section titled Authority: Where Are Wisdom and Direction to be Found?"
—The Living Church
"This author's keen insights throw light on the pluralism within the biblical tradition, and his pastoral sensitivity offers a method for dealing gracefully with the pluralism we find in life itself, a method grounded in the very texts that could separate us."
—The Bible Today
"Any biblical study group needs Fighting with the Bible: Why Scripture Divides Us and How It Can Bring Us Together and also heartily recommend it to Christian studies community library shelves."
—The Midwest Book Review