Bible and Justice

Ancient Texts, Modern Challenges

Matthew J. M. Coomber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134939428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Bible contains a variety of passages that defend the poor and champion the cause of the oppressed, but are these ancient texts able to find a voice in confronting injustice in the modern world? 'Bible and Justice' examines the ways in which the Bible can speak to contemporary poverty, environmental issues, and state-sponsored violence, whilst exploring the difficulties that arise when ancient concepts of justice are applied to modern ideals. The book covers a range of topics from human rights to deaf biblical interpretation and from hospitality to corporate globalization. Broad and accessible, 'Bible and Justice' will be an invaluable resource for students of religious and biblical studies.

Part I
CHALLENGES AND UNDERSTANDINGS OF BIBLE AND JUSTICE

ON THE GENESIS OF THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN THE BIBLE AND RIGHTS

Yvonne Sherwood^a

And God said, “Let there be rights; and there were rights” (Gen. 1:3a, adapted)

1. The Bible and the Public Square

While we biblical scholars have been busy in our introverted corners, discussing etymologies of the personal names in the Mari tablets and hapax legomena in the Pastoral Epistles, the Bible has been equally busy playing a lead role in heated contemporary debates about liberalism and justice. In his widely discussed Justice: Rights and Wrongs, philosophical theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff dedicates no less than 65 pages to showing how the Bible provides a theistic ground for rights (Wolterstorff 2008).¹ Countering origin stories that appeal to beginnings in pagan/Christian antiquity, the nominalism of the fourteenth century, or the individualism of the seventeenth, Wolterstorff seeks to establish the Bible as an alternative – more trustworthy and explicitly Christian – origin for rights. At the other end of the spectrum, Mark D. Lilla, Professor of Humanities at Columbia, has recently argued that the preservation of liberalism relies on the “Great Separation” between Christianity and the secular state. According to Lilla’s The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (Lilla 2007), liberal justice can only be sustained by bravely holding the line established by founding heroes such as Hobbes, Locke and Hume. Its maintenance depends on constant vigilance against the ghost of “political theology” – a term that Lilla regards as synonymous with mysticism and theocracy.

Many such resurrections are taking place, even as Lilla is busy trying to push political theology firmly down into its grave. In these, the Bible stands for the very inverse of autocracy, just as clearly (that is to say starkly and crudely) as it represents autocracy for Lilla. According to John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas – representatives of very different Christianities who nevertheless unite in the belief in Christianity’s uniquely redemptive political potential – the Bible is not just liberal, but post-liberal, counter-liberal. It is a massive soteriological-critical force to be pitched against the current order; a symbol of exhorbitant justice that chastises a mealy-mouthed and individualistic (selfish/secular) discourse of rights. In the myriad giddy theological-political visions currently rolling off the press, “Christianity emerges with an uncompromising theopolitical praxis that outflanks the current liberal deadlock”; or the One and Only God opposes idolatrous human political Oneness (be that hypersovereignty or totalitarianism); or redemptive power is made manifest in Paul’s “overtly counter-imperial” theo-politics or “the hypostatic descent of the Spirit” that heralds “counter-sovereignty”, radical communitarianism and even “eucharistic anarchism”.²

These arguments – from Lilla and his allies and from those who seek to usher in the redemptive-corrective force of the Christian anti-kingdom – seem at once highly sophisticated and crude in their rough-handling of the perceived struggle between the Christian and the secular, cast as rival forces in a Manichean struggle between darkness and light. The argument seems to be yet another example of what Régis Debray calls an “operatic duet” of “alternating voices”, a “dialogue of the deaf between neopagans and neobiblicists” governed by an either-or logic, in which religion must feature either as “liberation” or “plague” (Debray 2004: 4). At the level of their simplified antagonistic framing conflicts, these high academic arguments come uncommonly close to more “vulgar” battles being fought out on a very public stage. In the central battlefield of the USA, the latest phase of the Religion-Secular Civil Wars has involved a major skirmish between the Constitution and the Bible – the latter being led, appropriately enough, under the Commandership of the Ten Commandments. The bugle-call sounded in 2003 when Roy Moore, the former chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, erected a two and a half ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the grounds of the Alabama courthouse. The counter-attack was launched in the law-courts and the mediasphere by blogs such as “The Swift Report”. In 2005 (the year that several European nations voted out the European constitution) the Swift Report announced that Americans were on the verge of voting out the Constitution, which had “lost market share to more muscular governing documents, including the Ten Commandments and the Patriot Act” (Swift 2005). Since the Constitution is “abstract” and “cluttered with amendments”, it cannot fight against the simplicity and glamour of the Ten Commandments, endorsed by the authority of Moses/Charlton Heston, the blog laments. The high academic battles are fought on the more abstract grounds of history, ethics, and theology – with less crude announcements about the implications for the polity – and they are aimed at a different (though perhaps overlapping) demographic. A two and a half ton monument is a very different kind of thing to an academic monograph, but they can still share the aim of publicly placing the Bible/Christianity at the origin of modern liberal/legal justice.

It is interesting that Wolterstorff and Moore feel called – albeit in very different ways – to restore the deep connection between the Bible/Christianity and rights. For this alliance seems to be built in deep into the self-understanding of the democratic West. The front cover of Brian Tierney’s The Idea of Natural Rights displays a gavel resting on a Holy Bible and an ancient Hebrew manuscript (Tierney 1997).³ The equation seems, well, natural, at least at the level of cover-design. Though swearing on a Bible in a court of law is now optional in the UK, swearing on Das Kapital has never been an option. The Bible and the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition seem to have a self-evident relation to justice and rights. Alongside the idea that religion is a particular problem for democracies (the view expressed by Lilla) we encounter the widespread assumptions that: (a) the particular scriptures and religious tradition of the “West” are a natural ally, and even foundation, for modern notions of justice; and (b) the Christian God (and his Bible) does not seek direct theocratic governance over the state. So broad is this consensus that it is affirmed not just by those representing a specifically Christian position but also by theorists of the origins of secularism and human rights.

For example, the 2007 Human Rights Reader, subtitled “Major Political Essays, Speeches and Documents from Ancient Times to the Present” was called, in its first edition in 1997 “Major Speeches, Essays and Documents from the Bible to the Present” (Ishay 2007). The second edition expands the origins of rights to a more global-inclusive base in “secular, Asian and Monotheistic Traditions”. In order to counter criticisms that a particularized, Western history jeopardizes a “universal” declaration, it seeks to extend the domain of rights as far as possible in time and space. Select pages from the ancient texts are used to show that the ancient and the modern are essentially on the same page when it comes to crucial core topics such as “Liberty, Tolerance and Codes of Justice”, “Social and Economic Justice” and “Justice War and Peace”. The citations are framed by introductory comments such as: “One can only marvel at how the same precepts as one encounters in Buddhism are also found in monotheism. The Ten Commandments of the Hebrew Bible represented a code of morality, justice and mutual respect shared by the three monotheistic religions” (Ishay 2007: 31), or “Like the secular and Asian traditions, these three religions preached universalism” (Ishay 2007: 31) or “The pacifist conviction … found expression in the Hebrew Bible, when Micah demanded that a “nation shall not lift a sword against nation (Mic. 4:3)”. Yet if a war was unavoidable, despite all efforts to avert it, “the Hebrews … would have to treat their prisoners humanely” (Ishay 2007: 63). The logic of the Reader is that the ancient biblical (and expanded “religious” sources) are generally on the right evolutionary lines, even as the need for progress is indicated by a poor record on slaves, women and homosexuals.

The idea that Christianity and its Bible lay the foundation for an inevitable trajectory of progress is also a curiously constant theme in theories of secularization/democratization. Robert Bellah argues that the Protestant–Puritan concept of the priesthood of all believers quite logically “eventuated” in the secular democratic theory of John Locke (Bellah 1976: 68). Francis Fukuyama locates the origins of “democracy” and “political equality” in the Christian doctrine of the “universal dignity of man” (Fukuyama 2006).⁴ John Berger argues that the transcendent and supernatural God of the Hebrew Bible granted the world a kind of independence from the beginning, thus anticipating the separation of God and state (paradoxically by divine design) (Berger 1967: 127). In a similar vein Marcel Gauchet sees Christianity as the “seed” that flowered into secular humanism, making possible the terrestrial autonomy at the heart of Western democratic society. For Gauchet, the potential for democracy is in the open Bible in a way that it is not in the closed Qur’an (Gauchet 1997: esp. 80).⁵

These origin myths of democracy/secularization disagree about the precise elements in the Bible or the Christian that led so inexorably to the modern “West”. It may have been the Hebrew/Christian God’s hands-off transcendentalism. (This is an interesting twist – and one we shall return to – where transcendentalism is read as an expression of the divine desire to devolve earthly-secular political power.) It may have been the notion of universal priesthood. Or it might have been the divine declaration in Gen. 1:26–27 that human beings were all created in God’s image (hence equal, hence destined for rights). Whatever the particular point of contact between the ancient text and the modern constitution, the biblical seems to fuse seamlessly and unproblematically with cherished modern principles such as religious toleration, rights and government by contract or consent.

Exactly the same fusion is assumed by Roy Moore in his autobiography So Help Me God:

The god [sic] of Islam commands that no other faiths are to be tolerated by the government. In contrast, the God [sic] of the Christian faith prohibits government from interfering in that relationship which lies solely between God and his creation. Our forefathers recognized that essential truth and adopted the First Amendment to protect freedom of conscience from government interference. (Moore 2005: 109)

If Moore is a cruder Wolterstorff, he is also a populist Gauchet. For Moore, it is self-evident that the First Amendment lies, in utero, in the verse “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Mt. 22:21). Moreover, the “God of the Holy [Christian] Scriptures” is a God who guarantees “freedom of conscience and thought” and “equal treatment under the law” – unlike the God of the Qur’an (Moore 2005: 73).

This self-evident truth seems to be affirmed across the Christian spectrum just as easily as it is affirmed in histories of secularization and human rights. The evangelical political activist and founder of Sojourners magazine, Jim Wallis, would disagree with Roy Moore on numerous issues. But in God’s Politics he affirms, exactly like Moore, that fundamentalism and theocracy, as practised by Al Qaeda or Jerry Falwell, can only be “a betrayal of biblical faith”. For biblical faith in no way supports the desire to enforce a “religious agenda” through the “power of the state” (Wallis 2005: 67). Once again, the Christian God typically devolves power and supports democratic human government. And, once again, this fundamental disposition of the Christian God and his Bible is tied to the key text of Gen. 1:27 – interpreted as a declaration of “equality” and “human rights” (Wallis 2005: xxx).

2. In the Beginning

The purpose of this essay is not to adjudicate between the Lillas and the Hauerwases and to enter the fray on one side or the other. (I shall go on to explain in my conclusion why any such definitive statements on the theo-political essence of the biblical would be futile and absurd.) Rather, far more modestly, I want to explore the genesis of the move that located the origin of rights in God’s first words in the book of Genesis – at the very beginning of the world.

The book of Genesis is, of course, the famous battleground for another key struggle perceived to lie at heart of our modern Western identity: the battle between the Darwinians and the creationists (and their various offshoots including proponents of intelligent design). This battle is given a great deal of public airtime because it is presumed to sort out, once and for all, the true nature of the identity of the modern West and the Truth of the World. According to the logic of the either-or, it is assumed that this will either be acknowledged to be founded by the Christian God and his Bible – or it will be defined by the expulsion of the Bible and all its myths and fables, convicted of obfuscating the true Truth of the World.

Because we have become distracted by dinosaurs in Eden, we have forgotten an earlier modern battle that was also fought out – and conclusively decided – on the stage of the book of Genesis. This was a battle for nothing less than the theological–political identity of the Western world.

It is of course no accident that, in the quest for its identity, the West keeps going back to Genesis and the moment of creation. The origin is a crucial place; the most crucial place. It holds out the promise of a pristine “virginity of a story of beginnings” (Derrida 1974: 29); the idea of beginning as the source of the “most precious, most essential” (Derrida 1974: 21).⁶ Hence the “superstitious reverence that surrounds the very notion of a Source” (something that we biblical scholars, with our relentless quest for sources, will understand) (Derrida 1974: 21). As Foucault puts it, the quest for the origin, the Ursprung, is an “attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities”. It is a search that “assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession”; a search for primordial truth as “that which was already there” (Foucault 1984: 78–79). The lure of the origin is that it is the presumed meeting point for the historical and transcendent, the contingent and the non-contingent. It marks the very first point in time and the transcendental guiding principle of the world.

In the English seventeenth century,⁷ the desire or need to appeal to the ultimate beginning was, if anything, even more acute. Any theo-political vision worth its salt had to be related back to the “experience and Wisdom of [our] Ancestors”⁸ and notions of the “ancient constitution”. The origin was prized above originality. Claims of novelty would have rendered a political–theological project invalid. This is in marked contrast to the era self-designated as “modern” with its huge investment in the novel, the neologism and the now. In this seventeenth century context, the book of Genesis and the moment of creation became the battleground for two radically different political–theological visions. These slogged it out for supremacy just like those rival brothers – all those Abels and Cains, Isaacs and Ishmaels, Esaus and Jacobs – who fight in the book of Genesis for the prized place of the origin, the ...