Sex, Sacrifice, Shame, and Smiting

Is the Bible Always Right?

Donald Kraus

• Publisher: Seabury Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781596270688
• eBook ISBN: 9781596271852
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The Bible presents us with difficult statements about money and finance, social justice, marriage and divorce, sex, religion and politics, and other areas of life. Many of us pick and choose among them, feeling free to treat some of the Bible's moral rulings as absolutes but ignoring those we find unacceptable.

Are there areas where we can ignore what the Bible says? Is the Bible is simply wrong about some things? Are we free to argue that we understand things better than the biblical writers did an so can disregard them? Or must we accept what the Bible tells us, no matter how difficult it might be to put into practice? Kraus explores questions of prosperity, treatment of enemies, the death penalty, economics, social justice, sexual behavior, and others.

LOOKING FOR GUIDANCE

Does the Bible Always Help?

The Bible is the Manual for Living, Life’s User Guide, the spiritual diet for the believer. . . .

— Lesson 11, The Bible Course
Stewarton Bible School, Scotland

The Word of God . . . is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.

— Mark Twain, Letter III of “Letters from the Earth”

The Bible Most Certainly has the power to produce contradictory opinions in those who read it—or even in those who do not. Mark Twain’s “Satan,” the purported author of the “Letters from the Earth”—writings that were considered so scandalous that they were never published in Twain’s lifetime, or for fifty years afterward—presents Twain the unbeliever’s view of the Bible as a primitive hodgepodge of poetry, morals, and barbaric thought. The Stewarton Bible School, on the other hand, maintains a widely held characterization of the Bible as God’s manual for human life and behavior.

Twain’s opinion of the Bible, that of a humorist and satirist who had been exposed in his youth to forms of Protestant piety that he rejected, remains that of the nineteenth-century skeptic. For such a mind, perhaps understandably given the cultural dominance in America of a Protestant civic religion, there was really no third choice aside from the alternatives of unthinking credulity and thinking agnosticism. The present-day view of many Christians, that the Bible is both a sacred text and a human artifact that must be read critically, was simply not an available opinion for the ordinary reader in Twain’s time.

The Stewarton view, prevalent though it is in some circles—I have heard sermons essentially making the same point, one with a direct analogy between the Bible and an operating manual for a power lawnmower—raises problems in the opposite direction. To take only the most obvious: if God is the author of the Bible and intends it to be the manual of life for the believing Christian, could it not have been written a little more clearly? We are all very familiar with the experience of buying a new electronic device and then discovering that the operating instructions for it are unclear and confusing, but there at least we understand that these instructions are written by other human beings, and that being able to design an electronic device is a different skill from that of being able to write clearly. But the Bible has no such excuse: God (presumably) can do anything, including write clearly. People sometimes point to the Ten Commandments as providing the basis for living. But aside from the fact that the Ten Commandments are very unrepresentative of the Bible, they are also incomplete: they make no mention, for example, of charitable deeds, which most people would wish to include among the rules for living a good life; in addition, they are addressed (as we will note below) exclusively to males. If you depended only on the Ten Commandments for your moral rule book, you could logically conclude that while men may not covet their neighbors’ wives, women are perfectly free to covet their neighbors’ husbands.

Clearly, we will have to take a somewhat different view if we are going to make sense of the Bible’s varied rules and its apparent moral strictures. This is all the more important when we are engaged, as we now are in a number of different Christian denominations (and in Judaism as well), in arguments about where moral guidance can be found and what moral behavior is. The Bible can be a valuable help here, but it is not the sort of help that will automatically provide answers, like some kind of ethics cash machine, if you just put in the right codes. It is more like consulting widely among friends, many of whom have differences of opinion among themselves, and trying to come to a decision based on all the advice and insight that you can gather. And first, we must look at the actuality of “the Bible” itself.

The Bible is a varied collection of writings, put together in various places and by various groups of people over the course of more than a thousand years. Partly as a result of that process of development, in places it can be complex and hard to understand. For people of faith, obscure passages can be a challenge, but also an opportunity for deepening our understanding. Wrestling with thoughts that are difficult to grasp can be a kind of mental exercise, similar to competing with a better chess or tennis player. It can build “muscle” and agility, and help us think or react more quickly and accurately. More important, it can deepen our insight and widen our sympathy—both spiritual benefits we can all use more of. Some of the difficult passages in the Bible, therefore, though they may require effort in research or in reflection, clearly help bring about growth among those who accept the Bible as religiously authoritative. This is in keeping with what the Bible itself, in various passages, says. For instance, one writer praises the study of torah in Psalm 119.97: “Oh, how I love your torah! It is my meditation all day long.” The New Testament author of 2 Timothy urges study of the “sacred writings,” saying: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousnesss . . .” (3.16). In John’s gospel, Jesus promises his followers, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (16.12–13).

There is a different sort of difficulty in the biblical text, however, and it is a much more serious challenge to a mature, committed faith. What are we going to do with those Scripture passages where there seems to be little doubt what the Bible means to say, but what it means—about money or sex or justice or politics—is exactly where the difficulties begin? For one reason or another we may not want to accept what the Bible says. Sometimes we don’t want to accept it at face value; sometimes we don’t want to accept it at all. It may seem impossible, utterly impractical, unwise (or downright foolish), immoral, or just plain wrong.

Despite the common opinion that such difficulties with the Bible are a purely modern phenomenon primarily afflicting those at the “liberal” end of the spectrum of believers, these kinds of difficulties affect all of us, and have for many centuries. Conservatives as well as liberals, and ancient writers as well as contemporaries, have all encountered passages that seemed to threaten their faith, but they dealt with them nevertheless.

These problems are those of the believer, however, and not the scholarly commentator. For the author of a scholarly commentary on Exodus, for example, there are difficulties to be solved—authorship, date, obscure vocabulary—but how the text is to be applied to one’s life or how it might help to solve some ethical quandary is not among them. A scholar, writing as an historian or literary critic, would see the Bible as a collection of writings, an anthology, assembled over the course of a millennium or more. Clearly principles of selection were at work—some writings were included, others were excluded—but these principles are not entirely clear, and what’s more, there are different “selections” for different groups. There are books that everyone agrees on (Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah) and others (Sirach, Judith) that only some include, and, of course, Jews do not accept the New Testament at all.

All of these considerations, and many others, mean that for a scholar as a scholar the Bible does not have to be internally consistent, nor does it necessarily have to apply to present-day life. A scholar can belong to a particular religion, but his or her scholarship, if it is to have scholarly integrity, must not favor it. If a passage in a biblical text creates difficulties in the modern mind, there is no scholarly need to reconcile the passage with contemporary moral norms. And if one biblical passage seems to contradict another, that is no reason not to regard both as equally authentic—or inauthentic—since “authenticity” in this context means only that some recognized group has accepted the passage as part of the Bible.

For those who accept the Bible’s authority in any sense, however, the situation is quite different. If passages in the Bible seem to be making a demand—stating a moral imperative, endorsing or denouncing a social arrangement—and that demand is impossible, or wrong in any way, then we need to have some principles on which we can base our objections. If passages in the Bible seem to be in conflict, we must have intelligible reasons for preferring one to the other, or for reconciling them so that we can try to understand the Bible’s underlying point, or for putting them in a wider context that makes clear that each is a partial view of a larger truth.

As we work our way through various biblical passages that challenge our moral sense, our practical knowledge, our understanding of the world, and our own experience, we should try to keep in mind how to read these passages with the fullest sense of the biblical context we can muster. In the following pages we will look at texts that are violent, texts that demand extremely challenging economic behavior, texts that seem to advocate unacceptable political and social arrangements, and texts that, perhaps, overly regulate and restrict sexual behavior. In each case, we will be confronted with a text that some or all of us would not wish to honor without adjusting it to our understanding—or, in some cases, would not wish to honor at all. In our examination of these texts we will try to develop ways of reading them that offer principles of interpretation that can allow us to keep faith both with the Bible and with our understanding of the way things are. There will be texts that challenge conservative approaches, and there will be texts that confront liberal understandings.

For many of those who have taken positions on progressive issues, such as the ordination of gay and lesbian candidates in committed same-sex relationships, it is frustrating when those on the other side of the issue continually accuse them of abandoning the Bible. That is not really the case. Nor is it true that two different methods of reading the Bible are in conflict, although that is also frequently charged. Instead, what is at issue is a difference about which parts of the Bible to emphasize, and whether strictures about sexual behavior—specifically, homosexual intercourse—are at the same level of importance as doctrines about God, teachings about social justice, or efforts to reach out to marginalized persons of all sorts so that all may hear the good news of salvation. Neither side is “abandoning” the Bible, but each side has firm ideas of what the Bible says and why.

The point is not to bring to the Bible all of our assumptions and prejudices in order to find support for them in the text, or to discard the text when it conflicts with something we already think. But neither is the point to find out what the Bible says, or seems to say, and simply apply that to how we live our lives. Things are never that easy. In addition, no one—no one—agrees with everything that the Bible says we should be doing, or refraining from. (If you don’t believe me, read on. I guarantee that there will be plenty of moral imperatives from the Bible that you would have nothing to do with.)

The issue, then, is not that we should never interpret the Bible in such a way as to temper its demands, or even put them aside in favor of better understandings derived from elsewhere. That has always been done, and will be done, by people of all theological persuasions. The issue rather is to be honest—honest with ourselves, and honest with each other—about what we are doing and why. If someone wants to put aside biblical strictures on poverty and economic behavior because (he claims) we now know more about how economies work and can judge the impracticality of trying to live by biblical rules, that is all right. We may even agree with a proponent of “democratic capitalism” that the Bible, with its communitarian ethics and view of the world as God’s possession rather than ours, is naïve or simply wrong. But we can then ask such a proponent of a specific nonbiblical economic view why we cannot apply an equally keen analysis, based on current knowledge, to the Bible’s psychological understandings and sexual rules.

So the decision about which verses to apply to our lives, and how to apply them, is not an easy one to make. We sometimes hear from people about a specific verse or passage dealing with one topic that “you can’t just take verses out of context and apply them.” That is true in a narrow sense, but it is true in a broader sense as well. The “context” of a verse, for someone who believes that the Bible is meant to guide us into truth, is the entire Bible itself. We must remember that in our experience of any great and complex work of art—a landscape, a symphony, an epic poem—comprehension and enjoyment are not simply a matter of noticing details and individual passages, but of seeing how one detail or passage modifies another to produce the overall effect. The brushwork, the harmonies, the imagery and metaphors do not exist for themselves alone, but rather in service to building up a whole complex unity.

So it is with the Bible. Each verse or passage of the Bible is, at least potentially, in dialogue with every other verse or passage. Until that dialogue takes place, we may not fully understand what a particular section of the Bible is telling us, or how we should apply it. And, in trying to understand how we might apply one passage of the Bible to one kind of situation, we may be able to discover principles of interpretation, adjustment, and modification that can apply to other passages dealing with other situations as well.

That at least is my hope. The actual application of any given passage is up to the individual reader. I have my views on various topics, and they will become plain—I have thought it best to put all my cards face up. But I hope that I will also accomplish two things. One is to present enough of the biblical text so that others with differing presuppositions can come to conclusions different from the ones I have come to. In other words, I hope to have provided the materials necessary for arguing against me as well as agreeing with me. The second aim, and one I have tried very hard to keep in view as I have put this book together, is to bring myself—and my readers—to be more careful about claiming “what the Bible says” without taking into account nuance or context. We all need to learn to be more cautious. I believe firmly in dogmatic theology: I accept as a basic article of faith, for example, that “God is love” (1 John 4.8). Dogma, for me, is the indispensable floor or foundation on which we all move, and the basis on which we each can build a house of faith. I find less helpful a notion of dogma that sees it as a set of walls, or closed doors, designed to keep some people inside and the rest outside. Dogma must be in some sense definite, in the sense of “defined”: that is, we should be able to articulate our beliefs at least to the extent that someone else can understand them. But it is sadly the case that too many people seem to confuse being definitive with being exclusive. We all stand on the same ground; if we can’t all live in the same house, we can at least refrain from condemning houses we ourselves don’t want to live in. As Matthew’s gospel tells us (7.24–27), it is the foundation of the house that is supposed to be made of stone rather than sand; the nature of the house itself is not described.

Rules and Regulations

In reading the Bible’s moral rules and exhortations, Christians often make a distinction between those rules that have to do with such matters as dress and diet—rules that are deemed to have been suspended by Jesus and eliminated for Christians by the arguments of Paul and the actions of the early church—and those that deal with strictly moral matters. When we actually begin to look at the Bible’s rules, however, we find quite an array of specific regulations, some dealing with particular situations but also more general applications, and we may find that we cannot so easily separate the purely moral ones from those having to do with arbitrary matters such as dietary restrictions. To take just one example, the command “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19.18) occurs just before “You shall not let your animals breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall you put on a garment made of two different materials” (Leviticus 19.19). Note that this last command would preclude the breeding of mules (the result of mating a male donkey and a female horse) and the production of clothing made of linen and wool (“linsey woolsey” was a common clothing material on the American frontier) or cotton and polyester (which is the cloth used to make many shirts and blouses today). And, unlike Jesus’ abrogation of food regulations (“Thus he declared all foods clean,” [Mark 7.19]), these “mixture” regulations were never explicitly repealed. But the larger point is that the command to love one’s neighbor, given its placement in the text, is not differentiated in any way from the commands that follow it, although most people would recognize it as on an entirely different moral level than strictures about animal breeding, agricultural practice, and cloth manufacture.

Many other regulations fall into a gray area, and it would be difficult to classify them in the category of kosher food laws, distinctive clothing, and other practices of Judaism from which Christians are presumably exempt. On the other hand, though they deal with matters of behavior or are otherwise intended to promote morality, they are not the kinds of regulations that we would be likely to carry out today.

For example, here is a regulation about the punishment to be imposed in a particular situation:

If men get into a fight with one another, and the wife of one intervenes to rescue her husband from the grip of his opponent by reaching out and seizing his genitals, you shall cut off her hand; show no pity. (Deuteronomy 25.11–12)

The issue here is not whether this situation is likely to arise, but rather what we should do about rules such as this. Penal codes in Western countries no longer contain punishments like cutting off hands, and it is unlikely that any will resume such penalties in the future. Nevertheless, here in the Bible is a specific case, treating a situation which is not intrinsically ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Looking for Guidance: Does the Bible Always Help?
• 2. Vengeance: Does the Bible Let Us Get Even?
• 3. Loving Our Enemies: Does the Bible Coddle Villains?
• 4. Justice: Is What We Need What We Deserve?
• 5. Slaves, Women, and Jews: What Does the Bible Say about “Those People”?
• 6. Homosexuality: Is the Bible Straight about Gay People?
• 7. Authority: Who’s in Charge Here?
• 8. Community: Will We Ever Get Along?
• Further Reading
• A Guide for Study and Discussion