The Bible Says . . .: How Good Is the Good Book?

Preface

Books like this one often have multiple points of origin. One of mine was the reading and thinking I did while pursuing a graduate degree in New Testament and Early Christian Origins in the 1980s. At the time, new interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the Bible were beginning to flower. Insights from the social sciences, literary studies, the mood and concerns of postmodern thinking, and psycholinguistics, as well as the more traditional modes of historical criticism, were in vogue. People outside the guild of biblical scholars like Mary Douglas, Walter Ong, and Northrop Frye, along with those within the field of biblical studies like Wayne Meeks, Werner Kelber, and Bruce Malina, who were pushing for more cross-fertilization with other disciplines, opened my mind to think about the scriptures differently.

Another point of origin was the age-old pastoral task of trying to make sense out the Bible for my congregation, Sunday after Sunday in preaching and at other times in Bible studies, to help laypeople reclaim the Bible as a vital resource for their own spiritual growth and faithful action in the world around them. Attending to this pastoral work at the same time I was also doing doctoral-level academic study kept that study grounded. Around the same time, Westar’s famous (or infamous, depending on one’s perspective) Jesus Seminar was in full swing, and I was fortunate enough to participate personally in one of those meetings and to follow the Seminar’s work through its publications thereafter, seeing both its benefits for the church as well as some of its weaknesses and questionable methods and agendas. One of Westar’s great strengths was to bring biblical scholarship out of the closet where it had too often been relegated by church leaders and pastors who were afraid that learning or allowing their congregations to learn too much about the Bible would destroy their parishioners’ faith or their own. My own conviction has always been that all truth is God’s truth, and that whatever is true can never destroy anything, except perhaps some idolatrous illusions. I welcomed this coming out of the solid work of biblical scholarship of the past two centuries into the setting of the local congregation where the real work of listening for the Word of God takes place.

Because of this pastoral concern, I have deliberately tried to make the book as user-friendly as possible. My thought has been to provide busy pastors and thoughtful laypeople a way to think seriously about the Bible without getting overly bogged down in the technical scholarship regarding the biblical texts. While I have depended heavily on that scholarship, as well as my own research, most of what is said here about the Bible is information that has become general knowledge in scholarly circles, even though little of it has, until the past decade or two, crossed the invisible, but real, barriers between the academy and the pulpit or pew. Accordingly, I have tried to keep footnotes to a minimum, and to write in a style accessible to the thoughtful reader who may wish to have a layman’s grasp of scholarly thinking, but who lack all the tools to do so. For the most part, I have reserved footnotes for direct citations of particular works and for extended comments for those interested.

A third originating impulse was the exhilarating and exhausting opportunity given me to become Senior Pastor of the American Church in Paris for nearly a decade following completion of my graduate work. There, in a setting where I had to preach to 500 to 700 people per week (not always the same people each week) who hailed from more than forty countries of origin and represented as many denominational or religious traditions, I discovered the power of worship structured around the church’s ancient book, to bridge the chasms of culture, history, and life situations. From American corporate executives to West African refugees fleeing civil war to college students on their junior year abroad to Filipino nannies to young musicians and artists to Franco-Anglo couples, they came to hear a fresh word that would speak to them in their own particular place. It was there, in the adult church school class I taught before worship each Sunday, that this book actually began as a ten-week study. I will always be grateful to that group of twenty to thirty people who came weekly, and struggled with me through an attempt to think about the Bible in a different way. Because we brought our own religious backgrounds, beliefs, and histories with us, we entered that struggle at different points. Those who came from churches where they had been enculturated with a naïve and dogmatic literalism regarding the Bible came together with folks whose ignorance of all things biblical was vast, or who actively doubted whether anything in the Bible was either true or relevant to their lives. And, of course, there were many somewhere between those extremes who valued the Bible but just wanted some help in understanding it. That class was repeated in two subsequent congregations I’ve served, as well as taught to seminary students, who also received it both gratefully and critically. All these audiences contributed their own insights, and if this book has any value, it will be as much due to those communally-generated insights as to my own.

As is often the case, I am blessed with a spouse who has not only been my cherished life companion, but also my best and most patient critic. The best critics are those who offer their criticism before the sermon or manuscript goes public. Though not formally trained in theological or biblical criticism, she has patiently endured my need to hear myself articulating an idea before I can really know if it’s what I think or not. If there are faults in my thinking and in this book, and I have no doubt that there are multiple sins of commission and omission, they are not hers.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge my debt to one of my most memorable teachers, Dr. Paul Minear. Even though I only had the privilege of studying with him for one semester, he had some of the most seminal insights into the scriptures I had ever encountered, as well as the great gift of encouragement for his students to think their own thoughts. He modeled for me the kind of scholarship that begins from a position of standing under the scriptures.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Larry Kalajainen

New York, July 2012

Chapter 1

Claims And Counter-Claims

The archbishop of Canterbury has found it advisable. . .

Found what? said the duck.

Found it, replied the mouse rather crossly. Surely you know what it means.

Of course I know what it means when I find a thing, said the duck. Generally, it’s a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Defining the Problem

The Bible says . . .

Through much of the latter half of the twentieth century, Americans and even people in other nations grew accustomed to seeing the American evangelist Billy Graham on their televisions or at a podium in a football stadium, Bible open in his hands, the gleam of certainty in his gaze, saying those words in authoritative tones. Such assertions are not the exclusive preserve of the Reverend Graham, however. For more than 2000 years, first Jews, and later Christians, have cited the writings that we call the Bible to authorize their views about nearly every subject imaginable, from pronouncements on such large issues as war, slavery, economics, the rights of women and homosexuals to ones of somewhat lesser import such as wearing makeup, dress codes, flying in airplanes, or playing football (or undertaking any other secular activity) on Sunday or the Sabbath.

A moment’s thought is enough to realize that many of the claims about what the Bible says are often starkly contradictory. For example, in the debate over slavery in the years preceding and during the American Civil War, the Bible was the court of appeal for those on both sides of the issue. Defenders of slavery were fond of appealing to a story in Genesis 9:20–27 about Noah (he of the ark) being discovered drunk and naked in his tent by his son Ham. Though the story is somewhat ambiguous (it is Ham’s son Canaan who actually gets cursed rather than Ham himself), there is at least the implication of some sort of sexual offense, since seeing his nakedness is not an uncommon biblical euphemism for a sexual relationship. Whatever the provocation, Ham’s youngest son Canaan is the one punished by a divine curse condemning him and his descendants to slavery. Since the three sons of Noah were thought, in ancient times, to be the ancestors of the various races of people in the world, the curse that Noah pronounced upon the son of Ham (the purported ancestor of the black peoples of Africa, though this is never actually stated in the text) was used as ammunition in the argument that the enslavement of Africans was therefore justified because it was divinely sanctioned by the Bible. In addition, proponents of slavery cited references to statements by Jesus in the Gospels or in the letters of Paul such as that in Ephesians 6:5, Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ, that appear to accept the reality of slavery.¹

Opponents of slavery, on the other hand, were fond of citing the various passages in the Bible dealing with God’s love for all peoples, and particularly those prophetic scriptures that speak of liberation of the oppressed or St. Paul’s statement in Galatians 3:28, There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ. Though the issues involved in the Civil War were much more complex than simply the disagreements between North and South over slavery, it would not overstate the case to say that one prominent factor, among others, was a fundamentally divergent reading of the Bible.

Competing claims about what the Bible says continue to be a source of confusion in the church and in the larger society today. While the term the Bible most commonly refers to the scriptures which Jews and Christians hold sacred, the conflicts generated by appeals to biblical authority are much broader than the issues that are currently causing so much internal division within the Jewish or Christian religious worlds. Debate within those communities spills over into the larger societies in which they exist. The sharp differences between the ultra-orthodox Israelis and their more moderate religious or secularized compatriots on the question of who is truly a Jew, is, in a real sense, a biblical struggle. The Bible also plays no small part in the intractable political issues between Israelis and Palestinians. Will the scriptural texts (as interpreted by the ultra-orthodox) in which God promises the land of Canaan