Timothy Beal

Timothy Beal 2013-05-22T16:17:20-04:00 Timothy Beal http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=timothy-beal Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Timothy Beal Good old fashioned elbow grease. Open Letter to Rev. Billy Graham tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2002127 2012-10-22T14:18:40-04:00 2012-12-22T05:12:01-05:00

Timothy Beal http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-beal/
Over the past several days, newspapers across the country have been running a full-page ad with your picture and a letter from you imploring Americans to "vote for biblical values" this November by supporting candidates who will promote, among other things, "the biblical definition of marriage as between a man and a woman." This ad, paid for by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, a 501(c)(3), was apparently launched shortly after your meeting with Gov. Romney.

It truly pains me to call you out on your decision to be party to this ad. I grew up in a household that revered you as a deeply sincere man of God. We watched your crusades on television. My mother once sang in your choir. My home church in Anchorage, Alaska helped bring your crusade to town. In an evangelistic movement often plagued by hubris, greed, and lust, I have always seen you as exceptional, not only because you have been vigilant against such temptations in your own faith walk and professional life, but also because you have shown humility in questioning some of your own past decisions, including your public support of certain men in political power who probably didn't deserve it.

I believe something similar is happening now. You are allowing your voice, your face, indeed your "brand," to be leveraged for a political cause that is beneath you. I do not doubt that you support the positions that the ad promotes. What I do doubt, as a biblical scholar and as a Christian, is that you believe that such positions, especially with regard to homosexuality and gay marriage, are so clearly "biblical."

I am particularly disheartened that, even while your letter proclaims that there is a clear biblical viewpoint on the subject, it does not offer a single biblical reference or quotation. You and I know the handful of potentially relevant passages (Leviticus 18:19-22; 20:10-16; Galatians 5:19-20; 1 Corinthians 6:9-10; 1 Timothy 1:9-10; Romans 1:26-2:1), even if most people who see your ad don't. And after decades of debate on this issue in the church and the academy, you know as well as I that what these texts do or don't say on this issue is a matter of translation, interpretation and context. And you know that responsible, faithful people who study them carefully can and will come to different conclusions. If your son and the other leaders of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association don't know likewise, then they need to go back to seminary. But I suspect that they do. They know that as soon as you crack open a Bible, things gets messy and complicated, leading to anything but a clear biblical view on homosexuality, let alone a biblical definition of marriage. Sadly, this is not about trying to be faithful to the text; this is about converting religious capital to political capital. Which is why it is so heartbreaking to see your name and face front and center. I guess I still expect you to rise above that cynical sort of political fray.

So I ask, can we go deeper? Where exactly are these "biblical values" clearly given in biblical texts? The New Testament book of Acts describes how those who heard Paul and Silas preaching in the synagogue "welcomed the message very eagerly and examined the scriptures every day to see whether these things were so" (Acts 17:11). No doubt as a preacher you hope your own audiences do the same. Please put the Scriptures that the ad lays claim to on the table so that people can read and study them for themselves. Please don't treat the Bible as closed book. Let's have a real, substantive discussion about what the Bible says or does not say with regard to these current issues. And as we do, let's keep in mind Jesus' admonition against tithing mint, dill, and cumin while neglecting "the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith" (Matthew 23:23).

Sincerely,

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BibliFact Roundup: Conventional Snippets of Uplift and Hope tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1917508 2012-10-02T18:44:54-04:00 2012-12-02T05:12:01-05:00

Conventional Snippets of Uplift and Hope

The Bible possesses a kind of iconic power in American culture that has little to do with its contents. Indeed, sometimes its contents and its iconicity clash, as was the case for Paul Ryan during the 2011 Faith and Freedom Conference, when the Catholic group Faithful America offered him a Bible in which passages about caring for the poor and the marginalized were highlighted. They asked him why he preferred Ayn Rand's views to those of Scripture when in came to social welfare policies. Ryan rejected the Bible, climbed into his big black SUV, and rode away.

The Bible's sacred capital is best translated into political capital in tiny bits taken out of context, as though it were a collection of nice sayings, The Golden Book of Moral Uplift. An edifying clause here, a phrase of hope or blessing there is enough to claim biblical endorsement. Such well-placed biblical snippets do the trick, binding a politician's words with the Word. More than that and it can get messy.

In the run-up to elections, we are likely to see more and more examples of this kind of biblical cherry-picking. In this respect, the Republican and Democratic national conventions gave us a pretty good sense of what to expect.

Bible Clips at the Democratic National Convention

"I don't know what party these men and women belong to. I don't know if they'll vote for me. But I know that their spirit defines us. They remind me, in the words of Scripture, that ours is a 'future filled with hope.' And if you share that faith with me -- if you share that hope with me -- I ask you tonight for your vote." -- President Barack Obama, accepting the party's nomination, Democratic National Convention, Sept. 6, 2012

Yes, that's a phrase from the prophet Jeremiah, but the context is completely different. In Jeremiah, it's part of a larger declaration from God that Babylon will be allowed to dominate the exiled Judean people for 70 full years. Once that's done, however, God says "I will be kind and bring you back to Jerusalem, just as I have promised. I will bless you with a future filled with hope" (Jeremiah 29:10-11). Interesting that President Obama here uses the Contemporary English Version translation rather than the New International Version ("give you hope and a future"), more popular among evangelicals, or the New Revised Standard Version ("a future with hope"), more popular among liberals. In any case, the gist of Jeremiah, taken in context, is that you'll be oppressed and downtrodden for decades, but your distant future is full of hope and restoration.

"Mitt Romney has so little economic patriotism that even his money needs a passport. It summers on the beaches of the Cayman Islands and winters on the slopes of the Swiss Alps. In Matthew, chapter 6, verse 21, the scriptures teach us that where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. My friends, any man who aspires to be our president should keep both his treasure and his heart in the United States of America." -- Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, Democratic National Convention, Sept. 4, 2012

This passage, which is the punch line of one of Jesus' teachings from the so-called Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, makes for a nice dig on Mitt Romney's practice of storing treasures in other countries. Taken in context, however, it doesn't really apply, at least in the way Former Gov. Strickland wants it to. Jesus isn't talking about "economic patriotism" or banking in one's own country versus another; he's talking about storing worldly treasure at all: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matthew 6:19-21; New Revised Standard Version). "Heaven" or the "kingdom of heaven" is the compelling yet riddling center of Jesus' teachings in Matthew. He never comes close to defining it. He speaks about it metaphorically, mostly in parables ("the kingdom of heaven is like ... a mustard seed ... a merchant in search of fine pearls ... a net that is thrown into the sea"). Taken together, these teachings point to a kind of close-at-hand divine economy that offers a radical alternative to the world as we know it, full of surprises and inversions. Invest your heart and treasure in that yet-to-be-fully-realized divine economy, Jesus seems to be saying, rather than in this world. In that light, storing treasures in one's home country would be no better than storing it in another.

A couple verses later, Jesus offers another teaching about treasures that indicts wealth more pointedly: "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth" (Matthew 6:23). Strickland could certainly have wielded these and many, many other teachings of Jesus as unequivocal indictments on personal wealth. But of course that sword cuts both ways, and this campaign, unlike Jesus, has big donors to court.

"We should not run from the term Obamacare. I am glad Obama cares. Because Obama cares, children born with diabetes can no longer be denied coverage. People with catastrophic illnesses can no longer be dropped from coverage when they get sick. Families will no longer have their benefits capped. Romans 13, verse 12: "The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light." Let us go from this place, lighting candles all across this great country, and re-elect President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden so they can continue moving our country forward into the light." -- Rep. James Clyburn, Democratic National Convention, Sept. 6, 2012

Yes, Representative Clyburn is quoting directly from the King James Version translation of Romans 13:12. But Paul is not talking about bad days passing and a new day dawning. He's talking about the Second Coming of Christ, which he believed would be very soon. His is an urgent wake up call: "now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand." In these metaphorical terms, casting off "the works of darkness" means quitting the debauched partying ways of the night (Romans 13:11-14). It's not about staying the course or moving forward into the light but snapping out of night stupor and sobering up for a radically new day.

"I grew up in a Methodist church and taught Sunday school, and one of my favorite passages of Scripture is, "inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Matthew 25:40. The passage teaches about God in each of us, that we are bound to each other and we are called to act, not to sit, not to wait, but to act - all of us together." -- Elizabeth Warren, Democratic National Convention, Sept. 5, 2012

Yes, the verse is from Jesus' description of the final judgment of the nations in Matthew 25:31-46. At that time, he says, the people will be separated like sheep from goats. He will welcome the first group (the sheep) into the kingdom prepared for them, saying, "I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me." But they will be surprised and ask when they ever did those things, to which he will respond, "Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40). The latter group (the goats) will likewise be surprised to find themselves cursed and told, "just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me" (Matthew 25:46).

This passage is pretty radical. It goes well beyond the more familiar Golden Rule of doing unto others as you'd have them do unto you. That's about seeing yourself -- your desires and fears -- in another person. But here, as Warren says, it's about encountering God in another person, even and especially when you don't know it. Neither the "sheep" nor the "goats" in the story realized that helping or not helping the hungry, foreign, thirsty, naked, sick and imprisoned was helping or not helping God. Neither group expected God to be identified with such lowly states of need and vulnerability. Note, moreover, that this is about judging the nations, not individuals, and that the sheep and the goats speak collectively, not individually. So Warren is right to emphasize collective action in response to such a teaching.

Still, Warren is stretching the passage at least a little to say that it teaches about "God in each of us." As with so many Gospel texts, God is identified here not with everyone -- not even with the nations under judgment -- but exclusively with the weakest, most disenfranchised, and most vulnerable of human beings within those nations.

Bible Clips at the Republican National Convention

Not without reason, the "least of these" verse from Matthew 25 enjoys heavy rotation among Democrats. Gabriel Salguero and Jim Wallis have drawn from it in support of immigrant rights, for example, and in his Prayer Breakfast speech on Feb. 2, President Obama said he drew inspiration from it in his efforts to fight human trafficking, support foreign aid and stand up "for the poor; for those at the margins of our society."

So it was interesting to hear Mitt Romney's friend and colleague Grant Bennett quote the same passage (King James Version translation) to describe their service together as Mormon lay ministers. "These wonderful, even glorious hours together were spent in serving our fellow men and women. They were spent in service in our church. We embraced Christ's admonition, 'inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.'" Nothing to fact-check here, inasmuch as he's simply saying this passage inspired them to serve others in their church (though, as we've seen already, this passage is about much more than attending to one's own church members).

Mr. Bennett also draws on another passage to explain his and Governor Romney's practical, on-the-ground approach to theology and religion:

"In our early morning calls, Mitt didn't discuss questions of theology. He found the definition of religion given by James in the New Testament to be a practical guide: 'Pure religion is to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction.'" -- Grant Bennett, Republican National Convention, Aug. 30, 2012

Yes, this is a quotation from the epistle of James, a very practical text that emphasizes living out one's faith in action. In contrast to Paul's emphasis on justification by faith, not works, James argues that faith without works is dead (James 2:17). And those works, for James, center on caring for society's most vulnerable. Indeed, his phrase "the fatherless [orphan] and the widow" is a familiar shortlist for such people throughout the Bible (along with the "alien in your midst"). A few verses later, moreover, we read this more pointed indictment: "For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment; And ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool: Are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts?" (James 2:2-4; King James Version). Here again, when placed in its larger context, what might otherwise pass in a convention speech as an edifying bit of pious uplift shows itself to be something more radical than either party really wants to hear or say.

"And we are special -- we are special because we are united not as a common race or a common ethnicity. We are bound together by common values, that family's the most important institution in society, and that almighty God is the source of all we have. We are special -- we are special because we have never made the mistake of believing that we are so smart that we can rely solely on our leaders or on our government. Our national motto, "In God We Trust," reminding us that faith in our creator is the most important American value of them all. And we are special -- we are special because we have always understood the scriptural admonition that "for everyone to whom much is given, from him, much will be required." Well, my fellow Americans, we are a uniquely blessed people. And we have honored those blessings with the enduring example of an exceptional America." -- Sen. Marco Rubio, Republican National Convention, Aug. 30, 2012

Interestingly enough, President Obama also quoted this passage during his Prayer Breakfast last February. And he, like Sen. Rubio, earned a "Yes, but..."

Yes, Jesus says this to his disciples in the Gospel of Luke after presenting a parable-like scenario (Luke 12:42-48) in which a householder promotes one of his servants to be manager of the other servants. While the householder is away, that servant-manager shirks his responsibilities, beating the other servants and getting drunk. When the householder returns, he is furious and cuts the irresponsible servant-manager to pieces. Jesus concludes that the one who knows what the householder wants -- in this case the servant-manager "to whom much is given" -- and doesn't carry through deserves a far more severe punishment than the one who doesn't know better.

In Jesus' story, then, the much that's given and required is knowledge and responsibility -- knowing what the master wants and being responsible to manage others to that end. In President Obama's Prayer Breakfast speech, however, the much given is the loads of money that wealthy people have been given, and the much required is to give more of it to those less fortunate by giving up tax breaks. And in Sen. Rubio's speech, the much given is the "uniquely blessed" and "special" status that "we" Americans supposedly have, and the much required is to keep "honoring those blessings" by continuing to show how exceptional we are as a nation. Both are far cries from what Jesus was talking about. Indeed, one wonders if either of them or their writers have read the whole biblical story, which is more than a little grim.]]> BibliFact Roundup: Southern Baptists and Pacquiao vs. Savage on Sex and Marriage tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1633535 2012-07-02T16:30:50-04:00 2012-09-01T05:12:12-04:00

Southern Baptists And Pacquiao vs. Savage On Sex And Marriage

Unlike many of his supporters, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney seems reluctant to engage in Bible talk. Indeed, one has to wonder if he's intentionally avoiding it. How else did he manage to deliver a 20-minute commencement address at Liberty University, a citadel of conservative evangelicalism founded by the late Jerry Falwell, without once quoting from Scripture, let alone referring or even alluding to it? No mean feat, and probably a first for a graduation ceremony there.

Of course, having a Mormon deliver the address was also a first for Liberty, and the booing from some students as Romney was introduced made clear that not everyone was happy about it. No doubt his avoidance of biblical references was an attempt to avoid fanning any flames among students, faculty and administrators who believed that the university had compromised its Christian identity and biblical values even by giving him the podium, which in that context looks a lot like a pulpit.

Like most politicians whose religious identity is outside the American Protestant mainstream, Romney tends to avoid all but the most general references to American civil religion -- family, prosperity, posterity, etc. To get more specific, especially with biblical citations, risks opening a potentially messy can of worms for him, namely, his alternative canon of Scriptures, which includes not only the Protestant Bible but also the Book of Mormon.

President Obama, too, has waxed less biblically of late. Despite the potential for support among evangelical progressives on immigration reform, as witnessed by the mobilizing work of Sojourners, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, and many others, he made no references to the many biblical passages that call for hospitality to resident aliens in his address to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials on June 22. And when he went public in May with his change of heart about gay marriage, he said he was motivated by his personal Christian faith, and he mentioned the Golden Rule ("do unto others") from Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31, but did not address any of the biblical arguments so often invoked concerning homosexuality and gay marriage.

But others are filling in, providing biblical prooftexts for and against Obama's and Romney's positions.

Southern Baptist Resolution

At the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans, June 19-20, its "messengers" (delegates) passed a resolution, "On 'Same-Sex Marriage' and Civil Rights Rhetoric," which responds directly to "the first time in history the President of the United States has publicly voiced his personal support of 'same-sex marriage.'" That document opens with these four specific claims about what the Bible says on marriage, sexuality and human nature:

"WHEREAS, Marriage is a covenant relationship and an institution established by God rather than simply a human social construct (Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:4-6; Ephesians 5:22-33); and

WHEREAS, Southern Baptists have consistently affirmed our support of the biblical definition of marriage as the exclusive union of one man and one woman; and

WHEREAS, The Scriptures indicate that all sexual behavior outside of marriage is sinful; and

WHEREAS, All people, regardless of race or sexual orientation, are created in the image of God and thus are due respect and love (Genesis 1:26-27)..."

--SBC Resolution "On 'Same-Sex Marriage' and Civil Rights Rhetoric," June 2012

... AND

Notice that the first and fourth claims come with citations of specific biblical texts that are commonly interpreted to support these claims, especially among conservative Christians. The first, that marriage is a divinely established covenant relationship and not just some kind of sociological phenomenon is often grounded in God's creation of Eve and Adam as flesh of flesh and bone of bone: "therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh" (2:24). Not that this text actually mandates or institutes anything so much as it offers an explanation of why couples do what they do. In the second citation for this claim, Matthew 19:4-6, Jesus quotes this same passage from Genesis as support for his quite radical position on divorce, that there's no going back: "So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate" (19:6). The third citation, Ephesians 5:22-33, is part of a collection of mandates, ostensibly from Paul to the church at Ephesus (many scholars argue that this letter is pseudonymous or "deutero-Pauline"), calling for wives to "submit" to their husbands even as the church submits to Christ, its head, and for husbands to "love" their wives as Christ loves his church.

The resolution backs its fourth claim, that all people are created in the image of God and therefore deserve respect and love, is backed by Genesis 1:26-27, from the first creation story, in which God creates humans, male and female, in God's own image -- a biblical claim that resonates powerfully for religious people of all kinds and stripes.

But sandwiched between these first and fourth biblical claims are two others that don't include specific citations: that "the biblical definition of marriage" is "the exclusive union of one man and one woman" and that "Scriptures indicate that all sexual behavior outside of marriage is sinful." The claim that the Bible defines marriage as "the exclusive union" of one man and one woman could find some general support from the texts cited earlier in support of marriage is a divine institution. But it is blatantly contradicted by many stories of divinely blessed unions of biblical patriarchs and kings to multiple wives, servants and concubines. Think of Jacob, renamed Israel, whose 15 children are born to his two wives, Rachel and Leah, and their two servants, Bilhah and Zilpah. And think of David, who has seven wives as well as an un-specified number of concubines (at least 10, with whom his son Absalom has sex on David's palace rooftop after driving David out of Jerusalem; 2 Samuel 16:22). Indeed, in biblical tradition, exclusive male-female unions are far from definitive.

Likewise the claim that "the Scriptures indicate that all sexual behavior outside of marriage is sinful." No, they don't, at least not in any consistent way. To be sure, there are several biblical texts, especially in the legal traditions of the Torah, that condemn adultery, that is, extra-marital sex, but they do so because it involves a man taking another man's wife. Which is also why David's taking of Bathsheba was condemned as sinful: not because he wasn't married to her but because she was married to someone else -- another man's property, as the prophet Nathan makes clear when he confronts David with God's judgment. Within that social system, adultery is a threat to patriarchy. Non-adulterous pre- or extra-marital sex is a different matter altogether. The Song of Songs, for example, is a collection of steamy erotic love poetry between two young people, and there is no indication that they are married. Abraham has sex with his wife Sarah's Egyptian slave-girl Hagar in order to produce an heir (Genesis 16:1-3). And of course there's the prostitute Rahab, heroine of the battle of Jericho and David's great-great-grandmother, who hosts the Israelite spies while they're casing the city (Joshua 2:1-3 and 6:17-25). And lest she be judged, how did the spies wind up staying with her in the first place? And so on. The fact is that there is no clear scriptural indication, let alone biblical definition, when it comes to sex within and without marriage.

Manny Pacquiao vs. Dan Savage on Gay Marriage

Still more dramatic biblical battles continue to wage over homosexuality and gay marriage. The two most provocative voices in this fight of late have been, in one corner, professional boxing champion and politician Manny Pacquiao, and, in that corner, author and founder of the It Gets Better Project, Dan Savage.

"God only expects man and woman to be together and to be legally married, only if they so are in love with each other ... It should not be of the same sex so as to adulterate the altar of matrimony, like in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah of Old." --"Interview: Pacquaio Rejects Obama's New Twist on the Scriptures"

Again, God's destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18-19 is not on account of homosexuality, let alone same-sex marriage. In fact, it's not at all clear why they warrant fire and brimstone. God says to Abraham, "How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know" (Genesis 18:20-21). The word "outcry" (Hebrew ze'aqah), which God uses twice in this short declaration, is used elsewhere in the Bible to refer to the outcry of victims of injustice. In Exodus 2:23, for example, the oppressed Hebrew slaves in Egypt "cry out" (verb form of the same word) to God, which leads to their deliverance. So perhaps the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is enslavement or a similar form of oppression. The idea that homosexuality is to blame comes from later in the story, when men from Sodom try to rape two men staying with Lot, who offers his daughters in their place. That episode makes clear how bad it can get for visitors and daughters in Sodom. But it's about rape, not homosexuality. And, as far as we know, none of the rapists are married couples or domestic partners.

"We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people. [applause] The same way, the same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. [applause] We ignore bullshit in the Bible about all sorts of things. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads during the Civil War and justified it. The shortest book in the New Testament is a letter from Paul to a Christian slave owner about owning his Christian slave. And Paul doesn't say "Christians don't own people." Paul talks about how Christians own people ... The Bible says that if your daughter's not a virgin on her wedding night -- if a woman isn't a virgin on her wedding night, she shall be dragged to her father's doorstep and stoned to death. Callista Gingrich lives. [applause] And there is no effort to amend state constitutions to make it legal to stone women to death on their wedding night if they're not virgins. At least not yet. We don't know where the GOP is going these days." --Dan Savage Discusses Bible at High School Journalism Convention

Yes, Deuteronomy 22:20-21 says that if a man can prove that his new wife was not a virgin when he married her he can return her to her father's door where she will be stoned to death. And Savage is justified to compare this law to those in Leviticus (18:22 and 20:13) that prohibit a man from lying with another man "as he lies with a woman" under penalty of death. That prohibition appears along with several other prohibitions, including adultery, sex with a menstruating woman and sex with a former prostitute (like David's great-great-grandmother Rahab?).

And yes, there are many texts in the Bible that clearly presume slavery as a matter of fact, and even institutionalize it. The first 15 chapters of the book of Exodus tell the story of the Hebrew people's liberation from slavery in Egypt. Then, only six chapters later, without any apparent sense of irony, we find regulations for their own trade in and treatment of slaves. Indeed, you need look no further than the Tenth Commandment (Exodus 19:17), which prohibits one from coveting a neighbor's male or female slave (not to mention his wife, cattle, house and other property). That text, like many others in the Torah, takes slavery for granted. And we mentioned the slave-girls of Sarah, Rachel and Leah earlier. Finally, as Savage points out, Paul's brief letter to Philemon, a slave-owning Christian, does not criticize slavery per se. Instead Paul asks him to welcome the return of an escaped slave named Onesimus, with whom Paul has become close, "no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother" (Philemon 16). Calling these texts or the Bible as a whole "radically pro-slavery" is going too far, but much of biblical tradition does appear to accept slavery as a part of its social context.

And yes, those arguing for slavery did indeed wave these and other pro-slavery biblical texts at abolitionists, often from the pulpit. But the abolitionists had their sling full of anti-slavery biblical texts too. Indeed, most major liberation movements over the last century and a half, including not only abolitionism but also the women's rights and civil rights movements, have found inspiration in the Bible.

The problem in political discourse these days is that too many on the right and the left operate with simplistic assumptions about the Bible that just don't hold up when you read it thoughtfully. They assume that the Bible is a book, indeed The Book, of moral pronouncements about what's right and wrong, what to do and what to think. They assume it takes clear positions on controversial issues, that is says things about things. As though God sat down, wrote it out and published it to settle matters once and for all. When in fact the Bible doesn't say one thing, clearly, about anything that really matters. Mark Twain put it best when he described the Bible as a drugstore: in it you can find both poison and cure, depending on what, when and how you open it up and read it.

The Bible isn't a pro-slavery or anti-slavery document, nor is it a pro-gay or anti-gay document. It's not a document at all; it is, rather, a polyvocal library, a collection of different voices that often disagree with one another. As such it is not a document that takes positions but a locus of interpretation and argument.]]> BibliFact Brief: Billy Graham and Marriage in the Biblical Sense tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1475826 2012-05-04T08:00:58-04:00 2012-07-04T05:12:04-04:00

BILLY GRAHAM AND MARRIAGE IN THE BIBLICAL SENSE

"At 93, I never thought we would have to debate the definition of marriage," Billy Graham's statement said. "The Bible is clear -- God's definition of marriage is between a man and a woman. I want to urge my fellow North Carolinians to vote for the marriage amendment." -- Billy Graham, in support of North Carolina's Amendment 1, which would stipulate that marriage between one man and one woman is the only valid domestic legal union in the state

With all due respect to Reverend Graham, who has tended to avoid engaging in political debates about homosexuality and gay marriage, the Bible does not clearly define marriage. Nor is the Bible clear that God's definition of marriage is between a man and a woman. Nor is the Bible straightforwardly applicable to any of the current policy debates about gay marriage, civil unions, and homosexuality. For an excellent summary and assessment of biblical-political discourse around gay marriage, read biblical scholar Lee Jefferson's excellent article, "What Does the Bible Actually Say About Gay Marriage?," written last summer in the wake of its legalization in the state of New York. His conclusions: (1) although the institution of marriage has often been governed by ecclesiastical authorities, it is not a biblical institution but a civil one; (2) there is no biblical endorsement of one particular form of marriage (the creation of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2, which is the primary text used to support the argument that it does, is about the creation of gender, and desire, not heterosexual marriage); (3) discussions of specific sexual behavior in Paul's letters are not about marriage; and (4) the modern concept of homosexuality or same-sex orientation is foreign to the ancient texts of the Bible. Professor Lee reasons out each of these points, drawing out all the potentially relevant biblical texts along the way. Long and short, "The Bible is not specific, literate, or even concerned with what we call same-sex orientation or gay marriage."]]> BibliFact Roundup #3: Biblical Aliens, SB 1070 and a Jericho March tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1461330 2012-04-30T13:21:13-04:00 2012-06-30T05:12:02-04:00

ROUNDUP #3: SB 1070, BIBLICAL ALIENS, AND A JERICHO MARCH

On April 25, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments concerning Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which, among other anti-immigration reform measures, requires all aliens over 14 to carry proof of registration at all times, calls on law enforcement officials to stop anyone whom they suspect might be an illegal alien, and cracks down on anyone who shelters illegal aliens. As the court deliberated whether to uphold the bill, a large group of religious leaders, laypersons, and other community leaders gathered for what they called a "Jericho March" around the courthouse in opposition to this and related initiatives.

Jericho marches, also known as "victory" or "glory" marches, have their roots in Pentecostal traditions of worship, in which someone, moved by the spirit, spontaneously arises and begins walking or running up and down and around the aisles while shouting or singing praises to God. Soon others catch on and join the train, which coils around the sanctuary like a charismatic Congo line. The biblical story that more or less inspires such marches is the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua. There the Israelite army marches around the walled city of Jericho once per day for six days, and then seven times on the seventh day. Then a ram's horn is sounded, all the soldiers shout out, and the walls come tumbling down. The biblical connection to Pentecostal Jericho marches seems pretty loose -- circling the worship space while giving voice to an experience of collective spiritual victory. A political-religious Jericho march around the high-walled SCOTUS, on the other hand, seems to bear a slightly more combative connotation.

As we might expect, moreover, these Jericho marchers, along with many other religious groups that you wouldn't normally dare put in a room together, proclaim biblical grounds for their faith-based denunciations of SB 1070 and similar laws. Among the most outspoken is Rev. Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, whose "Building Bridges" campaign seeks to educate the public "about Biblical and Evangelical teaching on migration and immigrants" and to "create political will" for humane immigration reform. As he told a packed audience in a voter mobilization and registration worship service in Cleveland on April 21, "We're saying let's look at what the Bible has to say about immigrants and poor people and education."

Reverends Gabriel and Jeanette Salguero

"'Hospitality is not at the margins of scripture. Jesus wasn't kidding around when he said, 'I was a stranger and you welcomed me.'" -- Gabriel Salguero, G92 South Immigration Conference, Samford University, Feb. 23, 2012; retweeted by Rev. Salguero from Washington, D.C., April 25, 2012.

This is the surprising punchline of Jesus' description of the final judgment of the nations in Matthew 25:31-46. Then, he says, the Son of Man "will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats." To the former, he will say, "Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me." But they will be surprised and ask when they ever did those things, to which he will respond, "Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me." The latter group, by the way, will be equally surprised when they are cursed and told, "just as you did not do it to one of the least of these," including the stranger, "you did not do it to me." And Reverend Salguero is right: Jesus does not appear to be kidding around.

Indeed, hospitality is not at the margins of Scripture. It is a central theme. In fact, the name of the immigration conference where Salguero made this statement -- "G92" -- is also biblical: the G stands for the Hebrew word ger, usually translated "alien" or "stranger" and referring to someone dwelling in or passing through a land other than her or his own; and 92 is the number of times that Hebrew word appears in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. (We might note, by contrast, that there are zero words for "homosexuality" and only a few marginal references to male-male sexuality in the Bible.)

Below are a several of the 92 biblical passages concerning the ger, or alien, and how she or he should be treated. Of course, none of these or other biblical commandments about aliens prescribes a particular immigration policy for ancient Israel, let alone for the contemporary United States. Moreover, some of these passages also unapologetically acknowledge and essentially sanction slavery by dictating how slaves should be treated. When it comes to biblical ethics and justice, it's never so simple as separating baby from bathwater. As Mark Twain aptly put it, the Bible is like a drugstore; in it there is both poison and cure, depending on what you pull out when. Still, with regard to aliens, these and the other biblical texts consistently make three things very clear: (1) that aliens are to be treated justly, according to the same laws as native residents; (2) that the Israelite people are to remember their own past as aliens in a foreign land; and (3) that, especially in the Torah and the prophets, the God of Israel takes sides with aliens and other vulnerable groups over against those who would oppress them.

"The LORD said to Abram, "Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years..." (Genesis 15:13).

"She [Zipporah, Moses' wife] bore a son, and he named him Gershom; for he said, "I have been an alien residing in a foreign land" (Exodus 2:22).

"But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work -- you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns" (Exodus 20:10; likewise Exodus 23:12, Leviticus 16:29 and Deuteronomy 5:14).

"You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children orphans" (Exodus 22:21-24; see also Malachi 3:5).

"You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 23:9).

"You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God" (Leviticus 19:10; likewise Leviticus 23:22 and Deuteronomy 24:20-21).

"When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God" (Leviticus 19:33-34).

"You shall have one law for the alien and for the citizen: for I am the LORD your God" (Leviticus 24:22; see also Numbers 9:14; 15:15, 29; 19:10).

"The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants" (Leviticus 25:23).

"Give the members of your community a fair hearing, and judge rightly between one person and another, whether citizen or resident alien" (Deuteronomy 1:16).

"For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Deuteronomy 10:17-19).

"Every third year you shall bring out the full tithe of your produce for that year, and store it within your towns; the Levites, because they have no allotment or inheritance with you, as well as the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, may come and eat their fill so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work that you undertake. Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts" (Deuteronomy 14:28-15:1; also Deuteronomy 26:12).

"Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice. All the people shall say, 'Amen!'" (Deuteronomy 27:19).

"The LORD watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin" (Psalm 146:9).

"But the LORD will have compassion on Jacob and will again choose Israel, and will set them in their own land; and aliens will join them and attach themselves to the house of Jacob" (Isaiah 14:1).

"For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever" (Jeremiah 7:5-7; likewise Jeremiah 22:3; see also Zechariah 7:1).

"You shall allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the aliens who reside among you and have begotten children among you. They shall be to you as citizens of Israel; with you they shall be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel" (Ezekiel 47:22).

]]> BibliFact Roundup #2: Bible-n-Eggs with the President tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1407905 2012-04-07T09:00:41-04:00 2012-06-07T05:12:01-04:00

Timothy Beal http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-beal/

"They welcomed the message very eagerly
and examined the scriptures every day
to see whether these things were so"
--Acts 17:11

As we make our way toward the 2012 elections, many feel tossed to and fro by often contradicting claims about what the Bible says on this or that political issue. Most people just don't know the Bible well enough to say whether these claims are right, wrong, correct, incorrect or a matter of interpretation. On top of that, political Bible talkers on the campaign trail rarely cite chapter and verse, making it tough for us to check them out for ourselves. The Bible is a powerful weapon that has been wielded for good and for ill throughout American history. How can we keep political Biblespeak honest? Inspired by PolitiFact.com, BibliFact roundups aim to do just that.

Roundup #1: Bible-n-Eggs with the President

President Obama has been quite the biblical expositor at recent prayer breakfasts. Here are a few highlights worth checking out.

"For like us, Jesus knew doubt. Like us, Jesus knew fear. In the garden of Gethsemane, with attackers closing in around him, Jesus told his disciples, 'My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.' He fell to his knees, pleading with his Father, saying, 'If it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.' And yet, in the end, he confronted his fear with words of humble surrender, saying, 'If it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.'" -- President Obama, Easter Prayer Breakfast, April 4, 2012

Yes, these are quotations from the story of Jesus and his disciples in Gethsemane on the night of his arrest in the Gospel of Matthew (26:36-46). But, although Jesus in this story does express sorrow or anguish, does he experience doubt and fear? That's not clear. Moreover, in the president's recounting, it sounds like Jesus initially tries to get out of it but finally, "in the end," gives in, saying "may your will be done." In fact, Jesus offers the same prayer three times, each time asking that "this cup" be taken away but then insisting that God's will, not his, be done. So the anguish and the surrender are both there from the start.

Interesting that, here and elsewhere, President Obama quotes from the 1984 edition of the New International Version, which is by far the most popular translation among evangelical Christians (most liberals prefer the New Revised Standard Version).

"We all have experiences that shake our faith. There are times where we have questions for God's plan relative to us. But that's precisely when we should remember Christ's own doubts and eventually his own triumph. Jesus told us as much in the book of John, when he said, "In this world you will have trouble." I heard an amen. Let me repeat. "In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." -- President Obama, Easter Prayer Breakfast, April 4, 2012

Yes, the president is quoting John 16:33, in which Jesus is speaking to his disciples. Less reassuringly, in the verse immediately preceding this one, Jesus tells them that the time is near when they will be scattered and will abandon him. If verse 33 sounds like Easter Sunday, verse 32 sounds more like Good Friday.

At the National Prayer Breakfast on February 2, the president drew from several different biblical passages to explain how his policy positions are rooted in his religious values. The one that is attracting the most attention, and that we will likely hear him repeat, is this:

"And when I talk about shared responsibility, it's because I genuinely believe that in a time when many folks are struggling, at a time when we have enormous deficits, it's hard for me to ask seniors on a fixed income, or young people with student loans, or middle-class families who can barely pay the bills to shoulder the burden alone. And I think to myself, if I'm willing to give something up as somebody who's been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that's going to make economic sense. But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus's teaching that 'for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.'"

Yes, Jesus says this to his disciples in the Gospel of Luke (12:48). But he's not talking about taxes, money, or any sort of material wealth. Rather, he's talking about knowledge and responsibility. Jesus makes this statement after presenting a parable-like scenario in which a householder promotes one of his servants to be manager of the other servants. While the householder is away, however, that servant-manager shirks his responsibilities, beating the other servants and getting drunk. When the householder returns, he cuts the irresponsible servant to pieces. Jesus concludes that the one who knows what the householder wants - "unto whom much has been given" - and doesn't carry through deserves a far more severe punishment than the one who doesn't know any better.

This is the only biblical quotation in President Obama's prayer breakfast remarks that is not taken from the New International Version translation. In fact, it doesn't seem to match any particular translation. It is closest to the King James Version: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required." But that could be a bit of a tongue-twister before your second cup of coffee in the morning.]]> BibliFact Roundup #1: Visions, Vomit and Phony Eco-theology tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1370244 2012-03-27T10:36:57-04:00 2012-05-27T05:12:02-04:00

"I've stayed in the race because I think Proverbs is right. It warns that without vision, people will perish."
-- Newt Gingrich, speaking at Judson University, March 15

Yes, Proverbs 29:18 reads, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Pretty close, at least in the King James Version, to the Gingrich version. But, whereas he quotes the text to say that he needs to stay in the race because he's the only "conservative visionary," the text itself isn't talking about that kind of leadership. "Vision" (Hebrew chazon, from the verb chazah, "see" or "have vision") refers not to the visionary leadership of a king or other head of state, but rather to the challenging visions of a prophet. Biblical prophets usually stand outside the mainstream, presenting countercultural, even treasonous perspectives on a society's state of affairs. Read Jeremiah. Rulers and prophets rarely get along. In any case, their job descriptions are for the most part mutually exclusive.

Given Gingrich's tenacity, one wonders if anyone in the audience at Judson, a Christian women's college in Alabama, recalled another passage from the same chapter of Proverbs: "He, that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy" (Proverbs 29:1).

"In the Bible, God actually rained down fire and brimstone upon two cities in the Old Testament, Sodom and Gomorrah, basically because of the sin of homosexuality. Now in that particular passage, God called homosexuality an abomination in his sight. When you translate that particular word, 'abomination,' from its original text, which is the Hebrew text, you will find that that particular word means this: 'disgusting.' That's the meaning of the word. It means 'disgusting' and 'very nasty.'"
--Rev. O'Neal Dozier, Florida pastor and honorary co-chair of Rick Santorum's campaign, explaining to CNN's Brooke Baldwin why he said, "homosexuality is so nasty and disgusting that it makes God want to vomit."

First, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:16-19:29) is not about homosexuality, and God's decision to destroy these biblical twin cities is not "because of the sin of homosexuality," basically or otherwise. So what is it? It's not clear. All God says about their fire-and-brimstone worthiness is this: "How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know" (Genesis 18:20-21). That's it. The best clue to what's so bad about them is in the word "outcry" (Hebrew ze'aqah), which God uses twice in this short declaration. That word is used elsewhere in the Bible to refer to the outcry of victims of injustice -- as when, in Exodus 2:23, the oppressed Hebrew slaves in Egypt "cry out" (verb form of the same word) to God, which leads to their deliverance. That suggests that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is enslavement or a similar form of oppression. (No doubt the idea that homosexuality is to blame comes from later in the story, when men from Sodom try to rape two men staying with Lot, who offers his daughters in their place! An indication of how bad it is for visitors and daughters in Sodom, to be sure, but not really about homosexuality.)

Second, the word "abomination," a common translation of the Hebrew word to'evah, which does carry a connotation of physical repugnance, is never used in this story, by God or anyone else.

But Reverend Dozier doesn't stop with that false Bible talk. Concerning the alleged socialist agenda of Obama and other Democrats, he states, "There is no place in the Bible, Brooke, where God orders or even mandates for the rich to give their moneys over to the poor." In fact, there are lots of such places. Here are a couple, just for starters, one in which God commands it and one in which Jesus does:

"Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, "Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land" (Deuteronomy 15:11).

"Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, 'You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.' When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions" (Mark 10:21-22; see also Matthew 19:21-24).

"I was talking about the radical environmentalists. That's why I was talking about energy. This idea that man is here to serve the earth, as opposed to husband its resources and be good stewards of the earth. And I think that is a phony ideal. I don't believe that that's what we're here to do. That man is here to use the resources and use them wisely, to care for the earth, to be a steward of the earth. We're not here to serve the earth."
--Rick Santorum on CBS's Face the Nation, explaining his statement that Obama's environmental policy is "about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh not a theology based on the Bible, just a theology."

In Genesis 2:15, God forms the first human (ha'adam) from the earth (ha'adamah) and then puts him (or it, since there's only one human so far -- sexual differentiation comes later) in the garden to "serve" or "till" and "keep" it. The Hebrew verb often translated as "till" here is 'abad, whose most basic meaning is "serve." That's how it's almost always translated in the Bible. Whether one translates it as "serve" or "till" in this passage, the sense of careful service of the earth is definitely biblical.

The fact is that the Bible readily serves a wide variety of environmental ethics and policies, because different biblical texts offer different ways of understanding creation, life, the earth and the place of humans within it. In presidential politics, there's a general trend among Republicans to emphasize the language of the first creation story in Genesis, in which God tells humans to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth" (Genesis 1:28). Here the emphasis is on the earth as bounty, gift and resource for humans to control and use maximally. Democrats also use that kind of biblical language, but tend to lean a little more toward the second creation story in Genesis, which, as we have seen, emphasizes humankind's intimate, mutually dependent relationship with the earth and other living creatures.]]> There's No Such Thing As Osama Bin Laden tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.866532 2011-05-25T12:13:00-04:00 2011-07-25T05:12:01-04:00

Timothy Beal http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-beal/
"Seth, you seemed really upset by that man. What's going on?" Clover asked.

"Sometimes when I see someone who looks like that," he confided in a hushed voice, "I'm afraid maybe it's him."

"Who?"

"You know, him, the one who blew up the towers."

"You mean Osama bin Laden?" He nodded seriously, tearing up a little.

For Seth, as for so many of us, bin Laden had already become something more than a mortal. He was omnipresent, and might show up anywhere in the world at any given moment. He was omniscient, too, an unknown knower and unseen seer who watched all our every moves. He knew when and where we'd be most vulnerable, and seemed to be laughing at the hysterical security theater of amber squares and x-rayed shoes that he'd driven us to act out, at great expense, to ward off his evil. Already in 2004, and indeed long before then, we had turned Osama bin Laden into a mysterious, powerful, supernatural monster.

And so he will rise again from the dead. Not because the Navy Seals didn't kill him certainly enough. Every doubter in the world could put a finger in his wounds till there was no hesitation in declaring him undeniably and reliably dead. Even still, he'd be back. Because we have turned him into a monster, and monsters don't stay dead.

Monsters put a face on our otherwise vague sense of impending doom. The typical Hollywood monster movie serves as a vehicle for a public rite of exorcism in which our looming sense of unease is projected in the form of a monster and then blown away. Although there will be some collateral damage before the battle is over, in the end the monster will be vanquished and the nation will be safe once again. In this way such monster movies literally scare the hell out of us. And in an insecure time such as this one, they give us a sense of closure. At least for a while. And therein lies the downside: "The End" of the monster tale always implies a question mark.

I regularly teach a college course called "Religion and Horror," based on my book, "Religion and Its Monsters," which happened to come out a couple months after 9/11. The idea of the course is to see what we might discover about religion by getting to know its monsters, and to see what we might discover about nowaday monsters by getting to know their religious backgrounds. In other words, we explore religion as horror and horror as religion.

One thing we discover is that there is a slippery slope between gods and monsters. As personifications of radical otherness, the monsters of supernatural horror are often identified with the divine, especially with its more dreadful, maleficent aspects. And the experience of horror in the face of the monstrous is akin in many respects to religious experience: Both are often represented as encounters with mysterious otherness that elicit a vertigo-like combination of dread and fascination -- a feeling captured in the older spelling of "aweful," which retains its sense of awe.

Religions have always had their monsters; if you don't believe me, just skim the book of Genesis, or Revelation, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Epic of Gilgamesh. But monsters have their religion, too. Indeed, the most unstoppably undead monsters are almost always in some sense religious, figures of monstrously divine or anti-divine otherness. Our ancient myths are full of them, from the Babylonian chaos mother Tiamat, whom Marduk slays in order to create the world from her body; to the biblical sea serpent Leviathan in Psalm 74, whom God kills in order to form a habitable place of homeland security for God's people; to the book of Revelation's great red dragon, "that ancient serpent who is called the Devil and Satan." Likewise when it comes to the greatest supernatural monsters of modern-day horror, most notably that diabolical king of the undead, Count Dracula, whose shape-shifting forms reveals as much about our own anxieties and repressions of the other within us, and whose own roots trace back to ancient biblical dragons. In the religious mythologies of these and many other monsters, then as now, the stories of their demise always leave us with a deep unease, an unnerving sense that, no matter how certainly they have been destroyed, they will be back. Monsters, once made in the fiery furnaces of our religious imaginations, are almost impossible to unmake.

The past few times I've taught this course, I've begun the first session with a statement: "There's no such thing as Osama bin Laden," by which I mean to suggest that the Osama bin Laden we know is not a human being but, like other supernatural monsters, is a construction of our popular cultural imaginations. Even as the dust was still settling around Ground Zero, this monster was already rapidly taking form in the fiery, apocalyptic forges of the news media, tabloids, blogs, and political speechwriters. We had begun to envision ourselves in a battle of good against absolute evil, anti-God, anti-Allah, anti-freedom, anti-nation, anti-"us." And bin Laden was its omnipresent, omniscient incarnation.

And so the question mark will keep creeping up to the end of bin Laden's death sentence. Lord knows we're trying to get rid of it. That's what is drawing us to the news images and reports of him coloring his beard, watching himself on TV, and collecting porn, and that's what keeps us laughing, however uneasily, at Saturday Night Live's under-the-sea skit in which his corpse drops in on little mermaid Tina Fey, or Fred Armisen's impersonation of him requesting Dakota Fanning to be one of his pallbearers, or Andy Samberg as Nicolas Cage announcing that, in his next adventure movie, he's "gonna kill the ghost of Osama bin Laden." Is it time for a Mel Brooks musical? Springtime for bin Laden?

Deep down, we know that it'll take a lot more than all that and a slide of DNA to erase the inkling of insecurity that bin Laden will be back. Once made, this monster will not easily be unmade.

Alas, we knew not what we were doing.

(Postpost: after posting this article, several friends shared this from The Onion: "Giant Bin Laden Destroys New York, Washington". And so it begins ...)]]> Will the King James Bible Survive? tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.836538 2011-03-21T00:00:30-04:00 2011-05-25T18:40:24-04:00

Timothy Beal http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-beal/
The King James Bible's 400th may well be its biggest birthday ever, but also its most poignant. For its end draws nigh. Sure, it'll hang around for a while, mostly in hotels and old folks homes. But it's not long for this world, at least in any form we'd recognize from the bookish years of its youth.

Often touted as the purest and holiest of all English Bibles, the King James Bible was itself born of political and religious turmoil. King James I commissioned it as a counter-revolutionary alternative to the very popular Geneva Bible, which had been published in 1560 by Puritan exiles in Switzerland. Harshly critical of the English monarchy, their translation and marginal commentary often had a subversive edge. In Exodus, for example, when the midwives didn't follow Pharaoh's order to kill the Hebrew males as soon as they were born, a marginal note from the translators says that they were right to disobey the unjust law but wrong to do so secretly. And when Pharaoh next orders that all Hebrew boys be tossed into the Nile, a note adds, "When tyrants can not prevaile by craft, they brast [i.e., burst] forthe into open rage." No wonder King James I declared such notes "seditious, and savouring too much of daungerous, and trayterous conceites." And no surprise his rival prohibited any notes or illustrations and strictly regulated who was authorized to publish it and how. Thus it became known as the "Authorized Version."

Many of us assume that was pretty much the end of the story, that King James I had effectively closed the book on Bible, that his Authorized Version quickly established itself as the one and only English Bible. Not so. Unauthorized yet ambitious printers soon found profitable ways around the government's controls on Bible publishing. Some purchased Bibles published by authorized printers, took them apart and inserted illustrations and other value-adding content like maps and illustrations, and then rebound and resold them at higher costs. Some sold as "commentaries" books that happened to include all or nearly all of the text of the King James Bible. Some radically abridged the text of the King James Bible to make portable editions, like the 16-page Souldiers Pocket Bible (1643). Others completely reshuffled its contents. The most dramatic was Matthew Talbot's Bible (1800), which took all the verses of the Old and New Testaments out of their original contexts and put them into 30 new topical "books."

Still others imported King James and Geneva Bibles printed in other countries, often underselling the authorized printers, who protested that they lacked quality control and were full of misprints. In an imported Bible from 1682, for example, a passage about divorce addresses a situation in which a husband "ate," rather than "hate," his wife. But such protests were undermined by the errors of licensed printers. Consider the so-called Wicked Bible, published in 1631 by the King's Printer, which forgot a rather significant "not" in the Seventh Commandment: "Thou shalt commit adultery."

We tend to think that the printing press led to a standardization of the Bible, and that the King James Version was the culmination of that process. Indeed, it stands in our cultural imagination for the immortality of the book. It represents the transcendent immutability of the printed Word.

Yet, the reality of the Bible in the age of print, including the King James Version, has been the complete opposite: a flood of biblical proportions, covering the world in more Bibles in more forms and contents than ever. Already by 1800, at least a thousand different editions of the Bible in English had been published. Over the next two centuries, the number and variety grew exponentially, to the point that, by the 1970s, the American Bible Society in New York gave up trying to collect every new edition in English. A wise decision, because since then Bible publishers have pulled out all the stops. This year, about 6,000 editions of the Bible will be published in English alone, representing an incredibly wide variety of things and contents, from nostalgically appealing zippered leatherbound Bibles and family Bibles, to chronological Bibles in which all the verses have been rearranged into someone's idea of biblical history, to graphic-novel style Manga Bibles and R. Crumb's Genesis Illustrated, to niche-marketed Bibles like The Golfer's Bible and The Bride's Bible, to Biblezines, biblical magazines that are designed to target different age groups and genders, like Refuel for teen boys, which includes biblical war stories from Joshua, Judges and Kings along with lots of callouts and text boxes about sex and dating, pop music and how to grill a steak. These newfangled Bibles include volumes of value-adding and values-adding notes and comments, and they come in dozens and dozens of translations, including the non-copyrighted texts like the King James Version as well as a growing number of proprietary translations, most notably the New King James Version from evangelical publishing behemoth Thomas Nelson (it's not very King Jamesian, but Nelson knows there's still capital in that name). And all these wildly divergent things and contents will be sold as "the Bible." No king or anyone else can restrict extensions, revisions and reinventions of the Bible. And so it will continue, ad infinitum. Biblical liquidation.

The larger setting in which this biblical fire sale is happening is, of course, the twilight of print culture and the dawning of the digital revolution. Traditional print books are rapidly losing ground as the dominant medium for reading and writing. How will the way we think about, read, and share the Bible change in the emerging networked, digital media culture in which everything is editable, movable, cut-copy-and-pastable, mashup-able, and in which the lines between inside and outside, canonical and non-canonical, are fuzzy and permeable? The decline of print culture and the rise of a digital network culture means the end of the book as we know it, and the end of the book as we know it will be the end of the Word, The Book of books, as we know it, and of its flagship, the King James Version.

As we gather around to sing "happy birthday," it's less about celebrating the eternal triumph of the printed Word and more about nostalgia for earlier days. We are aware more than ever before of the good old King James Bible's mortality, that it too shall pass and go the way of all Bibles. Indeed, we are aware, more or less consciously, that the idea of the Bible that it has represented for so long -- the authorized and authoritative Word, printed and bound and fixed for all time -- was an illusion. The King James Bible's seeming steadfastness as the cultural icon of the Word without end hides the actual, historical reality of biblical impermanence. But it's now on cultural life support, and the writing is on the wall.

No doubt, here in the twilight years of book culture, innovative media entrepreneurs will find ways to reanimate the text of the King James Version for a new hypertextual dawn. Some will recoil in horror at their recreations, declaring their monstrous progeny an abomination against God and King. Still others will embrace its post-print resurrections. A "Bible believer" from my youth, I sympathize with the former and their longing for that old time religion. But I number myself among the latter, seeing this moment as a chance to reimagine the Bible after the Bible. If there's one thing that's constant in the history of the Bible, it's change. The end of the Word as we know it will open up other ways of knowing.
]]> In the Beginning(s): Appreciating the Complexity of the Bible tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.822703 2011-02-15T20:41:47-05:00 2011-05-25T18:30:24-04:00

Timothy Beal http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-beal/
In the second story, which immediately follows this one, the order of creation is entirely different. Here God's first act of creation, before there are any plants or animals, is to form a single human, not yet male or female, by shaping it from the dust of the earth and then bringing it to life by breathing into its nostrils. Thus ha'adam, Hebrew for "the human," is formed from ha'adamah, "the earth," and becomes a living soul by divine breath. A beautiful image of the ecological spirituality of humanity: a God-breathed and breathing lump of clay, human from humus, an incarnation of divine transcendence and earthy immanence, as intimate with the ground as with God. Then come plants and animals. Then, when no animal fits the bill as lifelong companion (sorry, Fido), God essentially divides the human into two, male and female. So, in the first story, humans in the plural, male and female, are created last; and in the second, a single human is created first. These two versions of creation simply do not sync.

That's just the first few pages of Genesis. There are several other creation stories in the Bible, and they don't add up to anything like a coherent biblical account of cosmic or human origins. In Job 38, for example, the first act of creation involves a conflict between God and the sea, that is, the formless, watery deep that was there before the world began. God sinks foundations into it for the earth to rest like some huge primeval offshore drilling station. God then sets boundaries for the waters so that they don't overwhelm it.

In the brief account of creation in Psalm 74, on the other hand, there are monsters, and the struggle to establish order is much more intense. God must first slay Leviathan and the sea dragons, monstrous forces of primordial chaos, in order to create the cosmos as a safe, orderly place. Then again, in Psalm 104, Leviathan is not as a monstrous opponent of creation but a sea creature with whom God plays.

And then there's the account of creation in Proverbs 8, in which God has a divine cohort, Wisdom (in Hebrew, Hokhmah), who declares that she was with God "from the beginning, from the origin of the earth ... there was still no deep when I was brought forth, no springs rich with water, before the mountains were sunk." When God "assigned the sea its limits" and "fixed the foundations of the earth," she says, "I was at his side as confidant. I was a source of delight every day, playing before him all the time" (my translation). This may remind us of the account of beginnings in the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the logos," usually translated as "Word" but also carrying the meaning of "Wisdom," now incarnate in Christ.

You get the idea. These and other biblical visions of beginnings don't add up to a consistent biblical account of creation. Unlike the creationism in circulation today, the Bible's own creationism is rich in different, mutually incompatible ways of imagining cosmic and human beginnings. There is no single biblical account of creation. The Bible doesn't seem to have a problem with that. Why should we?

Whether or not we should have a problem with this biblical polyvocality, I've learned the hard way that many indeed do. I recently wrote a short piece for Askmen.com on "Five Things You Didn't Know" about the Bible. The first of those five things was that there are multiple accounts of creation in the Bible. I expected some people to disagree, and I looked forward to a serious back-and-forth about the texts I had pointed out. That's not what happened. Instead, I was overwhelmed with a flood of angry responses, most of which were as impious, rude and downright unchristian in tone as they were reactionary and unthinking in their "defense" of the Bible.

Once I got over being called a "gay moron" and "fatass nerd editor sitting in his basement," I could see that what I'd gotten myself into was an amplified version of the debates that go on every day between "Bible-believers" and atheists, who looked to me very much like two sides of the same coin.

Both sides agreed that my goal was to "discredit" the Bible, to "make the Bible look stupid, irrelevant, and full of holes" and "a load of bullshit." The only difference between them was whether they supported or condemned me for doing so. Neither side was remotely interested in engaging with the logic of my argument, let alone the biblical texts I used to support it. As one exclaimed, "the OP ["original poster," me] needs to actually check his facts. You would think one might actually read the books objectively before commenting on them. Seriously??? Differences in Gen 1&2??? Are you nuts!!!" Another wrote, "There is only one creation account found in the bible, which anybody with any intellectual honesty can see. There are no contradictions; You're just not reading it carefully. Probably on purpose. All I'm seeing is cheap shots being taken at the bible, all of which are based on opinion and not fact." Several made clear, moreover, that my "attack" on the Bible was also an attack on its presumed author, God, and therefore on faith in general. As one commenter put it, "i don't buy any of this futile facts ... i stand by one fact, the Bible is a true and unchanging word of God, we shouldn't take God to court."

Never mind that I'm a Christian, that I regularly teach about the Bible in confirmation classes and in Sunday school, and that I've dedicated more than two decades to studying and teaching biblical literature as a college professor. I think I have my facts right, and the biblical references were right there. It would've been easy to go and read them before responding. But no one on either side of the argument did.

It seems to me that those dedicated to removing all potential biblical contradictions, to making the Bible entirely consistent with itself, are not very different from the irreligious debunkers of the Bible, Christianity and religion in general. Many from both camps seem to believe that simply demonstrating that the Bible incorporates inconsistencies and contradictions, as I have done, is enough to discredit any religious tradition that embraces it as Scripture. Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits. They agree that the Bible is on trial. They agree on the terms of the debate, and what's at stake, namely its credibility. They agree that Christianity stands or falls, triumphs or fails, depending on whether the Bible is found to be inconsistent, to contradict itself. The question for both sides is whether it fails to answer questions, from the most trivial to the ultimate, consistently and reliably.

But you can't fail at something you're not trying to do. To ask whether the Bible fails to give consistent answers or be of one voice with itself presumes that it was built to do so. That's a false presumption, rooted no doubt in thinking of it as the book that God wrote. Biblical literature is constantly interpreting, interrogating and disagreeing with itself. Virtually nothing is asserted someplace that is not called into question or undermined elsewhere.

Nor can we presume that such contradictions are stupid mistakes, editorial oversights or divine typos. We'll never know all the details about the history of the development of the literature now in our Bibles. What we do know is that it was thousands of years in the making and involved countless people writing, editing, copying, canonizing, publishing and so on. Can we honestly believe that, if agreement and consistency were the goal, such discrepancies would not have been fixed and such rough seams mended long ago? That creation stories would have been made to conform or be removed? Could all those many, many people involved in the development of biblical literature and the canon of Scriptures have been so blind, so stupid? It's modern arrogance to imagine so.

The Bible canonizes contradiction. It holds together a tense diversity of perspectives and voices, difference and argument -- even and especially when it comes to the profoundest questions of faith, questions that inevitably outlive all their answers.

The Bible is not a book of answers but a library of questions. As such it opens up space for us to explore different voices and perspectives, to discuss, to disagree and, above all, to think. Too often, however, that's not what happens.
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