As Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum fight it out for the G.O.P. nomination, preachers on both sides of the aisle are opining on "what the Bible says" on a range of issues, from Occupy Wall Street to contraception coverage, from Mormonism to welfare programs.
Don't take them too seriously.
Truth is, the Bible can "say" anything depending on which verses are emphasized and how they are spun.
Do you support capitalism? Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council insists the key passage on finances is the parable of talents in Luke 19, where money is given to a number of investors and Jesus praises the one who achieves the biggest returns.
Do you support socialism? Liberal activist Shane Claiborne wants you to know that Jesus spent his time with the poor and that the Sermon on the Mount, with its blessing of the poor, is the centerpiece of the gospel.
Do you support gay marriage? Well, Jesus said nothing about homosexuality and God insists in Genesis that "it's not good for the human to be alone."
And if you oppose gay marriage, God created Adam and Eve (not Adam and Steve) and the Apostle Paul condemns sodomy in Romans 1, calling it "unnatural" and "shameful."
We could run through the list of controversial issues -- abortion, war, pre-marital sex, slavery -- and find that on both sides each debate, a host of passages can be marshaled both for and against each position, creating mutually contradictory portraits of "what the Bible really says."
It's tempting to conclude that one side of these debates is simply biased while the other side (usually our side) is not.
But it's also wrong.
Literary theorists, psychologists and theologians have long recognized that how humans interpret texts inescapably reflects their prior beliefs. As Yale biblical scholar Dale Martin notes, "We read certain ways because we are socialized to do so."
Looking at the history of biblical interpretations makes this apparent.
Take the seemingly straightforward command in Genesis 1:28, for example, to "subdue the Earth" and "have dominion over the beasts."
As a result of our current environmental woes, today's progressive evangelicals often read this as a command to exercise "stewardship" over the natural world, to refrain from excessive manipulation of nature and shield it from exploitation.
But early Christians thinkers such as Saint Augustine saw it very differently. Guided by his culture's preference for allegorical readings and stress on self-denial, Augustine understood "the beasts" to be sinful impulses that "could serve reason when they are restrained." "Having dominion," in his culture, meant exercising self-control.
Medieval theologians, by contrast, were interested in creating encyclopedic bodies of knowledge. The command to "have dominion," in this context, became a command to accumulate facts about the natural world. As Oxford historian Peter Harrison notes, "knowledge of the creatures was thus another way of restoring ... the original dominion that the human race had once enjoyed."
And early modern thinkers interpreted the command to "have dominion" differently yet again. In a cultural context where burgeoning technologies were increasingly used to manipulate the natural world, "having dominion" came to mean intervening in nature to make it more useful for humans. As John Locke put it, "God and his reason commanded him to subdue the earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of life."
The command "have dominion" has thus been interpreted as a command to refrain from intervening in nature, to exercise self-control, to accumulate knowledge, and to intervene in nature. And if two words can be interpreted is such different ways, how much more entire biblical passages or complex themes?
The idea that we can derive our beliefs from an unbiased reading of the Bible is as pervasive in American discourse as it is untenable. And that fact has significant implications for how we think about the Bible's role in politics.
When a community claims they can't help but oppose homosexuality because the Bible requires them to do so, or that Jesus would support a liberal economic system, or that if you really read the Bible carefully you should end up supporting Party X, they're showing naivete. What the Bible "requires" depends on the beliefs one brings to it.
So as the election season heats up, let's stop pretending our ideology comes straight from what the Bible says. The reality is, "what the Bible says" comes straight from our ideology.
Follow Jonathan Dudley on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jonathandudley
According to the bible, the bible is not the Word of God. At the beginning of the gospel of John, we have a hymn to the Word of God, and according to the Gospel of John, Jesus is the Word of God 'made flesh' [presumably 'made manifest in a human life'].
Please excuse me . . .
How humans interpret EVERYTHING--from music to dance to poetry to facial expressions is based on our own (existing) beliefs.
Our technology has exceeded our intellect and probably--more to the point, greatly exceeded our honesty. So dishonest are we that even thousands of years ago, when our 'technology' was limited to hand-writing on parchment, our level of honesty was still grossly deficient for that era.
What we accept as 'bibles' are mainly just portable forms of tribal identity. Not to say that some truth is not contained therein, even elegant truth--just that we are not evolved enough to know the difference anyway.
Second, everyone who's thinking of voting for a person based on religion ought to find and watch the 1950s film, "Elmer Gantry." I doubt that it could be made now, with all of the organized fundamentalists around. But if you want to see how the abuse of power can be clothed in the 'garments of the righteous,' watch Burt Lancaster! When the movie was made he was seen as evil -- now, I guess someone would propose him as a presidential candidate because he knows his Bible.
The Bible is not even close to inerrant. Just look at the creations story... I mean stories in Genesis. There are two (well three if you count the Jewish version where Lilith was the first wife of Adam who refused to submit, Christians didn't like that version when they compiled their Bible) accounts of the creation in Genesis, and the order of creation is not the same in both. How can the Bible be inerrant if it can't even relay the dates of creation correctly from one chapter to the next in the first book? Not to mention the Bible's numerous references to the Earth being an unmovable, flat, circle.
So which came first in the creation, man, or animal?
"And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image.... So God created man in his own image."
"And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof."
We can debate much of what scripture tells us in terms of application, but the principles and the orthodox views surrounding them have remained consistent since the advent of the church.
Amos 7:6?
Jeremiah 26:19?
BTW- I'm Jewish. I don't need Jesus' forgiveness or to be baptized.
Had the radically anti-pagan Christians not destroyed the great Library of Alexandria, there would be much greater documentation of other ancient texts.
""The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."
I would love to know when "religious freedom" became "the freedom to make laws based on interpretations of the Chrisitan Bible, to the exclusion of all other religions, even if it infringes upon those who do not adhere to these views."