The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  THE

  GOOD

  BOOK

  READING THE

  BIBLE WITH MIND

  AND HEART

  PETER J. GOMES

  TO

  ARCHIE CALVIN EPPS III

  OLDEST OF COLLEAGUES

  CLOSEST OF FRIENDS

  “A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  “A riveting tour of this holy book with the guide both witty and wise. Gomes blends the passion and reason of the humanist to open the sacred even to the most secular and skeptical mind. THE GOOD BOOK is a great work of scholarship and imagination.”

  —HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

  Contents

  Apologia

  Part One Opening the Bible

  Chapter 1 What’s It All About?

  Chapter 2 A Matter of Interpretation

  Chapter 3 The Bible in America

  Part Two The Use and Abuse of the Bible

  Chapter 4 Hard Texts and Changing Times

  Chapter 5 The Bible and Race: The Moral Imagination

  Chapter 6 The Bible and Anti-Semitism: Christianity’s Original Sin

  Chapter 7 The Bible and Women: The Conflicts of Inclusion

  Chapter 8 The Bible and Homosexuality: The Last Prejudice

  Part Three The True and Lively Word

  Chapter 9 The Bible and the Good Life

  Chapter 10 The Bible and Suffering

  Chapter 11 The Bible and Joy

  Chapter 12 The Bible and Evil

  Chapter 13 The Bible and Temptation

  Chapter 14 The Bible and Wealth

  Chapter 15 The Bible and Science

  Chapter 16 The Bible and Mystery

  Afterword

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Books by Peter J. Gomes

  About the Book

  Praise for The Good Book

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Apologia

  SOME writers begin their books with an Introduction or a Preface, sometimes titled simply From the Author, in which the origins of the book are briefly stated, and something, but not so much as to make reading the book unnecessary, of its intentions disclosed, and necessary acknowledgments made. Such an opening is meant, in part at least, to attract the reader’s attention, with the hope that what follows will sustain it, while giving something of the author’s method, clearing away wrong expectations, and positioning a few useful clues and landmarks by which the reader may make way through a form of argument and prose which has become far too familiar to the author. Some readers routinely skip such introductory matter to get on to “it,” the real heart of the book. I have been guilty of this, for I am one of those who, in driving, for instance, refuses, at least at first, to spend much time in consultation of a map. I am convinced that I can find my way on my own with just my common sense, my not always justified sense of direction, the urgent good intentions that tell me that I must or wish to get to my destination, and the naive faith that that is enough to get me there. I, and the waiting friends on the other side of my travels, have discovered over many years that this is not a sound system.

  The front matter of a book is something of a road map. It tells the reader not only where the author intends to go but in some measure how the author wants the reader to get there, and why the journey is worth taking at all. Obviously such an enterprise is more than a mere map—it is also an explanation, a justification.

  Secular readers will notice that this front matter bears a slightly unfamiliar title, and in a foreign language. I say “slightly unfamiliar,” for even those with no Latin will recognize in the sonorous term Apologia something that looks remarkably like our word apology, and we all know what that is. Or do we? The third meaning in The Oxford English Dictionary comes closest to our unexamined sense of what an apology is: “an explanation offered to a person affected by one’s action that no offense was intended.” It is in this sense that we understand the remark attributed to the Duke of Wellington, “Never apologize, never explain.” Charles I, who knew much of these things, said, “Never make a defense of apology before you be accused,” and Ambrose Bierce, the cynical author, earlier in this century, of The Devil’s Dictionary, said, “To apologize is to lay the foundations for a future offense.” The best of these aphorisms about apologies in the popular meaning of the word is that of Elbert Hubbard, who advised, “Never explain: your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe it anyhow.”

  All of this notwithstanding, this is neither the oldest sense of the apology nor the sense in which I use it. The oldest usages describe an apology, or apologia, as a formal argument to speak in defense of anything that may cause dissatisfaction. It is more explanation than excuse. It does not ask for pardon but rather seeks to offer light to those who may need it but may not want it. That is what an apologia is, and one who makes such an argument is known as an apologist.

  There is a risk in embracing so ancient a term with such an ambiguous contemporary resonance to it. One thinks of hapless presidential press secretaries, usually called by critics “shameless apologists for the bankrupt policies of the present administration,” and it doesn’t take a degree in linguistics to recognize that apologists, in the evolution of the species, became public relations experts, then press officers, and now spin doctors, who, together with pollsters, have become the court astrologers of modern politics and industry. To begin one’s work with the title Apologia, to call oneself an apologist, and to consider one’s argument as an apology is at once to risk confusion and to court disaster.

  Yet the term as I am using it has an ancient literary and specifically Christian lineage. The New Dictionary of Christian Theology defines apologetics in the history of Christian theology as “the defense, by argument, of Christian belief against external criticism or against other world views,” and gives as an example of such apologetics Paul’s sermon on Mars Hill, in Acts 17:22–31, in which he argued the Christian faith against the Greek secular philosophy. Saint Augustine’s The City of God, written in reply to pagans who blamed the fall of Rome in A.D. 410 on the Christians, is counted as one of the most magisterial of apologetics. In modern times Paul Tillich and Hans Küng are so styled, and it might be argued that Pope John Paul II’s remarkably successful book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, is a vivid example of a contemporary apologetic. Given such company I do not mind that Karl Barth was dogmatically opposed to all forms of apologetics, although, ironically, his works have seen considerable use as fodder in the apologetics of others.

  My apologia is an argument in favor of taking the Bible seriously, and it is addresséd in part at least to those who either trivialize it or idolize it, and who thereby miss its dynamic, living, and transforming quality. It is an argument addressed as well to those who are in search of spiritual and moral grounding in their chaotic lives, and who may have heard of the Bible but know little and want to know more. It is also an argument that condemns the lazy, simpleminded approach that many are tempted to take when considering the serious matter of Bible study and interpretation. Finally, it is also an invitation to enter into the Bible and to let it enter into us, all of us, and most particularly into those who have been excluded from the faith of the Bible by the use of the Bible. The summary of such an argument may be found in the aphorism of the early biblical scholar Bengel, who said, “Apply yourself closely to the text; apply the text closely to yourself.” As my own new class of Harvard Divinity School students began New Testament studies now thirty-something years ago, we were instructed to write this on the flyleaf of our Bibles.

  There is a certain inevitability about this book. Henry Ward Beecher used to tell of the Fr
ee Will Methodist preacher and the Predestinarian Presbyterian preacher who agreed to exchange pulpits. As they met on the road, each on the way to the other’s pulpit, the Presbyterian said, “Brother, does it not give you pleasure and glory to God that before the earth itself was formed, we were destined in the mind of God to have this exchange this morning?” To which the Methodist replied, “Well, if that is so, then I ain’t going,” and he turned his horse around and went home. I know how he felt. We all want to feel that we are masters of our own fate, at least of our intellectual fate, but I know otherwise. I have been an apologist in the sense that I hope that I have rehabilitated scripture for general use for over twenty-five years. The day that I accepted duty as a Christian minister at “godless Harvard” I became one, and willingly, even gladly, for I was not ashamed of the gospel and wanted to present it with all its power to a time and a place that badly needed it. In my view, to be a Christian is by definition to be an apologist, for not only are you obliged to present your view to a world that is no longer, if it ever was, Christian, but people want to know why, in such a world, you would continue to hold allegiance to something so out of harmony with it. Conviction on the part of the Christian, and curiosity on the part of others, are essential ingredients in the apologetic for the faith. One offers one’s own life as the immediate and ultimate “explanation,” remembering that Christian truth is advanced not by postulates and formulas, the bone-crushing logic of arguments point and counterpoint, but in the living flesh of human beings. Jesus Christ remains the ultimate apologist for the faith not because of the sublime logic of his teaching but by the undaunted example of his life. I take enormous consolation in the precedent of one of the great apologists of the last century, John Henry Cardinal Newman, who in 1864 published his now classic autobiography under the title Apologia pro Vita Sua—A Defense of His Life.

  This book began a very long time ago with the conviction that intelligent people seemed to know less and less about the Bible, and that religious people revered it and would defend it to the death but seldom read it with any industry or imagination. The fact that we preach regularly from the Bible to congregations that know so little about it means that we have a fundamental task of reeducation before we can relate the Bible to the world in which we live. This task is further complicated by the fact that the Bible has become an American cultural icon with enormous influence, both symbolic and substantial. Thus, for me, the Bible and the social and moral consequences that derive from its interpretation are all too important to be left in the hands of the pious or the experts, and too significant to be ignored and trivialized by the uninformed and indifferent.

  The theme of this book is the risk and the joy of the Bible: risk in that we might get it wrong, and joy in the discovery of the living Word becoming flesh. It is around this theme that I formulate three basic questions which the thoughtful reader brings to the Bible: What is it? How is it used? What does it have to say to me? The three-part structure of the book is designed to address these questions. The first part, “Opening the Bible,” is didactic; it discusses what the Bible is and how it came to be as it now is. The second part, “The Use and Abuse of the Bible,” is more polemical. It is concerned with the interpretations of scripture, as well as with the reappropriation of scripture on the part of those who feel excluded from it. The third part, “The True and Lively Word,” a phrase drawn from Thomas Cranmer’s description of the Bible in the Book of Common Prayer, has a pastoral function and seeks to discover the relationship between the human condition and the biblical witness. This pastoral ambition, however, is not only the driving force behind this final section of the book but is the spirit that animates the whole book.

  My debts are many, and yet responsibility falls fully to me. I am grateful to my publishers, and particularly to my editor, who had enough confidence in me and in the idea of this book to wait for it with the patience of Job and the perseverance of the Saints. I thank Will Schwalbe for his conscientious collaboration, his many trips to Cambridge, and his genuine interest in the substance of this book. I thank as well John Taylor Williams, the best of all literary agents, without whom none of this would have happened. A sabbatical leave of absence at Duke University Divinity School provided me with a season of refreshment, stimulation, and research, in addition to boundless hospitality. I thank Dean Dennis Campbell for his many kindnesses while I was his guest. I thank as well my Duke colleagues and friends William H. Willimon, Stanley Hauerwas, and Samuel DeWitt Proctor, whose conversation helped refine many an idea. The assistance of Donald Polanski at Duke was invaluable, and I remain ever grateful to him for the benefit of his extensive knowledge of the resources in the Duke library.

  Closer to home, I thank the President and Fellows of Harvard College, by whose kind permission my leave of absence was taken. This book had its origins in the imagination of my colleague and friend Daniel Ayers Sanks, whose insistence on its writing is equaled only by his support along the detours: I owe him much. I owe a significant debt to Dr. Eugene Clifford McAfee, who joined this enterprise at its earliest stages and while pursuing his own academic work found time to help me. As a teaching colleague in the fields of Church History, Interpretation of Scripture, and Preaching, and as a friend, his worth to me is beyond measure. There would literally be no book without the consummate skills of Cynthia Wight Rossano, who prepared the final manuscript and all of its prior permutations, gave encouragement in moments of despair, and lavished upon me much for which I call her blessed.

  My colleagues and congregation in The Memorial Church have borne my absences and fits of authorial despondency with great Christian forbearance, and they, more than anyone, will be relieved to see this project finally accomplished. I am grateful to all my friends, and record here and now my most especial appreciation to those friends who, after a decent interval, stopped asking me, “How’s the book coming?” I owe a great debt of gratitude to my old and late friend and colleague, John Robert Marquand, long in the service of Harvard College. He knew of the earliest stages of this book and followed them with his characteristically keen and pungent interest. Much of this I did for him.

  Finally, I must remember my mother, Orissa Josephine White Gomes, daughter of preachers, who first taught me the Bible, and the people of the First Baptist Church and the Bethel AME Church of Plymouth, Massachusetts, my first community of interpretation. In the end we are where we came from.

  Johann Sebastian Bach used to write at the top of the first page of every new composition the Latin words Soli Deo Gloria: Glory to God Alone. I adopt his device as my own.

  PETER J. GOMES

  Sparks House

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  Part One

  Opening the Bible

  “The study of the Bible is the soul of theology.”

  —POPE LEO XIII

  Providentissimus Deus, November 18, 1893

  Chapter 1

  What’s It All About?

  MANY years ago when I began my service as minister in Harvard’s Memorial Church, an anonymous benefactor offered to present as many Bibles as were needed to fill the pews. No particular translation was specified, and no objections were made to the Revised Standard Version. Before proceeding too far along the road of this benefaction I felt it wise to take the advice of some colleagues, and I found their reaction to be apprehensive, and in fact quite suspicious of the motivation behind the gift. “What does the benefactor want or expect?” I was asked, and warned that placing Bibles in the pews would create an invitation to steal them. Further, I was warned that “people will think that this is a fundamentalist church. If they see Bibles in the pews you will have an image problem.” My colleagues and counselors meant well, I knew, and wished only to protect the church from secular and religious zealots. These concerns notwithstanding, however, we accepted the gift, placed the Bibles in the pews, and, happily, over the years we have lost quite a few to theft.

  A Nodding Acquaintance

  One of the more
embarrassing social situations, upon which even Miss Manners and other arbiters of social etiquette have failed to provide a useful strategy, is the one in which you have more than a nodding acquaintance with someone. At the point of introduction you got the person’s name, forgot it, asked it again, and forgot it again. Meanwhile you go on meeting this person, chatting and being chatted with, but you have clearly passed beyond the point where you can ask for the name again. It is easy enough to maintain the facade of friendship until that awful moment comes when you are required to introduce your nameless friend to a third party. What to do? I have seen artful evasions such as “Surely you two know each other?” followed by a discreet withdrawal while they got on with the job themselves, leaving you unexposed. Another stratagem is to avoid the risk of introduction altogether by declaring emphatically, “Ah! Here’s an old friend!” What we should know, pretend that we know, and wish that we knew, we don’t. Worse still, we do not know, without risk of embarrassment, how to ask about what we need to know.