For those who hold to the intimate relationship between the Bible and the culture, the Bible often becomes an icon of that culture. The culture sees itself mirrored in the Bible, the Bible is understood to be the norm by which the culture is defined, and this often results in the Bible’s use as a textbook for the status quo. Nearly every motion for social change in America has been resisted on biblical grounds—to change is to go against the Bible. What is, is what is mandated by the Bible. What is not, is not because the Bible either forbids it or does not endorse or require it. Thus, change is not simply tinkering with the culture, it is tinkering with the Bible, and therefore tinkering with God. This sort of view was expressed by the middle-aged Englishwoman of a generation ago, who said, “If God had intended man to fly, He would not have given us the railroads.” Every reform movement in America, every movement for social or political or cultural change, has had to encounter an argument of this sort, and the ultimate resistance of appeals to fidelity to scripture. The example was set by John Winthrop in 1630, and we have not departed from it.
This appeal to scripture has ironically also been made in behalf of wide-ranging and comprehensive change in American life. The Bible that to many seems an icon of the cultural status quo is seen by many others as an agent for social change, much of it radical. The arguments from scripture for and against slavery, for example, come to mind, and we shall examine these and other hard texts and changing, times in the second portion of this book. Here, however, we should look at a powerful movement of our own time, itself a part of the renovation of the American cultural household after World War II: the movement for civil rights.
Many will argue that the history of civil rights in twentieth-century America is a history of the law and public policy. Others will argue that the achievement of civil rights for African Americans was one of the great social inevitabilities of our nation, an idea whose time had to come. Still others will see it as merely the last battle of the Civil War. It may be any or all of these, but I think that it is important for us to understand the civil rights movement as a religious movement based upon a particular reading not only of the national documents of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but of the Bible. The civil rights movement was a moral crusade, and the content of that morality was determined by a sense of biblical justice and equity before God.
It is the fashion to remember Martin Luther King, Jr., as the master orator and strategist of the movement, and its ultimate martyr; he was, for many, the conscience of twentieth-century America. It is also a part of the fashion, however, to forget that he was first and foremost a Christian minister whose thought and cadence were framed by an understanding of the Bible as a way of understanding God’s design for human beings. He was a Christian preacher before he was anything else. Revisionist historians who minimize this dimension of Dr. King and the movement he led diminish that movement and are incapable of seeing it whole, or of understanding its motivation or its impact.
The trouble with Martin Luther King, Jr., is that he believed more in America and in America’s God than America did. He actually believed that the nation wished to be a nation under God, that it wished to live up to the moral ambition of its founding documents, that it wished to find a way to do right and to be right. Historians of the movement and biographers of King all emphasize his reliance upon the strategy of Gandhi and the principles of passive resistance, and that that strategy was only part of a much larger one, which was to shame America into being what it pretended to be. He did not invite America to revolution or to fundamental change, much to the annoyance of his more radical critics both white and black; his case was to urge America, and to shame it if he had to, into upholding its own first principles, to affirming its own myths and metaphors, to becoming the very “city set upon a hill” that the very white John Winthrop had so long before invoked as a vision of the New World.
For King, the Bible hardly read as a textbook of the status quo, for it was full of change from Genesis to Revelation. Adam and Eve are not permitted to abide in eternal felicity in the Garden of Eden. They must move on. Moses leads his people, often against their will, out of the stability of slavery in Egypt and into the vividly vague uncertainties of the promised land. The prophets of Israel are always warning the powers-that-be against complacency and against taking too much for granted. King would have known with delight and urgency the words of the prophet Amos, “Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria, the notable men of the first of the nations, to whom the house of Israel come!” (Amos 6:1)
In the Bible, kings are upended, kingdoms totter and fall, those who have power lose it, those who have none gain it. The New Testament is no easier: Jesus’ very existence is a threat to any and every status quo, and his resurrection even overturns the rule of nature. The Christians of Paul’s era reject the blandishments and power of this world; the Book of Hebrews celebrates a kingdom unlike those of this world, one that cannot be shaken; Paul seeks a peace that this world can neither give nor take away, that passeth understanding; and the Revelation of John is as radical a vision of the future in triumph over the present as the mind of man has yet devised. No, for Martin Luther King, Jr., the proof text for the movement, for himself, and for America was not one of the prophetic paeans to social justice from the Old Testament, but rather I Corinthians 15:52: “The trumpet shall sound…and we shall all be changed.”
Our Current Discontents
Today, both social conservatives and social activists are unhappy with the status quo. Each feels that the culture has reneged on a moral commitment in which each has invested heavily. To listen to the Christians who support Pat Robertson’s 700 Club is to hear a litany of betrayal and disenfranchisement and profound dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. “Moral drift” is what they call it. They recognize it in changing social mores that are tolerant on such matters as abortion and homosexuality, and in a climate that seems to be driven by anti-family values, social violence, and the corrosive effects of an ever-present pornography.
If the social conservatives are unhappy one would suspect in this winlose culture that the social activists should be happy, but they too pine for the days of yore and the days that are yet to be. There is nothing more depressing than to hear recited the litany of lost ground and lost opportunity which so often is at the center of today’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Day celebrations. As veterans of the movement age and their glory days grow more distant, they compare the moral energy of that generation with the apparent moral indifference of today. The backlash against affirmative action, the cut in social-service budgets, the hardening of attitudes toward minorities and the poor, particularly toward the urban poor, the seemingly intractable problems of black crime, the decline of the black family, and the economic instability of the black middle class—all of these cause social activists, in flights of rhetorical fancy not too far removed from fact, to declare that “we are worse off now than we were before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” The wholesale burning of black churches across the American South in the summer of 1996 is a hideous flashback to those long hot summers not so long ago, when in the South, instead of burning churches, they lynched the black people who went to them.
Two things hold these apparently polar constituencies of social conservatives and social activists together in what ought to be a creative tension: their anger and their expectation that things ought to be better. Of this visceral cultural anger that cuts across all conventional divisions in our society, Russell Baker has written, under the heading “God’s Angry Land,”
America is angry at Washington, angry at the press, angry at immigrants, angry at television, angry at traffic, angry at people who are well off, angry at people who are poor, angry at blacks and angry at whites. The old are angry at the young, the young angry at the old. Suburbs are angry at cities, cities are angry at suburbs, and rustic America is angry at both whenever urban and suburban intruders threaten
the peaceful rustic sense of having escaped from God’s angry land.
Baker calls anger in America “a new national habit.” Angry white Christians and angry black social activists both feel cheated. The things that have always worked for them no longer do so, and their anger stems from a disappointed conviction that somehow progress was inevitable and things and people would get better. As a British critic of the Welfare State once noted, however, “Things have got better; it’s people who have got bloody worse.”
Sir Isaiah Berlin once observed that “the ideas that liberate one generation become the shackles of the next,” and in these tendentious times in America we are coming to a painful realization of that truth. We have always celebrated the notion of freedom, and by it we have usually meant freedom from restraint or constraint, and liberation from various forms of bondage and tyrannies political, social, economic, and ideological. The history of our social experiment may well be the extension of that premise to its logical conclusion—the ultimate, nearly autonomous freedom of the solitary individual from all restraints, constraints, obligations, and relationships. In these celebrations of “freedom from” as a uniquely American form of self-indulgence, the middle-aged Free-men of Justus Township, Montana, are the 1990s descendants of the flower children of the 1960s Haight-Ashbury District, a comparison neither would find flattering.
That rugged individualism that is the personification of our American sense of freedom, and which we celebrate on the Fourth of July and in our popular myths and heroes, also contributes to the breakdown of the social fabric that has always provided a secure context for our freedoms. Freedom “from” has not yielded to an appropriate freedom “for,” and the national culture is much the poorer for it. We are perhaps further now from Winthrop’s ideal of a city set upon a hill than at any point in our national history.
Back to the Bible?
In times like these in America, historically we have been invited “back to the Bible,” and there are many who issue that call today. So-called Bible churches are filled on Sundays with people seeking a way into the good life, people who are literally hungering and thirsting after righteousness. We will discuss that search in more detail in the final section of this book. “Back to the Bible!” is the cry of many sincere Christians, and as we draw nearer to the millennium, and as our troubles and problems develop new immunities to our quick-fix vaccines, that cry will grow in volume and in intensity. If the concept of “back to the Bible” means an effort to find a time and a place in which we will not be disturbed by the world in which we find ourselves, and an effort to find a secure, user-friendly, no-risk place to conserve ourselves and our worldly goods from threat and danger—much like those 1950s Cold War backyard bomb shelters—then we are doomed to disappointment, for the Bible makes no such promises to Americans or to anyone else in this life.
If we accept the call to go back to the Bible, we will have to do so with an unnatural cultural modesty that makes it clear that we are seeking what we have not yet enjoyed—the effort to conform our will and our work to the will and the work of God. The land we seek is not behind us, it is before us, and that is the secret the Bible has always been willing to impart to those who would seek it. The Bible opens with an account of creation in the Book of Genesis; it closes with a revelation of a time superior to this one, a time that is yet to be. Reading the Bible to find ways of justifying the status quo, then, is an enterprise that is bound for frustration and failure.
The temptations to misread the Bible on our own behalf and to domesticate it for our own purposes are many and dangerous, and in America, devoted as we are to the Bible, we have tried them all. Bibliolatry, the worship of the Bible and the making of it an object of veneration, of ascribing to it the glory due to God, is one of those temptations that we ought to avoid. Literalism, which worships the text and gives it an inappropriate superiority over the spirit that animates it, is another temptation to be eschewed. And the worst of these, what I call culturism, is the worship of a culture in which the Bible is forced to conform to the spirit of the age. In our discussions of interpretation we have addressed those temptations, which in the context of the religious culture of the United States have not served us very well.
The Bible is a book for the future, about the future, and written with confidence in the future. It embraces the future not out of disgust with the present or with the past but out of the conviction that God is in the future, and to be where God is, is to know fulfillment, purpose, and bliss. Who should be satisfied with anything less than that? Recovering the lost vision for America may mean recovering God’s vision for a future society of equity, love, and peace, a society rich with change and destined for a world we have not yet known. Making sense of the Bible has been an American cultural preoccupation now for nearly four hundred years. We are neither righteous Israel nor decadent Rome. We are, however, a needy nation, as needy of God and of one another as we have ever been. Perhaps this bottoming out of our experience will make us less arrogant, less certain of our Manifest Destiny, more desirous of being transformed, and less willing to conform. The Bible is not a therapy program nor is it a human success story, a moral tale with an inevitably happy ending. It is the account of a faithless people and a faithful God who seek constantly to renew their relationship each with the other. Perhaps we are prepared to hear that story for the first time.
Part Two
The Use and Abuse of the Bible
“Either this is not the gospel, or we are not Christians,”
—THOMAS LINACRE (1460–1524),
upon reading the gospels
late in life for the first time
Chapter 4
Hard Texts and Changing Times
THE Bible would be a difficult enough book to read were it used simply as an aid to private devotion and inspiration, and even in reading for that purpose one would usually read with some selectivity. Pocket versions of the Bible often contain the Psalms and the gospels. Within the Psalms alone one is likely to encounter powerfully disturbing passages that are not all soothing and “spiritual.” How, for example, does one apply to one’s devotions Psalm 137:9, which reads, “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock”?
More Than a Private Book?
The Bible has always been more than a private book. It is, in fact, and always has been, a very public book; public in the sense that it is to be read and commented upon in public. We see this in the account of Jesus’ visit to his home synagogue at the start of his public ministry, when his first act was to read the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, to do so in public, and then to comment on it. The implication is that the Bible is meant to have an effect upon the way in which people and their communities go about the business of life.
When we read in Exodus and Deuteronomy of the delivery to Moses of the law, in the form of the commandments from God on Mount Sinai, we are meant to understand that this is not simply a public occasion, but the establishment of what we would today call public policy. The Bible is for people, but more than that, it is understood to be for the ordering of the private and the public, the individual and the corporate affairs of a community of people. In Jewish history, the community is formed when it is given the law: Whereas before the delivery of the law the people are a rowdy assortment of individuals with private and personal agendas, they become something other than that when the law is given to them; they become the people of God. I Peter 2:9–10 alludes to this transformation:
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were no people but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy but now you have received mercy.
The Bible, then, does not simply have a public dimension; it is a public book, and those to whom it is given and who take it seriously are meant to order their affairs from it.
This public dimension of the B
ible has a long history, and some of that history is heroic and dramatic. We have a clear image of Daniel in the lion’s den—the brave Jew and the menacing lions ready to tear him apart—but we ought to remember that Daniel was thrown into the lion’s den because he practiced his Jewish religion in public and at great consequence in the face of the Babylonians who had captured Jerusalem. We know what happened: God stopped the mouths of the lions and Daniel was spared.
Hebrew scripture is filled with accounts of public fidelity to God’s law against powerful opposition. It was public fidelity to the law as found in the Bible that distinguished the Jewish people from every other people on the earth, when in their minority status and in exile this public fidelity preserved them as well as distinguished them. Christians also became people of the Book. In the days when they too were a persecuted and then barely tolerated minority within the Roman Empire, they and their Book were considered to be subversive. The Christian loyalty to its own system, to its one Book and its one God, was held to contribute directly to the fall of Rome to the Vandals: The Roman gods, in the city’s hour of need, felt unappeased and thereby failed to protect the Romans from their fate. It was to counter this charge that Augustine wrote The City of God.
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