The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  Minds and hearts are indeed very difficult to change, and especially so when the unchanged mind and heart are sustained in their convictions by the sanctions of the Bible, to which all authority is submitted, and when those convictions reinforce and are reinforced by the cultural consensus—those extra-biblical lenses through which scripture itself inevitably is read. Minds and hearts were already changing in the culture of the South, however, and the source of that change was not necessarily the culture imperialism of the alien North, but a changed reading and hearing of scripture. For example, in 1956 Floyd Bryant, a self-confessed “sixty-three year old white man, a Baptist, and a Southerner,” wrote an article in The Southern Baptist Review and Expositor under the title, “On Integration in the Churches.” This is what he wrote:

  Throughout the first sixty years of my life I never questioned but that Peter’s confession that “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34) referred exclusively to the differences among white Christian persons. Neither did I question that segregation was Christian, and that it referred to the separation of white and Negro people. Three years ago (1953) these views were completely transformed. I became convinced that God makes no distinctions among people whatever their race and that segregation is exclusively by God in the final judgment. I exchanged the former views which I had absorbed from my environment, for the latter views which I learned from the New Testament. I came to understand the meaning of Paul’s plea, “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.”7 (Romans 12:2)

  Fixed Text and Changed Minds

  Here we have an instance, and a remarkably vivid one at that, in which the mind and the heart are changed because scripture requires that in Christ minds and hearts be changed—or transformed, in Paul’s language. What is remarkable is that the text itself remains fixed and unchanged. No new translations have emerged to clarify textual issues. No hidden or lost manuscripts have been unearthed that would unfix longsettled opinion. No startling revelations external to the biblical text have been discovered with radical new information. What has changed, however, is the climate of interpretation, indeed, the lenses with which we read the texts and tell the tales. The texts have not changed but we have, and the world with us. Scripture, like Jesus Christ himself, may be the same yesterday, today, and forever, but our capacity to read scripture and to appropriate Jesus Christ and his teachings is not. No one in contemporary America, except perhaps the most hard-bitten white supremicist, would read scripture with regard to race in the same way as Southern Baptists read it a century ago, or even thirty years ago; and no one feels that some travesty of scriptural integrity has happened because of that fact. The racial theories based on the tortured inheritance of the sons of Noah, upon which racism in America and apartheid in South Africa were based, have yielded to Saint Paul’s notion of the new creation in Christ and the transformed, renewed mind. The very same Paul who was seen as the apostle of the status quo is now also, and by the same people, seen as the apostle of liberation.

  It is not scripture that has changed, but rather the moral imagination by which we see ourselves, and see and read scripture. It is that moral imagination that tells us what we see and hear in scripture, and it is that same imagination that allows us to translate those transforming images into the world in which we find ourselves. The moral imagination, liberated from slavery to the literal text, also liberates from the cultural captivity of context both ancient and contemporary, and is informed by nothing less than what Christians call the Holy Spirit. That is why the Book of Hebrews describes scripture as “sharper than a two-edged sword.” That is why scripture is referred to as “the lively oracles of God.”

  Anticipating the act of the Southern Baptists by two years, no less a Southern Baptist and American icon than Billy Graham defined racial and ethnic hatred as a sin. Writing in Christianity Today in October 1993, of the culture of which he has been so conspicuous a part, Graham said:

  Tragically, too often in the past evangelical Christians have turned a blind eye to racism or have been willing to stand aside while others take the lead in racial reconciliation, saying it was not our responsibility. (I admit I share in that blame.) As a result, may efforts toward reconciliation in America have lacked a Christian foundation and may not outlive the immediate circumstances that brought them into existence.

  Then, with the authority of the preacher who has lived intimately and publicly in the culture to which he now speaks, Billy Graham concludes:

  Our consciences should be stirred to repentance by how far we have fallen short of what God asks us to be as agents of reconciliation…. Of all people, Christians should be the most active in reaching out to those of other races, instead of accepting the status quo of division and animosity.8

  C. Eric Lincoln, the distinguished social historian of black America, when asked in the summer of 1995 to comment on the Southern Baptists’ repentance, said, “Just think of all the violence and bitterness we might have been spared if the Southern Baptists had repudiated racism sooner.” This doubtless is true, and the sentiment of some that this is too little, too late, while ungracious, is surely understandable. This, though, is not about timetables, nor is it really about correcting a historical grievance; it is about how we read the Bible, and about the creation of the moral imagination that allows us to do so. In that same moral imagination it is never too late to be right, or to be good.

  Chapter 6

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

  THE Havard University Choir, arguably one of the great choral groups in America, has enjoyed that reputation over a very long period of time and refreshes it regularly with an astonishing output of good singing. Under a succession of distinguished choirmasters it has embraced the world’s greatest choral literature, and when it sings the incomparable repertoire of Palestrina, Schutz, Mozart, and Bach on a Sunday morning in The Memorial Church, it preaches as no mere prose preacher can. Where words fail, or at best divide, music succeeds at the most fundamental and ultimate level of communication, and many an undergraduate singer, indifferent to theology, unmoved by the Bible, and perhaps even hostile to religion, has been brought to the borders of heaven itself by the experience of singing this great choral literature of the Christian West.

  It was a profound experience of a quite different sort with which I was confronted after a University Choir performance of Bach’s St. John Passion on a Good Friday evening some years ago. The rehearsals had been long and intense, the performance, on the most solemn evening of the Christian year, was perfection itself, and on the next day, Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, one of the undergraduate singers came to see me. She was in tears, and they were not of joy. Her dilemma was that she loved the music of Bach to which her singing in our choir had introduced her, and the most demanding and satisfying aesthetic experience of her young life had been achieved in the performance of the evening before.

  As her fellow singers had, she had steeped herself in the music and in the countless rehearsals that had made the performance itself almost something of an anticlimax. True singer that she was, she knew that the true experience was in the rehearsals. The actual performance, however, had unhinged her. She was Jewish, she knew German, and she was torn apart because the cultural experience that had given to her and to so many others such pleasure was also the very same cultural experience that had destroyed her people and that remained a constant threat to the integrity of her own cultural identity. While her aesthetic self said, “This text is against me and my people, and combined they represent everything horrid and hateful that has ever happened to any Jew at the hands of any Christian. How can this be good music or God’s music? How dare I participate in it, much less enjoy it?”

  I could listen to her and try really to hear what she was saying. I could talk on and on about contextualization, and art transcending politics, and the ironic hope that beau
ty could cancel wickedness, but I knew in my heart that I had little of real substance to say to her because she was right. The beauty of Bach’s passion was grounded in the horrid realities of Christianity’s original sin of anti-Semitism, amplified, alas, by the Lutheran culture of post-Reformation Germany within which Bach had flourished and done his best work.

  As a footnote to this, I asked my colleague, the university choirmaster, why the Passion was not sung in English, since an English translation of the text had been provided while the performance in the darkened church had been given in flawless German. I expected him to give me some artistically correct apology for authentic performance practice in an effort to reproduce the effect of the Lutheran services of the eighteenth century where these passions would be performed, but he did not. With a pastoral sympathy equal to his capacity for making great music, he said, “In German it is less harsh; we can have much of the beauty without most of the pain.” That “pain” was not the suffering of Jesus. It was rather the pain that Christians, in the name of that suffering Jesus, have imposed upon the Jews.

  Another instance of the painfulness of Christianity occurred early in my ministry in The Memorial Church. My predecessor had extended the hospitality of the university’s church, a consecrated Christian space lean in the architectural vernacular of Harvard’s New England Protestant heritage, for use of the Jewish community at the time of the autumn High Holy Days. Space for meetings was ever in short supply, and the addition of space in The Memorial Church was a welcome relief. I was delighted to continue the happy custom, finding it congenial that this house of prayer for all people was in fact being used hospitably for all people. A crisis, however, arose when for the first time in this relationship one of the functionaries making arrangements for the Jewish services asked that the one cross, carved into the woodwork of the rood screen that separates nave and chancel from choir, be covered up. This had never before been requested, and I confessed to a certain reluctance to agreeing to the request, arguing that it would not make the space any less Christian to the Jewish worshipers, and it would give considerable offense to those who would regard the covering of the cross as an act of gross insensitivity to the Christian faith.

  It was explained to me then that at the High Holy Days, in addition to the young people of the university who would throng to the services, there would also be many older people and for some of these the sight of a Christian cross in the place of their most intimate and significant devotions would represent neither hospitality nor generosity of spirit. It would represent the horrors of two thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism and, for many, more immediate memories of the twisted cross of the Holocaust. No hospitality at all was better than a hospitality, however generous and sincere, that invoked such terrors upon one’s guests. I had long known, in something of an abstract way, the painful fallout of Christian anti-Semitism, but never before had I been confronted with the unavoidable fact that what was dearest to me in all the world, the sign and symbol of all that was true and good and holy, was not merely a “stumbling block,” to use Saint Paul’s freighted phrase in his letter to the Corinthians, but a gallows—a sign of all the perversity of which this fallen world is capable.

  We never resolved the matter, for life is too untidy for a solution that would put all of our anxieties to rest, but we did reach an accommodation with Solomonic implications. We decided that rather than exclude symbols, we would include them, and we commissioned the manufacture of a Torah screen with suitable inscriptions in Hebrew, from Hebrew scripture, which on the High Holy Days would enrich the worship of all God’s people in this particular space. The very untidy nature of this episode forced me as a Christian minister to face the remorseless tensions between the exclusive and inclusive elements of my Christian faith.

  Not all Christian ministers, however, are allowed the luxury of learning within a climate of thoughtful dialogue all that they need to know on these matters. The case of the Reverend Bailey Smith, formerly president of the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination, comes to mind. On August 22, 1980, Smith was quoted as saying,

  “I’m telling you, all other gods besides Jehovah and his son Jesus Christ are strange gods. It’s interesting to me…how you have a Protestant to pray, and a Catholic to pray, and then you have a Jew to pray. With all due respect to those dear people, my friends, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew. For how in the world can God hear the prayer of a man who says that Jesus Christ is not the true Messiah? It is blasphemous. It may be politically expedient…because no one can pray unless he prays through the name of Jesus Christ. It is not Jesus among many. It is Jesus, and Jesus only. It is Christ only. There is no competition for Jesus Christ.”1

  Nearly every major paper in the country carried an account of Dr. Smith’s remarks, usually under a headline such as GOD DOES NOT HEAR JEWISH PRAYERS. The reactions were swift and predictable. Marc Tenenbaum, national Interreligious Affairs director for the American Jewish Committee, called the remarks “morally offensive, really a defamation of four thousand years of loyalty,” and accused Smith of “invincible ignorance.” The director of the Interfaith Witness at the Southern Baptist Mission Board, said that Smith’s remark, “instead of furthering understanding, actually impedes it.” The editor of The Bible Recorder, the journal of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, said that he felt sorry for Southern Baptist missionaries working in Israel. “These words,” he said of Smith’s remarks, “could easily negate all the fine spadework that former SBC president Jimmy Allen and others have done there.” Smith’s remarks were apparently broadcast all over Israel, in Hebrew and in English, on the eve of Yom Kippur. Even Ronald Reagan got into the debate during his campaign for the presidency. Distancing himself from Jerry Falwell and from Bailey Smith, Mr. Reagan said, “Since both the Christian and Judaic religions are based on the same God, the God of Moses, I’m quite sure those prayers are heard…. But then, I guess everybody can make his own interpretation of the Bible, and many individuals have been making differing interpretations for a long time.”2

  Smith himself said, “I was emphasizing the distinctive nature of Jesus Christ. I still believe it is blasphemous to say that Jesus Christ is not the Messiah or Savior.” He went on to say, “As a Christian minister I must proclaim what the Bible says in I Timothy 2:5: ‘For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.’ ” Letters of support appeared in Southern Baptist denominational periodicals indicating that Smith’s position was by no means out of the mainstream of Southern Baptist opinion. One, typical of these, concluded: “The very name of Jesus is an offense to the Jew. But the only way they can ever be saved, and we will never get them or anyone else saved by compromising the gospel of Jesus Christ in order to make it palatable to the natural mind.”

  The writer based her argument on Acts 4:12: “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” To her, Smith had got it right, and the criticism he was seeing from around the world simply confirmed the truth of what he had to say. “There is no other God but by the way of the cross. And we should never compromise the word of God in order not to offend the world.”

  The controversy died down as the nation turned to the presidential elections of November 1980, and Bailey Smith and Rabbi Ronald B. Sobel, head of the National Program Committee of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, announced the establishment of a joint working group and a seven-point program which, they argued, “represents an important step forward for Baptists and Jews.” The controversy seemed settled, but the relationship between the views of Dr. Smith, which proved so offensive to many, and the Christian scriptures upon which they appear to be based, is an issue that has been with us since the earliest days of the Christian community, and will not go away, and is not easily resolved. The critical question is whether it is possible to believe in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, and to belie
ve the New Testament as the living and true word of God in which Jesus is revealed, and to not be anti-Semitic? Or, as a contemporary New Testament scholar has put it, “When reading the Bible, must the Good News for Christians always be bad news for Jews?”

  What Does the Bible Say About Jews?

  And all the people answered, “His blood be on us and on our children.” Then he [Pontius Pilate] released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, delivered him to be crucified.

  (Matthew 27:25–26)