(Return to my home page) : Blog Home : December 2006
The sanctity of marriage
December 7, 2006 08:55
Yesterday in my last Bible class of the semester we focused on one contemporary issue in relation to which the Bible is often quoted and referred to, namely homosexuality. I was impressed with the students' ability to see flaws in arguments that they probably would instinctively have sympathized with, and with the way they found sources reflecting different sides in the current debate.
Their own insights led me to express a greater cynicism about the current right-wing focus on homosexuality than I ever had before, because one issue that is often claimed to be at the center of this contemporary debate is the sanctity of marriage. But the truth is that the Bible says much less about homosexuality than about divorce, which it does emphasize as being a threat to the sanctity of marriage. Why, then, do we have a movement to amend the constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman (which the Bible doesn't, at least in terms of the number of women!), and not a movement to amend the constitution to prohibit divorce? The answer is shockingly simple: the latter would not gather widespread support that could unite people behind ministries and behind political candidates. That is the only answer that I can come up with that will explain why fundamentalists focus on issues that are low on the list of priorities in the Bible and ignore those issues that the Bible considers most important.
The highlight of the class was when we talked about Romans 1, which illustrates the importance of literary context in interpretation. The point of Romans 1 is to get certain readers to join in a classic Jewish polemic against Gentiles as sinners, so that Paul can then turn the tables on them and get them to recognize their own sinfulness. It is the same procedure used in the first couple of chapters of Amos. But Paul's very carefully crafted argument has met an enemy it could not foresee and against which it may be powerless to prevail: that enemy is versification, the division of the Bible into (frequently misleading) bite-sized chunks. When we seek guidance from the Bible, we regularly seek relevant verses. Yet a single verse is not the place to look for meaning. We need to be reading complete literary works in their entirety. One could read all of the Book of Job apart from the beginning and ending and conclude that Job's friends were correct. Context is everything, because as seminary professors warn their students all the time, "A text taken out of context becomes a pretext".
Da Vinci Code - The Movie is Better than the Book
December 8, 2006 13:35
I finally saw the movie of the Da Vinci Code a few days ago, and on the whole I think it has at least one major positive point in its favor over against the book. In the book, the reader is pushed towards the conclusion that the theories of Baigent and others about Mary Magdalene and all the rest are true. In the movie, Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks' character) regularly challenges Leigh Teabing's ideas as running counter to historical evidence or as speculation without sufficient proof. In the movie, all that is clear is that there is a secret society of people who genuinely believe that they are guardians of a secret that goes back to the time of Jesus. Rather than being a spy novel claiming to know more about church history than serious historians who have spent their lives studying it, the movie makes less grandiose claims, and is the better for it.
Abortion and the Bible
December 11, 2006 15:06
I am extremely grateful to a student of mine who recently drew my attention to a discussion of Exodus 21:22-25, which certainly does show it to be at the very least ambiguous as to whether this passage contrasts harm to the mother with harm to the unborn child, and it is certainly plausible to interpret it that harm to mother or child (apart from premature birth but with no other ill consequences) is punished according to the "eye for an eye, life for a life" principle. It does seem somewhat dubious, however, to make much of the contrast between yeled (child) and nephel (miscarriage/untimely birth), since the latter is only found three times with this meaning in the whole Bible, is also used (in the plural) for the giants known as the nephilim, and the word itself literally means "fallen one".
At any rate, the whole preceding discussion is rendered somewhat moot (or "moo" as Joey Tribbiani would say) when one considered the fact that the Bible actually commands (in passages such as 1 Samuel 15) the slaughter of the already born, including women and children who are clearly civilians. The truth is that one cannot in any easy fashion simply look at Biblical ethics and extrapolate to contemporary practice without significant problems.
Here are some useful sources on this topic:
http://www.rcrc.org/issues/ed_series.cfm
http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_biblcon.htm
http://ffrf.org/nontracts/abortion.php
Globalization (It's a Small World After All)
December 14, 2006 16:04
It is exam time, and as I take a brief break from reading my students' exam answers about globalization in South Asia, it strikes me that it is a mistake to think that what we refer to as globalization is in fact a new phenomenon. It is true that technology has made contact between opposite ends of the globe faster and more direct in innumerable ways. It is also true that today the dominant cultures are the economic empires, rather than those who actually conquer through war and take direct control of the government of a region or nation. Nevertheless, the reality of smaller cultures responding, and more specifically changing through the adoption and adaptation of ideas from a dominant culture with which they are confronted, is as old as human history itself. From my own field, one only has to read the Biblical literature in the order in which it was most likely written to witness the encounters of the Hebrews with Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman ideas. While it is a wonderful thing to be aware of the phenomenon of cultural influence, and make a concerted effort to help cultures maintain their identities over against the possibility of immersion and absorption into powerful dominant cultural trends, we will in so doing nevertheless simply be doing consciously something that has always been done. Cultures have never been static and have never existed in isolation, at least as far back as we have records of human history.
Postcards from Buster
December 18, 2006 09:38
As a parent who values diversity and is raising a child in a less diverse context (Indianapolis) than I myself grew up in (New York City), I have really valued the show Postcards from Buster on PBS, which introduces children to different ways of life in different parts of the United States and indeed the world.
I had mixed feelings when I saw today's New York Times article about the show and some controversy that has arisen regarding its inclusion of a family with "two moms". On the one hand, the children for whom this show is made are younger than the age at which parents want to explain "the birds and the bees" to them, and thus the question of how one broaches issues relating to sexuality is a difficult one. I balked at explaining my "Straight But Not Narrow" button to my own child.
On the other hand, the truth of the matter is that children are aware of the existence of families and of parents long before they have the sexual component explained to them. It is hard to imagine that there is any part of this country in which they will not encounter a parent that has opted for that anti-Christian alternative lifestyle choice, namely divorce. Yet because there is bigotry against homosexuals among Conservative religious people in our country, rather than merely theological objections to their activities, a bigger fuss is made about homosexuality than any reading of the Bible could justify.
It seems to me that, at the end of the day, the reactions to Postcards from Buster are just one more piece of evidence that religious fundamentalists in our society don't really value either democracy or freedom, in spite of the freedom of religion it provide for them. Let's face it, if the majority ruled without protection for minorities, would the mainstream "Middle Church
The religious far right wants to be able to live, and to raise its children, in a world in which it can pretend that homosexuals do not exist. That country is not America. And so I applaud the decision of PBS to create, and to continue broadcasting a show, where children who are old enough to learn (and NEED to learn) that there are other people not like them in this world, and whether they agree or disagree with them, whether they live like them or very differently, they should (1) know they exist and (2) get along civilly with them, at the very least. Keep up the good work, PBS!