Soul Force

What About the Bible?

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

October 24, 2010

^Reading

William Ellery Channing, Unitarian Christianity, 1819

We regard the Scriptures as the records of God's successive revelations to mankind, and particularly of the last and most perfect revelation of his will by Jesus Christ. Whatever doctrines seem to us to be clearly taught in the Scriptures, we receive without reserve or exception. We do not, however, attach equal importance to all the books in this collection. Our religion, we believe, lies chiefly in the New Testament…. Jesus Christ is the only master of Christians, and whatever he taught, either during his personal ministry, or by his inspired Apostles, we regard as of divine authority, and profess to make the rule of our lives.

This authority, which we give to the Scriptures, is a reason, we conceive, for studying them with peculiar care, and for inquiring anxiously into the principles of interpretation, by which their true meaning may be ascertained. The principles adopted by the class of Christians in whose name I speak [–Unitarians—], need to be explained, because they are often misunderstood….

Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books. We believe that God, when he speaks to the human race, conforms, if we may so say, to the established rules of speaking and writing. How else would the Scriptures avail us more, than if communicated in an unknown tongue?....

With these views of the Bible, we feel it our bounden duty to exercise our reason upon it perpetually, to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter to the spirit, to seek in the nature of the subject, and the aim of the writer, his true meaning; and, in general, to make use of what is known, for explaining what is difficult, and for discovering new truths.[i]

Eknath Easwaran, “Introduction” to The Bhagad Gita for Daily Living

There is no significant problem in life which cannot be referred to the Bhagavad Gita for a perfect solution. The Gita is one of the most powerful of the Sanskrit scriptures of ancient India, but in my eyes it is neither philosophy nor theology, metaphysics nor poetry. It is a practical manual for daily living in any age, in any religious tradition….

Every mystic will interpret the scriptures in accordance with the urgent needs of the times. Though the Bhagavad Gita is timeless, it too must be interpreted in accordance with the needs of the times—the yugadharma in Sanskrit, the 'special law of the age.' In The Bhagavad Gita, which is found in the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, is the most influential scripture to come down the ages in India. It is the quintessence of the Upanishads, giving us their perennial wisdom in a manner that can be systematically practiced. The Upanishads, which come at the end of the Vedas and are among the oldest, most revered Hindu scriptures, contain flashing insights into the nature of life and death. The Gita gives order to the insights of the Upanishads and tells us how to undertake spiritual disciplines to become aware of the supreme Reality always.

^Sermon

The late Jaroslav Pelikan, one of the most distinguished scholars of the Bible in the world, opens his book Whose Bible Is It? this way:

In a variation on all those old jokes about the rabbi, the priest, and the minister walking together into a bar, three women take advantage of the lunch hour in their downtown office to visit the bookstore across the street. One of them is Jewish, the other two are Christian—one Roman Catholic and the other Protestant. Because it is the season of Passover and Easter (closely related holidays that are nevertheless [often] observed on separate dates), each of them wants to buy a Bible for her daughter. And yet each of the three needs to buy a different Bible. Therefore, a knowledgeable clerk should ask each of them, "Which Bible do you want?" For not only must any buyer or reader of whatever religious affiliation find the many English translations of the Bible bewildering (King James Version, Revised Standard Version, New Revised Standard Version, Good News Version, Jewish Publication Society Version, New English Bible, Revised English Bible, Jerusalem Bible, New Jerusalem Bible, etc.), but the buyer has the right to expect "the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible." Yet the table of contents … is fundamentally different in the different Bibles. The difference between the Jewish Bible and all the Christian Bibles is the greatest: there is no New Testament, and the Jewish buyer ought to be able to demand "nothing but the Bible…." But the Protestant Bible is also very different from the Roman Catholic Bible: it has no Apocrypha, so the Roman Catholic customer may well ask, "Is this the whole Bible?" …. Five or ten minutes of comparison shopping ought to be enough for anyone to see the contrasts….[ii]

We find, then, that there are at least three different ways of understanding what we mean by “the Bible.” Terminology can be an issue, too. Christians consider the Bible to be divided into an Old Testament and a New Testament. These names have the unfortunate implication that Christianity has superseded Judaism, that we have the “New” version, the latest model; this is, of course, offensive to Jews, who regard their Bible as the only true revelation. The term most widely used in Jewish references to the Bible is “TaNaKh” – an acronym referring to the three major divisions of their Bible: Torah, the first five books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy, which is read from start to finish each year in synagogues; Neve’im, the prophets, which includes both the history of Israel: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, and also the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, as well as some twelve others; and Ketuvim, the writings, which include Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Daniel, and so on. The ordering of the books of the Bible as understood by Jews follows these divisions, and is therefore different from the order in the Christian Bible. Even the naming of the Bible of the Jews is a fraught issue; I was taught in seminary to refer to the “Hebrew Bible” rather than the “Old Testament” to avoid the implication that the Bible of the Jews is outdated or superseded. Just this week I learned from Rabbi Shira Joseph that “Hebrew Bible” is essentially a Protestant invention, and inaccurate in its own way because Jews don’t refer to themselves as Hebrew but as Jews; hence the better designation would be the “Jewish Bible,” so that’s the term I’ll use from now on.

It matters which Bible we use; we at Second Parish, of course, come from the Protestant tradition, so we almost never refer to the Apocrypha; and unlike our Jewish neighbors, we refer most often to the New Testament, especially to the gospels, which contain the teachings of Jesus. It is here we learn what is meant by “the spirit of Jesus,” in that phrase at the very heart of our covenant.

Having grown up in a church which taught that every word in the Bible is inspired and must be accepted as literally true, I’ve come to take a broader view of what the Bible is really about and why it matters. That view is represented by one of the earliest expressions of faith by our Universalist forebears, which starts with these words:

We believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments contain a revelation of the character of God, and of the duty, interest, and final destination of mankind.

Notice that it doesn’t say “the revelation,” as though there can only be one truth about what really matters in our lives, but rather “a revelation,” of which there can also be others. Even at this early stage, the founders of the Universalist side of our faith opened the door to the possibility of a diversity of approaches to the sacred. As Forrest Church put it in his last book before his untimely death, The Cathedral of the World, we live in a religious world in which there are countless windows facing out to the sacred that is beyond all naming, and ours is only one of those many.

My current understanding of the meaning and significance to us of the Bible is a view presented in the book Understanding the Bible: A Guide for Skeptics, Seekers, and Religious Liberals by John Buehrens, former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, currently the minister in Needham. Buehrens suggests that there are actually three levels on which it’s important for religious liberals, seekers and skeptics to understand the Bible: literary; prophetic, especially in support of social justice; and encouragement to spiritual growth.

The literary level is first of all about interpretation. In order to understand the literary meaning of the Bible, we have to understand something about the background of the Bible, what influenced its writers, something about the history about which they wrote and the knowledge they had available to them at that time. Just as a reminder, the Bible is not ONE book, it’s really a library – a biblios – containing a total of sixty-six books and probably at least as many authors in the Christian version, and thirty-nine books in the Hebrew or Jewish version.

It’s important to understand that the Bible is what we call “polyvocal”: it speaks in many voices, not just one. There are many points of view within the Bible. At one point the apostle Paul says that he forbids women to speak in the churches [I Timothy 2:11-12]; this has led some churches to decide that women should not become ministers or priests. At another point, Paul is also recorded as saying, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female.” [Galatians 3:28] The same Paul is saying there is complete equality between men and women and with another voice he’s declaring that men are superior. Most likely these two texts were written at different times in the early history of the church and responded to different needs in their own context. That does not make exclusion of women from the clergy normative for our very different society. Recently, feminist theologians and minority theologians have been mining these other voices and finding that there isn’t just one point of view in the Bible, there are many points of view. Sometimes when someone takes the Bible and holds it up and says, “This is the Bible and it means exactly what it says,” they’re engaging in what we might call “bibliolatry”—making an idol out of the Bible, making it be the whole thing that represents religion, when of course it can’t, since it doesn’t speak with a single voice itself.

This notion that there are many voices in the Bible undermines attempts to claim that the Bible proves exactly what we must believe. It is also consistent with this from The Buddha: "It is proper to doubt. Do not be led by holy scriptures, or by mere logic or inference, or by appearances, or by the authority of religious teachers. But when you realize that something is unwholesome and bad for you, give it up. And when you realize that something is wholesome and good for you, do it.”

The second level of understanding the Bible is social and political. The school of Liberation Theology has been particularly prominent in the last forty years; this way of thinking about the Bible and about God came out of Latin America in the 1970’s and 80’s, and its leaders pointed to what they called God’s “preferential option for the poor.” They cited the example of the Exodus, for example, where it’s the slaves of Egypt who are freed by the hand of God at the expense of the grand Pharaoh, and they pointed to other examples all through the Bible where the prophets, including Jesus, denounce the rich and the powerful, the ones who are stealing from the poor.

There’s a wonderful story in the second book of Samuel, chapter 12. King David —whom we remember fondly as the one who slew the giant Goliath in his youth, and about whom so many other charming stories are told—was not quite as attractive a figure as king. You may recall this story: While his army was out conquering another city, David saw the beautiful Bathsheba bathing on her roof. He called her over, seduced her, and then felt worried that her husband Uriah, who was off fighting in the king’s army, might find him out. David called Uriah back from the front on a pretext in the hope that he would spend the night with his wife, but Uriah instead chose to maintain his military discipline and set up his cot in front of his house. David then sent Uriah back to the front, instructing his general to ensure that Uriah will die during the assault. Uriah was killed; David, it seems, had gotten away with it. After all, who knew what he had done? David just gave an order, he’s a powerful man, so it’s not a problem any more.

A few days later, the prophet Nathan appeared before the king and told a story about a rich may who chose to rob his poor neighbor’s only lamb for a feast to avoid killing one of his many. King David jumped out of his chair in outrage and said, "As the LORD lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity." Nathan replied, “You are that man.”

There’s a prophetic voice here that has the courage to speak truth to power and say “You can’t treat people like that.” Your wealth or power does not give you the right to do whatever you want to people, even if you are the king or the president or the richest person in the world. Jesus says at the end of his ministry that in so far as we have dealt mercifully with the least among us, fed the hungry, visited the prisoners, clothed the naked, we have done it for him, for Jesus. Here, too, we see that the Bible is talking not to the wealthy, not to the powerful, but to the poor.

I think it’s important that we be aware of these broader meanings of the Bible in support of social justice and peace and not simply be silenced as religious liberals in discussing what the Bible says merely because some people have appropriated some pieces of it and proof-texted their way into a particular set of beliefs about our society and our economy. I think the gospel talks precisely about what drives us towards the kind of service that we here are committed to, the work of the food pantry, our support of Alcoholics Anonymous, the service we do as individuals. We need to continue to ask ourselves “Who is our neighbor” and work as a community to find new ways to express our love for our neighbors.

The third level of understanding the Bible is what our third principle refers to as our “encouragement to spiritual growth within our own congregations.” This is one that I’ve come to appreciate more as I’ve gotten older; sometimes that seems to happen to you. My father has read the Bible and prayed every morning for the past sixty years at least. I used to think this was just about his particular and, as I saw it, peculiar religion, but I’m finding that maybe there’s more to such a discipline than I knew when I was younger. We all require inward fuel for our journey; we can’t spend all of our energy helping others and serving causes. Some of the time we have to look within. Sometimes we find that these ancient texts can speak to us in a way that gives us strength, helps us by reminding us of other life journeys long ago, and shows us how to find our own paths.

Let me return, then, to the key reasons I find myself drawn back to re-reading and studying and teaching the Bible. The stories remain challenging to us across the generations because they remind of the strengths and weaknesses of the human condition, of the false presumptions into which we so easily fall by which older siblings are entitled or might makes right, or we convince ourselves to do things we shouldn’t by blinding ourselves to their real consequences for others. In this way, the Bible has been and continues to be a significant source of wisdom and strength for anyone who has ears and is willing to listen. In a broader sense, the Bible as a whole, by bringing us as it does back to a very different world, provides us a ruler against which to measure ourselves. It is not our own world, of course, but by giving us a yardstick it reminds us that this modern era of ours, this day in which we are living, is neither the finest nor necessarily the best time or place to be living. It reminds us not to make an idol of the way we live, to blithely assume that life as we know it here in the United States today is the best or only way anyone on earth now or at any time wants or should want to live. Finally, the Bible reminds us over and over that God sides with the underdog, that the youngest and weakest is not therefore less human or capable than the eldest or strongest – that David can hope to beat Goliath. Over and over the younger son comes out on top, or a woman leads the way to victory in battle because the man who should be doing it is a coward, or the weaker army prevails because it has justice and righteousness on its side. Over and over, we are reminded that the measure of a society lies in how well it cares the widows and orphans, the weak and defenseless, the least among us.

So we ask, how can words from these scriptures speak to us and to what in us can they speak? Let’s learn to discard the transient and find and honor the permanent, to discard the cultural appearance and adhere to the spirit of truth, the spirit of love, the Spirit of Life, which is borne in these words as also in those of all sacred scriptures.

May it be so, and Amen.