Roots…

Reading the Bible with Unitarian Universalist Eyes

Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham

October 8, 2006

The Bible is the best-selling book of all time; it is understood by some to contain everything that is needed to lead a good life. It is regarded by others as completely irrelevant to anything of value in their lives. I was raised in a family which held and still holds to the first understanding, and for many years after leaving home I held to the second. I have come now as a Unitarian Universalist to hold a position somewhere in the middle. I believe that knowing the Bible is important to us as a people of faith so that we can understand how others use it and sometimes abuse it; but I also believe that the Bible can still speak to us as individuals, and I have therefore returned to reading the Bible regularly for my own edification.

The key question for us to consider in reading the Bible is how it is to be interpreted. If we interpret it literally, as I was taught as a child to do, we often find ourselves struggling with the conflict between the worldview expressed in the Bible and our own, influenced as it is by almost two millennia of discovery and change since the Bible was finalized in its current form. But Conservative Christians hold that the Bible is inerrant—that God inspired it and it is therefore free of any error. As one of my friends expressed it on a bumper sticker: “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” If only it were that easy!

William Ellery Channing provided the foundation for a Unitarian understanding of the Bible in his 1819 sermon, “Unitarian Christianity,” an address which also served to launch Unitarianism as a religious movement in this country and defined the doctrines of Unitarianism as opposed to Trinitarianism. In that address, Channing said,

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…. [A]ll books, and all conversation, require in the reader or hearer the constant exercise of reason.[1]

Unlike many other books, the Bible is also an exceedingly ancient document which has been reproduced by many hands over millennia. In the course of many copies being created by hand, errors crept in. One scholar estimates that there are some 300,000 variants in the many texts of the New Testament, more variants than all of the words in the New Testament itself.[2] In most cases, these variants are insignificant, but some cases they can have a impact on what the Bible is understood to say. To take one quick example, 1 John 5:7-8 in the King James version reads: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.” This text has been widely used as a proof-text for the Trinity, but in fact the part of the text with the Trinitarian formula is attested in very few copies prior to the sixteenth century; here is how the contemporary New Revised Standard Version renders the same passage: “There are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree.” Identifying discrepancies in the ancient manuscripts like this is part of what our Unitarian and Universalist forbears meant by applying reason to scripture.

More than that, I discovered as I returned to reading the Bible in seminary that even in the text as commonly accepted there are some curious anomalies. There are, for example, two very different accounts of creation in the first three chapters of Genesis. In one, human beings are created in the image of God, both male and female. In the other, Eve, mother of all humankind, is created from Adam’s rib. If you read the account of the flood and Noah’s ark, you find that there seem to be two versions of the story intertwined with each other. We all “know” the story of the birth of Jesus, but in fact there are two very different accounts, one in Matthew and the other in Luke, and a careful comparison between them reveals many differences which are blended together in the story we tell every Christmas Eve.

In seminary I began to understand how this might have come about, how the different oral and written traditions were put together to create a book which became a library, a collection of writings from various periods, which was in turn canonized or blessed by the authorities in the Jewish and Christian traditions, and thereby became the sacred literature of those traditions, just as has happened for many other scriptures, such as the Vedic tradition in India or the Buddhist tradition in Southeast Asia.

Now, I grew up with a fairly literal approach to the Bible; we were fond of “proof-texting,” of pulling a particular verse out of the Bible and saying, “You see, that proves that whatever I believe is true.” One favorite in the church where I grew up was John:3:16, which reads, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life.” That particular proof-text is a way of declaring that you must be born again, so it’s taken by born-again Christians as a basis for saying you have to believe like I do because it says so right there in the Bible, and here’s the proof-text–John 3:16.

When I was about fifteen, I was a pretty good debater, and I’d had lots of exposure to the Bible. I went with my grandfather on a visit to a cousin of his who was himself being visited by some Jehovah’s Witnesses. Like the people in my family and the church I grew up in, Jehovah’s Witnesses are very good at reading the Bible and using proof texts. It turned out in the course of our conversation that their proof texts were quite different from the ones I was accustomed to. In fact, they were using their particular proof texts to construct a version of Christianity that was entirely foreign to my grandfather and me. I was fifteen at the time, and my appetite for conflict was whetted—after all, I was a debater, so I was motivated to study hard until the next week, when we’d go back and have another round of debate with these folks. But the next morning my grandfather called up to me and said, “We can’t go back there. My faith was never so shaken as it was last night.” I realized that his faith, his belief in a particular set of doctrines, was built on a set of proof texts, a particular way of looking at the Bible that gave him a certain amount of comfort, but that could be shattered if someone cited a different set of proof texts. I realized that I would have to look a little deeper; that was part of the reason I left that church, because I realized that there had to be more to learning how to live than a kind of faith that could be shaken so readily.

I’ve come to take a broader view of what the Bible is really about, a view I’ll be sharing in the course on Reading the Bible we’ll be starting here in a few weeks. It’s a view represented 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. There’s the literary level: the Bible is important because it pervades the literature and the language of English; the King James Bible along with Shakespeare have nurtured the language, the rhythms on which we’ve grown up. In the same way, Luther’s translation of the Bible into German helped to define the written German language from his day forward. More than that, the Bible has inspired and provided many of the themes and stories that occur in English literature.

There’s a second level that I‘ve become a lot more concerned about in the last few years and that is the level in which the Bible speaks about social justice and about what it means not to oppress people. It turns out that if you read the Bible closely, God is almost always taking the side of the oppressed. It doesn’t always seem that way, because frequently leaders of countries, leaders of churches, leaders of empires act as though the Bible were supporting their choices; but actually, when push comes to shove, the Bible supports the poorest among us, not the richest or the most powerful.

Thirdly, I think the Bible also addresses some issues that are important to our third Unitarian Universalist principle, the encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.

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 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] With one voice 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 them 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 if you take the Bible and hold it up and say, “This is the Bible and it means exactly what I say,” you’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 35 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 pointed to 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—David as King was not quite as attractive a figure. You may recall this story: One day the king is on the roof of his palace when he looks down and he sees a beautiful woman taking a bath—Bathsheba, as we learn later, the most beautiful woman in the city—and he invites her over for tea and, well, one thing leads to another and they sleep together and he ends up feeling guilty and worried about getting caught. It happens that Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, is fighting a war on behalf of King David; he’s out in the front lines of the battle. David conceives a plot to get himself out of trouble. He calls Uriah back from the front and invites him to rest in his own home and sleep with his wife Bathsheba. Unfortunately for David, Uriah turns out to be a faithful soldier; he says, “No, as long all of my companions are out in the front, I’m not going to partake of the comforts of home,” and he quite conspicuously sets up his cot in front of his house. Having failed with his first scheme, David hatches a second. He sends Uriah back to the front, and he instructs his general to send Uriah all the way to the front lines of the army and then to pull back and leave him unprotected so that he will be killed. Uriah is killed; David, it seems, has gotten away with it. After all, who knows what he has done? David just gave an order, he’s a powerful man, so it’s not a problem any more.

A few days later, Nathan appears before the king. Nathan is kind of a consigliore, a court counselor, a prophet, and he doesn’t come right to the point, he just tells a story. He says, “One time there was a very rich man who had everything he could want, and he had flocks of sheep, he had a palace, he had more wives than he could count, he had all the wealth in the world, and next door to him lived a very poor man who had one sheep which he’d bought with his own money. One day the rich man was visited by a friend from out of town and since he didn’t want to kill any of his own herd, he seized the poor man’s sheep and he caused it to be cooked; he ate it with his friend and had a lovely feast.” 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 replies, “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 work 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.

Within the Hindu tradition there’s the notion that you go through different stages of life. You start as a student, then you become a householder, you fulfill those obligations, and then later on you become a pilgrim or a monk and you begin looking farther and deeper for the sacred.

“Sacred” is a funny word, but I think this place, for example, is sacred. I think these old walls, made by our ancestors in faith so many years ago, are sacred, I think this space is sacred, not because some God makes it so, but because WE make it so. Things that have passed through many hands, things that have been polished by the years become sacred to us; that’s why, for example, the sacrilege of the destruction of the Torah scrolls in Europe during the Holocaust was such a horrible loss to the Jewish communities. That fury of destruction took precious heirlooms passed through many generations of human hands and destroyed them, ripped them apart. The scrolls were not just words on paper, they were sacred memories, memories of fathers and mothers and grandparents before them. Just so at Passover, the story of the Exodus is told as it’s been told for the last 2500 years, fathers and mothers telling their children the sacred story of liberation from bondage generation after generation.

The old can also become a straightjacket, it can come to constrain us; and sometimes in our Unitarian Universalist tradition we’re much more comfortable as iconoclasts, destroying, tearing apart any tradition we encounter—except the tradition of iconoclasm itself! We have to appropriate what is true, we have to reinterpret what we need to make our own, and we have to incorporate it into our selves from the depths across the ages.

So we ask, how can these 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.

Amen