How Religious Liberals Read the Bible
by Rev. Colin Bossen, August 30, 2009
Not twenty years into the 19th century the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing wrote, "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." With but two minor modifications this statement could well stand for the sentiments of a 21st century Unitarian Universalist. Today we would only add the phrase "and women" after each of Channing's "men" and include a clause denoting that the Bible is not only "a book written for men" but a book written by men and, almost certainly, women.
Reflecting, elsewhere, on what makes religion authentic, Channing wrote "We must start in religion from our own souls. In these is the fountain of all divine truth." Personal experience, in other words, is the starting place for theological reflection.
It is between these phrases of Channing's that we can articulate a two-part Unitarian Universalist strategy for approaching the Bible. First, as a human book the Bible can be best illuminated by the light of reason. The more sophisticated our intellectual tools--the greater our understanding of literature, history, theology and culture--the better we will be able interpret the texts and glean something of both their original and contemporary meanings. Second, the extent to which we care about the Bible at all depends upon our personal experience of it. Looking deep into ourselves what do we find when we encounter the Bible? Does it move us? Frighten us? Bore us? Remind us of a traumatic encounter with religion that we wish to put behind us?
Many of us would probably echo the sentiments of Stephen Fritchman, a Unitarian minister prominent in the middle of the last century. Fritchman once preached a sermon entitled "The Bible: That Vastly Overrated Bestseller" in which he declared "I find most of the Bible a dead weight, a tradition which holds me back even unconsciously from honest and nonconformist thinking on matters it speaks about."
For those who agree with Fritchman the Bible does little to nurture their religious sentiments. Instead, they might argue, it is a conservative or fundamentalist bailiwick.
Others of us are more sympathetic to the views of John Buehrens, a former President of our Association. Buehrens labels himself as biblical humanist and claims an interest "in...uncovering...the human experience of the Holy, of God, of enduring truth and wisdom lying behind the veil of the ancient texts."
While Buehrens takes a great deal of personal inspiration from the Bible he also encourages religious liberals and secular progressives to read and seek to understand it for two primary reasons. First, he argues that no other text has done more to shape Western religion and literature. Quoting the great liberal minister Henry Emerson Fosdick, Buehrens notes "Our intellectual heritage is full of [the Bible's] words and phrases, ideas and formulas. Ignorance of it constitutes a hopeless handicap in the endeavor to understand any great Western literature."
Second, Buehrens believes that "the Bible and God...remain powerful icons in our culture. Progressive people simply cede their power to opponents when they leave interpretation of our religious heritage...to the reactionaries, the chauvinists, and the bigots" who rally around these symbols.
Personally, I am probably closer to Fritchman than Buehrens. On the one hand, I agree with Buehrens that it is important to understand how the Bible impacts and shapes our culture. Understanding what it actually says about a particular issue is useful when engaging with those who claim that it has ultimate authority in human life. The influence of the Bible on literature and religion is undeniable and I gain a greater understanding of both art and theology when I understand how artists and intellectuals relate to it.
On the other hand, the Bible is not the first place I turn to when in need of spiritual sustenance. I am far more likely to seek comfort in the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth or Diane di Prima than the Psalms. I would rather contemplate the mysteries of evolution, shimmering star dust or sweet apple petals than Genesis.
Still, because of its impact on our culture, its place in the ongoing culture wars and its relation to development of our own liberal religious faith I find myself reading the Bible. Over the next ten months, in fact, I intend engage in a prolonged study of the Bible. The children in our religious education program are focusing on Bible stories this year. In an effort to bring a little more cohesion to the spiritual life of our congregation I am going to do a series of ten sermons--this being the first--on the Bible. It is important that on something of a regular basis what goes on downstairs is related to what happens up here in the sanctuary.
I have yet to map out all of my sermons but I do know that beyond this one I plan to address: "How Fundamentalists Read the Bible," "What Bible Really Says About Homosexuality," "Love, Sex and the Bible," "The God of Abraham" and "The Pagan Origins of the Bible." I imagine that other topics will suggest themselves through both my study and my conversations with you.
In all of these sermons I will explore different ways in which religious liberals read the Bible and what the Bible actually says on subjects as diverse as homosexuality, its own authority and monotheism. I should stop there and catch myself before I continue with a fallacy. Up until now I have referring to the Bible as if it was a single cohesive text. It is not. It is a collection of many different texts written by different authors and compiled for convenience into a single library.
The Bible is complicated, so complicated that the question of which texts comprise it is a matter of some dispute. For Jews the Bible refers only to the twenty-four texts which comprise the Hebrew Bible. Christians subdivide these twenty-four texts into thirty-nine (that's the Protestants) or forty-six (that's the Catholics who add a few texts) and call the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament. In addition, Christians have the their own texts relating to the stories of Jesus and the early Christian community which they call the New Testament. I try to avoid the supersessionism implicit in this term and refer to the New Testament as the Christian New Testament. It clarifies to whom that group of texts belong.
For those of us who read neither Hebrew--the language of the Hebrew Bible--or Greek--the language of the Christian New Testament--the question of what someone means when they refer to the Bible becomes even more complex. It is not only a matter of which community's Bible one is reading but which translation. In English alone there are probably a couple of dozen different translations--each reflecting the theology, literary craft and linguistic ability of its translators. Some of the most popular versions of the Bible--the King James Bible, for instance--are not considered by contemporary scholars to be the most accurate. Nor is a given translation limited to just one version. One edition of the King James Bible appeared early with a small mistake. It omitted the word "not" from a commandment and readers--to the delight of some and the horror of many--were confronted with the rule "Thou shalt commit adultery."
The texts that comprise the Hebrew Bible were composed over a several hundred year period by different communities of authors. Many of what appear to us to be just one text--the book of Genesis, for example--were compiled from multiple sources. Over the years biblical scholars have used the tools of literary criticism--examining the grammar, word choice and theology of the texts--to discern that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were redacted from at least four different sources.
Two major types of clues are used to ferret out these strains within the text. The first of these is the existence of many doubles, instances when the same story appears twice in the text. An example can be found within the very first chapters of Genesis. Before we even get beyond the second chapter we encounter two stories of the creation of humanity. The first reads: "God created human beings in his own image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." Not ten verses later appears a second creation story in which God creates man first and then, in a reversal of gender roles, brings woman out of man's body (his rib to be precise). To scholars the existence of such different versions of the same story side-by-side suggests that the text was compiled from multiple sources.
The second kind of clue revolves around the name of God. Sometimes God is referred to as Yahweh--the sacred Hebrew name. Other times God is called Elohim--a generic term for God from the Semitic language that is actually a feminine plural. For the most part only one name for God appears with a given double. This has lead scholars to argue that most of the doubles comprise a version from the source written by those who called God Yahweh--the J source--and those who call God Elohim--the E source.
Digging deeper into the text scholars found that the E source contained several doubles within it as well as a discrete set of stories concerned with matters of ritual, purity, worship and law. This has led to the supposition of the existence of a third source, the Priestly source usually referred to as P.
The first five books of the Hebrew Bible tell the story of creation and offer the prehistory of the tribes of Israel--stretching from their earliest ancestors through their servitude in and escape from Egypt. The first four of these books--Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers--are similar in style and tone. The fifth, Deuteronomy, is dissimilar enough that scholars surmise it to have been written by a different community than the other four. In fact, many believe that the person or people who wrote Deuteronomy edited and compiled the other four books. When the hand--or phraseology--of the editor appears it is labeled the work of the D source.
Each of these sources has a different theology and focuses on different concerns. For instance, the J source portrays a fairly anthropomorphic God while the E source offers a less human like one. There are other differences as well. One source might favor a particular community or set of priests over others.
So far I have just been speaking of the first part of the Hebrew Bible. Most of the other texts do not claim the same authorship as the first five books. In fact, some admit that they were written by different authors. The book of Psalms, for instance, is a compilation of religious poetry from different sources.
The Christian New Testament is also not a unified text. It offers four gospels--four accounts of the same story written by either four authors or, more likely, four communities--and almost two dozen letters and sermons authored by or attributed to different early Christian figures. In each case these authors see the Christian story and community through the lens of their own theology. To even more complicate matters we know of the existence of many other gospels and early Christian texts that for reasons of theology and, perhaps, power did not make it in the Christian New Testament. At some point there was a struggle over what would be included and the authors of these other gospels lost out. In the last century the discovery of many of these texts has broadened our understanding of the richness of the early Christian community.
With each source offering its own view of things at least one scholar has argued that what we commonly call the Bible--that is the combination of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament--is the product of no fewer than nine different religious movements. So, when asked what the Bible says about something it would do well to respond: Which Bible? Which translation? Which source within the Bible? Which part of the text you go to, and how you read it, will partially determine your answer.
The Bible then is a very human set of documents. Through its stories, theological texts, poetry and sayings one can discern something about subjects as diverse as human nature, spirituality, religious community, power and violence. The same is true of other sacred scriptures and other texts. As but one human document of many it should not be held up as the sole or final authority in religious life. Instead it can be studied carefully, examined through the light of reason, and only taken seriously in one's spiritual life to the extent to which it stirs, in the sentiment of Channing, "our souls." Within it then, we might find the solace of the psalmist who "Like a hind crying for water...thirsts for God." Or we may conclude with Fritchman that "many modern writers have [more] genuine help to offer...than can be found in most of the Bible..."
That truth depends finally upon our own experiences and our minds. Let us look to them then for authority in religion, and never cease to seek and to think freely, always questioning both the experiences we have and the texts we encounter.
Amen.