If the Bible Accepts Slavery, How Can Slavery be Wrong?

If the Bible Accepts Slavery, How Can Slavery be Wrong?

I’ve been reading the book Bounds of Their Habitation, Race and Religion in American History, by Paul Harvey, a professor of history at a branch campus of the University of Colorado.[1] In the first chapters of that book Harvey describes how the racist slaveowners in the antebellum American south used evangelical Christianity as a foundation for a theology and social theory that justified and even romanticized the horrors and injustices of the slave system upon which their economy depended. In their theology these self-identified Christians pointed to the way that neither Testament of the Bible ever condemns or rejects slavery. They were right about that of course. They don’t. In Exodus Moses gets angry with and kills an overseer of Hebrew slaves and has to flee the country. Exodus thus condemns the mistreatment of the Hebrew slaves, but it never condemns slavery as an institution. In the Torah Hebrews are expressly permitted to own slaves as long as the enslaved person is not another Hebrew. St. Paul never condemns slavery. At least in texts attributed to him he counsels slaves to be obedient to their masters. In Philemon he sends a slave back to his slave-owner master. The slaveowners of the American south understood this truth of Christian scripture. It never condemns the institution of slavery. These supposed Christians combined that truth about the Bible with the evangelical belief that everything in the Bible is divinely inspired. Thus, they insisted, slavery is part of God’s will for humanity. The Holy Spirit inspired the biblical texts that accepted it, so it can’t be wrong. They taught this theology to the slaves and hurled it at northern abolitionists. It constituted a foundational aspect of their justification of the brutal, inhumane, profoundly unjust, un-Christian, and sinful institution upon which their economy and their society depended.

So if the Bible accepts and never condemns slavery, which it undeniably does, how can slavery be wrong? Not many American Christians today accept the divine sanction of slavery the way their antebellum ancestors did, yet a great many of them continue to insist that everything in the Bible is at lease divinely inspired if not actually divinely dictated. Are they not then faced with a radical inconsistency in their thinking? Yes they are, and in order to avoid that inconsistency while maintaining our moral aversion to slavery we must somehow obviate the notion that the passages in the Bible that accept slavery are divinely inspired. There are at least two ways to do that. One is to assert that while the Bible is divinely inspired in everything necessary to salvation it also contains some human error. The Bible’s acceptance of slavery is human error, therefore the Bible’s acceptance of slavery is not inconsistent with the Bible’s divine inspiration. The other is to reject the idea of the divine inspiration of the Bible altogether and to reject its acceptance of slavery as both inconsistent with other parts of it and wholly inconsistent with any notion of morality and justice. I will examine both of these alternatives here.

A great many American Christians believe that the Bible is divinely inspired in everything necessary for salvation but that it also contains some human error. In my book Liberating the Bible, Revised Edition, Volume One,[2] I (citing the late Marcus Borg) call this position the soft version of the belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible. It functions well enough as a refuge for people who must believe in some divine inspiration of the Bible while being unable to accept everything in it as either factually true or morally acceptable. Yet as I explain in my book there is a fatal flaw in this conception. It unavoidable creates the necessity of distinguishing between those parts of the Bible that one believes are divinely inspired and those that one believes are not. It is certainly possible to do that, but to do it with any integrity one must be able to express the criteria one uses to make the distinction. It is also certainly possible to do that, but any attempt to do it is necessarily subjective. The stated criteria may be valid for the person stating them, but there is no way to establish that they are objectively valid for everyone. There are possible criteria that are wholly contradictory. One person might say that everything in the Bible is divinely inspired that speaks of divine love. Another might say that everything in the Bible is divinely inspired that speaks of divine wrath and judgment. Which is the appropriate criterion? There is no valid, objective way to answer that question. The notion that some things in the Bible are divinely inspired and some things are not fails because of this unavoidable internal contradiction.

The other way to avoid the conclusion that the things in the Bible that accept slavery are divinely inspired is to abandon the idea of the divine inspiration of the Bible altogether. This is the solution I advance in Liberating the Bible. It is simply undeniable that there are a great many things in the Bible that are not and cannot be divinely inspired, at least if they’re taken literally the way that those who insist on divine inspiration always insist we must take them. No, Joshua did not make the sun stand still in the sky so he would have more daylight hours to slay his enemies. The author of the book of Joshua thought that was possible because he thought the sun revolves around the earth as it appears to do. We know it is impossible because we know that the sun does not revolve around the earth as it appears to do and that the earth is rapidly spinning on its axis. There’s no way to stop it, but if you could it would destroy the earth in an instant. There is no geological evidence for a universal flood that killed everything living on land except Noah, his family, and a few animals in a big boat. The story of Noah and the flood is simply not factually true. The New Testament too contains things that cannot be literally true. Did Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem when Jesus was born as Matthew says or did they live in Nazareth and travel to Bethlehem as Luke says? Both of those assertions cannot be literally true. Did the Holy Family flee to Egypt after Jesus’ birth to escape the wrath of King Herod as Matthew says, or did they not as is unavoidably implied by the fact that no New Testament author other than Matthew has any awareness of that happening? Was Jesus baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist as he is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Or did he encounter John but not get baptized by him as in John? It really can’t be both. We must assume that God would not make mistakes like these, yet each of these things is undeniably in the Bible. It is easy to produce other examples of statements of the impossible and internal contradictions in the Bible. The notion that any of the Bible is divinely inspired just doesn’t work.

So how then are we to understand the Bible and its authority, if any? We could reject it as a fraud having no authority whatsoever. Most of us Christians however are loathe to do that. Here’s how I  propose solving this problem in Liberating the Bible. 

Let me suggest that you think of the Bible as invitation. The Bible doesn’t dictate truth to us. Rather, its ancient authors say here are the experiences and understandings of some of your ancient forbears in the faith. Generation after generation of faithful Jewish and Christian people have found meaning, hope, comfort, and challenge in these pages. So come on in. Learn what we have to say. Do the difficult work of really understanding our ancient texts on their own terms. Then do your own discernment. We did ours, now you do yours. We hope that what you read here will light your path to God, but we cannot relieve you of your duty to discern God’s truth for you and your world. We don’t all say the same thing. We didn’t all understand God the same way. We didn’t understand the universe and human nature the way you do. But come on in. Learn from us. There is great wisdom here. Learn from us, but don’t parrot back what we had to say. We invite you not to rote responses and easy answers. We invite you to the hard but sacred work of study and discernment. May God be with you in that work. Amen.[3]

What I propose in this passage is that we consider the Bible to be what it truly is, a human product created by human beings as fallible as we are that contains great wisdom but to which we must bring our own minds, understandings, and questions. Once we see the Bible as not divinely inspired all of the problems with rejecting the Bible’s acceptance of slavery disappear (as indeed do a great many other problems that arise when we cling to the notion of divine biblical inspiration). We are free to read the Bible as a proclamation of God’s will for peace and freedom for every human being without getting hung up on expressions of ancient cultural ways and understandings that no longer apply in our world (if indeed they ever did properly apply to any other world, which I doubt).

Two hundred years ago many American Christians thought they could use the Bible to justify and defend slavery and the sea of horrors associated with it. They were wrong. Their use of the Bible in this way surely was driven primarily by what they perceived to be their own economic and social interests. Yet turning the Bible into a justification for the horrors of race-based slavery in the United States required an understanding of the Bible and everything in it as divinely inspired. Once that proposition is accepted seeing the Bible as a justification for slavery is nearly if not quite totally impossible. Once we understand what the Bible truly is, namely, a wholly human product, we can free ourselves from erroneous and even sinful uses of it. May more and more of us come at long last to a proper understanding of Christianity’s foundational document.

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[1] Harvey, Paul, The Bounds of Their Habitation, Race and Religion in American History, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland, 2017.

[2] Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating the Bible, Revised Edition, Volume One, Approaching the Bible, Coffee Press, 2018.

[3] Id., page 211. I consider this paragraph to be perhaps the best thing I have ever written.

On the State of Our Nation

On the State of Our Nation

August10, 2019

Here are some of the defining characteristics of the life of the United States of America at this time, in no particular order:

·       We are acting like fascists with regard to undocumented immigrants and causing enormous suffering especially by innocent children.

·       We have an immoral, self-absorbed, sociopathic liar as president whose policies are indeed fascist.

·       Money buys our politicians and controls the outcome of our elections.

·       We have, mostly through our tax structure but by regulatory means as well, created an economy that works extremely well for the very wealthy and huge corporations but works very badly for the working poor, the disabled, and the homeless.

·       We are destroying the earth’s environment and doing next to nothing to reverse our destructive environmental policies.

·       We are cozying up to one dictator, Kim Jong-un, and very nearly starting a pointless and unwinnable war with Iran while we continue a useless and unwinnable war in Afghanistan.

·       Our culture glorifies the military, calling all military work “service” and ignoring the true service rendered by teachers, nurses, firefighters, police officers, social workers, and others who truly do serve and do so without adequate pay or recognition.

·       Our consumer-oriented culture and economy tell everyone that their purpose in living is to consume, consume, consume so that other people can get rich.

·       We have abandoned religion en masse, leaving people with nothing on which to ground their lives and their morals. The most vocal Christianity among us is nothing but a betrayal of the one it claims to believe in and to follow.

·       Powerful politicians, bought and paid for by big pharma and other parts of the medical industry, work to deprive millions of Americans of health insurance and thus to deprive them of access to medical care.

·       We support and glorify a culture of guns, Americans owning more guns than there are Americans (and more by far than the people of any other nation or even than the people of all other nations combined), while powerful special interests block even the most minimal legislation that might in some way reduce the gun violence that is ubiquitous among us.

·       We have a history of racism and white supremacy that we used to tell ourselves we had overcome but which we clearly have not overcome with our president empowering and encouraging white supremacist terrorists.

·       Our president is so enamored of Vladimir Putin that his party (especially through Moscow Mitch McConnell) blocks any meaningful effort to protect our political processes from interference by Russia and other foreign nations.

·       We have an unhealthy trade relationship with China that our president makes worse by slapping on tariffs that he has no actual legal authority to impose, thereby raising prices for everyone and producing a reaction by the Chinese that threatens to destroy American agriculture altogether.

·       The only political party with any hope of changing any of this, the Democrats, are fighting with each other as much as they are attacking Trump. We don’t know who their candidate for president will be next year. More importantly, we don’t know if that person will be able to defeat Trump.

·       Our culture is by far the most individualistic one the world has ever seen. We lack community, and vast numbers of us are so convinced that their only concern is themselves and their immediate family that they resist paying taxes even for worthwhile things and elect politicians whose primary objective is to keep taxes low.

·       We maintain only the most minimal social safety net for those in need while right-wing politicians make up claims of welfare fraud and do everything they can not only not to expand social services but to cripple those that already exist.

·       We live with millions of people homeless and do next to nothing to address that crisis.

·       Our entertainment consists largely of computer generated violence in movies, on television, and in video games.

·       The Republican Party, one of our two major political parties, does everything it can to stop people of color from voting because that party knows that blocking those people is the only way it can maintain power.

·       We claim to be the greatest nation on earth and a beacon of freedom and democracy while we permit all of these things to continue.

I suppose there are even more horrors that I could list here, but this list is already depressing enough. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the United States of America is nothing but an empire in decline. All empires decline, and most of them go through a period of social, economic, and political disintegration as they do. We seem to be going through that phase of imperial decline, and almost no one recognizes or admits that we are. Until we wake up to our actual reality nothing will truly change for the better. In conclusion all is can say is: “Heaven help us.”

On Hermeneutics and Exegesis

On Hermeneutics and Exegesis

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

August, 2019

Prepared for the Wednesday morning Bible study group at Brookdale, Monroe, Washington

Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation of a text (or of anything else for that matter, but our concern is with texts).

Exegesis is the practice of interpretation of a text.

Understanding hermeneutics and exegesis is important for everyone in their search for meaning in a text. The principles of current hermeneutics and exegesis include the following:

The human mind creates meaning. Meaning is not something that exists out there objectively on its own. “Interpretation is the quest for meaning, and humans make meaning.”[1] Page 62

Therefore the meaning of a text does not reside in the text itself. It can’t because meaning comes only from the operation of a human mind on the text.

“Meaning arises and can only arise in the encounter of a reader with a text.”[2] Page 63

Because meaning is a creation of human mind, all meaning is subjective in the sense that it is created by a subject.

The consequences of the reality that meaning arises only in the encounter of a reader with a text include:

It is impossible to read a text without interpreting it.

Every reader brings her or his own particularity, her or his experiences, to the reading of any text. “The meaning of a text arises in the reader’s encounter with the text in all of her particularity, both those things she has in common with others in her context and the things that are unique to her.” Page 67

Because no person’s particularity is identical to any other person’s particularity the meaning of any text can and probably will be different for each reader at least to some extent.

Because meaning does not reside in the text alone any text can mean something different from and even more than what it meant to its author. Waiting for Godot. Called a “surplus of meaning.”

The principles of hermeneutics apply to the texts of the Bible in exactly the same way they apply to any other text.

Yet there are principles of interpretation that stop us from concluding that any text can mean anything at all.

Doing interpretation, as distinct from the principles of interpretation, is called “exegesis.”

The principles of exegesis include:

Spend time with a text before you decide what it means to you.

Every text has its own integrity that we must respect. “Good interpretation always respects the integrity of the text it is interpreting.” Page 75

To be legitimate the meaning a reader finds in a text must bear a reasonable relationship to the text itself. A valid interpretation cannot contradict the clear words of the text.

Interpretation must begin with a solid understanding of what the words of a text actually are and what they mean. In the Bible that isn’t always easy, but no interpretation is valid that ignores important issues about what a text actually says.

The “worlds of a text.” Every text functions in three different worlds. They are:

The world behind the text.

This is the world in and for which the text was originally written. Having at least some understanding of the world(s) behind the texts of the Bible is essential for interpreting them well.

It will contain things that the author(s) assumed the reader(s) would know and therefore does not make them explicit in the text.

It includes the cultural understandings and assumptions of the time and place in and for which the text was originally written.

The world(s) behind the Bible:

It was prerational. That doesn’t mean it was irrational, it means that it had a different understanding of the nature of truth than we do, all of us being rationalists in our understanding of truth. They didn’t for the most part look to human reason as a source of truth.

It was prescientific. The people of the world of the Bible had essentially no scientific understanding of the nature of the cosmos, of the earth, of human nature, or of so many other things that we have learned from science. They didn’t look to science as a source of truth.

The people of that world conveyed truth mostly by telling stories rather than through conveying facts. The world of the Bible was much less concerned with facts than we are. When people heard a story they would not first ask if the story were factually true. They would ask: What does this story mean? The stories in the Bible were written much more to convey meaning than to convey facts.

In the world behind the Bible people were much more accustomed to expressing and understanding truth through metaphor, symbol, and myth than we are.

The world of the text.

This is the world that appears in the text itself.

It interacts with the world behind the text, the world behind the text being reflected either directly or indirectly in the text itself.

It can critique the world behind the text.

It can offer a new vision for the world behind the text.

The world of the text may use specific literary forms to convey its message. Mark, for example, often used a three-part structure to make a point. See for example Mark 12:38 to 13:2 as a good example.

The world in front of the text.

This is the world the reader brings to the text.

It includes the reader’s understandings of the nature of truth, the nature of reality, the nature of literature, etc.

It includes the reader’s previous understandings of the text, if any. Recognizing those previous understandings is particularly important when reading the Bible, for virtually all of us have previous understandings of many of the stories in the Bible. When we read a story we think we understand we should set our previous understanding aside and start anew with the actual text itself as opposed to what someone has told us or that we have formed ourselves, understanding always that true objectivity in understanding is neither possible nor necessarily desirable.

The world in front of the text includes our search of meaning in the text for us. The meaning we find in a text can be valid for us as long a we don’t stray too far from the text itself.

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[1] Sorenson, Liberating the Bible, Revised Edition, Volume 1, Approaching the Bible, page 62.

[2] Id., page 63.