Transcription
A very dangerous thing that I'm about to say now, but since I may, a bit dangerous. All right, let's see it. I'm of the opinion that we need a third testament. I wouldn't let the Mormons hear you say that, but this bishop is going to talk about some problematic aspects of the Bible. And the Book of Mormon actually reinscribes some of these. So, it's not really the solution that she's looking for because the Bible has become problematic.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with my content knows that I would wholeheartedly agree that there are many ways in which the Bible is problematic and it always has been. In fact, we can find passages within the Bible that are trying to correct earlier received traditions that they considered problematic. In fact, one of the earliest parts of the Bible, the covenant code, Exodus 22, toward the end of the chapter, a lot of scholars agree that this sure sounds an awful lot like a commandment to sacrifice your firstborn children. And then we have later passages earlier and later in Exodus that seem to be renegotiating that by saying, "Yes, you're supposed to sacrifice your child. Just kidding. You're going to take a hard left at Albuquerque and you're going to pay money to redeem the child on the way to the sacrifice." or you're actually supposed to be committing your child to priestly service. The commandment has been renegotiated.
There's a sense in which the New Testament is an attempt to renegotiate the received tradition of the Jewish scriptures in light of this renegotiated understanding of the mission and the identity of the Messiah that they identified with Jesus of Nazareth. And throughout history, we have renegotiated parts of the Bible that we did not like, whether that had to do with polygamy or whether that had to do with the transactional nature of marriage or whether that had to do with slavery. In fact, in the 19th century, we went through a generations-long wrestle with the Bible's position on slavery to come up with a hermeneutical framework for finding a God in the Bible that did not approve of slavery. If you'd like a wonderful discussion of how that process went, I would highly recommend this 2000 paper from Religion and American Culture by J. Albert Herrell entitled "The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension Between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate." We came out on the other side of that debate deciding that the God of the Bible was not a fan of slavery. But from a historical critical perspective, when we try to understand what these texts meant on their own terms, they condone, if not outright, endorse slavery from beginning to end. So if you look in the Bible and you see a God who does not endorse slavery, does not condone slavery, is opposed to slavery, that's a renegotiated God. You have already accepted a renegotiated God because you cannot accept what the scriptures were written to achieve and to communicate.
So we all find parts of the Bible problematic. You can either be transparent and honest about that or you can lie to yourself and to others about that. But everybody finds parts of the Bible problematic. This person is just being a lot more brave and having a lot more courage than most of the folks out there who identify as Bible believers. "Slaves, obey your masters as you do the Lord." It's a text. "Let the women keep silent in the churches. And if they have any questions, let them ask their husbands at home." So, we've already acknowledged the slavery issue, but women keeping silent in church from 1 Corinthians 14:34 and 35, that's another issue that many Christians find problematic.
Now, obviously, there are also Christians, and increasingly so in 21st-century America, who just lean into the misogyny and leverage it in the service of their own misogynistic and right-wing authoritarian and social dominance orientation identity politics. But for those who recognize it as problematic, there are a variety of different hermeneutical approaches to getting around it. For instance, one approach is to say, well, this is Paul addressing a specific isolated set of circumstances in Corinth. And so, this is counsel that is intended only to address a specific circumstance in Corinth, and it is not intended to be applied universally. Or others will say, well, this is actually Paul just quoting something that the Corinthians have asserted. And so Paul is actually responding to what they think by rejecting it. And still another approach is to say, well, this actually wasn't written by Paul. This was an interpolation. And here's a recent article that argues for the interpolation of these passages. And I think this article is probably right. And it's possible, indeed plausible, that this interpolation was carried out by whoever was responsible for the pastoral epistles, which are also deeply misogynistic, which is one of the reasons that a lot of scholars have concluded the pastoral epistles probably were not written by Paul. They were probably written in the early 2nd century by someone pretending to be Paul. Because this is also a time period when ecclesiastical leadership is beginning to become more patriarchal in nature and a lot of people are pushing back against the notion that women could hold any ecclesiastical leadership. And so there are a variety of ways to say this is problematic. It does not apply to us.
This bishop is going to introduce another way that some people will consider too extreme, but really it's just doing the same thing, acknowledging things are problematic, finding a way to improve things. But instead of just saying, "Well, we can reinterpret it. We can renegotiate what's going on here," they're going to take another approach. "Now, I'm a believer. My whole heart, I trust God with my whole heart. I wake up in the morning talking to God and God talking to me. But I am completely frustrated with the ways in which the text speaks to the kind of vitriolic God that makes those kinds of things." And people will say, "Well, it's in the book." And I said, "Then we need to pour that page out." They say, "Well, you can't do it. It's the word of God." I said, "No, it's words about God. Come on now. But is it the word of God? No, it is not the word of God."
So, this is the part of this video that is responsible for it being shared far and wide on social media. And this is part of the video that has catalyzed the most vitriolic responses, the most belligerent condescension. And this is the part that I find the most frustrating because again, what this bishop is acknowledging is something that everyone has seen and has experienced, whether or not they have been honest with themselves about acknowledging it. This bishop is just being more honest. And the notion that we need another testament and that we need to pull parts out of the Bible, that's something that would not have been problematic in earlier periods of the composition, the transmission, the canonization of the Bible. The reason that this is so controversial and that why there is so much nashing of teeth against this woman, apart from the racial and gendered aspects of this black woman saying things that a lot of people don't like to hear, is that the Bible has become an icon. And the Bible as a text, as an artifact, is more inviolable than the meaning that was intended by the words. Because, as we've already seen, we are happy to eject and excise interpretations that we find problematic and divest the words with the meaning that the authors intended and replace them with our own meaning. We do that all the time with the Bible. And so we are perfectly fine with rejecting parts of the Bible and replacing those parts of the Bible with the way we feel. But this does violence to the integrity of the Bible as an artifact, as an icon, as a text. And because a lot of people place the Bible as an icon over the Bible as a collection of ideas, that is unacceptable. That is blasphemy. That betrays the abject ignorance of this bishop. And that's what I find most interesting about all of this is that folks are really tacitly betraying the fact that they view the Bible as a divine image, as an icon, as more inviolable than what was intended by the authors. And again, the fact that people go through and reinterpret and renegotiate stuff to bring it into alignment with what they feel shows that they are already willing to overrule what these ostensibly inspired authors had to say. They're already willing to say, "No, Paul, it's going to be what I want, not what you want." No, authors of Deuteronomy, it's going to be what I want, not what you want. But as soon as someone says, "Well, let's be honest about this. Let's just take out the parts that we know are problematic rather than lying to ourselves and pretending that what we wanted was there all along, thereby baptizing our own perspectives by arrogating to them the authority of inspired scripture. Let's just cut it out and as long as we're going to be rewriting what's in there, let's just be honest about it." So, this is not someone who is ignorant. This is not someone who has no training. This is just someone who has more courage than an awful lot of the Christians in America today.