Evangelicals, Trump and the Apostle Paul

It suddenly made sense to me. Evangelicals love Trump/Paul because it gives them an excuse to behave badly.

I started reading Paul Behaving Badly: Was the Apostle a Racist, Chauvinist JERK? shortly after the Evangelicals elected as President of the US the unqualified, greedy, morally-compromised, power-hungry, sexually-predatory, non-stop liar, say-anything-to-anyone-to-get-votes including the wholesale embrace of a white supremacist platform, Donald Trump.

Time after time as I read, I noted in the margin that the author’s description and defence of Paul matched the evangelical description and defence of Trump.

However, I doubt that this is what the authors, E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien, both professors at Southern Baptist-affiliated colleges, had in mind when they wrote the book.

They implore the reader to trust them as they state their basic affirmation: The Bible is 100% true. Standing on that platform, they fearlessly expose most of the parts of Paul’s writings that are particularly disturbing to the modern reader of the Bible. They then offer a response using the historical/critical method, looking carefully at the cultural settings in which the words were written.

Here’s what I gleaned:

Did Paul say racist, demeaning things about people? Absolutely, but it’s OK: he didn’t really mean it and was truly progressive. Paul didn’t dislike other races or his fellow Jews. He really, genuinely, bigly loved them and, of course, those he routinely insulted actually knew that.

Did Paul offer unbelievably bad put-downs of all things female? After all, in Paul’s world, only males reflect the glory of God–women have to make do with reflecting the glory of the males in their lives. And males are saved by Jesus, females by childbearing.

Well, yes, absolutely he did write these things, but it’s OK: he didn’t really mean it. Truly, he was bigly advanced for his era and really, absolutely wanted women to have full rights, but he just couldn’t say it. I’m sure the women understood exactly what he meant when he told them to be quiet and ask their husbands their silly little questions later.

Did Paul flip-flop on multiple positions, saying one thing to one group of people and another to different groups? Did he use incendiary language with one group, but more peaceful language with another? Absolutely!!! And it’s OK because Paul was God’s chosen vessel, and needed to get the word out any way possible.

Did Paul say simply awful, condemnatory things about homosexuals and their sexual practices? Absolutely!  And even better: he really meant this one. There is no place in Paul’s world for those despicable ones. Kick ‘em out, Lock ‘em up!

Did Paul blatantly misuse passages from the Hebrew Bible to make his point? Darn right–and the authors acknowledge he would have flunked a beginning class on biblical interpretation today.

But it’s OK. According to the authors, most of us are simply not able to understand Paul’s reasoning and use of interpretative methodologies employed by the Pharisees for biblical exegesis. In many ways, the authors ended up indicating that the very methodology they used throughout the book, i.e., reading the words of Paul in the more accurate historical, cultural setting, is actually inadequate to properly interpret Paul. They backed themselves into a fascinating bind here.

It’s fairly clear by now that I didn’t like the book a whole lot although I fully intended to. To be fair, it is written in an engaging, readable fashion, accessible to a wide range of people without theological educations. Both authors have a great ability to communicate their points to modern readers. And for those who need to have Paul affirmed, despite some of his more despicable utterances, it is genuinely helpful.

But their own web of “political correctness” backs the authors into a corner. They acknowledge that at times Paul was just wrong. But they are unable to see that acknowledging this makes their affirmation that the Bible is 100% true problematic. Nonetheless. they have no choice but to vindicate Paul or they will lose their livelihoods. Even worse, their carefully constructed belief systems will crumble.

This is and always has been the problem with the “100% true” or “inerrancy” world of Biblical interpretation. Try though they might, those in that world dare not take a step back and simply let the Bible unfold in all its humanness, in its wandering paths taken by people to make sense of the world and of God’s redemptive hopes for this broken, messed up place.

Instead, that world elevates certain people, almost always men, who do indeed “behave badly” and justifies the badness under the uncritical blanket of “This is God’s man–Listen to him.”

And so, we end up with generations of people endorsing slavery and upholding racism, treating women with contempt, excluding those who don’t fit the sexual binary and following the latest iteration of the strong-man/bad-boy saviour rather than the actual good news: God is with us and in the name of Jesus Christ, we are forgiven.