From December 18, 2014, “The Bible used to get a lot of things wrong”

Amanda Marcotte writes at Salon about “10 things conservative Christians got horribly wrong.”

Looking over the long history of people claiming to be speaking for God’s wishes, it quickly becomes evident that Christians are frequently on the wrong side of history. Here are 10 things that American Christians of the conservative stripe got completely wrong when they were so sure they were speaking on God’s behalf.

I realize that Marcotte is both an atheist (gasp!) and, even worse, a feminist, and thus she’s not someone that conservative Christians are inclined to listen to. So let me point out that many politically conservative white evangelical men would agree with her on at least some of the items in her list.

For example, the first item on Amanda Marcotte’s list of “things conservative Christians got horribly wrong” is slavery. Southern Baptist spokesman Russell Moore agrees with her. Here’s what Moore recently said on that topic:

The founders of the Southern Baptist Convention were wrong and wickedly wrong on the issue of human slavery. And the problem wasn’t just that they were on the wrong side of a social issue; they were on the wrong side of Jesus and the gospel when it came to brothers and sisters in Christ made in the image of God that they treated with injustice.

Moore would probably (I think) agree with about half of Marcotte’s list. I’m guessing he’d also agree that conservative Christians who defended segregation were “horribly wrong.” And I’d guess he would agree that Prohibition was a mistake, and that opposing women’s suffrage was wrong (but not opposing women’s ordination). And I’m pretty sure he would say now that evangelicals’ hostile anti-Catholicism during the 19th and most of the 20th centuries was something that shouldn’t have happened.

But he would likely disagree — strenuously — with the other half of Marcotte’s list, which includes things like evolution, official prayer in schools, contraception and marriage equality.*

On all of those points, of course, Moore and his fellow “conservative” Christians would insist that their own opinions aren’t the issue here. What matters, rather, is what the Bible clearly says. It’s not that “conservative Christians” reject evolution, but that the Bible insists it’s wrong. And same-sex marriage is anathema not because “conservative Christians” think so, but because that is what the Bible clearly teaches. And contraception is wrong because the Bible clearly says so (right there in … um … I’ll have to get back to you with chapter and verse on that one).

These conservative Christians would object to Marcotte’s assertion that they are wrong on these matters. What she’s really saying, they would say, is that the Bible is wrong about such things.

The problem with that argument is that this is exactly what those earlier conservative Christians said about slavery, segregation, women’s suffrage, Prohibition, and the Papist Menace. If Russell Moore’s Southern Baptist predecessors had been confronted with Moore’s claim that they were “wrong and wickedly wrong on the issue of human slavery,” they wouldn’t have defended their opinion — they would have said it wasn’t about their opinion, but about the clear teaching and inerrant authority of the holy Word of God. And then they’d have viciously attacked Moore for his refusal to accept the clear and unambiguous authority of scripture.

This isn’t speculation about how they would respond. This is what they actually did. Those pro-slavery Southern Baptists were — regularly and repeatedly — accused of being wickedly wrong about slavery. And their response — documented in thousands of volumes — was always to attack their accusers for infidelity to the clear teaching of the Bible.

Anti-slavery Christians, in response, insisted they weren’t criticizing the Bible itself, only the way that pro-slavery Christians had chosen to interpret the Bible. The problem isn’t with what the Bible says, they argued, but with how the pro-slavery Southern Baptists were reading it and misusing it.

But that response only made those pro-slavery Baptists angrier. There can be only one way to read the Bible, they insisted. There can be only one way to interpret it. More than that, really what they were arguing was that the Bible didn’t need to be interpreted at all.

That claim is the identifying characteristic of the people Marcotte identifies as “conservative Christians.” They all share this idea that the Bible is uniform and unambiguous — that despite being a diverse collection of ancient texts written over a period of centuries in diverse contexts for diverse audiences, it never displays a diversity of perspectives. The Bible, they insist, never contradicts itself and never presents opposing views, and thus requires little interpretation for a contemporary reader.

Unfortunately, while this view of the Bible is horrifically misleading, it’s also widely accepted not just by conservative Christians, but by many of their critics. Thus we see things like Marcotte writing “the Bible clearly has a positive view of slavery” — uncritically accepting not just the illiterate anti-hermeneutic of the fundies, but even their favorite thought-suppressing adverb (“the Bible clearly …”). 

The Bible does, in fact, contain a great deal of material that endorses various forms of slavery. That is undeniable. Slavery is, in various parts of the Bible, commended and commanded. In some places in the Bible, an abundance of slaves is presented as evidence of God’s blessing.

But the Bible also does, in fact, contain a great deal of material that attacks slavery. That is also undeniable. Slavery is, in various parts of the Bible, condemned as contemptible. In some places in the Bible, an abundance of slaves is presented as evidence of wickedness, disobedience and rebellion against God.

Such contradictory arguments can be bewildering if you haven’t got some way of determining which part of this biblical argument is the winning side. (Jubilee, people, it’s always about Jubilee. All of it.)

But there’s no way of doing that if you’ve decided ahead of time that such intra-biblical disputes cannot be allowed to exist. Pretending they don’t exist doesn’t make them go away. Refusing to acknowledge their existence doesn’t make them vanish in a puff of smoke — no matter how much “conservative Christians” wish that it were so.

This is a huge problem for 21st-century white evangelicals. Like Russell Moore, they’re mostly convinced — now — that white evangelical support for slavery had been a terrible mistake. Yet they still want to cling to the pro-slavery Christians’ insistence that the Bible is uniform and unambiguous and that no interpretation is necessary to understand what it clearly says.

So while they’re pretty sure those earlier, pro-slavery Christians were wrong, they’re not able to explain how or why they were wrong. And thus, today, they are also unable to explain how or why they themselves are right about all the things they claim “the Bible clearly says.”

If those early Southern Baptists were wrong about slavery, then they were wrong about the Bible — wrong about how to read the Bible. They were wrong about slavery because they were wrong about how to read the Bible.

Contemporary white evangelicals want to retain the same approach to reading the Bible, but not the same conclusions about slavery. That doesn’t work.

If you want to retain the anti-hermeneutic of the early Southern Baptists while rejecting their pro-slavery views, then you can’t say, “The founders of the Southern Baptist Convention were wrong and wickedly wrong on the issue of human slavery.” You have to say, instead, that the Bible itself used to be wrong and wickedly wrong on slavery, but somehow isn’t anymore (even though it never changed).

If you’re not willing to reject that anti-hermeneutic, then you have to say that the Bible itself used to be wrong about a lot of things.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* I’m a bit worried about mentioning item No. 4 on Amanda Marcotte’s list:

4) Pain relief for childbirth. The Bible explicitly lays out pain in childbirth as Eve’s punishment for sin, so unsurprisingly, that’s what many Christians in the 19th century believed had to be so. Once reliable pain relief in childbirth began to be developed, therefore, there was a lot of resistance to it from Christians who feared it defied God to let women have some relief. … Eventually, the argument that women owed it to God to suffer through childbirth faded to the fringes of right-wing Christianity.

It’s true that this was once conventional wisdom — a widespread argument that shaped common practice. Childbirth was seen as something that ought to be painful, because Eve. Today, though, that argument is a mostly forgotten relic of history.

But today we also have a reflexively polarized religious right that trips over itself in a rush to oppose anything and everything that we evil liberals and baby-killers view approvingly. Just by mentioning stuff like this, we may be giving them ideas. If Amanda Marcotte approves of reliable pain relief in childbirth, that probably means that Barack Obama does too. And Sandra Fluke and Rachel Held Evans and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi and Brian McLaren and Planned Parenthood. Probably even Rob Bell.

And once they realize that, they’re likely to start angrily opposing such pain relief as another evil symptom of women’s lib and the sexual revolution. After all, if bearing children isn’t as painful and dangerous as it was back in the Golden Age, then it’s like we’re giving these wanton hussies permission to go out and do the sex without the fear of pain and suffering that God intended to accompany such filthy behavior, etc., etc.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, keep in mind that this is exactly what has happened in recent years when it comes to the abruptly newfound white evangelical opposition to contraception — a position that has surged to prominence without any credible biblical, ethical, scientific or logical argument to support it.

From December 10, 2014, “A really big wheel of cheese, Southern Baptists, the Bible, and slavery”

John Leland was not, technically, a Southern Baptist. He was born in Massachusetts, for one thing. And for another he died in 1841, several years before the Southern Baptist Convention split away from other Baptists in defense of slave-owners’ rights to serve as missionaries. But Leland also spent many years building churches and ministering in Virginia where he served in a leadership role as a member of the Baptist General Committee for that southern state.

Leland is remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for two events in the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. He helped to found the Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut, to which President Jefferson sent his famous 1802 Letter to the Danbury Baptists — the letter in which Jefferson wrote of the First Amendment as “building a wall of separation between Church & State” and reaffirmed “the rights of conscience” as a natural right of all people.

More memorable, if less consequential, was Leland’s response to that letter, provided in the form of cheese. A lot of cheese. As an expression of gratitude to Jefferson for his shared commitment to religious liberty, John Leland organized the creation of the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese — a 1,200-pound, four-foot wide cheese wheel made from the milk of every cow in Cheshire, Mass., where Leland was then serving as a pastor.

The big cheese had to be transported by sleigh, and it was John Leland himself who drove that sleigh the 500 miles from Massachusetts to Washington. The journey took three weeks, with the strange sight of the Mammoth Cheese drawing crowds at each stop along the way. As a Baptist preacher, Leland couldn’t resist such crowds, and he preached his way from Massachusetts to the White House, standing in the pulpit of his sleigh next to a ginormous cheese wheel which bore the inscription “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

But the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese was only the second most audacious thing John Leland attempted.

His more audacious project was undertaken during his years of ministry in Virginia. In 1789, Leland authored a resolution put before the Baptist General Committee of Virginia. That resolution called for a “great Jubilee” and the abolition of slavery in the state. It also declared slavery to be a “a violent deprivation of rights of nature” and “contrary to the word of God.”

Leland’s resolution, remarkably, was initially met with some enthusiasm. Consider that for a moment — it’s more startling than even the image of a sleigh-riding itinerant preacher bearing a half ton of hand-crafted, revolutionary cheese. In 1789, in the state of Virginia, a gathering of southern Baptists who were not yet officially Southern Baptists entertained a proposal from a Massachusetts abolitionist that would have freed all their slaves and declared the practice of slavery in Virginia to be “contrary to the word of God.”

Leland wasn’t laughed out of the convention and sent packing back to New England. His fellow Baptists in Virginia took this resolution seriously. They considered this proposal as something they might actually affirm and embrace and do. Leland’s resolution was sent out to the various regional Baptist associations throughout the state.

That’s when the push-back started.

The good Christians of the Strawberry Baptist Association, near Lynchburg, did not explicitly dispute the resolution’s argument that slavery was incompatible with scripture and human rights, but they worried that Leland’s Jubilee would create a humanitarian crisis among all those abruptly unemployed former slaves. The pious devout of the Roanoke Association fretted that the General Committee’s resolution took too simple a view of what they saw as a “very abstruse … set of complex circumstances.” Surely such a complicated issue was best left up to local congregations to decide.

Leland’s resolution was returned to the statewide General Committee in 1792, which quickly voted to dismiss it.

The non-cheese-related history recounted above is taken from Garrett Ryland’s 1955 book, The Baptists of Virginia, 1699-1926. Ryland says that this same pattern — initial support for abolition and Jubilee followed by local resistance and ultimate reversal — was repeated at the local and regional level in Baptist associations throughout the state. The Ketocton Association, for example, adopted a plan for the “gradual abolition of slavery” in 1796. Angry resistance from local congregations led to the repeal of that plan just two years later.

The resistance to Leland’s proposal from the regional associations shows that it probably never really had a chance, but this is still a tantalizing story. In 1789, the Baptists of Virginia came to a crossroads and saw that something else, some other way, might be possible. And they paused, for just a moment at least, to consider that before passing by on the other side.

From May 30, 2013, “Dives will always be with us — and so will selfish rich jack wagons who misquote the Bible“:

The authors of both Gospels, like Jesus himself, expected that everyone reading or hearing that phrase — “For you will always have the poor with you” — would recognize it and know where it comes from. Jesus was quoting scripture. Jesus was quoting scripture and counting on his disciples knowing that he was quoting scripture.

Fincher is quoting Jesus and counting on his listeners not knowing that Jesus was quoting scripture. Because anyone who knows that will instantly recognize that Fincher is twisting Jesus’ words into the opposite of what they mean.

Jesus was quoting from the Torah, from Deuteronomy 15. That’s another one of those Jubilee passages. The chapter starts with a quick rehash of the laws regarding the Sabbath year. Every seven years, debts must be cancelled. Thus saith the Lord.

Yes, the Bible says that. It says that over and over and over again. Every seven years, debts must be cancelled.

Jubilee and the cancellation of debt are kind of a major theme in the Bible. This tends to escape the notice of most American Christians — particularly those who most loudly proclaim themselves to be upholders of “biblical” morality. Years of painstaking conditioning have rendered this major biblical theme invisible to the eyes of American readers, so much so that people like Dave Ramsey have been able to create an industry out of teaching the opposite of Jubilee.

Every seven years, Deuteronomy 15 reminds us, “every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against a neighbor, not exacting it.” Follow all these rules for Jubilee, Deuteronomy says, and there will be no such thing as poverty:

There will, however, be no one in need among you, because the Lord is sure to bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession to occupy, if only you will obey the Lord your God by diligently observing this entire commandment that I command you today.

Got it? Obey the rules, Deuteronomy says, and no one will be poor. So if anyone is poor, it’s because you’re disobedient. That’s implicit in the verse above, but Deuteronomy makes it explicit in the verses that follow:

If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted towards your needy neighbor. You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be. Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, “The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,” and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing; your neighbor might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt. Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so, for on this account theLord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”

That is the context for Jesus remark in the Gospels. “For you always have the poor with you” is Jesus’ direct quotation of Deuteronomy 15:11, “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth.”

That statement is followed by a “therefore” — “I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor.’” In reciting the first part, Jesus was invoking the second, the “therefore.” He didn’t need to recite all of Deuteronomy 15 for his disciples because he knew that they, unlike American Christians like Rep. Stephen Fincher, were not biblically illiterate.

For Jesus, it was impossible to cite the first part without reinforcing the second part. The two are inextricably linked — hence that “For ..” and “Since …” in our English translations. People like Fincher who invoke the first part as a denial of the second part are mangling the Bible in obscenely perverse ways, turning Jesus’ words into their opposite and turning Christ into antichrist.

Don’t miss the rebuke there in Deuteronomy 15. That’s the key point here — it’s why Jesus chose to quote this particular passage, applying its rebuke to Judas.

“If only you will obey the Lord your God,” Deuteronomy 15 says, there will be no one in need. And then, six verses later, “Since there will never cease to be some in need …” Ouch. That passage just comes right out and says “you’re all a bunch of disobedient disobeyers who will never cease to disobey disobediently.” And in the context of the Pentateuch, that’s not good. (Do you know what Deuteronomy says should happen to the disobedient? It isn’t pretty.) In that context, that’s far harsher than anything Southern Beale had to say to Rep. Fincher.

Whenever you hear some blowhard quoting “the poor will always be with you” in the backwards, antichrist way that Fincher invoked it, there really is nothing more true, more appropriate, or more necessary to be said than just exactly what Southern Beale wrote: “You are a horrible person who uses the Bible to selectively justify your greedy, selfish ways. Woe unto you.”

And “Repent, asshole,” is actually charitable — an extension of mercy, offering Fincher, et. al., a last-gasp shot at escaping their otherwise certain fate of “You are accursed, depart from me.”

Read the whole post here.

From May 28, 2012, “Slavery, seafood, sexuality and the Southern Bible“:

I’ve written many times here about Peter’s vision of the treyf smorgasbord in the book of Acts (most recently here, and earlier here).

I love that story, which is why I’ve linked to those chapters from Acts, reprinted them here, and summarized them many times. It’s a terrific story from the Christian Bible and I want everyone to read the whole thing. For some reason, that leads my conservative friends to accuse me of desperately wanting to hide this story and to prevent people from reading it. Please go read it.

(Seriously, click the link there with the words “go read it.” Or click this link here. Read it. Read what it actually says rather than just what these alleged “conservatives” pretend it says. Go read it.)

Part of my fascination with that story, yet again, is that so many modern American readers of it insist that the apostle Peter was some kind of disobedient jerk who could not be trusted to report honestly on the meaning of the vision that God gave to him alone and that he alone witnessed. …

They don’t say this explicitly, in exactly those words. But they want to tell you what Peter’s vision means. And what they tell you it means is not at all the same thing as what Peter himself said it means and what Peter himself showed it to mean.

Don’t listen to Peter, they argue — Peter cannot be trusted to tell us what Peter’s vision means. And don’t listen to Luke. Both of them pervert the obvious meaning of Peter’s vision, refusing to stick with the obvious literal interpretation of this divine revelation.

So, OK, here, for the um-tiddly-umpteenth time, is Peter’s vision as described in Acts 10:11-16, quoted here in the approved conservative formulation that surgically segregates those five verses from the whole story as told in Acts 10:1 through Acts 11:18 in which it reinforces the themes, also, of the larger story told in Acts 1:1 through Acts 28:31, inclusive:

He saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down, being lowered to the ground by its four corners. In it were all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a voice saying, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ But Peter said, ‘By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.’ The voice said to him again, a second time, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ This happened three times, and the thing was suddenly taken up to heaven.

This vision, Team Mohler says, correctly, is very specific. It’s about food and diet and doesn’t mention anything else — nothing about sexuality or gender or ethnicity or liberation or Jubilee or reconciliation. God speaks in the imperative and God’s words are clear, direct and specific: “Kill and eat.” This imperative applies specifically to that which is shown in the vision, to “all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air.”

The voice of God speaks in this vision and Team Mohler notes that the voice of God is unambiguous and explicit. We have a verbatim quote from God: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

That’s God Almighty talking there. God Almighty, the source of this vision, explicitly states the meaning of the vision and sets a clear, unambiguous boundary on that meaning. To miss that point or to try to change God’s words would be to contradict the explicit, verbatim words of God Almighty.

That’s a powerful argument there from Team Mohler. Seems conclusive. They’ve cited chapter and verse and the authority of the very words of very God.

And yet some of us — obstinately — refuse to accept that this is all that this vision meant or all that it means or ought to mean. Worse than that, some of us who insist that this vision meant something more than that have the audacity to put other words into the mouth of God. We insist on changing the words that God Almighty spoke to Peter and, thereby, vastly altering and expanding the meaning of this revelation.

Let me note yet again that this vast alteration of the explicit words of God wasn’t my idea. If you want to blame someone here for changing the words and misquoting Almighty God, blame Peter and Luke. They started it.

They started it almost instantaneously, seconds after Peter received the vision, with the explicit words of God still ringing in his ears. In that instant, Luke writes, Peter reveals the confusion that would lead to his changing the words God spoke. Here is the very next verse: “Now while Peter was greatly puzzled about what to make of the vision that he had seen …”

What is that all about? How could he possibly be “puzzled”? How could Peter fail to understand the very explicit meaning of what he had just seen, of what he had just heard God Almighty say, verbatim, three times?

This puzzlement separates Peter from Team Mohler. Mohler et. al. read the account of Peter’s vision in Acts 10:11:16 and they are not puzzled at all. They know exactly what it means and what it doesn’t mean and don’t see any basis for Peter’s confusion. It’s obvious. It’s clear. God spoke and all we have to do to understand is to listen to the literal words that God literally said: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” The “four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air” that had previously been forbidden as un-kosher were now fair game.

But the apostle Peter doesn’t listen to those verbatim words from God. Instead he listened to something else — to the knocking at his door. That knocking heralds the arrival of the two-footed, warm-blooded, un-feathered gentile servants from the household of the Roman centurion Cornelius. With the arrival of these visitors Peter arrives at a new conclusion about the meaning of his vision. He arrives at a conclusion that Team Mohler insists is the wrong conclusion — one that contradicts and changes the very words God Almighty has just spoken to him.

And make no mistake about it, Peter does exactly that. He changes the words. He misquotes God. “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” God said. God said it, Team Mohler believes it, and that settles it. But Peter unsettles things by changing those words, saying instead that, “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”

That’s not what God said. God didn’t say “who,” God said “what.” God was talking about “all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air,” and saying that un-kosher food is no longer forbidden. Peter’s formulation is radically different — it’s sweeping and universal in scope, going far beyond what God actually said in the vision. “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”

Rebellion. Sin. Apostasy. Peter is putting words into the mouth of God. New words, different words, incompatible words that directly contradict what God Almighty had said, verbatim, just a few verses earlier.

To make matters worse, Luke plays along with Peter’s alteration of the words of God. The following chapters of Acts treat Peter’s perverse paraphrase of the words of God as authoritative, denying and defying the clearer, more obvious, less expansive literal meaning of the words God spoke.

This rewriting of divine revelation, this putting strange new words into the mouth of God Almighty is, alas, not unique to Peter and Luke. It happens all over the place in the Bible.

Isaiah did the same thing Peter did. It’s an even more egregious case, actually.

In Isaiah 58, the prophet directly contradicts and alters the clear and unambiguous words of God as revealed in the books of Moses. God ordained and commanded feast days. God decreed particular sacrifices and offerings. These were not optional. This was the word of God Almighty.

But not only does Isaiah dismiss those explicit, verbatim words of God, he has the gall, like Peter, to put new words into the mouth of God. Isaiah brazenly interprets his own vision from God as a contradiction of what is clearly and explicitly established as God’s will. It’s not just that Isaiah makes God ridicule and dismiss those earlier divine statements about feast days, fast days and sacrifices, he also puts words in the mouth of God that deal with a much larger subject. Isaiah 58 changes what God had to say about the singular theological question that has shaped American history, American culture and American Christianity more than any other theological question: the matter of slavery.

The laws of Moses did not condemn slavery. The laws of Moses permitted, regulated and condoned slavery. In the books of Moses, the people of God were sometimes commanded to take slaves and to keep slaves and to punish slaves. Abraham, a righteous man blessed by God, owned slaves. Abraham’s owning of slaves did not adversely affect his standing with God as a righteous man or cause him to lose God’s blessing. On the contrary — Abraham’s owning of slaves is portrayed in the books of Moses as a sign of God’s blessing. We know that Abraham and others were righteous and blessed, in part, because they owned so many slaves.

That’s in the Bible. That’s canon.

And yet here comes Isaiah to turn all of that upside-down. Here comes Isaiah to put new words into the very mouth of very God — words that contradict the canonical words God spoke to Abraham and to Moses. Here comes Isaiah, like Peter, to suggest that the clearest, most straightforward and literal obvious meaning of those words of God is wrong — that the literal face-value meaning of those words is inadequate, that it’s not nearly big enough or expansive enough or inclusive enough.

Rebellion. Sin. Apostasy, etc.

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?

That’s in the Bible too. That’s also canon.

So here we are: Scripture vs. scripture, the Bible vs. the Bible. How are we to make sense of this?

That’s a difficult problem for any subject in any context. But we’re not talking about just any subject or just any context — we’re talking about the subject of slavery in the context of America. And that takes things to a whole other level.

The question of slavery was the foremost theological controversy in America in the 19th century, but it was never simply an abstract question for scholars in ivory towers to debate abstractly and disinterestedly. There was way too much money at stake for that.

It may seem crass to suggest that any amount of money at stake would influence a theological dispute or the way that Christians relate to and interpret the Bible, but you really need to appreciate the amount of money we’re talking about here.

No, no, no — much more money than that.

I’m not sure how much money you were thinking about when you read that phrase “too much money at stake,” but you’re underestimating the sheer, vast, mind-boggling size of the pile of money at stake in this dispute. Whatever amount you were imagining, the amount of money at stake in this controversy is bigger than that — even if you’re taking into account that the amount is bigger than what you’re imagining. Here’s Yale historian David Blight:

By 1860 there were approximately 4,000,000 slaves in the United States, the second largest slave society — slave population — in the world. The only one larger was Russian serfdom. … In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together. Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy. The only thing worth more than the slaves in the American economy of the 1850s was the land itself, and no one can really put a dollar value on all of the land of North America.

So it’s hard to imagine that the pro-slavery side of America’s epic theological dispute over slavery could have been wholly disinterested.

And the anti-slavery side, of course, wasn’t disinterested either. Frederick Douglass, for example, never even tried to approach the theological and hermeneutical controversy over slavery from a vantage point of impartial abstraction. His personal interest in the controversy was unquantifiable — it was priceless.

So both sides had more at stake than can be easily imagined and the theological battle-lines were drawn.

On the one side were the ancestors — in every sense — of Team Mohler. They defended slavery by citing chapter and verse from the Bible and by arguing that this is how the Bible must always be read and understood, by citing chapter and verse. They listed dozens of biblical passages that unambiguously permitted, condoned or commanded slavery. Such passages, they said, must be interpreted literally. That was the only acceptable way to read the very words of very God. “Literal” became a rallying cry, a battle cry that shaped one faction’s theology throughout the 19th century and, thereafter, on through the 20th century and into the 21st.

But the other side quoted the Bible, too. They had a few passages, such as that chapter of Isaiah, that were no less explicit and unambiguous in condemning slavery. But this side didn’t rest its case on a literal reading of those literal words. Instead, they stepped back to look at the bigger picture, at the trajectory of the Bible, at the character of God portrayed in that Bible and the characteristics it taught for any people who sought to be God’s children. They sometimes cited chapter and verse, but they also sought to put verses into the context of chapters, and chapters into the context of books, and books into the context of a larger whole. For them the big picture was clear, and no single chapter-and-verse data point from one location along the grand trajectory could rightly be interpreted — “literally” or otherwise — as contradicting the clear meaning and direction of the whole.

So who won this theological argument? In a sense, the big-picture people did, but they didn’t really win on theological grounds. They argued that their hermeneutic was more consistent and more respectful of the whole of scripture, but that contention didn’t turn out to matter quite as much for the outcome of this debate as did, say, Gen. Sherman’s burning of Atlanta. They came out on top in the theological dispute because they were aligned with the side that came out on top in the Civil War.

Before that war, slavery had also been the subject of a fierce secular controversy over the meaning of the text of the U.S. Constitution. That conflict precisely mirrored the ongoing theological dispute. On the one hand there was the pro-slavery side, arguing for a literal interpretation of the literal text. And on the other hand was the anti-slavery side arguing for a big-picture consideration of that text’s larger trajectory. Victory in the war allowed the anti-slavery faction to settle that matter by subsequently rewriting the Constitution to include the revolutionary 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. The dispute over the interpretation of the text of the Constitution thus was resolved — in theory — by amending the text to make it support the winning side.

Alas, this textual dispute settled by the lethal violence of war was quickly unsettled by the lethal violence of terrorism, with mass killings, night riders, lynchings and mob rule rendering the text itself — literal or otherwise — largely irrelevant throughout most of the country for a century afterward.

It may seem like I’ve drifted far, far afield from my original subject. I started out by discussing Peter’s vision in Acts 10 and somehow I’ve wound up at the Colfax Massacre.

Well, yeah. Because it’s all the same subject. The question I’m exploring about Peter’s vision is how we go about understanding what that vision means. Can we accept Peter’s interpretation of it, even though that requires us to change the literal words that God spoke to him? And there — at the intersection of biblical literalism and meaning — I as an American must also come inevitably and inexorably to Colfax and terrorism and the Klan and all the cruel violence of a history shaped by slavery.

These things are inseparable here in America. Here the claim of a “literal interpretation of scripture” is bound up, warp and woof, with the central, defining American dispute over slavery. American biblical literalism arose to prominence in defense of slavery and has shaped itself for centuries in pursuit of that one contention. American biblical literalism retains that same shape today, even when it is applied to diverse other subjects, from sexuality to origins to eschatology.

American biblical literalism has not changed. It preserves its essential fear of and antipathy toward any consideration of the bigger picture or the larger trajectory. It reflects its instinctual sympathy for siding with the deepest pockets. It reflexively strikes back against any hint of liberation or of Isaiah’s redefinition of Jubilee.

If you really want to understand Team Mohler, you have to appreciate that it is the heir to, and the latest incarnation of, Team Calhoun.

Read the whole post here.

From May 26, 2007, “Giving the moon the finger“:

It seems whenever the question of slavery and the Bible comes up, everybody starts to get their fundie on. Even people usually far-removed from the fundamentalist and evangelical subcultures start using some of its more dubious tools — like the vivisection-by-concordance approach to Bible study. Yes, concordances are helpful, and this can be a fruitful approach, but only if studying the index is not seen as the equivalent of, or a substitute for, reading the book.

In this case, actually, you’d be better served by reading the Table of Contents than by reading the index: “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Num …”

Wait, what was that second one?

Right, Exodus. The title of that book is the first and last biblical word on the subject of slavery.

Exodus definitively establishes the motif and the trajectory. Liberation starts here. But it does not end here.

The Exodus story provides refrains that echo all through scripture: “You were once slaves in Egypt,” “the Lord brought you out of slavery in Egypt.” This refrain is the basis for much that follows in the law and the prophets. You were once slaves in Egypt, so we’re going to practice liberation every Sabbath year and every Jubilee. You were once slaves in Egypt, so breaking every yoke is what religion is all about. And further along this trajectory, You were once slaves in Egypt but I brought you out, so you’re going to love your neighbor and even love your enemies.

The Exodus is, to borrow an image from Buddhism, a finger pointing at the moon. Measuring the length and the limits of that finger misses the, well, point. Woolman and Wilberforce understood this. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. Bob Marley understood this.

So if you’ve an interest in this subject — what the Bible says about slavery — you need to do more than study the finger. You need to look where it’s pointing.

Read the original post here.

• So, OK, tried to pre-schedule a few posts ahead of a hectic and daunting Big Box weekend and I goofed up on tomorrow’s, making it today’s. Those worried that this blog is turning into nothing but re-runs can be reassured that it also now includes Sneak Previews of future re-runs. Oops.

• Before diving in on the ways that Grove City College trustees have disgraced and beclowned themselves by embracing anti-anti-racism, here’s a bit of background on another white evangelical college:

• The Race Project: Cedarville (Part One)
• The Race Project: Cedarville (Part Two)

Nothing to see here, just a bunch of white evangelical college students hog-tying and assaulting a Black classmate because his parents refused to sign the school-mandated form banning interracial dating. But, you know, that was the 1980s — ancient history.

• “She swallowed the bird to catch the spider, she swallowed the spider to catch the fly …”

• RIP Roger Angell:

Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try — antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.

• This Daily Kos post by Benthovens5th discusses one of the most pertinent biblical passages for our curdled, crabs-in-a-bucket national discussion of odious debt: “Student Loan Forgiveness vs the Parable of the Vineyard.”

I’d add Luke 4:29, “They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff.”

This is a recurring theme throughout the Bible: 1) Any talk of Jubilee will make Some People very angry; 2) Those people are the Bad Guys.

• Shelby Alito’s sloppy draft of the precedent-destroying decision criminalizing abortion was most probably leaked ahead of time by Alito himself. But the second likeliest candidate for the leak is Ginni Thomas.

• This Smithsonian piece by Diane Bernard is interesting: “How a Failed Assassination Attempt Pushed George Wallace to Reconsider His Segregationist Views.”

I mean, personally, I attempt and advocate a host of rational, spiritual, and social approaches that I hope will nudge my white-/Christian- nationalist neighbors to reconsider their segregationist views. And I’m certain it’s best to stick to such nonviolent approaches (for a host of reasons, including the practical/prudential reasons Niebuhr discusses here). So while I’m somewhat grateful to the Smithsonian for reminding us that other approaches are sometimes also effective, please don’t take that headline as advice.

• Before this month, I had never heard of the “Free Republic of Franklin,” but then this weird-but-true slice of history showed up twice in my RSS feed. The first was from Erik Loomis’ visit to the American grave of William Blount — a war profiteer during the Revolution who went on to a bunch of other grand schemes involving his personal enrichment at the expense of the newly independent country. The second was from Daniel Silliman’s look at “Why Tennessee Is Just Now Looking at Lifting a Ban on Clergy in the Legislature.”

Both pieces are a helpful tonic against claims that our contemporary political and religious divisions are “worse than they’ve ever been.” Loomis reminds us that Abigail Adams wanted William Blount executed by guillotine. Silliman recounts vicious intramural fights between very slightly different Calvinist perspectives that resulted in preachers being burned in effigy.

I’d say that makes the impeccably polite wine-and-cheese protests near Shelby Alito’s house seem quaintly civil by comparison, but frankly those protests were doing a fine job being quaintly civil on their own.

• “Why It Took Six Decades for James Hong to Get a Star on the Walk of Fame.”

James Hong is amazing. He’s a “working actor” who’s still working, now, at age 93 — still adding to his list of 440-and-counting acting credits on IMDB. You’ve seen him a whole lot in movies or on TV, or heard his voice in animated productions. And you’ve never seem him just coasting or phoning it in or settling for the two-dimensional stereotypes that were the only parts available to him for much of his long career.

• Like Chris Arnade, I’m a big fan of long walks, and there’s plenty of interesting or wise advice in his post, “How to Walk (12 miles a day).” But I’d also point out one more way to walk 12 miles a day: Get a job at the Big Box (and then leave early once you hit the 12-mile mark).

• This is well stated and very hard to disagree with: “Google search is merely Google searching its advertisers pockets for some transaction money. Google Search used to convey an impression of limitless brainpower and now you can’t tap on it without being despatched to the mall. Worse yet, it’s not even a good mall.”

• Mark Evanier doesn’t usually write much about sports, but this is a terrific story: “The Man We Didn’t Believe.”

• This post will, for some people, be full of immensely helpful and practical advice. If you’re not one of those particular people, then that post still stands as a reminder that, whatever your specific situation or experience, sharing your story with others may well be immensely helpful and practical for someone out there: “So here I am, somehow, me, little pure and naive Perfect Number, somehow I’m giving sex ed advice on the internet. But I have to. I have to say these things, because I needed to hear them back then, and there was no one to tell me.”

• I agree with both the title of this post and the tweet it quotes.

• Fred Bonine (1763-1941) was a capable eye doctor who ran track in college. There’s no urgent reason why you should know that, just as there was no urgent reason for Paul Campos to spend hours of his time writing and researching a 2,000-word deep dive confirming that this is all anyone really needs to know about Fred Bonine.

But I’m still glad he did that, and I’m glad I read it. (Is there a follow-up post? Of course there is.)

• “Will Minneapolis Pass a Law That Helps Renters Buy Their Homes?” We need a (better) progressive version of ALEC, so that instead of occasionally reading stories about positive efforts in one city we’re constantly reading stories about a series of positive efforts in dozens of cities and statehouses.

Some of those efforts might even gain bipartisan support.

• For now, the Old People who own more than $1 trillion in odious student debt are still alive and  still in charge, and still using every one of their remaining breaths to ensure that the Young People burdened by all of that debt will never, ever escape from it. But time is not on their side.

Eventually, those Old People will be dead and the Young People trapped in their beastly system will be able to demolish it, rewrite the rules to make them just or at least minimally decent, and all the living will celebrate a great Jubilee. That will happen. It would be nice if the Old People now in charge helped it to happen now instead of leaving millions of Young People waiting for — and thus wishing for — them to die.

• Is your refrigerator running? “Glenn Youngkin Set Up a Tip Line to Snitch on Teachers. It’s Only Gotten Weirder Since.” Glad to see this backfiring almost as much as it deserves.

• “Jason Wolter, is a thoughtful, broad-shouldered Lutheran pastor who reads widely and measures his words carefully.”

No, no he is not. The next sentence of this MPR/AP cletus safari reads: “He also suspects Democrats are using the coronavirus pandemic as a political tool, doubts President Joe Biden was legitimately elected and is certain that COVID-19 vaccines kill people.” And, we learn later in the piece, he gets all his news from Gab (“Widely described as a haven for extremists including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists, the alt-right, Donald Trump supporters, and QAnon conspiracy theorists”).

The Rev. Wolter is a barking mad white nationalist loon who appears to be measuring his words only because he’s working hard not to drop the N-bomb when speaking on the record with the big-city reporter. If he’s a Lutheran pastor, then I’d guess it’s more because of Von den Jüden und iren Lügen than despite it.

• “In August, after purchasing a 900-square-foot-Methodist church built in 1876, Lindsay and his business partner, Anna Cronin, opened Dirt Church Brewing Co. in East Haven, Vermont. It’s one of at least eight church breweries that have opened in the U.S. since 2020.”

That’s from Kathryn Post’s RNS report, “Suds in the sanctuary: Craft breweries populate vacant US churches.” One more for our growing file of stories about former church buildings. That file is likely to get pretty big in the years ahead. But, alas, not big enough, because …

• “Inside the fastest growing religious movement on earth.”

And also: Inside the fastest growing religious movement on earth.

But at least the St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Benson, Minnesota, is still destined to be turned into a microbrewery in the next five-to-10 years.

• Jeffrey Salkin highlights a lovely Late Show moment between host Stephen Colbert and guest Dua Lipa. (Relevant magazine also flags that conversation. And here’s the video.)

This would have been a Huge Event for the white evangelical subculture even as recently as the W years. A certifiably famous pop star speaking fluent evangelicalese and earnestly discussing Christian faith on network television would’ve had us giddy with excitement, making Dua Lipa a subcultural cult hero hailed as the Second Coming of Tim Tebow.

But in the Trumpified and Fox-ified white evangelical culture of today, this will barely register at all because, after all, neither Lipa nor Colbert is Team MAGA. Those are the new rules.