Should the Bible be Banned?
In an era where politicians are legislating the shape of education by banning books that come close to telling the truth of America’s origin story, let’s foreground how the Bible has been used to support every form of harm. Whether it’s humans against humans, or humans against creation, each time there is a form of subjugation, exclusion, or dominance, we can always count on someone finding a passage in the Bible that can be used to support it. I like the Bible and find it to be most fascinating and yet, I will also say (as I have on multiple occasions) that the Bible is the most dangerous book ever published.
As if we have forgotten about the racialized, beaten, and lynched body that is central to our religious belief and practice, at least one day per week, millions of people gather collectively around a book that is still being misused to frame and structure racial and racist irrationality.
The Book in question:
Problematic:
Given the above conversation about what the Bible is, how do we reconcile stories such as the conquest narratives, rape, the enslavement of people, the subjugation of women, invasion of nations, abuses, and a longer list of violence with it being the story of ‘God who stands in a covenant relationship with the people of God’? These, and more, are models that continue to inform the societal ills that seem to exist in perpetuity.
Interpretation:
The most problematic obstacle to working with the Bible is the work of interpretation. This is what makes the Bible so dangerous. So, what do I recommend as best practices? First, use the life of Jesus as a hermeneutical tool. If Jesus is indeed the holy vision incarnate (John 1), it makes sense that the weight of interpretation should fall on Jesus’ telling. Since we cannot divorce the God of the Bible from human experience, what does Jesus have to say? Matthew’s Jesus said that he did not come to abolish what was established as law, but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). To read this without further investigation is to make Jesus into a bigoted, racist, homophobic, misogynistic God.
So, what did Jesus mean?
For starters, Jesus was not referring to what this present empire has made into law. Jesus was referencing the law of God – which he so aptly clarified: Love God with everything and love people as if you were them (Mark 12:30-31). This brings me to a second practice – reading not only the text but reading around the text as well as reading the context. This demonstrates the dynamic nature of God’s vision. Biblical interpretation is by nature dramatic and personal. Thus, to separate who we are individually and collectively from interpretation is irresponsible and will soon land us in the place where enslaving others, Christian nationalism, and other forms of exclusion become a way of life and even worse, the so-called word of God.
A third best practice is to do the arduous work of disengaging from the seduction to follow the interpretive path of least resistance. Jesus’ seminal statements “You have heard it said… but I say to you….” is the most faithful way of loving your neighbor as yourself without diminishing, fetishizing, or demonizing your neighbor.
Well, if having faithfully attended to the above suggestions, the reader of the Bible can still make Jesus a bigoted, racist, homophobic, trans-phobic, misogynistic, colonizing, enslaving, marginalizing God, then the Bible should be banned.
See you at the next post!
#bannedbooks #Bible #biblicalinterpretation #scholar #criticalthinking #readingfromthemargins #hermeneutics #hermeneuticofsuspicion #matthew5
Jesus, as portrayed in the Bible, is not bad. But God (Christian or otherwise) is a problem. So perhaps ban large portions of the Bible? Or at the very least remove it from its high place.
ReplyDeleteDear Ivyleague,
DeleteThank you for your sassy engagement here! I love it! The problem is quite multi-faceted because in the Christian Scriptures, Jesus is the incarnation of the God of the Bible, thus believed to be indivisible. It is further believed that what we see Jesus doing is what God is doing, what we hear Jesus saying is what God is saying, etc. This being the case, one must bear in mind the human component to the writings and the canonization of the Scriptures. This, in my estimation, is the crux of the matter. Humans messed up. Another problem (created by humans of course) is the kind of abuse that comes from crafting a paradigm based on the ideals of a dominant group. This has led to the Bible becoming more important than the God it claims to celebrate. So, you have a point there about removing the Bible from its high place. To do this, one must be willing to ask questions about interpretation instead of simply uncritically accepting what a dominant group decides to dictate. This is more acceptable than making excuses for the problematic and violent in the Bible. As a professional religious practitioner who must also do public theology, I hope that I am at least doing some of this work ;)
You are!
DeleteThank you!
Delete