Stark choices (8)

So how do we deal with the "texts of terror" in the Bible, or even just the terminally embarrassing ones?

Thom Stark begins (in chapter 9) by outlining three widely used reading strategies, each of which he judges to be problematic and inadequate.

1. Allegory: I first remember hearing the allegory strategy being trotted out from the pulpit of my highly fundamentalist church many years ago. The context was the liquidation of the people of Canaan by the tribes of Israel. Bob Morton fiddled with his glasses and explained in his faux American accent (he was a Kiwi) that the text was a difficult one and far too complex to explain fully in the sermon, but that we needed to think of it in terms of rooting out the spiritual "Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites and Jebusites" in our own lives. Even then I thought it was a pretty lame approach.

Stark notes - correctly in my view - that this kind of allegorization is "an evasion of the truth; it is just one more way to doom ourselves to repeating history." These readings "do not directly confront the text; they simply discard the text's meaning." Equally important, "such readings are profoundly disrespectful to the actual victims of genocide, and to their survivors and descendants... In effect it makes us the equivalent of Holocaust deniers."

2. Canonical Readings: These, Stark explains "seek to discover the macro-narrative that underlies the minutiae. The important thing is the forest, not the trees." Anyone who has followed recent posts here knows my position on macro/meta/grand narrative claims already, but Stark puts it more lucidly: "the diverse voices of scripture are lost, and the problematic texts are swept under the rug... Problematic texts are immunized by appeal to some supposed grand narrative that recasts their significance." Again, "the reader does not seek to be faithful to the individual text; rather, the individual text is remade to be faithful to the reader's own conception of a broader canonical message."

3. Subversive Readings: This critique took me by surprise, as I assumed that this was what Stark was leading up to. But no. The example used is of the subversion of Roman imperial language (e.g. son of God, saviour, lord) by the early followers of Christ. This seems a brilliant strategy at first blush, but consider its down side. Stark writes: "If Jesus' language was a subversion of the official transcript, the reality is that his language has only been subject to counter-subversion by the ruling elites ever since." Who could deny that? The persecuted became the persecutors. The categories remain intact, lying in wait to pounce on future generations.

Well, what alternatives remain? That's the concern of the tenth and final chapter, and the concluding post in this series.

Not nice

For anyone who feels miffed that a comment hasn't been approved to appear on Otagosh, you might take solace from this. Now that's what I call "going ballistic."

Of course there's got to be a back-story, just like the epic histories you hear when you pull two brawling kids apart in the playground.

It seems someone needs a nice cup of tea and a lie down.

(No comments on this post, I can't handle the "he did... did not..." routine.)

CGWA Soda - flat and tepid?

Is it my imagination, or has the fizz gone from the CGWA soda can? CGWA? That's the anointed acronym for Kilough and assorted hangers-on.

I'm old enough (sigh) to remember the buzz that surrounded other schisms in the past, with excited talk of "new beginnings" and an avalanche of supporting material hitting letter boxes quick smart. In contrast this breakaway group seems to elicit little more than a reluctant grunt. The website is completely uninspiring, and those who do run their own sites - Ken Treybig springs to mind - seem to have to little energy to update them. There are indications that some of the ministers who got caught up in the split are now ruing their decision. Let's face it, most of these blokes are too old for this sort of drama, happy to belly-ache, averse to innovate. History can only repeat itself so many times before ennui sets in.

So is CGWA viable? Probably, at least in the short term, but not as a significant player. As we used to say in less culturally sensitive times, "too many chiefs and not enough Indians." Some of these guys have egos as big as Texas, and I suspect the rest have substantial personality disorders... except for those who qualify for both.

Meanwhile the parent body seems to have staunched the hemorrhaging for now, and are pretending everything is rosy. They've even got their "literature" appearing on the Barnes and Noble website as e-book downloads. Uh, okay...

Stark choices (7)

Child sacrifice - faithful Abraham? (R. Crumb)

I intended to structure the Stark choices series as a review of The Human Faces of God, but that's clearly not the way it's working out. Thom Stark just has so many worthwhile things to say it's tempting to just précis some of that material. That's a compliment to Thom, but cause for a bit of self-inflicted wrist slapping on my part. Truth to tell, the sting in this series comes at the end, with the two final chapters, and I'm longing to get to that point. But, hey, there's just so much good stuff leading up to there, so maybe it's time to scan through chapters 4 through 8.

Ch. 4. Yahweh's Ascendancy: Whither Thou Goest, Polytheism?

Ch. 5. Making Yahweh Happy: Human Sacrifice in Ancient Israel.

Ch. 6. Blessing the Nations: Yahweh's Genocides and Their Justifications.

Ch. 7. The Shepherd and the Giant: Government Propaganda.

Ch. 8. Jesus Was Wrong: or, It's the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine.

There's enough here to keep us going till next Xmas. This is quite a tour de force, but any further summarising on my part won't do justice to the book itself. If I had to pick the chapters that most had me riveted, they'd probably be the ones dealing with human sacrifice in the Old Testament (hide your firstborn!) and the following one on the genocidal dictates of an angry deity. I'd thoroughly recommend this book, though, on the basis of any one of the above chapters.

Along the way Stark deals to the arguments presented by such apologetic luminaries as Walter Kaiser, William Lane Craig, Gleason Archer, Christopher Wright, R. A. Torrey, Eugene Merrill, Eric Seibert and Paul Copan. Even N. T. Wright doesn't escape.

Okay. Decks cleared. Next time we'll move into chapters 9 and 10.

Stark choices (6)

The story of Jonah in the great fish's belly must be true,
Because Jesus speaks of it,
And Jesus was God's Son,
Incapable of any kind of error.
If he was wrong about Jonah,
He could have been wrong about everything else,
So he wasn't,
Case closed.

That's the way the argument goes among many apologists who assume the Bible has to be without error - inerrant. Thom Stark begs to differ, but unlike most of us isn't content to just harrumph and move on without tackling the logic head on.

Jesus never taught that David wrote Psalm 110, or that Daniel wrote the book of Daniel, or that the book of Jonah is historically accurate. At the very most, he assumed these things. But not even this is guaranteed. (p.53)

According to the logic of fundamentalism, if Jesus assumed traditions that were wrong, then Jesus himself would have been wrong - and the whole religion (apparently) collapses in on itself. (p.54)

This is also the logic of the more simple-minded atheistic rejections of Christianity, and fundamentalists have no one but themselves to blame for setting up such a stupid argument in the first place. Stark however is no atheist. His response is that Jesus must have learned like the rest of us as a child, correcting faulty assumptions as he grew, so "why can we not grant that there were still some lingering faulty assumptions into his adulthood?" To think otherwise is to get netted in the heresy of docetism, which denies Jesus' humanity.

If Jesus believed the world was flat, and that Daniel wrote Daniel, it is not because he was an inferior or imperfect being; it's because he was fully a human being.

Just because Jesus is portrayed in the gospels as assuming a first century worldview doesn't mean we need to. No need to sweat the tale of the big-bellied fish, shonky predictions made after the fact in the book of Daniel, or the belief that demons caused epilepsy for that matter.

Works for me.

To be continued.

Jeremiah was no bullfrog

Tim Bulkeley has had some interesting things to say about Jeremiah recently, and specifically those sections described as the laments. In his latest post he notes:

... whatever else the book... of Jeremiah is about it is concerned with the tempestuous and troubled relationship of God and prophet.

Coincidentally I've been rereading Jeremiah over the last couple of weeks, and a pleasant diversion it is not. Jeremiah strikes me - and this is far from an original thought - as first and foremost a political agitator, and the God-talk, which serves as a framework for his agenda, serves those ends. The book is written against a time of horrific political developments, and the prophet - a partisan for the Babylonian superpower ("my servant Nebuchadnezzar") - attempts to make sense of it all through the time-honoured method of blaming the victim (the people of Judah) while stewing in his own self pity. He would have made a great conservative radio talk-back host! Here's a brief outline of just some of the textual evidence (bearing in mind that all we have is Jeremiah's side of the story.)

Jeremiah is accused of being a 'Tokyo Rose' Babylonian collaborator. Jer. 38:4-6
Jeremiah is arrested as a deserter and imprisoned as a political prisoner. Jer. 37:11-21
Jeremiah is rewarded by the invading Babylonians for his helpful role. Jer. 39:11-14, Jer. 40:2-6
Jeremiah uses Glenn Beck-style political invective against the enemy (pharaoh.) Jer. 46:17
And, not entirely unrelated:
Jeremiah describes his own encounter with Yahweh in terms of a rape. Jer. 20:7 (see Tim's comments on this verse, and my earlier comments.)

Jeremiah's God is a bloodthirsty and pitiless monster (Jer. 48:10). Even some of the ameliorating texts included in the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Jer. 49:6) are probably later editorial additions, and are absent from the LXX. Issues of justice and expressions of compassion are remarkably absent. Yahweh and Yahweh's prophet seem to be, unsurprisingly, on the same page on matters like these.

Yes, there are a few nice passages and a handful of usable but decontextualised proof texts. But after trudging through all fifty-two chapters, with the blood and bile up to the tops of my gumboots, I have to wonder whether Marcion's instincts weren't spot on after all.

(Thom Stark suggests a way through such dilemmas, but that's another post.)

Stark choices (5)

[Continuing a review of The Human Faces of God by Thom Stark]

The next section, Just Deserts or Just Desserts, contrasts varying understandings of the meaning of suffering. Do the bad guys get their cosmic comeuppance in the end, and good folk receive a belated reward? Or is it a case of enjoying life in the here and now, as the Preacher in Ecclesiastes maintains. The final part of chapter one briefly touches on the history of Old Testament canonisation with some plain talking.

... the process by which these disparate books were collected together into a single curriculum was undertaken in large part in order to contribute to the consolidation of political power - as a way to safeguard religious identity and group cohesion ... it  was only after the texts had been brought together for these purposes that it even began to make sense to think about them as a singular "Word" from God. (p.14)

Chapter 2, Inerrantists Do Not Exist, calls the bluff of those who claim they believe everything in the Bible.

If you were to ask an inerrantist if she agrees with Ezek. 18:20, she would certainly answer in the affirmative. Of course she concurs that children should not be made to suffer for the sins of their parents! But ask her if she agrees with Isa. 13:16, where Yahweh's idea of justice is to punish parents by dashing their infants' heads against large rocks. Ask her if she concurs with Lev. 26:29, or Ezek. 5:9, or Jer. 19:9 ... Is the inerrantist still an inerrantist? (p.16)

From here the discussion moves on to hermeneutics and the many "inspired revisionist readings" of the Bible that occur in the Bible itself, followed by methods Christian leaders have used in both the early church and modern fundamentalist communities. In broad terms Stark is cogent and convincing, though I have a few quibbles on details when he touches on the figure of Marcion (but more on that later.) Along the way he swats at the expected throw-away lines that inerrantists toss out, the caricatures of 'hostile liberals,' and the idea that 'scripture interprets scripture.'

The discussion is to the point without the usual pussy-footing around that one invariably encounters from cautious ecclesiastical functionaries, and that is a breath (or maybe a blast) of fresh air.


To be continued.