That someone who attended Patrick Henry College does not like Matthew Vines, author of God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships
As a professor, I am often forced to wade into the murky waters of religion, religious practice, and religious justifications for ethics and public policy. I typically enjoy the conversations, but I am frequently confronted with students whose exegetical and hermeneutical skills are less than ideal, yet they have been taught a particular way of using their texts without ever understanding why their text should matter in conversations beyond their tribe. I have lengthy conversations about the Bible, the Tanakh, and the Qur'an, but most students (and pastors) have no idea why their text should be preferred over another, except that theirs is the one God wrote or helped write. As a former believer, I have a difficult relationship with the Bible and with sacred texts in general.
While I appreciate what these books are, I'm troubled by the persistent insistence that we use them to shape policy and ethics. Of the three main Westernish ones, the Qur'an, the latest, was compiled in written form in 650 CE. We can charitably assume the Tanakh takes its nearly final form in the fifth century BCE, and the Christian Bible is complete by the fourth century CE. Well, sort of. The Council of Trent (1546 CE) decided the Apocryphal books were canonical, but the Protestant church mostly disagreed, thanks in large part to Luther, who also didn't care much for Esther. All that to say, the big monotheistic faiths can't agree which text(s) is authoritative.
Sacred texts are not sacred because god(s) wrote them; they are sacred because a particular community of faith declares them sacred. The same community declares them authoritative. As to whether god(s) actually wrote one of them, that is a question that can only be answered honestly with, "I don't know." That the Bible says it is inspired is perhaps the worst case of begging the question in print. If a book says it's trustworthy, it's trustworthy because it says so?
I'm not sure many believers hold to the notion that god(s) wrote their book. Islam, which has always maintained that the words of the Qur'an are the actual words of Allah, found a way to subvert the words of Allah by means of the Hadith tradition. An oral tradition with its chain of authorities manages to make the authoritative text moot by means of questionable chains of transmission. Christians by and large do not believe God literally dictated the Bible, and even when really smart people say something really dumb, as in Chicago once upon a time, that only shows that really smart people can say really dumb things especially when they do so in a group whose sole purpose is to protect the group's identity and sacred totems.
Chicago was where the definitive statement on the Bible's inerrancy was written, but with the caveat that it only applied to the original autographs. You know, the original written version of texts like the Pentateuch that were oral tradition for centuries. Those autographs are guarded by a unicorn in the Garden of Eden or the ruins of Atlantis, I suppose. Not to worry, though, as these folks knew that God intended His "word" to be preserved, therefore, it makes total sense that He protected it. Begging the question seems to be endemic to certain strains of theism. Inerrancy was to be a short cut to answering the question of authority. Why should I trust the Bible? "Because it's without error. Well, not your version. Manuscript zero was, but we no longer have that, but you should totally make this an article of faith. Trust us." All claims to authority are based on the power, influence, and prestige of the individual making the claim, not the text itself.
The problem here is that once you admit God(s) didn't author the text, you are left with the difficult task of explaining why anyone should take it seriously, especially when you are using it to enforce particular behaviors or prohibitions. (If you believe God wrote the text, I have no idea what to say to you.) Fundamentalists in the Christian tribe have long opted for "fulfilled prophecies" and proof texts attesting to the Bible's authority, and other such nonsense, while more moderate evangelicals have believed in authority without being able to clearly articulate what the word actually means, other than some generic idea like, "I ought to believe the Bible because it's God's Word," never bothering to parse that idea either. So, authority functions as a warrantless warrant. In other words, if I need you to believe something, I'm going to give you a good reason to believe it (a warrant); in the absence of a good reason, I need something to stand in for that good reason, a warrantless warrant in this case—a good reason that is neither good nor an acceptable reason. Unfortunately, unless the mechanism for authority can be explained in a meaningful way, why would anyone embrace the idea that this concept somehow makes unbelievable things or unprovable things more believable?
For that reason, authority is an ambiguous concept in every case where it's applied to a sacred text. Authority, I think, is supposed to mean that the text by virtue of what it is gets to define in a particular or occasionally general way who a community is (ontology), how they interact as individuals and a group (ethics), what they ought to believe (doctrine), and how they ought to minister in the world (praxis and worship). However, rather than be able to clearly define the mechanism by which authority governs the community's identity, belief, and practices, the concept of authority is used in often ad hoc ways, making it clearly subject to the demon of context. It's like a trump card, pulled out when necessary but in a game that doesn't involve trumps, or a statistic you make up in the middle of an argument you're losing, not really substantive, but damn useful if your opponent accepts it.
To say that authority is used in an ad hoc way is not to say that there are no things that have been decided for a long time, as there clearly are, but the truth of the application of authority is that those things that have been decided stay that way until they are no longer decided (e.g., slavery, sexuality, women in ministry, etc.). It's also true that some things that have been decided aren't all that important in human life or theological belief. Once something becomes undecided due to new information, social change, better exegesis, or new leadership (you know it's happened), the argument from authority is applied, and it's done so in a way that feels coercive or abusive or prejudicial or simply preferential, because, as I've already stated, there is no sensible way to explain how Biblical authority actually works. That's because all sacred texts are authoritative because a particular community says so. That's it. The Council of Trent said the Apocrypha was authoritative. The Protestant churches disagreed. Who sorts this out? Any argument from tradition only admits that tradition trumps Biblical authority. It's amusing at this point that conservative evangelicals are making arguments from tradition that sound just like a Catholic arguing for the authority of the Magisterium. You can change the word, but you can't change the grammar, folks. All Protestants are ultimately Catholics inasmuch as they read the Bible and believe it authoritative; it wasn't Protestants who selected those 66 books.
And so we arrive at Mr. Vines attempting to convince the Church that the Bible, read correctly, makes room for same-sex relationships. While I admire his attempt, and let's be honest, I do so because I think same-sex relationships are fine for people who are attracted to the same sex, I think it's a mistake to play the hermeneutics game. What you need is not a new interpretation grounded in Paul or Greek or the Church Fathers, but a community that confers authority on your understanding of the grammar of Christianity. Justifications always follow beliefs. Get enough people to believe something, and you can find a chain of authorities in the form of verses or voices that will establish your beliefs. Doctrine becomes doctrine because enough people agree that it is so. Example? Sure.
In the early 1970s, my Pentecostal mother thought the world was coming to an end because the U.S. was normalizing "no-fault divorce." Some of you are too young to remember this tectonic shift in U.S. culture. For those of us who lived through it, even if some of us weren't in churches at the time, we remember the sort of unhinged feeling our parents and grandparents displayed at the time. How could America toy with divorce that was easy, affordable, and without scarlet letters? Still, we did it. The issue passed, and no-fault divorce—ironically, $69 for divorces without property or custody issues—became the norm. The churches had to respond. It took some time to sort it out, but something amazing happened, and it's happening again with the LGBT debate; people started getting divorced, whether from abuse, neglect, dissatisfaction, incompatibility, or other less specific reasons, people started doing what they wanted to do: end bad marriages. (Yes, we can debate for a long time the cultural effects of divorce, but the problem is likely a commitment to traditional ideas of marriage rather than divorce itself. That's another discussion for another time.)
The churches had to respond. Slowly, almost glacially in terms of human lifespan, but in a blink in the lifespan of Christianity, churches decided to allow divorced people into full fellowship. And, if like me you're a religion nerd, you remember when Charles Stanley stayed in the pulpit following his divorce. It's hard not to put that in all caps. A conservative Baptist minister stayed the senior pastor of his congregation subsequent to his divorce, and it was less than one generation after no-fault divorce became legal. Doctrines didn't change first; interpretations didn't change first; exegesis didn't reveal something new first. As is most often the case, theology followed culture. Yes, there are attempts to reconcile Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount with the culture of divorce in the Church, but all fall hopelessly flat. The Church just usually decides Jesus is wrong, and then they act accordingly. It will be the same with this debate, Mr. Vines. All that to say, you don't need to prove to conservatives that the Bible supports your position. I understand that within the tribe that's an important issue, but once you try to bring the issue outside the tribe, you discover that no one cares, it's pointless anyway, and people wonder why you care what a Bronze Age book has to do with 21st century ethics. Rally the tribe. That's where the authority really is; use the Bible after you gather the tribe. That's the way it's always been.
(If you believe God wrote the text, I have no idea what to say to you.)
How about a few questions?
Why is God's grasp of grammar generally, and pronoun referents specifically, shaky in Mark but impeccable in Luke/Acts?
Why are there stylistic differences between individual books in the same genre? (I mean, it's not like any number of copying errors could make a few chapters of Jane Austen read like Ernest Hemingway.)
Why does the question of textual origins get more airtime than questions of how to interpret the text? Put another way, why can two people fast and pray and reflect and, in good conscience and confidence in their faith, arrive at incompatible interpretations? How does that not make God a terrible communicator?
Not that I would expect responses - as with any authoritarian system, affirming the authority of a text/leader/principle is more important than understanding what they say. It's pretty hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn't see how Mark 2.27 works as a metaphor for religious authority.
Posted by: Leighton | May 27, 2014 at 10:47 AM