JUNE
2002
The Bible is much loved, but its authority is much debated
THE BIBLE LIES AT THE HEART of our worship, our belief and our lives. Its ancient words inspire us today just as they did thousands of years ago.But what authority do the Scriptures have for us as Christians today? How do they influence our beliefs and attitudes in our daily lives? What do they say to us about how we should view those of other faiths?
Dean Peter Moore of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pa., and the Rev. Canon Gray Temple Jr., former Rector of St. Patrick's Episcopal Church in Atlanta, have very different ways of interpreting biblical authority. They first shared their views at a forum in the Diocese of Maryland on how biblical authority relates to sexuality. Recently, Episcopal Life invited them to meet in Washington for an informal dialogue moderated by Ed Stannard. Excerpts of their conversation follow.
Would you each talk a bit about how you view biblical authority?
Moore: I think the thing I would want to do is raise the question as to what we mean by authority first. Because I think that when people hear the word authority, they immediately think that you're talking about the Bible as a kind of answer book, for basic questions in life, or they think about it as a rule book whereby their behavior is controlled. In other words, they start with a concept of what authority is, whereas I think what I would like to do is to sort of turn the issue around and say, Let's look at the Bible itself, and see what it is and what it's trying to do and then see authority emerge from that.
I think that the Bible is the story of our redemption, it's the story of creation, fall and redemption. And it's the story of God's search for us, to win us to himself, to bring us into a covenant relationship with judgment and mercy. What we're saying when we go to the Bible is that obviously God is the authority. But when we talk about the authority of the Bible we're saying that God has invested his authority in some way in this Scripture.
Temple: The position I find myself taking on this is to think of the word "authority" at this juncture as so contaminated that I think it's difficult to use it helpfully. What we mostly mean in the world when we talk about authority is some sort of implement to wield on other people to get them to behave conveniently, as far as we're concerned.
Now, like you, I really took heart in what you said: If we could not assume a priori that we know what authority is, and we could just say, "What is this book that we have in front of us? How is it working with me personally? How is it working between us, how is it working with all of us, in the room, and let authority mean what we discover empirically," then I would be vastly more comfortable with that approach.Moore: Where we would part company is that I think that ultimately all issues in the church do end up with arguments around the Bible. I don't think you can avoid that since it is our heritage.
Temple: This is history, that is true.
How should we look to the Bible when we have issues like sexuality, where there's wide disagreement?
Temple: One of the things I go to the Bible for, in the face of a new ethical question, is novelty. Virtually all the other sacred writings of world religious systems generate stability and stasis when you read them. The iterations of the Koran predictably result in Shariah law and reading the Hindu scriptures result in the durability of the caste system. Reading the Bible generates instability, it destabilizes our human attempts to make society convenient, and so I go to the Bible seeking for something that none of us has ever thought of before -- novelty.
Moore: Most of my ministry has been with non-churched people, searching teenagers, kids going through the '60s revolution and so on, so when I look at the Bible I'm not looking for novelty, I'm look for a way to make the wisdom of the ages, if you will, relevant and powerful in the lives of searching people. And so when I preach, of course I'm looking for what's new and what's different in a given text, but I think my overall ministry has been: What can I say to make the historic faith of our church, the historic faith of the Bible, relevant to a searching high school kid or young adult. Tradition is very important to me, not as an authority over against Bible, but as a supplementary idea.
Temple: My own approach to tradition, I think, is more cautious. The tradition of the church has been to suppress the ministry of women, contrary to what I honestly believe was Paul's original intent in 1 Corinthians. I think he was in favor of women's ministry,
As in all the churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. 1 Corinthians 14:33b-34 Moore: So do I. We're not going to disagree on that one.
Temple: But the tradition discourages that. The tradition is what kept parents from listening to the pleas of their children for protection against predatory priests and nuns. I think tradition is something that I look at with caution.
Moore: Let me pick up on that if I can. What you've described as tradition, I would describe as traditionalism. Because I like what Jaroslav Pelikan said when he said traditionalism is the dead religion of the living and tradition is the living religion of the dead. One of the things that I feel strongly about is -- why I'm a child of the Reformation as well as of the historic church, and why I believe the Reformation is essential -- is that I think the church needs to be, and all of our traditions need to be, reformed.
Let me throw out two questions at once that are loosely related. What does it mean that the Bible is the word of God, and how do we balance the original intention of the author vs. the traditional intention of the church?
Temple: The first thing that occurred to me was the Word became flesh, and I see that as paradigmatic for us. One of the things about flesh, as Jesus would be the first to tell us, is that flesh is historically mediated and vulnerable to all kinds of misuse and abuse, as was done to Jesus himself. Among the misuses of what we would call canonical interpretations, an innocent instance of a canonical interpretation, is to call the parable of the loving father the parable of the Prodigal Son, which automatically restricts what we'll permit ourselves to see in that story. But a more sinister instance of canonical interpretation is the traditionalist way of reading St. Paul, which opposes the ministry and the integrity of women, whereas in fact the author's apparent intention was to favor the ministry of women.
Moore: This is a good question and I think it needs to be addressed. I think to say the Bible is the word of God certainly does not imply a dictation theory of inspiration; it doesn't imply that every word in the Bible has to be given equal weight. It means rather, I think, a few things. It means that God is a speaking God, first of all, which is a very radical thought. Theodore Roszak in "Where the Wasteland Ends" said that the Jews of the ancient world were the greatest listeners of history because they believed that God was speaking to them into their own context from beyond it. But despite the variety and the contingent nature of it, I approach the Bible with the belief that God is the primary author, that God is speaking through these different people using their different styles of writing and thought forms and personalities and settings, but nevertheless there is a common voice coming through it.
It seems to me that everyone says that there are certain things that are culturally bound and we shouldn't need to hold onto -- not wearing clothes blended from two different fibers, for example -- but there are some things that are true through the ages that are moral precepts, and which we can't just decide are no longer relevant. It seems where we draw the line is part of what divides us.
Temple: We're seeing this from a Christian culture-bound perspective. Jewish brothers and sisters have a Talmudic process, where we have authoritative creeds. We are constantly trying to nail it down for all time what truth is, but Judaism is a 4,000- or 5,000-year-old conversation and it's not over yet, and as far as I can tell that is a deeply godly spirit-driven conversation. So it does not have to be as impulsive as so frequently this argument sounds.
Moore: I'd want to explain what I mean when I say the Bible isn't primarily a rulebook. I'm looking at it from the point of view of your typical secular outside person who thinks that that's what Christians mean by the Bible. G.K. Chesterton once said, "As I look at Christianity at first it looks like a rigid guard of ethical negations, but once inside that inhuman guard, I find life dancing like children and drinking wine like men." But once inside that inhuman guard, yes, I think there are principles, there are laws if you will, rules. I'm not going to shy away from those words because I think they are part of the given of our heritage.
Yes, there's a conversation, because the church through the centuries had a big debate and argument about slavery, let's say. Thank God some people saw that this was totally inconsistent with biblical teaching, even though you could try to justify it as people did, by biblical references.
What about divorce?
Temple: Divorce is another instance where the rule embodied a principle, and the principle carries across cultures and the rule does not entirely. The principle involved the protection of women against male perniciousness. In the time of Jesus, divorce law was extremely liberal. A woman could be put out on the street, disinherited just like that on the whim of the husband. And Jesus was very conservative with this, and his movement has remained conservative on this. In our lifetimes, when we finally realized that to protect women against men's vagaries and whims it may be necessary to divorce. In my personal opinion we permit it rather too lavishly. But a canonical change, I think was a legitimate expression of seeking the principle that underlay the rule.
I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Moore: I think I would add to your reason for why the Bible is against divorce. I think Jesus did have a high degree of sanctity of marriage. I think he believed in it deeply. Yes he was protecting women but I think he was also going back to the Genesis basis for marriage itself and giving strong endorsement for that. But there is of course the Matthean exception. He did allow for divorce for adultery, and Paul allowed for divorce for desertion.
So I think that the real challenge to the church today is we have a great obligation, which I'm not sure we're always fulfilling, to do a much better job in marriage preparation, in preparing people for life in marriage and what that really is.
Temple: I like your answer better than mine.
We haven't dealt with homosexuality too explicitly. The question is, What are the principles vs. the rules concerning sexuality issues?
Temple: In my pastoral dealings with homosexual Christians, I encourage them to embrace the text and to read it very very carefully and to discover, as I do, that there's nothing in the Scripture that talks about sexuality within life in general that does not apply to faithful, committed same-sex unions.
I notice that the mob outside of Lot's door in Sodom was behaving the way no Christian homosexual would ever contemplate behaving, so it's as unpleasant as it can be but it's not pertinent to our discussion. Gay people are not talking about permission to commit rape.
Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, I notice, achieved their present form probably in the time of the purity-preoccupied Second Temple. They prohibited it on two bases: One was they didn't like category confusions, and to have a man behaving as a woman is a category confusion. Second, they did not define maleness and femaleness chromosomally, as we do, or even anatomically. They did it in terms of behavior -- who was active and who was passive. The problem with sex with a man if you're a man is that you are compelling him to abdicate his male status and privilege and become a woman. That becomes an act of social murder.
You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. I note that the authors of 1 and 2 Samuel present an erotic relationship with Jonathan and David which we would unquestionably identify as such if we saw it in any other literature other than the Old Testament. I notice that Jesus healed the Centurion's male servant, which in Galilean culture was probably or at least possibly a homo-erotic relationship. He did so without critical comment. So I don't think we have an argument from silence on Jesus' part. I think he knew what he was doing.
In Romans 1:18-2:5, Paul is doing a rhetorical bait and switch; he is not doing legislation. He's talking about something he knows will disgust his Jewish-Christian reader, that is homosexual behavior, and he gets them all angry and worked up at that and then he slams them in Chapter 2 and says you are therefore without excuse for don't you do the same thing.
Moore: I would argue that what you've given, Gray, is a novel interpretation. Since the church has spoken that homosexual behavior is incompatible with Scripture -- I'm talking about the Lambeth resolution, I'm talking about the Orthodox, the Catholics, the vast majority of Protestants, those who have studied these issues have come to that conclusion. Plenty of people argue for it in our culture, but outside of our culture, and outside of the Western liberal Protestant theological mindset, I think you'll find that most people find those arguments very unconvincing.
I do think that God calls us into a covenant of mercy and love in a relationship, no matter who we are, where we are, our warts and all, our sins and failings, but I believe God calls us to holiness of life as well. And to bear the fruit of the Spirit in our relationships and to live within the boundaries that God has set. I do believe that marriage is the boundary for sexual pleasure that God has given to us, I think that's not just based on a few texts, I think that's the overall biblical approach to sex and marriage.
I think attempts to find subtle references to homosexual activity in the stories of David and Jonathan, the Centurion and his servant, are on the same order as attempts to find homosexual connections between Jesus and his disciples. In other words, I see them as specious arguments, that have no basis in serious exegesis.
The two most frequently quoted writers on your side are William Countryman and Robin Scroggs. [For] Countryman, this is not a moral issue, it's an issue of purity, and the fact of the matter is I think the context of Romans Chapter 1, which is the classical passage on this subject, shows very clearly that Paul saw this as a moral issue. Countryman's argument that this is not a sinful behavior I think falls apart if you can demonstrate that Paul saw homosexual behavior as a moral issue, not just an issue of purity, and I think that can be abundantly shown to be true.
Scroggs is wanting to say that Paul's primary concern is one of exploitative homosexual sex, pederasty for instance. I'd have to argue that I think if that's so, then why does Paul condemn lesbianism, because that was not pederasty, that was not exploitative. Why does he condemn the malakoi and arsenokoitai -- words that he uses in 1 Corinthians 6:9 -- which most people understand to mean the passive and active members in homosexual activity. You're talking here not about exploitation, you're talking about sexual activity. Also I think that even Scroggs admits that Jews and Christians in antiquity, including Paul, opposed all forms of homosexual intercourse, and so he sort of defeats his own argument there.
I know there's a spectrum and I'm not trying to say that all gay relationships are, you know, the most hedonistic and the most outrageous, there's a perspective there, but I think that the primary problem is that by turning males into females, from men offering themselves to one another in terms of as a sexual partner, I think degrades the biological complementarity of our creative nature that we're made male and female, I think that attempts to make the Bible say something else are never going to be accepted by serious biblical scholars.
Temple: I'm very much with you in terms of the Scripture expressing a distinct preference for the restriction of sexual activity to marriage, but, it seems to me, to insist that marriage by its definition has to be heterosexual is to reduce the status of marriage to where we say the shell is more interesting than the peanut. If marriage is to be distinguished by its sexual gender constituency, then in effect we're in a position as silly as Roman Catholics, who say marriage is primarily for the purpose of procreation, which reduces it to animal behavior, and rules out the spiritual.Moore: Marriage is a symbol of Christ's love for the church; it's a symbol of the healing the divisions of the sexes. I learn to love somebody who's totally other than me, and who's very different from me. I think that in principle [gay marriages] are not marriages with somebody who is so radically other, that they learn the reconciling power, need desperately the reconciling power of the Holy Spirit. Maybe they do.
Temple: That's the most helpful thing I've heard from your side of the tennis court, speaking of people who disagree with my position.
