I’ve seen a lot of stories lately about people telling versions of the past that might not be exactly right.
Perhaps you’ve seen Sarah Palin’s version of Paul Revere’s midnight ride, in which Revere warned the British with bells and warning shots that they weren’t going to take our arms. In the generally accepted story, he sneaks away to warn the colonists with lanterns and words that the redcoat forces are on their way to Lexington and Concord. What struck me about Palin’s version of events is how much her Revere resembled a Mama Grizzly: feisty and brash.
That made me think of this book review in The Christian Century. The book being reviewed addresses the complicated question: Was America founded as a Christian nation? The author concludes this may be a bad question “because it arises not from a rich understanding of the past but from present-day polemics.” Here again, people are trying to understand the heroes of our past in a way that makes them look more like what we want for today. We’re asking questions of the past that makes sense to us, but not necessarily to them.
But American history isn’t the only story that tends to squish around a bit to serve our own purposes or reflect our own desires. Christians sometimes do the same thing to the Bible. Our cultural wisdom or assumptions have a funny way of coloring the way we understand the Bible, and sometimes we imagine our modern proverbs are actually found in the Bible when they aren’t. A recent CNN article covers a few of the more popular ones, such as, “God helps those who help themselves” and “this too shall pass.”
A Facebook page calls these statements “Bibleish” – things that might be wise, but not in the Bible. Some of these “Bibleish” stories and details are a matter of tradition. The fruit in the garden of Eden probably wasn’t an apple, for instance, and the story of Jonah describes a “big fish” not a whale. Lately I’ve been wondering why “Jezebel” got turned into a name fired at promiscuous or seductive women, when from my perspective, the Bible character’s main sin was promoting a false religion. Surely her manipulation of King Ahab and worship of Baal was more serious than her vanity. Could modern uses of her name tell us more about what our culture fears in women than what the Bible story includes?
Perhaps we need to be more careful any time the Bible or a historical hero is conveniently confirming our assumptions about the world rather than challenging them. Because when we only use the Bible to justify what we think we know, we’re not letting it transform us. It might be a powerful text for backing up an argument, but it’s an even more powerful one for changing our perspective. We don’t do ourselves any favors by flattening the characters of the Bible or our common history, or by slowly morphing them into ourselves.
Accessing the Bible as a living, powerful document is hard work, and it’s dangerous. It might undermine our ideas and change our entire lives. How do we keep ourselves from drifting into demagoguery rather than approaching the Bible as a living document?
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Comments (20)
Her Biblishness is I think the interesting part of this story. What does she do in with this "gotcha" question? (the same gotcha question grade school kids face when they return from summer vacation) She appropriates a historical event and reshape it for present (in this case) political-sermonic application. What does Paul Revere teach us? "Freedom means being able to own guns!" Sarah likely learned this from listening to preachers do it all the time in church.
The next thing to ponder is that in fact this is what Biblical writers do all the time. Look at what the gospel writers do and how they shape the details of the story for their audience.
Palin, probably one of the most regular church attenders in the political limelight today, comes by this tradition honestly.
A few examples. One that is corrected often but still hangs in there is, "money is the root of all evil." Of course, the quite different true truth is, "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" (1Tim 6:10). Another is "spare the rod, spoil the child," which is often quoted as Scripture, though it is not (it is probably a mangling of Proverbs 13:24). There's also the Scripture that doesn't really mean what the person using it wants it to mean. How many parents quote Proverbs 22:6, "train up a child in the way he should go," applying it to their very small child, when the Hebrew term and context is probably more likely a "young man" (a teen). Of course, the nativity story has generated a treasure trove of "Great Cliches of the Faith" and an amazing amount of narrative conflation (how long Mary was in Bethlehem, was it an "inn" or a "guest room", was it a stable or a house, the number of Magi, when they arrived). I could go on (and on, and on...).
These axioms are less like weeds in the garden of the "mind of Christ," which would be Satan's untruths, but more like unwanted plants with attractive but non-nutritious fruit. It takes a lot of work to identify them, pull them out and keep them out, and it can be to the neglect of the real biblical plants in the garden of truth that need constant cultivation and feeding to become strong and fruitful. I guess that's just the nature of the garden in the fallen world. We need to become better gardeners.
NPR (generally not a friend of Palin!) interviewed a historian from Suffolk University (Boston, Massachusetts). He concluded that although she may have overemphasized certain 2nd amendment conclusions, she got the facts of the story basically straight.
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/06/...
It appears the news problem may not be Palin's statements so much as "the generally accepted story". In fact, if I'm understanding your article correctly, that's exactly the problem that so many people have with Biblical "knowledge". They accept (and argue vociferously about!) what they think the Bible says instead of actually reading and studying it.
Bethany sent me the article before she posted it and I actually looked online and found a historian that ABC News interviewed who said that she basically got the story wrong so I saw no problem in using this as an example. I'm not convinced yet because one historian - even if he is from Boston - can defend what Palin said.
My reason for writing earlier is that, before Bethany posted this, I did, in fact, check to make sure that the Paul Revere part was right. I objected to the commenter who said that she didn't check her facts. The internet's Paul Revere information is much richer (or at least there is a lot more of it) than there was earlier in the week!
But I think my point is still valid - if someone asked you about Paul Revere's ride and you were going to say something that most people thought was wrong - and EVERYBODY thought she was completely wrong at first - don't you think you would have said something about that? Wouldn't you have said "you know, here is what people think, but actually..."?
I know I would have.
On Bethany's main point - I have been reading a VERY FAMOUS recently published book and one of my issues with it is very much this issue. The author gives sometimes non-standard interpretations of Biblical passages without noting that he is doing so. Then he builds his case on those non-standard interpretations as if everyone has thought this all along - or at least they should have!
Biblical interpretation is hard work and I think God that I am part of a denomination (in my case, the CRC) who can stand with me and can help me think through what certain passages might be saying. As a friend of mine says "Biblical interpretation is a team sport."
Lambert Sikkema
I think my observation that her Revere looks a lot like Palin isn't diminished if her version is more selected than invented.
The idea of our culture and society mangling Biblical truth from lack of knowledge is a vitally important one. If we are to be salt and light in a dark world, we must be prepared to respond truthfully and lovingly to Biblical ignorance. It's critically important that we, as His followers, are steeped in the truth of His word.
I just don't think the recent news story about Palin and Paul Revere (and the wild controversy all over the internet regarding it) is a particularly pertinent foundation for that discussion.
George Bush's big strength was identification; from the get-go, Karl Rove and Bush's other handlers constructed an image of him that told folks in the middle of the country "this guy's one of you." Every time one of us coastal liberals made fun of the way he pronounced "nucular" or any of the million other stupid things he said or did, another person in Peoria or Dallas or Lincoln said "they're making fun of me." (At the end of the day, his support collapsed when people realized "he's someone like me" isn't necessarily the best qualification for the job of running the world's largest empire and guiding the world's largest economy.)
Palin has that same sense of identification, but at the same time more intense and more limited; to those who do identify with her, that identity connection is much stronger than it was with Bush—as evidenced by their recent efforts to edit Paul Revere's Wikipedia page to reflect Palin's mangling of history—but her apparent lack of intelligence and her persecution complex have turned off a lot of people who saw the appeal in Bush. (The "gotcha question" she blamed for her making Paul Revere one of the Three Amigos was "What have you seen today in Boston and what will you take away from your visit?" Everyone say it with Admiral Ackbar: "It's a trap!") When your character is so defined by Tina Fey's impersonation of you that even Fox News mistakes the caricature for the real thing, you've got just as many problems in Lincoln as you do in Los Angeles.
Her "tribe" is a lot smaller than Bush's ever was—and the "tribe" of people who are scared out of their wits that she might ever be President is, according to polling, a pretty substantial majority of the country.
- InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA ("Transform Lives, Renew the Campus, Change the World")
I think the idea of sola scriptura is a deep error, in that it presupposes that one can at any point actually approach Scripture in a way that doesn't involve one's own cultural assumptions about everything. We all look at Scripture through our own eyes—so of course it's going to confirm our biases by praising the people and practices we want it to praise, and condemning the people and practices we want it to condemn. It's completely unavoidable, and to pretend otherwise is to misunderstand the very nature of culture.
I like to go back to a metaphor Brian McLaren uses: he resists a "constitutional" reading of Scripture, which looks at it like a law code functioning primarily for citation in disputes or the building of propositional philosophical and theological edifices, rather than a series of narratives about the ways in which various peoples encountered God. Wrangling with Scripture is, in part, wrangling with context and culture—not only looking for the light it might shed on our own context and culture, but also looking at the ways in which it was shaped by its own context and culture.
We've already gotten very good at this, even the "sola scriptura" evangelicals—as evidenced by the fact that there aren't any American religious figures of any prominence making Scriptural arguments to justify slavery anymore. We've come to an understanding that the Bible's acceptance of slavery isn't based in some kind of timeless moral truth, but rather in the messy and complicated relationship between the people of God with the cultures and contexts of the eras in which they lived.
And that is, I think, a proper understanding—but let's not pretend that we've somehow arrived at the pure meaning of Scripture, any more than the antebellum Southern pastors who used the Bible to justify chattel slavery were looking at the pure meaning of Scripture. Our context and the contexts in which the Scriptural documents were written and redacted are in dialogue with one another. To suggest that somehow this example is completely based in the cultural context, but that in other situations—like women in ministry, or sexuality, or marriage, or government—the things the Bible says are somehow timeless and objective moral truths is, I think, intellectually disingenuous at best, and speaks to exactly the problem you're getting at.