gregoryjenks

Category: Opinion

  • The myth of an infallible Bible

    The myth of an infallible Bible

    A brief note for the newsletter of A Progressive Christan Voice Australia

    It is literally an article of faith for some Christians that the Bible is infallible. By that descriptor they are claiming at least two things: (1) The Bible is without any errors, and (2) the Bible is a guide for faith which will never mislead or fail to provide a reliable guide to the spiritual wisdom that a person needs at any time in their life.

    Christians have actually killed each other over these claims, and even in recent times people have lost their jobs as seminary professors and congregational pastors under suspicion of somehow not defending such a view of the Bible.

    All the same, and without wishing to offend colleagues and co-religionists who insist on believing the incredible and the ridiculous, this is a nonsensical claim for anyone to make about any historical text.

    Let’s start at the very beginning, as it is a very good place to begin according to another canonical text of western civilization, The Sound of Music.[1]

    Which Bible are we talking about and which set of books do we consider to constitute this collection of supposedly infallible texts? Already the heads of our fundamentalist friends will be hurting.

    There is no such thing as “the Bible.”

    To the contrary, there are many collections of books which various sets of Christians recognise as the Bible for them.[2] The Bible which is most likely in the mind of people who claim biblical infallibility is an expurgated edition the Bible which is much beloved among Evangelical and Pentecostal Christian communities.

    Category error?

    Yes, indeed. 

    This whole debate is an ecclesiastical mad hatters party. The rare individual who enters the rabbit hole with some basic religious literacy feels a remarkable affinity to Alice in Wonderland, where the powers that be insist that words can mean whatever they choose to make them mean. But that is not so.

    Leaving aside for now the rather important fact that Christians do not even agree on which books comprise the Bible, or in which order they should be arranged, the claim to possess an infallible sacred text fails on numerous other grounds.

    It is simply impossible to have an infallible book:

    • All texts are generated by people in particular contexts and under the influence of various personal assumptions, many of them entirely beyond their conscious knowledge.

    • The texts will be inscribed using technologies and linguistic conventions at the time, and some of those features will be incomprehensible to readers from later times.

    • The documents will need to be preserved, and copies will need to be made. Indeed, we have thousands of handwritten copies of the biblical texts and no two of them agree in every single details. Oops!

    • In many cases they will need to be translated, even if just to update the font or the syntax for current readers.

    • The readers will change over time. There will be different individuals at various points in time. The kind of readers will change from the original audience to the clerics of the religious institutions to the mass readership of an industrial society with general education for all its citizens. The social location and existential context of the readers will vary enormously. They will each be influenced by some obscure mix of their personal experiences and their prior religious beliefs, not to mention their psychological needs.

    • Some of them will need persuade us that their reading of their Bible is the reading of an infallible Bible given to us by God, with absolute truths which remain constant for all time and across all cultures.

    I would not buy a car from such a person and I will not embrace their concept of biblical infallibility either.

    Fortunately for me as an Anglican, the community of spiritual practice of which I am both a member and a cultic official has a more nuanced understanding of the Bible, as well as a wider definition of the Scriptures—a definition which reflects ancient Christian wisdom.

    I am encouraged to believe that all the spiritual wisdom which I need can be found in these sacred texts, but I am not required to subscribe to fairy tales about the divine origins of my Scriptures nor to ascribe ultimate truth status to everything my Bible says.

    Thanks be to God

    Notes

    [1] https://www.metrolyrics.com/doremi-maria-and-the-children-lyrics-the-sound-of-music.html

    [2] For a current example of a reasonably ecumenical edition of the Christian Scriptures see the New Oxford Annotated Bible, which carefully explains which of the apocryphal texts that are part of the Bible for the vast majority if Christians over most of the 2,000 years are recognized in one or another faith community. It may not be sold in your local “Christian” (sic) bookstore, but that is another essay for another day.

  • Black Lives Matter to Jesus

    This post was first published as an opinion piece for A Progressive Christian Voice Australia.

    There is an age-old divide among religious people about just what God—however understood—wants of humans.

    For the better part of 3,000 years in the Jewish and Christian spiritual traditions, there have been those stressing the need for purity (often expressed through codes about sex and food) and those who focus on justice for the victims of structural evil.

    Recently, Martyn Iles, the Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby has stoked the kind of controversy that appeals to their base and drives their fund-raising efforts with a claim that the Black Lives Matter movement is “anti-Christ”.

    This is theological ‘dog-whistling’, and especially in the deliberate evoking of the biblical term ‘Antichrist’.

    In the current context of global protests and persistent systemic discrimination against people of colour, this claim is highly partisan. It is also ‘tone-deaf’ to the cries of the oppressed which ascend to the God who has promised to hear them.

    The intention to provoke (opponents) and alarm (supporters) was clear when—rather than apologise or retract those comments—Martyn Iles doubled down on them by producing a special podcast session with a 20-minute tirade again BLW as another example of radical secular Marxism seeking to destroy Christianity.

    Despite his self-description as a “lover of law, theology and politics” (Facebook – About), Martyn Iles has no formal theology qualifications. His only listed qualifications are in the law. That lack of formal training in theology is evident in his public statements.

    Iles espouses a fundamentalist form of Evangelical Christianity, with a fascination on apocalyptic eschatology. He has recently announced a new YouTube channel dealing with questions about the ‘End Times’.

    The problem is not his naïve use of the complex texts which constitute the Bible, nor his total disconnect from critical religion scholarship. Both those things are typical of Australian Evangelicals. Rather, what concerns me most is the way that he ‘verbals’ Jesus by imposing his own concept of Christ onto the biblical texts.

    The domesticated Jesus promoted by Martyn Iles does not engage in political action, so I presume he would neither support nor join the ACL.

    His Jesus only cares about ‘saving souls’ and did not care about feeding the hungry, healing the sick, or letting the oppressed go free (fact check that claim against Luke 4:18–19).

    Such a Jesus would not have bothered himself or his disciples with a campaign against a religious discrimination bill; or indeed opposed legislation for same-sex marriage. He just came to save souls.

    This kind of Jesus crosses to the other side of the road when he encounters a victim lying wounded in the ditch. Nothing can be allowed to distract from saving souls.

    He would not have protected a woman from death by stoning at the hands of a self-righteous religious mob. He would have invited the lady to accept Jesus into her heart but done nothing to address the immediate danger of killing by the authorities.

    It seems that Martyn Iles frets over a secular Marxism that he sees in the DNA of every social movement, but is blissfully unperturbed by the multiple structural injustices which have promoted white prosperity at the expense of black lives, not to mention indigenous Australian lives.

    He notes the correlation of black deaths with crime rates in black neighbourhoods, but he does not question why we have black neighbourhoods nor why poverty is allowed to continue in the wealthiest societies we have ever seen on the planet.

    That myopia must be convenient.

    Secular Marxism is a special worry to Martyn Iles.

    He recycles the nonsensical idea that a secret KGB operation created liberation theology (apparently an especially virulent form of secular Marxism) to subvert Catholicism in Latin America, while simultaneously infiltrating the World Council of Churches in Geneva.

    Some people do love conspiracy theories.

    It seems that Martyn Iles has no idea that liberation theology occurs spontaneously any time that an oppressed person reads Scripture (not just the Gospels) through the lens of their own experience.

    They may be peasants in Latin America, blacks in South Africa or the USA, Palestinians languishing under decades of illegal military occupation by Israel or—an LGBTQI Christian in a Sydney Anglican congregation.

    Such is the power of Scripture when the Spirit of God moves in the heart of a reader.

    However, as already mentioned, the deeper problem with the analysis promoted by the ACL, is its self-serving blindness to systemic evil.

    Possibly the ACL members need to spend some time reading the prophets of ancient Israel. They make up quite a large section of the Bible, actually. Anyone who reads these texts could hardly miss the prophetic denunciation of injustice, poverty and exploitation.

    Never mind the prophets, even Deuteronomy is crystal clear about what is expected of those who might seek God’s blessing on them:

    Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue, so that you may live and occupy the land that the LORD your God is giving you. (Deut. 16:20)

    If it is too much to ask dedicated Christians who support ACL to read the biblical prophets, perhaps they could find the time to reflect on the earliest version of the Lord’s Prayer and notice the raw edges of poverty in that prayer before we spiritualised it:

    Father, hallowed be your name.
    Your kingdom come.
    Give us each day our daily bread.
    And forgive us our sins,
    for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
    And do not bring us to the time of trial.     (Luke 11:2–4)

    As a sequel, let me recommend Luke’s version of the Beatitudes:

    Blessed are you who are poor,
    for yours is the kingdom of God.
    Blessed are you who are hungry now,
    for you will be filled.
    Blessed are you who weep now,
    for you will laugh.

    But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have received your consolation.
    Woe to you who are full now,
    for you will be hungry.
    Woe to you who are laughing now,
    for you will mourn and weep.     (6:20–21,23–25)

    If even these brief epitomes of the central message of Jesus are too much for the ACL supporters to absorb, perhaps it would suffice for them simply to take to heart the words of the prophet Micah:

    He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
    and what does the LORD require of you
    but to do justice, and to love kindness,
    and to walk humbly with your God?     (Micah 6:8)

     

  • Clean hands and open hearts

    This opinion piece appeared in The Daily Examiner on Thursday, 12 March 2020

    “Facts not fear. Clean hands. Open hearts.”

    With these seven simple words, Dr Abdu Sharkawy, concluded a recent Facebook post about the coronavirus. Dr Sarkawy is a Canadian medical doctor and an infectious diseases specialist. His post went viral, which is an interesting metaphor given our content.

    After all the scientific and medical details in his post, those three simple axioms stand out for me: Facts not fear. Clean hands. Open hearts.

    We certainly need to pay attention to the facts and resist the tendency for fear to override both common sense and scientific knowledge. The empty shelves in the supermarket aisles reveal how easily fear can trigger irrational responses.

    We are fortunate to have an excellent public health system. Let’s give the advice coming from the federal and state health officers at least as much credence as the advice we accepted so readily from our emergency services during the recent bushfire crisis.

    Facts not fear.

    The best practical advice is to leave the toilet paper on the supermarket shelves and to focus on personal hygiene, especially cleaning our hands. Often. And thoroughly. Yes, it really is that simple. Clean our hands. Cough into our elbows. Avoid shaking hands. Stay indoors if we feel unwell. Do not put others at risk even if that means some inconvenience for us.

    Clean hands.

    But perhaps the most important lesson of all is to keep our hearts open to one another.

    As a compassionate community we affirm our shared humanity, and we renew our commitment to be there for one another.

    A year ago we determined not to allow an act of violence in Christchurch to tear us apart. Since then we have stuck together as fires ripped the heart from our forests and threatened so many small communities. The same resilience is needed as we stare down this virus which threatens our compassion for one another.

    Open hearts.

     

    Dr Greg Jenks is the Dean of Grafton. Like many Anglican and Catholic churches across the North Coast, Grafton Cathedral has made changes to its worship arrangements to reduce the risk of the COVID-19 virus being spread.

     

  • Faithful responses to climate change

     

    In the last couple of days, there has been some controversy around the comments made by the Principal of the Coffs Harbour Christian Community School in a newsletter distributed last Friday, the last day of term three.

    You can read the comments of the CHCCS Principal by downloading their newsletter from the school website.

    Coffs Harbour Christian Community School was founded by—and continues to be operated as an activity of—the Coffs Harbour Baptist Church.

    I became aware of this controversy when I was contacted by the Coffs Harbour ABC radio station with a request that I comment on the CHCCS Principal’s message in last week’s school newsletter.

    My concerns fall under three categories.

     

    Intellectual Rigour

    My first concern is that the Principal seems to think that his views on climate change carry more weight than the collective research undertaken by thousands of independent scientists whose work is reviewed and assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

    Such an attitude would be a deep concern in any context but is especially troubling when it is promoted by someone who leads an educational institution. Schools are essentially places of learning. Wilful ignorance—whether in the form of so-called ‘creation science’, anti-vaxer campaigns or climate change denial—has no place in schools.

    We need to be teaching children to think for themselves and navigate competing truth claims, rather than distract them from the best science currently available to serve some other agenda.

     

    Religious fundamentalism

    In this case, the CHCCS Principal appeals to the ancient myth of a giant flood, which he describes as “the first, and only, complete catastrophic climate change”. Apart from the stunning ignorance in such a claim, this is a naive approach to the Bible which reflects the biblical fundamentalism promoted by the school’s own Statement of Belief. This statement can be found on the back page of the School’s Prospectus, but—oddly—is not easily accessed from the school website.

    Such an approach to the Bible ignores and demonises more than 200 years of critical biblical scholarship. CHCCS and their local Baptist owners are not unique in holding such views. Indeed their form of Christian fundamentalism has a lot in common with other forms of religious extremism which reject the insights flowing from the natural and social sciences, while appealing to ancient traditions with no intellectual credibility. Needless to say, such religious communities and their institutions, neither prepare people for the modern world nor offer safe places for gender-diverse persons. Like all forms of fundamentalism, Christians who espouse such views promote toxic forms of religion and do not represent the best spiritual wisdom of the Christian faith.

     

    Vilification and abuse

    The intellectual and religious objections to the views expressed in the recent newsletter from CHCCS are significant, but the final objection is perhaps even more important.

    While appealing to an indefensible reading of Scripture to support his rejection of the best currently available climate science, the Principal of CHCCS went to an even darker place. Not content to ignore science and twist the biblical texts, he launched an attack on the young Swedish activist, Greta Thunberg, as a “little girl with self declared (sic) various emotional and mental problems”.

    This is unconscionable and especially so for an educational leader with a professional obligation to protect vulnerable children. Neither her small stature, her age nor her mental health are appropriate targets for such an attack by a powerful male figure. What message does it send to young children in CHCCS or in the wider community, let alone anyone living with physical disabilities or mental health issues? And all this while ingenuously claiming to be concerned about unnecessary anxiety among his students and other persons connected with the school.

     

    Happily, another religious school operating in Coffs Harbour offers an example of a ‘more excellent way’ (1 Corinthians 12:31).

    Bishop Druitt College is a large Anglican school based in Coffs Harbour and serving the same region as Coffs Harbour Christian Community School. BDC encouraged students to participate in the recent school strikes for climate action. More than that, they also provided buses to transport students to and from the rally.

    More recently, the Principal of BDC has issued a statement on the school’s Facebook page about the approach which his school takes on the climate change issues. I will quote just the final couple of sentences from that statement:

    At Bishop Druitt College, we applaud Greta’s integrity, courage and her sense of social justice. It should also be noted that these three values are part of our set of college values.

    This coming Sunday at Grafton Cathedral we will be hosting a seminar on faith-based responses to climate change, presented by the Revd Peter Moore. The seminar is open to the public and free of charge. No need to be anxious about climate change, come a learn how people of faith can respond to the crisis with courage, hope and science.

    Fr Moore is an accredited climate change workshop facilitator and a member of ARRCC (Australian Religious Response to Climate Change). In this session, we will be updated on the latest data as well as practical ways for people of faith to respond to the crisis our planet is now facing.

  • The Fourth R

    For years now educators have reminded us of the need to address the “three R’s”: Reading, ‘Riting and ‘Rithmetic.

    At the same time, Religion scholars and especially those of us engaged critical biblical studies have been warning people not to neglect the ‘fourth R’—religious literacy.

    Religious literacy might be defined as that set of knowledge, attitudes and skills which enable people to navigate successfully the contested religious landscape.

    Doubtless, there are several components of religious literacy:

    • an appreciation of the role religion plays in the lives of individuals and communities
    • appreciation of diversity among religious communities
    • recognition of commonalities that cross religious and cultural boundaries
    • knowledge about and skills in engaging with key religious practices relevant to particular faith communities
    • role of sacred texts within religious communities
    • impact of religion on public health
    • the interface of religion and violence
    • the capacity for religion to be toxic and ‘best practice’ to avoid that outcome
    • fundamentalism as a dynamic that crosses religious boundaries

     

    For many people of Christian faith, including people whose most significant cultural context has been some form of Christianity even they do not practice any faith, biblical literacy seems to be a pivotal element of wider religious literacy.

     

    Biblical Literacy

    The following comments on biblical literacy are extracted from my lecture Reading the Bible as a Charter for the Human Spirit at the Festival of Wild Ideas sponsored by the Mosman Neutral Bay Inter-Church Council on 5 May 2019.

    Biblical literacy has numerous elements, including at least the following:

    • It requires attention to how written texts function as acts of communication between and among authors and readers. This is an unremarkable literacy skill in other areas of modern life, including media studies and genre analysis at school. Yet it seems oddly and sadly lacking in many Christian churches. Meaning is always negotiated between the author and reader, with all the power being in the hands of the reader who is the one constructing meaning out of the process. The author can seek to shape the form of those negotiations, but the reader is the one ultimately creating meaning from the communication process. As text the Bible is subject to those same dynamics. We determine what it means. It does not determine our meaning.

     

    • Typical literacy also requires us to pay attention to the nature and function of language as we create, share, adopt, implement and adapt human knowledge between individuals and across generations. This is essential as we seek to use the Bible authentically.

     

    • Biblical literacy further requires that we pay some attention to what may reasonably be known about the composition of those texts that we now value as sacred Scripture. They did not drop out of heaven and they were not dictated by the Holy Spirit. Despite years of teaching biblical studies in seminaries around Australia and elsewhere, I was still shocked the other day to see a Christian leader quote from Psalm 51 as part of his argument against abortion, with the claim that the Psalm represents the direct words of God. This is, of course, nonsense.

     

    • In addition to paying attention to how the text may have originally been composed, we also need to pay attention to the process of reception for certain texts which were accepted as sacred while other texts from the same period were excluded from those documents authorised to be read in church or consulted to settle theological disputes. In other words, both the formation of the canon and the history of the interpretation of the canonical texts have a part to play in genuine biblical literacy.

     

    • What we have learned about using these texts from the accumulated experience more than 2,500 years of continuous interpretation within communities of spiritual practice must also be brought into the discussion. We are not the first people to read these texts and people of goodwill have been wrestling with them for centuries, constructing life-giving ways of reading the text as a charter for human flourishing in different cultural and social contexts. We ignore that wisdom at our peril.

     

    • An essential element of biblical literacy — or perhaps simply religious literacy — is that we consider what impact our new insights into the physical and social realities of being human in our kind of universe have on our contemporary reception and interpretation of these ancient texts. Since we no longer think we live on a flat earth or in an earth-centric universe, we will necessarily construct a different vision of life as we read these texts.

     

    • Finally, there is our own lived experience. This informs us as we reflect on past and contemporary interpretations of these venerated ancient texts. When we speak of the inspiration of Scripture, the work of the Holy Spirit is surely as much in the life of the reader and the listening community as it is in the texts themselves. Such a view of inspiration would certainly be consistent with our understanding of how meaning is constructed when a text is being read.

     

  • Sarcasm as a ​rhetorical​ tool

    The axiom, “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence”, is usually attributed to Oscar Wilde, the Irish poet and playwright who lived in the second half of the 1800s.

    That attribution may not be accurate, but the axiom itself is usually misquoted (stopping at the mid-point) and mostly misunderstood as implying that using sarcasm is evidence of low intelligence. What the axiom perhaps seeks to express is that sarcasm fails as humour, but can reflect an acute intelligence.

    Whatever may be the case for sarcasm as an index of intelligence it is a dangerous tool to wield in public debate. It is more likely to offend than persuade, and it can even reverberate with unfortunate consequences for the polemicist who draws that tool from the debating toolkit.

    This may indeed have been the fate of a well-known Anglican blogger in Sydney whose delight in deploying sarcasm to attack a media release by the Bishop of Grafton has quite possibly exposed the folly of our blogger’s own worldview.

    In attempting to undermine the statement by Bishop Murray Harvey, the Revd David Ould stoops to sarcasm as if that strategy will deflect and rebut the sound spiritual wisdom to be found in the statement by Bishop Harvey:

    Here at davidould.net we want to suggest that Dr Harvey should issue some more press releases because there are people out there making bigger threats than Folau. For instance, this guy should get a rocket:

    Luke 13:1   Now there were some present on that occasion who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. 2 He answered them, “Do you think these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered these things? 3 No, I tell you! But unless you repent, you will all perish as well! 4 Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower in Siloam fell on them, do you think they were worse offenders than all the others who live in Jerusalem? 5 No, I tell you! But unless you repent you will all perish as well!”

    LUKE 13:1-5 (NET)

    Now there’s a threat if ever I saw one. He doesn’t just have a small list like the narrow-minded Apostle Paul in 1Cor. 6:9-10 (which Folau quotes in his post along with Gal. 5).

    No, whoever that hater is in Luke 13 … well he just used hate speech to threaten and vilify everyone.

    EVERYONE!

    That’s the last thing a Christian should do. Someone should find out who he is and tell him to change his attitude and send a positive message about his faith and promote social inclusion (although what could be more socially inclusive than including all of society in your “threat”?).

    As for community well-being, surely telling people that they will perish if they don’t repent can’t be good for anyone. Someone tell Dr. Harvey so he can sort this dangerous bigot out.

     

    What this somewhat reckless rhetorical missile has done is simply to expose a serious problem with the biblical texts themselves. Sometimes—indeed quite often—the Bible says things which are indefensible, incomprehensible or just gutter talk. When the Bible descends to the gutter that does not justify us in doing the same, nor are we obliged to believe or practice anything in particular just because it happens to be written in the Christian scriptures.

    In his exaggerated journalesque mode, Mr Ould inadvertently illustrated precisely the core issue with the ugly social media posts by Israel Folau as well as the point correctly—albeit gently—made by the Bishop of Grafton.

    The Bible endorses and even commands a range of beliefs and practices which most people of faith would these days find abhorrent. The catalogue of nasties includes (but is not limited to) capital punishment, ethnic cleansing, the willful destruction of fauna and flora, patriarchy and sexism, totalitarian rule by absolute monarchs claiming divine approval, and slavery.

    When even a modicum of biblical literacy is applied to the task of biblical intepretation, a much more nuanced reading of Scripture results. But Mr Ould and Mr Folau are not ones for nuance, it seems. It is all so simple and so black and white. Just read the words from the ancient text. No need for brains to be engaged at all.

    There is, of course, ‘a more excellent way’ than this mindless recital of ancient words, but it requires us to read the text with some critical awareness of how texts work (and the power of the reader to determine what a text means), how these particular sacred texts were composed and received, how little actual historical credibility the biblical texts really have, and at least some awareness of what we now know to be true about the scale of the universe and the complexity of our shared DNA.

    When read with cognitive modesty and some critical awareness, the Christian Bible—like all the sacred texts from the great religions—can be a catalyst for human liberation, rather than manacles on the collective human spirit. I made precisely that point when giving a public lecture in Sydney this past weekend for the Mosman Neutral Bay Inter-Church Council.

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