ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 29, 1996 TAG: 9612310059
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD SCHEININ KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
Everyone talks about it, reads about it. Few read it. The Bible.
Those who do, often idolize it, worship it. But do they think about it? Not deeply enough. Instead many manipulate it to justify their prejudices. There is little attempt to understand the Good Book as a text that expresses, yes, the spirit of God, but also the ambiguous acts and attitudes of ancient people.
So says the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, minister for 25 years of Harvard University's Memorial Church. A black Republican and Baptist preacher, the New England-born Gomes sermonized at President Bush's inauguration. and opposed Harvard's ridding itself of South African investments in the '80s.
Now he's written a book explaining how the Bible has been used to justify slavery, anti-Semitism, sexism and, today, he says, homophobia. Professor of Christian morals at Harvard, Gomes, 54, knows how to deliver a zinger: ``One must not use the Scriptures as a drunk uses the lamppost - for support rather than for illumination,'' he says in ``The Good Book: Reading the Bible With Mind and Heart'' (William Morrow, $25).
The book is his attempt to reclaim the Bible from the religious right and resolve ``the remorseless tensions between the exclusive and inclusive elements of my Christian faith.'' It increases the public trajectory of this essentially private man who stepped to a Harvard podium five years ago to talk about a student magazine attack on homosexuality as ``immoral'' and ``pitiable.'' No, said Gomes: ``Gay people are victims not of the Bible, not of religion, and not of the church, but of people who use religion as a way to devalue and deform those whom they can neither ignore nor convert.'' Then Gomes surprised his audience: He spoke as ``a Christian who happens as well to be gay.''
We talked to him in San Francisco.
Q: You say many people have a ``lazy, simpleminded'' approach to reading the Bible. What are the consequences?
A: You're victim to whoever knows more than you do. The irony is that the Bible remains, despite all of the secular world surrounding us, and all of the diversions and changes in our culture, the central book of our discourse. So if you're not conversant with it, not able to reference it, you're out of the cultural loop. And those who have more knowledge than you do, or who are better at appropriating what knowledge they have to advance their understanding of reality, really have a great advantage.
Q: One of your treatises is that the Bible has historically been manipulated to justify cultural prejudices.
A: Right. Reading the Bible is an exercise that requires a certain amount of cultural and intellectual modesty. I have to be very careful when I reach conclusions about what the Bible is saying. I have to recognize when I'm speaking, when my culture is speaking, when the culture of the Bible is speaking, and all the interactions among those perspectives. That's an exciting enterprise. It's also a demanding one.
Q: I can't help thinking that many conservative Christians would accuse you of rejecting absolute truths. Many would call you a relativist: ``Gomes accepts the possibility of different interpretations of the Bible ...''
A: Well, everybody's a relativist. My most conservative friends, those who bathe themselves in the waters of literal interpretation and absolutism - it's impossible for them not to relativize. I think conservative Christians would like to be absolutists, would like to be persuaded that they don't have to be persuaded. But they engage, and all of us do, in moral and intellectual and spiritual gymnastics to try to make an ancient text ... make sense in our time.
And they don't take everything literally even though they say they do. The Bible nowhere condemns polygamy, for example. In fact, some of the most distinguished people in the Bible, the Patriarchs, are polygamists. Very few of my conservative, absolutist friends would take that as a mandate for multiple wives nowadays. We are all engaged in a process of trying to adapt what's there in the Bible to what we understand to be appropriate or useful behavior now.
Q: Will you describe how slavery was Biblically justified by slaveholders?
A: The Southern forces regarded themselves as deep, devout Christians - in fact, more Christian than their Northern antagonists. And they defended slavery on the basis of their reading of the Bible.
Nowhere in the Bible is slavery condemned. They're absolutely right. Nowhere does God say to anybody who owns slaves, ``What you're doing is wrong and release them.'' In fact, the people who own slaves are often celebrated and given great responsibility, and they are told how to be responsible slave owners. But they are not told the responsible thing as a Christian is ``get rid of your slaves.'' ... Jesus says nothing about slavery, and Paul acknowledges slavery as one of the givens of culture. So the South was right on that level.
Q: And the Northerners?
A: The Northerners, the abolitionists, argued, from the very same Bible, against the Biblical practice and in favor of the Biblical principles of justice, equity, creation in the image of God, and, therefore, abhorring the treating of one part of the creation by another as property. And they, too, quoted Paul, who in his vision of the Christian ideal, states that ``In Christ, there is neither free nor slave, Jew nor gentile, male nor female.''
So both sides had their biblical resources. And they went to war.
Q: With such ambiguity in the text, why should people cleave to it?
A: Because for those of us who are Christians, we can't get rid of it any more than we can get rid of being culturally an American, or I can get rid of being a male or being black. I mean, to think of the Bible as merely a kind of artifact that you can either take or toss away without any fundamental change to your view of the world or your identity - that is to totally underestimate the connection that religious people have with the book and its capacity to help define who they are and their relationship to God and each other.
Q: So what is the spirit behind all the words?
A: The Bible reflects, in its varieties of literature and authors, inerasable human and spiritual ambitions, which those of us who cherish that book aspire to.
Its spirit reflects the fundamental notion that, number one, human beings are created in the image of God, which gives them an unchangeable, unchallengeable dignity. Number two, that means that we owe the creator a certain loyalty, responsibility and obedience that we also owe our fellow creatures. Being created in the image of God is the basis of our ethical conduct and encompasses such things as love, justice, honor, integrity, all the big truths.
And when people ask Jesus, ``What's it all about? Give us a little fortune cookie view of it,'' he answers, ``Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, soul and strength, and thy neighbor as thyself.'' That's pretty fundamental! I accept that.
Q: Your book says the word ``homosexual'' is not even used in the Bible.
A: The word ``homosexual'' was a Viennese construction of the late 19th century, a word to account for varieties of sexual experience. The reason I make that point is that when most people hear the word ``homosexual,'' their reaction is based on their own experiences or perceptions, or the freight of contemporary culture. And then what one does is translate that freight back into the biblical context and assume that when Paul is talking about homosexuals - ``sodomites'' is the word the Bible generally uses - or when Leviticus is talking about homosexuals, it is contemplating exactly the same thing that contemporary critics of homosexuality are seeing. And my point is that is simply not so.
It is impossible to build a sexual ethic on six verses of the Bible.
Q: In your discussion of the Book of Leviticus, I believe you say the injunction against a man lying with a man is akin to ritual injunctions against eating pork or having sex during menstruation.
A: Let's back up. The rules of ritual purity have to do with distinguishing the invading Israelites from the indigenous, predominant Canaanites ... And there is a very abstemious view of sexual relations: The only acceptable purpose for sex is to produce new Israelites. And so the procreative function is the only acceptable function, particularly in this cultural environment in which these people are outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and have to preserve ... the tribe.
So not only is a man lying with a man a non-procreative use of the sexual energy, but so is masturbation, coitus interruptis, or sex with your wife while she is menstruating. And then there are all the other rules of ritual purity: Laws having to do with what is appropriate food, how you cut your hair, what kind of gowns you may wear close to your skin. So if one were going to be rigorously consistent and abide the moral code as a contemporary moral code, one would be doing all of those things, or proscribing all of those things.
But we're very selective about what we proscribe, and the only verse that many people know from Leviticus is the prohibition against a man lying with another man.
Q: You argue that there is a parallel between biblically based opposition to homosexuality that we see today and the biblically based support of slavery a century or two ago.
A: Yes, we've been there before: A clear social prejudice is advanced by a particular group which then reads Scripture in a highly selective manner, and uses the Bible as a sort of moral cover for its own point of view. If the Bible confirms your prejudice, you accept it. If the Bible contravenes it, you disregard it. And people have done this with women, with Jews, with blacks. But the overwhelming message of the Bible would go against the kind of doctrine and prejudices that Christian racists held.
Q: Everybody says, ``Do what the Good Book says.'' But your book is about just how difficult it is to figure out ``what the Good Book says.'' So Peter, what does the Good Book say?
A: It's not altogether clear! I'm always very cautious about this notion that ... if it's in the Bible it's OK, if it's not in the Bible it's not OK. That goes back to using the Bible as a kind of moral thesaurus or telephone book: Look up your problem, find your verse, and there you are. It doesn't work that way.
If you're going to take the Bible seriously, you're going to have to work a little harder than you're used to. And you may have to come up with some conclusions that don't necessarily celebrate the way we have always done things. The Bible is a risky enterprise.
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Q: You write that the Bible ``tempts'' us, almost ``like Satan in the garden.'' That's quite an image.
A: I mean that we are easily beguiled, and if we're not constantly on our guard, instead of trying to derive our principles from the Bible, by which we then live, we will try to find in the Bible justifications for principles that we already have. We will in fact consecrate or sanctify our own prejudices.
Q: Do you admire anything in the evangelical devotion to the text?
A: Yes, of course. I think that mainline traditional Christianity gave away the store - tossed the Bible out, and left devotion to the Bible and the attempt to wrestle with it seriously to what (mainline Christians) then regard as the fringes. And what I admire about evangelical Christianity is its attempt, one, to take the Bible seriously, and, two, to have the Bible play a constructive role in both the lives of individuals and the lives of society.
Had they not done that, had they not waged this campaign over the last 35 years, I think we would be in a worse situation than we are now, in terms of taking values and virtues seriously, trying to define ourselves as people not simply moved by our appetites and our sensations, but by true desire to find out what God's will is. And I admire the questions that they have asked. And I admire their fidelity to the text, their devotion to community, and to a spirit of discipline.
I do not always agree with or admire the conclusions, you see.
Q: I'm interested in the parallel you draw between extreme individualism that results, on the one hand, in flower power burnouts, and on the other hand, with the Freemen. What does the Bible have to say about rugged individualism, if anything?
A: The Bible doesn't have much to say about individualism at all. And that is where many of our conservative evangelicals in America who are individualists - with a capital I - really misread both Testaments. The Jewish Bible is always about people, not about individuals. The Jewish Bible is not concerned with existential dilemmas. It is concerned with defining a people and regulating their relationships to God and with each other. It's a societal book.
So, too, is the New Testament. It is not a collection of personal aphorisms. Jesus always talks about ``the Kingdom.'' The Kingdom is a society, a corporate entity. Paul talks about the church, the ecclesia, a gathering of people. That is not the solitary, moral lone ranger. To read the Bible as a kind of private owners' manual is to misread its corporate nature.
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