Overheard

An actual in-class exchange:

"These prophets are pictured as giving counsel, advice, or correction to the king. So, you have Nathan rebuking David over the affair with Uriah, Elijah pronouncing judgment on Ahab for . . . everything, and Huldah counseling Josiah when-- Anybody notice the prophetess in our reading for today? Huldah, the prophetess, one of the instigators of Josiah's reform?"

"I noticed her, Mrs. Sours."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I read it and noticed that you always make us read the stories that have women in them."

"Sneaky, aren't I?"

Strong Words

I am an ethicist because I enjoy exercising my feelings of righteous indignation from time to time.

Usually, this leads me into trouble. I hear about an issue, a case, an action, a legislative agenda, and I immediately take a stand, pronounce judgment on all who are in obvious and morally culpable error, and then stand around somewhat shame-faced and backpedally when the situation proves more complex than I had initially understood.

In this case, however, I don't mind taking righteous indignation out for a spin.

Tweets, Facebook posts, and bumper stickers now bandy about a prayer, ostensibly wishing for a change of administration come November 6, 2012, but literally wishing, in the words of Psalm 109:8, for the shortening of the President's days so that "another" will "take his office."

First and foremost, this is a plain and embarrassing example of the biblical illiteracy of the church.

That Christians are passing along this verse without understanding the context in which it appears is a testament to how little and how poorly Christians read scripture.

Few of those who pass along this meme take the time to read Psalm 109 in its entirety. The psalm is one of the "cursing" psalms--prayers that God punish the wicked or defeat the psalmist's enemies.

This particular gathering of curses is impressively specific and thorough: the psalmist wishes upon his adversary vicious enemies, financial ruin, death, poverty and homelessness for his children, and permanent damnation upon his soul.

It is an embarrassment to the church that so many people are passing along a verse whose context they don't know; it is an even more troubling embarrassment that they are not curious enough to find out.

But one doesn't need to know the context to know that this verse has no innocuous intent. "I'm just praying for someone else to become president! Like, next Election Day!" comes the quick response to any perceived question or correction. "I'm not praying that anything bad happen to him!"

This response betrays nothing but splendid, willful ignorance--not only of the context but of the plain sense of the verse in question.

To pray that someone's "days be few" is to pray that they die. Soon.

(I recommend that you ask people who disagree with this statement whether they believe in the literal interpretation of scripture. If they really do take scripture seriously, they will squirm. If they don't squirm, call them theological liberals.)

There is no possible alternative interpretation of the literal meaning of that phrase. This verse wishes for someone's early and imminent death. To advocate using this verse in prayer is to advocate praying for someone's death. There is no way to sidestep this issue. And there is no excuse for allowing people to try.

Some people with no particular interest in Jesus, no habit of prayer, and no substantive commitment to Christian scripture, are passing along this meme because it seems cute and funny to them. Delighted to find such an apt expression of their own sentiments in an otherwise charmingly old-fashioned book, they pass it along as if passing along a useful and attractive sweater that doesn't happen to flatter their particular figure.

They are abusing and deriding scripture, albeit unknowingly, but one can't expect otherwise from people who have no reason to take scripture seriously.

Many of the people who are passing it along, however, are people of prayer and professed biblical faith. They claim, in other parts of their lives, to take scripture seriously. Their participation in this meme needs to be named as the insult to scripture that it is. People who claim to value biblical faith must be called to shun vacuous and unserious uses of scripture. It is an embarrassment to the faith that Christians can be so publicly ignorant of their own scriptures and can permit or perpetuate sloppy interpretations of it.

If such displays of biblical illiteracy are an embarrassment, how much more shameful is the actual content of the meme.

One would think it should go without saying that praying for a political adversary's death is unbecoming to a Christian.

One would think it should go without saying that even if one admits that there might be circumstances in which praying for someone's death could be appropriate--say, under conditions of extreme persecution, inescapable abuse, or unrelenting tyranny--that even the worst of the current administration's failures and policies hardly rise to this level.

One would think it should go without saying that if one ever found oneself in a such circumstances, casual or triumphant pronouncements of one's tragic prayer are hardly the order of the day.

But if one thinks those things, one has not sufficiently reckoned with the doctrine of total depravity. Pace dear Thomas Aquinas, who is otherwise my guide in all things ethical and ecclesial, human reason and intellect bow to the deformed will with alarming consistency. One sees what one has willed to be there; one investigates as one intends to conclude; one reasons as one wills. Once one has cast one's lot with those who find nothing wrong with praying for the death of a political enemy, one is emotionally committed to reason that one has done rightly, even in the face of the plain sense of scripture.

The level of self-justification that arises in the face of any attempt at biblical correction is disheartening.

All the same, the effort at biblical correction is not wasted. It may be unsuccessful, especially in this particular instance. Once one is raised to a level of hypocrisy in which one can publicly pray for the death of a president with whom one disagrees after spending eight years arguing that the office of president must command respect irrespective of its holder (because that was just about the only refuge left for persons of a certain political persuasion), one is most likely immune to fraternal correction, no matter how gently or lovingly offered.

But it is not wasted.

I understand that some issues are too complex, too nuanced, too fraught to speak strongly or decisively. There is a reason that the General Conference of the United Methodist Church cannot offer clear and conclusive admonitions on such topics as abortion, homosexuality, or war.

But even Methodists can find a few topics on which to speak clearly and strongly. (I might wish that abortion, rather than gambling, was such a topic, but at least we picked something!)

Even ethicists who've learned to temper their strong words with the knowledge of previous missteps can and should find a few topics for which strong words are required.

It is my sincere hope that all Christians who take scripture seriously will object, publicly, to its public abuse. I hope all Christians will call other Christians to account for perpetuating this shameful meme and will call non-Christians to understand how poorly it represents the Christian faith.

Books in Review

I don't recall whether or not I had a specific textbook on the Historical Jesus Problem in Intro to the New Testament. I remember the professor's lecture on it (very clearly), and I remember some books I read on the topic in subsequent years.

But I can't remember whether we had a book in NT 18 that explained the debate.

If not, that's likely because Mark Allan Powell's Jesus As a Figure in History wasn't published yet.

This is a surprisingly good textbook for introducing seminary students, religion majors, and beginning biblical students to the field of Historical Jesus research. Powell is detailed, clear, thorough, and--what was perhaps the most surprising--unfailingly generous in his descriptions of scholars and their methods. It would be a useful addition to any introductory New Testament syllabus.

Books in Review

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, by Elaine Scarry, begins with an absolutely brilliant account of the interior structure of torture--how it accomplishes what it intends, what it, in fact, intends quite apart from what it purports to intend, how embodiment is configured in the interaction between torturer and victim.

That we are now having something of a national . . . well, debate is too strong a word, isn't it? . . . thought exercise maybe? (of course, it's only a thought exercise for us) on the subject of torture only makes Scarry's chapter seem eerily prescient (the book was published in the mid-nineties).

She then moves to an equally important reading of the structure of war. Following Carl von Clausewitz, she makes the simple (but hardly simplistic) statement that war is an injuring contest whose physical consequences are held to certify the right of the "winner" to author reality for both parties. Each aspect of that statement (injuring, contest, consequences, winning, authoring reality) receives thorough attention, especially to the ways in which the statement's accuracy is masked (whether intentionally or incidentally) in speech about war (histories, media reports, propaganda, personal accounts).

My respect for Scarry's accomplishment in these two chapters is only partially mitigated by the three chapters that follow. The conceptual lenses by which she is able to read war and torture (and later, capitalism) so keenly are themselves less persuasively described.

For Scarry, bodily pain is the ground of creation/civilization and disembodiment is its product. One makes--coats, bread, speech, ideas--in order to alleviate an uncomfortable awareness of one's body (hunger, vulnerability to injury). The made thing, as long as it perdures, gives benefits the force of which is to remake the body of the maker (resistance to cold, increased mobility, ability to communicate with those outside the range of one's physical capacity) in a manner that disguises the limits imposed by human embodiment.

While this analysis has much to recommend it, Scarry's account of pain and creation are too narrow. Pain is not the only experience in which we become attuned to the fact of our having a body; pleasure serves that function, too. (Thomas's account of pain is much more convincing--it is one of the passions, not the paradigmatic fact of human existence.)

And pain is not the only creative prompt. This is, of course, a theological as well as an experiential claim. (Scarry addresses this objection, incidentally, by claiming that apparently gratuitous acts of creativity are only possible in the presence of a cultural abundance itself produced by pain, a claim which has merit but is not sufficient to explain the phenomenon of creativity.) If we are the children of a God who creates out of peace, out of completeness, without external compulsion, then our creativity likewise may not always require the goad of suffering. (I am obviously borrowing from David Hart's book here.)

I must also find fault with her reading of the Old Testament as compared to the New--like all post-Christian liberals, she depends on a trite and anti-Judaic reading of both texts. The "Christianity is an evolutionary improvement on Judaism" motif is too tiresome for words, and the variation played here is neither subtle nor plausible. The Old Testament god functions in the role of torturer; the violence and cruelty of religion is mitigated by the embodiment of god narrated in the stories of Jesus of Nazareth. If god has a body, the concept of god is destabilized in humanity-affirming ways. We make room for peace and democracy and (a Marxist version of) the American way.

I have other, more minor, quibbles with Scarry's work, but these will suffice. In truth, however, none of these quibbles can undermine my respect for what she has accomplished in her first two chapters. Would that I could make these two chapters required reading for participation in civic life!

Christian Bioethics?

This past week, I began a four-week lecture series in a local church's Sunday School class. The parish, a significant portion of which is comprised of doctors and lawyers, had requested a class in Christian bioethics.

Believing they were expecting a four-week class in "which side to come down on" ethics, and hoping to problematize their approach somewhat, I decided to focus on biblical portrayals of health and sickness for the first three weeks of the class. We won't get to "Issues in contemporary medicine" until the last week.

The first class focused on Old Testament depictions of health. I depended heavily on observations by Norman Wirzba and Ellen Davis on the holistic nature of the Hebrew concept of Shalom--a concept that included human health, of course, but also the health of the land, of the people's relationship to its God, of the politics of the people, and of interpersonal relationships among the people. Not just health, but justice, mercy, forgiveness, love, economic responsibility, and environmental stewardship are encompassed in the biblical concept of health and wholeness.

We looked at texts like Isaiah 65 and Leviticus 26 to ground our understanding of God's desire for all of creation to share in God's Shalom. I'm hoping that they begin to see that "health," as we moderns understand it (i.e., the absence of pathology in an individual body), is a paltry substitute for Shalom.

Books in Review

Hector Avalos, in Health Care and the Rise of Christianity, makes the case that a study of the health care milieu in which Christianity arose is necessary for understanding the attraction that Christianity might have had for, particularly, the chronically ill in the Greco-Roman world.

Avalos helpfully surveys Jewish and pagan sources for indications of the values and practices surrounding sick members of those societies, particularly with respect to chronic illness. The survey of pagan culture is particularly helpful (at least for this non-Classicist) in that it enumerates the different health care options available to inhabitants of the Roman world, as well as the likely cross-pollination between Jewish monotheism and Roman paganism.

I am not conversant enough with Classical sources to know whether his presentation of health and sickness in the Roman world is accurate, but I was disappointed with his survey of Judaism. He dealt almost exclusively with the canonical texts, and seemed to weigh the New Testament critiques of Pharisaism rather more heavily than may be warranted. He did not seem to make use of more modern (and more charitable) studies of Jewish culture in the Second Temple period.

Additionally, his reading of the canonical texts was deeply problematic. He seems to have found in the texts a deep concern for protecting the state (meaning, especially, the levitical priestly hierarchy) from the burden of the chronically ill and underproductive. He takes the strict regulations concerning purity and contamination to be less interested in regulating the spread of contagious illnesses than in isolating and stigmatizing those with chronic illnesses which left them unable to be economically productive. His evidence for this interest is scant--he makes the point that the gradated requirements for thanksgiving offerings after healing (as in Leviticus 14) acknowledge the possibility that chronic illness may render a person economically unproductive, but he implies that levitical regulations are intended to marginalize those persons who have become poor.

He seems to have missed the deep concern for the poor and economically unproductive evident throughout, especially, the priestly code. The passage in question, for example, could be read as a particular effort to include those who have become poor through chronic illness and to mitigate the effects of their disadvantaged position. Economic disadvantage and unproductivity, in other words, is not an impediment to participation in the liturgical life of the community. Chronic illness is, to be sure, but there is little to no evidence that the Jewish community isolated and stigmatized the economically unproductive on a regular basis. Contagion and purity concerns are a much more convincing read of the levitical regulations regarding blood and bodily fluids.

That said, his more basic point is quite sound: whether or not such was the intention of the levitical code, and whether or not the Second Temple Jewish community practiced the levitical code exactly as written, the effect of the canonical regulations concerning chronic illnesses was to create a sub-group of people who would be particularly interested in the healing ministries of Christian missionaries, as well as the theological commitment to non-isolation of "sinners" and lepers.

Both Judaism and paganism, by Avalos's read, created a demographic group of disaffected members of society that would be attracted to Christianity precisely because it rejected (at least in its canonical texts) the very practices that had isolated them from their own societies. This partly explains, Avalos contends, the tremendous growth in the first decades after the death of Christ.