Ev
ents which receive more than their share of news coverage are not my favorite topics for blog posts. However, this past week's revelations of yet another politician's infidelity offered one aspect worthy of comment (or so it seems to me). That is the use of the Bible as a means for reflecting on one's personal situation in life.There is a long history of just such usage. The pilgrim fathers who came to America read their situation into the Bible (or the Bible into their situation) with the result that white pilgrims were seen as fulfilling the role of the Israelites in this, the Promised Land, while native Americans were cast in the role of Canaanites. Thus generations of Joshuas arose feeling Biblically justified in the genocide of America's native population. Some of that Biblical reading continues to echo in the popular imagination to this day. It was Bad theology in the 17th century and it is bad theology today. Stated in a fundamental way: you are not a Bible character.
This past week saw a sitting governor confessing his infidelity, choosing to stay in office, and reflecting out loud to his cabinet members about the story of King David. King David was, of course, guilty of adultery (and in the Biblical account it cost him the life of his child). It is a story of great repentance and internal suffering as well as the mercy of God.
But it is not a pattern story to which individuals are invited for their own comparisons.
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Kirk, I'm not sure that's true. The whole purpose of the hit on Uriah was so that David could marry Bathsheba and make it look like the child was legitimately his, rather than the result of adultery. Presumably there was no way to establish that the child was conceived before David took her in marriage, so the legal issue would have been murky at best.
Geoff, your whole argument seems to rest on the premise that the child was "punished." But how? He died. As all of us do. David was the one who suffered grief, loss, and shame. Abortion isn't wrong because unborn children would live forever if they weren't aborted, it's wrong because we have no right to choose to end their lives.
An excellent post by the good Father! Thank you for linking to this blog. I'm sure I will disagree with him on lots of things but on this particular issue of expropriating the Biblical narrative I think I agree completely.
When I became a Christian, it was in a community that used a queer version of liberation theology and was quite explicit about its "subversive" christology and theology. I still feel that there is a place for that as a path to faith and as a corrective to the dominant reading that is used to justify the "American" narrative. But eventually it isn't enough. The good Father is correct. There is a meaning to Scripture that is beyond any of our attempts to claim it or write our selves into it.
My contention that the imagination is usually deluded is the general teaching of the Fathers in the Eastern Church. But that Tradition would hold that the mind as we experience it is largely in a state of delusion.
"You are not a Bible character" is a nice, punchy one-liner. Not as good as "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake", perhaps, but that's a matter of taste. Definitely one for the one-liner file, though.
Father Freeman gives a well-deserved epistemological and moral rebuke to the haphazard, self-serving, and hermeneutically arbitrary way that Mark Sanford, like many other religious people throughout history, has taken biblical stories as justifications for his decisions.
Now if only Freeman would further reject the numerous places in the New Testament in which the authors took random phrases out of context to be "prophecies" confirming their interpretation of their own contemporary events. And if only Freeman would attack the hubris of the Bible characters themselves who intrepreted their genocides as God's will, etc.
Freeman's right to reject the attitude that intreprets random Bible passages not written to you but to other people as addressing you or as laying down a convenient precedent that justifies your behavior. But the problem is that this audacious tendency to hear the voice of God direclty addressing you is not the corruption of otherwise wise religious thinking but rather is at the very core of religion as its chronic corruption. It is not simply "bad theology," it is theology itself.
If they literally existed, reasoned, and talked the way the Bible depicts, then the Bible characters themselves were the self-serving manipulative shysters and political spinners of their own day. Unless they are simply the fictional characters of fables, they have all the arrogance and presumption Freeman condemns in his own age. It is inconsistent and to hold the Bible as authoritative while holding those who think and behave the way biblical writers and characters did as the revealers of God himself.
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