Misusing the Bible

Fr. Freeman: It was Bad theology in the 17th century and it is bad theology today.

It was Bad Theology back in Abraham's day.

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.

Governor Sanford may not be the Lord's Anointed but he is not a murderer either.

There's just no pleasing some people.

I think I agree with Father Stephen about the overall point -- the actions of Bible characters don't give us warrant to imitate them outside of biblical ethics.

However, I don't like his bright-line distinction between us and Bible characters. Rather than "what King David did has nothing to do with you," I'd rather say, "Go ahead and justify yourself by King David's actions, as long as you're willing to admit that God could justly take any child conceived in your adultery and that you are willing to pay the price of your actions in a degree equivalent to what his actions brought about -- warfare and murder among your descendants and your whole nation for the next few dozen generations." (Read I and II Chronicles if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

We ARE Bible characters, but we have to learn THE SAME LESSONS as Bible characters for the comparisons to make any sense. To claim "Well, King David was sorry, and I'm sorry too, but God forgave him, so I'll guess he'll forgive me, too" is true but only half of the very, very terrible truth. And that's not even counting the sacrifice of the Son of God that enabled the forgiveness in the first place.

PS Thanks for pointing me to Fr. Stephen's blog. May God grant him many years!

Lord Karth July 2, 2009 12:56 PM Isn't it true that the Devil may quote Scripture to his purpose ?

The Devil, as well politicians, priests, pastors, bloggers, reporters (but I repeat myself)....

as long as you're willing to admit that God could justly take any child conceived in your adultery

"Justly"? Really? A God who would slaughter an innocent child for the sins of the father is wholly unworthy of worship.

Father Stephen makes an excellent point. And granted, almost any text can be misunderstood or misappropriated. But, you know, when a sacred book has a very long history of being misused in the ways he describes -- and may other ways; he's barely scratching the surface -- I don't see how you can escape the conclusion that the book itself is just radically unclear. It says too many things and lends itself to too many different interpretations.

I realize that this is more of a problem in the Protestant world than the Catholic, because in theory Catholics agree to accept the Church's interpretations as authoritative instead of seeking their own. But once that authority is overthrown, then as Father Stephen says, "Nothing tells us which story to use other than our own imagination (which is generally a deluded part of our mind)." That "nothing" includes nothing inside the book itself: There is just as much disagreement over what the Bible says about how to interpret the Bible as there is over what it says about anything else. And the problem is that in modern Western societies, the old authority HAS been overthrown; almost no one is truly Catholic anymore in the sense of agreeing to set aside their own judgment and accept what they're told. Even nominal Catholics, like the nuns under investigation as reported in RD's other post, are often, in effect, Protestants in this regard (if not New Age spiritualists).

I don't know what the upshot of all this is, except that I think Protestantism made a wrong turn at the outset when it said, "We're going to reject the authority of the [Catholic] Church, but replace it with the authority of the Church's ancient book." That only works if the book's teachings are clear. But even Martin Luther himself apparently realized at some point it wasn't, which is why one of his early projects had to be writing all those catechisms to try to explain it.

Charles Foster Kane hits a nail on the head. I love reading comments by someone who actually has an idea of where the problem lies...like e.g. the old Calvinist/Arminian debate - the problem is that the Bible teaches both!

And, BTW, that warning was a kindness, not a curse.

Roland de Chanson

But this is precisely what the doctrine of Original Sin entails.

I think there are two situations were looking at here. It is a common condition of humanity that our nature will lead us to make choices that harm others, or otherwise behave in ways we shouldn't. But that is still predicated on the individual's nature and the choices he or she makes.

Likewise, circumstances can and often do put us into a position where we are forced to choose between evils. Merely because we have had to choose between a set of bad decisions does not absolve the sin.

Both of these (especially the former) seem representative of "original sin", that is sin that we unavoidably commit, that we personally own as a part of being human.

But it's still my sin, for my behavior, even if it stems from my own human nature. And presumably I will answer for it.

Sometimes original sin (Adam's felix culpa) is framed as the justification for the trials and tribulations of life on Earth. But there are two things to remember about this.

First, every single animal, every single plant, right down to every dingle fungus and bacteria all are subject to the vicissitudes of life on Earth: they must work and compete to survive, they face old age and sickness and death, they can be randomly slaughtered by chance and circumstance. Unless the doctrine of original sin extends to them as well (which I am quite sure it does not) then there must be another explanation for our trials and tribulations. Nothing lives in Eden.

Second, random disasters (death in battle, from disease, from natural disaster) cannot be attributed to particular sins. Hurricane Katrina killed many people, ruined many more. Some no doubt deserved it. Others did not. Many more survived. Again, some deserved it, others perhaps didn't. Did God pick and choose who would live and who would die? If so, it wasn't under any objective criteria (at least none that I can see).

So to suggest that God would concern himself with David's adultery and murder, that he would as a result punish not David (except indirectly) but his son, who did not ask to be born or involved in the adultery (especially as we decry the abortions of children, even those born of the massive sins of rape or incest), strikes me as a suggestion that God is either capricious or malevolent.

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.

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.

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.