A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [135]
3. Many thanks to Tom and Christine Sine (www.msainfo.org), who were the first teachers to sensitize me to the power of these prophetic images at a seminar in Three Hills, Alberta, some years ago. For more on this subject, see Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2001).
4. Note this pattern of expansion: from one chosen people in one promised land to all people across the whole earth. We’ll see this pattern of expansion recur again and again in the Bible, for example, in Matt. 28:18–20 and Acts 1:8.
Chapter 7: How Should the Bible Be Understood?
1. For a scathing indictment of violence in monotheistic texts and traditions, see Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Is Religion Killing Us? Violence in the Bible and the Quran (Harrisburg, PA: Continuum, 2005).
2. A startling slave trade exists today in new forms. For more information, see the work of Gary Haugen’s International Justice Mission (www.ijm.org) and David Batstone’s Not for Sale Campaign (www.notforsalecampaign.org).
3. Eric McKitrick, Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1963). This book is out of print, but it is widely referenced in relevant articles easily accessible on the Internet, especially “Roots of Racism,” from which much of the material in this chapter is derived. The original article was published in Flagpole Magazine (November 17, 1999) and is available online at http://www.lawsch.uga.edu/academics/profiles/dwilkes_more/his29_racism.html.
4. William S. Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1935, 1959); Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987).
5. Cornell University Library makes a digital reproduction of the original 1864 edition available. For information, see http://www.amazon.com/Nellie-Norton-scriptural-abolitionists-vindication/dp/142971770X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238786478&sr=1-1.
6. Many of us routinely hear or read identical rhetoric in response to our positions today.
7. Note the similarity between these words and the words of a widely respected Evangelical Bible teacher and radio preacher who is quoted in Chapter 13. Also note that the character avoids Paul’s letter to Philemon and 1 Timothy 1:10, the former urging the release of a slave and the latter condemning the trade of slaves.
Chapter 8: From Legal Constitution to Community Library
1. I hope that readers from the United Kingdom and other nations that don’t have constitutions will be able to make sense of this metaphor. I could also speak of the Bible as the key element in a social contract: we agree to associate with one another as long as we affirm a set of interpretations of it (some written, some unwritten).
2. We generally avoid quoting Mark 2:27, where Jesus says, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.” This statement radically undermines a constitutional approach to Scripture, since it subordinates the requirements of even “the Law” to the well-being of human beings.
3. Constitutions generally have provisions for their own amendment, so they can be updated to deal with new situations. However, since the Bible was never designed as a constitution, it has no such provisions, rendering it more inflexible than, and therefore in at least one way inferior to, any actual constitution.
4. His opponents—religious lawyer types—were about to use “the Law” to stone a woman for committing adultery. The Law had ostensibly been written by the finger of God on stone. Now Jesus, who had said elsewhere that the law was made for humankind and not humankind for the law, writes with his finger in dust—ostensibly the substance from which humanity was formed by the hand of God. It is an amazingly evocative symbolic action, isn’t it?
5. We might also suggest that the ability to maintain multiple perspectives energizes a community and