A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [38]
Of course, nobody defends slavery today. (Almost nobody. You’d be surprised to read what some defend in emails I’ve received.) In McKitrick’s words, the whole argument ended up in “oblivion,” because it was “discredited by events.” We not only stopped defending it; we repented of it, so that now a proslavery advocate would be excommunicated from the very denominations whose leading pastors once defended slavery, quoting a “pro-slavery Bible” in the name of a “pro-slavery God.”
We’ve gone through a similar process with regard to anti-Semitism, segregation, and apartheid. Many of us have gone through a similar process regarding the status of women in the church, and some of us regarding the status of gay, lesbian, and transgendered people. We are also going through a similar process regarding stewardship of the environment, religious supremacy, and (I hope) the sanctioning of war.
But very few Christians today, in my experience anyway, have given a second thought to—much less repented of—this habitual, conventional way of reading and interpreting the Bible that allowed slavery, anti-Semitism, apartheid, chauvinism, environmental plundering, prejudice against gay people, and other injustices to be legitimized and defended for so long. Yes, we stopped using the Bible to defend certain things once they were “discredited by events,” but we still use the Bible in the same way to defend any number of other things that have not yet been fully discredited, but soon may be. By and large, few of us have become self-critical regarding our assumptions about the Bible and our ways of using it that flow from those assumptions, often leading to “discredited” results. That self-critical turn is at the heart of the second passage in our quest. Our quest for a new kind of Christianity requires a new, more mature and responsible approach to the Bible.
We pursue this new approach to the Bible not out of a capitulation to “moral relativism,” as some critics will no doubt accuse, but because of a passion for the biblical values of goodness and justice. Our goal is not to lower our moral standards, but rather raise them by facing and repenting of habits of the mind and heart that harmed human beings and dishonored God in the past. We have no desire to descend a slippery slope into moral compromise; rather, we admit that we slid down the slope long ago, Bibles in hand, and we need to climb out of the ditch before we are complicit in more atrocities. Repentance means more than being sorry—it means being different.
PART II:
THE AUTHORITY QUESTION
8
From Legal Constitution to Community Library
As I look back on my own experience with the Bible, I figure I’ve heard or given over two thousand “live” sermons on the Bible, not counting radio and TV sermons I’ve taken in. I’ve also read thousands of theological books and engaged in thousands of theological conversations. How would I describe the way we typically use the Bible, especially in conservative settings like my own heritage? In short, we read and use the Bible as a legal constitution.1 It shouldn’t surprise us that people raised in a constitutional era would tend to read the Bible in a constitutional way. Lawyers in the courtroom quote articles, sections, paragraphs, and subparagraphs to win their case, and we do the same with testaments, books, chapters, and verses.2
Like lawyers, we look for precedents in past cases of interpretation, sometimes favoring older interpretations as precedents, sometimes asserting newer ones have rendered the old ones obsolete. We seek to distinguish “spirit” from “letter” and argue the “framers’ intent,” seldom questioning whether the passage in question was actually intended by the original authors and editors to be a universal, eternally binding law. As a result, we turn our seminaries and denominational bodies into versions of a Supreme Court.3 At every turn, we approach the biblical text as if it were an annotated code instead of what it actually is: a portable library of poems, prophecies,