[Dialogue] A new worry: Relig Right "Madrassah" in North Dakoa

[Karl Hess]

Jim,

Thanks for posting this.  It is indeed scary.  However, in my opinion 
it is both destructive and inaccurate to lump evangelicals together 
like this.  These folks are Fundamentalists.  Lumping Muslims like 
this would be likewise.  In fact I would expect some outcry if 
someone wrote this about Muslims.  This kind of article feeds the 
evangelical paranoia about the media.

There is an interview with Richard Cizik, the political operative of 
National Association of Evangelicals on "Speaking of Faith" recently 
which is available as an mp3 download 
[http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/].  In it he speaks of  his 
conversion (his word) to environmentalism.  Worth listening to.

Then there is Brian McLaren, The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering 
the Truth that Could Change Everything. also A Generous Orthodoxy: 
Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, 
Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, 
Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, 
Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, 
Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN

Another evangelical worth reading is N.T.Wright.  His "The Last Word" 
discusses authority, starting out with Jesus statement "All authority 
has been given to me."  He didn't say "All authority is given to the 
books you guys are going to write." He has an interesting list of 
distortions -  see below.  These come at the end of the book and thus 
quoting them out of context risks abuse.

In my opinion being a liberal with a Christian veneer is no better 
than being a conservative with a Christian veneer.  If you call 
yourself a Christian, that is.  One test I use is if someone thinks 
that the 'true' meaning of Jesus' life and teachings was discovered 
since 1800 and that Calvin, Luthur, Augustine didn't know what they 
were talking about, they aren't worth listening to.

Karl

Misreadings of Scripture

Within this complex cultural context, it is not surprising that all 
kinds of misreadings of scripture have grown up, both among those who 
count themselves as Bible-believers and among those who distance 
themselves from that label while claiming some continuity at least 
with the biblical tradition. Many of these misreadings are now so 
common that they are taken for granted in large segments of the 
church.

At the risk of sustaining a polarization I regard as misleading, we 
might instance them in two blocks.What follows is a short list; many 
more examples could be found. I here summarize wildly for reasons of 
space, and at the obvious risk of caricature. Each of the categories 
could of course be explained and exemplified at much greater length.

Misreadings of the "Right". - To begin with, I offer the many 
positions regularly thought of as "right wing" which are based on, or 
involve, a serious misreading of scripture:

A. The openly dualistic "rapture" reading of 1 Thessalonians 4 (as in 
the hugely popular and blatantly right-wing American Left Behind 
series), which ironically lives in close symbiosis with (B) below.

B. The explicitly materialist "prosperity gospel" understanding of 
biblical promises.

C. The support of slavery. (Scripture always struggled to humanize an 
institution it could not expect to eradicate; by privileging the 
Exodus narrative, it constantly appealed to a controlling story of 
the God who set slaves free; at some points, e.g., Philemon, it set a 
time-bomb beside the whole system.)

D. The endemic racism of much of Western culture. (Neoapartheid 
groups still try to base racial ideologies on scripture.)

E. Undifferentiated reading of the Old and New Testaments, which of 
course exists in symbiosis with (F) below.

F. Unacknowledged and arbitrary pick-and-mix selection of an implicit 
canon-within-the-canon. (Few Christians have offered animal sacrifice 
or rejected pork, shellfish, etc., but few know why; some churches 
are tough on sexual offenses but not on anger and violence, and 
others are the other way around; few today even notice the regular 
biblical prohibitions against usury)

G. The application of "new Israel" ideas (e.g., a reading of 
Deuteronomy) to various Enlightenment projects. (The United States is 
the obvious example, but interestingly the same ideology can be 
found, transposed into a French Roman Catholic key, in Quebec.)

H. Support for the death penalty (opposed by many of the early church fathers).

I. Discovery of "religious" meanings and exclusion of "political" 
ones, thus often tacitly supporting the social status quo; this 
happily coexists in some cultures with (A) above.

J. Readings of Paul in general and Romans in particular which screen 
out the entire Jewish dimension through which alone that letter makes 
sense; this often exists in symbiosis with (K) below.

K. Attempted "biblical" support for the modern state of Israel as the 
fulfillment of scriptural prophecy.

L. An overall failure to pay attention to context and hermeneutics.


Misreadings of the "Left" - The preceding list is balanced by the 
equally routine misreadings by what is thought of as the "left wing":

A. The claim to "objectivity" or to a "neutral" reading of the text 
(the classic modernist position).

B. The claim that modern history or science has either "disproved the 
Bible" or made some of its central claims redundant, undesirable or 
unbelievable.

C. The "cultural relativity" argument: "The Bible is an old book from 
a different culture, so we can't take it seriously in the modern 
world."

D. Rationalist rewritings of history, which assume as a fixed 
starting-point what the Enlightenment wanted to prove (that, say, 
some aspects of the story of Jesus "couldn't have happened") but has 
not been able to.

E. The attempt to relativize specific and often-repeated biblical 
teachings by appealing to a generalized "principle" which looks 
suspiciously Enlightenment-generated (e.g., "tolerance" or 
"inclusivity"); note that, when Jesus went to lunch with Zacchaeus 
(Luke 19:1-10), people were shocked but Zacchaeus was changed; and 
that, having "included" the woman taken in adultery and shown up her 
self-righteous accusers (John 8:1-11),Jesus told her not to sin again.

F. Caricaturing biblical teaching on some topics in order to be able 
to set aside its teaching on other topics: despite repeated 
assertions, the New Testament does allow divorce in certain 
circumstances; it does envisage women as apostles and deacons, and as 
leading in worship; it does (see above) do its best to humanize, and 
then to challenge, slavery.

G. Discovery of "political" meanings to the exclusion of "religious" 
ones, often without noticing that, unless there is some power 
unleashed by these readings, this results merely in sloganeering 
which provides false comfort to the faithful through a sense of their 
own moral insight and superiority ("I thank thee, Lord, that I am not 
like those non-political pietists"), but without effecting actual 
change in the world.

H. The proposal that the New Testament used the Old Testament in a 
fairly arbitrary or unwarranted fashion; sometimes, aswe saw, the 
conclusion is drawn that we can and should use the New Testament in 
the same way. Standard examples include Matthew's use of Hosea (2:15) 
and Paul's use of the "seed" motif (Galatians 3:16). Both, in fact, 
depend on a nexus between Jesus and Israel which remained opaque to 
many Protestant scholars in the modernist period, but which is now 
fairly common coin within the scholarship that has paid attention to 
the New Testament's use of Old Testament themes and narratives.

I. The claim that the New Testament writers did not think they were 
writing "scripture," so that our appeal to them as such already does 
them violence (see pages 51-52).

J. Pointing out that the church took a while to settle on the precise 
canon (and that the relevant debates included some non-theological 
factors, e.g., political ones), and using this as an argument for 
discrediting the canon and privileging other books (e.g., "Thomas") 
which articulate a different woridview, sometimes ironically 
projecting this preference back into a neopositivistic claim for an 
early date for the non-canonical material (see pages 61-64).

K. A skin-deep-only appeal to "contextual readings," as though by 
murmuring the magic word "context" one is allowed to hold the meaning 
and relevance of the text at arm's length.

L. The attempt to reduce "truth" to "scientific" statements on the 
one hand, or to deconstruct it altogether on the other.
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