Exploring Sex and Violence in the Bible

By Dr. Gale A. Yee

At a recent meeting of the Pacific Asian North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM) at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, one of my Old Testament colleagues introduced herself as someone who teaches sex and violence in the Bible at her seminary. 

In some ways, I could say the same. This month my co-edited book, Joshua and Judges, in the Texts@Context Series from Fortress Press, examines two biblical books, Joshua and Judges, that fit the bill precisely. 

In the lectionary of the Episcopal Church, the only Sunday readings from the book of Joshua are stories about the Israelites crossing the Jordan and entering the Promised Land, bearing the ark of the covenant (Josh 3:7-17), their circumcision and eating of first Passover in the land (Josh 5:9-12), and their renewal of the covenant, now that they are settled in the land (Josh 24:1-3, 14-25). 

Completely passed over are the horrific stories of the genocide of the indigenous Canaanites at God’s command. The only story from the book of Judges in the lectionary is one about the prophet Deborah commanding Barak to take up a military position on Mt. Tabor against the armies of the Canaanites (Judges 4:1-7). Completely ignored are the many stories of the violence against women in the book, which ends with the gang-rape of a woman and her dismemberment and the seizure and rape of 600 more women (Judges 19-21). Both books have terrible legacies. The book of Joshua has been used to legitimate the conquest, colonization, and extermination of many indigenous people across time and around the globe. Violence against women is still an appalling aspect of our societies even in this “enlightened” era.

Acknowledging the specific socio-cultural contexts from which the contributors write, Joshua and Judges, the essay collection that I edited with Athalya Brenner, confronts the issues of sex and violence in these books head on. 

Well-known biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann tackles the hermeneutical dilemma in Joshua that describes God decreeing violence so that Israel can occupy a land already inhabited by other peoples. The violence stems from the uncritical view that Israel’s covenantal chosen-ness that demands the negation of the Other, the Un-chosen. Two Israeli educators, Yonina Dor and Naomi De-Malach, examine the wide range of Jewish attitudes about the book Joshua, those that provided ideological support for Zionism, conquest of the land, and the expulsion of its residents, and those that feared that the book would sanction further violence in Israel.  Daniel Hawk surveys the parallels between the ways in which biblical Israel and American Manifest Destiny construct national identity through stories of conquest.

The essays on Judges particularly focus on the women and gender issues in the book from the social locations of their contributors. My co-editor, Athalya Brenner, argues that women intentionally framed the book of Judges by design. Three contributors examine the tent-peg wielding assassin, Jael (Judges 4-5).  Ora Brison sees in Jael a strong independent woman that offsets her experience of abused and humiliated women in her work in an Israeli women’s shelter. Ryan Bonfiglio interprets Jael and her choice to kill or not to kill Israel’s enemy general, Sisera, from the perspective of the choices his immigrant Italian grandparents faced when they settled in the US. 

I see parallels between Jael and the Chinese woman warrior, Fa Mulan, highlighting the American Orientalism of Disney’s Mulan and its influence on the gender formation of young Asian American females. Royce Victor reads Delilah through the lenses to two significant Indian literary works, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Brad Embry interprets the horrible story of the Levite’s concubine’s rape (Judge 19) from his specific religious context: the Pentecostal-Holiness Assembly of God tradition. Examining the male judge Gideon, Bar Mymon observes that Gideon puts on his masculinity the way he (Bar Mymon) dons his Israeli military uniform and becomes the Man, in a severe process of gender deconstruction and reconstruction.

The people in the pew are most likely unaware of the sex and violence embedded in the books of Joshua and Judges, since their stories are rather censored in the Sunday lectionaries. Nevertheless, I urge congregations to read and study these stories together to see how awfully familiar they are to present-day happenings. My students in my Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures have their eyes wide-opened when they read these narratives. I remember one of my students saying that she now hesitates to teach children the popular song, “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,” because it calls to mind the atrocities committed against the indigenous Canaanites described in Joshua. I am hopeful that this volume of collected essays continues the very needed conversation we need to deal with the military and sexual violence endemic to our society.

Dr. Gale A. Yee is Nancy W. King Professor of Biblical Studies at Episcopal Divinity School.  

Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms

By Kevin G. Thew Forrester

What if Beauty rather than fear held us? What if we knew Jesus not as life’s judge, but as our “Life-Giver”?

Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms is a guide for postmodern pilgrims seeking authentic spirituality transformation. I follow the lead offered in the wisdom tradition of early Syriac Christianity, where Jesus is known as the “Life-Giver” (Ihidaya). The Beauty of Jesus is that his life reveals how “to give life.” Jesus invites us into relationships which make us alive and give us “cause to live.”

In Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms, I explore what it means for our lives to be lived from “the ground of the soul, where God’s ground and the soul’s ground are one ground” (Meister Eckhart). We revisit some of the pivotal self-defining stories of the scriptures and the lives of the saints and mystics, seeking their meaning for us when read from the experience and wisdom of our gracious at-one-ment.

I begin by developing an “integral sacramental theology,” which is a theology that recognizes the graced core of creation and deliberately respects, receives, and converses with the various disciplines that study four dimensions of existence: individual and collective, internal and external.

I then practice this integral sacramental theology as we discover anew how the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, along with the stories of the saints and mystics, invite us to be transformed, awakening to the truth of our gracious one common ground.

All too often tribal division divides Christian from Christian, as well as Christians from persons of other spiritual paths. All too often baptism is experienced as a ritual of separation and division, not conformation of union. Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms is an invitation to discover that the baptismal waters dissolve illusionary walls separating sacred and profane, pure and impure.

Along with Nicholas Cusa, the 15th century German mystic, we are invited to discover our own prophetic and dissident voice: “God…is the enfolding of all in the sense that all are in God, and God is the unfolding in the sense that God is in all.”

I introduce Spiral Dynamics and the Enneagram as rich resources for helping us to realize personally, communally, and systemically, that health and wholeness is not a matter of ritual purity, but of primordial unity confirmed in baptism.

Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms invites us all to dig deep and “mine the subterranean river of Christianity.” In the process we may well discover that we, like Jesus, are transformed into life-givers, because we, also, directly experience our at-one-ment.

What a beautiful gift it is when theology itself becomes a rich language that satisfies and enlivens anew. We are courageously drawn out again into the deep, where the grace of God invites marvelous discoveries, none more breathtaking than the realization that we, too, are beloved. Our souls awaken and know God as surely as the taste of fresh water on the tongue.

* The Rev. Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D., has served in the Diocese of Northern Michigan for the past ten years. He is the author of  Leadership and Ministry within a Community of Equals (InterCultural Ministry Development, 1997) and I Have Called You Friends (Church Publishing, 2003).

Tears for Peter Gomes

By William Bronson

I cried when I heard the Rev. Peter Gomes, minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church, died last February. I am not normally emotional. I can hardly remember crying over anyone’s passing. But my tardy awareness of his leaving us, over three months late, struck me hard.

How can I explain it? I felt less embarrassed to be a human being knowing that I shared that species designation with him. I had been reading again, off and on, his Scandalous Gospel of Jesus recently, as though an angel had told me he was gone.

As I prepared an envelope and enclosed my book, How to Get to Heaven with a note about how I enjoyed his books and ministry and hoped he found my little tome pleasant, inclusive, and reasonable. I couldn’t resist a PS that said James Carroll thought it was great.

Then, looking up his address I got the news, perused the Wikipedia article summarizing his life and the brutal stroke, brain aneurism, and heart attack that took him a year before he planned to retire and a month or so before his Easter sermons.

I remember his graciousness when I met him a couple times at his Wednesday teas at his home just north of Harvard Yard, when I was at Episcopal Divinity School (EDS). I remember his wonderful sermons at Memorial Church and his wisdom when he shared the stage at Trinity Church’s remarkable 2006 conference on eschatology with Carroll, Jürgen Moltmann, and Barbara Rossing in New York.

But I remember most the wonderful, conversational way he wrote. His eloquence transferred to the written page seamlessly. It may be more accurate to say that he spoke the way he wrote. And imbedded in all he said or wrote was a deep wisdom, patience, and perspective.

And he lacked no courage. When he came out years ago it was in solidarity with embattled gay and lesbian students who were challenged on Biblical and cultural grounds through a periodical by fellow Harvard students. As a Republican American Baptist pastor who participated in both Reagan and Bush senior’s inaugurations, it came as a surprise to many that he would not only defend but identify by his own sexual orientation with the gay community.

When they invited him to speak with other administration and faculty members about the raging controversy, the organizers of the rally had no idea that they would receive not only a personal “confession” but a careful dismissal of the Biblical arguments against homosexuality. One may read of the whole episode in the chapter “The Bible and Homosexuality” in his wonderful bestselling The Good Book: Reading the Bible With Heart and Mind. This quote from those pages is worth repeating:

“I also knew that no one wanted me to be ‘religious.’ Religion, in fact, was part of the problem here and not part of the solution, or so it was thought by my secular friends. I knew all that, and yet I also knew that the only ground on which I could stand in this particular instance was religious ground, and so rather than a pious elegiac on civility, or an exercise in political outrage, I determined that I would make my best effort to represent my understanding of the Bible and the Christian faith as it applied to the heart of the present discontents. As the university’s pastor and preacher, as a Christian, and as a homosexual, I decided to reclaim by proclaiming a vision of the gospel that was inclusive rather than exclusive, and to do so as a Christian who was more than the sum of the parts of which I was made…I also wanted to win minds and hearts, or at least to awaken them, to a view of the Christian faith which in dispute valued charity and humility over mean-spiritedness and arrogance.”

It is remarkable, one might say destined or karmic, that someone with such a high view of Scripture was found in the center of this controversy in this place. What I love about Pastor Gomes speaking and writing is that he never second guesses the Bible. He takes it as he finds it and draws from it the lessons that it gives. While valuing Scripture, he is too intelligent to be drawn into the doctrinaire interpretations that have created such rancor in recent times.

As an older student (sixty-nine on graduation) at EDS, coming out of the evangelical community, having done my Masters in Theological Studies thirty years earlier at Gordon-Conwell, I had some anxiety about fitting into the community here. But when I discovered how much common ground I felt reading Gomes and Cox and others, I took courage. Listening to Bishop Steven Charleston preach and later receiving his warm endorsement of my book confirmed my decision to come here.

In solidarity with the blessed pastor Gomes, I would like to end with my very succinct plea from my very succinct book:

“On the issue of sexual orientation, I think it would be helpful if we would not be so obsessed with sexuality considered in the light of human anatomy. The psychological aspects of femininity and masculinity are far more important identities. And it is clear that everyone is a mixture of these two elements including the Godhead. How people are equipped physiologically need not always match their stronger psychological identity. Most of us would be androgynous physiologically if that were possible. We should not stand in judgment of the creation (which any biologist will tell us has huge variations in that regard), the Creator, or each other on this issue.”

We will miss him. He will be on my short list of those I would like to commune with in heaven, but I’m sure it will be a long line I will stand in.

*William Bronson, DMin ’08, was an airline pilot for many years and author of How to Get to Heaven.

Christian Explorations of Traveling

By Joerg Rieger

Travel takes many different forms. Some travel for pleasure, others for work, and many more travel in order to find work and a better life. Moreover, there are different travel movements under way in our time.

One is vagabonding, where mostly young people leave their homes to explore the world, seeking adventure and broader horizons. Another, very different travel movement is migration, where people leave their homelands for reasons of need and survival.

Pilgrimages constitute different kinds of travel movements—some tied up with deep religious quests and others indistinguishable from tourism, which constitutes one of the biggest travel movements of all times. These movements seem to have little in common at first sight. Yet as we explore different layers of travel, we will see what the various travelers can learn from each other and what even those staying at home can learn.

I wrote the book Traveling as someone who has learned a great deal on the road. Travel is woven into my life in many ways, combined with a lifelong wanderlust. I grew up in southern Germany, thousands of miles away from Dallas, Texas, where I live now. I have had the opportunity to travel to many countries, in both the Northern and the Southern Hemispheres. I also have had the opportunity to travel for very different reasons: for pleasure, for work, and out of sheer necessity.

Nevertheless, I write this book not merely as a traveler but also as a Christian theologian who is convinced that travel has significantly shaped our Judeo-Christian traditions and our varied experiences with the divine—a role that has for the most part been underappreciated.

Perhaps the most surprising insight of this book is that traveling is so deeply rooted in our traditions that many of them fail to make sense without it. Consider how much of the material of the Judeo-Christian traditions actually developed on the road. Abraham, regarded as one of the pillars of the faith, has nothing static about him. The people of Israel spent a good amount of time on the road. Their stories speak of slavery in the lands of a foreign empire called Egypt, of an exodus from Egypt, and of forty years of wandering in the wilderness. On this journey, they learned important theological lessons, which included profound challenges to outdated images of God.

In the New Testament, Jesus’ ministry takes place almost entirely on the road, as a person who has “no place to lay his head” (Luke 9:58). Perhaps one of the most important theological challenges that travel poses to the Christian life is summarized in the Letter to the Hebrews: “Here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14).

Christianity is what takes place on the road. Travel, it appears therefore, is more than a metaphor of the Christian faith. Location and constant relocation are central matters of the Christian life.

Traveling is, thus, a central topic for faith and life. Those who travel to live and who live to travel might be in a position to make important contributions in today’s world. These contributions include a habit of thinking on one’s feet, the broadening of horizons, a flexibility that is typical especially of travelers who have less control, various challenges to the status quo, and a much-needed awareness of our own limits and finitude.

Travelers who spend much time on the road experience in their very being what is at the heart of the logic of the Jewish-Christian traditions and what took philosophers thousands of years to understand: a new appreciation for small, particular experiences of life, out of which broader universal ideas grow. This appreciation is where theology and philosophy started when religion took place on the road, rather than with the big concepts and ideas proposed by the powers that be.

Finally, those who find themselves on the road without safety nets often develop special bonds and relationships. No travel ever occurs in a vacuum. Power, as well as the lack of power, plays an important role in our travels. Becoming aware of these things is part of the broadening of our horizons.

*Joerg Rieger is Wendland-Cook Professor of Constructive Theology at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. Among his most recent books are Globalization and Theology (Abingdon Press, 2010), No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics and the Future (Fortress Press, 2009), and Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Fortress Press, 2007). His website is http://www.joergrieger.com.

Sneaking Into Libraries

By Laurel Dykstra

I researched my book Set Them Free: The Other Side of Exodus by sneaking into libraries. After completing my degree at Episcopal Divinity School I was no longer a student and could not afford the guest user-fees at most academic libraries, so I marshaled all my race and education privilege, tried to look like the sort of person who belonged, and quietly made use of the staff, the stacks, and sometimes the online passwords, at several of North America’s most excellent theological libraries.

Over the past few years I have been part of a project that would make such subterfuge unnecessary. The Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice (CLBSJ) seeks to make a collection of scholarly texts into a commons, rather than a limited-access resource or a privately owned treasure that passes from mentor to favorite student.

Norman Gottwald is the initiator of this collaborative venture. In 2006 he approached the Word and World People's School, a grassroots experiment in theological education for activists, to see whether that organization might accept the gift of his world-class personal library. Word and World did not have the infrastructure to accommodate this extraordinary gift but the seed of an idea was planted and grew.

John H. Elliott and Herman Waetjen, two other pioneers in the use of the social sciences in biblical scholarship, responded to Norm’s invitation to donate their libraries as well and over several years a remarkable and generous group of scholars and community-based activists came together to design and negotiate the Center and Library. Housed at Stony Point Conference Center, 40 miles north of New York City, with a developing relationship with their resident interfaith Community of Living Traditions, the CLBSJ’s mission is

“to provide informed biblical resources for those committed to the study and practice of social justice in contemporary church and society… [and to] seek to bridge the gap that presently separates critical study of the Bible from faith-based organizations and activities working for social justice and reconciliation.”

CLBSJ opens officially on the weekend of October 22-23; it is a first-class collection of books, periodicals, archival, and electronic data on biblical studies and related justice areas. Because of the interests of the initial donors, it is particularly strong in the social sciences. The Center and Library will serve the needs and interests of those from seminary, sanctuary, and streets, welcoming scholars, students, activists, educators, community organizers, clergy, and laity seeking biblical resources for restorative justice and peacemaking. To foster an interweaving of theory and practice, the Center and Library will provide an ongoing educational program of seminars and conferences on topics central to the social-critical study of the Bible and to its use in enacting social justice. There is no comparable collection, center, or organization anywhere in North America.

In conjunction with the project’s opening I have co-edited, with biblical animator and scholar Ched Myers, our inaugural volume, a remarkable anthology that is something of a hand-held version of the new library. Liberating Biblical Study: Scholarship, Art, and Action in Honor of the Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice, brings together the work of biblical scholars, social change activists, and movement-based artists. The book explicitly addresses such biblical justice issues as empire, resistance movements, identity, race, gender, and economics, but it raises questions as well: What is the role of art in social-change movements? How can scholars be accountable beyond the academy, and activists encouraged to study? How are resistance movements nurtured and sustained?

I am particularly proud of the real diversity of contributors to this volume and of the fact that artists and activists are not merely included for decoration or illustration. Instead the book demonstrates practically how the disciplines of scholarship, art and activism challenge and enrich one another.

I encourage you to come to Stony Point for the library opening, to take advantage of our programming and the opportunity to write and study immersed in an amazing collection of scholarship on the biblical call to justice.

*Laurel Dykstra, MATS '97, is a community-based Bible and Justice educator and activist exploring the vocation of neighbor in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the poorest off-reserve postal code in Canada.

The King James Bible at 400

New York Times, January 8, 2011

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Sometime in 1611, a new English Bible was published. It was the work of an almost impossibly learned team of men laboring since 1604 under royal mandate. Their purpose, they wrote, was not to make a new translation of the Bible but “to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one.” What was published, 400 years ago, was indeed one principal good one: the King James Version of the Bible.

It’s barely possible to overstate the significance of this Bible. Hundreds of millions have been sold. In 1611, it found a critical balance in a world of theological conflict, and it has been beloved since of Protestant churches and congregations of every stripe. By the end of the 17th century it was, simply, the Bible. It has been superseded by translations in more modern English, translations based on sources the King James translators couldn’t have known. But to Christians all around the world, it is still the ancestral language of faith.

To modern readers, the English of the King James Version sounds archaic, much as Shakespeare does. But there would have been an archaism for readers even in 1611 because the King James Bible draws heavily from a version of William Tyndale’s New Testament published in 1534 and from translations by Miles Coverdale also published in the 1530s.

Tyndale’s aspiration was to make his New Testament accessible to “the boy that driveth the plough.” Though readers often talk about the majesty of the King James Bible, what has made it live is in fact the simplicity of its language.

Scholars have often debated just how much the King James Bible has influenced the English language. They count the number of idioms — “the powers that be,” for instance — that entered the language from the Bible. They look at how often it’s cited in the Oxford English Dictionary.

T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis deplored the idea of considering the secular literary or linguistic influence of the King James Bible. Eliot said it had such a profound effect because it was “the Word of God.” Lewis went further. He argued that the King James Bible had little influence on the rhythms of English and that many of the Bible’s characteristic rhythms were simply “unavoidable in the English language.”

But Lewis missed the point. The King James Bible has had an enormous impact on English for the very reason that it captures and preserves — and communicates down through the centuries — the unavoidable rhythms of good English. Its words are almost never Latinate, and its rhythms are never hampered by the literalism that afflicts other translations.

It would have been so easy to get that wrong, to let scholarship overwhelm common sense, to let theology engulf plainness. We owe an enormous debt to William Tyndale’s imaginary plowboy. All who speak this wonderful language still speak in the shadow of the King James Bible.

And from the KingJamesBibleTrust.org:

Christopher Howse gets Bible fever in his article " The global phenomenon that will never be lost in translation":

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/8151865/The-global-phenomenon-that-will-never-be-lost-in-translation.html

The Daily Mail reports on how the King James Bible has provided the English Language with hundreds of well-known phrases:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1332138/More-half-young-people-heard-King-James-Bible.html

Robert McCrum wrote in the The Observer about how the King James Bible shaped the English language:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/21/king-james-bible-english-language

Editor's note: For a postcolonial interpretation of the translation of the Bible into English and why the KJV triumphed over other versions, consult RS Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford 2002), ch 5.

Why 99 Brattle?

by Kwok Pui-lan

We start this new blog to share our ideas about how progressive Christianity can transform the world.

 

Every year we hear fabulous speeches and lectures at 99 Brattle Street. The faculty and students share new ideas about being a progressive Christian in the contemporary world. 

In 1998, the faculty initiated EDS Occasional Papers, and we published the works of Manning Marable, Valerie Batts, Denise Ackermann, Bishop Barbara Harris, Iza R Hussin and those of our faculty. The circulation was about 350, with a copy sent to each of the seminaries and theological schools in North America. The Papers were discontinued because of a lack of funding.

Then some of the faculty began blogging and publishing in online journals. I became a blogger accidentally. I was watching President Obama’s speech in Cairo on June 4, 2009 and I had something to say. I checked with a professional guild of religion scholars and was told that it had no forum for comments on current affairs. Since my response was time sensitive, I sent it to a religious website, and it was published three days later. To my amazement a staff member and a student at the School told me the morning after it was posted that they had read it. They said it came to their attention via RSS.

We are witnessing a shift in media and communication more dynamic than that following Johann Gutenberg’s printing press of 1450. Before Gutenberg, there were about 30 000 books in Europe, most of them Bibles and biblical commentaries. Many of us have seen those exquisitely handwritten and elaborately decorated medieval Bibles in European museums. Martin Luther would have died an unknown monk if his religious tracts and treatises had to be copied and were not popularized by the new printing press.

Today paper printing is being replaced by e-books and e-journals. “Still reading a book made out of paper? That’s so 2009,” says one commentator. Since Apple launched the iPad, an e-reader tablet, in April 2010, about 10 million units have been sold. With an estimated 3m Kindles and more than 1m Nooks sold, books on paper may become relics of the past, much like those handwritten Bibles. Barnes & Nobles recently reported that it sold more e-books than physical books on its Web site. On Christmas day alone, nearly 1m e-books were purchased.

Christian churches and theological seminaries need to learn to use the latest technology to communicate our message.

Through technology, EDSConnect provides resources for Christians in rural and small parishes and the School can offer a distributive learning option for students unable to study on campus at Cambridge.

We are publishing this blog to encourage constructive debate and careful thinking, and to reach out to those who form part of God’s greater community. We welcome your comments and we hope to hear what you are doing to advance God’s kingdom beyond 99 Brattle Street.

(Note - we welcome your blog and comments, for editorial guidelines please write to comms@eds.edu. When writing a blog limit your word count to between 500 to 700 words and do a spell and grammar check US English before sending. Blogs on this site are the personal opinions of authors and do not reflect, unless specifically noted the views of the institutions they work for, nor do they necessarily reflect the views of Episcopal Divinity School.)

* Kwok Pui-lan is William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School. She has written for Episcopal News Service and her blogs also appear in Religion Dispatches and Patheos.