Trajectories of Justice

What the Bible Says about Slaves, Women, and Homosexuality

Gnuse

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781498223362
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Bible proclaims a message of liberation. Though the Bible arose in an age when slavery and patriarchalism permeated society, the biblical authors sought to elevate the rights of slaves, the poor, and women. Their attempts to elevate the oppressed set in motion a trajectory of evolution, which we should still be advancing today. Critics of the Bible declare that it accepts slavery and the subordination of women, but they fail to understand the biblical texts in their historical context. For their age the biblical authors were advanced in their understanding of human rights, and the democratic values we hold today actually resulted from their early attempts to affirm the dignity and rights of slaves and women. It is equally important that we critique those spokespersons of the church who quote the Bible literally but have lost sight of its historical context so that they might still subordinate women today. Such spokespersons also declare that the Bible condemns homosexuality. But a closer reading of the text discerns that those few passages that address same-sex relations actually condemn rape, ritual prostitution, and master-slave relations. To use the Bible to condemn people often is to misuse the Bible.

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Perspectives on Biblical Trajectories

Oppression in the Bible?

I have too often heard said or seen in print that the oppression of women, the centuries-long existence of slavery, the justification for war, the pollution of our environment, and other woes of human society result from statements in the Bible as well as from the teachings of monotheistic faiths. I have had my college students say as much at the beginning of a course, usually as a prelude to a statement that explains why they have no commitment to the church. Over the years I have written several works to demonstrate the opposite—that the biblical tradition speaks a message of liberation, human freedom, egalitarianism, human dignity, and social reform.1 Critics of the biblical tradition who attribute the source of such woes to the Bible can indeed point to the message of fundamentalist preachers, who have used the Bible in the modern age to subordinate women, attack homosexuality, attack the theory of evolution, affirm the inferiority of African Americans, and defend the notion of a just war as the solution to most international crises. In the early nineteenth century such preachers also justified the existence of slavery. But I maintain that the fundamentalist use of the Bible on these issues is a misuse of the Bible. A deeper understanding of the biblical text in its historical context reveals it to be a document that elevates humanity, strives for human equality, and attempts to lead society forward in terms of respect for the poor, the oppressed, women, and others so often crushed by the social and economic forces in our world. It is for the purpose of reclaiming the Bible’s message of liberation that I have written this volume. I shall contend that the biblical tradition, as it developed, increasingly sought to provide rights and dignity for both slaves and women, so that from our modern perspective, abolitionism and women’s equality are the natural outgrowths of the biblical message. In regard to the biblical understanding of homosexuality, I shall maintain that the biblical text itself does not condemn a loving and committed relationship between two free, adult members of the same sex. Those who speak disparagingly of the biblical text as an oppressive document on these issues do not really understand its deeper message.

Critical intelligentsia who so quickly condemn the Bible and its message fail to appreciate two important realities. First, the biblical texts were generated in the first millennium BCE (for the Old Testament) and in the first century CE (for the New Testament). They were products of an era in so many ways repressive, an age of patriarchalism and imperial oppression by military empires. The biblical texts cannot help but reflect the values of that age, especially when straightforward narratives describe the everyday happenings of life. If we desire to know the values and the beliefs of the biblical authors, we are best advised not to read the stories, which, of course, reflect the mores of the common society. Rather, we should turn our attention to the laws that the authors sought to impress upon society, to the prophetic oracles spoken by those critics of religious and social values, to the classical prophets, and to the writings of the New Testament—especially to Paul. We should observe where the values of the everyday society lay, and how the values of the biblical authors stood in tension with them. We should compare the writings of the Bible with the culture of that age, and we should not compare them to our own values. We live two thousand years later, and much of our egalitarian progress, which has moved us beyond the values of the biblical authors, was inspired by those very same authors.

The second overlooked reality about the Bible is that the biblical tradition itself reflects ongoing social progress. We would acknowledge readily that in terms of democratic social values our modern society has moved beyond the social values and beliefs of the biblical text. But what is not acknowledged is that an evolutionary process occurs on several issues within the history of the biblical tradition itself. That evolutionary process or trajectory reflects how the biblical authors increasingly sought to redress the wrongs of society in the oppression of the poor and women. That evolutionary process is what has inspired us over the years. In effect, the evolving trajectory of values in the Bible encourages us to move beyond where the authors were in their own beliefs. The Bible is not to be viewed as a static and timeless work; rather, it inspires an evolutionary trajectory that begins with it and moves forward into the future. Thus, when we read a biblical text, we should ask, what was the point of the author in articulating what we read, and how would that transform itself into our values today? For example, when a biblical passage is critical of slavery in the first millennium BCE without necessarily calling for the elimination of slavery, that message should really translate into abolitionism in the modern era, as it did in nineteenth-century America. The same is true on other issues. We are called upon to go further in social reform than the biblical authors ever could have done with the limitations placed upon them by their society.

In a previous work I observed how the biblical texts inspired political thinkers in America in the eighteenth century. From 1760 to 1805 American political authors drew 34 percent of their citations from the Bible, compared to 22 percent drawn from Enlightenment thinkers, 18 percent from Whig authors, 11 percent from common law, and 9 percent from classical sources.2 Democracy did not exist in the first millennium BCE, but biblical ideas carried to their logical conclusion ultimately resulted in the emergence of democratic thought. I observed that eighteenth-century American political thinkers quoted the biblical text more than any other resource. (They were, of course, deists, not Christians in the traditional sense.) That is what I mean by an evolving trajectory. The Bible invites us to move beyond where the biblical authors were intellectually; the Bible invites us to participate in an ongoing evolving trajectory. The evolution we can observe in the Bible is an ongoing process that has surfaced most dramatically in Western society over the past four centuries (after the interlude of the Low Middle Ages and the High Middle Ages between us and the biblical era). These intervening centuries between the biblical era and ours may have kept some radical concepts in the biblical text from surfacing.

What I will seek to explore in this short book are those aspects of biblical expression in behalf of the poor and the oppressed that appear to demonstrate development within the biblical tradition. The two issues addressed by biblical texts, which appear to reflect an evolution of thought primarily, are the amelioration of the woes of slavery, along with the concomitant causes of enslavement, and the rights of women in a patriarchal culture. To me, the texts connected to these two issues reflect the dynamic nature of the biblical text as an ever-changing and evolving intellectual tradition seeking to elevate the dignity and the rights of all human beings. We should never quote the Bible as a static resource to tell where we should stand on social issues; rather, we should observe the spirit of the biblical text and ask: What is the deeper message, and where is it telling us to go with our own actions?

Intellectual Revolution in the Bible

Over two and a half thousand years ago a religious and intellectual revolution began. We still live in the midst of that ongoing, not-yet-finished revolution. Perhaps because our individual lives are so short, or because we do not readily sense the great patterns of history in our everyday lives, we fail to realize that we still live in that continuing revolution, which is changing the religious, intellectual, and social assumptions of human culture. Historians speak of the Neolithic Revolution, a period of time approximately from 9500 to 4500 BCE when agriculture spread across the Old World, and it encompassed more than four millennia in its process. But historians still call it a revolution. Analogously, we are into the third millennium of this yet unfinished revolution, and though slightly over two thousand years might seem to be a long time, it is still a revolution.

The revolution of which I speak is the emergence of monotheistic religious beliefs with their concomitant intellectual and social values. We might be tempted to refrain from applying the term revolution to a process that endures for millennia and appears to us to have been an established part of our worldview. But in reality, the religious and moral revolution generated by the biblical authors has been going on for a short period of time compared to the vast eons of time involved in human evolution. Human history, which has elapsed since we first settled in villages around 9500 BCE in the Near East, is but a cosmic wink, and the period of time involved in the emergence of monotheism is but a fraction of that.

The emergence of the values of justice and egalitarianism in the biblical testimony was not only revolutionary for its age, but evolutionary: that is, we may observe the stages of development within the biblical tradition, especially as we move from the Old Testament to the New Testament. An intellectual or religious breakthrough requires many years to unfold as the implications are worked out in the social-cultural arena of human existence. Thus I speak of the monotheistic process, which we can observe in the biblical text, as one that is still emerging in our own age as we continue to develop the implications of the text. For example, the Old Testament was critical of the oppressive aspects of slavery, the New Testament sought to abolish the distinction between slave and free in the Christian community, and ultimately Christianity in its liberal social manifestation gave rise to the modern abolitionist movement. For years I have used the expression “emergent monotheism” to describe the process wherein the beliefs and social values of monotheistic faith have been unfolding in society. Recognition of this process in human culture should lead us consciously to will to continue and advance the monotheistic “revolution” and “evolution” in our own age, as we advocate justice and equality in our modern world.

Modern scholars in the past generation have begun to sense that monotheism did not emerge among the Israelite people with Moses in the thirteenth century BCE, as once we assumed in the scholarship of previous generations. Rather, Israelites or Judahites did not become monotheistic in a real sense until the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE or even later. The religious experience of the people until then was one of polytheism. Great religious spokespersons, such as the classical prophets, and religious reform movements of Hezekiah and Josiah, provided the preliminary stages for the emergence of monotheism among the Judahites during and after the sixth-century-BCE exile.

The new scholarly view that polytheism was regnant among Israelites until the exile has been undergirded both by archaeological discoveries and by a fresh look at the various texts in the Bible that testify to the diversity of religious belief in Israel and Judah. Much of this information we had in our possession for years, especially the biblical texts. The breakthrough in our scholarly paradigms emerged as scholars were willing to look at all the information in a new way. Now scholars are more willing to speak of a development of monotheism in ancient Israel until the time of the exile, and some speak of a developmental process that continued down even into the Maccabean period of the second century BCE or even into the Christian era.

Certain assumptions and ideas in the biblical text could not be fully developed in that initial biblical age. They would be realized only in the “fullness of time,” or when human culture was ready for their fuller actualization in the social arena. To put it another way, emergent monotheism creates a trajectory, an ongoing developmental process of ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Perspectives on Biblical Trajectories
• Chapter 2: Old Testament Law Codes and Justice for the Oppressed
• Chapter 3: Loans, Interest, and Debt That Leads to Slavery
• Chapter 4: Freedom for the Oppressed Debt-slaves
• Chapter 5: Rights for Slaves in the New Testament
• Chapter 6: Women’s Rights in the Old Testament
• Chapter 7: The Dignity of Women in the Jesus Movement
• Chapter 8: The Dignity of Women in Paul and the Ancient Church
• Chapter 9: Old Testament Passages Used to Condemn Homosexuality
• Chapter 10: New Testament Passages Used to Condemn Homosexuality
• Chapter 11: Conclusion
• Bibliography