- Biblical Theology Bulletin Online - Seton Hall UniversityIf religious belief is fifty percent genetic, as one 1990 study of identical twins indicates (see Sharon Begley, Is Everybody Crazy? NEWSWEEK 1/28/98), religious educators might well reconsider how much their efforts influence people. How much nurture is needed to tip the scale towards belief? How significant are nurturing efforts in formal settings such as schools and churches as opposed to the effect of relatively intimate relationships? How intensive and extensive must the nurturing efforts be if the genetic factor predisposing towards belief is weak or absent?

In the latest wrinkle on the nature vs. nurture debate researchers increasingly find evidence that genes predispose people not only to particular forms of mental illness, but also to mild forms of mental conditions researchers label shadow syndromes. Quite apart from current research that attributes both the fully developed syndromes and the shadow syndromes to specific genes or configurations of genes, there is little new in the insight that the obsessive-compulsive syndrome runs along a continuum from dysfunctionally ill people to, for example, annoying originators of religious dietary rules and hand-washing rituals. What is new and—in the nature of things—subject to considerable debate is the genetic base for these syndromes. A genetic factor accounts for psychological conditions and states. Depending perhaps on the sensitivity of people discussing genetic factors, they may speak of “brain lesions” or “brain damage.” Somewhere down this path of inquiry, the issue of chemical adjustment or repair, i.e., drugs, also appears.

Most significant, however, is the way the notion of shadow syndromes alters our whole understanding of people. Two points are relevant to anyone seriously engaged in the humanities and the social sciences. First, the genetic predispositions for mental conditions of whatever severity appear to almost always be multiple, patterns of genes rather than individual genes. In fact, the varying impact of the factors appears to result from how much of the pattern is present. Second, in a broad but significant sense it would be rash to suppose that anyone is free of all syndromes and shadow syndromes. Call one person quirky and another wacko, if you will, but we’re all somewhere on one spectrum or another. A logical self-interested conclusion is that we have a right to expect tolerance from others, if only because we all need it.

Likewise, inescapably all efforts to plot moral or ethical responsibility now as never before must recognize that there are no standard humans to fit into our measures. Human nature may well be, as many moralists have believed, a given, but the givenness—what is relatively fixed—in each human is a configuration of the human quite different from the given in most other humans. Hence, a perhaps ever-refined understanding of what human nature is will ground ever greater reliance on the individuality of the conscience. Interestingly, however counter-intuitive it may be, what this means is: the more researchers have looked for genetic factors the less deterministic the emerging vision of the human appears to be.

Ethicists, religious thinkers, and even church leaders have already begun to acknowledge, however hesitantly, some of the realities at work. For example, they accept homosexual orientation as a constitutive factor in some individuals. The next level of analysis will be more difficult for some. If (a) the various genetic factors constituting a personality are intricately linked to one another, and (b) personal abilities for intimacy and relationships are indispensably linked to the relatively satisfactory functioning of the person, might it not follow that a constitutive element in a personality may require specific forms of activity? Up to now, following the disease model of addiction, and assuming that norms must reflect a human nature that exists in a virtually standard form, many draw one universal conclusion: because the prescribed form of the act is its common form, those unfit to act according to prescription are required to abstain.
 

Biblical scholars have been the first to suspect a problem. Because we have to make sense of ancient documents, we have for the most part become historically critical enough to take anachronism into account. The circle of scholars from whom BTB has increasingly drawn its articles has recognized that communications not only reflect the time in which they are sent, they are shaped by the social world of the communicators. Efforts to create models of the ancient (and often continuing) Mediterranean social world have helped contemporary non-Mediterraneans negotiate the strange communications contained in the biblical corpus. The validity of these models may rest on the fact that the communications were made by persons within a relatively restricted gene pool. One result of endogamy, if the geneticists are on the right track, is this: a good sample of pathologies provides valid clues to quirks and value orientations so common that no one in relatively closed cultures needed to mention them.

No one needs to mention what “widow” means, unless the term passes from writers who think in terms of social support systems to readers who attend to no more than the fact that a personal relationship has been terminated by death. In this issue of BTB, John Rook, in When Is a Widow Not a Widow? Guardianship Provides an Answer, demonstrates why Mediterranean widows looked to the community or the king for protection. Likewise, Victor Matthews, in The Social Context of Law in the Second Temple Period, speculates on the interplay of needs and resources accounting for the less structured legal traditions of a Judea at once embedded in, but not quite part of the imperium shaped by Cyrus and his successors of various ethnic backgrounds until the final Judean disaster at the hands of the Romans.

In Matthew 27:45–53 and the Turning of the  Tide in Israel’s History, Andries G. Van Aarde argues that the first–century Mediterranean understanding of time accounts for the fact that Matthew does not separate the fall of Jerusalem from the coming of the Son of Man. Robert J. Miller, in History Is Not Optional: A Response to THE REAL JESUS by Luke Timothy Johnson, contends that historically conscious contemporary readers have no option but to risk the shaky stability of traditional orthodoxy by dealing with the questions of history surrounding the issue of Jesus.

In sum, if it is pathological to think that all the ancient accounts were passed down to control us, the shadow form of this syndrome is unavoidable: inquiring minds—as the ad says—want to know who selected the data to be transmitted and whose purposes they served.

Reconstructing the meaning of the data transmitted from within the restricted Mediterranean gene pool was, in fact, the easy step. As incomplete as this task is, we must now turn to the far more complicated task of connecting with readers shaped by the exogamous forces of the global village. It has been often enough remarked that the church that reached out from Judea to the Roman Empire in the first centuries must in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reach out to the rest of the world. Even though this outreach has been scarcely attempted, the character of the present challenge is far broader. Cultural boundaries are very much in flux (hence, the defensive efforts to retribalize). If the geneticists are on the right track, the human is a virtually infinite spectrum. This spectrum calls for ever clearer acknowledgment (religiously in the form of thanksgiving) of individualized contributions and responsibilities.

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