Idolatry has long since gotten its comeuppance. Graven images are no longer what they used to be. Instead, people have gotten much more sophisticated in their attachments, as the Camp David Peace Talks in July, 2000 well demonstrated. Justice is well served when people are treated fairly; that is not the sense that outsiders gained in witnessing the negotiations. In truth, it may be a hopeless task given the complexities that have punctuated the vast history of the Middle East. Where can realistic lines be claimed, fought for, managed?

What seems lost amid all the painful negotiations is a sense of brotherhood that underlies the religious traditions now making legitimate claims for fairness. Given the conflicting, if not irreconcilable, claims that each of the traditions—ethnic, cultural, religious— makes for the land and the governance of its peoples, how else than with a spirit of brotherhood can these claims be adjudicated? If this were being handled in family court, perhaps the expected outcome would be mandated family counseling. Isn’t that the claim that most in the region make, that Abraham is their father? Isn’t it also true that each of the traditions has at its heart the notion of familiarity with one God?

But brotherhood is surely too fragile a concept to resolve the issues at hand. Even brothers fight and vie for priority of status and goods. If justice is to prevail, then some dynamic force must enkindle it from within. I’d thought that perhaps we should forget brotherhood and let women handle things; sisterhood may be the operative paradigm shift. Would women have more heart and sense of danger when war seems the only option? Might women reignite the sense of extended family so long overlooked among Abraham’s offspring? I wonder whether women—not a stereotype of home-bodies, but those whose biological being may enhance their nurturing disposition—might blow the whistle, crack the whip, put an end to aggressive shows of strength. Could women do this? Would they? I wonder.

Needless to say, women as such can’t be the only answer, for women have been present, operative, and even outspoken in these matters of seeking justice amid enormous complexity. Women have raised armies (Deborah), led them into battle (Joan of Arc), and ruled over vast regions (Hatshepsut). Women have incited their male counterparts to act, forced them to hold the line by using subtle or otherwise forms of intimidation. Women have been cruel, oppressive, greedy, not unlike their fathers, husbands, brothers, sons. But, what else can bring about a sea change at this impasse?

Women have been held at bay in traditional religious groups because there seems some irrational belief that God is male, that he has empowered males to take charge, and that religious leaders must observe this biological imperative to leadership. The popes have arbitrarily claimed that it is by divine law that women not be ordained priests. Orthodox Jews would likely await the arrival of the Messiah before accepting a woman rabbi. Muslims are scarcely likely to preempt Catholic or Orthodox Jews in recognizing a religious leadership role for women. All this means that looking to women would certainly be common ground for rejection. However, precisely because of that systematic exclusion, women have learned through cultural/religious necessity to find ways to resolve issues that are not based on physical power so much as they are on expertise in the power of persuasion. Maybe that is what is lacking: the ability to persuade each contending party to give enough to make settlement beneficial, fair, and an offer that cannot be refused.

The time is right. Other means have failed. No doctor can remedy the disease. No superman has been able to force justice. God hasn’t taken sides, so far as we know. We need women to move the issue and find ways to nurture rather than destroy in the name of peace and justice. If gender isn’t really the only answer, then perhaps we can look to the ways of both brothers and sisters seeking to understand and accept one another. No family is devoid of differences—from birth, most parents learn soon enough. The pluralistic society is upon us whether we like it or not: no one individual is the ideal, no one religion is the whole answer, no one patriarch/legislator/savior/prophet encompasses all that is needed for fulness of life. Without a spirit of accepting limits on exclusive claims,  in the interest of truth and justice, no side can or will win a meaningful solution.

Reinhold Niebuhr succinctly identifies a critical element in the resistance to a settlement, based on the pretensions of superior truth: “Intellectual pride is the pride of reason which forgets that it is involved in a temporal process and imagines itself in complete transcendence over history” (NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN, vol. 1, p. 215). Whatever truth each group claims, whether by reason of divine mandate, revelation, or some historical “fact” that renders alternative claims
null and void, the pride of reason, as Niebuhr characterizes the problem, renders a collective people rigid and self-righteous. A further element of the problem is contained in the recognition afforded by William J. Wainwright:

Religious doctrines may be backed by appealing to the pronouncements of an authoritative book, person, or group of persons; by appealing to cultic practice; and by appealing to religious experience. I do not think that these appeals are always illegitimate. Nevertheless, they are all, except for the last, useless in interreligious contexts [RELIGIOUS PLURALISM AND TRUTH, ed. Thomas Dean, p. 79].

The reality is that each group’s position seems absolutely right over against the other traditions. But, if group claims to possess transcendent truth, and the insistence on the group’s higher authority are held in check, isn’t a settlement more likely?

No group can be expected to cast away its own self-interest. Yet, if such a situation persists, then all will suffer the consequences and none will survive the effects of continual warfare. Whether it is a matter of passing the reigns of power to others, wholly of a new cast, or adjusting one tradition’s truth claims to a realistic assessment of human complexity, the need remains. Peace at any price is not the danger; continuing hostility is the most deadly of all alternatives, for all bleed to death gradually.

A wholly other approach is the value system of pluralistic societies that recognize rights and responsibilities inhering within individuals rather than within collectivities (whether religious, cultural, ethnic, sexual). Instead of gambling away the collectivity’s presumed birthright, the pluralistic society recognizes each person as the subject of rights and responsibilities -- constituting the dignity of the human person -- honoring as well the individual’s rights to form or belong to particular groups as they freely choose. This may appear a threat to collectivities that maintain coercive control over their constituents, neither allowing them to choose another group membership nor to acknowledge partial truths in several.

Perhaps it is time to engage the modern reality of individual rights and duties when seeking to resolve the impasse that collectivities so consistently create for their members and from which they can so seldom extricate themselves without bloodshed. Brotherhood and sisterhood may well be part of the problem rather than the heart of the solution: when brothers or sisters of one group set themselves over against those of another, none really functions as brother or sister to the other, but only to their own against the others. Such is the continuing legacy of clans and extended families, whether real or fictive.

Certainly a distressing message was sent when one of the negotiating leaders at Camp David refused to shed his military uniform in the negotiating process, thus suggesting not only militancy but also the insignia of a collectivity from which he could not separate himself. The result was that the other members of his collectivity were left devoid of the agreement because he needed to maintain their collective rights whole and intact. If the negotiators had sought to safeguard individual rights rather than collective rights, would the outcome have been different?

The biblical base for much of the conflict may be a contributing factor. To Jews and Christians, collective identity is paramount for covenant and redemption respectively. The modern has much less a dependence upon such a sense of collective election and salvation and more of a sense of internal relations with God, religion being a matter of the heart and mind first and foremost. Can we continue to argue for a collectivist hermeneutic when eliciting biblical theology? Or, is it possible—even essential—to advance theologically to a greater awareness of the complexity of divine relationships with individual persons? In other words, is the collective claim to divine rights just another idol that has grown tarnished
in our midst?

The three articles in the current BTB address the critical question of hermeneutics for moderns. Roland Murphy, a seasoned and respected First Testament scholar, ponders the contributions of biblical theologians in the second half of the twentieth century in Questions Concerning Biblical Theology. James Hanson seeks to finger a core issue in the biblical message, The Endangered and Reaffirmed Promises of God: A Fruitful Framwork for Biblical Theology. The core issues are ones that we can carry with us as we gain new awareness of how people and societies take shape and grow over time. Santiago Guijarro relates the perspectives of modern medical anthropology in his analysis of core meaning in Healing Stories and Medical Anthropology: A Reading of Mark 10:46–52. Recognizing the native point of view in Mark may well enable modern readers to distinguish values deriving from another world view, an essential element in grasping meanings
cross-culturally and building a biblical theology for today.