With all due religious fervor and conviction, misguided pious religionists murdered over three thousand innocent people on September 11, 2001 in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Notable is not just that these murders took place in a spirit of religious piety, but that the perpetrators were neither ignorant nor simple-minded. In fact, they were instructed believers. That gives us all pause to consider the meaning of religion’s fruits as the product of theological teachings.

Religious devotion may strike us as noble and high-minded, focused as it is on transcendence, and informed with an elaborate system of beliefs that make it appear eminently real. Often, it is quite the contrary. Often, it is not worthy of the religion it purports to observe. Discerning of the prophet was a biblical process intended to sort out the difference between what was false and what was true among those who spoke of heavenly mandates. Today, such standards need to be reassessed as we witness outcomes of religious devotion that must be deemed blasphemous in any religion.

No religion is free of extremes. Whatever in the human psyche promotes religious awareness can and often does press the devout to actions that can only be regarded as  abuses of religion. BTB editor Leland White presciently wrote of this in BTB 31:3, Sources of Hatred—Some Explanations, noting that group-centered thinking and behavior oftentimes blinds people to what truly unites us all, our shared humanity.

When a group claims unique relationship with a divine person, especially when there is only one such divine person, what is likely to follow is the conviction that the divinity is committed to that group more than any other. Those not members of the privileged group (the “elect”) are then seen as misguided, dangerous, or simply inferior. In these cases, one owes obligations first and foremost, sometimes exclusively, to group members and their patron-deity, and to others only to the extent that they can benefit the elect. The destruction of outsiders can even be deemed perversely as an affirmation of the group’s loyalty to its deity.

The daughter of a famous American evangelical preacher, interviewed recently on national television by a Jew, was asked whether Jews can be saved. She noted that her father lives in a gated community, and may thus be reached only by invitation. Those not invited are not welcome. She used this example to affirm that only those similarly invited can enter into God’s home. One might ask, what happens to those “not invited”? In her mindset, the answer is simple: God has the right to choose, and he simply has not chosen those who are not born again in Jesus. Or, as some might put it, they have not corresponded in their belief with what God demands to enter into his home. Thus, to her, and presumably to others similarly instructed, Jews are not “saved,” at least until they become born again in Jesus.

What rights do those fellow-humans have who are not part of a divinely chosen group, living with its particular belief system? John Pilch suggested an answer to that question in a BTB article entitled Lying and Deceit in the Letters to the Seven Churches: Perspectives from Cultural Anthropology (BTB 22: 126–35). Pilch concluded that in a collectivist social system,

Lying and deceit are honorable strategies in the service of [gaining or maintaining group] honor. What does the liar or deceiver intend to gain? Certainly to protect or augment honor. Was the deception successful for this purpose? In pursuit of greater honor, some church members . . . practiced a strategy of offensive lying, claiming greater honor for ideas and behavior of their elite members and belittling in the process the honor of observant members [133].

The point is that those not members of the elite religious group are owed neither truth nor justice.
The bitter fruits deriving from the exercise of such religious zeal on behalf of the “honor”  of  certain believers is not peace or justice within the human family but reinforcement of group prerogatives, maintenance of in-group power, to the detriment of any number of outsiders.
The practice of propping up in-group status on the backs of out-group people has punctuated many religious debates from time immemorial. Ken Stone’s article, The Hermeneutics of Abomination: on Gay Men, Canaanites, and Biblical Interpretation (BTB 27:36–41) demonstrates how Israelite elites defamed Canaanites by claiming that Canaanites engaged in practices that Israelite elites deemed abominable. The boundary separating Israelites from Canaanites thus was maintained by denigrating Canaanites, and those like them, as hated outsiders, a common practice in the ancient world as it is today. Never mind that Israelites may well have engaged in the same practices as their neighbors; the distinction enabled one power group to denounce individuals by likening them to vilified outsiders.
 

Critical biblical theology can help people today discern group norms and practices that met particular local needs, perceptions, and customs, limiting such claims to the circumstances that produced them. Local customs and practices, however legitimate in context, need not—and should not—be taken as divinely ordained norms for all people of all times. The informed biblical theologian needs to identify local theologies that travel poorly in altered social circumstances or with developments in the sciences. Lacking such discernment, scriptural theologians can be locked into a box of self-imposed exile from the rest of the human family.
If biblical theologians do not provide the means for religionists to engage with religious outsiders as fellow-humans, worthy of respect, they can become purveyors of prejudice, hate, terrorism, and crimes against fellow humans in the name of the religion they cherish. Clerics who arouse a congregation with hate and fear of outsiders, inflaming religious sentiments that make villains of those with different beliefs and practices, are in effect destroying the very religion that they propose to build up. Such narrow scriptural theology persists throughout our various religious traditions and is not the legacy of only one or the other. It must be identified for what it is, the destroyer not the support of religion.

If indeed the believing community is vital and growing, then historical consciousness can enable informed scriptural theologians to view past practices in perspective of time, place, and circumstance. Parochial claims to universality must be seen for what they are: ethnocentric, narrow, dismissive of human diversity. The limits of human knowledge, and thus of any religious system, must always be recognized and humbly acknowledged as the product of human finiteness.

We can witness the abuse of religion as well as its merits when we hear the Bible read within various believing communities today. Some have come to understand human diversity as productive of a wide range of religious experiences and symbolic representations. Others are locked into an our-way or no-way frame of mind. The biblical theologian, schooled in a wider range of religious traditions and historical analyses, can be the effective instrument for opening or closing the minds of fellow-religionists. Knowing as we do the fruits of each, that is an awesome responsibility.

The present issue of BTB provides several instances in which the biblical theologian needs to ask hermeneutical questions of the biblical tradition. What did they do then? Why did they do it? And should we do what they did, or learn lessons from our present awareness that instructs us about how local, thus limited, their theology in fact may have been?

In his article, Reinstating Isaac: The Centrality of Abraham’s Son in the “Jacob–Esau” Narrative of Genesis 27, Craig Smith seeks to re-center the author’s focus on the responsibility of Isaac by means of chiastic analysis. By changing this emphasis, Smith proposes, while the responsibility of each of the story’s characters remains, Isaac’s role becomes pivotal in a subtle single-author story.
Joel Kaminsky’s study, The Concept of Election and Second Isaiah: Recent Literature, exposes a variety of interrelated misunderstandings, with a broad range of subsequent ecclesiastical effects, of the idea of election and of specific texts invoked in such discussions. Kaminisky calls religious leaders to a broader sense of service and a lessening of particularistic ideas.

If Esther Had Not Been That Beautiful: Dealing with a Hidden God in the (Hebrew) Book of Esther studies the theological impact of a book that seems to be a story without God.  Sabine Van Den Eynde shows that the story teaches how to live and subsist in a world ruled by other norms and values, while still keeping one’s own identity.
Marie Noël Keller focuses on broadening awareness of discipleship in Opening Blind Eyes: A Revisioning of Mark 8:22–10:52. An earlier dependence of Jesus’ followers on the miraculous was to be transformed into a more realistic commitment and growth in dedicated service.

Critical questions arising from these articles should help biblical theologians employ historical consciousness when interpreting biblical texts for believers today.

David M. Bossman
Editor

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