Authorized conflicts: the Bible in church conversations.

Abstract

Although Christians may think of the authority of the Bible as something that will resolve our arguments, we continue to argue. The authority of the Bible is primarily one of authorizing: giving us our identity. The Bible itself is full of arguments, and we who live in its heritage continue those arguments and also use the Bible as a model for arguing about in areas that were not contentious in biblical times. Christians can recognize one another as sisters and brothers in Christ while continuing to argue.

**********

It was an argument with one of my most treasured colleagues. We had reached the end of our respective ropes. Each could see the other's point, but it seemed much smaller than our own concern. Finally I said, "This is what is so interesting about working with you. I think we have nearly identical convictions, but opposite instincts."

We knew, both of us, that life, even (or especially) life in Christian community, is precarious: a narrow pathway between cliff and abyss. I thought my colleague's instinct was to defend against chaotic forces, mine to defend against imperial power. And yet: I am hardly eager for chaos, nor is my colleague insensitive to empire: both of us are aware of twin dangers, rocks hurled by imperial forces above, or a misstep hurtling us into the chaotic depths below. The difference is the immediate, instinctive fear. As we walk that narrow pathway, my colleague is more likely to watch our feet lest one of us slip, while I am more likely to keep an eye out for rocks thrown from above.

That story offers a clue about why biblical authority is a problem in the church. The church (with Christian denominations and congregations and families and individuals) turns to the Bible both for reassurance of divine order in a world we experience as chaotic and as promise of deliverance from powers we experience as imperial. When we think about it, we probably recognize both aspects. But as we are living our everyday lives, walking the narrow path between cliff and abyss, some of us will be more alert to imperial imposition and others of us to chaotic irruptions. As we live our common life, sometimes we will be at odds.

How is the Bible Authoritative?

The Bible authorizes Christian communities and individual Christians: it gives us our identity as Christians. Oh, I know, sometimes we back off from this formulation. Some would say: it's not exactly the Bible that authorizes us; it's the Gospel, God's gracious word of love to a needy world. Others would say it's what God has done in the world, things like the Exodus, establishment of the covenant and faithfulness to it, and most especially the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There's something to those claims--and yet, the Bible remains central. After all, events don't have much meaning for us until we are able to talk about them. It is the Bible that gives us the language in which to talk about God's work in the world, that shapes the events into a story, that begins to interpret the stories of Israel and Jesus as relevant to our identity, and provides a basic fund of images with which we can talk about that story.

In addition, in lived experience, what authorizes is sometimes a specific biblical text. I am comforted when feeling lost by remembering the words from the second part of Isaiah: "I have called you by name; you are mine." When I am certain I am not good enough, I am reassured by Paul's insistence that people "are justified by faith, not by the works of the law." When I am angry or hurting I turn to the Psalms of complaint for permission to turn to God with my pain and language in which to do it.

Once the relationship with God is not only private but communal as well, it becomes important that there be some common understanding of who we are as community, of what the story is that shapes us, of how to talk about it with one another. Within and between denominations, the use of the Bible in liturgies and in preaching helps to provide the family resemblance that enables us to recognize one another as church, as sisters and brothers in Christ. ("God brought us out from the house of slavery, the land of bondage"; "Now Christ is raised from the dead.") This particular way in which the Bible functions as identifying authority has a harsh edge to it. We Christians have used the Bible not only to recognize other Christians as part of the family; we have also used it to decide who is not part of the family. So in this way the authority of the Bible has been a kind of boundary-setting authority, which sets the limits on just who can be recognized as one of "us" and who is instead described as one of "them." But it must be remembered that the core of the Bible's authority is its authorizing function, and that excluding outsiders is secondary and derivative.

This is not obvious. While thinking about this article, I asked some friends and colleagues how they had experienced biblical authority in their lives. I was surprised to receive negative answers: how the Bible doesn't function primarily to restrict or convict them.

Why Is Biblical Authority a Problem?

We know, many of us, that the Bible is an important factor in constituting us as church and as individual Christians. We have different ways of referring to its role, but we cannot dismiss it. And yet we also know that we are in serious disagreement with other Christians (including, for most of us, Christians in our own denominations and/or communions) over a variety of issues.

We are sophisticated enough in our critical study of the Bible to recognize that it is a complex and often contradictory batch of texts reflecting a broad time span. It is unlike, for example, the United States Constitution, which is a unified document--and even so is the subject of broad interpretive debate.

We are living through the juncture of eras, modern to postmodern, which unsettles our certainties and at the same time heightens our longing for certainty. This is a setting in which we are increasingly aware of the extent to which we participate in creating meaning from the texts to which we turn. Our awareness is problematic to the extent that we want to turn to the Bible not only to be affirmed and comforted and supported but also to be challenged and discomforted and convicted.

We are also increasingly aware of the extent to which our own knowledge is shaped by our perspective. Thus it is more difficult than ever to make absolute truth claims. At the same time (and probably not coincidentally), there is a real hunger in our society for just such absolutes. There are biblical texts that provide absolute answers--although for almost every absolute claim you can support with a biblical text, you can find a competing text that undercuts it. The challenge for our time is to maintain the foundational role of the Bible without flattening it into an assembly of proof texts.

Many of our denominations are in trouble--over such issues as sexuality, the role of women, who is eligible for ordination, ecclesial authority, even Christology. In times of conflict, it is tempting to sound more certain than in fact we are--or perhaps to insist on the uncertainty of those who disagree with us.

Many of our denominations are in dialogue with Christians of other traditions. If we have a denominational predisposition toward a particular interpretive direction, we may not even notice that our conversation partners are hearing the text differently (see Bouteneff & Heller).

Particularly in North America, especially the United States, some evangelicals read the Bible in a way that clings to modernism and even flirts with pre-modernism. For some, the Bible begins by transforming identity; but eventually is systematized into a book of answers, especially for answers to questions about individual-centered morality (Patte 1995).

The Bible is complicated. These texts full of divine love and longing are recorded by human authors who reflect human interest groups, arguing about how the divine will supports and sometimes undercuts those interests.

My own relationship with the Bible (and with the ecclesiastical use of the Bible) is also complicated. The Bible has functioned positively, to give me my identity as child of God in Christ, but also negatively to limit and deny me. I have not always found it easy to determine when the sense of limit has been a righteous conviction of me as a sinner, and when it has been because human interest groups in my own time have co-opted the voice of divine authority to maintain their own power.

Biblical Arguments

Recent treatments of biblical theology have frequently noted divergent theological tendencies (e.g., Brueggemann 1997, Gerstenberger 2000). It is reasonable to label these "biblical arguments."

There are biblical arguments within particular biblical books or complexes. For example, historical criticism has long noted that the Deuteronomic History Work includes both pro-monarchic and anti-monarchic strains. One might also get contradictory answers to other questions. According to 2 Samuel, does God want a house? Does authority in Matthew consist in obeying chains of command or subverting them? What does I Corinthians have to say about women taking vocal leadership in worship? Historical criticism has tended to be satisfied with sorting out the arguments, and perhaps deciding which voice is more original. (Generally, historical critics make it sound as though the redactor was too dim-witted to notice that source documents were contradictory.) It is tempting to take one side of the argument as representing the heart of biblical religion, and the other a temptation away from Israelite or early Christian ideals. Sometimes that may be appropriate. But more often I think the preservation of two or more voices on a particular issue is proper, even inspired. That is: to the extent that I as a post-modern interpreter dare to speak of truth at all, I believe that it is not expressed by the winning side in an argument. Rather, I suggest that more truth comes out of the clash between contradictory position--each of them disclosing some truth, each of them obscuring some truth. For example, in the biblical argument about whether the establishment of monarchy in Israel is a gracious gift of God to enable Israelite survival in a hostile environment (and eventually to enable messianic expectation) or whether it is a sign of Israelite rejection of God as the true king: both sides of this argument have legitimate truth claims, and neither is adequate on its own. Monarchy in Israel is complicated enough to partake of both of these possibilities, and the most faithful thing we can do is to keep both of those evaluations, and the disjuncture between them, alive.

The existence of these biblical arguments is not an accident of history. Arguments among the people of God are only to be expected in a canon in which arguing with God is legitimate prayer (Genesis 18:22-33), and sometimes changes God's mind (Exodus 32). The book of Hosea suggests that God even argues with Godself: the divine being is torn between righteousness and love.

The tendency toward argument is even more pronounced when one looks at the canon overall. What is the role of sacrifice in Israelite religion? (Is it essential? Or is it a good supplement to a life organized around interpersonal ethics?) How should Israelites relate to non-Israelites? (According to Ezra-Nehemiah, a good Israelite shouldn't have anything to do with foreigners, especially with foreign women; and according to Deuteronomy Moabites are so vile that their descendents are barred from the assembly for ten generations--and yet, the book of Ruth presents a Moabite as the great King David's great-grandmother.) Is Israel's God accessible apart from the temple and the Jerusalem cult? (That one can't pray when away from Jerusalem is implied by Psalms 42 and 137; yet the Bible consistently presents people as praying in other places, and strains of biblical material even present sacrifice in outlying areas as normal.) How are Christians to relate to the legal material of the First Testament? (The law is superseded by Christ according to some Pauline material; it is subordinated to human need in some of Jesus' synoptic sayings; but strengthened by Sermon on the Mount and Epistle of James.) Even more central is determining the meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus? (It is salvific according to Paul and Hebrews, but Peter's Pentecost sermon in Acts 2 sounds as though it was a tragic mistake.)

What is significant is not only or primarily that Israelites and followers of Jesus argued about these things. Rather, it's that more than one voice is preserved in the canonical texts.

The tendency toward argument is perhaps clearest in the canonical process. Most striking is the way that the Hebrew Bible textual tradition maintained minority readings in the system of ketib (what is written) and qere (what is to be read). When the text of the Hebrew Bible was being stabilized, where there were two readings attested, the rabbis kept both of them. And they kept the minority reading (the ketib) in the body of the text, the majority reading (the qere) in the margins. (It's easy to imagine that if the minority reading were relegated to the margins, copyists might forget to record it: making the majority reading the marginal one helps ensure that both will be preserved.) When the vowel points were added to the text, the body of the text included the consonants of the ketib with the pointing of the qere, resulting in a text that was often unpronounceable as printed, so that the reader would have to look to the margins to find the consonants that corresponded to the pointing in the text.

The decision about which books to include continues the tradition of argument. Israelite tradition includes two versions of history. The primary history (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings), a depiction of Israel and Judah with flawed leaders, forms the "former prophets" in the Hebrew Bible. But there is a secondary history (Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah) included in the Writings. In this version of Israel's past, Moses hardly figures (being only a name in a genealogical list) and David hardly sins. This dual reading of history opens up interpretive possibilities. The tendency is not limited to the Hebrew Bible; it is expanded in the New Testament, where there are four canonical gospels, although one would provide a more definitive claim about Jesus.

In all of these areas, the shaping of a biblical book or the entire canon often suggests or insists that one side of the argument wins: the Davidic monarchy is overall affirmed, the crucifixion positively valued. Even so, the process takes care to preserve the traces of the other side(s). Overall, it seems, the canon has a stronger interest in preserving arguments than in insisting on solutions.

Particularly notable is the existence of two overall attitudes (cf. Brueggemann. One is structure-affirming: the structures of society, of religion, of creation are good and provide for the well-being of the people. The other is structure-suspicious: those same structures are dangerous, as are the people who wield power in them. They provide for the well-being of some of the people but not all: there are always those whom the structures do not fit, and their experience of exclusion or oppression or other pain is not to be silenced or ignored. In fact, the structures of Israelite and Christian communities themselves need to be shaped in such a way as to take into account those people who are hurt by those very structures. This is one of the fines things about the psalms of lament.

The reason this is central is that we who identify with biblical religion tend to identify mostly or entirely with one side of this polarity. Either we see the good intentions of the structures, and the fact that most of the time, at least for most of the people we notice, the structures work; so we assume that people for whom the system doesn't work are themselves to blame. They should stop complaining, get with the program, and re-shape their lives or their attitudes so they do fit. Or, on the other hand, we see the places where the structures don't fit, and take an overall subversive or even revolutionary stance toward them, suspecting that the people for whom the structures work are probably in league with the forces of evil.

Complicating this particular issue even more for those of us who identify with feminist or womanist or other liberation groups is a growing awareness that the Bible not only functioned historically in the church but also was written and shaped in societies marked by structures in which people dominated each other in a way that feminists often call patriarchal and Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza calls kyriarchal, in spite of the fact that there is a strong (some would say overwhelming) message of equality in many biblical texts (Schussler-Fiorenza 1983; see also the articles in Schussler-Fiorenza 1993). And the texts that have been the most powerful in determining the church's teaching and structure are, some of us believe, also some of the most powerfully marked by that patriarchal or kyriarchal shaping. The Bible can be, has been, still is used to limit and restrict people, to deny that some particular group really is fully image of God, likeness of Christ. (There are still groups who say that we women are essentially unable to bear the likeness of Christ, and who say so at least partly on the basis of the Bible.)

This is where I think it is important to recognize that even on something so basic as the institution of the monarchy and the Davidic dynasty, biblical texts are in tension. Is the monarchy itself, and particularly a single dynasty in which kings would be chosen because of their ancestry and not because of they are particularly struck with the spirit, a sign of God's faithfulness, a divine gift that enabled the survival of this small and comparatively weak nation in a strategically important setting in a volatile international situation of competing empires? Or alternatively was the monarchy itself a sign of and concession to the lack of faithfulness of the people? If there is a biblical answer, the answer is: both. And this is very difficult for most of us to hear, because we identify overwhelmingly with one answer or another. In fact, I would venture to say that many of the most divisive arguments going on in our denominations these days have to do precisely with the question of just how our biblical tradition reinforces the structures of our religious and social institutions and how at calls them into question.

It's even more complicated than that in many mainline Protestant denominations. Many of the people who hold institutionalized structural power within our denominations have heard and to some extent identified with the side of the tradition that questions and subverts traditional institutional power and are actively seeking ways to reshape the institutions themselves so as to embrace those who have previously been excluded. And many of the people who don't hold such institutional power are experiencing that reshaping as a way of excluding them from the institutional structures. And so the question is not so much "Should we embrace those who have been excluded?" as "Whose exclusion counts for more in our system?" And both sides tend to discount their own power in the overall social or religious system, while at the same time exaggerating the power wielded by those whom they see as agents of oppression.

The willingness to maintain a record of contradictory positions may be one aspect of what has made biblical religions endure--but it complicates life in the biblical heritage, especially in our own time.

Post-Biblical Arguments

We Christians and Jews live in the heritage of those biblical arguments. And we are still arguing. Sometimes our arguments are in fact continuations of biblical arguments. What is the role of the law in Christianity? Are outsiders to be welcomed into the sacred community or feared as contaminants?

But many of our arguments are about issues that were not of explicit concern to the communities that produced the Bible: reproductive technology, nuclear disarmament, global warming, abortion. Biblical authority has been used in those arguments in a kind of proof-texting way, or to try to find an overall biblical trajectory that will help us to shape our lives and communities in a moral way. That is, the authority of the Bible has been invoked to resolve arguments.

The problem is: invoking the Bible does not settle any argument worth having. If we are continuing an argument reflected in biblical texts, there will be texts to support every position. If we are engaged in a post-biblical argument, there will be texts that can be twisted to support any position. But if the Bible's authority is fundamentally of an authorizing sort, it will not resolve our dilemmas.

This is difficult for many of us to accept. Those of us who believe our ethical decisions to be shaped by our biblical faith may well expect that everyone who finds identity in the Bible will be shaped in a similar way. We forget that the authors of the biblical texts were themselves engaged in arguments reflected in those texts. The arguments were important enough to preserve, but the boundaries of the community were expansive enough to include those who disagreed passionately about Jerusalem, monarchy, crucifixion.

In fact, the Bible properly functions (and has in fact functioned as long as it has existed) to enable arguments among those who find their identity in it. That is, the tradition of biblical argument provides models for our own arguing about our own issues in our own time.

Of course: we do not always agree about whether we are engaged in a biblical argument or a post-biblical one; or even about which biblical argument we're joining. So, for example, the Bible does not acknowledge the existence of people whose sexual orientation is not heterosexual, although a few texts do explicitly condemn sexual intercourse between people of the same sex. Do these statements about sexual practices preclude our consideration of possible faithful and committed relationships for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons? Or do those biblical texts reflect an understanding of sexuality that does not translate to our culture?

Similarly, in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, is the stronger biblical argument that God gave the land to Jacob-identified tribes or that God sides against oppressors in favor of the oppressed?

Attitudes toward those arguments have been overall different in Christianity and Judaism. Jews have tended to find positive spiritual value in argument (although specific behaviors can be enough to cut an individual off from the people). Christians have tended to find negative spiritual value in argument. The Christian tendency has been to establish an orthodox answer and to deny the Christian identity of those who do not accept it (with the admission that some issues are matter of pious opinion rather than dogma).

In some arguments (especially those that go back to issues that were important when our denominations were formed) our denominational identity may predispose us to take one side over the other. In my own Lutheran tradition, the legal function of the Bible has been much more oriented toward showing us our own neediness than toward creating a code of prescriptive ethics. For me (and also many non-Lutherans, but certainly not all Lutherans) the ethical bottom line is the prohibition of idolatry and of behavior harmful to others or self. Others find biblical warrant for a specific code of behavior. But many of our current arguments do not easily correspond to the tone of our denominational identity documents; and yet we argue as if our biblical identity were at stake.

The practical result of the Jewish tolerance for argument and the Christian insistence on agreement is that Jews have ended up much more unified than have Christians. Almost all religious Jews belong to one of four groups, Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed, and Reconstructionist, while there are hundreds of Christian denominations. That is: in lived experience, denying the legitimacy of argument has led not to unity but to fragmentation.

What Now?

Of course we will continue to argue. As for how we might do so honestly and respectfully, here is one argument. I offer it in full recognition that other Christians will make other arguments, and are no less redeemed for being, in my estimation, mistaken.

First, we can recognize that our arguments are family fights. We would not be engaged in them if we did not recognize one another as sisters and brothers in Christ. Christians who take the Bible (and other foundational documents) just as seriously as we do, will disagree with us about the implications of those documents for our common life together and our lives as Christian persons.

Second, even though we may believe that our position is closer to the truth, we can admit that those who disagree with us can legitimately turn to biblical texts.

Third, we can recognize that our areas of disagreement are not trivial. Even though an issue is not settled by appeal to biblical texts, it may be central to our sense of what it means to live as God's redeemed people in the world.

Fourth, we can continue to love one another as sisters and brothers in Christ, even while attempting to persuade others that they are entirely wrong-headed about whatever the issue may be.

Fifth, in humility we might consider the possibility that truth is not our side of the argument, but a product of our arguing together faithfully in love.

And throughout, we can and must continue to pray together and read the Scriptures together, that through and past our disagreement, we may be one in Christ.

Works Cited

Bouteneff, Peter and Dagmar Heller, eds. 2001. INTERPRETING TOGETHER: ESSAYS IN HERMENEUTICS. Geneva, Switzerland: WCC Publications.

Brueggemann, Walter. 2002. That the World May be Redescribed." INTERPRETATION 56:359-67.

1997. THEOLOGY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT: TESTIMONY, DISPUTE, ADVOCACY. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress.

1985a. "A Shape for Old Testament Theology, I: Structure Legitimation." CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY 47:28-46.

1985b. A Shape for Old Testament Theology, II: Embrace of Pain." CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY 47:395-415.

Burgess, John P. 1998. WHY SCRIPTURE MATTERS: READING THE BIBLE IN A TIME OF CHURCH CONFLICT. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox.

Gerstenberger, Erhard S. 2000. Conflicting Theologies in the Old Testament. HORIZONS IN BIBLICAL THEOLOGY 22:120-34.

Patte, Daniel. 1995. ETHICS OF BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION: A REEVALUATION. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox.

Sanders, James. 1984. COMMUNITY AND CANON: A GUIDE TO CANONICAL CRITICISM. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress.

Schussler-Fiorenza, Elisabeth. ed. 1993. SEARCHING THE SCRIPTURES. VOLUME ONE: A FEMINIST INTRODUCTION. New York, NY: Crossroad.

1983. IN MEMORY OF HER: A FEMINIST THEOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS. New York, NY: Crossroad.

Elizabeth Huwiler, Ph.D. (Duke University) is Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia (e-mail: [e-mail]). Author of Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs in the same volume that also includes Proverbs by Roland Murphy, she dedicates this article to his memory.