Sunday August 21, 2022
Colorado Republican Representative Lauren Boebert wants the U.S. to have a “biblical citizenship” test. Was she serious? On video clips, she sounds as if it was just a casual aside.
Serious or not, it may be the stupidest idea that the U.S.’s Christian Right has come up with yet.
The first casualty would be Donald Trump. The 9th Commandment forbids lying; Trump broke it 30,573 times during his presidency!
Beyond that, though, what constitutes biblical literacy? Is it enough to know the Ten Commandments, a few choice quotations from Jesus, and the 23rd Psalm?
Or should biblical literacy mean that you can open the Bible to any page, any verse, and know how it relates to the book’s larger themes?
You cannot take the instructions of any verse without question, because the Bible is full of contradictions.
Perhaps the most striking example has Isaiah telling the Jews to beat their swords into plowshares; another prophet, Joel, tells them to do the exact opposite.
The Bible is revered by two billion Christians around the world. It’s also esteemed by other religions. I consider it the essential foundation of my own ethics.
Unfortunately, selected bits of the Bible can be used to support almost anything.
Israel’s supporters use it to justify discrimination against Palestinians, because God gave this land to the Jews. Racists base anti-Semitism on it, because the Jews accepted responsibility for executing Jesus.
The Bible approves of genocide (I Samuel 15). Incest (Genesis 19). Prostitution (Genesis 38). Betrayal (Judges 4). Child sacrifice (Judges 11).
Selective reading
I received in the mail an expensively-produced booklet, whose front cover trumpeted, “America in Bible Prophecy.”
In fact, the Bible doesn’t mention America. Nowhere. Not once. Because America was still unknown to biblical civilizations.
But -- if you can follow this reasoning -- some verses in the Bible do refer to Babylon. Which becomes a code word for any empire. Thus, the Babylonian empire 2,000 years before. King Nebuchadnezzar’s empire, 600 years before. The current Roman Empire.
And, by extension, America. Also the Vatican. Even if neither actually have a physical empire.
The booklet cited 167 biblical verses to make its point. Most readers, I expect, simply accept those references as authoritative. (Did you, for example, bother looking up my biblical references above?)
I did make the effort to check them. All 167 of them.
Two-thirds came from just two of the Bible’s 66 “books” -- Revelation and Daniel. All but a handful of those, in turn, came from just three chapters in those two books.
A smattering of verses came from gospels; another smattering from Paul’s letters. The rest wandered through the Old Testament.
The selected verses “proved” that the great sin of both America and the Vatican was abandoning the Sabbath, the “seventh day” of the week, as a day of rest and worship.
Even though the Bible itself never names “Saturday” as the Sabbath.
Use, misuse, and abuse
The booklet’s single-minded focus on the Sabbath identifies it as a publication of the Seventh Day Adventist Church.
Does their ability to cherry-pick isolated verses to support a narrow viewpoint make them biblically literate? Would they pass Rep. Boebert’s criteria for citizenship?
Or, conversely, would she pass theirs?
I doubt it.
The problem, you see, is that the Bible can be used -- and has been used -- as authority for almost any argument. Which may make it the world’s most dangerous book. Surpassing Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Marx’s Das Kapital, and Machiavelli’s treatise on corruption in politics, The Prince.
I shouldn’t be too critical of that booklet that came in the mail. My stream of Christianity is equally likely to fixate on a selection of verses. But different verses.
Verses about love, certainly. Love your neighbour as yourself. Love as the greatest of virtues.
Or verses about justice, rolling down like a mighty river.
Even verses praising truth itself -- truth that will “set us free.”
The problem lies in treating the Bible as the answer to everything. As the late Alex Trebek might ask, “What is the question?”
I’m not maligning the Bible. I’m objecting to its misuse. Or abuse.
Personally, I read the Bible as the unfolding and evolving story of a people’s attempts to understand God, to learn about God.
It’s a spiritual journal, recorded over some 15 centuries. Sometimes they got it right, sometimes wrong.
But it is not a repository of all wisdom, disguised so that only the cognoscenti can decode it.
And it is certainly not a test for American citizenship.
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Copyright © 2022 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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Your turn
In last week’s column, I argued that the Independence of India, 75 years ago on August 15, was the beginning of the end for the colonial obsession. I got a variety of reactions, including some from first-time responders.
Several people noted that August 15 is also a special date for them, for a different reason.
Mary Collins wrote, “August 15 is in my mind every year, but for a reason different from yours. Both North and South Korea (using their informal names) have it as a national holiday -- National Liberation Day -- commemorating the surrender of Japan to the allied forces on that day in 1945, liberating the Koreans from 35 years of brutal rule and oppression by Japan. Huge jubilation was soon followed by grief, however, when the US and Russia divided the country at the 38th parallel, and I’m sure you know the rest, including the later Korean War 1950-53 which did not end with formal peace but only an armistice. The United Church of Canada is a strong player, with Korean partners, in the campaign for a final peace treaty.”
JT note: According to some of my reading, Pandit Nehru chose August 15 for the official date of independence because it coincided with the Japanese surrender, two years before.
Nenke Jongkind’s husband, “Robert ‘t Hoen (pronounced Toon) was born in Banjarmasin, Borneo and spent much of WWII in a Japanese Concentration Camp with his mother and his sister. His father was a POW on the bridge over the river Kwai. The Red Cross was able to reunite the family in Bangkok, Thailand. On 15 August, we acknowledge Peace in the Pacific.”
“Actually I have the 15th circled on my calendar,” Cliff Boldt wrote. It’s his wedding anniversary -- 58 years in 2022.
Cliff continued, “Yes, Britain left the Indian continent in a mess and now it is considered an anocracy headed to dictatorship. Not unlike the USA today.
“But I agree colonialism is on the wane, with its consequences for new generations to clean up.”
Mirza Yawar Baig agreed about the British legacy: “That's the best account of Indian Independence that I've read in a long time. As for the British and their rule, you gave the best one-word description that I can imagine.”
Tom Watson “saw the movie ‘Viceroy House’ a few years ago, and it was a good examination of that particular period in history.”
Several writers dealt with the issues of colonialism.
Vera Gottlieb: “Colonialism continues to this day, disguised under different names. I don’t think humanity will ever reach true equality for all beings, not as long as this drive of superiority over others is in our genes. Natural instincts? Perhaps. And when modern times came up with ‘greed is good’, there went the instincts to the detriment of all else.”
Wim Kreeft thought that Indian Independence affected only “English colonialism [which] died 75 years ago but it appears that China and Russia are working hard to extend their control and domination. The mind-set of colonialism didn’t die 75 years ago but continues in all of those who think that people who dress differently, speak differently, are of a different colour or of a different ethnic persuasion are somehow ‘less’. Our world has a long way to go before there is equality and respect for all people.”
Isabel Gibson wondered “what the world would be like today, absent all colonialism. Would folks still have spilled out of Europe (and then Asia, and Africa, and South America) looking for space, freedom, and economic possibilities?
“Or would each region have managed its own problems and resources?
“As it is, we -- like everyone who came before us -- have the world we have. All we can do is look to the world we'd like to have.”
Bob Mason commented, “When India achieved (was granted) independence, Pakistan was the Muslim state, physically divided into two parts, East and West Pakistan, still a single nation. Many years later, West Pakistan declared independence and the eastern part then became Bangladesh.
“Over the years as I've visited India on a number of occasions, I've met many Indian residents, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Parsee and Christian, and lots of those people said how they wished the place was still ruled by the British.
“I'm so happy to see how India, which has for too long been considered a Third World country, is gradually being thought of as almost a First World and certainly is well known as an advanced and economically developed country.”
Steve Roney: “I’d dispute uyi k9nyour idea that decolonization began on August 15, 1947. I’d pick July 4, 1776. Not just because that date marked the independence of 13 former colonies, but because the USA then inspired and sponsored decolonization generally. Soon after, most of the nations of the Western Hemisphere declared their independence. I believe Canadian or Australian independence was also inevitable due to the American model. That’s a large portion of the world to overlook.
“Whether British rule was on balance good or bad for India economically is disputed by economists and historians. You do miss one valuable legacy of the Raj: parliamentary democracy.
“An important point: empire and colonialism was not a European invention. It was the universal norm from ancient Mesopotamia on. It is the nation state, decolonialization, that is Europe’s historic contribution.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns