Many members of the congregation are participating in a class with me, reading the book of Job. It’s not a fun book, exactly; it’s a book of trials and tribulation, of eternal questions like “Is life fair? Is God good?” We have read them for ourselves, and we have grappled with them. It’s been great; and all this discussion reminded me of a new book. We’re Unitarian Universalists, and so we’re deeply ambivalent about the Bible to begin with. Let’s just face it; we are. And this class reminded me of a new publication by Oxford Press, which I’m going to be talking about today. It’s an inclusive Bible; it’s a politically correct Bible, and that’s the question we’re going to ask today: Can there be a politically correct Bible? And even a more interesting question, to me: Should there be such a Bible?
Well, the Bible is indeed a very, very tough book. It is so tough that many religious liberals have quite happily abandoned it—turned it over to the orthodox, and even to the religious right. “Here! Take it! We don’t need it any more!” I’ve had this articulated to me many times through the years. I remember that at my installation in Columbia, Maryland, some twenty-six years ago, John Wells, one of our great ministers, got up to do the reading, and he had forgotten his Bible. He looked out at the sea of Unitarian ministers who were attending, and he said, “Does anyone have… Oh, forget about it.” There was not a Bible to be had in the entire building.
There are good and sufficient reasons that we have done this. I know these reasons; I feel these reasons; they are very real to me. Is the Bible patriarchal? Yes. Is it sexist? Absolutely. Is it full of violence? Yes. Is it guilt-inducing? Oh, my, yes it is; unbelievably so, painfully so. And I am an unrepentant religious liberal; I would even quote one of our great ministers, A. Powell Davies, who said, “So far as I am sorry for anything, it is not because I am a liberal, but that I am not more liberal than I am.” And yet—and yet—there is this quirk in me; an oddity. I don’t completely want to throw the Bible completely away. I want to grab it back from the orthodox. I want to say that we can read it too; it is also our book. The words of the prophets deeply imbue every aspect of Unitarian Universalism in our quest for social justice. When it says that the peacemakers shall be the children of God, I get that.
To me, the Bible is a story of evolution. Now, that may be ironic, but I grew up in east Tennessee, only miles away from Dayton, Tennessee, where of course the great Scopes Monkey Trial was held; so it may seem odd that I would say that the Bible to me is a book of evolution, but it is. It’s a story at the beginning where God walks in the garden and has a whole cadre of fellow godly beings, and the book of Job begins with God and Satan sitting around as heavenly beings, deciding to wager whether Job, the supposedly righteous man on earth, will in fact hold to his righteousness if God takes and strips away everything from him. He says to Satan, go ahead, test him; it’s a wager. And then Job comes through. His kids are killed; his cattle are taken away; everything is stripped away. Satan comes back and says, you know, you haven’t touched his skin yet; is he really so righteous? And so they come up with another wager, which is to go deep into his body.
Now, for many religious liberals, when they encounter the book of Job, they say to themselves that this is myth; this is not true. But I would offer a different question. Even as problematic as the book of Job is, even as problematic as virtually every aspect of the Bible is, I ask this question at the beginning of the classes I teach:
Our science has changed; our understanding of history has changed; our understanding of really everything has changed; but one thing has not changed, and that is human nature. We still hurt; we still dream; we still grieve; we still fall in love; and we still look up at the stars and wonder. We wonder why we’re here, what is the purpose of our lives. The story of the evolution of the Bible is of a God who begins the story as a petulant desert tyrant who changes, across the course of well over two thousand years in the books that are recorded in the Bible, into love—into a powerful love that does not belong to any one people or tribe, but in fact binds all people. It’s an amazing evolution, and we don’t pay enough attention to it; because fundamentalists tell us that every word of the Bible is true, and that every aspect of every story is true, almost as if it is history; and it is not history, but it does record something. It records an earth-shaking story of how you and I may find ourselves, and may come to understand ourselves, in the context of something larger and more loving. It comes through very imperfect texts, but I still think they’re worth grappling with.
Now, there is something I really dislike. Liz hates it when I use the word “hate”; she says, Stephen, never use the word “hate” from the pulpit; but I have to confess, I really hate the way religious fundamentalists misconstrue the Bible, misuse the Bible, and oftentimes thwart the Bible’s true intentions, because of their almost obsessive devotion to wrapping themselves in the Bible, somehow marinating themselves in each and every word, as if they are literally true. The Bible is also a book of poetry. It is rich in metaphor; it is rich in the poetic understandings that make life make sense. Jesus is not literally a lamb of God; he’s not a little sheep with fur on him. Are we children of God? These are metaphors. There are ways to come into understanding the Bible that we religious liberals can employ with great sophistication, understanding, maturity, and wisdom. We do not have to hand the Bible over to those who, frankly, have forgotten how to read the Bible in its depth, and in its power, and in its true evolutionary story.
And frankly, the Bible is just too powerful to be left in the hands of fundamentalists. The Bible I’ve described is like dynamite; it’s extraordinarily powerful. It can do great harm; it can do great good as well. It purely depends on the wisdom in which these words are employed. They contain, yes, clumsy words; blind and sometimes bigoted words; harsh words; it is true. The Bible can sometimes feel like a club that people use to beat each other over the head with. It’s a big, heavy book, and it can really hurt if it’s used in that way. Here in Massachusetts, we are embroiled in a seemingly never-ending story of whether gays and lesbians can love each other as they will, and people keep using the Bible as a weapon against their choice to love whom they will. Oh, there’s a passage in Deuteronomy. Oh, there’s a passage here. The same people that employ these passages to reinforce their own political beliefs are exactly the people who ignore the fact that the Bible, especially in Genesis, promulgates multiple wives, the destruction of our enemies, antiquated food regulations, ways in which we are to worship, and even all the way up into Paul, that women are to separate themselves and to be seated in a separate part of the worship experience, and to cover their heads. And you don’t see that in fundamentalist mega-churches; they conveniently ignore what they want to ignore, and pay strict attention if there’s a piece of the Bible like a shard of glass that they can take and use.
The Bible is extraordinarily tricky; it must be read with sensitivity and wisdom. The Bible is not supposed to be a political weapon. That’s absolutely wrong. Religious liberals who abandon the Bible, who stop reading the Bible, who say the Bible has nothing do with us, have taken the power of the Bible and given it into the hands of those who would most misuse it; and I think that, too, is wrong. That’s why we do take a piece of the Bible every year; it’s why (unlike some of my colleagues that I’ve met) I do employ Biblical imagery in my preaching; and I do so unapologetically, because I wish to reclaim what in the Bible is worth sharing as our deep heritage. I don’t want to give it away.
Now, there is this whole issue of whether there can be a politically correct Bible. Well, Oxford Press has given it to us. It’s an extension of the radical retranslations of the New Revised Standard Bible, but it takes it a lot further—a lot further indeed. Most male references have been taken out. There have indeed been radical retranslations all the way back to the old King James Bible. Now, most of us grew up with the King James translation; it’s probably what feels most comfortable to our ear whenever we hear the Bible. It has been said that the King James Bible is the only good thing that a committee has ever done. It is beautiful; it is stunning poetry. The genius of Shakespeare is right there in the King James Bible, in its cadences and its power. There’s an old joke about a minister who is reading a new translation of the Bible, and as the people are leaving the church, a little old lady comes up and shakes his hand, and says, “I don’t understand why you didn’t just use the King James Bible the way God wrote it.” So retranslation—re-envisioning the Bible—is a very, very good thing for one specific reason: the King James Bible was written a good long time ago, and it’s riddled with mistranslations, mistakes, and words that have frankly, since Shakespeare’s time, changed their meaning. And so, when the Bible is retranslated into modern prose, we have an opportunity to step a little bit closer to the intentions of those who originally wrote down the words in Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek.
This is all good, so I’m in favor of an inclusive Bible; and this is absolutely state-of-the-art. I know why they did it; it’s because they want the Bible, in all forms and fashions, to be able to speak to modern sensibilities, and—hey—even to Unitarian Universalists. They want the Bible to continue to speak, to move past barriers of old words, mistranslated words, and antiquated words, and to live anew. Now I know that oft-times (and I’m sure that Paul has done this on occasion as well) I take pieces of the tradition that has been handed to us, and quietly (and hopefully subtly, hopefully with some poetic grace) we kind of correct it, retranslate it, make it less problematic. I know I do this. I’ve been known to add the word “and daughters” if I’m reading a psalm, and in that sense, yes, I’m reworking the Bible. I’m sometimes joining with other ministers and other clergy who have in a sense re-circled the Bible through radical selection; and every lectionary in the Presbyterian church, the Methodist church, and the Episcopal church does it too. There are no verses that endorse slavery in any modern lectionary. They have in that sense edited the Bible to their taste. There are no verses that indicate that it’s a good thing to slaughter your enemies. This is not in any lectionary in any orthodox church. Do you know that beautiful psalm, “By the waters of Babylon”? It’s beautiful; it’s gorgeous. Don McLean’s folk setting of that just gives me chills. However, never, never are the concluding words of the psalm listed, where it says “O, that I could take the babies of my enemies and smash their heads upon the rocks.” You don’t hear that in the lectionary. In this sense, everyone is deeply employed in rewriting the Bible. This is unabashedly true. They are trying to meet our sensibilities halfway. Is this political correctness? Yes and no.
Here is what Oxford has done. They’ve made some suppositions that I think are fair-minded, and then some that are pretty radical, and you’ll help sort me through them here. It says, of course, that in the beginning (Genesis) God created men and women in God’s image—therefore not male and not female—and they have translated accordingly. Paul says that in the beloved community there is “going to be no longer Jew nor Greek, enslaved or free, male or female; for we are all one in Christ”; and they have translated accordingly. This is a vision of an inclusive community, an inclusive Bible. This is the hidden, inner reality that may be brought to the surface. And so, if they can do it, God, in this translation, is no longer “he.” Jesus is a male, so he remains “he.” There’s no way we can get around that; but interestingly, if the word “Christ” is used, Christ is no longer male, because if God is no longer male, then Christ cannot in that sense be male either. It’s a radical notion, and it has its own sense and power.
“Father” is absolutely a limited metaphor; we understand that as religious liberals, but they can’t necessarily take it out, because if that’s what Jesus said, then that’s what Jesus said. So what they’ve done is to look at the actual word which Jesus might have used in Aramaic, which is abba, and which isn’t translated as “father” at all. It’s translated as “daddy,” a very intimate and personal word, and so they’ve made the leap to talk about “father-mother” or “parent.” It sounds awkward to our ears, but here in Boston we should be okay with that. Mary Baker Eddy came up with the first retranslation of the Lord’s Prayer that used the phrase “father-mother,” and so did Theodore Parker when he, as a great Unitarian minister before the Civil War, talked to as many as six thousand people in a Boston music hall. He, too, used “father-mother,” so here in Boston we’re okay with it.
The word “Lord” is severely cut. “Son of man” is retranslated as “the human one,” which is actually a very, very good translation. “Kingdom of God”? Nope. The real Greek word is basilia, and the word was never “kingdom”; the word was actually better translated as the “realm” of God or the “dominion” of God. It’s the place where God somehow dwells. It was never seen as the political or kingly dimension at all, so “king” is out as a metaphor for God. Even Satan has been de-genderized; I know he’s happy about that. “Dark,” “darkness,” and “darken” have all been taken out as negative metaphors because of racial sensitivities. Women’s names have been added to genealogies if we know their names; it’s no longer just Abraham, it’s going to be Abraham and Sarah. The word “slave” is not used; “enslaved person” has been substituted. In the gospel of John, where there are great condemnations of “the Jews” who have killed Jesus, instead is substituted—and it’s more accurate—“leaders” or “authorities,” not the people themselves. “At the right hand of God” has been rewritten as “to be near” or “to be beside” God. And I know this sounds funny, but I suppose they did that to be even-handed, so that no left-handed people are offended.
Can there be a politically correct Bible? On one level, absolutely; they’ve done a beautiful job, a poetic job. Occasionally it is awkward to our ears, but here’s my problem with it. It’s not that we shouldn’t do it; it’s not that we shouldn’t try to come up with better and better translations of a book. Many of these retranslations are actually more accurate translations of the original Hebrew or the original Greek. My problem with it is that as a religious liberal, I don’t have to have everyone come to me. I think of liberalism as the ability to grapple with multiple points of view; to be able to talk to anyone despite their point of view; to be able to grapple with texts, even texts three and four thousand years old, that don’t necessarily align with my current political sensibilities. I think that true religious liberals are in fact able to wrestle with the Bible as it is. We don’t need, in fact, to rewrite it at all. When we can retranslate it, yet; but let’s actually grapple with the Bible as it actually is. Precisely because I am a liberal, I wish to encounter the Bible as it was originally written. Yes, it is still going to be patriarchal; but then again, so is the structure of the world in which I live. So, too, are most world religious. So, too, are most social structures. So we might as well grapple with the Bible as it actually is, as to rewrite it for current sentiments.
In the end, I believe that we must engage in a great struggle with the Bible. We do so for a lot of reasons. One is very simple: we can’t cope with the world where fundamentalists have great sway in our life, culture, and politics, if we in fact are Biblically illiterate. That’s just number one, but number two is that we are then cutting ourselves off from a great current that has informed us and helped us along the way. We don’t need the Bible the way our forebears did, but we also can’t fully understand ourselves as Unitarian Universalists unless we are familiar with the Bible, for the Bible in fact is our heritage. It is not our only heritage; we are not enslaved or confined to it; but it is part of us, who we are. The Bible does contain, in this great evolutionary story, the notion that all people—all people—because they have been created by God, are valuable, of infinite potential, the source of creation itself. It contains the story of exodus and liberation; of celebration; and in the book of Job, we also understand the deep frustrations of what it means to be human, and to wonder if there is a God at all. And we can come to understand the glories of being alive, of feeling within us the spark of something divine, something mysterious and loving.
Amen
