Caution: the Bible is a Dangerous Book

When I was young and green and growing like an emerald sprout in the steamy Mississippi Delta, I was an avid churchgoer—my junior and senior years of high school I worked on the staff at the Ridgecrest Baptist Assembly Grounds, served as president of High School Youth for Christ, and led the closing prayer at my high school graduation. Yet in all my religious training no one ever warned me how dangerous the Bible was when read prescriptively, and that is precisely the way I was taught to read it in a Mississippi Baptist church—prescriptively! Taking the Bible prescriptively is what one does when one regards it as a divinely inspired book. My teachers in those early years were not critical scholars and they all believed the Bible reflected a prescription for a successful life, one that was pleasing to God. They seemed confident that knowledge of and obedience to its contents would develop a strong Christian character. During those early years, however, no one ever cautioned me that in reading the Bible I should have to choose carefully between its mosaic of good ideas and bad ideas; and it is essential that readers learn to discriminate between the positive and negative ideas advocated in its pages! For example, the Bible rightly extols the positive qualities of a wife and mother—qualities worthy of emulation (Proverbs 31:10-13), but it also promotes a blatant misogyny that easily misleads the unwary prescriptive reader (1 Tim 2:8-15).

Here is another example of the need to discriminate carefully among better and worse ideas appearing in the Bible. In 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 Paul compares three religious abilities: love (1 Corinthians 13:4-7), prophetic powers, and faith. He claims that the ability to love is the greatest of these three abilities (1 Corinthians 13:13). Unfortunately this judgment is something he seems to forget in Galatians, where he aggressively promotes the right kind of faith over some who disagree with him (Gal 1:6-2:14). Discriminating readers will recognize the need to choose between these two contradictory positions—love can lead to reconciliation, while insistence on the right kind of faith will inevitably lead to disunity—and even violence (church history abounds with such examples). A striving after love, is the ethically more demanding choice (1 Corinthians 13:4), while the other, insisting on the right faith, more likely than not will lead to callousness (Gal 1:6-9). It is far more difficult to treat with love and kindness someone who disagrees with your faith than it is to denounce and dismiss them (as Paul did).

The most insidious aspect of taking the Bible prescriptively, however, is that its authors view reality mythically (myth: things that exist only in the imagination), and subliminally they call for readers to share their mythical views. Yet to accept their views one is required to regard the universe as a battleground between the forces of light (God, angels, Holy Spirit, good spirits, etc.) and Darkness (Satan, demons, evil spirits, etc.). Bible readers generally assimilate such ideas without serious challenge. Yet no formal argument for the necessity of believing in such an unseen world is presented in the Bible; its mythical world view simply reflects the backdrop of Hebrew and Greco-Roman antiquity. Such concepts were in the air the authors breathed and the water they drank.

Now in the late autumn of my allotted years I am hard struck by the failure of the Church to handle carefully the greatest treasure of its historical past. The Biblical corpus is like the corpus of ancient Greek poets whom Plato accused of corrupting the minds of Greek youth by attributing things to the Greek Gods that were untrue (The Republic, 377A-383E). In his ideal state he virtually censored the reading of the poets by the youth for the damage it could do them.* Here is my question: Should the Church learn from Plato’s example, and insist that there be warning labels on Bibles—perhaps something simple like the following: “Caution; contains ideas in part that should not be taken as a prescription for modern life”? There are many types of literature (politics, medicine, etc.) whose authors urge that their ideas be taken as a prescription for modern life. They change with the times. Yet it is precisely because of the Bible’s continuing iconic status in American culture that it requires a warning label. What do you think?

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

*See Wry Thoughts about Religion Blog, June 26, 2015: “The Sybil’s Wish: A Mythical Encounter.”

Pondering the Origins of the Church

The word "church" is several centuries and cultures removed from the word it is used to translate in the earliest Christian texts. "Church" and its various cognates through the centuries is descended from a Late Greek word (which I would describe as ecclesiastical Greek) kuriakon meaning "belonging to the Lord" or the "Lord's house"; from this word has come the Teutonic word kirche, Kirk (still used in Scotland), which is the equivalent of the English word "church." It appears that translators of the New Testament have pressed into service what is today a "brick and mortar" fully baptized Christian word in order to render into English the pre-Christian ekklesia, used in the earliest extant Christian texts. Paul uses ekklesia to describe a local gathering of Jesus people, and the basic idea of ekklesia is an assembly of people called out for some purpose. The original idea of the word, its secular use, survives in Acts 19:32, 39, 41, where it is translated assembly. Another word Paul uses to describe the people in the gathering is agioi, or "holy ones," usually translated "saints" (1 Cor 1:2).

      It is an egregious chronological error, an anachronism, to translate ekklesia as "church" because in the middle first century there was no organization in the sense that we use the word "church" today. Technically speaking what we know as the "church" arose with the creedal and theological councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, although earlier certain theological developments led up to the fourth/fifth century "church." In the earliest period, for which there are extant texts, there existed only local gatherings of Jesus people.

 

            Paul's gatherings were comprised of Judeans (Jews) and non-Judeans; in Paul's mythological thinking people in the gathering were made "holy" in Jesus, whom he believed to be the Anointed (i.e., Christ; 1 Cor 1:2). These gatherings met in private homes (Rom 16:3-5; Gal 1:1), and were free-wheeling assemblies not bound by formal rules, procedures, or guidelines. Paul described these gatherings in the following ways: "the gatherings of the Anointed in Judea" (Gal 1:22), "the gatherings of God in Jesus the Anointed in Judea" (1 Thess 2:14), "the gatherings of the holy ones" (1 Cor 14:33), or he referred to the gatherings by the name of the location or region they assembled, for example: "to the gatherings of Galatia" (Gal 1:2). His later disciples came to think in terms of a united phenomenon, such as "the household of God, which is the ekklesia of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth" (1 Tim 3:15). Using the word "church" as a translation for ekklesia in this latter designation does not seem inappropriate. It is one of those evolutionary developments that led up to the church as it emerged in the fourth and fifth centuries.

 

            Paul did not invent the idea of a "gathering," for there was already a gathering in Jerusalem led by people he did not meet until some seventeen years after his conversion. Peter, James, and John (Gal 1:17-24), who earlier had been part of Jesus' inner circle (Mark 14:32-33), comprised the leadership of the Jerusalem gathering.

 

            It is improbable that Jesus invented the concept for these gatherings. The gospels do not portray Jesus forming small gatherings in the communities he visited. Ekklesia is used only three times in the gospels, and all three appear in Matthew. The first of these is a highly contested passage (Matt 16:16-19) where Jesus says to Peter, "You are Peter (petros) and upon this rock (petra) I "will" build my ekklesia." That is to say, the ekklesia, however translated or conceived, was something for the indefinite future. Ekklesia also appears in Matt 18:15-18, where it appears to relate to a formal religious organization with developed rules for disciplining "brothers"; hence it is not like the gathering reflected in the Corinthian correspondence. The passage Matt 16:16-19 is a Matthean insertion into a text borrowed from Mark 8:29-30. The primacy of Peter does not surface again until the third century and later. Hence these two segments in Matthew are best thought of as bolts out of the later ecclesiastical blue. In short, they are chronologically out of place.

 

            A more cogent occasion for the origins of the Pauline gatherings is most likely to be the widespread groups of private clubs and associations in the Greco-Roman world. In the early Roman Empire many belonged to private associations of one sort or another, based on common interests and needs. The broad purposes for people associating with such clubs were economic, religious, and social. There existed associations of the trades and professions (merchants, scribes, wood and metal workers), burial societies, dining societies, sports groups, groups of ex-servicemen, and some that were specifically religious. As the fledgling cults of the risen Christ emerged in the Roman world, it would be natural for likeminded persons in a given location to assemble together on the basis of their shared interest, following the model of private clubs and associations. Outsiders aware of such gatherings would have seen them as just one more private association.

 

            In short, what eventually became the church in Greco-Roman culture began initially as small independent gatherings around certain ideas about Jesus, the Anointed. The origins of these gatherings, which led in the fourth and fifth centuries to what became the Christian Church, had no one single point of beginning.

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

Works Consulted:

 

Ascough, Harlan, and Kloppenborg. Associations in the Greco-Roman World. A Sourcebook. Waco, TX: Baylor, 2012.

 

Ferguson. Backgrounds of Early Christianity. 3^rd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003.

 

Funk, Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar. The Five Gospels. The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. New York: Macmillan, 1993.

How Relevant is the Christian Worldview Today?

This essay was published in The Fourth R 28.3 (2015): 17-18.

What is called nascent Christianity emerged in the early first century CE as a tiny Judean religious sect.  Its religious heritage was shaped by the Holy Scriptures of the ancient Israelites, and the temple at Jerusalem.  What little we know about the group derives from the writings of their later descendants, who represented at least a third generation of followers of the faith.

            When Christianity emerged, the city of Rome controlled the Mediterranean basin, and had divided its territories into a number of provinces.  Judea was an imperial province, governed by the emperor of Rome rather than the Roman Senate.  The religion of Rome in general was comprised of the worship of the traditional Greek Gods in Roman garb, plus new religions that the Romans had allowed into the city.

            As a Graeco-Roman religion of salvation, and with the patronage of the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire (Constantine, 325 CE), the new faith rapidly replaced the old religious traditions, which survived only in the countryside (paganus; hence called "pagan").  After 440 CE no pagan names are listed among the elite of the city of Rome.

            Since the fourth century CE, Christianity has been a formidable force in the Western world, but only recently with the rise of modern science and a growing reliance on reason rather than faith has it begun to show signs of irrelevance.  There had been warnings about the demise of the "pagan" worldview before the Christian hegemony.  For example, in the first century CE about the time nascent Christianity emerged, the priest of Apollo, Plutarch, recounted a strange story; he had heard reports of an anonymous voice announcing the death of the Great God Pan, some 300 years before the ancient pagan worldview was replaced by the Christian.

            Similar warnings have been sounded about the Christian worldview, which has now survived some 1700 years.  Toward the end of the 19th century a German philosopher (Friedrich Nietzsche) in The Joyous Science described a madman who ran into a market place seeking God.  "Where is God?" he cried.  "I will tell you," he says.  We have killed him.  He delivered a short speech about the loss of moorings in a world in which God is dead.  He looked around at his small audience, and throwing his lantern to the ground, he lamented, "I come too early; my time is not come yet. This tremendous event is still the way…it has not yet reached the ears of man."  On the same day he entered numerous churches and sang an "eternal requiem to God" saying, "What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God" (96).

            In the 1960s there briefly emerged a group of scholars who wrote about the "death of God" as an event in our time.  One of these scholars (Thomas J. J. Altizer) took the incarnation quite seriously:  "God has negated and transcended himself in the Incarnation, and thereby he has fully and finally ceased to exist in his original or primordial form.  To know that God is Jesus, is to know that God himself has become flesh: no longer does God exist as transcendent Spirit or sovereign Lord, now God is love" (p. 67).  "Once God has ceased to exist in human experience as the omnipotent and numinous Lord, there perishes with him every moral imperative addressed to man from a beyond, and humanity ceases to be imprisoned by an obedience to an external will or authority" (127).

            Altizer's view clearly suggests there are more than a few cracks in the Christian Conglomerate; nevertheless it is evident that fissures, spearheaded by reason and science, have begun to appear in the seemingly impregnable Christian worldview.  The Christian Conglomerate holds that God controls the natural world, but Mr. Darwin's scientific view (evolution) on the origin of our species makes a more convincing case than does the theological answer.  The weather more often than not appears to work against the common good.  In the early 19th century the church was forced to admit in the face of compelling science that the earth was not the center of our solar system, which had been an item of faith for nearly 1700 years.

            The Christian Conglomerate holds that the Bible is a special religious text that puts human beings in touch with the divine will, but over 300 years of scientific study has shown it to be a human collection, and God has been reduced at best to the peripheral role of inspiring some of its ideas.  The idea that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19) is an item of faith that is not demonstrable except to those of like faith.  The Church is not as Paul believed a divinely gathered community of saints of the end-time, but has become a seriously flawed secular human institution.

            Could the church, like ancient paganism, simply fade into oblivion for lack of relevance?  Put differently: how is Christianity relevant in the 21st century?

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966).

Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche. Selected and Translated, with an Introduction. Prefaces, and Notes (New York: the Viking Press, 1954).

Who Decides What is True Christianity?

In a Springfield News-Leader "Voice of the Day" editorial Rev. Michael Haynes, Director of the Greene County Baptist Association criticized Rev. Dr. Roger Ray, the pastor of Community Christian Church (Feb 3, 2014).  Community Christian Church is a progressive Christian community (http://spfccc.org ).  Mr. Haynes said of Mr. Ray: "Ray is not a Christian"; Ray should "stop the charade and not call himself a Christian"; and Ray should "stop making Jesus into whomever he wants him to be."  What follows is a slightly longer version of my submission to the News-Leader on February 4, 2014, which has yet to be printed.

Dear Brother Haynes, it seems unfair of you to judge Brother Ray's Christianity, or lack thereof, by the Baptist Faith and Message Statement, a statement that likely represents what you conceive as "true Christianity."  Christianity has always been a "Big Tent" religion, encompassing very divergent views.  There never has been one true view of Christian faith—not even from the beginning.  What much later became the so-called "orthodox" view in the fourth century came about with the political assistance of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, aided by a self-appointed orthodoxy's aggressiveness, in stamping out their competition.

            There was no dominant view of Christianity until the fourth century and also no Christian Bible (Hebrew Scriptures plus New Testament) until the fourth century.  In short there were no agreed-upon standards that could be used to judge another's beliefs.  In the second century there were charismatic teachers with divergent views.  Paul, for example, had to argue his positions against those with whom he disagreed.  The early post-resurrection- belief followers of Jesus used only the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible as their Scriptures.  The writing of the New Testament texts was yet years in the future—some were not written until the second century.  Not until the Fourth century did it become possible to cite New Testament texts and church creeds as authoritative proofs of what some regarded as true faith.  Before that, each group promoted its own version of faith as the true faith, as is still the case.

            In this early period before the Constantine-led suppression of the diversity of beliefs about Jesus there were numbers of ways of interpreting Jesus.  In the end-of-the-first-century canonical gospels clearly he was regarded as the divine Son of God.  But oddly those words, as such, are never found as an admission on Jesus' own lips; the title is bestowed on him by others.  And only once does Jesus accept the title messiah ("anointed" Mark 14:61-62).  In the passages parallel to Mark he avoids such an admission.  In Romans 1:3-4, a pre-Pauline confession or hymn, Jesus was not presented as divine, but he was by nature essentially a human being, appointed or adopted for a special purpose.  Others believed that Jesus was not human after all, but rather he was completely divine, and only seemed to be human (cf. Phil 2:9-11 and John 1:1-2, 14).  Jesus' humanity, including what he said and did, essentially disappears in the later ecclesiastical creeds.  Still other groups regarded Jesus as a human being who came to be inhabited at his baptism by a divine spirit—"the Christ," or believed that he was the natural born son of Mary and Joseph, a human being like the rest of us except that he was better.  Throughout the first and second centuries the historical man Jesus became an originating principle for a variety of ways of understanding him and his role in faith.

With such diversity in the early days how does anyone have the authority to rule that any of Jesus' followers is misguided when it appears that the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 3) turns out to be only a statement of one's personal belief?  On one occasion, Jesus' disciples censured a stranger for exorcizing demons in Jesus' name.  Jesus said they should let him alone…  "For he that is not against us is for us" (Mark 9:38-41; compare John 10:16).

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University