Mind Space

Jesus' Family Values

This morning I went along to a seminar organised by the think-tank Ekklesia at which Deirdre Good spoke about her book Jesus' family values. Good is Professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary in New York City.

Her thesis is that 'family' is a theme that does not occur in the New Testament. The Greek term 'oikos', meaning household does, and it is uncritically rendered family in some translations. In doing this, the church is excluding from Christian community those who come from non-nuclear families.

Dr. Good's work is at one level a hermeneutical enterprise; she argues that we approach the Bible as an authoritative text, but that we read it in dialogue with our own experience, including our own  experience of families. If we come to the text with Victorian notions of nuclear family, then we see that understanding mirrored back in an interpretation that appears to affirm the nuclear family. She charges the the US religious right, and especially James Dobson's Focus on the Family organisation, of making this mistake when they declare biblical mandate for the two-parent marriage-based family as the foundation of society.

Critics could declare that Good is open to the same mistake, seeing her own experience of non-nuclear families being mirrored back in her reading of the text. However her hermeneutical work reveals aspects of the texts that are in tension with a reading that asumes the nuclear family is normative. Biblical households are rather more diverse than that. One example she gave is "...an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you..." (Mt 2:13 NRSV). This phraseology (which is repeated several times in subsequent verses) places a subtle distance between Joseph and the mother and child; they are not to be construed as a nuclear family unit, despite many examples of Christian art that depict them in this way.

The second part of her project is to use her reading of the text to evaluate understandings of the family in the north american context, and call for churches to support a greater diversity of family structures.

One comment that she made about the privatisation of family spaces particularly intrigued me; she said that in each of the gospels that recount the woman coming into the dinner party, no-one tries to expel her on the grounds that this is a private meal to which she isn't invited. Good concludes that the room is in some sense public space, or, at least, that our understanding of a home being private space cannot be applied to the first century jewish household uncritically. This got me thinking; in British society, single people, divorcees and others who live in non-nuclear households are often excluded from any experience of family by the necessity of living alone. Often this is due to architectural necessity; our housing makes sharp demarcation between public and private spaces, with little or no middle ground in which a degree of shared living can be experienced. Most blocks of flats consist of corridors off which are private flats behind locked doors, and offer no social, communal space. One way in which churches could affirm the validity of non-nuclear households would be to support the building of apartments which provide a measure of communal space for people to live alongside one another.  I recall that Tom Sine called for just these kinds of housing projects in his book Mustard seed vs. McWorld, and for very similar reasons. Architecture is a text which is shaped by the way we live, but which also plays an important role in determining the way we live.

 

Technorati tags: Jesus, family, theology, ethics, Deirdre Good

Creationism Disneyworld

America is about to gain a new tourist attraction;  'Embark on the adventure of a lifetime where the past comes alive and ancient mysteries are solved' runs the marketing blurb. It all sounds rather Indiana Jones, but in fact it's a theme park dedicated to seven-day creationism. The park features include;

•  a 'stargazers room' where spectators are invited to view evidence that "the latest images of the stars confirm an all powerful creator, not a random bang",
• Adam and Eve living in paradise alongside a big friendly animatronic T. Rex,
• A chance to experience what life was really like on the ark,
• a 'Bible Authority Room' where you can discover that "the Bible is true. No doubt about it!' I bet God's relieved.

The group behind this nonsense (lest you have any doubt of my opinion) is 'Answers in Genesis', a fundamentalist group dedicated to affirming the literal truth of every word of the Bible. I had the dubious privilege of discovering their magazine when, after a lecture I gave on evolution and Christianity a few years ago, someone felt that my soul needed saving, and signed me up for a year's free subscription. I was about to cancel it when I concluded that if they wanted to waste their resources on sending me their magazine, the least I could do was to lovingly compost it for them. Clearly they didn't squander enough of their resources on me, for they've raised the money to build a theme park.

Why do they hold such views, and why do they want a theme park? It seems to me that the issues at stake are truth and authority.

Authority will have to wait for a future article; I'll  just talk about truth here. Creationists view the Bible as a logical proposition that is either all true or all false. In the face of literary criticism and scientific knowledge that they believe erodes the authority and simplicity of the Bible, they have taken an entrenched position that the Bible is very simple, and that it is true in the plainest, most literal way possible. An example of this can be found in the conclusion of an article about sauropods on the Answers in Genesis website;

While some scientists study sauropods and make evolutionary conclusions as to the origin and probable extinction of these majestic creatures, Christians must never compromise the clear teaching found in the history book of the universe, the Bible.

This sentence contains four assumptions that I want to challenge. They are;

1. The Bible is incredibly straightforward, and Christians are under seige from people who want to complicate things for us.
2. God has communicated the full truth about how the universe was created to a pre-literate, pre-scientific people without simplification or generalisation.
3. Those same people were able to transmit this truth faithfully, even if they did not undersatnd it.
4. The questions we bring to the ancient Biblical texts are the same as the questions the ancient authors had in mind when they wrote or recorded it.

To our modern understanding, historical enquiry is about recording chains of events and understanding the causal factors that link them. We must ask if the original authors of the Old Testament intended to write history as we now understand it, or if they had a different intention.

Some parts of the Old testament are clearly recognisable to us as history. Most obvious are the accounts of the kings of Israel and Judah in the books of Samuel and Kings, but even there, the formulaic structure of the narrative suggests that these accounts are not intended as a dispassionate recording of facts but rather of the presentation of a theological interpretation of events. When we turn to the first 11 chapters of Genesis, it is rather harder to identify the texts as historical writing in the modern sense. There is little concern for accurate dating, and the motivation of the actors is sublimated to the theological interests of the narrator.

Creationists deal with these issues by saying that either the text is truthful as a modern historical account, or it is false. The latter possibility is hardly an option, and so the text is read as if it were modern history. This is a fallacy of restricting the options. It discounts the possibility that the text doesn't fit neatly into a modern literary category, but is a product of its time. Rowan Williams calls this a category mistake.

Treating a biblical text as if it were a modern literary form such as history writing is like putting a jigsaw piece into hole in the puzzle where it doesn't belong. You may force it into place, but you'll damage it in doing so, and it won't help you to understand the complete picture. Worse still, forcing it into the wrong place makes it much harder to see where it properly belongs. Similarly, forcing an ancient text into a modern category of writing in which it doesn't belong restricts the ways we can understand it, quite possibly leading us to an interpretation that was quite alien to the original author.

What happens if we liberate Genesis 1 from the category of modern history writing? There are signs in the text that suggest it might be read as a story told to illustrate a set of theological truths rather than historical facts. So here's what I read these truths to be;

God, and God alone, created the world, and created it to be good. He made it out of nothing, thus refuting the Babylonian creation myth in which the good creator god made the earth out of contaminated matter that was made by another god. He made lights in the night sky (which the narrative doesn't even dignify with the usual Hebrew names for moon and stars), thus refuting a Caananite creation myth in which they are gods in their own right.

Admitting the option that Genesis 1 is not history as we know it, but a story told to convey theological truths allows the possibility that scientific theories of the big bang and evolution are true, and they do not compromise the truthfulness of the Bible. It allows us to put aside the contorted linguistic and logical manoevers that creationists go through in order to make something approiaching a self-consistent creation narrative that has some vague grounding in modern science.

It also places an extra burden on readers of the Bible. Every text has to be read with one eye on what it meant to the original hearers, and the other on how we might understand it today. This burden is to recognise that the truth of the Bible is more complex and subtle than that offered by fundamentalists. They sometimes claim that this is a slippery slope that leads to the rejection of the truth of the Bible. It doesn't. It treats the Bible with deep respect, and opens it as a rich source of wisdom and truth for the complexities of life.

 

Technorati tags: creationism, theme park, museum, truth, authority, Genesis, creation, hermeneutics, text, Bible