Political Engagement as Biblical Mandate. Paul D. Hanson
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accommodationist model and should perhaps be understood in relation to Paul’s later writings, especially those written from Roman prisons. At any rate, it is important to recognize that the fundamental biblical principle of God’s sole authority is affirmed in the leading verse of Paul’s discourse, “for there is no authority except from God.” That having been said, the fact remains that in Romans 13, Paul seems to be more accommodating than either Jesus of the Gospels or even Paul himself in many of his other pronouncements. A plausible explanation for this is that he is being extraordinarily careful not to exacerbate the growing tensions between the Romans, the Jews, and the growing Jesus movement. Also not to be forgotten is Paul’s education under the Pharisees, which would explain the resonances between his thought and the earlier position of Ezra in relation to the Persians.
A third political position is staked out by the book of Revelation. Christian communities throughout the Empire were being sacrificed to the wrath of Nero and Diocletian. Powerless before this overwhelming power, they interpret it as the Anti-Christ. They find refuge in the message of final vindication after death and accordingly adopt the strategy of the apocalyptic political model. Again the dynamic flexibility of biblical politics to changing conditions is in evidence, providing an invaluable source of hope and strategy for survival in modern times for Christian leaders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans Lilje as they encountered yet again the face of the Anti-Christ in Adolf Hitler and his collaborators. And in our own time, the poignancy of the apocalyptic message has become apparent as the specter of genocide continues to cast its ghastly pall over Ruwanda, the Congo, and Sudan.
The Contribution of the Bible to Contemporary Politics
The diverse and often contradictory conclusions that individuals and communities draw from the Bible regarding the controversial issues of contemporary life represent one of the areas of religion that attracts the most attention in the popular media. To the “cultural despisers of Christianity,” the utter lack of unanimity among religious people offers occasion for ridicule or disdainful dismissal. For religious zealots, conflict is welcomed as a sign of the approach of the climactic skirmish that will determine the winners in the “battle for the Bible.” On the other hand, for many conscientious people of faith who want to do the right thing in relation to issues such as human sexuality and world peace, the fact that not only individual believers but entire denominations seem to be locked in intractable dispute over important moral issues is a source of great distress.
It is especially to such people that we now turn to reflect on the important issue of the essential nature of the theory of interpretation one uses as a guide to discerning the contemporary meaning of Scripture, which is to say, the issue of hermeneutics. It may be helpful to bring to light the presuppositional starting point of the two positions into which, in the most general sense, most interpretative strategies seeking to define biblical authority fall.
We begin with the approach that can be called absolutist. Proponents of this position within Christianity and Islam commonly go by the label “fundamentalist,” whereas within Judaism “ultra-orthodox” is the term most commonly used. All three ascribe to the words of Scripture (and in Judaism to the total corpus of words attributed to Moses) the attribute of truth transcending the limits of historical particularity and the fallibility of human understanding. In this approach, human participation in revelatory events is reduced to the formal matter of transmission, meaning that the words of the Quran are the words of Allah mediated by the Prophet Mohammed, the words of Christian Scripture (in the original transcripts) are the words of God inerrantly recorded by human authors, and the Hebrew Bible, Mishnah and Talmud are the words Moses received from God on Mt. Sinai.
In the case of the Christian version of absolutism, the assumption of inerrant Scripture is accompanied by the belief that the Bible contains answers to all matters of belief and morals if read literally and without the biases imposed by liberal interpreters deriving not from the realm of divine revelation but from the human realm of rationalist philosophy and secular bias. Biblical truth is thereby insulated from the limits endemic to human existence and the flux characteristic of history. Through literal reading, the plain truth of the Bible becomes clear regarding homosexuality and abortion. And depending on the particular interpreter, the list can go on to include global issues like the return of all Jews to Israel and even eschatological matters like the date of the end of the world.
Commonly, the critique of the absolutist hermeneutic begins with the marshalling of evidence intended to discredit the notion of inerrancy, such as the presence of two creation stories, conflicting accounts of a single historical event, and misattribution of a quotation. That starting point is unfortunate, inasmuch as its negativity seems indistinguishable from the scorn of the cultural despiser and, more importantly, it fails to place front and center the powerful positive argument for the alternative position.
Let our criticism be stated clearly: The absolutist position rests on an unbiblical concept of divine revelation! In the Bible, God is not presented as an aloof lecturer who occasionally breaks his customary austere silence with a solemn pronouncement of abstract truth directed to Moses or Isaiah or the Apostle Paul, humans viewed as passive amanuensises who take up chisel or stylus or pen and meticulously record the dictated words. Rather, God is encountered in the raw stuff of human experience such as the dread moment when fleeing slaves tremble as a crushing army of the Pharaoh descends upon them to drag them back into captivity, and what will become a passage in Scripture arises as their joyous response to seeing calamity transformed into deliverance: “The LORD is my strength and my might, and he has become my salvation” (Exodus 15:2). And the hand of God is recognized by an anonymous prophet of the Exile as he observes the Persian Emperor Cyrus breaking the fist of the Babylonians and preparing the way for the return of the Jews to their beloved homeland: “For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by your name, I surname you, though you do not know me” (Isaiah 45:4). Scripture is written when they respond to a miraculous deliverance in a hymn of praise (Isaiah 45:25). Revelation in this understanding is not the mechanical transmission of abstract truths, but the discovery of Immanuel, God with us, in the joys and tragedies of human existence. The Bible consists not of words frozen in eternity, but testimonies by a living faith community of their awareness of living not alone but in the ever-watchful presence of a loving God. The Word of God is not a set of propositions trumping human experience and excluding the ongoing exercise of discernment of that loving God in the here and now, but rather the framework of an ongoing conversation between a God continuing to create and to redeem and a people attentive to God’s presence in their midst. Part of the beauty of this historical understanding of the origin of Scripture and its ongoing interpretation in the community of faith is its congruity with central tenets of classical biblical faith, for example, covenant as relationship between humans and a God who chooses to enlist partners in his activity on behalf of fullness of life for all, and incarnation as God’s entering into intimate proximity with humanity not in the form of disembodied spirit but real flesh and blood. What is being affirmed in this description is the incarnate Bible of Luther and Calvin, described by the former as “a worm of a book” and the latter as “God’s stuttering,” powerful metaphors intended to stress the genuinely human dimension of Scripture.
Though it is far preferable to present the alternative to absolutism in positive terms such as the preceding, candor also leads us to note that the notion of an inerrant Bible resembles in an essential respect the timeless myths that defined the relation of ancient peoples like the Egyptians and the Babylonians to their deities. Unlike the epic of the Israelites, which we have described as arising out of historical experience and inviting ongoing development first through the stages of growth leading to canon and then through lively reinterpretation, the myths of Israel’s ancient neighbors depicted eternal realities in the realm of the gods that were mediated through scribal specialists to their particular cultures as a timeless template for the ordering of their religious cult, political institutions, and cultural mores. By repudiating myth, ancient Israel created room for all humans to experience dignity as equals before a God who related to them as one respecting their freedom and their right to accept or reject his beneficence. Such freedom involves far greater ambiguity and risk than the certainty offered by a timeless myth, but according to biblical faith, such freedom is the sine qua non of creatures created in the image of God. And it is within the context of that freedom that individuals and communities of faith today