Michael Knowles: the Church and its Scriptures 5

The Church and its Scriptures Michael Knowles

Recourse to Cultural Relativism

Another response might be to treat every single instance recorded in the OT where God is said to order an evil act like the slaughter of the innocent as something culturally dated and hence dispensable and disposable, not binding on us at all. Take Numbers Chapter 30 which deals with vows made by women.[1] Unlike men’s vows their vows are subordinated to the agreement or disagreement of their father or their husband and if they make a vow and their father or their husband then disallows it, “none of her vows and obligations will be valid” (v.5) That, Moses tells his people, is what the “The Lord commands”. What we often do when we read something the Bible says the Lord commanded, which we know to be sexist (ie unfair to women and therefore immoral), is to say that the writer of Numbers was just expressing a culturally dated norm, one we can safely ignore. Objectively discrimination against women, as this was, is evil. It is sinful. In Christ, the NT tells us (Gal. 3.28), there is neither male nor female. So when the author of the Book of Numbers writes that the Lord so commanded, we just ignore it. We don’t “take it seriously”. Our response is simply that the author is confusing his culture with religion and that’s his problem.

Or take Numbers chapter 5.11-31 where the writer (speaking in the name of Moses), deals with accusations of adultery against women. . Not to put too fine an interpretation on it, it is rampant sexism. And nasty at that. And pretty thorough-going witchcraft too. Voodoo in fact. “If she has let herself be defiled and has been unfaithful to her husband, then when the priest makes her drink the water that brings out the truth and the water has entered her body, she will suffer a miscarriage or untimely birth, and her name will become an example in adjuration among her kin...Such is the law for cases of jealousy where a woman, owing obedience to her husband, goes astray and lets herself be defiled, or where a fit of jealousy comes over a man which causes him to suspect his wife. He shall set her before the Lord and the priest shall deal with her as this law prescribes. No guilt shall attach to the husband but the woman shall bear the penalty of her guilt”. Now, even though these instructions and rituals are laid down with the following words “The Lord spoke to Moses and said: Speak to the Israelites in this words” (ibid 5.1), we treat them as peculiar to a particular and outdated culture.

In a way the precedent for this was set by the Church very early on, at the Council of Jerusalem when faced by the influx of non-Jews and diaspora Jews. Going by what Peter said to his fellow apostles and elders: “Why do you now provoke God by laying on the shoulders of these converts a yoke which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear?” (Acts 15.10) it seems Judaism itself had come to the same conclusion. It’s a very interesting, and instructive, point that Peter’s making. The Council of Jerusalem was obviously standing in a tradition where the People of God were already choosing for themselves what they would keep observing and what they could ignore. Doubtless a tradition that began the moment the ink dried on each redaction of Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

In fact it really has never stopped. I am thinking of 1.Cor 11 .2-15 where Paul gets all het up about women in church: “Judge for yourselves. Is it fitting for a woman to pray to God bare-headed? Does not nature teach you that while flowing locks disgrace a man, they are a woman’s glory?” (vv13-15). He’d already said: “If a women is not to wear a veil, she might as well have her hair cut off” (v.6). I am thinking too of Ephesians 5. 22-33. “Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord....just as the church is subject to Christ, so must women be subject to their husbands in everything (en panti)”. It is a passage which is read at church only with some embarrassment nowadays. It is also one which is more difficult to talk one’s way out off than with Paul’s instructions about women covering their heads at prayer because the writer of Ephesians supports his argument with very fundamental theology about the relationship of the church as Christ’s body to him as the head. “It is a great truth hidden here (to musthrion touto mega estin)” says the writer (v.31). For all that, I personally know of no one in the Church who would now tell women they’re to be subject to their husbands in everything. I believe it is true to say that we do not in any way diminish the mystery and the dignity of marriage, where, as the writer of Ephesians says, the two become one flesh (esontai oi duo eis sarka mian) which he says is the hidden truth and relates to Christ and his church, when we not only do not draw the conclusion which he draws but we also reject it.

But what are we saying of our relationship to the Word of God? We are in very deep waters indeed. We –I think I am right to say ‘we’ and not just I- are disagreeing with the Word of God itself. Are we not? We are saying that the deliberate murder of the innocent as in the case of the invasion of Canaan and that of Samson is evil even though the OT lavishes praise on these actions as acquiring and defending the ‘kingdom’. We are saying that discrimination against women as in the Book of Numbers (and many other places too) is sinful even where the Lord is explicitly stated to be commanding it. We are saying that women should not be subject to their husbands in everything when the NT expressly states they should be. In the examples I have given, and there are more besides, the Bible, which is the Word of God, expressly affirms, using what is obviously a set and time-honoured formula, that God commands actions which are objectively evil, some of them very evil.

We might argue that what is commanded is culturally peculiar to its time and place and therefore not a moral issue any longer. Yes, the Israelites obviously didn’t consider it immoral to slaughter their opponents, men, women and children if it got them the land of Canaan. The whole culture of the whole region, and beyond, took that as a normal activity. And even more so discrimination against women. The modern idea that women could be equal to men would have been pure pantomime at that time. As it still is in virtually all of that region to this day where the majority religion is Islam. Mohammed in the Koran is uncompromising in this matter: “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other and because they spend their wealth to maintain them”. 4.34. For the reasons provided in the following paper Islam cannot depart from this perspective on women, which is that of an primitive 6^th and 7th century Arab tribe, whereas Christianity can repudiate whatever in its scriptures is expressive of an outdated culture and distinguish between what in its scriptures is its faith and what are just the trappings.

But it isn’t men we’re talking about. It’s God. There’s no time and place get-out for God. Murder of the innocent in any place or at any time is a moral issue. Discrimination against women in any place and at any time is a moral issue. Our problem is that the Word of God explicitly states that God is commanding both. To argue that we can respond to this problem by saying we can sieve out and repudiate what is culturally dated is not good enough. Islamic theology and tradition have correctly seen this. For Islam the Revelation of God, which is the Koran, is the Revelation of God and we cannot tamper with it. It is God’s, not man’s. We take it as it is or not at all. We cannot be in judgement over it. We are subject to it, not above it. God’s Word is God’s Word down to each single letter. That is an essential part of the Islamic understanding of revelation. It has had, it has, and it always will have, the most significant implications for human behaviour and relationships, individual and social. That is not, however, the Catholic understanding of revelation. The Catholic understanding of the revelation contained in the Old and New Testament allows us to decide, as in judgement upon what is in the Old and New Testaments, what is acceptable from a Christian perspective and repudiate what is not. It’s what the Church does about what is contained in the Bible that tells us definitively what its relationship to it is.

The issue then is this: God is eternally good and in him there is no evil or cause of evil. God is not subordinate to culture. God cannot be dated. God cannot therefore command things at any time and in any culture which are in themselves evil. Therefore the argument that we can repudiate in the Bible something that is in itself immoral or evil and incompatible with the Christian ethic on the grounds that it is culturally dated is unacceptable for the reason that God cannot issue an instruction in any culture that is evil. The conclusion must be therefore that any such instructions or orders or ritual which the Bible says are from the Lord are not from the Lord; and in that matter the Bible therefore is wrong.

There are some commands to do evil which the Bible ascribes only indirectly to God, not directly, which might be looked at. Take Joshua 23. 2-6. ‘Joshua was now a very old man (the writer is modelling Joshua on Moses as in Deut. 31.). He summoned all Israel...and said to them: “You have seen for yourselves all that the Lord our God has done to these peoples for your sake. It was the Lord God himself who fought for you...He drove them out to make room for you and you occupied their land as the Lord your God promised you”. Here it is Joshua who is said to be speaking, not God directly. Likewise the Book of Deuteronomy. “These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel.....It was in Transjordan, in Moab, that Moses resolved to promulgate the law. These are his words” (Deut. 1.1&5), and what follows is not God speaking directly but what Moses is said to have said in the name of God, like: “The Lord said to me: Do not be afraid of him for I have delivered him (Og, King of Bashan) into your hands and all his people and his land” (3.2.). This method is widespread in the texts.

Now we could argue that the author is culturally assuming that God is approving of these actions while the text does not explicitly say that God is. We might argue that people in those parts in those days (in fact in probably most parts of the world throughout history and today) didn’t see anything wrong with invasions and occupations. Our own Christian history is pretty dismal in this regard –the Americas, Africa and so on. Islam’s too. Mohammed regularly operated raids out of Medina on caravans, especially caravans out of Mecca. He wrote verse upon verse in surah after surah to justify it all, just as the OT writers did to justify what Israel did. Just like Christians in the Americas the Islamic armies swept everything before them to the western tip of North Africa. The formulas “God is Great” and “The Lord said” can provide justification for some pretty awful brutality all right. So we might argue that the Word of God (the Bible) isn’t here ascribing evil to God but it’s the writer ascribing what we consider to be evil to God, which he doesn’t consider evil at all. This puts God at one remove from the evil -a subtle but significant difference, one might say. Does it work?

Hardly. It’s just too clever by half. The plain intent of the Bible, the Word of God, is to ascribe these things to God. Anyway the Book of Numbers scuppers the argument altogether. While Deuteronomy puts everything into the mouth of Moses, Numbers (Leviticus even more so) has God speaking direct. “The Lord said to Moses: ‘Do not be afraid of him (Og, king of Bashan). I have delivered him into your hands, with all his people and his lands. Deal with him as you dealt with Sihon the Amorite king who lived in Heshbon’. So they put him to the sword with his sons and all his people until there was no survivor left, and they occupied his land”. (Num. 21.34f). The Word of God explicitly ascribes the evil of the slaughter of the innocent to God; and in Num.5 11-31 explicitly ascribes discrimination against women to God.

What is quite awful about the Old Testament, which is the Word of the one true God, is its thundering emphasis on war, violence, retribution, punishment as God’s way of dealing with people. It’s everywhere –in the first five books, Joshua, Judges, Kings, Chronicles and throughout the prophets. Even in the psalms in places. And likewise, though of course the topic does not get the same amount of explicit treatment, is the degree of discrimination against women. The OT is through and through a statement of a tribe’s culture within the general culture of the whole Near and Middle East area which was unashamedly accepting of violence and sexism. Leviticus is rank with it. Chapter 8 for example, which describes the consecration of priests, repeats the phrase “Aaron and his sons” eight times. Doubtless the phrase served another purpose as well ie establishing which branch of the Jewish priesthood was the legitimate one depending which kingdom it was meant for, but, though no one would have thought anything else anyway, it’s still sexist. In chapter 12 a woman is unclean for just 7 days when a boy is born, but double that number if she has a girl.[2]

I would suggest that all this has gone deep not just into the Jewish consciousness but into the Christian consciousness as well. The Old Testament just cannot be read, and read out loud, day after day over centuries without it informing, moulding and shaping the mind of Christendom to its core. It’s little wonder the Church –by which I mean lay as well as cleric- has a problem with the idea of women priests. .There are moments when I am inclined to believe that the OT should be not be read privately or publicly without a mental and spiritual health warning prominently displayed. That warning was given in no uncertain terms in the Sermon on the Mount, as I will come to, but it has gone unrecognised. Of course every word of the OT must be read, and read aloud, as often as possible. How else can we hope to understand the New? But it must be read with understanding.

Nothing that advocates war, violence, retribution, the ill-treatment of women, using animals as sacrifices and much else besides should be read without an awareness of the ‘better plan’ that God has made for us (Hebrews 11.40). It is arriving at that correct understanding which is the very difficult bit and which preoccupied Paul (Romans) and Peter (Acts). Collectively as the Body of Christ and individually as Christians we have to discard “the old nature with its deeds and put on the new nature which is being constantly renewed in the image of its Creator and brought to know God” (Col. 3.10) – a process that just does not ever find a conclusion. We are in sin, in darkness and ignorance and they inform our cultures and every aspect of our relationships and civic life. Inch by inch we struggle through as best we can, individually and collectively, recognising and battling one prejudice after another, decade by decade, every insight met by reaction, every instance of enlightenment threatened by the darkness of prejudice as we stumble towards the light that would enlighten every man. Revelation in a very real sense is simply ongoing. There is in this sense no final testament, no last revelation. We see in a glass darkly. Christ is the way, the truth and the life but to follow him is to take up his cross. The mental journey is a Golgotha. We must never rest from mental fight.[3]