Ashes of American Evangelicalism (a la Wilco)

Today is Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday. Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, and the start of Lent. But I’m going back to St. Valentine’s Day and reproductive success. And by the time I get around to posting this on my blog, it might be St. Patrick’s.

I wrote a few posts back about Jesus rejecting ‘normal’ evolutionary assumptions about reproductive success. Those arguments also motivate affirming gender egalitarianism and same-sex marriage.

So much has been written about this and in some ways I’m decades behind. But I’ve lived my whole life among evangelicals, many of whom are smart, loving, and conservative defenders of ‘traditional’ sex and gender roles. I can’t really help but write with that audience at least partially in mind. That said, I don’t know if anything I say will change any conservative evangelical minds. It would be arrogant and condescending to assume that we only disagree because they haven’t thought about it as deeply as I have. They may have thought about it more deeply than I have, and their reasons may be even more solid than mine.

So as much as I would like to convince and persuade, I’m going to simply testify, as a witness, to how Jesus led me here. Thankfully, I don’t think it will end in martyrdom.

Much of the conservative evangelical discussions about egalitarianism and same-sex marriage are textual. They focus (with varying emphases) on the specific words of Bible verses, their historical and linguistic contexts, authorial intent, original languages, and subsequent translations. This is justified as appropriate to a ‘high view of the authority of scripture’ – especially its inerrancy, or infallibility, or divine authorship (depending on your particular (non-)denominational statement of faith). This scholarship is pretty exhaustive and well-established. I’m not going to reproduce it.

But some arguments are less narrowly ‘textual’ and more ‘biblical’ – which is meant as a holistic, all-encompassing view of the totality of scripture as formative. The authoritative force of any specific isolated text is influenced by its interpretation and incorporation into a consistent and over-arching (thus, ‘biblical’) perspective. I tend to share this approach somewhat, with some necessary clarifications, which is why I think there may be some room for persuasion of like-minded folks.

However, my ‘biblical’ perspective differs quite a bit from what I understand to be the conservative evangelical norm. But I would argue that is because my view is ‘biblical’, not because it’s not. We agree on the importance of a ‘biblical’ perspective, but we arrive at different conclusions based on our shared sense of the importance of that perspective.

So-called ‘biblical’ hermeneutics endeavors to bring the whole testimony of scripture to bear on a particular text or more general theme. Sometimes this implies a kind of balance – that all the parts of scripture ‘weigh in’ on the question at hand and so must all be accounted for as somewhat ‘equally’ authoritative. That’s a clumsy way of putting it, because as far as I know ‘equality of authority’ is less an explicit component of ‘biblical’ interpretations and more of an implicit practical bias.

On my view, ‘biblical’ hermeneutics logically leads beyond itself to a ‘Gospel’ hermeneutics, which explicitly does not weigh all scripture as equally authoritative. If treating all of scripture as authoritative does not result in treating the Gospel (yes, the four Gospel books, but also the actual Gospel itself embodied in Jesus and enacted in and through us by the Spirit) as ultimate and primary, then one has failed to be ‘biblical’ despite one’s stated intentions.

Some folks have called this ‘Red letter Christianity’ – referring to the artificial convention (marketing gimmick?) of printing the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels in red ink. That seems like an attempt to get at what I mean, but a potentially misleading one.

The analogy I prefer – and most people I’ve shared it with don’t – comes from ancient Skepticism. On this image ‘biblical’ hermeneutics is an emetic – a substance you ingest when sick to induce vomiting, thus expelling both the cause of the illness and the emetic at the same time. To borrow from Rage Against the Machine: “there is no other pill to take so swallow the one that makes you ill.”

Thus, to truly adopt a ‘biblical’ hermeneutic is to eventually follow it beyond itself to a Gospel hermeneutic. It’s difficult to word this in a way that doesn’t irritate or offend many evangelicals. So I’ll give some practical examples.

Jesus says it like this: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

The writer of the Gospel of Mark illustrates it like this: “And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then a cloud appeared and covered them, and a voice came from the cloud: “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!” Suddenly, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus.”

A Gospel perspective arises from a ‘biblical’ perspective when we “no longer see anyone… except Jesus.”

A more specific ‘biblical’ example comes from the inaugural presentation of the Gospel by Jesus in Luke 4:

[O]n the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Jesus reads Isaiah 6, but only the first 1 and 1/3 verses. A ‘biblical’ interpretation might argue that, because he reads the introductory verses, we should understand Jesus as referencing the entirety of the Isaiah 6 passage. But Jesus doesn’t read the entirety of the Isaiah 6 passage when he obviously could have (and was expected to have) read it from the scroll in his hand. He deliberately stops and does not read the next line: “and the day of vengeance of our God.” Instead, he sits down to further emphasize its finality.

A ‘Gospel’ perspective takes Jesus as authoritative. The ‘biblical’ text from Isaiah “and the day of vengeance of our God” is deliberately excluded because it is not consistent with the Gospel Jesus teaches.

The scriptural defense of egalitarianism and same-sex marriage operates the same way, by adopting the Gospel teachings of Jesus as authoritative with respect to other ‘biblical’ texts.

More on that next time.