Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Adrian Thatcher is Professorial Research Fellow in Applied Theology at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the author of numerous books, including: Theology and Families (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007); The Guide to Christian Marriage and to Getting Married in Church (2003); Living Together and Christian Ethics (2002); Celebrating Christian Marriage (ed., 2001); Marriage after Modernity: Christian Marriage in Postmodern Times (1999); People of Passion (with Elizabeth Stuart, 1997); Liberating Sex: A Christian Sexual Theology (1993); and Truly a Person, Truly God (1990).

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Misuse of the Bible has made hatred holy. In this provocative book, Adrian Thatcher argues that debates on sexuality currently raging through the churches are the latest outbreak in a long line of savage interpretations of the Bible. He claims they should be exposed, not least because they continue an anti-tradition in Christianity that has discriminated against many minorities, including people of color, slaves, women and children. He asks how Christians have been able to conduct, in public and on a global scale, arguments which have exposed so much hatred and misrepresentation that the very mission of the church has been severely compromised.

The answer lies largely in particular attitudes towards the Bible and the misuse of biblical passages. Informed by wide-ranging debate, and drawing on numerous examples, this balanced book breaks new ground in the well-ploughed territories of sexual ethics and biblical interpretation. It unmasks this savage tradition and offers instead an alternative, faithful and peaceable reading of the Bible; one which is faithful to the Triune God and rooted in the early church. It is fascinating reading for anyone concerned about the future of Christianity.

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The Savage Text

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

The Bible as an Idol?

The Bible has become Christianity's most acute problem. In some parts of the Christian Church the text of scripture rivals or even exceeds in importance the very reality of the God to whom the scripture points. This is a remarkable irony. The heirs to the movement that smashed countless icons, paintings, statues, and stained-glass windows on the grounds of one of the Ten Commandments ("You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below" - Exodus 20:4), have installed an idol that exceeds them all.

One way of exposing the elevation of the Bible is to examine one of the names which has been attached to it, the "Word of God," or "God's Word." The Bible and the Church say God's Word is Jesus Christ. "The Word became flesh ..." (John 1:14). The term "the Word" refers in John's Gospel to Jesus Christ. The Word is the divine self-communication. All Christians (as far as I know), including the growing number of evangelical, conservative, and literalistic ones, accept this belief unanimously. Of course they do - it's in the Bible! Jesus Christ is what God "speaks" to the whole creation. Christ is God's own self-disclosure. It is a core belief in all the churches. The problem is that some Christians combine this core belief with a further, non-core belief with which it is incompatible. The damaging add-on is the claim that the Bible is also the Word of God. But the Bible does not make this claim. (How could it, for it has no consciousness of itself?) No, this is a modern ideology about the Bible and about which the Bible and the Creeds know nothing. It is a colossal mistake, and one which cannot be rectified or normalized by being constantly repeated.

Once the Bible is identified with the Word of God the text of scripture rivals or even replaces the Word of God, which is Jesus Christ. This is a disaster, for as St. Paul observed in a comparable context, "the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life" (2 Corinthians 3:6). Biblicism becomes bibliolatry, the actual worship of the Bible by assigning it the same status as that which is accorded by Christians to Jesus Christ. The Person is replaced by the proposition: flesh by words; the Word of God by written, and much-disputed, text. Speaking for Anglicans who are confronted with biblicism in many of their churches, Maggi Dawn wisely advises, "So while we owe it to ourselves and our tradition to guard and treasure a high view of the Bible, we need to avoid venerating scripture excessively, to the point where it displaces Christ the Word, and silences the capacity of Christ the Word to speak through the words on the page."

This book is written in part to defend innocent Christian victims of this mistaken elevation of the Bible, for it has deleterious consequences for Christian ethics, for the personal conduct of millions of Christians all over the world, for the social and moral teaching of the churches, and, wherever it has influence, for politics. Christians all over the world are following the Bible instead of following Christ. But the main reason for writing The Savage Text is itself evangelical. The Church's mission is to spread the good news of Jesus Christ. This mission is frequently impaired by the ideological biblicism that accompanies it. This book makes a small contribution to the removal of this impairment.

The "savage text" is the name this book gives to the Bible (or passages from it) when its use results in the marginalization, or persecution, or victimization, of any of the people or creatures for whom (according to the Christian Gospel) Christ died. The savage text, it must be stressed, is not the Bible. It is not those parts of the Bible that depict or authorize violence. There is plenty of violence in the Bible, but the savage text does not refer straightforwardly to these passages. That there is much violence in the Bible is unsurprising since the biblical books were compiled over a period of some 700 years in the land, still war-torn, of Palestine, and the oldest parts probably date from the tenth century BCE, possibly slightly earlier. No, the savage text is not the Bible. It is what Christians have made of the Bible when they have used its pages to endorse cruelty, hatred, murder, oppression, and condemnation, often of other Christians. The savage text is what the Bible, or parts of it, becomes when it enables Christians to convert the good news of God's revealed love in Jesus Christ into the bad news that people are the wrong color, or race, or gender, or denomination, or orientation, or religion, or class, or empire, just because they differ from the Christians who are preaching this bad news. The savage text belongs to a "mind-set" that authorizes condemnation of any view or practice which is not that of its official or most powerful readers. When the Bible becomes a savage text, the theology that is proclaimed from it is already faulty. The savage text makes hatred holy. It makes seekers after truth its jealous guardians. Perhaps the worst feature of the savage text is the divine authority it claims for its strictures. The savage text is implicated in the moral case against Christianity. Who wants to defend a faith that customizes hatred?

The vision for this book dawned on me during my involvement over the last two decades in the bitter arguments within the churches about sexuality. Readers will know that the Christian churches are presently locked in damaging controversies over sexuality and gender, and in particular over homosexuality. Indeed the Anglican Communion of churches, to one of which I belong, is in danger of splitting itself apart over these questions. These controversies have resulted in the frequent misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and fear of sexual minorities, especially of homosexual people, inside and outside the churches. Such people are frequently victims of Christian homophobia. They suffer the pain of rejection that compulsory heterosexuality enforces upon them.

The Savage Text does not contribute directly to the resolution of these debilitating arguments. Rather, it asks how Christians have been able to conduct, in public and on a global scale, arguments that appear to have exposed prejudice, fear, and hatred to the extent that the very mission of the churches in the world has been compromised. Churches all over the world are arguing about these matters, and with regard to homosexuality (but not in other areas such as divorce and further marriage) it is probably fair to say that conservative views have prevailed. My interest was alerted to how conservative Christians have used the Bible in their assertions about lesbian and gay people, their relationships, and their place in the Church, the priesthood, and the episcopate. Gradually, and with increasing horror, I began to form the opinion that this use of scripture might resemble earlier uses of it, when Christians victimized children, women, Jews, the disabled, witches, people of color, slaves, scientists, criminals, heretics, and even animals, nature, and the environment. This kind of Bible use is intolerable and should have no place at all in Christianity, in any version of it. Neither is its misuse confined to fundamentalists or extremists who can be neatly differentiated from the more "mainstream" type of Christian view. Dozens of respectable bishops and their carefully chosen theological advisors lend their episcopal weight to savage, exclusionary policies which they claim to find in the Bible. I have concentrated mainly on manifestations of the savage text in Protestantism and Anglicanism, but there are also references throughout to Roman Catholic teaching. Since Protestant churches have no Magisterium or central teaching authority, and generally do not value tradition, the weight of interpretation that the Bible is required to bear is greater in these churches. The title, The Savage Text, began to suggest itself. It is the name I give to uses of the Bible which convert the good news the Bible brings to the world into the savage text that persecutes, condemns, and banishes. The Savage Text lays bare these savage interpretations of scripture, and shows that there is a "shadow side" to Christianity that remains disturbingly alive.

The Savage Text is neither a work of social science investigating religious behavior nor an attack on Christian faith by one of its opponents. It is a Christian theological work that is written for the sake of the future of Christianity. The Christian faith professes the self-giving love of God in Christ as the basis of its existence, mission, and practice. For it to be credible in its third millennium it must recover its vocation as the embodiment of the divine love, and its practice of the Great Commandments and the Golden Rule. It learns this vocation from the Bible. Thankfully in every generation including our own, there have been many faithful Christians who read the Bible in immensely fertile and creative ways, and who inspire the Church in fulfilling its vocation. Their presence in the Church is thankfully acknowledged here, but it is not the subject of the present work. For there is much in the Bible that, without due care, lends itself to work against this vocation. For the good of the Gospel it is time to devote attention to this, to examine how it works, and to seek to minimize its influence.

The readership of the book is likely to be of two kinds. Students of theology, religious studies, and ethics will find much here about the use and abuse of the Bible in relation to ethical questions, historical and contemporary. But since the Bible and its continuing use is of interest beyond the demands of the curriculum in universities and colleges (and since the Manifesto series is concerned with broad issues in the humanities and the social sciences),I hope to attract that mythical character beloved of publishers, the "general reader." Specifically, there are thousands of potential readers outside or on the fringes of the churches who remain interested in living, practical, intelligible theology. Some are puzzled by the obsession of churches with issues to do with sexuality; other readers may be curious about the religious roots of homophobia, and anxious to see the churches more obviously striving to be welcoming and inclusive communities. There are many members of churches who are weary of over-cautious or censorious leaderships, and who long for a more adventurous, less risk-averse way of "being church." There are millions of people who define themselves as "spiritual" yet think there is a moral deficiency within the churches at the present time. Since the harm caused by the savage text extends beyond the boundaries of the churches, there should be interest in it from beyond these boundaries also. In short, there are countless general readers, and I hope to attract some of these as well as students pursuing their university studies. It is with general readers in mind that a glossary has been included at the back of the book for all names and terms in bold type in the text, and why the names of biblical books are included in full (and not by standard abbreviations).

The Savage Text is unique in that it is a book about the Bible that allows itself to be molded by actual Bible use in and by the churches. I won't be trying too hard to expose fundamentalism. That has already been well done. But a characteristic of fundamentalism is that it is impervious to criticism and indeed thrives upon it. I am more concerned with the inroads made by a conservative biblicism in many of the churches. It is 30 years since Dennis Nineham wrote The Use and Abuse of the Bible, and 45 years since his The Church's Use of the Bible, Past and Present. John Barton's admirable People of the Book? is 20 years old, and concentrates on the authority of the Bible, whereas I already locate that old question in the separation of the Bible from other sources such as tradition, reason, and of course church. Keith Ward's excellent What the Bible Really Teaches: A Challenge for Fundamentalists makes similar proposals to mine, except that I think "what the Bible really teaches" begs further questions (not least because Jehovah's Witnesses and others make similar claims), and that the Bible has to be understood more overtly through the faith of the Church which produced it. Ward does not concentrate on examples of historical Bible use as I am about to do. The Savage Text concentrates on the bizarre results that arise out of the excessive veneration of the Bible, and offers proposals for avoiding textual savagery in future.

The perspective taken in the book is both traditional and progressive. There is no truck here with a theological liberalism that reduces the contents of Christianity to the narrow scope of the "enlightened" Western mind, or that replaces the God of Jesus Christ and the Creeds of the Church with whatever anyone takes God to be, or that assumes all religions or even all versions of religions are equal before they have even been compared with one another. The book is traditional and conservative in locating itself in the tradition defined by the classic Creeds of the Church (none of which contains a doctrine of scripture or ideology of the Bible). The book is progressive in allying itself with the lively influences within Christian traditions that encourage change so that "the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints" (Jude 3) is able to retain its freshness and seductive appeal. If to be "liberal" is to believe that "genuine faith is committed to the search for truth, wherever it comes from," that "God invites us to do our believing in ways appropriate to the twenty-first century," that "We never have absolute certainty," and that "Only God is infallible," then this work is unashamedly liberal too.

The tone and style of such a work represents a challenge. On the one hand there will be philosophical, theological, and historical argument which, if it is to be successful, must be sharp, forensic, and clinically efficient. On the other hand, there is little point in perpetuating the polemics that Christians hurl at each other. It must be possible to demolish poor arguments without demolishing the people who are taken in by them. There are deeper reasons why a peaceable tone is required. Anyone who argues, as I do, for a radically inclusive Christian Church, cannot, without scoring a spectacular own goal, alienate or exclude those Christians who already belong to it and with whom one presently disagrees. And anyone who disputes the claim of another to have privileged access to truth cannot simultaneously claim to have privileged access to truth either. In much of what I say I may be wrong. In the end one can only strive for clarity, offer arguments, and learn from people with whom one disagrees. This is important in any discipline, and vital in the Church. If there are lapses of charity in what follows, I apologize for these in advance.

The Manifesto of "The Savage Text"

Authors in the Blackwell Manifesto series can be expected to court controversy. They have a manifesto (an Italian term meaning "denunciation"), a manifestus or public written statement about which there may be little public agreement. It will not be easy to balance controversy with charity. This is my manifesto. I hold:

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Savage Textby Adrian Thatcher Copyright © 2009 by Adrian Thatcher. Excerpted by permission.
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