Interpreting The Eternal Truth:  Problematizing The New Testament

What does the New Testament teach us?
I can’t answer that question for you.  Instead, I am interested in the fact that this book teaches different people very different things.

I was raised as a church-going son of a Protestant minister and the grandchild of church-going Presbyterians and Methodists (and an atheist Jewish grandfather).   My parents’ closest friends were mainly other ministers or Franciscan Catholic nuns and priests, and so I also grew up saying various kinds of “grace” before meals, attending various, different Protestant churches and Catholic mass. I was taught in church and at home that the core message of this book was that of love and the inherent worth and dignity of all of God’s creation – all people, and the planet itself -- and that this message played itself out through social justice: ensuring that all God's children are treated as such. 

The churches I attended spent very little if any time discussing Heaven or Hell as literal places, or in the Creation story as factual, or in the actual existence of Satan or angels and so on -- these were all offered as metaphorical means of understanding God and godly behavior.  Similarly, as a Protestant, I wasn't taught to believe in actual saints, but I was often taught to emulate the godly behavior or men like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and even Cesar Chavez:  to love my enemies and to sacrifice my own needs, desires and safety for the betterment of humanity.  In other words, I was taught that to be a Christian was to practice caritas and agape:  love.

I assumed everyone else attending church was taught the same message.

I was well into my 30s before I learned that many Evangelical Protestants believe faith – not love or charity – is what they believe to be the core message.

And when I read the NT for myself, now, today, I’m no longer confident that what I was taught is, in fact, the core message of that particular book.  Now I see that there are so many messages in this book that was written by so many authors with so many perspectives, that it’s hard to say not just what the core message is but whether there is a central, core message.

This is not to say that I don't still hold the values I was taught in Sunday school -- I do still hold those values -- it is instead to say that I now see how radically different other Christians were raised to read this same book.

I was only exposed to the Book of Revelation and the Evangelical focus on end times and the Apocalypse when I visited conservative friends’ or family members’ churches in junior high and high school.  That was also the first I realized people took the Creation stories literally.

At that time I also realized that some of my own family had, in the 1950s and 1960s, been using the Bible to support Southern segregation…during the same period of time that Martin Luther King and other members of my own family had used the Bible to end segregation.

My point here is that those of us raised in church as Christians, raised to read and recite the Bible, are all pretty confident that we know what this book is about, but what we were taught is often radically different from what other Christians believe this book to be about.

I'm not here to teach you which interpretations are correct or wrong, but I am here to point out, among other things, that there is really little agreement about the core message of this book even within the Christian religion.

Fighting Over Interpretations
These differences are radical enough that for over 1800 years Christians have fought countless wars against each other, and killed each other, over this debate.   In fact, by a enormous factor, more Christians have killed each other over religious disputes than were ever killed by Muslims or non-believers over these differences -- just as it is likely Muslims have similarly killed one another over internecine theological disputes.

If nothing else, this is a strong lesson in how seriously books influence history and even a book that may hold “The Truth” seems to generate competing interpretations – and people are willing to kill and die over these different interpretations.

Along these lines, the Bible is often cited as the beginning of our Western concept of human equality – and yet it was used for about 1500 years to predicate the divine right of kings.  It was used to support slavery and the slave trade for roughly a thousand years, including in this country for over three hundred years – and it was also used by Christians to end slavery, but not until a civil war in which Christian Americans killed over 600,000 of each other over this issue.  Some make a convincing argument that without the Bible we would have ended slavery long ago.  Others argue that without the Bible we’d still have slaves.

It was used by Christian Europeans to drive the Jews out of Spain and England in 1492, killing tens of thousands in the process, and by the Nazis to commit some of the worst acts of genocide our planet has ever known. In my own lifetime it was used to justify the segregation of black and white Americans…and to end that segregation.  In your lifetime it was used to both support and to condemn the war in Iraq.

I have devoutly Christian friends who believe God wants them to be rich.  I was raised that poverty was Godly and wealth sinful.

I have devoutly Christian friends arguing both sides of the gay marriage debate.

In classes in which we’ve debated the death penalty, some of the most ardent supporters of the death penalty were devout Catholics.  And yet the Catholic Church unequivocally condemns the death penalty.

I have repeatedly been told by Christians that Christ upsets all the laws in the Old Testament – which is why Christians don’t keep kosher or hold to the Laws, such as not working on the Sabbath, or stoning adulterers to death and so on – and I have been repeatedly told by equally devout and well versed Christians that Christ upsets none of the Hebrew Scriptures;  the Sermon On The Mount certainly supports both interpretations.

So, from a literature course perspective, the Bible teaches us unequivocally one important lesson: that we all interpret texts differently – and that this rule holds to all texts, even those claiming divine origin and eternal, unchanging truths.

It also teaches us that books matter – that the printed word shapes our destinies – not just as individuals or even as a society, but as cultures, and perhaps even as a species.