Scripture and the Authority of God - N.T. Wright

Wright, N.T., Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today. New York: Harper Collins, 2011

“They (current books of Biblical scholarship) indicate that there is today a lively and serious engagement with the whole question of what scripture is, how to read it with cultural and intellectual alertness and integrity, and how to enable it to be what it ought to be in the life and mission of the church.” (19)

I was twelve or so. My brothers, cousins and I were crossing the pasture on a Sunday afternoon, jostling, jabbering and generally trying to fill a boring afternoon with something, anything that wasn't nothing. As we walked, my brother, Bob, stuck out his foot and tripped me, landing me in a cow pie. “You **** fool!” I yelled as I picked myself up and hurled myself at him.

            My uncle was a minister; his children had heard a lot of scripture. “It says in the Bible that if you call your brother a fool, you'll go to hell,” cousin Abe taunted.

            Cow shit washes off in no time; that particular taunt had a smell that lingered through the rest of my green years. So much for cultural and intellectual alertness and integrity.

            “Non-scholarly” Christians might be forgiven for despairing that if God inspired scriptures for the guidance and edification of his people, He might have done it in a less puzzling way, a way that doesn't require centuries of scholarship to unpack its apparent riddles and enigmas. (Not to mention the knitted brows of lay persons trying to grasp the scholarship.)

            The problem of how to read the Bible arises in part because the written word is by its nature, static. “It is written,” after all. Oral traditions seem less static, they enjoy the benefit of greater flexibility, a likelihood of adaptation to suit changing cultures and times, different ways of telling the stories by different story tellers. I'm reminded that the record of the Ten Commandments was written in stone, apparently required to be so by the writers of Exodus in order to emphasize their immutable nature. That made sense in a nomadic people trying to establish and maintain a distinct identity among alien, “pagan” peoples, but there is a price to pay for writing your words in stone.

            Does Wright's book help us along the road to benefiting from scripture in a world where it often seems outdated and stale, almost irrelevant? Apropos to the current climate around Bible as authoritative, Wright bemoans the splits among Christians we characteristically give names to like fundamentalist, liberal, conservative, literalist, etc. I find it helpful to consider the possibility that we might someday stop the endless abuse of the Bible on all sides, the selective use or rejection of portions that support or don’t support our worldview. That could be helpful, if impossible, given our natures.

            And is it useful to list from A – L the misreadings of the “Right,” and from A – L, the misreadings of the “Left?” I find it interesting that the “Left” and the “Right” have exactly the same number of ways of botching the reading of the Bible. For example, “B” in the “Right Misreadings” list is the folly of “The explicitly materialist ‘prosperity gospel’ understanding of Biblical promises.’ (108)” Lefties, on the other hand, make the error of “[claiming] that modern history or science has either ‘disproved the Bible’ or made some of its central claims redundant, undesirable or unbelievable (109).” My church has adopted a document that similarly lists Bible reading dos and don’ts, and calls the two lists “paths” and “ditches,” i.e. the positive practices to keep in mind and the negative practices to avoid. Lists are generally notorious over-simplifiers of situations, partly because they have the appearance of being complete when they can’t possibly be, and because the relative weight of the items in the list appears the same even if it isn’t.

            There are things in Wright’s book that will help some Christians to understand in part how the changing interpretations of scriptures have come about historically. The progression of thinking from medieval times through the Enlightenment to Post Modernity is helpful, as is Wright’s suggestion that we give credence to a “Five-Act Model.” The latter proposes that Biblical history be viewed as one would view a five-act play, with each act being discrete and distinct, yet integral to the whole. The five acts are: creation, “fall”, Israel, Jesus and the church. The New Testament is Act 4, leading into Act 5 in which we find ourselves today. Reading the Bible as a one-act play may lead to “over-reading,” so that we feel compelled, for instance, to replicate the Sabbath of Act 1 in Act V.  

Those who live in this fifth act have an ambiguous relationship with the four previous acts, not because they are being disloyal to them but precisely because they are being loyal to them as part of the story . . . we must act in the appropriate manner for this moment in the story . . . a moment where genuinely new things can and do happen (123).

            Wright ends with two case studies, namely Sabbath and Monogamy. He illustrates in Chapters 9 & 10 the progression through the acts of the play that sees strict seventh-day laws in Act 3 leading to accusations that Jesus was breaking the Sabbath in Act 4 to present day “Sunday shopping.” The last chapter illustrates that the fact of Solomon’s many wives (Act 3) is not indicative for Act 4, nor should it be considered to be in Act 5.

            I also learned a new word in Chapter 9: adiaphoron: "something over which one should not divide the church." I don’t expect it to slip into coffee conversation on Monday, but I do wonder if the issues that are “hot” these days, like gays as church members, should be treated as adiaphoron.

            Wright helped me think about this in a new way.

            Scripture and the Authority of God is not a big book at 195 pages and it is a “Revised and Expanded Edition of The Last Word” of 2005. On the whole, it probably serves best as a primer of current Bible scholarship for lay persons; it seems much too cursory for more and I found myself wishing that Wright had not used the “much too big a topic to be covered in this volume” excuse quite so often, particularly when I had questions for which I craved answers.

            I close with a quote (13) that may make novice seekers in the field of hermeneutics uneasy, but which anyone who reads extensively already knows:

Anyone who has worked within biblical scholarship knows, or ought to know, that we biblical scholars come to the text with just as many interpretive strategies and expectations as anyone else, and that integrity consists not of having no presuppositions but of being aware of what one’s presuppositions are and of the obligation to listen to and interact with those who have different ones.

Amen to that, brother. Amen to that. 

         My slip in the cow pasture may not have consigned me to hell after all; that language clearly belongs to another act of the story!

The Spirit Level - Can't get level!

Wilkinson, R & Pickett, K., The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London; Penguin Books, 2009

A man visits his doctor in the hope that a cure for his headaches may be found.  “Every time it rains, I get this ringing in my ears followed by a raging headache, doc. Unless you can make it stop raining, you’ll just have to prescribe me a pill!”
    The doctor—ever the skeptic about self-diagnoses, as doctors tend to be—prescribes a pill and the man goes home . . . in the rain. As he walks through the front door, his wife greets him with “How many years am I gonna have to wait for you to fix the leak in the roof??” and she conks him on the head with a frying pan . . . again.
    Question is: What really caused the man’s headache? Was it the rain, a physically aggressive wife, his procrastination? Or can it all be blamed on parents who didn’t raise their kids properly?
    The thesis in The Spirit Level is that the spread of means among citizens in a country is a factor in all sorts of social ills, regardless of that country's real wealth or lack thereof. But like the man with the headache, it’s incumbent that cause and effect be established beyond a reasonable doubt or someone is bound to say, “How do you know it’s not the high crime rate that’s causing inequality and not the other way ‘round?” Or, “How do you know that a third factor is not causing both the inequality of means AND the high crime rate?”
    Sometimes identifying the real relationship between a cause and its effect is easy: the man’s headache certainly didn’t cause the rain. At other times, it’s not all that clear.
    You might well scoff if someone were to tell you that, “All penguins walk single-file . . . at least the two I saw did!” How many times would you have to observe penguins walking single-file to establish a principle of behaviour? Ten? Hundred? Thousand?  And if they only walked single file 5 times out of 10, would there be a useful observation to be made there?
    Wilkinson and Pickett are fully conscious of the problems of demonstrating cause and effect, particularly on a subject like Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better—the subtitle of the book. Their basic method is this: using the relevant research gathered from around the world, they plot the equality/inequality factor on the X axis of a scatter graph and the incidence of a certain social ill (murder rate per 1 million, incidence of teenage pregnancies, for instance) on the Y axis. Then they get their computer to draw a straight line through the “averages” and by the gradient of the slope, the relationship between the two factors is revealed. Needless to say, everything from drug use to obesity to social mobility/immobility is clearly demonstrated by the research to bear a statistical relationship to inequality/equality that goes well beyond a reasonable doubt.   
    The USA is the most unequal country in the world on Wilkinson’s and Pickett’s X axes; Japan one of the most equal. The USA experiences 63 murders per I million population annually, Japan only 5.
    Clearly, none of the correlations are one to one. “Health and social problems” tend to increase quite strongly with inequality, but that obviously doesn’t mean that egalitarian societies don’t have any such problems. Imagine the difference it would make to health care, though, if the incidence of such problems were reduced by even 10%. What is also evident is that countries don't necessarily show the same social responses to economic equality/inequality, and so the graphs show a lot of what could be called “outliers,” countries that might be predicted to have high drug use rates, for instance, but don't.  The reader might find the presence of so many “outliers” disconcerting even though the trend indicators can hardly be doubted.
      If the relationship between equality and inequality were one to one, it would follow that poor countries or communities could be happier places than richer places . . . if everyone were similarly endowed with worldly goods. It would also follow that wealthy countries with great inequality would find social dysfunction reaching toward plague proportions.
    The question, “what can be done about it?” follows naturally. Here The Spirit Level definitely needs a sequel. Reference is made to the escalating, exorbitant salaries being paid to management, for instance, and a revisit of the tax system, minimum wages, employment insurance, social assistance programs, etc., is a no-brainer; these income-adjusting measures always need to be tailored to changing conditions.
    Seems to me, though, that nothing short of a new philosophy of nationhood will do, a philosophy that begins and ends with the premise that we all benefit when we are relieved of the burden of social stratification.  This notion, of course, swims upstream as it has always done. The long and the short of it is that equality of means will never come to be under an unregulated market economy, and our 2008 experience of the financial meltdown in the USA and the current economic woes in Europe have proven to be ineffective in advancing the social democratic option . . . so far.
    The solution to much of what ails us lies in moving from growth to steady-state economies, but a quote from Herman Daly hints at the difficulty in moving in that direction:

Capitalism can no more be “persuaded” to limit growth than a human being can be “persuaded” to stop breathing (220).

On the same subject, the authors quote Henry Wallich, former governor of the Federal Reserve and professor of economics at Yale:

Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable (221).

Why this is so may not be obvious, but it may well be as simple as the observation that we are made to want the things people with greater means have:

The growth of inequality made it harder for people to maintain standards relative to others. The increased pressure to consume led people to save less and borrow more to such an extent that the expansion of consumer demand became one of the main drivers of the long economic boom and financial speculation which ended in crisis (223).

Inequality drives up consumption and with it, debt. Both are symptoms of the rising inequality in developed countries, both phenomena have increased lock-step with the escalation of inequality. Both have made the climate change and national debt issues almost impossible to address reasonably.
    The final chapter deals with the future. The authors point out that there is a pervasive mythology out there that says public enterprise is inefficient and private enterprise is therefore the way to go. In the USA, public utilities produce product for consumers at an average of 11% less than corporate enterprises (245). Cooperatives and companies in which the workers own the bulk of the shares are doing very well, thank you, and are acting as good examples of ways to reduce inequality.
    So much is left to be talked about. Government policy is, of course, key to the inequality/equality question. In Canada today, this question is not on the agenda, at least not in the nation or in Saskatchewan where I live. Economic growth is being held up as the primary measure of success by both the Harper and the Wall governments. I recently attended a conference with delegates from across the country; the Saskatchewan boom entered the conversation and I pointed out that the optimism about our boom wasn't equally shared, that for the bulk of the population, it just meant that housing was now less affordable while incomes were remaining static. Municipal taxes are rising faster than the inflation rate because increased population is straining infrastructures.
    The corporate world is booming, no doubt about it, but the obvious downsides are the stubbornness about environmental concerns and the tendency to balance budgets by reining in social programs.
    Recipes for increasing inequality.