Sunday, March 14, 2004
(6:24 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
For several years, I studied the Old Testament closely, devouring it in huge chunks -- I still wanted there to be scripture, but the New Testament had long since become a dead letter to me, killed through proof-texting, killed through explaining the interesting parts away. Having already decided that the Old Testament's claim to historicity was questionable at best and still finding myself in some sense a Christian, I found that I had significantly greater freedom in reading it. The various historical accounts are obviously mutually contradictory (anyone who says otherwise is either evil, stupid, or willfully blind), and the really interesting things are precisely the differences -- exactly how malleable was the history of Israel? Was it possible that the many contradictions were accidents, or had the Hebrew Scriptures been selected, in part, for their diversity? I never developed a complete theory; I didn't have to. I was just reading, letting the words flow into my head, using the scholarly break-points as mnemonic devices.
Trying to make it all say any one thing seems to me the ultimate blasphemy -- the same blasphemy that killed the New Testament for me. Even now, studying under Ted Jennings, a careful and enthusiastic reader of St. Paul, I feel that I have to guard myself against much of the New Testament, lest I stumble across those same old proof-texts that were used to stop conversation, to suck the life out of community. (The Book of Revelation remains for me a completely closed book, even though I know that it wasn't "meant to be" a 1st century precursor of Nostradamus.) I've had conversations recently about the letters of Paul, and I'm not sure that it's worth it. Even if academics can bring the texts back to life for a moment, what are we to do with the churches? When "the Bible" has become the defining point of Christian moral practice and political engagement, a "Bible" in which everything it would have been worth God's time to reveal has been explained away or domesticated or made to say its exact opposite, a "Bible" in which the key passages are Romans 13:1-7 and a few catalogues of vices with obscure Greek words mistranslated as referring to modern vices -- what good can the Bible possibly do in the world? When atheists have to defend the Bible against Christian misinterpretations, then we must seriously ask ourselves: Can these dry bones live?
Is the church in exile? I think it's a valid question, especially during this period when many of the institutional leaders of the empirical church seem dedicated to restoring the ancien regime -- and I wonder, even if the church succeeds in reversing the trends in sexual morality (which seems to be a primary project of late), will it cease to be in exile? When Ezra brought the Jerusalem elites back from the exile, was the exile really over? Were the Judeans really at home in their land, which was claimed and conquered by empire after empire? Even in the traditional land of Israel, was Judaism at that point not essentially a faith of the diaspora? And then there is the lingering what if -- what if genuine historical narrative doesn't happen until the exile? What if none of it happened -- what if it was all a bunch of myths and legends given meaning by the uprooting of the exile?
And we could ask -- what if the church was never supposed to have a home? What if the councils themselves, which set our orthodoxy, were the ultimate betrayal? What if the New Testament itself is compromised? What if Christianity sprung out of a religion of the diaspora and assembled its scriptures in order to make sense of its newfound home in the Roman empire? What then?
