Theological Journal – July 27 Lee Camp: Scandalous Witness (7)

PROPOSITION 7 How Christian Values, and the Bible, Corrupt Christianity

When we lose the overarching Christian narrative, Christian witness is corrupted.

The Bible is a metanarrative, a “big picture” claim about human history, from top to bottom.

The Bible must be an interpretive conversation between ancient and contemporary cultural contexts otherwise claims about biblical authority are reduced to a crude literalism. And the damage is considerable.

Hear Augustine:

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned. . .

“Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books.” (Kindle Loc.1264)

The Problem of Redaction

A selective use of scripture in the interest of a particular agenda or viewpoint is a big problem.

“Consider the Slave Bible as one egregious and apparently malicious instance of Bible quoting. It is formally entitled Parts of the Holy Bible, Selected for the Use of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands. The 1807–1808 Slave Bible apparently sought to exclude texts that could incite rebellion and include texts that could foster obedience to masters—or such is one of the leading hypotheses regarding the provenance of the text.”

Recontextualizing scripture is a variant of this problem.

“Alabama Supreme Court justice Roy Moore and his installation of a five-thousand-pound block of marble with the Ten Commandments, exhibited with citations from the Declaration of Independence and the national anthem. By the redaction of the biblical context, we might say, Moore makes the Ten Commandments function in a way not originally intended. Nowhere is the narrative of Scripture exhibited: “I am the God who brought you out of Egypt . . .” Nowhere the radical social implications of such deliverance as seen in texts like Deuteronomy 15 or Leviticus 25. Instead, Moore makes the Ten Commandments function as an artifact of US sociopolitical conservatism and his redacted version of Christian values.” (Kindle Loc.1346)

These problems, though familiar and well-known, remain perennial problems in the use of scripture to corrupt and devalue Christian witness.