A Bible for Zombies

Why so many Christians insist the Bible is dead, and why they can't stop trying to bring it back to life.

Antonin Scalia's Zombie Constitution

The more firmly you insist that modern interpretations have no place, the more promiscuously you are actually blending the original intent of the text with your own very modern worldviews.

In the spring of 1857, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 7-2 against Dred Scott, an enslaved man who sued for freedom after traveling with his owners into the Missouri Territory, a free zone established by the Missouri Compromise. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote the infamous majority opinion, which held that Scott had no standing in Federal court, because "a free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a 'citizen' within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States." Writing just four years before the first shots were fired in the Civil War, Taney did not feign ignorance of the political battle raging around him, nor did he offer comment on the justness of the law he purported to uphold. On the contrary, he insisted that such judgments were irrelevant:

"The change in public opinion and feeling in relation to the African race which has taken place since the adoption of the Constitution cannot change its construction and meaning, and it must be construed and administered now according to its true meaning and intention when it was formed and adopted."

Today, we rightly lament the Dred Scott decision as a real low point in the history of the Supreme Court. But Chief Justice Taney's opinion represents an approach to jurisprudence that has actually gained steam in recent decades in the form of the doctrine of "originalism," which insists that the Constitution and its amendments must be interpreted by judges according to the "original intent" of its authors rather than the prevailing attitudes of the present day. Originalism presents itself as the antidote to "judicial activism," which, originalists claim, deploys a wrongheaded view of a "living constitution" in the service of private and partisan political agendas. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, originalism's most prominent contemporary champion, offered a useful distillation of this attitude toward the Constitution: "It's not a living document. It's dead, dead, dead." Far from lending itself to judicial activism, Scalia claimed, constitutional originalism often demands decisions that disappoint the beliefs of the jurists making them: "The judge who always likes the results he reaches is a bad judge."

The Dred Scott case is a useful stress test for modern originalists, both because the decision is morally indefensible and because it's not at all clear that Taney was wrong in his assessment of Constitution's original attitude towards the citizenship of slaves. An even tougher test case, though a less famous one, is Prigg v. Pennsylvania, over which Taney presided as Chief Justice fifteen years before Dred Scott. Taney's court upheld the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slave owners to recapture runaway slaves from the free states to which they had fled (they also acquitted Prigg, a slavecatcher who had been indicted for kidnapping under the Pennsylvania law the court struck down). Again, the court's decision was a complete moral travesty, and no one would be caught dead defending it today. But even more than the Dred Scott case, it's not clear that modern originalists would have any grounds for dissent based on their own legal doctrine. Until it was superseded by the 13th Amendment in 1865, Article IV of the Constitution expressly authorized slave owners to retrieve runaway slaves who had escaped into free states. A true originalist would have to conclude that the Court made the only legally justifiable decision.

You see the problem. If judges insist that the Constitution must be interpreted strictly according to its original intent, with no place for modern attitudes, they are committing themselves to profoundly unjust decisions.

Well, there's good news and bad news for originalists on that score, and it's actually all the same news: nobody actually practices constitutional originalism. Because of course they don't. I mean, think about it: how nuts is it to expect a clear mandate on the Federal government's role in health care administration from a document written before the advent of health insurance; on campaign finance law before the rise of modern political parties; or on same-sex marriage from a time when most states outlawed interracial marriage? How quickly would the Senate shitcan a judicial nominee who objected to Brown v. Board of Education, for example, on the grounds that the authors of the 14th Amendment (ratified 1868) clearly didn't agree about the virtue of integrated schools? As one law professor argues in a survey of decisions by Scalia and fellow originalist Clarence Thomas, the constitution is "alive and kickin'" in the hands of the very judges who have declared it dead, dead, dead.

Maybe you see where I'm going with this. Originalism is like many other fundamentalisms, especially those that find their authority in the pages of a sacred text. The more firmly you insist that modern interpretations have no place, the more promiscuously you are actually blending the original intent of the text with your own very modern worldviews. And the thing is, that's a feature, not a bug. Textual originalism isn't just a standard that fundamentalists fail to live up to, it's also (and perhaps primarily) a strategy for elevating their own distinctly non-original interests over and above the competition. It's a myth that enables the free and unaccountable proliferation of the very thing it claims to oppose, but only for the benefit of ideological allies.

Calling it a "strategy" makes it seem deliberate, when in actual practice it's the complicated byproduct of two conflicting desires: for the stability and authority of tradition on the one hand, and for freedom from that very tradition on the other. Conservatives especially (including temperamental conservatives as well as ideological ones) want to be able to point to the text and say, "See? There it is in black and white [and occasionally red, though less of it than you might suppose]." But more often than they admit, they really, really don't want to point to the text, because they know that the text points somewhere they can't follow.

So what do they do? Well, they do both. They continue to insist that everyone must follow the letter of the law regardless of how it makes them feel, but they still like to make up their own damn minds about which parts they're going to follow. It's one of those double standards that only works because it's so outrageous, like the Merrick Garland nomination or that time my parents let my little sister get her nose pierced (love you Mom and Dad).

The Zombie Brides of Ephesus

Contrary to what they say in their marketing materials, Biblical originalists are distinguished not by their principled refusal to contextualize but by the highly selective manner in which they do contextualize, all the time.

One of many differences between the Constitution and Christian scriptures, of course, is that no one's arguing that the Constitution is the inspired word of God. I mean, some people may as well be arguing that, but when it comes to disagreements about how to interpret the Constitution, we don't have to deal with the whole ass ache of debating over massive gaps in the documentary record. Interpretive differences aside, there is no fundamental confusion about who wrote the Constitution, for whom it was written, nor for what basic purpose and use it was written. Not only is the text itself very clear on those points, but we also have copious documentation of the historical context. The same cannot be said for the collection of texts we call "the Bible."

Which is just as well, because I don't want to debate whether the Bible is divinely inspired. At the risk of sounding dismissive, it wouldn't be a "debate" in the traditional sense, because divine inspiration is not a serious rational claim. I don't mean that you have to be dumb and irrational to believe in it; I just mean that it doesn't play by the rules of rational argument as such. The median orthodox position is just about the most extreme one possible: "God the Holy Spirit worked in a unique supernatural way so that the written words of the Scripture writers were also the words of God," according to Josh McDowell. And there's no point in arguing with that, because "unique supernatural ways" are, by definition, impossible to defend by rational means like argument. And if you asked him to try anyway, McDowell would point to—you guessed it—verses from the Bible.

No, I'd much rather talk about the ways that Biblical originalists fail to live up to their own standards. It's not a "gotcha" thing, at least not entirely. If anything, those failures reveal that we all have much more in common than we realize. And if conservative Christians simply did on purpose what they're already in denial about doing, it would be a lot easier to work out the problems dividing the modern church.

Consider the debate over gender roles in conservative churches. The scriptural heart of the conservative case, as you may know, is 1 Timothy 2:11-15, in which the writer insists that

"A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety."

Setting aside scholars' questions about the authorship of 1 Timothy, and setting aside the question of whether it's even relevant what Paul, the attributed author, might have thought about the conduct of women in Ephesus two millennia ago, is it even clear that Biblical originalists are faithful to the plain-text reading of the passage they use to justify silencing women in their assemblies? For one thing, is it obvious that this "quietness and submission" applies only to the time between the opening and closing prayers? Not to me. Even as a new, younger generation of "complementarians" try very hard to distinguish their doctrine of male-only leadership from a culturally discredited patriarchalism, it's not at all clear to me that their moderation is sanctioned by this passage, which pretty clearly justifies female submission in general on the grounds that women share in the sin of Eve. And that's not even touching the promise of "salvation through childbearing."

And hey, I'm glad they are responding at least a little bit to the modern impulse to moderate 1 Timothy 2, because yikes. Can you even imagine the sheer volume of yikes we'd have on our hands if we took a collection of texts from 40 different authors writing in three different ancient languages over a span of 750 years, combined them all into a single book, then read that book for another two-thousand years as though it were a coherent instruction manual for modern life written by God Himself, except that we were obligated to interpret His instructions in the idiom of the ancient cultures that wrote them (but not really because it was God the whole time)? Neither can I, and neither can even the most committed Biblical originalist, which is why they do no such thing.

And yet if I object to applying 1 Timothy to our modern church leadership because the letter was written in a much different cultural context, a Biblical originalist will say something similar to what Taney said about Dred Scott:

"The change in public opinion and feeling in relation to gender roles which has taken place since the writing of 1 Timothy cannot change its construction and meaning, and it must be construed and administered now according to its true meaning and intention when it was written."

This is exactly what many said recently, when the church I grew up in took the modest step of allowing women to serve at the communion table, act as ushers, and perform a few other mostly logistical duties traditionally reserved for men. One preacher from a nearby church lamented in a sermon shortly thereafter* that "turning to women for religious leadership FOLLOWS THE WORLD [original caps, of course]." Moreover, he insisted, "no congregation should determine its convictions according to socio-cultural change. Instead, we must determine them according to the word of God, which does not change." 1 Timothy 2, he said, "is a simple passage." 1 Timothy, in other words, is dead, dead, dead.

*I read the text of sermon when he posted publicly it to his Facebook page.

Or is it? I've never met this guy, so I wasn't able to ask him whether his church feels just as strongly about the writer's instructions only two verses earlier that women must not wear "elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes." But I trust that he and his congregants are equally scandalized whether women are preaching from the pulpit or simply wearing their Sunday best. Because otherwise, he's doing the same sort of contextualizing he explicitly condemns, and he wouldn't tolerate such an obvious contradiction, would he?

Let's see, what might motivate an institution dominated by men to enforce clear instructions demanding that women remain silent while ignoring clear instructions demanding that they dress plainly? Are these men misogynists? Well, yes, of course they are. Not because they hate women, although some of them certainly do. Rather, it's because they read a passage about hair and jewelry and think, "Well, it was a different time after all," and then they read literally the very next passage about women shutting the hell up and they think, "Yeah, that sounds about right."

Point is, contrary to what they say in their marketing materials, Biblical originalists are distinguished not by their principled refusal to contextualize but by the highly selective manner in which they do contextualize, all the time. I could fill the rest of this post with examples, of course. When the same author of 1 Timothy lists homosexuality among the behaviors of "the ungodly and sinful," the originalist points to the page and says, "Sorry, it's not up to me." (Or he says "Kill the gays!" depending on when and where this conversation is taking place.) But what about when Jesus tells the rich young ruler in each of the first three gospels to sell all his possessions to the poor, with 10-15 verses devoted to the story in each occurrence? They contextualize the shit out of that one, don't they?

Welcome to Zombieland

The hard truth is that you may have to join the rest of us in a far less certain reality.

I know I said I wasn't going to argue about Biblical authority per se, but I need to make sure you know that I know that the author of 1 Timothy wasn't talking to us. In order to conclude that he was, you have to make some pretty extraordinary historical and theological claims, claims that the author of 1 Timothy doesn't even make about himself. And not only that, you have to believe it with such unassailable confidence that you would ignore the real live people all around you who say they're in pain, who say they feel powerless, unlovable, and invisible when they're among you, rather than allow for any leeway. I think that level of confidence is indecent, if not downright sinister when it takes hold of a religious institution.

I also think that confidence is a sham, not because it's not authentically felt by many or most Biblical originalists, but because it is deeply unearned. It's simply not possible to be that certain of the intent of scripture for our modern lives based on the text itself and independently of other non-Biblical influences. I've been reading through scriptural arguments for various evangelical doctrines for a few days now, and the amount of interpretive license, not to mention free-wheeling speculation, is just staggering. I know this is one of those things that seems as natural as breathing if you grew up with it, but think about how crazy it is that a fairly typical evangelical sermon might take on the translation of Koine Greek and Classical Hebrew, the study of ancient history and culture, the archaeological and documentary records, the history of Christian theology, and maybe all of the above, all in order to make doctrine out of a text that is supposed to be able to speak for itself! On the other hand, if the preacher was trained at a conservative evangelical seminary, he (and I do mean he) may have only a dim appreciation for the depth of scholarship—not to mention a healthy amount of pure human imagination—that went into formulating the doctrines he is taught to find in the text as though they were self-evident.

If it sounds like I'm saying you haven't earned the right to feel confident in your application of Christian scripture in a modern context, then we're on the same page. I'm aware of the "slippery slope" argument—If we allow modern attitudes to dictate how we read scripture, how do we tell the difference between what comes from God and what comes from us?—and it's actually my entire point. The hard truth is that you may have to join the rest of us in a far less certain reality. I'm sypmathetic to the costs of letting go of that certainty, and I'm aware that accidents of temperament and upbringing may well have predisposed me to abiding in that ambivalence more easily than others. But I also know from hard experience that those who use unearned confidence as a hedge against uncertainty are not the ones who pay the price for it.

You'd be right to point out that the same uncertainty that casts doubt on conservative readings of scripture also casts doubt on progressive ones. I tend to roll my eyes (at least mentally) when someone says that Jesus was actually much more like a socialist than he was like a capitalist. I get what they're saying, but I've read the gospels pretty carefully too, and I can confirm that Jesus had very little to say about the means of production. And while I myself have made points like this one on social media...

...I actually think that Jesus of Nazareth would have had fairly conventional first-century views on sexual immorality.* If you had asked him, "Hey Jesus, is it permissible for two women to marry each other?" he would have said, "What? Of course not. Why would you even ask me that? And why would two women want to get married? The dowries would just cancel each other out!" It's easy for conservatives and progressives alike to forget that Jesus' ministry (at least as recorded in the synoptic gospels) was a Jewish reform movement with a few very important objectives. The safest thing to assume about any behavior Jesus didn't specifically address is that he took whatever the standard position was among Jewish rabbis of the time, with the important caveat that he judged adherence to the law not by obedience to its letter but by the fruit born in its practice.

*That joke about casting out demons is actually a great example of what I've been arguing. If you're one of the many "cessationists" who believe that the ability to perform miracles ended with the Apostolic Age, what is that if not a tacit acknowledgement that the spiritual world of the Bible is different from ours? Moreover, isn't that viewpoint just the result of looking around our modern world and saying, "Well, that clearly doesn't happen anymore," and imagining a theology to cover the seams?

The Lazarus Effect

Our source of power is not in the text itself, not ever. The best the text can do is conceal the ways we are all always writing and rewriting our stories in response to one another.

You see, I don't think it's enough to replace a dishonest reading we don't like with a dishonest reading we do. That's not because I'm trying to rescue the Bible from modern misreadings, nor because I think it's especially important for us to read the Bible exactly as it was intended. No, I firmly believe that when we face difficult questions about whom or what gives our values authority, the most important thing is to try to understand why we are seeking that authority in the first place. To me, the most disturbing thing about originalism, whether Constitutional or Biblical, is that so many people seem to want access to an ultimately unanswerable divine power. As much as non-Christians (and disillusioned Christians) have come to see conservative evangelicalism as a naked power grab, evangelicals themselves have cultivated a narrative of powerlessness and marginalization. The resurgence of "Religious Freedom" as a rallying cry is a perfect illustration of this attitude: even as evangelicals and their allies have gained control of all three branches of American government, largely on the strength of promises to codify evangelical values in the law of the land, their "Religious Freedom" branding campaign has enabled them to disavow any coercive motive, with the impressively audacious additional step of casting themselves as the victims of intolerance and government overreach.

In other words, the defining characteristic of modern evangelicalism—and political conservatism, for that matter—is the exercise of power over non-evangelicals both in spite of and by means of its claims of powerlessness. By claiming to speak for a divine word that never changes, they can skirt around the usual requirement to build consensus through persuasion and compromise. But whereas the Church historically wielded that power as a cudgel, unapologetically fusing the authority if scripture with the coercive power of the state, this latter-day church must find a somewhat subtler way to accomplish the same thing in a society that is suspicious of institutional power. The innovation of originalism is the ability to disguise oneself as a mere messenger while artfully bending the message to suit one's own ambitions.

Which all sounds quite sinister, I realize. It's important to note that, like every kind of power that doesn't understand itself (white privilege comes to mind as a particularly timely example), evangelical power is invisible to most of the people who enjoy it. And it's also worth pointing out that the orthodox church has lost whatever influence it may have had over the way non-Christians (and heterodox Christians) view themselves in the world, so it's not like they are some sort of irresistible cultural force. But largely as a result of that loss of influence, a leaner, scrappier orthodoxy has become expert at consolidating power internally and suppressing dissent. So while you may not see yourself as part of the massive socio-political complex of the Christian Right, if you take some pride or comfort in belonging to a "Bible-based" tradition, I urge you to go deeper than a defense of the authority of the Bible and consider why you need that authority in the first place. If the answer seems obvious to you—and especially if the answer is that you must be faithful to scripture in order to resist the influence of culture—I would submit that you are no less vulnerable to the influence of culture thanks to this attitude. In fact, because you're putting your trust in a text that does not and cannot speak for itself, you are only blinding yourself to the all-too-human voices claiming to speak in the tongues of angels.

Because our source of power is not in the text itself, not ever. The most the text can do is conceal the ways we the people are all always writing and rewriting our stories in response to one another. I find this basic truth both comforting and frightening. It feels like all the best parts of being human, equal shares risk and promise. But we compound the risk and squander the promise when we bury this Living Word in a leather-bound coffin because we can't stand the thought of letting someone else, especially some stranger or some enemy, contribute a verse.

So, instead of succumbing to the understandable need for control, let's embrace the saving ambiguities of God's revelation. Let's celebrate a Jesus who, to the best of our limited knowledge, judged the good of a law by the fruit it bore in its time. Let's celebrate the story of a God who chooses us as his text. Let's celebrate the story of a God who understands us well enough to know that we will change, and more than that, who believes that we can change. Let's celebrate a text that is supple flesh rather than brittle paper. Let's thank God for making us co-authors of a Word that is alive and kickin', instead of dusty curators of a book that is dead, dead, dead.