Abortion and the Death Penalty (To Rakesh)

Dhlazare at aol.com Dhlazare at aol.com
Wed Jun 10 08:54:12 PDT 1998


In a message dated 98-06-10 10:58:48 EDT, you write:

<<

This example of Charles Watts is illustrative of one of the problems

christians, as well as anyone else who tries to use the bible to support

an

argument, run into. The book is inconsistent, and for every quotation

Watts is going

to use, someone else is going to have a counterquotation that proves

beyond a shadow of a doubt that jesus was a socialist feminist. There are

alot of lucid thinkers who do close readings of the bible and come up with

compelling arguments. There are alot of radically different close readings

of the bible, and Watts is

certainly not the last word, or even a well-known voice. Gloria Naylor's

novel *Bailey's Cafe* has a wonderful scene with two characters having a

ferocious argument--solely through throwing conflicting bible quotations

at one another.

Alot of theologians are moving away from just reading the bible, and doing

more stuff around the "historical jesus." when looked at historically, one

sees better how radical the jesus movement was. Just from Watts title, you

can see there's a problem. He uses "christ," (meaning messiah) rather than

"jesus"--his name. So there's already alot of theological baggage attached

to his work. If yu're interested, I'd look at some recent work on jesus

and then decide if you still think Watts' argument is so compelling.

Take a look at Gustavo Gutierrez *The Truth Shall Make you Free,* Mev

Puleo, *The Struggle is One*, an edited volume, *The faith That Does

Justice*, Karen LeBacqz, *Justice in an Unjust World: Foundations for a

Christian Approach to Justice*, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza,*In Memory of

Her: A Feminist theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins*,and

gayraud Wilmore*Black Religion and Black Radicalism* The latter has good

account of the different ways in which the bible was read by slave owners

and slaves, and how each group took from the jesus stories the theology

they needed.

I can't stress enough the fact that bible interpretations are

ideologically driven and there is absolutely no reason to believe that

Watts presents an objective read.

Yours,

Frances

>> Also check out Christopher Hill's "The English Bible and the Seventeenth- Century Revolution." Hill describes the Bible as "a huge bran-tub" from which anything and everything can be taken. During the most radical period of the English revolution, all kinds of crack-pot visionaries used it to announce that the new Eden had arrived. One fellow, if I recall correctly, road naked into town of Bath on the back of a donkey while woman scattered palm fronds in his path -- his way of announcing that the the Kingdom of Christ had arrived. Yet, as Hill tells it, by the latter 1650s, it was becoming evident that if the Bible could be used to justify anything and everything, then it really justified nothing at all. By the end of the decade, MP's actually broke out in laughter when one member quoted the Good Book at excessive length, something that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. The Restoration ushered in a wave of skepticism, as well as revulsion against religious enthusiasm. Only fools and fanatics, it was now believed, took the Bible literally.

Dan Lazare



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list