Conservatizing The Bible

All translations of the Bible are influenced by theological assumptions and convictions that sometimes obscure rather than illuminate earlier meanings. For example, the Latin word for sacrament was no way to render the Greek word for mystery, and our understanding of both the sacraments and the mysteries of the faith have suffered as a result. Or, a gender neutral translation of the Bible, such as the New Revised Standard translation’s marketers purport it to be, runs roughshod over the understanding of masculinity, feminity, and divinity that the supposedly shameless patriarchal renderings from the past are falsely believed to obscure. For most readers, though, theological intrusions into the translation process are too difficult to detect to be offensive.

Not so, however, with another kind of translation effort that is going on today, with perfectly straight faces on the part of its promoters. It goes by the name of the Conservative Bible Project, and the envisioned outcome is a complete fix of the Bible by clearing up imprecisions both in the original languages and in the English language, as a way of eliminating so-called biases that from the beginning have tilted the biblical message left-ward. There is nothing subtle about this project. It is designed to be not just mildly offensive, but painfully offensive as well, to liberals who allegedly have been about the business of highjacking Jesus to their cause from the beginning.

Methodologically, the Conservative Bible Project is preposterous on the very face of it. The commitment to eliminate every vestige of liberalism from the Bible means that the translators must already claim to know in advance how to render every particular passage, no matter what the plain meaning of the passage itself (a principle supposedly sacrosanct to all true conservatives) may be. An example: Luke 23:34, Jesus’ petition to God from the cross to forgive his crucifiers because they do not know what they are doing. Apparently, the Conservative Bible Project will take this passage out, partly because it appears in none of the other Passion Narratives and therefore may not reflect Jesus’ own words. This in itself might be a justifiable move, so long as the principle that informs it is applied everywhere else. However, we would then lose five of the other seven last words, not to mention Jesus’ bread of life sermon and a bunch of other good stuff besides. But the key consideration for the people running this project is that Luke 23:34 is --- are you ready for this? --- a favorite passage of liberals, because it shows Jesus in a liberal light. Good God Almighty, save us. I offer this as a petition and not as a curse.

To be more liberal-minded toward the Conservative Bible Project, though, something which all conservatives most surely deserve --- whether they want to admit it or not --- liberals sometimes take a back alley assault approach to the scriptures too. Even though I continue to admire what Thomas Jefferson tried to do by re-writing the Bible for the Age of Enlightenment, I also find his presumptuousness in undertaking it little short of appalling, and many of the results of his efforts disappointing and irritating. And as for the Jesus Seminar’s recent efforts to produce a Fifth Gospel by taking votes on what from the other four and the Gospel of Thomas ought to go into it, well --- be still, my soul might be another petition worth sending up.

There is certainly nothing new about taking liberties with organizing the ancient texts of Scripture. By the 140’s, the messing around had already begun, with the Marcionite faction in the Roman church proposing an early version of the Christian canon in terms of parts of Paul’s letters and of the Gospel of Luke, and nothing else. Because the God of the Jews was an evil God, or at least a very weak one, Marcion appears to have believed, not only did Jewish scriptures have to go, but with them every Christian book that in any way depended upon them, and every passage even in Paul and Luke that made Jesus out to be a faithful Jew (which, in fact, he was). What remained from Marcion's peculiar paring down was a very short Bible, a God of love and not of justice, a wholly spiritual and not physical Christ, a denunciation of physicality itself as evil, and an ascetism that could make even a Desert Father beg for relief.

It is hard to see how a conservatizing of the Bible is going to help very much in overcoming the suppposed negative effects that liberalizing the Bible has had in the life of the church. More helpful still would be an approach that allows the holy and gracious God of the Bible to be holier than the Bible itself is and more gracious than doctrinaire theologies will ever be.

Conversion, Conviction, And Conscience

Soon after my high school conversion experience, my born-again Christian friends began hinting that the big event may not have been the real deal. I could report no stroke-like symptoms, bright lights, or angelic choruses, not even a basso profundo voice from above the clouds. I did not need to be helped to my feet after it was all over, or anyone to tell me what had happened or what it meant. I knew all by myself what had happened: a sudden massive energy surge went all through me, accompanied by an indescribable joy. And I had no hesitation expressing what it was telling me: "There is a God," I silently said to myself.

In comparison with the Jesus knocking at the door, slain in the Spirit, and tongues-speaking experiences my friends were having at the time, my own brief encounter with the Maker of Heaven and Earth had to have lacked a lot in their eyes. For me, however, it had all the quality of a one time only watershed occurrence, which is exactly what succeeding decades have proved it to be. The feeling of divine power and love that overwhelmed me in that single, momentary experience had a completeness about it that would only have suffered in the repeating. The process of reflecting upon it, however, has been on-going.

Most Christians who claim to have had a conversion experience seem remarkably consistent in their accounts of what the experience led to: a new or deeper relationship with Jesus, an unshakeable conviction about his identity as the Son of God, and a way of life intentionally even if imperfectly patterned after his. My own experience led me to someone and to something else, to the Source of the universe's matter, energy, and order, and to a life of passionate and continuing inquiry into the relationship between this Source and the God of Jesus Christ. At the time, there were enough Christians exerting a positive influence upon me to make me yearn to accept Jesus' heavenly Father as my own. And though I gladly joined my hands with theirs, I knew that before I could ever join my heart as well, I would have to discover in my own way whether the God I genuinely believed I had experienced could possibly have been Jesus' as well.
Some of my concerns were science-and-reason based; for example, I could not see any need for a God to explain the origin of the universe as a whole. Others sprang from a sense of moral outrage over things people kept telling me that their God relished doing, such as making a sacrificial lamb of Isaac and Jesus, and taking away any chance of salvation for people unfortunate enough to have been born before the latter's coming into the world.

These days, there is another reason for my continuing to struggle with conversion experiences of every sort. It is that these experiences are claimed to have a unique, unrepeatable character about them that by definition disqualifies them as solid evidence for the existence of anything other than of their experiencers. To count as genuine evidence for anything, an experience must be accessible to everyone and not only to a specially favored few. There are enough consistent patterns and predictable sequences observable in, around, and beyond us to make it reasonable to believe in a transcendent designer in, even if not of, the universe. But there is nothing in this kind of evidence that permits inferences to the more specific things about the divine nature in which faith is especially interested, e.g., that the designer is triune, or that he rewards the righteous and punishes sinners everywhere.

These are the kinds of logical considerations that keep generating questions which my conscience will not allow me to avoid for very long. Applied specifically to the vital center of my own conversion experience --- an in-pouring of pure, unbounded, glorious energy --- they still make me wonder about my jumping so quickly to the conclusion I did about what really was in that energy cloud surrounding me at that climactic moment. I judged it to be a "who" and not merely a "what." I have never recanted this judgment, but I soon realized that nothing in the experience upon which it was based itself necessitated any mention Christianity’s God at all.

Most especially, there was nothing in the particular idea of God that I brought to mind in my exclamation that even remotely corresponded to the Cosmic Accountant, Atonement-demanding, My Son or No One kind of God that people in the church continue to talk about as the only kind of God there is. In matters of faith, conscience has its own role to play over conviction, and even over conversion. To be sure, conviction not energized by conversion reduces to dogmatism. But conversion not tempered by reason equates with fanaticism.