by Dan Orfield
[Dan Orfield is a communicant of Christ Church Cathedral, Houston, and a member of the Exploring the Connections community]
I think Carroll misses a central point of Archbishop Williams' argument, which is that we must listen to Scripture not just from our vantage point now, in which violence in Joshua and subjugation of women are clearly no longer our call as individuals or community, but from the point of view of the historical audience that was listening to Joshua. We then must think hard about the unity between the various movements of the message then and the message now. (Some of which, even in the text itself, are clearly "disruptive" and critical.) By contrast, this critic seems to want to eliminate distasteful stories from Scripture, or criticize them as not "really" part of God's word, without any foundational Biblical or theological reasons. And I think that unless one wants to discard much of the Hebrew Bible, and also point to the more peaceful New Testament as superceding violent Judaism (which has its own problems of anti-semitism) one must try in faithful response to God and community to make sense of the entire Biblical story, to the audience then and now, rather than excise the points we now dislike.
Of course, an important part of that story is how we Christians after the cross and resurrection now view the power of God as self emptying, rather than warring, conquering or hierarchical. But, to come to that realization we need to address those earlier stories as also the word of God. Feminists and liberation theologians have a place in that project, certainly, but if they are Christian or Jewish, less I think to highlight how the intention of the original stories may have been to subjugate women, and more, as Williams does, to say either that those were not the primary movements of the stories, (whether that movement was consciously affected by the original writers or not) or to show how the Bible story itself has since identified the very notions of power and hierarchy in earlier stories as no longer a faithful response to God even though they were at the time. Indeed, that is what Jesus himself often did.
But without those earlier "distasteful" stories as themselves part of God's word the whole notion of God at least partly involved in our historical response toward God disappears. The Bible itself then no longer is a living word demanding our continual although admittedly partial response, but a tool solely for human control and criticism that freezes us in the particular moment the criticism is made. And I simply do not want creation to be frozen in Carroll's word of this-moment criticism, despite, I can gather, having equally left leaning notions of power, equity and justice. (I am a labor union lawyer precisely because I think the best current way for workers to equalize power with managements is through collective action.) I am faithful enough to believe that centuries hence, folks will read the Bible as a whole, with those distasteful stories, as more liberating than without, and such that Carroll's and feminists current view of liberation (and mine too) will seem quaint, parochial, even insular. And then we all will be much more liberated yet interpersonally and historically connected with each other and with God through Williams' interpretive strategy than through Carroll's.
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