Religion

In the beginning is the word. The spine of every modern religion is the collection of stories contained in its sacred texts. In the recounting of history through a lens of faith – whether the vehicle be myth, legend, poetry or chronicle – the reader is introduced less to God than to how God has been perceived and experienced by the tellers of the tales. To say that God is love, or judgment, or wisdom, is to say that this faith community has experienced what they call love, judgment or wisdom from God and have imparted it here in these writings. The word religion is itself derived from the Latin relegere meaning “to read again” and suggests it is at God’s direction that we return to these texts in order that we might see our own experience of God reflected in those of our forebears.

Our relationship to Scripture, like our relationship to religion, is not always a comfortable one. We are often wrestling with the meaning of tales first told thousands of years ago around councils, committees or camp fires by people with their own agendas to advance. The stories have been embellished by the teller, buffed and clipped, edited to suit the bias of this or that community, often without regard for consistency (Did Noah take two of every animal onto the ark, as written in Genesis 6:19, or seven of every animal, as written by 7:2? ). They give us abundant detail on how to manage a herd dispute between nomadic tribes or the proper way to clean up after the slaughter of a sacrificial goat, but are maddeningly silent on the question of whether the use of stem cells is a morally justifiable way to save lives or the use of nuclear weapons is a morally justifiable way to take them.

All this is to say they must be approached with great care and respect, trusting that the text is willing to give up its secrets to the person who is willing discern them. There is an element of the artistic to them. When we look at a work of Jackson Pollock’s, such as his cacophonous Lavender Mist, we can either reduce it to a riot of squiggles and smears “that any six year old could do,” or we can appreciate it as a product of genius, absorb ourselves in it, discover the undercurrent of order beneath the surface chaos, note the eagerness with which our eyes move from place to place across the huge canvas, and therein feel something of the artist’s congenital and ultimately fatal restlessness. In other words, we can ask the painting to do the heavy lifting for us or we can engage it, question it, mine it, and uncover its treasures.

This is why holy writ from any religious heritage is cheapened by those who – armed with nothing more than a conclusion in search of a hypothesis – take scriptural snippets out of context and hold them up as divine validation for whatever point it is they’re trying to make. Does the Bible condone war or condemn it? Read the book of Joshua, where the author writes, “about forty thousand ready armed for war passed over before the Lord for battle, to the plains of Jericho. On that day the Lord exalted Joshua in sight of all Israel,” (4:13) or Exodus where we read of “A hand upon the banner of the Lord! The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation,” (17:16) and you get hearty grist for the warrior’s mill. On the other hand Isaiah enjoins the faithful to “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks,” (2:4) 1Peter bids us to “seek peace and pursue it,” (3:11) and Jesus himself reminds his followers that “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.” (Mt 5:9)
So what does the Bible say about war? The faithful will disagree on this question, as we always have, and as we will on innumerable other questions of behavior and belief, from capital punishment to infant baptism to the divinity of Mary. But better honest disagreement in search of a difficult truth than cheap rhetorical sleights of hand in search of an easy one. We owe the text at least this much.