A reflection on peace and the Bible by Canon Paul Oestriecher

The article that follows is by Paul Oestreicher and was circulated by him via email. It remains his copyright.

B E W A R E O F T H E B O O K
by Paul Oestreicher

There are two related ideas currently in circulation. The first is that religion is harmful because it has, throughout history, been the cause of a great deal of violence. That is true. The second is that if only the adherents of the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, all three ‘religions of the book’, took their sacred texts more seriously and lived by them, then these outbreaks of violence would stop. That is untrue.

Let me explain. The first proposition needs no defence. The history of all three faiths is drenched in blood, blood ostensibly shed in the name of God. What then of the assumption that they all three are ‘religions of the book’. There is no dispute that without sacred texts they would not have survived. However the phrase ‘of the book’ needs to be unpacked.

I am no expert in comparative religion. This article does not call for that. I can only claim to have inside knowledge of Christianity. Some things are not complicated. Islam insists on the fact that the Koran was dictated by God. A degree of such infallible sanctity is attached to it, that to insult the book in any way, physically, verbally or in any other, is a capital offence. It is a direct insult to God. The Koran is divine. In principle it interprets itself. In practice that is not obvious.

The Hebrew scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, are not quite of that nature. They are indeed constitutive of Jewry, but they do need to be interpreted. There is a huge literature doing just that. It is the task of rabbinic scholarship. No part may be rejected, but great wisdom is called for to know the mind of God through it. The process of interpretation has divided Jewry. Orthodox Jewry rejects all liberal variants but the sacredness of the Torah itself is not in question. It is literally enshrined.

The Christian Bible, OT and NT, is, I contend, fundamentally different. It is an essential reference book of the faith. It is part mythology, part history, part poetry, part moral guidance and that does not exhaust what it is. It is a handbook to be treasured. It was not handed down from on high. The Church had to decide which texts were in and which were not. Taken together, they cannot simply be called the Word of God. Bibliolatry is another form of idolatry, the worship not of God but of a book.

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God…” In the beginning there was no bible. The Word, the logos, is the living Christ constantly made known in his Church and in our hearts by the Holy Spirit…the light that enlightens the world. That enlightenment is a process that goes on until the end of time.

The paradox is that the New Testament texts themselves attest to the fact that they are not the last word. The Spirit is the contemporary judge over all that has been written. Jesus said and the Spirit goes on telling us: “You have heard it said….but I say unto you.” Yesterday’s wisdom is not tomorrow’s. To the disciples Jesus said “there are many things you do not understand, but the Spirit will lead you to the truth”. He did not say “study the texts, it is all there” and significantly did not write any texts at all. Quite rightly we may therefore say “St Paul had a view of the role of women that we now recognise to be less than Christian”, to take a simple example. Once that is conceded there is no longer any need for theologians to sweat blood ironing out the many contradictions in the Bible. Given the world as it is, those contradictions make the Bible more, not less credible. They leave us with essential existential choices that give meaning to the ‘glorious liberty of the children of God’. We are slaves to no text and not a religion of any book.

How then does this connect with the violent face of religion? The Bible is full of violence in God’s name from the God-sent flood drowning everybody except Noah’s family (what’s wrong with an atom bomb then in a good cause?), drowning the Egyptian army to let God’s people get away (why not wipe out Gaza then?), ethnically cleansing the Canaanites ( Why not another little holocaust?) Not to speak of smashing children’s skulls and inflicting eternal punishment on all the enemies of God’s chosen people. And I haven’t mentioned the Apocalypse. What a horror film to outdo all horror films. (Directors note: God has written the best scripts!) All this and much more human beings have projected on to God.

God in Christ really has made all things new. That has proved to be too threatening to the churches. The ethic of loving enemies is what the Christian revolution is all about, loving our enemies and God’s. Jesus asked for them to be forgiven as they drove the nails into his hands and feet. When he preached in the synagogue of his home town and told the people of Yahweh’s preferential love for despised foreigners rather than for them, they tried to lynch him. This radical counter-cultural ethic is, I believe, unique to Christianity. It is the one thing Gandhi gratefully took from the Gospel, while the theologians argued away the challenge of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Love those who persecute you.’ This was not for the real world in which Christian soldiers who put down mutineers were assured of a crown of glory, with no shortage of accompanying biblical texts. The Empire’s monuments are witness enough. So is the sword as a sign of the Cross on every British war cemetery.

I hear the protest. Didn’t Jesus violently drive the profiteers out of the Temple? Quite the opposite. This was the righteous indignation of one man overturning the tables of many with no weapon that could kill. The only person in that drama whose life was at risk was Jesus. Today that’s called non-violent direct action, like damaging a nuclear submarine. It wasn’t long before the authorities caught up with Jesus. Even then he did not return in triumph to humiliate the High Priests and Pilate. Secretly, mysteriously, he came back to give hope to those who loved him.

If the churches of the world embraced that ethic, that enthronement of God’s peaceful kingdom of which the prophets of Israel dreamed, they would be renouncing major parts of their history. It is called repentance. It would mean that at least one of the three great religions would cease to be a contributor to the violence that could destroy us all.

So, late in life, I have come to see that I can only with great difficulty, after the liturgical reading of scripture, automatically go on saying: ‘This is the Word of the Lord’. In many cases it will be. In many others, specially if taken out of its context, it will give the opposite message and be a license for much that is a denial of what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

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Paul Oestreicher is a Canon Emeritus of Coventry Cathedral
and a Counsellor of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship.
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[1200 words]

copyright: Canon Paul Oestreicher