The gospel reading this past Sunday was Luke 4:14-21. In the reading, Jesus has returned home. With “the power of the Spirit” resting on him (4:14), he must have seemed different. He has already been preaching in the villages round about Galilee, but now at last he is home in Nazareth. His fame (Greek phēmē) has preceded him. No doubt his family is in the crowd, waiting nervously for the kid to speak. The synagogue authorities hand him an Isaiah scroll to read. He works his way through the scroll until he comes to these words near the end:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Isaiah 61:1-2, 58:6 LXX)
At the end of reading, we can imagine the crowd leaning in to see how he will interpret the reading. He begins, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. . . ..”
And then, abruptly, Luke leaves off his account of what Jesus said in his Sabbath message. I wish we had the whole sermon, but we don’t. But what we have, the first line, is curious. What’s curious about the opening is the last phrase, “in your hearing.” Jesus doesn’t say “in my preaching.” Or, “in my miracles.” Or, even, “in my presence,” which is how the passage is often interpreted. It’s “in your hearing” (literally, “in your ears”). He is not talking about himself here but about them: about their hearing. Of the lack of it.
In biblical tradition words for hearing are used often. “To hear” is not just to hear what God says but to act on it. It often means “obey.” Perhaps to Jesus’s comment we need to add an implied “if”: If you truly hear this prophecy from Isaiah and act on it, it will be good news for the poor, release for the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. The rule of God will break out among you. I have come, Jesus seems to be saying, to introduce you to just such a kingdom.
Bad Theology
I began with this scripture because in this post, one in a succession of Bad Theology posts, I want to talk about how scripture gets misused in churches. The series began, you may remember (or not), with a question that continues to be asked by commentators on current political events: why, they ask, would church people, supposedly committed to such Christian values as honesty, compassion, and love, love not only for the stranger but for enemies, continue to support a person like Donald Trump with his long record of dishonesty, nastiness, and expressed hatred for others? The argument I have been making is that it is not as much of a stretch as it may at first seem. Much of what passes for Christian theology–the bad theology of my title–has been preparing people to think in ways that lend themselves to the trumpian moment.
I began the series with a look at a form of charismatic spirituality that has lately come to prominence, in particular, among the followers of the late C. Peter Wagner (here). This form of spirituality tracks with several key features of Trump’s leadership style. It demonizes enemies (spiritual warfare). It claims that leaders are appointed by God more than by institutions and therefore beholden to whatever the leader believes to be right. It sets as a goal the Christian domination of the “seven mountains” of culture (family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government). It is about power, and power in this paradigm is personal, vested in charismatic leaders. This distorted flavor of charismatic theology drives some of the strongest supporters of Donald Trump, including Paula White, who has acted as Trump’s spiritual advisor.
In the post just previous to this one (here), I moved on to the somewhat more old-school topic of evangelical eschatology. Eschatology, particularly of the premillennial dispensational variety, preached in many evangelical churches, can be seen as a vast pseudo-biblical conspiracy theory. Using cues divined from a wonkish but deeply erroneous reading of the Bible, believers in this eschatological vision claim to be able to predict, in broad outline, a future of battles and betrayals and other dramas, leading at last to the end of the world.
What has changed in our lifetime is the rise of social media on the internet. Social media turns out to be the perfect soil in which to grow conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories we have always had with us. Some of the worst atrocities of earlier ages were prompted by false stories spread among receptive people. Now, the stories spread more quickly, fostered by algorithms and bots. What’s lacking, not just in society but often in the church, is the training to see through the various conspiracies paraded across our screens. Generations of Christians have instead been trained by bad eschatology to think conspiratorially. Bad theology leads to bad politics.
I didn’t dwell on this in my last post, but I should add to what I’ve just said a word about how American evangelicalism has trained people to resist science. It began with the American brand of fundamentalism. The American fundamentalism of the early 20th century was a reaction primarily to two intellectual challenges: modern biblical studies (what was called “higher criticism”) and evolutionary science. A contemporary symbol of these both is the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky. It disputes both biblical studies and science by trying to demonstrate with its ark reproduction that it—Noah’s ark surviving a worldwide flood with all the animals on board—could have happened. This is not how science works, of course.
But this sort of resistance to the academic study of the Bible and to evolutionary science has long been baked into people’s ways of thinking. It still is. In Christian schools and homeschooling curricula (see on this Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals, 2024, pp. 64-76), students are still being taught that the science is not to be trusted. Is it any wonder evangelicals grow up to doubt the science of global warming? Or vaccines. Or accounts of human origins. They have been prepared for it.
Reading the Bible
Behind all this, and of far longer standing than the evangelical resistance to science or the penchant for creating strange eschatologies, lies the Bible. Well, not the Bible but how it’s read and used. The Bible, itself an endlessly fascinating and spiritually challenging book, a rich and ancient conversation about God and life and much else, has been all but abandoned in many churches for declarations about how the Bible must be read and what it must say. What’s crucial here is the “must”: what the Bible “must” say. In this way of thinking, the Bible “must say” something definitive about all sorts of things about which it appears to say nothing at all. Or nothing, at least, that would decide our 21st century questions.
Like our questions about same sex marriage. Who in the 1st century had ever thought of such a thing? Certainly not the Apostle Paul. But when, in 2016, the synod of the Christian Reformed Church decided it needed to lock down its stance on same sex marriage it called together a committee and charged it “to articulate a foundation-laying biblical theology of human sexuality.” The synod never asked whether there was such a thing: “a biblical theology of human sexuality.” There’s not. But in due course, they got one: a 175 page long report about human sexuality that claimed to declare what the Bible said about human sexuality. And then the synod adopted the report and said, in effect, there, that’s done. No one need read the Bible again about sex, at least about queer sex. We’ve said it. And so interpretation replaces engagement with the text. What the Bible says is what the synod says.
At this point it’s tempting for someone like me, trained in biblical studies, to get down into the nitty gritty of biblical interpretation and begin disputing the way that the synodical committee and others like it read the text. In fact, I have done just that at great length in earlier posts in this blog. I have argued on the basis of close readings of the texts that they do not really speak to the issues of our own time like same sex marriage.
But to do so, to get involved in these close exegetical arguments, is to miss the point. The point is not about what this particular text or that text says; the point is how that text gets used in the church. The logic commonly employed in evangelical churches goes like this: what Paul says, say, to the Corinthian church in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, is what God says to the church in 21st century America.
But where does this logic come from? It comes from a theology of scripture with roots in the Protestant Reformation. Those of us who grew up in evangelical churches are so used to thinking in this way that we scarcely notice that this logic does not come from the Bible—at least not directly. It’s a sort of metatheory: a theory that determines how the text should be read. And because we have been taught that Christian theology begins with the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, we fail to notice that this is not the way the church has traditionally read the Bible. And, finally, because we think that this logic is the only theological option open to us, we fail to see that it’s a dead end. In the end, it doesn’t give us the Bible; it gives the assumptions of Bible readers.
Hearing the Divine Voice
Let me illustrate what I have in mind from another tradition: orthodox Judaism. Last night (as I write this on January 27), Adria and I watched a movie from among the selections of the Jewish Film Festival, sponsored here in Tucson by the Jewish Community Center. The movie, directed by Benny Fredman, is called Home. It opens in a kollel in a Haredi neighborhood in Jerusalem. A kollel is an advanced school for Talmudic study. Amid the din of the students discussing what they are learning, you hear the clear voice of Yair Kaplan, the flawed protagonist of the film. He’s asking his study partner about the “divine voice,” what we might call the “word of God.” He says that sometimes you can hear the divine voice clearly in the text of the Torah revealing “what the correct halachic ruling is.” But then, he says, the rabbi rules in the opposite direction, and so we no longer pay attention to the divine voice. “Why?” he asks his study partner, and when his partner doesn’t answer, he says, “Because the moment the rabbis declare what the halachic ruling is, they are the ones who determine [it].”
It’s not what the Torah says that matters. Or, rather, for Yair Kaplan, what the voice says that he hears in the Torah. It’s what the rabbi says. If you are Christian Reformed in 2025, it’s what the synod says. What the synod says is declared to be the word of God. The church is not engaged with the text of the Bible in all its diversity and ambiguity and subtlety but with the interpretations of those in power, interpretations that are often clear, unambiguous, and cruel.
Richard Hays and the Widening of God’s Mercy
A few months ago, Richard Hays, along with his son Christopher, published what will likely be Richard’s last book (unless he left a book’s worth of papers in his study). He died in early January of pancreatic cancer. Hays was a leading New Testament scholar, respected by conservatives and liberals alike. His fat book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996) was named by Christianity Today as one of the top one hundred greatest religious books of the 20 century.
In Moral Vision, Hays included a chapter evaluating the texts typically cited in condemnations of queer sex. Although he wondered whether the texts truly applied to the sort of consensual sexual relationships that we recognize today, he argued in the book that the traditional reading of the text should be upheld and the church maintain its long held stance condemning same sex relationships. This chapter was greeted gladly, to Hays’s later chagrin, by those who wished to deny full participation in the church to people in same sex relationships. It was, in fact, so used by the Christian Reformed study committee I mentioned above.
But over time, Hays realized that he had missed the forest for the trees. He had focused on a few texts, none of them decisive, and missed the overall pattern in the scriptures towards inclusion. Near the time of his death, he and his son Christopher published a new book, The Widening of God’s Mercy (2024). In the book, Richard Hays says he was wrong. He does not think he was wrong about the texts themselves. First century Jews–the people who wrote the New Testament–did not have positive attitudes toward same sex relationships. When Paul is looking around in Romans 1 for an example of how Roman society has gone awry, he chooses as a parade example Roman same sex relationships on which he turns his considerable scorn. He does not so much argue that these practices should be condemned as to assume they are in fact condemned. There were limits to Paul’s vision.
The limits included his apparent acceptance of slavery and of Roman patriarchy. But to say this is not the whole truth. In what Paul says, not just in these texts but across his letters, are planted the seeds of new ways of thinking that will take the church beyond the 1st century and into the 21st century. It was out of the Bible that the 19th century critique of human slavery developed. It was out of the Bible that the 20th century critique of patriarchy developed. And it will be out of the Bible, suggest Richard and Christopher Hays, that a critique of older attitudes towards LGBTQ people has been and will continue to be developed in the 21st century. The direction of the Bible is toward the widening of God’s mercy: the divine embrace of people who in the past have been excluded from full participation in the church.
Theoria
This is what Yair Kaplan was saying at the beginning of Home. Sometimes the voice of God is plain, even when the official interpretation of the text contradicts it. It’s not enough to say that a given text rules in a certain way, as if the Bible were a book of law. One must ask in every case: Is that the voice of God? One must read the Bible in the light of what the Bible tells us about the character of God.
This is nothing new. The early church clearly spelled out this way of approaching the Bible. It said that you must read the text carefully and fully—literally, if “literal” means “by the letter.” It called this kind of reading historia. But it said, in addition, you must read the Bible spiritually, with what it called theoria. If you don’t read the Bible in this second way, you will do what Yair Kaplan says: you will give the people in power, whether rabbis or synod delegates, the right to rule other people’s lives. You will miss the essential way the Bible reveals who God is.
In the manner of Yair Kaplan, we have again how to learn how to listen for that voice. As Jesus said, “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” What are you hearing?
Clay