Political Abuse of the New Testament
The following is my comment on a posting on Article6blog.com, which is concerned with maintaining religious freedom in the election process, as required by Article VI of the US Constitution, which prohibits any religious test or oath for persons taking Federal office. This comment responds to an item that was quoted from PBS Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, portraying the religious message of the Republicans versus Democrats as the contrast between the doctrinal messages of Paul's epistles and the charitable message of the Epistle of James:
"James stresses the theme of faith in action perhaps more than any other single book of the New Testament. Unlike other New Testament letters, many of them attributed to Paul, James plays down dogma in favor of practical ethical guidelines that center on loving one’s neighbor and, in particular, serving the poor.
"In 2004, said Coe, 'Republicans were really battering Democrats with religious rhetoric. The response offered by Kerry and others was to say, we might not be able to compete with the religious eloquence the Republicans have a handle on, but we can on policies more consistent with the New Testament, like uplifting the poor and fighting disease in Third World countries.'”
Let’s see . . . the author of 1 Corinthians Chapter 13, the wonderful sermon on the primacy of charity over faith, is supposed to be unconcerned about helping the poor? The apostle who in many of his letters and in Acts is soliciting funds to help the poor in Jerusalem is only focused on “doctrine”? The apostle who writes to his convert and close friend Philemon and pleads with him to accept back his runaway slave Onesimus as a brother in Christ cares nothing for the lowest strata of society? Give me a break.
This kind of false dichotomy demonstrates the utter lack of familiarity with the scriptures that characterizes so much invocation of the Bible by politicians. It is in the same vein as Obama’s assertion that the Sermon on the Mount preaches tolerance of homosexual acts against the “intolerance” of Paul’s letters, when in fact the Sermon of Jesus emphasizes strict accountability for sexual sin-even for thinking about it-while Paul’s plea is for those Christians who had left homosexual acts behind them to not fall back into them, so they do not nullify the mercy and forgiveness that they had already received from Christ.
It is such picking and choosing among passages of scripture that Shakespeare seems to refer to when he says that “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
(William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), “The Merchant of Venice”, Act 1 scene 3) As John noted, it dishonors the Bible to think one can use a sentence from it as authority out of the context of all the other paragraphs, chapters, and books. What makes the Bible authoritative is that it comes from God, who is the ultimate author and authority of the whole. One cannot claim authorization from God while intentionally disregarding many of His words that are also relevant to the topic under discussion.
But should we be surprised by this abuse of scripture? Not when we realize that this “pick and choose” approach is also the way that liberal judges approach the constitutions of the US and its states. In the process of finding new “constitutional rights” that limit the choices of legislatures and voters, those judges ignore the fundamental principle that the most important “rights” guarded by any constitution are the rights of democratic self-government, the right to be free from rule by the whims of an oligarchy, such as the class of judges. For liberals, neither the Bible nor constitutions are sacred.
The fundamental problem is that the habit of “lawyering” with biased arguments on behalf of a client, which is inherent to the adversarial system of the common law courts, is being improperly extended to the political arena where we are supposed to be building consensus and unity, not pursuing division and contention and a “win or lose” mindset that allows for no compromise or even a concession that the other side has an honorable purpose in mind. Candidates are afraid that if the voters do not see an election as a life-or-death decision, they will not bother to vote.
The irony is that most lawsuits actually end up being resolved by a settlement in compromise, usually without a trial and its argumentation before a jury, but there is no room for compromise in the political arena, since any concession is viewed as an admission against interest, and a sign of weakness and lack of confidence in one’s own side.
When religion gets coopted into this unduly adversarial process, churches are pushed to take sides, when there is much more to a real church than political positions. (The problem with the church Obama recently resigned from is that it had apparently become more of a political advocate than a means to spiritual salvation for its members.)
"James stresses the theme of faith in action perhaps more than any other single book of the New Testament. Unlike other New Testament letters, many of them attributed to Paul, James plays down dogma in favor of practical ethical guidelines that center on loving one’s neighbor and, in particular, serving the poor.
"In 2004, said Coe, 'Republicans were really battering Democrats with religious rhetoric. The response offered by Kerry and others was to say, we might not be able to compete with the religious eloquence the Republicans have a handle on, but we can on policies more consistent with the New Testament, like uplifting the poor and fighting disease in Third World countries.'”
Let’s see . . . the author of 1 Corinthians Chapter 13, the wonderful sermon on the primacy of charity over faith, is supposed to be unconcerned about helping the poor? The apostle who in many of his letters and in Acts is soliciting funds to help the poor in Jerusalem is only focused on “doctrine”? The apostle who writes to his convert and close friend Philemon and pleads with him to accept back his runaway slave Onesimus as a brother in Christ cares nothing for the lowest strata of society? Give me a break.
This kind of false dichotomy demonstrates the utter lack of familiarity with the scriptures that characterizes so much invocation of the Bible by politicians. It is in the same vein as Obama’s assertion that the Sermon on the Mount preaches tolerance of homosexual acts against the “intolerance” of Paul’s letters, when in fact the Sermon of Jesus emphasizes strict accountability for sexual sin-even for thinking about it-while Paul’s plea is for those Christians who had left homosexual acts behind them to not fall back into them, so they do not nullify the mercy and forgiveness that they had already received from Christ.
It is such picking and choosing among passages of scripture that Shakespeare seems to refer to when he says that “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
(William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), “The Merchant of Venice”, Act 1 scene 3) As John noted, it dishonors the Bible to think one can use a sentence from it as authority out of the context of all the other paragraphs, chapters, and books. What makes the Bible authoritative is that it comes from God, who is the ultimate author and authority of the whole. One cannot claim authorization from God while intentionally disregarding many of His words that are also relevant to the topic under discussion.
But should we be surprised by this abuse of scripture? Not when we realize that this “pick and choose” approach is also the way that liberal judges approach the constitutions of the US and its states. In the process of finding new “constitutional rights” that limit the choices of legislatures and voters, those judges ignore the fundamental principle that the most important “rights” guarded by any constitution are the rights of democratic self-government, the right to be free from rule by the whims of an oligarchy, such as the class of judges. For liberals, neither the Bible nor constitutions are sacred.
The fundamental problem is that the habit of “lawyering” with biased arguments on behalf of a client, which is inherent to the adversarial system of the common law courts, is being improperly extended to the political arena where we are supposed to be building consensus and unity, not pursuing division and contention and a “win or lose” mindset that allows for no compromise or even a concession that the other side has an honorable purpose in mind. Candidates are afraid that if the voters do not see an election as a life-or-death decision, they will not bother to vote.
The irony is that most lawsuits actually end up being resolved by a settlement in compromise, usually without a trial and its argumentation before a jury, but there is no room for compromise in the political arena, since any concession is viewed as an admission against interest, and a sign of weakness and lack of confidence in one’s own side.
When religion gets coopted into this unduly adversarial process, churches are pushed to take sides, when there is much more to a real church than political positions. (The problem with the church Obama recently resigned from is that it had apparently become more of a political advocate than a means to spiritual salvation for its members.)