A while back I wrote an essay on reading scripture for Wayfare magazine. In it, I try to make sense of how to offer a faithful but non-fundamentalist reading of the most troubling passages of scripture. Here is a taste:
I confess to a textual faith. I am not proud of this fact. I think that I would be a better disciple if my faith centered more on service to others, personal communion with God, or vanquishing my sins, but the core activity of my spiritual life is reading scripture. I have experienced great joy in this approach. But there are dangers too. Consider Psalm 137:
By the rivers of Babylon,
There we sat down,
Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song;
And they that wasted us required of us mirth,
Saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
Let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee,
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth;
If I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom
In the day of Jerusalem;
Who said, “Rase it, rase it,
Even to the foundation thereof.”
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee
As thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth
Thy little ones against the stones.
The first three sections of the psalm, verses 1–6, capture beautifully one of the central experiences of being a believer: alienation from the world. In mortality, we find ourselves cast out of Eden, living in Babylon while longing for Jerusalem. We must endure the taunts of those who do not understand the difficulty of singing the Lord’s song in a strange land. We pray that we can remember those moments when we have experienced Zion and seek to bind ourselves to them, pledging the cunning of our right hand in the hope of our own faithfulness. In short, reading Psalm 137:1–6 can both capture a central spiritual experience and in so doing capture our hearts, giving us tools to sacralize our discomfort with the world.
However, beginning in verse 7, where the psalmist invokes Edom, the experience of reading becomes very different. Now we are to remember the Bronze Age enemies who called for the sacking of Jerusalem. We are not to forget the need for violent retribution against Edom. We must cultivate our thirst for vengeance. The viciousness escalates as the psalm moves to its conclusion, addressing itself to the daughter of Babylon, a mother of young children, and exulting in the brutal murder of her “little ones.” As I read it, the bloody schadenfreude of these verses repulses me.
At the beginning of the psalm, I sink uncritically into the language. I let the anguish and longing of the images play across my heart and mind. I insert myself into the scriptural text, and I let that text describe my experience. When I read the end of the psalm, however, I scramble to distance myself from the text. No longer do I read this in terms of some spiritual universal with an authority that applies to me. Rather, my impulse is to historicize, contextualize, and limit the authority of the text. I find no spiritual sustenance in the image of infant brains dashed on rocks, nor do I want anything to do with an authority that would demand such things. Hence, while I am willing to hear the voice of God in verses 1–6, any God who would bless the climax of verses 7–9 would be a monster.
I continue from there. Please read the whole essay at Wayfare.
Until next time,
Nate