Do Religion Scholars Read the Bible?

I'm happy today to guest post a dispatch from Elesha Coffman. Elesha is assistant professor of history at Waynesburg University, and in 2011-2012 she will be a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. Her dispatch concerns one session at the just-concluded 2nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture. We'll have some other posts about the conference in the days to come.

Do Religion Scholars Read the Bible? (A dispatch from Indianapolis)

Elesha Coffman

Next time you’re trying to get religion scholars’ blood pumping during a post-lunch session deep into an academic conference, try this: Ask them if they have actually read the Bible.

This challenge arose at the penultimate session of the Second Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture in Indianapolis last weekend, a roundtable on “Changes in the understanding and uses of scripture.” Scheduled to give a nod to the 400^th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible and to introduce a new project at IUPUI on Scriptures in America, the session included presentations by Charles Cohen, Kathleen Flake, and Charles Hambrick-Stowe. Following their brief comments, the audience was invited to jump into the discussion—except, initially, no one did. Whereas previous sessions had produced a pileup of voices vying for the microphone, this one seemed to have fallen flat.

I cannot explain what happened next. I do not remember who spoke first or what was said, but suddenly a gauntlet was thrown: All of the religion scholars in the room who had read the Bible cover-to-cover should raise their hands.

There was a collective gasp, a few tentative hands raised, and then a barrage of responses flying much faster than the microphone could travel. Old jokes about Catholics and liberal Protestants never reading the Bible mingled with personal reflections on Sunday school and the lectionary. One contributor insisted that you couldn’t learn anything by reading the Bible “cover-to-cover,” though she would not suggest an alternate reading plan. Attention to the uniquely Protestant concern behind the question was countered by the assertion that scholars of non-Christian traditions (especially New Religious Movements) consider grounding in those groups’ texts essential, yet some scholars of Christianity feel they can skip that step. Conversation eventually drifted to other topics, including boutique Bibles and scriptural tattoos, and the proposed straw poll never happened.

Struck nerves expose anxieties, and there were at least two types in play here. One is the anxiety that contributed to the separation of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, which was initiated by the AAR in 2003. If the AAR were a ship unfurling its sails to catch the winds of new methodologies and religious expressions, the SBL seemed like the ballast in the hull, bearing the weight of (mostly) Christian traditions and texts and reminding religious studies of its divinity school past. Of course, ballast comes in awfully handy in a storm, and the economic crisis buffeting academic publishing and university budgets helped change some minds among the AAR leadership. The reunification of the two groups’ annual meetings will hardly erase the unease, however. The religion scholars in Indy still seemed very jittery about the Bible.

Another type of anxiety exposed by the show-of-hands kerfuffle concerns the relationship between religion scholars and the subjects they study. Versions of the insider/outsider discussion arose frequently throughout the weekend, beginning with the first session’s extended debate about Richard Lyman Bushman (who wasn’t present) and culminating with Julie Byrne’s meditation on an “ethnographic uncertainty principle,” by which a scholar inevitably changes and might inadvertently destroy that which she seeks to understand. In the context of the Bible session, asking who reads what not only raised questions of scholarly preparation but also of identification with religious subjects—or, to put it in moral terms, humility.

Tacitly, the straw poll suggested, “Are religion scholars so arrogant as to think they can make pronouncements about American religion without even reading the Bible?” I think that’s the part that really raised hackles. And while it would be nice to relegate that strain of interrogation to the heat of a strange moment, it’s the kind of question that creates distance between scholars and the large, biblically inclined segment of the American public. The panelists’ calls to take scriptures more seriously, along with the upcoming IUPUI project and renewed conversations between AAR and SBL, could build some needed bridges.

Psalm 109:8: Trivia or Conspiracy

By Michael Utzinger

With all of the discussion of the midterm elections, I would like to rewind the clock to a bizarre little incident from the ghost of news cycles past. Last November there was a short-lived furor about a bumper sticker that read:

Pray for Obama
Psalm 109:8

When I first saw this bumper sticker, while driving, I naturally went home and looked up the passage in the Bible: “May his days be few, let another assume his office.”

Because I found it moderately clever, I was surprised when the news broke that the websites selling Psalm 109:8 bumper stickers and T-shirts had stopped peddling these wares because the message may have been against the law, a law that bans threatening the President of the United States

The guilty speech in this case was not the verse printed on the bumper sticker (Psalm 109:8) but the verse that follows it in the Bible which reads: “May his children become fatherless, and his wife a widow” (v. 9).

Speaking with some colleagues about this, I admitted that I thought it odd that “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8” would be construed as a threat against the President. One colleague disagreed. “You have the read the next verse,” he insisted. “This is clearly a threat.” The implicit argument of my colleague was based upon the claim that the bumper sticker must be interpreted contextually. In other words, Psalm 109:8 can only be understood if it is read with Psalm 109:9. My colleague pressed that these people know their Bible, so they know what they meant.

I have no doubt that they knew what they meant. The problem is: how do “we” know what they meant? For example, what about verse 6? “Appoint an evil man to oppose him; let an accuser stand at his right hand.” (So much for the newest Republican revolution or the Tea Party.) Better yet, in the full context of the Psalm, it appears that verses 6-19 represent the voice of those that oppose the anointed of God, the king, the messiah. Perhaps, the bumper stickers implies those that paste it to their cars are the “accusers” (Satans) mentioned in verse 6? Perhaps, Obama was God’s anointed?

And this, of course, is the rub. Bible verses can be de-contextualized and re-contextualized on a bumper sticker or a shirt or a sign. On what grounds does one verse printed on a bumper sticker carry some or all of the rest of the meaning of the literature from which it was decontextualized?

For example, it is cliché to use John 3:16 in a decontextualized manner: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him shall perish but have everlasting life. My experience, however, has been that those that use the verse are completely unaware of verses that follow that speak of the condemnation of those that do not believe. How do I know if the fan in the rainbow wig is inviting me to accept Jesus as my personal savior, warning me that I am potentially hell bound, just an eccentric, or all of the above?

“Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8” on a bumper sticker, it seems to me, was clearly a bible-believing version of “throw the bum out.” Further, our current president was not the first to be targeted by this Bible verse as Arlen Specter, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton would certainly attest. So, why did this verse attached to Obama make the idea that it constituted a threat seems credible? Perhaps it seemed plausible because the media bombarded us the previous summer with images of the raw anger manifested by individuals within the emerging Tea Party movement and assumed that tea partiers were really populist remnants of the religious right. However, we now know (if little else) that the tea party movements are not primarily a cloaked religious movement of potentially violent evangelicals.

Claims about what the verse meant and why a certain interpretation seems credible at a particular historical moment requires argument and evidence if it is to have validity. This, of course, usually takes more time than a new cycle. However, well after the event is news, it becomes our job as students of American religion to determine if this was simply a trivial misunderstanding or a religious conspiracy to threaten the president.

Comrade Paul

Randall J. Stephens

[Nota bene: I don't mean our Paul (Harvey), but, rather, the Saint. Not that Harvey isn't both a saint and a comrade.]

The latest NYRB includes a wonderful essay on the apostle Paul. Columbia's Mark Lilla reviews books by Garry Wills, Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Éric Marty, and Slavoj Zizek. Though he’s still widely criticized in some circles as misogynistic, a Hellenizer, a gnostic, a prude, and a tool of the state, others now find him to be a venerable revolutionary. Looks like he has some new, unlikely friends on the left. Lilla has written a very funny piece, which reminds me of Tom Wolfe's famous savaging of the antediluvian lit-crit crowd in Harper's. Lilla takes on muddle-headed Mandarins and Rococo post-Marxists with flair. There are some terrific passages:

Oddly, there is a lot of thought being given to Paul these days by inhabitants of the foggy academic archipelago encompassing critical theory, deconstruction, post-modernism, postcolonial studies, and the like. When the wretched of the faculty club gathered twenty-five years ago, conversation would naturally drift to Michel Foucault's views on corporal punishment; today you are more likely to hear a debate on the Epistle to the Romans as it bears on globalization and the war on terror. . . .

The worst [of the new books on Paul], for my money, is Giorgio Agamben's The Time That Remains. Agamben is the very model of the baffling postmodernist: obscure, pretentious, humorless. He is capable of writing that "the messianic pleroma of the law is an Aufhebung of the state of exception, an absolutizing of the katargesis " and of littering nearly every page with passages quoted in the original German, French, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, Danish, Provençal, even (I'm not kidding) Hopi. Ezra Pound had nothing on Professor Agamben.

The essay on the web is for subscribers only. Yet it is available through many college, university, and public libraries.