by Harvey Cox
Should we then “believe the Bible”? I am confident that it is possible to take the Bible back from its fundamentalist hijacking and make it once again a genuine support of faith, instead of an obstacle.11 To do this, it is helpful to know something about how we got into the impasse in which we find ourselves. There are four significant turning points in the recent history of how Christians have viewed the Bible. One came in the late fifteenth century when the invention of printing made the wide distribution of the Bible possible and then—with the spread of literacy—eventually democratized it. The second came in the nineteenth century with the application of the historical-critical method, which subjected the Bible to the same scrupulous scholarship about dating, authorship, and audience that is applied to any other historical document. The third was the advent of the fundamentalist view of the Bible, which rose as a counterattack against the historical critics. The fourth was the “liberation” of the Bible from both historical critics and fundamentalists, which is happening mainly—though not exclusively—in the global South.
It might be argued that the first of these, printing, put a Bible in every literate person’s hands, while the second, the historical-critical method, snatched it back and handed it over once again to the experts. These specialists were, however, no longer priests and rabbis, but academic researchers with their lexicons and grammatical skills. The third, the fundamentalist strategy, was an attempt to bring the Bible back to the people, but it failed by making the Book itself the object of a deformed and static caricature of “faith.” Like the fundamentalists, I too am interested in rescuing the Bible from its scholarly wardens, but I believe the way they have done it has failed miserably and has understandably soured countless people on it altogether. The fourth stage, the discovery of the Bible by those who had not been party to the wrangle between the critics and the fundamentalists, appears to be the best way to reclaim it for the next generation.
Having taught for many years not just graduate and undergraduate students, but church-school classes and forums, I have often seen what damage both fundamentalist literalism and historical-critical skepticism can do to otherwise thoughtful and serious people. A better approach is to take the critical specialists with a grain of salt, realizing they are not experts in what its message means for today. As for the fundamentalists, it might be useful to help them see that their literalistic reading is a modern and questionable one. I advise my students to set aside their preconceptions and to dive into the Bible the way they might into a compelling novel or a good film.
The Bible is more like Shakespeare than an ancient history textbook. Don’t look for history in our modern sense, or for geology, or even for quick answers to ethical problems. Some New Testament scholars now believe that the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles (a single work called “Luke-Acts”) modeled it on Virgil’s Aeneid in an attempt to compose a Christian epic. The same literary objectives motivated many other biblical writers. The way to read them is to let their sheer narrative power evoke whatever response it can without relying on an externally decreed authority to either sanctify their status or pick apart their accuracy. Reading the Bible with this kind of imaginative leap puts us into the company of our spiritual forebears. Some of them were rascals, others were saints. Most of them were a mixture of both. But we all share something in common: our awkward attempt not just to respond to the great mystery, but to respond to it—negatively or positively—with the myths and symbols of our own particular tradition.
Even if we want to shake off that tradition, as many people do, it is that tradition that supplies us with the weapons of our revolt. Even the most zealous atheist denies the existence of “God” as the biblical tradition has defined God. The Bible is the wellspring of our intellectual heritage. It is, as the literary critic Northrup Frye (1912–91) writes, our “great code,” and wiggle as we may, we can never fully escape it. Even people who decide to embrace another faith tradition carry it with them in their corpuscles.
It is often argued that high-school and college students simply have to become familiar with the Bible if they are not to be at a complete loss in trying to understand the foundational works of our civilization’s literature, art, and music from Milton to Melville to Thomas Mann and from Leonardo to Chagall. It is true, of course, that to the biblically illiterate our most treasured cultural prizes remain incomprehensible. They can admire the brush strokes on The Last Supper or the meter in Dante’s Inferno, but if that is as far as they go, they are missing something vital about these works, namely, what they are saying to us. The same is true of the Bible itself. Even people who do not go blank when they look at a painting like The Binding of Isaac or The Prodigal Son eventually have to come to terms with something else about the Bible: the unavoidable demands its narratives make on our values and worldviews.
But this is where the most serious question about the place of the Bible in our lives today heaves to the surface like some stubborn Moby Dick. Of course much of the Bible consists of poems, legends, and stories, and even many fundamentalists do not take the seven days of creation literally. But why, then, should it make any claim on our spiritual and moral allegiance today? What about some of the morals it depicts, like God’s demand to the Israelites that they slay all the Canaanites, including the women and children? Worse, what do we do about those who claim the Bible’s authority to damn gays, to plant settlements in the West Bank, or to assassinate a Rabin or a physician who performs abortions? How do we read those texts from both Testaments that seem to justify murder and mayhem?
The only answer to these questions is to use one’s imagination, to place oneself in the context within which the Bible emerged, and then to allow it, with all its “texts of terror,” to speak for itself. Macbeth still speaks to us, even morally, though the stage is strewn with corpses at the end. But in order to do this, it is essential to know something about this old book, the one we often treat more as something to put your hand on when you take an oath rather than what it is: a fascinating record of how people in our own tradition wrestled with the same perennial issues we face, like the meaning of life and love, betrayal, suffering, and death. If war is too important to be left to the generals, the Bible is far too important to be left to either the academic critics or the Bible thumpers. Of course we need to bring to it the same degree of suspicion and expectation we bring to any other primal source. We must know where it came from and how others have struggled to interpret it. We also need to have the courage to let it speak, which I believe it can. But we may need to work hard to hear.
CHAPTER 12
Sant’Egidio and St. Praxedis
Where the Past Meets the Future
In the old Trastevere (“across the Tiber”) section of Rome, not far from where I met with Pope John Paul II and the Waldensians in St. Peter’s Basilica, stands a small gray nondescript church. It is understandably bypassed by tourists in search of art masterpieces, because it has none. Built in 1630, Sant’Egidio is no architectural gem. Its blue-painted front door is framed on each side by two standard Greek revival Corinthian columns and above by a single window. Once the chapel of an order of Carmelite sisters, it was abandoned by the nuns in 1971. Still, within its aging walls new life is coming to birth. Today this unlikely edifice is the headquarters of a lay association called the Community of Sant’Egidio, a harbinger of the rebirth of a faith founded on actually following Jesus rather than assenting to statements about him.
The community started in 1968 when a cluster of Italian high-school students led by a young man named Andrea Riccardi began meeting to discuss how they could put the examples of Jesus and St. Francis of Assisi—becoming peacemakers and friends of the poor—into actual practice. Since the students came mainly from middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds, they were especially impressed by how St. Francis had shunned his family’s wealth to embrace a life of poverty and cheerful simplicity. Talking, praying, arguing, and reading the Bible together, they eventually se
ttled on the first-century Christian communities who shared their goods (described in the Acts of the Apostles) as their model.
When the group began to grow, it moved, in 1973, into the disused church and took the name “Community of Sant’Egidio.” The old church is now the headquarters for a worldwide organization of over fifty thousand members in seventy countries. They have started soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and AIDS prevention programs in several African countries. They organize peace marches, campaign against the death penalty, and in recent years have participated vigorously in dialogues with Muslims. Still, most people had never heard of the Community of Sant’Egidio until 1992 when, to the astonishment of seasoned diplomats, they succeeded in brokering an agreement between the government of Mozambique and the Frelimo guerillas, ending a bloody sixteen-year civil war. Now the community is recognized as a model of what “citizen diplomats” working outside of official channels can accomplish.
The Community of Sant’Egidio is both a forerunner and an example of many thousands of similar locally based congregations with a worldwide reach. Its members not only travel around the globe and bring people to Rome to negotiate peace agreements; they also make friends with the poor, the mentally disabled, and the lonely elderly in Rome itself. The original St. Egidio is the patron of beggars and lepers. The community is a model of how a living faith can emerge from a crumbling ruin. Like many other examples of the current rebirth of faith, they look to the first Age of Faith for their inspiration, but they do not try to return to it. They also admire St. Francis, but they inhabit the contemporary world with joie de vivre, traveling on Air Italia and making use of the latest negotiation techniques and the Internet. The group is not explicitly anticlerical, but it is self-governing and lay led. Its members take no vows, but like St. Francis, they sought the approval of the Catholic Church and are officially recognized as a “public lay association,” demonstrating how the new can grow out of the old without wasting time trying to dismantle it. The Sant’Egidio community has many parallels. It strongly resembles the Latin American “base communities” and other groups like them all over the world.
The Sant’Egidio community lives in Rome, but the renaissance it embodies is even more evident in the global South. One reason for this is that during the past few decades the demography of Christianity has changed, shifting dramatically to the south and east. The population numbers tell the story. In 1900, fully 90 percent of Christians lived in Europe or the United States. Today 60 percent live in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, and that figure will probably rise to 67 percent by 2025. About 1975, Christianity ceased to be a “Western” religion. Reversing Hilaire Belloc’s famous dictum, the faith now is not Europe, and Europe is not the faith. The majority of followers of Jesus no longer reside in the old region of “Christendom,” but in the global South, where the Christian movement is growing most rapidly. Most of them are black or brown or yellow, and many live in poverty.
This “de-Westernization” of Christianity has produced a wave of new forms of religious life and a variety of liturgies and creative theologies. It also highlights the remarkable similarities between the first three centuries and our own times. In that first period a growing Christian movement, living in a powerful world empire, faced a host of knotty tests. During those early years, a faith that sprang up among Aramaic-speaking Jews in Palestine was spreading swiftly among both Jews and Gentiles throughout a multicultural and linguistically polyglot world, where its new followers adapted and modified it in a medley of different ways. Something similar is going on today. Fifty years ago Christianity was a religion associated in many people’s minds with the “West,” but today that is no longer the case. It is expanding most rapidly among millions of people whose cultures are steeped in millennia of Buddhist and Hindu motifs, Confucian values, and indigenous African and shamanic rituals.
During the first three centuries, the Age of Faith, Christians constituted a minority among worshipers of Isis and Osiris, Mithra adepts, and those who venerated the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheons and participated in the cult of the divine emperor. Today, both in the world at large and in the places where they are spreading fastest, Christians are once again minorities and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. In those early centuries, as today, there was no central hierarchy, no commonly accepted creed, and no standard ritual practice. In those first centuries Christianity was not yet “Western” today it is no longer Western. Christians then were united by their celebration of Jesus as Lord, by the exchange of visitors, gifts, and letters, and by a vibrant confidence in a shared Sprit. They were known as the “people of the Way.” Although trends toward centralization and standardization were already visible, it was Constantine’s political deployment of Christianity as an imperial ideology that sanctified those developments.
Today, as a new page is Christian history is turned, hundreds of thousands of different congregations with a vast range of practices and doctrines are again united mainly by their faith in Jesus, a shared Spirit, and a sprawling skein of organizations for mutual help, education, and social outreach. Even the Roman Catholic Church, which is theoretically organized as a severely top-down pyramid, must now constantly try to rein in unconventional African bishops and activist Latin American priests and adjust to a restive American laity demanding its right to share decision making, like the “Voice of the Faithful.”
Christianity has never been the strictly “Western” religion of the textbooks. The Christian church in Ethiopia goes back to the earliest centuries. There were already Nestorian Christians in China when Jesuit missionaries carried their message to the emperor at about the same time monks reached the north of England. Central and western Africa had fifteen centuries of unbroken Christian history before the first European missionaries stepped ashore.1 Still, because of the recent explosive growth, many of the Christians in the global South are first- or second-generation followers of Jesus, and this has suggested a useful idea to some historians. They believe it possible to get at least a few hints to illumine “what it was really like then” in first-century Ephesus or Corinth by becoming more familiar with the “new Christians” in twenty-first-century Africa and Asia. When scholars of early Christianity visit these non-Western congregations, they are often amazed at their similarity to those they have been reading about in ancient texts. They exhibit the same liveliness, cheerfulness, and often the same testiness. Maybe the past and the present are not as remote from each other as we sometimes imagine.
Christianity today is more planetary than it has ever been. It is also more culturally heterogeneous, and—as we have seen—its center of gravity now lies in Africa, Latin America, and the Asian Pacific region. It is growing rapidly in China. One of the great paradoxes of modern history is that this seismic change took place because of the actions of the Western “Christian” world. Some of it, of course, is attributable to the work of conquerors, traders, and missionaries. Religion often follows the money and the sword. But most of it is the result of unprecedented population movements. From 1500 on, millions of Europeans quit their “old countries” and settled in every corner of the globe. They pulled up stakes and shipped out for many different reasons. They sought adventure, land, wealth, or the “greater glory of God.” Some combined all these motivations. As Hernán Cortéz (1485–1547), the Spanish vanquisher of Mexico, candidly put it when he landed at what was later to be called Vera Cruz (“True Cross”), “We have come here to win souls for our Holy Mother Church, and to get much gold.” Others were driven to launch their arduous journeys to escape famine, the military draft, or religious persecution. Some were trying to escape law-enforcement officers. Others were dispatched halfway around the world as a criminal punishment. They were, as Australians today wryly remark about their forebears, “selected by the best judges in England.”
The Europeans carried with them an assortment of different kinds of Christianity. They brought Counter-Reformation Catholicism to “New Spain,” a relaxed deist
Anglicanism to Virginia, and a zealous Calvinist Puritanism to New England. But theirs was not the only kind of population movement. Not long after they had settled in, Europeans began to ship other peoples, often against their will, across the same seas. Even before the pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, a previous English settlement in Virginia had begun kidnapping and importing Africans as slaves. Then inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent were dragooned into ships to toil in the cane fields of the Caribbean, and later boatloads of Chinese were transported to North America to build the railways across the continent.
One result of this massive series of dislocations was that large numbers of non-Western people, usually under less than favorable circumstances, learned about and embraced Christianity. The demographic balance between Christians in the West and Christians in the global South began to shift. One might have thought that the dissolution of the European empires after World War II would have the ended this displacement, but it did not. Instead, the non-Western portion of the Christian population continued to wax while the Western portion waned. Today the empire has “struck back.” Black African priests serve parishes in London and Manchester. The era of Christianity as a Western religion is already over. Instead of “Western Christianity,” we now witness a post-Christian West (in Europe) and a post-Western Christianity (in the global South). America is somewhere in between.
