Not in God's Name
Page 21
The love of which the prophets spoke, of God for Israel, that fractious, sometimes disobedient people, is love for those who are different because of their difference, not for those who are the same because of their sameness. Love is particular. That is why, having given humankind, in the Noahide covenant, the general rules of a moral society, God turns to Abraham and commands him and his descendants to be a living example of what it is to love and be loved by God.
There is no single, simple system that will honour both our commonalities and our differences. Tribalism – identity without universality – leads to violence. Imperialism – universality without identity – leads to the loss of freedom and the suppression of the very diversity that makes us human. That is why the Bible sets out two covenants, not one: one that honours our common humanity, the other that sanctifies diversity and the particularity of love. And the universal comes first. You cannot love God without first honouring the universal dignity of humanity as the image and likeness of the universal God.
Note also that the phrase ‘image of God’, as it appears in the Bible, constitutes a paradox, almost a contradiction. It is axiomatic to the Bible that God has no image. To suggest otherwise – to make or worship an image of God – is the paradigm case of idolatry. When Moses asks God who he is, his reply is: ‘I will be what I will be’ (Exod. 3:14). God transcends categorisation. Were he to have an image, he would be like this, not that; here, not there; in this colour, creed or code, not that. Judaism’s sages fully understood the implication:
For this reason man was created alone, to teach that whoever destroys a single life is as if he destroyed a complete universe…and for the sake of peace among humanity, so that no one could say to another, ‘My father is greater than yours’…and to proclaim the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He, for when a human being makes many coins from one mould, they are all the same, but the supreme King of kings makes every human being in the same image, yet all are different.6
As God resists categorisation, so does humankind.
The Bible has a second surprise for us. The same phrase reappears, eight chapters later, after the Flood as part of God’s covenant with Noah:
Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed;
for in the image of God
has God made man. (Gen. 9:6)
This sounds like a restatement of Genesis 1. In fact, though, it is the opposite. Genesis 1 tells us that we are in God’s image. Genesis 9 tells us that the other person is in God’s image. Genesis 1 speaks of the pre-eminence of humankind (‘Fill the earth and master it’). Genesis 9 declares the prohibition against murder. Between the two lies tragedy. Granted mastery over nature, human beings used that power to attempt mastery over other human beings, and the result – from Cain to the Flood – was violence and murder. It still is. That is why Genesis 9 is not a repetition but a reversal of Genesis 1.
Genesis 1 is about the self, Genesis 9 about the human Other. One who is not in my image is nonetheless in God’s image – that is the basis of God’s covenant with Noah, a universal requirement of all cultures if they are to honour God who gave us life. Terror, the killing of the innocent and the sacrifice of human life in pursuit of political ends are not mere crimes. They are sacrilege. Those who murder God’s image in God’s name commit a double sacrilege.
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The unique structure of biblical spirituality – its calibrated tension between the universality of justice and the particularity of love – is the most compelling way I know of giving religious expression to both our common humanity and our religious differences. How does this work out in practice?
Consider the life of Abraham. Readers of the Bible are so familiar with his story that they often fail to notice how strange it is. Here is the father of monotheism, yet in the biblical text itself Abraham breaks no idol, challenges no polytheist, seeks no disciples,7 and establishes no new religious movement. He lives among people whose beliefs and practices were alien to his own, yet he does not reprimand them, except when the servants of Abimelek, a king with whom he had made a treaty, seize one of the wells he had dug (Gen. 21:25). He holds them to the standards of morality, not those of ethics or holiness.
When his nephew Lot chooses to live among the people of Sodom, about whom the Bible says that they ‘were wicked and were sinning greatly against the Lord’ (13:13), Abraham does not criticise him. Nor does he condemn them. To the contrary, he fights a battle on their behalf (Gen. 14) and when he hears that God is planning to punish them, he pleads for them in one of the most audacious prayers in the Bible: ‘Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?’ (18:25).
Abraham does not seek to impose his views on others. Yet his contemporaries sense that there is something special, Godly, about him. Melchizedek, king of Salem, salutes him with the words, ‘Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth’ (14:19). The Hittites say to him, ‘You are a prince of God among us’ (23:6). Abraham impresses his contemporaries by the way he lives, not the way he forces, or even urges, others to live. He seeks to be true to his faith while being a blessing to others regardless of their faith. That seems to me a truth for the twenty-first century.
There was clearly a profound love between Abraham and God, and it is this that eventually inspired not only Jews but Christians and Muslims also, in their different ways, to see themselves as his heirs. But all who embrace Abraham must aspire to live like Abraham. Nothing could be more alien to the spirit of Abrahamic monotheism than what is happening today in the name of jihad. Barbarism and brutality, the embrace of terror and the murder of the innocent, the cold, cruel killing of those with whom you disagree, the pursuit of power in the name of empire, and the idea that you can impose truth by force: these are pagan ideas that have no place in the universe of Abraham or Abraham’s God. They constitute neither justice nor love. They are a desecration.
To be a child of Abraham is to be open to the divine presence wherever it reveals itself. The faith of Abraham’s children is told in a series of stories about how strangers turned out to be not what they seemed. Tamar is not a prostitute. Ruth is not an alien. Moses is not an Egyptian. Abraham’s three visitors are not mere men. Strangers can turn out to be angels. Pharaoh’s daughter may be a heroine. David, the inconsequential child, becomes the greatest of Israel’s kings. The ethical imperative to emerge from such a faith is: search for the trace of God in the face of the Other. Never believe that God is defined by and confined to the people like you. God is larger than any nation, language, culture or creed. He lives within our group, but he also lives beyond.
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‘Because that which connects human thought and feeling with the infinite and all-surpassing Divine light must [be refracted into] a multiplicity of colours, therefore every people and society must have a different spiritual way of life.’ So said Rabbi Abraham Kook, first chief rabbi of pre-state Israel.8 ‘The righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come,’ said the rabbis in the second century.9 Rabbi Akiva, the sage of the late first century, said, ‘Beloved is every human person for he or she is in the image of God. Beloved is Israel (i.e. each Jew), for each of us is one of the children of God.’10 That is how Jews defined themselves in the past and do today. We feel ourselves close to God but we equally believe that God has a relationship with all humanity as defined in the Noahide code.
There are times when the Bible portrays Gentiles as conspicuously more religious than Jews. On the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur, we read the book of Jonah, in which the prophet is sent to Israel’s enemies, the Assyrians at Nineveh, to preach repentance. Jonah tries to run away. Who wants to see their enemies forgiven? Yet God refuses to let him escape. Jonah delivers his message, a mere five words in Hebrew, and the entire people repent. There is no instance in the entire Hebrew Bible of the Israelites responding with such alacrity to a prophetic call. The effect of reading this story at this most sacred of times forces one into a sense of hu
mility. For all the natural pride we feel in being part of our group – the people of the covenant, a holy nation – we are brought face to face with the fact that others may sometimes respond to the word of God better than we do.
That is what the dual structure of Hebrew spirituality does. It accepts the inevitability of identity in the here-and-now. We are not all the same. There is an Us and Them. But God is universal as well as particular, which means that he can be found among Them as well as among Us. God transcends our particularities. That is why he often appears where we least expect him. Sometimes he speaks in the voice of a stranger, the man who wrestled with Jacob at night, or the one who found Joseph wandering in a field, or even the pagan prophet Balaam. The unique dialectic in the Hebrew Bible – so rarely understood, so often reviled – between universality and particularity is precisely what is necessary if we are to have identity without violence.
For though God is our God, he is also the God of all, accessible to all: the God who blesses Ishmael, who tells the children of Jacob not to hate the descendants of Esau, who listens to the prayers of strangers and whose messengers appear as strangers. Only a faith that recognises both types of covenant – the universal and the particular – is capable of understanding that God’s image may be present in the one whose faith is not mine and whose relationship with God is different from mine.
Humanity lives suspended between the twin facts of commonality and difference. If we were completely unalike, we would be unable to communicate. If we were completely alike, we would have nothing to say. The Noah covenant speaks to our commonality, the Abraham and Sinai covenants to our differences. That is what makes Abrahamic monotheism different from tribalism on the one hand (each nation with its own God) and universalism on the other (one God, therefore one way). Neither tribalism nor universalism is adequate to the human situation. Tribalism envisages a world permanently at war (my god is stronger than yours). Universalism risks a dualistic world divided between the saved and the damned (I have the truth, you have only error11), and hence to holy wars, crusades and jihads.
What if the God of the crusaders, the terrorists, the inquisitors, the witch-burners and the jihadists were also the God of their victims? What if one could not, with absolute certainty, rule out that possibility? Humanity lives in that ‘what if’ and cannot survive without it. For we are finite, but God is infinite. We are limited, but God is unlimited. However perfect our faith, there is something of God that lies beyond, which is known to God but cannot be known to the frail, fallible humanity that is all we are and ever will be, this side of heaven.
12
Hard Texts
Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read’st black where I read white.
William Blake1
Never say, I hate, I kill, because my religion says so. Every text needs interpretation. Every interpretation needs wisdom. Every wisdom needs careful negotiation between the timeless and time. Fundamentalism reads texts as if God were as simple as we are. That is unlikely to be true.
Religions, especially religions of the Book, have hard texts: verses, commands, episodes, narratives, that if understood literally and applied directly would not merely offend our moral sense. They would also go against our best understanding of the religion itself. There are many examples in the Hebrew Bible. There is the war of revenge against the Midianites. There is the war mandated against the seven nations in the land of Canaan. There is the book of Joshua with its wars of conquest, and the bloody revenge against the Amalekites in the book of Samuel. These strike us as barbaric and at odds with an ethic of compassion, or even with a just war doctrine of the kind that emerged in both the Jewish and Christian traditions.
There were other internal laws that the rabbis found puzzling and morally problematic. There is, for instance, in Deuteronomy, a law about a stubborn and rebellious son who is to be put to death for what appears to us to be no worse than a serious case of juvenile delinquency. So incompatible did this seem with the principles of justice that the Talmud records the view that the law was never put into effect and exists only for didactic purposes and not to be implemented in practice.2
These texts – and there are notorious examples in the New Testament, the Qur’an and Hadith also – require the most careful interpretation if they are not to do great harm. That is why every text-based religion develops its own traditions of interpretation. Rabbinic Judaism declared Biblicism – accepting the authority of the written word while rejecting oral tradition, the position of the Sadducees and Karaites – as heresy. The rabbis said: ‘One who translates a verse literally is a liar.’3 The point is clear: no text without interpretation; no interpretation without tradition; or, as 2 Corinthians puts it, ‘The letter kills, but the spirit gives life’ (NIV, 2 Cor. 3:6).
For almost the whole of their histories, Jews, Christians and Muslims have wrestled with the meanings of their scriptures, developing in the process elaborate hermeneutic and jurisprudential systems. Medieval Christianity had its four levels of interpretation: literal, allegorical, moral and eschatological. Islam has its fiqh; its four schools of Sunni jurisprudence and their Shia counterparts; its principles of taqleed, itjihad and qiyas. Hard texts need interpreting; without it, they lead to violence. God has given us both the mandate and the responsibility to do just that. We are guardians of his word for the sake of his world.
That is why fundamentalism is so dangerous and so untraditional. It refers to many things in different contexts, but one of them is the tendency to read texts literally and apply them directly: to go straight from revelation to application without interpretation. In many religions, including Judaism, this is heretical. In most, it is schismatic. Internal battles have been fought over these issues in many faiths. But the general conclusion at which most have arrived is that it needs great wisdom together with a deep grounding in tradition to know how to apply the word to the world.
One reason is, of course, that these are often very ancient texts, originally directed to times and conditions quite unlike ours. The war commands of Deuteronomy and the book of Joshua, for example, belong to a time when warfare was systemic, endemic and brutal. The massacre of populations was commonplace. Another reason is that we are dealing with sacred scripture, texts invested with the ultimate authority of God himself. How do you take the word of eternity and apply it to the here-and-now? That is never simple and self-understood. That is why, for much of the biblical era, ancient Israel had its prophets who delivered, not the word of the Lord for all time – that had been done by Moses – but the word of the Lord for this time. There are things that may be justified in an age of prophecy that are wholly unjustifiable at other times.
As a general rule, though, the application of every ancient text to another age involves an act of interpretation, and there is nothing inherently religious about this. It is a central problem in secular law and jurisprudence, deliberated over in every Supreme Court. How is a law enacted then to be understood now? It is a problem every theatrical director faces in deciding how, for example, to stage The Merchant of Venice for a contemporary audience. In each case, the issue is how to apply the-word-then to the-world-now, bridging the hermeneutical abyss of time and change. Religions develop rules of interpretation and structures of authority. Without these, as we see today, any group can do almost anything in the name of religion, selecting texts, taking them out of context, reading them literally and ignoring the rest. Without rules, principles and authority, sacred texts provide the charisma of seemingly divine authority for purposes that are all too human. As Shakespeare said, ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’4
What happens in the case of fundamentalism is a kind of principled impatience with this whole process. A radical thinker decides that the religious establishment is corrupt. In his eyes it has made its peace with the world, compromised its ideals and failed to live up to the pristine demands of the faith. Therefore let us live by the holy word as it was before it was interpret
ed and rendered pliable and easy-going. Recall that even the founder of Christianity told his disciples, ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword’ (NIV, Matt. 10:34). There is always a confrontational as well as an accommodationist reading of any tradition.
Usually, of course, radical religious movements within an established faith tend to be sectarian and small-scale. What makes the present moment different is precisely what made the Reformation different in Christianity: the emergence, at roughly the same time, of a back-to-the-text-as-it-was-in-the-beginning religiosity, together with a revolution in information technology that allows the radicals to bypass conventional means of communication: church sermons in the age of printing, local imams and community elders in the age of the Internet. Suddenly the radicals command the heights and address the masses, while the religious establishment is left flat-footed and outpaced and looking old.
There is another factor also, that has been present in the background of all three Abrahamic monotheisms, namely the sheer dissonance between the world of tradition and the secular domain. It begins to seem impossible to hold religion and society together. There comes a tipping point at which faith can no longer be seen as supporting the social or cultural order and becomes instead radically antagonistic towards it. The term ‘fundamentalism’, for example, was originally coined in the early twentieth century to describe a reaction within the Protestant church in America against what seemed to traditionalists to be a steady erosion of faith in the light of modern science and biblical criticism. There was a similar movement in Orthodox Judaism against any accommodation with the intellectual doctrines of the Enlightenment or the social pressures involved in Emancipation.
In Islam much of the energy that produced the new radicalism came out of a deep disillusionment with the secularisation and Westernisation of traditional societies after the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In each case, the radical neotraditionalists felt the force of the echoing question: ‘What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ (KJV, Mark 8:36) Fundamentalism emerges when people feel that the world has been allowed to defeat the word. They, by contrast, are determined to defeat the world by means of the word.