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TOO MUCH SEX AND VIOLENCE?
Coming to Terms with the Bible

Daniel Hertzler

Some years ago I read a magazine article which purported to be a letter from a book editor to the author of the Bible explaining why the editor’s press couldn’t publish it. Too much sex and violence. The letter went on to explain how the Bible might be revised to make it publishable. It was an article I should have saved.

Many years earlier I had begun to read the Bible at age eight or nine. My Sunday school had a Bible reading program, so I began the pilgrimage of reading through the whole Bible. I seem to remember that I got bogged down somewhere about 2 Timothy. Then my father, who had not seemed to be paying attention, suddenly came forth and exhorted me to finish. I suppose I did, but that detail is not clear in my mind.

I do not recall that the sex and violence impressed me as a child. Perhaps there is a built-in naiveté which helps spare children from comprehending the gory details in such a narrative. I do recall, however, one of my own young sons chuckling at the story of Ehud who stuck a dagger into the abdomen of King Eglon, a man who was so fat that the dagger went all the way in and was covered by the flesh (see Judg. 3: 15-30).

I grew up and came to adulthood during the period of the Sunday school movement. The Bible’s prominence in our culture was symbolized by a column in our weekly Scottdale newspaper. In this column Kenneth J. Foreman commented on the Uniform Sunday school lesson for the week. Such a column has long since disappeared.

But the Bible has stayed with me as a companion, even though when I stop to look closely it seems a strange companion. Its significance has opened to me only gradually. I majored in Bible at Eastern Mennonite College, in part because I had no greater interest in any other major. I went to college off the farm for the love of learning more than to pursue any occupational concern. As a sophomore I was encouraged to change my major to biology, but at that point a major in Bible seemed to be the place to stay. I was to find later that this major in Bible had prepared me for the editorial work to which I was called at Mennonite Publishing House.

I was introduced to the inductive method of Bible study in college and comprehended it in some measure. This emphasis on careful examination of the text has stayed with me, and I aim to follow it. However, in college I did not have many occasions to consider the Bible as a body of literature or seek to understand its place in history.

As Providence would have it, I spent some 15 years as an editor of Sunday school curriculum material. In this role I felt the need to interpret the task of the lesson writer. What I proposed was somewhat as follows: (1) What does the text say? (2) What did it mean? (3) What does it mean to us?

This sequence probably grows out of the inductive method, but a number of important questions are not raised: (1) From what historical situation does the text emerge? (2) What literary form does the text represent? These questions may be overemphasized. The Shema and the Sermon on the Mount call for attention by their very eloquence. Yet for some of us their significance is heightened by seeing them in their historical settings.

For this we need to step back a pace and ask what the Bible really is. How has it come to us? There seems to be a line of thought which claims to take the Bible as it is without the influence of historical study. I fear that refusing to face historical questions may open the way for overinfluence of personal bias in the interpretive process. As a printed medium, the Bible is subject to the whims of interpreters. What they bring to the process may be as important as what they find in the text.

The controversy which erupted with the publication of the Revised Standard Version in 1952 involved translation issues. A typical point of contention was the translation of Isaiah 7:14, which in the King James Version reads "a virgin shall conceive." This wording was evidently based on the Greek Old Testament, the same version cited by Matthew as a prediction for the birth of Jesus from a virgin. The new translation went back to the Hebrew and found "a young woman shall conceive and bear a son."

Three Mennonite Bible scholars, H. S. Bender, C. K. Lehman and Millard Lind, were asked to evaluate the RSV and gave it a qualified endorsement. But some were not convinced. I am afraid that they were more inspired by an inflammatory tract written by "Missionary" J. J. Ray entitled "The Eye Opener," which provided a fundamentalist critique of the new version.

A later source of tension in my work was a Sunday school lesson by Clayton Beyler, who had recently graduated with a major in New Testament from Southern Baptist Seminary. In one lesson of a series on the life of Jesus, he observed that the instructions to the disciples sent out by Jesus vary among the synoptic Gospels and that some are even contradictory. Anyone who took the trouble to compare the accounts could find this, but the word contradictory disturbed some readers.

On reflection, I consider this to have been an unfortunate choice of term. I think sometimes we need to separate our own effort to understand the process of biblical compilation from our efforts to instruct people who are not asking the same questions.

An opportunity for me to reflect on the Bible and its place in history came in a series of lectures by W. F. Albright, a noted biblical archeologist. These were given, if I remember correctly, in autumn 1957. Two of his remarks remain in memory. For one, he suggested in regard to the creation accounts in Genesis that there is a "truer truth" than literal truth.

This provided me a place to stand when considering the six days of creation where we find light created at the beginning but the sun and the moon not created until the fourth day. When I read that some of Israel’s neighbors worshiped the sun and the moon, I found it of interest to see the strictly functional purpose attributed to them in this account. Evidently the biblical writer was making a statement.

Albright also proposed that perhaps Noah’s flood developed from the melting of ice following the ice age. Recently I came upon the book Noah’s Flood, by William Ryan and Walter Pitman (Simon & Schuster, 1998). It supports and develops Albright’s thesis. So it appears that there really was a flood. Is the story of Noah then true? Surely not literally so in all of its details, especially since there are two accounts. It appears that several Hebrew writers took a legend that was current in their culture and revised it to make a point many of us acknowledge yet today.

In my effort to deal responsibly with biblical interpretation, I found useful the principles of Paul Ricoeur, particularly his "second naiveté." If I understand him, to follow this principle, we first survey the interpretation scene and review the competing perspectives. Then we conclude that the biblical story is our story and that we will follow it—even though some challenge it from a variety of positions and we recognize that in certain respects it is culturally timebound.

When we take the time to consider the biblical story, we will find that it is a truly remarkable story. It represents a variety of efforts to make sense out of life with its accompanying tragedies. We have the Hebrew Bible because the Hebrews saved their stories. Two events overshadow the whole: the exodus from Egypt and the Babylonian captivity. Without the latter we might have little of the Hebrew Bible. Although the writing no doubt began before the captivity, the compilation of the whole had to come during and following that tragic experience.

Writing often grows out of trauma—and who would have saved and edited the devastating critiques by eighth-century prophets such as Amos and Isaiah had there been no need to account for the sixth-century collapse? I have said to myself that I would have some trouble cherishing the Hebrew story if the witness of the prophets had not been included. David and Solomon and most of the other kings make poor role models and get altogether too much admiration in Sunday school.

Then I came upon David Noel Freedman’s book The Unity of the Hebrew Bible. Freedman shows that the part of the Bible ending with 2 Kings was edited to emphasize show how nine of the Ten Commandments were violated one by one, and then came the end. I myself have noticed that after the Bathsheba affair, nothing in the life of David really goes well. The biblical storytellers need careful consideration if we’re to get the message.

The reconstruction under Ezra and Nehemiah and those who followed them enabled the community to continue for hundreds of years. In this community our Lord was born and his story became the basis for those additional writings Christians call the New Testament. That Testament draws heavily on the Hebrew Bible but gives it an interpretation not all were willing to follow.

The New Testament is as much at the mercy of interpreters as is the Old. In The Politics of Jesus (Eerdmans with Paternoster, 2nd. ed., 1994), John Howard Yoder set out to show that the teachings of Jesus are not stuck in the first century but are relevant today. He challenged H. R. Niebuhr, who held that "an ethic of the Son . . . needs to be completed or even corrected" by an ethic of the Father and an ethic of the Holy Spirit. It develops that the latter is the most influential and up-to-date. As Yoder puts it, "the ethic of Jesus is no longer of determining significance" (100, 101). Is Niebuhr’s theory a sophisticated way of making the Bible say what we want to hear?

In 1995 I wrote an S.T.M. thesis at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary on the Parable of the Sower in the Gospel of Mark. I found Mark’s to be a severe Gospel laced with irony. The 12 disciples all flunk the test of faithfulness and in the end three women who have stood by Jesus at the crucifixion are frightened and run away from the empty tomb without saying anything to anyone.

Such failures are anticipated in the Parable of the Sower, in which the seed falling on three out of four soils fails to yield a harvest. Is it really this hard to follow Jesus? Most of us in our own ways manage to scale down the demands of the gospel so we can live with them.

Yet I find it encouraging to see that New Testament scholarship appears to be moving in the direction of taking the Gospels as they are instead of picking them to pieces as was formerly done. Historical criticism and form criticism have been succeeded by literary and rhetorical criticisms. An example is Donald H. Juel’s The Gospel of Mark (Abingdon, 1999), which concludes that "the testimony of believers who have read the gospel as part of the Scriptures within the context of a worshiping community is that God does continue to work beyond the confines of the story—and that the continuing work of God is the ‘one thing necessary’ for those who read the gospel" (192).

And yet, and yet. There are obstacles. In The Decent of the Dove (Meridian Books, 1956), written in the late 1930s, Charles Williams noted the effect on the church of Constantinianism. He observed that "It is at least arguable that the Christian Church will have to return to pre-Constantine state before she can properly recover the ground she too quickly won. Her victories, among other disadvantages, produced in her children a great tendency to be aware of evil rather than of sin, measuring by evil the wickedness of others, by sin the evil done by oneself" (86). How could Williams have so vividly anticipated the rhetoric of George W. Bush following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001?

Constantinianism appeals to the best and the worst in human nature. On one hand, it calls for responsibility: Everyone should help to keep order. On the other hand, it advocates vengeance despite the fact that the Hebrew Bible in Deuteronomy 32:35 and the Christian Bible in Romans 12:19 assign this responsibility to the Lord. Constantinianism will not wait for the Lord.

The Anabaptist tradition has meant to take Romans 12:19 seriously. Books such as the Martyrs Mirror (latest Herald Press edition 1938), which preserves stories of persecution going back five centuries and more, have documented the experiences of many who refused to resist those who persecuted them. In North America our experience has been much more open-ended, although at times Anabaptist lives have been touched by organized violence. I myself have had no such experience.

If I were ever assaulted, I would wish for the courage shown by Sarah Corson, as described in John Howard Yoder’s little book, What Would You Do? (Herald Press, 1983). Sarah was a missionary serving somewhere in Latin America when her household was invaded during a revolution in the country and she faced an officer who held a gun.

She showed him a Spanish Bible and opened it to the Sermon on the Mount. He did not believe it possible to love an enemy, but Sarah said, "You can prove it, Sir. I know you came here to kill us. So just kill me slowly, if you want to prove it. . . . I will die praying for you because God loves you, and we love you too" (106, 107).

I doubt if Sarah Corson had spent much time considering the progression of New Testament studies from historical criticism through form criticism to literary criticism, but I think she got the point of the Sermon on the Mount. She was coming to terms with the Bible.

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, a long-time editor and writer, contributes a monthly column to the Daily Courier (Connellsville, Pa.). An inveterate gardener, during growing season he organizes his life around the schedules of peas and carrots, lettuce, potatoes, and especially sweet corn. This year he is scheduled to attend Mennonite World Conference in early August and will do his best to garden around his absence.