I was recently asked to read a scripture at a public
event. I chose my scripture, as
requested, and submitted it. A day later, I was sent a “recommended” NIV
scripture reading. I looked at the text and knew/felt instantaneously that I could
not read it. I asked the sender of the email if it was really “recommended” so
that I could stick with the text I originally submitted at their
request. Her boss replied that
he “preferred” that I read the “recommended” scripture. I replied that they should choose
another person to perform the public reading; I could not. And I did not think
the venue the proper place to engage in an un(sus)expected critique of the
guest’s text.
Having just completed my lectures for a new prep course
“Postcolonial Biblical Criticism” in which I challenged students not to simply
reinscribe oppressive, imperialistic and/or unjust relations, descriptions, characterizations,
and representations found in the sacred scriptures without contextualizing,
unraveling and critiquing them, I could not do it. I barely blinked between the
time my heart said no and my fingers keyed the words with my final reply; I
could not read the text. Please choose another person to read it.
Over the years, I’ve challenged my students to do the same critical
and contextualized reading in different courses. I could not with enthusiasm, spiritual fervor, or oratorical
sophistication recite a sacred text in which God is likened to an exacting
slave master, even if the translation reads servant instead of slave (both translations of the Greek word doulos).
In my past life as an uncritical, doctrinally circumscribed,
and passive bible reader whose consciousness about oppressions in the text, beyond the
issue of women called to preach, had not been raised, I would have read the
text without blinking. And no
doubt many of my students will read such texts without critique and without a
second thought (just as many seminarians revert to using nonexclusive language
in their sermons and writing). But some will be uncomfortable, at the least. And they should be uncomfortable with
such “texts of terror” (a phrase derived from Phyllis Trible), for slavery
often allowed for the social and bodily dismemberment of people as well as the
brutal rape and murder of human beings considered as property to be bought,
sold, used, and abused at will. And
ancient Roman slavery was no less brutal and inhumane than slavery in any other
slave society. Slavery in any context is an ideologically justified systemic
and institutionalized commodification of human beings who are seized,
dehumanized, brutalized, and sexually abused; it involves the exacting of under-
or unpaid-labor from one human being by another. Slavery is no less terrorizing than the rape and
dismemberment of a Levite’s concubine wife or a sister of Judah. Just because
it is in the Bible, does not make it okay. Just because some biblical writers
had no problem likening God/Jesus to a slave master, does not mean we should
not be bothered. If I have contributed to a student’s discomfort with “texts of
terror,” then my learning and teaching is not in vain.
