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Feminist Hermeneutics and Biblical Studies

Born and bred in a land of patriarchy, the Bible abounds in male imagery and language. For centuries interpreters have explored and exploited this male language to articulate theology; to shape the contours and content of the church, synagogue and academy; and to instinct human beings -- female and male -- in who they are, what roles they should play, and how they should behave. So harmonious has seemed this association of Scripture with sexism, of faith with culture, that only a few have even questioned it.

Within the past decade, however, challenges have come in the name of feminism, and they refuse to go away. As a critique of culture in light of misogyny, feminism is a prophetic movement, examining the status quo, pronouncing judgment and calling for repentance. In various ways this hermeneutical pursuit interacts with the Bible in its remoteness, complexity, diversity and contemporaneity to yield new understandings of both text and interpreter. Accordingly, I shall survey three approaches to the study of women in Scripture. Though these perspectives may also apply to “intertestamental” and New Testament literature, my focus is the Hebrew Scriptures.

When feminists first examined the Bible, emphasis fell upon documenting the case against women. Commentators observed the plight of the female in Israel. Less desirable in the eyes of her parents than a male child, a girl stayed close to her mother, but her father controlled her life until he relinquished her to another man for marriage. If either of these male authorities permitted her to be mistreated, even abused, she had to submit without recourse. Thus, Lot offered his daughters to the men of Sodom to protect a male guest (Gen. 19:8); Jephthah sacrificed his daughter to remain faithful to a foolish vow (Judg. 11:29-40); Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar (II Sam. 13); and the Levite from the hill country of Ephraim participated with other males to bring about the betrayal, rape, murder and dismemberment of his own concubine (Judg. 19). Although not every story involving female and male is so terrifying, the narrative literature nevertheless makes clear that from birth to death the Hebrew woman belonged to men.

What such narratives show, the legal corpus amplifies. Defined as the property of men (Exod. 20:17; Deut. 5:21), women did not control their own bodies. A man expected to marry a virgin, though his own virginity need not be intact. A wife guilty of earlier fornication violated the honor and power of both her father and husband. Death by stoning was the penalty (Deut. 22:13-21). Moreover, a woman had no right to divorce (Deut. 24:1-4) and, most often, no right to own property. Excluded from the priesthood, she was considered far more unclean than the male (Lev. 15). Even her monetary value was less (Lev. 27:1-7).

Clearly, this feminist perspective has uncovered abundant evidence for the inferiority, subordination and abuse of women in Scripture. Yet the approach has led to different conclusions. Some people denounce biblical faith as hopelessly misogynous, although this judgment usually fails to evaluate the evidence in terms of Israelite culture. Some reprehensibly use these data to support anti-Semitic sentiments. Some read the Bible as a historical document devoid of any continuing authority and hence worthy of dismissal. The “Who cares?” question often comes at this point. Others succumb to despair about the ever-present male power that the Bible and its commentators hold over women. And still others, unwilling to let the case against women be the determining word, insist that text and interpreters provide more excellent ways.

The second approach, then, grows out of the first while modifying it. Discerning within Scripture a critique of patriarchy, certain feminists concentrate upon discovering and recovering traditions that challenge the culture. This task involves highlighting neglected texts and reinterpreting familiar ones.

Prominent among neglected passages are portrayals of deity as female. A psalmist declares that God is midwife (Ps. 22:9-10):

Yet thou art the one who took me from the womb; thou didst keep me safe upon my mother’s breast.

In turn, God becomes mother, the one upon whom the child is cast from birth:

Upon thee was I cast from my birth,

and since my mother bore me thou hast

been my God.

Although this poem stops short of an exact equation, in it female imagery mirrors divine activity. What the psalmist suggests, Deuteronomy 32:18 makes explicit:

You were unmindful of the Rock that begot you

and you forgot the God who gave you birth.

Though the RSV translates accurately “the God who gave you birth,” the rendering is tame. We need to accent the striking portrayal of God as a woman in labor pains, for the Hebrew verb has exclusively this meaning. (How scandalous, then, is the totally incorrect translation in the Jerusalem Bible, “You forgot the God who fathered you.”). Yet another instance of female imagery is the metaphor of the womb as given in the Hebrew radicals rhm. In its singular form the word denotes the physical organ unique to the female. In the plural, it connotes the compassion of both human beings and God. God the merciful (rahum) is God the mother. (See, e.g., Jer. 31:15-22.) Over centuries, however, translators and commentators have ignored such female imagery, with disastrous results for God, man and woman. To reclaim the image of God female is to become aware of the male idolatry that has long infested faith.

If traditional interpretations have neglected female imagery for God, they have also neglected females, especially women who counter patriarchal culture. By contrast, feminist hermeneutics accents these figures. A collage of women in Exodus illustrates the emphasis. So eager have scholars been to get Moses born that they pass quickly over the stories that lead to his advent (Exod. 1:8-2:10). Two female slaves are the first to oppose the Pharaoh; they refuse to kill newborn sons. Acting alone, without advice or assistance from males, they thwart the will of the oppressor. Tellingly, memory has preserved the names of these women, Shiphrah and Puah, while obliterating the identity of the king so successfully that he has become the burden of innumerable doctoral dissertations. What these two females begin, other Hebrew women continue.

A woman conceived and bore a son and when she saw that he was a goodly child she hid him three months. And when she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds at the river’s bank. And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. [Exod. 2:2-4].

In quiet and secret ways the defiance resumes as a mother and daughter scheme to save their baby son and brother, and this action enlarges when the daughter of Pharaoh appears at the riverbank. Instructing her maid to fetch the basket, the princess opens it, sees a crying baby, and takes him to her heart even as she recognizes his Hebrew identity. The daughter of Pharaoh aligns herself with the daughters of Israel. Filial allegiance is broken; class lines crossed; racial and political difference transcended. The sister, seeing it all from a distance, dares to suggest the perfect arrangement: a Hebrew nurse for the baby boy, in reality the child’s own mother. From the human side, then, Exodus faith originates as a feminist act. The women who are ignored by theologians are the first to challenge oppressive structures.

Not only does this second approach recover neglected women, but also it reinterprets familiar ones, beginning with the primal woman in the creation story of Genesis 2-3. Contrary to tradition, she is not created the assistant or subordinate of the man. In fact, most often the Hebrew word ‘ezer (“helper”) connotes superiority (Ps. 121:2; 124:8; 146:5; Exod. 18:4; Deut. 33:7, 26, 29), thereby posing a rather different problem about this woman. Yet the accompanying phrase “fit for” or “corresponding to” (“a helper corresponding to”) tempers the connotation of superiority to specify the mutuality of woman and man.

Further, when the serpent talks with the woman (Gen. 3:1-5), he uses plural verb forms, making her the spokesperson for the human couple -- hardly the pattern of a patriarchal culture. She discusses theology intelligently, stating the case for obedience even more strongly than did God: “From the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, God said, ‘You shall not eat from it and you shall not touch it, lest you die.’” If the tree is not touched, then its fruit cannot be eaten. Here the woman builds “a fence around the Torah,” a procedure that her rabbinical successors developed fully to protect divine law and ensure obedience.

Speaking with clarity and authority, the first woman is theologian, ethicist, hermeneut and rabbi. Defying the stereotypes of patriarchy, she reverses what the church, synagogue and academy have preached about women. By the same token, the man “who was with her” (many translations omit this crucial phrase) throughout the temptation is not morally superior but rather belly-oriented. Clearly this story presents a couple alien to traditional interpretations. In reclaiming the woman, feminist hermeneutics gives new life to the image of God female.

These and other exciting discoveries of a counter-literature that pertains to women do not, however, eliminate the male bias of Scripture. In other words, this second perspective neither disavows nor neglects the evidence of the first. Instead, it functions as a remnant theology.

The third approach retells “biblical stories of terror in memoriam, offering sympathetic readings of abused women. If the first perspective documents misogyny historically and sociologically, this one appropriates such evidence poetically and theologically. At the same time, it continues to look for the remnant in unlikely places.

The betrayal, rape, murder and dismemberment of the concubine in Judges 19 is a striking example. When wicked men of the tribe of Benjamin demand to “know” her master, he instead throws the concubine to them. All night they ravish her; in the morning she returns to her master. Showing no pity, he orders her to get up and go. She does not answer, and the reader is left to wonder if she is dead or alive. At any rate, the master puts her body on a donkey and continues the journey. When the couple arrive home, the master cuts the concubine in pieces, sending them to the tribes of Israel as a call to war against the wrong done to him by the men of Benjamin.

At the conclusion of this story, Israel is instructed to “consider, take counsel, and speak” (Judg. 19: 30). Indeed, Israel does reply -- with unrestrained violence. Mass slaughter follows; the rape, murder and dismemberment of one woman condones similar crimes against hundreds and hundreds of women. The narrator (or editor) responds differently, however, suggesting the political solution of kingship instead of the anarchy of the judges (Judg. 12:25). This solution fails. In the days of David there is a king in Israel, and yet Amnon rapes Tamar. How, then, do we today hear this ancient tale of terror as the imperatives “consider, take counsel and speak” address us? A feminist approach, with attention to reader response, interprets the story on behalf of the concubine as it calls to remembrance her suffering and death.

Similarly, the sacrifice of the daughter of Jephthah documents the powerlessness and abuse of a child in the days of the judges (Judg. 11). No interpretation can save her from the holocaust or mitigate the foolish vow of her father. But we can move through the indictment of the father to claim sisterhood with the daughter. Retelling her story, we emphasize the daughters of Israel to whom she reaches out in the last days of her life (Judg. 11:37). Thus, we underscore the postscript, discovering in the process an alternative translation.

Traditionally, the ending has read, “She [the daughter] had never known man. And it became a custom in Israel that the daughters of Israel went year by year to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in the year” (11:40). Since the verb become, however, is a feminine form (Hebrew has no neuter), another reading is likely: “Although she had never known a man, nevertheless she became a tradition [custom] in Israel. From year to year the daughters of Israel went to mourn the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite, four days in the year.” By virtue of this translation, we can understand the ancient story in a new way. The unnamed virgin child becomes a tradition in Israel because the women with whom she chooses to spend her last days do not let her pass into oblivion; they establish a living memorial. Interpreting such stories of terror on behalf of women is surely, then, another way of challenging the patriarchy of Scripture.

I have surveyed three feminist approaches to the study of women in Scripture. The first explores the inferiority, subordination and abuse of women in ancient Israel. Within this context, the second pursues the counterliterature that is itself a critique of patriarchy. Utilizing both of these approaches, the third retells sympathetically the stories of terror about woman. Though intertwined, these perspectives are distinguishable. The one stressed depends on the occasion and the talents and interests of the interpreter. Moreover, in its work, feminist hermeneutics embraces a variety of methodologies and disciplines. Archaeology, linguistics, anthropology and literary and historical criticism all have contributions to make. Thereby understanding of the past increases and deepens as it informs the present.

Finally, there are more perspectives on the subject of women in Scripture than are dreamt of in the hermeneutics of this article. For instance, I have barely mentioned the problem of sexist translations which, in fact, is receiving thoughtful attention from many scholars, male and female. But perhaps I have said enough to show that in various and sundry ways feminist hermeneutics is challenging interpretations old and new. In time, perhaps, it will yield a biblical theology of womanhood (not to be subsumed under the label humanity) with roots in the goodness of creation female and male. Meanwhile, the faith of Sarah and Hagar, Naomi and Ruth, the two Tamars and a cloud of other witnesses empowers and sobers the endeavor.

Old Testament Ethics

In discussing Old Testament ethics, we are not faced with the usual problem of trying to pick out a consensus from a welter of diverging viewpoints and methods. If only there were such an abundance of careful studies on biblical ethics, we would find ourselves in the luxurious position of highlighting the helpful approaches, discarding those which are problematic, and generally drawing together the “assured results” of scholarship.

When one considers how often people invoke biblical teachings in matters of morality, it seems that biblical ethics would be an inviting terrain for scholars to explore. Yet there is a perplexing scarcity of comprehensive, systematic studies of the material. Several general treatments of Old Testament ethics appeared around the beginning of this century -- W. S. Bruce’s in 1895, Archibald Duff’s in 1902, Hinckley G. Mitchell’s in 1912, and J. M. Powis Smith’s in 1923. But to my knowledge the only study devoted to Old Testament ethics since 1923 is a German monograph of less than 200 pages, written in 1967 by Hendrik van Oyen as part of a series on the general history of ethics in the West. The situation is only slightly better in the field of New Testament studies, although there also the several systematic overviews are all rather too concise.

When biblical scholars have interested themselves in ethical studies, they have tended to focus on rather specific, narrow topics: social justice, the status of women, war, vengeance, property rights, ecological concern for nature and the like. Many also address problems tangential to ethics: social structures, political organization and control, economic systems, the ethos and the world view of the people, theological interpretations of moral issues and much more. What is missing is the effort to bring these aspects together and to examine the ways in which they interrelate in a general system of ethics.

Perhaps we can find part of the reason for this lack in a statement made by ethicist James Gustafson: biblical ethics, he observed, is in itself “a complex task for which few are well prepared; those who are specialists in ethics generally lack the intensive and proper training in biblical studies, and those who are specialists in biblical studies often lack sophistication in ethical thought” (“The Place of Scripture in Christian Ethics: A Methodological Study,” Interpretation 24 [1970], p. 430). A person venturesome enough to engage in interdisciplinary work runs the risk of being tagged a dilettante by colleagues in each discipline. But the root problem is how to conceive and conduct the work. Biblical studies and ethics do not mate easily; each has a quite different purpose, method, set of presuppositions and subject matter.

One way to demonstrate both the dilemma and the possibilities of biblical ethics is to retrace my own efforts to acquire an understanding of the field. From my first exposure to the critical study of the Old Testament in seminary, I found certain of its moral teachings and its general view of humanity and community attractive, indeed compelling. Yet like most seminary students I had little more than the standard introductory courses in ethics, and nothing at all in biblical ethics specifically. My graduate training focused almost entirely on. the Old Testament itself, again with no attention to its ethics but with much work on its theology. It was not until a few years into my teaching career that I was able to indulge my fancy by teaching a trial course at the seminary and graduate levels. That I survived that first stumbling attempt to put together an overall approach to biblical ethics -- indeed to experiment with whether there could be said to exist such a discipline -- I owe to the goodwill of those first students.

What I needed was a second graduate education in ethics. I decided instead to devote a sabbatical in 1976 to as much reading in the field as I could manage. With the advice of some colleagues I tackled a mass of materials ranging from Aristotelian ethics to contemporary analytical philosophy and phenomenological thought. The readings included key contributions in both philosophical and theological ethics. I sought to familiarize myself with these intellectual traditions, to ascertain what were the recurrent issues in the study of ethics and to identify categories and methods which could be helpful in conducting a study of biblical ethics.

This reading had a rather sobering effect on me, and I was tempted to abandon the whole project. What I discovered was that there is no generally accepted definition of the field of ethics, nor any widely practiced method for “doing” ethics. To my knowledge, there is no other field in which graduate students, often at the point of their doctoral examinations, are expected to define their discipline -- both its subject matter and the viable ways to approach it.

Actually, this is not an inherent weakness; more disciplines could benefit from the kind of self-criticism that ethics applies to its presuppositions, purposes and analytical means.

An obvious change in the study of religious ethics during the past couple of decades is its drift from its traditional moorings in the study of theology. This change is reflected in the curricula of many seminaries and divinity schools today: ethics has achieved an independent existence as a department or area of study. To be sure, many theologians and other nonethicists cannot understand this shift and are still reluctant to grant ethics separate status. Does not ethics serve as the practical application of theological truths?

Most ethicists seem unwilling to view the matter this simplistically. They must often make use of several nontheological disciplines in their work, such as sociology, anthropology, economics, jurisprudence, political science, philosophy and phenomenology. They may frequently engage moral questions in institutional contexts where the theological warrants for a specific ethical issue may not be honored -- as when they advise on matters of medical ethics, public policy and ecological practice. In addition, an apparent shift in the self-understanding of the field of ethics has occurred.

Ethicists today consider their area not just the normative task of what people ought to do and why but also the analytic and descriptive enterprise of how and why people in fact do act. Ethics entails critical reflection on the social dimensions of moral behavior, the constitution of meaning by both the individual and the group, the identification of values underlying moral action, the use of warrants in grounding these values, the operation of norms and principles in a changing and diversified world and similar issues. By no means are all ethical studies devoted to such theoretical matters, yet even the many books and articles that deal with some specific moral problem will typically address these general matters in the course of their discussions. The aim is to understand moral action in the total context of human existence, that is, in light of all the individual, social and environmental factors affecting it. For Christian ethics, the effort is to determine how certain moral behavior is consistent with, or even perhaps required by, the tenets of Christian faith.

At the outset we must recognize that the Bible is neither an ethical treatise nor a handbook of morals. For that matter, it can scarcely be considered a theological work -- that is, a critical, systematic study of the deity and of the relationship between the divine sphere and all other spheres of existence. Rather, the Bible is a gathering of traditional materials that gradually emerged among the people of ancient Israel and early Christianity and eventually became their authoritative statements about their God, the nature of their believing community and their terms for living. Morality and ethics, like religion and theology, are observable in this literature, but they can be recovered only with a method capable of identifying moral values in what began as folk or community literature before it was made normative as religious canon. How this task should be approached is at present a completely open question, and one that unfortunately is scarcely being addressed.

One can gain a helpful starting point from the influential article on “Contemporary Biblical Theology” by Krister Stendahl in the first volume of the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (Abingdon, 1962). Dealing with theology, Stendahl argues that the modern student of the Bible must distinguish clearly between the descriptive task and the hermeneutic task: between “What did the text mean?” and “What does it mean?” In ethics we would express this distinction in terms of the descriptive enterprise and the normative enterprise. It should be obvious enough -- but seems not to be to some --that one should first take pains to describe and understand the ethics of the ancient document and the people who produced it, before trying to appropriate moral norms and directives of the Bible for today.

Because there has been so little comprehensive work on the ethics of the Old Testament, it would be premature to indicate any trends in understanding it. We can, however, itemize several elements that converge to make up the descriptive task, taking our examples from Old Testament materials.

1. Most important are the moral norms and teachings in biblical literature. As central as they are, however, they are not theoretical absolutes. They are attached to explicit moral problems such as adultery, war, punishment, parent-child relations, the oppressed or defenseless in society and the use of property. The prophets often make sweeping statements about social justice, but there are always specific injustices they are trying to combat -- sometimes through rhetorical overstatement. In other words, the prophets seem to have certain general ethical principles or values in mind, yet they speak mainly in terms of concrete moral norms about specific conduct. It remains an open question whether it is the general values or the specific norms that are the universals -- if either is. By focusing on the moral dilemmas that the biblical generations faced, we can take a first step toward determining how principles and norms function in the moral life.

2. The sociohistorical context for both these moral problems and moral norms is crucial if we are to understand what the Bible is advocating ethically. After nearly a century of form criticism, all students of the Bible are aware how much the ancient social situation affected the meaning of the literature that grew up in its midst. Ethicists must look not only at the Israelite context but also at the moral values of the surrounding culture or cultures on any given moral point, for often the biblical position is taken in direct response to some contrary moral behavior.

For example, the Old Testament retains a largely disparaging ethic concerning the status and rights of women. Women were under all the obligations of the law but shared in few of the social and religious prerogatives. Yet while no excuse can be offered for the biblical ethic at this point, at least the historical and social reasons for it can be understood. Ancient Israel and its neighbors constituted a patriarchal world; at some points Egypt and Babylonia granted slightly more rights to women than did Israel. But by understanding the moral norms in Israel and early Christianity as natural products of their times, we are able to look beyond them for indications of a higher, liberating view of women. Such a critical analysis has been done by several scholars, notably Phyllis Trible in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Fortress, 1978).

3. Because we cannot directly observe the behavior of biblical people or interview them about their moral values and principles, it is all the more important to study the biblical forms of moral discourse -- the many ways in which these values and judgments are expressed. Some of these principles will be stated quite explicitly, from the sentence “Such a thing is not done in Israel” (II Sam. 13:12), to the descriptions of the prudent and virtuous life according to the wisdom tradition, to the unequivocal criticisms of the prophets. In other cases moral action will be promoted through persuasion, as in the way clauses are frequently added to laws and injunctions in order to motivate the people to conduct themselves in a certain manner (as in “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land,” Exod. 20:12). More subtle is the use of narratives (e.g., the stories about Abraham, David or the wilderness generation) to serve as paradigms of moral or immoral behavior.

4. The ancient people, like many today, would not be prone to distinguish sharply between morality and religion. What is morally right to do is so because God wills it or because it is consistent with the divinely ordained structure of the world. Consequently, it is especially important in biblical ethics to determine the theological warrants for morality. This includes the specific appeals made to God’s will as well as the general theological beliefs which serve to validate the content of the moral teachings. For example, even though the laws in the Pentateuch probably emerged gradually over the course of centuries as people sought ways to live in community, what does it mean that these laws became viewed as stemming directly from God at one point in the life of Moses? Or again, note that God is normally pictured as the supreme practitioner of the morality which humans must follow -- but that, in an interesting twist, Abraham (in Gen. 18:25), Job and others can step forward and remind God to do what is right. Such matters as revelation, divine activity, theodicy and eschatology will all be pertinent in understanding how the Old Testament theologizes its ethic.

5. An essential part of ethics is the particular view taken of moral agency. What is the nature of humanity according to the biblical tradition? Is it possible for us to know and do the good, and therefore should each person be held fully responsible for all actions and choices? Or does the human have certain inherent characteristics and external influences which call for a more cautious estimation of each person’s responsibility for moral behavior? Furthermore, to what extent is it even appropriate for us to single the individual out? Does not the Old Testament frequently view the whole community as a “moral agent”?

There will likely be quite different answers to these questions in different sections of the Bible. Within the Old Testament, for example, it appears that humans are in a position to know and do the good because of what they have experienced in their past history, but that they too often choose the wrong course nonetheless. Yet this is not because they are evil or because there is some malevolent force loose in the world that subverts people’s best intentions. According to the opening chapters of Genesis, humanity and all the world are created good -- but humans repeatedly choose, as they are free to do, a course which yields disruption, alienation and chaos. Yet there is no end to God’s attempts to reform them, both as individuals and as a community. This divine/human drama lies at the center of the Bible.

6. Inevitably, ethics involves the problem of authority. How is it that ancient Israel and early Christianity tried to secure conformity to certain moral practices and avoidance of others? Of course, the above-mentioned issue of theological warrants will loom large at this point, as will the forms of moral discourse employed in engendering and interpreting moral behavior. But one must also consider the roles played by institutions (the cult, the school, the court of law, the state), family and kinship groups and key leaders (including the prophets and the sages). Furthermore, it is very important to consider tradition in this regard; that is, the way in which the heritage from the past functions for each new generation -- sometimes being appropriated rather fully, sometimes being rejected or ignored and other times being creatively reinterpreted in the new situation. Values, attitudes and lifestyles can often be instilled in the succeeding generation by subtle means of inculcation and regimentation. The subtle as well as the more obvious techniques of persuasion, coercion and legal controls are part of the functioning of morality.

7. Finally, at the very heart of biblical ethics lie the fundamental values that infuse moral conduct and principles. These are not the first but rather among the last things that the ethicist will be able to determine. Such moral values involve an essential preference given to a particular way of existing in the world. Values are not the same thing as religious beliefs or practices, although they will be related to them. Values are also not mere ideas. They are oriented toward the concrete conditions of life and lie behind our choosing, acting and finding meaning in our situation.

Among such fundamental values observable in Old Testament morality are the following: affirmation of the goodness of life in this world (thus the Old Testament offers us more of a this-worldly than an otherworldly or eschatological ethic); the importance of viability for all members of society (thus a decisive stand against oppression or exploitation which restricts human fulfillment) the priority of good relationships (thus the importance of life in community and, consequently, of social ethics); and the preference for prudence and moderation (thus an ethic which seeks happiness and fulfillment not in excesses but in a deliberative, responsible lifestyle). Such values, while not all present at every point of Old Testament morality, do in fact underlie the bulk of the moral norms and principles we find there. Walter Harrelson’s recent book on The Ten Commandments and Human Rights (Fortress, 1980) provides a perceptive discussion of how important such basic values are.

The above-mentioned seven subjects together give us access to biblical ethics. Fortunately, there had already been substantial work done separately in nearly all of these areas. We have made real gains in understanding the historical context of ancient Israel, the literary forms of the Bible, the nature of tradition and the theological beliefs of the people. What now needs to be done is to examine these various areas together explicitly in terms of ethics.

I have already said that biblical ethics is primarily a descriptive discipline. The question of how biblical ethics can or should be used in facing today’s moral problems is a second stage which Christian and Jewish ethicists address. This problem of appropriation is a vital one. Unfortunately, the Bible has too often been exploited to support slavery and the denigration of women in society; to advance simplistic solutions to such issues as homosexuality, abortion and capital punishment; to deprive citizens of free choice, as in governing the consumption of alcoholic beverages; to do battle against science and the theory of evolution; to legitimate war, economic exploitation and rape of the land.

Partly because of such misuse and the potential for more healthy appropriation, ethicists recently have been giving more attention to the question of how the Bible can be used in moral decision-making. It may be sufficient simply to mention the names of some who have published on this matter: H. Richard Niebuhr, James Gustafson, Edward Leroy Long, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Bruce Birch and Larry Rasmussen, H. Edward Everding and Dana Wilbanks. The task of biblical application is one of the more immediate and sensitive problems which clergy and laity face daily.

On the basis of my own work in descriptive biblical ethics I can tentatively suggest a different avenue for this normative question than has been taken so far. The accent in appropriation should perhaps fall much more on the fundamental values in biblical ethics than on the specific moral norms and directives that we meet on the surface level of the text. Not only will this approach allow us to overcome the manipulation which can occur when one arbitrarily chooses one text over another on a given moral problem, but it also respects the very real cultural differences that exist between our age and antiquity. When those fundamental values are translated into concrete moral choice, the resulting norm may in fact differ from one historical situation to another -- from the premonarchic agricultural setting in Israel to the affluence of the eighth century to the period of Hellenistic or Roman domination to today’s secularized society. Affirmation of life, of human fulfillment, of good relationships, of prudent living -- all such basic values can find new, creative application in each generation. Thus the particular historical exigencies and social possibilities in our own age will necessarily affect the ways in which these values are translated into norms on such issues as women’s rights, sexual ethics, social justice, property rights, energy policy or ecological concerns. The “biblical ethic for today,” therefore, will not be readily apparent until one examines the present situation in order to see which course of action the biblical values seem to encourage now.

The process of appropriation is anything but a facile operation. It requires critical insight concerning our contemporary situation as well as a sensitive understanding of what was ethically at stake in the biblical world. Biblical scholars in the coming years can contribute to carrying out this task.

Ecology and the Fall

Those leaves

They gathered, broad as Amazonian targe,

And with what skill they had together sewed,

To gird their waist -- vain covering if to hide

Their guilt and dreadful shame; O how unlike

To that first naked glory. Such of late

Columbus found the American so girt

With feathered cincture, naked else and wild

Among the trees on isles and woody shores.

-- Paradise Lost, by John Milton.

In this generation Americans have awakened to a traumatic sense of guilt over the damage we have done to our environment. The veil has been torn from our past, and we start in astonishment to see the awesome downhill sweep of ecological history. After decades of thoughtless waste and destruction, we have come to the belated perception of a sort of cosmic Fall. As a popular song simplistically puts it, we’ve paved Paradise and put in a parking lot.

Unlike the Garden of Eden, pre-Columbian or pre-industrial America is accessible not merely through myths, but through the historical imagination. We have all sorts of records, from fossils to photographs, of what the country was like before we ravaged it. As late as the 19th century, artists like Audubon or Catlin or Bierstadt could venture into the wilderness and bring back pictures of a teeming paradise. Even today a traveler to the national parks from any blighted city or countryside might get an impression of escaping from a world of physical and moral filth into one of primal innocence. These bits of Eden make our Fall seem poignantly close, almost within the reach of memory.

But nostalgia is playing tricks on us. The Fall did not occur in 1492 or 1620 -- though the arrival of the white man certainly spelled catastrophe for the land -- or in 1849 or any such date. The fact is that human presence on this continent has always been more or less disruptive, and the first migrants to cross the Bering Straits brought trouble with them. In the Pleistocene period over 100 species of large animals disappeared, probably, as Paul Martin has shown, because of wasteful hunting methods. And even though their scanty numbers and lack of technology greatly softened their impact on nature, in their modest way Amerindians too plundered the world around them (by killing eagles to make head-dresses, for example).

So we can reach a state of paradisiacal purity only if we erase humanity from the picture entirely. However much human settlements may enhance nature in certain cases, they also inevitably cause it to deteriorate. Civilization has its costs. Roads smother the land they cover, books doom the trees they are made from. Not all this damage is permanent, of course, and much of it is in part desirable; yet, after all allowances have been made, an irreducible mass of evil remains. We are all sinners -- in this, theology and ecology agree.

The Fall itself resulted from’ man’s abortive endeavor to seize godhead for himself. In setting him over the plants and animals, God had already given him power and responsibility, but that was not enough. He wanted to know (i.e., be arbiter of) good and evil, to treat the earth as if he were its only Lord. This attempt to deny creaturehood has been the root of ecological havoc. Man the strip-miner, like man the "developer" and man the chemical farmer, makes money the criterion for whatever he does to the earth, because he thinks of himself as above and beyond it,

Now we always put one artificial construction or other upon nature, for such is our postlapsarian nature. To be human as we know it is to interfere, to try to remold reality nearer to the heart’s desire. We may resist this inclination, but only up to a point. We have left the womb of nature, and there is no going back. It is impossible for us to will exactly what nature wills -- only animals can, because they aren’t free. We shall never achieve unison with nature (except perhaps in death), nor would we want to. What we can do is strive to lower the dissonance -- to efface not original sin (since that is conterminous with humanity) but its effects.

And even in that we can go only so far, this side of universal redemption. For, like every other human activity, love of nature is conditioned by the Fall. We cannot become aware of natural beauty unless we have experienced alienation from it, just as moral consciousness comes only after breaking the law, or as consciousness tout court requires separation from its object. One cannot simultaneously love nature and be a part of it. Bighorn sheep don’t pause to admire the Rockies.

In other words, appreciation must be paid for by pain. Only someone oppressed by the crowds and ugliness of the city could long for wild places. Only someone disgusted with the mindless exploitation of nature could feel the urge to lose himself or herself in virgin territory. From the very beginning the rise in ecological consciousness has matched the decline in the quality of life. Walden starts out from the realization that the world of getting and spending is insane.

We are not simply nature’s exiles; we are also its enemies. The Fall has laid a hereditary curse on us which works two ways. First, nature is hostile to us and frustrates our designs. "Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your ‘life." This curse holds for everyone: even the most ecstatic naturalist steers clear of grizzly bears and poison ivy. Second, we, whether we like it or not, are hostile to nature. To live in the world is to pollute it. Every time we flush the toilet or turn the ignition key or put the garbage out, we contribute to the mess. As the world is constituted, we can’t avoid that.

This unhappy truth, sometimes smudged over by conservationists, has not escaped their enemies. Oil-company representatives clamor about the need

for jobs and energy, and damn their opponents as selfish elitists. They conveniently dichotomize all land-use decisions as people versus scenery or hungry workers versus idle back-packers. TV commercials cast a heroic light on engineers toiling on the Alaska pipeline or offshore oil rigs, suggesting that Exxon, unlike those environmental fanatics, is pitching in to help the people. The various friends of the earth" counter -- and rightly so -- that this self-serving rhetoric mocks the public interest. Surely we know by now that short-term profits from raping nature turn into dreadful long-term losses. Why drain the Everglades to fill condominium swimming pools?

But, for all this, there’s no point in pretending that a perfect solution can be found to the conflict between humankind and nature. Something has to suffer. The Great Plains can’t swarm with bison and enormous herds of cattle. The anticonservationists are right: ecology does in some ways downgrade humanity. Like religion it bids us abdicate our claim to sovereign mastery, and respect a transcendent reality. As a matter of fact, this approach generally makes more hard sense than greedy exploitation, but it’s still not truly practical. "Practical attitudes" toward nature lead to things like tree-farming and game management, whereas the religiously minded ecologist (the so-called "preservationist") wants to leave nature alone, even if this approach hinders economic expansion.

This determination to live with nature so far as possible rather than rule over it is not just an aesthetic preference, a taste for wilderness instead of gardens. It is a bowing down to the mana that flows through the universe, a reverence for life. Nature is not just the supreme datum: it is also the eternal unknown, the first and greatest mystery. So if, as John Passmore says, philosophy insists that animals have no rights, ecology will give them some anyway.

The ecologist attacks the familiar picture of creation as a pyramid of power with the human being at its lonely apex. In the first place, our omnipotence is illusory, since we are totally dependent upon the earth. In the second place, there are, as the transcendentalists claimed, "higher laws" -- higher than brute force and selfish cunning. Of course these laws can be grasped only by intuitive faith -- which is why ecology has become a religion, and why the battle over mundane issues like dams or highways is at bottom a holy war.

III

The religious impulse of the ecological movement explains both its popularity -- it satisfies a basic human need -- and the uncertainty of its future. In a world governed by Realpolitik, religion is always threatened. Since we can’t even guarantee that enlightened egotism will save the world from a nuclear doomsday, what will prevent the earth from turning into a gigantic feedlot for 40 or more billion people?

What indeed? Ever since the Enlightenment there has been a progressive tendency to deny original sin as an offense to human dignity, and to promote experiments in reaching for divinity. Many of these have failed catastrophically, but the attempts go on. It may be that the time has come for a broad recognition of the ecological Fall. It’s certain in any case that there can be no salvation, even piecemeal salvation, without "conviction" of sin. We can’t begin to rescue what’s left of the land till we have a common consciousness of our radical guilt toward it. That may be a lot to ask for, but nothing less will do.

The Last Passage: Re-visioning Dying, Death, and Funeral

Recently my aging parents visited my home in California. My mother brought along precious tapes and asked me to transfer them to cassettes which she could play on the small machine I gave her last Christmas. The reels she had packed in her suitcase were stories of our family. Mostly they were rites of passage: a memorial service for my brother, who died in Vietnam; weddings, an ordination, a first sermon.

My parents had only three days to spend with me before busing on to Texas to visit my sister. There was much to talk about, especially my parents’ celebration of their 50th wedding anniversary in the summer. But it was the tapes that preoccupied my mother. She seemed relieved and satisfied when the transcribing was finally completed. Now her precious cargo was accessible to her.

I suppose the tapes will keep her company while she irons or makes quilts and clothing for Lutheran World Relief. Even my father may stay awake after long hours at the store to grieve again his older boy’s death or to celebrate his younger daughter’s wedding.

As I struggled with aging tape recorders and connecting jacks that would not fit together, this taping project seemed an insignificant but annoying task to me. But my mother was insistent. She was the custodian of these memories, the keeper of the family story. Later I wondered whether she was also putting things in order for handing on. It was no accident that I, the surviving son, was asked to monitor this transmission from tape to tape. It was a rehearsal. My mother is a biblical woman. “You shall tell these things in the ears of your children.” I loved her persistence and my father’s eloquent stillness at this time.

So many passages here! What are my parents doing, and what am I doing? I recall how I cried when my own family recorded our Christmas tape to be sent back to Nana and Grandpa. I come to see now that in my mother’s taping project I am helping her tell the family story, aiding her in what she must accomplish. My parents are beginning their eventual last passage, and I am invited to be an oarsman.

I have learned about passages from them. Indeed, my mother keeps my own passages closet to her heart than I do. The congratulation cards and crisp five-dollar bills arrive from Iowa to mark my milestones. When the last passage comes for them, as it already has with cruel unexpectedness for my brother, the family will know how to act, how to keep community, how to tell our story. My parents have taught us well to own our history, to hold it in treasure. When they die, we shall weave the plot lines to their conclusion, as we already have learned to do.

But what of other people? What of those who want to recover the last passage, but do not know how? Is it possible, even in our culture, to revision death, to recover the last passage? Could we help people learn to tell publicly who they have been, what they have wanted to mean? Is there a language, are there rituals to aid this recovery?

I want us to recover the last passage. I want to evoke a vision of how we could again, or for the first time, take hold of our living and dying and death and distill it into a fitting memorial.

There are obstacles to such a venture. The decline of “public man,” the loss of a language that can bear larger meanings, the neglect of ritual and symbol in a technological and alienated culture, the privatization of life pilgrimage, the professionalization and marketing of this and other passages. All these have contributed to the destruction of the rich culture and religious grounding necessary for meaningful passages. This trend has left the poor and marginal with nothing; others are offered banality.

But hopeful signs are emerging. The death-awareness movement of the past two decades has awakened consciousness, even if there remain a disturbing superficiality and a too-frequent satisfaction with technique rather than depth. I want to call us to pilgrimage, not tourism. Our growing wish to take charge of our lives, from creating our weddings to laying hold of participatory democracy, could reach fruition in our taking ownership of last passages. The hospice movement is another promising sign. The fact and possibility of mass death in our time may also evoke reflection on our living and dying; but it may also cause us, like frightened turtles, to withdraw our awareness and hide.

I suppose I should like to provide a magic flute for this passage. Even in our age of parapsychology and back-from-the-dead experiences, it does not seem likely that we shall plumb the beyond, make it graspable or even name it, except in those symbolic terms which have always been the significant contribution of religion. We in religious communities should help the common person with his consent at this time of life, her saying of the Yes that this rite of passage requires. To offer consent is a thoughtful act, a wager with meaning, a continuation of life story. The last passage as reflective, verbal enactment can evoke the meaningfulness that lies waiting to be discovered in our lives; that enactment can enrich human culture. As the struggles and celebrations of last passages seep into our common awareness, the level of spirit among us can be lifted up. We can be called to remark on mystery. This is a promise to keep.

A recent study shows that Jamaican women who have suffered the loss of a child tend to increase the size of their families by a factor of 2.6 times the average. What strange cultural artifact is this! Is this a wrestling with God, a struggling with the unknown, a form of social security? I think we must help people re-vision the funeral as a time for cultural outpouring. Let the last passage be a takeoff point from which we pour our spirits into the universe, thereby rooting ourselves in the larger human community. As Karl Rahner writes in On the Theology of Death (Seabury, 1973), “It is in death, and only in death, that man enters into an open, unrestricted relationship to the cosmos as a whole, that he is integrated, as a constant and determining factor. into the world as a whole, through his own total reality achieved in his life and death” (p. 63). I see people making great the truth of their lives by the size of their wonder.

I am calling us to help people with their stories. Although the theology of story has occupied theologians in recent years, none has taken the step to encourage men and women specifically to plan a last passage rite which will become the end of their story. No one has helped them plan for the time when they will draw the plot lines together as best they can, and have others who are remembering their passing say the lines -- and add their own. I have in mind something akin to the grief quilts women once created, for husbands, for children, for themselves, out of the diverse fabrics of lives lived. A grieving mother made a quilt with patches from all the colorful garb of her now departed young daughter. As the quilt took shape, the daughter’s purpose and vitality could come alive right there on the mother’s lap.

I am calling for more participation in such a quilting, and for quilts that celebrate as well as grieve. We need to be delivered from reductionism. The triteness of so many weddings, the sterility of so many funerals is appalling. One would think us humans simple beings; whereas to question our passages is to evoke mystery and wonder. The patches from our livings and our dyings guarantee that such a quilt will be rich in the commonalities of our everyday experiences. Such a celebration would touch the earth, if also summon the nightingale. There would be attention to the scenery against which our lives have been lived, the stage on which our lines have been spoken. In such a scenario we would not continue to seal off metaphysical concerns for the sake of dreamless childhoods or unhaunted middle ages. No, we would have learned to cultivate all the soil of our living and dying, the darker sides, too, and to pour our unutterable yearnings into cultural and religious expression.

Perhaps most important, we in religious communities need to invite people to see this rite of last passage as a possibility for completion, an opportunity to reach a sense of integrity about relationships and commitments, a time for homecoming. How cold it sounds to speak of death as an “unscheduled status passage.” How warm it is to beckon people to complete their unfinished business and pass on with their houses in order.

What does it mean to reach completion? The last passage may be seen as a public reformulation of our beliefs, of our solidarity with the living, of the integrity of the human project, of the continuity of covenant and society. To reach completion is to give God due and give our humanity due. To finish with life is an act of construction, of creating meaning. For the survivors it is the careful maintenance of meaning. It is the professor’s last lecture, the father’s last song for his son, the young woman’s parsing of the grammar of her mother, herself.

We should be creating models for brief re-entries among the living before the longer exit. The hospice movement has enabled the dying to leave the premature burial of intensive-care units and nursing homes and re-enter a community of human touch and care. I am calling for a kind of re-entry, after death and through a rite of last passage, for the sake of mutual accompaniment. While we are living and certainly while we are dying, we lay the preparations for such an event. Such a last passage could help undo some of the most unfortunate aspects of our death-denying culture, including the medical mind-set which has focused on cure and not helped us recover the meaning of care Conquering is not all! Through re-entry the one who has died is transformed from pariah to worthy storyteller. “I am Ishmael and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

How is all this to be accomplished? We must seek a language of finitude and limit, of transcendental imagination, of wonder and mystery. We can recall the language in which human striving and the quest for ultimacy are conceived and brought to life again. It is possible to recover rather than repress the lines from the old prayer, “If I should die before I wake.” We must provide resources which will invite the simple or eloquent telling of what it means to be touched “by the love that moves the sun and other stars” or the grief that plumbs the soul’s abyss. There are elements to help us sound the overtones to the melody of life, elements to portray a transfigured night, elements for homecoming. We can model a communal reflection which occurs against a beckoning horizon of meaning.

In short, this is a call to awaken ordinary people to the possibility of creating their own memorial of their living and dying; a call to offer gifts to the future. It is a plea not to scorn ritual and leave the survivors with no path to follow. At the end, she shared her experiences and became useful again. Her hand was still warm so I took it and said good-bye. The last passage becomes a testament to the meanings we have found and a place of rest for travelers still on pilgrimage.

I would like to see awakened in churches, families, memorial societies and other institutions a thirst for such a project and a readiness to assist those who may wish to set out on it. The church, in particular, is a custodian of the language of transcendence, an heir to a rich tradition of rites of passage. I believe churches have hardly begun to offer their expertise, their inheritance, their faith, their care to their own members and to the community (which often comes calling in the time of death). We in religious communities have more to offer than rites lifted thoughtlessly from prayer books and stiffly performed in ways that really do not recognize the passing of a human person. It is time to create rich rites of passage which give God and the community and, the mourners and the one who has died their dues There are rich treasures to be unpacked. Perhaps there is a new readiness to appropriate them for a religious and cultural outpouring. Perhaps there are individuals and families who are ready to claim their own roles and participation in such rites. For once, let the churches lead!

Will Jesus Return? (No Trick Answers!)

A friend who wrote his master’s thesis on Paul Tillich was examined for ordination by a group of conservative Lutherans. For more than two hours he seemed to dance around such questions as the virgin birth and Jesus’ miracles. Finally one exasperated building contractor blurted out: “Mr. Johnson, did Jesus walk on water or did he not? No trick answers!”

Every Sunday many of us confess that we believe that Jesus “will come again to judge the living and the dead.” But what in the world do these words mean? When we say them, are we expressing anything more than a pious hope? Or might these words, quaint as they seem, be the most significant ones we can say?

No doubt it will seem like a trick answer to suggest that there is another question to answer before we consider how Jesus might return, which is “Do we human beings have a future?”

We all have fears about the future. Today Franklin Roosevelt would have to revise his words, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He spoke to a prenuclear age that had not yet discovered how to destroy life on earth wholesale. In 1933 we still had to go about killing people retail, with old-fashioned weapons.

George Kennan, author of the postwar “containment” policy toward the Soviet Union, recently wrote:

“We have gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructiveness upon old ones. We have done this helplessly, almost involuntarily . . . like men in a dream, like lemmings heading for the sea.” He says that the number of nuclear weapons has now reached “levels of redundancy of such grotesque dimensions as to defy rational understanding.”

Almost as disquieting as the threat of destruction itself is our feeling of helplessness and hopelessness. Protest marches, breaking and entering missile plants and damaging nose cones often seem futile. Little, it appears, can change the human race’s suicidal course. Americans seem committed to the philosophy “Better dead than red,” while Russians suffer from their own paranoia.

The nuclear paste is out of the tube. When we compare the massive technology of destruction with our paltry knowledge of peacemaking, the answer to whether or not we human beings have a future appears to be a rather convincing No. One possibility is that there is not a trick answer, but that the world itself is a trick. Someone said, “If there is a heaven and I get there, I am going to march right up to God and tell him: ‘You must have been kidding!’ ” But what if there is no heaven or hell and no cosmic complaint department? These who face this possibility and still live creative and contributory lives are surely saints without portfolio.

Another possibility is to rejoice with those who rejoice that the end is near. Despite all the predictions that have so far fallen short of the mark, many people insist that Jesus will return at any moment. The pre- and post-millennialists are all but selling tickets for an Apocalyptic Super Bowl. Hal Lindsey in The Late Great Planet Earth even calls in data from an oil company to support the return of Jesus:

Jesus’ feet will first touch the earth where they left the earth, on the Mount of Olives. The mountain will split in two with a great earthquake the instant Jesus’ foot touches it. The giant crevice which results will run east and west through the center of the mountain. It will go east to the north tip of the Dead Sea and west to the Mediterranean Sea (Zech. 14).

It was reported to me that an oil company doing seismic studies of this area in quest of oil discovered a gigantic fault running east and west precisely through the center, of the Mount of Olives. The fault is so severe that it could split at any time. It is awaiting the foot [p. 163].

We may reject Lindsay’s “foot eschatology,” but we still have a deep hope that creation and history have a destination and a fulfillment. We may dismiss the notion of Jesus coming like John Wayne, but if Jesus isn’t coming, who is? Our hope is in God alone. Nevertheless, this affirmation does not end our questioning, nor our speculation.

The real problem is not whether or not Jesus can return. We are Christians because we believe that God came to us in a special way in the First Advent. If he did it once, he can do it again. The problem is not so much mechanical as it is moral. If God has made a terrible bargain with himself not to override our human freedom, then on what basis does he decide when and how to send the Prince of Peace again? The catch-22 is that only Jesus can save us, but in order to do this, he seemingly has to save us from facing the consequences of our sin and disobedience. How does he save us without rewarding our irresponsibility, like a father giving his son a new car after he has totaled his old one?

Whatever God does, it will be an act of pure grace. After all our sin and rebellion, justice hardly demands that Jesus return to establish a “new heaven and a new earth where righteousness dwells.” But love, as only God is capable of loving, can “justify” such an action.

Jesus’ return is also God’s way of vindicating himself over the forces of evil, which have plagued us since the human race began. Only by returning can Jesus finish the work he began on the cross. The job is not done; evil has not been finally crushed. “It is finished” must be understood in light of the continuing battle with the demonic The cross was the beginning of the end, but the final triumph of Christus Victor is yet to come.

The doctrine, of the Second Advent goes to the heart of our understanding of God and how he deals with us. If we bomb-sick humans have painted ourselves into a corner, consider where this leaves God. For eons he brooded and labored over his creation until he produced human beings, with whom he could have fellowship. He gave to us the power to “satisfy the desire of every living thing”; instead, we are now bending all of our efforts toward destroying every living thing. We have the power to incinerate in an hour everything he took billions of years to create!

When I hold my first grandchild in my arms, I long to believe that she will grow up to have children of her own. But the odds seem against it. Clearly we need a miracle if we are to survive. God works his miracles through people, by sending his son, or his daughter.

Jesus’ return could mean the end of God’s agony and ecstasy in his grand experiment with human freedom. Have we now come to the place where we no longer choose good over evil and God must choose it for us? There is only one thing worse than my children leaving home and encountering all the risk and pain of being on their own, and that is for them not to leave home. The Second Advent means that we shall all return “home.” There is a great comfort in this, but there is also a great lament. Might we yet, with God’s hidden, hand guiding us, beat our swords into plowshares or even defuse our bombs? Whether Jesus returns in a day or in a thousand years, unless we are about peacemaking, everything else is moot.

The return of Jesus at this present time means that God has triumphed at last, but it could also mean that we human beings have failed. I find myself praying both that Jesus will come soon and that he will give us a little more time. But we have already been given more time than we imagine. When we consider Murphy’s Law (if anything can go wrong, it will), it seems it is only by God’s grace that we haven’t pressed the button for more than 36 years.

Then there is the old tension between present possibilities and future promises. If we believe that Jesus may return soon, there is a temptation to ease up on the struggle for peace and justice. One Lutheran seminarian recently warned a class on eschatology, “Be careful about preaching the imminent return of Jesus to a suburban congregation; they already know enough ways to avoid peace and justice issues.” Karl Marx’s word about religion as an opiate is not easily dismissed. Still, New Testament references to Jesus’ return are accompanied by injunctions to be found faithfully serving our neighbors (i.e., Matthew 24 and 25).

It is impossible to preach the First Advent and its consequences without reference to the Second Advent. In fact, the First Advent insists upon a Second Advent because clearly God has not yet finished the job. Without the Second Advent, we have to ask ourselves why Jesus bothered coming the first time. If he is not coming again, he has only set us up for a false hope, which is more cruel than no hope at all. But Jesus’ Second Advent is God’s victory over the death of the universe, just as the resurrection of Jesus is God’s victory over our personal death.

I don’t wish to give the building contractor any trick answers, but I offer the following for his consideration:

1. We Christians differ in our understanding of Jesus’ return, but we are united in the belief that the future is ultimately in the hands of God. We believe that “nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” If we believe that we have a future with God, we can believe in the Second Advent, whether it takes place on this earth or on a new earth.

2. If we could say Yes to Jesus walking on water or landing on the Mount of Olives, would this actually strengthen our faith that we have a future with God? Perhaps it would for some, while for others of us it raises more questions than it answers. But faith is not dependent upon prior understanding. Some of us have to settle for believing that Jesus will return without having the foggiest notion of how he will come.

3. More important than how Jesus will return is what we do with this belief. If it causes us to become indifferent to the care of the earth and to our sister and brother in need, then we have already denied what Jesus’ return means. It is ironic to pray for Jesus’ return and then to ignore him as he comes to us every day in the “least of these.” Better to turn our attention to where he has already told us he is -- with the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned -- than to spend our days looking for him in the sky.

St. Paul frequently, mentions the future, but never resolves its mystery. He deals best with such matters by quoting Isaiah:

No eye has seen, nor ear heard nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him [I Cor. 2:9].

Text:

And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and when they had made an opening, they let down the pallet on which the paralytic lay [Mark 2:3-4].

Except for Easter Sunday, perhaps, it’s not the press of overflowing crowds at the church door that keeps paralytics from getting inside. Today the Scripture might read: “And when they could not get near him because of the steps . . .”

In considering the role of congregations in relating to people with physical disabilities, and more specifically, people who need wheelchairs to get about, the key word to remember is “people.” So let me begin by telling you about one person who has been a patient at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago; her story may help us understand how we can help her and others like her.

I

Angela is 25 and is quadraplegic. Usually, if we see someone navigating a wheelchair on the sidewalks of our cities or towns, that someone is paraplegic, which means that the person is paralyzed from the waist down. Such a person has arm and hand movement and therefore can propel his or her own wheelchair along the sidewalks -- until reaching a high curb or pedestrian island.

People who are quadraplegic are rarely seen wheeling along sidewalks; they are paralyzed from the neck down, and most cannot operate a manual wheelchair with ease. There are more people like Angela every year. Not many years ago, most people who suffered accidents and injuries that could leave them quadraplegic did not survive. They broke their necks, and before they could reach a hospital they died.

But now paramedics are highly trained. A person who has sustained possible spinal cord injury in an automobile accident, for example, seldom is haphazardly placed on a stretcher and rushed to the nearest hospital; instead, he or she is carefully placed on a special mattress and helicoptered, if need be, to a regional spinal cord center where a team of orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons and other specially trained staff provide immediate lifesaving help.

Angela has been quadraplegic since she was injured in a diving accident almost ten years ago. In lay language, she broke her neck at the fifth cervical level. She is, in medicalese, a “C-5-quad” Her injury is permanent but not as bad as that of a “C-1” or “C-2” -- who is a “complete quad” and who may be barely living following an injury. As far as medical science can determine at this point, Angela probably will never walk or have complete arm and hand movement again.

She does have some arm movement -- called “gross” arm movement -- as do most people who are quadraplegic; they may even have some hand movement as well. The further away from “1” the number designation of the cervical injury, the better chance a person has of regaining more arm and hand movement. A “C-6-quad” has a better chance than a “C-4-quad,” for example.

Angela has enough gross arm movement to work an electric wheelchair. (For those who don’t, there are wheelchairs controlled by breath.) She wouldn’t be a star student in wheelchair driver’s ed, but she gets better with practice. However, when she wasn’t a patient at Rehab, she didn’t have much room to practice. She lived in a basement apartment with her father, and it’s not “handy” to tool up and down the steps in her electric wheelchair.

Angela is as beautiful as any high-fashion model. She has long lustrous black hair, a slender body, huge blue eyes and milk-white skin. She could have been a high school cheerleader, a fraternity princess, a serious ballet student. But, of course, she wasn’t. She has never had a date. And, sadly, Angela doesn’t ever expect to have a date.

I went to the beach the other day. My sister took me to the beach. The first time . . . in my wheelchair. It was warm and the sun felt good. I didn’t wear a bathing suit, of course. But then I began to watch all the other people running and playing and swimming. People my age. And suddenly I felt like a freak. I didn’t belong there. I was fooling myself. Who am I to think I can be normal, do normal things? I’m not normal. It was wrong. I shouldn’t have gone. I felt ugly and deformed -- and I am. And I started to cry and felt even worse and told my sister to take me home, where I belong.

About a year later, Angela summoned up a huge amount of courage and enrolled in a small religious college near her home. She would live on campus, and a friend who was transferring to the school would be her roommate and “attendant.”

II

That’s another thing you may need to know about people who are quadraplegic and about some people who are paraplegic: they need attendants. People who are quadraplegic cannot dress themselves completely or accomplish complete hygiene care; often they cannot comb their hair or brush their teeth or blow their nose -- or wipe away tears. Someone has to do these things for them. Also, there is usually no bladder or bowel control, so some people who are quadraplegic wear indwelling catheters connected to drainage bags. Others have bladder retraining programs. Bowel function also can be managed, so there rarely are any “embarrassing” moments. These are things no person who is quadraplegic likes, of course; but they are things he or she gets used to and knows how to manage, and those of us not directly involved in their personal care need not worry about them. People who are paraplegic may have the same body-function problems, but most often they can use washroom facilities -- if there is a wheelchair-accessible washroom where they are.

The attendant the person who helps a quadraplegic individual to dress and to take care of personal hygiene as needed -- is sometimes a family member, sometimes a friend, sometimes a trained employee; the latter is generally best. But it is not medically necessary that an attendant be with the quadraplegic person at every moment. This is important for all of us to remember: people who are quadraplegic or paraplegic, when otherwise healthy, are not in danger of momentarily going into a medical crisis.

So Angela, with her friend as roommate and attendant, went off to college. But unfortunately the college didn’t really know anything about quadraplegia and didn’t bother to find out. And Angela, pretty well sheltered so far in life, hadn’t developed the “worldliness” to make sure that the college got the necessary information. So when the attendant friend became overwhelmed with her commitment to Angela -- coupled with her pressured course load -- and could no longer cope, Angela had to leave college “until attendant care could be worked out.”

Rehab worked with Angela to help solve this problem. And Rehab tried to work with the small religious college also. But after encouraging Angela to leave “until the attendant problem could be worked out,” the college never answered any of Angela’s or Rehab’s letters or phone messages. It simply dumped her. It got scared of quadraplegia and it dumped her. It didn’t even have the courage to tell her so in letter or by telephone. Out of sight, out of mind. It ignored Angela as though she simply didn’t exist.

But she does. Angela is a person and she does exist. And so do thousands of other people who are quadraplegic. It will be a long time, however, before Angela tries to go to college again.

III

The part of me that is comfortable and happy in my job at Rehab wants to stand up on a soapbox and rail and scream and throw things at the religious people at that small religious college.

But the part of me that remembers what it was like to be new here and how uncomfortable and scared and unsure I felt when I first tried to talk with a severely disabled person in a wheelchair -- that part of me understands how the religious people at that small religious college felt. And how perhaps you and others feel who have never talked at length with or gotten to know someone who is quadraplegic or paraplegic.

I understand those feelings. But I can no longer accept them as cause for inaction. Because Angela and those like her are people just like me, their lives have forced me to ask myself some personal and scary questions. Knowing someone who is dying forces us to consider our own death. Knowing someone who is severely disabled forces us to consider the possibility of our own disablement.

For a long time after I came to Rehab I felt I’d rather be dead than be quadraplegic -- a hard thing to admit. To be the only chaplain in a 170-bed hospital filled with a great number of people who are quadraplegic; to try to help these people rediscover and/or redefine a life value and quality that they often feel has been lost; to grow to care greatly about these people; to do all these things and yet deep, deep inside, to feel that you would rather be dead than be quadraplegic -- that’s hard to admit.

But I admit it. I admit it because there are probably many other people -- ministers included -- who may feel the same way. And I admit it because once having done so, first to myself, I was forced to look at why I felt that way. In doing that, I learned something not only about myself but about disability and about the whole issue popular in Christian and medical ethics these days called “quality of life.”

In the medical/ethical area, the most popular quality-of-life issues for laypeople are those surrounding death and dying. We read about the right to die, the right to discontinue life-prolonging mechanical equipment and questionably effective medications and therapies, living wills, passive and even active euthanasia. The term “quality of life” is freely sprinkled throughout articles about death and dying.

But sooner than we might think, the term “quality of life” will be cropping up in popular medical/ethical articles about people who are not dying but who have either been born with severe physical birth defects or have sustained severely debilitating injuries, such as quadraplegia. We must ask, then, concerning “quality of life” for such persons: Living for what? To do what? To be what?

A person suffering a quadraplegia-producing injury first stays for several weeks in an acute-care hospital. Usually he or she undergoes fusion surgery to stabilize the spine -- surgery after which the patient is likely to believe, despite surgeon’s counsel to the opposite, that he or she will get up and walk. But that is not the case.

Then the person is transferred to Rehab or another rehabilitation center, from which he or she probably still believes, despite physician’s counsel to the opposite, that it will be possible to walk away. But that doesn’t happen either. The person doesn’t walk away -- despite hard work, despite prayers for a miracle and bargaining with God, despite making vast improvements in learning daily living skills from a wheelchair, and even despite, at times, some measurable return of arm and hand function. (This is not true of all people with high-level spinal cord injuries. Some whose spinal cords were not completely severed, some whose spinal cords were perhaps bruised but not cut, do regain ability to walk, But they are very, very few.)

The realization that one will not walk again is a terribly hard thing to come to terms with -- not to accept, but to come to terms with so that one can go on living. But people who are quadraplegic usually do come to terms with their disabilities and do go on living despite their extreme physical limitations.

IV

A current and popular Broadway play called Whose Life Is It Anyway? is about a sculptor who became quadraplegic in an accident, and about his battle to have his life-sustaining catheter removed so that he can die. The play does make a point about self-determination. But its story line is not what generally happens in real life, surprising as that was to me for a long time. It’s not what really happens with the many people I know who are quadraplegic. These people do go on living -- actually fight to go on living.

And for what? I asked myself this question for a long time. What makes life worth living for a quadraplegic person? Despite acute-care and rehab hospitalization, despite some improvement and learned skills, this person still cannot dress independently, eat without help, completely control bodily functions or have sex in any of the 101 ways (though there are ways). And likely the person cannot maneuver into his or her own parish church anymore.

Wouldn’t someone in this situation really be better off dead? Why more often than not does the person who is quadraplegic fight to go on living?

Such a person fights, I believe, not because death is more fearsome than this type of life, but because he or she still has hope. Hope to walk again? Yes. Despite the odds, no quadraplegic person I know has ever totally given up hope of someday walking again. Hope for a medical breakthrough, hope for an act of God” -- hope somewhere deep down inside, hope that does not quit.

But the hope that makes a person who is quadraplegic go on living -- fight to go on living -- is more than hope to walk again one day. More so, it is hope in life, hope that sometime -- today, tomorrow, next year -- life will be better. Many people who are quadraplegic work hard to make that hope come true. They work hard to add breadth and dimension to their lives, to grow and to learn, to give and to experience. In that, they are like you and me. For all persons, hope is the food of our tomorrows, the “anchor of the soul,” and when we lose hope, we lose life -- whether we are disabled or not.

And so there is a danger when those of us who are not quadraplegic assume that those who are would be better off dead: we may rob someone of that intangible human quality of hope which does not die when one’s spinal cord is severed. Hope dies only when one’s tomorrows are cut off. And that can happen to anyone.

Yes, people who are quadraplegic have physical limitations. But all of us have limitations that can keep us from doing a number of things we may want to do. And I don’t want you to assess my limitations, letting them serve as the sole criterion by which to determine the potential value of my life. I want to be free to work within and despite my own limitations to try to reach my own goals and determine my own life value.

And so does the person who is quadraplegic.

But if you and I decide that the quality of life of a quadraplegic does not make life worth living, then we in essence contribute to taking away that person’s hope -- because we don’t do anything that may be in our power to give that person some equal chances at tomorrow. We condemn the severely disabled through acts not of commission but of omission: lack of accessible housing, accessible transportation, accessible streets and sidewalks, accessible education and employment opportunities, accessible churches.

It is easier and less fearsome to hide behind our predetermined definitions of quality of life than it is actually to come face to face with someone who is quadraplegic -- at our jobs, in our schools, our neighborhoods, our restaurants, our leisure activities, our worship. And so, we often shake our heads and do nothing, thinking, “Wouldn’t that person really be better off dead?”

V

That’s the easier road. But it’s a dangerous one, for by taking it we are involved in playing God with someone else’s life. Only a person who is quadraplegic can decide whether he or she would be better off dead. The lead character in the play Whose Life Is It Anyway? decides that life is not worth living. But most real people I know who are quadraplegic have not made that decision. For the moment, at least, they are battling to go on living.

Even Angela. It took her six months to get over her abortive college experience. She still hasn’t actually gotten over it, but she is growing beyond it. She had a chance to move away from her father’s basement home and into an apartment with a friend. Both young women are about the same age, and it is a natural thing for them to share an apartment, like thousands of other young women. But Angela needs attendant care, which, previously, her father and other relatives had been performing. Now out on her own, she needs a paid attendant.

The state disability agency, however, didn’t want to help fund this supplemental care. “Stay home with your father,” she was told. But a 25-year-old woman should be able to choose whether or not she wants to stay home with her father. Few 25-year-old women choose to do this when they have a chance to be on their own. “If you need care,” she was told, go to a nursing home if you don’t want to stay at home. That’s what nursing homes are for.” (Ironically, it would cost the state more to maintain Angela in a nursing home than to contribute toward her supplemental attendant care.)

Angela didn’t take this sitting still. She challenged the state’s decision -- and eventually won; at least temporarily. The state fought her, however, and she may have to attend more unpleasant hearings to assert her rights. But she is going on fighting to live. She no longer is “going home, where I belong.” She is out in the world, where she belongs, fighting to live, fighting for a chance that her tomorrows will be better.

It’s easy to be angry with the state, with the government red tape -- which is a big problem for countless people who are quadraplegic. It’s easy for us to sit back and get angry with “the government.” But immediately following the “judge not” verses in Matthew 7 is the verse about beams and moats -- or specks and logs -- and eyes. “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”

What are you doing and what am I doing that is within our power to give Angela and others like her a chance at a better quality of life?

Perhaps we’re not the government -- or are we?

And what about our own backyards, our churches? “We’d ramp the church, but no one in a wheelchair ever comes, and it’s so expensive.” How many of us are brave enough to go into a strange church when the door is closed? We’re afraid we’ll make a commotion and everyone will turn and look. To a person in a wheelchair, an unramped church is like a church with a closed door. Save your roof! Build a ramp!

VI

Beyond building ramps and making washrooms accessible, there is more we can do. We can have courage, say a prayer and go out into the world of the disabled. It’s not easy to talk for the first time with someone in a wheelchair. It forces us to contemplate the possibility of our own physical disability. But it is just that consideration that can make it easier. The person in a wheelchair is a person, just like you and me. If the situation were reversed, what would you want someone to say to you? The same thing any of us wants anyone to say in situations when we are the stranger: to offer a friendly greeting, carry on a casual conversation, and give a feeling of being welcome, of being wanted, of belonging in this earthly society.

The person in a wheelchair isn’t going to shatter at your slightest breath. Apart from the disability, this person is probably as healthy as you or I. He or she has likes and dislikes, highs and lows, opinions and questions, just as we do. And he or she wants to belong, just as we do.

Take courage, say a prayer, and go out -- with hope -- into the world of the disabled. Reach out to bring people in wheelchairs into church if they want to come; share transportation van services with other churches~ have some programs geared to all people, including the disabled; let no churches be built or remodeled that are not wheelchair-accessible. Go out into the world of the disabled; you’ll soon discover that, as always, there is only one world.

As Christians we are not asked to play God and decide about another person’s quality of life. We are asked only to love God and our neighbor, to be God’s agents on earth, not by taking away hope but by giving it. “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

Would the “certain man” who was left half-dead by robbers en route from Jerusalem to Jericho have been better off simply dead? Perhaps the priest and the Levite thought so. It was easier and less threatening -- and less expensive -- to pass by on the other side.

But the Samaritan thought differently. He came face to face with a half-dead stranger and he acted on hope. The man was saved because the Samaritan acted on hope.

People who are quadraplegic usually are not seen navigating the sidewalks of our cities and towns in their wheelchairs, so it is still relatively easy to avoid coming face to face with one of “them.” We must therefore make a concerted effort to cross over to them -- and to act on hope.

“Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise” [Luke 10:36-37].

Archives: Articles

Feminist Hermeneutics and Biblical Studies

Old Testament Ethics

Ecology and the Fall

The Last Passage: Re-visioning Dying, Death, and Funeral

Will Jesus Return? (No Trick Answers!)

Bethlehem, Feminism and the New Creation

I

II

III

Pregnancy and Childbirth: A Theological Event

Seeing Ourselves as Human

Frailty and Finitude

The Paradox of Incarnation

The Serpent in the Garden

Created in God’s Image

Good and Evil

A Theology for Us All

Evangelism as Entertainment

A Fundamentalist Social Gospel

A Strong Element of Biblicism

Hermeneutical Ventriloquism

False Pretenses

Political Snake-Handlers

The Burden of Ambiguity