Guns R Us?

Book Review:

Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture

By Michael A. Bellesiles. Knopf 603 pp.

In no other industrialized nation in the world are there so many gun deaths as in the United States. In Canada, a country otherwise so similar to the U.S., there were only 68 handgun deaths in 1990 and 128 in ‘92. In 1994 the U.S. had 15,456 such deaths. More Americans are killed with guns in a typical week than in all of Western Europe in a year. To account for this enormous disparity, the myth was created that gun-toting was an early American tradition.

Michael A. Bellesiles debunks that myth. He argues that "gun ownership was exceptional in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, even on the frontier, and that guns became a common commodity only with the industrialization of the mid-nineteenth century" and the militarization of America during the Civil War.

Before this time, neither state nor national governments had been able adequately to arm either militias or volunteer units with guns. In 1644 there was only one musket for every four men in the Virginia colony -- the highest percentage it would attain until the Civil War. Soldiers routinely entered combat armed with swords, pikes or even hoes. Muskets were notoriously unreliable. Because they were made of iron rather than blue steel, they quickly rusted out. There were scarcely any gunsmiths during the entire colonial and postcolonial periods. A broken part meant the loss of a weapon, since parts were not interchangeable.

A musket cost around two month’s wages, placing it beyond the reach of most people, and it was very inefficient compared to a bow and arrow. A bow could release 12 arrows in the time it took to reload a musket, and had far greater range and accuracy. Arrows were not only inexpensive, but they could be used repeatedly in practice. Muskets often exploded, could not be fired in the rain without ruining the gunpowder and were so erratic that they were not even aimed. Their chief purpose was to create a cloud of smoke under cover of which a bayonet, sword, ax or pike charge could be mounted. Guns had a range of eight to ten yards, whereas a bow could fire its shafts 200 or 300 yards. One wonders, with Ben Franklin, why the bow and arrow were ever abandoned!

In the vast expanse of time from 1607 to 1775, peace was the norm. Entire generations passed without knowing war. Between 1663 and 1740 there were, on average, only two murders a year in North Carolina. In 46 years, Plymouth Colony had not a single homicide. "The image of the armed settler appears a grand mythology intended to formulate a portrait of Americans as many would like to see them: people not to be trifled with, not willing to put up with ill treatment, and very violent. . . . One searches in vain through the colonial period for evidence of Americans armed with guns rising in great numbers to defend their liberties, whether in organized militias or unorganized crowds." Because the militias were so averse to fighting, British officials relied primarily on Indian allies to fight hostile tribes for them.

Nor was the use of guns for hunting significant. Hunting is a time-consuming and inefficient way of putting food on the table. People seeking game usually trapped it. Those who joined wagon trains going west who were misled into believing that they could acquire food by hunting would, in nine cases out of ten, starve to death, according to one guide who knew. Hunting was an upper-class leisure activity. The 95 percent of European-Americans who were farmers found it infinitely easier to chop off the head of a chicken or slaughter a hog than to hunt wild game.

"Many historians have blithely declared that the British colonies were, in an oft repeated phrase, ‘the most heavily armed society in the world,"’ Bellesiles states, an assertion that he crushingly refutes. Carefully itemizing mercantile bills of sale, inventories of militia and volunteer detachments, the evidence that there was a lack of gun-smiths, records of importation of guns from Europe, the incidence of duels (three in the entire South in the 1760s, none fatal), children’s books and toys, comments by eyewitnesses about the abysmal shooting ability of settlers (lacking both the weapons and the gunpowder to practice), court records, and a wide variety of other historiographical resources, the author assembles an overwhelming mass of data to show that military prowess was not, in fact, characteristic of early Americans. They were consistently out-shot in marksmanship competitions by Britons. Eastern target shooters also outshot men from the west. General Andrew Jackson’s overwhelming victory in the Battle of New Orleans was not due to guns, most of which arrived after the battle was over. Only one out of three men in the Kentucky militia had a gun. Jackson’s victory was won by cannon fire, into which the British cooperatively marched.

This is not to argue that Americans of every stripe were nonviolent -- only that their tools for violence were rarely guns. Their violence was committed with swords, knives, clubs and tools. But all that changed in a single generation. Beginning with the invention of interchangeable parts, and spurred on by the desperate need for weapons to fight the Civil War, guns suddenly became abundant. Many veterans took their weapons home after the war -- durable weapons now made of steel.

Among the myths Bellesiles shatters is that of the anarchistic gun-culture of the West. Saloons and shoot-em-ups, good guys and bad, the West of films like Shane and High Noon are all debunked as pure fiction. Eastern and European cities were more violent than the comparatively law-abiding cities of the American West. Education is what mattered most in the West, with the schools teaching the classical curriculum, including Greek and Latin.

With a population of 500, Lexington, Kentucky, had six book dealers -- but no gun-smiths. Within a few more years it boasted three academies, a university; a theater, a natural history museum, a magazine, a painting school and, in 1817, the first performance of a Beethoven symphony in the U.S. One book dealer catered to the miners of the California gold rush by stocking the works of Shakespeare, Byron, Milton and other distinguished poets. "Virginia City, Nevada. one of the more notorious western towns in America’s collective imagination, claimed by its second year schools for one thousand children, three theaters, and a two-thousand-seat opera house where Italian operas were favored."

It was Samuel Colt’s entrepreneurial genius to recognize that a gun-culture would have to be created when the Civil War ended. He did all he could to link his revolver with an image of the heroic frontier and to find a market for his guns among the migrants heading west. He fostered the idea that the Great Plains were filled with "hordes of aborigines" who launched massive suicidal attacks against innocent travelers. Against these savages the "enterprising pioneer" stood alone, only his expertise with a gun standing between his family and death.

It was, Bellesiles remarks, a masterfully created mythology that has enraptured generations of moviemakers, novelists and historians. How a revolver was supposed to protect against Indians on horseback with repeating rifles, Colt didn’t say. But it was revolvers he needed to unload, and people fell for the hoax. The militarization of the West was also furthered by the creation of gunslinger heroes like Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley and Lewis Wetzel. The latter, a wholly fictional character, had the miraculous ability to reload while running, in only 15 seconds. And he never missed (shades of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Gene Autry or Matt Dillon). Bellesiles writes, "During the twenty years before the Civil War, Americans began constructing an image of themselves as a violent people and to act on that self-perception . . . the 1840s and 1850s marked a shift toward ever-accelerating passion and violence."

Until 1857, New York City police found truncheons sufficient. Between 1845 and 1854 there was not a single shooting incident. The arming of America changed all that. By the end of the Civil War, nearly every adult male in the country had been trained in the use of guns. What I call the "myth of redemptive violence" kicked in with a vengeance. The Civil War, Horace Greeley rhapsodized, would save a soft civilization from greed. The nation would rise above materialism through violence.

Even pacifists like Frederick Douglass and Julia Ward Howe were gripped by the militaristic fervor, the latter celebrating northern rectitude by her "Battle Hymn of the Republic." They failed to realize that it was capitalist materialism, as expressed in the massive manufacturing capacity of the North, that made the North’s victory possible.

The repeating rifle was the most significant development in firearms during the war. At its beginning generals, as usual, were still fighting the last war. It took the personal intervention of President Lincoln to get the ordnance department to start buying repeaters. Southern generals continued to march into northern repeater rifle fire as if they were still fighting against muskets. The new rifles were not only able to continue firing after the opening salvo, but were deadly accurate as well.

The 20 years after the Civil War saw an explosion of homicides. Domestic spats increasingly were settled with guns, and suicides became infinitely easier and more certain. But neither Bellesiles nor anyone else really has been able to account for the excessive gun violence in the U.S. After all, European soldiers also learned to kill, especially during World War I and II. Some took their weapons home. But this did not lead to the kind of violence that plagues the U.S.

Bellesiles’s case has some weaknesses. In his attempt to limit himself strictly to the history of guns, he slights the violence done to both African and Native Americans. Runaway black slaves were hunted down like deer, but they were seldom shot, since the point was to recover valuable slaves who would be of no value dead. During Reconstruction, however, black people were the victims of sheer terrorism. They were skinned alive, lynched, beset by wild animals. On one occasion, the good white citizens even played kick-ball with the head of a decapitated African-American. Many openly supported the Ku Klux Klan as a necessary way to control blacks. Courts established precedents that legitimated a reign of terror that lasted more than 100 years.

The author’s neglect of the gun culture of Native Americans is harder to understand, since he acknowledges that prior to the 1840s Indians had more guns than whites did. They fought for the French, the British and white Americans. The "final solution" of conquering them and crowding them into concentration camps euphemistically called "reservations" may have taken place after the period covered by this book, but the pattern of broken treaties, treachery and extermination was the policy of the European settlers from the start.

Given Bellesiles’s insistence on Americans’ near total ineptitude with guns, one wonders how they ever managed to defeat the Indians, the British and finally each other. Perhaps I am in the continuing grip of the myth of the American warrior, but it does seem that he slights the long rifle and its role in developing good marksmen. Critics from the National Rifle Association have challenged Bellesiles’s account of the Battle of New Orleans, citing the ability of the long rifle to strike targets well before British muskets could get within firing range.

This book is no easy read, due in large part to its repetitiveness. Bellesiles understandably wants to make his case irrefutable. In a tongue-in-cheek review of the book, Joseph R. Stromberg suggests that the first "several chapters could have been replaced with 10,000 repetitions of ‘There Were No Guns,"’ saving the editors and typists much work. For variety, the phrase "They Were All Rusty and Neglected" could have been thrown in every tenth line.

Nevertheless, the book is an historiographical tour de force. Bellesiles’s painstaking and compendious research exposes the myths that have elevated the gun to its unique place in American life -- and death. Colt claimed that his guns were the "great equalizers." In fact, they created a horrendous inequality, since the person who has the drop on another has a huge advantage. Historians have uncritically accepted the idea that the early colonies, the young states and the "wild West" were awash with guns. In fact, there was a perpetual shortage of guns on all the frontiers until the mid-19th century. The National Rifle Association insists that people are unsafe without the protection of guns. In fact, the arming of America ushered in an avalanche of violent crimes.

If America’s love affair with guns has been the creation of the military-industrial complex, hunting clubs, criminals and machismo, then we are not fated to be armed to the teeth. But turning aside from our enthrallment with guns will require a spirituality of nonviolence, a willingness to turn in our guns, and the activism of groups like Handgun Control, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the Parents Television Council. If we do our work well, perhaps Bellesiles’s future book can be titled Disarming America.

Apocalypse Now?

For those trapped in the Twin Towers or the Pentagon, that fiery hell must have seemed apocalyptic. In the fleeting moments before they leaped from windows or were crushed under melting I-beams, what passed through their minds? For those who watched in horror, on the streets or on television in their homes and offices, it must have looked as if a mini end-of-the-world Apocalypse had descended.

Or did it? In some respects, yes, it was an apocalypse. The word means "unveiling" -- specifically, the unveiling of things to come. What was unveiled for us was the prospect of endless acts of terrorism perpetrated by invisible enemies against mostly innocent civilians. In an apocalyptic moment, as it is generally conceived, the future seems to be closed, inevitable and inescapable. Since the future can’t be averted, apocalyptic can only call people to personal repentance, so that after the catastrophe they might survive to enjoy heaven or a transfigured earth.

Eschatology, by contrast, regards the future as open, undetermined and capable of being changed if people alter their behavior in time. The urgency of the great prophets of the Old Testament came from their conviction that catastrophe need not happen, that even a small deviation from the course toward doom might avert it.

Eschatology is concerned about the goal of humanity and the world; apocalyptic is consumed with the actual end of the planet earth as it is presently constituted. Prophetic eschatology is ruthlessly realistic, yet incurably hopeful. Apocalyptic has abandoned hope, and looks for divine, miraculous intervention.

Apocalyptic has a foreshortened sense of time. It anticipates a final war between the powers of Good and Evil. By appealing to these absolutes, President Bush has attempted to endow his cause with a kind of ultimacy, in which "those who are not for us are against us." There is no time left; every person, every nation must choose sides.

If that were the whole story about apocalyptic, many of us would want nothing to do with it. That is not the whole story, however. There is a positive role for apocalyptic as well as its better-known negative. The positive power of apocalyptic lies in its capacity to force humanity to face threats of

unimaginable proportions in order to galvanize efforts at self and social transcendence. Only such Herculean responses can actually rescue people from the threat and make possible the continuation of humanity on the other side. Paradoxically, the apocalyptic warning is intended to remove the apocalyptic threat by acts of apocalyptic transcendence.

As the philosopher Gunther Anders put it, we move into an apocalyptic mode when we no longer find ourselves asking "How shall we live?" and ask instead, "Will we live?" The normal eschatological situation, which gives life urgency by facing us with the inevitability of our own death, the hunger for meaning, and the fear of suffering and loss, becomes apocalyptic when it appears that there is no longer time for normal urgency. Time collapses. The Time of the End becomes the End of Time. Those who are "not yet nonexisting" must do everything in their power to make the End Time endless. "Since we believe in the possibility of the ‘End of Time,’ we are Apocalyptics," Anders wrote in the midst of the nuclear terror in 1962, "but since we fight against the man-made Apocalypse, we are -- and this had never existed before -- ‘Anti-Apocalyptics."’

The apocalyptic situation dwarfs our human capacity and reduces us to powerlessness. The negative response is passivity and despair; the positive is a superhuman effort and assault on the impossible. The negative version of apocalyptic leaves us feeling that we are smaller than ourselves, incapable of the required response. Positive apocalyptic, by contrast, calls on our every power to avert what seems inevitable. "Nothing can save us that is possible," the poet W H. Auden intoned over the madness of the nuclear crisis; "we who must die demand a miracle." And the miracle we got came about because people like the physician Helen Caldicott refused to accept nuclear annihilation. But she did it by forcing her hearers to visualize the consequences of their inaction.

Imagination, says Anders, is the sole organ capable of conveying a truth so overwhelming that we cannot take it in. Hence the bizarre imagery that always accompanies apocalyptic. Optimists want to believe that reason will save us. They wait to prevent us from becoming really afraid. The anti-apocalyptist, on the contrary, insists that it is our capacity to fear which is too small and which does not correspond to the magnitude of the present danger. Therefore, says Anders, the anti-apocalyptist attempts to increase our capacity to fear. "Don’t fear fear, have the courage to be frightened, and to frighten others too. Frighten thy neighbor as thyself." This is no ordinary fear, however; it is a fearless fear, since it dares at last to face the real magnitude of the danger. And it is a loving fear, since it embraces fear in order to save the generations to come. That is why everything the anti-apocalyptist says is said in order not to become true.

If we do not stubbornly keep in mind how probable the disaster is and if we do not act accordingly, we will not be able to prevent the warnings from becoming true. There is nothing more frightening than to be right. And if some amongst you, paralyzed by the gloomy likelihood of the catastrophe, should already have lost their courage, they, too, still have the chance to prove their love of man by heeding the cynical maxim: "Let’s go on working as though we had the right to hope. Our despair is none of our business."

Anders’s insight is fundamental, because it suggests that some of the biblical apocalyptics were really anti-apocalyptics too. They said what they said in order that it not become true. Jonah understood this, and for that reason fled his task. He knew God was sending him to preach doom so that it would not happen, thus making him appear a liar. A positive outcome might be conceivable, if the human race uses to its capacities and meets the future faithfully; but if it does not, then the apocalyptic nightmare may indeed descend upon us. Luke warns, "Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man" (Luke 21:34-36).

It is not difficult to see in that warning perils that threaten the very viability of life on earth today. Global warming, the ozone hole, overpopulation, starvation and malnutrition, war, unemployment, the destruction of species and the rain forests, pollution of water and air, pesticide and herbicide poisoning, errors in genetic engineering, erosion of topsoil, overfishing, anarchy and crime, the possibility of a nuclear mishap, chemical warfare or all-out nuclear war: together, or in some cases singly, these dangers threaten to "catch us unexpectedly, like a trap." Our inability thus far to measure ourselves against these threats is an ominous portent that apocalypse has already rendered us powerless.

Terrible as it was, the destruction of the World Trade Center was not an apocalypse. That horror will slowly recede. Other acts of infamy may take place. But we can anticipate a time when terrorism will decline. Nor are we helpless. We have the means to stop at least many, perhaps even most, of the terrorist attacks hurled at us. But we can see the other side of this catastrophe, when life feels normal again.

The threats to our very survival that I listed above, however, will not go away. They could well spell the end of humanity, and even of most sentient life. This is the awful truth that we have yet to recognize: We are living in an apocalyptic time disguised as normal, and that is why we have not responded appropriately. If we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction, as scientists tell us we are, our response has in no way been commensurate with the danger. We Homo sapiens are witnessing the greatest annihilation of species in the last 65 million years, and our children may live to witness ecocide with their own eyes. So while we are understandably preoccupied with terrorism, and must do everything necessary to stamp it out, we must at the same time wake up to these more serious threats that could effectively end life on this planet.

But the verdict is not yet in. It is late, but a positive response to the real apocalypse of our time is still possible. Consider South Africa. When I was there in the 1980s, it appeared that armed revolution was inevitable. Blacks were becoming more desperate by the day. Teenage boys were confronting the police and army without concern for their safety. Chaos was beginning to overtake the townships, as children, outraged by the timorousness of their parents, seized the initiative themselves. Whites were taking an increasingly hard line. It was a recipe for disaster. The whole scene reeked of an apocalypse of the negative sort.

Then the most unexpected thing happened. The white government chose, under intense internal and international pressure, to relinquish power, and negotiated with its former black enemies a process that led to the election of a black president, a model constitution, and relatively low casualties, considering the alternatives. No one to my knowledge anticipated this turn of events. What had appeared as an inevitable (negative) apocalyptic bloodbath turned out to have been a (positive) apocalyptic situation instead, thanks to the "anti-apocalyptists" who rose to the occasion.

Rather than two opposed scenarios, then, negative and positive apocalyptic seem to represent two alternatives. If the current evil course is adhered to, despite the warnings of the prophets (and South Africa was blessed with an abundance of these), the outcome will be negative apocalypse. If the warnings of the anti-apocalyptists are heeded, the outcome can be a miracle (see Jer. 18:7-11). Perhaps, then, we might read Revelation 18-20 as the dire negative apocalyptic prospect for those societies that refuse to do justice, and Revelation 21-22 as the propitious positive apocalyptic prospect for those societies that repent and do what is right.

Eschatology is a line stretching out to the distant, possibly infinite, future. That is the horizon of hope, possibility and becoming. Apocalyptic, on the other hand, is a detour, caused by an immediate crisis threatening whole societies. Negative apocalyptic paralyzes us into inaction; positive apocalyptic challenges us to transcend ourselves, opening to the unexpected possibilities thrust upon us. Usually, when the crisis passes, normal eschatology is reinstated. But in our day, the apocalyptic crisis may not pass.

How I Have Been Snagged by the Seat of My Pants While Reading the Bible

Ninth in a Series: New Turns in Religious Thought

The otherwise even flow of my life as a scholar-for-the-church has so far hit two snags. Both have irreversibly changed my course.

I was hooked by the first snag in 1962. Having completed work on my Ph.D. except for the dissertation, I was at last established as pastor of a church in southeast Texas, trying to write my thesis with one hand and take care of pastoral duties with the other. The church was generous in allowing me time to study -- and I needed that time for my psychic health, because I had walked in on a congregation in a shambles. It was no little relief to be able to retreat into the first century and thus escape the conflict and pain of the parish. The worse the storm outside, the more I fled to my study inside. Within nine months I had the writing finished.

Once during that period the chairman of the church’s official board asked me why I never preached on any of the New Testament passages which I was so exhaustively exegeting. I didn’t know. It was odd: I couldn’t say why, but I was very certain that I could not. It would be somehow -- wrong. It would be to sully the texts, to contaminate them. It would seem almost a prostitution to take these texts, which I had analyzed with the purest objectivity of which I was capable, and to apply them somehow to this bickering yet beloved parish. No. I could not explain why, but I could not preach on those texts.

Five years passed. I was preaching two different sermons every Sunday at first, then (mercifully) only one. In five years I must have preached upwards of 350 sermons. Yet on only a couple of occasions could I bring myself to use those dissertation texts.

The Bankruptcy of Historical Criticism

Now it is characteristic of most of us that when we uncover such anomalies as these, we dismiss them as aberrations of our own personal experience. That was where I was inclined to leave it. After all, I could scarcely blame my teachers for the problem. No more profoundly engaged teacher has taught Bible in our time than my Old Testament professor, James Muilenburg. And in New Testament there was the existentially involved Chris Beker, and the perceptively human work of John Knox. And all the rest -- W. D. Davies, Lou Martyn, Samuel Terrien, George Landes -- were deeply committed to the truth claims of the Scriptures. So I dismissed my snag as the peculiar problem of an escapist parson.

Then in 1967 Union Theological Seminary invited me back to teach New Testament. In this more exposed setting, dealing with students embroiled in war resistance, black economic development, curriculum reform, and the "Columbia Bust" of 1968, the question of the Bible’s relevance for modern life was stridently and insistently posed. At the same time I was meeting more and more pastors, to whom I would put the question -- at first very tentatively, almost as if to make conversation: What role does historical criticism really play in your preaching, your personal Bible study, your leadership in congregational study? The answers varied widely, but enough were sufficiently disturbing that my sense of the anomaly grew. I was not off the snag. I was impaled on it, and so were they. I would never be rid of it till I plunged into the water and dug out its roots.

The fruit of that effort was published in 1973 under the title The Bible in Human Transformation: Toward a New Paradigm for Biblical Study (Fortress). I had at last located what was for me at the base of the anomaly, thanks to the help of others who had pointed the way. Simply but quite precisely put, the historical-critical approach to biblical study had become bankrupt. Not dead: the critical tools have a potential usefulness, if they can only be brought under new management. But on the whole, the American scholarly scene is one of frenetic decadence, with the publication of vast numbers of articles and books which fewer and fewer people read. Most scholars no longer address the lived experience of actual people in the churches or society. Instead they address the current questions of their peers in the professional scholarly guild. The net result has been a gathering malaise, a crisis of morale, and a dawning recognition that what was once a vital contribution to the emancipation of people from the constrictions of dogmatism has become a new constriction in its own right.

I heard this report: the chairman of a university religion department, a biblical scholar by specialization, walked into the office of a colleague and flung my book on his desk.

"Have you read this?"

"No."

"Then read it and tell me what you think."

The next day the colleague dropped in on the chairman. "Well, I read it."

"What do you think?"

"He’s right, of course.

"Do you realize what that means for me?"

"You must have already known that, or you wouldn’t have asked me what I thought." At this point my memory, already no doubt enlarging on the tradition, breaks down. When it picks up again, the chairman is confiding that he doesn’t know for whom he’s writing books any longer, or why anyone would want to read them.

Caught in the Web of Objectivism

That dialogue tells me that my once private snag has now gathered quite a company. Hooked are hundreds of scholars, whose original intention in entering biblical studies has long since been compromised, squeezed out or suppressed. Most of us found ourselves drawn to the Bible. It chose us, as it were, or something in it chose us, something that comes to speech in it. We were attracted to it -- not out of curiosity or mere historical interest, but because we believed it could evoke human transformation. Biblical scholarship would be our ministry, our self-offering to the Kingdom of God.

Then ineluctably we found ourselves jettisoning the very questions and interests that led us to begin. We were caught in the web of intellectual objectivism, with its pretense of detachment, disembodied observation and uninvolvement as the ideal stance of the researcher. Bultmann had already so clearly exposed the false consciousness of objectivism that it seems incredible that, rather than being in decline, it is flourishing. I can only guess that one key reason is the history of denominational pluralism in America, and the understandable reluctance of universities and colleges to permit the teaching of religion in a way that smacked of sectarianism. Hence objectivism with a vengeance: the more religion could be taught as an exact science, the less offense it would cause. (This at a time when the physical sciences were beginning to repudiate objectivism!)

Other departments in the university felt no such pressures. In the department of philosophy a logical positivist might be busy demonstrating the folly of all previous philosophies prior to the moment he himself began his doctoral studies. Over in psychology, a Skinnerian or a Freudian unabashedly propounds his own school’s thought as if it were normative for the entire field. No one objects, because that is what these scholars are paid to do: to be professors, to represent a position -- to incarnate it even, if they are capable, yet with enough critical distance to be open to criticism and dialogue and even to changing one’s mind.

But over in the religion department scholars may still be churning out papers justifying the study of religion on the college campus. And any teachers of religion who are effective are so because they have courageously refused to knuckle under to this absurd demand for detached, uninvolved, disinterested study of the ultimate questions of existence.

I had finally named the anomaly for myself. It was the inability to study these texts in such a way that the intention of the texts themselves was honored. It was the trained incapacity to permit these texts to evoke personal and social change. It was not my professors who had trained this capacity out of me; I had caught the disease from the general ethos of the field, the meetings and journals of the professional societies and the endless flood of monographs.

But it was not enough to criticize the old mode of biblical scholarship. What was needed was an alternative, a new paradigm, a way beyond the anomaly. I was planning a "normal" scholarly sabbatical in Tübingen, Germany, when two of my former students persuaded me to look into a program in San Francisco with the Guild for Psychological Studies. Using Jungian depth psychology as an aid in interpretation, Elizabeth Howes and her colleagues were studying the Bible in a total context aimed at the healing of persons. I visited that summer, found it the answer to my need, and reversed directions on my sabbatical.

The approach of the Guild for Psychological Studies provided just the distance I needed in order to fight free of the hold which the objectivist paradigm still exercised over me. From my studies during that sabbatical and during each of five summers, I not only received necessary training in the Guild’s approach for use in my own work but was able to articulate an alternative to the current scholarly paradigm which, I hoped, might be at least one way to release others who were caught on the snag. From the outpouring of responses I must say that it seems to have hit home.

The Glass Wall of Individualism

Meanwhile, in the flow, I had hit another snag, as important as the first and as intractable. But by that time I had learned to respect my snags, to believe in them as a certain kind of voice. So I honored this one.

I had, in my book, discussed the importance of "exegeting the exegete," of bringing under analysis not only the analyst’s attitudes and reactions to the text, but also his social situation, his vested interests, the political implications of his or her work -- especially if it has none. I had no clear idea of how to proceed, nor had any of my subsequent work helped me significantly. In fact my preoccupation with psychological insights tended to eclipse social and political questions.

I thought to myself, "Surely it is the people involved; they are not politically aware. But then I led Bible study with the most politically aware and intellectually astute of all our students; I worked with an ecumenical and interracial group in East Harlem; I went to every conceivable class of church. Still it did not happen. No matter how much I wanted discussion to verge on the social, it generally tended to remain privatized, individual, personal. At first the sheer excitement of what was happening to people at a personal level mesmerized me. I was willing to leave it at that. Later they would become social activists, I hoped.

Finally I had to concede that it was not going to happen, and for exactly the same reason that it almost never happens to Billy Graham’s converts, or people in psychotherapy or the human potential movement, or devotees of Eastern religions, or simply students of theology.

It would not happen because it could not happen. There has been erected an invisible glass wall between ourselves and the social system. Whenever we try to move against the system itself, we hit the glass wall, we are deflected, and we rise to transcend the discomfort of injustice or institutional evil by purely private means. It is the ideology of individualism, and in this country it exists to protect racism, sexism and the class system of capitalism.

An Accursed Freedom

I did not discover this on my own. For three years I had puzzled over the anomaly: I want to address social, political and economic realities, yet in the groups I lead we seem to move further and further into ourselves. What is happening is good; but why can’t we connect it with the social? I pressed the question with Professor Beverly Harrison. She put into my hands The Hidden Injuries of Class, by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (Vintage, 1973). Suddenly I saw what I’d been looking at without really comprehending.

Sennett and Cobb’s study focused on working-class males in Boston. Generally accused of being materialistic by intellectual friends and foes alike, these blue- and white-collar workers were in fact trying to amass goods, get promoted, buy two cars and move to the suburbs because these are the things that society tells them they must do in order to win a sense of personal dignity and worth. But in fact even success in society’s terms does not bring the longed-for satisfaction:

This fear of being summoned before some hidden bar of judgment and being found inadequate infects the lives of people who are coping perfectly well from day to day; it is a matter of hidden weight, a hidden anxiety, in the quality of experience, a matter of feeling inadequately in control where an observer making material calculations would conclude the working man had adequate control [pp. 33 f.].

For these laborers, freedom is no longer merely the freedom to eat. Now it is a matter of how much choice one has, and the development of the human potential of people in what is for them a post-scarcity society. Such people do not feel that their work allows them to express enough that is unique in themselves to win others’ respect as individuals. They envy "cultured" people whom society has put in a position to develop their "insides." And yet their outrage that society permits this inequity of opportunity rebounds on them as self-doubt and accusation: if only I’d tried harder in school, if only I’d had the breaks. It is an accursed freedom, which tells everyone in this society, rich and poor, plumber and professor, that he or she must validate the self in order to win the respect of others and of oneself. Yet the system will not and cannot deliver that respect, even when all the players play the game by the rules.

The system says, for example, that if you strive to excel, like Horatio Alger, you will succeed; if you fail, you have no one to blame but yourself. But in a given plant there may be 3,000 workers eligible for six foremen’s jobs over a period of several years. Perhaps 1,500 would like to be promoted; only about 150 may be genuinely qualified. Six are selected. The others -- do they lead a revolt? Organize a factory takeover by workers? No. They blame themselves. They are angry, and unsure of their right to be angry.

‘Flawed Humanism’

It is the glass wall. Just at the moment when inequities might be confronted, the ideology of individualism blocks the view. And now the plot thickens. For it was just this dynamic which I saw happening week after week in my Bible study classes. Somewhere, way back there, we were all told that if we succeeded, it was by the grace of God; if we failed, we had only ourselves to blame. But more: we were told that all were created equal. That is the voice of the Enlightenment. If all were created equal, then by George,

those who are the most intelligent or able or competent have demonstrated more character in manifesting a potential that flows through all; don’t they deserve to be treated with more respect than others, or at least to be entrusted with more power? This would be only reasonable, after all; they showed themselves to be better in practice when all began the same [p. 255].

The basis of class inequality proves in our case to be -- belief in equality!

This "flawed humanism," as Sennett and Cobb call it, provides a perverse justification of the inequities of the class system, and confirms those on the bottom or middle or even uppermost rungs in their anxiety about their lives. We do not in fact deserve to be respected. We must earn it. The authors cannot restrain themselves; they finally call it by its theological name: justification through works.

Given such a situation, the preaching of the good news of God’s free acceptance of each of us should come as the word of a real deliverance. And there is no better way to break the karma of this cycle of self-deprecation. The message of justification by grace was never more timely in the whole history of the church.

But -- and this is a huge qualifier -- if that message of justification by God’s undeserved love is preached apart from an unmasking of the actual power relations which have aggravated these feelings to the level of a social neurosis; if people are released from the rat race of upward mobility only privatistically, with no critique of the economic and social ideology that stimulates such desperate cravings; if people are liberated from a bad sense of themselves without any sense of mission to change the conditions that waste human beings in such a way, then justification by faith becomes a mystification of the actual power relations, and the Christian gospel is indeed the opiate of the masses. And study of the Bible which avoids facing these issues becomes a justification of the status quo.

Still Caught on the Snag

Do not misunderstand me. I am not merely referring to the need for social involvement. Nor am I speaking of making the Bible relevant to modern society. The anomaly is far deeper; it has to do with the way the very social systems themselves are continually rendered invisible, perpetually withdrawing themselves from examination, leaving us only ourselves to blame or change.

We must not be deceived; the anomaly has not disappeared. We are still skewered on the snag. But we can now see what it is that has us hooked. It is the ideology of individualism, the flawed humanism of the Enlightenment, and an interpretation of Christianity which resolutely avoids addressing the principalities and powers. I have learned (and am still learning) from Elizabeth Howes and others something about how persons can relate to the Source of their own transformation. Now I am beginning to delve for this new set of roots. I am content to stay at the task for as long as it takes. The very integrity of the Good News is at stake.

It is not, of course, a task that one can manage alone. The vicious individualism of scholarship itself must be superseded; new kinds of relationships and communities must be formed. Liberation theologians, to be sure, have seen this for some time. But the large task of changing the way we wrestle with the Bible has scarcely even been acknowledged. (The first serious attempt is that of José Porifirio Miranda, Marx and the Bible [Orbis, 1974].) It must be begun, despite the enormous resistance of the biblical guild. The resistance is understandable. We cannot change our scholarship unless we change our lives.

To Hell with Gays: Sex and the Bible

Book Review:

The Bible and Homosexual Practice.

By Robert A. J. Gagnon. Abingdon, 520 pp.

It was inevitable that the antihomosexual lobby would develop something equivalent to a neutron bomb designed to wipe out the homosexual lobby without (it is hoped) altogether destroying the church. I refer to a tendentious study by Robert A. J. Cagnon of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. In an exhaustively argued work of over 500 pages he has tracked down most of the views put forward by homosexuals and targeted them for annihilation. Gagnon makes no secret of his convictions. From the first page he displays his loathing for homosexual behavior. In this short review, I can scarcely sift through all his arguments, but I think his case sinks under its own weight.

Gagnon bases his argument on Genesis 1-2: "Scripture rejects homosexual behavior because it is a violation of the gendered existence of male and female ordained by God at creation." Homosexuality is not mentioned in these chapters, so how does he know this? By means of physiology: penis fits vagina, and that’s that. Penis only fits vagina? Of course heterosexual coupling is normal. Survival of the species depends on it. But it is not normative. If monogamous heterosexual behavior alone satisfies the will of God, why didn’t Jesus marry? Why didn’t Paul?

To back up his argument, Gagnon exegetes every biblical text even remotely relevant to the theme. This section is filled with exegetical insights. I have long insisted that the issue is one of hermeneutics, and that efforts to twist the text to mean what it clearly does not say are deplorable. Simply put, the Bible is negative toward same-sex behavior, and there is no getting around it. The issue is precisely what weight that judgment should have in the ethics of Christian life.

Imagine the difficulty that abolitionists faced in making their case in the mid-19th century. In the absence of proof-texts, they had to fall back on the tenor of scripture, the spirit of Jesus, and appeals to compassion and empathy.

Amazingly, enough people understood their case that they were able to carry the day. Today almost no one still argues that slavery is justifiable because it is biblically sanctioned. Likewise, churches have been challenged to accept the equality of women with men, including holding of church offices, though the majority of Christians in the world still do not honor that equality. And women are kept down by appeals to scripture.

Gagnon, for his part, tries to circumvent the Bible’s treatment of women and slaves with arguments intended to bury the real issue, which is whether the Bible’s clear rejection of same-sex relationships needs to be reinterpreted today, just as its attitude toward women and slaves has been.

Despite his conservative treatment of scripture, Gagnon does have reservations about the way Paul reaches some of his conclusions. For example, he sometimes finds Paul’s exegesis of the Old Testament to be less than compelling. "Paul is still my apostle," he writes, "but he does not (and did not in the first century) have to be inerrant in every matter." In theory, that means Paul doesn’t have to be inerrant on the matter of homosexuality as well.

Divorce is another matter that Gagnon slides over. Jesus unequivocally condemns divorce. Gagnon notes that Matthew and Paul each in his own way modified Jesus’ words to make them less rigorous. Yet our churches are full of divorced people. Jesus never mentions homosexuality, but he explicitly condemns divorce. Why, then, does Gagnon single out homosexual behavior for censure, while refusing to treat divorce with the same condemnation as homosexual behavior? Does Gagnon believe that divorced people will, like practicing homosexuals, be damned to hell?

My own position is stated best by David Bartlett: "In Christ Jesus, neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality -- in themselves -- are of any avail, but faith working through love." Gagnon is incredulous at such a position: Fornicators, persons engaged in incest, pederasts, those engaged in adultery, prostitution and bestiality, could, according to a vague principle of love, justify their lustful and promiscuous behavior. How could anyone stand up against Gagnon’s withering logic here?

Gagnon imagines a request from the Corinthians to Paul for advice, based on 1 Corinthians 5:1-5: "Paul, we have a brother in our church who is having sex with another man. But that other man does not put on makeup or heavy perfume, wear women’s clothing, braid his hair, or otherwise try to look like a woman. And the other male is an adult. The two men really do love each other and are committed to spending the rest of their lives together. Neither are [sic] involved in idolatrous cults or prostitution. When you mentioned that arsenokoitai would be excluded from the coming kingdom of God, you were not including somebody like this man, were you?"

Gagnon expects that account to be a knockout blow: No, Paul wouldn’t accept that relationship for a minute. But that is precisely what is at stake here: a new judgment about the morality of same-sex relationships. Of course there are sexual behaviors that are deservedly condemned. But how that judgment is reached is the issue.

That "vague form of love" which Gagnon gags on is the future of the species. We are called, in the name of love, to "choose for ourselves what is right," as Jesus insists (Luke 12:57). Sexual mores are necessary. We need rules and norms. But rules and norms are easily coopted by the Powers That Be into serving as a form of crowd control.

To get to the point: the Bible has no sex ethic. It only knows a communal love ethic, which must be brought to bear on all the sexual mores of a given society in a given period. This doesn’t mean that anything goes. It means rather that everything is to be critiqued by Jesus’ love commandment in a fellowship of seekers -- just what we find in the Fourth Gospel. Such a love ethic is nonexploitative (hence no sexual exploitation of children, no using of another to his or her loss); it does not dominate (hence no patriarchal treatment of women as chattel); it is responsible, mutual, caring and loving. Augustine long since dealt with this in his inspired phrase, "Love God, and do as you please."

Such a critique rejects any double standards. Gagnon challenges gays and lesbians to the same norms of behavior that guide heterosexuals (but he fails to note that heterosexuals have a pretty poor record themselves). Gagnon cites levels of promiscuity among some gays that soar as high as a thousand sexual partners in a lifetime (but he fails to note that some heterosexuals boast of having matched that number). Gays have too often failed to practice safe sex (so have heterosexuals). Gay men have horrific levels of HIV and AIDS infection (but the vast majority of HIV and AIDS patients worldwide are heterosexual). And gays and lesbians have greater difficulty in maintaining long-term monogamous relationships (but that may be a function in part of books like Cagnon’s that condemn them for promiscuity yet keep them from marrying; besides, far and away, most failed monogamous relationships are heterosexual).

Persuaded that no biblical or theological arguments for same-sex relations have survived his initial blasts, Gagnon conducts a mopping-up operation using biological and social-scientific data. He insists that genetic and intrauterine factors cannot, by themselves, account for homosexual behavior. He believes that environmental factors are stronger. What is at stake in this nature-nurture debate is whether gays and lesbians can change. Homosexual activists insist that they cannot change their orientation, and that studies purporting to show that some homosexuals are able to change their orientation are largely fraudulent.

Gagnon insists that the lapses of purported "ex-homosexuals" are only to be expected, just as people with other addictions also occasionally fall "off the wagon." The arguments of both sides are tainted by self-interest. I find it most plausible to think of a continuum from homosexual to heterosexual, with those in the middle (bisexuals) capable of changing their behavior. So yes, some gays and lesbians can change, if they fall in or near that middle range. But those at either end of the continuum may find it impossible. For some homosexual persons, the effort to change can mean years of individual and group therapy, agonized prayers, suicidal depressions, and the constant fear of detection, loss of job and attack by straight men. Many of these gay people are my friends, and I know how they suffer. It is no picnic being homosexual in our society.

Therefore I would affirm any person who has been able to change his or her sexual orientation. But I also affirm all those who, for whatever reason, cannot or do not wish to do so.

So what is the homosexual to do? This is where Gagnon’s position reveals itself for what it is: "a cruel abuse of religious power," as someone put it. The homosexual who wishes to be Christian is supposed to totally abstain from all forms of sex for the rest of his or her lifetime. There is no other possible choice, given Gagnon’s logic. And not just homosexuals, but single persons of whatever orientation must also remain totally celibate, says Gagnon, till they marry or die. But look at the scores of Catholic priests who have not been able to maintain celibacy even though they took vows to observe it. How much less likely are gays and lesbians to remain celibate when celibacy is imposed on them by others?

Nor are any of these sexually starved victims of a loveless religion permitted to fantasize about sexual involvement with another person.

"‘Change or be destroyed,’ was the staple of Jesus’ teaching," says the unabashed Gagnon. That’s right: "believers who do not turn away from participating in homosexual intercourse are among those who will be excluded from God’s kingdom." (The people who talk about heaven always seem to assume they are going there.) That’s it: a life of permanent sexlessness not even broken by masturbation, in exchange for a heavenly compensation.

Gagnon thinks the very essence of love is to warn homosexuals that they are doomed unless they repent, change, marry or abandon sex altogether. But everything depends on the prior assumption that motivates his entire study: that homosexual behavior is a sin punishable by everlasting damnation. If we abandon that presupposition, we can envision a different future for the church: a fellowship where homosexuality and heterosexuality scarcely merit discussion any more; where the sufferings and sins of all God’s children are brought to the healing Source; where the excesses of homosexual and heterosexual behaviors are brought under the control of the Holy Spirit, as each and all seek to grow into the maturity that no longer is dictated by anxious ecclesiastics terrified of the freedom in which Christ has established us.

With Gagnon, I look forward to the time when God puts all the principalities and powers under Christ’s feet, and the humanization of humanity is accomplished. I would hope to undergo that transformation with my heterosexual and homosexual sisters and brothers -- and Gagnon himself.

That is, unless I am eternally damned for writing this review.

Drug policy: The Fix We’re In

The Fix. by Michael Massing. Simon & Schuster: 335 pp. $25.00. by Michael Massing. Simon & Schuster, 335 pp., $25.00.

The dust jacket of Michael Massing's study of U.S. drug policy offers a summary of his thesis in bold red letters: "Under the Nixon Administration, America Had an Effective Drug Policy. WE SHOULD RESTORE IT. (Nixon Was Right)."

A lot of people, myself included, don't want to hear that Nixon was right about anything. After all, it was Nixon who declared a "war on drugs" during the 1968 campaign for the presidency. John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy adviser, later confessed to Dan Baum, author of another trenchant study of drugs, Smoke and Mirrors (1996), that Nixon's election team was looking for scapegoats. There were two candidates: hippies and blacks. The "silent majority" was frightened of both. And hippies and blacks had something in common: they were publicly perceived to be into drugs.

According to Baum's report, Ehrlichman acknowledged, "We knew we were lying about the health effects of marijuana. We knew we were lying about the relationship between heroin and crime. But this is what we were doing to win the election. And it worked."

Once elected, however, Nixon found himself with no mechanisms for fighting his drug war, because the federal government had little day-to-day jurisdiction over crime. So, declaring a crisis in "law and order;" Nixon vastly expanded the government's role in drug control. He also commissioned a blue-ribbon panel of staunch conservatives to investigate marijuana use, expecting them to conclude that it was a dangerous, even lethal, drug. Instead, they recommended decriminalization. Nixon simply shelved the report.

Michael Massing is no fool. He is a journalist who has specialized in drug issues and received a MacArthur "genius" fellowship in 1992. So how can he argue that Nixon, who had fabricated this bogus drug war to deceive the American people, in fact had an effective drug policy which we should restore?

Because, whatever his other faults, Nixon put the drug money he got for his war in the right places: treatment and methadone maintenance. Addicts who had been unable to secure treatment started having their needs met. Heroin was decoupled from crime by methadone, which doesn't get you high but keeps you from needing heroin. Suddenly the drug problem was going into remission.

President Jimmy Carter was prepared to take the next logical step: he would ask Congress, as his first order of business, to decriminalize marijuana. Republican Dan Quayle threw in his full support. But Carter's drug czar, Lee Dogoloff, decided that drugs were not a medical problem, as the Nixon policy assumed, but a social problem. Drugs -- all drugs -- are simply bad. There is no difference, Dogoloff insisted, between "soft" drugs like marijuana and "hard" drugs like heroin or cocaine. So the penalties for dealing or possession should be the same.

Carter changed his mind on decriminalizing "soft" drugs. These drugs were now viewed as "entry" drugs that lead, virtually inexorably, to addiction to the harder stuff. (But the government's own statistics indicate that for every 104 people who have used marijuana, only one becomes a regular user of cocaine, and less than one becomes a heroin addict.)

With the election of Ronald Reagan, drug policy was further altered from the Nixon approach. Reagan regarded government itself as the problem. It had no business intervening in the lives of drug addicts by providing treatment centers, handing out free, sterile needles, or supplying methadone to those who wanted off heroin. So treatment centers were closed. Governments do properly wage war, however, so Reagan had no qualms about diverting funds from treatment to interdiction. Billions were poured into attacking the problem at its "source," by attempting to interdict drug trafficking, smuggling, growth and processing. Yet the available supply of cocaine and heroin has remained constant all through the drug war. Over the past 20 years, $500 billion have been thrown at the drug problem without securing any reduction in the drug trade. Any other failure so flagrant would never have escaped public scrutiny and outrage. But Americans do not like to lose wars, and so Congress continues to pump money into the longest war it has ever fought -- what someone has called "our domestic Vietnam."

Under George Bush things got even worse. Bush appointed William Bennett as drug czar. Bennett had a new message: people who use illicit drugs are not sick, they are immoral. Punishing drug offenders became more important than getting them off drugs. Nancy Reagan's campaign slogan, "Just say no," became the theme of the entire drug bureaucracy. It is all a matter of will power. Offenders should stop taking drugs and harming society. They deserve nothing, certainly not treatment. Society needs to meet their behavior with stern censure and the full weight of the law. The logic is simple: if people insist on being bad, we will lock them up. So prison populations soared, and mandatory sentences forced often reluctant judges to imprison first-time offenders, many of them lower-level "mules" who were merely carrying the drugs for the dealers, who were seldom touched.

Bill Clinton has only slightly improved the situation. His drug budget is double that of Reagan's. He has directed more money toward treatment, but far less than is needed. He fired his surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, for suggesting -- among other things -- that prohibition might not be the best approach to the drug issue.

In 1990 I wrote an article in the CHRISTIAN CENTURY titled "Biting the Bullet: The Case for Legalizing Drugs." It sparked a few letters, but otherwise it seemed to drop into a black hole. Apparently few people were ready to take on such a controversial issue, especially since those tangled in the web of prosecution and incarceration seemed to be mostly young black men. Middle-class whites had other concerns. Over the decade, however; interest has gradually increased. We may now, at last, be on the verge of a national debate.

In that debate there are a number of already-hardened positions. There is the moralistic view, already outlined, which contends that addicts deserve punishment for failing to live up to community standards. At the other extreme, there is the legalization option, which seeks to reestablish the status quo prior to drug and alcohol prohibition, when now-illicit drugs were sold over the counter and as ingredients in patent medicine, cough syrup and Coca-Cola. This is the view! championed in my earlier article. My assumption was that legalization would so drive down the market price of drugs that drug trafficking would no longer be profitable.

But events have proved me wrong. Due to the enormous demand and the consequent burgeoning of drug production, prices have fallen precipitously. Heroin now sells for less than half its 1981 street price, and cocaine prices have dropped by two-thirds. Likewise, the over-the-counter sale of hard drugs has been rendered problematic by the advent of new, more concentrated drugs like crack and metamphetainine. A more pragmatic position has emerged: harm reduction. Recognizing that neither the president nor the Congress is willing to propose a fresh look at the problem, the harm-reduction position attempts to accomplish a series of small reforms, such as making methadone more available, expanding needle-exchange programs, repealing mandatory sentencing for drug offenses, creating "safe injection rooms," decriminalizing marijuana, and providing controlled prescriptions of heroin to those who might otherwise buy lethal doses on the black market. Notice what is missing: a focus on treatment and education.

Massing has mixed feelings about the harm-reduction position. He sees the idea of "safe injection rooms" as little better than crack houses. This is a bit of a cheap shot, since such rooms have been experimented with successfully in Europe. But Americans are curiously unwilling to learn from Europe, even though almost all member-states of the European Union have better policies and lower rates of addiction than the U.S. On other points, Massing is in agreement with the harm-reduction approach: he favors free needles, methadone treatment, decriminalization of marijuana and repeal of mandatory sentencing. Where Massing differs is in his undoubtedly correct emphasis on treatment as the central element in any new drug policy. It should be noted, however, that while methadone is effective in dealing with heroin addiction, it does not work with cocaine or crack. These latter require a different kind of treatment all together.

Indeed, Massing may be too optimistic about treatment. There are many addicts who do not want to get off drugs, for whom the drug-induced high is the whole focus of living. Baum notes that for as long as figures have been kept, about 1 percent of the population has been addicted to drugs. People all through history have enjoyed, even depended on, the buzz they get from smoking nicotine, or drinking alcohol, or swigging down a cup of coffee, or inhaling marijuana, or using the harder drubs, and that is not likely ever to end. Others attempts to get off drugs and are unable to do so. What is to become of them?

Ethan Nadelmann, one of the chief proponents of the harm-reduction approach, reports a Swiss experiment involving some 1,000 heroin addicts who had at least two unsuccessful experiences in a methadone or other conventional treatment program. The trial quickly determined that virtually all participants preferred heroin to methadone, and doctors subsequently prescribed heroin for them. The results: crimes involving the participants dropped 60 percent, illegally gotten income fell from 69 to 10 percent, illegal heroin and cocaine use declined dramatically, stable employment increased from 14 to 32 percent, physical health improved enormously, and most participants greatly reduced their contact with the drug scene. Eighty-three even switched to abstinence therapy. The conclusion: given relatively unlimited availability, heroin users will voluntarily stabilize or reduce their dosage and some will even choose abstinence; long-addicted users can lead relatively normal, stable lives if provided legal access to their drug of choice, and with few side effects; and ordinary citizens (in Switzerland at least) will support such initiatives.

While Massing criticizes the moralism of a William Bennett, he betrays a moralism of his own. He simply finds it impossible to believe that it is safe for people to be on drugs and not be injured by them. He wishes to rescue every one possible from the scourge of drugs, but cannot envision addicts living fairly normal lives. But some heroin addicts do, and 95 percent of cocaine users somehow manage to quit eventually anyway. After the age of 35, the casual use of illegal drugs virtually ceases. As neurologist Michael Gazzaniga says, most people eventually walk away from the hedonistic pleasures of illicit drugs. Crack cocaine, on the other hand, is terribly addictive, and can nullify a mother's maternal instincts.

So while we need to make treatment universally available, we also need to tolerate those who will not or cannot break their habit. This requires a switch from regarding addiction as a legal matter to regarding it as a medical matter. It should be treated as a public health issue, not as grounds for punishment. The correct moral position is to quit moralizing about drugs and instead to regard addicts with compassion.

To further public debate, Howard Moody has gathered a group of respected clergy under the infelicitous title "Religious Leaders for a More Just and Compassionate Drug Policy" (237 Thompson St., New York, NY 10012; 212-253-2437). This group is open to all who are attempting to place harm reduction on the agenda of churches, synagogues and mosques. While it initially underplayed treatment in its call to action, it has now made it prominent, recognizing that the "harm-reduction" and the "treatment-centered" approaches should really be one.

Massing's superb study is rich in anecdotes that bring us face to face with the drug subculture. In its own way, his book is oddly optimistic. He cites studies that indicate that the longer a patient stays in a treatment center after three months, the greater her chance of breaking the habit. More than a year's treatment is optimal; two-thirds of the addicts who were in a program for over a year were drug-free a year after leaving treatment.

But if only a quarter of hard-core addicts were to seek treatment, and at best only two-thirds of those in treatment succeed, we are talking about only a 16 percent success rate. What about the other 84 percent? If we became wildly optimistic, and estimated that 75 percent would opt for over a year's treatment, then at a two-third success rate, 50 percent would still be addicted. Either way, some will simply have to live with their addiction, and we must find the most compassionate way of responding to their needs that we can. And that is where harm reduction comes in.

One thing is clear. Treatment represents the best investment of funds. Treatment is seven times more cost-effective than domestic law enforcement, ten times more effective than interdiction, and 23 times more effective than attacking drugs at their source.

Perhaps the most wrongheaded policy is that of incarcerating addicts purely as a means of punishment and revenge. Almost every treatment program in the prisons has been stripped of funding. As a result, prisoners simply continue their addiction in prison, where drugs are plentiful thanks to corrupt guards and wily visitors. Then, on release, they are almost guaranteed a return trip to prison since they must continue to support their habit. For addicts generally, New York State has only one bed for every four persons who will seek treatment in a given year. This neglect of men and women born in the image of God and of infinite worth in God's sight is unconscionable. We cannot leave addicts simply to wallow in compulsive behavior if they desire treatment.

Nor can we dodge the racism of our drug policy. The typical user is a white male between 20 and 40 years old. Only 13 percent of those using illegal drugs are African-American (exactly their proportion in the national population), but they constitute 35 percent of those arrested for simple possession and a staggering 74 percent of those sentenced for drug possession.. An entire generation of young black men is being destroyed by our drug war.

Our attempts to stamp out drugs by force violate a fundamental spiritual principle. Jesus articulated it in the Sermon on the Mount: "Don't react violently against the one who is evil." Adapted to fit the drug issue, it means, "Do not resist drugs by violent methods." We have merely repeated the mistake of Prohibition. The harder we tried to stamp out illicit drugs, the more lucrative we made them, and the more they spread. (We can't even keep drugs out of prisons!) We tried Prohibition once. We know it will not work. Our forcible resistance to evil simply augments it. We violated a fundamental economic principle as well: an evil cannot be eradicated by making it more profitable.

When we oppose evil with the same weapons that evil employs, we invariably find ourselves committing the same atrocities, violating the same civil liberties, bending and breaking the same laws, as those whom we oppose. In the process, we become the very thing we hate. Armed resistance to the drug trade is doomed to fail precisely because the drug trade perfectly mirrors our own values. We condemn drug traffickers for sacrificing their children, their integrity and their human dignity just to make money or experience pleasure -- without seeing that our whole society operates that way. Drug dealers mirror the morality of the capitalist system itself: get what's yours, greed is good, forget everyone else, cheat if it pays, the more the better, money speaks, hedonism is fun.

Americans are, variously, addicted to many things, among them wealth, sex, food, work, alcohol, caffeine and tobacco. By attacking addiction in others, we can feel good about ourselves without coming to any insight about our own addictions. Richard L. Floyd notes that drugs are the ultimate consumer product for people who want to feel good now without benefit of hard work, social interaction, or making a productive contribution to society. For their part, the drug dealers are aggressively living out the rags-to-riches American dream as private entrepreneurs desperately trying to become upwardly mobile. That is why we cannot win the war on drugs.

The enemy is us. Unable to face that fact, we launch a half-hearted, ill-conceived war against a menace that only mirrors what we have become as a nation.

It is high time we addressed the problem of illicit drugs not as a war to be won, but as an epidemic to be checked, a disease to be curbed, and an opportunity to see ourselves in the faces and mutilated veins of our addicted brothers and sisters.

Biblical Perspectives on Homosexuality

No more divisive issue faces the churches of this country today than the question of ordaining homosexuals. Like the issue of slavery a century ago, it has the potential for splitting entire denominations. And like the issue of slavery, the argument revolves around the interpretation of Scripture. What does the Bible say about homosexuality, and how are we to apply it to this tormented question?

We may begin by excluding all references to Sodom in the Old and New Testaments, since the sin of the Sodomites was homosexual rape, carried out by heterosexuals intent on humiliating strangers by treating them “like women,” thus demasculinizing them. (This is also the case in a similar account in Judges 19-21.) Their brutal gang-rape has nothing to do with the problem of whether genuine love expressed between consenting persons of the same sex is legitimate or not. Likewise Deuteronomy 23:17-18 must be pruned from the list, since it most likely refers to a heterosexual “stud” involved in Canaanite fertility rites that have infiltrated Jewish worship; the King James Version inaccurately labeled him a “sodomite.”

Several other texts are ambiguous. It is not clear whether I Corinthians 6:9 and I Timothy 1:10 refer to the “passive” and “active” partners in homosexual relationships, or to homosexual and heterosexual male prostitutes. In short, it is unclear whether the issue is homosexuality alone, or promiscuity and “sex-for-hire.”

Unequivocal Condemnations

With these texts eliminated, we are left with three references, all of which unequivocally condemn homosexuality. Leviticus 18:22 states the principle:

“You [masculine] shall not lie-with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” The second (Lev. 20:13) adds the penalty: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.”

Such an act was regarded as an “abomination” for several reasons. The Hebrew prescientific understanding was that male semen contained the whole of nascent life. With no knowledge of eggs and ovulation, it was assumed that the woman provided only the incubating space. Hence the spilling of semen for any nonprocreative purpose -- in coitus interruptus (Gen. 38:1-11), male homosexual acts or male masturbation -- was considered tantamount to abortion or murder. (Female homosexual acts and masturbation were consequently not so seriously regarded.) One can appreciate how a tribe struggling to populate a country in which its people were outnumbered would value procreation highly, but such values are rendered questionable in a world facing total annihilation through overpopulation.

In addition, when a man acted like a woman sexually, male dignity was compromised. It was a degradation, not only in regard to himself, but for every other male. The patriarchalism of Hebrew culture shows its hand in the very formulation of the commandment, since no similar stricture was formulated to forbid homosexual acts between females. On top of that is the more universal repugnance heterosexuals tend to feel for acts and orientations foreign to them. (Left-handedness has evoked something of the same response in many cultures.)

Whatever the rationale for their formulation, however, the texts leave no room for maneuvering. Persons committing homosexual acts are to be executed. The meaning is clear: anyone who wishes to base his or her beliefs on the witness of the Old Testament must be completely consistent and demand the death penalty for everyone who performs homosexual acts. This was in fact the case until fairly recent times -- hence the name “faggots,” which homosexuals earned while burning at the stake. Even though no tribunal is likely to execute homosexuals ever again, a shocking number of gays are murdered by “straights” every year in this country.

The third text is Romans 1:26-27, which, like Leviticus 18 and 20, unequivocally denounces homosexual behavior:

For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

No doubt Paul was unaware of the distinction between sexual orientation, over which one has apparently very little choice, and sexual behavior. He apparently assumes that those whom he condemns are heterosexual, and are acting contrary to nature, “leaving,” “giving up,” or “exchanging” their regular sexual orientation for that which is foreign to them. Paul knew nothing of the modern psychosexual understanding of homosexuals as persons whose orientation is fixed early in life, persons for whom having heterosexual relations would be acting contrary to nature, “leaving,” “giving up” or “exchanging” their usual sexual orientation.

Likewise the relationships Paul describes are heavy with lust; they are not relationships of genuine same-sex love. Paul assumes that venereal disease is the divine punishment for homosexual behavior; we know it as a risk involved in promiscuity of every stripe, but would hesitate to label it a divine punishment, since not everyone who is promiscuous contracts it. And Paul believes that homosexuality is contrary to nature, whereas we have learned that it is manifested by a wide variety of species, especially (but not solely) under the pressure of overpopulation. It would appear then to be a quite natural mechanism for preserving species.

Other Practices

Nevertheless, the Bible quite clearly takes a negative view of homosexuality, in those few instances where it is mentioned at all. And the repugnance felt toward homosexuality was not just that it was deemed unnatural but also that it was considered unJewish, representing yet one more incursion of pagan civilization into Jewish life. But this conclusion does not solve the hermeneutical problem of our attitude toward homosexuality today. For there are other sexual attitudes, practices and restrictions which are normative in Scripture but which we no longer accept as normative:

1. Nudity, the characteristic of paradise, was regarded in Judaism as reprehensible, even within the family (Lev. 18:6-19; Ezek. 22:10; II Sam. 6:20; 10:4; Isa. 20:2-4;- 47:3). For a son to look upon his father’s nudity was equivalent to a crime (Gen. 9:20-27). To a great extent this taboo probably even inhibited the practice of husbands and wives (this is still true of a surprising number of people reared in the Judeo-Christian taboo system). We may not be prepared for nude beaches, but are we prepared to regard nudity in the locker room or at the old swimming hole or in the home as an accursed sin?

2. Old Testament law strictly forbids sexual intercourse during the seven days of the menstrual period (Lev. 18: 19; 15:18-24), and anyone who engaged in it was to be summarily executed (Lev. 18:29, though 15:24 contradicts this). Today many people on occasion have intercourse during menstruation and think nothing of it. Are they sinners?

3. The Bible nowhere explicitly prohibits sexual relations between unmarried consenting adults -- a discovery that caused John Calvin no little astonishment. The Song of Songs eulogizes a love affair between two unmarried persons, though even some scholars have conspired to cover up the fact with heavy layers of allegorical interpretation. For millennia the church has forbidden sex outside of marriage. Today many teen-agers, single adults, the widowed and the divorced are reverting to “biblical” practice, while others continue to believe that sexual intercourse belongs only within marriage. Which view is right?

4. The Bible virtually lacks terms for the sexual organs, being content with such euphemisms as “foot” or “thigh” for the genitals, and using other euphemisms to describe coitus, such as “he knew her.” Today we regard such language as “puritanical” and contrary to a proper regard for the goodness of creation.

5. Semen and menstrual blood rendered all who touched them unclean (Lev. 15:16-24). Intercourse rendered one unclean until sundown; menstruation rendered the woman unclean for seven days. Some people may still feel that uncleanness attaches to semen and menstrual blood, but most people who consider themselves “enlightened” regard these fluids as completely natural and only at times “messy, not “unclean.”

Adultery, Prostitution and Polygamy

6. Social regulations regarding adultery, incest, rape and prostitution are, in the Old Testament, determined largely by considerations of the males’ property rights over women. Prostitution was considered quite natural and necessary as a safeguard of the virginity of the unmarried and the property rights of husbands (Gen. 38:12-19; Josh. 2:1-7). A man was not guilty of sin for visiting a prostitute, though the prostitute herself was regarded as a sinner. Even Paul must appeal to reason in attacking prostitution (I Cor. 6:12-20); he cannot lump it in the category of adultery (vs. 9). Today we are moving, with great social turbulence and at a high but necessary cost, toward a more equitable set of social arrangements in which women are no longer regarded as the chattel of men; love, fidelity and mutual respect replace property rights and concern to reduce competition between related males for the same woman. We have, as yet, made very little progress in changing the double standard in regard to prostitution. As the moral ground shifts, will moral positions remain the same?

7. The punishment for adultery was death by stoning for both the man and the woman (Deut. 22:22), but here adultery is defined by the marital status of the woman. A married man who has intercourse with an unmarried woman is not an adulterer -- again, the double standard. And a bride who is found not to be a virgin is to be stoned to death (Deut. 22:13-21), but male virginity at marriage is never even mentioned. Today some Christians argue that the development of contraceptives makes even the social prohibition against extramarital intercourse passé -- which is to say, they are prepared to extend to women the privileges which the Old Testament freely accords to men. Others, who believe that sexual intercourse requires a monogamous context for true love to flourish, would nonetheless be aghast at the idea of stoning those who disagree.

8. Polygamy was regularly practiced in the Old Testament. It goes unmentioned in the New -- unless, as many scholars now believe, I Timothy 3:2, 12 and Titus 1:6 mean, as the Greek plainly reads, that bishops and deacons should have only one wife, referring not to divorce and remarriage (surely a widowed and remarried bishop was not disallowed) but to polygamy. If so, polygamy was still being practiced in the early church but was beginning to be discouraged. We know from the Mishnah and the Talmud that polygamy continued to be practiced sporadically within Judaism for centuries following the New Testament period. Christian missionaries to Africa in past centuries were ruthless in demanding that tribal chieftains divorce all but one wife, with tragic consequences for the ones rejected. Now many wonder whether some other arrangement might have been more humane, even if it included tolerance of polygamy in at least the first generation of believers.

No Longer Binding

9. A form of polygamy was the levirate marriage. When a married man in Israel died childless, his brother was supposed to marry the widow and sire children for his deceased brother. Jesus mentions this custom without criticism (Matt. 22:23-33). Today not even devout Jews observe this unambiguous commandment (Deut. 25:5-10).

10. In the New Testament, Paul taught that it was best not to marry (I Cor. 7). While he qualifies this as his own advice and not a commandment of the Lord, it is clearly advice that most Christians choose to ignore. And here and elsewhere, in explicitly authoritative teaching, Scripture teaches patriarchal, male-dominant marital relationships as the norm. Do we wish to perpetuate that teaching?

11. Jews were supposed to practice endogamy -- that is, marriage within the 12 tribes of Israel. Until recently a similar rule prevailed in the American south, in laws against interracial marriage (miscegenation). We have witnessed, within our own lifetimes, the legal battle to nullify state laws against miscegenation and the gradual change in social attitudes toward toleration and even acceptance of interracial couples in public. Sexual mores can alter quite radically even in a single lifetime.

12. The Old Testament regarded celibacy as abnormal (Jeremiah’s divinely commanded celibacy is a sign of doom for the families of Israel [Jer. 16: 1-4]), and I Timothy 4:1-3 calls compulsory celibacy a heresy. Yet the Catholic Church has made it normative for priests and nuns.

13. In many other ways we have developed different norms from those explicitly laid down by the Bible: “When men fight with one another and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts [i.e., testicles], then you shall cut off her hand” (Deut. 25:11 f.). We, on the contrary, might very, well applaud her. And just as we no longer countenance slavery, which both Old and New Testaments regarded as normal, so we also no longer countenance the use of female slaves, concubines and captives as sexual toys or breeding machines by their male owners, which Leviticus 19:20 f., II Samuel 5:13 and Numbers 31:17-20 permitted -- and as many American slave owners did slightly over 100 years ago.

The Problem of Authority

These cases are relevant to our attitude toward the authority of Scripture. Clearly we regard certain things, especially in the Old Testament, as no longer binding. Other things we regard as binding, including legislation in the Old Testament that is not mentioned at all in the New. What is the principle of selection here? Most of us would regard as taboo intercourse with animals, incest, rape, adultery, prostitution, polygamy, levirate marriage and concubinage -- even though the Old Testament permits the last four and the New Testament is silent regarding most of them.

How do we make judgments that these should be taboo, however? There exist no simply biblical grounds, for as I have tried to show, in other respects many of us would clearly reject biblical attitudes and practices regarding nudity, intercourse during menstruation, prudery about speaking of the sexual organs and act, the “uncleanness” of semen and menstrual blood, endogamy, levirate marriage, and social regulations based on the assumption that women are sexual properties subject to men. Obviously many of our choices in these matters are arbitrary. Mormon polygamy was outlawed in this country, despite the constitutional protection of freedom of religion, because it violated the sensibilities of the dominant Christian culture, even though no explicit biblical prohibition against polygamy exists. (Jesus’ teaching about divorce is no exception, since he quotes Genesis 2:24 as his authority, and this text was never understood in Israel as excluding polygamy. A man could become “one flesh” with more than one woman, through the act of intercourse.)

The problem of authority is not mitigated by the doctrine that the cultic requirements of the Old Testament were abrogated by the New, and that only the moral commandments of the Old Testament remain in force. For most of these sexual mores fall among the moral commandments. If Christ is the end of the law (Rom.10:4), if we have been discharged from the law to serve, not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit (Rom.7:6), then all of these Old Testament sexual mores come under the authority of the Spirit. We cannot then take even what Paul says as a new law. Even fundamentalists reserve the right to pick and choose which laws they will observe, though they seldom admit to doing just that. For the same Paul who condemns homosexual acts as sinful is the Paul who tells women like Anita Bryant to remain silent in the church (I Cor. 14:34). If Anita Bryant were consistently biblical, she would demand that gays be stoned to death -- though she would never be able to say so in church!

‘Judge for Yourselves’

The crux of the matter, it seems to me, is simply that the Bible has no sexual ethic. There is no biblical sex ethic. The Bible knows only a love ethic, which is constantly being brought to bear on whatever sexual mores are dominant in any given country, or culture, or period.

Approached from the point of view of love, rather than that of law, the issue is at once transformed. Now the question is not “What is permitted?” but rather “What does it mean to love my homosexual neighbor?” Approached from the point of view of faith rather than of works, the question ceases to be “What constitutes a breach of divine law in the sexual realm?” and becomes instead “What constitutes obedience to the God revealed in the cosmic lover, Jesus Christ?” Approached from the point of view of the Spirit rather than of the letter, the question ceases to be “What does Scripture command?” and becomes “What is the Word that the Spirit speaks to the churches now, in the light of Scripture, tradition, theology, psychology, genetics, anthropology and biology?”

In a little-remembered statement, Jesus said, “Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?” (Luke 12:57). Such sovereign freedom strikes terror in the hearts of many Christians; they would rather be under law and be told what is right. Yet Paul himself echoes Jesus’ sentiment immediately preceding one of his possible references to homosexuality: “Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, matters pertaining to this life!” (I Cor. 6:3). The last thing Paul would want is for people to respond to his ethical advice as a new law engraved on tablets of stone. He is himself trying to “judge for himself what is right.” If now new evidence is in on the phenomenon of homosexuality, are we not obligated -- no, free -- to re-evaluate the whole issue in the light of all available data and decide, under God, for ourselves? Is this not the radical freedom for obedience which the gospel establishes?

It may, of course, be objected that this analysis has drawn our noses so close to texts that the general tenor of the whole is lost. The Bible clearly considers homosexuality a sin, and whether it is stated three times or 3,ooo is beside the point. Just as some of us grew up “knowing” that homosexuality was the unutterable sin, though no one ever spoke of it, so the whole Bible “knows” it to be wrong.

I freely grant all that. The issue is precisely whether that biblical judgment is correct. The whole tenor of the Bible sanctions slavery as well, and nowhere attacks it as unjust. Are we prepared to argue that slavery today is biblically justified? The overwhelming burden of the biblical message is that women are inferior to men. Are we willing to perpetuate that status? Jesus himself explicitly forbids divorce for any case (Matthew has added “except adultery” to an unqualified statement). Are we willing to forbid divorce, and certainly remarriage, for everyone whose marriage has become intolerable?

A Profound Prejudice

The fact is that there is, behind the legal tenor of Scripture, an even deeper tenor, articulated by Israel out of the experience of the Exodus and brought to sublime embodiment in Jesus’ identification with harlots, tax collectors, the diseased and maimed and outcast and poor. It is that God sides with the powerless, God liberates the oppressed, God suffers with the suffering and groans toward the reconciliation of all things. In the light of that supernal compassion, whatever our position on gays, the gospel’s imperative to love, care for, and be identified with their sufferings is unmistakably clear.

Many of us have a powerful personal revulsion against homosexuality -- a revulsion that goes far beyond reason to what almost seems to us an instinctual level. Homosexuality seems “unnatural” -- and it would be for most of us. I myself have had to struggle against feelings of superiority and prejudice in regard to gays. Yet for some persons it appears to be the only natural form their sexuality takes. This feeling of revulsion or alienness, or simply of indifference, is no basis, however, for ethical decisions regarding our attitudes toward homosexuality. It seems to me that we simply need to acknowledge that for the majority of us who are heterosexual by nature this deep feeling amounts to nothing more than prejudice when applied to others. It has no sure biblical warrant, no ethical justification. It is just the way we feel about those who are different. And if we can acknowledge that profound prejudice, perhaps we can begin to allow others their preferences as well.

I want to close by quoting a paragraph from a 1977 address by C. Kilmer Myers, bishop of California, before the Episcopal House of Bishops:

The model for humanness is Jesus. I know many homosexuals who are radically human. To desert them would be a desertion, I believe, of our Master, Jesus Christ. And that I will not do no matter what the cost. I could not possibly return to my diocese and face them, these homosexual persons, many of whom look upon me as their father in God, their brother in Christ, their friend, were I to say to them, “You stand outside the hedge of the New Israel, you are rejected by God. Your love and care and tenderness, yes, your faltering, your reaching out, your tears, your search for love, your violent deaths mean nothing! You are damned! You have no place in the household of God. You are so despicable that there is no room for you in the priesthood or anywhere else.” There are voices in this country now raised proclaiming this total ostracism in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. What will be the nature of the response to this in the House of Bishops?

Now that this issue has become one that none of us can dodge, what will be the nature of our response?

Letting Parables Live

Parables are tiny lumps of coal squeezed into diamonds, condensed metaphors that catch the rays of something ultimate and glint it at our lives. Parables are not illustrations; they do not support, elaborate or simplify a more basic idea. They are not ideas at all, nor can they ever be reduced to theological statements. They are the jeweled portals of another world; we cannot see through them like windows, but through their surfaces are refracted lights that would otherwise blind us -- or pass unseen.

Parables participate in the reality which they communicate. In the words of Sally McFague, there is a "simultaneity of the moment of insight and the choice of metaphor -- they appear to come together and be forever wedded" (Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology). Nor can parables ever be exhausted; they always contain more than we can tell. They are the precipitate of something ineffable; they percolate up from depths wherein the Kingdom itself is working its ineluctable work. They come from the same energizing reality that causes the seeds to germinate and the leaven to rise. They rise with the leaven.

A Single Point?

Parables have suffered under the rationalism and idealist orientation of biblical scholars ever since Adolf Jülicher uttered his dictum in i886 that every parable has one and only one central point. Jülicher was, of course, trying to break the back of allegorizing, which attempts to impose a set theological meaning upon every parabolic detail. Allegorizing uses equal-signs: in the parable of the ten maidens, for example, the bridegroom equals Jesus, his delay equals the overdue Second Coming, the wedding equals the Kingdom, the shut door equals the Last Judgment, the wise maidens equal the true believers, the foolish maidens equal the backsliders, and so forth (Matt. 25:1-13).

Unfortunately, Jülicher merely substituted for an allegorizing of the parts an allegorizing of the whole. In this he has been followed by almost every commentator until recent times. The reduction of every parable to a single point (read: idea) renders it a mere illustration of more primary theological meanings. Lost is all sense of the parable’s artistic integrity, its capacity to tell us something we do not know and could not come by in any other way, its ability to evoke experiences we have never had, and an awareness of realities we have not even guessed at before.

Allegory and Allegorizing

"Allegorizing" should be distinguished from allegory. Allegorizing is a kind of reductionism. It shows its hand when details intended literally are invested with inappropriate metaphorical weight -- when, for example, the ass, the inn or Jericho in the parable of the compassionate Samaritan is made a matter of deep mystical import. Or it may take the form of an intellectualism that has lost all sense of the feeling tone of the figure, and seeks to reduce the multiple meanings of a parable to just one, which is then regarded as normative and correct. Or allegorizing can involve applying a parable to a situation that it simply does not fit, or stretching the metaphor beyond its limits.

Allegory, in distinction from allegorizing, is as valid- a literary device as parable, but is not, as has long been supposed, a form at all. It is, as Madeleine Boucher has pointed out, simply a device of meaning, an extended metaphor in narrative form (The Mysterious Parable). The prodigal son, the friend at midnight, and the unmerciful servant are allegories, she believes, but they are no less authentic bearers of the mystery of the Kingdom than other figurative modes of expression.

A parable (or simile, allegory, exemplary story or any other figure) stands in an intermediate position between the known and the unknown. Valid interpretation presses through the metaphor to the unknown; allegorizing rebounds back to the safety of the known. In valid interpretation we feel our way into each symbol in order to sense the surplus of meaning that beckons us beyond ourselves to discover something new. In allegorizing we equate each symbol with something we already know, and render the parable’s meaning by a theological paraphrase. Valid interpretation is a listening to what cannot be heard without the parable; allegorizing is a speech imposed on the parable, telling it what it must mean. In the final analysis, then, allegorizing is an attitude of domination over the text and satisfaction with what one already has. It is a subtle or blatant form of arrogance. It is the death of interpretation.

Hooks to Grab Us

To hear a parable, then, is to submit oneself to entering its world, to make oneself vulnerable, to know that we do not know at the outset what it means. Parables function much as the Zen koan, or the tales of the dervishes, to tease the mind out of familiar channels and into a more right-brain view of things. Parables have hooks all over them; they can grab each of us in a different way, according to our need.

Are we discouraged about our ministry and its meager results? Then we can identify with the sower and look with new hope toward an unprecedented harvest. Have we unwittingly filled our lives with activities, cares, false loves, which threaten to choke off the ultimate values to which we once so flamingly committed ourselves? We might then see ourselves as thorn-infested soil. Are we just grazing the surface, dabbling in the life of the spirit, half-heartedly dipping into the struggle for a just and humane world? Are we perhaps the rocky soil? Or have we become stupefied by dogma or our own vaunted pride in reason, so that we can hear nothing new? Have our paths become ruts? This is but a skimming of meanings I have heard people find in the puzzling and inexhaustible riddle of the parable of the sower (Mark 4:1-9).

The fallacy of the one-point theory should have become manifest the moment it became clear that scholars themselves could not agree on what the one point was -- though each was certain that he knew! The fact is that there is no one point of entree into these parables, and no single exit. That is precisely why they are so timeless, so universally potent, so masterful. Like fire-seeking rockets for air-to-air combat, they seek us out and find us. The contradictions in interpretation of the parable of the sower (Mark 4:13-20) are proof of this. The early preachers in the Christian community tried to fix the "one" meaning of the parable by providing a definitive interpretation. But they too could not agree, some seeing the seed as the word (vs. 14) and the people as the soil (vs. 15b), others seeing the people as seed (vss. 15, 16, 18, 20). They would have mastered the parable, but it overpowered them and made nonsense of their attempt.

Many of us, still shackled by the chains of rationalistic exegesis, approach a parable fairly confident that we "know what it’s about." All the more important, then, that we find ways to defamiliarize the parable, to see it from new angles, to open new possibilities for hearing, as Jesus repeatedly warns us to do. Critical insights can sometimes help. So can identifying with various aspects of the parable, gestalting it from many angles, or miming it. You may have to work hard to keep from allegorizing it piece by piece or reducing it to a single bland "I know just what it means -- it means this" statement. Feel your way into the symbols, experience the parable’s mystery, its near-numinosity, until you begin to sense that you do not understand it after all, but that possibly it understands you.

The New RSV: The Best Translation, Halfway There

Throughout my career as a biblical scholar I have used the Revised Standard Version of the Bible in my classes. Though I noted its rare deficiencies, I little expected its sequel to be such a thoroughgoing improvement. Indeed, as I examined the New Testament section of the New Revised Standard Version line by line I was astonished by the almost unerring precision and appropriateness of not just some but virtually all its changes. Fifty-one other English translations of the New Testament have appeared since the RSV was published 44 years ago, but the NRSV now takes its place as the finest American translation yet.

That is not a grandiose claim. In a sense, every new translation should be better than its predecessors since it can draw on their improvements and add fresh ones. In practice, however, that is not the way it works. The New International Version is, in my view, too literal, wooden, halting. The Good News Bible (Today’s English Version) is at times inspired in its renderings, at others not, but is too much a paraphrase for basic study. The Jerusalem Bible, if one is strong enough to lift it, is a superb translation, though I often regret the changes made in the second edition. The Revised English Bible of 1989 is, if anything, more literary than the NRSV, and a truly excellent version; but it is less close in its -renderings to the originals and a bit, well, British -- as it should be. The King James Version is simply not based on the better Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, and is full of errors.

What makes the NRSV a quantum-leap forward, a work of such quality that it can serve, as the KJV and the RSV once did, as the definitive translation for North American readers? First, it reaps the harvest of literally tens of thousands of scholarly probes into the language and times of the Bible. It draws on the discovery of many older manuscripts, some of them, as in the case of the Isaiah scroll found at Qumran, a thousand years earlier than the texts used to translate the KJV.

Second, unlike the RSV translators, who bore the onus of adhering as closely as possible to the KJV (large portions of which the faithful had memorized) , the NRSV translators were instructed to continue in the tradition of the KJV but with complete freedom to introduce such changes as were warranted. Thus the NRSV preserves a continuity with the English literary tradition, in which the KJV has played a role approached only by Shakespeare.

Third, it is the first major translation mandated to eliminate linguistic sexism in reference to men and women (but not to God) , without altering passages that reflect the historical situation of ancient patriarchal culture.

Fourth, archaisms like "thee" and "thou" have been dropped. An enormous number of small changes have been introduced, few of them creating major shifts in meaning but whose cumulative effect is to produce a magnificent translation -- in short, a stunning achievement.

Here is but a sample of some of its improvements. Some changes are simply more vivid and pithy: "bombastic nonsense" replaces "loud "boasts of folly" in II Peter 2:18; the Gerasene demoniac is now "howling," not just "crying out" (Mark 5:5) ; the Shulammite maiden in Song of Solomon is now "black and beautiful," not just "dark, but comely" (1:5) , and her lover’s "intention toward me was love" (RSV: "his banner over me was love" -- 2:4) Saul no longer is "prophesying," but in a "prophetic frenzy" (I Sam. 10:13), and "outlaws" replace Jephthah’s "worthless fellows" (Judg. 11:3)

Adam and Eve did not make "aprons," since kitchens had not yet been invented, but "loincloths" (Gen. 3:7) The RSV’s "great men" are now "magnates" (Rev. 6:15) who behave like "tyrants" (RSV: "exercise authority" -- Mark 10:42) The stilled sea is "a dead calm" (RSV: "great calm" -- Mark 4:39) , and acting "by nature" is now to "do instinctively" (Rom. 2:14)

In a few cases the NRSV translation actually reverses the meaning of the RSV. When Agag comes before Samuel "haltingly" (RSV: "cheerfully") , saying, "Surely this is the bitterness of death" (RSV: "Surely the bitterness of death is past" -- I Sam. 15:32) , we are given a whole new picture of the scene. Here the Qumran scrolls have contributed to the translation. More often, however, the translators provide more modest clarifications. The angel with which Jacob wrestled did not merely touch the hollow of his thigh on the sinew of the hip (RSV) , but rather "struck Jacob on the hip socket at the thigh muscle" (Gen 32:32) And speaking of wrestling, Epaphras is not simply "remembering you earnestly" in his prayers, but "wrestling (agonizomenos) in his prayers on your behalf’ (Col. 4:12)

Jesus’ family is not just afraid that he is "beside himself" but that he has "gone out of his mind" (Mark 3:21) Phoebe is not a "deaconess" (RSV) but a "deacon," fully an equal of men and a "benefactor" or patron, not just a "helper" (RSV -- Rom. 16:1) Likewise, the translators make clear that Junia is a woman (RSV: "Junias") , and not one of the "men of note among the apostles" (RSV) ; she is rather a woman "prominent among the apostles" and a believer before Paul was (Rom. 16:7)

It is a delight to run across these improvements. At times I would catch myself saying, "Surely not!" only to consult the Hebrew or Greek and discover the NRSV is right. Why, I wondered, does it read "believing wife" in I Corinthians 9:5, when the RSV has merely "wife"? A glance at the Greek shows why: it reads "sister as wife" -- sister denoting a member of the church (the translators have conveniently supplied this datum in a note)

In other cases the NRSV translators have hit on brilliant phrasing: "super-apostles" (for "superlative apostles" -- II Cor: 11:5) ; or "to be our way of life" (for "that we should walk in them" -- Eph 2:10) Advice for slaves has been clarified, now that there is fortunately no need for such advice: obey your earthly master "not only while being watched" (RSV: "not in the way of eye-service" -- Eph 6:6) But the prize for straight talk goes to Galatians 5:12: "I wish those who unsettle you [with the demand that they be circumcised] would castrate themselves" (RSV: "mutilate")

One innovation in this version is the translation of the Greek imperfect tense with the proper sense of action continuous in the past. It’s a little thing -- but of such excellences are a greater excellence made. Thus the leader of the synagogue "kept saying" (RSV: "said") ’ to the crowd that healings should not take place on the sabbath (Luke 13:14)

Some passages no longer preserve the sonorous KJV cadences, and it will be hard for some people to part with them. John 1:1-4 is at every point more faithfully rendered in, the NRSV, but v. 3 just jerks and twitches ("All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being") But that’s what the Greek says. Should they have translated more freely? Many will lament the change in Paul’s rhapsody on love in I Corinthians 13:3, "If I hand over my body so that I may boast" (RSV: "to be burned") The better manuscripts do indeed support the alteration -- but isn’t something like "burned" implied? The change of Psalm 23:4 from "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death" to "through the darkest valley" may be more correct, but it is certainly less powerful. And some may regard the improvement of Romans 3:25 as worse, because more intelligible: "Whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement" (RSV: "expiation")

But other passages are so felicitously turned that no one could complain. The RSV’s awkward "In these you once walked, when you lived in them" becomes "These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life" (Col. 3:7) Or RSV’s "the time for establishing all" becomes the far more majestic and correct, "the time of universal restoration" (apokatastasis -- Acts 3:21)

In a few instances the translators actually solve the meaning of puzzling verses. Why did Peter, who was unclothed in the boat, put on his clothes and dive into the sea to reach the risen Jesus? He was just covering his nakedness, not fully dressing (John 21:7) And at Cana the steward does not say that good wine is normally served first, and then, "when men have drunk freely," poor wine is served (RSV) , but "then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk" (John 2:10) The Greek verb means to be inebriated. Picture it: Jesus creates 120-180 gallons of finest wine after everyone is already too soused to notice. I only wish translators had had similar chutzpah at Luke 18:5 and had placed their more accurate footnote in the text: "so that she [the importunate widow] may not finally come and slap me in the face" -- the term is from boxing, more literally, "give a black eye."

Judicious handling of monetary terms actually helps a couple of stories make sense. By rendering "denarius" as "the usual daily wage," the translators make it clear that the owner in the parable of the workers in the vineyard is giving all his workers what they need for survival, regardless of the time they worked (Matt. 20:2) And in Matthew 17:24-27, the story in which Jesus pays the temple tax by catching a pecuniary fish, the translators tell us through the notes that the stater is worth two didrachmas, thus covering the taxes of both Jesus and Peter.

Christological titles shift a bit. "Christ" is replaced by "Messiah" when it is a title, not a proper name, for Jesus (except in Mark 1:1 --why?) , and "my beloved Son" by "my Son, the Beloved"; both changes are welcome. "Son of Man" is correctly rendered by "mortal" in the Old Testament, yet it is left untranslated in the New. "Son of" in Hebrew is merely an idiom meaning "of or pertaining to the following genus or species," and the NRSV never leaves it untranslated. Thus a "son of a quiver" is an ‘arrow.’ In Matthew 8:12 "sons of the kingdom" is correctly given as "the heirs of the kingdom" by the NRSV. So why is Son of Man capitalized (it is not in the Greek) when applied to Jesus and left untranslated? Why not, for consistency’s sake and greater accuracy, try rendering it "the human being"?

In many cases the RSV’s footnotes have migrated into the NRSV text. It took some courage to change the revered reading of the Isaiah servant song from "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows" to "Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases" (Isa. 53:4) , though the RSV note indicates that its translators already knew which was the more correct. So also Genesis 1:1 now follows what was a note in the RSV: "In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth."

Antiquated terms are replaced. "Dome" helpfully supersedes "firmament" in Genesis I. "Behold" is handled by a variety of clever means: ‘look," "see," "just then," "see here," "suddenly," "here is." "Rejoiced exceedingly" becomes "overwhelmed with joy"; "he opened his mouth" becomes "he began to speak" "he knew her not" becomes he "had no marital relations with her."

Christian reflection on the problem of evil will be greatly advanced by the correction of the egregious error of the KJV, preserved in the RSV, that not one sparrow falls to the ground "without your Father’s will." This picture of God as a murderer violates not only moral feeling but the Greek text, which is literally rendered by the NRSV, "Not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father" (Matt. 10:29) God suffers with the creation.

All these excellences (and there are too many to count) will probably be eclipsed in the public mind by the NRSV’s treatment of sexist language. Be ready for the argument that the translators have violated the Greek text in order to curry the favor of feminists. That is all bluster. The care with which this part of the mandate has been achieved is everywhere evident. The fact is that sexist translations are inaccurate. To use "men" when women are clearly included is not just insensitive, it is incorrect.

The translators have used paraphrases, otherwise avoided in this version, to compensate for a deficiency in the English language -- the lack of a common gender third-person singular pronoun. One strategy is to shift from the singular to the plural in order to circumvent masculine pronouns: "Blessed is he" in Psalm 32:1 becomes "Happy are those." Or the third person can be shifted to second person, actually making the saying more personal and direct, as in Matthew 18:6 -- "it would be better for you [RSV: "him"] if a great millstone were fastened around your [RSV: "his"] neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea." Sometimes "one" does the job: "For one [RSV: "man"] believes with the [RSV: "his"] heart and so is justified" (Rom. 10:10) "Children" can be substituted for "sons" when women are clearly included (Rom. 8:19) , and "mortals," "human beings," or "humankind" used to translate the Greek anthropos (which is often an inclusive term, distinguished from aner, "man" or "male")

Some of the NRSV’s nonsexist translations demanded great resourcefulness. The refrain in Mark 4:9, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear" becomes "Let anyone with ears to hear listen!" "God’s foolishness," we learn from I Corinthians 1:25, "is wiser than human wisdom" (RSV: "men") The term "brethren" created greatest difficulty. It usually means the whole church. The NRSV translators have rendered it "brothers and sisters," "believers," "friends," "beloved," "the community," "members of your family" (of believers) , "members of the church" -- and all of them work. (Why then is "brother" left standing in Acts 15:1?) Some may balk at the taking of these liberties; but the issue is one both of accuracy and of justice, and "we must obey God rather than any human authority" (RSV: "men" -- Acts 5:29)

Not everything on the sexually inclusive front is satisfactory, however. Why is the awkward "humankind" preferred over "humanity"? Why in Mark 10:7 do we have the contrast "man . . . wife" (as if she were still chattel) instead of; as at I Corinthians 11:3, "husband. . . wife"?

Sometimes the attempt at inclusiveness founders. In trying to avoid the masculine pronoun, the translators render Luke 14:27 as "Whoever does not carry the cross." This makes it sound as if it is Jesus’ cross, rather than one’s own, as the Greek reads. The theological implications of that change are fairly serious. We have enough vicarious, Jesus-did-it-all-for-me Christianity already without that added burden. And what price justice, some may ask, when they discover that "fishers of men" has become the prosaic "fish for people" (Mark 1:17) Any takers for "fishers of folk"?

People are always on the lookout for theological bias in Bible translations. Is there one here? The signals are mixed. In two passages we have what appears to be a move toward a lower Christology. II Corinthians 5:19 is translated "In Christ God was reconciling the World to himself." The word order in the Greek (and the KJV and RSV) is "God was in Christ," putting greater emphasis on the incarnation. Again, the NRSV changes John 1:14 from "glory as of the only Son from the Father" to "glory as of the father’s only son" -- this, again, in an incarnational passage. Are these changes anti-incarnational?

Hardly. John 1:18 compensates fully in the opposite direction, declaring Jesus God. The RSV’s "the only Son" becomes "It is God the only Son." But the Greek is monogenes theos, "the only-begotten God," a phrase exceedingly difficult to render into modern English. The NRSV translates from the perspective of trinitarian theology, whereas John is far closer to the logos spermatikos notion of Stoic and Philonic philosophy. So on the issue of bias I would say we have a standoff reflecting the theological range of the committee.

In so great an undertaking as this there are bound to be a few weak spots. But they are very few indeed. Some are important; the majority amount to fine tuning.

A key and controversial text is I Corinthians 6:9, which NRSV translates as "male prostitutes and sodomites" (RSV second edition: "sexual perverts") Given the present state of our knowledge, I wish the translators had let the RSV stand. "Male prostitutes" is probably correct, but "sodomites"? What precisely does the word mean? In the story of Sodom in Genesis, sodomites are heterosexual men who want to humiliate other ostensibly heterosexual alien males by gang-raping them. Is that what the translators have in mind? Or do they mean everyone, hetero- and homosexual, who engages in anal intercourse? Or are they referring to what many take sodomy to mean: intercourse with animals? Some have argued that the two Greek terms here refer to active and passive male prostitutes. The issue is charged with significance, for Paul categorically states that none of these people (whichever they are) will inherit the kingdom of God. Do the translators mean all homosexuals?

I thought it was common knowledge that "feet" in Exodus 4:25 is a circumlocution for the genitals (as in the REB) , and that "Abba" means "Daddy" rather than "Father" (as the note- in Romans 8:15 says) Do the translators really wish to remove the question mark in John 7:28? Doing so makes this verse a direct contradiction of 8:14, and overlooks John’s characteristic irony.

Irony was also missed in the phrasing of Mark 10:30: all the wonderful things the disciple who leaves all will receive -- houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields -- will be tempered "with persecutions." And why follow the reading of a tiny minority of manuscripts in II Corinthians 5:3 against the powerful witness of the vast majority, when the latter reading (and RSV) makes better sense?

Why keep "virgins’ in I Corinthians 7:25 and 34, where the RSV’s "unmarried" and "girl" were better? We just don’t use virgins this way in modern English. Why, when the translators render "flesh" so adroitly over and over, do they leave it in I Corinthians 5:5, where "the destruction of the flesh" looks like, and has been taken by commentators to mean, ritual execution? Their own translation of sarx in Galatians 5:13 would have served: in "the destruction of his self-indulgence."

The translators do a wonderful job of putting passages in poetic form. Why then did they leave the hymn of the Cosmic Christ in prose in Colossians 1:15-20? And perhaps a footnote was in order at Mark 10:51 to indicate that Bartimaeus’s request, "Let me see again" (implying that he had once been sighted) , is only a conjecture, since the same word (anablepo) is used of the man born blind in John 9:11.

Many people have favorite hobby horses they like to ride that may have no urgent appeal to others. So it may just be a personal peccadillo that I find "patient endurance" in Revelation 1:9 unendurably bland, preferring something guttier, like "iron intransigence" or "resolute resistance," or "firmeza permanente," as the Brazilians like to put it. "Do not resist an evildoer" in Matthew 5:39 could have been tightened up to reflect the use of antistenai as a military term, indicating violent resistance.

My favorite hobby horse, however, is the principalities and powers, having written almost five books on the subject. Here the NRSV gets a mixed review. Its rendering of "principalities and power" by "rulers and authorities" is a welcome change, making far clearer that not just spiritual powers but earthly institutions are implied. This means, however, that the phrase "principalities and powers" must now recede from usage. Perhaps the Powers That Be will become the collective designation.

But the NRSV should have abandoned the RSV’s statement that God "disarmed" these powers in Colossians 2:15; they are far from disarmed! But they have been exposed and unmasked, which is what the Greek term really means (to "strip off") And I am disappointed that the phrase stoicheia tou kosmou is still being translated "elemental spirits," when the word "spirit" isn’t there. The NRSV footnote is correct -- "rudiments," though who knows what they are. The translation in Hebrews 5:12 would have served for all appearances of the phrase: "basic elements." And Daniel 10:13 should have been translated as "the guardian angel of Persia" or similarly, to indicate that it is an angelic being, as the reference to the archangel Michael makes clear.

But most of this amounts to fine print. What will create a storm of complaints is the decision by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ. USA, to eliminate masculine language in reference to people but not to God. Surely we must be aware by now that God is not really a man. The language of males, applied to God, is merely a metaphor. But it also reflects the patriarchal power structure of those who use that metaphor. It would be extremely difficult to erase all such patriarchal imagery, nor should we want to; much of it is valid. God is like a ‘loving Father.

The Education Division could have done something very simple. It could have asked the translation committee where possible to reduce the unnecessary use of masculine pronouns in reference to God without, violating the meaning of the text. The translation committee has demonstrated how faithfully and with what care it would carry out this directive. At several points it has in fact already made a beginning. For example, in Matthew 10:40 the NRSV substitutes "the one who sent me" for "him who sent me," referring to God (see also Matt. 19:4) How easy it would have been to substitute "God" for "he" or "him" in any number of places without in any way altering the meaning. "Jesus" is freely substituted for "he." The statement in the introduction that the English language is deficient in its lack of a common gender third-person singular pronoun applies as much to pronouns referring to God as those referring to people.

Many who have been deeply wounded by patriarchy will regard this version as a cup not half full but half empty. The very greatness of its achievement will be regarded as aiming too low. Such a judgment would be eminently unfair. The translation committee did what it was commissioned to do with unprecedented skillfulness. We should regard its effort as part of an ongoing process. Let us hope that the sheer success of this version, the first major translation seriously to tackle the issue of sexist language, will encourage the Education Commission to let the translators finish the job.

Biting the Bullet: The Case for Legalizing Drugs

The drug war is over. We lost it long before the latest declaration of war by President Bush. Whatever the other factors, we lost primarily for spiritual reasons. We merely repeated the mistake of Prohibition: the harder we tried to stamp out the evil, the more lucrative we made it. We should know that prohibition doesn’t work. Forcible resistance to evil simply makes it more profitable.

Our attempts to stamp out drugs violate a fundamental principle that Jesus articulated in the Sermon on the Mount: "Resist not evil." The Greek term translated "resist" is antistenai. When it is used by the Greek Old Testament or by the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, however, the word is usually translated, "to be engaged in a revolt, rebellion, riot, insurrection." It is virtually a synonym for war. It means to stand up against an enemy and fight. So Jesus’ words should be translated, "Do not resist evil by violent means. Do not fight evil with evil. Do not mirror evil, do not let evil set the terms of your response. Applied to the drug issue, this means, "Do not resist drugs by violent methods."

When we oppose evil with the same weapons that evil employs, we commit the same atrocities, violate the same civil liberties and break the same laws as do those whom we oppose. We become what we hate. Evil makes us over into its mimetic double. If one side prevails, the evil continues by virtue of having been established through the means used. More often, however, both sides grow, fed by their mutual resistance, as in the arms race, the Vietnam war, the Salvadoran civil war and Lebanon. This principle of mimetic opposition is illustrated abundantly in the drug War.

Bush’s drug-war strategy has three elements. First, it requires cutting off the drug source in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Yet this appears to be impossible. Already we see signs that Colombia is collapsing into civil war. Officials and journalists are being gunned down on the streets, civilian homes are being raided and seized, civilian government is increasingly being taken over by the military -- and so far the drug lords have only engaged in selective terrorism.

Moreover, the Colombian army has seldom confronted the 140 paramilitary private armies of the drug lords, or raided their training bases. For in certain areas of the country the military has formed a marriage of convenience with drug traffickers and landowners in a common front against a 30-year-old leftist guerrilla insurgency. With an income in the billions of dollars, drug leaders are able to buy generals, judges and police. In one week last fall, the Colombian national police fired 2,075 officers for having links with the cartels. The drug lords have also bought limited public acceptance by sponsoring the national soccer league, diversifying into legitimate businesses, supporting charities and offering to pay off the government’s $10 billion external debt.

To test public reaction, the Bush administration may talk about sending in U.S. troops. But even if only military advisers are sent, they will soon discover in the field what our advisers found in Vietnam: an army not really committed to a fight. And even if those producing countries could be rid of coca tomorrow, production would simply be moved somewhere else, and the eradication effort would have to be started all over again in Southeast Asia, Turkey, Afghanistan and other countries far less likely to let us call the shots. So far, cocaine cultivation uses only 700 square miles of the 2.5 million square miles suitable for its growth in South America. There is simply no way the U.S. can police so vast an area.

Second, the Bush strategy calls for interdicting cocaine at our borders. We have been trying that for years, and it simply cannot be done short of militarizing the borders. According to a Government Accounting Office study, the U.S. Air Force spent $3.3 million on drug interdiction, using sophisticated AWACS surveillance planes over a 15-month period ending in 1987. The grand total of drug seizures from that effort was eight. During the same period, the combined efforts of the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy, sailing for 2,512 ship days at a cost of $40 million, resulted in the seizure of a mere 20 drug-carrying vessels. Drugs are easy to smuggle. The entire country’s current annual import of cocaine would fit into a single C-5A cargo plane.

Even when interdiction works, it does nothing to reduce drug availability. On September 29, 1989, 21.4 tons of cocaine was seized in Los Angeles; within a week nine tons was taken in Harlingen, Texas, and five more at sea off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The almost 36 tons netted in the three seizures was valued at $11 billion. Yet ten days later undercover agents were able to buy cocaine in bulk at the same price as before the seizures.

William Bennett, director of the National Office of Drug Control Policy, hopes that interdiction will raise drug prices. In fact, however, cocaine has become more available, while its wholesale price has dropped by 80 percent during the past decade. Increased prices would not deter addicts anyway; it would simply increase their rate of criminal acts. In Dade County, Florida, a mere 254 young addicts accounted for 223,000 crimes in a single year -- almost 2.5 per youth per day. Multiply that by a nation and you see why the drug war was lost before it began.

As Senator John Kerry’s subcommittee on narcotics reported in December 1988, increased cooperation with foreign governments has neither cut the amount of cocaine entering the U.S. nor led to the destruction of the major smuggling organizations. Fifteen percent of the drugs entering this country are being confiscated, but "for the drug cartels, whose production capacities stagger the imagination, a 15 percent loss rate is more than acceptable."

Third, the Bush plan calls for arresting drug dealers and casual users. There are already 750,000 drug arrests per year, and the current prison population is overtaxing facilities. At an average of $51,000 per inmate per year, just to incarcerate the 750,000 arrested annually would cost $38 billion. There are 35 to 40 million Americans who have used illegal drugs within the past year. To jail all users would run a tidy $1.785 trillion.

As for using the death penalty for deterrence, it seems unlikely that this country is ready to execute drug dealers by the hundreds of thousands. If so many millions are flouting the law, Prohibition style, is there really a political will for harsh enforcement? And how sincere is our antidrug effort going to be when the financial community realizes that the cash flow from the drug trade is the only thing preventing a default by some of the heavily indebted Latin American nations or major money-laundering banks? Cocaine trade brings Bolivia’s economy about’ $600 million per year, a figure equal to the country’s total legal export income. Revenues from drug trafficking in Miami are greater than those from tourism, exports, health care and all other legitimate businesses combined.

It is not drugs but rather drug laws that have made drug dealing profitable. Drug laws have also fostered drug-related murders and an estimated 40 percent of all property crime in the U.S. Ethan A. Nadelmann, whose article "Drug Prohibition in the United States" in the September 1, 1989, issue of Science has been a major catalyst for public discussion of legalization, argues that "the greatest beneficiaries of the drug laws are organized and unorganized drug traffickers. The criminalization of the drug market effectively imposes a de facto value-added tax that is enforced and occasionally augmented by the law enforcement establishment and collected by the drug traffickers." Rather than collecting taxes on the sale of drugs, governments at all levels expend billions of dollars in what amounts to a subsidy of organized criminals.

The war on drugs creates casualties beyond those arrested. There are those killed in fights over turf, innocents caught in cross fire, citizens terrified of city streets, escalating robberies, children fed free crack to get them addicted and then enlisted as runners and dealers, mothers so crazed for a fix that they abandon their babies, prostitute themselves and their daughters, and addict their unborn. Much of that, too, is the result of the drug laws. Cocaine, after all, has been around a long time and was once sold over the counter in tablet form and consumed in Coca-Cola. What makes it so irresistible today is its lucrativeness. And it is lucrative only because it is illegal.

The media usually portray cocaine and crack use as a black ghetto phenomenon. This is a racist caricature. The New York Times reported on October 1, 1989, that there are more crack addicts among the white middle and upper class than any other segment of the population and far more such occasional cocaine users. The typical user is a single white male 20 to 40 years old who generally obtains his drugs from black dealers. The white demand makes the drugs flow. Americans consume 60 percent of the world’s illegal drugs -- too profitable a market for dealers to ignore.

In the drug war, we are blindly fighting what we have become as a nation. Some observers say that drugs are the ultimate consumer product for people who want to feel good now without benefit of hard work, social interaction, or making a productive contribution to society. Drug dealers are living out the rags-to-riches American dream as private entrepreneurs trying desperately to become upwardly mobile. That is why we cannot win the war on drugs. We Americans are the enemy, and we cannot face that fact. So we launch a half-hearted, half-funded, half-baked war against a menace that only mirrors what we have ourselves become as a nation.

The uproar about drugs is itself odd. In 1987, according to the Kerry subcommittee, there were 1,400 deaths from cocaine; in 1988, that figure had increased to 3,308. Deaths from all forms of illegal drugs total under 6,000. By contrast, 320,000 to 390,000 people die prematurely each year from tobacco and 100,000 to 200,000 from misuse of alcohol. Alcohol is associated with 40 percent of all suicide attempts, 40 percent of all traffic deaths, 54 percent of all violent crimes and 10 percent of all work-related injuries.

None of the illegal drugs are as lethal as tobacco or alcohol. If anyone has ever died as a direct result of a marijuana overdose, no one seems to know about it. Many people can be addicted to heroin for most of their lives without serious consequences. Cocaine in powder form is not as addictive as nicotine; Nadelmann points out that only 3 percent of those who try it become addicted. Crack is terribly addictive, but its use is a direct consequence of the high cost of powdered cocaine. Crack was a cheap ghetto alternative, and its spread to the middle and upper classes has in part been a function of its low price. Severely addicted humans may in some ways resemble those experimental monkeys who will starve themselves to death if supplied with, unlimited cocaine, but the vast majority of users are not in such danger (and alcoholic humans also will drink themselves to death)

We must be honest about these facts, because much of the hysteria about illegal drugs has been based on misinformation: All addiction is a serious matter, and the churches are right to be concerned about the human costs. But many of these costs are a consequence of a wrongheaded approach to eradication. Our tolerance of the real killer drugs and our abhorrence of the drugs which are far less lethal is hypocritical, or at best a selective moralism reflecting fashions of indignation.

Drug addiction is singled out as evil, yet we are a society of addicts living in an addictive society. We project on the black drug subculture profound anxieties about our own addictions (to wealth, power, sex, food, work, religion, alcohol and tobacco) and attack addiction in others without having to gain insight about ourselves. New York City Councilman Wendell Foster illustrated this scapegoating attitude when he suggested chaining addicts to trees so people could spit on them.

I’m not advocating giving up the war on drugs because we cannot win. I am saying that we cannot win as long as we let drugs dictate the means we use to oppose them. The only way to win is to ruin the world market price of drugs by legalizing them. When drug prices plummet, drug profits will collapse -- and with them, the drug empire.

Some people have called for decriminalization, but they probably mean legalization. Decriminalization would mean no more laws regulating drugs, no governmental restraints on sales to minors, no quality controls to curtail overdose and no prosecution of the inevitable bootleggers. Legalization, however, means that the government would maintain regulatory control over drug sales, possibly through state clinics or stores. Advertising would be strictly prohibited, selling drugs to children would continue to be a criminal offense, and other evasions of government regulation would be prosecuted. Driving, flying or piloting a vessel under the influence would still be punished. Taxes on drugs would pay for enforcement, education, rehabilitation and research (Nadelmann estimates a net benefit of at least $10 billion from reduced expenditures on enforcement and new tax revenues) Street users would be picked up and taken to hospitals, like drunks, instead of arrested.

Legalization would lead to an immediate decrease in murders, burglaries and robberies, paralleling the end of alcohol prohibition in 1933. Cheap drugs would mean that most addicts would not be driven to crime to support their habit, and that drug lords would no longer have a turf to fight over. Legalization would be a blow to South American peasants, who would need support in switching back to less lucrative crops; but that would be less devastating than destruction of their crops altogether by aerial spraying or biological warfare. Legalization would enable countries like Peru to regularize the cocaine sector and absorb its money-making capacity in the taxable; legal, unionized economic world. Legalization would be a blow to ghetto dealers, who would be deprived of their ticket to riches. It would remove glamorous, Al Capone-type traffickers who are role models for the young, and it would destroy the "cool" status of drug use. It would cancel the corrupting role of the drug cartels in South American politics, a powerful incentive to corruption at all levels of our own government and a dangerous threat to our civil liberties through mistaken enforcement and property confiscation. It would free law-enforcement agencies to focus on other crimes and reduce the strain on the court and prison systems. It would nip in the bud a multibillion-dollar bureaucracy whose prosperity depends on not solving the drug probe. It would remove a major cause of public cynicism about obeying the laws of the land.

Legalization would also free up money wasted on interdiction of supplies that are needed desperately for treatment, education and research. Clinics in New York have room for only 48,000 of the state’s estimated half-million addicts. Only $700 million has been earmarked by the Bush administration for treatment, out of a total expenditure of $8 billion for the drug war. Yet nationally, approximately 90 percent of the addicts who apply to drug treatment and rehabilitation Centers are turned away for lack of space, resources, and personnel. For those who do persist, the waiting period is six to 18 months. Even then, one-third to one-half of drug abusers turned away do reapply after waiting the extended time.

The worst prospect of legalization is that it might lead to a short-term increase in the use of drugs, due to availability, lower prices and the sudden freedom from prosecution. The repeal of Prohibition had that result. Drugs cheap enough to destroy their profitability would also be in the range of any child’s allowance, just like beer and cigarettes. Cocaine is easily concealable and its effects less overt than alcohol. The possibility of increased teenage use is admittedly frightening.

On the other hand, ending the drug war would free drug control officers to concentrate on protecting children from exploitation, and here stiff penalties would continue to be in effect. The alarmist prediction that cheap available drugs could lead to an addiction rate of 75 percent of regular users simply ignores the fact that 35 to 40 million Americans are already using some drugs and that only 3 percent become addicts. Most people have strong reasons not to become addicts. A major educational program would need to be in effect well before drug legalization took effect.

Fighting the drug war may appear to hold the high moral ground, but this is only an illusion. And while some have argued that legalization would place the state’s moral imprimatur on drugs, we have already legalized the most lethal drugs -- and no one argues that this constitutes governmental endorsement. But legalizing would indeed imply that drugs are no longer being satanized like "demon rum." It’s time we bit the bullet. Addicts will be healed by care and compassion, not condemnation. Dealers will be cured by a ruined world drug market, not by enforcement that simply escalates the profitability of drugs. Legalization offers a nonviolent, nonreactive, creative alternative that will let the drug menace collapse of its own deadly weight.

Those Who Have Not Seen (Jn. 20:19-31)

I was a freshman in college when I went to my first -- and last -- tent revival. I still remember the smell of sawdust, the glare of bare light bulbs, the squeak of metal chairs. And I remember the evangelist -- a wild-eyed man waving a Bible in one hand, slicking his hair back with the other and shouting himself hoarse on the Good News. When all that was left was a whisper, he leaned over the plywood pulpit and pleaded: "Won’t you come? Won’t you come? While the organist plays one more verse of ‘Just As I Am,’ won’t you come?" And although I didn’t go forward, I came close. He spoke as if it were his life that depended on it and not mine.

It is rumored that Rudolf Bultmann -- the demythologizer of the New Testament who had little interest in the question of Jesus’ physical resurrection -- often leaned over the pulpit when he preached, reaching out toward his hearers like any tent-meeting evangelist and pleading with them to come to Christ. So great was his concern for the intellectuals of his time, and so certain his conviction that they could not accept the primitive "myths" of the New Testament, that he reasoned the miracle stories away in an attempt to remove any roadblock between those skeptical minds and a living faith.

That same gesture -- leaning over the pulpit and pleading with the skeptics -- characterizes this story from John 20. John tells us that Jesus, now risen from the dead and very much alive, comes to that locked upper room where the Eleven have been hiding. It is dark outside, and inside a single lamp is burning. The disciples are gathered around the table, speaking in whispers, when one of them looks up and sees someone standing beside the door. There is a sharp intake of breath and then silence as the figure moves toward the table and into the circle of light. "Shalom," he says, showing a familiar face, holding up a wounded hand, and then he waits for the truth to sink in, for the disciples to let out their breath in one joyful gasp, for them to fall on him weeping, shouting, cheering.

What a glad reunion! And Thomas (out buying groceries at the time?) misses the whole thing. "We have seen the Lord," the others tell him excitedly. But Thomas is not convinced; Easter is too close to April Fool’s. He folds his arms across his chest and says, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.

That might have been the end of it, and maybe it should have been. Thomas has heard from a handful of eyewitnesses that Jesus is alive. Surely that’s enough. Still he takes his stand as a skeptic, making Jesus’ next gesture seem remarkably generous: Jesus comes back to that upper room the next week, when Thomas is there. He greets the disciples as before, but then turns his attention toward the doubter.

"Come, Thomas," he says. "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing." It is the kind of earnest plea you might expect from an evangelist, as if it were his life that depended on it and not yours: Won’t you come? Won’t you come? And Thomas, in one of the highest confessions of faith in the New Testament, blurts out: "My Lord and my God!"

Jesus’ response is gently reproving: "Have you believed because you have seen me, Thomas? Blessed are thosewho have not seen and yet have come to believe."

It is precisely here that John, the writer of this Gospel, leans over the pulpit and begins pleading with all those who have not seen the risen Jesus but may yet come to believe. "I could have written a lot more about Jesus," he says. "I could have preached all night. But what I have written I have written that you might believe that he is who he said he was: the Messiah, the son of God, and that believing you might have life in his name. Won’t you come? Won’t you come?

When I teach a New Testament course to college freshman I tell them that John is laying it on the line here. "He is saying that everything he has written in this Gospel is written so that you, the reader, will come to believe. He has done all he knows how to do. If you don’t believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, at this point in the Gospel, then John’s efforts will have been wasted and the Gospel will have failed." And then I lean over the lectern and add with a smile, "You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?"

This is where I join John and Jesus and Bultmann in urging "those who have not seen" to move from doubt to faith, from death to life. It is not so much a story of Jesus’ resurrection that John tells here as it is the story of Thomas’s rise to faith. And, as Jesus suggests, anyone can do it. You don’t have to put your fingers in his hands or your hands in his side. You don’t have to see him standing before you. As Bultmann would insist, faith and proof are two different things. And as John has explained, these things are not written so that you may have the facts, but so that you may believe.