Still exploring the mysteries of the Word
Editorial
Guyana Chronicle
October 8, 2003
‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.’
--John, Chapter one, verse one.
EVERY Christian child, who has ever attended Sunday school, has these divine words etched in his or her heart. It is one of the most enduring, most profound assertions of the New Testament in the King James Version of the Bible. In the same way that the early writings of all the major religions are considered sacred and treated with great reverence by their respective devotees, the Bible, which is believed to have been written by mortal men as they were inspired by the Holy Spirit, is held in wondrous awe by the followers of Christianity. For many believers, biblical passages and verses are invaluable sources of the assurance of God’s eternal love for mankind, as well as roadmaps for enjoying communion with an infinite and all-powerful Supreme Being, who will reward the good with great spiritual and material blessings, while conversely visiting the evil with physical and material destruction. One’s portion of blessings or curses will not necessarily be accorded in this world, but will most certainly be reaped in the afterlife of eternity.
But what are the parameters of “good” behaviour? What defines wicked behaviour? And should all human action be measured in the light of pure absolutes and certainties without taking into account those ever-present mitigating circumstances that often influence or compel human beings to behave in certain ways? Why is the act of one man taking the life of another deemed murder and is regarded as despicable in peacetime, when that same action is demanded of a soldier in the bloody theatre of war?
Wars and rumours of war aside, three subjects that provoke heated discussions in most societies today are abortions on demand, the death penalty and homosexual or gay partnerships. Fundamental believers frequently cite various scriptural texts to illustrate the rightness of their stances on each of these issues. In recent months, the Anglican world body has been almost riven over the question of promoting priests and bishops, who have declared their preference for the gay lifestyle. Amazingly, pro and con debaters of this subject find refuge and support for their choices in the Bible. Such situations prompt many observers, as well as believers to conclude that the problems arise as a result of each denomination’s interpretation of the Word of God.
The published reviews of three recent works on the English Bible offer useful insights, but not necessarily literal guidance on every vexing issue in this post-modern age. In the New York Times Book Review of Sunday, May 11, 2003, Jack Miles has this to say of the tome, ‘The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible’ by James L. Kugel: “…The God of before the time when God came to seem omniscient and omnipresent and the world came to seem a single thing in which He could always be imagined as present but from which He would always be experienced as absent. God imagined and experienced in this way is the God of the later books of the Hebrew Bible as well as of the New Testament; and He remains, by and large, the ‘standard’ God of our culture.”
One week later, Christopher Hitchens comments on Adam Nicholson’s book, ‘God’s Secretaries’, also in the New York Times Book Review: “He (Nicholson) brings off a brilliant freehand portrait of an England more rich yet insecure, more literate yet superstitious, more urban yet still rural in rhythm, more unified yet riven with factions. The years of the King James translation were also those of the first stage productions of ‘Othello’, ‘Volpone’, ‘King Lear’ and ‘The Tempest’, none of these being exactly free of the crisis of authority and the role of conscience. Nobody could have guessed it, but the Civil War and the Puritan Revolution were only a few decades into the future.”
And writing in The Christian Science Monitor of September 25, 2003, Thomas D’Evelyn critiques the “monumental study” ‘The Bible in English’ by David Daniell with these lines: “The main story has a hard certainty for Daniell: It all begins with Tyndale. Before Tyndale, ‘the Word had almost disappeared’, he writes. Tyndale’s translations not only put the ‘Word’ in the hands of ordinary people, his work gave them a taste of freedom from poverty and illness, ‘with glorious new and energetic energy.’ It’s as if modern subjectivity, the feeling of individual selfhood, came with the reading of Tyndale’s testaments. The immediacy of the early English Bible helps explain the ‘biblical cast of mind’ in which ‘the daily lives of the settlers were felt to be a part of a large cosmic process, a sense of destiny which still governs American thought’.”
While we realise that it is well nigh impossible to fully explore the various interpretations of the Bible’s profound mysteries in so short a column, we hope that some aspect of the views expressed would find resonance in sympathetic hearts