(Thoughts occasioned by an essay in The Claremont Review of Books (Summer 2006), "The Supreme Court v. the Constitution of the United States of America" by Michael M. Uhlmann, and the book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene by Bart D. Ehrman (Oxford Press, 2006). News and History | Religion )
So much of our political and religious strife comes down to one question about founders (of the USA, of Christianity): Do ancient texts have inherent authority that trumps any new developments in our understanding of the way we should live? My answer, in a word: No. Yet I believe above all in what conservatives call "rule of law" -- by which I mean, we go by procedures and guidelines created when calm people thought through a problem and came up with a solution. Much better that than the alternative, which would be rule by whim, rule by mass hysteria, rule by knee-jerk response. . .
The question has hit the blood-boiling point in two realms I think about often, in the Episcopal Church and in Constitutional law. The Claremont Review and other conservative groups -- and I! -- are worked up over the Supreme Court's recent interpretation that extends a municipality's "eminent domain" over property that could conceivably be a greater source of revenue in government hands. Then, in the Episcopal church, the appointment of a gay bishop a couple years ago and the more recent appointment of a woman to lead the House of Bishops has some parishioners in a tizzy.
Let's begin a discussion of "authority" with the historical observation that humankind made a great step forward when we learned to take original texts with a healthy dose of skepticism. That's what differentiated the Middle Ages from what followed, the notion that experience might be right when ancient texts (and, for that matter, present authorities in the church and state) were wrong. Petrarca, "father of the Renaissance," published a letter addressed to Cicero pointing out the ancient orator's errors and personal flaws that had been revealed in some recently-unearthed documents; Galileo used the telescope to demonstrate to those with an open mind that Copernicus had been right about the planets, despite what Scripture and ancient philosophers wrote. Martin Luther started the Reformation when he refused to accept the Roman Church's authority to tell him how to read what was plain in the text -- opening a can of Worms, one could say. The founders of the USA got their ideas and language from John Locke and others born in the English Renaissance who had to come up with a theory to justify decapitating King Charles I and later de-throning King James II, both of whom supposedly had Divine authority to rule.. . and they did it partly by giving new authority to something called Magna Carta they found in some trunk somewhere and by reading into it ideas about the common people that would never have occurred to the original authors, who were all self-interested aristocrats.
Let's say for argument that the founders were inherently authoritative, then we have the problem that they disagreed with each other. We have the Constitutional debate as proof, and disagreements among the heavy-hitters in The Federalist Papers, continued during Hamilton and Madison's days in early administrations, with fierce disagreement over the authority of the Constitution itself to bind states. A Civil War quelled the discussion, but it's still hotly contested in the limited realms of states' rights to limit abortion, for example. In Scripture, we see Paul v. Peter on Jewish law, Paul v. James on primacy of faith, and even Paul v. Paul on whether women should be leaders or just silent observers in worship. Does one person's inherent authority negate the others? Don't we still have to pick and choose?
Besides these, we possess dozens of writings -- gospels, letters, collections of sayings, apocalypses to rival Revelation -- that were once considered authoritative by at least some churches. By what authority did Church councils arrive at which ones of these to accept, and which to reject, five hundred years AD? Since those councils, other councils have picked and chosen some writings over others. During a parish meeting at St. James (Marietta, GA), one parishioner stood to accuse the bishops of betraying the faith by appointing the gay bishop: "you can't pick and choose which Scripture to follow." I was seated near the Rector, and we met eyes and whispered at the same time, "We've been doing that for two thousand years."
We also pick and choose which texts to read literally. Jesus and Paul state clearly more than once that the Kingdom of God would rise up within the life spans of their contemporaries. To insist that they did not err, one has to make allowances for either limits in their knowledge (i.e., Paul changed his mind), or some kind of rhetorical reason for exaggerration, or else they have to look at the loosely related congregations scattered throughout the Roman Empire and the persecutions of believers and call that "The Kingdom of God." Churches have long been embarrassed by the inclusion of The Song of Solomon in Scripture and have decided to read it as a ridiculously explicit allegory of Christ's love for his Church. In the Book of Job, "comforters" who spout the same ideas found in the Book of Proverbs come off looking like fools.
Lincoln was no originalist: he appealed to the Declaration and the Constitution, but he knew that others among the founders did not read these documents the way he was doing. Obviously, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt all read the words "All men are created equal" differently. Paul was no originalist: He interpreted literal stories as allegories whenever it helped in an argument, as he does in his discussion of "children of Abraham by faith" in Romans. Martin Luther wasn't an originalist: he advocated ripping James out of the Bible.
But picking and choosing makes originalists afraid. Most of all, they fear the "slippery slope," that we can't question part of the sacred text without questioning the other parts, and then, how will we stop a precipitous slide into the mud where nothing's sacred? And how do they know what to really believe?
"Slippery slope" is a logical fallacy that wouldn't earn points in a middle school debate. It makes no sense to say that A is okay but we must treat it as wrong because it might lead to D. Sorry, if A isn't wrong in itself, it's not wrong. Neither, for that matter, are B and C.
Originalists can relax. The authority of any text doesn't come from its being original or being somehow dictated by God. It comes from whether it feels right -- not to one person, not on a whim, but in a consensus of informed community, when experience, tradition, reason, and time have been used to make the decision. So, for example, the fourth-century council of Hippo didn't include in their Bible the ancient texts telling how boy Jesus struck an annoying neighbor dead and drowned his grammar teacher with a wave of his hand. That's not the Jesus that the Church was worshiping four hundred years before they'd had a Bible, so it didn't get into the Bible. In United States history, South Carolina claimed the right to nullify laws of the Federal Congress, and Andrew Jackson argued back -- with the threat of force. Eventually, force followed by reason prevailed.
On the plus side, there are other pieces of literature that do have this feeling of authoritativeness to them. My Bible would include St. Augustine, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and C. S. Lewis, plus Shakespeare's KING LEAR, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and the complete stories of Flannery O'Connor. (An actor who is also an evangelist on the London theatre scene, speaking to a group of evangelicals here in Atlanta last year, cited Samuel Beckett as his favorite modern playwright: an atheist who wrote truth that a Christian can feel to be right).
As the Declaration of Independence wisely puts it, when a people decides to pick and choose which parts of an ancient authority to jettison, it should not be done "lightly," and reasons should be declared.
Let our disagreements over who can be a bishop or what "eminent domain" or "cruel and unusual" mean be decided the old - fashioned way: hash it out on the merits, taking into account what our predecessors thought, and what may have changed since then; let's follow procedures mapped out for making new rules, or for changing old procedures; and let's not let someone from centuries ago have the final word by default.
Original Intent: A Good Place to Start, but . . . | News & History, Religion
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