"Fighting with the Bible" by Donn Morgan: "Why Scripture Divides Us and How It Can Bring Us Together"

Fighting with the Bible by Donn Morgan,  is part of this year's curriculum for Education for Ministry (EfM), an extension program of the School of Theology, University of the South, Sewanee.  Morgan is Dean of Old Testament at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California.  As a co-mentor at St. James Episcopal, I'm writing after our class's discussion. (More of their comments are at our class blog.) 

Morgan first writes about "Why Scripture Divides Us." As he demonstrates with several juxtapositions of passages, Scripture gives us ammunition to fight opposite sides of issues, religious and social.  The funniest example is a selection of Proverbs, one that condemns bribery and one that recommends it.  A telling example is Morgan's offering of vicious passages about Moabite intermarriage and about expelling Moabites back across Israel's border, subverted by the lovely story of Ruth, the Moabite woman whose progeny includes David.

But, telling us "How [Scripture] Can Bring Us Together," Morgan offers two insights that have caught me off-guard.

The core insight is what Morgan calls "the surprise of canon."  Describing how the Hebrew Scriptures came to be canonized for one book, he tells how "the existence of strong and important Jewish communities outside Israel forced the canonizers to include books such as Esther and Ruth" (79). Ironically, the canonizers who wanted "limits, scope, and control [instead] got diversity, difference, and variety, all within a single authoritative book." 

Now we have a Torah that mixes the final perspectives of several sources, as witnessed to by ... two very different stories of Creation (Genesis 1 and 2). Now we have two different "official" stories of the history of Israel (Samuel-Kings; Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah).  We have ended up with a canon that lifts up both the universal [i.e., God's promise to all nations] and the particular [i.e., to Israel], that bashes foreign nations on the one hand and makes them vehicles of God's love and justice on the other.

This dialogue, set up between outlooks in the Hebrew Scriptures, multiplies in the dialogue between those and the Christian canon.  

Another insight is in the way that Morgan foregrounds the exile of the Jews. Until this year, I've been more focused on the dramatic foundational stories of the Torah, from Abraham to David, a narrative of God's favor to a particular people.  I missed the story of Ezra and Nehemiah, in which the foreign king is God's agent.  I missed the exiles' evolving lines of defense against despair: to expect a hero in the line of David to restore the Kingdom; or, to accept exile as part of God's plan to make them "a light to the nations."  Morgan, and our EfM group's "theological reflection" on passages from II Kings 22 (here) and Nehemia (here) have made me more aware of how much of our tradition and prophetic passages (about "remnants" being saved, for example) come from that post-exilic period.