(mis)readings of scripture

In The Last Word, Wright devotes a chapter to looking at some of the most common misreadings of scripture by both the Right and the Left. The following snippets are collected from pages 106-110.

~ twelve misreadings by the right ~

(1) The openly dualistic "rapture" reading of 1 Thessalonians 4 (as in the hugely popular and blatantly right-wing American Left Behind series)

(2) The explicit materialist "prosperity gospel" understanding of biblical promises.

(3) The support of slavery. (Scripture always struggled to humanize an institution it could not expect to eradicate; by privileging the Exodus narrative, it constantly appealed to a controlling story of the God who set slaves free; at some points, e.g. Philemon, it set a time-bomb inside the whole system.)

(4) The endemic racism of much of Western culture. (Neo-apartheid groups still try to base racial ideologies on scripture.)

(5) Undifferentiated reading of the Old and New Testaments.

(6) Unacknowledged and arbitrary pick-and-mix selection of an implicit canon-within-the-canon. 

(7) The application of "new Israel" ideas (e.g. a reading of Deuteronomy) to various Enlightenment projects. (The United States is the obvious example...)

(8) Support for the death penalty (opposed by many of the early church fathers).

(9) Discovering of "religious" meanings and exclusion of "political" ones, thus often tacitly supporting the social status quo.

(10) Readings of Paul in general and Romans in particular which screen out the entire Jewish dimension through which alone that letter makes sense.

(11) Attempted 'biblical' support for the modern state of Israel as the fulfillment of scriptural prophecy.

(12) An overall failure to pay attention to context and hermeneutics.

~ twelve misreadings by the left ~

(1) The claim to 'objectivity' or to a 'neutral' reading of the text (the classic modernist position).

(2) The claim that modern history or science has either 'disproved the Bible' or made some of its central claims redundant, undesirable, or unbelievable.

(3) The 'cultural relativity' argument: "The Bible is an old book from a different culture, so we can't take it seriously in the modern world."

(4) Rationalist rewritings of history, which assume as a fixed starting-point what the Enlightenment wanted to prove (that, say, some aspects of the story of Jesus "couldn't have happened") but has not been able to.

(5) The attempt to relativize specific and often-repeated biblical teachings by appealing to a generalized "principle" which looks suspiciously Enlightenment-generated (e.g., "tolerance" or "inclusivity").

(6) Caricaturing biblical teaching on some topics in order to be able to set aside its teaching on other topics: despite repeated assertions, the New Testament does allow divorce in certain circumstances; it does envisage women as apostles and deacons, and as leading in worship; it does do its best to humanize, and then to challenge, slavery.

(7) Discovery of "political" meanings to the exclusion of "religious" ones, often without noticing that, unless there is some power unleashed by these readings, this results merely in sloganeering which provides false comfort to the faithful through a sense of their own moral insight and superiority, but without effecting actual change in the world.

(8) The proposal that the New Testament used the Old Testament in a fairly arbitrary and unwarranted fashion.

(9) The claim that the New Testament writers did not think they were writing "scripture," so that our appeal to them as such already does them violence.

(10) Pointing out that the church took a while to settle on the precise canon, and using this as an argument for discrediting the canon and privileging other books (e.g., "Thomas") which articulate a different worldview, sometimes ironically projecting this preference back into a neo-positivist claim for an early date for the non-canonical material.

(11) A skin-deep-only appeal to "contextual readings."

(12) The attempt to reduce "truth" to "scientific" statements on the one hand, or to deconstruct it altogether on the other.