and Jewish leaders, and the uncompromising insistence on the sole Lordship of the heavenly Father. Since the courageous witness of Jesus threatened both the Roman control of a rebellious, sprawling empire and the Jewish leaders deadly fear of any movement that could become the catalyst of revolt, it was unavoidable that Jesus took his place in the line of witnesses to God’s sovereignty whom the rulers of this world sought to silence. The centrality for faith of this particular martyr lies in the fact that vindication of the bearer of divine justice and mercy came on the third day after his crucifixion, and thus established like never before for the faithful the basis for their vocation of bearing witness in the world to the only ultimate government, God’s government and the reign of his Son.
Jesus’ political position embodied the dialectic of God’s ultimate ruling authority and the derived, penultimate rule of humans. Let us consider two examples from the Gospels.
In relation to the Roman emperor, the classic formulation is “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” (Matthew 22:15–22 // Mark 12:13–17 // Luke 20:20–26). Against the background of the politics of the entire Bible, believers then and now hear what the Romans would not have heard, namely, that everything is ultimately God’s, and therefore what will be rendered to Caesar will be what God has delegated to earthly rulers. Added to this is the defining qualification that their legitimacy remains intact only to the extent that they promote the universal justice and mercy of God.
Since divine justice and mercy were more often violated than upheld by the Romans, the question of fitting response was especially difficult for Jesus and his followers. Enormous pressure was placed on them to follow the path of the Zealots and the Sicarii of open revolt. But it is clear that Jesus regarded such a suicide tactic as a form of idolatry, that is, placing nationalistic goals over the purposes of God’s kingdom. Patience and suffering constituted the truthful path to “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
In relation to the claim that religious institutions and authorities hold over those who have submitted to the rule of God, the classic story revolves around the half-shekel temple tax (Matthew 17:24–27). Should the disciples pay it, and thereby acknowledge the authority over them of the temple administrators, or should they assert their true spiritual citizenship by refusing to pay, thereby raising the specter of violence? The path of submission placed in jeopardy their sole allegiance to God. But violence was not the way to the Kingdom taught by their Lord. The story has an ending that exquisitely upholds the dialectic of biblical politics: Not the disciples, but a fish pays the temple tax! Covenant fidelity and political pragmatism are simultaneously commended through a story that like Aesop’s fables proves that animals often are our most subtle teachers!
The political position of the Apostle Paul is even more complex, and many fine monographs in recent years have challenged older assumptions.17 At the heart of the controversy is Romans 13, a key chapter, which we above suggested is related to the accommodationist model and should perhaps be understood in relation to Paul’s later writings, especially those written from Roman prisons. At any rate, it is important to recognize that the fundamental biblical principle of God’s sole authority is affirmed in the leading verse of Paul’s discourse, “for there is no authority except from God.” That having been said, the fact remains that in Romans 13, Paul seems to be more accommodating than either Jesus of the Gospels or even Paul himself in many of his other pronouncements. A plausible explanation for this is that he is being extraordinarily careful not to exacerbate the growing tensions between the Romans, the Jews, and the growing Jesus movement. Also not to be forgotten is Paul’s education under the Pharisees, which would explain the resonances between his thought and the earlier position of Ezra in relation to the Persians.
A third political position is staked out by the book of Revelation. Christian communities throughout the Empire were being sacrificed to the wrath of Nero and Diocletian. Powerless before this overwhelming power, they interpret it as the Anti-Christ. They find refuge in the message of final vindication after death and accordingly adopt the strategy of the apocalyptic political model. Again the dynamic flexibility of biblical politics to changing conditions is in evidence, providing an invaluable source of hope and strategy for survival in modern times for Christian leaders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans Lilje as they encountered yet again the face of the Anti-Christ in Adolf Hitler and his collaborators. And in our own time, the poignancy of the apocalyptic message has become apparent as the specter of genocide continues to cast its ghastly pall over Ruwanda, the Congo, and Sudan.
The Contribution of the Bible to Contemporary Politics
The diverse and often contradictory conclusions that individuals and communities draw from the Bible regarding the controversial issues of contemporary life represent one of the areas of religion that attracts the most attention in the popular media. To the “cultural despisers of Christianity,” the utter lack of unanimity among religious people offers occasion for ridicule or disdainful dismissal. For religious zealots, conflict is welcomed as a sign of the approach of the climactic skirmish that will determine the winners in the “battle for the Bible.” On the other hand, for many conscientious people of faith who want to do the right thing in relation to issues such as human sexuality and world peace, the fact that not only individual believers but entire denominations seem to be locked in intractable dispute over important moral issues is a source of great distress.
It is especially to such people that we now turn to reflect on the important issue of the essential nature of the theory of interpretation one uses as a guide to discerning the contemporary meaning of Scripture, which is to say, the issue of hermeneutics. It may be helpful to bring to light the presuppositional starting point of the two positions into which, in the most general sense, most interpretative strategies seeking to define biblical authority fall.
We begin with the approach that can be called absolutist. Proponents of this position within Christianity and Islam commonly go by the label “fundamentalist,” whereas within Judaism “ultra-orthodox” is the term most commonly used. All three ascribe to the words of Scripture (and in Judaism to the total corpus of words attributed to Moses) the attribute of truth transcending the limits of historical particularity and the fallibility of human understanding. In this approach, human participation in revelatory events is reduced to the formal matter of transmission, meaning that the words of the Quran are the words of Allah mediated by the Prophet Mohammed, the words of Christian Scripture (in the original transcripts) are the words of God inerrantly recorded by human authors, and the Hebrew Bible, Mishnah and Talmud are the words Moses received from God on Mt. Sinai.
In the case of the Christian version of absolutism, the assumption of inerrant Scripture is accompanied by the belief that the Bible contains answers to all matters of belief and morals if read literally and without the biases imposed by liberal interpreters deriving not from the realm of divine revelation but from the human realm of rationalist philosophy and secular bias. Biblical truth is thereby insulated from the limits endemic to human existence and the flux characteristic of history. Through literal reading, the plain truth of the Bible becomes clear regarding homosexuality and abortion. And depending on the particular interpreter, the list can go on to include global issues like the return of all Jews to Israel and even eschatological matters like the date of the end of the world.
Commonly, the critique of the absolutist hermeneutic begins with the marshalling of evidence intended to discredit the notion of inerrancy, such as the presence of two creation stories, conflicting accounts of a single historical event, and misattribution of a quotation. That starting point is unfortunate, inasmuch as its negativity seems indistinguishable from the scorn of the cultural despiser and, more importantly, it fails to place front and center the powerful positive argument for the alternative position.
Let our criticism be stated clearly: The absolutist position rests on an unbiblical concept of divine revelation! In the Bible, God is not presented as an aloof lecturer who occasionally breaks his customary austere silence with a solemn pronouncement of abstract truth directed to Moses or Isaiah or the Apostle Paul, humans
