Sunday, March 29, 2009
Karen Armstrong on Compassion
If you missed Billy Moyers' interview with Karen Armstrong last week, you can watch the whole video online. I loved it!
BILL MOYERS: You ask the question, "What would it mean to interpret the whole of the Bible as a commentary on the Golden Rule?"
KAREN ARMSTRONG: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: What's your answer to that question?
KAREN ARMSTRONG: Well, this is one of the things that really intrigued me when I was researching this book. How frequently the early rabbis, for example, in the Talmudic period, shortly after the death of Jesus, insisted that to any interpretation of scripture that read hatred or contempt for any single human being was illegitimate.
Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, said that when asked to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching, while he stood on one leg, said, "The Golden Rule. That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. And everything else is only commentary. Now, go and study it."
St. Augustine said that scripture teaches nothing but charity. And if you come to a passage like the one you just read, that seems to preach hatred, you've got to give it an allegorical or metaphorical interpretation. And make it speak of charity.
BILL MOYERS: But of course, what some people do is to read for their own purposes what--
KAREN ARMSTRONG: Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: --they call allegorical. And then, read literally what they want to apply in their--
KAREN ARMSTRONG: And of course, you have to understand that this tendency to read scripture in a literal manner is very recent.
BILL MOYERS: Right.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: Nobody, for example, ever thought of interpreting the first chapter of Genesis as a literal account of the origins of life, until the modern period. It's our scientific mindset that makes us want to sort of read these texts for accurate information.
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5 comments:
Karen said: "you have to understand that this tendency to read scripture in a literal manner is very recent."
Where can I find support for this assertion? I want to investigate this much deeper, because I've assumed for many years now that it's true, but I haven't yet found any evidence for it. I'd love to have some!
Loren,
That's a good question! I think there is plenty of good evidence found in the Midrash tradition. Karen alluded to that in her mention of the ancient rabbis. John Shelby Spong makes a good case that the New Testament picks up that Midrash tradition in his book "Resurrection: Myth or Reality".
You might just look at the texts themselves. What must the authors of the Torah have been thinking when they pulled in the 2 different creation stories in Gen 1 and Gen 2 and placed them together side by side? These were 2 different stories from 2 different sources, joined by a third source. That third source (the priests), MUST have seen them as allegories. Otherwise, if they were looking for a "literal" history, they would have only selected one or they would have manipulated one to match the other. Only a group of people who thought of the texts as metaphor could produce a sacred text with 2 varying accounts of creation. If they were literalistic, they'd still be fighting over which story got it "right".
If you read Midrash texts, you get the idea that these people valued the ability to "re-tell" a story in different ways to draw out the meaning. It becomes clear that the meaning of the story is so much more important that the whether or not it actually happened.
I am curious to see if we could find more specific examples of ancient authors explaining that concept.
I recently finished Liberating the Gospels by John Shelby Spong, The midrash interpretation is the central theme of this book and many others he has written. I am fascinated by this idea that literal interpretation of the Old and New Testaments is a modern one. As a former fundamentalist, conservative, I also seek examples of the truth of this idea.
Don,
Thanks for the input! Spong's approach makes so much sense.
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