"Isn't God a shit?"
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - april 08 ]
I have spent a lot of time searching through the Bible for loopholes. - WC Fields, during his final illness
Major Randolph Churchill (1911-68), of Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford (failed BA), on first reading the Holy Bible, having been persuaded to do so by Evelyn Waugh, incredulously said, "Isn't God a shit?"
That's one way to look at it. God treated Adam and Eve the way banks treat the Adams and Eves who default on home loans these days, kicking them out of Paradise. The comparison is not exact, of course; bankers lost their shirts, while God lost only people's obedience. He must not be much of a god if people can disobey him whenever they want to.
Reading Genesis 2 and 3 is not like reading a traffic sign. In fact, we seldom consciously read signs. We simply react to signs, which are usually not even words, like the 'Pedestrians walk now' lights at intersections.
'Reading' a movie or play is pretending to witness goings-on that we relate to our personal store of information, experience, and prejudice, just as we read a story, poem, tract, or essay our own ways in understanding it according to our proper lights.
A written message may be without grammar - a telephone number, the doctor's prescription, the combination to a safe, which the reader must decipher from words and signs. Texts that are written versions of conversations are extremely cryptic and allusive too. On the other hand, a message or text may be nothing but grammar and nonsense, like 'The Jabberwocky', Lewis Carroll's verse:
"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe..."
Most written texts lie in between these extremes, cryptic notes and nonsense, such as CC Moore's 'The Night Before Christmas':
"Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse,
This is a perfectly absurd story that we choose to pretend to believe, putting our own meaning in it for our personal pleasure, use, and benefit, to the delight of children. Caveat lector: this writer is not to be trusted; he believes in Santa Claus.
To get into a work of imagination, a story, movie, drama, comedy, novel, or the Bible, you have to misread it and misunderstand it intentionally, in your own, personal manner. You know how to suspend your disbelief, your natural wariness, willingly, as Coleridge observed, in order to get information or to be entertained, accepting the basic ideas of an argument or story, taking the medium, speech, writing, film, and so on, into account. We root for the storyteller, and help him out - William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Michael Moore, Stephen King, Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, or the Gospel writer. We do our part by pretending the imaginary world in the story is real for us. We want the storyteller to succeed in capturing our imagination, in order for him to put it in his cage.
It's too bad you cannot be sure anyone else closely appreciates something the way you do. However, if you have learned to trust reviewers and critics of novels, plays, movies, music, or food, you might be able to share their pleasure and understanding, but you never know how far you can trust others. For example, the TV series Seinfeld is about nothing, and so is the movie The Darjeeling Limited. Some reviewers think they are stupid; I love them, and The Three Stooges too. You see, everything written or told is an allegory like Gulliver's Travels and Pilgrim's Progress in a profound, intentional way, and every reader and watcher has his own taste, of course, and it is a fact that every message can be taken any way possible, and it might be. People believe what they want to believe, and understand everything in their own way.
Every message being a mirror with two sides, we have to learn to turn it to our personal advantage by misreading and mishearing it on purpose in order to get at a story we like. For example, Jesus is said to have said:"In my Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you, for I go to prepare a place for you." (John 14:2)
This Bible verse bewildered me when I was a child. The passage does not refer to literal mansions in the ordinary sense of the word 'mansion,' because a mansion, by definition, is larger than a house. How then can one have mansions in a house? The simple answer is that the house is a spiritual house. So, what is a 'spiritual house?' Beats me. I still don't know, but I like the figure of speech, a mansion in the sky, the cornerstone of my grandmother Delta Heacock's faith, and part of her favorite song:
Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by
And did I hear you say he was a-meeting you here today
To take you to his mansion in the sky?
What the Gospel writer meant is whatever you want it to mean. 'My Father's house' can be read as heaven, the place of happiness, the abode of the just and righteous, or the firmament holding clouds and stars. 'Many mansions' can be taken as rooms, dwelling places, and so on, or maybe not. Wasn't his father a carpenter too? Can a mansion be a state of mind?
When I was a child I heard a wise old man say that theology and philosophy, like psychology, are just words, words, words. For example, according to the theologian Robert L Garringer, "A few pastors are convinced that the context of John 14:2-3 indicates that the Father's house that Jesus spoke of is a present experience of believers, and is not a heavenly or eschatological concept" [relating to final things like death, destiny, judgment, or resurrection. When on shaky ground, yell like hell, or use Greek]. "In his explanations in the rest of the chapter in the book of John, Jesus seems to give the three key phrases in these verses a spiritual application, relevant to the believer's life in this world.
1) "The rooms in verse 2 seem to be explained, in verse 23, as the presence of the Father and Son in the life of the individual believer, here and now.
2) "Jesus' departure also spoken of in verse 2 is explained as going to the Father in verses 12 and 28. And, in verses 6-7, Jesus indicates that one can come to the Father, in the same Greek phrase as know and see Him from now on.
3) "Even Jesus' coming again in verse 3 is explained as coming to you in verses 18 and 28 and coming to him in verse 23, where a lasting residence is established.
"Finally, in verses 28-29, Jesus summarizes, by stating that He had spoken of these things in advance so that, when they came to pass, the apostles would believe. This seems to mean that their faith would increase, not that it would be fulfilled, in an eschatological sense. On the other hand, the NIV [New International Version of the Bible], for example, translates verse 2, There are many rooms in my Father's house; otherwise, I would have told you. I am going there [presumably, to my Father's house] to prepare a place for you.
"And many commentators insist that verse 3 is a statement that Jesus will come from His Father's House in order to take the apostles (or, by extension, the apostle's heirs) back with Him."
So, what is the difference between reading and misreading or translating and mistranslating? None. Reading and translating is carrying over to the spoken language what is written or spoken, so that we can interpret it in a light we can see by, whether or not the author might have intended whatever we understand. When you read you get the meaning from the written words and from yourself. When you listen you get the meaning from the spoken words and from yourself, as when you really get into a movie or play, and you feel the antagonist's pain and pleasure. You become a part of a situation that is to a large extent of your own making.
All unschooled pastors, those who are not required to go to seminaries or colleges, nonetheless truly understand the Bible. Every one of them and all of us, surely just as many country preachers as doctors of divinity, understand the Bible. A goodly number of them no doubt get the same gist as most of us, which is the best that can be done under the circumstances of culture, time, and translation. The truth of the Bible is the truth of the reader. The truth is what any fool, like me and like you, can see.
We know very little about the lives of the people who put our oldest books together, for example, the Holy Bible and the Koran, so when we read them we have to compare what we think they mean to what they might have meant to those for whom they were written when the writers had the readers and listeners in mind. "We know virtually nothing about the persons who wrote the Gospels," Professor Elaine Pagels cautions us. We know little more about the people who first read them. What the old books mean to us today does not depend on what they say, for they were not written for us.
Saint Paul, who perhaps wrote much of the New Testament, did not write for us specifically. He wrote about his personal experiences when he went about sharing his newly found sense of individuality as a person belov"d of God. He got religion, as it were, on the road to Damascus, when suddenly it hit him, as recounted in Acts 9. It is only here in the West that a person gets a godly sense of oneself as different from every other individual. God is a personal matter to Christians, Jews and Moslems, whose connections to God all began in the Holy Land. There is no personal, manlike God elsewhere but here in the West. In Eastern lands and among other peoples, Nature, which is all existence, includes and encloses everything and everyone, including God. No manlike Supreme Being sticks His Nose into the affairs of men or into the scheme of things there. In the West we have Father God and Mother Nature, and we are their children. Or is it Mother God and Father Nature?
Our getting meaning from the Bible consists of our putting our own memories, thoughts, and feelings into the stories, just as people of the third and fourth centuries had to do. What they got out of it is not what we get out of it because what anyone gets by reading or hearing a story, explanation, or argument is mostly what they personally put into it in their minds.
To complicate matters, bygone superstitions are not so very gone as most people think. Once upon a time, oracles, soothsayers and priests used as authority many sorts of evidence - astrology, horoscopy, divination by ritual, crystal gazing, tea leaves, Tarot cards, the entrails of animals, and so on - to explain our situation and our future, most of which, like dowsing for water, people still believe in, openly or surreptitiously practicing them, spitting when they see a crow and going to church, and so on.
Bibliomancy and psychomancy, using the Bible and ghosts to prophecy the future and to determine proper actions, may still be observed when anthropologists and missionaries do their work, when they hope to instill the proper Western mindset in their converts by subverting and dominating the naÔve natives, taking advantage of their credulity. At first the natives believe the anthropologists and missionaries want only and simply to share the native's dinner, not to kill their culture and their way of life.
Suppose you were suddenly sent to monolingual Hell where nobody speaks your language and you had to survive without recourse to the modern Western world. That is the kind of situation Kenneth Pike of the Summer Institute of Linguistics used to recreate, the Monolingual Demonstration, in order to show linguists, anthropologists, and missionaries how to crack an exotic language and get inside a foreign culture in order to live with its speakers so that they could eventually subvert them.
First Pike looked around to find a speaker of an entirely foreign, obscure language to serve as his informant. The foreigner then promised to speak nothing but that language to Pike. At the demonstration, an improvised, little play, Pike "parachuted into the jungle" to find a native, coming across his informant, of course, like Robinson Crusoe finding his Man Friday. Through mime and gesture he got the native to give him his words for things and actions. As Pike got words and expressions from the informant, using stuff, sticks, stones, leaves, branches, body parts and mime, he wrote the words he heard on a chalk board, using the phonetic alphabet. After gathering a few dozen expressions, he began to recognize and point out recurring, necessary sounds, types of universal features, parts of language - vowels, consonants, syllables, words, phrases, tones - which he could then repeat to the informant to see whether he had made the right connections between words and things.
Pike showed that after a few hours of work he could translate his own magical English words into a sort of representation in the native's language, so that John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have life everlasting became 'For the sun, our friend, gives light and babies, and we know it and do not die.'
