“In recent years, some Benedictine houses, particularly women’s communities, have begun censoring the harshest of the psalms, often called the ‘cursing psalms,’ from their public worship.”
–Kathleen Norris
The church, across most of the centuries of its history, has acquired quite a reputation for censoring literature. Most unchurched people would be quite surprised to learn that the church, in its actual practice, censors the Christian Bible rather thoroughly. Thomas Jefferson is reputed to have taken his pen knife and cut out of his Bible every reference to anything miraculous, anything supernatural. It is still possible to buy copies of The Jefferson Bible. Christians decry Jefferson’s truncation, but themselves routinely do much the same.
If the Bible were made into a Hollywood movie, and if the movie were faithful to the text, much of it could not receive a “G” rating. Rather much of it would have to be rated either “PG-13,” or “R,” both for sex and violence. See in particular much of Joshua and Judges or the entire story of the rape of Dinah in Genesis 34 or the visit of Judah, from whom the Jews get their name, and his visit with a “prostitute.” Read the entire story of David. When we tell these stories in Sunday School classes, we edit out those parts that would not be “in good taste” to read in polite company.
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In our Bible study groups and in Sunday sermons, we get uneasy with parts of the Bible not only for sex and violence, but also because it is also comfortable with bathroom language, and with strong language of rebuke, bitterness and hatred. We don’t talk that language, or about those things in church, although we do everywhere else.
Darkness and ugliness are part of human reality and therefore a part of biblical reality. But because we see ourselves as clean, respectable, and nice people, we find that there is much in the Bible that it just would not be right to read publicly in church.
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I read two books about Mark Twain the summer before last, and to him Numbers 31 is another example of how organized religion and good, church-going people often fail to see the graphic biblical facts right before their eyes. MT would discuss with his friend, the minister Joe Twitchell, that chapter, which he thought was one of the most barbaric things human hand ever put on paper--sparing the 32,000 Midianite women as part of the spoils of war for the victorious Israelite soldiers (not to mention the slaughter of all the other Midianites).
I leafed through one of those study Bibles (meaning commentary included with the scripture) I saw my mother reading last summer to see how it would handle the thorny problem of explaining Numbers 31. Though the commentator bravely acknowledged that some readers saw the story as Moses and the priest basically sanctioning holy rape (which was also the realist Mark Twain's view), he contended that the 32,000 virgins were really going to be used by the Israelites for necessary household chores--dusting, cleaning, cooking, serving--and not for anything sexual. But at least he presented both points of view--the realistic and the quaint. In the Broadman commentary, the writer primly speculates, "Probably all of the living booty would be used in service of the priests and Levites in the religious practices of the community."
But more than censoring scripture in this way (blinding ourselves to the harshness of the ancient world), I think what is worse is the way we censor scripture by gutting it of a lot of its complexity in how to live morally. When Sunday School lessons and Sunday sermons cite Jesus's uncompromising teaching that a man cannot serve God and mammon, they always seem to intend for people merely to check their priorities and make sure that God theoretically still comes first rather than actually to dispossess themselves of anything. Peter's denial of Jesus shows that much of the time we really don't know our priorities all that well.
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