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Good morning. Biblical interpretation matters. The fact is that any interpretation of Scripture has, for better or for worse, an amazing power and authority for believers. It can bring peace and wholeness, but it can also tear apart and destroy both believers and their congregations, and denominations. Interpretations of the Bible can drive believers and their congregations to the services of others, and can also drive them to perpetuate the most atrocious physical and psychological abuses. Interpretations of the Bible have led to religious wars, persecution, and killings of heretics. anti-Semitism, chattel slavery. Interpretations of the Bible have encouraged submission to oppressive political systems. Apartheid in South Africa, racism, and the oppression and marginalization of women. Interpretations of the Bible have supported active participations in oppressive economic system. They marginalize people from different cultures. Yet, We must not deprive ourselves of the Bible, of Christian scripture, as an essential resource in our struggle against life-negating forces in the world. Scripture remains an essential resource for the Christian, especially when life-negating forces take the form of a misuse of scripture.

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The spirit of the biblical message encourages readers to interpret passages in such a way that reflects a love of God and a love of neighbor, and that seeks to create an environment that each of us has reason to value. This is the weight that presses upon our faith and guides us in our interpretive process. Please join me in welcoming W. Eugene March, an ordained minister and leader in the Presbyterian Church USA, and Arnold Black Rose Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Louisville Theological Seminary, as he further elaborates on contextual interpretation of the Bible and offers us a few practical strategies for dealing with difficult texts in difficult times. Thank you. I've always heard that you should never follow really great acts. And so let's have another -- let's sing another hymn or something here. Those of you who just heard with me, Leonard Pitt, heard a marvelous call to act. And I hope we don't let that one die at all. It was It was marvelous. I have to say thank you now because I may not get a chance later. It has meant more to me to be here than I can say. My love for this place might be at least indicated to you in something I did at Louisville Seminary in a similar setting about 10 years ago.

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after I'd been there 10 years plus, I was greeting a group of alums. And I was welcoming them to our midwinter lectures equivalent. And at the end, I said, you know, if you have some time, any time, just come by. We'd love to just sit and have coffee with you. That here at Austin Seminary, and you don't think my colleagues didn't give me a hard time. Everybody kept saying, now where do you live, you know? But this place does get in your skin, and it continues in mine. I love the place because I love the people. And thank you for coming, for being here, for inviting me, for all that this means. Okay. Of course, the other bit of reality is the president, when he invited me, said, of course, you only get half your honorarium until you write the book. So that gets me back to reality. Okay. The third lecture is entitled Some Practical Strategies for Contextual Interpretation, and I will see with you whether they will go anywhere. Columnist David Brooks, in a piece entitled Lessons from UN Week, written in the New York Times on September 11, 2006, drew attention to a number of lessons that might be learned from the tragic events of September 11, and as we reflect back. And the third of his list of several was this, that a huge gap

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is emerging between the way ordinary Americans see the Arab world and the way members of the political, media, and intellectual elites see it. Elite debate is restrained by a series of enlightened attitudes that amount to a code of political correctness. Be tolerant of cultural differences, seek to understand the responses of people who feel oppressed, Don't judge groups, never criticize somebody else's religion. He continues, as anybody who's traveled around the country or listened to talk radio of left, right, and center knows, these genteel manners do not inhibit the masses. Millions of America think the Pope asked exactly the right questions in his lecture about Islam a few months ago. Does the Muslim God accord with the categories of reason? Are Muslims trying to spread their religion with the sword? These Americans don't believe that they should lower their standards of tolerable behavior merely for the sake of cultural politeness. and they are growing ever more disgusted with commentators and leaders who are totally divorced from the reality they see on TV every night. End quote. While David Brooks was reflecting the way many Americans view Muslims, I want to ponder his

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observations, or broaden his observations, to include more than only Muslims. While Muslims may be the preoccupation of the American public these days, there's a wide variety of religious and ethnic experience that seems threateningly other to many Americans, to many Presbyterians. Perhaps more than at any other time in my life, I'm encountering widespread expressions with zonophobia of that fear and disdain for others who we consider stranger or foreign. Whether they are from south of our borders or from the Middle East, many Americans are forming opinions about them that may prove to be disastrous for us all. I think we need to open our eyes and listen with our hearts to this emerging reality and to the danger it poses if we leave it unacknowledged or unchallenged. This is now part of our context. I think it's a significant part of our context. I dare say that most of you know the people Brooks had in mind. They're in your pews, they're on your sessions. At times, we ourselves are among the group. We can well understand and appreciate the frustration that is stirred up with dealing with international diversity and perhaps even more with diversity at the local level. Sometimes we just don't want to think about it. Sometimes we deny the reality of it. But in the long run, we shouldn't because ethnic, political, sexual, religious diversity

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is here. And as much as some of us might want it to go away, it isn't going to. What I've tried to point out thus far is that we are in a new situation, theologically speaking. There are at least three facts, quote unquote, that will affect our work for some time. First, we Presbyterians are clearly in a minority. And Christians in general at home and abroad are declining in terms of our market share. I live in a town where Ford Motors is big. Second fact, Christian theology with respect to people of other religions has for nearly 1,500 years been basically exclusive. This I've tried to exemplify, but considering our thinking concerning Jews and Judaism, and I'll continue that, But the same exclusivism that has provoked that exclusion has guided our relationships with others as well. And as our speaker this morning said about mission, often for many people that meant either converting them or destroying them, one or the other. But we certainly have not been, by our church's teaching, encouraged to consider others of other faiths as bearers of divine grace.

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The third fact that I think is important for us to see seems to contradict what Brooks has written, because some of our people, are interacting more and more with people of other religions. Some of our people know Sikhs and Muslims and Buddhists firsthand. They're in the office place with them, the workplace.

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And they have found them personally to be good people. But it doesn't fit the theology that the church has taught them. And so they find themselves like our youth, saying the church must be relevant because it's not teaching what I'm experiencing. I'm experiencing good people.

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I have to put in a personal word. You could not, or I could not, maybe others could. I could not sit in the presence of Abraham Joshua Heschel for very long. before I came to the realization, this man has got to be loved by God.

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This is a situation I think we find ourselves in. The only pertinent question, seems to me, is what are we going to do with it? Rather, like our previous speaker said, here it is, what are you going to do? Are we going to help our people see diversity as a divine gift?

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or are we going to present it as a satanic curse? Personally, I consider pluralism and all the wondrous differences that go with it to be a marvelous gift from God. I consider the religious diversity we are now coming to know firsthand to be part of God's ongoing gracious providence. We live in a world

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that is wonderfully varied. I think we should rejoice and be glad in it. In this lecture, I will suggest a number of strategies that might be utilized in helping our people come to such an awareness and appreciation. Some of them are negative, things we ought not to do.

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Most, I hope, are positive, things we might try to do that might help. contextual interpretation is part of that suggestion. But whether or how well any of these suggestions that I'll offer today will work, you're going to have to tell me. Most of them haven't been field tested.

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Most of them are efforts by people who've recognized where we are, and instead of deciding, well, there's nothing we can do, it's impossible, they've said, Well, let's try to change it. Let's see what might happen. So I offer these to you in that spirit.

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And we'll see how they'll work. As I said just a moment ago, I'm going to continue to press the issue with you today or to illustrate the issue with ways primarily with things we can do with Jews. Why? Because our people have a long history with Jews, first of all.

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And also because this represents a fairly safe place to begin. Maybe I'm just being a pragmatist, but I think you ought to start where you can, and this is a place where we can, I think, start. Now, I don't want to stop there, but that's another issue, and I'll talk about that a little. One place to begin is very simple in one sense, starting with the language we use.

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Some years ago, we tried to change our behaviors, our practices, by simple ways we refer to the people of God and to many outside of seminaries that may not have been significant. But It didn't take me very long, at least, until the first really bright woman student I had challenged me to think about ministry as not only by men. Of course it's not only by men.

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How did my language ever get there? But we can change that. We have changed that in many places, and we continue to do so. But with respect to reference to

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our topic at hand. It is really that some second-century Christians inadvertently, I think, created a problem for us by coining a term, drawing on references to new and old covenants, testaments in Latin, they began to refer to the Bible that they shared with second-century Jews as the Old Covenant, the Old Testament, in distinction to a body of emerging materials that would come to be called, several centuries later, finally, the New Testament. Literarily, the term Old Testament

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as far as I can trace it, did not actually occur in any kind of a literary form that's been preserved anyway until 180 of the Common Era. A good while after the time of Jesus. While there may have been justifiable reasons for this terminology in the 2nd century, in contemporary American culture, the term Old Testament creates a problem. First, for many, old

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in our cultural situation signifies something useless. Near the end of its place. Old clothes, old car. I don't know about you, but an old body, you know?

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Only a few that I know prefer old movies, my wife being one. Our old homes, old for the most part, a bad word. And for some Christians, because of the obvious connection of the Old Testament to the Jews, the Jews become considered rather unnecessary as well, of little value. Their Bible is old.

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They ought to be left behind with it. Try to connect these misunderstandings to try to correct many of these misunderstandings. Many people in biblical studies, at least, now use the term Hebrew Bible. in referring to the Old Testament.

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I don't prefer that term myself for a number of reasons, not the least of which I'm an ordained Presbyterian minister and my book of church order requires that I maintain the term Old Testament. My creeds require that and I want to honor those. So I'm not wanting to remove the term Old Testament. But, and I don't want to use the term Hebrew Bible because I don't think that's accurate for what it is.

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I would prefer and suggest that we might begin phasing in something as simple as First Testament and Second Testament. That's rather un, it's not too problematic, and it does remove some of a false claim that we have sometimes been heard to make. I recently had a Jewish rabbi friend of mine nudge me and say, you know what OT stands for?

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And I said, no. She said, only Testament. While we're messing around with language, let's also challenge the nomenclature for referencing time, namely AD, year of our Lord in Latin, unless you happen to be in the military, and then you may think first of active duty.

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And BC, unless you're a Canadian who thinks British Columbia, most of us think before Christ, that language itself, which, quote, everybody uses, and, quote, isn't, in fact, used by everybody. And so far as I can find out, it wasn't until late in the 500s that a monk named Dionysius Exius used that language. And it wasn't until 1400 of the Common Era that it became widely used at all, and that was in Europe.

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This terminology is not rooted in the divine revelation. And I think it's inaccurate. Christians created it in a world where they were dominant and had the power to do so. And while Jews and others ignored it, there was no one to question or challenge it.

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Well, there is now. And again, at least in the world of biblical scholars, BCE, before the Common Era, and CE, Common Era, is widely used. It's in our commentaries. It's used in professional papers.

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I think pastors need to let our congregants know about it. and to somehow, to help them understand that this is not somehow part of a plot to take Jesus out of history. That's not what it's intended to do. It's simply a way to acknowledge the fact that we share history with varied peoples.

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certainly with Jews and with Christians, but others as well. For over 2 billion non-Christians, Jesus' appearance is not the defining event in history. We may want to challenge that theologically, but from a practical point of view, for me, it just means that I no longer live in the middle age when I use BCE and CE.

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That's all I'm saying. We're beginning to come to grips with the fact that Jews and Christians share a common history before and after Jesus, but the pre-Jesus origin of most of the other classical religions has something more to suggest about God's work beyond our context, I believe. And the First Testament provides some guidance. It wasn't written to answer that question primarily at all, but it offers some guidance nonetheless.

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Amos, some 800 years before Jesus, gave the ancient Israelites a hint. And you remember the passage when Amos said on behalf of God, are you not like the Ethiopians to me? people of Israel, did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt and the Philistines from the land from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kur? God has never been limited to the particular task of engaging only Israel or the church.

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God's world, thanks be to God, is much, much larger. Frankly, however, we have a much more serious problem that we as Christian leaders must face. Namely, there are texts within the 2nd Testament that are, or at least appear to be, blatantly anti-Jewish. We're first of all concerned with the misrepresentation of Jews and Judaism, but the attitudes prompted by some of these texts can spill over and poison our understanding of other religious traditions as well.

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Exclusivism is a rampant disease, it seems to me. There are some ways to deal with some of these passages relatively simply. We need to remember the context of the early Jesus movement. Jesus himself was a Jew, and so were his followers.

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Judahism as a religion, as we know it, had not yet emerged. There was great diversity among those who had common roots in the traditions that sometime in the late 2nd century came to be called a Bible. No one group could claim the title of Jewish, not at least to the exclusion of others. So when we read in English translations of the Bible, particularly the New Testament, we do well to interpret that language as referring it this way, a certain Jew, or some Jews.

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We might even be more accurate and say the Judeans, or the Galileans, or the Jerusalemites, We ought to make it more specific for our people, because when they hear Jew, they jump to all Jews. And that's not what the text is telling us. Only some of the Jews and some of the Jewish leaders, only some of the Pharisees reacted negatively toward Jesus.

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Secondly, we do well to remind our people over and over that Jesus was a Jew in His own time. He knew and observed Jewish tradition. He taught little. He really didn't.

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He taught little, if anything, that had not already been articulated in the tradition. For Him to instruct His disciples to love one another was not a radical new teaching. Yet we sometimes, too often I suspect, try to present Jesus' teaching as in some manner brand new, as unique, as in contrast to the teachings of others of his time. We do this sometimes in an attempt to demonstrate that Christian views are inherently superior to the views of Jews, and thus to be accepted.

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At other times we do so out of our ignorance. of their tradition. We may well find that Jesus's teaching, let me rephrase that, we, we may well find that Jesus's teachings claim and challenge us more than any other in the world. They certainly do me.

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But we should not try to explain or prove our choice on the basis of this supposed uniqueness or the more spiritual quality of our traditions, I respond to Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ has claimed me. And that's where I'm going to stand on that. On December 26, 2006, in the Christian century, I doubt, I'm sure many of you read that, Professor Amy Jill Levine, who is a

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Jew who teaches New Testament at Vanderbilt, wrote an article entitled Misusing Jesus. It's based on her longer book that is coming forth from Harper San Francisco entitled The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus. In her article, Levine enumerates a number of ways that Christianity purposefully or ignorantly, how Christians purposely or ignorantly misrepresent or misunderstand the implications that Jesus was a Jew.

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In introducing her topic, Levine penned the following devastatingly accurate, in my opinion, critique that speaks directly to the point I'm making. Quote, The problem is more than one of silence. In the popular Christian imagination, Jesus still remains defined incorrectly and unfortunately as against the law, or at least against how it was understood at the time.

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As against the temple, as an institution, and not simply against its 1st century leadership. As against the people of Israel, but in favor of Gentiles. She continues, Jesus becomes a rebel, who, unlike every other Jew, practices social justice.

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He is the only one to speak with women. He's the only one who teaches nonviolent responses to oppression. He's the only one who cares about the poor and the marginalized. That phrase, she says, becomes a litany in some circles.

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Judaism becomes, in such a discourse, a negative foil. Whatever Jesus stands for, Judaism isn't it. Whatever Jesus is against, Judaism epitomizes the category.

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Levine's discussion represents an area where we need to do a much better job of contextualizing the text for our congregants, for ourselves. Her critique is well worth your review, I believe, and I hope you'll take the time to find it if you haven't already read it. We stand in a serious danger of bearing false witness.

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More difficult to deal with are some of the passages in the Pauline letters where the term Jew does not actually refer to anyone who's Jewish. This is very hard to help people understand. What do I mean? Well, much of the controversy apparently found in Paul's letters seems to have been within the family.

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A debate among different factions within the church. Some Christians called other Christians Jews. We would better use the term Judaizers, but they used the term Jews to belittle or deny the legitimacy of that group's insistence on the necessity of things like circumcision or Sabbath keeping.

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Some of the Judaizers may have been born Jewish, but many others, perhaps most, were apparently Gentile converts to Christianity who just thought Jewish customs were part of the deal. And they become became very insistent. I had a conversion experience when I was a junior student here.

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It was to follow a man named Darrell Royal. And there's nothing worse than a convert, and I was one, you know? My gosh, oh well. There was a genuine debate in the early church between these various camps.

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Paul wanted his Gentile converts to be released from any obligation to follow the custom of circumcision, for instance. He was adamant on this. But at the same time, when it came to some of the laws about foods and observance of the food laws, he was less dogmatic. With foods, he said, he counseled Gentile Christians, respect the sensitivities of your brothers and sisters.

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It would be better to abstain from food offered to idols, not because the food itself was bad or contaminated, but because there was no need in offending the sensitivities of others who thought it might be. It's all too easy when the term we see in the translation is Jew in the Pauline letters to jump immediately to a universal application or understanding of the term. And that's to disregard completely the context out of which these texts have come.

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Many of the New Testament anti-Jewish writings were not actually addressed to Jews or about Jews they were part of a literature. for people struggling with the issue of who are we. And the issue was prompted by those who were trying to make one kind of statement about who we are, namely a group that now we can call Judaizers. But for your casual reader of the New Testament, that's hard to help people understand. And it's going to take some serious work on our part to try to sensitize them to that and to help them hear those texts again over and over, to hear them anew, because they've read them over and over with one set of understandings. There are a number of places in the biblical texts that suggest that God had a much more inclusive understanding of humanity and God's relationship to that humanity than might be suggested in the Bible. In the Bible, mainly, the language is about, there's two main groups in the Bible. There are Jews and there are the others. There are Gentiles. And that's the way humanity seems to be divided. But when you look at the

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more closely at the text, you'll find other passages that at least suggest maybe if you want to keep that distinction, okay, but don't think that God thinks only in that kind of language. It's not chosen and unchosen. Okay? What am I talking about? That wonderful little book of Jonah that represents the claim of God sending this person, to preach to Ninevites, the arch enemies of the people of Israel and Judah, and to announce their complete redemption, just because God wants to. And when Jonah questions whether he should, and God, the way the text ends, and the RSV, new RSV, puts it as a question, The Hebrew text doesn't tell us whether it's a question. That becomes an interpretation, whether it's a question. But either way, the last long sentence is, look, all these people with all of their goods, they're mine. Don't tell me how I'm to deal with them. Shouldn't I not love them? And we're left with the question. Yeah, I guess so. Or we could answer it, no. That's the way the church has answered it for too many years. That book that Leonard Pitt referred to yesterday, the book of Job, wonderful Job, an Edomite, no part of the people of Israel, an Edomite, that's who Job was.

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and a profound understanding. And by the way, this is one of those things that you can go look up if you haven't recently, because I'm sure all of you read your Hebrew text all the time. At least all my former students do, yeah. Go read what Job's wife says to him in the Hebrew. Job's wife in the Hebrew says, bless God and die. I'll leave that for you to ponder. It's an interesting difference in the way translation works. You know, in the Old Testament, that First Testament, God even speaks through the ass of Balaam. He uses a Gentile foreigner's donkey to deliver a word. I think texts like that, at least they provoke me to ask what is a simple question with a difficult answer. Why should I think for a moment that God does not redemptively love others as God has loved me? Why should I think for a moment that it is other? This is, of course, not the way the church has viewed such matters for some centuries, but now we are in a new context. Professor John Polakowski, a highly respected Roman Catholic scholar who teaches up at, or did, at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, has suggested in a book he wrote that I would like to quote his own understanding of what he calls a theology of religious pluralism.

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A theology of religious pluralism might allow us to say that we have more than others, but it would never permit us to say we have a hold on all significant religious insight. This does not mean that each religious tradition is incapable of providing salvation for its adherents. What we need to recognize that all of us are saved in our own incompleteness. Along with Paul Tillich, he says, I believe that theology of religious pluralism requires some notion of an ongoing revelatory process. Not very Presbyterian. I also acknowledge with Tillich that there may be a central event or events in the history of Revelation, but central in my judgment does not imply exclusivity. As a Christian, I would at least posit both Sinai and the Easter event as equally central, and I would be open to a possible expansion of the list. Also calling a revelatory event central does not, in my mind, automatically connote completeness. A central event need not make all other revelatory experiences secondary and by implication of lesser value. But this has been precisely the problem with the way Christianity has usually presented its notion of the centrality of the Christian event.

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I'm not going to try to unpack that statement, but if you want to follow it more closely, I'd refer you to a book called Visions of the Other: Jewish and Christian Theologians Assess the Dialogue, edited by Eugene Fisher. I think our new context requires that we reconsider our theology and suggest different ways to interpret the Bible. I've been suggesting that. We do well to recognize, as we go about this work, the alternative religious sensibilities that they can, might be real, that they might be true. I recently had the opportunity to attend a presentation of Aaron Posner's 1999 dramatic adaptation of that wonderful book by Chaim Potok, titled The Chosen. And if you remember the book, or if you've seen the play, you know that the drama has to do with one, a relatively progressive, quote unquote, from my point of view, Jewish father, professor, over against a rather orthodox, not rather, a totally orthodox father, Jewish rabbi, and their struggle over the question of Zionism. And the play, at one point, the play, the book, that's a little bit differently, but the play reaches its climax with these two fathers writing words that they're going to speak to their constituents

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in separate parts of the stage, and they're reading them out loud, and they say almost the same thing, but they conclude with different, they draw different conclusions, radically different conclusions, opposite conclusions, and the interlocutor enters the stage and makes these comments as these strident voices of the two professors are being heard. And this speaker recalls that such a disagreement was to be found in the Babylonian Talmud, and it centered on the schools of Hillel and Shammai. And the Talmud reported that in the midst of this great dialogue, a voice from heaven was heard saying, these and these are the words of the living God. But the Halakah is according to Hillel. Both views are true, but that of Hillel was to be preferred. Why, the Talmud answers, because when Hillel used to speak, he would always begin by mentioning Shammai's position first. He never taught Torah pretending to possess the unique truth, but admitting that two opinions might have plausibility and meaning. Yes,

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These and these are the words of the living God. I think that's an important position to adopt as we work with our people who are trying to understand our new context. There may be, in fact I believe there are, multiple truths rather than one single truth. At least so far as we will ever be able to vision it here on Earth. The question, of course, is how might we go about the task? I know several... congregations, presbyteries who are doing various things, and these I lay out for you to consider, and then please let me know if they work or others you discover that work as well or better. Some are holding diversity workshops.

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That seems like an obvious thing to do. And if you haven't yet in your presbytery or in your town, brought people together to consider the richness of the diversity within your presbyteries, certainly, but also are your-- I'm losing the Methodist term. I should know it.

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The conferences, of course. They're very rich. And most of our such organizations have resource centers that have wonderful materials that can be used to help you do that.

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But not many of them are doing this. I know of a few. But this seems to be a relatively easy and important thing to do. I hear over and over people say, you know, well, my people aren't ready.

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Your people aren't ever going to be ready. You're not ever going to be ready. I'm not ever going to be ready. We can't set the timetable.

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But the fact is, they are engaging, whether we wait for them to be ready or not. So we better try to get on with it. How do you do it? Well, again,

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Maybe it's to try to arrange with a local rabbi or an imam or an Hindu religious teacher, if there's one in your proximity, for a conversation between members of your group and theirs. Part of the program is, of course, socializing, just to have the opportunity to meet with other people of a different community self-consciously as Christians. meeting with people self-consciously who are Hindus. Often in the workplace, we're there because we're all computer experts, or we're there because we're teachers, or we're not there because of our religious identity.

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This has got to be a meeting where they are self-consciously religious folk. I think you'd do better to set a topic. I know of 1 congregation that spent a month or six weeks, I've forgotten the length, discussing, it was a Presbyterian and a Jewish congregation, spent a month discussing the subject of the sacred. What does it mean to talk about sacred in the different traditions?

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What does it signify? How do you symbolize the sacred? How do you acknowledge the sacred? Does any one religion have a corner on the sacred?

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Such conversations, they will start, I can assure you, at least all the ones I've ever had, start on a shallow level. But if you'll stick with it, they can become very rich and transformative. work projects. A group from one congregation I know of joined with that of a neighboring mosque on a Habitat for Humanity project.

00:47:35.120 - 00:48:09.200

You pound each other's thumbs with hammers and learned each other's curse words. You may become also better acquainted with them as individuals. Another church in the Louisville area, a Presbyterian church, went with a Jewish congregation down to New Orleans and did a habitat operation down there. They came back having done something important, but also having a much richer appreciation for how God is working with other people besides just themselves.

00:48:11.120 - 00:48:45.520

If you live near one, there are several now, Holocaust memorials in our country, put together a group of people, Jews, Christians, Muslims, put them together, take a trip to the museum, and then talk about it, think about it, ponder it together. That has proven to be a helpful way. International travel can be a rich source, but you've got to take it out of entertainment. You can have a little of that.

00:48:46.000 - 00:49:10.960

If you go to the Bahamas, okay, do a little. But then go on down to Cuba and see what the church is trying to do in Cuba. Live with a group of people who are not in a majority who can't be in a majority and see how they're making it, it can be very, very important to learn.

00:49:11.600 - 00:49:31.480

A popular Christian education project, at least in our town the last couple of years, has been to create a first century Jewish village. And then we have all sorts of things going on there. How did Jesus, what kind of food did he eat and et cetera, et cetera.

00:49:31.480 - 00:49:49.040

And that can be very helpful. You can have shops and households and schools and synagogues, but please get your Jewish community involved in the project. They did one at my church, and somebody misspelled the Hebrew. Now that didn't bother hardly anybody.

00:49:49.600 - 00:50:12.560

It bothered me. And we happened to have a couple of Jewish couples where one or the other of the couple is a Jew, and I was happening to sitting behind one, and the fellow was a Jew, and he's looking up there and saying, don't they know anything? Well, it destroyed the whole point of the project for him.

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Get a Jew involved. If you want to blow the shofar, don't give it to an 8th grader, to Christian to do it. Let the man who's in charge of the shofar do it. First of all, they need to know what St.

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Peter's going to sound like, or St. Gabriel's going to sound like. It isn't going to sound like the eyes of Texas. Darn it.

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But put them to work, you know. And you can do the same thing with a mosque. Have them create a mosque. Now let them go visit a mosque.

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or go to the Hindu temple if you have one, or to the Baha'i place of worship, and then come back and try to replicate that with the consultation of a member of that group. They learn it better, our group, our people learn it better, but then they teach it to others in the congregation, and it can be a great help. Joint projects can become controversial, to be sure. And working together is the best way, at least, to try to ameliorate some of that controversy.

00:51:21.120 - 00:51:39.920

I lived and was PTA president and part of Louisville, Texas. See, I still come there. Louisville, Kentucky, and happened to be in a part of town which was richly and deeply populated with Orthodox Jews. Now it has a number of Muslim families there, too.

00:51:40.800 - 00:52:12.880

I worked for two or three years, and never was totally successful, getting my teachers just to observe the simple fact that they ought not to have exams on Rosh Hashanah. Or they ought not to serve pig in a bun, or whatever we call it, sausage in a bun, as the only option for Jewish students going through the line in the cafeteria. Now those are obvious things. but you better do it in concert with a group.

00:52:13.440 - 00:52:28.720

I could get away with it somewhat because I'd convinced my PTA group that this was important for all of us and we needed to do it. Now, I left that position. I got out of school and they're right back to doing it. So it's not going to go away.

00:52:29.120 - 00:52:45.920

Don't think you're going to change the world immediately. You're not. What about the death penalty? Some in other religious groups feel very strongly about the death penalty and whether it should be maintained.

00:52:46.320 - 00:52:57.600

That should be addressed. We can talk about it. Whether we agree or not is another issue. But we can work together in such matters and lessen the misunderstanding of all of us.

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Possibilities are endless and they're still emerging. And I encourage, as I say, for you to try them out. I'm just convinced that the old way of doing business is simply no longer adequate to the task that is ours. But all the lectures and workshops in the world can't finally do what has to be done.

00:53:21.280 - 00:53:31.280

That has to be done by local leaders. Let me illustrate. Some of you knew my mother. Most of you didn't.

00:53:31.360 - 00:53:54.800

She died of November a year ago and approaching the age of 95. She was a faithful churchgoer, at least the last 70 years of her life, and a Sunday school teacher, even became an elder against her better judgment in the Presbyterian church. She really didn't think women ought to be ordained, but the congregation got so small they had to have her.

00:53:57.600 - 00:54:22.360

Somewhere about 15, 20 years ago, she called me in great distress She's in Dallas, Texas, and I'm in Louisville. Great distress. Because in the women's Bible study book for that year, put out by now, Horizons, I don't know who it was put out by then, some whatever the appropriate organization was, there was a prayer that addressed God using several maternal metaphors.

00:54:25.520 - 00:54:54.480

Some unofficial Presbyterian publication I won't name had called attention to this issue and the problem. And mom and her group had become, all of whom were at least what we would call mature women. They thought the prayer was at least inappropriate and perhaps blasphemous. And after I kind of got past the original, you know, calmed her down, I asked her to get her book and read the prayer for me.

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She did, and I recognize that the author was simply drawing on image. from Second Isaiah, chapters 42, 49, 66. So I said to Mama something like this, Well, Mom, that's right out of the Bible. She said, No, it didn't.

00:55:16.240 - 00:55:38.560

I didn't go into this profession not to be willing to argue, so I said, Oh, yes, it is. She wouldn't be my mother if she hadn't said, Oh, no, it didn't. And we played that game for a few minutes, and then finally I said, Look, go get your Bible. So we had a little Bible tutorial 850 miles apart, and I got her to read some of the passages out of Isaiah.

00:55:39.680 - 00:55:56.080

And as she read these verses in various ways, she exclaimed, where did these come from? When did they put these in the Bible? And I said, mom, they've been there all along. And she said, well, I never read them.

00:55:57.920 - 00:56:23.760

Why had she never read them? Because her pastors and teachers never thought it important to acknowledge and ponder feminine language about God. Maybe they were not brave enough, maybe they were not informed enough or sensitive enough to introduce the passages. More, probably they just had too many other things that their congregations demanded that they do to get their paychecks.

00:56:24.960 - 00:56:56.240

And she certainly had responsibility. She could have done more on her own. But the fact is that pastors and educators are at the front line of this whole issue of re-educating our people and learning to do contextual interpretation. Issues of inclusive language, issues of religious diversity, they're going to be met

00:56:56.880 - 00:57:26.360

at the local level, and they have to be addressed there. What I've tried to do in these lectures is challenge you and myself to explore and create new methods of biblical interpretation and theological interpretation. We who have thought of ourselves as being the majority are certainly no longer that, at least in terms of a world map. What's more, we're rapidly losing that status even in the United States.

00:57:26.560 - 00:57:45.760

Presbyterians are simply not the main line anymore, if we ever were. I think it's irreversible, so I think we need to learn to live with it. I think it's God giving us a creative new possibility. This is our reality.

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And using the method of contextual interpretation, which I hope I will explain more fully and carefully in the book that will follow, I'm suggesting we need to start with our own context and ponder it as we listen to these texts anew. I believe that God is doing new things. We're not the victims of an inept divine strategy that has caused some devilish multiplication of religious traditions across our world.

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No, look, listen. The rich tapestry of religious traditions that we are beginning to encounter firsthand, it's God's gift to us, intended to help us better understand God's graciousness. Whether we open our eyes and listen with our hearts, however, it's up to us. Thank you.

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Thank you, Dr. March, and thank each of you for being here today. Please join us now over and record for our ASA banquet. Thank you.