The Sins of Scripture (10 page)
Read The Sins of Scripture Online
Authors: John Shelby Spong
Many people, including the world-famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, rejoiced at the psychological implications of this latter doctrine. For the first time in Western history, Dr. Jung observed, the feminine had been lifted into heaven to become part of what God is. He regarded this pronouncement as a major moment in the religious history of the Western world.
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But is it?
Is it not strange that before the feminine symbol could be called holy and lifted into God by the Western Catholic tradition, it had to be first desexed and then dehumanized? That is what the symbol of the Virgin Mary has come to mean. She was systematically desexed, becoming first a virgin mother, then a permanent virgin and finally a postpartum virgin. Then she was dehumanized by attributing to her a miraculous birth and a miraculous assumption into heaven. The Blessed Virgin thus escaped both the trauma of a real birth into humanity and the trauma of a real death by her translation into heaven.
The question that this analysis begs is, What is there about women that caused the dominant strand of Western Christianity to state that before a woman could be envisioned as divine, she had to be desexed and dehumanized? This hostility toward women is not subtle in the Christian church. It is, in fact, pervasive. Even the acts of devotion to the Virgin Mary carry with them the baggage of the denigration of femininity.
Sexism is indelible and all but inevitable in Christianity. That is undeniable. How it got there, what it means and how it can be removed are the questions before us as the sinful texts regarding women in the Bible are brought front and center.
THE WOMAN AS THE SOURCE OF EVIL
When a woman wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman and will be called man.
St. Jerome
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T
he ancient Hebrew myths with which the book of Genesis opens describe the biblical understanding of many things. Their purpose was to explain what is. It was men who undoubtedly framed these legends and eventually recorded them, since women in that society had no access to the power that explained God or to the ability to write. Furthermore, women were assumed to have no interest in, or understanding of, the realities of human life. Women thus neither influenced cultural assumptions directly nor shaped primal decisions about the nature of anything, nor were they engaged in any decision-making processes. So it should come as no surprise that when this male-written and male-shaped biblical narrative seeks to explain how evil entered into God’s good creation, it does so by declaring it to be the fault of that subhuman creature created by God to be the man’s helpmeet. Her name was Eve.
In a man’s world women have been blamed for many things from that day to this. If a man rapes a woman, it is because she has tempted him with a provocatively appealing dress. If a man abuses a woman, it is because she irritated him. If a man divorces a woman, it is because she became one with whom he found it no longer tolerable to live. If a woman is competent at playing the man’s game, she is put down with the suggestion that at best she is a hussy and at worst a bitch. If she resorts to feminine wiles to achieve her goal, she is playing “the female thing” for all she is worth. These assumptions continue the pattern established in this story told about the Garden of Eden. Eve was the reason for the man’s downfall. She was responsible for the introduction of evil into the world. It is a wonderful story, but it is just that: a story. It is the narrative through which our ancestors tried to capture the “truth” of their existence. Let me continue the storytelling process begun in the previous chapter, separating the myth from the holy sounds of biblical language.
In the beginning, said this ancient Hebrew legend, God created a perfect world. It was a world upon which the creating deity could look with a sense of satisfaction and pronounce all things good. It was also a finished world, so complete that God could take a day off to rest from the divine labors. It was in this way, this particular narrative suggested, that the Sabbath was established.
Into that perfect world in the Garden of Eden God placed a perfect man, Adam, and his perfect helpmeet, Eve, to be the stewards of God’s bounty. In this garden was all that they could desire. There was ample water since four rivers ran through it. Those rivers were named the Pishon, the Gihon, the Hiddekel (sometimes called the Tigris) and the Euphrates. The latter two rivers are today identified with the country of Iraq and were known in ancient history as forming “the Fertile Crescent” or the “Cradle of Civilization.” There were also ample supplies of gold and onyx. The myth made no mention of how this first family would use these symbols of wealth, but whoever wrote the story understood their value and decided to include them in this first human dwelling place. There were also vegetables, fruit trees and all the other sources of food that human beings could want. It was a perfect world and the perfect man and the perfect woman who inhabited it had access to it all.
God and the man and the woman lived in a perfect relationship, symbolized in the story by the fact that God walked with Adam and Eve each day in the cool of the evening. Air-conditioning had not yet been developed and God knew better than to come out in the heat of the day. That kind of behavior was to be reserved in history for mad dogs and Englishmen!
There was but one rule in this original world. A tree stood in the midst of the garden, the fruit of which was forbidden to human beings. It was
called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was not an apple tree. It did not become an apple tree until Jerome translated the scriptures into Latin in the fourth century of this Common Era.
Jerome’s clever designation has enriched our language by entitling the cartilage that nervously vibrates in the throat of some men as the “Adam’s apple.” Apparently, the forbidden fruit stuck permanently in the throats of some of the sons of Adam!
So Adam and Eve settled happily into their life in this garden, enjoying it all while abiding by that single prohibition against eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Forbidden fruit, however, casts a peculiar kind of spell. It enters the fantasies. It creates wonder. One gets the impression that this tree was the subject of much conversation in the first family and even much mouth-watering anticipation. Nonetheless, Adam and Eve remained faithful to the divine command; at least they did so until one day when the woman was circling the tree alone. The story suggests that her fantasies simply overwhelmed her.
As Eve stared at that fruit, we are told, a serpent walked up to her on two legs, for that was the way snakes walked in those days. The snake spoke, probably in perfect Hebrew, since that surely was the only language Eve understood: “Miss Eve, did God really say you could not eat the fruit of this tree?”
“Yes, Mr. Snake,” Eve responded. “God said that if we eat the fruit of this tree, we will surely die!”
“You won’t die, Miss Eve,” said the snake. “God knows that if you eat of this tree, you will be as wise as God. God doesn’t want human creatures to compete with the Holy One! You, Eve,” the serpent suggested, “can be as wise as God!” That was a new idea for this woman. It presented her with a vision of transcending the limits of her humanity; it offered her a way to become something more than any of her dreams or fantasies had suggested; it freed her imagination.
The story suggests that this new idea constituted an irresistible and therefore a determinative temptation.
Eve succumbed and ate the fruit. Then she called the innocent Adam over and urged him to try it. He did. The deed was done. God’s perfect creation
was wrecked. Disobedience had entered the human arena through the woman, who was clearly the weak link in God’s creation. After Adam and Eve ate, the story tells us, their eyes were opened and they discovered that they were naked. Presumably they had been naked all along, but it appears that they had not noticed. Now, aware of their bodies, they experienced shame. They scurried to cover their nakedness with fig leaf aprons.
Suddenly they realized it was nearing the time for God’s evening stroll through the garden. Before their disobedience, God had been thought of as their friend and as one whose presence they anticipated with pleasure. After their disobedience, however, God was perceived as their judge, the elicitor of their guilt, a presence to be feared and avoided. They decided that they could no longer endure the company of the divine one, so in an act of wonderful theological naïveté, they invented a human game called “hide-and-seek.” God was to be “it.” It was a primitive conception that seemed to assume it really was possible to hide from God in the bushes. So it was done.
This strangely human deity, who was clearly without the divine quality of being all-seeing, began the stroll through the garden, only to discover that it was empty. The astounded God could not find the man and the woman. So God called out for the senior member of the human family: “Adam, Adam, where are you?”
Since this was the first time the game of hide-and-seek had ever been played in human history, Adam did not quite understand the rules. If God called, he had to answer, so Adam responded, “Here we are, God, hiding in the bushes.”
“What in the world are you doing in the bushes?” God asked. But then it suddenly dawned on the divine consciousness, which apparently did not know all things in advance, just what this behavior meant. So God asked, “Have you eaten of that tree?”
“It was not I,” said Adam. “It was that woman. You remember, that woman you made.”
“It was not I,” said the woman. “It was that snake.” So the process of blame and rationalization began.
Then the punishments were handed out. In an earlier chapter, when looking at the church’s negativity toward the environment, I noted that the punishment for Adam in the Garden of Eden was that he must scratch his living from a hostile earth. The woman Eve would have to endure pain in childbirth, the serpent would be condemned to slither on its belly through all eternity and all living creatures would have to leave the garden. From that moment on, human life would be lived not in Eden, but “east of Eden,” to borrow a phrase from John Steinbeck. Finally, all living creatures and their progeny were programmed to die. Mortality was their destiny. The universality of death would demonstrate, for all to see, the universality of that original sin, which brought death to God’s world. That sin was to be the defining characteristic of humanity, corrupting every person and making it impossible for human life to restore its relationship with God.
All of this, the story suggested, entered human history through the weakness of the woman. She was made to bear the blame and the guilt. She was the source of death, which was inescapable. It was a terrifying charge to lay at the feet of the female, but that is what this primal myth does. It states that the reason evil and death are the most distinguishing marks of our humanity is the woman’s disobedience. The apostle Paul certainly contributed to that definition. So did Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, in the fifth century. He made it the keystone of his thinking, and through him it was destined to dominate Christian thought for a thousand years. To this day this negativity toward women and sex is a major, if subliminal, feature of our religious life.
A whole theological system has been built on this story. We still refer to women as the “temptresses” of noble men. Women are still called the “forbidden fruit” for which male bodies yearn. Women are still defined as the corrupters and polluters of human holiness. They are still blamed for male powerlessness. Because of this story, holiness in Western Christian civilization came to be associated with avoiding women—that is, with sexlessness. Virginity in women and celibacy in men were established as the “higher way.” Even marriage was defined as a compromise with sin, as we saw earlier, an option available primarily for the weak. Jerome, that great translator of the scriptures, who would be better remembered if he had stuck to translating, once observed that the only redemptive aspect of marriage was that it “produced more virgins.”
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That statement still makes me blink with incredulity. Women were indeed evil to their core. That was the message of the Christian church and it was built quite specifically on the story of Eve.
This is how a “terrible text” works. It is born in a patriarchal myth. That myth eventually loses its original power. No one today, outside the most rabid fundamentalists, thinks of Adam and Eve as real people. But the poisonous assumptions that were loosed into the bloodstream of Western civilization through the myth continue to live, to grow and to victimize anew in every century. Indeed it was relatively recently that this evil was challenged in the secular society and not surprisingly that challenge was resisted by the church as an act of “godlessness.”
In 1873, in Illinois, a woman named Myra Bradford sued the state for the right to be given a license to practice law. There were no legal prohibitions to this possibility, since no one had entertained the idea that a woman would ever want to practice law. That was outside the boundaries of how the culture defined a woman and thus beyond people’s imagining. No society ever prohibits something of which its members cannot conceive. Yet although Ms. Bradford had passed the bar examination and met all the other clearly defined prerequisites of her state, still Illinois would not confer on her the license required to practice law. When the local court denied her suit, she appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which ultimately upheld the decision of the state of Illinois not to grant the legal license. Justice Joseph Bradley, writing for the eight-to-one majority of the court in that decision, said:
Man is or should be woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and function of womanhood. The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign office of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution and cannot be based on exceptional cases.
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But hostility and blame reveal threat and fear. What is it about a woman that causes such animosity? Is there something beyond the level of the conscious that might give us insights? Can that be identified? Where do we go to discover it?
One doorway into the patterns of the past, and into the unconscious fears and desires that underlie those patterns, is to examine the taboos that human beings set up to protect themselves from things they fear or do not understand. We find taboos in the prohibitions that people adopt—especially the irrational prohibitions. We also find them in the irrational negativities that people practice. To that discussion we turn next.