The blight of infallibility

First, just to unpack the two nouns in the title of this piece.

When one reflects on the basic plank of conservative evangelical ideology, namely that their Bible is infallible and inerrant, one can see how easy it is to slide into the de-facto belief that one's own theology is infallible and inerrant if it claims to be "biblical". It is infallibility by religious osmosis.

Blight – 'to nip in the bud, to wither' – Any fresh buds of insights into understanding or interpreting the scriptures, if they do not fit the evangelical hegemony (or the entrenched theology of the male power-brokers in the church) then the fresh buds are deprived of life. They wither and die.

This is not to say that evangelical theology is changeless. An evangelical acquaintance of mine recently declaimed to me that the Bible was full of timeless truth. I think he was unaware that he was thus a devotee of Plato. In the evangelical circles in which I once moved, that was not their evangelical belief. Rather, they argued that the Bible's truths were anchored in human history. So which of those two quite different (one could even say opposite) evangelical beliefs is infallible?

A study of the history of evangelical beliefs indicates that such a theological stream can be as influenced by the 'spirit of the age' as any other group. In practice, conservative evangelicals are usually influenced by the conservative ' spirit of the age'. That seems to be the common case in Australia.

An example. The Principal of the evangelical theological college in which I did my first theological study was a committed supporter of Apartheid in South Africa. (At the time, many conservative Australians shared that orientation.) To put it in religious terms, he saw such support as 'biblical'. And one of the key biblical texts he appealed to was Genesis 9:18, 25-26, 10:6. It was a text, alongside Exodus, Judges andJoshua – with their theologies of dispossession – that was appealed to by religious colonists in Australia to justify the killing and dispossession of the land's Indigenous owners.The Bible thus became a handbook for imperial expansion. And empires expand by dispossessing the original owners of the land.

Given established Protestant traditions of interpretation, these biblical writings served as handy texts if one wanted to defend not only Apartheid and imperial expansion, but slavery. Bible-believing Christians avidly used scripture for well over a century in the slave-owning southern United States to defend slavery. And the legacy of that racist biblicism still bedevils modern America.

A question nearer home. Do Australian evangelicals still regard the practice of Apartheid as being biblical? Or has that infallible doctrine slipped into fallibility in contemporary times? And can that fact be publicly admitted by conservative evangelical Christians?

I believe all theologies are contextual – even those in the Bible. Contrary to the view of my Platonic acquaintance, all the biblical writings have a historical, human context. That is so obvious. When they were first written, they were written within the parameters of two human languages – Hebrew and Greek. [Hebrew's first cousin Aramaic can also get a mention.] Surely no one would dispute that these languages are historical human phenomena.

And their social context was human. No language exists in a human-less vacuum. Social engagement produces language. And the very fact that there are such numerous different languages spoken in our world indicates that there are numerous different social contexts that have created, and shaped, both oral and written communication. And contexts and their beliefs change over time.

This point seems to be so obvious. But it is worth remembering in the current context, where there is such energy and activity in 'Bible-believing' ranks to entrench as infallible the contextual understandings of relationships in society held in the first century Graeco-Roman world. Of course the entrenching is quite arbitrary. While the current focus is on gender relationships, we need to recall that slavery [of both women and men] was also a social construct operative in that same first century. Indeed, some scripture writings give various advice to slave owners on how slaves were to be treated. No writer explicitly questioned slavery.

It was in the period of the Enlightenment, in the eighteenth century, that saw the first decided questioning of the practice of slavery. In Britain, this inspired both secular and religious critiques of slavery. I mention 'secular' because their writings and activity often gets overlooked in the re-writing of that history by religionists.

In the mid-nineteenth century, across the Atlantic, both before and during the American Civil war, divisions arose within evangelical ranks as to whether slavery was to be regarded as a God-ordained and biblical practice, or whether it was to be opposed in the name of biblical Christianity. Who, in that context, were the genuine Bible-believers?

Consequent to that war, there has developed a tradition of evangelical interpretation that seeks to sugar coat the biblical passages. I cannot go into detail, but that tradition of interpretation aims to suggest that these writings carried the seeds of slavery's destruction. An immediate question arises. If these seeds are so obvious, why did it take at least 1,800 years for Bible-believing Christians to plant the seeds in the ground?

Incidentally, history records that the first political group of humans to outlaw slavery (at least in their immediate domain) was the secularised government of the French Revolution. This occurred on the 4 February, 1792. [The conservative Napoleon sadly rescinded the decree in 1802.]

Nearer to home, accounts of the violent colonisation of Australia, especially its northern regions, have a number of references from both colonial and Indigenous eye-witnesses describing the forced labour imposed on Indigenous men and women as 'slavery'.

Slavery is no longer an issue in Australia. But gender relations are. And to focus on one area where there is genuine and growing concern is the practice of violence against women. In the context of this article it is worth noting that the Bible has next to nothing to say about such violence. Next to nothing!

In regard to an evangelical viewpoint that "what the Bible says, God says", presumably one can also say "What the Bible is silent about, God is silent about". Or more pointedly: "What the Bible writers do not care about, God does not care about". Why is the Bible so silent about domestic violence against women and children? A partial explanation is as follows:

And here we return to the context of the writers of scripture. Just to note briefly several points:

1. It is generally believed that all the biblical writers were male. So no woman contributes first hand to any biblical writing. There is no acknowledgment that domestic violence against women exists in the biblical writers' world of reference. That absence is worth noting especially if, in our context, these documents are interpreted as having the last (and infallible) word on how women are to be treated and subordinated.

2. The prevailing Greco-Roman (and Jewish) cultures were patriarchal. To use an evangelical term, the prevailing power arrangement in general society, as well as in domestic relationships, was 'male-headship'. The Christian scriptures were written totally within structural arrangements of male power. Such structures are never seriously questioned by the writers. Several of the writers actually entrenched further male power over females in the name of Christianity.

In contemporary conservative theology, one encounters the casuistry that, on the one hand, there is no objection to accepting that God has equipped a woman to be Premier (who thus heads a state government), or a female Prime Minister (who thus heads a nation) or a woman Professor (who heads a University Department), but, on the other hand, this theology can in no way acknowledge that God may also have equipped a woman to share the headship of a household, or the leadership of a diocese, or the leadership of a humble parish. To those outside the casuistry bubble, this is mind-boggling.

The famous political passage in Romans 13:1-7 would suggest that God does not feel outraged at having a woman in the leadership position, whether it be a large nation or a small parish. But conservative evangelicals are outraged at the latter prospect. There is no way God can call a woman in their dioceses to be ordained to be a priestly leader. Yet God calls women to other dioceses. Does this mean that the difference comes down as to whether God is a conservative evangelical, or a moderate evangelical, or even a non-evangelical?

And the passages that are adduced by these interpreters to keep women subordinate in those same three domains come out of central-casting of first century Graeco Roman culture and society. And no changes that have occurred since the first century, it seems, can dent their gender theology.

Here one can only present a very brief listing of the struggles down the centuries that women have had to mount in such areas as: protection from rape in marriage, laws condoning domestic violence, denial of inheritance, absence of voting rights, long delayed rights to an education, disparity in wages, etcetera. The list is extensive. And within Christendom the male opposition to such reformations, in retrospect, was based not only on male-centred ideologies of power-holding, but carried, at times, a cruel and callous edge to it.

In the present religious landscape, scriptural passages are cited to keep women in their biblical subordinate place. Such passages enjoin wives to be silent. Presumably, they and their daughters, are to make no complaint of sexual violence or other abuse. Such wives are "to make full submission", to be subordinate to their husband "in everything".

These are established first century gender power imbalances. They are still regarded as infallible in twenty-first century conservative evangelical theology. In contrast, evangelical scholar, Kevin Giles, [4] has lodged a protest. In his helpful study he documents how these biblical injunctions can sadly provide a basis of power imbalance in a domestic relationship. Historically, these passages supporting the overriding power of male headship, have played an integral role in undergirding the practice of domestic violence against women.

It is very difficult for those who believe they are always right to rethink their position. In a Christian context, such a tendency to infallibility becomes a blight that nips in the bud and withers any fresh and liberating understanding of the scriptures. For examples there is

a. no welcome given to, say, feminist insights into women's experience

b. no welcome to bringing a valuing of narrative theology (and stories that resist control from dogmatic requirements) into centre place. One is saved by infallible dogma – it seems.

c. no welcoming of fresh insights and analysis in liberation theology's question of who are the power-holders in a church, a country, and why do they in particular have power? And what of those who have no real share in power because of their gender or sexuality?

For Christians to behave as if they, and their institution, are infallible allows no room for any deepening and widening insights outside their closed circle to be welcomed. That is a loss to them and to us, for they can bring insights also to us. And a growing circle of mutual discovery – that would a fresh journey for us all.