Spirit in Action
Eco-Justice, Queer Commentary & the Hebrew Bible
Dr. Ken Stone of Chicago Theological Seminary leads workshops on Eco-Justice & The Hebrew Bible and he's written and edited several books including Practicing Safer Texts: Food, Sex and Bible in Queer Perspective. His analysis is spiritual fuel for lives of justice.
- Broadcast on:
- 09 May 2010
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(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today for Spirit in Action, we'll be visiting with Dr. Ken Stone of Chicago Theological Seminary. He's been touring recently, sharing some of the fruits of his study, offering a workshop, eco-justice, and the Hebrew Bible. And he has some real gems of insights, real gifts he helps us uncover. He's written and edited several books, including practicing safer texts, food, sex, and Bible in queer perspective. Clearly, Ken Stone goes beyond mainstream limited perspectives of the Bible, digs deeper, and fruits of his study promise a strong underpinning for those working for eco-justice and greater justice across a number of sexual and gender identities. Ken joins us today from Chicago Theological Seminary. Ken, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - Well, thank you for having me. - You work down there in Chicago, but I don't think that's your native land. Where do you come from originally? - I was born in Tennessee and lived there for a number of years. That's not the only place I lived, but I have family there. And so I do return there occasionally. I moved to Chicago immediately from Nashville, where I had finished my PhD at Vanderbilt. - You teach the Hebrew Bible. That's your specialty. And you come from the Bible Belt. Was this part of your background where you deeply steeped in theology growing up? - I was raised in a very religious family. I have a number of ministers on both my father's and my mother's side of the family. And so I do think that that shaped my interest in religion in general and in the study of the Bible in particular. Now my own religious views have evolved quite a bit. I would say in a direction away from most of the views that I was raised with. But yes, that did certainly shape my interest in religion in general and the Bible in particular. I'm certainly not trying to get you in trouble if anyone can. But would you say that when you're lecturing on things like sexuality or eco-justice, that the people of your childhood might have been aghast at the topics you pick? - Aghast may be too strong. Members of my family and friends of mine know a lot about what kind of work I do and what I write about. And I think by now they're used to it. But I suppose it would be true to say that it is initially a surprise to some of them. - You've been doing a lot of workshops currently about eco-justice and the Hebrew Bible. I've seen you moving all around Wisconsin and I assume many other states giving this workshop. Could you give us a little resume of what that is about? - Well, basically I am participating in a conversation that involves a lot of other theologians and biblical scholars today who are trying to look again at our religious traditions and ask whether or not there are resources in those traditions that would sustain those of us who do care about ecological concerns, who are concerned about environmental crisis and so forth. Traditionally it has been said both by critics of Judaism and Christianity and also by some adherence of both Judaism and Christianity that the Bible is very centered on humans, that it is not very interested in nature, that one of the things that is unique supposedly about biblical religion was that in comparison with other ancient religions, it was not interested in nature. And that has been a source of concern for people who want to know why it is that in the West in particular, there has sometimes been resistance to taking our ecological problems more seriously. So some ecologists have argued that religion is part of the problem. And these traditional biblical ideas are a big part of the problem. Today there are a number of biblical scholars and theologians, and I would count myself among them, who do not dispute that there are some problems there, but who also believe that the problem has been overstated. And that in fact the Bible is a lot more interested in nature, is a lot more interested in what we would call the environment than traditionally adherence of Judaism and Christianity have imagined. And so one of my tasks is to try to work with people who are interested in biblical literature to look at some of those texts that perhaps haven't been given as much attention. And also to think about the ones that are problematic and how we might recognize the problems involved in the ways in which we use some of those texts. - You certainly must get the criticism from some corners that what you're really doing is remaking the Bible. You're trying to choose conclusions, interpretations that match what you already believe, what you already value. First of all, do you get that kind of criticism? And if so, how do you answer that? - I do get that kind of criticism. And I don't get the criticism only when I'm talking about ecological stuff, similarly some of the work that I do around sexuality and gender and the Bible generates that kind of criticism from others. I don't completely deny the charge. I do think that there is a certain sense in which all of us read religious texts with particular interests in mind. And so we do happen to notice the things that are most closely aligned with the interests that we have. That being said, I do what I can to try to ask very carefully what might this text plausibly have meant in the ancient world when it was written. I try to understand the text in its original language. And then I also ask how might this text be read in relation to not only a ancient context, but the kinds of questions that contemporary readers have. - One of the responses I have when people bring that kind of criticism to me and certainly my interpretations of Bible vary from what a number of other people do is, they're saying, here's the accepted interpretation of that. And I have to say, yeah, that is the accepted interpretation that's been passed on by a certain group of people, but they were putting it through their filters already. So we're just saying, what if the filters were different? So you have my permission to use that counterpoint, if you will, when you're talking with people, you maybe already have used it. - Sure, that is one of the things I would also say. I don't think any of us read the Bible or any other text outside of the influence of the various interpretations that have been made of it and the various filters. I like that word filter that you use that people bring to the interpretation of those texts. I think that's right. And very often, particularly with the text that is as influential as the Bible, the traditional readings of it become very heavily ingrained. They become a little bit difficult to dislodge because people open the Bible and they see there what they think they have always heard the text means. But I think in many cases, one can show that the text is able to be read in a number of different ways and that it's often beneficial to us to look at some of the alternative interpretations that can be made of it. I know that this is not on the main line of what you deal with because if you're talking about the Hebrew text of the Bible, that's going back quite a ways. But I have heard people say, you know, of course, the Bible says, you know, you die and then you just go to heaven. There's no such thing as reincarnation. I have seen some verses of the Bible. I say, oh, well, maybe they do indicate reincarnation. And I understand that the early church, it was a pretty common belief to believe in reincarnation. But of course, the filters we've had for some many hundreds and maybe millennia are that reincarnation doesn't exist. Have you seen that kind of evidence, those texts? What do you think about that? - Well, that's an interesting question. I have to say that I don't recall being asked very much about it. My primary focus, as you indicated, is in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. And generally, the texts from the Old Testament don't say very much about any sort of life after death. Even in comparison with the New Testament and early Christian texts, the Old Testament doesn't seem to show much interest in the question about what happens after someone dies. There are a few texts scattered here and there. And consequently, it's not one that I have spent much time thinking about. It is certainly true that after the time in which the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament was written, as both Judaism and Christianity developed a lot more interest in what happens after one dies also emerged. And among the different views that people had about that, one can find perspectives that I think we could associate with the word reincarnation. But it hasn't been common in the text that I mainly focus on. And so it's not a question that I've given a great deal of fault. - Well, let's focus in on what you actually do study. You use the term Hebrew Bible. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that. Do you mean Torah, the Tanah? How far are you going in what you're studying for the Hebrew Bible? - Yes, Torah Tanah is what I would include under the praise Hebrew Bible. Basically, it would be the set of texts that Christians traditionally have called the Old Testament. However, Old Testament is obviously a Christian term and my students are not all Christians. Some of them are also Jewish. Some of them are not believers in either Christianity or Judaism. So Hebrew Bible is arguably a more neutral term to talk about the text that Christians and Jews share. - So you do include all of the prophets. There's a difference between what Jews treat as sacred texts, some that we, you know, maybe the Catholics are the only ones who include them in or how far do you go? Do you just use what I guess a Protestant Bible would label as the Old Testament? - No, I am also interested in those other texts as well, the ones that would sometimes be referred to as apocryphal texts or Deuterocanonical texts. I'm sure you're aware there's a lot of different terms for them. I'm interested in those texts as well, but they are somewhat secondary so far as the focus of my teaching and research is concerned. I would however want to be sure that my students are familiar with those texts. And so if, for example, in a graduate course on the whole of the Hebrew Bible, it would be important to me to spend some time on those other texts that would fall outside of what you rightly said would be the Protestant version of the Old Testament. - One of the reasons I asked this is because you said that you, as part of your study, take a look at some of the texts that are a little studied in respect to how they deal with the ecological dimensions, the eco-justice dimensions. What texts are you talking about there that are a little studied? - I was referring not so much to whole books of the Bible that would be a little studied, but rather to various sections of sometimes books that might be heavily studied can contain texts that people don't pay very much attention to. For example, I think you could make a case that there is no book in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament that Christians have paid more attention to than the book of Psalms. It's a book that gets a lot of attention. Nevertheless, it tends to be read in certain ways and certain parts of it tend to be read more often than others and among the pieces that seem not to be read as frequently, one can find the number of texts that do deal with nature, with the environment and so forth and so for purposes of this kind of work, I would be interested in spending a little more time focusing on those parts of the book of Psalms as opposed to the parts that people know better. While also acknowledging that the book of Psalms as a whole is itself relatively well known. So my suggestion about little studied texts would not necessarily go along the lines of, well, here's a book you've never read and you need to read it, although I suppose that could be true of some books of the Bible. Rather, my argument would be there are a lot of emphases in the Bible, a lot of particular passages in the Bible that have not played a major role in the most common interpretations of it and sometimes by emphasizing those texts rather than the ones that Christianity has traditionally emphasized, one can discover a number of emphases that I think are interesting, arguably helpful, including ones that place a lot of emphasis on, for example, the beauty of nature and the importance of nature for God that's talked about it in the Bible. - It is interesting that certain portions of the Bible have favored depending on which epoch of history you live in. I understand that sometime in the past, Song of Songs, Song of Solomon, was a very important foundational text for a lot of people on how they approach the Bible. I don't know that I've ever heard a priesthood minister lecture from Song of the Songs in my entire 55 years on the earth. - That's interesting. Song of Songs is a very interesting case of exactly what you said. If you look at the history of biblical interpretation, you can indeed find time periods and particular figures in the Christian past, some of whom were quite traditional for their kind of very orthodox, let's say, who nevertheless wrote volumes literally on the Song of Songs. Now for a lot of those thinkers, the Song of Songs was read as an allegory or kind of symbol of the relationship between God and humans, so that when you actually look at what they said about the Song of Songs, their interpretation of it might be quite different than the interpretation that we would think of the Song of Songs today. Nevertheless, it's true that they were spending a great deal of time talking about the Song of Songs, and as you rightly indicated, that's not a text that gets emphasized very often in contemporary churches. In fact, even if one belongs to a mainline church, which supposedly are the less conservative churches, often the mainline churches will choose their readings of the Old Testament from an electionary that circulates on a three-year basis. Only a few verses appear from the Song of Songs in the entire three-year cycle of electionary, and then I believe only one time. So one would not have many occasions to hear about the Song of Songs if one attends a church where the preaching is done on the basis of electionary text, for example. I happen to be very interested in the Song of Songs because it brings together a number of my interests. It brings together interests in gender and sexuality, but it also uses a lot of imagery from the natural world and from the agricultural world, a lot of what we could call nature imagery, farming in imagery, animal imagery appears there a lot, and obviously in a way that's very appreciative of the beauty of the natural world. So I think it's a book that I don't think gets much attention today, and I think we would benefit from more attention to it in quite a number of ways. - Even though I'm Quaker now, I was raised Catholic, and I was just having a hard time just now envisaging the priests that I grew up with reading from Song of Songs about breasts like leaping elks. I just don't think that they could have handled that. I'm not sure that the congregation could have handled it either, because I think there's a whole lot of sexual shame that is part of the Puritan tradition in this country. - I think that's a good observation. I do think a lot of people would be uncomfortable with the language of the Song of Songs. In spite of the fact that the language of the book itself mostly takes the form of symbols, it is nevertheless pretty clear once one starts reading it that the book is talking sometimes quite graphically about the body, about the sexuality and so forth. Then I do think people are uncomfortable with it, and so they prefer not to hear those parts of the Bible. It is however ironic, I think, that if we ask ourselves why people are uncomfortable with sex and gender and so forth, particularly in a religious context, we often imagine that there's something inherent in Christianity or Judaism that would look upon sexuality negatively, and I think there's a lot of evidence for that, but then it's ironic that a part of the Bible is itself so sexually provocative, and so what we tend to do then is just not read those parts of the Bible, and that reconfirms our mistaken sense, in my opinion, that the Bible itself takes a more negative view of sexuality than perhaps it does. So we don't wanna read those parts of the Bible because they make us uncomfortable, but because we don't read those parts of the Bible, we have a very skewed view of what attitudes one can actually find in the Bible toward the sorts of things that the song of songs talks about. - It is interesting to me how people do reshape the Bible in terms of the blinders that they put on looking at it. One of the arguments that I've heard is that the Bible says marriage is always just one man, one woman, and that's it. And I'm sorry, but I don't think I see it ever being said. I mean, it certainly talks about Adam and Eve and being one flesh, but it doesn't say anything about only one. As a matter of fact, the example I see is mainly of multiple wives. So is there a place in the Bible where it actually says one man, one woman? - You know, there may be some texts in the New Testament, which I don't study as much. They're not as a part of my specialization. There may be texts in the New Testament that do that. I don't wanna say for sure that there are or there aren't. What I will say is that you're right to notice that in the Old Testament, sort of norm for marriage included the possibility of multiple wives and sometimes concubines, as we say, some sort of wife of secondary status. So while marriage in that sense may have been, let's say heterosexual, to use a word. It's not a biblical word, but for one of a better word, it may have been heterosexual. It was not, however, monogamous. Moreover, it was not only the case that men had more than one wife, if they could afford to have more than one wife. There was no moral reason why they couldn't. It is also the case that, in terms of sexual ethics, a man who was married does not seem to have been prevented from having sexual relationships with women other than the ones to whom he was married, so long as those women weren't married to someone else. If, for example, a man wanted to have sexual relations with a prostitute and he was himself married, that doesn't seem to be ruled out by the system of sexual ethics that one can find in the Bible. So I do think that if one studies the views on marriage and sexuality carefully in the Old Testament, at least, one does realize that the assumptions about sexual ethics, about marriage, about gender, and so forth, are in many cases radically different than the views about sex and marriage and gender that one often associates, traditionally with Judaism and Christianity. - So does that mean that the commandment thou shalt not commit adultery? That that was a rule only for women? Is it not for men? - It was a rule for men too, but adultery is understood in a very particular way in the Old Testament. For a man to commit adultery, what he would be doing was having sexual relations with a woman who was married to someone else. It's almost a property offense in the Old Testament. A man who commits adultery is having sexual relations with a woman who almost belongs to someone else. If, however, he had sexual relations with a woman who didn't belong to someone else, that would not be defined as adultery even if he was also married to another woman. - Well, that's certainly convenient for some of us. (laughing) - Mind you that I'm not advocating this view, I'm just trying to describe the views on marriage that one finds in the Hebrew Bible. They're much more restrictive on women than they are on men. - That comes as a big surprise to a lot of us, not at all. So I do wanna deal specifically with the Eco-justice thing, but first I wanna follow a little bit further this thread about sexuality, especially since you have written significant portions on that. One of the books that you've written is Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible. What's this about and what's Queer Commentary? - By Queer Commentary in that book, what I mean and the other people who contributed to that book mean is something like this. If we gather together readings of the Bible that do not take as their starting point the assumed norms of heterosexuality, the assumed norms of sex and gender and so forth that have often enough been the foundation for Judaism and Christianity. If we come to the Bible and ask different sets of questions, if we take other starting points, if we ask what, for example, a gay reading might be, or if we ask what a reading of the Bible might be that didn't assume a rigid distinction between male and female roles, we might call that Queer Commentary. It's unusual commentary. It's unusual specifically with respect to questions of sex and gender. So that's what I would mean by the term. - It's very clear at least that there are a couple passages of Leviticus that seem to say, you know, man slept with a man, kill him, things like that. One of the things that I've noted, as I've read through the Bible, is you can find a passage like that and I can read a passage somewhere else, which seems to be very contradictory that it has implications which go against this one. Is this part of what you're looking at? Are you bringing the maybe competing views of the world that are held within this big barrel that is the Bible and showing us, well, yeah, if you read that passage, it looks pretty clear, but you read this passage, it looks pretty clear in a different direction. - That would indeed be one of the things that I would want to do in my work. I think that one of the big mistakes people make when they think about the Bible is to assume that it is a kind of a single book that articulates a unified, consistent point of view. I think that if one looks more carefully at the Bible, what one quickly realizes is, of course, that it consists of a lot of different books. Even a lot of those books seem to have been written by more than one person and so, not surprisingly, it articulates a lot of different kinds of views, some of which are in competition with one another. And so I do think that we read the Bible looking for often a consistent message. It would be important to me to be able to show other places in the Bible that articulate a different point of view. That would be true whether I was talking about sexuality or gender or views on nature or really just about anything else, the nature of God or views about death to come back to a question you asked earlier. So I would want always to encourage people to pay attention to the multiple perspectives that can be found in what you, I'm using we call this big barrel of the Bible. - You do know that you've committed heresy by saying that the Bible isn't a single party line. I know that there are people who are gonna get you. Do you get much flack? - Well, I suppose it depends on what one means by flack. The school that I teach in is associated with the United Church of Christ, which is mainline denomination of a somewhat liberal bent. So students who come here while they may not always be expecting to hear the things I say about the Bible, I don't know that I would say that my own students give me flack in that sense. It is, however, true that people who come from in much more traditional religious perspective who read one of my books or who hear me talk are sometimes disturbed and will ask questions about it. But that's the nature of the work one does, I guess. - Well, to get back to the topic of non-uniformity within the Bible and specifically the ecological portions of the Bible, a lot of us like to start right there with Genesis. Now my understanding is that there are two very different well, two significantly different stories of creation right there. And one of them, God is God's, the Elohim, plural. And the other God is a single God. So is your reading of this is that there are two competing camps that are putting these in? And so maybe we compromise by including both stories. - Well, there clearly are two different stories there. Now, whether or not they were understood as competing camps, I think that's a little difficult to know we can't get back to the point prior to their both being included. The our earliest evidence for the text comes from a time when they're already both included in the single book of Genesis. It appears obvious to me and to most biblical scholars that there are two very different stories there. And they don't literally agree with one another. Not only with respect to the views of God that you talked about a moment ago, but even in terms of the order in which things get created and so forth, the two stories are inconsistent if one understands them as anything like literal accounts. And I think that it is important for readers to be able to recognize that those multiple points of view are there, they're about things like creation. - I mentioned the Elohim, the gods, you know, it's plural. What is this we, and I don't know Hebrew, right? I mean, I know a few words, obviously, but is this a we, like in we, the king or like in French, where you sometimes use the plural vu when you're talking to an individual because it's the formal way of doing it? Or is this literally God's in plural? - Well, that's a somewhat complicated question to answer that word that you referred to, Elohim, which is a plural form. It is sometimes used with singular verbs, so there do seem to be texts where that plural word is understood as a way of referring to a single being. On the other hand, there are also a number of texts in which one can make a case for a view of God that's more complex than that, a view in which perhaps the Israelites did not deny the existence of other gods, but rather place their emphasis on the fact that this is the God we worship. So that one way that this is sometimes put is to say, while we think of the Bible as being sort of uniformly monotheistic, in fact, some of the texts of the Old Testament seem to presuppose not what we would call monotheism, but rather, monolotry. That is, we just, we worship one God without denying the existence of other gods. And among the texts that one would want to look at carefully when exploring this possibility would be that text there in Genesis that uses the we to talk about the events of creation. So I would myself see that text in Genesis as one of a number of texts that seem to presuppose a more pluralized notion of the divine, that there are arguably more than one divine being. That's a little bit controversial. The texts are a little bit ambiguous, and one would have to look at a wide range of texts and not only the text of Genesis in order to sort of sustain that argument. - If you've just tuned in, you're listening to spirit in action. And this is Mark Helps meat speaking to you. This is a Northern spirit radio production. Our website is NorthernSpiritRadio.org. And on our site, you can find links to all of our programs. There are all archives there, as well as comments and as well as links to our guests. And our guest today for spirit in action is Dr. Ken Stone. He's of Chicago Theological Seminary. Amongst other things, he's been on the road a lot these last couple of months talking about eco justice and the Hebrew Bible. And he's also written a book or participated in writing a book, queer commentary and the Hebrew Bible. He joins us today from down in Chicago where he teaches at Chicago Theological Seminary. I'd like you, if you would, Ken, to give me a few examples of texts, of ideas, of themes in the Bible that you use as part of your eco justice workshop. You say you look at these texts and you find some different meanings or different understandings, you see them in a different way. So how about opening up our eyes a little bit? - Okay, well, let me start by making perhaps a sort of a contrast between a text that you referred to and some of the other texts that I might emphasize. They're in Genesis in that creation story in the first chapter of Genesis, the first of the two creation stories. The story sort of culminates in a way with the creation of human beings. And there's a lot of emphasis there on the humans being created in the image of God and given some sort of dominion, let's say, over the rest of creation. The emphasis on that passage and on that verse in particular, which is in Genesis 128, is one of the reasons why people have noted critically that the Bible may be part of the problem that makes it hard for us to address ecological issues. And I think that that text is there and there are some problems about it. On the other hand, if one went to a text such as Psalm 104, for example, Psalm 104, it's not a short text, it's a rather long Psalm, very beautiful text that does also talk about nature and creation, but does so in a way that includes humans, but that gives human beings a somewhat limited role. The humans are there, they get to have a place to live, they get to have food, but so do all of the other creatures. The lions are there too and the goats have a place to live and so forth. And so if one tried to figure out what the biblical view of the relationship between the human beings and the rest of creation or nature was from Psalm 104, one would come away with a very different picture of the role of humans that would be, I think, a little less exalted that would not emphasize the image of God, but would rather understand God to be concerned with the whole of creation and would understand God being as concerned about the other animals alongside human beings. And in fact, that perspective, I think, can be found in other parts of the Bible as well. Psalm 36, for example, says of God, "You save human and animals alike." Now, I have not myself ever heard a sermon on what it means when the Bible says that God saves the animals, but there you have that sort of text in the Psalms that do talk about that. Similarly, we have texts from Isaiah that talk about God doing new things not only for humans, but also for wild animals. There are a number of texts scattered throughout the Bible that I think people don't think enough about the implications of, for example, in the book of Exodus, when God saves the Israelites, but destroys the firstborn Egyptians. One of the things that I don't think is often noticed is that the Israelite animals are also explicitly saved with the Israelites, whereas the Egyptian animals, the firstborn Egyptian animals, die with the firstborn Egyptians. Now, that's somewhat a troubling text in itself, but the way in which the text does not differentiate between human and animal, I myself find quite striking. It also reminds us perhaps of the book of Jonah. There's a scene in the book of Jonah where this great Assyrian city of Nineveh is repenting. They're praying and fasting and putting on sackcloth, which was part of the ritual of praying and fasting. And they can't let their animals eat either, and they put sackcloth on the animal. So the ways in which we draw a sharp line between human beings and the rest of nature, the rest of creation, I think that there are quite a number of biblical texts that undermine the sharpness of that distinction. And I think it's important to call attention to those texts precisely because one of the things that has sometimes been said about the Bible as a problem for ecology is that it is supposed to be so much more interested in human salvation alone or human well-being alone as opposed to the rest of creation. I guess I'd like to draw you into political argument. I guess there's a little bit of a fur going around because Glenn Beck says, if you go into a church and they have the word social justice there, then their communists, you better run out of there. Clearly, I read things in the Bible. Jesus seems to be, he's into communitarian living, I guess, at least by Acts they're doing that. Does this extend back into what we call the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, you know what I mean? There's jubilee there. I mean, there's all these different ways of thinking. Have you found any denomination, any people who don't ignore major portions of the Bible or say, I guess we're not gonna look at all this stuff from Leviticus or we're not gonna do that? Have you found anyone who really seems to hold all of it, is able to hold all of it in their view at the same time? - I have to say that I'm not really sure that it would be possible for any reader of the Bible to sort of take the whole of it and practice it all consistently. I know that a lot of people sincerely believed that they are doing that, but I think that what most of them do is they emphasize certain parts, they don't emphasize other parts, or they read texts that I might find contradictory in such a way as to smooth out the contradiction in their own interpretation. That allows them to believe, again, as I say, I think they're entirely sincere about the belief. It allows them to believe that they are practicing sort of the whole of a unified biblical religion. Now, the statement from Glenn Beck, I personally find quite remarkable because it is very difficult to find any book of the Bible that does not include somewhere positive statements about social justice. I actually believe it's very difficult to read the Bible and not find an emphasis on social justice. That doesn't, of course, mean that there aren't also texts that don't talk about social justice, those texts are there as well. But social justice is such a strong emphasis in so many parts of the Bible that I found that statement to be very surprising. And it would be hard for me to know exactly what role the Bible would have in a church that never said anything at all about social justice. - To come back to the issue where you're talking about views of animals, some of us never get past the first few chapters in the Bible. You've got creation and some people see the word dominion and right away they say, okay, so we're not stewards, we're dominion and everybody bends to our need. There are, as I see it, cues of the mindset of some of the people who were writing the Bible there. For example, Cain and Abel both make sacrifices to God and one's essentially giving plants, one's giving animals, and I guess the plants aren't up to snuff. And so that was not deemed good by God. So I guess that sacrificing animal is a good thing to do. That has ecological ramifications for how you look at the Bible. So certainly, on the first few pages, you can look at that. And if you're coming with certain mindset, you say, okay, well, that means that I guess killing animals, using them as whatever to please God, that does please God. - Well, there's no question about the fact that people who wrote the Bible assumed, as apparently most people in the ancient world did, that sacrifice to God was an appropriate way. So in that respect, the Bible would fit very much into its ancient Near Eastern context. Now, having noted that, I would also want to notice a somewhat controversial point that in the Torah, God requires not only your firstborn animal, but also your firstborn child and the firstborn of your fruits and so forth. So I think that the biblical views on sacrifice and so forth are probably a little more complex than most readers of the Bible realize they seem to be premised on a number of assumptions that we ourselves may not share, but that aren't as simple as saying that the Bible places more value on humans than animals. That in itself is not a surprising thing. The Bible was written by humans. It wasn't written by animals. So I would not want to be misunderstood as denying that the Bible, having been written by humans, places more value on them than it does on other creatures. What I would, however, want to say is that the gap between humans and other animals may not be nearly as large in the Bible as most readers assume. Even in those sacrifice laws, the fact that there's an assumption about you wrote God your firstborn child as well as your firstborn animal seems to say to me that while in the end you're able to sacrifice most of the animals and in most of the texts you don't sacrifice your child. Nevertheless, the gap between them is not quite as large as people often assume. Way back a number of years ago, when I first became a vegetarian, I was speaking with a family, I was friends with. And there's a younger daughter in the family, a 12-year-old at that time, who was just nuts about animals. And we were talking, and I was trying to explain to the mother in this family how I valued animals to like people. And this mother made the statement something to the fact of animals, you know, and it's not like they're people. And the 12-year-old just burst out with, but dogs are people too. And I would love it if you could tell me that there was a verse of the Bible that gave some credence to what that young 12-year-old said. Is there anything even approaching that, something that gets us on the equal part that way? - Well, I wouldn't wanna overstate the equal part of it, but as I mentioned, there are these texts like Psalm 36 that talks about God saving humans and animals alike. There are a number of texts in which God's care for the animals is referred to. I also would wanna note, coming back to the point you started with, about vegetarianism, that if one reads the opening chapters of Genesis carefully, it appears that initially the humans are created vegetarian. There's not any reference to humans eating meat until after the flood, up until then apparently plants are food for both the animals and the humans. And across time, there have been a number of figures in Judaism and Christianity who tried to articulate a religious case for vegetarianism who noticed that fact in the early chapters of Genesis. And of course, in that flood story as well, that's an example of a text in which God saved not only a few humans, but also some of the animals. So I wouldn't necessarily want to imply that the Bible is full of texts in which a simple equation of animals and humans is made. But I do think that there are quite a number of texts in which God's care for animals, God's concern about animals is emphasized, including Psalm 104, Psalm 36, Psalm 50. These would all be examples of texts that bring humans and animals a little more closely together. Then I think a lot of readers of the Bible do. There's one other text I'll mention in this connection. In the book of Job, the book of Job of course is a very long book, people tend to know the story and not have actually read all of the poems that make up the book. But most of the book is an argument between Job and some of his friends about whether or not Job deserved the suffering that he was going through. And Job's friends say maybe he did and Job to oversimplify Job's view says, "No, I didn't." But toward the end of the book, God talks for the first time in the book. For about four chapters, there's a long speech from God and it mostly concerns animals, almost the entire speech that makes up God's reply to the argument of Job and his friends is about the animals and about the fact that God has been busy taking care of all these animals and creating them and so forth. And that's a very unusual text that I don't think gets nearly as much attention as it should. - I wanted to draw one more point that you said there because I'm not sure what it means. You refer to, I think, in Psalm 36, God saving people and animals. And what kind of saving are we talking there? I guess it's easy from a New Testament point of view. It's like saving your soul or something like that. What kind of saving are we talking about in that verse? - That's a good question. I would not myself believe that the reference to saving in that text or most other Old Testament text is comparable to the idea of saving a soul, which we get more from the New Testament and other texts that come later in the development of Judaism and Christianity. It seems to me that what that text in Psalm 36 is talking about is God's care for, God's sustaining of life. God is tending to the fate of humans and tending to the fate of animals. So it wouldn't be saving in that sort of soul sense. It is, however, interesting that when the Bible, when the Hebrew Bible talks about people dying or people being born, it tends to use language about the breath. We get the breath when we're born. The breath leaves us when we die. We get that from God according to the biblical view. The same things, however, are said about the animals. And indeed, the word for breath is often also translated as spirit and the same breath or spirit that humans get from God is the breath or spirit that the animals get from God. Now, that's a different idea of what makes us human than the later Christian notion of a soul. But it is nevertheless an interesting sort of parallel between the makeup of the human and the makeup of the other animals. We all get our kind of sustaining living spirit from God. - And I'm thankful for that. I wanna come back to a little bit of your progression. I noted in your curriculum vitae that amongst the places that you studied was the Church of God School of Theology. And I think you said that your views have changed over the years. Was that a stepping stone along the way? I have no idea what the Church of God School is, but I'm guessing that it was somewhere short of Harvard and others in terms of your development. - Well, I think you rightly used the word stepping stone to refer to it. And I would think the Church of God School of Theology is a conservative, actually a Pentecostal seminary in the South. It would certainly hold two views that I do not myself any longer hold about the nature of God, the nature of the Bible, and so forth. Nevertheless, it was a stepping stone in a positive sense, as well as a negative one. That is to say, I don't know whether I would have gone onto places like Harvard and Vanderbilt. If I hadn't first gone to that seminary and worked with a number of people of great integrity and sharp mind who got me interested in religion and further study. And even though my path after that went in directions that I'm sure they did not anticipate and led to views that I know a lot of them would not hold, nevertheless, it was a very important part of my own formation. And in that respect, something that I value as much as my time at Harvard or Vanderbilt, even if my own current views are much closer to ones that I developed at those later places. - I do find it rich to watch people's development to see where they've gone from and to. You mentioned you went to a Pentecostal school of theology. Does that mean that you were raised in some form of Pentecostal? And are you now somehow affiliated with UCC? Or how has that progression gone for you personally? - Well, it's a somewhat complex journey as many people's spiritual journeys are. The simplest way to answer is indeed to say that I was raised in a Pentecostal church, but I am now myself and have been for a number of years a member of the UCC, which has a very different orientation. The progression from the starting point to the ending point wasn't a neat once and for all thing. It was something that developed over time also led me to explore other denominations, explore other non-Christian faiths. So it wasn't a simple thing. - We wouldn't want to be too simple. We grow more through the complexity, don't we? - Yes, I think that's right. As a matter of fact, on the website at Fort Chicago Theological Seminary, I noticed you have a statement about that's what you want your students to do, wrestle with it. It's instead of handing someone a neat, here's what this means. Each person like Israel or Jacob has to wrestle with it, right? - I think that's right. I think that story that you're referencing from the book of Genesis, where Jacob wrestles with this being, he doesn't know who he is, who this being is at first, but then it turns out that it is apparently God that Jacob's been wrestling with. I think that that story is a very good metaphor for religion in a positive sense that we get the most out of it when we do really wrestle with difficult questions that are raised by our religious tradition. And the way that story plays out, Jacob gets a blessing out of that wrestling. But he also gets wounded. And I think both sides of that, the blessing and the woundedness, I think many of us who, for whatever reason, continue to wrestle with religious traditions, I think that we often experience both sides of that, the blessing and the woundedness. I think we're richer for it though. - And I think we're richer for the wrestling. You've done issues of sexuality, of eco justice and other topics that we haven't even dealt with. Is your objective simply a scholastic objective or are you hoping actually that the world changes, moves in a certain direction? I mean, I don't think they have to be divorced from one another, but you could possibly be a person who says, I want people just to understand the thought, the ideas, and that's as far as it goes. Is there an important transformation into action? And again, this show is spirit in action that you hope people move toward as they wrestle with these texts. - Yes, I do hope that people will move toward action as they wrestle with text. It is true that I'm intellectually interested in the study of the Bible, but my interests aren't only intellectual. And in fact, one of the reasons why I find the Bible so important to study is because for many people, even people who disagree radically with my own views about the Bible, the study of biblical texts is in some way linked to the ways in which they live in the world. Now, specifically when we're talking about things like ecology or eco justice, I think myself that it would be wrong to say that the Bible gives us anything like a blueprint for environmental policy or anything like that. It was written a long time ago. It was written in a context very different from our own. And a lot of the problems that we face now with respect to the destruction of our environment would have been unimaginable to people living in ancient Israel or in the ancient Near East. What I do hope, however, is that people who wrestle with the texts and the relationships that the texts try to construct between God and humans and nature and animals and so forth. I do hope that it might serve to contribute to a kind of, for one of a better word, biblically informed spirituality that can sustain people who are activists. Again, I don't think the Bible gives us a blueprint, but I think that our own sort of spiritual nourishing the internal transformation that we need to undergo in order to be effective as agents of external transformation out in the world. I think that those internal transformations are helped by a lot of close and careful study and wrestling with the Bible. - You're a man after my own heart. We've been talking today with Dr. Ken Stone of Chicago Theological Seminary, professor of Hebrew Bible culture and hermeneutics. Specifically, he's been talking recently about eco-justice in the Bible. Got some other good publications out there. You can find them on my site, northernspiritradio.org. It's been a delight talking with you, Ken. Thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - Thank you very much for the interview. - That was Ken Stone of Chicago Theological Seminary. Find a link to him and his books on our website, northernspiritradio.org. - The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]