Misusing scripture

Zwinglius a few weeks ago poasted this announcement of a bad book. Yesterday he posted a "carnival" aggregation of blogposts - I hadn't seen one of those since the early 2000s when the blogosphere was still cool. In it he linked his own October post, as a link to that book.

The book's Jeopardy-style title is Misusing Scripture: What Are Evangelicals Doing with the Bible?. I disclose: I, too, bear little love for biblical-inerrantists or for HillFaith or for the rest of them. These days however I see a focus on these hucksters and their dupes as a means to tie them with popular Christianity as a whole, in service of a generally antiChristian agenda.

As example Tony Keddie proposes "Second-Amendment Exegesis of Luke 22:35–53: How Conservative Evangelical Bible Scholars Protect Christian Gun Culture". It's bad when Christians seek means of self-defence, see. Christians aren't supposed to notice when the world despises them. As for guns not owned by Christians - like those owned by Sikhs (as a literal divine commandment) - not Keddie's department.

I'd argue, with Hobbes and - incidentally - with Darwin, that some laws of Nature exist whether or not a Divinity commands them. One law is: the unarmed man is the slave of his armed companions. Some Christians do misread Luke 22 (disclosure: I don't care for Luke). But we can see an antislavery subtext throughout early Exodus, and a skepticism against kings in Judges and 1 Samuel; the Israelites are happiest when free, and in that time and place this meant they were armed, with slings and arrows as well as with swords. Christians today, and not just the conservative-evangelical bogeymen, dispute that our time and place be so different from theirs.

I'm leaving aside Susanne Scholz' wordsalad "Essentializing “Woman”: Three Neoliberal Strategies in the Christian Right’s Interpretations on Women in the Bible"; I'll just assume it's as bad as its title.

Overall the book looks like it's set up some massive strawmen. Other contributors might have something useful to say, noting in particular William Dever; but they are lending their weight to an overall flawed product. Consider if Russell Gmirkin contributed to a book about Jewish self-presentation in literature... edited by Kevin MacDonald and published by The Occidental Observer.

Back to Zwinglius, I find some irony in his complaint about misuse of Scripture where he cites this: Andrew M. Mbuvi destabilises dominant white Euro-American approaches to biblical studies, positing the need for biblical interpretation that is anti-colonial and anti-racist. "Anti-racist" tends to mean anti-white and anti-European; and in any case it will be difficult to extricate the Bible from its context, which is Levantine with some spillover across the Mediterranean into Hellas and Italia. BACKTRACK AUGUST 2023: Zwinglius' actual-ego points out that, indeed, progressives do it too. I vaguely recall his blog has rapped some lefthand knuckles before 1 November 2022; but on this day, Mbuvi presented him with the duty, which duty he failed.