On Monday, June 1, President Donald Trump walked out of the White House grounds, across Pennsylvania Avenue, through Lafayette Square, and to the front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, which was boarded up because it had been damaged in the previous night’s rioting. There, he paused and held up a Bible.
This photo-op seems to have triggered many, including Washington Adventist University’s professor of religion, Olive Hemmings. By itself, this is not surprising; what is surprising about Hemmings’ rant, entitled “Christendom, the Police State, and the Upside-Down Bible,” is that it is directed more at the Bible, and those, including Seventh-day Adventists, who have a high view of its inspiration, than at President Trump.
Hemmings describes the photo-op thus:
“The theatrics on Monday, June 1, 2020, that played out in the vicinity of the White House — the President of the United States holding the Bible against the backdrop of federal law enforcement agents advancing through a crowd of peaceful protesters with flash grenades and tear gas — exposes the distortion of the Christian faith: the misuse of the Bible by a powerful sector of Christendom.”
In fact, the “peaceful protesters” were cleared out long before Trump walked through Lafayette Square; they had been throwing bricks and bottles, and defacing the statue pediments and structures in the park with obscene graffiti, liberally sprinkled with the F-word. (Lafayette Square is dedicated to foreigners whose help during the Revolutionary War was crucial to the cause of American independence: the Frenchmen Lafayette and Rochambeau, the Pole Kościuszko, and the Prussian von Steuben.)
Hemmings repeatedly claims that the demonstrations in Lafayette Square were “peaceful,” but my conception of peaceful does not include destruction of property, vandalism, spray-painting obscene graffiti on national monuments, or throwing rocks and bottles. Nationwide, the riots following George Floyd’s death have been violent, resulting in the deaths of two law enforcement officers, with injuries to more than 400 others. At least 22 others have been killed in the rioting, including a retired black police officer, 77-year-old David Dorn, who was shot to death while standing guard outside a friend’s pawnshop in St. Louis. Over 9,000 arrests have been made. Looting and vandalism have caused hundreds of millions in property losses.
The drama finds bold relief in the inaccurate press report that he holds the Bible “upside-down.”
Apparently, one person tweeted that Trump was holding the Bible upside down, but that idea was debunked even by the ultra-Leftist “Snopes” website. Hemmings acknowledges that Trump was not holding the Bible upside down, but claims that,
The new evidence that the president did not hold the Bible upside-down does not take away from the fact that in essence the Bible was in “upside-down” position in the hand of the United States President. The entire scene is a stark picture of the dismantlement of the central prophetic element of the Bible that advocates against any kind of injustice. So, the inaccurate report of the press is ironic — an act of providence. This is how the Bible has been for centuries in the hands of the principalities and powers of Christendom, “upside-down” in the interest of power, control, and self-preservation.
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This is not merely the story of an alleged criminal and a law enforcement officer. This is the story of a culture sustained by the “knee on the neck policy” with the Bible as prop.
What a bizarre contention! My knowledge of the history of Christendom is non-encyclopedic, but I do not recall rulers using the Bible as a tool of suppression. Dear reader, have you ever heard of the Bible being used as the tool of oppressors?
In fact, the contrary is true: during most of the history of Christendom, kings worked with popes to bolster both the papal see and secular monarchies, but during this era the Bible itself was suppressed, because a careful reading of Scripture de-legitimates both crown and mitre. The United States was the first nation to be founded by a polity steeped in Scripture, and this nation established no throne, neither secular nor ecclesiastical.
Please, let not “separation of church and state” jargon deceive anyone. The police state is the Fundamentalist Christian state — the “Law and Order” state. It uses the Bible to keep people in subjection — to hold on to slavery, to entrench the idea that the white race is superior to races of color, and to entrench male domination and female subjugation. These ideas were openly and consciously enforced by preachers not very long ago to keep slaves and women in subjection.
Police state? A fundamentalist Christian state? What is she raving about? I understand that Dr. Hemmings’ piece is a cri de coeur, not a scholarly treatise, and that while we were all appalled at the video-recorded murder of George Floyd, blacks--Dr. Hemmings is black--were especially traumatized by it. But is she thereby relieved of the obligation to make any sense at all?
Law and order are foundational to any functioning society. Neither Christian nor atheist wants to live in a world in which the lawless run rampant, where the strong prey on the weak in a state of nature. Law and order are not concerns or values merely of fundamentalist Christians but of all sane people who want to live lives of peace and dignity. To rant against law and order is beyond foolish or unwise; it is utterly irrational and unhinged.
Law condemns police misconduct, just as it does the misconduct of the citizen and the sovereign. Our system of ordered liberty routinely deals with official malfeasance. A little over a year ago, the Minnesota authorities tried and convicted of 3rd degree murder another Minneapolis cop (Mohamed Noor) who murdered a civilian (Justine Damon). Derek Chauvin will be tried in a court of law and judged by a jury of his peers, and I expect the outcome will be the same.
We know what a police state looks like: Cuba, North Korea, China, the Soviet Union, East Germany from 1945-89. The United States is not close to being a police state, and yet Hemmings repeatedly asserts that it is. That is hysteria and derangement.
Yes, some misguided southerners did look for support for their “peculiar institution” in the Bible. But Scripture does not support slavery; taken as a whole, it condemns it. Slavery was always a commonplace, part of the human condition, almost ubiquitous both geographically and temporally. It is not slavery that requires an explanation, but rather its condemnation and eradication within Christendom in the last two centuries, largely thanks to Bible-thumping Christian abolitionists like William Wilberforce. Their view that Scripture condemned slavery was the correct reading, and became the dominant view.
But isn’t it strange to find a teacher of religion at an Adventist college slandering Scripture with the same tired, trite arguments used by atheists, agnostics, skeptics and backslidden former Christians, arguments that Christian apologists have disposed of? (See Slavery and the Bible, part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.)
In fact, the idea of female subjugation and male domination is still being spewed from the pulpit, and from committees — Bible in hand, and written in denominational policies in the Southern Baptist and Seventh-day Adventist churches, for example.
Anyone who thinks the United States is or contains a “police state” will naturally view male headship in the home and the church—regardless how scriptural, God-ordained, and intended for the protection of women—as “female subjugation.”
The jettisoning of patriarchy has been especially destructive in the black community. In 1940, black families were roughly as intact as white families; they were headed by husbands and fathers. In the 1960s, wrong-headed white liberals with good intentions designed a welfare system, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), that rewarded female-headed households, which resulted in the dismantling of the black family. That AFDC was destroying the black family was documented in the early 1970s by George Gilder in his book “Sexual Suicide” later renamed “Men and Marriage,” and black conservatives like Larry Elder will tell you the same story.
God designed that the home would include a father and a mother, and that the father would be the head of the household. This is the only arrangement that works, that functions. The dysfunction in the black community, including the pattern of criminality that results in so many contentious encounters with the police, and the “mass incarceration” so bitterly complained of lately, is largely a result of the plague of illegitimacy and fatherless households. If Olive Hemmings believes that the biblical pattern of male headship in the home and the church is “female subjugation,” she is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Hemmings then makes this strange detour to bash the Bible:
(One only needs to visit the Washington Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C. to observe the “Slave Bible” — a demonstration of the extent to which Christendom uses the Bible to instill obedience and subjection to the principalities and powers. This “Slave Bible” excludes 90% of the Old Testament and 50% of the New testament in the attempt to purge the Bible of its prophetic element and discourage any kind of rebellion. The Exodus story is not there, but Ephesians 6:5 is there. Today, this editing of the Bible still occurs — through interpretation in the interest of power and control.)
If the point of this digression is to show that the Bible is a tool of subjection, it actually proves the opposite: if you must throw out the great bulk of the Bible to make it serve the purpose of oppression, then it is very poorly suited to that purpose. Again, we see that the Bible, the whole Bible read in context, is anti-slavery! Many southern slave owners did not want their slaves reading any of it: during the later antebellum period, seven southern states made it illegal to teach slaves to read.
Next, Hemmings launches into a screed against “fundamentalism,” which she tries to tie to militarism and lynching. In fact, fundamentalism was a reaction against theological liberalism and its low view of the Scriptures. The five fundamentals were (1) The verbal inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, (2) the virgin birth of Christ, (3) the substitutionary atonement, (4) the bodily resurrection of Christ, and (5) the reality of Christ’s miracles. Seventh-day Adventists disagree with the fundamentalists only on the nature of inspiration; we do not believe in verbal or “word for word” inspiration. Per simple math, our church is 80% fundamentalist.
But even on the issue of inspiration, we are much closer to the fundamentalists than to strict liberals, who deny supernatural inspiration and hold that the Bible is an entirely human product, or the more common mushy liberals, who hold that some of the Bible is inspired, but some of it isn’t, and it is our job to decide which part is which (which makes us the arbiter and judge of Scripture). I would say that Adventists are more like 95% fundamentalist.
Given our affinity to fundamentalism, the effort to demonize fundamentalism is profoundly anti-Adventist. More importantly, it is hostile to the high view of Scripture that Seventh-day Adventists embrace and largely share with other conservative Christians. Hemmings’ distaste for fundamentalism reveals a disregard for the Bible and those who esteem it highly. She calls the Bible an “idol”:
The Bible has become an idol because too many in Christendom equate it with the Word of God — even with God. The myths of human culture tell us that an idol can be an agent of death. Fundamentalist Christianity has long used the Bible toward institutional self-interests and as an agent of death. But the Word of God, as John 1:1 indicates, is not the Bible.
The problem with criticizing the Bible because it is not itself God is that most of what we know about God is contained in the Bible. To see Jesus in the flesh was the privilege of a small group that lived two millennia ago; the rest of us must read the Bible to learn about Christ. Denigrating the Bible because it isn’t Christ is a common liberal trope on the path to creating a non-biblical “Christ” more congenial to the carnal mind.
Hemmings’ screed finally resolves itself into a plea for theological liberalism, a non-literal reading of the Genesis narrative, and a mystical, spiritualistic approach to Scripture:
To abide by the word of God is to attend to all the knowledge and understanding that humanity now has, and biblical authors did not have. To abide by the word of God is to hear the story of creation as a story of the Oneness of God in humanity, the divine nature of humanity, the loss of that divinity, and the message of Jesus that we can yet nurture and restore that image. Fundamentalist Christianity has lost that story of God and/in humanity. It has lost it in the attempt to hold on to its idol — the “upside-down” Bible — which is really self — self-preservation. And today we have a police state — a Fundamentalist Christian state largely unconscious of the true value of humanity — created in divine image — male and female — them (not him) having dominion (stewardship) over creation.
There is so much wrong in that paragraph that it is hard to know where to start. The first sentence: “To abide by the word of God is to attend to all the knowledge and understanding that humanity now has, and biblical authors did not have” is a frontal attack on the inspiration of Scripture. The Bible-writers had something crucial that current humanity, with all our scientific knowledge, does not have, namely the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
The second sentence hints at a non-literal, spiritualistic reading of the Genesis creation narrative. No, there is not “Oneness of God in humanity.” God is the Creator, and humanity are the creatures; there is thus a very distinct “two-ness,” not a “Oneness.” Yes, we are created in the image of God, but we are not divine. Talk of “Oneness” and “the divine nature of humanity” is bad theology, and leads to mysticism and spiritualism.
What is so ironic, in the present context, about Dr. Hemmings attack on Scripture and fundamentalism is that a high view of Scripture is necessary to combat racism and injustice. That Scripture is “God-breathed” is what gives it the authority to condemn the injustice of princes and potentates. If Hemmings is concerned about justice, the inspiration of Scripture is the last thing she should deny or denigrate. The word of God in the Bible is the eternal standard by which earthly rulers are judged and held to account.
The founders understood that our rights and freedoms are part of a transcendent moral reality that is a feature of God’s created order:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Thomas Jefferson’s words were true but, as Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out in his famous “I have a dream” speech, the founders’ failure to live up to these words with regard to slavery and race was wrong. It took many decades and a terrible civil war to overcome this failure, this original sin, but overcome it we have.
Likewise, it is only when Scripture is understood in a literal, “fundamentalist,” way that it cuts the legs out from under racism. The “fundamentalist” (creationist) reading of the Bible teaches that we are all descended from Adam and Eve, and even more recently from Noah and his wife, just a few thousand years ago. There is only one blood, one race, the human race:
“God, who made the world . . . has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, . . . (Acts 17:24)
But if you interpret Genesis non-literally, and defer to mainstream science—the “understanding that humanity now has” as Hemmings puts it—those Bible facts go by the boards. The races are separated by several hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. It is possible to believe, as Charles Darwin did, that the black race was more closely related to our putative simian ancestors, and that the white race is more advanced and more thoroughly evolved. Stephen Jay Gould wrote that, “Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.” The safeguard against racism, as against injustice in earthly rulers, is a high view of Scripture.
The problem is not the Bible but our failure to live up to its standard of righteousness. The answer is not to denigrate Scripture and those who insist that Scripture is divinely inspired and that it is not our place to critique it. Rather, we must seek, with the Holy Spirit’s aid, to live fully in accord with its teachings. These troublous times call for a return to the Bible and its message of the brotherhood of all mankind under the fatherhood of God. I would like to think that was the message Donald Trump wanted to communicate when he held up the Bible.