We Are the History We Choose to Believe

We Are the History We Choose to Believe

History may be considered boring by some, but it’s a hot topic now that Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representative, is promoting the revisionist history of David Barton. History has always been contestable. There’s a saying that the winners write the history. There’s a truism that “he who has the gold writes the rules.” Deeper than that commonplace, Walter Brueggemann, reflecting on Hebrew scripture as history, argues there is established truth (empire truth) and there is an embedded counter truth. In other words, there are two histories side by side in the Old Testament. Readers and interpreters decide the version of history they will accept.

There are other versions of truth, the kind that rises from below, that are carried by nonexperts, people without credentials. In the Old Testament, this truth is carried by song, oracle, and narrative that subvert official truth. The occupants of power are always promoting a version of history that is compatible with present power arrangements.

One premise of this essay, then, is that the history of biblical hermeneutics began centuries before the closure of the canon, as the people we now call the biblical writers responded to the pressure of the tradition they had inherited. The writers and editors of the biblical texts maintained the traditional stories and added new and different stories with new interpretations. The contest has always been there going on in the very texts. The Bible’s emergence as “text” was never rote repetition, but a clash of stories and meanings.

Old ideas were not discarded but retained so that each new generation could engage in the same scriptural arguments about the values by which they would live. The texts of Scripture, in common parlance, say, “Once upon a time the people of God believed this,” now, “The people of God believe something different.”  The writers of the Bible were the honest historians who refused to replace tradition with ideology. That is the meaning of having a sense of history. Ellen Davis remarks, “A tradition earns its authority through long rumination on the past. A living tradition is a potentially courageous form of shared consciousness, because a tradition, in contrast to an ideology, preserves (in some form) our mistakes and atrocities as well as our insights and moral victories. So the price that must be paid by those who are (from a biblical perspective) privileged to live within a tradition is accepting a high degree of inherent tension. The possibility open to them, which is not open to committed ideologues, is repentance, the kind of radical reorientation of thinking that the New Testament writers term metanoia, literally, “a change of mind.” (Davis, Ellen F.; Richard B. Hays. The Art of Reading Scripture (p. 168). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition).

Two Roads

Thus, being the interpreter, as a “contestant,” as we walk through history we often come to a place where two roads merge in the fog, and our inescapable role, because we have before us competing claims to truth—some attached to power, some arraigned against power—is to make decisions as we read and interpret (Brueggemann, Walter. Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture, p. 6). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.

I want to exhibit the natural contest between various versions of histories. The “history” of Solomon, in the Old Testament, has two “histories.” The history written by the king’s publicity department, the scribes of the king, show Solomon in all his glory. Here he is God’s man of the hour, grounded in the Davidic dynasty, held in awe by everyone, the smartest man in the world, highly thought of by other rulers, builder of the Temple. The story of Solomon is the story of success.

Then we read the other “history” of Solomon. In this story we learn that Solomon gained the throne through deception. In the rough and tumble world of kingly politics, Solomon has two powerful allies: his mother, Bathsheba and the court prophet, Nathan. Solomon became king by Bathsheba and Nathan deceiving old King David. In this history, Solomon’s throne is established by deception not legitimacy. Once Solomon takes the throne, he uses royal power in quick and devastating displays of power and violence. Three times the other history records that Solomon sent Benaiah to kill an enemy of the king. The text records the killings in cold, flat prose: “So King Solomon sent Benaiah, son of Jehoiada; he struck him down, and he died.” The sword falls and, like clods of dirt falling on a casket, Adonijah, Joab, Shemei – gone. With cunning and ruthlessness, the kingdom of Solomon is secured.

No judgment is passed in the texts as both stories are embedded in Scripture alongside one another. But we are not allowed to choose the one we like. Our task is to understand that history is always “contested” and a lot rides on the historian.

In this light, we are presently engaged in a battle of histories, as readers, interpreters, and participants. Not only is history contestable, but we are also contestants, whether we recognize ourselves as such or not.

In our “history” contest, one side writes that America was founded as a Christian nation, is a Christian nation today, and is God’s chosen nation of destiny. This side argues for white nationalism, white supremacy, for what Senator Cotton of Arkansas calls, “civilizational self-confidence.” This tribe would have us believe that slavery wasn’t that bad, that racism no longer exists in America, and that the Voting Rights Act can be repealed. They would lure us into believing that no version of affirmative action should be allowed.

The irony here is that no actual American historians belong to this tribe of scribes. There are preachers, like Robert Jeffress, who every year on the Sunday closest to July 4, preaches the same sermon: “America Is a Christian Nation.” There is the history “hobbyist,” David Barton, whose troves of misinformation, lies, and propaganda, are too numerous to enumerate here. Suffice it to say that Barton travels the country beating the same worn-out drum – “The First Amendment is a lie of the Devil.”

Reading History

The other side, working within the best practices of the discipline of history, have detailed that our founding fathers were a mixture. There were Christians, deists, agnostics, and an atheist or two in the crew that hammered out our Constitution. The “god” to which the founders referred is the “god” whose name finally appears on our money and in our pledge of allegiance. This generic “god” has nothing in common with the God who raised up Israel from Egyptian slavery and Jesus from the grave. This is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This idol is the American god.

An array of preaches, politicians, and consultants trot out theories from time-to-time about America. They offer misinformation and then use more misinformation to prop up the original misinformation. This reality doesn’t change that American history is contestable. As Will Campbell once put it, “LIES BEING TOLD ABOUT THE BIBLE AND AMERICA. BY PEOPLE WHO SHOULD know better, and probably do. They pose as the Messiah’s evangelists on programs subsidized with tax exemptions and protected by the same First Amendment ment they frequently denounce. They clothe a blatantly political agenda in pious rhetoric and peddle it as gospel.”

Campbell concludes: “Shame on those fat-cat false prophets spewing their toxic rhetoric, trying to control every facet of American can life with a selective reading of the Bible. That’s blasphemy. It’s idolatry. The Bible is a book about who God is, not a political handbook. And America was not founded on legislated morality.”

Two histories. Always at least two histories. Keep in mind the complexity of the lack of histories from the voices of the oppressed of the ages. The only recordings of the histories of the weak, the defeated, the exiled, the downtrodden, the exploited are whispered behind the scenes, not shouted from the thrones of power. The voices of these millions upon millions are recorded only as “groans” finally heard by God. The history we accept determines the direction of our lives. Our present becomes a reality based on how we read our history. Read well, my friends, read wisely. Do not be deceived by raw power or political promises.