After stumbling upon this post I couldn’t help but feel both sad but not surprised at the latest that bible publishers have come up with:
The Bible is constantly used as a tool to push forward the agenda’s of particular people and now we have a bible that is pushing American Patriotism: “The American Patriot’s Bible: The Word of God and the Shaping of America”. Yet, because the bible is so often used to push human agenda’s, does that mean that the bible cannot offer the truest moral vision in a time in which so many of us wish to use it to prove that we are right?
I think that the bible alone cannot, but that when those who approach the bible seeking after the WORD of God that transcends the text, the bible can be the authoritative venue through which we can come to know how to live right and true lives. Since this approach to the bible requires a huge amount of humility, it means we must be ready to have aspects of ourselves both affirmed and rejected through our encounter with the God of the bible. I think that Karl Barth is a helpful dialogue partner in thinking through some of these questions. I refer to a quote from Barth that I posted on an earlier post:
“The Gospel neither requires men to engage in the conflict of religions or the conflict of philosophies, nor does it compel them to hold themselves aloof from these controversies. In announcing the limitation of the known world by another that is unknown, the Gospel does not enter into competition with the many attempts to disclose within the known world some more or less unknown and higher form of existence and to make it accessible to men. The Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question-mark against all truths. The Gospel is not the door but the hinge. The man who apprehends its meaning is removed from all strife, because he is engaged in a strife with the whole, even with existence itself. Anxiety concerning the victory of the Gospel — that is, Christian Apologetics — is meaningless, because the Gospel is the victory by which the world is overcome. By the Gospel the whole concrete world is dissolved and established. It does not require representatives with a sense of responsibility, for it is as responsible for those who proclaim it as it is for those to whom it is proclaimed.”
Karl Barth — The Epistle To The Romans, pg. 35.
As Karl wants to show, the Word of God is independant from us, not ours to control and “defend”, whether through “patriotic” wars or the wars of logic. The whole concept that the bible be read through the lens of American Patriotism is I believe, in light of these thoughts, idolatry as it makes the bible into ONLY an affirmation of the shaping of America without the possibility for the rejection of much of that bloody and conflicted history. At least, this is my humble opinion. 