Peter Gomes encourages Bible readers to use their hearts and minds

William Morrow has just published The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Heart and Mind by Peter J. Gomes, Minister in the Memorial Church and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals. The Right Reverend Lord Runcie, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has already hailed it as "easily the best contemporary book on the Bible for thoughtful people." Gazette senior writer Marvin Hightower and Gomes recently discussed the book, which Gomes has dedicated to College Student Dean Archie C. Epps.

The Bible easily ranks among the most hotly and heavily discussed texts in human history, so one hardly writes at length about it on a whim. When and how did you realize that you had something to say beyond what you've expounded in hundreds of sermons over the years?

Frankly, it was the continued ministry in this Church over, now, these 25 years that led me to feel very strongly that most people know precious little about the Bible. If I was going to continue to function at any decent level in teaching and preaching biblically, I had to provide some more fundamentals for people to deal with. Then I decided that maybe I needed a wider forum than just the constraints of a 30-minute textual sermon every Sunday.

The idea of the book came into focus in the spring or fall of 1992, partly as a result of all of the hurrah [following] my famous declaration [of being gay, fall 1991] on the steps of Memorial Church. I got all this correspondence from people, much of it pleasant to receive, some of it not so pleasant. The difficult parts of it all came from people who felt they understood what the Bible had to say about everything. It then occurred to me, "Well, they really don't know what the Bible says about homosexuality -- or much else, for that matter." So the idea was spinning around that maybe I ought to attempt to address all of this.

You've often said that every good sermon has at least one point. A good book must surely have several. What are the big points in your book?

I would say, one, the Bible is accessible. Two, it takes work. The Bible is not a Reader's Digest sort of enterprise, and you can't simply open it up, as 90 percent of religious people do, and just hope that inspiration oozes out of the page or that you can just figure it out because you're a reasonably intelligent person. But, three, the work pays off because the Bible has to do with issues, both great and small, that are as relevant as tomorrow's headlines.

What made this the "right time" for you to produce such a book?

I've written a lot, but I've never written this kind of book. I felt I had reached a point where I could with some freedom and fluency speak to matters that I thought were important in this setting, without the protective coloration of the pulpit. The fact that nobody else has written my book was also a great help. This is the sort of book I would have relished as an undergraduate in college or even in divinity school, but it wasn't out there. The Bible books that are available are either little books of piety and inspiration, or they are the field artillery of biblical scholars, who increasingly are writing only to each other. I feel I am one of the last of the great generalists, and I ought to be able to speak across some of these great chasms.

Aside from buying your book, what do you suggest for getting beyond the obstacles so many people sense between themselves and the Bible?

I have always suggested to people that what they should do, even before they go out and get a Bible concordance or dictionary or history, is to read whatever it is in the Bible that interests them. But they should expose themselves to the tremendous experience of reading it in several different English versions. Suddenly, you begin to see that this text, which looks so fixed, so absolute, has, in the hands of somebody else, a whole different dynamic to it. You begin to see where they coincide and where they diverge, and you become a part of this interpretation process. Then you should go out and get a good one-volume general history of the Bible and pursue your interests, and one thing will lead to another.

Your subtitle reminds me of the Apologia to The Pilgrim's Progress, where Bunyan speaks of laying head and heart together. Throughout, you seem keenly attuned to the fact that when you open the Bible, you can't close mind or heart without seriously misconstruing its message.

It can't be done! Those who are head-readers, who want to be "liberated" from either the caresses or the clutches of the Bible, usually end up in some arid desert. Those who simply want to read it as the Spirit leads them, without any thinking at all, usually end up in some great moral distress.

Two principles have always guided me. One comes from [my days] as an undergraduate at Bates College, when a rather ordinary preacher came in to give us a [chapel] sermon with a title I have since appropriated and used many times: that a Christian was one who had "A Loving Mind and a Thinking Heart." That's been my motto all of my days.

The other thing is something I read that George Buttrick, one of my worthy predecessors, had said in a sermon here: that the door of the church should never be so low that you have to leave your head outside. It seemed to me that if you couldn't bring together these gifts of heart and mind that God had given you, and to which God attributes equal virtue, then you really were not likely to be able to get your soul around this book.

One of the most invigorating things about this book is diving with you straight into very deep and contentious waters -- for example, analyzing the historical misuse of the Bible to marginalize and mistreat blacks, gays, Jews, and women. What spurred you to take on so many thorny issues in a single book?

A rather horrible realization. I have lived all my life in the center of the Christian church. I was trained to be a good historian, and it has always been a burden that the faith that liberates me, helps me understand the world, and organizes the cultural heritage which is mine, has also been at the heart of some of the world's most terrible doings. Our inheritance bears a tremendous burden of responsibility for the misuse of its gifts and graces. The paradox of Christian faith is that it is at one and the same time an agent of liberation and redemption, and a culturally reactive force. It eventually passes out of its culturally reactive force into a force of redemption, almost against its will. But to focus only on the point when it has come out on the other side is to give a very distorted picture of Christianity.

So [just as] you stick your tongue into the aching cavity of a tooth just to see how it really does hurt, I decided this is the moment when I'm going to have to look at these painful cavities in the culture. It was as much to prove that the Bible somehow transcends those applications as it was to indicate how the Bible is manipulated to sustain those applications. I wanted to demonstrate how good people can do bad things and can get it wrong, and that the Bible has its own corrective mechanisms within it.

What did you discover about your own beliefs as you wrestled with all these hard topics?

In each one of these, I had to face things that I didn't anticipate, and I discovered things that I didn't know, so that the writing of those chapters became in many ways revelatory for me.

Many women from the early '70s around here will remember pitched battles with me about inclusive language and the "feminization" of the church. It will come as a surprise to many of them as it did to me that I came out in a position that neither I nor anybody else would have imagined 20 years ago. That is, actually saying that the women's movement has brought the most significant shift in ideology and in liturgical and theological sensibility since the Reformation. That's a big concession for me, but I came to that in process. I didn't have that before.

Then in the anti-Semitism chapter, I was exorcising some demons. I think there was within me some covert anti-Semitism, a kind of "Christian superiority" that said, "I don't want anybody to burn the Jews -- the Holocaust was terrible -- but thank God I'm a Christian, and we're a little better than they are." Christians have an almost intolerable burden of guilt and responsibility for anti-Semitism, and we have done it in the name of our own sacred book and their God. That was the most difficult thing to reconcile myself to and to move beyond.

The racial issue had always been for me in some sense defined as great forces of evil versus great oppressed forces of right. I, like many of my generation, tended to mark our progress in terms of legal steps. I recovered here something I had always known: that this was a movement rooted in the heart of the Christian faith on both sides, because no amount of civil strife, by and large, would have persuaded the majority culture to do the right thing, if there hadn't also been some substratum of both guilt and hope that [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] could tap into in a way that H. Rap Brown or Malcolm X could not. To secularize all of this to the armies of lawyers rather than to the preachers is to misread it.

When I wrote the chapter on homosexuality, I discovered two things which were incredibly liberating. Number one, it was reassuring to find that I was by no means the first person to have gone through this process, by which a clear and significant intellectual consensus [concludes] that the trouble with the Bible and homosexuality is not the Bible; it's the people who read it. As early as the '50s people had begun saying, "It's time to stop using verses of the Bible to justify our current doctrinaire cultural prejudices."

The second thing is that the more I read in this area, the more it became clear to me how important it was to refuse to define homosexuality in terms purely of sexuality, which is what everybody, including homosexuals, tends to do. I wanted to open up that little hothouse of identity into something that's far more inclusive and demanding. Here was a chance to put homosexuality in its place: the sexual part of that is no more or no less -- and ought to be no more or no less -- a dominant and defining enterprise than it is for heterosexuals.

You refer to several other faiths in passing and speak straightforwardly about Christianity's central claims, but I didn't see any of the flat assertions of exclusive spiritual truth common to some strains of Christian writing. How do you see Christianity today in relation to other world religions?

Christianity needs, in my view, a certain kind of modesty in the face of the rivers of spiritual truth that are out there and that are not ours exclusively. As long as Christianity was a struggling minority, it didn't have this great missionary urge to go out and conform everybody to its particular point of view. I think Christian imperialism is a mistaken use of the zeal of the faith. The God that I understand to be revealed in the Bible and in the Judeo-Christian tradition is not a parochial god. I can handle a god who has room for me and room for thousands of other conceptions of religious faith, of which I know nothing and which I cannot understand. I don't want God to conform or to be conformed to the limits of my mind and the limits of my tradition. That would not be a god; that would be an icon.

You periodically include illustrative vignettes from the classroom. How did your experience as a teacher shape the book?

It shaped it a lot, because I learned early on in teaching that I could take nothing for granted. I could not assume a common fundamental level of knowledge on anything. My job usually has been not simply to connect the dots but to put the dots out there to be connected. I wrote the book with that kind of consciousness in mind.

What do you hope your readers will gain from having read this book?

I hope they will be driven from my book to the book. I would want them to read my book and rethink the way they have always understood the Bible, or for the first time go to the Bible with some sense of what they might find there and put it to some use in their own lives. That's what I want to have happen. It makes my other job a lot easier!