[music playing]
>>DEAN THOMAS STEGMAN, S.J.: All right,
our second session is on a topic that I think is going to be
of great interest to all of us--
"The Bible and Justice."
When I first asked our presenter to do this,
I was thinking of the Bible and social justice.
And she immediately responded that justice
needed to be more broadly construed than that,
and she was absolutely correct.
Our presenter is Carol Dempsey, a Dominican sister
from Caldwell, New Jersey, who is
professor of biblical studies at the University of Portland.
That's Portland, Oregon, not Portland, Maine.
You have to do these things around--
when you're inside Route 128, you
have to orient people more broadly.
I've learned that, as a Midwesterner.
Carol holds an M.A. from Saint Louis University and a Ph.D.
from The Catholic University of America.
She is an award-winning author of eight books, most recently
The Bible and Literature, published by Orbis in 2015.
She's also the editor of 10 other books.
She serves on the editorial board for the Wisdom Commentary
Series published by Liturgical Press;
for the Theology and Dialogue Series, published by Orbis;
and for the Catholic Biblical Quarterly.
A former vice president of the National College Theology
Society and recipient of the University
of Portland's Outstanding Scholarship Award, Carol
has published numerous articles in the areas of prophets,
biblical theology, ecology, biblical ethics, and gender
studies.
She's an international lecturer for both scholarly and pastoral
audiences.
A co-editor for The Paulist Biblical Commentary, Carol
also wrote the article on "The Prophetic Literature,"
and the commentaries on the Prophets Isaiah and Habakkuk
for the Commentary.
And I will also briefly introduce
our respondent, Dr. Andrew Davis,
who's an associate professor of Old Testament
here at the School of Theology and Ministry,
and was tasked with the commentary on Job
for The Paulist Biblical Commentary.
No easy task, right?
Please welcome Sister Carol Dempsey.
[applause]
>>CAROL DEMPSEY, O.P.: Thank you, Tom.
First of all, I am delighted to be invited
to be a part of this conference and to spend
this time with you.
Now, before I begin on justice, I
want to affirm the wonderful presentation
that my colleague and my co-editor on the Paulist
Commentary, Dick Clifford, presented to us.
And I agree with everything that Dick has put forward,
but my starting point today is going
to be a little bit different, because I will be looking
at the biblical texts through a contemporary hermeneutical
lens.
Now, when I was asked to do the topic on justice,
I said, it needs to be ecological as well as social,
which is true.
But as I began to do the material on justice,
I said, wow, where do we begin?
You know, there's so much.
And between the social injustice that we're dealing with
and the injustice that's happening
to the planet, climate injustice,
you know, it's unbelievable.
And I don't have enough time to do both of them well.
So I ended up saying, well, I will
deal with some of the planet material toward the end.
But I do think we have very pressing social justice
issues as well, too.
And it's all related.
But it's just an issue of time.
So I'm going to invite you to think with me today,
to reflect with me, to ponder with me,
to look at the Scriptures in a different way
in the context of our world.
Some of this will be happily received,
and others may make us squirm.
But that's okay.
So we go forward.
So if we want to talk about "The Bible and Justice" today,
we have to begin with the present world.
What are the issues facing in our world
today that cry out for justice?
And I've put some of them up there on PowerPoint,
and I want us to look at them.
We have the rise of dictatorships and authoritarian
governments, the undermining and enchaining of democracy,
forced migration because of oppressive
governments, climate change, discrimination of all kinds.
We have racism and sexism, the abuse of power and control,
classism, tax reforms that benefit
the wealthy, human and non-human trafficking, the harvesting
of human and non-human organs for trade
on illegal and clandestine markets,
unjust labor laws for the working class,
discrimination on account of gender,
religion, sexual orientation, nationality,
physical ability, education, age, race, ethnicity.
We have the commodification of human and non-human life,
loss of biosphere and biodiversity, climate change,
and a whole host of ecological issues related to it.
We have the excruciating pain when institutions are protected
and deemed more important than the victims who have suffered
horrific abuse by and within various institutions whose
leaders are too cowardly, too proud, too arrogant
to take the kinds of responsibility that
can lead to true transformation instead
of mandating with hopes that the blistering wounds will go away.
We have global poverty, global hunger, countless rapes
of women and men globally, domestic violence and abuse,
bullying, gassing of one's own people in certain nations.
We have "tender care" facilities,
infants pulled from their mothers breasts,
and children ripped from their parents' arms
as a deterrence to illegal immigration, when the system
itself is broken and biased against certain races,
ethnic backgrounds, countries of origin,
and cultures of those who would seek proper immigration status,
but who would be denied because of discrimination
on the part of certain governments and their leaders.
Wow.
And the list goes on, doesn't it?
We're aware of this.
It breaks our hearts, and it also brings us to tears.
And we, as a Church, have responded
in so many different ways to all of these injustices
that we confront.
And we have so many more injustices to deal with
and to respond to.
So the need for justice and the work
to be done, well, we certainly have many areas locally,
globally, and what one might say, glocally.
Now we have a view of our world situation.
Now we have to have a view of our Bible.
The Bible, as we know it, is a cultural document
and a political artifact that has
been shaped by many people's political, social,
economic, and theological perspectives, and world views.
The Bible can shape culture, and culture
can shape our understanding of the biblical text.
Hence there's a dialectic between culture and the Bible,
and the Bible and culture, which necessitates
a hermeneutical approach to the text that complements
an exegetical understanding of the text, and both of which
must be a part of the ongoing interpretive process.
People in diverse social locations throughout the globe
will hear the biblical text in different ways.
People of different faith persuasions, denominations,
traditions, and people of no faith
will hear the biblical text in different ways.
What is essential is that we hear the text in an informed
way and that we have an informed understanding of the text,
which implies that one knows something
about the cultures, the theologies,
the worldviews embedded in the biblical text and that,
to the best of our ability, we need the knowledge
to be knowledgeable about the many approaches
and lenses available to us that can help shed light
on the biblical text and the myriad of ways
that it can be heard and understood today.
So how can the vision contained within this ancient document,
a vision that transcends its own time and cultures,
help to inform and transform our global world
today that, in my mind, is in crisis and chaos,
but not without hope?
We need to bring the Bible into the world
today and not leave it in its ancient times,
or on dusty shelves, or just in the hands
of a select group of people.
The Bible can continue to be an influential document,
particularly for generations of people
today who either take the Bible literally and follow it
religiously or have no religious tradition
and live disconnected from religious institutions.
We live in a world of growing secularism on the one hand
and a growing evangelical fundamentalism on the other.
The various faith traditions have sometimes
interpreted biblical texts, and who
gets privileged in the various readings and interpretations
has sometimes led to some of the forms of oppression
we experience today.
And I will talk about that.
So "The Bible and Justice"--
what we need to do to read It as global citizens
in a world aching and crying out for justice.
Okay, we have to remember, we as Catholics, we as Christians,
have a global mission.
And the prophets of the day had a global mission.
And I'm going to look at a lot of the texts
of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures,
because that's where sometimes we
have some of the problematic areas that we
have with regard to justice and how we hear these texts.
So we need to read the Bible in one hand
and the newspaper in the other.
We need to ask the following questions:
How does the biblical text and its concern for justice
give us a vision for justice appropriate for our world
today, that is dealing with tremendous violence
in the areas of politics, family, church, government,
social and professional relationships, economics,
health care, schools, telecommunications?
And that list goes on too.
How does the biblical text impede our struggle
for justice?
And how does its underlying message
contribute to the injustices we are facing today
that we must deal with if we are going
to move toward a world of justice,
and peace, and integrity for all of Creation?
How does our global world situation
speak to the biblical text?
And how does the biblical text speak to our global world
situation?
In other words, if we are to speak of the Bible and justice,
then we need to have a dynamic dialectic going on
between text and world.
We could no longer read the biblical text
in what one of my Old Testament colleagues, Susanne Scholz,
says is a "privatized, personalized,
and spiritualized manner, especially when,"
as she reminds me all the time, that "the world is burning up."
Now, the other situation that we need
to be aware of in our country right now
is the rise of the influence of the Evangelical Christian Right
that does read, adhere to, and preach
the biblical text from a fundamentalist and literalist
perspective.
And we, as Catholic Christians, have to deal with this as well,
and be in dialogue with our Christian brothers and sisters
of other denominations and persuasions.
And we need to preach--
and the people from the Christian Right,
who are our Christian brothers and sisters,
often have a fundamentalist, literalist perspective.
In her book entitled The Bible As Political Artifact,
Susanne Scholz provides us with an excellent overview
of the Christian Right.
And some of her main points are, it
is inherently a U.S. American phenomena,
with its own particular history in the American sociopolitical
and religious infrastructure, that reaches back
to the later 19th and early 20th century battles over Darwin's
Theory of Evolution.
The Christian Right's response to gender, family,
and sexuality is well articulated, and well
publicized, and put forth as the Christian position
on gender, family, and sexuality.
The Christian Right is firmly anchored
in traditional Christian doctrine.
Now, I'm going to come all back to this
and see the implications for us.
It recognizes, within Christianity,
the urge to be a political agent in political, social, cultural,
and economic life, and its effects
are being felt in our U.S. culture today.
It was very interesting.
When I was in Barnes & Noble selecting
a book that my nephew, who is currently serving in our United
States Armed Forces, had asked me to pick up for him--
and I picked up a book that was discussing our positions
of our current vice president.
And it traced, with remarkable insight, Vice President Pence,
his journey from Catholicism to the Christian Right.
Okay?
And I don't know if you've known that,
but that was a real journey for him--
from Catholicism to the Christian Right--
and right now he is one of the most influential speakers
for the Christian Right in our nation's
policy-making decisions today.
It's The Shadow President.
It's a fantastic study, and I was astounded.
I read the book practically standing in Barnes & Noble.
[laughter]
So in conservative American Christianity
today, the Bible is the actual or inspired Word
of God, the final authority on all matters.
A central feature of the Christian Right's discourse
on gender, family, and sexuality,
is the sincere commitment, which proponents relate their Bible
readings to the contemporary gender
practices in American culture, church, and society today.
They consider a discussion about gender
depictions not merely an exercise in academics,
but as a matter directly related to today's society
and ecclesiastical life.
To them, the Bible connects to today's world,
because the Bible is the single and most authoritative
guide to evangelical Christian faith.
Now, those who are Evangelical Christian Right
do read the Bible in a privatized, personalized, and
spiritual manner.
A number of years ago, Catholic theologian Terrence Tilley
gave a paper at the College Theology Society.
It was entitled "Here Come The Evangelicals."
He later published it in the journal Horizons.
What he unpacks in this paper and article
are the influences of the Christian Right on Catholicism,
especially since we have more and more
younger Catholics searching for faith, searching for God,
and using the Bible as a primary tool for faith
seeking understanding.
And this was a topic of discussion
that we had in a panel presentation
at the recent Catholic Biblical Association Conference
that we had in July.
Okay?
So we, as Catholics, know that we have both Scripture
and Tradition, but we have to be cognizant these days of how
Tradition has been and still is, to some extent, some extent,
a little frozen in time.
Biblical scholars have a lot of tools available to them
for the interpretation of biblical texts,
but too often historical critical method
has been the dominant one to the exclusion of the newer
hermeneutical methods that hold up
the text for ongoing critical and theological reflection.
Yes, the historical critical method is absolutely important.
But we have to hear it and use it in relationship,
I think, to other methods as well.
And we have many, many methods available to us, you know,
and the wonderful document, "The Interpretation
of the Bible in the Church," outlines
so many of these methods that we do have.
Okay.
So for Catholics, the role of the community
has always had a place in biblical interpretation,
and Aquinas reminds us that biblical text has
multiple meanings, contrary to thinking that the text only
has one meaning.
In the course of the Bible's formation,
the writings of which it consists were, in many cases,
reworked and reinterpreted so as to make
them respond to new situations previously unknown.
And I'm commenting on that document, "The Biblical
Interpretation of the Church Today."
And it goes on to say, in this document,
"Sacred Scripture is in dialogue with the community
of believers."
That's important.
And we are that community and believers,
and that's why I'm talking about the community of believers
as a global community.
It has come from their traditions and faith.
Its texts have been developed in relation to these traditions
and have contributed reciprocibly
to the development of the traditions.
It follows that the interpretation of Scripture
takes place in the heart of the Church.
The interpretation of Scripture takes
place in the heart of the Church of which
we are all a part in its plurality, and its unity,
within its tradition of faith, okay?
And so we, as Church, come from many different social
locations, many parts of the globe,
different genders, different orientations.
All of this is going to come into our understanding
of the texts today.
"Dialogue in Scripture," the article goes on to say,
"in its entirely, which means 'dialogue'
with the understanding of the faith prevailing in earlier
times must be matched by a dialogue with a generation
today."
And as I was on the plane, I was reading the material
that is just coming out from the Vatican now,
with the meeting that our bishops have
had with the younger Catholics.
And it's been a wonderful, wonderful meeting,
but there's a recognition that, yes,
we all have to listen better.
But what was working in the past is not necessarily
working anymore today.
I have these younger Catholics.
Many of them Catholics, and Christians,
and non-Christians sitting in my classroom
when I teach biblical studies.
And they are the ones that are pressing the questions.
They are the ones who are holding up
this text for hermeneutical, critical reflection.
And I'm teaching a course in Prophets right now.
And boy, oh, boy, are they confronting the text
and confronting me as we look at this text together.
Okay?
And how do we hear this text today?
So if we talk about the Bible and justice,
then we have to hear the text in new ways.
We have to bring the text into the contemporary world,
and we have to bring the contemporary into our hearing
of the biblical text.
If we don't, then our hearing and reading
of the biblical text, and our praxis that will flow from it
will be nothing more than a disconnected, disjointed
exercise that can compound our work for justice,
or not speak to it at all, or even worse,
sanction our own conscious and unconscious attitudes
of discrimination toward race, and gender,
and other areas of life that are crying out
for justice, especially when issues of power,
and control, and hierarchy, and patriarchy come into play.
So where are we going?
Where's the roadmap?
So here and now we're going to explore
a general understanding of the concept of justice
in the Bible.
What were some of the influences on the concept of justice
in the Old Testament?
One of the influences that we have-- and we're
going to come back to this-- is Lex Talionis.
Okay, it was considered a humane law--
"an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."
So that meant, if you stole my cow,
I could not demand your life, I could ask for a cow.
But if you took a life, then I could ask for a life.
We have the Deuteronomic theology and theory
of retribution that we find in Deuteronomy 28.
Very simply, if you're good, God will reward you.
If you're bad, God's going to punish you.
Okay?
And so we see this.
We see punitive acts being done in the name of justice, okay?
We have the divine warrior motif, the use of power
to liberate, but often at the oppression of others,
because that is what the ancient people understood
about war and battles.
Justice defined.
As a biblical concept, we have mishpat.
Justice is concerned with right relationship.
Right relationship is concerned with the common good
for all communities of life on the planet.
All communities.
The starting point for justice must be the intrinsic goodness
of all that exists.
The intrinsic goodness, okay?
Justice is a quality of God, and we hear this in Isaiah 30:18.
"Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you.
Therefore, he will rise up to show mercy
to you, for the Lord is a God of justice.
Blessed are all those who wait for him."
It's an ethical attitude of God.
"I know that the Lord maintains the cause
of the needy and executes justice for the poor."
And we have to ask ourselves, who are the needy,
and who are the poor?
And we're not just talking about the economic needy
and the economic poor.
Who are the disenfranchised?
Who are the ones on the margins?
"Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is
in the name of the Lord their God, who
made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever, who executes
justice for the oppressed, who gives food for the hungry."
Who is oppressed today?
And why?
Justice is a mandate to the Israelite community.
"Thus says the Lord-- act with justice and righteousness,
and deliver from the hand of the oppressor
anyone who has been robbed.
And do no wrong or violence to the alien,
the orphan, the widow, or shed blood in this place."
"Do no violence to the alien, the orphan, orphan, the widow,
or shed blood in this place."
Interesting when we hear that today, isn't it?
That's a quality of ethical living and leadership.
"A shoot shall come from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of its roots.
The Spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
Spirit of counsel, of might, the Spirit of knowledge,
and the fear of the Lord."
Fear of the Lord understood as awe and love.
"His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what he sees
or decide by what his ears hear.
But with righteousness, he shall judge the poor
and decide with the equity for the meek of the earth.
He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips, he shall kill the wicked.
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist,
and faithfulness the belt around his loins."
"He shall judge the poor."
Are not those people who are enchained in their own need
for power, control, greed?
Are they not the poor as well?
We have to ask ourselves those questions, okay?
And notice, the power is going to be in the power of the Word.
The power of the Word.
Speaking truth to power.
Interesting.
Justice as the cornerstone to the life and mission
of the Prophets.
"I hate, I despise your festivals.
I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain
offerings, I will not accept them.
And the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."
So what does it mean to be prophetic today?
We have to understand that the Prophets had
an ethical mission--
to liberate Creation from the pain
and suffering to the victims of injustice
as well as the perpetrators of injustice.
And that's why we see table fellowship in the New Testament
oftentimes.
Jesus ate with everybody, and a lot of times,
he wasn't a good table guest, because he put a lot of people
on notice.
We have to expose, as the Prophets did, what is hidden.
And we have to deal with the question of God
that we hear in these texts, particularly
in the prophetic texts.
New Testament scholar Sandra Schneiders
said, "The central question for the 21st century
is the God question.
I say, how we understand God is how
we are going to live our lives and practice justice."
How we understand God is going to be how we live our lives
and how we practice justice.
The prophets identified the roots of injustice
and those of us who are baptized Catholics
are called to be prophets.
It's part of our baptismal vocation.
Those of us who are Christian are also
called to be prophetic.
Those of us who are Jewish are called to be prophetic.
Those of other non-Christian faiths
or no faith at all, those of us who are purely secular
are also called to be prophetic, because the Spirit of life,
the Spirit of love, the Spirit that people of faith
call "the divine Spirit," in which we all have been imbued
and felt at the moment we took our first breath,
is a prophetic Spirit.
That divine presence, that divine Spirit,
whom some call God, Allah, or no name, or any name,
we can imagine, or give to the name,
or define it is that breath of life.
We swim in the mysterium tremendum, whose breath
permeates and flows in the midst of all life
in the entire cosmos.
So all of Creation is prophetic, and we humans
are just a small part of this huge picture and experience.
But we are called to be prophetic to expose
the injustices, to work for justice, and to give hope.
From this perspective, let us now explore
a few biblical texts to read with the text
and against the text, in a global context, as we discover
today our prophetic vocation, a vocation at the heart
of Israel's prophets, at the heart of Jesus's ministry,
and which must be the center of our lives,
since justice is a constitutive message of the Gospel.
Exploring the biblical text.
So the first text that I want to talk about that I do not--
you know, put the text up there because we're so familiar
with this-- is the Cain and Abel story.
We're all familiar with the Cain and Abel story, yes?
Okay.
All right.
So what we have going on in this particular story
is that we have a choice being made here.
And the choice is not for Cain's offerings.
It's for Abel's offerings.
And then Cain becomes crestfallen.
Okay?
And God says to Cain in the text,
the way the biblical writer situates it,
"ou can master sin, Cain; you will do well if you master
this;" it'll be okay.
But Cain becomes very jealous of his brother,
and he takes his brother's life.
And God, in God's munificence, doesn't condemn Cain
right away.
He says, "What did you do, Cain?
What did you do?"
He's trying.
What we see in the biblical text,
this God is trying to have Cain come
to some sort of responsibility.
But Cain gives the flippant answer,
"Am I my brother's keeper?"
Okay?
And then we get the chastisement, okay?
And Cain will be dispelled from the land, and Cain says to God,
"hat's too much."
So God says, "Okay, we'll put a mark on Cain,
and everyone will know that Cain is someone who
has committed an injustice."
Now, according to the books of Lex Talionis and justice,
what should God have demanded of Cain?
His life.
And yet God doesn't, okay?
God doesn't.
So we get justice tempered with compassion.
Justice tempered with compassion in that story.
That's a beautiful story.
It's a beautiful story.
And I'll tell you a short story, because I have
a lot I want to cover with you.
And Beth is my colleague, was at the University of Portland
and studying here.
But this is before Beth came to the University.
I taught a student in my class, and her name
was the name of a person that we gave and continue to give
an annual scholarship to.
And our wonderful student, when we were hosting the College
Theology Society Conference, was helping
us to work that conference at the University of Portland.
And this wonderful student of ours one night
was in her room, and a student who
had been living in the vicinity, not from our country, came in,
and assaulted her, and murdered her.
That rocked our campus like you cannot believe,
because on the one hand, you had students who knew
the assaulter, and on the other hand,
you had students who knew the victim.
And this was one of the students that I had taught.
And eventually, this assaulter, unbeknownst to another student
who had graduated, married one of the students,
or former students.
And the person was eventually extradited from the country
in which he had fled.
And the trial came up, and the Johnson family were there.
And Edie Johnson, the mother, and her father--
her father wanted-- and this is when Oregon had the death
penalty--
the father wanted the death penalty.
The mother did not want the death penalty.
And the mother confronted the assaulter
and said, "Two wrongs don't make a right, I forgive you,
and I want you to be served justice,
but I'm not requiring your life."
Wow.
That also split that marriage, okay?
So that's a real-life story here.
Cain and Abel-- justice with compassion, a living story
that you have.
Now let me read you some statistics, and let me
read you something else.
This is why we have to address these issues in our world
today and hear these texts.
29 states have the death penalty--
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida,
Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana,
Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South
Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah,
Virginia, Wyoming.
21 states have abolished it--
Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, the District
of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland,
Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New
Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island,
Vermont, Washington, Western Virginia, Wisconsin,
and recently Oregon.
Pope Francis has said that the death penalty
violates human dignity, but let me share a statement with you
from Robert Albert Mohler, Jr, who
is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
The views expressed in this column now are from Mohler.
And he states, "The death penalty
has been used as part of human society
for millennia, understood to be the ultimate punishment
for the most serious crimes.
But should Christians support the death penalty, especially
in the light of what is going on in our world today?
This is not an easy yes or no answer.
On the one hand, the Bible clearly
calls for capital punishment in the case
of intentional murder."
Oh, yeah, made you look up, doesn't it?
Clearly calls us.
This is his reading of the biblical text.
"In Genesis 9:6, God told Noah that the penalty
for intentional murder should be death.
Whoever sheds the blood of a man by man
should his blood be shed, for God
has made man in his own image.
The death penalty was explicitly grounded in the fact
that God made every individual human being in his own image,
and thus an act of intentional murder
is an assault upon human dignity and the very image of God."
Shocking, isn't it?
Okay?
All right.
And it goes on.
"On the other hand, the Bible raises a very high requirement
for the evidence in a case of capital murder."
And he says, capital punishment and capital murder
should be used only on rare occasions.
But essentially, he says, it's okay to continue
to agree with this.
And so we see the intersection of an understanding
of the biblical text from a Christian perspective
and also in relationship to our political situation
that we have today.
And Helen Prejean we had come speak
to all of the lawyers in Oregon.
And it was after her presentation, her moving
presentation, that Oregon took the death penalty
off the books.
And so he says, "Christians should take leadership
to help our fellow citizens understand what is at stake.
God affirmed the death penalty for murder
as he made his image of human dignity clear to Noah.
Our job is to make it clear to our neighbors."
How we understand God today and how
we understand God in this biblical text
without a hermeneutical lens is going
to affect how we act with justice today.
All right?
Okay.
So it would seem that this Christian perspective--
the death penalty is permissible in Christianity,
according to the way some Christians read
the biblical text.
So here it is, a clear example where
religion and politics intersect with regard to justice.
And as the death penalty, you know, when we look at this,
so what's just?
One Christian says no, one Christian says yes.
So how are we to understand and dialogue
with these different Christian perspectives, of which we're
called to do?
Now we have the oppression of the Israelites.
And we know what that story is.
The Israelites are oppressed by the pharaoh.
And it is forced labor for the sake of the pharaoh
to be able to build Ramses and Pithom, his own cities.
All right?
In our global world today, an estimated 20.9 million
are victims of forced labor, a type of enslavement
that captures labor and sexual exploitation.
Forced labor is most like historic American slavery--
coerced, often physically, and without pay.
All other categories of slavery are a subset of forced labor
and can include domestic servitude, child labor, bonded
labor, and forced sex.
State authorities, businesses, and individuals
force coercive labor practices upon people
in order to profit or gain from their work.
And we've seen this globally in what
we call sweatshops, in human trafficking that we have, okay?
So we have to look at this.
So how do we hear the Exodus story in relationship
to forced labor globally today?
And who is responsible, among our own U.S. corporations
at home and abroad?
And with the Gospel mandate of justice,
what are we doing about it to expose the injustice?
And what products are we boycotting?
And how are we, in word and deed, speaking truth to power?
So how does the Exodus story find a home in our hearts,
in our praxis today?
Then we see the woman who's caught in adultery,
and in the interest of time, I'm not
going to go through this story, because I
want to watch my time here.
What we see here, with this woman caught in adultery,
describes in the Pharisees, bring a woman to Jesus.
They state the case that with regard to the Law of Moses,
and that calls her to be stoned.
But there is no mention of the man in the story.
It's only the woman.
And Jesus confronts the leaders of his day,
and he puts them on notice.
And then he talks with the woman, and asks her a question,
and then proceeds to say that he does not condemn her,
as the other men, whom Jesus confronted, had condemned her.
Jesus does not play by the books,
and he doesn't uphold the law that's on the books.
Interesting, isn't it?
How do we hear these texts in a global context?
You know what's interesting is when
I was doing the research for this paper,
India's top court has ruled that adultery is no longer a crime.
India striking down a 158-year, colonial-era law, which it said
has treated women as male property.
Interesting.
All right.
And more than 60 countries around the world
have done away with laws that made adultery a crime.
So many evangelical Christians who
live by the Ten Commandments, and the religious law,
and civil law, and in some countries
and in other countries, is it not on the grounds
that a woman is not the property of her husband?
So how are we to understand this ancient law concerning
adultery today?
Wow.
That's interesting in terms of the globe.
Although adultery is a misdemeanor in most states,
with laws against it, some, including
Michigan and Wisconsin, they categorize it as a felony.
Punishments vary widely by state.
In Maryland, the punishment is a mere $10 fine.
But in Massachusetts, an adulterer
could face up to three years in jail.
Has an ancient religious law intersected with civil law?
And in some cases, what about those places
that no longer view it a crime?
So how do we seek justice in the midst of this as well too?
It is not easy.
How are we to view adultery today locally, nationally,
globally?
And how is justice to be served even for women today?
And I have students sitting in my classroom from India.
And they are Christian, and they're Catholic.
So they have one teaching on one hand,
and they have the law in their own country
now on the other hand.
Question's a global one, and global Christians
and non-Christians are reading our Bible.
Now, the Plagues and the Exodus Story.
We know about these Plagues.
So how are we to understand these Plagues?
From the Israelite perspective, yes, God
is the God of liberation, and Israel
is freed through the Plagues.
And the pharaoh says, oh, get out of the land,
especially when we get to that last plague.
And the Israelites take the goods and run.
But if you're an Egyptian today--
and I have students in my class who are Egyptian--
how do they hear that text?
And in light of the ecological questions,
both the suffering of the land and the animals
are made to suffer because of these Plagues.
The Egyptian cows get boiled, the Israelite cows
don't get any boils.
We understand, metaphorically, that, yes,
to do something with the food chain is to punish the people.
However, we have to ask the question, what
did the cows do that they deserved to die?
What did the fish do in the Nile River?
These are the same questions that we have to ask today
from an ecological perspective.
Our planet is suffering at whose hands?
At whose hands?
Alright?
Okay.
And then we have to ask the question, What kind of a God
are we celebrating here?
And whose God is this God?
Is it only the God of the Jewish people?
Is it only the God of the Christian people?
Or is this Elohim, the God of the nations?
And if it's the God of everyone who created all of life,
then how are we to understand this, when some people are
harmed and other people are not, when some aspects of Creation
are harmed and other aspects of Creation and the natural world
are not?
These are the deeper questions.
In the end, are the Israelites really freed from bondage?
Are they?
We have to ask that question too.
Now, this is very uncomfortable.
It's the God of the Empire.
It's the God of the nations.
And John Dominic Crossan has written a book about Jesus
against Rome, Then and Now, about the Empire.
However, when we look at this--
and I'll just read a little bit of this,
so you can see, again, in the interest of time,
because I'm running out of time.
"The oracle concerning Babylon that Isaiah, son of Amoz, saw.
On a bare hill, raise a signal, cry aloud to them,
wave the hand for them to enter the gates of the nobles.
I myself have commanded my consecrated ones,
have summoned my warriors, my proudly exalting ones
to execute my anger."
Who's speaking this?
God through the prophet, okay?
And it comes on.
"The Lord and the weapons of his indignation
to destroy all the earth.
Wail, for the day of the Lord is near.
It will come like destruction from the Almighty!"
And it continues on.
"See, the day the Lord comes cruel, with wrath
and fierce anger, to make the earth a desolation,
to destroy its sinners from it.
For the stars of the heavens and their constellations
will not give their light.
The sun will be dark at its rising,
and the moon will not shed its light."
And it goes on.
So what image do we have of this God?
This God that we find so often in the Prophets
reflects the Empire, reflects the violence of the day.
And when we are in empires, we have an image of a God
who has to be stronger than the strongest leader,
than the strongest pharaoh, than the strongest king,
asserting justice.
But that justice is assertive violently and punitively.
So how do we understand justice today
when we, as an American people, are
an empire among other empires?
And what's the language our leaders are using?
And how do we understand all of this?
And how are we going to achieve justice?
These are the deeper questions.
Oh, it goes on and on and on.
Now we have justice and gender relations.
This is an interesting one.
And what we see with this story--
and I'll just talk about it a little bit--
is the story of Hosea 2.
And in Hosea 2, we're familiar with this.
Okay, what you get here is Gomer is unfaithful to Hosea.
And Israel is unfaithful to God.
Covenant is tied to marriage, the metaphoric covenant,
at this particular time in Hosea.
And what you get here is this language.
"Therefore, I will hedge her up with thorns,
and I will build a wall against her,
so that she cannot find her paths.
She shall pursue her lovers but shan't now overtake them.
And she shall seek them but shall not find them.
Then she said, I will go and return to my first husband,"
et cetera, et cetera.
"Therefore, I will take back my grain
in its time, my wine and season, and I
will take away my wool and my flax,
and I will uncover her nakedness.
Now I will uncover her shame in the sight of all her lovers.
And no one shall rescue her out of my hand."
It continues on here.
It continues on.
Then we get to this wonderful part:
"I'll allure her, bring her back into the wilderness,
speak to her heart."
It's great.
I mean, the renewal of Covenant is absolutely great.
But how do we understand this metaphor in relationship
to either a wife or a husband who experiences infidelity?
How do we hear this in relationship to domestic abuse?
I am going to punish you, but then I'll
renew the covenant with you.
I'll take you back.
My students go wild with this.
How do we hear this?
How do we hear these metaphors?
Yes, yes, yes, on one level, the metaphor
works in the ancient world.
But on another level, what did the women in the ancient world
think about this metaphor?
And how do women hear this metaphor today?
And you know what?
We hear about Hosea and the infidelity
that was done to him.
I wonder, in a patriarchal, hierarchical world,
what kind of husband was Hosea?
I just wonder about this.
That's all.
I just wonder.
Then we have the hope.
And I'm going to jump ahead.
We have the hope here, and we have the vision
of the new leadership.
We see this in Isaiah 1-9.
And one of the things that we have in Isaiah 1-9,
the second part of it, "The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf,
and the lion, and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together,
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.
They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea."
Wow, isn't that beautiful?
When we have good governance, when we have good leadership,
we will have justice and peace in the land.
And the knowledge-- the earth will be filled
with the knowledge of the Lord.
What is our understanding of this sacred presence today?
And if anything, the Prophets show us
that violence in trying to achieve peace
is not the way to go, because in the ancient world,
it was not successful.
And yet we still use that same kind of violence today,
thinking it's going to be successful.
But it's not.
And I'm almost out of time, right?
Right.
Okay.
So we have all of this, all right?
So I will just jump to the end.
Justice is more than a matter of laws,
even more than a virtue that should be practiced.
Justice is a divine imperative that
has, as its goal, the full flourishing of all of Creation.
For the human community today, this sense of justice
begins with human beings recognizing
the intrinsic goodness of all of Creation,
with humankind as part of Creation's biodiversity
and not its dominant species.
If justice is to operate on a higher
level than the law itself, then it
has to flow from a heart transformed,
that, having been changed from stone to flesh,
is not only vulnerable, but also receptive
to the unanswered needs and unjust pain
currently present in Creation.
Such a heart can do nothing less than welcome everyone
and everything as it is and as it works to confront injustice
in the face of ever-growing anguish
that is becoming more and more pervasive for the human and
non-human life.
Justice demands a hospitality of heart and a robust spirit.
I live in Oregon.
And if you know anything about Oregon,
one of the issues that has a tremendous suicide rate
is our transgender community because of the way
they are being treated.
And right now what are we hearing on the news?
A hospitality of heart for everyone.
What does that mean for our Christian vocation
to be prophetic?
And what does that mean for us as Church?
What does that mean?
What does that mean?
Okay.
Who are the disenfranchised among us?
And then we get Micah.
All right.
But I want to get to this one last part
here of Ephraem of Syria, one of the Church Fathers.
Perhaps one of the most significant references
to a compassionate heart is found
in the writings of Ephraem of Syria
when asked by one of his brothers what compassion is.
And he says, "it's a heart on fire for the whole of Creation,
for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for the demons,
and for all that exists.
At the recollection and at the sight of them,
such a person's eyes overflow with tears
owing to vehemence of a compassion which
grips his or her heart.
As a result of his or her deep mercy,
his or her heart shrinks and cannot bear to hear or look
on any injury or the slightest suffering of anything
in Creation."
Okay.
And I'm going to have to end there.
I have so much more, but we'll have to come back for Part 2.
[laughter]
Thank you.
[applause]
>>PROFESSOR ANDREW DAVIS: Thank you, Professor Dempsey,
for that challenging and provocative talk.
I want to leave plenty of time that we
have for questions and for comments, because I
know there will be quite a few.
Let me just make two brief remarks based
on Professor Dempsey's lecture.
Number one, what I thought that her lecture did so well
and what I think the Bible, one of the most
important contributions to our thinking about justice
is the way it makes justice concrete for us.
And I think that there is a way in which we
can talk about justice and it begins
to feel like this abstraction, that justice
is this platonic form that exists way up in the heavens
and that it's beyond our reach.
But what the Bible shows us again and again,
and what Professor Dempsey's lecture
has shown for us tonight is that biblical justice is always
concrete.
It's always here on the ground, it's
always a part of relationships and everyday situations.
And I think the litany of examples
that Professor Dempsey began with is very biblical,
in a way.
And I think the biblical prophets would very much
view the world in that way, because they saw justice
as something that was embedded in the very fabric
of our lives.
And I think it's also--
I appreciate very much your avoidance
of just social justice, because in a way,
social justice is, I think, too narrow of a vision,
that justice in the Bible is more than just
a social phenomenon.
It's highly interpersonal, and so I
can't advocate for the widow, the orphan, the alien
if, in my personal life, my family life,
I'm a total tyrant.
There can't be this discrepancy between the justice
that we profess on a social level and the injustice
we're willing to tolerate on a personal, ecclesial,
or ecological level.
So I appreciate you highlighting for that,
for us, Professor Dempsey.
The thing I wanted to add maybe--
from the perspective of the Book of Job,
which is a book that I know and love.
The second point I want to make is the Bible's own willingness
to address these hard questions about justice.
And I think that the Bible's own willingness
to engage these questions and to ask provocative questions, I
think, to us, is a mandate to do the sort of work
that Professor Dempsey is doing in her lecture--
to ask the hard questions about justice
and even divine justice.
And I'm thinking specifically of Abraham in Genesis, Chapter
18, when God is announcing his plan for Sodom and Gomorrah.
And Abraham has the temerity to ask God, "Shall
not the God of justice do justice?
Shall not the judge of all the world act with justice?"
And it's a provocative question, I think,
that Abraham is willing to ask when
he hears his plan to destroy the innocent along with the guilty.
And I think that it's an invitation to us
to look around our world and ask the same question.
"Shall not the judge of all the world act with justice?"
And I'd also add the Book of Job, as I said,
to this as another biblical example that's
willing to ask hard questions.
The word that Professor Dempsey highlighted, "mishpat,"
is basically the rubric under which
Job's entire book takes place.
Job has a mishpat that he wants to take to God.
He has a question about justice, and this is a pervasive concept
throughout the entire book.
And so all of Job's questioning of God's justice
is built around this idea of mishpat.
And God's answer is also, in some ways,
built around this idea of mishpat
and has a very strong ecological thrust to it.
But I would just leave those two comments--
the embeddedness of justice in the Bible, its concreteness,
and also the Bible's willingness to ask the hard questions
that Professor Dempsey has invited to us
to reflect on this evening.
So with that in mind, I'd like to open the floor to questions
and comments on the talk.
So just as the last session-- thank you.
[applause]
>>FR.
STEGMAN: Just as at the last session, if you raise your hand
and wait till the microphone comes to you.
So we have time for about 10 minutes here.
Wait for the mic.
>>PARTICIPANT: One of the things that
struck me about Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment
is he was very good at connecting this social concern
to personal lifestyle and the personal holiness.
How do you think we can take these greater
issues of social justice, globalism, and our interaction
with the society, and relate it to our own personal
sanctification and holiness?
How can we make these principles more
of a lifestyle, in a way of our following God on a daily level?
>>SR. DEMPSEY: OK.
Where the social and the ecological connect, all right?
And I think, in terms of holiness--
and that's your question.
Again, I'll reflect on my social location,
where I am, my geographic location, I should say,
which is Oregon.
And how do we do this socially?
It comes down to a choice.
It's a choice.
What are our ecological choices that
are going to affect the social well-being of all Creation?
And so I also come from a Dominican community.
And my Dominican community has a real commitment
to justice for the earth.
And so we periodically get questions from my congregation.
What is our intake of meat?
What are we doing for recycling?
What are we doing with our land?
We have Genesis Farm, and Miriam Therese MacGillis
is the founder of Genesis Farm.
And so we have a lot of locally grown products,
and the same thing that we have in Oregon.
I shop locally grown, and I'm on a campus where
our former president said, "We will not
give in to the commodification of water anymore."
And bottled water is gone.
So it comes down to the choices that we make.
We have the students that went in and turned all the lights
off every night, every day, until the University got it.
All the computers off.
In terms of our carbon footprint,
where are our investments?
Carbon footprint.
So we can do a whole lot that says,
the earth is not for utilitarian purposes.
We will have what we need and only take what we need.
There's a lot we can do.
When I was over in Germany in May, my gosh,
everybody was riding bicycles.
I come back to the States.
Oregon has a lot of bikes, but we have a lot of cars too.
>>DR. DAVIS: Sure, I was going to say, to add to that,
the thing that most struck me about "Laudato Si'" actually,
is the correlation Pope Francis draws between economic justice
and environmental justice, and the fact that environmental
degradation is not borne equally across the planet,
and that it's no coincidence that communities that suffer
most from economic injustice are also the ones that are made
to bear the brunt of environmental degradation.
And I think that correlation that Pope Francis draws
between economic and environmental injustice
is one you would absolutely find in the biblical Prophets.
>>FR.
STEGMAN: Get one more question in.
Professor Groome.
>>PROFESSOR THOMAS GROOME: Thank you.
Thank you, Professor Dempsey, for a marvelous presentation.
I'm sitting here wondering, since we all
can read the text to our own advantage
and from our own perspective, and we tend to do so,
what's the canon within the Canon that
might guide us a little more right than simply reading
from the perspective of our own biases,
and prejudices, and valid commitments as well?
What's the canon within the Canon?
If one group can read the text to approve
of capital punishment, the other can read the text
to disapprove of it.
Where do we stand?
>>SR. DEMPSEY: That's the question.
That is really the hermeneutical question.
We have a historical background and understanding
of these texts, and yet its interpretation
is a process of interpretation, And the history that we have is
reconstructed history, for the most part.
And so what's the canon within the canon?
I don't know how, in honesty, to answer that question,
because the text is meant to be in dialogue with the community.
And the community is going to hear
the text in different ways.
And that's a hard question to ask.
But we are not--
our theology, we have to remember,
is not just sola Scriptura.
Okay?
But we're going to have to listen to this
and ask those questions.
As I say to my students, I say, the experience
does not begin with the text, the experience
begins with the experience of that Sacred Presence.
How do we understand that Sacred Presence?
That's the beginning.
It's a spirituality.
It's a place of spirituality.
It's our encounter with that Sacred Presence
that will inform our understanding of the text
as well.
And I often say, when was the last time
that you did something so egregious,
and came face to face with your God,
and you met the God of punitive judgment,
or did you meet the face of compassion?
And that's why that God question is so important.
And that's why spirituality is so important.
And that's why our encounter with the Sacred
is so important.
>>DR. DAVIS: I think that's great.
That was a great note to end on.
I think that's a really beautiful way of concluding.
>>FR.
STEGMAN: Good.
When Andrew speaks I usually listen,
so let's express appreciation both to Carol and to Andrew.
Thank you.
>>SR. DEMPSEY: Thank you for having me.
[applause]
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