The left end of the radio dial is designated for non-commercial broadcasters, which is usually NPR stations and Christian stations. No one would confuse the two. On Thursday, the nationally distributed NPR show Fresh Air with Terry Gross became the latest media outlet to celebrate the Bible-shredding of professor Jennifer Wright Knust (after CNN.com and the Washington Post On Faith website.) Gross began:
As a Bible scholar, ordained Baptist pastor and professor of religion Jennifer Knust says she's tired of watching those who are supposed to care about the Bible reducing it to slogans. For example, she says you can't use the Bible as a straightforward guide to sexual morality because the Bible fails to offer a consistent message regarding sexual morals and God's priorities.
Gross's first question: “What do you find most interesting and maybe most anachronistic about what the Bible has to say about marriage?”
Knust suggested that you simply cannot take what the Bible says at face value. If it calls homosexuality an abomination, then clearly that is not to be trusted, unless it's deeply processed, synthesized, and made into some liberal professor's version of ideologically pleasing Velveeta cheese:
[I]t seems to me that whatever the Bible says regarding homoerotic sexual intimacy is folded within a very large Biblical conversation about sexuality in general. And so to pull out a particular verse and say, oh well this solves our position on, you know, gay marriage, is such a mistake, given that the Bible says a lot of things about sexuality. And many of those things we would reject today, so why we are lifting out gay marriage when we've clearly rejected things like slavery and stoning women who aren't virgins at first marriage.
Then Knust started talking about how King David was gay and had a male “wife,” and this shows the Bible is conflicted on gay marriage:
So for example, David has an intimate relationship with the son of King Saul, whose name is Jonathan, and Jonathan loves David more than he loves women. Now, we can read that to mean that Jonathan and David had an intimate partnership in which David was the active or dominant partner in their relationship, meaning that Jonathan was David's woman, which from the perspective of 1st and 2nd Samuel means that David could legitimately inherit the throne that actually belonged to Jonathan as the son of King Saul. So now Jonathan becomes one of David's wives in a way and so therefore David can legitimately inherit.
My point is that even Leviticus and 1st and 2nd Samuel disagree about intimate male partnerships. So to suggest that that one commandment in Leviticus condemns gay marriage is quite a leap, especially because the Bible itself doesn't agree on this point.
Naturally, Gross, who enjoys abusing Christians enough to host a professor who thinks the resurrection of Jesus is complete malarkey – on Good Friday – asked Knust why she would love this Bible, since it's so conficted and “anachronistic”:
GROSS: So given that you've thrown out a lot, you're interpreting things differently than a lot of other people, what do you find in the Bible that you love? In other words, if you're challenging a lot of the things that are in the Bible, why does it remain such an important book to you? Why do you - why are you a pastor if...( laughter) you know, why are you a religion scholar if there's so much that you think is wrong, like slavery, polygamy, stoning women to death?
KNUST: ….I knew all the Bible, thanks to my mom. So, and what I remember about that is how invitational that was and how friendly it was and how warm it was. We would sit together and we would come up with troubling questions, we would encounter troubling stories, and we would talk about them. And in the process of that conversation we would think about how God loves us. We would think about how we love one another, and we would think about how we want to be to one another and to the people in our own communities.
You know, when I go to church on Sunday, when I teach the little kids Sunday school, which I do, I try to keep that lesson in mind, and therefore the Bible remains infinitely fascinating and infinitely love-giving and inspiring to me, because I read it as a document produced by human beings who love God and who are doing the best they can.
So Knust believes the Bible is not the Word of God, but a flawed document produced by human beings with no divine help whatsoever. How this makes her a “Baptist pastor” is anyone's guess. But there is no guessing where NPR stands on Christianity. It's for deeply misguided, "anachronistic" people.
