Karen Armstrong on "The Bible"

January 20, 2010

Continued from Page 2

David: At the end of your book, you point us toward what I think is a terrific idea: A new effort all around the world to invite Jews, Christians, and Muslims to work together to interpret scriptures. You're calling for interfaith circles that will discuss, together, the ways we read and understand scriptures.

Karen: It's time to do this. We all have the same difficulty. People are quoting our scriptures in all kinds of mischievous ways. The Bible is being exploited this way. The Quran is being exploited by people, too. I think this is a crucial idea right now.

One of the things I say in the book is that people do not even realize how selectively they are reading the Bible. It's a whole library of texts with different interpretations all included in the Bible. But, people have always had a tendency to be highly selective. This happened when early Christians decided to select those bits of the Hebrew Bible that they felt pointed to Jesus and when they decided to ignore those parts of the Hebrew Bible that didn't suit them. In Judaism, the rabbis reinterpreted whole swaths of the Hebrew Bible.

Today, the main people who are doing this selective reading are fundamentalists and it is a problem for all of us. In Christianity, fundamentalists like to quote from the book of Revelation with all of its violent battles and slaughter -- but you don't hear them quoting all that much from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus talks about turning the other cheek and not retaliating. Similarly, you have extremists in the Muslim world who are thumbing through the Quran to select extreme passages and who are overlooking the many passages that call for compassion. 

David: We share the problem. We should share the solution.

Karen: We should. All of the world's great religions have a strong voice in them for compassion. Together, let's try to make that voice of compassion and charity -- that voice that's right there in our scriptures -- become the voice we share.

This interview was originally published at ReadtheSpirit and is reprinted with permission.

David Crumm is an author, journalist, and filmmaker with more than twenty years experience as a Religion Writer for the Detroit Free Press, Knight-Ridder newspapers, and Gannett. Crumm is now the Editor of ReadTheSpirit, a new online home for important voices in religion and spirituality.

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