Thinking about my post yesterday, I realize one thing that I neglected to touch on was the disconnect that seems to exist in the minds of those who believe that Jesus did not preach a message of social justice between the teaching of Jesus and the prophetic tradition in Hebrew literature.
Now, I'll grant that for many of the anti-social justice Christians (among whom Beck clearly wants to put himself), the prophetic books of the Bible don't seem to mean what they do to people who can, for example, read. For some, "prophecy" in the Biblical sense has nothing to do with the plea that the prophets make to follow the commands of God in seeking justice for the oppressed, the widow, the orphan, and the sojourner. It's got nothing to do with the divine condemnation of those who practice injustice, who "attach land to land, and lie down with the temple prostitutes on garments given in pledge." It's got nothing to do with the patterns of social malformation that afflicted Israel and Judah in the monarchical period, despite the very clear implications of the words of the prophets themselves. No matter how directly the prophets seem to be addressing issues of injustice and socio-political oppression, to a particular brand of Christian "literalist" (whose literalism never seems to actually connect to the literal meanings of words) the prophets don't have any concern for any of this. Rather, the prophetic books are all about the far, far distant future, and have no relevance to the people to whom they were actually preached.
Jim Wallis likes to tell a story about working with a youth group once. He handed out Bibles and scissors, and told his students to cut out of the Bible all the passages they could find that pertained to social justice. By the time they were done, the Bible's were falling apart, unusable, because the removal of those passages had destroyed them. As he likes to say, that's what you have when you remove social justice from the Bible, a book full of holes.
Beck's reading of the Bible, with its individualistic emphasis on "you" and what "you" personally can do to help people, divorces Christian responsibility from the social context that was so central to the religion of Jesus by divorcing it from the prophetic calls for social justice that were the heart, the very heart of the prophetic books. Any time spent with Amos, Hosea, or Micah will demonstrate this fact.
More's the pity then that Beck is attempting to lead so many Christians away from what is at the heart of their faith, at the heart of the Bible, and at the heart of Jesus' teaching.
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