The Bible and Politics: An Interpretive Labyrinth

Safwat Marzouk 

The weaponization of the Bible in the politics of North Africa and West Asia (NAWA) quite often leaves preachers puzzled on how to interpret, preach, and teach these texts in their contexts. Overwhelmed by the region’s complicated history and afraid of saying the wrong thing or being mislabeled, many pastors choose to avoid the matter altogether. Those who are aware of the layers and complexity of the politics of the region sometimes feel helpless given the continuous colonial and imperial policies that fuel conflict, stir violence, and cause mass displacements. The complexity of the situation and the sense of hopelessness do not deter politicians or religious fundamentalists from employing the Bible for their political agendas; therefore, church leaders must develop an interpretive framework that empowers them to interpret the Bible in a nuanced way as they read or watch the news. 

Thirty years ago, I went to a seminary in Cairo, Egypt, to become a pastor. My vocational goals shifted quickly when I started asking myself questions around interpreting the Old Testament as an Egyptian Christian in light of the Arab Israeli conflict. I reflected on how I have been socialized in the church to read the Old Testament in a particular way and how that interpretive tradition relates to how Egypt is portrayed in the Bible. Over these three decades, I have wrestled with many questions and, as you can imagine, without finding final answers, I have tried many interpretive methods to make sense of how to read the Bible as an Egyptian Christian without reaching lasting conclusions. The journey of learning how to live with the questions has brought so much depth to my understanding of my faith and identity. The following paragraphs will give you glimpses of the questions that I ask when I reflect on the relationship between the Bible and politics. It might feel like a labyrinth. But I hope that my journey and questions offer you companionship as we seek to faithfully witness to the good news to all creation. 

With Whom Do We Identify When We Read the Bible?

Like many readers of the Bible within the realm of the church, I grew up identifying with the insiders of the biblical narrative (biblical Israel and the followers of Jesus). Why not, since I am a Christian and the Bible is scripture for me? Without faith identity, these texts would be merely great world literature. After all, biblical texts are read as the faithful witness to God’s revelation. Yet, the stories of the insiders are always intertwined with outsiders. In the Old Testament, there are the Egyptians, the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Amalekites, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians to name some of the dominant actors. Ancient empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia were replaced by the Roman Empire, which dominated the world as the texts of the New Testament were composed and circulated. In the New Testament, those who were the insiders started to be portrayed as outsiders. Even though many of the authors of the New Testament were from a Jewish background and Jesus himself was a Jew, Jews who did not follow Jesus, for example, and particularly the Pharisees, were depicted as the outsiders. As the stories of those who are insiders were remembered, narrated, and written, there was always an other entangled in their narratives. That other was represented and constructed by the authors of these stories. Even though these stories were written in order to speak about God’s work in the world and in the life of these faith communities and were not written to be shared with those outsiders, eventually, when Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and others converted to Christianity, these texts became scriptures for them. The interpretive question then was how to engage these texts as sacred ones considering the political realities and diverse ethnic identities of the readers of these scriptures. 

With whom the reader of the biblical texts identifies is a critical interpretive question. Even though this is a critical question for Jews and Christians who live in North Africa and West Asia, it is also relevant to readers of the Bible globally. For example, when one reads the story of the Exodus, does one identify with the oppressed Israelites or the Egyptian oppressors? In the story of Jericho, does one identify with the conquering Israelites or with the almost annihilated Canaanites? On what basis does one answer this question? Does one identify with the insiders of the story, erasing the temporal gap between the actors of the biblical story and the contemporary ones? Does one create a typology based on ethnic identities? Does one create a typology based on the plot of the narrative? What difference does it make to enter the text in multiple ways through the perspectives of the different characters represented in the story? How are the realities of the characters constructed in the stories similar or different from the realities of the readers of the texts?

Allegorical, Literal, Historical Interpretations

Jewish and Christian interpreters across the centuries have wrestled with how to make scriptures relevant to their audiences. One of the prominent moves of that interpretive journey has been allegorical interpretation. Since Philo and Origen of Alexandria, biblical texts in general, and more particularly the Old Testament, have been read to be referring to something else beyond their literal sense. For example, Origen suggested that Jericho represents the world and its desires that believers should overcome, while Rahab represents the church, and the crimson cord stands in for the blood of Jesus that saves people from damnation. One observes here that Origen tried to deal with the violence embedded in the text by spiritualizing it. For him, this war is a spiritual one. Allegorical interpretation did not deny the literal sense of the biblical texts, but it always argued that the details of the text point to a transcendent framework of reference that moves beyond the letter. Allegorical interpretation emerged in a context in which biblical texts were dismissed by philosophers as mere myths. Allegorical interpretation tried to redeem the text as scripture for its audience using the intellectual framework available to them in the form of a Platonic philosophy that believed that there is a more ideal reality behind the material one. In doing so, allegorical interpretation did not situate the biblical texts in their historical, political, and social contexts. They did not ask what the text might have meant to the original readers and authors. Furthermore, in a context in which the biblical texts have been misused and abused for political purposes, allegorical interpretation does not address the contexts of oppression in which the material realities of the oppressed stand in real tension with God’s intentions for a world of wholeness and flourishing. Spiritualizing the text becomes a way to escape the day-to-day struggles of the oppressed. It creates a dichotomy between the physical and the spiritual, denying a reality in which the embodied, the spiritual, and the political are all intertwined and all part of being human. Allegorical interpretation focuses so much on the journey of the soul and leaves the body behind it to be tortured, starved, and abused. 

Unlike allegorical interpretation that downplays the political aspects of the biblical texts, dispensationalist and Christian Zionist interpreters of the Bible created a map for world politics by way of mixing literal and symbolic interpretations of biblical texts. These interpretive approaches claim that the Bible predicts the end of the world. By jamming together passages from Revelation, Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah to mention a few, they create an apocalyptic map of world events, including the establishment of the state of Israel, the rebuilding of the temple, the great tribulation, the Parousia, and the millennial reign of Christ. The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey is a classic example of this interpretive approach. Even if not stated explicitly, in this interpretive worldview, wars and displacement are means through which God fulfills God’s plan for the world. Human and nonhuman creations are instrumentalized as tools. The suffering, dehumanization, and destruction of the many for the sake of the elected few is normalized. Funds flood in for militarization, political propaganda, and campaigns to push the region of North Africa and West Asia to the brink of explosion. This worldview is structured around a binary opposition between us and them, good and evil, with the assured presumption that “we” are in the right and everything that is not “us” is evil that needs to be tamed, if not completely eliminated. 

The question of how the Bible relates to modern-day politics is a challenging one. If allegorical interpretation turns away from the political or social realities of the readers of the Bible, focusing primarily on the “spiritual” meaning of the text, dispensationalist interpretations impose a rigid political agenda under the assumption that the biblical texts are predicting future world events that have been predetermined by God. Of course, biblical texts were often intertwined with the politics of their day. They offered perspectives on social, political, and mundane matters. Thus, it is natural for contemporary readers to ask about the relationship between the biblical texts and modern-day politics and social issues. Furthermore, granted that faith communities continue to read the Bible as scripture with the assumption that it continues to offer theological insight and ethical reflections, some sort of symbolic reading that transcends the historical gap between the text and the reader is inevitable. 

The starting point for interpreters of the Bible is to acknowledge the historical and cultural gap between the context of the texts and their readers across the centuries. We can consider reading the Bible as if we are reading someone else’s mail. Despite the continuous nature of some aspects of the social and political struggles that shaped the biblical texts, their differences with the world beyond them are also evident. The social and political realities of the sixth century BCE or the first century CE should not be simply transposed to the social and political realities of the twenty-first century. Faithful interpretation of the Bible asks two questions: What did these texts mean to their first audience? And what do they mean in our contemporary contexts, granted the recognition of the gap that we just named? The Bible is a child of its culture. Any theological and ethical engagement with it in relation to contemporary questions and challenges requires two postures: sympathy and criticism, suspicion and trust. The pages of the Bible are filled with harmful ideologies, but also filled with messages of hope, mutuality, goodness, peace, and justice. For contemporary readers to make sense of the biblical traditions, they need to learn how to travel to the world of the text, and they need to acquire the skills of discernment around continuity and discontinuity. Taking the Bible at face value is not the faithful way to read it. Engaging the Bible critically is not a sign of arrogance. A serious way of engaging the Bible treats the Bible as an other that should not be idealized or demonized. This other is welcome but not at the expense of the self. Encountering this other is revealing and should not be submerged under the self. 

The Bible Is Full of Diversity; How Do We Discern? 

We are accustomed to treating the Bible as a book. But in reality the Bible is more like a library or an archive that contains not only various genres but also diverse theological perspectives that sometimes complement one another and in many other cases stand in tension with one another. Yes, there is a continuity within each Testament and across the Testaments, but the overwhelming nature of the biblical texts is that of diversity and paradox. The biblical texts were written, redacted, and compiled over a long time. They engaged a changing world. They spoke of a relational God who is active in the world but also allows for human freedom and imagination. The biblical texts also reflect various social groups who have had diverse experiences of the world and the divine. Social location and political identities have shaped the theologies embedded in the biblical texts. No wonder, then, that we end up with disputes among interpreters of the Bible. These disputes are not only a result of the experiences that shaped the readers but are also a result of the diversity of these scriptures themselves. 

The biblical texts, for example, will have competing views around the relationship between the people and the land. Do they possess it by dispossessing its native inhabitants, as we see in the book of Joshua? Or do they live peacefully with the inhabitants of the land, sharing resources and looking after one another despite their ethnic and religious differences, as we see in the ancestral stories in the book of Genesis? What are the boundaries of the land? Does God use the empire to fulfill the divine will as we see in some of the prophetic texts? Or does God bring judgment over the empire as we see in other prophetic texts and an apocalyptic book like Daniel or Revelation? Does God condone violence as we see in many biblical passages, or does God achieve divine plans utilizing nonviolence? Does God favor one group of people over against other peoples or is God a universal deity that relates to all creation in diverse ways that do not preclude peculiarity? 

These texts were not envisioned to be brought together in a collection when their authors or traditionists composed or preserved them. They are together as a result of a long process of redaction, compilation, and canonization. This is a challenge that faced biblical interpreters once these books existed side by side. Interpreters tried to make sense of their diverse perspectives on the same issue. The majority of approaches over the past two centuries have shed much ink into harmonizing diverse biblical theologies. Diversity was seen as a threat or a problem to be solved. Many recent approaches that resulted from modern and postmodern readings of the Bible started to approach diversity in scriptures as something to be celebrated and not an issue that needs to be eliminated.

Given the diversity of theological claims and ethical commitments embedded in the biblical traditions, readers of the Bible will need to land somewhere as they navigate contemporary ethical and theological dilemmas and debates. How would a reader of the Bible discern what to believe and how to live in relation to the biblical witness and the realities of the modern world? 

1. A starting point is to ask about the function of these texts in the lives of the communities that have produced them. Why did they write them, and why did they preserve them? 

2. It is crucial to acknowledge that humans conditioned by time and space will always be limited by the horizon of our context. All readers of the Bible have presuppositions. No one reads the Bible as a blank page. All readers of the Bible are biased, selective, and inconsistent. The presuppositions condition the approaches we take to the Bible. Having presuppositions and biases makes the readers of the Bible selective about what they resonate with and what they feel uncomfortable with. Reading the Bible through our cultural contexts is not something that we should try to suppress. It is not opposed to being a faithful interpreter of the Bible. Instead, it is an honest approach to the Bible. Yet even though we cannot escape being conditioned by our context, we should still examine and be critical of what we bring with us to the text. Reading the biblical texts is a dynamic process that entails an ongoing journey of transformation. 

3. What are the theological or ethical voices with which the reader feels right at home? Why? What happens if one listens to the uncomfortable voice? The benefit of this dialectical approach is that even if one ends up choosing one voice because it is impossible to represent all voices at once, one’s choice will be nuanced and sympathetic even if one disagrees with other views. 

Readers of the Bible do not read the biblical texts in a vacuum. Aside from personal and cultural presuppositions, there are historical events and changes that complicate the processes of interpretation. Adherents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam read overlapping scriptural narratives and traditions. The interrelated histories of these religious traditions have witnessed various harmful approaches toward the other religious groups, including antisemitism, islamophobia, or persecution of minoritized Christians. Reading scriptures in light of these complicated histories is a perilous but critical process. Ideologies of sexism, racism, homophobia, ablism, colonialism, and anthropocentrism, to name a few, have misused the Bible and other theological traditions to exclude anyone who does not fit in what has been perceived to be part of the constructed normativity. Even if readers of the Bible try to simply engage it for spiritual nurturement, the harm and destruction that have been done over the centuries in the name of God will continue to haunt them, exposing the horrors that others have experienced. 

In light of interreligious conflicting readings of the scriptural traditions and oppressive ideologies, when one encounters diverse biblical perspectives and seeks to discern how to live ethically in this broken world, one should ask if their reading and appropriation of scriptures are consistent with the good news. Many Christians use the teachings of Jesus as the compass, the center, the lens through which they discern. I prefer the language of the good news, lower case, so it would not be confused with the gospel, because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have their peculiar versions of the good news. Thus, in an interreligious setting, one should slow down and reflect on their engagement with scriptures, wondering if it brings good news not only to oneself but also to others. Is one’s reading a life-giving and inclusive one or an exclusionary and oppression-perpetuating reading? 

Much of the biblical traditions emerged out of contexts of empire. Some of the biblical traditions were accommodating to the empire and its ideologies, while the majority of the biblical texts reflect subversive or confrontational resistance by the powerless against the hegemony of the empire. The texts of the powerless became the texts of the empire when Christianity and the empire became conflated. Reading and appropriating the biblical traditions in a contemporary theological or ethical debate should always ask about power relations in the texts and among the diverse readings of the texts. The texts that were meant to resist the empire have now become the very texts that the empire uses to suppress, dispossess, displace, act violently toward, and control the oppressed. Analyses of power relations within the texts are as crucial as exposing and reflecting on power relations among reading communities. Here, employing an intersectional lens to reading the Bible would be extremely helpful and illuminating. How are different parts of identity at interplay, conflict, or shape the politics and ethics of the texts and their interpretive communities? What do these texts say to the powerful? What do they offer the powerless? How is power measured? Who gets to decide who is powerful and who is powerless? Is powerlessness real or imagined, historical or ongoing? Does one ignore their privilege as they read the text and cast themselves in the place of the oppressed while they are the oppressors? Is there a way to acknowledge complexity and escape binary oppositions and still become an ally to the oppressed? 

A critical question that we should continue to ask is what is the ethical responsibility toward the other who is constructed in the texts and the other who is constructed in the process of interpretation. Is one reading out of fear, bigotry, and selfishness, or is one reading out of love, a desire to heal, and construct a new reality with the other? Does our interpretation continue to make the other voiceless and invisible? Does our interpretation essentialize those who are different from what has been perceived as the norm? Does our interpretation explicitly or implicitly exclude others, demonize them, and condone physical or verbal violence against them? Does our interpretation recognize their humanity and seek the well-being of the other despite the differences? 

That Feels Overwhelming. Where Do We Go from Here?

All these interpretive questions may feel overwhelming. One might even argue that preaching and teaching the Bible at the church should be simpler than this. Others who genuinely care about the world feel hopeless in the face of the enormity of suffering and the complexity of history. The biblical witness has never been simplistic. The Bible itself is very complex. One may want to opt for simplicity because they can afford it or because they want to numb themselves in the church. But worship is not about escaping reality or affirming familiarity because the truth is uncomfortable or too complicated. The biblical traditions witness to a God who chooses to be involved in this complicated world. The core of the Christian witness is that of incarnation, an embodied divine relationship with a broken world that longs for love, restoration, and healing. 

At the heart of the biblical witness is the covenantal relationship between God and the world. Exclusionary perspectives and inclusive perspectives on this covenantal relationship may participate in perpetuating violence in the world. Exclusionary perspective finds self-assertion and safety by claiming to be the only way to God. Rejection of the other is an attempt to have control over God and the world. And the only way for the other to be welcomed is for them to convert, assimilate, and become like us. An inclusive perspective tries to deconstruct exclusionary perspectives by eliminating boundaries altogether. This perspective tries to perpetuate tolerance by minimizing difference and peculiarity. What is needed in interpretive processes that are interreligiously constructive is to negotiate sameness and difference in ways that allow for the self and the other to be seen as equals in a mutual relationship of giving and receiving as they seek to relate to the divine and the world around them. 

The covenantal relationship also helps faith communities and readers of the Bible to navigate painful realities in the world. In this covenantal relationship, the powerless is not voiceless or powerless. Instead, they recover their agency when they cry out prayers of lament. Their lament is sometimes directed toward God and other times toward humans who have afflicted them with immeasurable suffering. Thus, the covenantal relationship holds God accountable, convicts the oppressor to repent, and empowers the powerless as they seek to restore their agency. It is in light of this relationship that one should reflect on how to preach the Old Testament or the Bible as a whole in a way that empowers the powerless, calls on the oppressor to be transformed, and urges God to do God’s part in transforming the brokenness of this world that is plagued with hatred and violence and that longs to wholeness, healing, justice, and harmony.