Media coverage of the Atlanta shooter has highlighted issues of anti-Asian prejudice in America and abuse of women. Sometimes it has also noted the shooter’s church upbringing and how he claimed to be motivated by a desire to destroy the sources of his temptation. I address this briefly in this video; if you prefer the written version, it appears below the video.
Media coverage of the Atlanta shooter has highlighted issues of anti-Asian prejudice in America and abuse of women. Sometimes it has also noted the shooter’s church upbringing and how he claimed to be motivated by a desire to destroy the sources of his temptation.
Anti-Asian prejudice in the U.S. is not a new thing. My brother’s wife, in California, is from China, but until 1948 marriage between whites and people of Asian descent was illegal in California. As for anti-Asian Bible interpretation in the U.S., one need only consider treatment of the “kings of the east” in Revelation 16:12: over a century ago, many Western interpreters viewed these kings as the Turks—even though Revelation was originally addressed to churches in—Turkey. After the breakup of the Turkish Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, a popular interpretation was that they represented imperial Japan. After World War II, interpreters settled on Communist China, comparing Revelation’s “great red dragon.” In the 1990s, they suddenly became Saddam Hussein. What at least most of these interpretations share in common is a fear of Asian powers.
But we need to separate such prejudicial interpretations from the Bible itself. Every or nearly every writer of the Bible was ethnically Asian, growing up in the Middle East or, by the division of continents we have inherited in the West from the Greeks, western Asia. Most of the Bible took place in western Asia or northeast Africa. In subsequent centuries, the church was established in western Asia and east Africa long before it was established in the northern Europe from which most of my ancestors descend.
As for misogynistic use of Scripture, Beth Moore has recently and rightly exposed that evil publicly, and many have complained about it for such a long time that it may not merit much comment. What merits more comment is the shooter’s reported idea that he had to eradicate the cause of lust, since Jesus actually did teach about that subject. Yet what Jesus taught is the exact opposite of what the shooter allegedly thought.
Widespread non-Jewish values in the Roman empire viewed lust as normal and healthy, but free males commonly sexually exploited others, both women and boys. Many ancient Jewish texts warn against being seduced by women’s beauty and conservative Judean culture required women to cover their heads. In Matthew 5:28, Jesus places the responsibility for sexual purity not on the object of desire, not (in that example) the woman being reduced to a sex object, but on the desirer, the one thinking of her in those terms: “Whoever looks on a woman to desire to sleep with her.” In context, Jesus is explaining how God’s law goes for the heart: not simply you shall not kill (5:21), but you shall not even want to kill (5:22). Not only shall you not commit adultery (5:27), but you shall not want to commit adultery. He is not saying, “If you’re going to lust, you may as well indulge fully.” He is saying: Do not reduce other human beings to sexual objects rather than persons in God’s image of dignity equal to your own.
In fact, Jesus is continuing another Jewish teaching from earlier in the Bible. The seventh of the ten commandments says, “You shall not commit adultery.” But the tenth of the ten commandments says, “You shall not covet—desire to have—your neighbor’s spouse, or property, or anything else.” The Greek translation for “covet” here is exactly the word that Jesus uses when he says not to look on someone to desire them: don’t want to sleep with your neighbor’s wife.
The commandment is not speaking about respecting beauty or pretending that one lacks biological passion; it is speaking about respecting others and their relationships and not being greedy as if others are there only for our own benefit. It is not about the spark that lights up in our brain when our eyes see what we experience as pleasant, such as a healthy athlete’s fitness, the face of a good friend, or a majestic sunset. It goes back to what Jesus regards as a summary of the commandments: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Someone who treats one’s neighbor as of worth equal to oneself will not treat them as a sex object for one’s own gratification.
And now, to those who like to criticize the Bible because of the way some people abuse it: Grow up. You know very well that anybody can quote any of us or any writing outside its context. People today thrive on sound bites out of context and so misrepresent what others say and think, and it’s exactly the same when people treat the Bible this way.
But to my fellow Christians who don’t take time to read and learn the Bible in its context, rather than simply verses here and there: context matters. That includes both what it says around those verses, and the historical setting those passages address. Please, please, please, get the context. In matters such as slavery, misogyny, the kings of the east, or even the meaning of lust—it eventually often makes a difference between life and death.
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