The Bible is not absent from this transcultural, transhistorical pool of sources, though neither is it particularly conspicuous. I would tentatively argue that the UU church’s relationship with the Bible, a relationship that is defined by the tension between seeing the Bible as “just another book” and privileging the Bible by considering it apart from other sources, allows the church to negotiate its post-Christian identity. Over six weeks of observations, the Bible has been used twice—once in a song that paraphrased some passages from the lesser prophets, and once in a sermon that referenced the story of Adam and Eve. The author of the sermon, however, offers a different interpretation of this biblical myth than one would expect to hear at an orthodox Christian church. Dennis Hamilton, who is a UU reverend in Texas, dismisses the God of the Old Testament as an “old, tribal god with the personality of a tribal chieftain, full of ego and needful of praise and obeisance.”
The story of Adam and Eve, Hamilton suggests in his “naturalistic” reinterpretation, is not about punishment or sin but about “human consciousness.” The author writes, “Humans were not always so intelligent…yet had begun to think rationally, to think symbolically. They awakened to their existential situation, that they were mortal, that they would die eventually, and so they began to wish otherwise.” God’s “punishment” of pain and toil, then, is inverted in this ideological program into a reward, albeit a subtle one: “We don’t like pain, even though pain warns us about threats to our bodies, and without pain we would soon succumb to some disease and die. Pain is our friend, yet we want to do away with it. The same is true for work.” Hamilton first establishes critical distance between himself as a reader and the Bible as a text, which in turn allows him the freedom to commit to more radical revaluations of Bible stories.
But is there a limit to interpretation, or at least a uniquely UU hermeneutic for reading the Bible? Is there such a thing as a uniquely UU approach to the Bible? I want to consider the way UU doctrine-against-doctrine might limit, at least partially, the possible interpretations of the Bible, or at least if there is such a thing as a coherent vision of the Bible at First UU Springfield.
