Haunted by Paradise: A Philosopher’s Quest for Biblical Answers to Key Moral Questions

By James Bernard Murphy and Nicholas P. Wolterstorff

The Bible today is weaponized by both liberals and conservatives, each side cherry-picking their favorite verses. Have you ever wondered why the Bible lends itself to supporting contradictory positions in moral debates--why even the devil quotes Scripture? If so, you will enjoy this book.
Haunted by Paradise reveals the unity and coherence of the Bible in the light of paradise. The Bible begins in Eden and ends in the new Jerusalem--in between, the Bible is haunted by the memory of paradise lost and the hope for paradise regained.
With paradise as the interpretive key, Murphy unlocks biblical ethics. He shows that there is no Old Testament ethics or New Testament ethics--only a unified biblical ethics. In sixteen short chapters, this book addresses urgent moral questions about issues ranging from capital punishment to war, including divine justice, homosexuality, marriage, nature, racism, patriarchy, and work. In each chapter, Murphy shows how the Bible negotiates the tension between divine ideals and human realities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jan 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781725269071

James Bernard Murphy

James Bernard Murphy is Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, where he has taught since 1990. He is the author of several books on political theory and ethics, most recently How to Think Politically (with Graeme Garrard) from Bloomsbury Publishers and Your Whole Life: Beyond Childhood and Adulthood from University of Pennsylvania Press. He is now writing a book titled The Quest to Become Like God: What It Means to Be Human. At Dartmouth, Professor Murphy teaches courses on biblical ethics, political theory, and jurisprudence.

Book preview

Introduction: The Original Utopia

The Bible is a book about the holiness of God in relation to the potential holiness of human beings. The whole message of the Bible is captured in one verse—all the rest is commentary: Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy (Lev 19 : 2 ; 1 Pet 1 : 16 ). What does it mean to be holy? Certainly to be holy means to be righteous, but the ideal of holiness transcends ideals of moral or political justice. To be holy is to be pure and sacred, that is, set apart from the profane. God’s holiness is inseparable from his awful majesty and terrible power. God’s holiness cannot be reduced to his righteousness even though his holiness manifests itself to human beings primarily as his righteousness: The Holy God shows himself holy by righteousness (Isa 5 : 16 ; Rev 15 : 4 ).

In this book, I shall explore biblical righteousness rather than biblical holiness—or rather, we shall explore holiness insofar as it can be understood as righteousness. Our moral and political concepts do not come from the Bible but from ancient Greek philosophers. The Bible has a code of holiness but no code of ethics or politics. Still, ever since Jews and Christians first learned some Greek philosophy, they have been asking: What does the Bible teach us about moral and political issues?

To ask Greek philosophical questions of a Jewish religious book is to invite myriad misunderstandings. Biblical holiness cannot be reduced to moral and political righteousness. Nonetheless, whatever the dangers, ask we must, because the Bible lives only in dialogue with our contemporary questions. Even though the Bible is not a book of moral or political theory, it has long shaped our moral and political practices—for better and for worse. For that reason alone, we need to understand the moral and political ideals of the Bible.

Biblical scholars are focused on questions of exegesis: What did a given biblical text mean to its authors at the time it was written? In this book, I shall be focused less on the explication of biblical texts and more on their application to contemporary issues: What does the Bible mean to us today? Meaning is a relationship between the past and the present, so I attempt to understand biblical texts both in their original meaning and in relation to our contemporary concerns. I attempt to create a dialogue between the ancient world of the Bible and the contemporary world, focusing on questions of permanent moral and political importance.

To answer our moral and political questions about the Bible, I try to understand each relevant verse of the Bible in relation to the whole. What is the nature of the Bible as a literary whole? Because the Bible is based on a contrast between divine ideals and human realities, I propose to compare the Bible to a literary utopia. All literary utopias are structured around a focused contrast between an ideal society and a real one. Yet, for many modern readers, the Bible is more dystopian than utopian. Not only is the Bible replete with graphic descriptions of murder, incest, rape, torture, slavery, holy war, child sacrifice, and hellfire, but all of these horrors are permitted, condoned, or even commanded by God. Responsible parents have never permitted their young children to read the Bible—except in thoroughly bowdlerized and sanitized versions. For many enlightened, secular liberals, in particular, the Bible is a barbaric nightmare from which the world is only now beginning to awake. Even many religious Jews and Christians today find much of the Bible to be just plain embarrassing, if not appalling. No wonder biblical visions of eternal damnation have long inspired the dystopian imagination, from Dante’s Inferno to Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit.

Yet, scattered throughout the war zone of biblical violence, we find islands of peace; the desert of biblical barbarism contains many small but inspiring oases. The beautiful garden of Eden, the harmony on Noah’s ark, the moral ideals of the Decalogue, the consolations of the Psalms, God’s everlasting fidelity to Israel, the messianic visions of the prophets, the radiant loving-kindness of Jesus, and the splendor of the new Jerusalem. The various biblical visions of a peaceable kingdom in which swords are beaten into plowshares have inspired the utopian imagination from Jewish Essenes and Christian monks to modern pacifists, vegetarians, socialists, and the founders of the United Nations. Indeed, the modern legal culture of human rights, our latest utopian venture, is undoubtedly inspired by biblical ideals.

It makes no sense, however, to sharply divide utopia and dystopia. The whole purpose of the utopian imagination is to contrast our dystopian reality with a utopian ideal. Mere critique, attack, or abuse of one’s own society is tiresome and largely ineffectual. Utopias offer not just an attack on a particular society but also a vision of an attractive alternative. No one abandons a leaky boat until a better one comes along. Plato’s Republic, especially book five, offers a vision of an ideal society that is simultaneously a far-reaching attack on the Athens of his day. Similarly, Thomas More’s Utopia begins with a bitter condemnation of the injustices of Tudor England and then describes a society in which all of those injustices are avoided by careful social planning. The great utopias are not meant to provide a blueprint for radical social engineering but to widen the imagination of political possibility, thereby suggesting that many personal vices could be ameliorated by better social institutions.

The modern dystopias of Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell are a reaction to the destructive utopian politics of twentieth-century communism and fascism. As Nicholai Berdyaev observed: before the twentieth century, the challenge was how to achieve utopia; now the challenge is how to prevent utopia from being fully realized. Utopias hold up ideal mirrors to existing societies; dystopias hold up frightening mirrors. Utopia alerts us to the possibilities for a better society; dystopia alerts us to the possibilities for a worse one. Dystopia reminds us that our existing societies are in some respects already utopian. Utopias, like dystopias, stem from a contrast between the good and the bad, the actual and the possible, the ideal and the real.

If not simply dystopian, then surely the Bible seems anti-utopian. After all, the utopian projects of human beings in the Bible are always condemned as prideful: Eve’s hope to be like God, knowing good and evil (Gen 3:5) and the human attempt to build a tower to heaven (Gen 11:4) are met with divine punishment. All biblical utopias are created by God: woe to the human being who attempts to usurp God’s utopian projects (Isa 14:14–15). He is a jealous God who claims exclusive rights to authorize all utopia-making. Nonetheless, he is also a generous God who enlists human cooperation in his utopia-making. In this sense, the Bible is indeed the source of all anti-utopian thought—if utopia is taken to mean a purely human attempt to create paradise. The Bible warns us of the grave dangers of attempting to build utopia—dangers fully realized in twentieth-century totalitarian utopias. Biblical utopias are recalled, longed for, expected, and watched for, but not by humans made. God’s monopoly on utopia, however, does not imply that biblical utopias play no role in human politics, as we shall see.

In what sense is the Bible utopian? Historians have long noted the utopian elements of the Bible—especially the visions of paradise and the millennium, but also the promised land, flowing with milk and honey. There is no doubt the Bible, like the myth of a golden age, has been an inspiration for literary utopias. Indeed, the biblical visions of Eden and the promised land are the source of geographical utopias, such as Thomas More’s Utopia or Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland—just as the biblical longing for the messianic age and the millennium are the source of futuristic utopias, such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

My claim is that the Bible as a whole has the structure of a literary utopia. The Bible holds up a mirror of divine ideals to human reality. The utopian visions of the Bible are forms of critique and judgment on human failings. The Bible is the story of the vexed relationship between divine ideals and human reality. God creates us in paradise and the memory of that utopia haunts all the failed attempts of God’s people to live in harmony with themselves, with others, and with their God. Certainly, the Bible is much more than a literary utopia: it contains chronicles and history, descriptions of priestly ritual, prophetic condemnation, legal regulations, and even love poetry. But at the center of the Bible is the contrast of ideal visions and sordid realities, of divine invitation and human rejection, of what we are meant to be and what we are. These are all devices of literary utopias.

The best literary utopias adopt an ironic stance to existing society. They are not intended to be read literally as a recipe for building a perfect society, but neither are literary utopias mere idle fantasies or wish fulfillment. Utopias are designed to hold up a mirror to society so we can see its imperfections more clearly. Like a mirror, utopias turn everything backwards; or like a photographic negative, they bring out the dark side. A utopia is written neither for adoption nor amusement: it is meant to make us think about the nature and causes of the injustices in our society; it is intended to shake us from complacency about the evils around us.

I will argue that the utopian visions of the Bible serve the same function. The Bible is a tale of two divinely created utopias—the paradise of Eden and the paradise of the new Jerusalem. I use the word paradise to refer both to Eden and to heaven (the new Jerusalem) because Jesus does (Luke 23:43) and biblical writers do. We are created for Eden and we are destined for the new Jerusalem. In paradise, we find our beginning and our end. We are not meant to try to return to Eden, let alone build a new one. Indeed, the way back to Eden is deliberately blocked by divine command (Gen 3:24; cf. Rev 22:14). Similarly, the vision of the new Jerusalem is not meant to be a blueprint for a model city. Although some Christians have taken drastic measures to try to bring about the millennium, the end-of-days is not something we can accelerate. Rather, these biblical visions represent the breaking-through of God’s saving love into human history. Utopias are a standing rebuke to our complacency and failures. They forcibly remind us of the chasm between heaven and earth, between God’s ways and our ways.

The Bible is not merely one literary narrative among others; the Bible is the paradigm of Western literary narratives. A narrative, says Aristotle, is essentially a plot, that is, a device to unify a sequence of events into a whole with a beginning, middle, and end. Plots unify time by interweaving past, present, and future, so that the beginning foreshadows the end and the end recapitulates the beginning. In my beginning is my end and in my end is my beginning captures the essence of every literary narrative. The Bible is the master narrative of Western culture because it presents the entire history of the universe, from creation out of nothing to the end of the world, from Genesis to Apocalypse (Revelation). The Bible is a unified account of cosmic history with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. Literary theorist Frank Kermode, in his book The Sense of an Ending, sees the Bible as the paradigm of all narrative because even from the beginning there is the sense of an ending. According to Kermode, the most basic plot of all is the tick-tock of a clock: The tick, a humble Genesis; the tock, a feeble Apocalypse. The tick anticipates the tock, just as Genesis anticipates Apocalypse; the tock recapitulates the tick, just as Apocalypse recapitulates Genesis.

In literary narratives, beginnings and endings are especially important, for they give the whole a pleasing shape. An artful beginning foreshadows and anticipates the whole, just as an artful ending completes and recapitulates the whole. God even describes himself in narrative terms: I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end (Rev 22:13). In Genesis we find a paradise containing the tree of life (Gen 2:9) and in Revelation (Apocalypse) we return full circle to this paradise and the tree of life (Rev 2:7). Genesis thus foreshadows Revelation while Revelation recapitulates Genesis. The utopian dimension of the Bible centers on both paradises: the Eden of the beginning and the new Jerusalem at the end. The messianic visions of the prophets and the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus also refer explicitly to our beginning and our end. My approach to the Bible is both protological and eschatological: I shall be arguing throughout this book that we discern divine intentions most clearly in the utopian beginning and the utopian ending of the Bible. God is our beginning and our ending.

What makes beginnings and endings inherently divine? The Bible is the paradigm not only of historical narrative but also of biographical narrative. Every human life has the same structure as the biblical narrative: we cannot control our origin or our destiny but we can hope to give some shape to the messy middle. As Aristotle noted, all narratives are representations of human life because human lives have an inherently narrative structure. That is why we commonly distribute human actions and lives into the literary genres of comedy, tragedy, romance, or farce. When we attempt to explain ourselves to others, we tell a story. And that story interweaves our past, present, and future. Beginning with Rousseau, it has become a romantic ideal to live an authentic life, that is, to attempt to become the authors of our own lives.

Even though our lives do have a narrative structure, we cannot be the authors of our life story but at most its co-authors. None of us can experience—let alone author—our own births and deaths. Our origins and our ultimate destinations are beyond our own direct knowledge. We arrive at a particular time and place not of our choosing and make the best of it. We inherit a set of social roles and expectations that we can endorse or reject but cannot create. During our adulthood we are able to make our own choices and to edit and revise the ongoing story of our lives. But we can do nothing to revise the circumstances of our births and we can do little to shape the circumstances of our deaths—apart from attempting to take our own lives. Because I am not the author of my own beginning or ultimate end, birth and death are traditionally attributed to divine providence. In the biblical view, the middle of life belongs partly to us while births and deaths, the beginning and the end, belong to God (Exod 23:26; Acts 17:25–26).

The Bible is at once a historical and a biographical representation of human life in which God alone brings everything into being at the beginning and God alone brings everything to a close at the end. The messy middle of the Bible tells the story of how human beings have responded to our divine origin and divine destiny. God is the sole author of creation and apocalypse; human beings are at most co-authors of the long biblical story in between. Creation and apocalypse provide the normative ideals intended to guide everything else: we are meant to live remembering from whence we came and being mindful of where we are going.

As with any artful narrative, to make sense of the whole Bible we must be especially mindful of the beginning and the end. That the Bible begins in paradise and ends in paradise provides the key for understanding the messy middle. Biblical utopia gives us the interpretative key to biblical dystopia. Eden, the messianic visions of the prophets, the kingdom preached by Jesus, and the new Jerusalem are all repositories of divine ideals against which human realities are judged. As such, they occupy a privileged place in determining what the Bible teaches us.

The biblical descriptions of paradise at the beginning and at the end of history share many features but differ in some details. Where they differ, which vision should guide us? What is more biblically important: Our origin or our destination? The memory of Eden haunts the entire Bible (Isa 51:3; Rev 2:7) as does the hope for the coming messianic age. Nonetheless, the Bible is characterized more by expectation for the future than by remembrance of things past. Rather than being a book of nostalgia for paradise lost, the Bible is a book of hope for paradise regained. The relentlessly future-oriented modern West, with its cult of progress and utopian fantasy, can only be understood against the biblical longing for a redemptive future. The Bible teaches us to look for guidance less in our origin than in our destination. Visions of a messianic future and the new Jerusalem trump even the memory of Eden.

In what I have called the messy middle of the Bible, we find many evils—including patriarchy, slavery, war, punishment, polygamy, death, toil, and disease—all of them permitted by God. For many people, what is scandalous about the Bible is precisely God’s toleration of so many human evils. There is an old maxim of Roman law that whatever the sovereign permits, he commands. Should we conclude that God therefore commands and approves of all the evils he permits? The Roman maxim is simply false: every government permits myriad evils without commanding or approving of them. Rulers of all sorts permit many vices among their subjects simply because trying to remove all vices is not always feasible. Attempting to uproot some evils can cause even worse evils (Matt 13:29). God may well have good reasons for permitting many evils of which he strongly disapproves. We must be careful in making assumptions about what God favors judging by what he permits.

The false assumption that whatever God permits, he commands is the basis for most erroneous interpretations of biblical ethics. Just because God tolerates patriarchy or animal sacrifice or capital punishment does not imply that he approves of or endorses them. We must consult paradise to determine whether what God permits, he also commands.

One might well conclude the Bible offers us two codes of ethics: divine ideals revealed in paradise and divine accommodation to human sin elsewhere. Should we be guided by what God endorses or by what God merely tolerates? This contrast helps to explain why the Bible is so often quoted to support inconsistent ethical positions. Idealists quote divine ideals while realists quote divine permissions. The Bible makes sense only if we contrast God’s original plan for us to live in paradise with God’s later plan for us once we are expelled. Plan A is never revoked or replaced by Plan B—only placed on hold. Plan B, you might say, is always guided by the hope for the restoration of Plan A.

Ultimately, biblical ethics is found in the tension between what God intends for human beings and what God tolerates. Biblical ideals are not wishful thinking but a standing rebuke to human complacency and failure. At the same time, the Bible warns us that human beings will never be able to fully realize divine ideals. We cannot live in paradise; we also cannot live without it. Every chapter of this book attempts to negotiate the tension between what God intends and what he only tolerates. In the Conclusion, I shall consider what the Bible tells us about how to live between divine ideals and human realities. We must not ignore either pole of biblical ethics.

I have stressed the unity of the Bible because that unity can be difficult to discern in the wake of modern biblical scholarship, which has analyzed the Bible into scores of distinct authorial traditions. Not only are most of the seventy-three books of the Catholic Bible said to have different authors, but many of these individual books are said to have several authors: we now have many Moseses, many psalmists, many Isaiahs, and many Pauls. Whatever unity the Bible possesses is not authorial unity—there are simply too many authors over too many centuries and languages. The Bible gets its unity from its editors: the Bible is the first great masterpiece of editorial committee work in the Western tradition. Biblical scholars have revealed the work of these editors at every level of biblical language: splicing verses, combining precepts, arranging stories, shaping individual books, and setting the books in order. The true human authors of the Bible as we know it are its anonymous