The weaponisation of Scripture
The weaponisation of Scripture
Helen Paynter considers how Scripture has been weaponised throughout history and to this day.
1. Give me this power
“Give me this power”.
So spoke a certain Simon Magus, as he watched the apostles wielding the power of the Holy Spirit (Acts 8). His request rewarded him with a rebuke from Peter, and the enduring shame of having an ecclesiastical crime (Simony) named after him.
While, strictly, Simony is about the selling or buying of clerical office, its namesake’s original instinct was even baser – the desire to use spiritual power for his own advantage. In my own research over the last ten years I have seen this instinct at work in what I term the “weaponisation of Scripture”.
The Bible has two types of power. As a Christian, I believe that God speaks through it and uses it to change lives. I term this “vertical power” – it is transcendent. The other power, operating “horizontally”, is not derived from God, but depends upon the trust and confidence which believers place upon the text. And this can result in the weaponisation of Scripture, where someone (usually with a measure of spiritual authority) preys upon a believer’s desire to be obedient to God’s word, and manipulates its presentation to them in order to manipulate them.
The 500th anniversary of the publication of a banned Bible might remind us that a very powerful way to control people with Scripture is to prevent or restrict their access to it. That facilitates the control of the narrative. Plantation owners, for example, handed their slaves Bibles with the exodus account completely excised, lest they learn of God’s active intervention on behalf of another slave people. Or, to use another example, the Magnificat has been banned many times on account of its revolutionary claim that God will humble the arrogant and bring down the rich.
I’m off to re-read Mary’s song now.
2. The power of translation
Previously we discussed the censoring of Scripture in order to control others. Now we will consider how translations themselves can be made for ideological purposes.
The years between the publication of the Tyndale New Testament (1526) and the King James Bible (Authorised Version, 1611) saw a flurry of English Bibles, each with its own particular translational choices to reflect the ecclesial or political preferences of the group that commissioned it. The Great Bible (1539) intentionally retranslated some of Tyndale’s “low church” choices. The Geneva Bible of 1560 reversed some of these changes and removed sacramental language to suit the Calvinism of the Dissenters. (For example, in the Great Bible, Acts 1:20 refers to a “Bysshoprycke”. The Geneva Bible translates this as “charge”, with the marginal gloss “office and ministry”.) Many of these changes were reversed again in the Bishops’ Bible (1568), which was authorised for pulpit use in the Church of England.
Some more contemporary examples could be offered. The English Standard Version of the Bible (ESV, 2001) is based on the Revised Standard Version (RSV) with reference to the original-language texts. It was published in 2001, to provide a very literal translation and resist certain liberalising (especially “feminist”) moves in other translations. But it is interesting to note the changes that the ESV chose to make to its “starter-text”.
Romans 16 contains some good examples. In the RSV Phoebe (v.1) is a “deaconess” (a position of some authority within the church). But the ESV opts for “servant”, even though it retains the RSV’s description of Epaphras as a “minister” (Col 1:7) for the masculine version of that word. And in verse 7, Junia is described by the RSV as “a man of note among the apostles”. By the time the ESV was produced, it was clear that Junia is a female name, and the ESV described her as “well-known to the apostles”.
It is important to note that no translation is free of bias, whether deliberate or not. But the manipulation of translations is one way to exercise control over others.
3. Words as weapons
Having considered the power that translational choices can exercise, we will turn to a more overtly weaponising use of Scripture – the presentation of verses or themes in ways which are entirely decontextualised.
Because they attacked the people of God from the rear, the Amalekites acquire a paradigmatic status in the Old Testament. They, along with their memory, were to be eradicated (Deut 25:17-19, 1 Sam 15:3). The significance of this instruction deserves more space than I can give it here, but one thing ought to be abundantly clear: context tells us it is not a transferable instruction. But this text was used to justify the Crusades, the Native American clearances, and the Rwandan genocide. More recently it was used by the government of Israel as part of the rationale for their action against Gaza in 2023.
A second example might be found in the way that certain characters from the Old Testament are held up as heroes despite very problematic behaviour. For example, Jephthah (Jdgs 11) was a war-lord who rashly vowed to God that he would sacrifice whatever came out of his house to celebrate his victory. Even though it was his daughter who came dancing to meet him, he nonetheless went ahead with her killing. The context of this is that Judges charts the moral decline of Israel in the days before the king. But this text has been used to justify overlooking the abusive conduct of leaders who appear to be doing “great things for God”.
A third example is the prophet Malachi’s condemnation of divorce because – here’s the context – the men of his time were harming their wives, abandoning them into situations of extreme vulnerability (Mal 2:16). This verse has been used to tell women experiencing appalling abuse that under no circumstances may they divorce their husbands.
Much violence has been endorsed with the context-less wielding of Bible verses.
4. Communities of Resistance
We've explored how decontextualising Bible verses can lead to very harmful weaponisation and in this final reflection we will consider how the unilateral focus upon one element of a complex theme can also be harmful.
Should Christians submit to the authorities? In Romans 13, Paul says so. ‘Whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment’ (v.2). This passage is beloved of certain political actors in our present moment, particularly in the USA, who seek to use it to enforce compliance with what many see as a corrupt and unjust regime. It was a convenient go-to text for certain Christian commentators after the recent killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, for example. But scripture is by no means univocal on this matter. From those who disobeyed the Pharoah and Nebuchadnezzar, to the actions of the apostles, including Paul himself who died under a Roman axe, obedience to a corrupt state is considered disobedience to God. To represent one side of the matter as if it is Scripture’s only word on the subject is to weaponise the text.
How can we become resistant to the weaponisation of Scripture in the ways that I have outlined over the last four reflections? And, for that matter, how can we resist the temptation to jump on the weaponisation bandwagon? The more we are immersed in God’s word, and enculturated with the great story of Scripture, the better we will be able to “smell a rat” when harmful interpretations are put to us. But this is long slow work. What can we do in the meantime?
One of the most effective things we can do is to read Scripture in community. Now, it is by no means certain that an entire community will automatically be resistant to narratives of weaponisation, but groups may contain wisdom that challenges or attenuate certain extremes. “Community”, of course, extends beyond the local church, too. It includes the voices of the global church, of the historical church, and of those who are set aside by the church to study Scripture deeply.
No one voice should have privilege. And this is key to resisting the weaponisation of Scripture.
