A theologian and a Hebrew Bible expert examine the motivation of the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby.
Most people who keep up with the news know about Hobby Lobby's law suit over whether business owners whose religious convictions forbid participating in the part of Obamacare that requires the business to cover contraceptives. They won the Supreme Court case.
What most Americans don't know is that Hobby Lobby is owned by the Green family, worth approximately four billion dollars, and that they are involved in other religious endeavors such as a Bible curriculum for the public schools and the construction of the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC, near the mall.
Authors Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden are both religious educators, Moss a professor of theology and Baden a professor of the Hebrew Bible at Yale. They are careful not to condemn Steve Green (chairman of Hobby Lobby) and his sincere religious beliefs. But they have some objections, such as Green's reluctance to share the 40,000 antiquities that will or have been donated to the Museum of the Bible with experts in the field. Green wants the Bible to speak for itself and has passed on anecdotes claiming that it has converted several atheists and agnostics. Green also claims the museum is and will be nonsectarian. The Vatican and a Jewish collection of antiquities concerning the Old Testament have been given room on the fourth floor of the recently opened Museum of the Bible. But the president of the museum says he will not tolerate any Catholic “goofiness”.
Another problem Moss and Baden have with the museum is that it centers on the King James Bible and has a definite Protestant bent. It appears to skip a thousand years of Bible history, jumping form the Old Testament to the Protestant Reformation. You can't talk about the Bible without giving Emperor Constantine his due. When Constantine converted in the early Fourth Century, he called Catholic bishops together at the Nicean Council to urge them to come up with a canon law for their faith. At the time Arianism, a sect of Christianity, claimed Christ was not divine but a created being. This led to the creation of the New Testament, which took about a hundred years to formulate. The Arians hung in there for about forty years. The orthodox bishops won out with traditional “holy” texts, such as the gospels (anonymous BTW) and St. Paul's letters winning out.
I thought it was strange that Moss and Baden referred to Bart Erhman, author of JESUS INTERRUPTED, as an agnostic. He is a former evangelical minister who now claims he was taught that the apostles did not believe Jesus was God and that St. Paul was a heretic.
Moss and Baden do argue that experts should be given access to the antiquities and different interpretations, including the Mormons and the gnostic gospels, should be given room at the museum. This would make the impact of the Bible even greater and spur discussion.
Green also argues that America was established as a Christian nation and Moss and Baden don't have too much of a problem with that contention. But the First Amendment is pretty clear that a religion is not allowed to impose itself on American citizens. Yes, you can worship a golden calf if you want, but there is no such thing as a state religion, which the Green family seems to think is praiseworthy. Also, a number of our founding fathers (Franklin and Jefferson especially) were Deists (God created the world, then left) and Washington, who was a deacon in several churches, hardly ever attended Sunday services, and when he did, refused to kneel.
This could have been a fascinating book, but the authors are too worried about appearing biased and leave out a lot of fascinating material.
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