Religious Terror and the Prophetic Voice of Reason: Unmasking Our Myths of Righteousness

Abstract

In a post 9/11 world where large-scale violence against civilian populations is ever more being justified through fundamentalist interpretations of Sacred Scripture, it is a moral imperative that religious communities establish a basis for some kind of objective criteria to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate interpretations of their sacred texts. While there has been much focus in the United States on the issue of Islamic extremism, the fact remains that Christian fundamentalism is a growing phenomenon behind US military aggression. However, Christian fundamentalism is not only an inadequate response to Islamic extremism, but more importantly it is dangerous because both ideologies share a presumption of their own righteousness and each divinely sanctions its acts of aggression toward the other. As an interpretive starting point, historical criticism becomes a much needed “prophetic voice of reason,”19 whereby inspired texts are examined honestly and in light of the historical limitations they contain. A critical examination of biblical tradition, for example, will demonstrate that violence and cruelty are not tangential to biblical narratives, but intrinsic to them. Therefore, it is argued that the criteria to determine what is ethically demanded by the biblical texts must be sought in the future world toward which biblical narratives point, but in which they themselves do not fully participate. Only in this way can communities of faith begin to unmask the myth of their own righteousness and with it, the ambiguity that allows for the perpetration of untold violence and evil in the name of religion.