In this quirky tribute to the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, Harper’s Magazine offers a forum called “King James, Revised,” which includes three poems (Paul Guest’s on Acts 26:28 is my favorite), one dramatic retelling (John Banville re-imagines 2 Samuel 18), two essays (Marilynne Robinson weighs in on 1 Corinthians 15:51-52) and a diatribe by Benjamin Hale on why the Bible is “enraging” and “poison.”
The Benjamin Hale contribution is most at odds with the spirit of the forum. Is the anniversary of the most notable translation of the Bible the proper time for ideological hip-checking? Yet Hale decides to pick a fight with Psalm 8:4-8, which lays the groundwork for human exceptionalism, and point out how it’s at odds with a Darwinian ordering of the species.
Unfortunately, his claims exceed his scientific range. It’s a category error to assume that biology has everything to tell us about the relationships and hierarchies between species. It’s a hubristic problem to assume that when biology differs from the fields of philosophy and religion, that biology, a child of the sciences, necessarily trumps the soft thought of humanities.
If he truly wants to follow Darwinian thought into the alleyways beyond science, he has to confront that the survival of the fittest does not segue well into ideas about human rights or altruism. Or if the branching tree of biological life represents all that we need to know about the equivalency of animals, the implication would be that a snail rivals the value of a human being.
If you’d prefer a rich, thoughtful exploration of a Biblical passage, read Marilynne Robinson’s essay, “What We May Be,” which begins like this:
“The whole of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is beautiful. But just here there is a rise in the language, a pent joy, a vision under profound restraint, that is like nothing else. “Lo! I tell you a mystery,” as the Revised Standard Version has it, “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” Paul is telling his new converts that, at the end of things, we will be changed from human beings into human beings, from the first Adam to the second Adam . . . It is the voice of life, disheartened with itself and yearning for more life, for the other self or selves we know most intimately in their elusiveness.”
