II New Readings
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Introduction For the figures discussed in the first part of this book, the quest to establish their authority on a solid footing was only a preliminary step. But it was a crucial one. Their new visions of what constituted authoritative discourse opened up possibilities for reforming existing religious traditions and starting new ones. In some cases, such as the Church founded by Joseph Smith, the line between reformation and innovation was blurry from the start and has continued to remain so. There is still a lively discussion about the relationship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the broad Christian tradition. 1 For the purposes of this argument, however, Jan Shipps conclusion that the Mormons constitute a new religious tradition, distinct from their origins in Christianity, will be accepted as persuasive. 2 On their part, the mainstream Seventh-Day Adventist Church rejected every form of the Davidian sectarian movement, from Victor Houteff s original attempt to purify the Church through David Koresh s claim that he alone could reveal the contents of the sealed scroll mentioned in Revelation 5:1. The various forms of the Davidian movement became new religious groups despite their own intentions. 3 On the other hand, Anton LaVey set out from the beginning to found a new religion. As he thunders in The Satanic Bible, It has become necessary for a NEW religion, based on man s natural instincts, to come forth. THEY have named it. It is called Satanism. 4 Yet, as that statement suggests, LaVey could never quite shake off his reliance on Christianity as a foil. With his split from LaVey s Church of Satan, however, Michael Aquino went a long way toward removing the Temple of Set from the orbit of Christianity and establishing it as a new religion. As David Koresh s example demonstrates in particular, new visions of authority can provide extraordinary leverage for new readings of familiar texts. Without Koresh s identification of himself as the Lamb of God, his distinctive new reading of Revelation would simply have remained as one possible reading among many. It would have no claim to persuasiveness other than its own interior logic. But as the utterance of an individual who himself embodied a symbolic figure from the Bible, it gained
88 Reading and Writing Scripture in New Religious Movements substantial gravity. Ignoring it became tantamount to ignoring the will of God. Joseph Smith s new translation of the Bible was founded on a similar logic; it depended for its persuasiveness on an acceptance of Smith as God s chosen prophet in the latter days. Similarly, although he did not succeed in his efforts to change the course of the Temple of Set, Ronald Keith Barrett also sought to justify his new reading of Aquino s foundational text, The Book of Coming Forth by Night, by referring to a complex of visionary experiences that led to his Xem utterance. 5 The new visions that those individuals claimed to behold were what enabled them to speak with authority, and with some regularity what they spoke about was a new way of reading texts already accepted as authoritative, foundational, or scriptural. Although questions of legitimacy and authority are inextricably bound up with proposed new readings of familiar scriptural texts, the four chapters in this part turn their attention to selected new readings themselves. The Christian scriptures certainly provide a vast field of topics, events, individual figures, themes, and books for the reader to consider. And quite a few of them have been taken up by figures in new religious movements as being central to their articulation of their innovative religious messages. Rather than try to survey a full range of new readings of the Bible, the chapters in this part will focus on a limited number of topics, specifically creation, law, the life of Jesus, and the apocalypse of the book of Revelation. Each chapter will concentrate on the interpretations of its central topic generated by two different new religions. Accordingly, chapter four will focus on the interpretations of the biblical creation stories ventured by the Raëlian movement and the Unificationist movement. In both cases, the central movement texts 6 assert that a proper understanding of the creation story from Genesis will lead any reader to a dramatic reconception of the nature, meaning, and destiny of human life. Chapter five will move to a consideration of the appropriation and transformation of the Ten Commandments in two contemporary religious movements where race has been a central issue. The Holy Piby, one of the texts that inspired the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica in the 1930s, can be considered a selective retelling of the biblical story, including an account of creation and even the facts of the apostles. In one of its central sections the prophet Robert Athlyi Rogers receives a new set of Twelve Commandments for the children of Ethiopia. In The Holy Piby the biblical paradigm of a divinely approved figure receiving a set of commandments for a new community is more important than the specific content of the biblical commandments. That is even more the case in a text composed by white racial ideologue Ben Klassen to serve as the centerpiece of his new religion of Creativity, The White Man s Bible. Like Anton LaVey, Klassen is well aware of how
New Readings: Introduction 89 much of a provocation it is to entitle any new book a Bible. Also like LaVey, he is unable to carry his adoption of the literary forms of the Bible all the way through his own text. He does, however, deliver a list of 16 commands that define his new religion. Chapter six moves away from the Christian Old Testament to focus on two of the many different perspectives on the life of Jesus articulated within new religions. For the Church Universal and Triumphant, long under the guidance of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the so-called lost years of Jesus, between his childhood visit to the Jerusalem Temple and the beginning of his public career, hold a particular fascination. Prophet produced one volume that focused on recovering the history of those years and four others focused on Jesus s lost teachings. Expressing a similarly detailed interest in Jesus life, The Urantia Book, which presents itself as a revelation from a group of supernatural beings, devotes nearly eight hundred pages to a review of Jesus life and teachings. Each group ends up producing a new Jesus that fits securely within its overall message. Finally, chapter seven will focus on readings of Revelation in two new religions. The millennialist anticipation of the radical renovation of this world, most often through a catastrophic ending that presages a new beginning, is a biblical spark that has been fanned into searing flames in many new religious movements. The focus in chapter seven will be on how the leaders of the group known as Heaven s Gate used their readings of Revelation to develop their self-understandings and elaborate their understanding of the imminent transformation of the world and how teacher Chen of the Chen Tao ( True Way ) movement read the seven seals of the book of Revelation as indicating that the Great Tribulation was under way. If there is one thing that the extraordinarily diverse readings of the Bible contained in these four chapters have in common, it is the interpretive principle advocated by Anton Szandor LaVey that Satanists should seek the meanings behind the meanings. 7 These readings all challenge established understandings of what the texts in question really mean. Interpreters of the Bible in new religions have no interest in the simple profession of interpretive transparency that is even seen on bumper stickers, God said it; I believe it; That settles it. 8 The unanticipated appearance of novel, insurgent forms of authority imputes entirely new meanings to what God is claimed to have said in any given text. Even God may not be what he has long appeared to be, as in the Raëlian s contention that the term Elohim in the Hebrew Bible actually refers to those who come from the sky, who are a race of technologically advanced beings who first created life on Earth. Tellingly, when one of the Elohim arrives in a flying saucer on December 13, 1975, to transform the small-time journalist and racing enthusiast Claude Vorilhon
90 Reading and Writing Scripture in New Religious Movements into the messianic prophet Raël, the first substantive thing that he does is to explain to Vorilhon what the Bible really means. In contrast to the simple assurance and adamant faith expressed in the bumper sticker, the readers of the Bible in these chapters adopt an interpretive strategy that acknowledges that s what (you think) it says, but this is what it (really) means. Whether under the guidance of supernatural beings or simply of their own superior insight, they try to ferret out of familiar texts new meanings on which whole new movements can be based. For those who take their findings seriously, those new readings both preserve and enrich their sense of the Bible as an authoritative text, sometimes by expanding its reach to include other worlds. Others dismiss the new readings as ludicrous distortions and unconscionable impositions upon a time-honored text. As with the innovative claims to authority discussed in the previous three chapters, the readings of the Bible produced by new religions are never far from controversy. These chapters will identify and explain the specific points of interpretive leverage that enable and authorize new readings of the familiar biblical texts. Those generative ideas allow interpreters like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Shepherd Robert Athlyi Rogers, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, or Teacher Chen to present coherent religious systems as the result of their interpretations of the Bible. Anchoring their innovative religions in the biblical tradition links them to the prestige associated with antiquity even as it claims for them a vast potential audience. In the shared view of the biblical interpreters in these chapters any intelligent, aware, or open person who reads the Bible will potentially come to read it their way. So, these readings of the Bible also become the leading edge of a missionary strategy for any cultural context in which knowledge of the Bible can be assumed.