A Little Convenient

“It's a little convenient that you're saying all this after Hope Yards was exposed as an actual evil plot to destroy the city.”

Ms. Marvel (2015) #3 (2015)

Thanks to the talented DocLew at new grounds.com for the truly epic fanart.

I collect Ms. Marvel compilations. By this I in fact mean that I have an obliging sister who knows how much I love Ms. Marvel, aka Kamala Khan, and often buys me successive instalments of her illustrated adventures as gifts on appropriate occasions. So far I've seen Jersey City's polymorphous protector battle a plethora of foes, including a human-bird hybrid with plans to reappropriate young people as living batteries, a perfect-boyfriend-material family friend who tries to draft Kamala into his Inhuman-supremacist terrorist group, alien tech smugglers, living pizza dough, and what appeared to be the actual end of the world (but then sort of wasn't, or something; I think one has to trouble oneself to follow more than one superhero's story arc to really get to grips with the substance of these grander storylines). The latest compilation I've been gifted, however, sees Ms. Marvel face arguably her most terrifying enemy yet: an unscrupulous urban development corporation.

The first taste we get of the Hope Yards Development and Relocation Association's unscrupulousness is the fact that they've slapped Ms. Marvel's face all over their marketing materials, assuring their audience that to buy into their gentrification plans is to ‘help Ms. Marvel clean up Jersey City’, without having bothered to ask the permission of the hero herself for the use of her image and brand. Certainly if they had asked, that permission would have been withheld: Kamala is severely unimpressed with the posh flats and artisanal sushi restaurants in favour of which the area’s previous tenants have been ungraciously turfed out. Beyond that, though, she's suspicious of some of Hope Yards’ equipment - like state-of-the-art crowd dispersal gadgets, winged security drones, and mysterious purple refrigerated goop, touted as a new energy drink, that turns out to be crammed full of definitely-illegal brainwashing nanotech. (I mean, of course.) So she barrels in and busts the bad guys just like she usually does. Except this time things are different. This time she's beset by a crowd of anti-gentrification protestors demanding an explanation for her supposed selling out. And just to make things worse, said crowd is fronted by her best gal pal, Nakia, who has no idea about Ms. Marvel's true identity.

“Listen...” Kamala begins. “I never agreed to have my picture associated with this redevelopment stuff. This all happened without my permission. I don't want to be the reason Jersey City becomes the next Park Slope or whatever. I love this place.”

Nakia isn't convinced: “It's a little convenient that you're saying all this after Hope Yards was exposed as an actual evil plot to destroy the city.” Her fellow protestors rally with her: “No smoke without fire!” one of them asserts. “She's just trying to protect her public image!” In the next panel, Kamala stands forlornly beneath Hope Yards’ ‘Clean it up!’ banner while the crowd erupts into arguments before her, and mumbles a little lamely into the chaos: “But … I'm telling the truth…”

And she is. Kamala never endorsed Hope Yards’ activities, never wanted them carried out in her name, never suggested that to buy into that scheme was to play a part in her own work for the good of her neighbourhood. The whole notion that she approved of Hope Yards originated because they seized on her identity as someone to be respected, and declared her approval over something they were doing that actually had nothing to do with her - actually went against everything she stood for, indeed. But because they had declared her approval over it, however unjustifiably and deceptively, well, it nonetheless did then look a bit suspicious for her to turn round and publicly denounce Hope Yards only after it became clear and universally acknowledged that they were definitely Bad.

And I wonder whether I don't sometimes entertain similar suspicions about God as the crowd of protestors entertained about Ms. Marvel. You know when the church ties itself in knots stressing so hard that God doesn't endorse some attitude or practice considered particularly loathsome by modern western society - racism or misogyny or slavery or whatever - even though huge numbers of Christians in decades and centuries past claimed the very opposite? You know when the church cherry-picks its own history for examples of figures who don't stray too far from current societal orthodoxy on these matters, and glosses over anything uncomfortable? Like, we'll uphold William Wilberforce as a shining paragon of faithful Christianity, and John Newton will do because even though he continued his involvement in the slave trade for some time after his conversion, he did turn his back on it eventually, but please keep George Whitefield's founding role in the evangelical movement carefully separated from his economically-justified pro-slavery campaigning, thank you kindly. And you know when the church explains away confessedly ‘difficult’ passages of scripture that have traditionally been read as approving of such things, by babbling about Historical Context and Common Idiom and ‘well if you look at the Hebrew, this word really means such-and-such’ in a fashion that seems more embarrassed by God's revealed word than awed by it, and, perhaps more pertinently, doesn't strike one as all that compelling an explanation of the actual words on the page? Well, doesn't it ever put a little niggle in the back of your mind that it's a little convenient that Christians have started saying all this after the attitude or practice in question has come to be universally acknowledged as Bad? Doesn't it ever put a little niggle in the back of your mind that maybe the text really does imply what the exegetes of previous eras thought it did, or at least something closer to that than the modern church is prepared to admit?

Look, I'm not saying that when I come across someone making a spurious-sounding argument that ‘slaves, obey your masters’ doesn't really mean what it looks to mean, I immediately start seriously entertaining the possibility that God was actually a huge fan of the transatlantic slave trade, or something (he definitely wasn't). It's just a niggle, just a little niggle that our sudden rediscovery of the right ways to read these passages just in time to be in line, or in line enough, with the views of wider society on the issues in question, is a suspiciously fortunate coincidence. And a niggle like that, if undealt with and allowed to grow, essentially leaves you with two options: either you reassess your ethics and decide that the pro-slavery racist misogynists of days gone by were in fact onto something in terms of Biblical interpretation, however much nuancing that something might need; or you retain your ethical stances and start to question instead the extent to which the Biblical text really is infallible or reliable or literally intended. Call me crazy, but I'm not exactly enchanted with either possibility. So is there a truthful and compelling way to prevent or neutralise the niggle before it grows?

Well, let's go back to Ms. Marvel and the crowd of protestors. What she said did seem suspiciously convenient from their perspective, but we the readers knew that in actual fact she was telling the truth, that she had never given Hope Yards her approval. All their claims that they were working in her name were false, and that fact couldn't be negated, even by the most suspiciously fortunate coincidence in the world. Convenient doesn't necessarily mean untrue.

Plus, people do frequently commit the same offence against God as Hope Yards committed against Ms. Marvel: they take his name, his ‘brand’ if you will, as someone to be respected - and how much more so! - and they claim his approval of things they're doing that have nothing to do with him, that go against everything he stands for, indeed. This jazz is all over the Bible: Aaron called the worship of the golden calf he'd made a festival to the LORD; some bloke called Micah made himself some household gods and expected the LORD to prosper him just because he'd managed to persuade a Levite to serve as his priest for them; the Rabshakeh told the inhabitants of Jerusalem that the LORD had told him to destroy their land and they therefore shouldn't expect their God to save them (hint: he totally saved them). But the example I'm going to zoom in on is this, from Jeremiah 7:31: “And they have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.”

Note how God is kind of clarifying here: I did not ask you to perform human sacrifices, he says. That did not even occur to me as something to ask you to do. The implication being, of course, that people had somehow got it in their heads that that was something he'd asked them to do. The funny thing is that even today some people try to claim that the Bible does actually advocate human sacrifice. They pick out the binding of Isaac (where the whole point is that he isn't sacrificed because it's an incomplete prototype of the cross), the story of Jephthah and his daughter (where the moral is, don't make blank-cheque vows you might not want to keep), the command to give firstborn sons to God in Exodus 22:29 (ignoring the earlier instruction in 13:13 that firstborn animals were to be sacrificed, humans redeemed). There's enough material there to create a niggle, if you don't know the rest of your Bible well enough, the way the anti-gentrification protestors didn't know about Ms. Marvel having opposed Hope Yards from the start.

That said, when Ms. Marvel turned round and denied any endorsement of Hope Yards, the crowd knew they were dealing with a human being, a fallible, changeable, not-always-entirely-truthful human being likely to be looking out for her own interests; their suspicion was justified. When God turns round and denies any endorsement of something, on the other hand, we know he's infallible and unchangeable and always entirely truthful.

Now, obviously the above ramblings have not solved the problem of any of the difficult passages. They have not attempted to identify any specific areas in which the church has followed modern thinking too far, or, conversely, clung to things God doesn't endorse because earlier saints thought he did. They have not really dealt with the problem of any particular niggle. But I hope they might have vaguely indicated a few tools and principles by which various niggles might be dealt with. The point is, people have always been declaring God's approval over things he doesn't actually approve of. It shouldn't surprise us if society's changing ethics sometimes provide the necessary jolt for us to examine those lies and recognise them for what they are. And it shouldn't surprise us if we find ourselves disagreeing with traditional exegetical positions; but at the same time, we need to be humbly conscious that we share the same faults as our predecessors, the same tendency to want to claim God's endorsement of whatever it is we're already doing or want to do. And we need to know our Bibles really, really well - not just the words on the page, but the heart of God, the essence of what he's like, that’s revealed by them - so that any niggle that impugns the perfection of his character can be swiftly debunked.

It does sometimes seem a little convenient that the church has taken up a given stance on an issue at a time when said stance has become widely acceptable - but convenient doesn't necessarily mean untrue. The Bible itself, and not how anyone else happens to have read it over the centuries, is our standard for truth. People have been declaring God's approval over wrong attitudes and practices pretty much since records began; our burden is to aim, with the Spirit's guidance, to correct their mistakes and avoid making more of our own - all the while knowing and trusting that any we do make are forgiven by the blood of Jesus shed on the cross. Now isn't that convenient?